Attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II

• 1. Introduction

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  At 17:17 on the 13th of May 1981, four shots rang out across St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. Pope John Paul II, riding through a crowd of supporters, was struck by two bullets: one tore into his torso, narrowly missing vital organs; the other hit his left index finger. He collapsed into the arms of his aides as tens of thousands of onlookers fell into shock.

  The man who fired those shots was Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish national with a history of violence stretching back years before he ever set foot in Rome. He was grabbed before he could flee, arrested at the scene, and within months sentenced to life in prison by an Italian court.

  But the story of who sent Ağca, why, and what happened in the decades that followed is far from simple. Multiple governments, intelligence agencies, and shadowy networks would be named, accused, and cleared in a tangle of competing claims. And at the center of it all, the man Ağca had tried to kill would eventually visit him in prison, forgive him, and work to secure his freedom.

• 2. The Shooter's Path to Rome

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  By 1979, Ağca had already attracted attention from The New York Times, which described him as "the self-confessed killer of an Istanbul newspaperman" - that victim was Abdi İpekçi, editor of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet. That same year, Ağca threatened to kill the Pope if he did not cancel a planned visit to Turkey, describing John Paul II as "the masked leader of the crusades." The Pope went ahead with the trip anyway, arriving in Turkey in late November 1979.

  Beginning in August 1980, Ağca began moving through the Mediterranean region under the alias Vilperi, swapping passports and identities. According to his later testimony, this trail was meant to obscure his point of origin: Sofia, Bulgaria. He arrived in Rome on the 10th of May 1981, coming by train from Milan, just three days before the attack.

  Ağca claimed in testimony that he met three accomplices in Rome - one fellow Turk and two Bulgarians. He said the operation was commanded by Zilo Vassilev, identified as the Bulgarian military attaché in Italy, and that a Turkish mafioso named Bekir Çelenk had assigned him the mission while he was in Bulgaria. The plan, as Ağca described it, was for him and a backup gunman named Oral Çelik to open fire and then escape to the Bulgarian embassy under cover of a small explosion. Çelik panicked on the day and fled without firing a shot.

• 3. The Square, the Shots, the Arrest

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  On the morning of the 13th of May, Ağca sat in St. Peter's Square writing postcards and waiting for the Pope's motorcade to arrive. When John Paul II passed through the crowd, Ağca drew a 9mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol and fired four shots.

  Two bullets struck the Pope. One entered his torso and narrowly missed his vital organs. A second struck his left index finger. The Pope was rushed to hospital immediately, having lost severe amounts of blood.

  Two bystanders were also hit. Ann Odre, of Buffalo, New York, was struck in the chest. Rose Hall, of Massachusetts, was slightly wounded in the arm.

  Ağca fled into the crowd and threw the pistol under a truck, but he did not get far. Vatican security chief Camillo Cibin, a nun, and several spectators seized him before he could escape or fire further shots. He was arrested on the spot.

• 4. Trial, Prison, and Pardon

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  In July 1981, just weeks after the attack, an Italian court sentenced Ağca to life imprisonment. He would serve that sentence at Rome's Rebibbia Prison while the investigations around him grew increasingly complicated.

  Back in Turkey, separate legal troubles waited. Ağca had been convicted in absentia for the 1979 murder of journalist Abdi İpekçi, and he also faced charges related to two bank raids carried out in the 1970s.

  In November 2004, Ağca appealed for early release from Turkish custody, but a Turkish court ruled he would not be eligible until 2010. He was released on parole on the 12th of January 2006, only for the Turkish Supreme Court to rule on the 20th of January that his years served in Italy could not be deducted from his Turkish sentence. He was returned to jail. He was finally released on the 18th of January 2010, after nearly 29 years behind bars in total.

  The Italian imprisonment ended earlier. In June 2000, Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi pardoned Ağca at the Pope's personal request. Ağca was then deported to Turkey to face the remaining charges there.

• 5. Forgiveness in Rebibbia

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  In 1983, Pope John Paul II walked into Rebibbia Prison in Rome and sat down with the man who had tried to kill him. The two met privately. Ağca reportedly kissed the Pope's ring at the end of their visit, a gesture that confused some onlookers into thinking the Pope was hearing his confession.

  The Pope had already made his feelings public after the shooting, asking people to "pray for my brother Ağca... whom I have sincerely forgiven." The relationship between the two men extended beyond that single prison meeting. John Paul II met Ağca's mother in 1987 and his brother, Muezzin Ağca, a decade later.

