FEW PAPACIES HAVE INSPIRED so many myths as the reign of Pope John Paul II. One of the most enduring concerns his role, alongside US President Ronald Reagan, in the collapse of Communism in Europe at the end of the twentieth century. Serious writers have suggested that the two men conspired to bring about the destruction of the Soviet Empire with the Pope virtually single-handedly creating Solidarity and the President secretly pouring millions of dollars into Poland to sustain Wojtyla’s creation. The truth, however, is somewhat less spectacular.
Since its very beginning, the United States has been a predominantly Protestant country, ruled by Protestants, with a historic suspicion and hostility towards Roman Catholics. Even John F Kennedy, the only Roman Catholic to date to be elected President, was very careful to keep the number who shared his faith within his administration to a minimum and to keep his church at some distance from government.
Though not himself a Roman Catholic, Ronald Reagan numbered a great many who were among his close friends and acquaintances. His cabinet included a disproportionate number: Haig, Donovan, Bennett, Heckler, Clark. Among his speech-writing team and staffers in the Office of Public Liaison were Peggy Noonan, Pat Buchanan, Linda Chavez, Bob Reilly, Carl Anderson and Tony Dolan, all of them devout, practising Roman Catholics. There were also National Security Advisors Richard Allen, Director of the CIA William Casey, William Clark, Vernon Walters and Ed Rowny. William Clark, who served in turn as Secretary of the Interior and National Security Advisor, had a particularly close friendship with Ronald Reagan.
On 11 February 1981 President Reagan appointed William Wilson as his personal representative to the Holy See. Wilson, a close friend of Reagan’s for many years, was one of the loyal cabal in Reagan’s kitchen cabinet. Wilson’s time at the Vatican was not entirely appreciated by the Vatican. Within days of his arrival he allegedly let it be known that he had a personal hit list of priests and bishops in Latin American countries whom the Reagan administration wanted removed from office. The Secretariat were unimpressed with this piece of lobbying. The story was leaked by a Vatican official to an Italian newspaper, then vehemently denied by William Wilson. Instead he began to concern himself in a wide range of activities on behalf of the Reagan administration, including lobbying for unqualified support for the Chilean military dictatorship of Pinochet and the Argentine military junta as well as US policies on numerous other South American issues, the Middle East, funding Afghan rebels, Ukrainian Church status and Poland.
Within twelve months of taking up his post, Wilson had succeeded in bewildering even himself. A memorandum from National Security Council staffer, Dennis Blair, to National Security Advisor William Clark, requesting that Clark should meet with Wilson, explains:
‘The main objective of your meeting with Bill is to straighten out his chain of command. He has been confused about who he receives direction from with embarrassing diplomatic results. This has been a problem for months but it was highlighted by the incident of the President’s remarks about the Pope’s letter at his January 20th press conference.’
The ‘embarrassing diplomatic results’ were the very public demonstrations of frequent misunderstandings, confusion and total incomprehension. Some of the most spectacular of these occurred over Poland. As recorded earlier, in April 1981, the Pope had the first of a series of meetings with the head of the CIA William Casey. These meetings are very much part of the myth around the Wojtyla–Reagan relationship. There was certainly an exchange of views and opinions. The two men had much in common ranging from their deep hatred of Communism to their admiration of right-wing dictators, like Marcos of the Philippines and Pinochet of Chile, whom they considered a bulwark against godless Communism. But the exchange of intelligence information that Casey allegedly sought from the Pope and his officials at the Secretariat of State never materialised. As always the Vatican played its cards close to its collective chest.
John Paul II most certainly despised Communism but he was never enchanted with capitalism and the American way of life. He remained deeply suspicious of the United States and saw most Western countries as decadent and morally inferior to Poland. His views on such matters were well known and caused a continuing friction with his Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli.
At the time of Casey’s first visit, John Paul II was preoccupied with the looming problem of Cardinal Wyszynski’s imminent death and the appointment of his successor. The Pope attempted to exploit the memory of Wyszynski at the time of the Primate’s funeral to buy some breathing space. He called for the four-day period of mourning to be extended to thirty days, which should be ‘a period of special prayers, peace and reflection’. This was seen by many observers as a direct attempt by the Pope to prevent further confrontations between the regime and Solidarity before the approaching Communist Party Congress in July. The papal plea was rebuffed within days when on 4 July Solidarity’s National Co-ordinating Commission called a two-hour national strike to take place in seven days’ time. The situation was showing disturbing similarities to the events prior to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in June 1968.
When the Communist Party leadership in Poland turned to the Catholic Church for help, as they had done so many times during Cardinal Wyszynski’s life, it had to make do with the Cardinal’s former advisor, Dr Romuald Kukolwicz. The bishops gathered in Rome were contacted; they could only repeat the Pope’s request for thirty days of national mourning. The Pope hesitated for six weeks and only appointed Bishop Glemp to the Polish Primacy after great pressure was exerted upon him to appoint ‘somebody – anybody – but before 14th July’, the date that the Polish Communist Party Congress was due to begin. Jozef Glemp was to prove to be a nobody in a somebody’s chair. The Church’s influence within Poland continued to diminish. Glemp’s appeals for all protest actions to be halted were ignored.
Throughout the summer of 1981, life for the man in the Warsaw street or the woman in the Cracow market place became progressively grimmer. The various concessions won in the heady latter half of 1980 now seemed meaningless. The queues for the already rationed basic commodities got longer. Strikes were frequent and hunger marches a regular event. Total state censorship of the media, from which all Solidarity spokesmen were banned, tightened the screw yet further. The Soviet Union gave it a few more turns during the first week of September when they commenced a huge nine-day naval and military exercise in the Baltic. Using more than sixty ships and some twenty five thousand servicemen, the exercise included landings on the shores of Latvia and Lithuania. Simultaneously Rudé Právo, the Communist Party daily in Czechoslovakia, ran front-page stories declaring that Solidarity was fine-tuning its plans to seize power in Poland. The activities had been designed to coincide with the commencement of the First National Congress of Solidarity due to begin in Gdansk on 5 September.
Just how wide the gulf between the Church and Solidarity had become was demonstrated when the delegates adopted a message ‘To the Working People of Eastern Europe’. It challenged the very essence of Communism as, addressing the workers of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany (the GDR), Romania, Hungary ‘and all peoples of the Soviet Union’, it offered to ‘support all of you who have decided to take the difficult path and fight for free trade unions’. This political naivety won no friends within the Vatican. As for the Soviets, they told the Polish regime that the entire Solidarity congress was ‘a disgusting provocation’. More significantly, the Soviets called on the Party and the Polish Government to take ‘determined and radical steps’.
There was a dreadful inevitability beginning to emerge within the divided country. Crisis makes for curious alliances. The Polish Catholic Church and the Government led by General Jaruzelski and the moderate wings of both the ruling Communist Party, the PZPR (The Polish United Workers’ Party) and Solidarity were urging patient negotiation. The hard-liners within both the Party and Solidarity were intent on pursuing confrontation. Shuttle diplomacy between Warsaw and Rome began to accelerate. Suggestions of power-sharing were floated by, among others, the Prime Minister: ‘A grand coalition of the Communists, the Catholic Church and Solidarity’ was much discussed but the Church predictably vacillated on the issue.
Pope John Paul II’s biographers, including the personally approved George Weigel, are agreed that, notwithstanding the appointment of Bishop Glemp as Primate, ‘. . . everyone knew that, with Cardinal Wyszynski’s death, the de facto Primate of Poland was in Rome.’ That being the case, the Pope should have kept a very tight grip of a situation that continued to deteriorate.
If ever there was a moment for the Pope to seize the day, it was when Prime Minister Jaruzelski floated the idea of ‘a grand coalition’ of Communists, Church and Solidarity. Lech Walesa, his KOR advisors and other senior figures within Solidarity saw it as a trap to control their movement while the Polish Church looked to Rome. The Pope shrank from such political involvement either public or private. The de facto Primate missed an historic opportunity. Undeterred, Glemp, Jaruzelski and Walesa held an unprecedented meeting on 4 November seeking solutions to the crisis. Views were exchanged but solutions remained elusive.
In the Vatican, the Pope, talking to members of the KOR and other Polish intellectuals with ties to Solidarity, spoke of the freedom movement being irreversible, but his demeanour belied his words. Tadeusz Mazowiecki recalled,
‘I remember that I told him that we had to go back quickly. We’d had worrying news from Poland. His response was, “Yes, everybody is in a hurry. Everybody is going back.” He was very worried.’
What was needed at that moment was not handwringing but a political initiative, such as a papal invitation to Walesa, Glemp and Jaruzelski to reconvene in the Vatican with Wojtyla, or his Secretary of State Casaroli, in the role of honest broker, to pull a compromise from the fire, but the man for that kind of initiative, Cardinal Wyszinski, was dead and in his grave.
On 24 November military forces were sent to 2,000 major centres throughout Poland. It was announced that the reason for this national troop movement was to co-ordinate plans for the winter. No matter how one looked at that statement it was entirely accurate. On 26 November the Polish Church issued a communiqué that indicated that both Rome and the National Church were fully aware of what was at stake. ‘The country is faced with the threat of civil war and loss of all gains already achieved.’
The bishops declared that the only hope of a peaceful solution was through national unity. They condemned the authorities for hampering the process of ‘bridge-building between the Government and the people . . . no understanding or reconciliation would be possible without freedom of expression’. There was much more in similar vein. Nonetheless in November alone there were 105 strikes of indefinite duration and another 115 strikes were planned. None of these actions, however, were addressed within the Episcopal Conference communiqué. If Poland was to be saved statesmanship was urgently required from the various leaders, particularly the ‘de facto primate’ John Paul II. Lech Walesa would later admit that by the first week of December he had lost control of events. ‘I took a hard position against my convictions, in order not to be isolated.’ Others in the movement, including Jacek Huron and Adam Michnik, continued to oppose ‘the hard position’ bitterly but voices of sanity and reason were not in demand in November 1981. General Jaruzelski may well have been planning a military coup d’état since 1980. Meanwhile he and those around him were being inexorably pushed into acting in isolation against their own people by the Soviet Politburo who feared a domino effect within the Warsaw Pact countries.
The Pope, meanwhile, appeared to be greatly preoccupied in an entirely unrelated power battle with the Jesuit Order while in the Primate’s residence Glemp continuously agonised over what Wyszynski would have done. In a mere six months, much of the legacy that Stefan Wyszynski had bequeathed his country had been squandered. On 27 November the Episcopate had again urged that some form of national accord was the only solution. Glemp offered himself to act as mediator. The response from the Communist Party’s Central Committee was muted and on the day following Archbishop Glemp’s proposal instructed their parliamentary group to introduce legislation to ban all strikes. On 3 December Solidarity’s Central Committee responded. With all the hard-won agreements of 1980 now threatened, they declared that if Parliament did indeed pass such legislation they would call a twenty-four-hour general strike throughout Poland.
Glemp tried again on 5 December, meeting with Lech Walesa in an attempt to find a way out of the impasse. Walesa duly rebuffed him. The Warsaw branch of Solidarity called for co-ordinated protests throughout the country on 17 December in protest against the regime’s intention to ‘solve the conflicts by force’. Two days later Glemp made a further attempt. During this same period, the Pope was busily engaged with other more pressing matters, including blessing a mosaic of Mary to commemorate the 750th anniversary of the death of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.
Little more than two years earlier the Polish Pope had been given the most extraordinary demonstration by the Polish nation during his nine-day visit of the unique place he occupied within the hearts and minds of his people. If during the autumn of 1981 he had chosen to engage General Jaruzelski in a direct dialogue and demonstrated to the Polish Prime Minister that there was a third way and that through quiet diplomacy and mediation an acceptable compromise could be reached, an ongoing working accommodation with the Solidarity movement would have created an historic opportunity, not only for Poland but the entire Soviet European bloc. What was to occur in 1989 and 1990 could have been brought forward by six or more years. Far from bringing about the end of the Soviet Empire the Pope, by his inaction, his indecisiveness, his inability to apply the Wyszynski doctrine, prolonged it.
