Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 12 BLESSED ARE THE SPYMASTERS

One of the massive gates of the Arch of the Bells was already closed — the prelude to the nightly ritual of locking all the entrances to the Vatican on the stroke of midnight — when the dark blue Fiat limousine crunched across the cobblestones, its lights picking out the two Swiss Guards caped against the chill. Behind them stood a Vigili. One of the guards stepped forward, arm raised half in salute, half in command to stop. The car was expected and the figure behind the wheel was the familiar one of a Vatican chauffeur. But after the assassination attempt on the pope, no one was taking any chances.

The chauffeur had waited an hour at Rome’s airport for the flight from Vienna, which had been delayed by bad weather. The guard stepped back after raising his arm in full salute to the passenger in deep shadow on the rear seat. There was no return acknowledgment.

The car drove past the side of St. Peter’s Basilica and bounced over the cobblestones of San Damaso Courtyard before stopping outside the main entrance to the Apostolic Palace. The driver jumped out and opened the door for his passenger. Archbishop Luigi Poggi emerged, dressed in severe black, a scarf covering the white flash of his collar. Physically he bore a resemblance to Rafi Eitan: the same powerful shoulders and biceps, the same rolling gait, and eyes that could be as cold as this night.

As usual, Poggi had traveled with a small leather suitcase for his personal effects and a briefcase fitted with a combination lock. He sometimes joked he spent more time dozing in aircraft seats than asleep in his bed in the spacious suite he occupied at the rear of the Apostolic Palace.

Few recent trips matched the importance of what Poggi had finally been told at the meeting in Vienna’s old Jewish Quarter. There, in a narrow steep-roofed building a few blocks from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s offices, the archbishop had listened raptly to a man they had agreed would only be called by his first name — Eli.

Poggi was now well used to such precautions in his dealings with Mossad. None carried security to such lengths as did its operatives. The only personal detail he knew about Eli was that he spoke several languages, and had finally answered the question of who had orchestrated the attempt on John Paul’s life.

For his part, Luigi Poggi’s own work was so secret that the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican register that listed the names and duties of all its employees, contained no clue that for over twenty years, the archbishop had developed his own tried and tested and very secret contacts, which reached all the way into the Kremlin, Washington, and the corridors of power in Europe. He had been among the first to learn that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was dying from chronic hepatitis, a disease of the kidneys. It was Poggi who had sat in the Russian mission in Geneva, a palatial nineteenth-century mansion stocked with the finest vodka and caviar the archbishop so relished, and learned firsthand that Moscow was prepared to eventually withdraw its nuclear warheads pointing at Europe if Washington would stop playing hardball in the disarmament talks. The news had been given to the CIA station chief at his next Friday-night briefing with the pope. Over two decades, Poggi had provided pontiffs with details that enabled them to better evaluate information from other sources. The archbishop had that ability, rare even among diplomats, to produce a balanced and swift assessment of material from a dozen sources and in almost as many languages, most of which he spoke fluently.

In his next meeting with Eli, Poggi had spoken in the soft voice that was long his trademark, his brown eyes watchful, lips pursed before putting a new question, his composed appearance never changing.

But on that cold winter’s night, no doubt physically tired from his travels, he could be forgiven a bounce in his step. Walking into the Apostolic Palace, past the duty Vigili and the Swiss Guards who sprang to attention as he passed, Poggi took the elevator to the Papal Apartments.

The pope’s butler showed Poggi into John Paul’s study. The room’s bookshelves offered clues to the pope’s expanding interests. Along with leather-bound Polish editions of the classics and the works of theologians and philosophers were copies of the International Defence Review and books with such arresting titles as The Problems of Military Readiness and Military Balance and Surprise Attack. They reflected the pontiff’s unswerving conviction that the main enemy the world still faced in 1983 was Soviet Communism.

John Paul had never lost an opportunity to tell his personal staff that before the new millennium dawned, something “decisive” would sweep the world. To all their questions as to what the event would be, he had refused to amplify, shaking his massive head and saying they must all pray that the Church would not lose more ground to Communism or the secularism sweeping countries like the United States, Germany, and Holland. He insisted his life had been spared in St. Peter’s Square to lead the fight back.

