Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (12 page)

“Moving quickly to try to repair any damage to morale” in the Guards after the Estermann murders, “the Vatican brought back the popular Buchs as commander. But from outside the walls of the papal state, there were suggestions that the Swiss Guard should be disarmed again, or even replaced by a modern police force.” Countering this idea, Swiss Cardinal Amedee Grab said, ‘Without the Swiss Guard, or with a disarmed Swiss Guard, it would be impossible to ensure the security of the pope.’

“Estermann and his wife were given a funeral in St. Peter’s Basilica that was concelebrated by 16 cardinals and 30 bishops. All available Guardsmen turned out, standing composed and impassive through the mass. Before the service, Pope John Paul II prayed at all three caskets, which were displayed, side by side, for viewing. Vatican officials gave Tornay a proper funeral, despite the Church’s condemnation of suicide. A crowd of his Roman friends gathered at the parish church of Santa Ana, within Vatican walls. The Swiss Guards also turned out, with many of them weeping openly, as they had not done for Estermann. The Guardsmen’s band played ‘I Had a Good Comrade.’”

In its May 18, 1998, issue,
Newsweek
presented an account of life in the Swiss Guards by Jacques-Antoine Fierz. A member from 1992 to 1995, he had returned “to Rome to join annual ceremonies known as the Swearing In, in which the Swiss Guards…renew their allegiances. Instead, he attended a funeral.”

“We are, it has been said, the pope’s calling cards, the Vatican’s finest,” he said, “And here were three dead among us, all three absurd deaths—a loss that has profoundly wounded us all. It is only invidious bad-mouthers who speak ill of the Swiss Guard, and among those I count the ones who are floating these provocative theories that Cedric Tornay and Estermann were homosexuals. It is impossible, inconceivable. We live and work in such close quarters that we would surely have known if anything like that went on. It didn’t. Those who say otherwise are jealous of the prestige the Swiss Guard has gained throughout its history….

“The Swiss who become the pope’s soldiers are simply young men with high enough ideals to take on huge responsibilities, those who want to dedicate their lives to the service of one man and all that he represents.

“I don’t know a single Guard who really minded the hours or the duties,” he said. “The great majority of us feel a very strong affinity for the church, the pontiff and the military life, and the discipline and the adventure it represents. And it’s not bad to improve your language skills, or to live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Also, I can’t deny the fascination of being part of the oldest continually serving army in the world. And I admit that it’s something else to be able to dress up in those elegantly colored uniforms, however out of fashion they may now seem. If I sound enthusiastic, it’s because I remember my time at the Vatican very positively, especially the spirit of camaraderie. That’s what makes this tragedy so sadly incomprehensible. I talked to a lot of the Guards after the murders, and they all said the same thing—it was so senseless, so impossible to imagine. I agree. Estermann had been my lieutenant colonel. He had wonderful human qualities, was an exemplary believer and a very correct officer. His wife, Gladys, was pleasant and well educated. I remember Cedric Tornay as very kindly…. This was an act of a madman, not of Tornay the Guard.”

“After a nine-month internal inquiry, the text of which remained secret, the Vatican repeated the claim that Tornay acted in a fit of madness, saying traces of cannabis were found in Tornay’s urine, and a cyst ‘the size of a pigeon’s egg’ in his head, helped explain the ‘madness.’”

A year after the killings, a group of disaffected priests within the Vatican claimed that Estermann was the victim of a Vatican power struggle. Calling themselves “the disciples of truth,” they claimed that evidence had been tampered with in order to fit the hypothesis that the killing was the result of a moment of madness on the part of Tornay. In a book titled
Blood Lies in the Vatican
, they said that the struggle was between the secretive, traditionalist Catholic movement Opus Dei and a Masonic power faction among the Curia for control of the Swiss Guard.

“‘In the Vatican, there are those who maintain that Vice Corporal Tornay was attacked after coming off duty and dragged into a cellar,’ the book said. Tornay was then ‘suicided’ with a silenced 7mm pistol, and his duty revolver used to kill the Estermanns in their Vatican apartment. His body was dumped in the Estermann’s flat so that the triple killing would appear to be a murder-suicide.”

