Wizblog

Media Still Ignores Assassination Story

Back in 1981, the idea that Moscow could have ordered the assassination of the Pope didn't fit the "prevailing paradigms" of either the New York Times or the CIA. For the Times to tailor their news coverage to comport with their biases is expected. It's more dangerous when the Agency lets their "culture" dictate which evidence they take seriously. Thomas Joscelyn looks at the way the CIA treated the "Crime of the Century" more than 20 years ago:

A stunning revalation buzzed throughout Italy last week. According to two Italian newspapers, German government officials had found proof that the Soviet Union ordered the May 13, 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. The recently discovered documents--which are mainly correspondences between East German Stasi spies and their Bulgarian counterparts--reportedly discuss the Soviet assassination order as well as efforts to cover-up any traces of involvement by Bulgaria's spooks.

If the documents are as advertised, then they put an end to one of the great whodunits of the 20th century. The U.S. media has all but ignored this incredible story; which isn't, actually, much of a surprise.

Indeed, the elite media in this country never wanted to investigate the threads of evidence pointing to Bulgarian, and thus Soviet, involvement. What is surprising, however, is that in one of the greatest U.S. intelligence failures of all-time, neither did the CIA...

...The CIA...did not want to investigate the possibility of Soviet complicity, or--even worse--the possibility that the Soviets had actually ordered the false flag operation. The idea of a state-sponsored terrorist attack, especially ordered by the Soviet Union, went against the agency's prevailing paradigm for understanding terrorist actions. Proof of Bulgarian-Soviet involvement may also have jeopardized the dove's desire for détente....

In another good piece on the topic from the Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave says there were problems with the "right-wing, neo-Nazi" angle right away:

Mainstream media quickly assumed the plot was the work of Turkish terrorists known as the Gray Wolves, a neo-Nazi group of former military and Islamist extremists. What was suspicious about this story is that it surfaced within hours of the arrest of Ali Agca. One investigative reporter suspected the Gray Wolves were brought in as plausible deniability for the real culprits.

Claire Sterling, a prize-winning journalist and author, had just published 'The Terror Network' when Ali Agca tried to kill the pope. Her articles were widely published in major U.S. magazines as she used her Rome base for 30 years to report in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Miss Sterling quickly saw the Bulgarian connection when it became known Ali Agca had made several trips to Sofia, Bulgaria, and stayed in a hotel favored by the Bulgarian KGB (DS). In Rome, he had also had contacts with a Bulgarian agent whose cover was the Bulgarian national airline office. In an earlier incarnation, he had escaped from a Turkish jail where he had been serving time for killing a newspaper editor.

What's amazing to me is that John Paul II had long since visited, prayed with, and asked forgiveness for his would-be assassin by the time the proof of Ali Acga's sponsors' identity was made public.

But the example of the CIA's behavior in the case shows that the cultural problems we are trying to reform in the Agency today are not terribly new ones.

Posted by dan at April 7, 2005 04:08 PM