Secret services of socialist countries successfully infiltrated agents into the Vatican
The secret services of socialist states during the Cold War made repeated attempts to penetrate the secrets of the Vatican court.
Agents from behind the “Iron Curtain” were interested not only in the influence that the Holy See exerted on millions of people, inspiring them with anti-communist ideology. A significant role was also played by the fact that the Vatican was and remains a center where a mass of information, not only of a religious nature, is concentrated, writes the newspaper Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye on Friday.
The history of Soviet espionage in the Vatican was set out in the book Spies in the Vatican by former US military intelligence officer John Koehler, who in the 1980s was an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
In the 1960s, according to J. Koehler, the Soviet authorities decided to infiltrate their agents into the Vatican, which was then conducting its so-called Eastern policy, perceived in Moscow as dangerous interference in the affairs of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. This operation was carried out by the GDR’s secret service, the Stasi, which recruited the Secretary General of the German Bishops’ Conference Paul Dissemond, Benedictine monk Eugen Brammerz, and Munich University graduate Alfons Waschbüsch.
P. Dissemond began working for the Stasi in 1974. He informed the Stasi and the KGB that the then Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, had established contacts with the bishops of the GDR and Poland to pursue, jointly with the Vatican, a policy hostile to the communist regimes, aimed at their subversion and weakening. It was he who kept the Stasi informed about the development of these contacts.
E. Brammerz was recruited by Soviet secret services immediately after World War II, when, as a Luftwaffe military doctor, he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. In 1975 he was sent by the Benedictine Abbey of St. Matthias in Trier to Rome, where he was taken on as a translator in the editorial office of the German edition of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
Gradually he managed to gain access to the Holy See’s commission for science, of which Cardinal A. Casaroli, the “architect” of the “Eastern policy,” was a member. Among the greatest successes of the “magnificent monk,” as Stasi chief Markus Wolf called him, was a report listing the names and giving characteristics of those in the Vatican involved in the conduct and implementation of the “Eastern policy.”
After the election of the Cardinal of Kraków, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, to the papal throne, E. Brammerz sent numerous dispatches on the “growing influence of the Polish clergy in the Vatican.”
A. Waschbüsch, who graduated from the philosophy faculty of the University of Munich in 1965, went to Rome in 1976 as a correspondent for the German-language Catholic news agency KNA.
In 1981, during the state of emergency declared by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in Poland, A. Waschbüsch supplied Polish secret services with information on the anti-communist activities of the Catholic Church.
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