Terrorism: New Pieces for the Puzzle

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More hints that the Pope's attacker had help

Wiretaps of phone calls in which the Turkish gunman mutters that he received the money and says he will now carry out his assignment. Reports that the gunman met with a suspected Bulgarian agent at a small hotel in Rome to plot the murder of Polish Labor Leader Lech Walesa. Word that a key witness recants her testimony and thus threatens the alibi of the Bulgarian, who issues a denial that he aided the Turk in any way.

Investigating the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II is like putting together a maddeningly complex jigsaw puzzle. The picture remains far from complete, and there is no proof of the growing suspicion that the Soviet Union, acting through Bulgaria, was behind Turkish Terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca's effort to kill the Pope, or even aware of the attempt. But the latest fragments make the inquiry more tantalizing than ever.

According to published reports of his confession to Italian Judge Ilario Martella last year, Agca contended that during a seven-week stay in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in 1980, he was offered $1.5 million to kill the Pope. The man Agca said made the proposition is Bekir Çelenk, a shadowy Turkish businessman whose dealings often brought him to Bulgaria. Çelenk last week again denied that he had ever met Agca, but he admitted that the two had stayed at the same Sofia hotel at the same time in July 1980.

After leaving Sofia in August 1980, Agca traveled freely throughout Western Europe, stopping several times in Rome. He claimed to have met three Bulgarians during these visits, including Sergei Ivanov Antonov, the head of the local office of Bulgaria's Balkan Airlines. With this trio, Agca said, he made final plans to murder the Pope.

Agca's contention that the Bulgarians conspired with him remains unproven. But intriguing details keep emerging that support Agca's account of his activities before the shooting. In a meeting on March 3, 1981, at the Hotel Rŭtli in Zurich, Musa Serdar Çelebi, a right-wing Turkish activist with rinks to Çelenk and Bulgaria, also offered Agca $1.5 million to kill the Pope. Çelebi reportedly was acting as middleman for Çelenk, and may have been either simply renewing his fellow Turk's offer or actually paying Agca the money. Some time in late April or early May, according to Swiss and German wiretaps cited in a television documentary broadcast by NBC last week, Agca, staying in Majorca, telephoned Çelebi in Frankfurt. The gunman reportedly said, "I have received the sum we agreed. I'll go to Rome to carry it out." Agca allegedly then called another Turk, Omer Bagci, a restaurant worker in a Zurich suburb, and instructed him to deposit in a baggage room at the railroad station in Milan the Browning 9-mm semiautomatic pistol used in the papal shooting. On May 9, according to Agca, he arrived in Milan from his Majorca sojourn and picked up the gun. Four days later, he was standing in St. Peter's Square waiting for his victim.