KGB and Soviet Leadership Sought to Kill Pope

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 29, 1999

A KGB dossier from the files of the former Communist Czech secret service has surfaced in Rome after coming into the hands of Italian intelligence officials. The 600 pages of secret documents reveal that, with the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, the KGB and the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow became greatly alarmed. Milan's venerable Corriere della Sera reports that a directive to attack the new pope was signed on Nov. 13, 1979. Brezhnev at that time was in his terminal illness. The plan was prepared by the mysterious Mikhail Suslov, chief ideologist and one of the most powerful men in setting the grand strategy of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Suslov was deeply concerned that the Slavic pope would establish close relations with the Russian Orthodox church in the Soviet Union and undermine the regime.

The plan later was approved in mm by Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev. The scheme was straightforward: It called for the destabilization of Vatican activities through a campaign of disinformation to be carried on throughout the West -- and even, ultimately, the "physical elimination" of the pope.

As the Corriere pointed out, "the man of perestroika, of glasnost with the West, of the dialogue with the Vatican" was at the same time the signer of a secret directive to have the pope killed if necessary.

In the end, according to the documents, the Soviets decided that it would be counterproductive to kill the pope. The documents do not discuss the 1981 assassination attempt by Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish terrorist.

A prime target of the Soviet campaign was to plant KGB agents in the Vatican itself. The documents assert that bugs were planted in the office of the late Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, the secretary of state responsible for the Vatican's "opening to the East." The Catholic World News Service reports that the listening devices were planted by the wife of the cardinal's nephew, and that Archbishop John Bukovski, now papal nuncio in Russia, was working with the Soviet secret service from 1972 to 1990. The archbishop emphatically has denied the report.