Zero Hour (2004–…): Season 2, Episode 6 - The Plot to Kill the Pope - full transcript

(CROWD CHEERING)

NARRATOR: In 1981, John Paul II
had been Pope for less than three years.

Then on a warm May evening,

he nearly lost his life when
he was shot at close range

during his weekly audience in Rome.

-(GUNSHOT) -(CROWD SCREAMING)

The Papacy that is now likely to be
crowned with John Paul becoming a saint,

almost never got a chance to get started.

(CORRADO MANNI SPEAKING ITALIAN)

TRANSLATOR: The Holy
Father was very close to death.

He was borderline between life and death.



NARRATOR: The identity of the
gunman was never in any doubt.

Mehmet Ali Agca was
an erratic 23-year-old Turk

with a record of political assassination.

He was caught on the
spot before he could escape,

and eventually sentenced
to life imprisonment.

(SPEAKING HEAVILY ACCENTED ENGLISH)

PROF. SAHIN: He's either the greatest
pathological liar of the 20th century,

or he was a master of
disguising who really he is.

(SPEAKING HEAVILY ACCENTED ENGLISH)

NARRATOR: Was Agca really an international
terrorist, or simply a madman?

Was he part of a massive
conspiracy, or did he act alone?

Was there an accomplice
in St. Peter's Square

in that fateful hour
leading up to the shooting?

If so, who?



And was the gunman acting out a plot

hatched by the Soviet
Union and its client, Bulgaria?

Everything we've learned about the Soviet
Union since makes it entirely credible

that men in Moscow would have been
attempting to carry out this conspiracy.

(GUNSHOT)

NARRATOR: It's just after a quarter past
4:00 on a balmy Wednesday afternoon in Rome.

Inside the Vatican, Pope
John Paul is readying himself

for his weekly audience with
pilgrims and holidaymakers.

In St. Peter's Square, the
crowd is beginning to congregate

in anticipation of the Pope's
arrival in about 45 minutes' time.

In the crowd, a man who has not come
to be blessed or to take photographs,

but who has murder on his mind.

So who is this Turkish would-be assassin?

-(SPEAKING TURKISH) -TRANSLATOR:
He told me that he had taken on

sort of divine mission. And actually I
feel that he did have a divine mission.

(SPEAKING ITALIAN)

TRANSLATOR: Ali Agca
was an A-class criminal.

A shifty character capable of saying
one thing today and the opposite tomorrow.

NARRATOR: With just a few minutes to go

before the Pope make
his entry into the Square,

there's nothing so far to
distinguish this audience

from any other conducted by John Paul.

But one 20-year-old
American in the square today

has a premonition that
something is not quite right.

A couple of days before the trip, I
woke up and I said to my husband,

I said, "Terrorists are gonna
get me," and he laughed at me.

And I just had the
strangest feeling before I left

that something was gonna happen.

NARRATOR: Another
American tourist, Anne Odre,

a 58-year-old widow from upstate New York,

is with a church-organized tour of Europe.

Months later, back home in Buffalo,

she was to record the
events of this day in her diary.

ODRE: May 13th, 1981. Morning.

Took a taxi to the Vatican from the
Hotel Residence, to attend a private mass.

Then toured the Vatican to
where St. Peter was interred.

After lunch, decided to return again
with the group to the Vatican Square

for a viewing of the Pope.

JOAN KENJARSKI: She had always wanted to
visit the Holy Father and see him personally

because he was of Polish descent

and ever since he was elected
in 1978, that was her dream.

So when this trip became available,

even though she had no
real close friend to go with,

she decided that the Christian
family was enough for her,

you know, to accompany her.

ODRE: There were 42 people on our tour
from every corner of the United States.

Returned to the Square at 4:45 p.m.

The group had reserved sections.

As this was my first visit, I was very
excited and wanted to see the Holy Father.

She often said that when
they were in St. Peter's

they had given a rose
to the black St. Peter

and legend has it, if you touch his
toe, it's supposed to be good luck.

And she said she did because
she wanted to have a safe trip home.

NARRATOR: Behind the
high walls of Vatican City,

Pope John Paul has
left his private apartment,

and is on his way to the papal Jeep

which will then carry him through
the crowds in St. Peter's Square.

After proceeding around the
square twice, as is his usual routine,

he intends, then, to dismount
and formally bless the pilgrims.

But today there will be no formal blessing,

because in 22 minutes,
God has other plans for him.

Meanwhile, according to one of
the gunman's later confessions,

in the Via Della Conciliazione,

a few hundred meters from St. Peters,

next to the Canadian
Embassy to the Vatican,

this Alfa Romeo is to
be his getaway vehicle.

