The Pope: a smoking gun.

BASING HIS own report on some 25,000 pages of documentation gathered by Judge Ilario Martella in the course of his painstaking investigation, an Italian state prosecutor has now filed a brief charging that the Bulgarian secret services recruited Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish terrorist who shot Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981. The prosecutor calls for the indictment of three Bulgarians and six Turks in connection with the plot.

The prosecutor's report does not mention the KGB by name, but it does not have to , and it makes the motives for the assassination attempt clear. "Some political figure of great power," it says, alarmed by the rise of the Solidarity movement and the spreading turmoil in Poland, "decided it was necessary to kill Pope Wojtyla." No one can seriously entertain the notion that the Bulgarians initiated the plot on their own, or that this language describes some Bulgarian political entity. Judge Martella and his investigators have in fact caught the Politburo, though Brezhnev and then-KGB chief Andropov will be unable to stand trial.

There has been remarkably little outrage over this entire appalling matter, though the essential story has been available for some time through the efforts of Claire Sterling, John Wallach, Marvin Kalb, and others. The CIA has done a passable imitation of the Three Monkeys, not the first time it has given reason for doubt about its perceptions, and the New York Times discounted the Moscow connection from the start. Nothing indicates that George McGovern will alter his gushing opinion of Yuri Andropov.

Never underestimate the capacity of either individuals or the media collectively to avert the gaze when the Soviet Union is concerned, and in the spirit of synecdoche we recall the following: In his special two-hour TV program on George Orwell and 1984, Walter Cronkite never mentioned the phenomenon of Communsim, but, rather, used the World War II internment of Japanese Americans as an example of government by Big Brother, and interpreted Orwell's novel as prophesying the dangers of com puters, listening devices, and other forms of potentially intrusive technology, as if 1984 were not about politics, and as if the model for Big Brother were not Josef Stalin, whose politics had no need of computers.

But Judge Martella has done his work superbly, and the truth, the New york Times scooping the news world, is now out with the whole world watching. The facts are there, and they speak for themselves. There will be the nine indictments in Rome, but it will be really the evil empire itself that will go on trial.