DISINFORMED AGAIN

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

So Agca was gone, heading out on the long road to Rome via most countries in Europe. Before he absconded, he left one clue to his future wanderings. He sent a letter to Milliyet, Ipekci’s old paper, warning that he planned another assassination.

This time he said he would kill Pope John Paul II, who was scheduled to visit Turkey within the week. His purpose was to meet and reconcile with , the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church at his headquarters in Istanbul. Ankara and Ephesus were also on the pontiff’s itinerary.

The major works of nonfiction (which in this case are largely works of fiction) that deal with the attempted assassination of John Paul II glide over this point very gingerly. They don’t like to make too much of the fact that Agca had fixated on the pope long before he reached Bulgaria through the impenetrable curtain of communism.

John Paul II

If these conspiracy theorists had to face reality, then their theories of Bulgarian-Russian involvement suffered a body blow. Almost fatal, but not quite. If Agca wanted with all his heart to kill John Paul II before he had a single sit-down with the KGB, then all their carefully gathered sheaves of propaganda tended to fall loose in their hands.

Not that it bothered them. They were simply in a hurry to put the truth behind them before moving on to more interesting, and grand, theories of state-sponsored terrorism. And the state most responsible, of course, was our archenemy, the Soviet Union.

The two main disseminators of the commies-did-it theory were Claire Sterling and Paul Henze. Both were hired by Reader's Digest to write about the assassination, and both turned their articles into book-length books that could turned into film in an assassin’s minute.

They hit the talk shows like a tag-team who could bail each other out whenever the bullshit rose to dangerous levels around their ears. Their warped versions of the truth were disseminated by so many public means, and so many hidden means including the vast informal network of ex-intelligence officers, that no other versions were ever considered by the mainstream media. Henze and Sterling were so close that Sterling’s Reader's Digest article in 1982 was called “The Plot to Kill the Pope.” Henze, without blinking, called his 1983 study in deep background on the assassination The Plot to Kill the Pope.

Those two were sympatico in every way. Sterling had been plugged into the world of terror networks by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies like a 110-watt bulb into a 220-volt socket. Henze was a virtual polymath of terror, having been the CIA station chief in Ankara when some of the worst depredations of the seventies were taking place. Henze had known Ipekci and even visited him a couple of weeks before his death. Who was better qualified to speak of the subject of Turkey and terrorism than the man who knew them first hand?

Paul (The Man) Henze

And who was more to be believed than the man who had made anti-communist propaganda his life’s work?

We might want to rephrase that. A better question should be: What hand did Henze have in furthering right-wing terror networks in Turkey? There’s a lot of suggestive evidence that he might have been in it up to his curly beard.

But the best question for the contemporary audience should undoubtedly be this: Were Paul and Claire sleeping together?

We’ll let that one go for the next time.