Spies in the Vatican

Espionage and Intrigue from Napoleon to the Holocaust

David Alvarez

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780700612147, 9780700612147
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622894
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

Revered by millions, the Papacy is an international power that many nations have viewed with suspicion, some have tried to control, and not a few have spied upon. Ranging across two centuries of world history, David Alvarez’s fascinating study throws open the Vatican’s doors to reveal the startling but little-known world of espionage in one of the most sacred places on earth.

Reviewing the pontificates of ten popes—from Pius VII, Napoleon’s nemesis, to Pius XII, maligned by some as “Hitler’s pope”—Alvarez provides the first history of the intelligence operations and covert activities that reached the highest levels of the Vatican. Populated with world leaders, both famous and infamous, and a rogue’s gallery of professional spies, fallen priests, and mercenary informants, his work casts a bright light into the darker corners of papal history and international diplomacy, a light that often sparkles with a witty appreciation of the foibles of the espionage trade.

Alvarez reveals that the Vatican itself occasionally entered this clandestine world through such operations as a network of informants to spy on liberal Catholics or a covert mission to establish an underground church in the Soviet Union. More frequently, however, the Vatican was the target for hostile intelligence services seeking to expose the secrets of the Papacy. During World War I, for example, Pope Benedict XV’s personal assistant was a secret German agent. During World War II, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States sent spies into the Vatican to discover the pope’s intentions. The Nazis were especially resourceful, securing the services of apostate priests, such as Herbert Keller, an unscrupulous monk who exposed Pope Pius XII’s involvement in a plot against Hitler, and devising a plan to establish a “seminary” in Rome with agents posing as student priests. Alvarez recounts these operations and many more, including the methods by which the Vatican learned about the Holocaust.

Based on diplomatic and intelligence records in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, the United States, and the Vatican—with the latter including documents sealed after the author had access to them—Spies in the Vatican reveals that the Papacy often was hindered by its inability to collect timely and relevant intelligence and that it made little effort to improve its intelligence capabilities after 1870. Challenging the long-held notion that the pope is the world’s best-informed leader, Alvarez illuminates not only the inner workings of the Vatican but also the global events in which it was inextricably involved.

1

The End of the Papal States

In appearance there was nothing to distinguish the young man in the simple jacket and blouse of an Italian artisan from the other petitioners who, that July day in 1817, crowded the reception hall of the bishop’s palace in Fermo, a quiet hill town in the Marche region of Italy. He refused to state the nature of his business and declined an invitation to speak with a secretary, insisting that he must see the bishop personally. When, finally, the persistent visitor was ushered into the bishop’s study, it quickly became apparent that he was no ordinary petitioner.

The young man introduced himself as Paolo Monti, a resident of Fermo, and without further ado he announced that he was a senior officer in a clandestine revolutionary organization committed to overthrowing the pope’s rule in the Papal States, the broad swath of territory stretching across central Italy that pontiffs had governed as priest-kings for centuries. Monti explained that earlier that year, at the direction of his superiors, he had prepared a plan for insurrections in the principal cities of the papal domain set to flare upon the death of the seriously ailing pope, the seventy-five-year-old Pius VII. The plan was shelved, in part because Pius recovered (he would vex his opponents by living another six years) and in part because it was far too ambitious for the limited resources of the revolutionaries. Acting on their own, perhaps in the hope of sparking a spontaneous uprising, a band of hotheads in Macerata, a town near Fermo, had attacked police posts on the night of 24 June 1817. The attacks were repulsed, and the only consequence was increased pressure on the clandestine organization as the pope’s police flooded Macerata with reinforcements in an effort to suppress the revolutionary underground.

Standing before the bishop of Fermo, two weeks after the Macerata incident, Monti explained that a guilty conscience had driven him to confess his criminal activity, and to prove his contrition he was prepared to reveal everything he knew about the membership and plans of his secret organization. The astonished bishop, more accustomed to dealing with confirmation schedules, the finances of poor parishes, and the peccadillos of errant priests than with self-confessed terrorists, hardly knew what to do with the earnest young man. He decided to pack the penitent off to Rome, the capital of the Papal States and the home of the Curia, the central administration of the Catholic Church.

