Kremlin Targeted Pope, Ex-KGB Official Says

WASHINGTON —  A former Soviet KGB official whose defection had remained secret for a decade says the Kremlin asked in 1979 for information that could be used to assassinate Pope John Paul II, according to an interview published today.

The defector, Victor Sheymov, also told the Washington Post that the KGB once discussed whether to break the legs of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who made anti-communist statements after his defection to the West in 1961.

Sheymov, a KGB major in charge of communications security for the Soviet spy agency, had intimate knowledge of the KGB’s most closely guarded coding systems, the newspaper said.

Allegations of Soviet involvement in a plot to assassinate the Pope surfaced after an attempt on the pontiff’s life in 1981 by a Turkish gunman, but no connection to Moscow was ever firmly established.

Sheymov said that during a trip to Poland in 1979, he learned of a cable from Yuri V. Andropov, at the time the head of the KGB and later general secretary of the Communist Party, that said, “Obtain all the information possible on how to get physically close to the Pope.”

“Everyone knew what it meant,” Sheymov said. “It meant they wanted to assassinate the Pope.”

The idea of killing the Pope upset a KGB general who, according to Sheymov, complained, “If we do that, we’ll have to kill them all (the Poles) or get out of here.”

Sheymov, who defected in May, 1980, with his wife and children, said that he told what he knew about Andropov’s interest in the Pope to the CIA but that he does not know what the CIA did with it.

For all his information, Sheymov was given a medal.