Is this for real?

Well, this is big news, isn't it? Or am I just out of the loop? An article in NRO by a former Romanian intelligence officer describes the KGB's efforts to discredit the Church's authority in Western Europe. He says they focussed on Pius XII, and that the infamous play The Deputy emerged from the cloud of influence of the KGB:

In 1963, General Ivan Agayants, the famous chief of the KGB’s disinformation department, landed in Bucharest to thank us for our help. He told us that “Seat-12” had materialized into a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII, entitled The Deputy, an oblique reference to the pope as Christ’s representative on earth. Agayants took credit for the outline of the play, and he told us that it had voluminous appendices of background documents put together by his experts with help from the documents we had purloined from the Vatican. Agayants also told us that The Deputy’s producer, Erwin Piscator, was a devoted Communist who had a longstanding relationship with Moscow. In 1929 he had founded the Proletarian Theater in Berlin, then sought political asylum in the Soviet Union when Hitler came to power, and a few years later had “emigrated” to the United States. In 1962 Piscator had returned to West Berlin to produce The Deputy.

Throughout my years in Romania, I always took my KGB bosses with a grain of salt, because they used to juggle the facts around so as to make Soviet intelligence the mother and father of everything. But I had reason to believe Agayants’s self-serving claim. He was a living legend in the field of desinformatsiya. In 1943, as the rezident in Iran, Agayants launched the disinformation report that Hitler had set up a special team to kidnap President Franklin Roosevelt from the American Embassy in Tehran during the Allied Summit to be held there. As a result, Roosevelt agreed to be headquartered in a villa within the “safety” of the Soviet Embassy compound, which was guarded by a large military unit. All the Soviet personnel assigned to that villa were undercover intelligence officers who spoke English, but, with few exceptions, they kept that a secret so as to be able to eavesdrop. Even given the limited technical capabilities of that day, Agayants was able to provide Stalin with hourly monitoring reports on the American and British guests. That helped Stalin obtain Roosevelt’s tacit agreement to let him retain the Baltic countries and the rest of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939-40. Agayants was also credited with having induced Roosevelt to use the familiar “Uncle Joe” for Stalin at that summit. According to what Sakharovsky told us, Stalin was more elated over that than he was even over his territorial gains. “The cripple’s mine!” he reportedly exulted.

Just a year before The Deputy was launched, Agayants had pulled off another masterful coup. He fabricated out of whole cloth a manuscript designed to persuade the West that, deep down, the Kremlin thought highly of the Jews; this was published in Western Europe, to great popular success, as a book entitled Notes for a Journal. The manuscript was attributed to Maxim Litvinov, né Meir Walach, the former Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, who had been fired in 1939 when Stalin purged his diplomatic apparatus of Jews in preparation for signing his “non-aggression” pact with Hitler. (The Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact was signed on August 23, 1939, in Moscow. It had a secret Protocol that partitioned Poland between the two signatories and gave the Soviets a free hand in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina.) This Agayants book was so flawlessly counterfeited that Britain’s most prominent historian on Soviet Russia, Edward Hallet Carr, was totally convinced of its authenticity and in fact wrote an introduction for it. (Carr had authored a ten-volume History of Soviet Russia.)

The Deputy saw the light in 1963 as the work of an unknown West German named Rolf Hochhuth, under the title Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). Its central thesis was that Pius XII had supported Hitler and encouraged him to go ahead with the Jewish Holocaust. It immediately ignited a huge controversy around Pius XII, who was depicted as a cold, heartless man more concerned about Vatican properties than about the fate of Hitler’s victims. The original text presents an eight-hour play, backed by some 40 to 80 pages (depending on the edition) of what Hochhuth called “historical documentation.” In a newspaper article published in Germany in 1963, Hochhuth defends his portrayal of Pius XII, saying: “The facts are there — 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).” In the original edition, the appendix is entitled “Historische Streiflichter” (historical sidelights). The Deputy has been translated into some 20 languages, drastically cut and with the appendix usually omitted.

