Then he veers like the wind and is gone, this culprit who makes his own strength his god!
—Habakkuk 1:11
D uring the four years, seven months, and six days that John XXIII governed the Church of Rome, the Holy Alliance experienced a period of inactivity. The pope was more interested in granting an audience to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s daughter Raisa or preparing for the revolutionary Second Vatican Council than in worrying about more earthly and political affairs on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
The Holy Alliance devoted itself to placing agents in the countries of Eastern Europe, given the growing power of communism and full fury of the Cold War. The Sodalitium Pianum , for its part, carried out intense surveillance of figures in the Roman curia and their respective departments who would be in charge of launching Vatican II.
When Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, who had been in charge of the Vatican secret service since the papacy of Pius XII, died on July 12, 1960, the supreme pontiff John XXIII decided not to appoint a substitute. The pope was in favor of “opening the Vatican’s doors to the world.” This implied the end of secret operations by its intelligence services.
In late 1962, John XXIII himself suffered a severe hemorrhage, the first sign of a serious disease. On May 17, 1963, the Holy Father’s ills grew worse, confining him to his bed. Toward the end of the month, his condition improved, but then one night peritonitis set in. On June 3, John XXIII died, leaving the Throne of St. Peter vacant. The conclave had to meet again, for the sixth time so far in the twentieth century, to elect a successor. 1
A few days before retiring into the conclave, a group of cardinals led by Giacomo Lercaro of Bologna met in the Villa Grottaferrata, owned by Umberto Ortolani. There, protected by the night and by Holy Alliance agents charged with guarding Their Eminences until the meeting in which they would elect the new pope, this group considered which cardinal to support. Their choice was Giovanni Battista Montini, Archbishop of Milan, who had already been told about the meeting in the house of the famous Freemason. 2
The conclave began on the afternoon of July 19, 1963. Two days later, on the fifth ballot, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, sixty-five years old, was elected pope. He received his crown nine days later, having taken the name Paul VI. The new pope’s first decision was to reciprocate the Mason Or-tolani’s hospitality by conferring on him the status of a “Gentleman of His Holiness.”
The man who had helped Krunoslav Draganovic to create the so-called Vatican Ratline, who had been one of the highest officials of the Roman curia to be implicated in Operation Monastery, which aided the flight of Nazi and Croat war criminals after the Second World War, was now the supreme pontiff. 3 The Vatican secret services, the Holy Alliance and the Sodalitium Pianum , would be reborn from their ashes, once again operating at full steam. Paul VI put this difficult task in the hands of a simple priest. His name was Pasquale Macchi. He had met Cardinal Montini when the latter was first assigned to lead the archbishopric of Milan. Macchi became not only his private secretary but also his best source of information. Now that he had been chosen as pope, Paul VI turned one of the most powerful information apparatuses on earth over to Macchi. The Holy Alliance was only a few years shy of completing its fourth century in operation since its creation by order of the inquisitor general Cardinal Miguel Ghislieri, soon to become Pope Pius V.
Some evidence points to Pasquale Macchi as the ultimate chief of the Vatican state’s espionage services, while other reports suggest that perhaps he never rose to the height of directing the Holy Alliance but was only a buffer connecting and separating the supreme pontiff and a cardinal who truly ran the espionage services. In any case, Paul VI’s papacy of just over fifteen years became one of the most fruitful for the Holy Alliance’s operations.
Names such as Michele Sindona, Roberto Calvi, Paul Marcinkus, Carlos the Jackal, Black September, Golda Meir, and Mossad indicate some of the people and organizations that occupied the Holy See’s espionage agents during this time. The enemy was not only outside the Vatican’s walls but also inside; Freemasonry is one example.
One of the most spectacular Vatican counterespionage operations carried out by the Sodalitium Pianum took place during the first years of Paul VI’s papacy. Evidently, Moscow and the KGB had a heightened interest in the Vatican state, and therefore Soviet intelligence determined to place a mole in the highest ranks of the Roman curia, alongside the supreme pontiff himself.
Alighiero Tondi had studied in a Jesuit seminary and, thanks to his efficiency, had become Monsignor Montini’s secretary and aide. When Montini assumed the papacy in Rome, he brought young Tondi with him from Milan. 4
In fact, however, the Jesuit was an undercover agent for the KGB within the Vatican, perhaps one of the most active. When he graduated from seminary in 1936, Tondi began working in Catholic publishing houses, where he first formed ties with communist groups. He was even selected by the Italian Communist Party to study at Lenin University in Moscow. There Soviet intelligence recruited him to operate inside the Vatican.
