Karol Wojtyla, a poet, actor, and playwright, who had been a bishop in
Poland for twenty years, was elected Pope by the College of Cardinals on
October 16, 1978. Shortly afterward, Yuri Andropov, the head of Soviet
intelligence, called the K.G.B.’s station chief in Warsaw and asked
furiously, “How could you have allowed a citizen of a Socialist country
to be elected Pope?” The Warsaw rezident, who, during his time in Poland,
had developed a knowledge of at least the rudiments of Church procedure,
reportedly told Andropov that he would do better to direct his inquiries
to Rome.
Andropov’s anxiety was existential and well founded. As a defender of the
Soviet faith, Andropov had previously directed the expulsion of Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn from Russia as a threat to the stability of the Union. Now
he ordered the First Chief Directorate of the K.G.B. to analyze the
potential of a new threat, who had given himself the name John Paul II.
According to the Pope’s biographer George Weigel, the hurried analysis by
Soviet intelligence determined that Wojtyla’s election had been backed by
a German-American conspiracy led by, among others, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Carter’s national-security adviser. Their goal, the document
said, was nothing less than the undermining of the Communist regime in
Poland and the ultimate disintegration of the Soviet Union and its
satellites—an analysis as preposterous as it was prescient.
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