The Plot to Kill the Pope/The Time of the Assassins
Sterling, Paul B. Henze/Claire
wuniversities of that country for the first time to children of the working class. Thousands of young men and women were prepared for jobs the likes of which their parents could never...
...And the KBG doesn't...
...Because the CIA does things like that...
...How then did one go about sorting out "the deserving poor," as the Victorians called them, from the non-motivated poor...
...In fact, as he gently puts it, "in twentiethcentury America, motivation was not a universal characteristic...
...Beneath all the well-intentioned legislation, he comments, was the feeling that if the poor were given a bit more help and a chance at greater opportunity they would work hard to get ahead...
...Oh, that...
...The merest glance at the historical record demonstrates otherwise...
...Stepping Over is supposed to be a book about exceptions--people who have crossed the boundary between the ordinary and the pathological or the downright bizarre...
...Accour Name Expirat Address Make y, City, State, Zip...
...Thousands of young men and women were prepared for jobs the likes of which their parents could never have dreamed, but the jobs themselves did not always materialize...
...The number of native Turkish Roman Catholics today probably could con36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 gregate in a confessional booth...
...The Establishment vs...
...On the one hand, Henze and Sterling both take note of the studied silence maintained by U.S., West European, and Vatican authorities concerning any suggestion of Soviet complicity in the plot...
...He also noted that "no country should ever develop at the cost of enslavement, conquest, outrage, exploitation, and death...
...The Pope went even so far, during this visit, as to challenge the legitimacy of the Warsaw Pact...
...Peter's Square, John Paul II had been a target of widespread vilification in the Soviet provincial press--depicted as a "malicious, lowly, perfidious and backward toady of the American militarists...
...The two books thus complement each other...
...Equally important was the Pope's dramatic appeal to East European Catholics...
...Bornet does not give us is a sure sense of whether the Great Society would have worked had it received sufficient funding...
...It was he who sanctioned the murder by terrorists of the former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro.'" Whatever its merits, Andronov's book is noteworthy for advancing a hypothesis of guilt at odds with previous Soviet disinformation about the Pope's American connection...
...3) Funding was "utterly inadequate...
...The truth is that we live in an unsettled age in which the most outrageous ideas are given a respectful hearing, and in ways that many of us probably do not realize, are becoming part of our larger frame of reference...
...rested on a simple premise: that constraints were fundamentally harmful to one's own well-being, and if, in the process of self-realization, society's interests were not met, well, that was society's problem...
...The Bulgarians...
...But the clincher in Andronov's book turns out to be an American citizen in Wiesbaden, a member of what Andronov refers to as a "U.S...
...Nevertheless, the two authors converge in their final judgment that (a) the Turk Agca was not a loner...
...Sterling, at least, seems anxious not to acknowledge her indebtedness to Henze's previous research on the topic (indeed, his name appears nowhere in her book, not even in a footnote, an omission the more obvious to connoisseurs since Henze now figures as a" prominent malevolent figure in Soviet versions of The Case...
...Or just how much additional funding would have been needed...
...During the 1970s many Italian cities were overflowing with young adults still living at home, waiting for the employment that would give them not merely economic independence but would validate their new identity...
...the Vatican in short has had no place in that nation's internal or external politics...
...On both counts his analysis is damning, all the more so for its bland impersonality...
...McConnell congratulates those young people who were not totally sucked in and destroyed, but he overlooks the degree to which these poisons are still in our system, and the length of time it will take us to work them out...
...c) Agca, following his arranged escape from prison in Ankara, was trained, funded, and expedited across national frontiers and developed intimate ties with Bulgarian ajgents...
...For years Sterling has been based in Rome...
...d) Agca's connections as a young professional killer while in Turkey were with extremists of right and left alike, and (e) it was precisely his publicized rightist connections which made him an ideal Soviet choice to accomplish his final task in Rome...
...but he tells us little of the first 55 years of Johnson's life and never undertakes a serious exploration of the President's personality and character...
...the arrest of several Bulgarian nationals in Rome on charges of complicity, and the flight of another, has the case now sub judice in the hands of an Italian judge...
...He clearly has his doubts...
