A man with Friends
The Third Secret: the CIA, Solidarity and the KGB’s plot to kill the Pope
Nigel West
HarperCollins, London, 2000, £19.99
Let’s dispose of the ‘Third Secret’ nonsense. West claims that Pope John – the Polish Pope – was told the ‘third secret’ of the Fatima revelations; and that this ‘third secret’ spoke of his assassination and suggested an anti-communist crusade. West reproduces the text of this on p.5 – it was first released onto the Vatican’s Web site! – and there is nothing in there which refers to the Pope, or his assassination, or communism. What is there is desperately vague – at least as vague as the odd fragment of Nostradamus I have seen – and open to many interpretations. West discusses this in the first, short, chapter and, sensibly, abandons it.
The rest of the book is a re-presentation of the thesis that the KGB – or the Bulgarians (West never quite decides which one he is aiming at) shot the Pope; and an account of some of the U.S.’s many covert and overt anti-Soviet operations of the 1980s. As you might expect with the author’s track record of accepting what the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services tell him, there is no consideration – none; not a line – of the massive critiques of the KGB-done-it thesis by Edward Herman and others in the mid 1980s; no account of the milieu from which Agca emerged; and no reference to the evidence that the KGB-done-it thesis was a psychological operation mounted by the Americans. West’s thesis, in short, is absurdly one-sided and not worthy of serious attention for that reason. Neither is there any discussion of the blowback from any of the operations of the 1980s, of the kind discussed in the Cooley and Johnson books discussed below.
That said there is some interesting material here. Given access to CIA documents and personnel, West produces an interesting account of the conflict within the CIA between the KGB-plot group and those who didn’t believe it; and there are some sections of considerable interest on CIA operations in Poland and Afghanistan. However, since none of the latter material is adequately documented it is hard to know how seriously to take it.
There is undoubtedly an important book to be written about all the American operations in the 1980s when the roll-back boys took over but this isn’t it. West’s determination to stay on-side with his state informants prevents him from doing anything credible.
In a comment on Stephen Dorril’s new book about MI6 on intelforum (www.intelforum.org) West concluded with this:
‘Dorril’s book resembles (sic), in my judgment, a useful work of reference for what has appeared in the newspapers’.
This is not only false – Dorril’s research runs much, much wider than that – it also shows that West still doesn’t get the point. Even if Dorril’s book was merely ‘what’s been in the papers’, it would mean that the material had been in the papers: it had probably been checked in some way and was attributed to some source or other. Most of this book of West’s is attributed to nobody. He expects us to take it on trust that it is true because he was told it by some state employee – most of whom, of course he cannot name. Given the choice, I’ll take the newspapers any day.