In the Eternal City Monti was personally interviewed by Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, the pope’s secretary of state and chief minister in both foreign and domestic affairs. Cardinal Consalvi passed the erstwhile revolutionary to Monsignor Tiberio Pacca, the director general of the papal police. A secret police officer in clerical costume, Pacca was an old hand at conspiracy.¹ He owed his senior position in part to his success several years earlier in exposing the clandestine channels by which Napoleon Bonaparte, the former emperor of France and scourge of Europe, then living in exile on the small Italian island of Elba, had plotted his return to power with his supporters in France and Italy. Pacca immediately saw an opportunity to penetrate the antipapal underground. Assuming correctly that Monti’s former colleagues remained ignorant of his betrayal, the wily police official sent the repentant revolutionary back to Fermo to reestablish contact with them. From his position inside the underground, Monti passed to the papal police intelligence on the membership, structure, and plans of conspiratorial groups in the Marche. With this intelligence the police were able to arrest more than thirty conspirators and deal a serious blow to the revolutionary movement in central Italy.²

The image of a papal official in clerical dress and collar directing intelligence operations, recruiting double agents, and penetrating clandestine organizations is somewhat incongruous, but the nineteenth century was a dangerous time for the Papacy, and popes as much as kings and emperors relied on intelligence to anticipate and deflect threats to their power. Since the collapse of the Roman Empire, the popes had successfully claimed the right to rule as temporal sovereigns in central Italy. Expanding or contracting according to the relative strength or weakness of the Papacy, the papal domain allegedly provided the pontiffs the political and financial independence necessary for the unfettered exercise of their spiritual authority. Without his own state, the argument went, the pope would become little more than the chaplain of whatever monarch controlled Rome, dependent on the goodwill of that monarch for the food on his table, the water in his cisterns, the wool in his cloak, the very ink and paper on his desk. Although the popes claimed a place in the councils of kings and potentates on the basis of their spiritual office of Vicar of Christ on earth, this claim was buttressed, especially after the Protestant Reformation, by sovereign control over territory, population, and resources. For both religious and political reasons, therefore, Catholics, both churchmen and laypeople, came over the centuries to believe that the status and prerogatives of the Papacy were inextricably linked with its control of the Papal States. By the nineteenth century, however, that control and the claims that depended on it were under serious assault.

The Papal States proved no more capable than other European principalities of withstanding the wars and political upheavals that followed in the wake of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries lumped the Catholic Church together with monarchy and aristocracy as oppressive elements of the old order that they were determined to sweep away. Remnants of religious practice might survive, but only in a form supportive of revolutionary purposes. In 1796 the Directory, the ruling junta in Paris, had sent into Italy an army under its youngest and most ambitious general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to chastise Pope Pius VI for resisting its effort to subordinate the Catholic Church in France to the revolutionary regime. Despite the occupation of Rome and other papal cities and the imposition of crippling indemnities, including the shipment to Paris of valuable artworks and ancient manuscripts from church buildings and libraries, Pius remained unbowed. In 1798 the eighty-one-year-old pontiff was forcibly removed from Rome by French troops (who interrupted the kidnapping to plunder the Vatican palace) and dragged from one place of temporary incarceration to another until, in 1799, he died in the fortress of Valence in southern France.

The cardinals who were free to travel gathered in Venice under the protection of the Austrian emperor to elect a successor to the martyred pope. Their choice, the Benedictine monk and cardinal bishop of Imola, Luigi Barnaba Chiaramonti, assumed the name Pius VII in memory of his predecessor. Hoping to reach an accommodation with Napoleon, who had in the meantime returned to France to overthrow the Directory and establish one-man rule, the new pope negotiated with the new dictator a concordat (treaty) by which, at least in theory, church and state demarcated their respective rights and responsibilities in French religious life. The pontiff also flattered Napoleon’s ego by agreeing to officiate at his coronation as emperor of France in 1804.

Pius, however, refused to ally the Papacy with Napoleon’s program of personal aggrandizement and imperial expansion. Insisting on his political neutrality in the constant warfare that was the French emperor’s gift to Europe in the years between 1798 and 1815, the pontiff declined to close the ports of the Papal States to the shipping of Britain, France’s principal enemy, and categorically rejected Napoleon’s request to control one-third of the seats in the College of Cardinals, the body responsible for electing popes. For his part, the emperor was not about to allow a stubborn monk to challenge his power and tarnish his glory. In February 1808 French troops occupied Rome and surrounded the Palazzo Quirinale, the papal residence, where Pius remained defiant behind gates barred and patrolled by his Swiss Guards. The standoff continued until May 1809, when Napoleon, frustrated by the pope’s recalcitrance, simply signed a decree incorporating the Papal States into the French empire and allowing the Holy Father to continue to reside in his private palace with an annual allowance of 2 million lire. Refusing to become a ward of the French empire, Pius rejected the terms of the decree and announced the excommunication of all those responsible for formulating and executing the document. Outraged by this new act of defiance, Napoleon decided to remove this affront to his power once and for all.

