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
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.
