Wild Theories Real Bullets

   In 1978 Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland was elected pope as a compromise candidate. He was the first non-Italian pope in five centuries. One of his Protestant admirers said John Paul II was "a pope who knew how to pope."
   At the time of his election, the Soviet empire in eastern Europe was beginning to crumble. The election as pope of  one of their own gave the staunchly Catholic Poles the courage to knock out the bottom stone, and soon the empire was in ruins.
  On May 13, 1981, John Paul was shot and seriously wounded by a Turkish assassin. The pope almost immediately said he forgave the man who tried to kill him, and, on this day in 1983, he visited Ali Agca in an Italian prison.
   Investigators have never determined Agca's motive for shooting the pope. There are many theories, some put forth by Agca himself. Mehmet Ali Agca was born in central Turkey and spent his youth as a street gang member and smuggler. He joined the right-wing Turkish group Grey Wolves and on its orders assassinated a Turkish journalist. At at age 23 Agca was sentenced to life in prison, but he escaped to Bulgaria with the help of the Grey Wolves.
    Agca was given a false passport and was recruited by a Bulgarian military officer and a member of the Turkish mafia to help assassinate John Paul II. That's what he told investigators after the shooting. After a few months in Bulgaria, Agca spent seven months crisscrossing Europe and North Africa. Interpol was looking for him and he was spotted a couple of times, but he always managed to escape.
    On the evening of May 13, Agca and his accomplice sat at a table on the edge of St. Peter's Square writing postcards while they waited for the pope to arrive. Agca's mission was to back up the other gunman who was to shoot first and also set off a small bomb. When the crowd panicked, the two gunmen would escape to the Bulgarian embassy.
   As the open popemobile made its way through the crowd, Agca fired four shots. John Paul was hit twice in the abdomen. He was also hit in the arm and a finger. Two American tourists were also wounded. The other shooter panicked and ran away without firing a shot or setting off the bomb. People in the crowd, including a nun, caught Agca and held him until security took over.
  Agca told investigators about the Bulgarian connection, but Western commentators immediately assumed the Soviets were behind the attempt. It seemed logical, but no hard evidence connecting the Soviet government with the assassination attempt has ever been found.
  At the pope's request, Agca was released after having spent 19 years in prison. Turkey still wanted him for the murder of the journalist in 1979, so he served ten more years in a Turkish prison. On his release at age 52 he was sent to the Army to fulfill his compulsory military service. The army didn't want him. They said he had an antisocial personality disorder.
   While in the Turkish prison Agca named a cardinal in the Vatican as the brains behind the assassination attempt. He tried to team up with Dan Brown to write a book. He was too late. Tom Clancy and Fred Forsyth had already written bestsellers about him and his voluptuous KGB handler. After his release from prison, he laid flowers on John Paul's grave not long after John Paul had been made a saint.
   Agca next looked into becoming a Catholic priest. He wanted to help out with the centenary celebrations at the pilgrim site of Fatima in Portugal. By this time he was saying that the Ayatollah Khomeini was the one behind the assassination attempt. When Agca requested an audience with Pope Francis the Vatican politely declined.

Bulletproof confessional