A month after receiving the KGB’s instructions, Pacepa had his “first contact with a Vatican representative. For secrecy reasons the meeting-and most of the ones that followed-took place at a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. [Pacepa] was introduced to an ‘influential member of the diplomatic corps’ who, he was told, had begun his career working in the Vatican archives. His name was Monsignor Agostino Casaroli… This Monsignor gave access to the Vatican archives, and soon three young DIE undercover officers posing as Romanian priests were digging around in the papal archives. Casaroli also agreed ‘in principle’ to Bucharest ’s demand for the interest free loan, but said the Vatican wished to place certain conditions on it…

“[From] 1960 to 1962, the DIE succeeded in pilfering hundreds of documents connected in any way with Pope Pius XII from Vatican Archives and the Apostolic Library. Everything was immediately sent to the KGB via special courier. In actual fact, no incriminating material against the pontiff ever turned up in all those secretly photographed documents. Mostly they were copies of personal letters and transcripts of meetings and speeches, couched in routine diplomatic language.”

Using this material, according to Pacepa, the KGB developed a play in which Pope Pius XII was depicted cooperating with the Nazis, with full knowledge of the program for exterminating Jews. With the playwright cited as Rolf Hochhuth, the title in German was Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). The published text of the eight-hour drama was accompanied by “historical documentation.”

In a newspaper article published in Germany in 1963, Hochhuth defended his portrayal of Pius XII. “The facts are there,” he said, “forty crowded pages of documentation in the appendix to my play.”

In a radio interview given in New York in 1964, when The Deputy opened there, Hochhuth said, “I considered it necessary to add to the play a historical appendix, fifty to eighty pages (depending on the size of the print).”

Pacepa claimed that “before writing The Deputy, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma, was working in various inconspicuous capacities for the Bertelsmann publishing house. In interviews he claimed that in 1959 he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Rome, where he spent three months talking to people and then writing the first draft of the play, and where he posed ‘a series of questions’ to one bishop whose name he refused to reveal.”

Pacepa noted, “At about that same time I used to visit the Vatican fairly regularly as an accredited messenger from a head of state, and I was never able to get any talkative bishop off into a corner with me, and it was not for lack of trying. The DIE illegal officers that we infiltrated into the Vatican also encountered almost insurmountable difficulties in penetrating the Vatican secret archives, even though they had airtight cover as priests.”

During its first ten years of life, “The Deputy generated a flurry of books and articles, some accusing and some defending the pontiff. Some went so far as to lay the blame for Auschwitz concentration camp atrocities on the Pope’s shoulders,” and some books attacked Hochhuth’s arguments.

When evidence was presented by researchers in the 1970s that Hitler had been plotting against Pius XII, including a plan to kidnap him, KGB chief Yuri Andropov conceded to Pacepa that “had we known then what we know today,” the KGB would never have gone after Pius XII.

A decade later, as described in chapter 7, the KGB turned to its puppet spy service in Bulgaria in an effort to silence Pope John Paul II as he expressed support for Poland ’s Solidarity movement.

Upon the death of John Paul II, keepers of Vatican secrets found themselves forced to guard against journalistic spies intent upon eavesdropping on the College of Cardinals as the princes of the Church met to elect John Paul II’s successor.

The Associated Press reported, “Computer hackers, electronic bugs and supersensitive microphones threaten to pierce the Vatican ’s thick walls next week when cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel to name a papal successor.”

Confident it could protect the centuries-old tradition of secrecy that surrounds the gathering, one official said, “It’s not as if it’s the first conclave we’ve handled.”

“ Vatican security refused to discuss the details of any anti-bugging measures to be used during the conclave. But Giuseppe Mazzullo, a private detective and retired Rome policeman whose former unit worked closely with the Vatican in the past, said the Holy See would reinforce its own experts with Italian police and private security contractors.”

“The security is very strict,” Mazzullo said. “For people to steal information, it’s very, very difficult, if not impossible.”

The Devil, You Say

“Thank God we have a Pope who has decided to confront the devil head-on.”

So said Father Gabriele Amorth, the official exorcist of the Rome diocese, when he heard a report in 2007 that Pope Benedict XIV would soon undertake a new campaign to combat demonic possession.

An expert on the subject and author of a popular book on exorcism and demonic possession, age seventy-five and a priest for fifty years, Amorth spoke as “the undisputed leader of Rome ’s six exorcists…and honorary president-for-life of the International Association of Exorcists.”

“I speak with the Devil every day,” he said to an interviewer while “grinning like a benevolent gargoyle. ‘I talk to him in Latin. He answers in Italian. I have been wrestling with him, day in day out, for fourteen years.’”

Born in 1925 in “ Modena, northern Italy, the son and grandson of lawyers,” he joined the Italian resistance as a teenager in World War II. “Immediately after the war, he became a member of Italy ’s fledgling Christian Democratic Party. Giulio Andreotti was president of the Young Christian Democrats, Amorth was his deputy. Andreotti went into politics and was seven times prime minister. Amorth, having studied law at university, went into the Church.”

“From the age of fifteen,” he recalled, “I knew it was my true vocation. My speciality was the Madonna. For many years I edited the magazine Madre di Deo (Mother of God)… I knew nothing of exorcism-I had given it no thought-until June 6, 1986, when Cardinal Poletti, the then Vicar of Rome, asked to see me. There was a famous exorcist in Rome then, the only one, Father Candido, but he was not well, and Cardinal Poletti told me I was to be his assistant. I learnt everything from Father Candido. He was my great master. Quickly I realized how much work there was to be done and how few exorcists there were to do it. From that day, I dropped everything and dedicated myself entirely to exorcism.”

In 2008, he said to the website Petrus that a “new Vatican document would call for the designation of exorcists in every Catholic diocese around the world… But Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office, flatly denied the Petrus report. The papal spokesman said, ‘Pope Benedict XVI has no intention of ordering local bishops to bring in garrisons of exorcists to fight demonic possession.’”

Taking note of these conflicting statements, the Catholic World News service reported, “The topic of exorcism commands considerable public interest in Italy, and Father Amorth has frequently generated attention with warnings about the unchecked spread of diabolical influence. In a new course on the topic, being offered by Rome’s pontifical university Regina Apostolorum, Father Paolo Scarafoni warned that while Satanic cults were making inroads in society, and the influence of the devil was real, he reported that most suspected cases of demonic possession could be explained by other factors.”