Killing the Pope

An immersive narrative investigation into the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, and the international dispute over who was responsible for it

On a warm, sunny afternoon in May 1981, more than 10,000 pilgrims from all over the world gather on St. Peter’s Square for the start of Pope John Paul’s general audience. Out of nowhere, a gunshot is heard. John Paul collapses. A gunman is apprehended.

After the attempted assassination, John Paul II said that ‘one hand pulled the trigger, another guided the bullet’. But in this electrifying account of one of the most iconic events of the Cold War, historian Serhii Plokhy invites us to ask: what if there were far more than just two hands present that day? Drawing on new archival research, Plokhy accompanies the assassin as he travels across Europe in preparation for his strike, following the threads of the story into the corridors of the Kremlin and the Vatican, and through the inner circles of Turkish ultra-nationalists, KGB functionaries, Sicilian mafiosi and Catholic cardinals.

Both riveting and illuminating, Killing the Pope goes right to the heart of the Cold War in its final decade – an era of extreme paranoia, in which our own age of disinformation was slowly being born – and sheds new light on one of its most troubling and enduring mysteries.