Two bullets tore into John Paul, hitting him in the stomach, right arm, and left hand. Within minutes, the semiconscious, seriously wounded Pontiff was in a wailing ambulance speeding the two miles to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital where he underwent five and a half hours of surgery to stem the blood loss and internal damage.1 By midnight, the hospital issued its first official status report that the Pontiff was in “guarded and serious condition.”2
The olive-skinned man tackled at the scene with a Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol was thirty-three-year-old Mehmet Ali Ağca, a convicted murderer who had escaped two years earlier from a prison in his native Turkey. Ağca had written to newspapers threatening to kill John Paul II in the name of Islam.3 Not everyone was convinced it was quite so straightforward. A BBC documentary only months after the shooting fingered the KGB as the mastermind behind the attempted assassination.4 The official Soviet newspaper Pravda ran a series accusing the CIA of having concocted the conspiracy.5 NBC followed up with a persuasive program that put the blame on Bulgaria’s secret service.6
Ağca had been on the periphery of the Gray Wolves (Bozkurtlar), an ultranationalist Turkish cell for which he had carried out the 1979 assassination of Abdi İpekçi, an editor of a prominent left-wing newspaper. Six months after a court sentenced him to life for that murder, he somehow donned an army uniform and walked through eight normally locked doors at a high-security military prison and found safe haven in neighboring Bulgaria.7 That country was under the iron-fisted control of Todor Zhivkov, a Stalinist-styled autocrat who had been in power since 1954. It was unlikely that a fugitive Turkish political murderer could stay there without coming to the attention of the National Intelligence Service, Bulgaria’s equivalent of the CIA. The National Intelligence Service’s intimate working alliance with the KGB later served as the foundation for the conspiracy theories that identified those agencies as the ones likely to have wanted John Paul II, the most stridently anticommunist Pope since Pius XII, dead.8,I
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the deputy speaker of the Russian State Duma, later told Russian Radio: “There is no direct evidence of necessarily a Russian connection here, but it was not to our liking that a Pole became the Pope of Rome, inasmuch as it was done specially by the CIA special services and by the USA to influence the situation in Poland through a Pole, the Pope of Rome, and this succeeded. A movement began there for real, akin to what we now regard as an orange revolution.”10
The “orange revolution” to which Zhirinovsky referred was the beginning of Pope John Paul’s activism against the communist regime that controlled his native Poland. Encouraged by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (who himself had survived an assassination attempt only six weeks before John Paul was shot), the Pontiff embarked in early 1981 on a policy of covertly supporting anticommunist movements throughout Eastern Europe.11
John Paul had been Pope less than a year when Polish shipyard workers in Gdańsk, led by Lech Walesa, a young union activist, had a standoff with the communist authorities. That resulted in the formation of a worker’s trade union, Solidarity. It eventually claimed nearly ten million members, about a quarter of Poland’s population.12 CIA Director William Casey considered Solidarity the ideal vehicle through which to rattle Poland’s communist leaders and the Soviets. At Casey’s encouragement, Poland became the U.S. administration’s first target by which to undermine the Soviet Bloc, which Reagan would in a couple of years dub the “Evil Empire.”13
As Walesa stood up to the communists, there were rumors that the Soviets might crack down on the trade unionists, just as they had crushed incipient democracy movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Pope John Paul dispatched Marcinkus on a secret trip in August 1980, sending a handwritten note to Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev.14,II In the letter, John Paul threatened to spearhead the Polish resistance if Soviet troops invaded.15 Once the Vatican leaked word of the Pope’s letter to the Polish clergy, it spread like wildfire through the ranks of Solidarity.16
