The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (62 page)

On Wednesday, 13 May 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot as his popemobile entered St Peter’s Square in the Vatican City. The shootist, who used a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol, was grabbed by the Vatican security chief and promptly identified as one Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish national. The Pope, despite being wounded by four bullets, survived. A miracle claimed the faithful.

Altogether less miraculous were cogent explanations for Ağca’s attempted whacking of His Holiness.

Ağca was a member of the Grey Wolves, a vitriolic neo-fascist Turkish group. He had form for murder (of a liberal journalist) and had previously sent letters threatening Pope John Paul’s life. So, the classic right-wing “lone nut”? Unfortunately for any straightforward explanation of why he peppered the pontiff with 9 mm slugs, Ağca suddenly remembered after a year in his prison cell that it was a trio of Bulgarians living in Rome who had put him up to the job. With the Cold War still a going concern, Ağca’s “confession” was manna from heaven for anti-Communists such as veteran Yankee hackette Claire Sterling who stuck her sharpened pen into Bulgarian intelligence
and
the KGB. Sterling’s
The Time of the Assassins
, co-authored with CIA-veteran and Cold War warrior Paul Henze, lucidly implicated the KGB as the directors of Bulgarian spookery, who in turn manipulated wires that made Ağca move. The KGB’s motive for offing the Polish pope? He supported the free trade union Solidarity in Communist Poland. As to why the Bulgarians/KGB needed a Turkish nazi to do their dirty work, that was easily accounted for: it allowed the KGB “deniability”.

The Bulgarian connection looked oh, oh so promising when Bulgarian airline worker Sergei Antonov was arrested on Ağca’s say-so, as being his controller. However, a fair trial of Antonov in Italy failed to find him guilty of so much as stealing sweets. (It did reveal Ağca to be mad, or a liar, or both. He claimed to be Christ.) As several pundits wisely noted, Ağca did not mention the Bulgarian connection until visited in jail by agents of the Italian intelligence bureau, the SISMI, whose incompetence was only matched by their corruption. Fancying a spot of Redbaiting, the SISMI had already tried to implicate the USSR in the papal misfortune with a “document” that proved that Ağca had been trained in Moscow. It was later proved to be a forgery.

Just when the Bulgarian connection looked like the Bulgarian concoction, the Italian Mitrokhin Commission came to the conclusion that Bulgarian intelligence
was
implicated in the plot to kill the pope,
and
that “leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the assassination attempt”. After a moment’s reflection the sane recalled that the impressive sounding Mitrokhin Commission had been set up by the perma-tanned Silvio Berlusconi, was fronted by one of his favourite right-wing
Forza
stooges and was the same bunch of buffoons who had slanderously accused Romano Prodi, sometime Italian PM (and frequent Berlusconi opponent), of being the KGB’s man in Italy.

So much SISMI/CIA effort went into pinning the blame for the attempted offing of the pope that it looked suspicious in itself. Indeed, the Bulgarian secret services argued that Ağca’s “Bulgarian connection” story was an anti-Commie plant placed by SISMI, the CIA and the Grey Wolves. They would say that, wouldn’t they? Yes, but an intriguing piece of support on behalf of the secret service boys from Bulgaria came from no less than Abdullah Catli, a Grey Wolves leader (top dog?), who told a Rome judge that German intelligence asked him to implicate the Bulgarians/Soviets in return for a nice lump of money.

Ah yes, the Grey Wolves. One John Paul II conspiracy has the Grey Wolves down as the bedfellows of neo-Italian fascists in their “strategy of tension” by which they terrorized Italy (e.g. the bombing of Bologna rail station), put the blame on the Reds and theoretically built popular support for themselves. In this scenario, the quasi-Masonic
P2
lodge and Ordine Nuova, also got under the black sheets. Far-fetched? Actually, no. One P2 big cheese, Francesco Pazienza (who also happened to be an ex-SISMI agent), informed US authorities of a meeting held in Miami a month before the attack on the pope attended by the Grey Wolves and Italy’s most wanted fascist terrorist, Stefano della Chiaie.

It’s worth pointing out for the record that during a May 2002 visit to Bulgaria, Pope John Paul II told Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov that he never believed allegations that there was a Bulgarian connection. The pope also credited the Madonna of Fátima with saving his life, and in 2000 the Vatican disclosed that the long suppressed
Third Secret of Fátima
had been an assassination attempt on a pope.