Tondi began work as a Soviet agent in 1944, betraying the Russicum priests sent to the Soviet Union as undercover evangelists. The Holy Alliance later calculated that Alighiero Tondi betrayed some 250 members of the Russicum , many of whom ended their lives in Soviet gulags or were executed on charges of having spied against the USSR. 5
In 1967, a Sodalitium Pianum agent reported that Tondi had been seen in a Roman café with a “supposed” KGB agent posted to the Soviet embassy in Rome. From then on, without Pope Paul VI’s knowledge, Father Alighiero Tondi was placed under counterintelligence surveillance. The Holy Alliance wanted to know how far Tondi had penetrated Vatican security. Finally, one night in 1968, the counterespionage agency got word that His Holiness’s secretary had requested some documents from the Vatican Secret Archives. Immediately, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, head of the Archives, was told to stall Tondi until Holy Alliance agents could get there. The file requested by Alighiero Tondi included communications between Paul VI and his nunciatures and legations in Eastern Europe, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. If Tondi had gained access to these communications, the cover and safety of Holy Alliance agents in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania would have been jeopardized.
Tondi told the counterespionage agents that the pope himself had requested these files. He said that since he was following a papal order, he would answer only to Paul VI. The Jesuit was taken to an office, where he remained under the guard of two Vatican security agents overnight. The first call went out to the cardinal secretary of state, Amleto Giovanni Cicognani. The head of the Holy Alliance told the cardinal that the pope’s secretary had been arrested on suspicion of spying for the Soviet Union inside the Vatican. Cicognani immediately informed the supreme pontiff, counseling him to turn Tondi over to the Italian police for prosecution. But the papal espionage service urged Paul VI to expel Tondi from the Vatican without explanation, on the condition that he never return.
That same night, wearing only the clothes on his back, Alighiero Tondi, Pope Paul VI’s secretary and a KGB agent in the Vatican for the past twenty-four years, was taken to the Vatican-Italian line by a group of Swiss Guards. From there he set out for Russia, where he became an advisor on Church affairs to the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. 6
It was not only the Soviets who infiltrated the Vatican, however. The Masons had their spies as well. Since late 1968, Vatican counterintelligence had been investigating various members of the curia in search of possible Masonic “infiltrations.” The investigation went on until early 1971, when one day the head of the Sodalitium Pianum was called before the pope. Paul VI wanted to hear the details of this operation. The S.P. head offered the supreme pontiff a thick dossier with names, dates, and places demonstrating all the links between Freemasonry and various Vatican departments. 7
The Masons within the curia knew that they needed to be close to the heartbeat of history, as the writer Cesare Pavese said, and they followed the simple dictum “Believe as little as possible without becoming a heretic, so that you can obey as little as possible without becoming a rebel.”
The report prepared by papal counterespionage exposed the tentacles of the Masonic octopus that had spread through the palaces of the Vatican. Many years had passed and many popes come and gone between the time Clement XII (July 12, 1730—February 8, 1740) had issued a bull excommunicating all Masons and an October 19, 1974, article in the magazine Civiltà Cattolica in which the Jesuit priest Giovanni Caprile tried to put Catholics affiliated with Freemasonry at ease. In truth, since Montini’s accession to the Throne of St. Peter, Masons had begun appearing everywhere in the Vatican’s halls. The most important was the banker Michele Sindona, whom the pope named as his financial advisor. A few years later, Paul VI would entrust the power of the IOR 8 to four Masons: Sindona, Roberto Calvi, Licio Gelli, and Umberto Ortolani.
The pope himself told the counterespionage chief to close the investigation of Freemasonry in the Vatican. He ordered the report deposited in the Secret Archive.
Years later, in 1987, journalist Pier Carpi put forward the claim that many cardinals and bishops belonged to the Masonic lodge Propaganda 2 or P2, 9 which he called the Loggia Ecclesia , closely tied to the United Lodge of England and its grand master Michael, Duke of Kent. Another press report 10 revealed that “Masonry has divided the Vatican into eight sections, in which four Scottish Rite lodges are active. Their members, high officials of the small Vatican state, belong to the rite as individuals and are apparently unknown to each other, even by the signal of three taps with the thumb.” Be this as it may, since Paul VI ordered the SP’s investigation closed in 1971, there has been no further probing of the issue within the Vatican’s walls. 11
The Sodalitium Pianum’s list of Masons included such illustrious cardinals as Augustín Bea, secretary of state during the papacies of John XXIII and Paul VI; Sebastiano Baggio, prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops; Agostino Casaroli, secretary of state during the papacy of John Paul II; Achille Lienart, Archbishop of Lille; Pasquale Macchi, Pope Paul VI’s private secretary; Salvatore Pappalardo, Archbishop of Palermo; Michele Pelligrino, Archbishop of Turin; Ugo Poletti, vicar of the diocese of Rome; and Jean Villot, Pope Paul VI’s secretary of state. 12
The famous dossier on Freemasonry’s tentacles inside the Vatican prepared by the counterespionage agents remained “buried” in the Vatican Secret Archives.
In early January 1974, the supreme pontiff ordered the heads of the Holy Alliance and Sodalitium Pianum to meet with him in his private dining room. The three men met for about three and a half hours. No one else knew what was said or how, but during this meeting Paul VI asked his intelligence directors to put in motion what became known as “Operation Nessun Dorma” (Let no one sleep).
The goal of this operation was to assemble a broad report revealing the needs and deficiencies of all Vatican departments and detailing accusations of corrupt behavior by Vatican officials. Although the investigation itself was assigned to the Holy Alliance, the task of writing the final report fell to Archbishop Édouard Gagnon and Monsignor Istvan Mester, the head of the Congregation for the Clergy. 13
For months, Holy Alliance agents walked kilometer after kilometer of Vatican hallways, questioning and interrogating all the officials of the many papal departments. In a few weeks, the pope’s spies had hundreds of accusations of irregularities and crimes committed by bishops and cardinals. Finally, Monsignor Gagnon, as president of the commission, spent three months organizing all the material the Holy Alliance had collected. The voluminous report exposing hidden activities within the curia bore the title Nessun Dorma , the same as the Holy Alliance operation. Holy Alliance and S.P. agents kept watch over it every night. Still, other forces were determined to keep the report from ever reaching Paul VI.
Once he had finished writing the report, Monsignor Gagnon requested an audience with the supreme pontiff through the secretariat of state. Gagnon wanted to personally inform Paul VI of what the Holy Alliance agents had found. Weeks went by, and he got no response. Finally the secretariat replied that, given the sensitive nature of the matter, the dossier should be handed over to the Congregation for the Clergy, directed by Cardinal John Joseph Wright. There it would remain in the custody of Monsignor Istvan Mester until Gagnon was summoned before the pope.
The dossier was ensconced in a chest with iron locks inside one of the rooms of the Congregatio pro Clerici . On the morning of June 2, 1974, Monsignor Mester opened the door to this room and found books scattered on the floor, papers in disarray, and boxes opened. He immediately called Monsignor Édouard Gagnon, who in turn called the heads of the Holy Alliance and the Sodalitium Pianum . When they arrived, they found Mester on his knees in front of the chest in which the dossier Nessun Dorma had been placed on the afternoon of May 30. The locks had been ripped off. The report of the completed investigation was gone. The counterespionage service concluded that the thieves must have had keys to the quarters of the Congregation for the Clergy, because none of the door locks had been forced. Sometime during Saturday, May 31, and Sunday, June 1, the unknown intruders had carried out the theft.
When Pope Paul VI learned of this assault, the supreme pontiff ordered everyone connected to the case, including the espionage agents involved in the investigation, to put themselves under the rule of “Pontifical Secrecy.” 14
Monsignor Gagnon informed the secretariat of state that he was ready to write a new report. Mysteriously, he was ordered (still under “Pontifical Secrecy”) to turn his notes over to the secretariat and suspend any further work on the matter until he received new orders. Investigation of the robbery was turned over to Camillo Cibin, head of the Corpo di Vigilanza (the Vatican police force). The secret services, who had gathered the information in Nessun Dorma , were incomprehensibly left out.
Cibin was to inform only the secretariat of state, without filing written reports on any part of his investigation. The pope ordered the entire affair to be kept an absolute secret, but rumors about the theft of a secret dossier had already begun circulating outside as well as inside the Vatican.
On Tuesday, June 3, the press began to report that “thieves had broken into a secured room somewhere inside the Vatican, and there is speculation that a report prepared on the orders of the pope himself has disappeared.” Dr. Federico Alessandrini, the Vatican spokesman, could not escape from journalists’ repeated questions. Finally, even the Holy See’s official paper, L’Osservatore Romano , reported the theft: “It is a case of true and shameful robbery. Unknown thieves entered the office of a prelate and stole files from a solid chest with a double lock. This is a true scandal,” the article said.
In the following days, fourteen members of the curia who had spoken with Holy Alliance agents and given them information on corruption in various departments were expelled from the Vatican. Five more were sent to Africa on an “evangelical mission.”
Although Monsignor Gagnon was not told to write a new report, the clergyman secretly put together a replacement for the stolen one. When he had finished, he again requested an audience with Pope Paul VI. Again his request was rejected. Then he asked the secretariat of state to forward the report to the pontiff, but the dossier did not get there. Someone in the secretariat told the pope that the Nessun Dorma report could not be found. Rumors of conspiracy all pointed to Cardinal Jean Villot, ex—secretary of state and former cardinal-chamberlain of the Apostolic Chamber, who was known in the Vatican as the “vice-pope.”
Finally, Monsignor Édouard Gagnon asked permission to retire, leaving the Holy See for his home country of Canada. In 1983, John Paul II recalled him to Rome, raising him to the rank of cardinal on May 25, 1985.
Nothing more was heard about Operation Nessun Dorma in the halls of the Vatican. No future pope ever again assigned the Holy Alliance and the Sodalitium Pianum any similar investigation. But the Vatican secret services continued to run in high gear during Paul VI’s papacy, fighting new enemies. One of these was Black September.
The Holy Alliance’s “Operation Jerusalem” and the Mossad’s 15 “Operation Diamond” showed that the two espionage services were working together. This collaboration would bear fruit in a few years when the Mossad, at war with Black September over the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, exposed an operation to kidnap or assassinate Pope Paul VI.
In late autumn of 1972, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir received a secret message from Pope Paul VI. He said he would like her to come for a brief personal audience. On December 11, Meir met with her cabinet and with Mossad’s memuneh 16 Zvi Zamir to ask their advice about the meeting with the supreme pontiff and the security measures it would require.
Meir made it clear that she “did not want to go to Canossa,” a popular Israeli expression alluding to the Italian castle where in 1077 Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire had humiliated himself by presenting himself before Pope Gregory VII as a penitent. Meir was too proud for that.
Zamir (through the Holy Alliance) and the Israeli foreign ministry (through the Vatican secretariat of state) knew that January 15, 1973, was the date selected for the meeting. Cardinal Jean Villot said the encounter would last thirty-five minutes, followed by an exchange of gifts. The meeting between Paul VI and Golda Meir would not follow a specific agenda, which was to say that any subject could be brought up by either side. For security reasons, surveillance and control would be in the hands of Mossad, directed by Zamir, and the Holy Alliance. Under no circumstances would there be any public announcement of the meeting between the two high officials, either before or after the event. 17
According to the plan, Meir would fly to Paris to attend a conference of the Socialist International on January 13 and 14. From there, an unmarked plane rented by El Al airline would take her to Rome. The aides accompanying Meir would not know their final destination until the flight was in the air. After meeting the pope, Meir would travel to the Ivory Coast to meet for two days with President Félix Houhouiet-Boigny, and from there she would return to Israel.
Zamir decided to get to Rome a week earlier so as to prepare the security measures and create a channel connecting him to the Holy Alliance agents. The memuneh saw the Eternal City as a possible staging area for an Arab terrorist attack. Since Black September’s assault on the Israeli delegation to the Munich Olympics the year before, the Italian capital had become a meeting ground for terrorists of all factions in search of information and arms traffickers in search of clients.
The liaisons connecting Mossad and the Holy Alliance were Mark Hessner on the Israeli side and Father Carlo Jacobini on the Holy Alliance side. Hessner was joined by Shai Kauly, the case officer of the Mossad station in Milan. In a secret meeting, Zvi Zamir briefed Jacobini, Kauly, and Hessner on all the details of Golda Meir’s trip to meet with Pope Paul VI. Clearly, none of this information could be allowed to leak out if they wanted to avoid a possible assassination attempt against the Israeli leader.
A day later, the Vatican counterespionage, the Sodalitium Pianum , informed Jacobini that someone, possibly a priest attached to the secretariat of state, had passed information about Meir to a contact in Rome known to have relations with Arab extremists.
The Holy Alliance agent alerted Zamir, who called Golda Meir personally to try to convince her it might be wiser to cancel the visit with Paul VI. Knowing the prime minister as he did, he was aware that a mere threat would not set her back in her attempt to win Vatican recognition of Israel, even if she had to risk an assassination attempt by Arab terrorists. Meir’s only response to Zamir was, “Memuneh , your work is to prevent this. Israel cannot be stopped by a threat.”
The Vatican assigned an additional Sodalitium Pianum counterespionage expert to provide security for the meeting. This was Father Angelo Casoni. It was he, in fact, who had discovered that word of Golda Meir’s clandestine trip to meet with Pope Paul VI in the Vatican could have reached the ears of Abú Yúsuf. The Holy Alliance’s Carlo Jacobini and the Mossad’s Zvi Zamir knew that sooner or later some terrorist group would put in an appearance. In fact, Yúsuf had sent a message to Ali Hassan Salameh, alias the Red Prince , the top leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September and the brains behind the operation against the Israeli athletes in Munich. The text of this message said: “Let’s get the one who is spilling our blood all over Europe.” 18 The method and exact site of the attempt on Meir would depend on Salameh. While the assassination of Golda Meir would be a master stroke in the Red Prince’s fight against the Israelis, for Yúsuf it would be a spectacular way to show the world that Black September remained a powerful terrorist group that had to be taken into account. Assassinating the Israeli leader in the Vatican would put his group in the top headlines of every communications medium. 19
On January 10, five days before the meeting, memuneh Zvi Zamir and katsa Mark Hessner and Shai Kauly stepped into a black car to be driven through the streets of Rome to the Vatican. The Swiss Guards at the gate stood at attention as the car passed through into the administrative area of the Holy See. When the passengers emerged, they were met by Father Carlo Jacobini. From his report on Jacobini, Zamir knew that the priest had studied in the United States and that he had taken several courses on intelligence work at Langley, the CIA headquarters in Virginia. The Holy Alliance agent spoke six languages fluently. In the Vatican, he was regarded as a true “noble” because of his family ties to Cardinal Dominico Maria Jacobini, Cardinal Ludovico Jacobini (who had been secretary of state to Pope Leo XIII), and Cardinal Angelo Jacobini. Without a doubt, Zvi Zamir knew that young Carlo was a very useful contact in the mazes of the Vatican, especially since the Holy Alliance’s loss of confidence in the CIA.
Nothing is known about the content of this secret meeting between Mossad and the Holy Alliance inside the Vatican, but Zamir surely departed satisfied with what he heard. Crossing the Piazza San Pietro, the memuneh told his driver they were going to the airport so he could catch a flight to Tel Aviv.
The “Institute,” as the Israeli intelligence service was known, was now well aware that Ali Hassan Salameh had been informed about Golda Meir’s impending trip to Rome. Thanks to the work of Father Angelo Casoni, they knew they had to be ready for an attack.
The terrorist groups had a special relationship with the KGB. They received political indoctrination in Moscow, as well as training in assassination techniques and in the use of explosives, which they later placed in shopping centers and crowded airport terminals.
Both Mossad and the Holy Alliance knew they could not count on the KGB to detect any Black September attempt on the life of Golda Meir. If they wanted to stop it, they could depend only on their own efforts, working against the clock.
The Soviets were not about to reveal that Hassan Salameh’s men had Russian-built missiles hidden in an industrial building in a Yugoslav port. The plan was to ship the missiles in a fishing boat from Dubrovnik to Bari on the Italian Adriatic. From there, they would go to Rome by truck in time to arrive before Golda Meir. Zvi Zamir and Father Carlo Jacobini continued to work side by side to discover when and how the attack would come, but now they could only wait.
The anti-Israeli attack began on December 28, 1972, when Black September commandos attacked the Israeli embassy in Bangkok. Salameh wanted to divert Mossad’s attention from Rome, and an attack on the far-off Jewish diplomatic legation was the way.
