BY the grace of God, Pope Francis is back safe in the Vatican. But could 25,000 policemen and soldiers posted at various public venues have ensured the safety of His Holiness on his visit to the Philippines?
Unfortunately, not against a determined and crafty criminal, such as Frederick Forsythe’s would-be assassin of Charles de Gaulle in the suspense novel, The Day of the Jackal, or the Bolivian painter, Benjamin Mendoza, who struck Pope Paul VI with a knife at the Manila International Airport in 1970. Mendoza was disguised as a priest.
Sadly, with the pastoral visit of Pope Francis, the Philippines was weighed down by the dubious reputation of having the lives of two visiting pontiffs imperiled. The first was Pope Paul VI and the other one was the future St. John Paul II.
The plan to kill Pope John Paul II on his visit to Manila in 1995 was part of a bigger, more massive al Qaeda plot to explode several international airliners in mid-air and to crash hijacked planes on CIA headquarters in Virginia and selected New York skyscrapers.
On September 11, 2001, that last component of the terrorist scenario was executed with the simultaneous attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
Luckily, the plot to kill Pope John Paul II – code-named Oplan Bojinka –was uncovered by a Manila policewoman, Aida Fariscal. She had noticed suspicious activity in the culprits’ quarters at the Doña Josefa Apartments in Malate and had called in support.
It was the third attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II. The first was in 1981, when a Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, fired point blank at him at St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. The second was in 1982, a day short of the first anniversary of Agca’s assassination attempt. The Pope was visiting the Fatima shrine in Portugal when a deranged priest, Juan Maria Fernandez y Krohn, lunged at him with a bayonet, wounding him.
While the Pope never publicly said it, Vatican quarters hinted broadly that the KGB was behind the first two attempts to kill him because of his role in dismantling communism in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe.
In truth, the papacy is fair game for assassins and brutal killers. According to Church history, several dozen Popes, starting with the first one, St. Peter, were tortured and killed during their incumbency.
As head of a congregation of 1.1 billion Catholics, Pope Francis must certainly be aware of these perils. His views, pronouncements and criticisms have an impact on the world and are not taken lightly by those affected. According to doomsayers in Iraq, the ISIS is after Pope Francis’ life.
As a Latin American cleric, Pope Francis comes from a part of the world where liberation theology was considered synonymous with Communism and was, thus, anathema to strong arm regimes. In 1989, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador was gunned down by suspected government agents while celebrating Mass..
As a native of Argentina, the Pope tended his flock in Buenos Aires at the height of the dirty war between government forces and left-wing guerillas. Life, then, was not worth a red cent. It can be said that Pope Francis was no stranger to the likes of Gen. Jovito Palparan.
Additionally, there are crazed individuals, like the woman who struck down Pope Benedict in December 2009 while he was about to deliver his traditional Christmas blessings in Rome. The woman, Susana Maiolo, was deranged.
Indeed, protecting Pope Francis needed more than close in security at the Luneta Grandstand or the Mall of Asia or the University of Santo Tomas or in Tacloban. If there was a plot to do him harm, it would have required intricate planning, much like the scheme to kill Pope John Paul II.
The problem was made worse by the fact that Pope Francis is a populist pontiff who likes to reach out and touch his flock. That is always a security detail’s nightmare.
The closest I ever got to gaining an insight into this problem was back in 1980, during a festival in Tacloban with which I was involved. President Marcos and the First Lady, Imelda Marcos, were seated on a stand by the main road, within spitting distance from parade marchers, and I was standing next to them, manning a microphone.
My hair stood on end when an officer of the Presidential Security Command instructed a soldier, who was holding a thick blanket, to use it to smother a grenade, in a case anyone threw one at the first couple. Of course, the soldier was expected to absorb the impact of the explosion.
In this regard, it was our hope that the Philippines’ intelligence community had been at work over the past several years, closely monitoring the activities of suspected terrorists and even planting double agents in their midst. They would have thus been able to tap into the grapevine and be properly alerted.
Of course, that was no guarantee of keeping a dangerous situation under control. In the case of the recent massacre of staffers of the Parisian publication, Charlie Hebdo, the French police had been keeping one of the suspects under surveillance for over three years. They had just taken him off the watch list when he and his companions pulled off the killings.
While it may be said that the attack on Pope Paul VI by the Bolivian painter and the attempts on the life of Pope John Paul II were probably one-man operations fueled by deep personal resentments or an imbalanced mind, a plan to murder Pope Francis on Philippine soil would require months of preparation by a dedicated team. That would provide red flags to an alert intelligence group.
Records of the 1995 plot to kill Pope John Paul II showed a scheme that would have put Ian Fleming’s James Bond villains to shame. Aside from laundering funds through Ermita bar girls, the plan required “dress rehearsals” by way of deadly bombings in Cebu, in a Makati theater and in an airplane on an Asian route. These trial runs took their toll in lives.
Activities like that would rouse the suspicions of the intelligence community. It is said that during the tenure of the late Gen. Fabian Ver, there was an operative of the NISA in every municipality in the country, as well as every embassy and consular office abroad. Perhaps the country’s current intelligence infrastructure is just as well-placed.
But even the Western intelligence agencies have often been caught off-guard by “sleepers” in their respective jurisdictions. The recent massacre in Paris is one tragic example.
President Aquino rightly called on the Filipino people to help protect Pope Francis and assist the 25,000 men and woman assigned to ensure his safety.
But there was one other recourse that, I have no doubt, the Holy Father considered. The 23rd Psalm:
“The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want…Yea, through I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.”
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