To Kill A Pope

Everyone knows the Soviets were behind the attempt on John Paul II.

Everyone except The New York Times, that is:

Even as more evidence that the Soviets were behind the attempt on the pope’s life emerged over the years, the Times continued to act as the Kremlin’s chief propagandist. During the 1985 trial of the would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, the paper asked in an August 15 editorial: “Why should anyone care what Mr. Agca says?” The editorial argued that “there is no credible independent corroboration of his claim that he was recruited by Bulgarian and Soviet secret police to eliminate a troublesome Polish Pope.” Rather, said the Times, the trial “has at least given weight to a simpler hypothesis — that the roots of this plot were in Turkey.”

In 1991 a Times columnist, Anthony Lewis, wrote that a 1985 CIA report on “the case for Soviet involvement” in the assassination had “tortured logic” and “read like a novelist's fantasy of Red conspiracy.” He wrote that “William Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence then, was seized with the notion that the Russians were behind everything wrong in the world, including the attempt on the Pope’s life.” And as recently as 2003, the Times ran a piece by Milt Bearden, a CIA veteran, who wrote that a story he challenged “fell in the same category as the story of the KGB plotting the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II — too good a yarn to check or dispute.”

Well, after all these years the trout has surfaced — repeatedly. Last week, Poland’s highest-ranking cardinal confirmed that priests working in the Vatican spied on the pope for the secret services in Moscow and Warsaw. Cardinal Jozef Glemp said Pope John Paul II was “spied on, and how.” This followed March’s findings by an Italian parliamentary commission that “beyond any reasonable doubt” the Kremlin was guilty in the attempted murder of John Paul II. And its account confirms the direction in which the Wall Street Journal and Claire Sterling and others were pointing a generation ago. Russia, led today by an ex-colonel of the KGB, is still denying its involvement in the attempted assassination. The AP reported in March that a Russian foreign-intelligence spokesman, Boris Labusov, said that “all assertions of any kind of participation in the attempt on the pope's life by Soviet special services, including foreign intelligence, are completely absurd.”

Of course, The New York Times continues to stand by Walter Duranty's claims that there was no famine in the Ukraine and Nikita Kruschev's promise to bury us.