BULGARIAN OUTRAGE

The Bulgarians furiously deny plotting to kill the

Pope, by Richard Bassett Sofia 'TRUTH will triumph over the lie.' The release of Antonov is an absolute moral and legal imperative.' Cyrillic headlines in Bulgarian newspapers have never been easy to digest but for the last two weeks their general drift has been unmistakable. Day after day, the name of Sergei Antonov accompanied by a photograph of his rather sad Groucho Marx features has adorned the front pages of all the country's papers.

Antonov, an official working in the Rome office of Balkan Airlines, was arrested in 1982 after the Pope's would-be assassin, Mehmet Agca, had named him as part of a 'Bulgarian connection'. As each day of Agca's trial in Rome passes, the headlines in Sofia become angrier, even demanding last week that Agca should be tried in Bulgaria for distorting the truth, an offence so rare and so heinous in this part of the world that it carries the death penalty, or would do in Agca's case.

Most Bulgarians agree that even this would be too good for the Turk and talk of more Mandist treatment has began to fill the fly-infested coffee-house around Sob- ranie Square. In the eyes of his compat- riots, Antonov has become more than just an innocent victim of a mad Turkish plot. He is the symbol of what most Bulgarians believe is a relentless campaign by the West to blacken the good name of Bulg- aria. Agca is the chief protogonist of this conspiracy and as such deserves nothing less than ceremonial decapitation.

Why, Bulgarians ask, is it that assassina- tion, drug-smuggling, illegal arms ship- ments and massacres of Turks always evoke in the West the name of Bulgaria? The obvious answer, that the Bulgarians have been extravagantly involved with all these things, is not convincing in Sofia, where the press never breathes a word of such things. Nor is the no smoke without fire argument comprehensible to the Bal-

kan mind: it is no good pointing out that, like an etching in a 19th-century copy of Punch depicting the grisly murder of some hapless vice-consul in the hills around Rila, the lingering impression tends to be that these things are only possible in Bulgaria.

There are some who would attribute this conviction to some extent to the average Bulgar's build and countenance. The staff of the Hotel Balkan, that unforgettable and uninhabitable Stalinist edifice where water hisses from behind every marble column, are a case in point. Nearly all of them seem better suited to a heavyweight wrestling ring than the clearly by no means tamed telex and telephone machines which lie buried behind a sea of cigar butts on the reception desk.

Some of the Bulgarian public relations people seem to realise this, and attempt to dispel any misgivings with a hospitality which the impoverished foreign correspon- dent acquainted only with the meagre entertainment of today's parsimonious British embassies cannot fail to find pers- suasive. But even after several glasses of Black Sea Sauvignon, the relentless accusations begin to sound tiresome. 'Notorious international plot — Italian agents — the CIA — Turkish Fascists — the Knights of Malta.' The Knights of Malta? Of course. Everyone knows the Knights are just a cover for the CIA. These are the thugs behind the murder attempt of the Pontiff.

My blurred memory quickly scans the starry-eyed ranks of eccentric White Rus- sians, octogenarian counts and languid daughters of Gurkha officers who make up the great annual cortege to Lourdes, but

perhaps because there are really very few mentally underprivileged members of the Almanach de Gotha left in Bulgaria, my scepticism is not convincing.

Such preposterous reasoning aside, the Bulgarians are nonetheless not acting en- tirely unreasonably in venting their anger over Antonov's detention. The man has been under arrest for years simply on the evidence of Mehmet Agca, evidence which to anyone following the dispatches from Rome last week must throw, in their rambling contradictions, doubts on Agca's honesty and even his sanity. Despite Anto- nov undergoing interrogation since his arrest in 1982, no link has been established between the hapless airline official and the Bulgarian secret service. No eye-witnesses confirm that Antonov was in Saint Peter's Square on the day of the shooting. No documents link him with any plot. Never- theless, the far from well Antonov has remained under arrest.

This is referred to in Sofia as the 'glaring mystification' and its causes are laid squarely at the door of the Americans. It is of course absurd to imagine that even the CIA would have attempted to shoot the only Pope this century to enjoy the soubri- quet of 'anti-communism incarnate' as the Czech Party paper Rude Pravo regularly describes him. But it is equally not beyond belief that any evidence, however circum- stantial, of an Eastern European link would be a valuable propaganda point to the West, who, following the old detec- tive's maxim 'Who profits most from the crime?' could plausibly accuse someone in Eastern Europe.

Two telegrams sent, it would seem, en clair from the American embassy in Rome to Washington in the autumn of 1982, show that the value of such an insinuation was not lost in the State Department. The telegrams, originally published by an American news agency, make rather un- comfortable if realistic reading. The first runs:

Discrediting Bulgaria which is the Soviet Union's most loyal follower would be a step towards discrediting the Soviet leaders and would present Moscow as a centre of terror- ism. Italy and its allies would be given a hint that the Kremlin's purpose is to destabilise Western Europe which would cast doubt on the usefulness of any dialogue whatsoever.

The second is a plea from the American embassy in Rome for the presence of a former CIA employee, to help 'finalise the details of this operation'.

Now these are far from gentlemanly words. If true, it should be remembered that the war of words between superpow- ers has long ceased to be a gentlemanly affair and it would be rather churlish to haul the Americans severely over the coals for simply doing their utmost to exploit a situation at a time when East-West rela- tions were reaching a particularly frosty stage and Moscow's rhetoric was becoming increasingly belligerent. In any case the Americans were in good company in draw- ing their conclusions. Presumably indepen- dent of the Americans and any Maltese knights, the Guardian voiced the opinion — still to be forgotten in Sofia — that 'Bulgarian involvement in the assassination attempt was not much of a surprise'. Not much of a surprise of course to anyone except the Bulgarians, fanned into Mediterranean somnolence by the strictly censored press which draws a blind eye to such 'slanders'.

The inescapable fact remains that even if Antonov is found innocent and released, it cannot exonerate the Bulgarians entirely. The fate of Markhov, the emigre Bulgarian working for the BBC who was assassinated by a poisoned umbrella, is only the most memorable of the macabre activities.

The tight leash which is kept on the Bulgarian press also takes the edge off Sofia's self-righteous indignation at the so-called 'mystifications' of the Western press. Only last year at the time of the Libyan embassy siege in Saint James's, every Bulgarian paper insisted that it had been an English gun rather than one of Gaddafi's which had killed WPC Fletcher. There may yet be 'triumph over the lie' in Rome, but Antonov's detention and the talk of a Bulgarian connection is as much the result of Bulgaria's policies over the last decade as it is of Agca's ramblings in an Italian court.