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David Dastych – A new sensational book was launched in Poland on Monday, April 28. Its author, an American journalist and writer John O. Koehler claims that in November 1979 in Moscow a group of nine prominent Soviet Communist Party leaders signed a secret document instructing the KGB to “use all available possibilities to prevent a new political trend, initiated by the Polish pope,” and “if necessary – reach to means beyond disinformation and discreditation.”
Two journalists of a top-ranking Polish weekly “Wprost” (read: vprost, it means “direct” in Polish) reached the author of that book, entitled “It’s about the Pope”: Spies in the Vatican”. In their article, published on April 28, Rafal Pasztelanski and Grzegorz (Greg) Sadowski quoted a conversation with Mr. Koehler about his discovery: „I was shocked, when I found this order. The means “beyond disinformation and discreditation” meant only one thing: an approval to kill the pope.”
Who signed the “informal” death sentence against John Paul II? The party document quoted by the author of the book listed nine prominent Soviet CP members: the chief of the Soviet propaganda – Mikhail Suslov, members of the Presidium of the CC CPSU – Andrei Kirilenko, Konstantin Chernenko, secretaries of the CC – Konstantin Rusakov (responsible for the contacts with the PUWP – the Polish Communist party), Vladimir Ponomarev, Ivan Kapitonov, Mikhail Zimyanin, Vladimir Dolgikh and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev’s responsibility?
In 1979, Gorbachev was promoted to the Politburo as a candidate member, and received full membership only in 1980. Gorbachev owed his steady rise to power to the patronage of Mikhail Suslov the powerful chief ideologist of the CPSU, and Yuri Andropov head of the KGB (see: Mikhail Gorbachev, career Wikipedia). Was Mikhail Gorbachev involved in the later KGB plot against John Paul II, which led to the historic attempt at the pope’s life on May 13, 1981? The document quoted by John O. Koehler listed him only as a co-signatory of the “instruction” to the KGB. There is no direct proof that the future General Secretary of the CC CPSU and the father of perestroyka wanted the Polish pope to be assassinated or that he had enough influence to put his consent to action.
A „Grey Wolf“ free after 25 years: Ali Agca
The Soviet leadership, then under Leonid Brezhnev, fully realized that the rise of a Polish cardinal, Karol Wojtyla, to the papacy would cause trouble to the Communist regime in Poland and to the entire Soviet bloc. The new pope, elected just one year ago (1978) was known as a staunch anti-Communist, though also as a talented negotiator who avoided a head-to-head clash with the regime. In his first year at the papal throne in the Vatican, John Paul II received a strong backing from the West, and from the United States in particular.
His first pilgrimage to Poland, in June 1979, was a huge manifestation of the Polish nation’s support to the Church and his symbolic words at the Warsaw Victory Square, “You are not who they say you are. Let me remind you who you are,” by restoring to the Polish people their authentic history and culture created a revolution of conscience that, fourteen months later, produced the 10-million strong nonviolent Solidarity resistance movement.
The Tower of Secrets: In November 1979, the Soviet leadership had all reasons to worry about the influence of John Paul II unpon Poland and the whole Communist world.
The Polish pope received a strong backing also from the American intelligence, the CIA. As a famous British journalist and the author of “Pontiff”, Gordon Thomas, wrote for Canada Free Press in January 2007 in his article “The pope and the secret world of intelligence”:
“It was the CIA who kept him continuously informed on global events. As well as the CIA Rome station, based in the shadow of the Vatican walls, the agency operated a network of what Casey called „our messengers“. They included Lee lacocca, the car magnate; Spyros Skouras, the shipping millionaire; Robert Abplanalp, the aerosol tycoon; Barron Hilton, the hotelier; William Simon, a former US Treasury Secretary; and Robert Wagner, the former Mayor of New York who became President Carter’s personal envoy to the Holy See.
Finally there was Clare Boothe who served on the US government’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversaw the CIA’s covert operations.Throughout his long reign, John Paul knew he was never more than a telephone call from the present CIA director. In turn they had the direct line to the ivory-white telephone on the pontiff’s desk: extension 3101 in the Apostolic Palace.