In a pre–glasnost and perestroika era, it seemed natural that the Reagan administration would want a partnership with a Polish Pope who had repeatedly demonstrated his commitment to his native country’s small pro-democracy movement. All of the top American national security and intelligence officials—CIA Director Casey, National Security Advisor William Clark, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and roving ambassador and ex-CIA Director General Vernon Walters—were devout Catholics.17 U.S. officials also turned to Philadelphia’s archbishop, Cardinal John Krol, a Polish American and a close friend of John Paul II, as well as Archbishop Pio Laghi, the just-appointed Nuncio to the United States. Krol and Laghi became the original go-betweens for the Americans and the Vatican.18 Casey and Clark soon began dropping by the Nuncio’s Washington residence on Massachusetts Avenue for a briefing and breakfast. Laghi visited them—at least half a dozen times—at the White House.19
By the spring of 1981, Casey and General Walters began traveling to the Vatican every six months to brief the Pope, often with Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli present. They met with John Paul fifteen times over the next six years.20 The American consul to the Vatican at the time, Michael Hornblow, was at the first meeting between Casey and John Paul. “Anyone expecting a ‘holy alliance’ in their first get-together would have been disappointed,” Hornblow told the author. “It was a simple twenty minutes mostly of small talk, with the Pope having a hard time understanding Casey because of his thick New York accent.”21 But in subsequent meetings, the work began in earnest. The CIA shared classified intelligence with the Pontiff, everything from satellite photos of Soviet troop movements and missile sites—the Pope was fascinated by them—to data about communist efforts to undermine Solidarity.22 And Casey asked the church’s assistance in transporting to the resistance everything from communications equipment to printing presses.23
There was little doubt about the importance of their meetings given the events unfolding at the same time. On March 27, 1981, Poland had the largest demonstrations against a communist government since World War II. It was a movement that the United States and the Papacy were doing their best to encourage.
Reagan, who would have a private fifty-minute meeting with John Paul the following year at the Vatican, later told journalist Carl Bernstein: “We [Reagan and the Pope] both felt that a great mistake had been made at Yalta and something should be done. Solidarity was the very weapon for bringing this about.”24 The President confided to his National Security Advisor, William Clark, that he intended to make the Vatican a loyal ally, even if that meant breaking precedent and recognizing the church-state (Reagan did that in 1984, ending more than a century of U.S. opposition to such relations. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case brought by those opposed to diplomatic relations).25
“This was one of the great secret alliances of all time,” says former National Security Advisor Richard Allen.26 There was “considerable sharing of information about developments in Poland with the Vatican,” by Casey, Walters, and “sometimes our ambassador to the Vatican” (that was William A. Wilson, one of Reagan’s closest friends and a member of the president’s small kitchen cabinet of closest advisors).27 Lech Walesa and Solidarity leaders got steady intelligence from both U.S. agents as well as Catholic priests.28
The KGB took a dim view of the new alliance between Washington and the Vatican. A four-page top secret KGB assessment in early 1981warned about the church’s aggressive campaign to influence events inside the Pope’s native country.29 In April, KGB chief Yuri Andropov prepared a top secret dossier that concluded the Polish communist leadership was “inept” and suggested massive military maneuvers near the Polish border, leaving open the possibility of sending Soviet “troops into Poland.”30 In June, Hungarian intelligence distributed a report to the KGB and East Germans, titled “The Role of Zionists and the Catholic Church in the Activities of Solidarity.” The Hungarians concluded that the church was allied not only with the U.S. government, but also with “Italian Jews” and �
��Israel, as well as Polish emigrants in Western Europe.”31
The Vatican’s partnership with U.S. intelligence meant that Marcinkus’s help was sometimes required. Early on, he served as an informal conduit between Washington and the Vatican. His ability to brief the Pope, and to pass along intelligence during Papal travels, was considered indispensable. CIA Director Casey liked that in addition to his high rank inside the Vatican, Marcinkus was an American citizen.
