The Undiplomatic Bulgarian

By James Kelly

A defector points the finger toward Moscow

From the start, the evidence has come in bits and pieces, with each new shred making the mystery only more intriguing. Was the Soviet Union, acting through Bulgaria, behind the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by Turkish Terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca on that sunny May afternoon in 1981? The latest fragment does not answer that question once and for all, but it tightens the web of circumstantial evidence around the Kremlin. A Bulgarian embassy worker who defected to France in 1981 has told French intelligence officials that the KGB devised the plot to kill the Pope out of fear that the Polish-born prelate was part of a U.S.-inspired scheme to undermine the Polish government.

According to an account published in the New York Times, the talkative official is lordan Mantarov, 48, who was last posted as deputy commercial attache at the Bulgarian embassy in Paris. The Times said that Mantarov defected in July 1981, two months after the failed assassination. While being debriefed by French intelligence officials, Mantarov reportedly said that a close friend in the Bulgarian state security agency named Dimiter Savov had given him details about a KGB plan to murder the Pontiff.

Savov is said to have told Mantarov that the KGB concluded in 1979 that Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's Polish-born National Security Adviser, had somehow engineered the election of Pope John Paul II the previous year. Brzezinski's supposed purpose: to use the Pope to inspire further unrest in Poland and eventually to wrench the country out of the Soviet orbit. Mantarov claims that he was told that as the troubles in Poland mounted, and as the Pontiff came to be identified with the budding Solidarity movement, Soviet authorities gave the command to "eliminate" the Pope. They allegedly handed the assignment to the Bulgarians, long known for their subservience to the Kremlin's wishes.

The Bulgarians, according to Mantarov, picked Agca as the assassin because he was known as a right-winger with no ties to any Communist country. In November 1979, unknown accomplices slipped Agca out of a Turkish prison. Agca then began a murky trek that ended in St. Peter's Square on May 13,1981. According to Mantarov, the Turk was to meet his own fate there as well: he was supposed to be killed immediately after shooting the Pope.

The Bulgarians, predictably, dismissed Mantarov's account. An embassy spokesman in Rome described Mantarov as nothing more than a mechanic formerly employed by a Bulgarian firm in France. Mantarov, meanwhile, has dropped out of sight. French intelligence officials refused to admit last week that they had ever spoken to him, let alone that he had told them anything about the Bulgarian connection. Mantarov is most likely still in French custody and living under a false name.

TIME has confirmed that Mantarov gave French officials an account charging that the KGB ordered the papal assassination. TIME has also learned that Mantarov did not have diplomatic status at the Bulgarian embassy; he was, in fact, a technician attached to the commercial section. And at least one important detail in the Times story may be wrong: Bulgarian emigres living in Paris insist that Mantarov defected on April 11, 1981, not the following July. If the earlier date is correct, Mantarov would have defected before the assassination attempt. The timing is crucial, since Mantarov then could have told French authorities about the plot before the attempt took place. What makes this speculation important is that Alexandre de Marenches, then head of French intelligence, has said he had solid evidence in late April 1981 that an assassination attempt against the Pope was imminent. He was so confident of his information that he dispatched a pair of deputies to the Vatican to advise papal aides of the plot.

Even though it is not known when Mantarov told French authorities about the alleged KGB involvement, Paris has been remarkably stingy in sharing its information. The French are believed to have briefed Washington only after they knew that what Mantarov had to say was going to be made public. Nor does it appear that the French told Italian authorities about Mantarov, despite the fact that Italian Judge Ilario Martella has been conducting a meticulous investigation into the assassination attempt for the past 17 months. When TIME Rome Correspondent Barry Kalb asked Martella last week if he had been told about Mantarov, Martella replied flatly: "Never."

How valuable is Mantarov's account? The Bulgarian agent may or may not have told Mantarov the truth; Mantarov, in turn, may have distorted what he was told. The story breaks little new ground, but it does buttress previous reports. It has been speculated, for example, that the young man who had been spotted running from St. Peter's Square with a gun in his hand was there not to help Agca but to shoot him as soon as the Turk finished his deadly assignment.

Ever since that fateful day in St. Peter's Square, Italian authorities have suspected that Agca had accomplices. But at his trial in July 1981 the Turkish terrorist stoutly insisted that he had acted alone. In the spring of 1982 Agca began changing his story. He reportedly told Martella that while staying in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in 1980, he was offered 3 million deutsche marks (then worth $1.25 million) to kill the Pope by Bekir Celenk, a shadowy Turkish businessman with ties to his country's arms and drug smugglers. In Rome, Agca said, he met with three Bulgarians, including Sergei Ivanov Antonov, the head of the local office of Bulgaria's Balkan Airlines, to plan the papal assassination. According to Agca, Antonov drove him to St. Peter's Square on the day of the attempt. In November, Martella ordered the arrest of Antonov. According to Martella and other Italian officials, Agca's account has held up remarkably well. An Italian appeals court last week turned down a petition by Antonov's lawyers to have their client released.

Other Italian investigations promised additional proof of Bulgaria's nefarious activities. Luigi Scricciolo, 34, a former labor official arrested in February 1982 on charges of spying for Bulgaria and aiding the terrorist Red Brigades, has identified as one of his contacts Todor Aivazov, one of the other Bulgarians implicated by Agca in the papal plot. Agca has also claimed that in January 1981 he and Antonov talked about killing Polish Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa, perhaps by planting a bomb in his car or hotel room. An Italian magistrate investigating the allegation has already officially warned Antonov and six others, including Scricciolo, of the charge.

Martella expects his own inquiry to last at least several more months. Within a month after the shooting, however, the Vatican had already concluded that Agca was part of a conspiracy. "The Soviet intention was to cut off the head of Polish nationalism," says a top aide to John Paul. The last straw may have come in the summer of 1980, when the Pope sent a message to the Soviets threatening to return to Poland if the Soviets invaded his homeland. Vatican officials believe that Moscow feared not only the Pope's growing role as the symbolic leader of Poland, but stepped-up Catholic Church activities in the Baltic states and the Ukraine. And the target himself? John Paul too believes that the Soviet Union ordered him to be killed. Says a close adviser: "We know whose interests the shooting served." -- By James Kelly. Reported by William Dowell/Paris and Wilton Wynn/Rome

With reporting by William Dowell/Paris, Wilton Wynn/Rome This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.