Bulgarian Myth

...2) Socialist Party Defense Minister Lagorio announced to the Italian Parliament that Agca had identified his Bulgarian accomplices from photographs two months before he actually did so...

...The authors take us on a tour of some of the U.S...

...The dissection of the three experts is a model of rhetorical argumentation analysis...

...It will perhaps be quietly placed on the back burner for a while, but the myth has entered popular consciousness by intense and indignant repetition, and it will take on renewed life after memories of the upsetting trial are dimmed...

...3) A Red Brigades "supergrass" was in the next cell to Agca and spent considerable time with him...

...The same chaplain was later jailed for proven active membership in the Mafia...

...In this book by Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, their extended dissection of the evidence for a "Bulgarian connection" to Ali Agca's assassination attempt suggests that such manipulation of public opinion is depressingly easy...

...Within the context of the Italian state and legal system as described by the authors, these oddities assume great significance...

...The authors review the evidence that Agca may have been coached during the lengthy period—eighteen months—he spent in prison before he came forward with the names of his supposed Bulgarian coconspirators...

...Using original sources in Turkish, Italian, and German, they have shed a great deal of light where previously there was darkness...

...Herman and Brodhead provide a detailed but compressed overview of the whole affair...

...In the era of superpower confrontation, how easy is it to subvert the Western public mind by reportage of dramatic events—such as the shooting of a Pope— which conveys a gigantic array of seemingly factual details and sober authorities, thus producing a vague but indelible impression of incontrovertible Soviet barbarism...

...They help to explain the motivation and connections that enabled Agca to shoot the Pope, along with the Byzantine quality of Italy's public life and legal "system" within which Agca and his alleged accomplices from Bulgaria were processed...

...principals in the diffusion of a Bulgarian connection: Claire Sterling, Paul Henze, and Michael Leeden, "terrorism experts," with The New York Times and McNeil-Lehrer Report acting in this instance as amplifiers...

...4) The then prison chaplain visited Agca frequently, despite the prisoner's Muslim beliefs, to the point where Agca wrote to Cardinal Silvio Oddi that the chaplain was pressuring him and that he was becoming afraid for his life...

...The main points at issue include these problematic aspects: (1) The "high-security" jail where he was kept (As-coli Piceno) was widely recognized as "notoriously porous" (New York Times correspondent John Tagliabue...

...In the analysis of conspiracy and conspirators, it is hard to distinguish well-founded suspicion from paranoia, and it is to their credit that they have so effectively done so...

...Their work raises still further questions of great topical interest, such as the reason why organs such as The New York Times and the McNeil-Lehrer Report were prepared to take such shoddy stuif on credit, and the implications of the ferocious attack on the media for liberal bias and covering up the "Bulgarian connection" by Sterling and her associates...

...The problems with taking Agca's testimony about the Bulgarian connection become considerable, even without taking into account his later claims to be Jesus Christ and to know the legendary "secrets" of Fatima...

...These chapters are extremely informative for those without any sense of ongoing political realities in Turkey and Italy...

...Insofar as this is so—and the persistence of superpower confrontation provides the continuing context for it to be so—the authors' analysis of how the Bulgarian connection came to be constructed in the first place is an important contribution to the thinking of those people who genuinely wish to live in peace, not with the Kremlin but with the peoples of the Soviet bloc...

...John Downing (John Downing is chairman of the communications department at Hunter College in New York...

...Despite the collapse of the case for a KGB plot to kill the Pope, they write at the conclusion of their painstaking review that "the Bulgarian connection will be salvaged...

...It becomes quite unnerving to see what flimsy evidence was accepted from the experts by these respected media, as well as by several book publishers...

...In two chapters they introduce readers to the Turkish and Italian contexts of the Agca case, with particular attention to the documented involvement of the CIA since World War II with the ultra-Right in both nations...

...The authors, in this reviewer's mind, have demolished any motivation for Agca's action beyond extremist hostility to what he perceived as anti-Islamic imperialism...

...This book touches upon much more than the construction and collapse of a fantasy house of cards...