Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  The popemobile had continued at an agonizingly slow speed toward the nearest ambulance stationed by the Vatican’s Bronze Door. But the ambulance had no oxygen equipment, so the pope was transferred to a second ambulance nearby. Vital moments were lost.

  Lights flashing and sirens wailing, the ambulance raced to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, the nearest to the Vatican, completing the journey in a record eight minutes. During the drive the pope uttered no sound of despair or resentment, only words of profound prayer, “Mary, my mother! Mary, my mother!”

  At the hospital, he was rushed to a ninth-floor surgical suite that comprised an induction room, an operating room, and a recovery area. Here, at the center of the crisis, there was no panic, no wasted movement or word. All was quiet urgency and tightly controlled discipline. Here the stricken pontiff could have felt the beginning of hope.

  His bloodstained cassock, vest, and underpants were expertly cut away, and the bloodstained cross on its solid gold chain was removed. Surgical towels were draped over his nakedness. Gloved hands reached for, fetched, and carried the first of the instruments needed in a struggle the surgical team was only too familiar with.

  When he had recovered after almost six hours of surgery, John Paul believed he had been saved by the miraculous intervention of one of the most revered apparitions in the Catholic world, the Virgin of Fatima, whose feast day was the same one as the attempt on his life.

  During his long months of recovery, John Paul became increasingly preoccupied with who had ordered him to be assassinated. He tried to read every scrap of evidence that came from police and intelligence agencies as diverse as the CIA, West Germany’s BND, and the security services of Turkey and Austria. It was impossible to read it all: there were millions of words of reports, statements, and assessments.

  Not one document answered fully John Paul’s question: Who had wanted him killed? He was still no wiser when Agca stood trial at the Rome assize court in the last week of July 1981. The brisk three-day hearing cast no light on the gunman’s motives. Agca was sentenced to life imprisonment; with good behavior he would be eligible for parole in the year 2009.

  Two years after Agca had been convicted, John Paul had finally been promised the answer to the question that still festered in his mind. It would come from a priest he trusted above all others. His title was Nunzio Apostolico Con Incarichi Speciali. The words offered no real clue that Archbishop Luigi Poggi was the natural heir to the world of secret papal politics, with special responsibility for gathering intelligence from Communist Europe. People in the Vatican simply called him “the pope’s spy.”

  For many months Poggi had been involved in very secret contacts with Mossad. Only recently, when they were sufficiently advanced, had he informed the pope what he had been doing. John Paul had told him to continue. Since then there had been meetings with a Mossad officer in Vienna, Paris, Warsaw, and Sofia, Bulgaria. Both priest and katsa wanted to make sure what was on offer, what was expected. After each contact both had gone away to ponder the next move.

  A few days before, there had been another meeting, again in Vienna, a city both Poggi and the officer liked as a background for their clandestine contacts.

  It was from that meeting that Poggi was returning to the Vatican on that icy November night in 1983. He was bringing with him the answer to the pope’s question: Who had ordered Agca to try to murder him?

  CHAPTER 12

  BLESSED ARE THE SPYMASTERS

  One of the massive gates of the Arch of the Bells was already closed—the prelude to the nightly ritual of locking all the entrances to the Vatican on the stroke of midnight—when the dark blue Fiat limousine crunched across the cobblestones, its lights picking out the two Swiss Guards caped against the chill. Behind them stood a Vigili. One of the guards stepped forward, arm raised half in salute, half in command to stop. The car was expected and the figure behind the wheel was the familiar one of a Vatican chauffeur. But after the assassination attempt on the pope, no one was taking any chances.

  The chauffeur had waited an hour at Rome’s airport for the flight from Vienna, which had been delayed by bad weather. The guard stepped back after raising his arm in full salute to the passenger in deep shadow on the rear seat. There was no return acknowledgment.

