More than half the world's population was not born or was less than 10 years old when a 23-year-old Turk named Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II four times with a 9-mm pistol from a distance of 15 feet as the pope drove through a crowd of 20,000 in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981.
In the round-the-clock coverage of Pope John Paul II's death, remarkably little has been said about the plot, even less about those who wanted the pope dead ASAP.
It was the Polish pope's election in 1978 and his first visit a year later to his homeland (where he had been archbishop of Krakow), and the millions that turned out to greet him, that set alarm bells ringing in the Kremlin. Unlike Joseph Stalin, who sneered at the pope and his imaginary divisions, KGB chief Yuri Andropov (1967-1982) saw this anti-communist pope as a mortal danger to Soviet control over Eastern Europe.
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