Monday, Jul. 15, 1985
Italy the Third Man
By Jill Smolowe
As the trial of the eight defendants accused of conspiring to kill Pope John Paul II resumed last week in Rome, the overriding question was whether Star Witness Mehmet Ali Agca would ever testify again. The previous Tuesday, after persistent grilling by presiding Judge Severino Santiapichi, Agca had wearily announced, "There is nothing left to say." Then he returned to his cell in Rebibbia prison, refusing to appear in court. Over the weekend, however, the convicted Turkish gunman had a change of heart. Early last week he not only showed up in court but arrived with the announcement that "I have searched my conscience" and that he was abandoning the "double game" he had played through the first five weeks of the trial. Quietly, with little of his earlier theatricality, Agca then testified that a third Turkish accomplice had been present in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, the day that Agca raised his gun and shot the Pope.
Agca's deferential new testimony was laced with contradictions as in the past. Three weeks ago Agca testified that only two Turks had accompanied him to St. Peter's Square: Co-Defendant Oral Celik, who is being tried in absentia, and a man Agca identified simply as "Akif." Agca rejected Judge Santiapichi's suggestion that the mysterious Akif might actually be Sedat Sirri Kadem, an old school friend of Agca's. The next week Agca stuck to his claim that he had only two accomplices in the square and said that Akif was Turkish Terrorist Omer Ay, who is in a prison in Turkey and has not been accused in the conspiracy. Last week, however, Agca did not stop at Celik and Ay. After looking at photographs of the crowd in St. Peter's Square taken just before the assassination attempt, he declared that Akif was actually School Friend Kadem, after all. The charge is significant because Kadem is a leftist, unlike Celik and Ay, who have ties to an ultraright Turkish terrorist group known as the Gray Wolves. If it can be proved that Kadem was involved in the shooting, it would discredit East bloc charges that only Turkish neo- Nazis had a hand in the plot.
Agca offered other testimony last week that probably unsettled some Communist capitals: Co-Defendant Zhelio Vassilev, a former Bulgarian military attache in Rome who is being tried in absentia, had worked out a plot to mislead investigators into thinking that Agca had acted alone in St. Peter's Square. When Agca was seized in the square, he was carrying a letter stating that the motive for shooting the Pope to protest U.S. and Soviet imperialism. "(Vassilev) suggested that I write (the letter) because in the event of capture it would be useful to give the impression of a lone killer," Agca said.
Twice during the week Agca elaborated on his earlier claim that the papal shooting had been commissioned for about $1.3 million by "Malenkov," whom he | identified as the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Ten months before the assassination attempt, Agca said, he, Celik and two other Turks attended a strategy meeting in Room 911 of the Hotel Vitosha in Sofia at which Malenkov was present. "(Malenkov) said, 'Have you changed your mind about killing the Pope?' I said no, and he told me the reward would be 3 million marks," Agca testified.
A new charge was also leveled by Agca: during a visit to Iran in 1980, he said, he learned that Moscow was trying to pressure the government of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini to kill some or all of the 52 Americans held hostage in Iran. "This time (Agca has) gone beyond his usual fantasies," fumed a spokesman at the Soviet embassy in Rome. "This is madness. It is provocation."
With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Rome