Two years after this accolade, Benedict stripped the Swiss Guard of its sole role in papal protection. Some of the duties were handed to the Holy See’s second, and larger, protection service, the Vatican Gendarmerie. When the commander of the Guard, Elmar Theodor Maeder, quit in protest, Benedict appointed Daniel Rudolf Anrig, a senior police officer from the Swiss canton of Glarus and a former lecturer in civil and church law at Freiburg University. The Rome newspaper, Il Messaggero, suggested that “despite the long-standing rivalry between the two forces, Anrig and [Domenico] Giani,” head of the 180 gendarmes and a former officer in the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial police, “would find cooperation because they were ‘of a similar age,’ thanks to Pope Benedict’s policy of promoting younger men and women.”

For the first time in five hundred years, the Swiss Guard that Cedric Tornay wished to reform was no longer the sole protector of a Pope’s physical safety.

Vatican Espionage

A few days after Cedric Tornay murdered the commander of the Swiss Guard, Italian newspapers bristled with articles based on mere rumors that Colonel Alois Estermann had been a spy for Communist East Germany. No evidence was provided to support the claim, but the annals of the Vatican contain ample proof that cloak-and-dagger business was carried out against and for the Holy See.

“For five centuries, the Vatican has used a secret spy service, called the Holy Alliance, or later, the Entity. Forty popes have relied on it to carry out their policies. They have played hitherto a role in confronting” Church schisms, revolutions, dictators, civil wars and world wars, assassinations and kidnappings. According to historian Eric Frattini, “the Entity was involved in killings of monarchs, poisonings of diplomats, financing of South American dictators, protection of war criminals, the laundering of Mafia money, manipulation of financial markets, provocation of bank failures, and financing of arms sales to combatants even as their wars were condemned, all in the name of God.” The Entity’s motto was “With the Cross and the Sword.”

Espionage expert David Alvarez, professor of politics at Saint Mary’s College of California, author of Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage Against the Vatican, 1939-1945 and the later Spies in the Vatican: Espionage & Intrigue from Napoleon to the Holocaust, in collaboration with Robert Graham, S. J., investigated “espionage in the pontificates of eleven popes, [starting] with Pius VI who died in 1799 as a prisoner of the French during the French Revolution [and concluding] with Pius XII… The period from the Congress of Vienna in 1814 to the end of the Papal States in 1870 was the high point of papal intelligence ‘to navigate between the rocks of internal revolution and shoals of foreign intervention and aggression.’ Finally, with the disappearance of the Papal States intelligence capabilities of the papacy largely vanished.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new domestic intelligence unit of Monsignor Umberto Benigni was aimed at “modernist” liberal Catholics’ reform ideas. “His organization for propaganda and disinformation was short-lived.” From the beginning of World War I in 1914 to the end of the Second World War, the secular world experienced an intelligence revolution which “completely bypassed the Papacy.” Between the wars, a “secret mission of Bishop Michael d’Herbigny in 1926 to re-establish a Catholic Church organization in the Soviet Union failed. His covert operation was compromised from its very beginning.”

In the Vatican review La Civiltá Cattolica (The Catholic Civilization), U.S. Jesuit Robert A. Graham wrote in 1970 that between 1939 and 1945, the “Nazis distrusted the Vatican and flooded Rome with bogus priests and lay spies in an effort to discover whether it was plotting against them. The Germans were astute enough to fathom one thing about Catholicism: it abounds in rumor and thrives on hearsay. ‘In place of this river of unreliable information, we need authentic news which is really important,’ read a 1943 report…[to] Berlin from Ernst von Weizsacker, who as Ambassador to the Holy See also directed a German spy network” in an effort to pierce the Vatican ’s inner circles.

“Assigned to ferret out authentic news for the Germans was an apostate priest named Georg Elling, who came to Rome ostensibly to study the life of St. Francis of Assisi. What really interested him was the movements of the Allied ambassadors at the Vatican. Other spies tapped telephones, monitored Vatican Radio transmissions and intercepted cables. [The German aviation ministry] cracked the code by which Rome communicated with Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, its apostolic nuncio in Berlin.”

According to Graham, “the Germans were principally interested in…what they referred to as Ostpolitik des Vatikans (Eastern European political policy).” Despite the Church’s well-known hostility to the Soviet Union’s Communism, Hitler was obsessed with the idea that the Vatican and the Kremlin would form an alliance. This alarm heightened in 1942 when Pope Pius VII “ordered two monsignors to study Russian.”…

“Nazi leaders like Martin Bormann and Reinhard (“The Hangman”) Heydrich were also interested in what Heydrich called ‘political Catholicism.’ Certain that the Church was attempting to establish a political alternative to the Nazi Party in Germany, they monitored all contacts between Rome and the German bishops for signs of scheming.”

After researching “ U.S., German and Vatican archives,” Graham concluded that Pope Pius XII was “vaguely aware of what was happening. To thwart the Germans, Pius depended on the loyalty of those around him, rather than on counterespionage… Those close to the Pope, Graham found, kept their secrets…‘because they are bound by the faith.’ As a result, the Germans learned little” from at least five Nazi agencies with espionage agents in Rome.

Even more obsessed with the Pope as a political nemesis and threat were the suspicious men who ran the Soviet Union ’s spy agency.

In 2007, former Romanian lieutenant general Ion Mihai Pacepa wrote in an article for National Review Online that in 1960 the Kremlin of Nikita Khrushchev sought to discredit the papacy by showing that Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazis. To accomplish this, said Pacepa, “the KGB needed some original Vatican documents, even ones only remotely connected with Pius XII, which its dezinformatsiya experts could slightly modify and project in the ‘proper light’ to prove the Pope’s ‘true colors.’ The difficulty was that the KGB had no access to the Vatican archives.”

The Soviets turned to the Romanian foreign intelligence service (DIE). “The new chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, had created the DIE in 1949 and had…been its chief Soviet adviser, he knew that the DIE was in an excellent position to contact the Vatican and obtain approval to search its archives.”

Pacepa wrote, “In 1959, when I had been assigned to West Germany in the cover position as deputy chief of the Romanian Mission, I had conducted a ‘spy swap’ under which two DIE officers (Colonel Gheorghe Horobet and Major Nicolae Ciuciulin), who had been caught red-handed in West Germany, had been exchanged for Roman Catholic bishop Augustin Pacha, who had been jailed by the KGB on a spurious charge of espionage and was finally returned to the Vatican via West Germany.”

In the KGB plan, code-named “Seat- 12,” Pacepa became its Romanian point man. “To facilitate [his task], Sakharovsky authorized him to [falsely] inform the Vatican that Romania was ready to restore its severed relations with the Holy See, in exchange for access to its archives and a one-billion-dollar, interest-free loan for twenty-five years. (Romania ’s relations with the Vatican had been severed in 1951, when Moscow accused the Vatican ’s nunciatura in Romania of being an undercover CIA front and closed its offices. The nunciatura buildings in Bucharest had been turned over to the DIE.)” Pacepa was to say that “access to the Papal archives…was needed in order to find historical roots that would help the Romanian government justify its change of heart toward the Holy See. The billion [dollar loan was]…to make Romania ’s turnabout more plausible. ‘If there’s one thing those monks understand, it’s money,’ Sakharovsky remarked.”