By axis Information and analysis
Friday, October 13, 2006
aIa received a report from David Dastych, a Polish journalist, researcher and the chief of David' s Media agency, paying attention to the new evidence, leading to an investigation by Polish authorities into the 25-year-old assassination attempt against John Paul II on St Peter's Square in Rome.
In an article, written by Leszek Szymowski and consulted by Marek Lasota, a research fellow of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the Warsaw-based weekly Wprost reports about new facts, confirming that it was the Soviet KGB that planned and led all efforts to "eliminate" the Polish Pope, from 1978 up to 1989. New evidence is a crushing blow to all "conspiracy theories", invented by the Soviet disinformation experts or circulated in the West, pointing to the extreme-right Grey Wolves organization in Turkey (of which Mehmet ali agca was member), to the CIa and to the Vatican itself (with the pretext of to put the blame on the political rivalry in the Holy See), marks Dastych.
New evidence, found in the archives of the East German communist secret service (Stasi), confirms the earlier conclusion that the Bulgarian secret services helped agca in the execution of the attempt. Stasi was also allotted by the Kremlin a task to counter all reports and accusations against the Bulgarians. It looks like the Moscow-led efforts to get rid of the Pope were shared by other secret services of the Warsaw Pact countries and were well coordinated by the KGB, Dastych underlines. What was not known before is that the Polish secret services played a key part in the criminal plan.
For a long time the Operation Triangolo code-name used by the Polish secret service (SB), was mistakenly linked to a singular provocation, led by a super-secret Section D of the SB in Cracow, in 1983. Section D was a special operations group, secretly organized in the Polish Ministry of Interior to carry out criminal operations against the Catholic Church. This particular action aimed at compromising a Cracow priest, andrzej Bardecki, an editor of Tygodnik Powszechny weekly and one of the closest friends of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, elected pope John Paul II. Only in 2005, the researchers of the Polish Institute of National Remembrancediscovered that the Operation Triangolo embraced all hostile actions against the Pope, carried out by the Polish Communist secret services.
The secret files, concerning the Operation Triangolo disappeared from the SB archives in the Polish Ministry of Interior april 11, 1989. a special KGB delegation came to Warsaw to secure and move out these documents that are still kept as "top secret" in Moscow.
IPN archivists found out that only two times, three high SB officers attended Vatican public events: October 22, 1978,during an inaugural pontificate Holy Mass, the second time May 13, 1981, when agca was shooting at John Paul II. The names of the officers are known: adam Pietruszka, Zenon Chmielewski and Jan Zacherowski, all from the 4th Department.
an IPN document, concerning "The travels out and in Poland of the employees of the 4th Department", also contains some evidence of the trips to Moscow for official meetings with representatives of the KGB 5th Main Directorate. Some notes from these meetings, fragmentarily conserved, indicate that these meetings were devoted to the planning of joint actions against the Catholic Church. Similar meetings took also place in Czechoslovakia.
IPN researchers are convinced that a decision to kill the Pope had been taken by the top KGB leaders during one of these meetings.
The attempt in St Peter's Square was the second known attempt to murder John Paul II. The first occurred already in 1979, in the holy shrine city of Czestochowa, in Poland, when John Paul II celebrated a mass at Jasna Gora. Some notes found in the SB archives testify that in 1979 a regional prosecutor investigated a case of placing explosives to detonate them when the Pope visited the Jasna Gora Church. In Rome and in the Vatican, a Polish communist spy-group began to invigilate the Pope and his close aides. The spies were supervised by General Zdzislaw Sarewicz, then the head of the 1st Department (Intelligence) of the Ministry of Interior, according to Wprost.
David Dastych, working on the staff of a popular weekly paper and also for Polish Radio and the TV, decided to do some research on his own. In 1983 in Sofia he met Vasiliev who escaped from Italy after the attempt on the Pope, and he denied any Bulgarian involvement in the attempted killing. In their turn, some Hungarian intelligence officers told Dastych they had doubts about the official outcome of the agca trial. They told that agca could not work alone, and Bulgarians helped him.
In 1987 Dastych was arrested as a 'spy' and while in Communist jail, he incidentally met colonel adam Pietruszka of the SB, who was serving 25 year's sentence for his alleged part in the murder of priest Jerzy Popieluszko. Pietruszka, after release from jail in 1989, told Dastych about his work in Rome under diplomatic cover, developing secret SB agents in the Vatican. He also told that many high priests in Poland and in the Vatican did not believe in his participation in Popieluszko's murder. He said that the chief of the killers' squad, major Grzegorz Piotrowski, the former chief of Section D in Cracow, was "out of control" and probably cooperated with the KGB. In 2005, when Dastych tried to reach Sergei antonov in Bulgaria his friends told him antonov was in a psychiatric ward, being fed special medicine to "forget".