>I cracked up when I read this totally objective comment in the
>middle of a news article:
>
>"As foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin enraged the Bush
>administration with his relentless criticism of the American-led war
>and occupation in Iraq and struggled to implement a new activist,
>romantic vision of the world in which France would regain the
>centrality it lost long ago."
>
><http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/international/europe/31CND-FRAN.html?hp>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/international/europe/31CND-FRAN.html?hp
Ah, but remember where we were 20 years ago, during the rule of the execrable A.M. Rosenthal. Note that Sterling was allowed, contrary to all NYT style, to refer to "my posession." Sadly the whole thing is 38k, so I'm only sending the beginning.
Years later, the puerile Anthony Lewis did a column recalling all the absurd things people believed during the Reagan years, including the KGB plot to kill the Pope. I wrote him and pointed out that his own newspaper had put Sterling's fiction on the front page. He wrote back, admitting he'd forgotten that.
Doug
----
June 10, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 1, Column 1; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 5873 words
HEADLINE: BULGARIA HIRED AGCA TO KILL POPE, REPORT OF ITALIAN PROSECUTOR SAYS
BYLINE: By CLAIRE STERLING, Special to the New York Times
DATELINE: BONN, June 9
BODY:
An Italian State Prosecutor has filed a report in court saying that the Bulgarian secret services recruited the man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 in a plot to weaken the Solidarity movement in Poland.
The rise of the Solidarity labor union in Poland ''and consequent social convulsions,'' the report says, were ''perceived as a mortal danger'' to Eastern Europe and were ''mostly due to the fervid religious faith of the population, sustained and helped above all by the first Polish Pope in history.''
These conclusions are in a 78-page report by State Prosecutor Antonio Albano, who is the equivalent of a district attorney. The report is based on some 25,000 pages of documentation gathered by Judge Ilario Martella in his investigation of the attempt to assassinate the Pope.
The report, which was filed in court May 8 and is still officially secret, asks for the indictment and trial of three Bulgarians and six Turks for conspiring to assassinate the Pope. The Turks include Mehmet Ali Agca, who has been convicted of shooting the Pope on May 13, 1981, in St. Peter's Square.
Under Italian law, the report cannot be made public until Judge Martella issues his own comprehensive report, which is expected next month, when he rules on whether there is to be a trial. The Prosecutor's report is based on the same material the judge will use in his report and most people think it faithfully reflects the judge's views.
The Prosecutor's request for indictments has been reported, but the broad outlines of the judge's findings are presented here for the first time.
Although the K.G.B., the Soviet intelligence and internal security agency, is not mentioned by name, the report, speaking of the turmoil in Poland, says that ''some political figure of great power took note of this most grave situation and, mindful of the vital needs of the Eastern bloc, decided it was necessary to kill Pope Wojtyla.''
The Prosecutor's report, which has come into my possession, makes these additional points:
- Mr. Agca was promised more than $400,000 by the Bulgarians to kill the Pope but has not received it.
- The man who was supposed to help Mr. Agca escape was spirited out of Italy in a sealed diplomatic truck of the Bulgarian Embassy. The truck was sent to Bulgaria under a diplomatic procedure not used before or since by the Bulgarians. Since then no one has reported seeing the man, Oral Celik, a leader of Turkey's neo-Nazi Gray Wolves and a close friend of Mr. Agca.
- Mr. Agca did not start to confess until a year after the shooting. He apparently concluded that he had been abandoned by the Turks and Bulgarians who he thought would manage to obtain his freedom.
- The authorities think Mr. Agca's testimony against the Turks and Bulgarians is accurate, despite his earlier lies, because such a preponderance of the details he provided have been independently confirmed in the investigation.