Casey’s „messengers“ unfailingly called the number to let John Paul know „an extra important message“ was being hand-carried from Casey, and later his successors. Those messages remain one of the many secrets stored in the Vatican archives.”
In November 1979, the Soviet leadership had all reasons to worry about the influence of John Paul II unpon Poland and the whole Communist world. John O. Koehler quotes a KGB defector (1980) Victor Sheimov from a book “The Tower of Secrets.” In his earlier book “Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police” (Basic books, 2000) ) Koehler expressed a similar opinion, now repeated in his just published Polish edition “It’s about the Pope”: Spies in the Vatican”(ZNAK, 2008). Let me quote from the article in “Wprost” weekly:
“Sheimov wrote that the KGB was afraid of the consequences stemming from the election of a Polishman as the Roman Catholic Pope. In April of 1979, the East German secret service, Stasi, prepared a report with a conclusion that ‘the pope, who had a direct contact with Marxism and took an uncompromising stand against it, will firmly defend the interests of the Church’. Victor Sheimov also quotes his conversation with Valeriy Titov, then a security officer of the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw. Titow openly complained to him about the hostile attitude of the Poles to the Russians and, mentioning the newly elected pope he warned: ‘If [the pope] gave a sign to them, Poles would go to the streets and they would fight against our tanks.” Both Soviet officers agreed that the Soviet Union had only two ways out: to kill the pope, that could be a mistake, or to support [General] Wojciech Jaruzelski, because ‘if we go out of here, [Poles] will hang him.’”
According to “Wprost” (and Koehler), Sheimov also talked to General Nikolai P. Kuritsin, then a KGB liaison officer to the Polish security service [SB]. When Kuritsin learned that the KGB HQ wanted to [physically] eliminate John Paul II, he got mad and exlaimed: “Idiots! This is a political suicide. Not only political. If we liquidate the pope, our days would be numbered. Even if we tried to hold on, we would have to get rid of the Poles – everyone of them will sacrify his life for him.’”
I think we can’t directly blame Mikhail Gorbachev with a decisively hostile attitude towards the Polish pope. In November 1979, the Soviet leadership had to express their disapproval for the new-elected sovereign of the Roman Catholic Church. Later on, when Gorbachev became the supreme Soviet leader (1985) he took a more concilliatory stand versus the Holy See and John Paul II. He met the Polish pope for the first time in 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and on April 5, 2005 he praised him in Moscow by saying that Pope John Paul II’s „devotion to his followers is a remarkable example to all of us.”
The notorious ‘Bulgarian connection’
The authors of the above mentioned article in “Wprost” weekly recall other Koehler’s findings concerning the KGB plot against the late pope. “In the German archives John Koehler found KGB documents with an order to hush up the participation of the Bulgarian secret services in the operation to kill John Paul II. In September of 1982, general Markus Wolf, the head of DDR’s Main Intelligence Directorate and then the head of Stasi, received a sealed envelope with an inscription [in German]: “Operation Papst” [Operation Pope]. Its sender was the Active Operations Department of the Bulgarian intelligence.
The content of the said envelope was later lost. But soon after that instruction some Western left-wing media supported by the KGB began to publish articles to divert attention from the participation of the KGB and the Bulgarian secret services in the attempt to kill the pope. This could be an indirect confirmation that the Soviet authorities had been seriously engaged in the organization of the attempt [on St. Peter’s Square, on May 13, 1981].”
I remember these propaganda efforts wery well. In 1982 I went to Sofia to interview two Bulgarian intelligence agents who had escaped from Italy soon after the Mehmet Ali Agca’s attempt on the life of John Paul II. One of them, Zhelyu Vassilev granted to me an exclusive and very emotional interview, later printed in a Polish weekly Przeglad Tygodniowy.
Bulgaria’s special services blamed the so-called Bulgarian connection in the assassination attempt on Western services, CIA in particular and the Italian services which visited Turkish gunman Ali Agca in prison shortly after the shooting.
Following their visit, Ali Agca said the plot for the assassination was hatched in July -August 1980 during his stay in Bulgaria. In his words he contacted Todor Ajvazov, a financier from the Bulgarian Embassy in Rome and Zhelyu Vassilev, secretary of the military attache at the Embassy in Rome. According to Agca Sergei Antonov, the only Bulgarian arrested for complicity in the papal attack, was to be in charge of the transportation of Agca and the other gunman Oral Chelik.
