Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

“By 1983 the Vatican Bank was being routinely used by the mafia to move money both into and out of Italy. The money came from drugs, prostitution, and a variety of other crimes that the Vatican officially condemned,” said Yallop.

Did the $200 million earmarked for Solidarity come from the mafia? Twenty-one years would pass after that Fiat limousine drove on through the Arch of the Bells gateway before those and other questions would be asked.

The solitary passenger on that April night in 1983 was Archbishop Luigi Poggi. He was the pope’s diplomatic troubleshooter, a nuncio extraordinary and a seasoned operator in the world of very secret papal politics. Among the direct-line numbers in his briefcase were those of CIA director Casey—a devout Catholic himself—Lech Walesa of Solidarity, and the foreign ministers of half a dozen European nations. The most recent addition to the list was that of Nahum Admoni, then the director general of Mossad. The archbishop and spy chief had met in Paris during the latest journeying around Europe that Poggi had just completed. Poggi knew that with Admoni’s Polish background—his parents had been middle-class immigrants to Israel from Gdansk—the spy chief had more than a passing curiosity about the church.

In Warsaw, Poggi had conferred as usual with Cardinal Josef Glemp in his palace. They had spoken in a lead-lined room to overcome the surveillance of Poland’s intelligence services. Even so, the two men had spoken in Latin. A clue to what followed is provided by Admoni, who lives today in the United States.

“I soon knew that the Vatican would help Solidarity. I calculated they would do so through Solidarity’s Brussels office, a kind of unofficial embassy. A Polish Jew, Jerzy Milewski, good on knocking on doors, was the main fund-raiser.”

Boris Solomatin, the KGB rezident (station chief) in Rome, would confirm. “We knew all about the secret alliance between the CIA and the Vatican to support Solidarity.” Less certain is Solomatin’s claim that the KGB had “an important spy in the Vatican.” Yet the claim cannot be totally dismissed. The papal nuncio in Ireland, the late Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi, said in an interview (with the author) following the attempt on the pope’s life in May 1981: “The Soviets appeared to have inside information as to the Holy See’s position on foreign affairs.”

On that April evening in 1983, late though the hour was, the pope’s then senior secretary Stanislaw Dzwisz and Marcinkus were waiting to be briefed. Marcinkus had recently been promoted by Pope John Paul to become governor of Vatican City. He was also now in charge of security for all the pontiff’s foreign trips.

The pope’s former English-language secretary, Monsignor John Magee, now bishop of Clones in Ireland, provided a rare insight into Poggi. “He was imbued with well-founded confidence in his own abilities, his mission in life and his relationship with God.”

Settled in Dzwisz’s office in the papal secretariat in the Apostolic Palace, Poggi told them that the outgoing United States ambassador to Poland, the soft-spoken Francis J. Meehan, had revealed that the Reagan administration was going to arrange the transfer of $200 million to support Solidarity. The news came at the end of Poggi’s twenty-third visit to Warsaw in the past two years. Each time he had stayed with Cardinal Josef Glemp, primate of All Poland, availing himself of the lead-lined room and speaking in Latin. It made no difference. Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, had carried out a major coup only two months before Poggi was briefing Marcinkus and Dzwisz.

It had been set up by Nahum Admoni, the spymaster who had dined with Poggi in Paris and discussed church affairs. Then Mossad’s director of operations, Rafi Eitan, had smooth-talked the U.S. Department of Justice and the developer of the software it prized above all else in its electronic arsenal to part with a copy. The software was Promis.

Down the years Bill Hamilton, the president of Inslaw, would say of Rafi Eitan and the cool way he stole Promis: “Rafi fooled me. And he fooled a lot of others.” Eitan, now in his seventies, admitted (to the author in 2004): “It was quite a coup. Yes, quite a coup.”

The Israelis deconstructed Promis and inserted a trapdoor in the software. Dr. Jerzy Milewski, the hardworking Polish Jew responsible for Solidarity’s fund-raising, was persuaded by Eitan on a visit to Brussels to accept the doctored software “as a gift from Israel.” Mossad had become the first intelligence service to penetrate the heart and soul of Solidarity.

Born and bred in Cicero—the Chicago suburb that was also the birthplace of Al Capone—Paul Marcinkus had acquired many of the gangster’s mannerisms, evident in the way he would terrorize a teller in the Vatican Bank or threaten a bishop. Marcinkus also rejoiced in being on what he once claimed was “Moscow’s Top Ten list of targets. Next to the pope, I am the man they most want to knock off.” But for the Vatican’s banker he had some unusual clients: the casino at Monte Carlo, the Beretta firearms company, and a Canadian company that made oral contraceptives. From the day he took over as the bank’s president, Marcinkus had increased its investments beyond all expectations. By 1983, on the night he listened to Poggi, the overall bank deposits were worth tens of billions of dollars. Marcinkus had once boasted to Monsignor John Magee, “It is a real gravy train.”

The arrival of the CIA as a client was welcomed by Marcinkus, hosting Casey and Brenneke for dinner in the Villa Sritch, where the banker had a three-bedroom apartment. Served by handsome young Romans—youths Marcinkus was known to refer to as “my bodyguards”—the tall, heavyset archbishop learned how the Vatican Bank would act as a conduit for the $200 million for Solidarity. Later, as he and his dinner guests played a round of golf at the Aquastina—Rome’s most exclusive golf club, which had gifted Marcinkus a membership—the final details were settled.

The money would leave America from a number of banks, the Bank of America and Citibank among them. Brenneke had devised special codes for all his transactions. These changed on a regular basis. No transactions remained in any of his accounts for more than seventy-two hours. The money for Solidarity would enter the Vatican Bank from the Banco de Panama (the Panamanian national bank), the Standard Bank of South Africa, and Coutts, the Queen’s bankers, in London. The money would then be rerouted to Bank Lambert in Brussels. The system was what Brenneke called “SOP”—standard operating procedure. In part, it was designed to deal with what Casey had called “a tricky little problem.”

Solidarity was concerned that if it became known it was receiving substantial financial aid from Washington, it could lead the Jaruzelski regime to crack down on the movement—even perhaps arrest its leaders. But that secrecy would later lead to a very public clash between one of President Reagan’s key advisers, Professor Richard Pipes, and President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Pipes was said to have alleged that he knew well that large sums of money had been transferred to Solidarity through several accounts operated by the CIA. There were reports Pipes had challenged Brzezinski that the money had never reached Solidarity—where did it go? It was a question Brzezinski did not answer then, and has not since.

At best, only a small portion of foreign money—which was urgently needed by Solidarity to pay its members a token weekly wage while on strike—was ever received by the Brussels headquarters of Solidarnosc. Elizabeth Wasiutynski, whose parents had served in the NSZ, part of the Polish resistance, became head of Solidarnosc in Brussels. She insisted that money for Solidarnosc came from the AFL-CIO, international trade union organizations, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Further sums came later through an organization called the Stanton Group in the United States. It was donated on behalf of American taxpayers.