  Ağca, for his part, was quoted describing the Pope as "the incarnation of all that is capitalism," yet something shifted between them over the years. In early February 2005, as the Pope lay seriously ill, Ağca sent him a letter wishing him well. Just two days before the Pope's death, on the 31st of March 2005, Ağca gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, in which he claimed to be writing a book about the assassination attempt.

• 6. The Bulgarian Connection

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  After the shooting, Ağca began making claims in custody that he had traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, before the attack and had contact with a Bulgarian agent operating in Rome under cover of the Bulgarian national airline office. Based on this testimony, a Bulgarian man named Sergei Antonov, who worked in Rome for Balkan Air, was arrested and charged with masterminding the plot. After a three-year trial, he was found not guilty in 1986.

  The theory that the Soviet KGB had ordered the assassination - because the Pope supported Poland's Solidarity movement, which Soviet leaders saw as a serious threat to their authority in Eastern Europe - was pushed strongly in the American media from the early 1980s onward. Journalists Michael Ledeen and Claire Sterling were prominent advocates of this view.

  Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman rejected this narrative in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, calling it the spread of "disinformation as news" and arguing there was no evidence for the claim. Wolfgang Achtner of The Independent called it "one of the most successful cases - certainly the most publicized - of disinformation."

  According to Paul Henze, identified as the CIA's chief of staff in Turkey, Ağca later said he was offered three million German marks to kill the Pope, with the offer coming from the Bulgarian Secret Service and Turkish mafiosi in Sofia. Critics including Edward S. Herman, who co-authored a 1986 book called The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection with Frank Brodhead, argued Ağca made no claims of Bulgarian involvement until after he had been held in solitary confinement and visited by Italian Military Intelligence agents, known as SISMI.

• 7. Competing Theories and the Mitrokhin Commission

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  On the 25th of September 1991, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman - later identified as a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy - told the US Senate intelligence committee that colleagues had falsified their analysis to support the Bulgarian accusation. He stated plainly that "the CIA hadn't any proof" for the alleged connection.

  Attorney Antonio Marini offered perhaps the most direct assessment of Ağca as a witness: "Ağca has manipulated all of us, telling hundreds of lies, continually changing versions, forcing us to open tens of different investigations." Over the years, Ağca claimed membership in the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which denied any connection; later implicated Vatican cardinal Agostino Casaroli in 2010; and in his 2013 memoirs wrote that the Iranian government and Ayatollah Khomeini had ordered the attack.

  In March 2006, the Mitrokhin Commission, set up by Silvio Berlusconi and headed by Forza Italia senator Paolo Guzzanti, revived the Soviet theory ahead of the April Italian general election. Guzzanti stated that "leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the assassination attempt." The commission's evidence included computer analysis of photographs purporting to show Antonov in St. Peter's Square during the shooting, and testimony from French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière.

  Both Russia and Bulgaria condemned the report. Bulgarian foreign ministry spokesman Dimiter Tzantchev pointed to the 1986 court verdict as the final word. The Pope himself, in his final book Memory and Identity, wrote that he was convinced the shooting was not Ağca's initiative alone and that "someone else masterminded it and someone else commissioned it."

• 8. Fatima, Fiction, and Loose Ends

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  The date of the shooting, the 13th of May 1981, happened to be the 64th anniversary of the first reported apparition of the Virgin Mary to children at Fatima, Portugal, on the 13th of May 1917. While in prison, Ağca was widely reported to have developed an obsession with the site. During his trial he claimed to be the second coming of Jesus Christ and demanded the Vatican release the so-called Third Secret of Fatima.

  The assassination attempt had also come only 11 days after the hijacking of Aer Lingus Flight 164 by an ex-monk named Laurence James Downey, who had made the same demand about the Third Secret.

  On the 13th of May 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano gave an address linking the Third Secret to the 1981 shooting, describing John Paul II as the "Bishop clothed in white" in the prophecy and repeating the Pope's own belief that "a motherly hand" had guided Ağca's bullets away from fatal injury. The text of the Third Secret was made public on the 26th of June 2000.

  The assassination attempt has also filtered into fiction. A. J. Quinnell's novel In the Name of the Father explores the aftermath of a plot to kill the Pope and traces it to the highest levels of the Kremlin. Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit draws on the same Moscow-origin theory. In the 2004 alternate history film C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, the attack is transplanted to New York City, where a Baptist from Tennessee named Maynard Brimley shoots the Pope and kills a bystander - yet the Pope still visits the shooter in prison to offer forgiveness, echoing John Paul II's actual visit to Rebibbia in 1983.