Further Reading

Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead,
The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection
, 1986

Claire Sterling and Paul Henze,
The Time of the Assassins
, 1984

PRINCESS DIANA

It was news that shocked the world. In the early hours (GMT) of Sunday 31 August 1997, reports started coming from Paris that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been injured in a car accident. Then came updates reporting she was dead. Also killed in the car crash in the tunnel beneath Pont de l’Alma were Diana’s lover, Dodi Al-Fayed, and the driver, Henri Paul. Dodi’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was seriously injured.

The cause of the crash seemed clear. Chased by paparazzi on motorcycles, Paul had driven too fast – 75 mph (120 kph) according to one French police estimate – into the tunnel, clipped a white Fiat Uno and, in overcorrecting, had swerved the Mercedes S280 into the thirteenth pillar. There were also reports that he had been drinking. None of the occupants had been wearing seat belts.

Autumn seemed to come early to Britain that year, as a stunned nation shed tears for “the Queen of Hearts”. As the sorrow subsided, people began to wonder how the female icon of the latter half of the twentieth century, the most famous and photographed woman on the planet, could have died in something so mundane as a car crash.

Perhaps, people began to say, it wasn’t an accident. The loudest voice of suspicion belonged to Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods department store. According to Al-Fayed, Diana and his son were assassinated. Al-Fayed even named the guilty party: Prince Philip of the British Royal Family. Naturally, Philip didn’t dirty his hands personally – he ordered the security service MI6 to carry out the hit on his 36-year-old daughter-in-law. There are legion other Diana conspiracies (it was the IRA whatdunnit, it was
Le Cercle
who sponsored her death because of her opposition to wealth-generating landmines, she was a ritual sacrifice by Satanists, she faked her death to live a paparazzi-free life …) but Al-Fayed’s retains the pole position.

In his view, the British Royal Family needed Diana eliminated because she had become pregnant by Dodi and intended to marry him. Their child would be a Muslim half-brother to the second and third in line to the throne, an impossible embarrassment to the white, Anglican Windsors. Al-Fayed claims that Diana told him personally that her life had been threatened. “The person who is spearheading these threats,” she said, “is Prince Philip.” Diana also told a number of other people that she feared for her life. In his account of life as Diana’s butler,
A Royal Duty
(2003), Paul Burrell recorded that ten months before her death she wrote to him claiming that “XXXX is planning an ‘accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry.” She also told her voice coach Peter Settelen that she thought that her former lover, bodyguard Barry Mannakee, had been murdered in a faked motorcycle crash. Evidently, Diana had concerns over safety. And the Windsors had a motive of sorts.

Suddenly, it wasn’t only Al-Fayed raising questions about the crash in the tunnel under Pont de l’Alma. Why had the lights and security cameras in the tunnel been turned off just before the crash? Why did the ambulance take forty-three minutes to get Diana to Pitie-Salpêtrière hospital? Why had her body been embalmed before a proper autopsy could be undertaken? Why had the crash site been cleansed and disinfected before a forensic examination could be carried out? And where was the driver of the white Fiat Uno? Wasn’t it too convenient that Rees-Jones had “no memory” of the crash?

Then a former MI6 agent, Richard Tomlinson, revealed that MI6 had been planning an assassination at the time of Diana’s death. In a sworn affidavit Tomlinson stated that MI6’s Balkans operations officer had shown him the service’s plan to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, in a car crash … in a tunnel. Tomlinson stated that MI6’s planned assassination of Milosevic showed “remarkable similarities to the circumstances and witness accounts of the crash that killed the Princess of Wales, Dodi Al-Fayed, and Henri Paul”. How had MI6 caused the car to crash? Possibly, suggested Tomlinson, with a disorientating strobe light held by an operative in the tunnel, or by another car forcing the Mercedes into the pillar. There were rumours that Henri Paul was a CIA/DGSE/MI6 agent and had deliberately taken the roundabout Pont de l’Alma route to the Al-Fayeds’ Paris flat to get Diana into the killing zone. (If Paul was a spook this might explain, people said, the series of 40,000-franc deposits in his bank account.) A more far-fetched suggestion was that Rees-Jones, a former paratrooper, wrenched the wheel from Paul’s grasp. Suspicions of a cover-up mushroomed when the body of James Andanson was found in a burnt-out car in 2000. Andanson, a paparazzo, had owned a white Fiat Uno three years before and had been investigated by the French police. There was a final oddity: just after Andanson’s death his office was burgled. Meanwhile, an investigation by French forensic specialists found no significant mechanical faults in the Mercedes S280, ruling out the possibility that the crash had been caused by some internal failure.

So far, so bad for the Windsors. Yet Al-Fayed’s case has a number of weaknesses: