In 1979, The New York Times reported that Ağca, whom it called "the self-confessed killer of an Istanbul newspaperman" (Abdi İpekçi, editor of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet), had described the Pope as "the masked leader of the crusades" and threatened to shoot him if he did not cancel his planned visit to Turkey,[2] which went ahead in late November 1979.

[4] Beginning in August 1980, Ağca, under the alias of Vilperi, began criss-crossing the Mediterranean region, altering passports and identities, perhaps to hide his point of origin in Sofia, Bulgaria.

[5] According to Ağca, the plan was for him and the back-up gunman Oral Çelik to open fire on the pope in St. Peter's Square and escape to the Bulgarian embassy under the cover of the panic generated by a small explosion.

He fled the scene as the crowd was in shock and disposed of the pistol by throwing it under a truck, but was grabbed by Vatican security chief Camillo Cibin,[7] a nun, and several spectators who prevented him from firing more shots or escaping, and he was arrested.

[contradictory] Two bystanders were also injured: Ann Odre, of Buffalo, New York, was struck in the chest, and Rose Hall, of Frankfurt, West Germany, was slightly wounded in the arm.

Ağca was sentenced in July 1981 to life imprisonment for the assassination attempt, but was pardoned by Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in June 2000 at the Pope's request.

One, which was initially propagated in the American media and strongly advocated since the early 1980s by Michael Ledeen and Claire Sterling among others, was that the assassination attempt had originated from Moscow and that the KGB had instructed the Bulgarian and East German secret services to carry out the mission.

[16] The Bulgarian Secret Service was allegedly instructed by the KGB to assassinate the Pope because of his support of Poland's Solidarity movement, seeing it as one of the most significant threats to Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe.

Attorney Antonio Marini stated: "Ağca has manipulated all of us, telling hundreds of lies, continually changing versions, forcing us to open tens of different investigations.

[21] According to the CIA's chief of staff in Turkey, Paul Henze, Ağca later stated that in Sofia, he was once approached by the Bulgarian Secret Service and Turkish mafiosi, who offered him three million German marks to assassinate the Pope.

On 25 September 1991, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman (now Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy) claimed that his colleagues, following orders, had falsified their analysis to support the accusation.

A French lawyer, Christian Roulette, who authored books blaming Western intelligence agencies for the assassination attempt, testified in court that the documentary evidence he referred to actually did not exist.

[29] In Rome, Çatlı declared to the judge in 1985 "that he had been contacted by the BND, the German intelligence agency, which would have promised him a nice sum of money if he implicated the Russian and Bulgarian services in the assassination attempt against the Pope".

[30] In March 2006, pending the 2006 Italian general election held in April, the controversial Mitrokhin Commission, set up by Silvio Berlusconi and headed by Forza Italia senator Paolo Guzzanti, supported once again the Bulgarian theory, which had been denounced by John Paul II during his travel to Bulgaria.

[31] The report's claims were based on recent computer analysis of photographs that purported to demonstrate Antonov's presence in St Peter's Square during the shooting and on information brought by the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, a controversial figure whose last feat was to indict Rwandese president Paul Kagame, on the grounds that he had deliberately provoked the 1994 Rwandan genocide against his own ethnic group in order to take power.

[32] According to Le Figaro, Bruguière, who was in close contacts with both Moscow and Washington, D.C., including intelligence agents, was accused by many of his colleagues of "privileging the reason of state over law".

[37] In 2009, journalist and former U.S. Army military intelligence officer John O. Koehler published Spies in the Vatican: The Soviet Union's Cold War Against the Catholic Church.

On 13 May 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano gave a public address[40] in which he linked the then-as-yet-unreleased Third Secret of Fátima to the assassination attempt: while describing the Secret as a "prophetic vision" which does "not describe with photographic clarity the details of future events," he also identified the prophecy's "Bishop clothed in white" as the Pope, and repeated John Paul II's impression that "a motherly hand" had deflected Ağca's bullets.

[citation needed] However, when Ağca published his memoirs in 2013, his story changed completely,[43] writing that the Iranian government and supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the assassination attempt on John Paul II.