Dark Mysteries of the Vatican

CHAPTER 12

Vatican Espionage

A few days after Cedric Tornay murdered the commander of the Swiss Guard, Italian newspapers bristled with articles based on mere rumors that Colonel Alois Estermann had been a spy for Communist East Germany. No evidence was provided to support the claim, but the annals of the Vatican contain ample proof that cloak-and-dagger business was carried out against and for the Holy See.

“For five centuries, the Vatican has used a secret spy service, called the Holy Alliance, or later, the Entity. Forty popes have relied on it to carry out their policies. They have played hitherto a role in confronting” Church schisms, revolutions, dictators, civil wars and world wars, assassinations and kidnappings. According to historian Eric Frattini, “the Entity was involved in killings of monarchs, poisonings of diplomats, financing of South American dictators, protection of war criminals, the laundering of Mafia money, manipulation of financial markets, provocation of bank failures, and financing of arms sales to combatants even as their wars were condemned, all in the name of God.” The Entity’s motto was “With the Cross and the Sword.”

Espionage expert David Alvarez, professor of politics at Saint Mary’s College of California, author of Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage Against the Vatican, 1939-1945 and the later Spies in the Vatican: Espionage & Intrigue from Napoleon to the Holocaust, in collaboration with Robert Graham, S. J., investigated “espionage in the pontificates of eleven popes, [starting] with Pius VI who died in 1799 as a prisoner of the French during the French Revolution [and concluding] with Pius XII… The period from the Congress of Vienna in 1814 to the end of the Papal States in 1870 was the high point of papal intelligence ‘to navigate between the rocks of internal revolution and shoals of foreign intervention and aggression.’ Finally, with the disappearance of the Papal States intelligence capabilities of the papacy largely vanished.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new domestic intelligence unit of Monsignor Umberto Benigni was aimed at “modernist” liberal Catholics’ reform ideas. “His organization for propaganda and disinformation was short-lived.” From the beginning of World War I in 1914 to the end of the Second World War, the secular world experienced an intelligence revolution which “completely bypassed the Papacy.” Between the wars, a “secret mission of Bishop Michael d’Herbigny in 1926 to re-establish a Catholic Church organization in the Soviet Union failed. His covert operation was compromised from its very beginning.”

In the Vatican review La Civiltá Cattolica (The Catholic Civilization), U.S. Jesuit Robert A. Graham wrote in 1970 that between 1939 and 1945, the “Nazis distrusted the Vatican and flooded Rome with bogus priests and lay spies in an effort to discover whether it was plotting against them. The Germans were astute enough to fathom one thing about Catholicism: it abounds in rumor and thrives on hearsay. ‘In place of this river of unreliable information, we need authentic news which is really important,’ read a 1943 report…[to] Berlin from Ernst von Weizsacker, who as Ambassador to the Holy See also directed a German spy network” in an effort to pierce the Vatican ’s inner circles.

“Assigned to ferret out authentic news for the Germans was an apostate priest named Georg Elling, who came to Rome ostensibly to study the life of St. Francis of Assisi. What really interested him was the movements of the Allied ambassadors at the Vatican. Other spies tapped telephones, monitored Vatican Radio transmissions and intercepted cables. [The German aviation ministry] cracked the code by which Rome communicated with Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, its apostolic nuncio in Berlin.”

According to Graham, “the Germans were principally interested in…what they referred to as Ostpolitik des Vatikans (Eastern European political policy).” Despite the Church’s well-known hostility to the Soviet Union’s Communism, Hitler was obsessed with the idea that the Vatican and the Kremlin would form an alliance. This alarm heightened in 1942 when Pope Pius VII “ordered two monsignors to study Russian.”…

“Nazi leaders like Martin Bormann and Reinhard (“The Hangman”) Heydrich were also interested in what Heydrich called ‘political Catholicism.’ Certain that the Church was attempting to establish a political alternative to the Nazi Party in Germany, they monitored all contacts between Rome and the German bishops for signs of scheming.”

After researching “ U.S., German and Vatican archives,” Graham concluded that Pope Pius XII was “vaguely aware of what was happening. To thwart the Germans, Pius depended on the loyalty of those around him, rather than on counterespionage… Those close to the Pope, Graham found, kept their secrets…‘because they are bound by the faith.’ As a result, the Germans learned little” from at least five Nazi agencies with espionage agents in Rome.

Even more obsessed with the Pope as a political nemesis and threat were the suspicious men who ran the Soviet Union ’s spy agency.

In 2007, former Romanian lieutenant general Ion Mihai Pacepa wrote in an article for National Review Online that in 1960 the Kremlin of Nikita Khrushchev sought to discredit the papacy by showing that Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazis. To accomplish this, said Pacepa, “the KGB needed some original Vatican documents, even ones only remotely connected with Pius XII, which its dezinformatsiya experts could slightly modify and project in the ‘proper light’ to prove the Pope’s ‘true colors.’ The difficulty was that the KGB had no access to the Vatican archives.”

The Soviets turned to the Romanian foreign intelligence service (DIE). “The new chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, had created the DIE in 1949 and had…been its chief Soviet adviser, he knew that the DIE was in an excellent position to contact the Vatican and obtain approval to search its archives.”