On the night of 5 July 1809, French troops broke into the Palazzo Quirinale. As one French detachment disarmed the heavily outnumbered Swiss Guards, another descended from the roof into the papal apartments, where they found Pius calmly awaiting their arrival. When the Holy Father courteously but firmly refused the demand of the French commander to renounce his claim to the Papal States, he was pushed into a carriage and rushed out of Rome under heavy escort. Eventually the pope was confined in virtual isolation and spartan conditions in Savona, a small town near Genoa. Pius, who had spent most of his life in Benedictine monasteries, was little discomfited by the rough conditions of his imprisonment. Nor was he impressed when, in the summer of 1812, Napoleon, hoping to substitute the carrot for the stick, transferred him to Fontainebleau, a luxurious château near Paris. Napoleon’s blandishments were no more effective than his threats. Pius resolutely refused to renounce the territorial claims of the Papacy or to accept any arrangement that would reduce the Papacy to a chaplaincy of the French emperor. When, upon the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Pius was released from custody to return in triumph to Rome, the pope fully expected to reassume his position as both a secular and a spiritual ruler. Unfortunately, others did not share this expectation.³

At the Congress of Vienna, the great international conference convened to reconstitute the traditional European order upon the ruins of Napoleon’s empire, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Pius VII’s brilliant secretary of state, successfully negotiated the return to the Church of its territories and authority in central Italy. However, the odds against the pope or his successors retaining these territories and maintaining that authority were high. Under French occupation or influence almost continuously between 1798 and 1814, the States of the Church had borne the exactions, requisitions, and confiscations that were the unwelcome burden of any territory subdued by Napoleon. The papal territories, however, had also harvested the fruits of French domination, namely, the limited civil and social reforms that allowed Napoleon to justify, systematize, and exploit his conquests. Centuries-old clerical government had been swept away in a flood of decrees and proclamations and replaced by secular administrations staffed entirely by laymen. Civil law was clearly distinguished from ecclesiastical law, and the jurisdiction of the latter was significantly curtailed. Taxes were rationalized, while projects to improve education, transportation, and public order were put in hand. The secularization of politics and society and the reform of administrative institutions struck a responsive chord among the professional and middle classes in the papal territories. While these groups may have applauded the end of French domination, they did not welcome the return of papal power and clerical rule, both of which represented, in the minds of many, obscurantism, inefficiency, and repression.

The reform-minded subjects of the pope were also not immune to the rising national sentiment that looked toward the unification of the ancient and ineffectual principalities of the Italian peninsula into a single nation-state under a popular and progressive regime. Throughout Italy secret societies with such names as Guelfi (Guelphs), Carbonari (charcoal burners), Cavalieri della Libertà (Knights of Liberty), and Giovane Italia (Young Italy) appeared to challenge the traditional order and the regimes that protected that order. With their earnest manifestos, elaborate initiation rituals, and secret passwords, these groups adopted a comic-opera manner that often obscured the deadly seriousness of their revolutionary purpose. With the restoration of clerical rule in central Italy, several such groups committed themselves to the violent overthrow of papal government.

After the Congress of Vienna, ecclesiastical authorities, fearing that political and social reforms were merely the precursors of political and social revolution, had no intention of accommodating challenges to the pope’s temporal rule in central Italy and condemned such challenges as dangerously radical and irreligious. A few farsighted individuals, such as Cardinal Consalvi, were open to cautious change, recognizing that prudent and timely reforms were often a better guarantee against revolution than police repression. At the urging of his secretary of state, Pope Pius instituted several modest reforms aimed at humanizing the government of the Papal States without substantially changing it. Some, such as the separation of civil tribunals from ecclesiastical courts and the reorganization of finances, continued innovations introduced by the French; others, such as the prohibition of torture in judicial proceedings, merely formalized established practice. Unfortunately, reactionary elements in the College of Cardinals and the papal administration, known collectively as zelanti (zealots), successfully impeded and undermined reforms that might have removed at least some of the popular discontent and quieted the more strident voices calling for revolutionary change. Even before the death of Pius in July 1823 and the subsequent departure from office of Consalvi, the zelanti and their attitudes were in the ascendancy.