Poggi knew that it was this concern, more than any other, which had affected John Paul both mentally and physically. Greetings over, Poggi could not have failed to notice that away from public gaze, John Paul had become more withdrawn. Agca’s bullets had not only shattered bone and tissue, but had created emotional scars that had left the pope introspective and at times remote.

Seated with both hands on his knees, the position Poggi always assumed when there was grave news to impart, the archbishop began to unfold a story that had begun in those first weeks after Agca had shot John Paul.

When news of what had happened in St. Peter’s Square on the afternoon of May 13, 1981, reached Tel Aviv, the immediate reaction of Mossad’s director general, Yitzhak Hofi, was that the shooting had been the work of a crank. Shocking though the incident in Rome had been, it had no direct bearing on Mossad’s current concerns.

Israeli Arabs were becoming ever more radical while, at the same time, Jewish extremists — led by members of the Kahane Kach Party — were becoming more violent. A plot had been discovered just in time to stop them blowing up the most holy Muslim shrine in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock. The consequences if they had succeeded were too nightmarish to contemplate. The Lebanon war dragged on despite endless U.S. shuttle diplomacy between Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem. In the cabinet, Prime Minister Begin led a party eager for a full-scale “final” showdown with the PLO. Killing Yasser Arafat was still a standing order for Mossad; during the very month the pope was shot there were two unsuccessful attempts to assassinate the PLO chairman.

The fact that seemingly every Western intelligence service was investigating the papal shooting also influenced Hofi’s decision to keep Mossad from becoming involved. In any event, he eventually expected to learn from one of them the background to the incident.

He was still waiting to be told when he was replaced by Nahum Admoni in September 1982. With his Polish background — his parents had been middle-class immigrants from near Gdansk — Admoni had more than a passing curiosity about the Catholic church. In his time abroad working under cover in the United States and France, he had seen how powerful the Church’s influence could be. Rome had helped elect John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, to the White House and, in France, the Church continued to perform an important role in politics.

Once he had settled into office, Admoni sent for Mossad’s file on the attempted papal assassination. It contained mostly news clips and a report from a katsa stationed in Rome that did not go much farther. Unusually, the six security services who had conducted their own inquiries — including interviewing Agca in his high-security cellblock of Rome’s Rebibbia Prison — had failed to pool their knowledge. Admoni decided to conduct his own investigation.

William Casey, then director of Central Intelligence, would later say the likeliest reason appeared to be “Mossad sniffing that maybe here was a way into the Vatican. Admoni had to be thinking he could come up with something to trade off with the Holy See.”

In the wake of Golda Meir’s unsuccessful attempt to establish diplomatic ties with the Vatican, Zvi Zamir had established a permanent Mossad presence in Rome to try to penetrate the Vatican. Working out of a building close to the Israeli embassy, the katsa had tried and failed to recruit priest informers. Most of what he learned was gossip overheard in the bars and restaurants frequented by Vatican staff. He achieved little more than enviously watching the CIA’s head of Rome station drive into the Vatican for his Friday-night briefings to the pope; these had resumed as soon as John Paul had recuperated from his surgery.

During that convalescence, Agostino Casaroli, cardinal secretary of state, had run the Vatican. The katsa had heard that Casaroli had expressed some very blunt sentiments about the shooting: the CIA should have known about Agca and the entire plot. He had sent on the secretary’s views to Tel Aviv.

Within the U.S. intelligence community was a prevailing view that Agca had been a trigger for a KGB-inspired plot to kill the pontiff. In a paper stamped “Top Secret” and titled “Agca’s Attempt to Kill the Pope: The Case for Soviet Involvement,” the argument was made that Moscow had come to fear how the pontiff could ignite the flames of Polish nationalism.

Already by 1981, Solidarity, the country’s workers’ movement under the leadership of Lech Walesa, was increasingly flexing its industrial muscles, and the authorities were under mounting pressure from Moscow to curb the union’s activities.

The pope had urged Walesa to do nothing that would precipitate direct Soviet military intervention. John Paul had urged Poland’s dying cardinal, Stefan Wyszinski, to also reassure the country’s Communist leaders that the pontiff would not allow Solidarity to overstep the mark. When the union scheduled a general strike, Cardinal Wyszinski prostrated himself before Walesa in his office, grabbed the bemused shipyard worker’s trouser leg, and said he would cling on until he died. Walesa called off the strike.

In Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts concluded that the pontiff fully understood the importance of appeasing the Soviets over Poland so as to avoid losing the considerable ground Solidarity had achieved. It seemed increasingly unlikely Moscow would have wanted the pope killed. There was still the possibility that the Soviets had subcontracted the assassination to one of its surrogates. In the past, the Bulgarian secret service had carried out similar missions for the KGB when it was necessary to keep its own involvement hidden. But the analysts thought this time it would be unlikely the KGB would have delegated such an important mission. The Bulgarians would never have conducted the assassination of their own volition.

Nahum Admoni began to explore the CIA’s current involvement with the papacy. In between Casey’s regular visits to the pope, an important player in the relationship between the Vatican and the CIA was Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia, who shuttled between the White House and the Apostolic Palace. To Monsignor John Magee, the pope’s English-language secretary, Krol was “the Holy Father’s extra-special pal. Both came from a similar background, knew the same Polish songs and stories and could joke across the Pope’s dining table in a local Polish dialect. The rest of us just sat there and smiled, not understanding a word.”

It had been Krol who had accompanied Casey to the CIA director’s first audience with John Paul after his convalescence. Later, the cardinal had introduced Casey’s deputy, Vernon Walters, to the pontiff. Since then, the list of subjects the CIA officer and the pope discussed ranged from terrorism in the Middle East to the internal politics of the Church and the health of Kremlin leaders. For Richard Allen, a Catholic, who was Ronald Reagan’s first national security adviser: “The relationship between the CIA and the pope was one of the great alliances of all time. Reagan had this deep conviction the pope would help him to change the world.”

More certain, common goals were established. The president and pontiff had proclaimed their united opposition to abortion. The United States blocked millions of dollars of aid to countries that ran family-planning programs. The pope, through a “purposeful silence,” supported U.S. military policies, including supplying NATO with a new generation of cruise missiles. The CIA regularly bugged the phones of bishops and priests in Central America who advocated liberation theology and opposed U.S.-backed forces in Nicaragua and El Salvador; the phone transcripts formed part of the pope’s Friday briefing by the Rome CIA station chief. Reagan had also personally authorized Colonel Oliver North, then working for the National Security Council, to make regular and substantial payments to priests the Vatican deemed “loyal” in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. The money was used to support their often lavish lifestyles and promote the Holy See’s opposition to birth control and divorce.

One of the duties of the pope’s personal secretary, Monsignor Emery Kabongo, was to keep the list of approved priests updated. Another task was to file the documents provided by the CIA and act as note taker to their clandestine meetings with the pope.

Kabongo had first encountered the Washington spymasters on November 30, 1981, shortly after John Paul returned to work after being shot. After Kabongo joined John Paul for the first prayers of his day—5:15 A.M. on the longcase clock in the corridor outside the private chapel in the Papal Apartments — the two men had gone to the paneled study to receive CIA deputy director Vernon Walters. Kabongo would recall:

“I took up my usual position in the corner of the room, a notebook on my knee. There was no interpreter present. General Walters asked what language should he use. His Holiness said he would be comfortable with Italian. Walters began by saying he brought greetings from President Reagan. The pope returned the felicitations. Then it was down to business. Walters produced satellite photographs and His Holiness was fascinated to see how clear they were. Walters spoke for over an hour about the CIA’s view of the latest Soviet intentions. His Holiness thanked him. At the end of the meeting, Walters produced a number of rosaries and asked the pope to bless them, explaining they were for relations and friends and His Holiness did so.”

Intrigued by the pope’s ability to switch from temporal to spiritual matters, Admoni used his personal friendship with Secretary of State Alexander Haig — they had met when Admoni worked out of the Israeli embassy in Washington — to obtain a copy of the CIA’s psycho-profile of John Paul.

It was a portrait of a man whose religious fervor could be so intense that he would cry out when praying and would often be found on the marble floor of his private chapel, face down, arms extended to form a cross, as still as in death. He could spend hours in that prone position. Yet his anger could be eruptive and fearful to behold; then he would storm and shout. His grasp of geopolitics was formidable and he could be as unflinching as any dictator. John Paul was also not afraid to confront the Curia, the Vatican’s civil service, or his long-serving secretary of state, Agostino Casaroli. The profile concluded that John Paul was “highly politicized from his Polish experiences and that he relishes being a player on the world stage.”

For Nahum Admoni, one matter was clear: the close and self-serving ties between the CIA and the pope had played a crucial role in John Paul coming to accept the American view that the attempt on his life had been organized by the Kremlin.

Yet, supposing that standpoint could be demonstrated to be wrong? How would the pope react? Would that shatter his faith in the CIA? Make him wary of all intelligence services? And would it allow Mossad — if it could show there was another hand behind the attempted assassination — to finally find a way past the Vatican’s Bronze Door and, if not be admitted as a fully fledged secret secular adviser to the papacy, at least be granted a hearing for its information and, in return, hopefully be able to revise the Holy See’s attitude to Israel?

Six months later the answer to Admoni’s first question — had someone else masterminded the attempted assassination? — was established to his satisfaction.

The plot had been prepared in Tehran with the full approval of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini. Killing the pope was intended as the opening move in a jihad, holy war, against the West and what Khomeini saw as its decadent values being approved by the largest Christian Church.

A report prepared for Admoni said: “Khomeini remains the classic example of religious fanaticism. He has cast himself in the role of God-instructor to his people. To maintain that myth, he will need to act increasingly in a manner more dangerous to Israel, the West and the whole world.”

Anticipating that Agca could fail, his Iranian controllers had ensured he would be seen as a fanatical loner by leaking details of his background. Mehmet Ali Agca had been born in the remote village of Yesiltepe in eastern Turkey and had been raised in a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. At the age of nineteen he joined the Gray Wolves, a pro-Iranian terrorist group responsible for much of the violence in a Turkey clinging to democracy. In February 1979, Agca murdered the editor of an Istanbul newspaper renowned for its pro-West policies. Arrested, Agca escaped from prison with the help of the Gray Wolves. The next day the newspaper received a chilling letter about the pope’s visit to Turkey, then three days away:

“Western imperialists, fearful that Turkey and her sister Islamic nations may become a political, military and economic power in the Middle East, are sending to Turkey at this delicate moment the Commander of the Crusades, John Paul, designed as a religious leader. If this visit is not called off, I will deliberately kill the Commander Pope.”

Admoni became convinced the letter had been composed in Tehran: in style and content it was certainly far above the writing skills of the almost illiterate Agca. Mossad’s computer search of Khomeini’s speeches revealed he had previously referred to the “Commander of the Crusades” and “Commander Pope” in describing John Paul.

In the end the pontiff’s visit passed without incident. Agca’s name and photograph went on to the computers of a number of intelligence services, though not Mossad’s. Otto Kormek, a case officer with the Austrian security service who had been in charge of its inquiries into the papal shooting, felt it was “not necessary to inform Mossad. Israel would be the last place Agca would go.”

Mossad’s investigation had discovered that after his prison escape, Agca was spirited into Iran, where he spent months in various training camps being indoctrinated. From its own sources in those camps, Mossad had pieced together a picture of Agca’s life at that time.

He arose before dawn, his small, red-rimmed eyes set deep in a long face, watchful as the other recruits awoke. The first light of day showed posters on the walls of their hut: photographs of the Ayatollah Khomeini and revolutionary slogans, each designed to fire their fantasies. Songs piped through the huts’ loudspeakers reinforced this.

Clad in vest and shorts, Agca was an unprepossessing figure; large hands and feet were all out of proportion to his body with his concave chest, protruding shoulder blades, and skinny arms and legs. The first thing he did each morning, like the other recruits, was to spread his prayer rug and prostrate himself three times, each time touching his forehead to the ground, murmuring the name of Allah, Master of the World, the All-Meaningful and All-Compassionate, the Supreme Sovereign of the Last Judgment. Afterward he began to recite his long list of hatreds, which his instructor had encouraged him to write down. The list had grown long and diverse and included all imperialists, NATO, and those Arab countries that had refused to cut off oil from the West. He especially called upon Allah to destroy the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, and its people, praying that their way of life, their values and customs, the very wellspring of their existence, would be squeezed from them.

Finally only his religious hatreds remained. They were the most virulent, consuming him like a cancer, eating into his brain. He saw all other faiths as threatening to overthrow the one to which he subscribed. His instructors had taught him to reduce that hatred to one instantly recognizable image: a man, dressed in white, living in a huge palace far beyond the mountains. From there he ruled like a caliph of old, issuing decrees and orders many millions obeyed. The man spread his hated message the way his predecessors had done for over nineteen centuries. Supported by pomp and glory, rejoicing in even more titles than Allah, the man was known variously as Servant of the Servants of God, Patriarch of the West, Vicar of Christ on Earth, Bishop of Rome, Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, Supreme Pontiff, His Holiness Pope John Paul the Second.

Mehmet Ali Agca had been promised that, when the time came, he would be given a chance to kill the pope. His instructors drummed into him that it was no coincidence the pope had come to office at almost the same time as their beloved Khomeini delivered Iran from the shah’s regime. The “infidel in Rome,” as Agca was taught to refer to John Paul, had come to destroy the revolution the ayatollah had proclaimed in the name of the Holy Koran.

There was a grain of truth in the accusation. John Paul had increasingly spoken harshly about Islam and the dangers he believed it contained in its fundamentalist form. Visiting the Olivetti factory at Ivrea, Italy, John Paul had astonished the workers by inserting into his speech an impromptu passage:

“What the Koran teaches people is aggression; what we teach our people is peace. Of course, you always have human nature which distorts whatever message religion is sending. But even though people can be led astray by vices and bad habits, Christianity aspires to peace and love. Islam is a religion that attacks. If you start by teaching agression to the whole community, you end up pandering to the negative elements in everyone. You know what that leads to: such people will assault us.”

In January 1981, Agca had flown to Libya. Initially Mossad had been puzzled by that part of his journey, until an informer in Tripoli discovered that a renegade CIA officer, Frank Terpil, had been in the country at that time. Terpil had been indicted by a grand jury in Washington for supplying arms to Libya, conspiring to assassinate one of Gadhafi’s opponents in Cairo, recruiting former U.S. military pilots to fly Libyan aircraft, and Green Berets to run Gadhafi’s training camps for terrorists. In Libya he was instructing terrorists how to evade detection by Western security agencies. Terpil had moved on to Beirut — where he had disappeared. Mossad believed he had been murdered when he had outlived his usefulness.

Mossad knew Agca’s contact with Terpil had been arranged by Agca’s controllers in Tehran and leaked to the KGB after the attempted John Paul assassination, allowing for the Russians to claim the plot had been orchestrated by the CIA. Like Mossad, the KGB had an effective psychological warfare department. The fiction about the CIA filled thousands of column inches and many hours of broadcast time. To further muddy the waters, the Tehran mullahs arranged for Agca, after he left Libya in February 1981, to travel to Sofia, Bulgaria, to meet men who told him they were members of the country’s secret service: no convincing proof ever emerged they were. Furious at the KGB’s attempts to smear the Agency, the CIA countered by claiming the Bulgarians had controlled Agca on behalf of the Kremlin.

For Mossad the situation was perfectly poised to exploit the adage “We divide to rule.” Not only would Mossad be able to discredit the CIA with the Vatican, but at long last, by promoting their version of the plot as the correct one, Mossad had found a way to gain the pope’s ear. All else would flow from that: its officers could have access to the secretary of state’s own formidable information-collecting network; it would enable katsas to work with, and if need be, exploit priests and nuns; and, when the opportunity arose, those electronic bugs could finally be planted in all those holy places in the Vatican Zvi Zamir had indicated.

When Mossad’s account of Mehmet Ali Agca’s odyssey had been fully pieced together in Tel Aviv, Nahum Admoni set out to answer the one question that would make all that happen. Once more a computer search found the solution. One of Rafi Eitan’s “survivor spies,” a Catholic living in Munich, had described the extraordinary role Luigi Poggi played in the papacy. Nahum Admoni had sent for Eli and told him to make contact with Poggi.

Now, a full two years after Agca had shot the Pope, the archbishop sat far into the night, explaining completely to John Paul what Eli had told him.

A month later, on December 23, 1983, at 4:30 A.M., almost three hours before the lights on the Christmas tree in St. Peter’s Square would be switched off for the day, the pope was awoken by his valet.

The bedroom was surprisingly small, its walls still lined with the pastel linen covering his predecessor favored. The wooden floor, gleaming from being polished, was partly covered by a rug woven by Polish nuns. On the wall above the bed, in which four of John Paul’s predecessors had lain waiting for death, was a crucifix. On another wall was a fine painting of Our Lady. Both were gifts from Poland. In addition to the pope’s valet, those who saw him at this hour — usually one of his administrative priests with news that could not wait — were relieved to see John Paul had regained some of his old vigor and vitality.

As always, the pope began his day by going to his prie-dieu to kneel in private prayer. Afterward he shaved and showered and dressed in the clothes the valet had laid out: a heavy woolen white cassock caped around the shoulders, white clerical shirt, knee-high white stockings, brown shoes, and white skullcap. He was ready to go to see Agca in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison.

The meeting was arranged at the pope’s request, intended, he said, as “an act of forgiveness.” In reality, John Paul wanted to find out if what Mossad had said was true. He was driven to the prison by the very man who was at the wheel of the popemobile in St. Peter’s Square when Agca shot him. Accompanied by a Roman police escort, the limousine sped northeastward across the city to the prison. In a backup car was a small group of journalists (they included the author of this book). They had been invited to witness the historical moment when the pope and his assassin came face-to-face.

Two hours later, John Paul was admitted to Rebibbia’s maximum-security wing. He walked alone down the corridor to the open door of cell T4, where Agca stood waiting inside. The reporters waited farther up the corridor. With them were prison guards, ready to run to Agca’s cell should he make any threatening move to his visitor.

As the pope extended his ring hand, Agca moved to shake it, hesitated, then bent to kiss the Fisherman’s Ring. Next he took the pope’s hand and placed it briefly against his forehead.

“Lei è Mehmet Ali Agca?” The pope framed the question softly. He had been told Agca had learned Italian in prison.

“Sì.” A quick smile accompanied the word, as if Agca was embarrassed to admit who he was.

“Ah, lei abita qui?” John Paul looked around the cell, genuinely interested in the place where his would-be killer might well spend the rest of his life.

“Sì.”

John Paul sat on a chair positioned just inside the door. Agca sank onto his bed, clasping and unclasping his hands.

“Come si sente?” The pope’s question as to how Agca felt was almost paternal.

“Bene, bene.” Suddenly Agca was speaking urgently, volubly, the words coming in a low torrent only the pope could hear.

John Paul’s expression grew more pensive. His face was close to Agca’s, partially shielding him from the guards and journalists.

Agca whispered into the pope’s left ear. The pope gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Agca paused, uncertainty on his face. John Paul indicated, with a quick chopping motion of his right hand, that Agca should continue. Both men were so close their heads almost touched. Agca’s lips barely moved. On John Paul’s face there was a pained look. He closed his eyes, as though it would help him to better concentrate.

Suddenly, Agca stopped in midsentence. John Paul did not open his eyes. Only his lips moved; only Agca could hear the words.

Once more Agca resumed speaking. After a few more minutes, the pope made another little chopping motion of the hand. Agca stopped talking. John Paul placed his left hand to his forehead, as if he wanted to shield his eyes from Agca.

Then John Paul squeezed the younger man’s upper arm, almost as if to thank him for what he had said. The exchanges lasted for twenty-one minutes, and then the pope slowly rose to his feet. He held out a hand, encouraging Agca to do the same. The two men stared into each other’s eyes. The pope ended this moment of near perfect drama by reaching into a cassock pocket and producing a small white cardboard box bearing the papal crest. He handed it to Agca. Puzzled, Agca turned the box over in his hand.

The pope waited, the gentlest of smiles on his lips. Agca opened the box. Inside was a rosary crafted in silver and mother-of-pearl.

“Ti ringrazio,” thanked Agca. “Ti ringrazio.”

“Niente. Niente,” responded the pope. Then he leaned forward and spoke again words only for Agca.

Then, saying no more, the pontiff walked from the cell.

Later, a Vatican spokesman said, “Ali Agca knows only up to a certain level. On a higher level, he doesn’t know anything. If there was a conspiracy, it was done by professionals and professionals don’t leave traces. One will never find anything.”

