◆ SpookStack

Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 SPECIAL EDITION -- T STERLING. ..Continued don’t have a restless Catholic popu- lation; they don’t have any particular bone of contention or any grievance with the pope. On the other hand, they do have 400 agents of the KGB sta- tioned in Sofia in various branches of their Secret Service, of whom 300 are stationed in the department having to do with Bulgarian espionage activities outside of Bulgaria, and every Bulgarian Embassy abroad has at least one such agent that reports directly to Moscow to the KGB. - So apart from any other consider- ation or speculation, it really would have been physically impossible for the Bulgarians to have mounted this opera- tion using at least three Bulgarian agents directly who were running the hit-man Agca in Rome unless the Rus- sians had given them the instructions to do this, which is my conclusion. Now, apart from my own con- clusion, 1 published much of this in an article that I wrote in the Reader’s Digest, which came out at the end of August-September 1982, and in November 1982 the Italian magistrate investigating this case arrested a Bulgarian in Rome and issued arrest warrants for two other Bulgarians who had, by then, fled to Sofia, on charges of direct complicity in this case. He also arrested two Turks and issued arrest warrants for two other Turks on charges of direct complicity and one of those two Turks was this godfather Bekir Celenk who fled to Sofia where he remains to this day. I had been forming a chain of circumstantial evidence that I had un- covered in a long nine-month investi- gation going through Turkey, West Germany, Switzerland, Austria and so on. Parallel to my own investigation was an official judicial investigation in Italy conducted by Judge Martella, in which by November 1982, he had iden- tified seven people outside of Agca who were allegedly involved in the con- spiracy. Four were. Turks and three were Bulgarian. The judge has now completed a two- year investigation. In mid-December he turned over several thousand pages of evidence to the state prosecutor in Rome, the equivalent of the attorney general’s office, for review. The state prosecutor any: day now will probably be issuing his formal recommendation for trial for the Bulgarian and the two Turks who are presently under arrest and the other two Bulgarians and two Turks who are wanted as accomplices. t CLAIRE STERLING Then Judge Martella will have another month to hear any appeals from the Bulgarian’s lawyers and then he will make the final ruling for trial and publish a thousand pages — roughly — of a report presenting the main evidence that he has gathered which in his opinion justifies sending these people to trial. So what we have now is no longer me, as a reporter, saying that there was a Bulgarian connection in this case. It is a very upright judge of stainless repu- tation in Italy who, after two years of investigation, will be sending these peo- plé for trial on the charges that they were all participating directly in the plot to kill Pope John Paul. Q. To say that there is not only a Bulgarian connection but also a KGB connection is a very grave allegation, as I’m sure you are aware, because It means that the trail goes directly to the door of Yuri Andropov. Ironically enough, we are conducting this Inter- view on the day of his funeral. What you’re saying, by implication, Is that he really was responsible for ordering the assassination attempt on the pope. A. Well, yes. Of course, he was head of the KGB when the attack was ordered. I believe that actually it might ERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 have been easier for the West to handle this whole problem if the Establishment in the West had concluded from the start that he, alone, could not have in- itiated a plan of such dimensions, that a decision to assassinate someone as im- portant as Pope John Paul, who heads the Roman Catholic Church, about a sixth of the human race, would have had to be made by the Politburo, headed at the time by Brezhnev, who was dead by the time Andropov then became the sensitive figure as the leader of the Soviet Union, itself, And in that case Andropov would have been a kind of senior civil servant, you might say, carrying out orders from the top, I think that perhaps Western leaders might have found it easier to deal with what was coming out in this case if they had put it that way from the start. Now we have two dead Soviet leaders who might make it easier for us in the West to handle what is going to come out in. the courts. The original order would have had to emanate from Brezhnev himself, now dead, and it would have had to then be passed on for execution by Andropov, now dead. So you might say there is a relatively clean slate if we now find that the Italian court declares these Bulgarians guilty. Any normal grown-up has to see that it’s really not possible fot the Bulgarians to have done this on their own, unless the Russians had told them to do it. And we can’ now say that all right, the two main characters, the main personalities in the Soviet Union who would have borne the direct responsibility for this, are now dead. So let’s start again in discussing this kind of problem, of holding the Russians accountable with whoever now is leading the Soviet Union. Q. So you wouldn’t advocate any punitive action on the part of the United States? A. No, I don’t think we should try to ‘take punitive action. I think the impor- tant thing is to first of all let the public know what is known to the governs ments of the West, not try to shield the Russians from public view, which has been done up until now, and not try to persuade the public that this was the act of a lone, crazy, gunman, a religious fanatic. He is none of those things and the court has already made that very plain in Italy. CONTINUED NEXT PAGE Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5