...Because the author's assignment was to do a comprehensive history of the Johnson presidency, he attempts to cover every significant aspect of LBJ's 1887 days in the White House...
...The validity of alliances, he said, depended on "whether they led to more well-being and prosperity for member states...
...Sterling Paul Seabury is professor of pofitical science at the University of California, Berkeley...
...In this regard, Sterling tells a quaint little story arising from a lunch hosted in her honor not long ago in Washington by the editor of the New Republic, Martin Peretz...
...Only weeks before the event in St...
...What do you think of the story that the CIA plotted to kill Castro...
...Bornet leaves no doubt that he considers Vietnam a serious miscalculation...
...Henze should take scholarly affront that his name is consistently misspelled in this little book, but his identity is nonetheless unmistakable...
...4) Programs directed from Washington tended to be out of touch with local conditions...
...5) A fair amount of such money as was thrown at the poor had a way of being intercepted by opportunistic activists, local politicians, and various interest groups...
...Yet apparently there really was a message from Rome to Moscow not unlike that which Kalb described...
...Yet the authors are obviously competitors...
...Likewise, the teeny-bopper prostitutes of Santa Monica Boulevard simply present a more joyless version of the Playboy Philosophy...
...they lie scattered across the pages of this book--some maimed, some incapacitated, some dead...
...According to the Soviet author, Henze engineered the whole affair working in the U.S...
...One must then reject other piddling explanations proffered in the Soviet press shortly after the attempt, such as those that singled out the Mafia, or secret Italian masonic conspirators, or chauvinist Romans incensed at a Polish pontiff--which leaves us with one of the great superpowers...
...On the one hand, a Vatican spokesman later denied that such a letter had then been sent...
...The other point about this book worth noting is that the decline of traditional institutions of social controlmfamily, church, school--has been profoundly damaging not merely for societies but for individuals-perhaps, indeed, particularly for individuals...
...The authority for these allegations, as apparent spokesman for "New Solidarity," appears to be a member of Lyndon LaRouche's peculiar, New York-based leftwing/right-wing organization...
...Perhaps because he has already chronicled the trials of another embattled President, or simply because he takes the canons of objective scholarship seriously, Vaughn Davis Bornet has written the most comprehensive and evenhanded work on the LBJ presidency that we have...
...We have now before us two American books which, taken in tandem, present the case for Soviet guilt in the plot: Paul B. Henze's The Plot to Kill the Pope, and Claire Sterling's The Time of the Assassins...
...Agca himself had no prior personal reason--as a "loner"--to "get" the Pope, nor, for that matter, did the zealots of the Turkish Right...
...and the CIA...
...The result is a book that is frequently thought-provoking, if far from the last word and hardly for everyone...
...What other movement could directly benefit from the consummation of this act...
...on the other, the Soviets have displayed no such polite compunction in hurling blame at the U.S...
...mission in Ankara with the extremist Turkish Gray Wolves...
...This has not been the work of zealous investigative journalism alone...
...b) press reports to the contrary, he was neither a religiously inspired Muslim zealot nor a right-winger of any sort in his short career as a killer...
...T h i s first full scholarly study of an administration that tried to outdeal the New Deal has been produced by a former biographer of Herbert Hoover and a certifiable political conservative...
...the remnants of Christianity which that regime has allowed to survive its persecution are almost exclusively Eastern Orthodox...
...the People his a New Populist Revolt on the Way...
...The Vatican's role in inner Bulgarian events is almost non-existent...
...In large measure, he accepts Lyndon Johnson on his own terms, balances criticism with praise, and tends to treat the motivation of LBJ's critics as a problem of greater interest than the working of the presidential mind itself...
...As John Paul said in his 1979 visit to Poland: "Is it not the intention of the Holy Spirit that this Polish Pope, this Slav, should at this moment of history manifest the spiritual unity of Christian Europe...
...Tell me," pursued Marty...
...The principal American motivation to do away with the Pope, Andronov finally concludes, was to break the unity of the peace movement and to turn Catholics against Communists...
...The principal victims of the 1960s, it would appear, were not the Mrs...
...Grundys, but those who followed the Pied Piper...