Not for the first time, the Vatican had been economical with the truth. Agca had confirmed what Luigi Poggi had been told by Mossad. The plot to kill the pope had been nurtured in Tehran. The knowledge would color John Paul’s attitude toward both Islam and Israel. Increasingly, he told his staff that the real coming conflict in the world was not going to be between the East and West, the United States and Russia, but between Islamic fundamentalism and Christianity. In public he was careful to separate Islam, the faith, and Islamic fundamentalism.

In Israel, Mossad’s analysts saw the pontiff’s new attitude as the first sign that the evidence presented to Poggi had been accepted. But while there was no immediate move made to invite Mossad to contribute to John Paul’s understanding of the world, the pope had become convinced of the value of Poggi’s dialogue with Eli. In Tel Aviv, Admoni told Eli to remain in contact with Poggi. They continued to meet in various European cities, sometimes at an Israeli embassy, other times in a papal nunciature. Their discussions were wide-ranging, but almost always focused on two issues: the situation in the Middle East and the pope’s wish to visit the Holy Land. Linked to this was John Paul’s continued effort to find a permanent homeland for the PLO.

Poggi made it clear the pope had both a liking for, and a fascination with, Yasser Arafat. John Paul did not share the views of men like Rafi Eitan, David Kimche, and Uri Saguy, that the PLO leader, in Eitan’s words, was a ruthless killer and “a butcher of our women and children, someone I would kill with my own bare hands.”

To the pontiff, raised against the background of the heroic Polish resistance against the Nazis, Arafat was an appealing underdog, a charismatic figure continuously able to escape Mossad’s various attempts to kill him. Poggi recounted to Eli how Arafat had once told John Paul he had developed a sixth sense—“and some measure of a seventh”—when he was in danger. “A man like that deserves to live,” Poggi had said to Eli.

Through such glimpses, Eli obtained a clearer view of the pope’s mind-set. But John Paul also paid more than lip service to the historical truth that the Jewish roots of Christianity must never be forgotten, and that anti-Semitism — so rife in his own beloved Poland — must be eradicated.

In May 1984, Poggi invited Eli to the Vatican. The two men talked together for hours in the archbishop’s office in the Apostolic Palace. To this day no one knows what they spoke about.

In Israel, this was once more a time of scandal involving the nation’s intelligence community. A month before, April 12, four PLO terrorists had hijacked a bus with thirty-five passengers as it headed for the southern town of Ashqelon. The official version of the incident was that Shin Bet agents had stormed the bus, and in the ensuing gunfight, two terrorists were shot dead and the two who had been wounded died on their way to the hospital.

Newspaper reports showed them being led from the bus, visibly not seriously injured. It emerged they had been so severely beaten in the ambulance by Shin Bet officers that both men died. Mossad, although not directly involved, was tarnished by the international condemnation of the incident.

Against this background, Poggi explained to Eli, there could be no question of John Paul establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. Until he did, Eli reiterated, there could be no question of the pope being allowed to visit the Holy Land.

Yet it was a measure of the bridge building they were engaged upon that both men agreed the issue was not dead.

On April 13, 1986, John Paul did something no other pontiff had done. He entered the Synagogue of Rome on Lungotevere dei Cenci, where he was embraced by the city’s chief rabbi. Each dressed in their regalia, the two men walked side by side through the silent congregation to the teva, the platform from where the Torah is read.

In the back of the congregation sat Eli, who had played his part in bringing about this historic moment. Yet it still did not achieve what Israel wanted — papal diplomatic recognition.

That would only finally come in December 1993, when, despite the continuing objections of the Secretariat hard-liners, diplomatic ties were established.

By then, Nahum Admoni was no longer Mossad’s chief. His successor, Shabtai Shavit, continued the delicate process of trying to bring Mossad closer to the Vatican. Part of that maneuvering was to show the pope that both Israel and the PLO at long last had a genuine interest in reaching a settlement, and recognized the common threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Pope John Paul bore the physical scars of the truth of that.

Meanwhile, Mossad had been busy on a continent where the Vatican pinned so many hopes for the future — Africa. From there the Holy See one day expected to see emerge the Church’s first black pope. But it was there that Mossad had already shown itself the past master at the black art of playing off one intelligence service against another to secure its own position.