If true, the existence of the car

and, more particularly,
its driver, is dynamite,

since it represents proof positive

that Mehmet Ali Agca is
at the tip of a conspiracy

reaching back almost
certainly to the Kremlin.

But did the car ever exist,

or was it just part of the many
lies invented by the gunman later?

At the Bulgarian Embassy in
Rome, seven kilometers away,

this truck, allegedly containing
furniture, really does exist.

It has been sealed earlier in
front of Italian customs officers,

and is scheduled to leave later in
the day for Bulgaria's capital, Sofia.

Under an international agreement,

trucks like this don't get
examined at international borders.

In one of his later confessions,

Mehmet Ali Agca says it was this truck that
was to be used to smuggle him out of Italy.

As he mounts his Popemobile
under the Arco delle Campane

at the entrance to St. Peter's Square,

John Paul knows that today is
the 64th anniversary of a miracle.

On May the 13th, 1917,

the Virgin Mary is said to
have revealed three secrets

to three young Portuguese
peasant children at Fatima.

-(CROWD CHEERING) -When he became Pope,

John Paul found out
the one remaining secret

and it's devastating.

The Virgin told the children at Fatima

that one day, a bishop dressed
in white would suffer greatly.

John Paul does not know
that he is to be that bishop,

and indeed, that the moment of the
assassination attempt the Virgin foretold,

is just 17 minutes away.

Mehmet Ali Agca doesn't
know about the Fatima miracle.

But he does know a thing
or two about assassination,

for this is a man with form.

This is the funeral, two years previously,

of Turkey's highest profile
assassination victim of the time,

newspaper editor Abdi Ipekci.

The weapon that killed
him, a .9mm Browning pistol,

just like the gun Agca is carrying in Rome.

And Ipekci's assassin?

None other than 21-year-old
student, Mehmet Ali Agca.

The murder of Abdi Ipekci was one of
the greatest shocks of the 20th century

in Turkish society,

because Ipekci was a
highly respected journalist

and till that time,

terror, that had been raging in Turkey,

had not reached up to a
target as high as Mr. Ipekci.

NARRATOR: During Agca's
formative years in the late 1970s,

Turkey had become a battleground
between leftist and rightist groups.

Murder, terrorism and battles
in the street were commonplace.

(EXPLOSION)

Agca's home town of
Malatya in eastern Turkey

was a center for the right wing
group called the Grey Wolves.

SAHIN: Grey Wolves were mostly young people

recruited in small towns or cities
of Anatolia to fight Communism.

In the 1970s, Turkey was deeply
polarized between the left and the right

and the factions called each other,
you know, "fascists" and "communists."

And the Grey Wolves were
the warriors of the right wing.

They were well-organized,
they were well-armed,

and they had this ideological strength
that made them more influential.

(CROWD SINGING IN TURKISH)

NARRATOR: Four months
after Ipekci's assassination,

a notorious Grey Wolf hangout near Istanbul
University was raided by Turkish police.

(MAN SPEAKING TURKISH)

(DOOR BURSTING OPEN)

(SPEAKING TURKISH)

NARRATOR: They'd got their man.

But was Agca an anticommunist Grey Wolf

or, as conspiracy theorists
were later to believe,

a carefully disguised
procommunist Bulgarian stooge

put in place to give him cover
for more significant acts of murder

later on the world stage?

After the assassination of Abdi Ipekci,

Agca was put through an elaborate procedure

to try to make him look like a Grey Wolf.

But Agca was not a Grey Wolf.

There is a great deal of evidence

that Agca was dressed in Grey
Wolf clothing rather deliberately.

NARRATOR: To those who really
knew Agca's political affiliations,

this conspiracy theory is a fantasy.

One such is Agca's lawyer,

who worked on the Ipekci case for free, and
who was himself a Nationalist Party member.

(SPEAKING TURKISH)

TRANSLATOR: Mehmet Ali Agca was a member
of the extreme right wing nationalist group

known as the Grey Wolves in Istanbul.

I used to know all of them through
various criminal cases I worked on.

NARRATOR: After his arrest, Agca
immediately confessed to Ipekci's murder

with the words, "I shot Abdi Ipekci."

But in a pattern that became
established behavior for him,

he was later to withdraw his confession.

(INDISTINCT TALKING)

As the moment for his trial drew nearer,

Agca threatened to reveal the identity of
his masters behind the Ipekci murder plot.

In effect, he was blackmailing
his Grey Wolf comrades.

"Get me out of prison, or else..."

Within days he was to walk out of
Turkey's highest security military prison

disguised as a soldier, and
accompanied by an officer,

for his guards had been infiltrated by the
Grey Wolves and the Fascist nationalists.

