Gideon's Spies полностью

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.

McCone, unable to contain his anger any longer—“I had not come to debate”—said the CIA had ample evidence that, while the pope pursued his détente with Moscow, Communism was persecuting priests through the Soviet Bloc, Asia, and South America: Pope John realized that was all the more reason to seek a better relationship with the Soviets. Defeated, McCone returned to Washington convinced that Pope John was “softer on Communism than any of his predecessors.”

John’s not unexpected death—he had a rapidly progressing cancer—was greeted with relief by McCone and President Kennedy.

When Montini of Milan became Paul VI in late 1963, Washington relaxed. Two days after his inauguration, the pope received Kennedy in private audience. Outside, McCone strolled through the Vatican gardens like a landowner who had returned home after a long absence.

Paul’s long pontificate was blighted on the personal front by his declining health and, on the international stage, by the Vietnam War. He came to believe that the escalation President Lyndon Johnson had ordered in 1966 was morally wrong and that the Holy See should be given the role of peacemaker. Three months after Richard Nixon came into the Oval Office, he flew to Rome to meet the pope. The president told him he proposed to increase America’s commitment in Vietnam. Once more the CIA found itself out of favor in the Vatican.

All this, Zvi Zamir had learned from his Washington katsa. Now, on this brilliantly sunny morning on January 10, 1973, as he and his two colleagues were driven into the Vatican to check the security arrangements for Golda Meir’s visit, Zamir hoped it would result in Mossad taking the place of the CIA in the Vatican’s long flirtation with the intelligence world.