Friday, March 03, 2006
Did the Russkies try to whack John Paul II?
"All affirmations about any involvement of Soviet intelligence services, including the military secret service, in the attempted assassination of the pope are absolutely absurd and have nothing to do with reality," a spokesman for the service was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying.
Oh? It isn't just Italian politicians who clam the connection. Allow me to quote Yale's esteemed John Lewis Gaddis
, writing about the rise of the Polish trade union Solidarity and the election of John Paul II:It was a moment at which several trends converged: the survival of a distinctive Polish identity despite the attempts of powerful neighbors, over several centuries, to try to smother it; the church's success in maintaining its autonomy through decades of war, revolution, and occupation; the state's incompetence in managing the post-World War II economy, which in turn discredited the ruling party's ideology. But trends hardly ever converge automatically. It takes leaders to make them do so, and here the actor-priest from Krakow and the actor-electrician from Gdansk played to each other's strengths -- so much so that plans began to be made to remove them both from the stage.
The agent was Mehmet Ali Agca, a young Turk who may have plotted to kill Walesa on a January, 1981, visit to Rome, and who did shoot and almost kill the pope in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981. Agca's ties to Bulgarian intelligence quickly became clear. Soviet complicity was more difficult to establish, but it strains credulity to suggest that the Bulgarians would have undertaken an operation of this importance without Moscow's approval. The Italian state prosecutor's official report hinted strongly at this: "In some secret place, where every secret is wrapped in another secret, some political figure of great power ... mindful of th eneeds of the Eastern bloc, decided that it was necessary to kill Pope Wojtyla." The pope's biographer put it more bluntly: "The simplest and most compelling answer ... [is that] the Soviet Union was not an innocent in this business."
Of course the Russians signed off on the contract to murder John Paul II, and had they succeeded they probably would have taken down Lech Walesa, too. This is old news. The only thing that is troubling is that Vladimir Putin's government believes that it is more credible to deny the charge than to admit it and apologize for it.
5 Comments:
By 
Consul-At-Arms, at
Fri Mar 03, 07:56:00 AM:
Your last comment touches on one of Putin's problems. He ought to be concerned about being head of Russian REPUBLIC instead of being an apologist for the Soviet Union. He ought to be able to simply repudiate and renounce the USSR's attempt at assassinating JP2. Instead, he's either worried about Russia being implicated in the larger sense and the KGB (of which organization he is the most prominent alumnus) more specifically.
Wouldn't it be something if his attempts at denying responsibility stem from a more personal involvement in the attempt?
By Pax Federatica, at
Fri Mar 03, 01:45:00 PM:
I'd say the Italians are probably just jealous because the Russians won twice as many medals as they did (22 to 11) at their own Winter Olympics. 8-)
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Mar 03, 02:30:00 PM:
Not to second guess liklihoods, but governments do begin or get involved in operations that are not written down, anywhere. I don't trust the Russians as far as I could throw one, but it's possible that no records of involvement exist, so a poor archivist tasked to check this would claim that no, the USSR had nothing to do with it.
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Fri Mar 03, 07:33:00 PM:
Gorbachev, even after the fall of the USSR, continued to deny the claim.
He was the guy who Ended The Cold War, remember?
By Dawnfire82, at
Tue Mar 07, 05:22:00 PM:
No, really... governments do things that are never written down.