Sergei Antonov was held for more than three years in Italian prisons only to be acquitted over lack of evidence. Shattered and physically damaged, he returned to Bulgaria unable to carry on a conversation or concentrate on complex tasks, symptoms his friends say came from the use of psychotropic drugs in his interrogation. In 2005, I tried to contact Antonov, with the help of Bulgarian journalists. I was told, he was ill and could not control himself. Antonov was found dead at his appartment in Sofia on the 2d of August 2007. Doctors said, his dead body remained there for several days. He was 58, living alone, ruined.
One year later, I tried to contact and interview Mehmet Ali Agca in a Turkish prison. My Turkish friend, a known journalist helping me, was refused a visit to Agca by the Police. She told me they threatened her and blocked her any contact with the assassin, who had been briefly set free and then rearrested and put to jail.
The Bulgarian trail still remains unaccessible.
Spies in the Vatican
The article in “Wprost” weekly concluded that the Communist secret services had placed many spies in the Vatican, since the beginning of the Cold War. The then Polish secret intelligence service scored a big success placing a spy near Pope Paul VI. “That person had access to top secrets. He reported about conversations of Paul VI with diplomats from France, Britain or Vietnam”, said priest Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, who was writing a book about the activity of the Communist secret services in the Vatican.”
“But the most outstanding successes in the placing of agents in the Vatican scored the East German Stasi. From 1971 to 1980 Stasi located there at least 17 spies. One of their more valuable agents was a priest, Paul Dissemond, who had been recruited in 1974 as agent “Peter.” Strong proofs of “Peter’s” collaboration with the Stasi have been presented in Koehler’s book…According to John O. Koehler, every more important department of the Holy See had been infiltrated. Koehler asserts that after the fall of Communism in the USSR the KGB and then the FSB never stopped its infiltration of the Vatican.”
“Moscow constantly denies any [Soviet] participation in the attempt(s) against the [Polish] pope. The present Russian authorities do not want to disclose the archives about that subject. Therefore Polish investigators count on the Hungarian archives and on the archives of the recently opened Czech counterpart of the [Polish] Institute of National Remembrance [IPN]”, concluded Pasztelanski and Sadowski, the authors of the article.
I think we can also count on Italian cooperation in solving of some riddles of the Communist secret services plotting against John Paul II and participating in the attempts on his life. There were more than just one attempt, that of May 13, 2008. Back in 2007, journalists of “Wprost” weekly interviewed an Italian general Giuseppe Cucchi, who confirmed that the then Polish Military Intelligence (WSI) could have known (from an Arab source) about the assassination attempt, some days before May 13, 1981.
The confirmation of the alleged KGB and other Communist plots has a fundamental historical significance for Poland, the Catholic Church and the world opinion. But in the past the secretive nature of the Soviet regime did not allow to disclose the truth about the Katyn Forest mass murder of Polish officers and civilians on the 5th of March 1940 until Soviet scholars revealed in 1989 that Joseph Stalin had indeed ordered the massacre, and in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the NKVD had executed the Poles and confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katyn: Mednoje and Pyatikhatki.
On 30 October 1989 Gorbachev allowed a delegation of several hundred Poles, organized by a Polish association named Families of Katyn Victims, to visit the Katyn memorial. This group included former U.S. National Security Advisor, Professor Zbig Brzezinski. It took 49 years to the Soviets to finally admit to their crime. But they never admitted Katyn and other Soviet mass murders of Poles were genocide.
How long shall we have to wait for a Russian disclosure of Soviet plots against the late Pope John Paul II? Another 50 years, or more?
Soviet politbureau members, Gorbachev included, signed an „informal“ death sentence on John Paul II
David Dastych, 67, is a veteran journalist who served both in the Polish intelligence and the CIA; jailed in Poland by the Communist regime he spent several years in special prison wards; released in early 1990’s he joined international efforts to monitor illegal nuclear trade in Europe and Asia; handicapped for lifetime in a mountain accident in France, in 1994; now he returned to active life and runs his own media agency in Warsaw.
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