Angelo Casoni, of the Vatican counterespionage, said that one of his sources had reported that Black September’s attack on Israel’s embassy in Thailand was only a feint to distract public opinion. Jacobini didn’t believe him, but Zamir did. 20 Mossad knew that Israeli commandos could free the hostages there, and Golda Meir was not going to allow the Thais to shoot their way into the embassy. At last, after hours of negotiations, the attackers were granted safe conduct to leave the country en route to Cairo. Carlo Jacobini advised continued readiness for a possible strike against Israeli policy that would come on Vatican soil.
Very early on January 14, one day before the planned meeting between Paul VI and Golda Meir, a Vatican counterespionage agent reported to Angelo Casoni that an informer had told him about rumors of a Palestinian guerrilla operation in Ostia or Bari. At the same time, a sayan 21 told the Mossad station at the Israeli embassy in Italy about a conversation in which a man with an evident Arabic accent told another man with the same accent to expect a shipment of candles.
At the same time, too, the Mossad station in London reported to Zvi Zamir that one of their informers had indicated that Black September’s objective was “one of your own.” The Mossad chief was sure that the shipment of candles had to be missiles, yet he also knew that neither Golda Meir nor Paul VI would ever cancel their meeting.
Zamir called Hessner and Kauly while requesting a meeting with Fathers Jacobini and Casoni. The Vatican secret services had to be kept informed at every step of the operation, for they surely had better sources in Rome than the Israelis did.
Ali Hassan Salameh, alias Abú Hassan, alias the Red Prince, was well-educated, energetic, and cruel. It was said that he had killed his stepbrother with a shot in the eye when he found the stepbrother passing information to Al Fatah, the PLO faction led by Yasser Arafat. 22 Salameh was married to a Lebanese beauty, Georgina Rizak, who had been Miss Universe of 1971.
According to Mossad, the Red Prince was behind the attempt to assassinate Golda Meir, but the Holy Alliance doubted that the Palestinian terrorist could be in Rome without their knowing it.
The day slated for the meeting, January 15, dawned cold and rainy. Mossad, the Holy Alliance, and the digos (the Italian anti-terrorist unit) were on a state of full alert. Father Carlo Jacobini was sure that Black September would not allow Meir to leave Rome alive, and he so informed Pope Paul VI. Zamir and Jacobini knew that if the plan were a missile attack, the place to carry it out would be near the airport, when the plane was either landing or taking off. Both Mossad and the Holy Alliance deployed their agents in the airport and its vicinity to watch for any suspicious activity. 23
The first alert came just a few hours before Golda Meir’s planned arrival. A Sodalitium Pianum agent watching the vicinity of the airport warned Father Angelo Casoni that he had seen a station wagon near a runway and had approached it and asked whether the occupants needed any help. The men inside had nervously answered that they’d already called a tow truck. Casoni radioed this to Zamir and Hessner, who set out for the spot. When they arrived, they found a Fiat station wagon. Armed, they asked the driver to step out of the vehicle and identify himself. A prudent distance away, Carlo Jacobini of the papal secret services was watching.
At that moment, the vehicle’s back gate opened and a fusillade of shots rang out. The Mossad agents escaped unharmed, but they left two terrorists gravely wounded, while the driver fled on foot. The Israeli agents caught him and put him into a car, apparently one with Vatican license plates. Hessner sat in the driver’s seat, Jacobini alongside, and Zamir in back with the terrorist. The memuneh of Mossad beat the Palestinian’s head with his pistol butt, demanding to know where the other missiles were. With the silhouette of the plane approaching in the distance, the agents saw another station wagon, this time a white one, with a roof that had been modified. Several tubes stuck out, pointing skyward.
Hessner floored the accelerator and rammed the car from the side, making it roll over. Inside, two members of Black September were trapped, crushed under the weight of the missiles. Zamir told Father Jacobini to turn away so he could execute the terrorists, but before he could shoot, the Holy Alliance agent told the Mossad chief that if he killed them, there would be no alternative but to tell the supreme pontiff, which would place Israel in a difficult position.
Zamir preferred not to further complicate the already difficult relations between Israel and the Vatican, so he turned the terrorists over to the Italian digo .
Golda Meir had her meeting with Pope Paul VI. Though he informed her the time was not right to establish relations, he did commit himself to visiting the Holy Land. On leaving the Vatican, Golda Meir told Zvi Zamir that “the Vatican clock runs on different time than the rest of the world,” which may, in fact, be the case.
