Dark Mysteries of the Vatican by H. Paul Jeffers

agency of the U.S. government] agents in CIA covert operations. They employed undercover operatives to lobby members of the Curia and spy on liberal churchmen on the pope’s staff who challenged the political assumptions of the United States; and prepared intelligence briefings that accurately predicted the rise of liberation theology.” The CIA also collaborated with Catholic groups to counter actions of leftist clerics in Latin America.
    “In February 1981, just over a year following his triumphal visit to the United States, Pope John Paul II planned to refuel for three hours in Anchorage, Alaska, en route home following a major pastoral trip to the Philippines, Japan, and Guam. When the White House learned of this plan, National Security Council staffers recommended that Reagan ‘establish an early, personal relationship with the Pope while welcoming him back to North American soil.’ On February 5, NSC staffer James M. Rentschler proposed that a ‘Nanook-of-the-North mission’ be mounted during the pope’s Alaskan layover.
    “Accordingly, when John Paul landed in Anchorage on February 25, the envoy-designate to the Vatican, William Wilson, handed him a letter from Reagan, stating: ‘…I hope you will not hesitate to use [Wilson] as the channel for sensitive matters you or your associates may wish to communicate to me.’”
    Three moths later, John Paul II was being driven slowly around St. Peter’s Square in his open jeep to greet thousands of people who crowded into Vatican City to see him and receive his blessing. On May 13, 1981, dressed in a papal-white cassock, he was shaking hands and lifting small children into his arms. As he reached a point just outside the Vatican’s bronze gate, there was a burst of gunfire.
    “One hand rising to his face and blood staining his garments,” reported the New York Times , “the Pope faltered and fell into the arms of his Polish secretary, the Rev. Stanislaw Dziwisz, and his personal servant, Angelo Gugel, who were in the vehicle with him….
    Rushed by an ambulance to Gemelli Hospital, two miles north of the Vatican, for surgery,…John Paul was conscious as he was taken to the operating room….
    “The gunman had fired four times in the attack. Two tourists, an American and a Jamaican, were wounded by two of the bullets. The gunman, armed with a nine-millimeter Browning automatic, was set upon by bystanders, who knocked the pistol out of his hand. He was arrested, taken away by police car, and later identified as twenty-three-year-old Mehmet Ali Agca. Police quoted him as having told them, ‘My life is not important.’
    “He was said to have arrived in Italy the previous Saturday at the Milan airport and arrived in Rome on Monday. The police said that he had in his pocket several notes in handwritten Turkish, one of them saying, ‘I am killing the Pope as a protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the United States and against the genocide that is being carried out in El Salvador and Afghanistan.’
    “The Turkish news agency Anatolia reported that Agca had been convicted of murdering Abdi Ipekci, the editor of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet , in February 1979, but had escaped from prison later that year. Anatolia said he wrote a letter to the newspaper on Nov. 26, 1979, saying that he had fled from prison with the intention of killing the Pope, who was due to visit Ankara and Istanbul….
    “The Vatican announced that the Pope…had suffered multiple lesions of the abdomen and a massive hemorrhage and had been given a transfusion of about six pints of blood. The Vatican also said that he had been wounded in the right forearm and the second finger of his left hand.”
    Some news media quickly assumed the plot was the work of Turkish terrorists known as the Gray Wolves, a neo-Nazi group of both former military and Islamist extremists. This theory surfaced within hours of the arrest of Agca. Later, authorities investigating the attack declared