Pacepa wrote, “In 1959, when I had been assigned to West Germany in the cover position as deputy chief of the Romanian Mission, I had conducted a ‘spy swap’ under which two DIE officers (Colonel Gheorghe Horobet and Major Nicolae Ciuciulin), who had been caught red-handed in West Germany, had been exchanged for Roman Catholic bishop Augustin Pacha, who had been jailed by the KGB on a spurious charge of espionage and was finally returned to the Vatican via West Germany.”

In the KGB plan, code-named “Seat- 12,” Pacepa became its Romanian point man. “To facilitate [his task], Sakharovsky authorized him to [falsely] inform the Vatican that Romania was ready to restore its severed relations with the Holy See, in exchange for access to its archives and a one-billion-dollar, interest-free loan for twenty-five years. (Romania ’s relations with the Vatican had been severed in 1951, when Moscow accused the Vatican ’s nunciatura in Romania of being an undercover CIA front and closed its offices. The nunciatura buildings in Bucharest had been turned over to the DIE.)” Pacepa was to say that “access to the Papal archives…was needed in order to find historical roots that would help the Romanian government justify its change of heart toward the Holy See. The billion [dollar loan was]…to make Romania ’s turnabout more plausible. ‘If there’s one thing those monks understand, it’s money,’ Sakharovsky remarked.”

A month after receiving the KGB’s instructions, Pacepa had his “first contact with a Vatican representative. For secrecy reasons the meeting-and most of the ones that followed-took place at a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. [Pacepa] was introduced to an ‘influential member of the diplomatic corps’ who, he was told, had begun his career working in the Vatican archives. His name was Monsignor Agostino Casaroli… This Monsignor gave access to the Vatican archives, and soon three young DIE undercover officers posing as Romanian priests were digging around in the papal archives. Casaroli also agreed ‘in principle’ to Bucharest ’s demand for the interest free loan, but said the Vatican wished to place certain conditions on it…

“[From] 1960 to 1962, the DIE succeeded in pilfering hundreds of documents connected in any way with Pope Pius XII from Vatican Archives and the Apostolic Library. Everything was immediately sent to the KGB via special courier. In actual fact, no incriminating material against the pontiff ever turned up in all those secretly photographed documents. Mostly they were copies of personal letters and transcripts of meetings and speeches, couched in routine diplomatic language.”

Using this material, according to Pacepa, the KGB developed a play in which Pope Pius XII was depicted cooperating with the Nazis, with full knowledge of the program for exterminating Jews. With the playwright cited as Rolf Hochhuth, the title in German was Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). The published text of the eight-hour drama was accompanied by “historical documentation.”

In a newspaper article published in Germany in 1963, Hochhuth defended his portrayal of Pius XII. “The facts are there,” he said, “forty crowded pages of documentation in the appendix to my play.”

In a radio interview given in New York in 1964, when The Deputy opened there, Hochhuth said, “I considered it necessary to add to the play a historical appendix, fifty to eighty pages (depending on the size of the print).”

Pacepa claimed that “before writing The Deputy, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma, was working in various inconspicuous capacities for the Bertelsmann publishing house. In interviews he claimed that in 1959 he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Rome, where he spent three months talking to people and then writing the first draft of the play, and where he posed ‘a series of questions’ to one bishop whose name he refused to reveal.”

Pacepa noted, “At about that same time I used to visit the Vatican fairly regularly as an accredited messenger from a head of state, and I was never able to get any talkative bishop off into a corner with me, and it was not for lack of trying. The DIE illegal officers that we infiltrated into the Vatican also encountered almost insurmountable difficulties in penetrating the Vatican secret archives, even though they had airtight cover as priests.”

During its first ten years of life, “The Deputy generated a flurry of books and articles, some accusing and some defending the pontiff. Some went so far as to lay the blame for Auschwitz concentration camp atrocities on the Pope’s shoulders,” and some books attacked Hochhuth’s arguments.

When evidence was presented by researchers in the 1970s that Hitler had been plotting against Pius XII, including a plan to kidnap him, KGB chief Yuri Andropov conceded to Pacepa that “had we known then what we know today,” the KGB would never have gone after Pius XII.

A decade later, as described in chapter 7, the KGB turned to its puppet spy service in Bulgaria in an effort to silence Pope John Paul II as he expressed support for Poland ’s Solidarity movement.

Upon the death of John Paul II, keepers of Vatican secrets found themselves forced to guard against journalistic spies intent upon eavesdropping on the College of Cardinals as the princes of the Church met to elect John Paul II’s successor.

The Associated Press reported, “Computer hackers, electronic bugs and supersensitive microphones threaten to pierce the Vatican ’s thick walls next week when cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel to name a papal successor.”

Confident it could protect the centuries-old tradition of secrecy that surrounds the gathering, one official said, “It’s not as if it’s the first conclave we’ve handled.”

“ Vatican security refused to discuss the details of any anti-bugging measures to be used during the conclave. But Giuseppe Mazzullo, a private detective and retired Rome policeman whose former unit worked closely with the Vatican in the past, said the Holy See would reinforce its own experts with Italian police and private security contractors.”

“The security is very strict,” Mazzullo said. “For people to steal information, it’s very, very difficult, if not impossible.”