John Paul, in return, had something to trade with the CIA. Just as the church’s army of clerics native to every country had provided Pius XII with grisly accounts of the Nazi Holocaust before any Western leader knew the details, John Paul provided the CIA with useful intelligence gathered from Polish priests. The information was so good that Reagan himself began awaiting the Pope’s summaries.32
The Pope gave Marcinkus the approval to create a secret conduit to send church money to Solidarity. That became an even greater priority after December 13, 1981, when Poland’s military ruler, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared martial law, outlawed Solidarity, detained six thousand members, charged hundreds with treason, and cut the telephone lines between Poland and Vatican City.33 For the next eight years, Marcinkus diverted an undetermined amount of money to what had become an underground movement to overthrow the communist regime.34 It is not clear where Marcinkus obtained the cash, but it likely came from a slush fund, either provided covertly by U.S. intelligence or through spare funds that Marcinkus had accumulated through his Calvi and Sindona dealings. Marcinkus never admitted to accepting half of the $6.5 million commission that Ambrosoli had charged that Sindona paid to the IOR chief and Calvi. But even his most ardent foes seldom accused him of profiting from any of the IOR’s questionable dealings.35 Instead, if money like that “commission” from the Banca Cattolica sale ended up in a special fund used at the direction of the Pope, it would be understandable how John Paul became such a strong defender of Marcinkus. Sindona later concluded that Marcinkus “was greedy because he wanted to give the money to the Pope because he wanted to become a cardinal.”36
And Calvi, who still needed the backing of the church as his own problems mounted in Italy, was ready to also assist. An Italian government investigation into the Ambrosiano years later raised questions about whether Calvi had paid Marcinkus extra cash for his refusal to disclose their convoluted business relationship even to Cisalpine’s accountant, Coopers & Lybrand. Investigators were suspicious about a $500,000 payment from a special Banco Ambrosiano Holding account at the IOR. It was paid out in 1980 at Calvi’s direction to an anonymous Vatican City recipient. The IOR has refused to open its records to show who received the money.37
Although Calvi later denied playing any role in the church’s covert money pipeline to Solidarity, he told a journalist that he warned Marcinkus the entire matter was a dangerous game that could lead to World War III: “If it comes out that you’re giving money to Solidarity, there won’t be a stone left of St. Peters.” And once, when secretly taped by Flavio Carboni, Calvi warned that if Marcinkus’s secret network and slush funds to funnel money to Solidarity were exposed, “the Vatican would collapse.”38
Italian intelligence agent Francesco Pazienza told the author that Marcinkus tapped him to convert $3.5 million of Vatican cash into physical gold from Credit Suisse. “They were the only Swiss bank at the time offering 99.99 percent pure gold ingots in small sizes,” Pazienza recalls. The gold was put in a Lada Niva SUV, hidden in a custom-built double bottom as well as inside its doors. “And a priest from Gdańsk drove it from Italy back to Poland.”39
A less comprehensive and dramatic political dynamic played out between the U.S. and the Vatican in Latin and Central America. In 1979, Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinista revolutionaries overturned the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. In a country where 89 percent of the population was Catholic, an atheist government that linked itself with godless Soviets caused great consternation at the Vatican. Other Latin American countries confronted the same fate from leftist insurgency movements. In Peru, the establishment was under assault by the Shining Path, violent Maoist guerrillas. El Salvador was in the midst of a civil war, with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, an umbrella military wing of four left-wing guerrilla organizations and the Salvadoran Communist Party, gaining ground. Colombia’s government was having a tough time fighting the Revolutionary Armed Forces, FARC, a Marxist-Socialist paramilitary force. And on the horizon was the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, another hard-core band of Marxist revolutionaries.
It was not a stretch for Bill Casey and Vernon Walters to convince John Paul that the church’s best interests in Latin and Central America were the same as those of the United States: supporting authoritarian regimes that were at least nominally Catholic.