Archbishop Glemp had clearly seen the writing on the wall. During a meeting in November with Francis Meehan, the US Ambassador to Poland, Glemp told him that there ‘was a good chance of martial law’. Meehan had duly reported this observation to Washington. In fact the concept of martial law did not exist within Poland’s laws. What was declared was ‘a state of war’. On 7 December, contrary to the Pope’s instructions in October, Glemp waded into the choppy waters of Polish politics. He sent a letter to every deputy in the Sejm, a second to Prime Minister General Wojciech Jaruzelski, a third to Lech Walesa and a fourth to the Independent Students’ Union. In different ways all four letters were seeking the same end, compromise and conciliation. Glemp’s commendable effort was dismissed. On 11 December, Solidarity’s National Commission met for a two-day conference in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. In an act of self-delusion the Commission, after long and frequently over-heated debate and despite strong objections from their Catholic Church advisors, called for a referendum by 15 January 1982 to ask the nation to pass a vote of no confidence in the Government.
As the meeting broke up the delegates realised that none of the telephones, telexes or fax lines were working. They had been cut at three minutes to midnight, not just in the conference hall but throughout Poland, cutting off 3,439,700 private phones simultaneously.
The Government might have been having difficulty running the country but their military coup d’état was a model of efficiency. At midnight ZOMO, the anti-riot police, ransacked the Solidarity offices in Warsaw. The mass arrests had already begun and continued throughout the night. The security police had provided the militia units with the last known address of every single Polish citizen both home and abroad. Four thousand people vanished before dawn. The Solidarity National Co-ordinating Committee, who had only just finished drafting its four questions that it had planned to put to the nation by 15 January, were pulled out of their beds in a Gdansk hotel at 2.00 a.m. Lech Walesa was collected from his home and put on a plane to Warsaw. The first question of the aborted national referendum had been, ‘Are you in favour of expressing a vote of no-confidence in the Government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski?’
Shortly before 1.00 a.m. the Pope was aroused to take a phone call from Emil Wojtaszek, the Polish ambassador to Italy. He told the Pope that General Jaruzelski had found it necessary to introduce ‘temporary emergency measures’ of a limited nature; ‘temporary’ being the Polish for eighteen months. The Pope was also advised that the Church would be expected to play a key role in mediation to eliminate the measures ‘as soon as possible’.
At 6.00 a.m. Jaruzelski went on national television and radio. Stripped of party-speak he told the nation that there had been a military coup, the Communist party were no longer running the country, all trade union activity was banned; members of the military were appointed in Government ministries, in the provinces, the towns, the factories. To ensure the execution of orders from the Military Council there was to be a dusk-to-dawn curfew, a ban on public gatherings, a ban on wearing specific uniforms and badges, freedom of movement was to be severely restricted. Mass internment was already a reality, there was to be a strict censorship of mail and telecommunications and the closure of Poland’s borders. Poland was at war with itself. The country and its peoples would suffer greatly in the years ahead not least because of the failure of will of the few who had been in a position to pull Poland back from this particular precipice.
General Jaruzelski, the Prime Minister, First Secretary and Head of the Armed Services played the role of a man who had chosen the lesser of two evils to perfection. Martial law was preferable to ‘intervention’ by the Soviet Union. Two days earlier on the tenth the Soviet Politburo had been in session where the first item under discussion was Poland and Jaruzelski’s request for $1.5 billion in additional aid during the coming first quarter of 1982. That request was made on the assumption that the Soviets would also be shipping aid at 1981 levels. It is very clear from many Politburo documents, that since 1981 the Soviets had tied additional aid to Polish action to suppress Solidarity. In July 1981 Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko had told Kania and Jaruzelski that ‘the nature of Soviet–Polish economic, political and other relations will depend on how things shape up in Poland’. Brezhnev reiterated this formula when he spoke to Kania later the same month and again in August in a discussion with the East German leader Honecker.
Although the Soviets could ill afford such largesse they were more than happy to deliver if the Polish military and the security forces effected the coup without any external military assistance. However, up to the very eve of the martial law declaration Jaruzelski was seeking much more than a huge increase in foreign aid. During the Politburo meeting of 10 December the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, complained that ‘Jaruzelski has been more than persistent in setting forth economic demands from us and has made the implementation of “Operation X” (the military coup) contingent on our willingness to offer economic assistance; and I would say even more than that, he is raising the question, albeit indirectly, of receiving military assistance as well.’
A few moments later Yuri Andropov made a truly extraordinary prophetic statement. He referred to a meeting between Jaruzelski and three senior Soviet officials on the previous day and Jaruzelski’s understanding of what one of the officials, Kulikov, had said regarding Soviet military aid.
‘If Comrade Kulikov actually did speak about the introduction of troops then I believe he did this incorrectly. We can’t risk such a step. We do not intend to introduce troops into Poland. That is the proper position and we must adhere to it to the end. I don’t know how things will turn out in Poland, but even if Poland falls under the control of Solidarity, that’s the way it will be. And if the capitalist countries pounce on the Soviet Union, and you know they have already reached agreement on a variety of economic and political sanctions, that will be very burdensome for us. We must be concerned above all with our own country and about the strengthening of the Soviet Union.’
Andropov, the head of the KGB, knew full well the realities that were confronting the Soviet Union. He had been the principal advocate of the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan. By late 1981 it had become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. The ruinous cost of the war and a basket-case economy at home meant that Western sanctions could cripple the entire Communist bloc.
Moments later, Andrei Gromyko, the great survivor, weighed in. ‘No Politburo member is coming. No troops will be sent. Economic aid will be considered later. A statement of support will be made at a time and date yet to be determined.’ An anguished Jaruzelski could not hide the pain as he responded, ‘You are distancing yourselves from us.’ In reality there had always been that distance since the Soviets had abandoned their plans to invade Poland the previous year. The collapse of the once so powerful Soviet Union can be dated from that failure of will in December 1980.
‘Be not afraid,’ the Pope’s first public utterance after his election, was a message that he had carried to Poland in June 1979. It had been warmly embraced by the majority of the country. On the morning of Sunday 13 December 1981 many in Poland were deeply afraid. Everywhere there were soldiers. Even the TV newscasters were dressed in uniform. The junta’s control of the media was total and wild rumours blossomed to fill the vacuum along with curfew, identity cards, instant arrests. For the third time in living memory Poland was an occupied country but this time the occupiers came from within. The Polish nation turned as she had done many times in the past to her faith, to her Church. On Sunday evening Archbishop Glemp spoke in the Jesuit Church of Mary, the Patroness of Warsaw, in the old town of the city. It was a sermon that the army, who controlled TV and radio, would broadcast a number of times.
‘. . . In our country the new reality is martial law . . . The authority ceases to be an authority of dialogue between citizens . . . and becomes an authority equipped with the means of summary coercion and demanding obedience. Opposition to the decisions of authority under martial law could cause violent coercion, including bloodshed because the authority has the arms at its disposal . . . The authorities consider that the exceptional nature of martial law is dictated by higher necessity, it is the choice of a lesser rather than a greater evil. Assuming the correctness of such reasoning the man in the street will subordinate himself to the new situation.’
The Church ‘received with pain the severance of dialogue’. But for the Archbishop the most important thing was to avoid bloodshed. ‘There is nothing of greater value than human life. I shall plead, even if I have to plead on my knees. Do not start a fight of Pole against Pole.’
Within days, other Polish bishops, appalled at the collaborating appeasement message of Glemp’s sermon, had sprung into action. A stinging attack on the military junta was issued as an episcopate communiqué throughout the country. When news reached Warsaw that nine miners and four security police had been killed and thirty-seven miners injured during a ZOMO attack on men conducting a sit-in at Wujek colliery in Katowice, Archbishop Glemp, under pressure from General Jaruzelski, withdrew the communiqué.
Speaking in Polish during his traditional Sunday midday Angelus seven hours before Glemp’s sermon, John Paul II was very aware that his words would be heard live in Poland via Vatican radio.
‘The events of the last few hours require me to turn my attention once again to the cause of our homeland and to call for prayer. I remind you of what I said in September. Polish blood cannot be spilled because too much has already been spilled, especially during the war. Everything must be done to build the future of our homeland peacefully. I entrust Poland and all my countrymen to the Virgin Mary who has been given to us for our defence.’
A few days later during a general audience the Pope powerfully endorsed Glemp’s Sunday sermon.
The resistance against the coup was widespread and varied, including sit-in strikes, street protests and a refusal to co-operate with the military. Demonstrators in the factories, mines, steel works and pits were met with an excess of violence, not from the army but the members of the ZOMO who relished the opportunities of inflicting appalling violence without fear of any retribution. Facing them were unarmed people, ill prepared, leaderless and frequently very frightened who nonetheless showed astonishing courage. Without their Solidarity leaders, their intellectual advisors and any of the communication infrastructures necessary to mount a co-ordinated national resistance the nation experienced an internal spiritual awakening. Many of them were not particularly devout and their constant attendance at church often had less to do with Christian faith and more to do with a desire to spite the Communist regime: ‘ONI’ – ‘THEM’.
The Polish nation was certainly going to need spiritual strength to sustain it through the darkness. The repression, given such momentum on the night of 11 December 1981 produced the deaths of at least 115 and the imprisonment of up to 25,000. Yet what was inconceivable for the Pope in early November became an imperative less than a week after martial law had been declared. A secret dialogue between the Pope and the General began as the two men exchanged regular private hand-written letters.
Apart from the periodic visits to the Vatican by the head of the CIA, William Casey, another member of the Reagan administration, General Vernon Walters, had a series of meetings with the Pope. The first occurred on 30 November 1981, just eleven days before the military coup in Poland. Walters had been appointed Ambassador at Large by President Reagan in June 1981. His primary task, performed for a number of previous presidents, was to liaise with a wide variety of heads of state. A devout Catholic, he had been educated in several countries including France and the United Kingdom where he attended Stonyhurst College. A gifted linguist, he was fluent in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch and Russian. He conducted negotiations with the North Vietnamese and Chinese in Paris from 1969 to 1972. As Deputy Director of the CIA from 1972 to 1976 he nursed a number of major CIA assets including King Hassan of Morocco and King Hussein of Jordan. General Pinochet of Chile had been a good friend since the two men had been majors. Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines was another CIA asset that Walters looked after. After William Casey, the Pope must have found Walters to be the personification of refinement.
Reporting directly to Secretary of State Haig, General Walters’ primary task was to persuade various heads of state to support any US position or policy under discussion. The Pope was a totally different proposition. At the time of General Walters’ first audience with the Pope, Poland was on the brink of a military coup. CIA asset Colonel Kuklinski, after passing the Polish regime’s plans for the takeover to Washington, had fled the country on 7 November and, long before Walters appeared in the papal apartments, was being debriefed by Langley.
On 13 November Walters’ superior, Secretary of State Haig, had warned President Reagan that the crushing of Solidarity and with it the rising Polish democracy was very close. On the morning after Walters met the Pope, Haig would follow up with an even more urgent plea to the President: ‘. . . Our entire tradition and security interests dictate prompt action . . .’ Yet it is abundantly clear from the secret cable that Walters sent to Haig immediately he left the Vatican and drove to the US Embassy in Rome, that Poland rated only a passing reference near the end of the Pope’s meeting with Walters. ‘I said, Poland is the great Soviet dilemma. The Pope replied the Soviets think only in terms of military force. All their plans are based upon the threat or use of force.’
General Walters had begun the meeting by explaining the ‘nature of my job as ambassador-at-large’. He then continued with details of his recent trips to South America and Africa. He briefed the Pope on his conversations in May with Chilean officials to discuss the Beagle Channel dispute between Chile and Argentina, an issue on which the Vatican was acting as mediator. Walters talked to the Pope about US activities in Central America.
‘I explained our efforts to improve the human rights situation without causing counter-productive embarrassment to governments by shouting out their faults from the roof tops. Violence actually rose in the years the US used public condemnation of governments to attempt to reform their actions.’
The General’s version of US involvement in Central America is remarkable in the light of realities of the region, which are examined later within this chapter. ‘In El Salvador we have only fifty military security personnel; the Soviets have over 300 in Peru alone. More than the US has in all of Latin America excluding the base at Panama.’ The Pope did not take issue with any of these statements. Indeed he nodded and told Walters, ‘Yes, I understand that this is the situation.’ In fact it was far from being the situation. The General had neglected to give the Pope the number of US forces based in Panama. It was 10,000. He neglected to mention the additional $25 million in military aid that the Reagan administration had given to the junta in El Salvador within two months of entering office. This military aid would continue to rise. In 1984 alone it reached over $500 million.
The General also neglected to mention the 17,000 US backed and financed Contras based in southern Honduras from where they waged war against the democratically elected Nicaraguan Government. There was a great deal more on US military aid to a variety of Central American regimes that the General neglected to mention. Very much the Cold War warrior, Walters talked of
‘The Cuban and Soviet mischief-making in the region . . . The Nicaraguans have 152 mm guns, Soviet-built tanks and pilots trained in Bulgaria. We seek a peaceful solution that will not endanger the lives and freedom of the Latin American people.’
Walters was highly censorious of those sections of the priesthood and the various religious orders who, like a significant number of the population – in some instances the majority – were opposed to US policies and to the presence of US military advisors, security personnel and US arms being used to sustain those policies. ‘The religious have posed problems for us. Unfortunately some help the guerrillas and thereby tend to undermine the credibility of many religious in the area.’ Walters was particularly critical of the Jesuits. This struck a very receptive chord with the Pope who only the previous month after a long running battle with the Jesuits had placed his own nominee in charge of the Order, an act of unprecedented intervention.
Vernon Walters then took the opportunity to praise Wojtyla’s papacy as he recalled being in St Peter’s Square when the man from Poland had been elected. There then followed the brief interchange on Poland recorded earlier and the meeting was over.
The authors of the book His Holiness, Bernstein and Poletti, claim that during this first meeting between General Walters and the Pope there was a great deal of discussion on Poland, during which the Pope was shown a number of satellite photographs of huge troop movements from the Warsaw Pact countries towards the Polish border, ‘. . . tens of thousands of troops diverted from their barracks in the USSR, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia towards the Pope’s homeland’. They recount that the Pope was told how many divisions the Soviets had moved towards Poland.
It is difficult to believe that General Walters would have been so inept, so incompetent as to have delivered this alarming and frightening scenario to the Pope. What the photographs must have shown were the Warsaw Pact troop movements and the Soviet troop movements that took place a year earlier in December 1980. No such activities occurred in the second half of 1981. Indeed, the absence of such activity in the weeks before the military coup, as a leading historian on the Cold War, Professor Mark Kramer, has observed: ‘was one of the reasons the United States remained complacent’. Of the intelligence information from Kuklinski, Walters in fact said not a word. Of the certainty based on all available intelligence that Jaruzelski was about to declare martial law, total silence.
After his audience, General Walters at the Pope’s request talked at length to the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli. Sources within his department have confirmed that he learned nothing from Walters that indicated just how close Poland was on the last day of November to a seizure of power by the Polish military. In fact, Secretary of State Haig had taken a decision not to advise Solidarity of Jaruzelski’s plans. He feared that to do so would lead to ‘stirring up violent resistance when the US had no intention of attempting to deliver assistance’. To have advised the Pope was, in the minds of the Reagan administration, tantamount to advising Solidarity. The solution applied was to advise neither.
The lack of communication between Washington and the Vatican was to become a recurring feature over the years and the failure was not one-sided. A week after the martial law declaration on 17 December, President Reagan cabled the Pope. He, or his advisors, considered they might have come up with a way of moving the situation in Poland forward. Reagan ‘strongly urged’ the Pope ‘to draw on the great authority that you and the Church command in Poland to urge General Jaruzelski to agree to a conference involving himself, Archbishop Glemp and Lech Walesa’. Reagan also suggested that Jaruzelski should be urged to agree to permit Walesa to have eight or ten advisors of his own choosing with him in order to assure the Polish public ‘that he was acting as a free agent’. The purpose of such a meeting, the President explained, would be to search for common ground ‘for eliminating martial law and restoring social peace’. President Reagan had not been advised by the Pope that he had in fact begun just such a dialogue, secretly, two days earlier.
On 29 December President Reagan announced a raft of trade and economic sanctions against the Soviet Union and Poland. The victim was to be punished along with the aggressor. The Pope received a letter from Reagan on the day of the announcement which explained the measures and asked him to urge other Western countries to join the US in imposing sanctions. On 6 January a senior member of the Curia, Achille Silvestrini, handed envoy William Wilson the Pope’s response. Not content with transmitting it to the White House, Wilson could not resist putting his own and Silvestrini’s off-the-record interpretation of the letter when forwarding it to Reagan. The letter had gone through a number of drafts, was very carefully worded and studiously avoided saying that the Pope approved of the action of swingeing sanctions against his own country. He expressed ‘appreciation’ for ‘humanitarian’ measures on behalf of the Polish people. Envoy Wilson advised the President that Silvestrini had told him that ‘press reports that suggested the Holy See disapproved of the US actions imposing sanctions against the Soviet Union and Poland were false’.
During President Reagan’s White House press conference of 20 January he declared that the Pope had written to him approving of the sanctions. Reagan did this despite the fact that since the imposition of the sanctions the Pope had endorsed a declaration by the Polish bishops opposing the US sanctions on the grounds that sanctions would penalise the people without changing the situation. On 18 January the Joint Government-Church Commission in Poland issued a communiqué that not only condemned the sanctions as being against the interest of Poland but attacked them as being counter-productive to efforts to overcome the crisis. On 21 January Casaroli authorised the release of the Pope’s letter to the President to illustrate that Reagan had seriously overreached himself.
The media roof fell in on the President whose National Security Advisor William Clark was advised by White House staffer Denis Blair,
‘You may wish to personally mention to the President that in the case of letters from friendly heads of state, it is safest to check with the sender before talking about the contents publicly.’
This was one of the ‘embarrassing diplomatic results’ concerning Envoy William Wilson’s tenure in Rome. There would be more. It is one thing to have the Pope tell you during a private meeting that he fully supported the US sanctions, it is quite another matter to share that information with the general public, particularly the Polish public.
Wojtyla was inviting himself in another pressing issue of the day. Reagan was aware that in late November 1981 the Pope was in the process of writing a letter to both the US and Soviet leaders on the nuclear arms race. While advising the Pope of his country’s aspirations to seek ‘verifiable reductions . . . in both nuclear and conventional weapons’, Reagan argued that the United States had ‘to maintain a military balance in order to deter aggression . . . We are deeply concerned by the steady Soviet build-up of military power and their willingness to employ force.’ It was, as the Politburo transcripts for the period establish, also a time when the Soviet Empire was financially haemorrhaging to a slow and inevitable death. If just a fraction of the $40 billion budget that the United States was lavishing on the CIA and its other fourteen intelligence agencies had shown a decent return by giving accurate information on the realities within the USSR, a decade of wanton expenditure could have been averted.
In a letter to Ambassador Wilson, Secretary of State Haig observed:
‘We are pleased at the Pope’s interest in the negotiations . . . It would be misleading, we believe, to imply in any way that the US and the Soviet Union are equally responsible for having created the conditions that pose a danger of nuclear war. We would hope that his Holiness would give due weight to this consideration as he determines the most appropriate means of giving expression of the Church’s views.’
The letter was a heavy-handed attempt to influence not merely papal thinking but also the conclusions of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. A delegation from that august body were due at the White House in mid-December to present the President with a statement on the consequences of the uses of nuclear weapons. Haig made it clear to William Wilson that the US Government would welcome details of the contents of their report before the meeting. What greatly concerned the Reagan administration was to keep the Catholic Church onside with the US Government’s position on nuclear armaments. The majority of the US bishops were highly critical of the administration’s proposals. If the Pope could be persuaded to prevail upon the bishops, then life both internally and externally would be immeasurably easier for the President.
What Reagan, Haig and the other senior members of the Government really feared was the Pontifical Academy. This was no lightweight group of idealist left wingers that could be discounted. There were professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professors of Genetics and Biochemistry and Public Health, a total of fourteen Americans. Other members of the group came from Italy, the Soviet Union, France and Brazil. Each was an acknowledged, renowned expert in his field. A month before the Vatican delegation were due to meet with the President and give him a copy of their report, one of their number, Howard Hiatt, Professor of Public Health at Harvard University, published an article in the journal of the American Medical Association entitled ‘Preventing the Last Epidemic’. It gives a devastating analysis from a medical standpoint of the madness and futility of nuclear war:
‘According to press reports, President Reagan was transfused with eight units of blood [following his assassination attempt]. If each Washington victim of a nuclear attack needed as much blood (a burns victim would probably need much more), the blood requirements for Washington would exceed 6.4 million units. Furthermore, it would obviously be impossible to provide the personnel and equipment to administer such a vast quantity of blood. (To put this number into context, the blood stockpile in the American Red Cross Northeast Region on one particular day last month was approximately 11,000 units. The total amount of blood obtained throughout the United States during 1979 was 14 million units.) This is simply one small illustration of the futility of suggesting that we can handle the overwhelming medical needs that would follow a nuclear attack.’
The article certainly made a deep and lasting impression on President Reagan. He specifically referred to it within one of his cables to Pope John Paul II. The statement presented to the President by the Vatican group and its description of the aftermath of a nuclear attack were a powerful indictment of the so-called ‘balance of terror’. Although the Pope had a full horror of such consequences of nuclear conflict, his position on the issue was not always consistent. Reagan, a shrewd political operator under his folksy manner, continued to court the Roman Catholics of America. In April 1982 he told the National Catholic Education Association,
‘I am grateful for your help in shaping American policy to reflect God’s will . . . And I look forward to further guidance from His Holiness Pope John Paul II during an audience I will have with him in June.’
The two men, who had both survived assassination attempts little more than one year earlier, met in the Vatican in the first week of June 1982. Israel chose the same day to invade Lebanon, a country whose Christian-Maronite community made it a special concern to the Holy See. An additional paragraph was rapidly drafted into the speech that Reagan made in the papal library to add Lebanon to the acute ‘concern’ section of the President’s speech along with Latin America and Poland. On Latin America, Reagan claimed that ‘we want to work closely with the Church in that area to help promote peace, social justice and reform, and to prevent the spread of repression and godless tyranny’.
Another country which really was struggling against godless tyranny inevitably received special mention.
‘We seek a process of reconciliation and reform that will lead to a new dawn of hope for the people of Poland, and we’ll continue to call for an end of martial law, for the freeing of all political prisoners, and to resume dialogue among the Polish Government, the Church and the Solidarity movement which speaks for the vast majority of Poles. Denying financial assistance to the oppressive Polish regime, America will continue to provide the Polish people with as much food and commodity support as possible through church and private organisations . . .’
From that particular observation yet another of the myths of this papacy was born. Various papal biographers, Vaticanologists and unidentified members of the Reagan administration later claimed that among the fruits of the ‘secret alliance’ between the Pope and the President was a United States commitment to spend whatever it took to keep Solidarity alive. Money and equipment channelled by the CIA into Solidarity has been valued at between $50 million and $100 million. Added to that were the funds laundered by Roberto Calvi into the Polish trade union, one tranche of $50 million, other amounts totalling at least a further $50 million. That the CIA and other elements both in the United States and in Europe rallied to the cause is indisputable. The real issue is the actual size of the amount funnelled to the union and where it went.
The amounts allegedly donated via the CIA, the AFLCIO American trade union organisation, and the National Endowment for Democracy were laundered, it is claimed, through a business bank account but both Andrzej Gwiazda, the former deputy leader of Solidarity, and Janusz Paulubicki, the former Solidarity treasurer, have denounced the claims of payments of any figure even approaching the $50–100 million. The actual figure for the entire period 1982 to 1989 was significantly less than $9 million. As for the millions that Roberto Calvi plundered from Banco Ambrosiano and insisted he had sent to Poland, Bank of Italy officials have confirmed that they hold compelling evidence that these transfers were indeed made but have declined to reveal the identity of the account holders to whom the transfers were made. Lico Gelli, who for decades through the illegal Italian masonic P2 lodge exercised more control within Italy than any Government, has always maintained, ‘If you are looking for the missing millions from Banco Ambrosiano, then look in Poland.’ Exactly where to look has never been established but the Polish Catholic Church would be an excellent place to begin. Such an investigation should start with questions to a certain Bishop Hnilica.
General Czeslaw Kiszcak, the Interior Minister during the years of martial law, has confirmed that Solidarity was
‘thoroughly penetrated . . . about 90 per cent of funds arriving from the West passed through our hands. Certainly some of that money had been sourced from the CIA but if that had been known, some of our intellectuals would not have touched it. The money was always channelled under cover of some other organisation. We never seized any of it; we could have but that is an exercise you can only do once, and then the channel of information would have dried up.’
The hard currency was used mainly to print books and leaflets, to look after the families of political prisoners and to fund fugitives who were changing flats and cars to avoid detection.
In October 1982, General Vernon Walters was back at the Vatican briefing the Pope, Secretary of State Casaroli and Archbishop Silvestrini on the Middle East, Poland and the problem of nuclear disarmament. If the Pope and his colleagues had any misgivings about US foreign policy in the Middle East they remained diplomatically silent, allowing Walters to temporarily share the Pope’s claim of infallibility.
On nuclear issues, Walters claimed that the US position was uniquely reasonable, while the Soviets remained aggressive and devious. He was preaching to the converted. In his cables back to the Secretary of State recounting his comments to the Pope, each paragraph ends with a recurring theme: ‘He agreed completely.’
The meeting was later reported in the Vatican’s own newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and was picked up by several members of Congress, including Patricia Schröder, who asked the President: ‘Is the new political strategy by your administration to ask foreign powers to intercede in domestic political affairs?’ Schröder then quoted recent news stories suggesting that ‘the purpose of Walters’ visit was to convince the Pope to side-track efforts by American Roman Catholic bishops challenging the morality of nuclear weapons.’ She wanted to know if this was indeed the primary purpose of the meeting and went on to ask ‘Will future appeals for papal intervention to squelch the peace movement be made? Does this imply that you are unable to stop the peace movement in this country?’
In their response the Department of State confirmed that the meeting took place and observed, ‘They did not, however, talk about the Roman Catholic bishops’ discussions of the American nuclear deterrent. In fact, neither the American bishops nor the proposed letter was a topic of conversation.’ The State Department had, in fact, suppressed the truth from Schröder, namely that most of the forty minutes Walters had spent with the Pope were, in the General’s own words, spent on ‘the SS20 briefing and the whole nuclear question’. As to the American bishops, many deeply critical of the administration’s stance on these issues, Vernon Walters was far too experienced in diplomacy to attempt a direct appeal for the Pope to help ‘squelch the peace movement’. Walters was a consummate salesman, although in this instance he had a willing customer. Although Karol Wojtyla believed for much of his life that Communism could not be defeated, if the Reagan administration were prepared to take them on he would give them every encouragement. That encouragement would come to include putting pressure on the American bishops to fall into line.
These were busy times for American foreign policy makers. Of the many parts of the planet where the Reagan administration had special interests, none was more important than Central America. The Pope was scheduled to make a nine-day visit to the region in early March 1983. Inevitably, General Vernon Walters appeared in the Vatican in late February to give Cardinal Casaroli and Monsignor Carlos Romeo, the Vatican’s Central American specialist, an overview of the region and a country-by-country briefing. Also present was the ubiquitous Presidential Envoy William Wilson and Archbishop Silvestrini, the Secretary to the Council for Public Affairs. Walters emphasised that
‘we share common goals with the Holy See. We are opposed to dictatorships of both the left and the right. We are seeking a middle way. Pluralistic democracies, social reform, domestic tranquillity, reconciliation and the prevention of another Cuba.’
He made no attempt to address some of the glaring contradictions to that common goal that existed within the region. One was the repressive military dictatorship in Argentina responsible for the disappearance of more than 30,000 civilians. It was a regime with very close links to the Reagan administration, so close that when the US Congress severely restricted the number of military personnel that President Reagan could legally send to El Salvador, the military in Buenos Aires were delighted to make up the numbers.
In El Salvador a right-wing regime was being assisted by the Reagan administration with economic aid, military weapons and military ‘trainers’ as they struggled to crush a left-wing insurgency. ‘The US considers it of vital importance to continue giving aid to El Salvador and to other countries in the region,’ General Walters told the Vatican Secretary of State and his colleagues. ‘We will not permit guerrillas to shoot their way into power in Central America.’ US policy led directly to a grim alternative in which some 75,000 died in El Salvador.
In Nicaragua the Sandinistas had overthrown the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in July 1979 bringing to an end over forty years of oppressive rule by his family. A State Department briefing document prepared in the 1930s for President Roosevelt commenting on the first Somoza observed, ‘He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he’s ours.’ When the revolution occurred, a hardcore of some 17,000 National Guards and Somoza’s closest officials fled the country to Honduras. These were the men who had done the dictator’s bidding, the killing, the raping, the suppression, the continuous disappearance of dissidents. In 1981 President Reagan ordered the covert funding of this group who had by that time become known as the Contra Revolutionarios – the Contras. In the President’s mind he was fighting Communism.
When the fact leaked that the United States was behind the creation and financing of the Contras, the administration claimed that its reasons for supporting the Contras was to stop the arms flowing from Nicaragua to the guerrillas in El Salvador. There was no common border between the two countries and the only arms ever ‘found’ were those planted by the CIA. The serial numbers on the M16s were traced back to US Government control stock. Casualties among those who supported the revolution began to mount. By the end of President Reagan’s second term nearly 40,000 people had been killed.
Nicaragua and El Salvador were on the Pope’s visiting schedule. Also on the list was Guatemala where a devout ‘born-again’ Christian psychopath General Efrain Rios Montt had seized power in March 1982. His death squads were responsible for a weekly death toll running into hundreds. UN estimates would ultimately estimate that Rios Montt’s troops had slaughtered a minimum of 100,000 people. The guerrillas invariably described by the Reagan administration as Marxists were very largely Mayan Indian peasants fighting for the land they had been promised in the early 1950s, a promise that directly led to the toppling of the elected leader who had made it. The coup was CIA-financed and organised on behalf of US business interests. The new regime reneged on the promise. After thirty years the peasants were still fighting, still landless and still dying. On 4 December 1982, after a meeting with General Efrain Rios Montt, President Reagan praised the dictator as ‘totally dedicated to democracy’ and added that the Rios regime was ‘getting a bum rap’. He also ensured that they got continuous amounts of covert arms and money.
During the Vatican briefing by General Walters in February 1983 he neglected to mention any of these US involvements in Central America. General Walters also neglected to mention an additional $50 million in US military supplies and personnel the President had sent to El Salvador by executive authority, thus circumventing the need for approval by Congress. It had also slipped from the General’s memory that in March 1981 the US had voted against a UN Commission on Human Rights resolution condemning human rights abuses and violations in El Salvador. He also forgot to mention that the Reagan administration had renewed military aid to Guatemala and financial and military aid to Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, all under military dictatorships, all with appalling human rights records.
When Karol Wojtyla became Pope in October 1978, his knowledge of Latin America was scant. He was heavily reliant for information on Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, the prefect of the Congregation of Bishops and President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. The primary role of this Commission was to monitor the activity of CELAM (the Latin American Bishops’ Conference) and assist the Latin American Church with personnel and economic means. This put enormous power in the hands of Baggio, a man who had nurtured ambitions to ascend to the papal throne until his double defeats in 1978. By the time of the emergence of Karol Wojtyla, Baggio’s personal experience belonged very much in the past.
Between 1938 and 1946 he had been a junior Vatican diplomat in three Latin American countries. This was followed by a two-year stint in Colombia as chargé d’affaires then between 1953 and 1969, a posting as nuncio to Chile and then later a further posting as nuncio, this time to Brazil. His politics were right-wing, his views and opinions reactionary and his influence on the Vatican’s and therefore the Pope’s interpretation of Latin American affairs was profound. He was assisted in his various tasks by a close friend, Archbishop Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, a man even further to the right and a vociferous critic of Liberation Theology. From the moment he had become general secretary of CELAM, he had purged the organisation of anyone with ties to any version of Liberation Theology. He wrote, ‘Liberation Theology starts out with good intentions but ends in terror.’ In a working paper for the Puebla, the first CELAM meeting to be attended by the Pope in 1979, Trujillo endorsed the various military regimes of Latin America. ‘These military regimes came into existence as a response to social and economic chaos. No society can admit a power vacuum. Faced with tensions and disorders, an appeal to force is inevitable.’ Karol Wojtyla had much in common with men like Baggio and Trujillo, not least when it came to taking a position on military regimes. As early as the 1930s the future pope had been an enthusiastic supporter of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
In 1990, when Trujillo was Archbishop of Medellin, two hundred Colombian Catholic lay professionals wrote to the Vatican demanding a canonical visit from a senior member of the Vatican to ‘clear up the anti-evangelical acts, some of them questionable before canon law, others before criminal courts’. They declared that they were ‘scandalised’ about the ‘orphaned state’ of the Medellin Church and the behaviour of their pastor, Lopez Trujillo. But the Pope did not investigate the allegations to establish if they were correct; in his eyes Trujillo could do no wrong. In 1985 Trujillo had given further comfort to the military dictatorships in Latin America by masterminding the ‘Andes Statement’ denouncing Liberation Theology in such ringing tones that Chilean theologian Ronaldo Munoz described it as ‘a virtual incitement to repression, and of a criminal nature’. Subsequently when Pinochet’s security forces arrested the Jesuit editor of the magazine Mensaje because of his criticism of the government, the army cited the ‘Andes Statement’ in defence of the arrest, arguing that the Church itself had disavowed editor Father Renato Hevia’s position.
Trujillo was not unique as a Latin American member of the Catholic hierarchy with extreme-right opinions. Archbishop Dario Castrillon Hoyos, one of Trujillo’s protégés, was another Colombian prelate with a close relationship with the drug dealer Pablo Escobar. He took some of Escobar’s profits from his global trade in cocaine which he gave to charity, arguing that to do so ensured that at least part of the hundreds of millions of dollars would not be spent on prostitution. He painted all liberation theologists as revolutionary terrorists, a libel that deeply angered and offended many. More importantly, Castrillon’s attacks not only gave credibility to right-wing regimes throughout the region: it encouraged them to yet harsher measures and upped the continent’s killing rate by an immeasurable amount.
Others who were cherished by right-wing regimes in Latin America included the Chilean cardinal Jorge Medina, the Brazilian cardinal Lucas Moreira, the Italian cardinals, Angelo Sodano and Pio Laghi, and the German cardinal, Höffner. In late 1998 when General Pinochet was arrested and temporarily held in England, the former dictator’s friends were quick to rally round. They included all of the above and several like-minded high-ranking Vatican officials. Pinochet’s friends and admirers within the Holy See, particularly Secretary of State Sodano, persuaded the Pope to approve a letter to the British Government urging them to release Pinochet. By interceding on behalf of Pinochet, Sodano, the other cardinals and indeed the Pope were ignoring the General’s history, which included his illegal seizure of power in 1973 (with significant support from the United States) and the murder of the democratically elected president, followed by seventeen years in which at least 4,000 Chileans were murdered, over 50,000 were tortured, 5,000 were ‘disappeared’ and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned or exiled.
After years of protection from the Vatican cabal who regarded the General as a devout Roman Catholic and after years of affecting senility both mental and physical, doctors determined in late 2005 that Pinochet was fit to stand trial. Asked by a Chilean judge about the thousands of Chilean civilians who had been murdered during the years of the military junta, the General replied: ‘I suffer for these losses, but God does the deeds; he will pardon me if I exceeded in some, which I don’t think I did.’
The Vatican cabal frequently referred to by insiders as ‘the fascists’ looked with favour on many right-wing dictatorships during the reign of John Paul II. Even the Argentinian military dictators were not beyond the pale. When Archbishop Laghi was posted to Argentina in the 1970s the military terror was at its height. As papal nuncio he was not alone in pursuing unusual activities during his tenure in Buenos Aires. In 1976 during the early months of the military dictatorship he gave a speech to the army in which he quoted the Catholic Church’s just war theory and used it to sanction the military campaign against dissent. Hardly any of the Argentinian bishops denounced the daily human rights violations. A number of priests accompanied tortured prisoners on their last journey, blessing them and giving the last rites before their handcuffed bodies were tossed out of military helicopters into the South Atlantic. At least 30,000 ‘enemies of the state’ were killed by the junta between 1976 and 1983. This was the same junta that Pope John Paul II visited in 1982 after his trip to Great Britain to ensure that the Vatican was seen to be acting in an even-handed manner.
The Pope’s speeches and sermons during his visit to the country contained no direct mention of ‘the disappeared ones’; neither did he have time during his trip to meet any of the human rights organisations, although he did meet the current military dictator General Galtieri.
The power and influence of this cabal within the higher reaches of the Catholic Church was not confined to hobnobbing with murderers. In 1981 the Canadian Bishops’ Conference found themselves in complete and total agreement with the other four main religious denominations. The issue that had united Canada’s Roman Catholic, Protestant Anglican and Orthodox Churches had also inspired a united opposition of Catholics, Protestants and Jews in the United States. They united against the Reagan administration reactivating the supply of military aid and financial assistance to the regime in El Salvador. The Vatican response, one that was again organised by Cardinal Baggio and his like-minded friends, was a confidential letter to Canadian Government Minister for External Affairs, Mark MacGuigan. It advised the minister to ignore the Canadian Bishops’ Conference decision to condemn the US intervention in El Salvador declaring that it did not represent the Holy See’s position, which was one of support for the ‘judgement of the US administration’ on the issue. The minister, previously outspoken against the US action, dramatically changed to, ‘I would certainly not condemn any decision the US takes to send offensive arms.’
Simultaneously the papal nuncio in the United States, Archbishop Pio Laghi, was having ‘constant’ conversations with the US bishops. These resulted in a softening of previous criticism. In El Salvador itself the regime took great encouragement from the Vatican interventions and killings continued.
In March 1980 Archbishop Romero, Primate of El Salvador, had been murdered in cold blood while performing Holy Mass in a hospital chapel. He was shot as he raised the host before the congregation. It was a unique, horrific and profane killing, but one quickly matched by the regime.
On 2 December, four missionaries were murdered on the road to Santiago Nonualco. The four, three nuns and a social worker, were all US citizens. The perpetrators were members of the ruling regime’s security forces. It transpired that all four women had been repeatedly raped by the security forces. These crimes had happened during the closing days of Carter’s presidency. The US suspended all aid to El Salvador because of the suspected involvement of state security. Thirteen days later the economic aid resumed. The judge appointed to investigate the murders had himself been murdered a week after the killings. A UN-sponsored investigation concluded that the killings had been planned well in advance, that a cover-up involving the head of the National Guard, two investigating officers, members of the Salvadoran military and a number of American officials had been perpetrated.
Despite the fact that the US State Department had been given evidence that clearly implicated senior members of the Salvadoran military establishment they took no action other than to mount a smear campaign against the dead women. Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, observed, ‘The nuns were not just nuns. They were political activists, and we should be very clear about that.’
The image of gun-toting nuns with an excess of political attitude running a roadblock did not play well within the US Press but the aid, both economic and military, kept going into El Salvador from the Reagan administration. Twenty-six years after these murders they still resonate. In death the victims have become powerful symbols of a larger truth and for many the four stand as witnesses to the many hundreds of thousands who died during these decades.
During his late February briefing to the Pope’s most senior advisors on Central America, General Walters, as befitting an Ambassador, had dressed Reagan’s foreign policies for El Salvador in elegant language:
‘We are seeking a middle way. Pluralistic democracies. Social reform. Domestic tranquillity. Reconciliation and the prevention of another Cuba.’
Earlier during his first term the President had put it more bluntly:
‘Central America is simply too close and the strategic stakes too high, for us to ignore the dangers of governments seizing power there with ideological and military ties to the Soviet Union . . . Soviet military theorists want to destroy our capacity to re-supply Western Europe in case of an emergency. They want to tie down our attention and forces on our own southern border . . .’
Apart from releasing one and a half billion dollars worth of military and economic aid to El Salvador, creating the Contras and illegally funding them as a terrorist front against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, Reagan’s administration built up the Honduran army as a firewall against the further spread of revolution in the region, gave covert support to Guatemala’s genocidal army in its war against its own people and set up secret military bases in Costa Rica to support Reagan’s war effort against Nicaragua.
In 1984 the US financial commitment to the military regime in El Salvador had totalled $576.1 million. Throwing more good money after so much that had been ill spent, the apparently indestructible Henry Kissinger emerged into the light again. He had been appointed by President Reagan to investigate alternatives ‘for improving the situation in Central America’. His committee’s report to absolutely no one’s surprise found itself ‘largely in agreement with the administration’s current Latin America policy’. Kissinger recommended doubling the current ‘aid’ package to the region from $4 billion to $8 billion. Little of this extraordinary largesse was filtered down to the poor. The facts that Archbishop Romero had given the Pope in May 1979 were still the facts during the mid 1980s. In El Salvador two per cent of the population continued to own more than sixty per cent of the land, and eight per cent of the population continued to receive half of the national income. Meanwhile, fifty-eight per cent of the population continued to earn less than $10 a month. Two thirds of the urban population still lacked sewage services, forty-five per cent were still without regular safe drinking water, seventy per cent of children under five were malnourished and the average daily calorific intake of 1,740, about two thirds of what it takes to sustain a human being, was still the lowest consumption rate in the western hemisphere.
In early March 1983 the Pope left Rome and flew into the Central American maelstrom. The trip would demonstrate that in this area at least there was a perfect meeting of the minds. Where the President saw surrogate Soviets behind every Latin American tree, rock and bush, the Pope saw Liberation Theologists. Apparently Solidarity was desirable in Poland but not in Latin America.
In Costa Rica where his tour began, the Pope told his audience that he had come ‘to share the pain’ of Central America and that he hoped to provide a voice for the searing images of daily life, for ‘the tears or deaths of children, of the long lines of orphans, of those many thousands of refugees, exiles or displaced persons searching for a home, of the poor with neither home nor work’. The Pope repeated his frequently stated view that it was the Church’s mission to right social wrongs, but only according to Christian principles. He rejected both the ideologies of the left and the right, rejected both capitalism and communism and stressed that it was important for each nation to ‘confront problems in a sincere dialogue, without foreign influence’.
In Nicaragua, the Pope’s second stop, he was confronted with a country in total uproar. The ruling Sandinistas were fighting the US-backed Contras, and were constantly targeted by mercenaries trained and financed by the CIA. The Nicaraguan Catholic Church was bitterly divided between the traditional hierarchy and their followers, largely anti-Sandinista, and the ‘popular’ Church which blended Christianity with strands of Liberation Theology and a Latin American version of Marxism. The Archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, had emerged as a symbol of the middle-class opposition to Sandinista rule.
In the Nicaraguan line-up waiting to greet him at Managua airport was at least one of the priests who was also a government minister. The Pope publicly humiliated the man, constantly wagging his finger at the figure on his knees as he admonished the priest, Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal Martinez, demanding, ‘Regularise your position with the Church. Regularise your position with the Church.’ The image went around the world and was widely interpreted as a sharp rebuke. Later the same day during a televised open-air Mass in a park, some of the most extraordinary images of this Papacy were recorded. When the Pope, reading from his prepared text, began to condemn the ‘popular Church’ as ‘absurd and dangerous’, the Sandinistas in the front rows began to take great exception. ‘We want a Church allied with the poor,’ they responded. That in turn provoked the loyalists. ‘Long live the Pope,’ they chanted. Soon everyone was joining in the impromptu debate.
Pope John Paul II was never a man to show the slightest regard for religious dissidence. Visibly angered, he shouted at the congregation, ‘Silencio!’ He appeared taken aback that his angry commands had not silenced the congregation and again shouted, ‘Silencio!’ To a group chanting, ‘We want peace!’ he shouted back, ‘The Church is the first to want peace.’ Much of the Mass following the sermon could not be heard through the continuing shouting and counter-shouting. A week after he had left Nicaragua the line had been clearly drawn. The Catholic hierarchy had begun to display far less tolerance for the Government and for Catholics who supported the revolution. One of the country’s most progressive priests, Father Uriel Molina, recalled an ultimatum that he and other pro-revolution priests had been given by auxiliary bishop Bosco Vivas: ‘Either you are with me, the Archbishop and the Pope, or you can find yourself another diocese.’
In El Salvador the Pope insisted on visiting the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero and at the open-air Mass which followed he proclaimed Romero as ‘a zealous and venerated pastor who tried to stop violence. I ask that his memory be always respected and let no ideological interest try to distort his sacrifice as a pastor given over to his flock.’ The Pope returned to his solution for an end to the conflicts that convulsed the region. ‘Dialogue is the answer.’ Again he did not explain how to conduct this dialogue. He adopted a similar theme in Guatemala, telling the indigenous Indians to ‘organise associations for the defence of your rights’. This had been precisely the ‘crime’ for which six ‘subversives’ were executed on the eve of his visit. Under the previous regime of Lucas Garcia, a minimum of 35,000 citizens had been killed in four years. Since General Montt had seized power exactly a year before the Pope’s visit, between 10,000 and 15,000 – mostly native Indians – had been killed.
Many took comfort from this papal tour but perhaps those who derived the greatest satisfaction were the right-wing cabals within the Vatican and the Reagan administration, particularly the State Department and the CIA. The Pope’s initial reaction in 1979 against all aspects of Liberation Theology had hardened over the ensuing years. Within his first decade he had silenced a number of leading liberal theologians. He shut progressive seminaries, censored ecclesiastical texts and repeatedly promoted deeply conservative clergy to positions of great power. He had very effectively silenced the voice of those within the Catholic Church who spoke for the poor of Latin America. On the Reagan administration’s activities in Central America, a number of the State Department cables sent by General Vernon Walters demonstrate that invariably the position of the Pope and his Vatican advisors was essentially identical. Confirmation of that fact came from the Pope himself. During a discussion in early 1985 with Chicago’s Cardinal Bernardin, the Pope said that he did ‘not understand why the US hierarchy is sending bishops to visit Cuba and Nicaragua. Neither do I understand why the bishops do not support your President’s policies in Central America.’
Having admonished the clergy of Latin America to ‘stay out of politics . . . regularise your position with the Church’, the Pope’s next trip was to the one country where he and a great many other priests and bishops were up to their necks in politics: Poland.
Martial law or to use the Polish term stan wojenny – a state of war – was in many respects precisely just that. The country was in the total grip of the occupying force. That it was a Polish occupying force in no way lessened the oppression. After the ‘introduction’ of martial law at least 13,000 people were held for varying periods within internment camps throughout Poland. The courts handed down over 30,000 prison sentences ‘relating to charges of a political nature’ and more than 60,000 people were fined for ‘participating in various forms of protest’. Countless numbers were ‘dismissed from work’ or ‘expelled from colleges, universities and other institutions’ for ‘political activities’. Every form of trade union was declared illegal. The regime, with an eye to softening Western sanctions, would occasionally make a conciliatory gesture and authorise the early release of prisoners. On 1 May 1982, 1,000 were released, but this was followed within weeks by their being re-arrested along with a further 200 people. They were all charged with ‘riotous assembly’, sentenced, and returned to prison.
The greatest legacy of the many creators of Solidarity was continuously demonstrated before the eyes of the nation. Though the Union’s leaders were still in prison and the Union itself outlawed, the flowering of Solidarity had left a permanent mark upon the country. The clock could not be turned back; no matter how brutal their conditions, no matter how low their morale, millions carried within their minds the memories of the summer of 1980. The regime was slow to learn, but eventually Jaruzelski and the others would conclude that you cannot put ideas behind prison bars; you cannot lock memories away in internment camps.
The various top-secret CIA reports on Poland for 1982 paint a grim picture of the Catholic Church’s failure to play a significant role in events.
‘. . . Despite its unrivaled moral authority, however, the Church lacks the power to guide developments. Some leaders of the Church fear that the Government and party hardliners have enough momentum to threaten its access to the media and the freedom to teach catechism . . . The Church’s influence probably is weakest among young people – the group most likely to engage in violent resistance . . . Archbishop Glemp seems frustrated with the intransigence of Solidarity leaders, particularly Lech Walesa . . . Glemp adopted a middle-of-the-road position . . . He is also afraid to undercut Premier Jaruzelski, who he views as a moderate . . . The Archbishop, however, lacks the authority of the late Cardinal Wyszynski, and his tactics have been challenged by other prelates . . . The Pope is likely to endorse continuing Glemp’s strategy, perhaps with some modifications. The Pontiff would be reluctant to run roughshod over his former colleagues. . .’
Before the events of December 1981 the Vatican and the Polish regime had been negotiating a return visit for the Pope in 1982. The Polish government discreetly indicated to the Church that the situation within the country lacked the necessary stability to absorb a papal visit. The Pope, acutely aware that he might provoke an uncontrollable response on Polish soil, agreed to wait until 1983. The trip and the potential gain for both sides greatly exercised many minds as the diplomatic trading proceeded behind closed doors. In Moscow on 10 November Leonid Brezhnev died. The very next day Lech Walesa was released and on 31 December 1982 General Jaruzelski announced the suspension but not the formal end of the ‘state of war’. The pace of the negotiations over a papal visit quickened. The Polish Church submitted a list of sixteen towns that the Pope would like to visit.
The regime refused to consider that any part of northern Poland could feature on the itinerary. It also asked for all texts that the Pope planned to deliver to be made available in advance. The Vatican refused. The Vatican requested that a general amnesty should be declared before the visit; the regime responded with the promise that such an amnesty would be declared, but only when martial law was formally ended, and so the negotiations continued. One of the many sticking points concerned the Pope’s desire to meet Lech Walesa. ‘Why does he want to meet that guy?’ and ‘You mean that man with the big family?’ were two of the responses from the Polish Interior Minister, General Kiszcak, who headed the regime’s negotiating team. ‘Why would the Pope want to meet the former leader of the former Solidarity?’ was another.
The Pope was determined. He gave ground on a regime demand and said that in return he would not only meet General Jaruzelski but would deliver a speech and exchange gifts. The General upped the ante; he wanted two meetings with the Pope. In the General’s mind that would give further legitimacy to the regime. After considerable hesitation the Holy See agreed. What was written and broadcast about the papal visit was very tightly controlled and, unlike the 1979 trip, crowd control was totally in the hands of the state. Karol Wojtyla was returning to a deeply troubled homeland which, apart from the various problems already recorded, had a deeply divided Church.
Glemp had ignored the repeated pleas from Solidarity, now functioning as an underground movement, to act as an intermediary between the union movement and the Church in Rome. Solidarity believed that there was an important role for the Church to play at this crucial time. The Primate, now a cardinal, never responded to the letters. With other young priests, the charismatic Father Jerzy Popieluszko became a national hero with his mixture of a Gandhian philosophy of non-violent resistance and Martin Luther King-style appeals on ‘Choice’. ‘Which side will you take? The side of good or the side of evil? Truth or falsehood? Love or hatred?’ While Popieluszko inspired his people, the Primate sat in his library wondering what Cardinal Wyszynski might have done.
The Pope was also returning to a Solidarity movement that was deeply demoralised. Their call for a national strike in November had been an abject failure. Their printing presses were busy. The revolutionary word was going out but at times those leaders still at liberty clearly feared that no one was listening. During his eight-day visit in mid-June the Pope had to perform a high wire act; one that was fraught with great risks requiring not the near frontal attack of a Popieluszko but something that delivered the same message with stealth and he was given early notice of the need for such tactics. On the day of his arrival he talked at St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw of why he had come at this time to Poland.
‘To stand beneath the cross of Christ . . . especially with those who are most acutely tasting the bitterness of disappointment, humiliation, suffering, of being deprived of their freedom, of being wronged, of having their dignity trampled on . . . I thank God that Cardinal Wyszynski has been spared having to witness the painful events connected with the date December 13th, 1981.’
But the censors cut the comment from all press reports.
To a crowd of more than half a million at Czestochowa, Wojtyla then preached the Gospel message complete with contemporary footnotes. ‘The love of Christ is more powerful than all the experiences and disappointments that life can prepare for us.’ He spoke of a ‘greater freedom’ that must be attained before one can look to reform the body politic. He told his audience that they must ‘call good and evil by name’. He talked of the ‘fundamental solidarity between human beings’. The message was exactly the same as that being constantly delivered in Warsaw by Father Popieluszko but now it was carrying the moral authority of the Pope.
On the fifth day of his trip, in a strong defence of Solidarity’s record, he spoke of the events before December 1981, which were primarily concerned with ‘moral order . . . and not just increasing remuneration for work’. He recalled that ‘these events were free of violence’. He observed that ‘the duty to work corresponds to the rights of the working man’ which included ‘the right to a just salary, to be insured against accidents connected with work and work-free Sundays’. Then he quoted the man whom in his petulance he had dismissed as ‘that old man’, Cardinal Wyszynski, defending the right to create free trade union organisations.
‘When the right of association of people is at stake, then it is not the right bestowed on people by some person. This is the people’s own inherent right. That is why the state does not give this right to us. The state has merely the right to protect that right so that it is not breached. This right has been given to the people by the Creator who made man a social being.’
In his private meetings with the General, the Pope had no need to invoke the Almighty. He made it very plain to Jaruzelski and his colleagues. He wanted an official end to martial law and a general amnesty to be declared: and re-legalisation of Solidarity. The biggest concession, which Jaruzelski had agreed before the Papal visit, was that martial law would be formally lifted within weeks of the Pope’s departure but a dialogue between the regime and the ‘former’ Solidarity leaders was not on the current agenda.
One of his last acts on this trip was his meeting with Lech Walesa. The Polish Church and Glemp and his advisors in particular had prevailed upon the Pope to delay this meeting until the last moment, arguing that to do otherwise would be to play up the importance of a man whose fifteen minutes of fame had passed by. What really aggravated Glemp was that the Western media had very largely focused on the Wojtyla–Walesa meeting.
Revealing details of the meeting, however, were recorded in the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano by deputy editor Monsignor Virgilio Levi, a man whose sources were unimpeachable. Levi confirmed that Walesa as a significant player had been retired from the game. He was to be accorded ‘great honours’ but would never return to lead Solidarity. Levi confirmed that in exchange for the lifting of martial law the Pope had formally assisted in lowering the profile of the little electrician from Gdansk.
When the story broke in the Vatican newspaper and then in the world’s media, the response from the papal apartments was very similar to that when Ambassador Wilson had revealed that the Pope approved of the Reagan sanctions being applied to Poland. The Pope was furious at the report, not that his actions had been misinterpreted but that the correct interpretation had become public knowledge. Within twenty-four hours L’Osservatore Romano was in need of a new deputy editor.
On 22 July martial law in Poland was formally ended. On 5 November Lech Walesa, written off by so many within both the regime and the Vatican, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Seven years later he was elected President of Poland.
As 1983 was drawing to a close, the White House announced that it was raising US ties with the Vatican to the level of full diplomatic status. Expecting flak from critics who were already concerned at the President’s appointment of William Wilson as his special representative to the Vatican in February 1981, the White House got its defence in before the attack. At the press conference announcing the appointment in December 1983, press secretary Larry Speakes in his opening statement declared, ‘We did not actively promote this legislation, which passed overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate, but we see a number of foreign policy advantages resulting from it.’
In fact the idea was born within the White House, as a memo dated 12 July 1982, from Deputy Secretary of State Elliott Abrams to National Security Advisor William Clark confirms:
‘. . . There are substantial political and humanitarian benefits to be gained from giving full diplomatic recognition to the Vatican . . . If we announced our intention to so do now, it would emphasise our support of the Catholic Church as a force for freedom under the present Pope . . . It might signal that there is greater understanding between the Reagan administration and the Pope than there is with some radical Catholic bishops in the US on such issues as nuclear freeze. Needless to say there are significant political benefits as well.’
Indeed there were, not least in the message it would send to the electorate of the United States in the presidential election year 1984. The Catholic vote is always an important factor in such elections. The reference to the US bishops’ nuclear stance, however, touched on a long-running and highly contentious issue. The Pope did not share the views of the majority of US bishops on the nuclear issue. His bishops wanted the United States to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons, and they were sceptical of the concept of mutual deterrence. Most importantly, the bishops were very critical of the Reagan administration’s arms escalation and its support for the concept of limited nuclear wars. The administration had chosen to ignore their own scientists’ advice on this last theory. They had argued that a nuclear war could never be ‘limited’ and that ‘escalation to total war’ would be inevitable. The Pope, on the other hand, believed in the concept of deterrence. He did not believe in unilateral disarmament and he held to the traditional Catholic theory of just war.
His views chimed exactly with those of the West German and French Cardinals. West German Cardinal Joseph Höffner was particularly busy promoting the Reagan line and attacking the US bishops. Privately the Pope was very sympathetic to their arguments but publicly he aspired to maintain a studied neutrality. The administration hoped that full diplomatic recognition might be the means of moving the Pope to a public and pro-USA stance on these issues.
Virtually every major religion came to protest about the Vatican upgrade. James Baker and Edward Meese listened attentively to the various arguments, responded politely to the various questions and attempted to reassure the various delegations that the new status between the Holy See and the United States would ‘in no way violate the constitutional strictures on the separation of Church and State’. Having sent the delegations away, safe in the knowledge that the Catholic Church would have no input or influence at all on any aspect of US government policy, the State Department bowed to Vatican pressure and agreed to an outright ban on the use of any US aid funds by either countries or international health organisations for the promotion of birth control or abortion. They announced their policy change at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City in March 1984. Funding was withdrawn from, among others, two of the world’s largest family planning organisations, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities. Ambassador Wilson later confirmed that ‘American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy.’
It was but one of a number of issues where Vatican influences affected US policy but undoubtedly the most far-reaching. As the 1982 memo from Elliot Abrams makes clear, the administration was hoping for a payback, particularly on the nuclear weapons issue. The Pope, Cardinal Casaroli, and the papal delegate to the US, Pio Laghi, were fully prepared to exert pressure on recalcitrant bishops on the nuclear issue but only in private. Publicly, Cardinal Casaroli advised Ambassador Wilson in October 1983 that ‘The Holy See is aware of the US position on arms reduction negotiations but our appeal to both the Soviet Union and the United States must be even-handed.’ Very typically Casaroli then implied off the record that the letter which had been sent to both countries was ‘principally aimed at the Soviets’.
The Reagan administration was far more successful with the President’s Strategic Defence Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars. The Vatican Academy of Sciences had responded to the announcement of this surreal escalation of the arms race in March 1983 with a long, detailed study which had culminated in a highly critical report. This provoked a flurry of activity. Lobbying from, among others, Vernon Walters, Vice President George Bush, CIA Director William Casey and ultimately the President, eventually persuaded the Pope to order that the report should not be published.
On Central America, it was easy to get Vatican endorsement for administration policy, because the Pope’s view of that part of the world coincided with Reagan’s. The Pope saw all the insurgencies as a threat to the established order, namely the Roman Catholic Church. The President saw them as a threat to the United States. His policies met with full papal approval. However, on Poland there was a surprising fundamental difference. Initially the Pope had believed that the Reagan sanctions were a correct response to martial law. When martial law was revoked, the Pope believed that the sanctions should be lifted. His people were hurting. Reagan wanted more than the end of martial law. He wanted Solidarity and KOR leaders released simultaneously.
Communism and its multiple threats were a constant theme of General Vernon Walters in his discussion with the Pope. During his next papal briefing in December 1984, among the subjects discussed were events in Chile and the Philippines. Walters, voicing the State Department position observed,
‘We must not allow the Communists to come to power using the genuine democratic parties, only to exclude them once in office . . . The US would welcome any initiatives that help Chile towards a smooth transition to democracy.’
The two men discussed the likely scenario that might follow the death or removal in the Philippines of the US-backed Ferdinand Marcos. The Pope asked Walters about the emergence of Corazon Aquino, the widow of the assassinated leader of the opposition, Benigno Aquino. ‘I think she would be totally unacceptable as a successor to Marcos.’ Again Walters was expressing not only the State Department’s position but also the President’s. To judge from the Pope’s treatment of Cardinal Sin of the Philippines, subsequent events would appear to confirm that Wojtyla shared the General’s opinion.
In March 1985 CIA chief William Casey received from an intelligence source within the Soviet Union the news that the nation’s leader Konstantin Chernenko had died, but that the news was being suppressed. Casey, with all of the wealth and the facilities at his disposal, had no second source he could turn to for confirmation. Three days later he was growing increasingly disturbed that the information he had rushed to give to the President might be incorrect.
On 10 March it was announced that Chernenko had indeed died and that his successor was Mikhail Gorbachev. Casey advised the President that any difference between Gorbachev and his three predecessors, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, was only superficial. The head of the CIA predicted that the younger Gorbachev, only 54 at the time, would ‘only export subversion and trouble with more zest’. It was a total misjudgement by the head of the world’s most expensive intelligence agency. The same agency that ensured that its opinions, balanced or not, were invariably whispered to the Holy Father. In a conversation with Cardinal Bernadin in the summer of 1985, the Pope made it very clear that he fully supported the Reagan administration’s actions throughout Central America and expected his US bishops to do the same.
During the run-up to the Reagan–Gorbachev summit in Geneva in November 1985, the administration strained every nerve to ensure that Roman Catholic opinion supported the Government position on the forthcoming arms reduction negotiations. Particular effort was made with regard to the position of various cardinals. One suggestion put to National Security Advisor, Bud McFarlane, by the State Department was to invite US Cardinals Law and O’Connor to a White House meeting with the President. ‘. . . Such an invitation would be viewed positively by the American Catholic community, improve our relations with the Vatican and assist in our efforts to influence the Bishops’ statements on national security issues . . .’ Thanking the proposer, Ty Cobb, Bud McFarlane advised him that he had recommended the idea and the presidential schedulers would try to accommodate the meeting. He continued:
‘Law has been a strong advocate of our national security policies, but we are not impressed with O’Connor’s stance on the MX missile. You indicated to me that these two (Law and O’Connor) and Bernadin are now the leaders of the Catholic Church in the US. What do you think that portends for our defence policies?’
One might well conclude that McFarlane and Cobb were talking about the respective merits of three US senators rather than senior members of a religious organisation.
Another Prince of the Church under the critical spotlight was Cardinal Jaime Sin of the Philippines. He alarmed the Pope, his Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli and the papal nuncio in the Philippines, Archbishop Bruno Torpigliani, just as he disturbed the State Department. The papal nuncio was an avid supporter of the Marcos regime and a close friend of Imelda, the dictator’s wife. The Archbishop worked very hard for several years attempting to undermine Cardinal Sin whose crime was his constant attempts to protect ordinary Filipinos from the worst excesses of a brutal regime. When Sin also began to support the opposition to Marcos and work for social reform within the country, the Marcos family took every opportunity to attack him. Imelda would tell the nuncio of the latest alleged provocation by the Cardinal, the nuncio would then telephone the Secretary of State complaining, whereupon Casaroli would attempt to control the activities of Cardinal Sin. This became a regular event.
The Pope’s view of the Cardinal was poisoned just as his views of a great many others were poisoned over the years, and the Vatican lost no opportunity in humiliating a man who responded to a despotic regime in a manner not dissimilar to Cardinal Wyszynski’s in Poland. Yet again the Pope demonstrated serious double standards. What was applauded in Poland was condemned in the Philippines.
The Pope warned Sin that he was setting a bad example by becoming too deeply involved in his country’s politics. This was after it had been powerfully demonstrated to the world that the Cardinal had the backing of his bishops and the overwhelming majority of the Philippine people. It was also after Marcos, despite having organised massive vote rigging, had been defeated at the polls and Corazon Aquino, the woman dismissed by General Vernon Walters, had become President.
President Reagan promptly switched horses, gave full diplomatic recognition to the new Government and recognised Mrs Aquino as the country’s legal head. Instead of publicly acclaiming the extraordinary courage of his Cardinal, the Pope, the Secretary of State and inevitably the ‘fascists’ treated Cardinal Sin with contempt.
Two bishops from the Third World who were working in Rome at this time recalled certain events.
‘The Secretariat of State had for a number of years been bombarded on a daily basis by Torpigliani who was at the beck and call of the Marcos family and the ruling regime . . . He turned blind eyes to torture, to death squads, to every form of repression. He regularly asked Casaroli to persuade the Holy Father to put a co-adjutor (a bishop who would for all practical purposes run the Cardinal’s arch-diocese) into Manila. Casaroli backed away from that but he made sure the Holy Father was aware of the continuous complaints. They treated Cardinal Sin very badly. A lesser man would have crumpled . . .’
All this was for holding a moral position that was acclaimed around the world. When Cardinal Sin died in June 2005, Pope Benedict XVI, a man who had done nothing to support Sin in 1986, saluted the dead Cardinal for his ‘unfailing commitment to the spread of the Gospel and to the promotion of the dignity, common good, and national unity of the Philippine people.’ The ‘fascists’ were not alone in attempting to stem the irresistible tide of change that was stirring in various parts of the world. They and others within the Vatican still clung to the desire that the old order, provided it was a right-wing order, should not change. Others held with equal tenacity to opinions and positions concerning European Communism that grew daily more untenable.
By March 1986 the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had achieved considerable success in convincing the West that the ‘Evil Empire’ was indeed under new management. Margaret Thatcher memorably observed of Gorbachev that ‘this is a man I can do business with’. But Cold Warriors die hard. President Reagan was still surrounded by men who continued to insist that virtually all the world’s ills could be traced back to the Soviet Union. In a March 1986 meeting with the Pope, Walters spent the entire thirty minutes delivering an anti-Soviet lecture yet was obliged near the end to admit that ‘seldom can one trace a specific act of terrorism directly to the Soviets’.
Walters did not record in his secret report to the US Secretary of State whether the Pope raised any questions or pointed out the contradiction of a Soviet State hell-bent on worldwide terrorism and simultaneously making historically unique efforts to end the Cold War. In little more than a year the Soviet leader would succeed and in doing so would initiate the collapse of the Communist dominoes all over Europe.
General Walters’s meeting in March 1986 with the Pope would be the last arranged by Ambassador Wilson. Wilson had led a charmed life from the moment his close friend had accepted him to the Vatican post in February 1981. That he had survived for just over five years speaks volumes about Ronald Reagan’s sense of loyalty. Some of William Wilson’s embarrassments have already been recorded in this chapter. Exceptionally, Wilson had been allowed to break the normal rules of conduct for American diplomats and continue to serve as a director of the Pennzoil Corporation. He was especially valuable to them because of his continued access to Libya during a time when the US was applying stringent economic sanctions against the country. It was this link that eventually did for Wilson.
The Reagan administration never succeeded in its prime ambition in its relationship with the Vatican to persuade the Pope to commit the Church publicly to the US position on nuclear weapons, but it was not for lack of trying. When the arms reduction talks, first in Geneva and then Reykjavik, faltered solely because of US intransigence regarding the Star Wars programme – the US refusing to abandon the project, the Soviets insisting that the programme be cancelled – President Reagan yet again justified his stance in a cable to the Pope. ‘. . . The programme threatens no one. Such technologies offer the hope of placing deterrence of war on a safer and more stable basis. Is it not better to save lives than to avenge them?’ In the Secretary of State’s offices there was bemusement. How could the Americans spend trillions of dollars on a concept that could never be tested unless someone attempted to start a nuclear war?
In October 1986, a few days after the Reykjavik summit ended in deadlock, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger met the Pope to discuss the implications of the US position on arms reduction and to justify yet again the value of Star Wars. ‘We do not seek a unilateral military advantage through SDI, but in fact we have offered to share the benefits with the Soviets.’ The Pope expressed his appreciation for the briefing observing that, ‘While I earnestly seek peace, I am not a unilateral pacifist.’
The Pope also took the opportunity during this meeting to raise one of his own major preoccupations, the continuing economic and commercial sanctions that the United States had imposed against Poland. After reflection, he had concluded that the sanctions were indeed bad for Poland and attempted for years to persuade the Reagan administration to lift them. On 24 December 1986, exactly five years after the sanctions had been imposed, he tried yet again, this time while talking to the Polish community of Rome.
‘I wish nobody to live any longer lacking material means and facing the everyday preoccupations of life; I wish Poland to become the “house of freedom” where everybody is subject to the same law and shares the same obligations. I wish that, with adequate efforts in this direction, Poland can again proceed on the road leading to full and fruitful co-operation and exchange of goods in every sector.’
The speech was quoted extensively in the Italian media. The new US Ambassador to the Vatican, Frank Shakespeare, cabled a copy back to the State Department. It was also discussed at length in the papal apartments on 13 January 1987 when the Pope received General Jaruzelski. Both men were optimistic that the US sanctions would be lifted in the very near future. The previous September the Communist regime had announced a general amnesty and released 229 political prisoners who represented the heart and soul of Solidarity. Now for the first time since the declaration of martial law, although Jaruzelski still deprived the movement of any legality, its essence was alive and well and active through the many underground publications, CIA-financed radio stations and the Vatican Radio.
The Pope and the General discussed Gorbachev at great length. Jaruzelski had spent many hours in conversation with the Soviet leader and was deeply impressed. He recounted his belief that through this new breed of Soviet leader ‘whom we must support, there is a great chance for Europe and the World’. The Pope was also aware through the continuous reports he received from Cardinal Glemp and members of the Polish hierarchy that the General was cautiously moving Poland forward. The relaxations were not happening overnight, but they were happening. Just over one month later on 19 February President Reagan announced the lifting of the sanctions he had imposed against Poland. In giving among his reasons the claim that ‘the light of liberty shines in Poland’, yet again Reagan was guilty of wishful thinking.
During the first week of June 1987 the President paid his second visit to the Vatican. In his welcoming speech the Pope remarked,
‘The Holy See has no political ambitions, but it does consider it part of its missions in the world to be vitally concerned about human rights and the dignity of all, especially the poor and suffering.’
Officially, as the Pope stated, it is an organisation devoid of political ambition; secretly, however, and sometimes not too secretly, it invariably has a political agenda. If any institution is ‘vitally concerned about human rights and the dignity of all especially the poor and suffering’, and then puts this concern into action, it is politically involved. Underlining the Holy See’s activity, on the day of the Presidential visit a totally unpublicised meeting took place between Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli, Secretary of the Council for Public Affairs of the Church Archbishop Achille Silvestrini, his Under-secretary Monsignor Audrys Backis and a US delegation that included National Security Council Advisor Frank Carlucci and his deputy Tyrus Cobb, Senator Howard Baker, the Senate Republican majority leader, Ambassador Frank Shakespeare and various other US officials. Among the subjects discussed were Poland, Third World debt, Latin America, Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, and Israel.
On Latin America the cardinal told his visitors that the Vatican wanted to see a ‘true democracy’ in every Latin American country, but that meant democracy ‘in the fullest sense of the word, including socially and economically just societies’. He expressed anxieties about the future of religion in the region, particularly in the poorer countries where poverty and injustice can lead the faithful and ‘even some clergy toward socialism’. The Vatican was also concerned ‘about proponents of Liberation Theology’ and was particularly worried about ‘Mexico, where we believe a radical and anti-religious revolution is possible’. Casaroli said that ‘the US has a special responsibility in Latin America as the region’s “big brother”. You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your brother.’
Their discussion on Gorbachev and the major obstacles facing him as he sought to bring change within the USSR elicited from Carlucci the extraordinary suggestion that Gorbachev’s reforms ‘resembled Khrushchev’s’. This dismissal of the Soviet leader was very much in line with the opinion of the head of the CIA, William Casey, the State Department’s Ambassador General Walters and many of their colleagues within the administration.
During the summer of 1987 the political involvement of the Holy See continued apace. It included a continuing secret dialogue between General Jaruzelski and the Pope with the General acting as an unofficial go-between as he assiduously worked on bringing the Pope and Mikhail Gorbachev together. It would take time but already each leader was keenly interested in learning about the other. Vatican political involvement also included Nicaragua and Haiti with the State Department pulling every conceivable lever to persuade the Pope to allow Cardinal Obando to remain in Nicaragua during October rather than attend a Synod of Bishops in Rome. The CIA, the State Department and a quiverful of ambassadors plus the President appealed to the Secretary of State Casaroli, the Vatican Foreign Minister and finally through Reagan, to the Pope. The secret cable traffic for the period shows a rampant paranoia. The administration feared that if the Cardinal who was very much their man in Managua left for Rome, the Sandinistas would block his return, and they feared without Obando’s presence at the peace talks between the Sandinista Government and the Contras the US-backed Contras might not prevail. Eventually after four different approaches by the administration and Reagan’s direct intervention, the Pope gave way and Cardinal Obando was back home after just one week’s absence.
The State Department was less successful in attempting to get the Pope to fly into Haiti as a ‘side trip while he is visiting Miami in September’. The two incidents and the tenor of the cables are very reminiscent of the language used to describe the US cardinals when the idea of having three of them at a Presidential lunch was discussed.
‘The Pope should re-engage on this issue (unrest in Haiti) . . . It would be particularly useful if Holy Father would again become directly engaged in focusing Haitian attention on co-operation and compromise leading to elections in an environment of domestic tranquillity. A few words in Creole and French would have a positive impact.’
Treating the Pope as no more than a US roving ambassador who should be following his brief and his script is straight out of a Grahame Greene novel.
In the real world during December 1987 the United States and the Soviet Union signed a formal treaty on arms control limitation. This was the first such agreement in the nuclear age. The Russians agreed to destroy four times as many nuclear warheads – 1,500 – as the United States – 350. Gorbachev, the man that the US administration had so easily dismissed, had delivered what no one had even dared think was possible. Because of Mikhail Gorbachev, millions of people had learned their first two words of Russian, words that Gorbachev frequently used to describe his policies: ‘perestroika’ – economic restructuring and ‘glasnost’ – openness. Now with the arms treaty the West had a practical example of both words.
The Pope, a man far better informed about the Russian leader than President Reagan, had been following the arms negotiations closely. He also studied the speech that Gorbachev made at the United Nations on the day the treaty was signed. Gorbachev had stunned his audience by announcing that apart from the arms reduction he had just agreed he was willing to make major troop and weapon reductions in Eastern Europe. These would reduce the Red Army in Europe by at least half a million soldiers and 10,000 tanks. Explaining his reasoning he observed, ‘Although the Russian Revolution radically changed the course of world development, today we face a different world, for which we seek a different road to the future.’ He continued, with a self-honesty never before seen in a Soviet leader, ‘Closed societies are impossible, because the world economy is becoming a single organism.’ On the rights of the individual Gorbachev described freedom of choice as ‘mandatory’. To the listening Pope and to many others around the world, Mikhail Gorbachev was proclaiming the end of the Cold War.
The cost to both superpowers had been unimaginably high. The Soviet Union’s attempts to match US spending in the arms race had resulted in an economy on its knees and infrastructure in disarray. The United States under President Reagan sustained the largest peacetime military buildup in the country’s history. Then there was the development of the Strategic Defence Initiative or Star Wars programme designed to shield America from incoming missiles. The financial cost to the country was astronomical. The national debt tripled during the Reagan years, rising from $900 billion to $2,700 billion, and the trade deficit quadrupled. By the time Reagan left office, interest payments alone on the debt amounted to fourteen per cent of the Federal budget and the debt was growing by $200 billion a year. He had not only put his successors in a financial straitjacket but also, it seemed, unborn generations of Americans.
The high-cost strategy had undoubtedly accelerated the conditions within the Soviet Union that enabled Gorbachev’s realism to prevail over the Soviet hard-liners. Reagan’s foreign policies in other areas such as the Middle East and Latin America were also high-cost in every sense, but largely resulted in failure. The Middle East had been largely abandoned, a legacy that would come back ultimately to plague the United States. Latin America was very much a disaster area. It would take many years for the region to recover from the Reagan scorched-earth version of political settlement.
The papal briefings from US officials tailed off even before President Reagan left office in January 1989. The consultations on American policies also became a curiosity of the past. To such an extent were the Pope and his senior officials ignored that there were complaints from the Holy See during the Gulf war of 1990/91 that neither the US Secretary of State Baker nor any other senior members of the Administration considered it worthwhile to request an audience with the Pope or an appointment with the Secretary of State. Such indifference had in fact been manifesting for years.
The following letters were part of a large bundle of material, some 900 documents, obtained from the personal papers of President Ronald Reagan.
6 September 1985
INTEREST IN A DISCREET DIALOGUE –
POPE JOHN PAUL II TO McFARLANE
Pope John Paul II remains vitally concerned with the following issues:
• Developments in Poland.
• ‘Liberation Theology’ and its impact on developments in Latin America.
• African developments and how to correct the manipulation of Christian principles.
• Role of the Catholic Church in America.
• Foreign policy issues which impact on the respective interests of the Vatican and the United States.
At the moment the Pope believes his problems with the Curia – particularly with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli and Archbishop Achille Silvestrini – are such that the quality of his dialogue with the United States is less than what he would like. In an attempt to correct this, the Pope has authorized one of his personal secretaries – Emery Kabango – to undertake discreet soundings of the possibility for opening a back channel dialogue to McFarlane. This decision was taken because McFarlane impressed the Holy Father and Kabango with his sincerity and openmindedness in a previous meeting. It was also influenced by the belief that a two-tier communications system was required to enable the Pope to circumvent the restraints of Vatican political life, the views of special interest groups, and security considerations affecting the privacy of his dialogue.
Kabango in turn has asked a trusted confidant to assess the prospects for opening such a channel. That is the genesis of this memorandum, for the emissary is currently in the United States and is available for a meeting to elaborate on this matter.
It is understood that McFarlane may find it difficult to travel. If he were in Rome, however, a discreet one-on-one meeting with the Pope is assured.
An expression of interest or disinterest in this Vatican probe is requested.
15 October 1985
VATICAN REMAINS KEEN TO HAVE A DISCREET DIALOGUE–POPE JOHN PAUL II TO McFARLANE On 8 October 1985 a meeting was held at the Vatican with Monsignor Emery Kabango, one of Pope John Paul II’s personal secretaries. The conversation took place in a wing of the private quarters of the Holy Father and lasted seventy-five minutes. The prime purpose of this session was to discuss the dates and ground rules for a magazine interview with Pope John Paul II.
After agreement was reached on the next steps to be taken relative to the interview, Kabango adroitly turned the focus of the discussion to themes that obviously interested him. In this portion of the meeting, Kabango made the following points:
• A private visit at an early date by McFarlane with the Holy Father would be most welcome. This encounter would, of course, be a one-on-one session undertaken under the most discreet circumstances. Could such a session take place before too long?
• It is recognised in the Vatican that the United States has the mission of defending peace and freedom throughout the world. Others must help America in the pursuit of this mission, but the question is how.
• The Vatican can identify with specific American foreign policy objectives. It cannot, however, sign up for a blanket policy endorsement of America’s actions. As a result there must be a discussion of specific points on which co-operation can be achieved.
• The Vatican remains in close contact with its bishops. Recently conversations with 370 bishops from Brazil revealed they believe the Church should not support United States policies in an area like Latin America in total terms.
As the meeting was drawing to a close, Kabango said, ‘Dr Pavoni is our very good friend. He is called upon to help us solve difficult problems. We appreciate, therefore, your assistance in attempting to find a way for Dr Pavoni to open a channel to McFarlane on our behalf.’
A few brief observations based on the 8 October meeting may help to put the above data into perspective. They are:
• Dr Pavoni is on extremely good terms with Monsignor Kabango. In the discussion of all items, Dr Pavoni was a full participant and it is clear Kabango respects his advice.
• Dr Pavoni has easy access to all parts of the Vatican. He arranged the meeting with Kabango under circumstances that permitted the author to enter and leave the Vatican without being checked by any security personnel.
• It is clear a meeting with McFarlane just prior to the Geneva Summit, during the conference or just after it, would be most welcome by the Holy Father.
• While the magazine interview was the primary reason for the meeting with Kabango, the latter wanted to make certain points during this session which he hoped would be conveyed to McFarlane or his associates. All of these points have been covered in this memorandum.
7 January 1986
VATICAN IS PERPLEXED AS TO WHY NO
FOLLOW UP HAS TAKEN PLACE ON
ITS OVERTURE FOR A DISCREET DIALOGUE
On 6 January 1986, the question was raised in a double-talk international telephone call as to why there had been no response to the Vatican’s September 1985 overture for a discreet dialogue between Pope John Paul II and Mr McFarlane or his successor. The Vatican emissary said Monsignor Emery Kabango, a private secretary to Pope John Paul II, understood that Washington’s top echelons had been preoccupied with the Geneva summit and other issues, such as personnel changes. On the other hand, the Holy Father was perplexed why no one had extended him the courtesy of an interim response. How was this lack of a sign of life to be interpreted?
The caller was told we had no answers to his questions, but would forward his inquiry to appropriate authorities.
Attached for easy reference are two previous memoranda on this topic. They are dated 6 September and 15 October 1985.
At the time of the first two letters Bud McFarlane was President Reagan’s National Security Advisor. He was succeeded on 4 December 1985 by Admiral John M. Poindexter. It is inconceivable that these letters were not drawn to the attention of both men and the fact that they are in the late President’s official papers demonstrates that they also reached Ronald Reagan. What action the White House subsequently took, if indeed any was taken, is unknown. The administration’s failure even to respond demonstrates the fantasy of the ‘Holy Alliance’.
The letters also demonstrate a state of affairs that had existed within this Papacy since its inception and continued into the 1990s. The Pope was so profoundly alienated from his Secretary of State and his Foreign Secretary that he attempted to open a back channel to Reagan and his National Security Advisor. The issues of concern are equally revealing as are the points that the Pope’s Secretary Monsignor Emery Kabango lists in the October 15th letter. It would seem that the Pope was seeking in the mid 1980s to establish the very relationship that has been claimed for himself and Reagan and that his overtures were rejected.
Although the concept of a ‘Holy Alliance’ is a myth, the efforts of the Reagan administration to upgrade US relations with the Holy See paid handsome dividends. US activity throughout Latin America was not the only Reagan agenda that escaped either public or private papal criticism. The bottom line is by any criteria an indictment of the Wojtyla Papacy. At no time during Reagan’s two terms of office did the Pope see fit to object, condemn or criticise the administration. He ignored the objections of his US bishops on the vast military build-up. He castigated the same bishops for not supporting the carnage that the administration was wreaking in Latin America and under pressure from the administration the Pope ordered that a highly critical Vatican Academy of Sciences study of Reagan’s Star Wars project should be filed with the minimum of publicity. The spiritual leader of the Catholic Church held a sincere belief in the rightness of eight years of Reagan’s foreign policy decisions and with that belief he profoundly compromised many of the basic tenets of his faith.
Within twelve months of Reagan’s stepping down from the Presidency, the face of Europe had dramatically changed. Under Gorbachev’s urging, free elections had occurred in Poland and the country had the first government in a Communist state in which the Communists were a minority. Again with the support of Mikhail Gorbachev, East Germany began to move out of a forty-year darkness. When the Soviet leader came to participate in the ‘celebrations’ for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the DDR, he declared to the party leader Eric Honecker: ‘Life itself punishes those who delay.’ Privately he advised Honecker that he could not count on the 500,000 Soviet troops still stationed in East Germany ‘to repress the citizens of this country’. Ten days later Honecker was gone and on 9 November the authorities made an opening in the Berlin Wall for the first time since 1961. Within a further eleven months, Germany was once again a united country.
Gorbachev throughout the entire period had been greatly preoccupied in simultaneously fighting off the Soviet conservative hard-liners and encouraging Warsaw Pact countries to believe that ‘the future of every East European country was in its own hands’. By the time of German reunification in October 1990 he had had his first highly successful meeting with the Pope and for good measure received the Nobel Peace Prize. The hard-liners did not yield without a fight. In mid-1991 an attempted coup to overthrow Gorbachev failed, but it led to the emergence of Boris Yeltsin, a man whose thirst for power far outweighed his abilities. By December 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to resign to be replaced by Yeltsin. Gorbachev’s place in history was secure; the majority have already forgotten Boris Yeltsin.
While these events were unfolding in Europe, some countries in Latin America, apparently impervious to such tumultuous change, carried on their same repressive path of murders, political assassination, mass disappearances and human rights violations. Peace negotiations broke down. Peace accords were flagrantly abused and wherever there was continuing anarchy one of the inevitable elements was a core of right-wing Catholic bishops supporting the regime. The civil war in Guatemala lasted thirty-six years, finally ending in 1996. The same year, during a papal visit to El Salvador, one of the country’s bishops accused Oscar Romero, the murdered Archbishop, of being responsible for the death of 70,000 Salvadorians.
The slander went unchallenged by the listening Pope. Finally in 2002 yet another peace accord was stitched together in El Salvador and – wonder of wonders – President George W. Bush flew in to attend a working lunch for the leaders of seven Central American countries, including the current Nicaraguan president, Enrique Bolanos. The region may finally be edging forward to a period of continuing peace but a quiver full of problems remain to be solved. The murder rate in El Salvador in 2000 was nearly 200 per 100,000 residents, compared with a US rate of 5.5 murders per 100,000 residents. Many of the killings are the responsibility of organised crime whose members, having begun their careers in the US, were imprisoned there and then were deported to El Salvador.
In another bizarre sign of change in late June 2004 Daniel Ortega, who led the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s and was the declared enemy of Cardinal Miguel Obando Bravo, the man so highly regarded by the CIA and the Reagan administration, proposed that the Cardinal be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ‘in recognition of his struggle for national reconciliation’.