Review
Believe it if you will: on Sunday, 13 May, 1917, the Virgin Mary appeared to three Portuguese children and revealed three secrets. Two of these forecast, retrospectively, the prediction of two local deaths and the reconversion of Russia to Christianity; the third was kept secret for many years, until it was read by Pope John Paul II, who took it as a personal instruction to himself to bring down the Berlin wall and re-unite Germnay, thus precipitating the collapse of the USSR, the Evil Empire. West (who else?) reveals how the present Pope by sheer faith and strength of will actually accomplished this, together with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the defeat of Soviet army in Afghanistan and the restoration of democracy across Eastern Europe. While doing so he was famously shot in St Peter's Square by a Turk, Frank Ozgun, who turned out in fact to be Mehmet Ali Agca, a Russian agent trained by the PLO and on the run from a death sentence. The story behind the shooting is close-textured, well-argued, backed up by circumstantial and what seems to be hard evidence from American, Italian and Russian secret service files. It is as engrossing and as believable as one of Frederick Forsyth's thrillers - with the difference that it seems that West may have discovered an extraordinary but true chain of events. One up for the Pope, and indeed the Virgin Mary. (Kirkus UK)
Product Description
This text is the inside story of how the CIA combined with the Vatican under the Polish Pope John Paul II to launch a massive campaign to destabilise Warsaw - and how the KGB reacted by trying to kill the Pope in 1981. The rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, which began the undermining of the Soviet Bloc and the defeat of international communism, was essentially funded by the CIA covertly, through the Vatican. Pope John Paul II (elected in 1978) had a deep interest in mysticism and long believed in "the third secret" - the third piece of advice given to the eldest of the three children at Fatima (Portugal) in 1917 by an apparition of the Virgin Mary. This secret, written down by the last surviving child, who became a nun, was revealed by the Pope in 1980 and described an avoidable apocalyptic catastrophe in Europe. Thereafter the Pope began his ideological offensive against the Soviet Bloc.
