Agça knew how to shoot, and he certainly shot to kill. Yet it was as if someone was guiding and deflecting that bullet… Around Christmas 1983, I visited my attacker in prison. We spoke at length. Ali Agça, as everyone knows, was a professional assassin. This means that the attack was not his own initiative, it was someone else’s idea; someone else had commissioned him to carry it out. In the course of our conversation it became clear that Ali Agça was still wondering how the attempted assassination could possibly have failed. He had planned it meticulously, attending to every tiny detail. And yet his intended victim had escaped death. How could this have happened? -- From Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (2005)