BULGARIA

THE ROAD SHOW

All this does not mean that the CIA had a hand in the murder of Mumcu. He was so persistent in his research, so courageous in taking on targets that were reactionary and violent, and so heedless of his safety, that the suspect list goes on for pages.

The Turkish police were of no use in bringing the killer to justice. They seldom are when the victim opposes the establishment. Considering that MIT, Turkey’s intelligence agency, could have been the killers who did the deed, the chances of an arrest were slim.

Or none.

The killings of Ugur Mumcu and Abdi Ipekci, as well as others of their profession, were part of an accelerating trend that has made Turkey the second most dangerous place for newsmen in the world. Colombia is first. It’s not much of a coincidence that both countries have thriving drug trades that sometimes dwarf their legitimate businesses.

When illegal drug networks become so big that a significant portion of a nation’s economy depends on them, the lives of the men and women who guard the gates to the Fourth Estate are easily forfeit. Too many people competing for too small a pie spells trouble for free speech. For critical reporters, it can spell doom.

Much the same was true of Turkey’s neighbor, Bulgaria, during the late seventies. Freedom of the press was not a problem there, since it did not exist, but the Turkish drug gangs who made Sofia their home lived lavishly in the best hotels, passing out bribes to government officials who begged for them.

We could ask ourselves, if we were obtuse, what kind of communist would accept bribes from the most lowdown capitalists anyone had ever seen in that country? But that question is too stupid for words. It doesn’t take a capitalist to want more gold in his pocket. Anyone who thinks so should audition for the next round of the Paul and Claire Road Show. (And there will be one.)

The truth is that Turkish drug smugglers did what they wanted in Bulgaria. Communist officials waited their turn at the hog trough. They did not give orders to men who could buy and sell them like rolls of toilet paper. Supplicants on bended knee are in the wrong position to do anything but wipe their asses.

Nor should it be a surprise to discover that Turkish drug smugglers are fascists at heart. Ugurlu and Celenk and the others kept close ties back to the homeland and kept the right palms greased. Those palms almost always belonged to the facilitators of the heroin trade, who worked hand in hand with MIT and the Gray Wolves.

To think that a completely mercenary drug connection offers proof of communist intervention in the attempted assassination of the pope is well beyond credibility, but it’s the version of events that’s widely believed by the right wing of this universe, and even the general public. In most cases no one even questions it. The books, including but not restricted to Sterling and Henze, are still out there, and the Internet—that worldwide cathedral of gossip and bad information—still brings up an avalanche of references to what should never have been given the slightest credit.

If we want to know what really went down in Sofia the fall of 1980, we might look at the friends of Agca who joined him there when they fled from Turkey. There were any number of them, but in the important ways they were all the same.

They were men like Abdullah Catli (Chat–luh), a Gray Wolf and handsome young killer who had already been responsible for wiping out eight student leftists in Ankara in a single night. He was a friend of Agca’s from early on, helping him in every way he could. Catli would go on from Bulgaria to a career in the heroin trade across Europe that did not end until he was thrown in prison in France and then Switzerland.

Abdullah Catli

After escaping from prison in a semi-miraculous fashion, Catli made his way back to Turkey in the nineties to help rationalize the casino business by murder and the Kurdish Rebellion by torture and murder. He was never interrupted in his activities until the car he was traveling in smashed to pieces under a trailer truck one night.

The fact that Catli was a wanted criminal at the time meant nothing to his traveling companions. One was a former beauty queen and a purported female assassin, another was one of the highest police officials in the country, and the last a Kurdish member of parliament. The upshot of that random accident, however, became the greatest scandal in modern Turkish history.

The Susurluk Crash

They're still sorting that fantastic mess out, but we shouldn't be surprised to hear that the list of Agca's associates coming to call in Sofia goes on for some length. Oral Celik, who was said by one witness to have participated in Ipekci’s assassination, came to Sofia, too. He was primed for new adventures in—guess what?—the heroin trade. Like Catli, he worked all over the continent until he wound up, like Catli, in prison for running that drug. He too executed a miraculous escape from prison and returned home to become something of a hero for doing one of the worst things on earth.

Other Gray Wolves made the same journey to the same places doing the same things, like Mehmet Sener and Yalcin Ozbey. These men had been together for some time on and off. Sener had taken receipt of the gun that Agca killed Ipekci with, and Ozbey had been Agca’s roommate and paymaster for the Ipekci assassination. He was apparently responsible, along with Catli, for springing Agca from Maltepe Prison. After the escape, Agca spent two weeks hanging out at Catli’s apartment when he should have been trying to assassinate the pope in Istanbul, as he had promised in writing.

Agca’s connections to his associates did not lapse until he was put into deep jail following his attempt on the life of the pope. His friends hardly missed a beat in picking up their lives in exile. After leaving Bulgaria, Catli had lived in Vienna and traveled extensively in Europe, using the connections of the radical right to help him with food, living quarters, and many etceteras.

Agca had used the same network for the same reasons, particularly when he needed a clean weapon for the assassination. About a month before he shot John Paul II, Agca sojourned to Western Austria to meet Catli and Celik. Celik was an old friend who had been born in the same village as Agca, moved to the city of Malatya at about the same time as Agca, and had come to Istanbul to find his fortune at the same time, too.

Oral Celik

The good news for Agca was that Catli and Celik had managed to score four factory-fresh Browning Hi-Powers from an ex-Naz in Austria. Agca took only one of the pistols with him, probably thinking that if he needed more than fourteen rounds plus a spare clip of fourteen he was doomed anyway.

He ran the weapon across the border to Switzerland, where he stashed it (and the extra clip and three boxes of ammunition), with Omer Bagci, the leader of the Gray Wolves in Olten, Switzerland.

These connections were always valuable to Agca and his friends. Turks who had emigrated to Europe were often lonely souls who were more committed to the motherland in exile than they had ever been when they were at her bosom. Prime Gray Wolf recruits could be found nearly everywhere on the continent where emigre Turks were found. When these men were called on for help, they usually came through.

So we can see how the network of radical right supporters assisted Catli and Agca and the rest of the team. They kept on assisting him until the moment he shot the pope.

Correction: They assisted him up until the moment he was caught.

But even after Agca was apprehended, he was given support. Catli was called by the Italian authorities to testify about what he knew concerning the assassination and related circumstances. The things he said in court, particularly the ones that told about the links between his homeland and the Bulgarian drug trade, should have put Claire and Paul and their theories in the shade forever.

But that didn’t happen either. The Western press, many of whom were present when Catli testified in Rome, steadfastly ignored almost all the things he said.

Most of their commentaries sounded vaguely offended by these bursts of truth. Where were the commies in all this? The Russians? The KGB? The Etceteras? If you believed this raving Turk, no leftists had any real part in the Plot to Kill the Pope.

How could that be?

Well, it couldn’t be if all you believed were the lies you had been fed by the CIA and the Road Show it had put in motion.