Whose Fantasy?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The news brought in by the Corriere della Sera of new documentary evidence in old East German intelligence files indicating that the KGB ordered the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II reminded us how this idea was once mocked by some of our fellow journalists.
A columnist for the New York Times, Anthony Lewis, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote in a 1991 column that a 1985 CIA report on the case for Soviet involvement in the plot against the pontiff “read like a novelist’s fantasy of Red conspiracy.” He said it was a “politicized report” that had “tortured logic.” He accused the director of central intelligence at the time, William Casey, of being “seized with the notion that the Russians were behind everything wrong in the world, including the attempt on the Pope’s life.”
A December 1982 editorial in the New York Times advised Americans to “test the evidence soberly, and to avoid excessive sanctimony.” The editorial speculated that “zealous Bulgarian security agents might have acted on their own, without clearance from their Soviet allies.” A September 1982 television review in the Times faulted an NBC News program documenting the Soviet role in the assassination for relying on “disappointingly scanty evidence” and for failing to include Soviet comment.
The crimes of the Soviet Communist empire were so many that they tend to blur together into a murk of murder. For each crime there were apologists in the West, and it is now clear that they were the ones living a fantasy.
There were several particularly heroic journalists on the story. One, Claire Sterling, died several years ago, but at the height of the story on the attempt on the life of the pope, she was one of the most impassioned and thorough reporters to make the case for Soviet involvement. Robert L. Bartley of the Wall Street Journal and his colleague L. Gordon Crovitz also did memorable reporting and editorializing in an effort to get the world to understand the nature of this crime and the nature of the Soviet enemy. It’s hard for people today to remember how important and impassioned this debate was. And it’s sad that Sterling and Bartley aren’t around to see the evidence vindicating their view of it.
