Allegations of KGB ties, which were denied and ruled defamatory in nature in court, included Prodi as the alleged "KGB's man in Italy", his staff, Massimo D'Alema, Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, General Giuseppe Cucchi (later director of the CESIS), Milan's judges Armando Spataro, and Guido Salvini, both in charge of the Abu Omar case, as well as La Repubblica reporters Carlo Bonini [it] and Giuseppe D'Avanzo [it], who broke the Niger uranium forgeries.
[8] According to Frank Brodhead, the new conclusions brought by Guzzanti were based on the same information provided in the early 1980s by Michael Ledeen, an American neoconservative author tied to the SISMI and Ağca himself, which he said is "bogus at best and at worst deliberately misleading".
[9] The Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, who had initially believed this conspiracy theory, later wrote that "the Bulgarian connection was invented by Ağca with the hope of winning his release from prison.
He was aided and abetted in this scheme by right-wing conspiracy theorists in the United States and William J. Casey's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which became a victim of its own disinformation campaign.
[11] Guzzanti's claims in the draft report were based on recent computer analysis of photographs that purported to demonstrate suspected conspirator Sergei 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 the power.
[12] According to Le Figaro, Bruguière, who was in close contacts with both Moscow and Washington, D.C., including the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was accused by many of his colleagues of "privileging the raison d'état over law".
[13] In its final report, issued on 15 March 2006, the Mitrokhin Commission mentioned on page 248 that Bruguière during the course of his investigations allegedly gained information, indicating that the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II was orchestrated by the GRU, the foreign military intelligence agency of the former Soviet Union.
[14] Bruguière's information supporting the "Bulgarian connection" in the attempted assassination allegedly sprang from the prosecution of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias Carlos the Jackal, held in France since his capture in Sudan in 1994.
[19] On 1 December 2006, several Italian newspapers published interceptions of telephone calls between Guzzanti and Scaramella, who was the commission's consultant and became involved in the events surrounding the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in Great Britain on 23 November 2006.
[25] The Mitrokhin Commission was shut down in March 2006 without any concrete result provided, and not one political figure was exposed by the allegations, despite months of press speculation alimented by Berlusconi family newspaper Il Giornale.