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
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.
