His bloodstained cassock, vest, and underpants were expertly cut away, and the bloodstained cross on its solid gold chain was removed. Surgical towels were draped over his nakedness. Gloved hands reached for, fetched, and carried the first of the instruments needed in a struggle the surgical team was only too familiar with.
When he had recovered after almost six hours of surgery, John Paul believed he had been saved by the miraculous intervention of one of the most revered apparitions in the Catholic world, the Virgin of Fatima, whose feast day was the same one as the attempt on his life.
During his long months of recovery, John Paul became increasingly preoccupied with who had ordered him to be assassinated. He tried to read every scrap of evidence that came from police and intelligence agencies as diverse as the CIA, West Germany’s BND, and the security services of Turkey and Austria. It was impossible to read it all: there were millions of words of reports, statements, and assessments.
Not one document answered fully John Paul’s question: Who had wanted him killed? He was still no wiser when Agca stood trial at the Rome assize court in the last week of July 1981. The brisk three-day hearing cast no light on the gunman’s motives. Agca was sentenced to life imprisonment; with good behavior he would be eligible for parole in the year 2009.
Two years after Agca had been convicted, John Paul had finally been promised the answer to the question that still festered in his mind. It would come from a priest he trusted above all others. His title was
For many months Poggi had been involved in very secret contacts with Mossad. Only recently, when they were sufficiently advanced, had he informed the pope what he had been doing. John Paul had told him to continue. Since then there had been meetings with a Mossad officer in Vienna, Paris, Warsaw, and Sofia, Bulgaria. Both priest and
A few days before, there had been another meeting, again in Vienna, a city both Poggi and the officer liked as a background for their clandestine contacts.
It was from that meeting that Poggi was returning to the Vatican on that icy November night in 1983. He was bringing with him the answer to the pope’s question: Who had ordered Agca to try to murder him?
One of the massive gates of the Arch of the Bells was already closed—the prelude to the nightly ritual of locking all the entrances to the Vatican on the stroke of midnight—when the dark blue Fiat limousine crunched across the cobblestones, its lights picking out the two Swiss Guards caped against the chill. Behind them stood a Vigili. One of the guards stepped forward, arm raised half in salute, half in command to stop. The car was expected and the figure behind the wheel was the familiar one of a Vatican chauffeur. But after the assassination attempt on the pope, no one was taking any chances.
The chauffeur had waited an hour at Rome’s airport for the flight from Vienna, which had been delayed by bad weather. The guard stepped back after raising his arm in full salute to the passenger in deep shadow on the rear seat. There was no return acknowledgment.
The car drove past the side of St. Peter’s Basilica and bounced over the cobblestones of San Damaso Courtyard before stopping outside the main entrance to the Apostolic Palace. The driver jumped out and opened the door for his passenger. Archbishop Luigi Poggi emerged, dressed in severe black, a scarf covering the white flash of his collar. Physically he bore a resemblance to Rafi Eitan: the same powerful shoulders and biceps, the same rolling gait, and eyes that could be as cold as this night.
As usual, Poggi had traveled with a small leather suitcase for his personal effects and a briefcase fitted with a combination lock. He sometimes joked he spent more time dozing in aircraft seats than asleep in his bed in the spacious suite he occupied at the rear of the Apostolic Palace.
Few recent trips matched the importance of what Poggi had finally been told at the meeting in Vienna’s old Jewish Quarter. There, in a narrow steep-roofed building a few blocks from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s offices, the archbishop had listened raptly to a man they had agreed would only be called by his first name—Eli.