...Mission in Rome...
...The very idea that the Soviet leadership in 1981 ordered the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II has been difficult for many to imagine, much less to believe...
...S ! purposes in Poland, )uch crude allegations aside, the Soviets of course had every reason to want to rid themselves of this vexing priest in 1981...
...This line of reasoning can be found in a third book which has come to my attention, fresh off Bulgaria's Sofia Press: On the Wolf's Track, by a Soviet auth?r, Iona Andronov, of the Moscow Literaturnaya Gazeta...
...Still, few will have doubts about Bornet's opinions on the two problems that loom largest in any evaluation of the Johnson Administration: Great Society social welfarism and the Vietnam war...
...For example, Duane, the Vietnam veteran, uses coarser language than does George McGovern or Gary Hart, but his "analysis" of our foreign policy traces roughly the same lines as theirs...
...But he is on firmer ground when he asserts what has become a standard conservative criticism: Kennedy was wrong to sanction the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem...
...Henze in failed assassin Mehmet Ali Agca's native land...
...AM I,:1 Please Prlnl AS 7777 LP., THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 37 powers...
...Who benefits...
...Of course...
...pian overpromises of absolutely equal opportunity...
...and of those who know Bulgaria well, none would have us believe its government capable of disobeying Soviet orders...
...Bornet's critique of the Great Society is at one with much of the conventional wisdom of the sane center these days: (1) Both the nature of poverty and the plan of attack on it were illdefined...
...Sterling, for instance, cites the assertion of NBC's Marvin Kalb that John Paul, in a handwritten letter to Brezhnev in August 1980, warned that if the Red Army moved against the Polish people he would "lay down the crown of St...
...the result was to destabilize further an already shaky ally...
...No, no...
...But what one notes about McConnell's people is how in many ways they are merely grotesque archetypes from which more "mainstream" figures f'md their views, however watered down...
...But how in the world would even the loyal Soviet Bulgarian regime directly benefit from the murder of a Roman pontiff...
...Those in the Democratic party work to transfer economic power from productive citizens to bureaucrats by unnecessary regulation and over taxation...
...Present at the luncheon were two of Peretz's editorial assistants, both fresh from State Department internships...
...Why are you so ready to believe that the CIA would kill Castro but not that the KGB would kill the Pope...
...Marty began...
...Each approaches the mystery from a special point of departure...
...I n such an intricately concocted plot as that against the life of this Polish Pope, common sense leads one to begin by asking: cui bono...
...Secretary of State and was monitoring the activities of the CIA...
...Andronov pays scant attention to the Pope's own Polish origins, yet it would seem odd that such an American asset in the Vatican, previously regarded by the Soviets as so priceless for U.S...
...As both Henze and Sterling remind us, the attempt on the Pope's life took place months before the December 1981 Jaruzelski crackdown, at a time of great uncertainty as to the outcome of the Polish c r i s i s . Solidarity was then at the height of i t s "'At present, elitists dominate both padies...
...Various hypotheses can be ruled out...
...As to Johnson's own reasons for escalation, Bornet persuasively demonstrates that the President should 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984...
...Or whether the antipoverty infrastructure was capable of absorbing a greater infusion of cash...
...The colloquy "about The Case is worth reprinting here in full: "What do you two think of the idea that the KGB plotted to kill the Pope...
...As its chieftain Todor Zhivkov once proudly remarked, Bulgaria keeps its "political watch-dial to the second with the watch of the Soviet Union...
...subversive organization" called "New Solidarity," who comes clean nevertheless to ascribe responsibility to the CIA and is "quoted" as follows: "Do not be surprised...
...It was from this reserve army of unemployed inteUectuals that the urban guerrilla and armed political action groups (including, it must be said, the neo-fascist MSI) drew their recruits...
...He is, however, overly partisan when he declares that Eisenhower had established no commitment to South Vietnam...
...His forthcoming book, Liberalism and Its Challengers: FDR to Reagan, includes an evaluation of Lyndon Johnson...
...What connoisseurs will find most astonishing is Andronov's conclusion: namely, that Paul Henze, author of The Plot to Kill the Pope, is the guilty party, having organized the plot personally on orders of the Reagan Administration...
