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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 STERLING. ..Continued contingent goes into his room to see that he is there. At the same time, the day he was transferred to house arrest, the state prosecutor reviewing the evidence in this case appealed to an emergency court, the Tribunal Liberty, to have him put right back in prison on the grounds that he might otherwise escape or be murdered, and that the gravity of the evidence against him again required his presence in prison. And, in the middle of January, on the 13th of January, the Tribunal Liberty ruled that he had to go. back to prison as a pre-trial precaution. : Now I keep in touch with Rome while I’m here in the United States so I know these things. But they have not been published in the American press at all. Apart from this one report that he’d been freed from prison. And I have discovered that truly, people genuinely believe in Washington that this Bulgarian has been freed, whereas the opposite is the case: He is about to be formally indicted and to have to stand’ trial for direct complicity in this case. So I think that one of the expla- nations is that our government, our Administration, has been extraor- dinarily badly informed about what anybody could have reported more ac- curately who had looked at the as- certainable facts in Rome. Apart from that, I think there’s been a deliberate effort by certain sections of the govern- ment not to take a public position that would concede any possible Bulgarian-Soviet connection because they consider it a destabilizing factor in the East-West power balance for the public to know such things. They think the public probably has a mental age of 12 and can’t be trusted with knowledge of this sort. Q. You think this tacit premise you are describing here explains the bad reporting as well as the silence emanating from the government? A. I think the bad reporting has cer- tainly been encouraged by the fact that when a Washington-based reporter who goes to a source he has known for some time as a reliable intelligence source, let’s say, or a State Department source, and says well, what’s the inside - story, how do you all feel about this so- called Bulgarian connection and he’s told by these people that it’s a bunch of nonsense—well, obviously he would be inclined to believe what he is being told. SPECIAL EDITION -- TERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 He is not in a position to go himself and investigate this case in Rome, and what he’s read so far doesn’t encourage him to believe very much in this connec- tion, and he’s told by the most authori- tative sources who are commonly ‘con- sidered the most anti-Soviet sources you could find in the United States—the CIA, perhaps, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the Na- tional Security Council, or the State Department—that in their opinion there is no evidence for a Bulgarian connection. So of course he’s en- couraged to report this case badly: Q. But all of our major newspapers and our networks have bureaus In the major European capitals. Is this the type of thing they are hearing there, as well? A. I’m afraid that’s the case, yes. Cer- tainly our embassy in Rome has not contributed to a clarity of view in this matter, so far. That’s putting it kindly. Q. How did you get interested in his case? What made you decide to pursue it? A. Pvebeena political reporter in Ita- ly. for over 30 years and I’ve been writing about terrorist problems, especially since I wrote The Terror Net- work in 1981, so I’ve been working on terrorist problems, specializing since 1978. ; In my book, The Terror Network, 1 had a chapter on terrorism in Turkey which I had studied firsthand at some length in preparation for that book. I had a general knowledge of that situ- ation, so it was a natural for me to go after a story like this. When it was clear from the time the presiding judge at Agca’s trial in the summer of 1981 wrote in his written opinion that Agca was not a loner, not a religious crank, that-he was perfectly sane and that he was a professional assassin who had been hired by a conspiratorial band, it seemed to me that this was an extraor- dinary, just a terrific, story for any reporter to look at. « Q. some of your critics, or at least people who don’t share your point of view on this matter, have discussed what they consider to be the contradic- tions in the testimony of Agca. What do you make of this? A. You know, if you want to look for contradictions in anybody’s testimony you can find them. In reality, when Agca was first arrested after he shot the pope, it was clear to the magistrates in- terrogating him, as they have all told me since that time, that he had been coached in how to handle himself under interrogation. His purpose was to did- dle his interrogators, not to give them any information, and in fact for a year he did not give them any information; he made no confession. And so he was throwing out every kind of wild statement in the book—such as that he wanted to kill the queen of England, and Simone Vial of the Council of Europe, and he discovered they were women and so he decided against it. , I mean he said a lot of crazy things, and he’s not a crazy. We know he’s not a crazy. And the judges interrogating him knew perfectly well he was not crazy. But he was throwing out so many different things that they could see no clear leads in the case and that was his purpose. He only began to make a genuine confession in May 1982, after he had waited a full year for the. Bulgarians to get him out of prison somehow. Surely he had the full expectation, he had had their commitment that they would do that, just as the Turkish Mafia had got- ten him out of prison in Istanbul in 1979 on a murder charge because they persuaded him to take the fall for that murder and they promised to get him out and they did get him out. And so he assumed they were going to do it again, but of course Italy is a different situ- ation. He was in solitary confinement’ as they could not get him out, so he began to talk. From the time he began to make a confession in May, the judge waited from May until the following Novem- ber to make his first arrest of a Bulgarian which means that the judge spent that time finding corroboration for Agca’s confession. Agca had con- fessed, had identified these three Bulgarians from mugshots and _ said they were his agents running him in Rome, and since that time, since the Bulgarian’s arrest, four appeals have been made by his lawyers for his provi- sional release on the grounds of insuf- CONTINUED NEXT PAGE 5 Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA RDP96-00788R000100330001-5