Gideon's Spies полностью

The fact that seemingly every Western intelligence service was investigating the papal shooting also influenced Hofi’s decision to keep Mossad from becoming involved. In any event, he eventually expected to learn from one of them the background to the incident.

He was still waiting to be told when he was replaced by Nahum Admoni in September 1982. With his Polish background—his parents had been middle-class immigrants from near Gdansk—Admoni had more than a passing curiosity about the Catholic church. In his time abroad working under cover in the United States and France, he had seen how powerful the Church’s influence could be. Rome had helped elect John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, to the White House and, in France, the Church continued to perform an important role in politics.

Once he had settled into office, Admoni sent for Mossad’s file on the attempted papal assassination. It contained mostly news clips and a report from a katsa stationed in Rome that did not go much farther. Unusually, the six security services who had conducted their own inquiries—including interviewing Agca in his high-security cellblock of Rome’s Rebibbia Prison—had failed to pool their knowledge. Admoni decided to conduct his own investigation.

William Casey, then director of Central Intelligence, would later say the likeliest reason appeared to be “Mossad sniffing that maybe here was a way into the Vatican. Admoni had to be thinking he could come up with something to trade off with the Holy See.”

In the wake of Golda Meir’s unsuccessful attempt to establish diplomatic ties with the Vatican, Zvi Zamir had established a permanent Mossad presence in Rome to try to penetrate the Vatican. Working out of a building close to the Israeli embassy, the katsa had tried and failed to recruit priest informers. Most of what he learned was gossip overheard in the bars and restaurants frequented by Vatican staff. He achieved little more than enviously watching the CIA’s head of Rome station drive into the Vatican for his Friday-night briefings to the pope; these had resumed as soon as John Paul had recuperated from his surgery.

During that convalescence, Agostino Casaroli, cardinal secretary of state, had run the Vatican. The katsa had heard that Casaroli had expressed some very blunt sentiments about the shooting: the CIA should have known about Agca and the entire plot. He had sent on the secretary’s views to Tel Aviv.

Within the U.S. intelligence community was a prevailing view that Agca had been a trigger for a KGB-inspired plot to kill the pontiff. In a paper stamped “Top Secret” and titled “Agca’s Attempt to Kill the Pope: The Case for Soviet Involvement,” the argument was made that Moscow had come to fear how the pontiff could ignite the flames of Polish nationalism.

Already by 1981, Solidarity, the country’s workers’ movement under the leadership of Lech Walesa, was increasingly flexing its industrial muscles, and the authorities were under mounting pressure from Moscow to curb the union’s activities.

The pope had urged Walesa to do nothing that would precipitate direct Soviet military intervention. John Paul had urged Poland’s dying cardinal, Stefan Wyszinski, to also reassure the country’s Communist leaders that the pontiff would not allow Solidarity to overstep the mark. When the union scheduled a general strike, Cardinal Wyszinski prostrated himself before Walesa in his office, grabbed the bemused shipyard worker’s trouser leg, and said he would cling on until he died. Walesa called off the strike.

In Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts concluded that the pontiff fully understood the importance of appeasing the Soviets over Poland so as to avoid losing the considerable ground Solidarity had achieved. It seemed increasingly unlikely Moscow would have wanted the pope killed. There was still the possibility that the Soviets had subcontracted the assassination to one of its surrogates. In the past, the Bulgarian secret service had carried out similar missions for the KGB when it was necessary to keep its own involvement hidden. But the analysts thought this time it would be unlikely the KGB would have delegated such an important mission. The Bulgarians would never have conducted the assassination of their own volition.

Nahum Admoni began to explore the CIA’s current involvement with the papacy. In between Casey’s regular visits to the pope, an important player in the relationship between the Vatican and the CIA was Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia, who shuttled between the White House and the Apostolic Palace. To Monsignor John Magee, the pope’s English-language secretary, Krol was “the Holy Father’s extra-special pal. Both came from a similar background, knew the same Polish songs and stories and could joke across the Pope’s dining table in a local Polish dialect. The rest of us just sat there and smiled, not understanding a word.”