  The car drove past the side of St. Peter’s Basilica and bounced over the cobblestones of San Damaso Courtyard before stopping outside the main entrance to the Apostolic Palace. The driver jumped out and opened the door for his passenger. Archbishop Luigi Poggi emerged, dressed in severe black, a scarf covering the white flash of his collar. Physically he bore a resemblance to Rafi Eitan: the same powerful shoulders and biceps, the same rolling gait, and eyes that could be as cold as this night.

  As usual, Poggi had traveled with a small leather suitcase for his personal effects and a briefcase fitted with a combination lock. He sometimes joked he spent more time dozing in aircraft seats than asleep in his bed in the spacious suite he occupied at the rear of the Apostolic Palace.

  Few recent trips matched the importance of what Poggi had finally been told at the meeting in Vienna’s old Jewish Quarter. There, in a narrow steep-roofed building a few blocks from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s offices, the archbishop had listened raptly to a man they had agreed would only be called by his first name—Eli.

  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 International Defence Review and books with such arresting titles as The Problems of Military Readiness and Military Balance and Surprise Attack. They reflected the pontiff’s unswerving conviction that the main enemy the world still faced in 1983 was Soviet Communism.

  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 th
e 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.

  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.”

  It had been Krol who had accompanied Casey to the CIA director’s first audience with John Paul after his convalescence. Later, the cardinal had introduced Casey’s deputy, Vernon Walters, to the pontiff. Since then, the list of subjects the CIA officer and the pope discussed ranged from terrorism in the Middle East to the internal politics of the Church and the health of Kremlin leaders. For Richard Allen, a Catholic, who was Ronald Reagan’s first national security adviser: “The relationship between the CIA and the pope was one of the great alliances of all time. Reagan had this deep conviction the pope would help him to change the world.”

  More certain, common goals were established. The president and pontiff had proclaimed their united opposition to abortion. The United States blocked millions of dollars of aid to countries that ran family-planning programs. The pope, through a “purposeful silence,” supported U.S. military policies, including supplying NATO with a new generation of cruise missiles. The CIA regularly bugged the phones of bishops and priests in Central America who advocated liberation theology and opposed U.S.-backed forces in Nicaragua and El Salvador; the phone transcripts formed part of the pope’s Friday briefing by the Rome CIA station chief. Reagan had also personally authorized Colonel Oliver North, then working for the National Security Council, to make regular and substantial payments to priests the Vatican deemed “loyal” in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. The money was used to support their often lavish lifestyles and promote the Holy See’s opposition to birth control and divorce.

  One of the duties of the pope’s personal secretary, Monsignor Emery Kabongo, was to keep the list of approved priests updated. Another task was to fi
le the documents provided by the CIA and act as note taker to their clandestine meetings with the pope.

  Kabongo had first encountered the Washington spymasters on November 30, 1981, shortly after John Paul returned to work after being shot. After Kabongo joined John Paul for the first prayers of his day—5:15 A.M. on the longcase clock in the corridor outside the private chapel in the Papal Apartments—the two men had gone to the paneled study to receive CIA deputy director Vernon Walters. Kabongo would recall:

  “I took up my usual position in the corner of the room, a notebook on my knee. There was no interpreter present. General Walters asked what language should he use. His Holiness said he would be comfortable with Italian. Walters began by saying he brought greetings from President Reagan. The pope returned the felicitations. Then it was down to business. Walters produced satellite photographs and His Holiness was fascinated to see how clear they were. Walters spoke for over an hour about the CIA’s view of the latest Soviet intentions. His Holiness thanked him. At the end of the meeting, Walters produced a number of rosaries and asked the pope to bless them, explaining they were for relations and friends and His Holiness did so.”

  Intrigued by the pope’s ability to switch from temporal to spiritual matters, Admoni used his personal friendship with Secretary of State Alexander Haig—they had met when Admoni worked out of the Israeli embassy in Washington—to obtain a copy of the CIA’s psycho-profile of John Paul.