The Vatican: The Undiplomatic Bulgarian

A defector points the finger toward Moscow

From the start, the evidence has come in bits and pieces, with each new shred making the mystery only more intriguing. Was the Soviet Union, acting through Bulgaria, behind the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by Turkish Terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca on that sunny May afternoon in 1981? The latest fragment does not answer that question once and for all, but it tightens the web of circumstantial evidence around the Kremlin. A Bulgarian embassy worker who defected to France in 1981 has told French intelligence officials that the KGB devised the plot to kill the Pope out of fear that the Polish-born prelate was part of a U.S.-inspired scheme to undermine the Polish government.

According to an account published in the New York Times, the talkative official is lordan Mantarov, 48, who was last posted as deputy commercial attaché at the Bulgarian embassy in Paris. The Times said that Mantarov defected in July 1981, two months after the failed assassination. While being debriefed by French intelligence officials, Mantarov reportedly said that a close friend in the Bulgarian state security agency named Dimiter Savov had given him details about a KGB plan to murder the Pontiff.

Savov is said to have told Mantarov that the KGB concluded in 1979 that Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's Polish-born National Security Adviser, had somehow engineered the election of Pope John Paul II the previous year. Brzezinski's supposed purpose: to use the Pope to inspire further unrest in Poland and eventually to wrench the country out of the Soviet orbit. Mantarov claims that he was told that as the troubles in Poland mounted, and as the Pontiff came to be identified with the budding Solidarity movement, Soviet authorities gave the command to "eliminate" the Pope. They allegedly handed the assignment to the Bulgarians, long known for their subservience to the Kremlin's wishes.

The Bulgarians, according to Mantarov, picked Agca as the assassin because he was known as a right-winger with no ties to any Communist country. In November 1979, unknown accomplices slipped Agca out of a Turkish prison. Agca then began a murky trek that ended in St. Peter's Square on May 13,1981. According to Mantarov, the Turk was to meet his own fate there as well: he was supposed to be killed immediately after shooting the Pope.

The Bulgarians, predictably, dismissed Mantarov's account. An embassy spokesman in Rome described Mantarov as nothing more than a mechanic formerly employed by a Bulgarian firm in France. Mantarov, meanwhile, has dropped out of sight. French intelligence officials refused to admit last week that they had ever spoken to him, let alone that he had told them anything about the Bulgarian connection. Mantarov is most likely still in French custody and living under a false name.