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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 Exclusive Interview with Claire Sterling SPECIAL EDITION -- TERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 HUMAN EVENTS 21 April 1984 Pgs.10-15 Why Is the West Covering Up for Agca? Q. Ms. Sterling, could you give us a synopsis of the plot of your book? A. The plot as I was able to unfold ~ it—independently of what the judge in charge of this case in Italy, Judge Martella was doing—is this: that a young Turk in Istanbul, who was mov- ing in the circles of a neo-Nazi, right- wing terrorist group called the Gray Wolves, was picked to be a professional hit-man. He was picked by a unique criminal band called the Turkish Mafia, which operates out of Sofia, Bulgaria, which, indeed, is under the direct control and supervision of the Bulgarian Secret Service. Since the end of the ’60s the Turkish Mafia, using a Bulgarian state corpora- tion called Kintex, has been smuggling billions -of dollars worth of, weapons and other contraband into Turkey and -the Middle East from Western Europe, and heroin from Turkey and the Middle East into Western Europe. Kintex ‘is also a branch of the Bulgarian Secret Service. _ The Turkish Mafia is the operating force in the mechariism of this plot. It used this Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, who had a right-wing image, and it used other Turkish Gray Wolves, neo-Nazi Gray Wolves, who were scattered through Europe, to preserve and enhance this right-wing image, so that the attack on: Pope John Paul IT was made to hook like a right-wing terrorist hit. How did Agca become involved? He escaped from a military prison after be- ing jailed for the murder of an impor- tant editor in Istanbul. His escape was arranged by two Gray Wolves leaders who were lieutenants of the Turkish Mafia. These two lieutenants then pro- cured the false documents, perfectly counterfeited, which Agca used to travel through Europe, and they then ‘got him over the Bulgarian border, got his fake passport stamped with suitable entry-exit stamps by the Bulgarian ser- vices and got him installed in Sofia. In Sofia he met with the two major godfathers of the Mafia in the summer of 1980. He spent the entire summer there. One of them, Abuzer Ugurlu, is presently on trial in Ankara and has Rome-based author Claire Sterling has written one of the most important books of the year—probably, in fact, in many years. Entitled The Time of the Assassins (Holt Rinehart and Winston), it explores in detail the plot behind the assassi- nation attempt on the life of Pope John Paul {I in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. : The identity of the man who shot the pope is well known by this time. He is Mehmet Ali Agca,.a young Turk who has been described in much of the worid’s press as a rightist Islamic fanatic. Ms. Sterling has demonstrated, con- vincingly, that he is no such thing—that, in fact, this Image of Agca was based on disinformation put out by the Soviet KGB. The real Agca, as Ms. Sterling shows, was a highly intelligent mercenary involved with the Turkish Mafia and, through them, with the Bulgarian secret police. The Buigarians, of course, are totally beholden to the Soviet Union. Thus, the circumstantial evidence is great that the thread of the assassina-. tlon-plot leads ultimately to Moscow and: the headquarters of the KGB—whose. director at the time was.none other than Yuri Andropov, who shortly thereafter became president of the Soviet Union. The reluctance on the part of the Western press and intelligence agencies to.face. the facts in the Ali case. con- now, just recently, admitted to having met Agca there and given him money. The other one, Bekir Celenk, was in Western Europe when this case broke. As soon as he heard that the Italian judge had a warrant out for his arrest, he fled to Sofia, where he is being sheltered at present. He’s the one who was supposed to have offered Agca $1.3 million to shoot the pope. To summarize, Agca with the Gray Wolves, representing the extreme right, had the image of the right-wing ter- rorist hit-man. The Wolves were being run by this huge contraband ring, the Turkish Mafia, unique in the world in ttiat it was really working for a Com- munist state corporation under the sponsorship of the Communist state of Bulgaria. And the two godfathers of 51 Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 stitutes, in Ms. Sterling’s view, a massive cover-up almost as disquieting as the plot itself. Ms. Sterling was commissioned by the Reader's Digest to investigate the assassination plot against the pope, and the Digest was extremely generous in its terms, basically giving the author a com- mission to get to the bottom of the mat- ter, whatever: the cost. Sterling was a logical choice for such an assignment, having been based in Rome for 34 years and having already written a book, The Terror Network, which documented the rising tide of* terrorism around the world—and also the role played by the Soviet Union In sponsoring It. The Digest's faith In Ms. Sterling has paid off in an extraordinary book, thoroughly documented, riveting in style and startling In its conclusions—most notably for placing the ultimate respon- sibility for the shooting of the pope at the door of the Kremlin. (Interestingly, Paul Henze, a former analyst with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s National Security Council, was commissloned by Reader’s Digest to conduct a parallel, fully independent In-- vestigation of the case. His basic conclu- sions were the same as Ms. Sterling’s.) On February 14, ironically, the day of Yuri Andropov’s funeral, Claire Sterling recorded the following exclusive inter- view for Human Events with James Roberts, former director of the White House Fellowships program. . this Turkish Mafia, each Sofia-based, have in fact been working directly for the Bulgarian Secret Service: Abuzer Ugurlu, since 1954, when he was recruited, and Bekir Celenk since the middle ’60s. All this is heavily documented in the book. That’s as far as I go in recreating the mechanism of the way the operation was mounted, My conclusion is that the Bulgarians would have had to have the instructions for this attempted assas- sination from the Soviet Union for several reasons, not just as speculation. First, because Bulgaria itself has no evident motive to quarrel with Pope John Paul Il. The Bulgarians don’t have any problem like Solidarity; they CONTINUED NEXT PAGE