The Holy See and intelligence

Talking about Vatican intelligence means dealing with a reality that is difficult to fit into the traditional models of contemporary intelligence services. The Holy See did not build its intelligence-gathering capacity around a single centralized structure, but rather through a diplomatic and religious network that developed over the centuries. Apostolic nuncios, papal representatives, and structures of the Roman Curia provided the Holy See with constant access to information coming from very different political contexts, making the international dimension of the Church one of the central elements of its ability to observe political developments.

This peculiarity is also linked to the very nature of the Holy See, which does not coincide with the Vatican City State. It is the Holy See, that is, the Pope together with the bodies of the Roman Curia, that maintains diplomatic relations and operates as a subject of international law. The Vatican State, established only in 1929 through the Lateran Pacts, instead represents the territorial basis necessary to guarantee its independence.

A Network Born Before Modern Intelligence

The roots of this information-gathering capacity go back many centuries before the emergence of modern intelligence services. The Holy See progressively developed its own network of representatives abroad, leading to the establishment of the first permanent nunciatures at the beginning of the sixteenth century. According to the reconstruction provided by the Vatican Secretariat of State itself, the first permanent missions were established in Venice and Paris in 1500 and in Vienna in 1513, in a European context in which state diplomacy was also taking increasingly structured forms.

The apostolic nuncio performed a peculiar function, as he represented the link between the Holy See, local political authorities, and ecclesiastical communities. His activity was not comparable to that of a secret agent, but it ensured a stable presence within the main European courts and direct knowledge of political and religious developments. Over time, this diplomatic network would become one of the main resources of the international projection of the papacy, particularly at times when its territorial power was diminishing.

The decisive turning point came in 1870, with the end of the Papal States. The loss of territorial control did not, in fact, result in the disappearance of the Holy See’s international presence. Diplomatic activity continued even during the decades in which the papacy did not possess a sovereign state, until the establishment of Vatican City State in 1929. The diplomatic network therefore survived the loss of temporal power and became even more relevant during the twentieth century, when the Holy See operated within an international system marked by world wars and totalitarian regimes.

The Second World War and Secret Channels

It was with the outbreak of the Second World War that this network assumed a particularly delicate function. The neutrality of the Holy See, together with the presence of papal representatives in numerous countries, allowed information to reach the Vatican even from territories where normal diplomatic relations had been interrupted or severely restricted. The Secretariat of State received communications from local Churches and nunciatures, but also information transmitted through governments and foreign diplomatic missions.

The documents published by the Holy See provide concrete evidence of the circulation of this information. During the conflict, reports reached the Vatican concerning the situation in occupied Poland and the conditions of Catholic communities in Eastern Europe. The information did not always coincide: in April 1945, for example, in response to a relatively reassuring British report on the situation of the Church in Poland, Monsignor Domenico Tardini noted that the information received directly by the Holy See was instead “anything but encouraging.” This discrepancy shows how the Vatican could compare information coming from different channels and rely on its own sources on the ground.

The information-gathering dimension, however, was not limited to the collection of news. During the first months of the war, Pius XII was also involved in the discreet transmission of contacts between German circles opposed to Hitler and the British government. The reconstruction published by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence highlights how the Pope was used to convey secret proposals from Germany to London, temporarily transforming the Holy See into a communication channel between parties that could not openly engage with one another. The need to keep these exchanges secret also made reliable encrypted communication systems essential, an area to which the Vatican devoted particular attention during the conflict.

Precisely this ability to receive information and maintain discreet channels inevitably attracted the attention of foreign intelligence services. At the end of the war, the United States Office of Strategic Services also sought to penetrate Vatican circles in order to obtain information, demonstrating how the network built by the Holy See had by then come to be regarded as significant by the intelligence apparatuses of the major powers.

The Cold War: The Vatican Between Diplomacy and Infiltration

With the end of the Second World War, the information-gathering dimension of the Holy See entered a completely new context. The division of Europe into two blocs made the Vatican’s position particularly delicate, as it maintained ties with Catholic communities located in countries under communist regimes. This presence made the Holy See a privileged observer of Eastern Europe, but at the same time a target for the security services of the Soviet bloc.

Beginning in the 1960s, under John XXIII and especially Paul VI, the Holy See developed what would become known as Vatican Ostpolitik: a policy of dialogue with communist governments aimed at preserving room for action for local Churches and maintaining diplomatic channels beyond the Iron Curtain. Historian Hiroaki Shiozaki has emphasized that this strategy did not emerge out of nowhere, but was part of a longer tradition of contacts, including discreet ones, with Moscow, which had begun as early as after the Bolshevik Revolution.

The gradual opening to dialogue, however, made the interest of Eastern intelligence services in Vatican circles even more intense. A particularly significant case concerns Hungarian intelligence and Gottfried Kusen, a Radio Vatican journalist who was given the codename “Mozart.” Between 1962 and 1965, the Budapest services attempted to use his contacts to gain a better understanding of the evolution of the Holy See’s Eastern policy. Kusen did not become a genuine agent, and the Hungarian attempt did not produce the desired results, but the file shows how subtle the boundary between diplomatic relations, the circulation of information, and intelligence activities could become.

Polish intelligence services also devoted considerable resources to gathering information in the Vatican, attempting to reconstruct its political orientations and strategies towards communist countries. Studies based on documentation from the intelligence services of the Polish People’s Republic nevertheless reveal a more complex picture than that of a Holy See simply “penetrated” by Eastern security apparatuses: intelligence networks were fragmented, and the quality of sources could vary considerably.

The election of Karol Wojtyła in 1978 further intensified the attention of communist governments towards the Vatican. For the first time, a pope came from a country belonging to the Soviet bloc and had direct knowledge of how the Polish regime operated. His first visit to Poland, in June 1979, gave enormous international visibility to demands linked to religious freedom and individual rights, while relations between the Holy See, the Polish Church, and the communist authorities entered a new phase.

The Cold War therefore demonstrated particularly clearly the ambivalent nature of the Vatican’s position. The Holy See possessed a network capable of transmitting information from behind the Iron Curtain, but that same network was constantly monitored and, whenever possible, infiltrated by the intelligence services of communist countries. Rather than a traditional clandestine apparatus, what emerges is a system based on the overlap between diplomacy, ecclesiastical presence, and access to information that would have been difficult to obtain through ordinary state channels.

An Intelligence Without a Secret Service

The history of Vatican intelligence therefore reveals a model very different from that developed by the great powers during the twentieth century. The Holy See did not build its information-gathering capacity around a permanent clandestine apparatus, but instead relied on a diplomatic and ecclesiastical network capable of maintaining contacts even in political contexts that were difficult to reach through ordinary state channels.

Over time, this structure made it possible to gather information, maintain discreet communications, and gain a closer understanding of the internal dynamics of countries affected by wars or authoritarian regimes. At the same time, precisely this position made the Vatican a privileged target for foreign services interested in penetrating its networks or interpreting its diplomatic strategies.

Talking about Vatican intelligence therefore means going beyond the image of an alleged secret service of the Holy See. Its main advantage was not the possession of a structure comparable to those of major contemporary agencies, but rather its ability to rely on a widespread international presence, built over centuries and capable of transforming diplomatic and ecclesiastical relations into a continuous source of political knowledge.

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