From then on, Mossad and the Holy Alliance maintained close relations, which continued on into the papacy of John Paul II. Fathers Carlo Jacobini and Angelo Casoni, of the Vatican espionage and counterespionage services, continued to serve as liaisons with Israeli secret services in the following years, even after Jacobini ceased to belong to the Holy Alliance. The terrorists whom the Italians had arrested were set free and sent to Libya. Months later, most of them were executed by a unit of the kidon, 24 the Mossad assassins. As to the identity of the person in the secretariat of state who could have informed the Black September terrorists about Meir’s secret trip, the Sodalitium Pianum ‘s suspicions pointed to Father Idi Ayad. What Mossad didn’t know then, and possibly never knew, was that Ayad was not only a member of the Holy Alliance but also an unofficial liaison between Pope Paul VI and the leadership of the PLO. 25
Meanwhile, in an office lost somewhere amidst the kilometers of Vatican hallways, a man placed a seal upon a folder labeled “Operation Jerusalem” and ordered it to be interred in the Vatican Secret Archives, a division of the Vatican Library. To the world at large, the operation charged with saving Golda Meir’s life had never existed. But Mossad would never forget that Israel’s prime minister still drew breath thanks to the Holy Alliance.
Three years later, Mossad repaid the favor. The occasion came in April of 1976.
On December 25, 1971, the terrorist Carlos the Jackal had carried out an operation against OPEC delegates meeting in Vienna. From then on, he was in open confrontation with the Palestinian groups who had previously been aiding him. In their eyes, Carlos was simply a mercenary who had acquired a good deal of money to “spend on bourgeois comforts.” Carlos and his associates had pocketed nearly twenty million dollars out of the ransom the Saudis paid to free their OPEC representative Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamami. 26
Wadi Haddad, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), demanded a share of this money from Carlos, but the Jackal refused. Haddad, a dyed-in-the-wool guerrilla, was not pleased by the attention Carlos had attracted, since to him the Jackal was merely “a bad actor who wants to be a movie star.” After the action against OPEC in Vienna, Carlos and his confederates moved to Algeria and then to Yemen, where they were given a heroes’ welcome, complete with a band. Carlos the Jackal’s legend continued to grow.
One morning in late March of 1976, the telephone in an administrative department of the Vatican rang. A priest picked up the phone to hear a speaker identify himself as Yitzhak Hofi, the new memuneh who had replaced Zvi Zamir at the helm of Mossad two years before. Hofi told the priest that he needed a meeting in a safe location.
That same afternoon, the priest made his way on foot to a downtown Rome hotel. When he identified himself, two crew-cut men led the clergyman to a guest room, where Yitzhak Hofi awaited him, seated in a chair. The new arrival also took a seat. The Israeli spy chief told him the moment had come to repay the Holy Alliance for the favor of having helped to save Golda Meir’s life in January 1973.
Father Carlo Jacobini said although he no longer worked for the Holy Alliance, perhaps he could connect the Israelis with someone in the papal espionage service. Hofi rejected that offer, saying his orders from his predecessor Zvi Zamir were to work only with Jacobini. Before he could hear the information Mossad had to give him, Jacobini responded, he had to get a specific order from the Vatican. Hofi repeated that he could deal only with Jacobini, or with Angelo Casoni of the papal counterespionage.
Yitzhak Hofi shifted in his chair and told Jacobini that a Mossad station had unearthed a plan by an Arab terrorist group to kidnap or assassinate Pope Paul VI. After some beating around the bush, the Israeli explained that his katsas were sure the author of the attack was Carlos the Jackal. Jacobini’s blood ran cold. He knew from Holy Alliance reports that Carlos rarely failed in his objectives, and even if he didn’t succeed, he always left a trail of blood and death.
In fact, Hofi’s information did not come from a Mossad station, but rather from a political attaché in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, John D. Stempel. This diplomat had reported to the CIA that during a meeting with the second secretary of the Soviet embassy in Iran, Guennady Kazankin, the latter had told him the KGB had discovered a possible plan to kidnap or assassinate Pope Paul VI, which might involve several members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who had collaborated with Carlos the Jackal in the OPEC kidnapping in Vienna. Hofi finished his briefing of Carlo Jacobini by promising the Holy Alliance all possible help from Mossad in frustrating this plan. 27
When the meeting ended, the priest took a taxi to the Vatican. Hofi’s words echoed in his brain, and he needed to share them with someone. When he passed through the Vatican gate, he directed his steps toward the offices housing the papal secret services. He said he urgently needed to speak with his friend Father Angelo Casoni. In the two hours they spent together, Jacobini told Casoni what the Mossad memuneh had told him.