...Henze's own professional and scholarly interests have focused largely on Turkish and Muslim politics...
...During the time this complex plot matured, Henze was living in Washington, researching a history of Soviet minority nationalities...
...Remember a similar occasion when Kissinger was U.S...
...Not at all...
...But no doubt so did the Soviets, and the odd thing is that our two authors, Sterling and Henze, for all the evidence, circumstantial and testimonial, they provide, refrain from asking the obvious: What do we do if we know for sure...
...militaristic Lithuania, and the Ukraine, would have been so casually eliminated by the Americans who had allegedly gained so much from his elevation...
...Both books have come off the press at about the same time, and each is the product of more than two years' intensive sleuthing...
...Providence knows what it is doing...
...His elevation to the Papacy, according to Soviet sources then, had been engineered during the Carter White House by Zbigniew Brzezinski working through Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia, as a means of destabilizing Socialist Poland...
...The method of exposition of each work is idiosyncratic: Sterling's is that of a bold investigative reporter, Henze's more that of a seasoned intelligence analyst...
...Even after he was installed as Pope, the Soviet press continued to call him the "Archbishop of Krakow," and spread false innuendoes of his record of proNazi collaboration...
...is at home in the Italian scene...
...Her published work on terrorism in Italy (not just "Italian terrorism") has gained her widespread recognition for meticulously tracing the links among such groups as the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Brigade Rosso, the IRA, and the PLO...
...The sort of person whom the lit trade calls The General Reader will find it rambling and pedantic...
...Yet evidence of such complicity continues to mount in the face of grim official silence in the West concerning the affair...
...Other Bulgarians--secret service defectors to the West--have joined in accusations of Bulgarian complicity in the matter...
...YES, I am placing my order for Bill copy(ies) of Richard Viguene's new i Enc book or 3-hour cassette version Charge copy(ies) ($12.95 each plus I ~ Am~ $1.50 each for postage and handling...
...What Mr...
...The Russians wouldn't do such things...
...Fairly enough perhaps, the author does not address that question...
...At one point the ailing Polish primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, referred explicitly to the "Holy Father's . . . letter to Brezhnev," having publicly stated in March 1981 that "Providence has placed in the Vatican a man who could be protector of Poland, and this he is...
...Sterling also has the investigative journalist's penchant for heroic systembucking, exposing bureaucratic stonewailers and sandbaggers who, she says, sought to block her access to necessary information (part of her book is devoted to flashing out at a most uncooperative, U.S...
...The Roman Church, even in Byzantium, played no role in Turkish politics...
...2) Johnson engaged in utoAlonzo L. Hamby teaches American history at Ohio University...
...Also at issue here were the Pope's intentions at the time when Soviet forces were mobilizing to deal with a possible collapse of their puppet regime in 1981...
...Appearing to confuse objectivity with balance, he resorts to an "on the one h a n d . . , on the other hand" treatment, more often than not making his points by indirection...
...Ridiculous," they replied...
...Marty went on, intrigued...
...I n this matter of superpower complicity, what one gains from reading these two books (and related materials) would truly intrigue a Sherlock Holmes...
...Those in the GOP bail out the big banks that lend money to anti-'American Third World and communist countries and provide tax credits and loan guarantees for doing business with foreign governments...
...Peter and return to his homeland to stand shoulder to shoulder with his people...
...The entire theme of 1960s culture--"Do your own thing...
...In the Middle East, of which (for these purposes) Turkey may be considered a part, Muslim zealots easily could find Christian targets of greater local prominence on whom to vent their hatred--the Greek Orthodox, for instance, or perhaps Westernized Protestants residing in the country...
...Indeed, Bornet might have made more of the way in which the antipoverty programs served a welfare function for the various groups working in what Daniel Moynihan once characterized as "the resentment business"--welfare bureaucrats, planners, social scientists, and assorted do-gooders...
...Both are richly documented...
...officialdom both in the CIA and in the U.S...
...On most i s s u e s , t h e r e ' s not a dime's worth of difference between the e l i t e s of the two major parties...
Vol. 17 • June 1984 • No. 6