Pius’s successors were committed to affirming rather than reforming the traditional order. Pope Leo XII (1823–29) was a reactionary who substituted principle for prudence and inflexibility for imagination. He dismissed Consalvi, canceled the administrative and legal reforms instituted by the reforming secretary of state, strengthened censorship of books and newspapers, restored the judicial privileges of the higher clergy, and built a new prison to house those convicted of heresy. To protect civic morality, his administration removed from public view statuary of nude figures, promulgated legislation regulating female dress, prohibited men from walking too closely behind women, and banned the waltz as obscene. Even medical vaccination was denounced as an imprudent departure from traditional practices. In the political realm, Leo endorsed the suppression of political dissent and excommunicated Catholics who joined the secret revolutionary societies.⁴

The pontificate of Pope Pius VIII (1829–30) was too brief to accomplish much beyond affirming the death penalty for revolutionaries. It was left to the next pope, Gregory XVI (1831–46), a pontiff so enamored with the past that he banned railroads from his domain, to face the political storm. Three days after his election a revolt broke out in Bologna, the principal city of the northern Papal States, and quickly spread across the country as the pope’s small and ineffectual army fled the rebels or joined their ranks. Within three weeks the new pontiff controlled little beyond the walls of Rome, while inside the Eternal City antipapal conspirators were so active that Gregory considered fleeing to Genoa or Venice. The pope was saved only by the intervention of Austria, which dispatched an army from Austrian-controlled territories in northern Italy to ruthlessly suppress the rebellion. The victory, however, was only a temporary reprieve, since the surviving revolutionaries simply went underground to continue the struggle. The result was a low-intensity conflict of terrorist attacks by revolutionaries and counterterrorist operations by papal security forces that persisted throughout Gregory’s pontificate.⁵

Briefly it seemed that Gregory’s successor, Pius IX (1846–78), might assuage popular discontent and reverse the deteriorating political situation in the Papal States. A moderate reformer, Pius opened his pontificate by releasing political prisoners and decreeing modest reforms, including the liberalization of press controls and the creation of city and state councils that included laymen. These changes, however, merely fueled popular expectations. When Pius made it clear that the reforms were the limit of his concessions, that he had no intention of moving toward a constitutional monarchy that might compromise in any way his temporal sovereignty, and that he would not join a national crusade to expel the Austrians from northern Italy, popular disorders broke out in Rome. On 15 November 1848 an assassin murdered Pellegrino Rossi, the pope’s chief minister. The next day an armed mob swarmed around the Palazzo Quirinale and exchanged gunfire with the Swiss Guards. Several guardsmen were wounded, and Pius’s secretary was killed by a musket ball while standing next to the pontiff at a window. Enraged, the mob threatened to storm and destroy the palace unless the pope disarmed his Swiss Guards, accepted a “civic guard” as his new protectors, and granted a popular government. To avoid further bloodshed, Pius reluctantly acceded to these demands. His status uncertain, he remained in his palace under virtual house arrest until the evening of 24 November, when he made a run for it.

Pius began planning his escape even as his new “protectors” were taking up their positions outside his apartments and at the gates of his palace. The French, Bavarian, and Spanish ambassadors agreed to help: the Frenchman undertaking to get the pope out of the palace, the Bavarian to get him across the border to Naples, and the Spaniard to provide a ship to carry him, if necessary, to refuge in Spain. On the evening of 24 November the French ambassador arrived at the Quirinale and informed the civic guards that he had an audience with His Holiness. Admitted to the papal apartments, the ambassador began speaking in a loud voice as if in conversation with someone. This was for the benefit of the guards outside the door. While the diplomat carried on an imaginary conversation, the pope, dressed in the black cassock of a common priest, with his faced obscured by a muffler and dark glasses, slipped out through a secret stairway accompanied only by an aide. At a side door to the palace, the two “priests” politely greeted th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The End of the Papal States
• 2 Prisoner of the Vatican
• 3 The Great War
• 4 Facing the Dictators
• 5 Men in Black
• 6 Between Moscow and Washington
• 7 “The Best Information Service in the World”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover