Chapter Eleven

The Three Amigos

While Pius XII may have erred in choosing an internal archeological team without outside consultants, he made no mistake at all in picking his external team to deal with financing the excavation and eventually with other equally grave matters. This astoundingly talented team of three priests — we’ll call them the Three Amigos — accomplished amazing things far beyond the excavation of the Vatican Necropolis.

The Three Amigos possessed an extraordinary collection of talent. Monsignor Giovanni Montini, Pius XII’s secretary and closest confidant, and also George Strake’s friend, was the chairman and glue of this extraordinary team. Together the three men served as the pope’s team on a variety of secret, sometimes very dangerous, projects. Montini was the consummate Vatican insider, spending — against his wishes — almost all of his career inside its confining walls. He was incredibly brilliant but selfless, requesting over and over that he not be promoted as he was dragged up a road that would ultimately lead to the papacy. He was bitterly hated by the Fascists, and Mussolini in particular, who resented Montini’s efforts, both open and secret, on behalf of refugees. Those efforts began in 1936 after Mussolini’s attack of butchery on the ancient Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. Montini was somewhat introverted, unlike most of his papal predecessors and successors, but he had a deep love of history and commitment to peace. He was fascinated by and loved the United States from his earliest Vatican days, and he learned English to better understand that strange country whose freedom so contrasted with old Europe and the confining walls of the Vatican. It was probably this fascination that caused Montini to recruit two young American priests as his ablest assistants and closest comrades in the early 1940s: Walter Carroll and Joseph McGeough. His love for and knowledge of the United States was almost certainly responsible for Montini sending Carroll on an unlikely journey to visit George Strake in Houston.

Walter Carroll, only thirty years old when he visited Strake, was a deeply engaging man with impeccable social skills and a smile that lit up any room. Tall and dark-haired, he had a commanding but inviting presence. He was a native of Pittsburgh, where both of his brothers were also priests. He suffered from terrible coronary illness from childhood and at times required months of rest simply to regain normal strength. His condition marked him for an early death, so he lived life with frenetic energy and a desperate courage beyond bravery. His friends said simply he had joie de vivre, an incredible love of each moment of life. He met and dealt not only with Strake, but with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Generals Mark Clark, George Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and many others, whose confidence he commanded.107 Although a priest, he had the larcenous heart of a riverboat gambler, concocting or participating in a variety of outrageous scams to defeat the Nazis and save the Jews — the discovery of any of which would have brought his execution.¹⁰⁸ Carroll’s friends said he walked with kings but had the common touch. He was Montini’s closest friend and comrade. He was consumed, like Montini, with aiding the victims of persecution. While aiding refugees, he conveyed important intelligence information to the Allies — serving as a spy for the Church.109

The third of the amigos was Joseph McGeough, only thirty-seven years old when he joined Montini and Carroll. While deeply religious, he had all of the moxie and street smarts of his birthplace of Manhattan — land of Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, Bernie Madoff, and many others. Tall and dark-haired, McGeough had uncommon brass, but largely avoided any public persona, even writing letters under the code name “Father Fitzsimmons.” The schemes he conceived with Carroll and Montini would save countless thousands of lives during World War II. In later years, McGeough would go public and become the Vatican’s go-to emissary in crisis areas — to an Ethiopia ravaged by Mussolini, to South Africa to combat apartheid in 1960, and to Ireland in 1966 to combat civil unrest over religious differences.

In mid-1943, however, the Three Amigos faced challenges much closer to home. Immediate problems intruded upon the excavation beneath the Vatican. It was becoming increasingly questionable whether the Vatican itself, the city of Rome, and Italy’s Jewish population would survive at all. It was the Three Amigos the pope would employ in this crisis.