the shadow of the secret services returns –

Rita Cavallaro

July 02, 2024

The shadow of the secret services, the Bulgarian lead and the attack on Pope John Paul II that led to Ali Agca being sentenced to life imprisonment, returns to the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi and Mirella Gregori. The ghosts of the past were brought back to life by the latest hearings in the bicameral commission of inquiry, which gave the floor to the magistrates. The investigating judge Adele Rando classified her intervention, but Ilario Martella, in charge of the case from 1985 to 1990, argued without hesitation that the principle must be set in the attack on John Paul II. “The background to the two disappearances is represented by the attack on the Pope, committed in 1981, which immediately led to Ali Agca being sentenced to life imprisonment,” said Martella, specifying that Emanuela and Mirella “were sacrificed to something incredible, which can be defined as reasons of State. We are faced, as John Paul II said when he went to the Orlandi house for Christmas 1983, with an international intrigue.”

The intrigue, which would involve a part of the Italian secret services, probably 007 of the SISMI, and the intelligence of East Germany, would be linked to the Bulgarian lead and the role of Agca. For the judge, in fact, «it was a mass distraction operation conceived and carried out by the Stasi to prevent Bulgaria and the entire Eastern world from being involved in the attack on the Pope, following Ali Agca, questioned by me, had started to accuse three Bulgarian officials. The attack on the Pope is a starting point for me», Martella underlined to indicate to the Commission the path to follow to discover the truth. Also in light of the fact that «since 1982», specifies the magistrate, «Bulgaria was very worried regarding being involved in the attack on the Pope». There was a risk that, in the hands of the Vatican gendarmes, the same member of the Turkish far-right organization of the Grey Wolves, convicted of having fired the two 9mm shots at Pope John Paul II on that terrible May 13, 1981, might have revealed who the instigators were. So “something was needed that might determine total inattention, a sort of mass distraction. And who might have carried out such an operation?”, Martella told the Commission.

“It certainly wasn’t something low-level like the Magliana gang,” the judge explains, “but it was necessary for things to be done with the highest professional quality by an organization like the Stasi at the time. This mass distraction operation was supposed to create episodes to attract public attention.” And that’s how the kidnappings were supposedly born. “First they tried with Mirella, but since, as they wrote in a statement, the requests made under the radar had not been “referred to the hierarchies,” they decided to move up a level,” Martella said. “The girls were sacrificed, killed not immediately, but perhaps following a while. Keeping them alive would have been dangerous because they might have been key witnesses.”