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During the trial, which extended over two years, Agca again changed his story, exonerating Antonov in rambling and incoherent testimony. Antonov was acquitted in 1986, returned to Bulgaria, became the subject of a novel called The Executioner by Stefan Kisyov, and died in 2007. His lengthy trial produced no evidence to substantiate the media stories that Agca was paid by the Bulgarian intelligence. For his part, Agca had made so many contradictory claims in the trial that his testimony was of little value in resolving the question of conspiracy. After the pope recovered and asked that Agca be shown mercy, Agca was extradited toTurkey, and then, after twenty-eight years in prison, was released on January 18, 2010.
    As for why he attempted to assassinate the pope, there are three main theories. First, that he acted on his own, believing, as he wrote prior to the attempt, that the pope was an enemy of Islam. According to this view, Agca, no matter who helped him escape from prison, earned money through smuggling and other criminal activities in Bulgaria and Germany. He used this money to buy a false passport, train tickets, and the weapon he used to shoot the pope. His conspiratorial confessions were either delusional or attempts to win favor from the Italian authorities. A second theory is that he was working for a Muslim extremist group, such as the Grey Wolves, who recruited him in prison, because of the threats he had made against the pope, and arranged his escape. In this view, Agca’s trips to Syria, where Agca himself said he had received terrorist training, were sponsored by the Islamic group that recruited him. That his target was not beyond the scope of such Islamic extremist groups was demonstrated, according to this theory, by the failed attempt by Ramzi Yousef, who was the organizer of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, to assassinate Pope John Paul II in the Philippines on January 15, 1995. Finally, there is the theory, advanced in the books of Sterling and Henze, that the papal assassination had been organized by the Bulgarian intelligence service on behalf of the Soviet Union’s KGB. The motive, according to this theory, was that Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope, had been secretly funding the anti-Soviet Solidarity involvement in Poland. This alleged KGB plot was the prosecution’s theory in the 1984–86 trial of Antonov.
    My own assessment is that Agca acted alone. His own contradictory statements demonstrate, if anything, that he was opportunistic in inventing stories. There is no doubt that he had assistance from the Grey Wolves in escaping prison, as Mumcu convincingly shows, but there is no evidence that thisorganization supported or even stayed in contact with him when he went to Europe. And there is no persuasive evidence that he had ever been connected to either Bulgarian or Russian intelligence. At Antonov’s trial, Agca appeared to be totally deranged. If that was not an act, he was clearly capable of undertaking delusional missions. So it is possible, though by no means certain, that he himself decided to eliminate a person he described as a “crusader.”
    A lesson here is that a lone assassin may find reason to falsely implicate others in a putative conspiracy. For example, James Earl Ray, who confessed to the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1969, asserted in an unsuccessful attempt to win a new trial eight years later that he had a co-conspirator named “Raoul” (even though a polygraph test financed by Playboy magazine showed that he had acted alone). In the attack on the pope, the Cold War interest in implicating Soviet intelligence in a papal assassination attempt provided Agca with an incentive, if only to break the boredom of prison, to implicate Antonov and other Bulgarian and Russian officials in the putative plot. Not all loners have help—even if they say they do.

PART TWO
SUICIDE, ACCIDENT, OR
DISGUISED MURDER?

CHAPTER 7
THE MAYERLING