The time of the assassins.

IN 1963 the President of the United States was murdered by a Communist. From that day on, the American opinion establishment has shrunk from describing the event as I have just done: "Lone gunman" is the preferred term, encouraging us as it does to interpret Lee Harvey Oswald's act as random, unrelated either to his ideology or to any possible ties he might have had with the USSR and Cuba.

The Soviets, even if they had nothing to do with Oswald's decision to kill Kennedy, must have been astonished. Here was a golden opportunity for anti-Communist propaganda, not to mention the dread "new era of McCarthyism" the Left is forever predicting. Yet nothing of the kind happened. Liberalism played down Oswald's Communism with unanimous resoltuion. Imagine the extrapolations that would have been made had Oswald been a card-carrying Republican. After all, John Kennedy himself had warned that anti-Communism (as embodied in the John Birch Society) might be a greater danger to this nation than Communism. When the Soviets killed the head of the Birch Society last year, liberals were quick to make the least of it.

This pattern of seeing no evil where the evil empire is concerned may have convinced the Soviets that they would get plenty of cooperative response in the West if they were to mount a plot against Pope John Paul II. If so, they were not disappointed. I was in Rome less than a year after John Paul was shot, and Vatican insiders freely told me that the shooting had all the earmarks of a KGB operation. Yet the Western press had not pursued the obvious clues. (The Soviet "press" was less restrained: Having regularly denounced the Polish Pope as a CIA flunky, it immediately charged the CIA with having tried to kill him.) I wrote a column from Rome on the subject, hoping my pebble would begin an avalanche of belated attention, but it was several months before the American media began picking up the story; and some of them, notably the New York Times, seemed to pick it up only under duress, and only for the purpose of refuting the findings of those who found footprints leading toward the Kremlin.

In The Time of the Assassins, Claire Sterling tells two consecutive and equally gripping stories. The first takes us through the labyrinth of the Turkish-Bulgarian underworld of organized crime and political terrorism: though, as she observes, it is inaccurate to describe the purposeful assassination of a Western leader as an act of "terrorism," as so many have done. The term "terrorist," in this context, serves the same function as "lone gunman," minimizing the nexus of motive and conspiracy bhind the event, depriving it of its obvious rationality. But I anticipate. Miss Sterling's first story is a memoir of her investigative work in tracing the connection between the Bulgarian secret police, police, a KGB affiliate, and Mehmet Ali Agca. The plot alone is worth the price of the book. There are also interesting glimpses of Agca's family and of the Turkish immigrant community in West Germany, a community so large and so alien that the Germans have given up seriously trying to keep records of it--a fact convenient to the large numbers of Turkish political terrorists of various stripes.

But the more remarkable story is that of the Western response. The Times was quick to promote the predictable liberal party line: "Police are convinced, according to government sources, that Mr. Agca acted alone." This was two days after the event, when La Stampa of Turin was quoting government sources by name to the contrary. Joseph Kraft, that enemy of ethnic and religious stereotype, laid the shooting to the charge of "turbulent Islamic society, pregnant with nasty surprises." The Los Angeles Times wrote Agca off as a "known crazy . . . too unstable to be included in an assassination plot, let alone be trusted to do the shooting." Agca was in fact cool, quick, and rational.

even worse was the official response of Western governments. A Whitehall functionary dismissed Agca's own confession as an attempt to get himself released from jail. (Not bloody likely, guvnor.) A CIA deputy director in Rome, far from cooperating with Italian officials, told the Interior Minister: "You have no proof." Ronald Reagan's press secretary refused to comment on the case, or to look into it any further, and, says Miss Sterling, "Where the White House led, makers of public opinion--for once--followed." So much for the "adversary press."

So the Italian authorities who built the case against the Soviets' Bulgarian servitors were swimming against strong currents. When they announced their preliminary findings, "a political hurricane of extraordinary fury burst upon the West." And as the Soviets raged, the New York Times made editorial excuses for them on the assumption that they had indeed instigated the shooting of John Paul. Ironically, an Italian Communist newspaper at the same time was condemning the Soviets roundly.

Only a week before he was shot, the Pope had mystified his Swiss Guards at his morning Mass by saying, "Let us pray that the Lord will keep violence and fanaticism far from the Vatican's walls." He seems to have been tipped off by French inteligence. On the day of the shooting Italian intelligence noted unusually heavy traffic in coded messages between the Bulgarians and the Soviets.

Like Whittaker Chambers, Agca lost his credibility in liberal eyes by deciding to tell the truth. And even nonliberals behaved as if the West somehow could not afford, or simply did not dare, to believe his story. When Miss Sterling confirmed the Soviet link in a Reader's Digest article, all the hottest rhetoric came from the Soviet side. The peripatetic Wilfred Burchett, writing in a Bulgarian publication, called her "the would-be twentieth-century annihilator of the Bulgarian people." Again, leading Western opinion-makers missed the opportunity to extrapolate from violent words--slanderous words, words with no relation to reality--to a disposition toward violent deeds.

Pardon my McCarthyism, but Communism would get nowhere without liberalism, its indispensable adjunct. Not to espouse the sort of conspiracy theory our shiftier citizens are forever mocking, I nonetheless insist that the whole pattern of liberal behavior is governed by the purpose of protecting Communism. The motive, the degree of consciousness may be mysterious, but the pattern is there, as The Time of the Assassins vividly attests. It's like--oh, I don't know--a beehive, or something.