Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Both knew what had happened the last time Mossad tried to do that under cover of a state visit by Begin’s predecessor, the redoubtable Golda Meir.

Late in 1972, Golda Meir finally received a response from Pope Paul VI that he would be prepared to receive her in a short private audience. In December of that year she told cabinet members at their weekly session who had wondered if the meeting would produce anything worthwhile that she was fascinated by the “Marxist structuralism of the papacy. First it has financial power which is almost unprecedented. Then it operates without political parties or trade unions. The whole apparatus is organised for control. The Roman Curia controls the bishops, the bishops control the clergy, the clergy control the laity. With its multitude of secretariats, commissions and structures, it is a system tailor-made for spying and informing!”

The date for the papal audience was set for the morning of January 15, 1973; Golda Meir was informed she would have precisely thirty-five minutes with the pontiff; at the end they would exchange gifts. There was no specific agenda for the meeting but Golda Meir hoped to persuade the pope to visit Israel. The official reason would be for him to celebrate Mass for the hundred thousand or so Christian Arabs in the country. But she also knew his presence would give the country a huge boost on the international stage.

For security reasons there would be no prior announcement about the meeting. At the end of her visit to a conference of international socialists in Paris, Golda Meir would fly on to Rome in her chartered El Al plane. Only on the flight would journalists accompanying her be told she was going to the Vatican.

Zvi Zamir, Mossad’s chief, flew to Rome to check security arrangements. The city was a hotbed for terrorist factions from both the Middle East and Europe. Rome had also become an important listening post for Mossad’s current preoccupation, locating and killing the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre.

Zamir had based Mark Hessner, one of his ablest katsas, in Rome to probe the city’s large Arab community. In Milan, another center for terrorist activity, the Mossad chief had stationed Shai Kauly, another experienced katsa . After Zamir briefed both men on the forthcoming visit, they accompanied him to the Vatican.

On January 10, 1973, as the three men were chauffeured across Rome to the Vatican, they knew far more about the Holy See’s long relationship with another intelligence service than their hosts may have realized.

In 1945, the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner to the CIA—had been welcomed into the Vatican, in the words of James Jesus Angleton, the head of the OSS Rome station, “with open arms.” Pope Pius XII and his Curia asked Angleton to help the Church’s militant anti-Communist crusade by getting the Italian Christian Democratic Party into power. Angleton, a practicing Catholic, used all the considerable resources at his disposal to bribe, blackmail, and threaten voters to support them. He had been given full access to the Vatican’s unparalleled information-gathering service through Italy; every curate and priest reported on the activities of Italian Communists in their parishes. When the Vatican had assessed the information, it was passed to Angleton, who sent it on to Washington.

There it was used to support the now deeply entrenched State Department fear that the Soviet Union presented a real and long-term threat to the West. Angleton was told to do anything that would stop the wartime resistance activists of Italy’s Communist Party from taking over. Like the pope, Angleton was haunted by the specter of a worldwide Communist threat that would split the globe into two systems—capitalism and socialism—which could never peacefully coexist. Stalin had himself said no less.

The pope was convinced that the Italian Communists were at the spearhead of a campaign to destroy the Church at every opportunity. The regular meetings between Pius and the pious Angleton became sessions where the bogey of Communism loomed ever larger. The pope urged Angleton to tell the United States it must do all possible to destroy the threat. The pontiff who represented peace on earth became an enthusiastic proponent of U.S. foreign policy which led to the cold war.

By 1952, the Rome station of what was now the CIA was being run by another devout Catholic, William Colby—who went on to mastermind the CIA’s activities in Vietnam. Colby had established a powerful network of informers within the Secretariat of State and every Vatican congregation and tribunal. He used them to help the CIA fight Soviet espionage and subversion across the globe. Priests regularly reported to the Vatican what was happening. In countries like the Philippines, where Communists were trying to make inroads into what had long been a devout Catholic nation, the CIA was able to launch effective counterattacks. The pope saw the violence as necessary and shared the view that if the United States did not perform what he once called “sad, but necessary actions,” the world would have to endure decades of further suffering.

In 1960, the CIA achieved another breakthrough when Milan’s Cardinal Montini—three years later to become Pope Paul VI—gave the CIA the names of priests in the United States deemed by the Vatican to be still soft on Communism. The cold war was at its peak; paranoia ran rife in Washington. The FBI hounded the priests, and many left the country, heading for Central and South America. The CIA had a substantial slush fund, called “project money,” used to make generous gifts to Catholic charities, schools, and orphanages to pay for the restoration of church buildings the Vatican owned. All-expenses-paid holidays were given to priests and nuns known to be staunchly pro-American. Italian cardinals and bishops received cases of champagne and hampers of gourmet delicacies in a country still recovering from the food shortages of World War II. Successive CIA station chiefs were regarded by the Vatican as being more important than America’s ambassadors to Italy.

When John XXIII was elected supreme pontiff in 1958, he stunned the Curia (the Vatican civil service) by saying that the crusade against Communism had largely failed. He ordered the Italian bishops to become “politically neutral.” The CIA was frantic when Pope John ordered its free access to the Vatican must stop. The Agency’s panic increased when the CIA learned the pope had begun to nurture the seeds of an embryonic Ostpolitik and started a cautious dialogue with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader. For the CIA’s station chief in Rome, “the Vatican was no longer totally committed to the American system. The Holy See is hostile and we must from now on see its activities in that light.”

CIA analysts in Washington prepared exhaustive assessments with such grandiose titles as The Links between the Vatican and Communism. In the late spring of 1963, the Rome station reported that the Holy See was to establish full diplomatic relations with Russia. The CIA’s director, John McCone, flew to Rome and bulldozed his way into a meeting with Pope John, saying he had come at the insistence of America’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. McCone told the pontiff that the Church “must stop this drift toward Communism. It is both dangerous and unacceptable to dicker with the Kremlin. Communism is a Trojan horse as the recent left-wing victories in the Italian national elections indicate. In office the Communists have dismantled many of the policies Catholic parties supported.”

For ten full minutes, McCone spoke in this blunt manner without interruption. Silence finally settled over the audience chamber in the Apostolic Palace. For a moment longer the old pope studied his tall, ascetic visitor. Then, speaking softly, John explained that the Church he led had an urgent duty: to end abject poverty and the denial of human rights, to close down the slum dwellings and the shantytowns, to end racism and political oppression. He would talk to anybody who would help him do that—including the Soviets. The only way to meet the challenge of Communism was to confront it with reasoned argument.