The book alleged that “Estermann and his wife…were actively engaged in secret international financial deals for the benefit of Opus Dei.”

Those who discerned a conspiracy asserted that a Vatican inquiry had been rigged, as was the case in the assassination of John Paul I twenty years earlier, and in the murder of Roberto Calvi. It was alleged that a “veritable piece of stagecraft was orchestrated at midnight, [in which] an ambulance from the Vatican’s Health Assistance Fund…pretended to transport ‘three bodies’ to the Gemelli Polyclinic Hospital, when…the three victims were actually placed on stretchers which halberdiers transported to the Vatican morgue next to Saint Anne’s Church. It was imperative to prevent an autopsy taking place outside the Vatican or on the premises of the Health Assistance Fund. The three corpses were therefore taken away without any of the precautions routinely used in criminal investigations…and placed in the corridor of the morgue, then covered with sheets.”

The conspiracy theorists said “the inquiry was entrusted to the only judge in the Vatican State, Gianluigi Marrone. He decided that the autopsy would be carried out the following day, within the Vatican, by forensic pathologists Pietro Fucci and Giovanni Arcudi, who could be trusted to do what was necessary.”

In 2003, Anglo-French writer John Follain drew several startling conclusions in his book,
City of Secrets: The Startling Truth Behind the Vatican Murders
. Author of books on the Mafia and Carlos the Jackal, Follain asserted that the official explanation for the deaths of Estermann, his wife, and Tornay was a “hastily cobbled cover-up” concerning a papal protective force in which “homosexuality was common, with as many as one quarter of the Swiss Guards gay, morale low, and fundamental reform desperately needed.” Follain agreed that “Tornay was the murderer, but he said he discovered a morass of abuse, discrimination and misery behind the young guard’s desperate act. ‘The decision not to award Tornay the medal was the trigger,’ he said. ‘But it was not an act of madness: it was premeditated.’

“Other grievances had been simmering in Swiss-French Tornay. He suffered prejudice and discrimination by the majority Swiss-Germans in the force. He believed the Swiss Guard was amateurish and not up to the duty of protecting the Pope, and had urged reform of the body. Nobody was listening. He had also had a homosexual affair with Estermann, who had hurt him by moving on to other lovers.”

Tornay’s mother stated that his letter to her was a forgery by someone who knew him well. She noted that it was addressed to the name “Chamorel,” but her son always used her maiden name, Baudat. Graphologists from Switzerland attested that Tornay had not written the letter. She also said “an independent autopsy in Lausanne established that a 7mm bullet killed her son—not a 9.4mm caliber bullet from a Stig 75 gun, as claimed in the Vatican’s investigation. She claims the autopsy suggested her son was drugged, then shot and his body positioned in Estermann’s flat to make it seem that he killed the couple before shooting himself.”

In 2005, “high-profile French lawyer Jacques Vergès and his colleague, Luc Brossollet, acting for Tornay’s mother, said that they would file a murder claim” in Switzerland because Tornay was Swiss. They said they had “faced years of stubborn deafness from the Vatican.”

On May 7, 2006, “Benedict XVI thanked the Swiss Guards for 500 years of service and invited them to continue their mission with ‘courage and fidelity.’” The Pope said this during a Mass commemorating the 500th anniversary of the arrival in Rome “of the first 150 Swiss Guards, requested by Pope Julius II. Also remembered were the 147 Swiss Guards killed while defending Pope Clement VII during the sacking of Rome on May 6, 1527. In his homily delivered in Italian, French and German,…The Holy Father said that his purpose for the meeting was to render honor to the Swiss Guard corps.

“‘For all, to be a Swiss Guard means to adhere without reservations to Christ and his Church, to be ready to give his life,’ he said. ‘The effective service may finish, but within one is always a Swiss Guard.’”

He said the Swiss Guard had always been constant, even in 1970 when Paul VI dissolved all the other military corps of the Vatican but the Guard.

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.

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.”

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.”