Before writing The Deputy, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma (Abitur), 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. Hardly likely! 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 we infiltrated into the Vatican also encountered almost insurmountable difficulties in penetrating the Vatican secret archives, even though they had airtight cover as priests.

And speaking of espionage, if you haven't yet, check out Sandro Magister's article on Polish efforts in regard to JPII:

There’s no lack of surprises. Many would like to discover the identity of “Seneka,” an agent active in both Krakow and Rome, someone very close to the pope. Was he a philosopher? It is clear that interest was concentrated from the very beginning upon the curious name “Wojtyla.” Now the whole world, and not just Poland, knows how to say the name “Wojtyla.” But back then, just after the war, it was a cipher that could lead to an error, that could be turned to “Wojdyla.” And that’s where our story begins.

Krakow, November 17, 1949. The mole, using the code name “Zagielowski” (but who also used the name “Torano” and in the future would give his real signature), sent the police a “top secret” report on a meeting in the curia during which this “Wojdyla” was pointed out as someone to keep an eye on.

“Zagielowski” was recruited in 1948 and would be active until his death in 1967. His age would remember him by his real name, Wladyslaw Kulczycki. Father Kulczycki. He had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, and it was for this reason that he was viewed as more approachable: he had seen of what evil man was capable. Besides, he had a sin that compromised his priestly character – a sexual weakness. In 1953 a note from Department IV of the interior ministry, the one charged with watching over the Church, gave this assessment of him: “His evaluation is good. He is the only one working in Krakow who can be approached.” He was the pastor at Saint Nicholas, and was the friend – and perhaps even the confessor - of the legendary cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (in the photo, with Wojtyla). He showed bitter enmity against young Karol from Wadowice. Kulczycki couldn’t explain how he climbed the ecclesiastical ranks so easily. A document written in 1960 contains this outburst: “I don’t understand why Wojtyla is chosen for all the important tasks. The man is well educated, he knows the communists, he has ties among the workers, and he frequently organizes pastoral visits to Nowa Huta.”

The infiltrators didn’t know each other. That’s how things worked, whatever the location. And who knows how many times Fr. Kulczycki met at the chancery with another key pawn for the regime: Tadeusz Nowak, the treasurer for the curia, who was also the administrator of “Tygodnik Powszechny,” the Catholic weekly dear to the future John Paul II.

Comments

[Jacob]

Details are certainly surprising, but the KGB's efforts to undermine the West ought never be underestimated.

[TM Lutas]

General Pacepa was never a Soviet agent. He was Romanian. From the article:

Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.

With some alarm, I note the casual revelation of the infiltration and turning of Romanian priests who were in the Vatican.

[Ed the Roman]

Well, Gen. Pacepa was no more a Soviet agent than any other east bloc intelligence officers were.

[Maureen]

That's not what it says. It says he had DIE undercover agents who were _posing as priests_, rummaging through the Vatican Archives. Not priests become agents or agents become priests; simply poseurs.

This sort of thing would be a lot harder to do nowadays because independent verification across borders is easier; though of course someone would have to think to check.

[Jeff]

That the Deputy originated from an effort by Communists and their sympathizers to destroy the universal acclaim that Pius XII had garnered after the war?

That is not new news, though some of the details are.

I highly recommend Bottum and Dalin's collection The Pius War. It deals with this subject and related matters.

It's mindblowing how much Pius XII did during the War and how it was common knowledge in the years afterward. All forgotten.

Did you know that Castel Gandolfo was packed full of thousands of Jews during the war? When the Americans bombed Monte Cassino and apologized to the Pope, he didn't complain. "Oh, well, it's war," he said.

But when they bombed Castel Gandolfo and Jews were killed he lodged a furious protest.

After the War, the Jews that had sheletered there bought and donated a memorial CROSS in gratitude for what the Pope did for them.

Read that book.

[Dan]

The article about the KGB's involvement in "The Deputy" is truly extraordinary. If it is true, it means that those involved with the campaign to discredit Pope Pius are dupes of the KGB. