THE SATAN MACHINE

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS??

Who planned these assassinations is the question that dominates discussion of the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II, and the earlier successful assassination of Abdi Ipekci.

Agca isn’t saying.

Actually, he was saying, if anyone bothered to listen. They just had to read between the lines.

The public didn’t do a good job of that, the press was even worse, and the book-length writers who took on the complex afterward were the next thing to wretched.

They kept ignoring facts and inventing their own. The educated people of Turkey, which sometimes includes the press, have a visceral dislike of the lower-class Islamic majority. They will not stand to have their very secular military criticized in any meaningful way.

The military is their guardian when chaos in the form of political Islam periodically threatens to invade their lives. The military has initiated coups against civilian governments on a clockwork basis. It’s a hell of a way to tell time, and a true bargain with the devil. And it’s what sets THE SATAN MACHINE in motion.

The important thing to know is that when Ipekci was assassinated, and when Agca was caught, and while he was tried for murder, Istanbul had been placed under martial law for some time. The military ruled Istanbul and twelve other provinces in the country, though they usually deferred to civilians for the day-to-day.

Who wanted to be bothered with the day-to-day? The military handled matters of real importance, like the trial of Agca.

A lot of things became clear, or should have been, when one day Agca stood up in court and said that he wished to recant his testimony. He did not kill Ipekci, he said. But—and this was a very large but—he was prepared to reveal who had done it. He would do this tomorrow at the trial.

Agca while in police custody but before his trial

Not today. Tomorrow.

That was enough time for everyone to get their ducks in a row. By the time the trial opened the next day, it had been decided that Agca, based on his irrational performance of the preceding day, should be removed to another venue for psychiatric examination.

That process lasted a while. Not a day or a week but several months, most of them spent in prison by our young assassin. And by that time Agca had escaped custody. He was just gone.

It seemed incredible. Agca had been confined to the prison at Kartal-Maltepe on the Asian side of Istanbul. It was thought to be a secure facility, though Turkish prisons were never as secure as Midnight Express would have us believe. Still, this one was run by the military, so most people were surprised that a high-value inmate like Agca could walk through numerous checkpoints to melt away into the night before Thanksgiving, 1979.

That meant he had help. A lot of help. Within the prison. The military prison.

And the educated elite of Turkey, who so mourned the passing of Ipekci, and so backed the military without thought or compunction, could do nothing but wring their hands.

And perhaps howl at the moon.