Having passed through eight check points,

Agca and his confederate made their
way across Istanbul's Bosporus Bridge

to a safe house where he was to meet up with
old friends from his home town of Malatya,

including his closest
boyhood buddy, Oral Celik.

(SPEAKING TURKISH)

NARRATOR: He was now
Turkey's most wanted criminal,

but bizarrely, the following day, he
wrote a letter to the selfsame newspaper

whose editor he only recently had murdered.

It was an act of bravado,

prompted by Pope John
Paul II's controversial decision

to visit predominantly
Muslim Turkey in late 1979.

Some Turkish Islamists and nationalists,

Agca among them, were outraged.

AGCA: To Milliyet Newspaper.

Fearing that Turkey will form a
political, economic and military alliance

with our brothers in the Muslim world,

Western imperialists have hurriedly
dispatched their Crusader Commander in Chief,

John Paul, to Turkey.

Unless this ill-timed and
pointless visit is canceled,

I will definitely shoot the Pope.

This is the only reason I have
escaped from prison. Mehmet Ali Agca.

Agca's proclamations always
sound very schizophrenic.

He puts together concepts that
do not necessarily belong together.

Whether he does those things to
hide his real origins and real identity,

or just because he is sick in the mind,

I have never been able to figure out,

and neither have Turkish psychiatrists.

NARRATOR: Now 18 months later,

Agca's public threat to kill John
Paul II is about to be realized.

But the question that remains
to this day is whether he is,

as he is first to reveal to his
captors within hours of his arrest,

a lone gunman. A self-styled
international terrorist.

A man with a personal
mission and no accomplice.

Or are there much more
sinister forces behind him?

In a series of confessions

starting nearly 18 months
after his attempt to kill the Pope,

Agca produced three
wildly different stories

with three wildly differing implications.

In one, he said he'd been
accompanied in the square that day

by Bulgarian diplomat, Todor Avaizov.

In another confession, his accomplice
was Turkish left-winger Sedat Kirri Kadem.

And in yet another version, he said
he'd been accompanied that afternoon

by this dear friend Oral Celik,

the Grey Wolf who'd aided his
escape from the Turkish prison.

(SPEAKING ITALIAN)

TRANSLATOR: None of
what Agca says is believable.

Whatever he says must be verified
and checked which, as you can imagine,

is a problem for an investigating
magistrate who, from the outset,

is faced with a huge problem
with grave consequences

that makes his job of finding
the truth very difficult indeed.

NARRATOR: When he began his investigations,

one of Judge Martella's
earliest discoveries

was that shortly after Agca's
escape from prison in Turkey,

he'd spent two months living
it up in a series of luxury hotels

in Bulgaria's capital Sofia.

To Martella,

this indicated that the Bulgarians
probably were involved in the Papal plot.

(SPEAKING ITALIAN)

TRANSLATOR: Someone like Agca,

a murderer wanted by the
police in more than one country,

goes to a country like Bulgaria,

at that time under a non-democratic regime

which checked everyone
entering or leaving the country,

and spends almost two months there...

Well, someone like Agca must
have enjoyed some kind of protection.

NARRATOR: But if Agca
enjoyed protection in Bulgaria,

there is a simple explanation that has
nothing to do with the plot to kill the Pope.

Sofia was, at the time,
a major transit point

for the lucrative Turkish Mafia
activity of smuggling drugs and guns,

and Agca had impeccable connections
when it came to the Turkish Mafia.

(KNOCKING)

In July 1980, in the luxury
Vitosha Hotel in Sofia,

Agca met another Turk. Omer Mersan.

(BOTH SPEAKING TURKISH)

NARRATOR: Mersan was later to
be described by the Italian prosecutors

as a swindler well placed
with the Bulgarian authorities.

Mersan says that Agca introduced
himself as student called Metin,

working for Turkish Mafia
godfather, Abuzer Ugurlu.

(BOTH SPEAKING TURKISH)

NARRATOR: Agca's patron, Abuzer Ugurlu,

was one of the most important
bosses of the Turkish Mafia.

In 1974, he'd been convicted
of running 27 million cartridges

and 70,000 guns into Turkey via Bulgaria.

He was also wanted by Interpol for
smuggling large quantities of cannabis

between Syria and Western Europe.

(SPEAKING TURKISH)

(SPEAKING TURKISH)

TRANSLATOR: Various criminals stayed in hotels
in Sofia. Major arms and drug smugglers.

Members of the Bulgarian
Intelligence Services and the Mafia,

frequented these places,

and they went out of their
way to help the criminals

because of the vast fortunes
that were being made.

Agca was undoubtedly in
Sofia. He stayed at Sofia hotels,

and that's in the registration
records of the hotels.

So there's no doubt that Agca
did spend several weeks in Bulgaria

and he was probably
able to stay in Bulgaria

'cause he had protection
from the Turkish Mafia

who were connected with
the Bulgarian Secret Police.

I don't think out of any part
of the plot to the kill the Pope,

they were connected just out of
small-time smuggling business.

NARRATOR: Everyone agrees
that Mr. Ugurlu instructed Mersan

to give Agca 2,000 Deutschmarks,

equivalent, then, to less than £500.

To the conspiracy theorists,
this wasn't Mafia business,

but a down payment by Agca's
communist paymasters for shooting the Pope.

Since, to them, it was entirely credible,
the KGB wanted to get rid of John Paul

because of his anticommunist
views and influence.

HENZE: The Soviets were
concerned about the Pope

from the moment he was
elected. It was a shock.

And here, at the beginning of the '80s,

when the Soviet Union still seemed
to be flourishing, came a Polish Pope.

What a hellish situation.

NARRATOR: Under
interrogation by Judge Martella,

Agca wove a story of an elaborate plot

involving the Turkish Mafia,
Bulgarian secret agents,

and his old Grey Wolf comrades.

In one of his contradictory confessions,

a meeting in his hotel room in
Sofia took on great significance.

It was here, he said, that he first met
Bulgarian secret agent, Todor Avaizov.

Together with Turkish
Mafia boss, Bekir Celenk,

and his Grey Wolf friend Oral Celik.

According to this
version of his confession,

this, then, was the first key
planning session for the Papal plot.

Ten months later, according to the
most likely of Agca's many scenarios,

Celik and he wait to carry
out the final act of the plot

that was possibly first hatched
at the Vitosha Hotel in Sofia.

(CROWD CHEERING)

Pope John Paul is near the end
of his first circuit of the square,

and is right next to Agca and Celik.

Will they or won't they shoot him now?

Unaware of the gunmen opposite,

for Rose Hall and her
mother, it's the perfect moment.

HALL: My mom was just so
ecstatic. I was just taking pictures.

I mean, I was snapping. I don't know if
I got heads, if I got hands, if I got arms,

I don't know what I got, I
was just snapping happy.

And everybody around us was trying to fight

for just a touch of his cloth or whatever.

NARRATOR: For Agca, the moment passes.

He has no clear line of sight and John
Paul has escaped, albeit temporarily.

John Paul II is in mortal danger.

In seven minutes, a renegade Turkish
assassin with friends in strange places

is going to shoot him.

Is the gunman simply mad?

Or is he carrying out
an Islamic-inspired plot?

Or is he a hit man for
Bulgarian intelligence

and an instrument of Russia's feared KGB?

This man was also a key plotter,

according to one of the
gunman's many confessions.

Musa Cerdar Celibi.

A Turkish nationalist based in Frankfurt,

and leader of the right wing
Federation of Turkish Idealists Abroad.

In reality, this innocent-sounding group,

was the foreign branch of
Turkey's terrorist Grey Wolves.

Agca claimed that it was during
a meeting at a hotel in Switzerland

in 1981 with Celibi,

that Turkish Mafia man, Bekir Celenk,

outlined the final plans
of the plot to kill the Pope.

(SPEAKING TURKISH)

One of the key aspects of
evidence relating to Agca

was the money that somehow mysteriously
kept going into his bank accounts in Turkey.

This was a young man of very modest origin

from a very provincial city in Turkey

who somehow started, when
he was a university student,

benefiting from large amounts of money

which went into bank accounts that had
been opened for him all over the country.

NARRATOR: Musa Celibi admits
he did meet Agca in Milan and Zurich,

but says that he only
ever knew Agca as Murat,

a Turkish student who was always
pestering his organization for money.

Celibi says that far from being
offered millions of Deutschmarks

from the Bulgarians by Celenk,

the most money Agca ever
got was 800 Deutschmarks

handed over at the Zurich Sheraton.

(SPEAKING TURKISH)

KENJARSKI: My mother saw throngs of people.

She tried to stay pretty much
with who was on the tour with her.

And she related to me that
just as the Pope was passing by,

someone stood up in front of her
to take a picture and he went by,

and she was very disappointed that
she just didn't make any eye contact

or see him really close.

So she decided on the
second pass of His Holiness,

that she just needed a
better place to view him.

NARRATOR: Someone else has
not had a clear view of the Pope

on his first circuit.

But even though Mehmet Ali
Agca could not get his shot in,

according to most of his versions,

the whole operation had been meticulously
planned, down to the last detail.

By Agca's account,

this had necessitated frequent
interaction with his Bulgarian controllers.

Even by open telephone
lines on some occasions.

(PHONE RINGING)

(SPEAKING BULGARIAN)

(IN ENGLISH) Is that the Bulgarian Embassy?

Yes, how can I help you?

