Plokhy Hunts the Smoking Gun and Finds Only Roses on a Grave

A meticulous historian chases the Cold War's most compelling conspiracy and concludes — to his own surprise — it probably wasn't one. The anticlimax is the point.

On the afternoon of 13 May 1981, a Turkish gunman named Mehmet Ali Ağca shot Pope John Paul II twice in St Peter's Square, then tripped and was pinned to the ground by a Franciscan nun. The scene was absurd and catastrophic in equal measure, and it has sustained conspiracy theorising for four decades. Serhii Plokhy, the Ukrainian historian best known for his Baillie Gifford-winning Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, now turns that same archival rigour on the question that consumed the CIA, the Italian judiciary, and the pope himself: was Moscow behind it? The circumstantial case for Soviet involvement was genuinely strong. John Paul II was a Pole in a country that was overwhelmingly Catholic, and by 1981 the Catholic Church was providing financial and moral support to Solidarity, the unofficial trade union that was becoming the focal point of civil resistance to communist rule. Lech Wałęsa had visited Rome for a private papal audience just four months before the shooting. The Russians had already threatened to invade Poland if Warsaw didn't suppress the uprising itself. If you wanted a reason for the KGB to want this particular pope dead, you had no shortage of them. The theory that emerged — the 'Bulgarian connection,' holding that Bulgarian state security acted as Soviet proxy — gained traction in an Italian court, in CIA analysis, and in the minds of hardliners on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bulgarians had form: in 1978 they had deployed an agent to assassinate dissident Georgi Markov in London, using a poisoned-umbrella stabbing on Waterloo Bridge. Plokhy admits he began the project sympathetically inclined toward the conspiracy thesis. What he found changed his mind. Ğca was a catastrophically unreliable witness. His courtroom testimony was contradictory, transparently self-serving, and occasionally delusional — he declared himself Jesus Christ from his steel cage during the trial of his alleged Bulgarian co-conspirators, who were acquitted. Plokhy finds no evidence of an international conspiracy and concludes, with evident disappointment, that Ağca was probably just another deranged individual seeking notoriety — the kind of anticlimax that history keeps delivering but that ideological investment keeps refusing to accept. The pope himself never accepted it; John Paul II was convinced the KGB was responsible until his death in 2005. The book's strangest and most indelible sequence is its coda: Ağca, released from prison in 2010, arriving at John Paul's tomb on 27 December 2014 — thirty-one years to the day after the pope had visited him in prison — to lay white roses and perform silent meditation for a waiting television crew. There is something both grotesque and weirdly moving in this image, and Plokhy is wise enough to let it sit without over-explaining it. The earlier scene it echoes — John Paul visiting Ağca in his cell, spending twenty minutes alone with the man who tried to kill him — is the book's moral centrepiece, and Plokhy earns it. The prose is clear and workmanlike. Plokhy's choice to use the present tense throughout is a technique that generates momentum during the assassination sequence but becomes awkward and occasionally confusing when applied to events decades later. It is a minor irritant in an otherwise well-paced narrative. The book's larger structural problem is the one Plokhy cannot solve: he promised the reader a conspiracy and delivers a verdict of lone wolf. That is honest, and probably correct, but it means the book's most dramatic chapters are the ones setting up a theory the final chapters dismantle. What saves Killing the Pope from being merely a debunking exercise is Plokhy's ability to reconstruct the geopolitical context with precision and without melodrama. The parallel between Poland and Iran — both countries where religious leadership proved capable of toppling a stable political order — is not decorative. It explains why Moscow's alarm was rational even if its alleged response was not. The book earns its place as the most rigorous account of the assassination attempt available in English, even if its conclusion leaves readers with less than they arrived hoping to find.