Although John Paul condemned “savage capitalism,” and even told a reporter that there were “kernels or seeds of truth” in Marxism, he nevertheless dramatically changed course from Paul VI when it came to liberation theology, a twentieth-century mixture of Catholicism and left-wing ideologies that emphasized a redistribution of wealth to help the poor, particularly through political activism.40 Marcinkus, from his work with Sindona and Calvi, was more familiar than any other Vatican official with how to move money around Central and Latin America. The money arrangements among U.S. intelligence agencies, covert operatives, and Marcinkus left few footprints.41,III
John Paul rewarded Marcinkus for his service in September 1981 by appointing him as the city-state’s pro-president of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, the church’s chief administrator. The position automatically made Marcinkus an archbishop. In his new post, he oversaw the management of Vatican City’s day-to-day affairs. It encompassed everything from the relations with its 3,200 employees to all construction and maintenance projects, to the rules affecting its museums, radio station, post office, and newspaper.43 It was a remarkable turnaround even by the nine-lives standards of the Vatican. Marcinkus had weathered public scandal. He had emerged from assured banishment when John Paul I was elected to having not only reinforced his grip on the Vatican Bank, but expanded his influence. Curial gossip was that Marcinkus would return soon to America as a cardinal.
A wire service story by UPI agreed: “One of the most active prelates in the Vatican, Marcinkus will most probably be made a cardinal when the pope calls the next consistory. Traditionally, presidents of pontifical commissions are cardinals. Vatican observers said the new appointment and the fact that Marcinkus will maintain the presidency of the Vatican Bank, are clear indications that John Paul has full confidence in the prelate.”44
But while events played out in Marcinkus’s favor during 1981, matters beyond his control would soon trip him up.
* * *
I. Ağca later added to the frenzied speculation when he picked from a photo lineup three Bulgarian state officials and intelligence agents as accomplices. Italian prosecutors charged the three Bulgarians and four others, including Turkish ultranationalists, but failed to convict any. Ağca was mentally unstable, often claiming he was the world’s messiah. Later he dropped the Bulgarians from his story and said instead he got weapons training in Syria at a Soviet-sponsored camp for the terror group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. After his release from a Turkish prison in 2010, he announced that he shot the Pope because Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s fundamentalist revolution, had told him, “You have to kill the Pope in the name of Allah. You have to kill the devil’s mouthpiece on earth.”9
II. John Paul believed that delivering the note to Brezhnev was a critical intervention in the standoff over Solidarity. The Pope considered several emissaries, including Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli, Vienna’s Cardinal König, and John Paul’s private secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz. Casaroli had the advantage of speaking Russian. Marcinkus, who also spoke some Russian, was chosen because the Pope was convinced that he was the least likely to be intimidated by the Soviets
or Brezhnev.
III. The fall of communism that began in 1989 across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union made the Washington-Vatican alliance less urgent. In Poland, Solidarity was again legal, and the following year Lech Walesa was elected the country’s president. Signs of some strain in the partnership were evident that year. In December, Panama’s strongman, Manuel Noriega, took refuge in the Vatican’s embassy in Panama City. The previous year the church and Reagan administration had discussed finding a Latin American or European nation willing to grant Noriega asylum. The church had worked hard to get Spain to take Noriega. But under President George H. W. Bush, the Associated Press reported, the Americans had dressed down the Pope and his diplomatic staff in “extraordinarily tough terms.” The Vatican allowed U.S. authorities to take Noriega back to America to stand trial. The partnership between the United States and the Vatican was never again the same.42
24
“Tell Your Father to Be Quiet”
Gerardo D’Ambrosio, Milan’s chief investigating magistrate, had taken charge of the Calvi probe in April 1981.1 The following month, on May 20, Calvi was arrested at his Via Frau apartment.2 It was only a week after the attempted assassination on John Paul, and six days before Italy’s fortieth coalition government since World War II collapsed because of fallout from the P2 scandal.
Calvi and six directors of La Centrale Finanziaria, a financial company at which he was also president, were indicted for violating the country’s currency statutes by improperly exporting up to $50 million of lire through a web of offshore operations.3 News of Calvi’s arrest kicked off a tumble on Milan’s stock exchange, the beginning of a 40 percent slide over several weeks.4 The central bank drafted six major Italian banks into a consortium to stabilize the Ambrosiano with a line of credit.5
God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Page 41