Carlos’s idea revolved around two possible plans. One was to take control of the Basilica of St. Peter by storming it with arms in hand while the pontiff was conducting Mass. The other was to have sharpshooters fire at Paul VI when he emerged onto his balcony facing the plaza to welcome the faithful on Sunday. The first idea was the subject of several weeks of study, given the successful use of this tactic in the kidnapping of the OPEC representatives in Vienna. The Jackal doubted that his group would meet much resistance from the Swiss Guard, armed as they were with lances and halberds.
The second option had the support of Wilfred Böse, a German anarchist and friend of Carlos the Jackal and of Gabrielle Kroche-Tiedemann, a twenty-three-year-old terrorist who had taken part in the Vienna operation alongside Carlos the year before. Böse thought it would be simple enough to get hold of a large-caliber rifle with a telescopic sight and use it against an “immobile objective dressed in white.” The plan appealed to Kroche-Tiedemann because killing the supreme pontiff of Rome in the act of blessing the faithful gathered in the Piazza San Pietro, in full view of television cameras from around the world, would bring Carlos the Jackal the greatest publicity any terrorist had ever gathered.
The Holy Alliance worked against the clock, in collaboration with Mossad, to prevent the looming debacle. Jacobini needed to know more, so he called Hofi personally. The memuneh promised to send copies of the dossiers on the men and women who had accompanied Carlos in all his actions. The next day, a pile of folders covered with seals appeared on the desk of Father Angelo Casoni of the papal counterespionage. Black-and-white photographs of corpses paraded before his eyes, as did faces captured from a distance by the camera of one or another spy.
Shortly afterwards, Jacobini and Casoni received another Mossad message to the effect that Wilfred Böse and Gabrielle Kroche-Tiedemann had been spotted in Bahrain and Carlos Ramírez in Yemen. At that moment, however, neither the two Vatican agents nor Yitzhak Hofi knew that the Jackal’s organization had decided to change its target. Kidnapping or killing Paul VI no longer interested Carlos Ramírez. On a whim, he had decided instead to skyjack an Air France jet, Flight AF139 en route from Tel Aviv to Paris with a stop in Athens.
This plane would become world famous on July 4, 1976, when, in a lightning operation at the Ugandan airport of Entebbe, a squad of Israeli commandos and Mossad kidon members stormed the jetliner and freed the hostage passengers. In the gunfight that broke out on the airport runways and terminal, Wilfred Böse and Gabrielle Kroche-Tiedemann died from Israeli fire, as did five other terrorists.
A few days after Operation Entebbe, Father Carlo Jacobini received a mysterious phone call in the Vatican. Hofi, on the other end of the line, told him about the dead terrorists and assured him that the “crisis involving Paul VI” had ended. On January 22, 1979, the Mossad finally located Ali Hassan Salameh, alias the Red Prince, the top leader of Black September, in Beirut. A remote-control bomb placed by the katsa Erika Chambers of the kidon , the operative arm of the Metsada , killed Salameh. It also killed four of his bodyguards, several passers-by, and Susan Wareham, a secretary at the British embassy in Lebanon.
Some rumors had it that Salameh had been tracked down in the Lebanese capital thanks to the work of the Vatican secret services by way of a CIA leak that a Holy Alliance or Sodalitium Pianum agent passed on to the Mossad memuneh , Yitzhak Hofi. That agent could well have been Carlo Jacobini or Angelo Casoni. But, like everything in the Vatican and its intelligence services, “whatever isn’t sacred, is secret.”
P aul Casimir Marcinkus, Michele Sindona, and Roberto Calvi would become the main actors in one of the greatest scandals in the history of the Holy See. The Vatican Bank collapse was about to surprise the world. The ensuing investigations of financial organizations and courts in the United States and Italy, as well as books by writers in several countries, would show that although the Holy Alliance was not directly and officially involved in the dark doings of the IOR under Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, some of its agents did take part in certain specific operations. For many of them, defending “Vatican, Inc.” was a question of loyalty to the supreme pontiff.