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using historical data. But in the case of the anthrax attack, there was only one prior case of bioterrorism in the United States, the deliberate contamination with salmonella of salad bars in ten restaurants in Oregon. But this biological attack, which resulted in the poisoning of 751 individuals, was not perpetrated by a lone American. It was the act of a conspiracy in which the main perpetrators were foreign-born followers of the Indian spiritualist Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Nor did the text of the anthrax letters themselves point to a single American scientist, since it used the plural “we,” contained the misspelling of the word “penicillin,” and also had jihadist formulations, such as “Death to America.” If, as the FBI assumed, the text was a deliberate deception, it left little material to support its profile of a lone American scientist. Yet, by clinging to this profile, it neglected investigative paths that may have resolved this crime.

CHAPTER 6
THE POPE’S ASSASSIN
    On May 13, 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca, a twenty-three-year-old Turkish citizen, who was amidst a throng of people in the piazza in front of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, suddenly raised a Browning semi-automatic pistol, and shot Pope John Paul II no fewer than four times. The fusillade of bullets gravely wounded the pope, who survived the attack. Agca was captured gun in hand at the scene by Vatican security and Italian police. He had arrived in Rome by train only three days earlier. Under interrogation, Agca freely admitted firing the shots and said that he acted alone. Two years earlier, Agca had been sent to prison in Turkey for assassinating Abdi Ipekci, the editor of the newspaper Milliyet , a crime he confessed to on Turkish television. He had also threatened in a letter to kill Pope John Paul II, whom he called “the Commander of the Crusades” against Islam. He escaped from prison in November 1979. Based on his confession, the Italian investigation concluded that he acted as a lone fanatic when he shot the pope. In July 1981, he was tried in Rome, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Even with the conviction, it was not a closed case.
    Within months, the case was transformed from a lone-assassin scenario to a possible conspiracy. The driving force for this new narrative was investigative journalism. In Turkey, journalist Ugur Mumcu was able to piece together an intriguing trail for Agca. It began with his well-planned escaped from a high-security Turkish prison in 1979, an escape in whichhe walked out disguised as a soldier, and it continued as he assumed various other aliases, assisted by false travel documents through a half-dozen countries, including Bulgaria, Germany, Syria, and Iran, to Italy. According to Mumcu’s research, the jailbreak was organized by a Turkish terrorist organization called “The Grey Wolves,” which also supplied him with money, weapons, and documents. Meanwhile, in America, two separate journalistic investigations—one for the Reader’s Digest by Paul Henze, the CIA station chief in Turkey from 1974 to 1977; the other by Claire Sterling, who had written The Terror Network —uncovered evidence suggesting that Agca had been working for the Bulgarian intelligence service at the time of the assassination attempt. They also named a number of Bulgarian officials in Rome who they said may have been involved in the plot. As the firestorm grew in the Italian media, Agca was re-interrogated in prison. After being shown pictures of the Bulgarian officials in Italy, Agca changed his story. He now said he had two Bulgarian accomplices in Rome. He said one of them was Sergei Antonov, the representative in Rome of Balkan Air, the Bulgarian national airline, who drove him to St. Peter’s Square to shoot the pope. Antonov denied knowing Agca and having any involvement in the plot. Nevertheless, he was arrested by Italian authorities and put on trial for complicity in the attempt to kill the pope.