I need to speak to Sotir Petrov.

Just a moment. I'll put you through.

(PHONE RINGING)

(SPEAKING BULGARIAN)

AGCA: (IN ENGLISH) Hello.

NARRATOR: If Agca's
confession is to be believed,

one must accept that a
Bulgarian secret agent

would have given the gunman the
phone number of an open telephone line

- at the Embassy as a means of contact.
- Okay.

Since all the diplomats in the
Embassy except the Ambassador

took turns at manning the switchboard,

that had to mean that everyone would
know the agent's secret code name.

Yes, everything is good.

(VASSILEV SPEAKING IN UNCONFIRMED LANGUAGE)

(IN ENGLISH) Of course. You must
show me where to stand on the piazza.

NARRATOR: Then there's the question
of what language these conspirators spoke.

Vassilev and his diplomat colleague Avaizov

were later to swear that they
spoke no English or Turkish,

while Agca spoke only
Turkish and rudimentary English.

Okay, we'll talk soon, then.

(SPEAKING BULGARIAN) Ciao, ciao!

Bye.

NARRATOR: One of the most compelling
pieces of evidence Agca came up with

confirming the Bulgarian connection

concerns a meeting in the
apartment of Sergei Antonov,

the Deputy Director of the
Bulgarian state airline office in Rome.

Agca claims it took place a day or
two before the assassination attempt

and it was, according to him,
a crucial planning session,

involving his Turkish co-conspirators
and their Bulgarian controllers.

It took Agca more than 17
months after the shooting,

and half a year after agreeing to
fully cooperate with the investigation

headed by Italian judge Ilario Martella,

even to mention the existence of his
host at the meeting, Sergei Antonov.

At that time, he described
Antonov, code name Bayramic,

as having a blondish beard.

He also provided many other
details about Antonov or Bayramic.

MARTELLA'S TRANSLATOR: He
told me that Antonov was a collector

of miniature bottles.

When we checked this out, it
turned out that, sure enough,

Antonov had miniature bottles in his house,

and we also found the
shop where he bought them.

This convinced me that Agca might
have been to Antonov's apartment

on a couple of occasions.

NARRATOR: In another
interrogation session with Martella,

Agca provided further evidence that
he seemed to know Sergei Antonov.

He picked out a photograph of Antonov

from an album he was shown of a
number of Rome-based Bulgarians.

There was only one problem.

The picture revealed a
man with a black beard,

but to Mehmet Ali Agca
this was not an issue.

He simply changed his previous description
of Antonov's beard from blonde to black.

However, there was still
to be a further problem.

Many witnesses were able to testify

that at the time of the assassination
attempt Antonov had no beard.

Agca also gave Judge Martella a convincing
detailed description of the apartment,

including specific reference
to a set of folding doors.

The trouble is that the only apartment in
the building that doesn't have these doors

was Antonov's.

Sometime earlier, they'd been
removed and replaced by curtains.

Agca also claimed that Antonov's
wife, Rositsa, and daughter Anna,

were both at the meeting.

He got their names right,

but then it emerged that they had
alibis for the time of the meeting.

In fact, they weren't even in Italy.

Once Anna and Rositsa's
alibis were published in the press,

Agca then told Judge Martella
that he never met Antonov's family,

had never been to the apartment.

That the meeting had never happened,

and that he did not even know that Antonov,

whom he'd always known
by the code name of Bayramic,

was an employee of
Bulgaria's state airline.

But Agca was irrepressible.

During one interrogation,
he told Judge Martella

that Sergei Antonov had
first been introduced to him

only the day before the
assassination attempt,

as the man who would drive
him to St. Peter's Square.

Then, at another interrogation,

he suddenly remembered
that he'd met Antonov

on two or three previous occasions,

the first of which was at the
bar of the Hotel Torino in Rome.

Then, in yet another session with
Martella, the story changed again.

This time, he had first met Antonov
here at the Hotel Archimede in Rome,

way back in December, 1980.

Nearly six months before
the attack on the Pope.

This time they're supposed
to have also discussed

killing another thorn in Moscow's side.

Polish trade union leader, Lech Walesa.

When Martella made it
clear he didn't believe Agca,

even though the Turk could
provide intricate and accurate details

of Walesa's hotel accommodation in Rome,

Agca's response was simply
to withdraw the accusations.

Not to be stopped, eight days later,

Agca gave yet another
version of the Papal plot.

VASSILEV: Agca, I want you to
meet my good friend Bayramic.

Bayramic, this is Agca. He's
gonna be working with you on the file.

NARRATOR: Now, according to him,

he'd first been introduced to Antonov

by his Bulgarian control
officer, Major Zhelio Vassilev,

in Vassilev's Rome apartment.

