ROME — The Soviet Union was behind the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, and the order to carry out the attack came from the very top of the former communist regime.

This was the verdict of an Italian parliamentary commission report, extracts of which were published in Italian newspapers March 2.

According to the findings, to be published in full later this month, former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev asked the Soviet Union’s Main Intelligence Directorate, known as the the GRU, to eliminate the Polish-born Pope because of his opposition to communism in Eastern Europe. The GRU was a secret body, independent of the Soviet Secret Service, better known as the KGB, and was responsible for the country’s military intelligence.

Italian Sen. Paolo Guzzanti, who headed the commission, said that evidence that the former Soviet leaders were directly behind the attack and that they delegated the task to the GRU was “beyond any reasonable doubt.”

The commission also drew on statements made by Jean Louis Bruguière, an expert in terrorism, who is “certain” the attack on the Pope was the work of the GRU. Guzzanti said the GRU, “was instructed to carry out all of the necessary operations required to carry out a murder whose seriousness is unparalleled in modern history.”

The report alleges that Bulgarian agents were also used as a cover-up, while officials from Stasi (East Germany’s secret police) were told to derail the official investigation into the attempted murder by supplying false information to the media. These findings first came to light after the commission succeeded in opening relevant Stasi files last year.

Pope John Paul II was shot and seriously wounded in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, by Turkish national Mehmet Ali Agca. But the Pope was always convinced that Agca was not alone in carrying out the attack.

“Someone else planned it, someone else commissioned it,” he said in Memory and Identity, his last book published shortly before his death in 2005. That statement prompted Guzzanti to further investigate the claim.

The report’s conclusions, carried out by Italy’s Mitrokhin Commission — named after the KGB archivist who disclosed Soviet espionage activities in the West — confirm the so-called “Bulgarian connection” by identifying the presence of Sergei Antonov, then-head of Bulgaria’s state-run airline, Balkan Air, in St. Peter’s Square at the time of the shooting.

Antonov, who was tried alongside Agca in 1986 but later released due to lack of evidence, maintained that he was working in his Rome office at the time of the shooting. However, due to advances in photographic technology, Antonov has now been identified in the crowd in St. Peter’s Square.

Responding to the news, Antonov’s lawyer, Giuseppe Consolo, insisted the photograph was a case of mistaken identity. The man in the crowd, he said, is an American tourist of Hungarian origin.

“Since Antonov is alive and well in Bulgaria, they should make a comparison with the physical person, not with other photos,” Consolo said.

According to the Italian parliamentary commission, the reasons for the Kremlin’s decision to murder John Paul were simple: It considered him too much of a threat. The commission report cited John Paul’s support for Lech Walesa’s Solidarity, a Polish movement that opposed the communist regime, as the most real and present danger as the Soviet leadership feared Solidarity would energize dissidents elsewhere in the Soviet bloc.

The commission’s report will be the first official document to accuse the Soviets of direct involvement in the events of May 13, 1981.

Russian authorities, however, deny the accusations that Soviet leaders masterminded the attack. Vladimir Kryuchkov, deputy chairman of the KGB at the time, called the commission’s findings “a complete fabrication but also provocation, absurdity and nonsense.” And the FSB, which succeeded the KGB as the organization responsible for Russia’s state security, supported Kryuchkov’s comments.

Some observers believe that Russian authorities are reluctant to own up to any acknowledgement of Soviet involvement because many of those allegedly involved in the attack are still alive. Analysts also note that no government is likely to admit its country was responsible for trying to assassinate a head of state, let alone a pope, even if the Soviet regime is no longer in existence.

In Rome, though, there was little surprise at the findings. The Kremlin was suspected of involvement almost immediately after the attack took place.

Past attempts by the Vatican and the Italian government to downplay possible Soviet involvement were “merely a political maneuver designed not to upset communists in Italy and the Soviets — to make it seem as though the Pope was not an anti-communist figure,” said Kishore Jayabalan, director of the Rome office of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty

Jayabalan said that it was not only John Paul II’s connections with Solidarity that the Soviets feared, but Christianity itself. This threat, together with John Paul being a vibrant, charismatic and respected world figure allied to the Solidarity movement amounted to an unacceptable danger to the Kremlin, Jayabalan suggested.

“The Soviets understood very well the threat that John Paul II posed, and understood that better than other governments might have done,” said Jayabalan. “The nature of the Soviet regime, like all totalitarianisms, wanted to place everything under the state, but John Paul II was saying there was something much more than just the state — that man’s fate is not, as communist regimes believe, somehow completely bound up with our earthly and material existence.”

Added Jayabalan, “Christianity, although based in this world, points to something greater, and in so doing relativizes all political, totalitarian claims that are absolute in their nature. The supernatural aspects of the Church’s teaching are what make it a threat to any political, totalitarian regime.”

Edward Pentin

writes from Rome.