The shooting of the Pope; the CIA and the Mafia.

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/essays/popeshooting.html

Grover C Furr wrote about 'The Politics Behind the Shooting of the Pope' in Comment, Montclair State College, NJ, in 1983.

Pope John Paul II was shot on May 13, 1981 by a young Turk, Mehmet Ali Acga.

Agca was a member of the 'fascist' GREY WOLVES, the military wing of Turkey's National Action Party (NAP). The Grey Wolves are alleged to have links to the CIA.

Cedar Celebi, head of the NAP in West Germany, was arrested in West Germany on November 1, 1982, and charged with giving Acga money and weapons to kill the Pope.

Sometime prior to the shooting of the Pope, Acga confessed to the murder of a newspaper editor. Acga reportedly carried out that murder at the request of the NAP’s founder, Col. Arpaslan Turkes.

Acga was put on trial for the murder of the editor. Documents from Acga's trial revealed apparent NAP contacts with West German intelligence. West German intelligence was formed by the U.S. after World War II from ex-Nazis and members of Hitler’s intelligence corps. It has always worked closely with the CIA. The trial documents also show the NAP has been involved with Turkish ex-members of the Nazi SS battalions.

Newspapers and journalists with alleged CIA connections tried to blame Russia for the shooting of the Pope. Michael Ledeen in Il Giornale Nuovo blamed the Soviets. Robert Moss in the Economist Foreign Report blamed the Soviets.

Why might the CIA have turned against the Pope?

Pope John Paul II had tried to restrain the fascist leaders of Solidarnosc. The Church had urged non-violence and cooperation with the Polish government. The Pope had held talks with the PLO. The Pope had shown increased toleration for the activist clergy of Central America. The Pope had agreed to visit Nicaragua which had a Sandinista government. The Pope had created the first Soviet Cardinal acceptable to the Kremlin and resident within the USSR.

John Paul II seemed to have upset the neo-fascists in Europe and America.

Was the CIA behind the shooting of the Pope?

Allegedly, Turkey's National Action Party (NAP) and the Vatican 'support competing sides in the international heroin traffic'.

Reportedly, the NAP 'uses a route through Sofia, Bulgaria to supply the burgeoning European heroin market'.

They are, according to the Rome newspaper La Repubblica of March 1, 1982, in 'direct competition' with the Italian mafia, the major heroin suppliers to the U.S. through Latin America.

Michele Sindona, "God’s banker", owed his meteoric rise in the financial world to his personal friendship with Pope Paul VI. Three Vatican Cardinals volunteered to testify for Sindona at his New York trial in 1980.

According to Carlo Bordoni, Sindona’s co-defendant, Sindona "was one of the mafia’s bankers, the route through which organized crime money passes across the Atlantic."

Ex-New York Times reporter Richard Hammer revealed in The Vatican Connection (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982) how, in 1971, Pope Paul VI’s closest associate, Eugène Cardinal Tisserant, 'set up a $950 million phony securities fraud with mafia help; Cardinal Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, was the bag-man.'

Vatican links to the mafia are commonly discussed in the Italian press.

Thus the Turkish fascist NAP could have had their own reasons for wanting to see the Pope out of action.