Again, Agca was able to
provide his interrogators

with many details on all
his Bulgarian controllers.

Their teeth,

the fact that one had a pocket
calculator, a rarity at the time,

the car one of them drove.

But he also made mistakes.

In his account, Agca said that
Vassilev was taller than Avaizov.

Well, maybe not.

Agca also told the Italians that
Antonov's code name was Bayramic.

That the Bulgarian should
have chosen as his code name

the name of a village near
Agca's Turkish birthplace

never seems to have struck anyone as odd,

or suggested the possibility
that the whole elaborate plot

was simply a figment of Agca's imagination.

But with all the inconsistencies,

some months into his interrogation of Agca,

Judge Martella decided to set him a test.

(SPEAKING ITALIAN)

TRANSLATOR: Agca told us
about Bayramic, who was Antonov.

Petrov, who was Vassilev,
and Avaizov who was Kolev.

Well, I had a photo album of all the
Bulgarians who were in Rome at the time

and were being investigated
by some of my colleagues.

Some 42 pictures in all.

So I took this album

and I showed the pictures to Agca

without him being able to see their names.

Now he pointed at three of
the photos. One, two, three.

And he named three people.

That's Antonov, Avaizov and Vassilev.

NARRATOR: Agca had been able
to match the names of the Bulgarians

he'd previously implicated,
with their photographs.

To Martella, and the conspiracy theorists,

this indicated he almost
certainly had met them.

But it would seem that Agca's task of
identification was made easy for him.

The pictures of Antonov and Avaizov
were the first two images in the album,

while Vassilev was the only
character in the book in military uniform.

All of which raises the question

whether these were genuine identifications,

or whether Agca had
been coached in some way

by people who wanted to
see the Bulgarians implicated.

This would explain how he got
some things right and many wrong.

A question that's never been answered

is whether Agca was ever
given any promise or commitment

that if he somehow fingered the
Bulgarians he would be let out of prison.

So we don't know the extent to
which Agca was telling the investigators

what he thought they wanted to know.

Um, there's also a possibility that he was
deliberately misleading the investigators.

He'd read articles speculating
about the Bulgarian connection

including some of the work of
Claire Sterling in the Italian press.

So he may have been simply
trying to mislead the investigators.

He may have been having a sort of amuse...

Been amusing himself with them,

as he had amused himself and misled the
investigators in Turkey a few years before.

It was exactly the same strategy.

He would change his story every
day and feed them new details,

some of the details of which he'd learned
during the course of the investigation.

He did that in Turkey and he
repeated the same thing in Italy.

KENJARSKI: My mom was of Polish extraction,

and the Holy Father and her mother

were born in the same
village of Wadowice, Poland.

And so, she felt this kind
of connection with him.

HALL: When he came around the second time,

it was not to shake hands
with any of our group,

it was to shake hands with the outer court,

the people that were on the outer court.

And there was many more people there.

And it took a while because, you
know, he wanted to pray over people,

he wanted to see people.

(CROWD CHEERING LOUDLY)

My mom was standing on the
chair, the Holy Father approached.

She was extremely happy that this
time she was able to see him in full view.

And at that moment,

-there was a loud noise. -(GUNSHOTS)

(PEOPLE SCREAMING)

I cannot remember the shots
exactly. I cannot remember hearing it.

But all of a sudden, you know,
my mom thought I'd fainted

because I saw the Pope getting shot.

And I thought, "No..."

(CHUCKLES) "I think I got shot."

KENJARSKI: My mom said
she saw the Holy Father slump,

and then she said, "I had a
burning sensation in my chest,

"and before I knew it I was
off the chair and on the ground."

NARRATOR: Agca's bullets
have also hit his intended target.

John Paul II has been
wounded in three places.

His life hangs in the balance.

Had one of the bullets been
just millimeters to the left or right,

his aorta would have been punctured
and he would have died almost instantly.

(SPEAKING ITALIAN)

NARRATOR: Within seconds of the shooting,

Sister Letizia, a Franciscan
nun standing next to Agca,

- prevents him from making his getaway.
- (CLAMORING)

While the Pope is rushed off to
hospital, and Agca is taken into custody,

Anne Odre and Rose Hall lie on
the ground where they've fallen.

HALL: My first reaction was,
"Where's my camera?" (CHUCKLES)

You know, "What happened to my pictures?"

And all I could feel was a
burning sensation in my arm.

I've never felt pain
like that before and, um,

then it just started. Then the
Swiss Guards came running

and they were taking care
of the Pope but they also

was able to take care of us, too.

There was a number of them that
was able to take care of us. And, um...

They didn't realize
where I had gotten shot,

so the best thing that they could
do was to get us over that fence.

They grabbed my arms.

And the pain...

Then they finally realized
where I had gotten shot

and they tried to grab me from my body up.

KENJARSKI: The bullet
entered Mom's left breast

and it penetrated her upper intestine,

damaged part of her lungs.
She lost a part of her liver.

Um, also she damaged part of her pancreas

and they had to remove
her spleen at that time.

And it ended up in her
lower abdominal cavity.

NARRATOR: After nine weeks in
hospital in Rome and the United States,

Anne Odre recovered from her injuries,

but she was to be plagued with
health problems for the rest of her life.

(SPEAKING ITALIAN)

TRANSLATOR: The Holy
Father was very close to death.

I'd say that the bullet was
miraculously guided in its path

through the abdomen and
its exit through the sacrum

because it didn't damage the
important arteries of the abdomen,

like the abdominal aorta
or the nervous system.

Thus, it seemed as if the bullet
had been guided from on high

without causing internal lesions

which wouldn't have made it possible
for the Pope to reach the hospital in time.

NARRATOR: In St. Peter's
Square, there is chaos and confusion.

But one tourist with his wits about him

- sees something very odd indeed.
- (CAMERA CLICKING)

NEWTON: Damn, I'm out!

American journalist, Lowell Newton
says that seconds after the shooting,

this man ran past him, brandishing a gun,

and that he captured him on film
using the last two pictures in his camera.

When Agca was eventually
asked who the man was,

he identified him as the
Bulgarian diplomat, Todor Avaizov.

However, when confronted with the fact

that Avaizov looked nothing like the man
in the picture, he changed his story twice.

While the identity of the second man
has never been completely confirmed,

the most likely answer is that it
was Agca's old Grey Wolf friend

from his home town in Turkey, Oral Celik.

(CROWD CLAMORING)

With Agca under arrest
immediately after the shooting,

and his ever-changing stories
about every aspect of the plot,

we shall never know whether this is
what happened in the immediate aftermath.

Go, go. They got Agca. It's just me now.

NARRATOR: Did Celik really ride with
Sergei Antonov to the Bulgarian Embassy?

Can we really assume that he
then hid in the sealed TIR truck

before being driven to Bulgaria?

Certainly, Celik disappeared for many
years before surfacing in Turkey again.

Certainly, the truck that
was loaded at the Embassy

embarked on its journey that
evening from Rome to Bulgaria.

And, certainly, in the years that followed,

Agca's many versions, together
with the hazy known facts,

provided conspiracy theorists
and those with an ax to grind,

with fertile material for any
number of possible plots.

Between May, 1985 and March, 1986,

what many felt would be the final chapter

of the conspiracy plot
to kill Pope John Paul,

was played out in a Rome courtroom.

After more than two years of
investigation and a 1,200-page report,

Judge Ilario Martella recommended
that Agca, three Bulgarians

and four other Turks be put
on trial for conspiracy to murder.

All denied the charges.

And things did not go
smoothly for the prosecutors.

The only concrete evidence that there
had ever been a Bulgarian conspiracy

had come from the mouth and
fertile imagination of the key accused,

Mehmet Ali Agca,

who did not help matters by
announcing on day one of the trial

that he was the Messiah.

(SPEAKING HEAVILY ACCENTED ENGLISH)

(SPEAKING ITALIAN)

TRANSLATOR: I didn't realize
throughout my time with him

that I was dealing with a Messiah,

otherwise, I would have
felt the hand of God on me.

NARRATOR: After a 10-month trial,

all the Bulgarians and Turks were
acquitted of conspiracy to murder the Pope,

due to insufficient evidence.

So how did the notion that there
had been a Bulgarian conspiracy,

that was based on such flimsy
foundations become so firmly rooted?

(PATRIOTIC MUSIC PLAYING)

The answer lies almost
certainly with Ronald Reagan

and those he had gathered around him

when he became President
of the United States in 1981,

just months before the
assassination attempt on the Pope.

MELVIN GOODMAN: Reagan came
in in 1981 with a typical Cold War view.

That the Soviet Union was
essentially responsible for all trouble,

around the world

and every threat that the United
States had to deal with, on a global basis,

they had to deal with it because of actions
that were taken by the Soviet Union.

And this was extended particularly
into the area of international terrorism.

NARRATOR: So when Paul Henze
and other sympathetic journalists

started writing books and newspaper
articles on the Bulgarian connection,

this played straight into the
prevailing mood of the times.

Even today, Henze has an explanation
as to why no independent evidence

of a communist conspiracy has ever emerged.

This was probably the
deadliest, most scurrilous thing

the KGB was ever involved in.

So, uh,

obviously, very early, when the
Soviet Union began to collapse,

measures were taken, and
measures were taken even before that,

to dispose not only of any
records that might have existed,

but to dispose of any people who
might have been knowledgeable.

NARRATOR: In 1984, CIA Director William
Casey and Deputy Director Robert Gates,

commissioned a secret report for the
President on the Bulgarian connection.

But they asked junior agents to write it,

since senior analysts were totally
skeptical of any communist link with Agca.

The CIA had very good evidence
that the Bulgarians were not involved,

and indeed that the
Soviets were not involved.

But there were also accusations out there.

Uh, they were coming from
secondhand and thirdhand sources

and they were working their
way into CIA operational reporting.

So that if the CIA
wanted to leak information

to a European audience or an
international media audience,

clearly there were some
provocative reports that could be cited

that could be used in black propaganda

which the CIA obviously
engaged in on the Papal plot.

This was a deplorable time in
terms of American intelligence

and I think it really... This
is really a Holy Grail issue.

Once you start politicizing
intelligence of the CIA,

you get to the situation
we're involved in now in Iraq,

where the CIA gave false intelligence

to the President and to the
Congress to justify a war.

In many ways, all of this
started in 1984 and 1985.

NARRATOR: So if there was
no KGB or Bulgarian conspiracy,

what scenario of the assassination
attempt fits the known facts?

For sure, Agca was the gunman.

Certainly, it seems he had
an accomplice in the square

and probably this was
his old friend Oral Celik.

Equally certainly, Agca
was connected to Turkey's

right wing terrorists Grey Wolves,

who had a strong nationalist, anti-Western
ideology with Islamist fringes.

Agca also had connections
to known Turkish Mafia bosses

who definitely gave him
small sums of money.

As for the Bulgarians,

with the collapse of Communism we now know
that elements of Bulgarian intelligence

were privately up to their
necks in criminal activities

with Turkish crime lords.

The same criminals for whom
Agca was a lowly employee.

Finally, the key to Agca and
his plot was there for all to see

from the very day he wrote
to a Turkish newspaper

18 months before the assassination attempt.

AGCA: Fearing that Turkey will form a
political, economic and military alliance

with our brothers in the Muslim world,

Western imperialists have hurriedly
dispatched their Crusader Commander in Chief,

John Paul, to Turkey.

I think there's a coherent explanation that
revolves largely around the personality

of Agca himself.

That this was a man who had a thirst

for fame, recognition, he had an ideology,

he emerged from right
wing circles in Turkey,

he was alarmed at the
direction the country was taking.

He detested the Westernization of Turkey.

He first killed a newspaper editor

that was a symbol of
Westernization within Turkey.

He then found himself on a much
larger stage in Western Europe

and then, he sort of... Did exactly
the same things he was doing in Turkey

but he was looking for a
target within Western Europe

and from a perspective
of someone like Agca,

the Pope was an obvious target.

In fact, Agca himself had threatened
to kill the Pope on a previous occasion

when the Pope visited Turkey.

I think the Turkish Islamic
explanation was extremely possible.

I'm not saying that it
was a larger conspiracy,

it might just have been Agca
and a couple of his friends,

but, to me, that is the most
logical explanation for the, uh,

for the assassination attempt on the Pope.

We were so obsessed with the Soviet
threat and the superpower competition

that we missed what was
going on behind the scenes

of the superpower rivalry.

To understand Agca and his motivation

is to get closer to what
the West is dealing with now

with regard to Islamic fundamentalism.

NARRATOR: On Pope John Paul's suggestion,

Mehmet Ali Agca was
pardoned in Italy in June, 2000,

and sent back to Turkey to
serve out the rest of his sentence

for the murder of
newspaper editor Abdi Ipekci.

In a sense, his life
had turned full circle,

from small-time right wing assassin

to player on the global
stage and back again.

Late in his life, John Paul II again
contemplated the circumstances

of the 1981 assassination attempt.

Although he had consistently said that he
never believed in the Bulgarian conspiracy,

he did say that he believed Mehmet
Ali Agca was acting on behalf of others.

But he never suggested
who he might have had in mind

and all we know is that, for his part,

he believed his life was saved that
fateful day in May by divine intervention.

Curiously, Mehmet Ali Agca believes
he was an instrument of the Lord.

On the day we interviewed him,

Adnan Agca had come straight
from visiting his elder brother in prison

and he brought with him a message
for the world from Mehmet Ali.

(SPEAKING TURKISH)

TRANSLATOR: He says
that all this was God's will

in accordance with the prediction
of the third secret of Fatima.

He says that his act
was the third secret itself.

Prophets have come and gone.
Messiahs have come and gone.

Messiahs are those
people who bring good news.

The Vatican must accept that
Mehmet Ali Agca is a messiah,

and the third secret of Fatima.

It must do this for the good of humanity,

the future, and in the name of world peace.