Basic HTML Version
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 11, 1981
PAGE 9
office manager, Frank Schnee. Within the day an arrangement had been made
for Mr. Armstrong to visit Bavaria's Minister-President (governor) in his
office in Munich on Thursday, November 26 at 9:00 a.m. Mr. Alfred Hennig,
our photographer in Bonn, knows Herr Strauss's longtime personal secretary,
who worked for Strauss even when he was a federal cabinet minister in Bonn
in the 1960s.
Without this contact, nothing could have been arranged so quickly, espe
cially considering the fact that Strauss was not in Munich but in Bonn on
Tuesday and Wednesday, attending the proceedings of the official visit of
Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev to West Germany. Mr. Armstrong's private
visit was conveniently squeezed in as Mr. Strauss's first order of business
back in the Staatskanzlei in Munich.
When the time came, Herr Strauss was in no hurry. He gave Mr. Armstrong and
Mr. Fahey a one-hour-thirty-five-minute-long tour de force of world affairs
as he saw them. Herr Strauss laid much of the world's political problems
right on the doorstep of the Kremlin. He claimed that the Soviets were
implicated in all three assassination attempts on high world officials this
year--President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and President Sadat. Not that
KGB agents actually pulled the trigger in each case, but the Kremlin set
events into motion that resulted in the desired end.
(Last week in this
column we discussed how that the Soviets pursued this precise tactic in
Egypt by stirring up the religious dissension that ultimately ended in
Sadat's death.)
The last things the Soviets want, said Strauss, are a U.S. President to
stand up to them, an activist Pope in Europe and a peacemaker in the Middle
East. How the Russians may have been involved in the attempted assassina
tion of President Reagan was not explored, but Strauss pointed to evidence
implicating the Soviet Union in the attempted murder of Pope John Paul II.
We have some of the same evidence in our News Bureau files.
"Western intelligence experts, particularly the west Germans," reports the
TIMES of London, "are now convinced there are reasonable grounds for sus
pecting that the Soviet KGB, or one of its client organizations in Eastern
Europe, had a hand in the attempted assassination of the Pope."
The intelligence agencies have not produced conclusive evidence yet, but
they do generally support the theory put forward by both Vatican intelli
gence and Italian security services that Turkish gunman Ali Agca was not a
fanatical lone wolf but was part of a carefully conceived plot originating
probably in Eastern Europe. "Vatican sources" added the TIMES, "were cer
tainly convinced that the KGB had organized the attempted assassination .e,y
indirect means."
Initially Soviet agents are believed to have infiltrated a faction of the
Turkish secret police. This faction had seen the usefulness of Agca as a
hired killer, after he had shot the editor of the Turkish newspaper MILLYET
in 1979. This faction subsequently planned his otherwise impossible escape
from a maximum security prison.
Agca then lived lavishly while traveling through East and west Europe for
the next year and a half, two months of which he was in Bulgaria. It is
believed that the Bulgarian secret service (100 percent tied to the KGB)
supplied Agca with money, documentation and instructions.
A leading