Killing the Pope

An immersive narrative investigation into the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, and the international dispute over who was responsible for it.

On May 13, 1981, a Turkish man named Mehmet Ali Agca shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in the heart of Vatican City. Agca was put on trial and served nineteen years in an Italian prison before his return to Turkey, where he lives to this day. Why did the shooting in Saint Peter's Square take place, and how did it shape the turbulence of the late Cold War?

In Killing the Pope, written with the momentum of a fast-paced thriller and the rigor of the best scholarship, the master historian Serhii Plokhy revisits the era and one of its defining mysteries. He traces Agca’s membership in the right-wing terrorist group known as the Gray Wolves, his assassination of a liberal journalist and escape from a Turkish prison, and his grandiose rhetoric about the dangers of the Church and imperialism to Turkey’s national honor. Agca’s story intersects with many others, however, as the newly installed pope visits his native Poland and becomes an anti-communist icon, and the Gray Wolves’ ties to organized crime prompt widespread allegations of a Soviet-Bulgarian conspiracy to eliminate John Paul.

As Agca’s trial proceeds, it becomes a bizarre but consequential Cold War theater, with both Washington and Moscow spreading disinformation, and a beloved pontiff and voluble, enigmatic wouldbe killer at its center. Drawing on pathbreaking research in far-flung archives, Plokhy’s absorbing narrative dispels myths and offers the most meticulous account to date of a violent act that shook the world.