Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Three Spanish pathologists were assigned to perform the autopsy. They wanted the vital organs and tissue to be sent to Madrid for further tests. Before this could be done, the Maxwell family intervened, ordering the body embalmed and flown forthwith to Israel for burial. The Spanish authorities, unusually, did not object.

  Who or what had persuaded the family to suddenly act as it did?

  On November 10, 1991, Maxwell’s funeral took place on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the resting place for the nation’s most revered heroes. It had all the trappings of a state occasion, attended by the country’s government and opposition leaders. No fewer than six serving and former heads of the Israeli intelligence community listened as Prime Minister Shamir eulogized: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said.”

  Those who stood among the mourners included a man dressed in a somber black suit and shirt, relieved only at the throat by his Roman collar. Born into a Lebanese Christian family, he was a wraithlike figure—barely five feet tall and weighing little over a hundred pounds. But Father Ibrahim was no ordinary priest. He worked for the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.

  His discreet presence at the funeral was not so much to mark the earthly passing of Robert Maxwell, but to acknowledge the still-secret ties developing between the Holy See and Israel. It was a perfect example of Meir Amit’s dictum that intelligence cooperation knows no limits.

  CHAPTER 11

  UNHOLY ALLIANCES

  From the beginning, successive Israeli prime ministers had been fascinated by the concept of the pope as an absolute ruler elected for life, a leader not held accountable to any judiciary or legislative control. Using a pyramidic and monarchical structure, the supreme pontiff wielded extraordinary influence to shape the economic, political, and ideological outlook of not only the Catholic faithful but the world at large. David Ben-Gurion once growled: “Never mind that nonsense about how many divisions does the pope have—just look at how many people he can summon to his aid.”

  For Mossad, the appeal was the sheer secrecy with which the Vatican operated. It was a well-defined mechanism, strictly enforced, and it cloaked everything the Holy See did. Often months passed before the first hints emerged of papal involvement in some diplomatic initiative; even then the full story rarely surfaced. Each Mossad chief wondered how to penetrate the veil. But various attempts by both the government of Israel and Mossad to establish a good working relationship with the Vatican had been politely but firmly rejected.

  The reality was that within the Holy See’s Secretariat of State—the equivalent of a secular foreign office—there existed a powerful anti-Israeli faction. These soutaned monsignors would invariably refer to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as “occupied territories” and the Golan Heights as having been “annexed” from Syria. In the evenings, they would drive out of their tiny city-state to the apartments of wealthy Arabs on Rome’s Via Condotti, or join them for cocktails in the Piazza Navona, dispassionately listening to dreams of removing Israel from the face of the earth.

  The priests were careful what they said; they believed the Jewish state had its agents everywhere, watching, listening, perhaps even recording and photographing. One of the first warnings a newcomer to the Secretariat received was to be aware of being “spied or enveigled upon, especially by agents from countries the Vatican firmly refuses to diplomatically recognize.” Israel was high on that list. Upon his election in 1978, Pope John Paul II had reaffirmed it would remain there; only well into his pontificate would he finally agree to grant full diplomatic status to Israel.

  The information the pope received about Israel continued to be influenced by contacts his priest-diplomats made with Arabs. Their forays into Rome were followed by the monsignors returning to the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, the overcrowded, artificially lit, and poorly ventilated headquarters of the papal diplomatic service. Known as the Extraordinary Affairs Section, it was responsible for implementing the foreign policy of the Holy See. Its twenty “desks” dealt with almost as much paperwork as other major foreign ministries, a measure of the Vatican’s ever expanding worldwide diplomatic interests.

  The Middle East desk was housed in cubbyhole offices overlooking the San Damaso Courtyard, a magnificent piazza in the heart of the great palace. One of the first papers the desk presented to the new Polish pontiff was a closely argued case for Jerusalem to have international status and be patrolled by United Nations forces with the Vatican having responsibility for all the city’s Christian shrines. News of the proposal reached Tel Aviv early in 1979, having been photocopied from a document passed by a monsignor to a wealthy Lebanese Christian living in Rome. The man’s staff included a Mossad sayan. The prospect of internationalizing Jerusalem angered Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who ordered Mossad’s chief, Yitzhak Hofi, to redouble his efforts to establish contact with the Vatican.

  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 o
n 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.

  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.

  Waiting for them outside the Apostolic Palace was the head of Vatican security, a tall, pinch-faced man wearing a dark blue suit, the uniform of the Vigili, the Vatican security service. For several hours he had taken them on a tour of the small city-state, checking possible places where an Arab gunman could hide before trying to assassinate Golda Meir. Unknown to the Vatican security chief, Zvi Zamir was also looking for places where Mossad could plant bugging devices once it had established a working relationship with the Holy See. Zamir flew back to Tel Aviv satisfied with the city-state’s security presentations. More important, he believed he had detected a softening in the attitude of the Holy See toward Israel.

  Even before Zamir had landed in Israel, details of Golda Meir’s visit were in the hands of Black September, almost certainly leaked by a pro-Arab priest in the Secretariat of State. For Ali Hassan Salameh, the group’s leader, though he was on the run from Mossad after masterminding the Munich atrocity, Golda Meir’s visit was an opportunity he could not ignore. He began to plan a missile attack against her plane as it landed at Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci Airport. He hoped to kill not only her, but key government ministers who would be accompanying the prime minister and the senior Mossad men who would also be on board. By the time Israel had recovered from these blows, Salameh hoped, he and his men would be ensconced in the hideout they were negotiating with the Russians to provide.

  Since 1968, when a generation born after World War II launched its own war on society—under such disparate names as Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Red Army Faction, the Turkish People’s Liberation Army, Spain’s ETA, and the PLO—the Kremlin had recognized their value in helping to destroy imperialism—and Israel.

  Arab terrorists had struck a special chord with the KGB: they were more daring and more successful than most other
groups. And they faced a most powerful enemy, Mossad, long a service the KGB both loathed and admired for its sheer ruthlessness. The KGB arranged for selected Arab activists to receive training at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. This was no ordinary campus, but a finishing school for terrorists. They received not only political indoctrination, but also instruction in the latest KGB terrorism target selection and assassination techniques. It was at Patrice Lumumba that Salameh put together the finishing touches to the Munich massacre. After the murderous attack, the surviving members of the group asked Russia to give them sanctuary. But the Soviets were reluctant to do so: the firestorm of fury the Munich attack had generated had made even the Kremlin unwilling to be discovered shielding the killers. They had told Salameh his request for asylum for himself and his men was still being considered.

  Nevertheless, the Russians had done nothing to cooperate in the hunt for Black September—and certainly had not revealed that the group had a cache of Soviet missiles hidden in Yugoslavia. These rockets would be used to shoot down Golda Meir’s aircraft.

  The plan, like all those created by Salameh, was bold and simple. The missiles would be loaded onto a boat at Dubrovnik and taken across the Adriatic to Bari on Italy’s east coast. From there they would be brought by road into Rome shortly before Golda Meir’s plane arrived. Salameh had also not forgotten the lessons on strategy his KGB instructor at Patrice Lumumba had given: Always make the enemy look the other way. Salameh needed to direct Mossad’s vigilance away from Rome in the run-up to the attack.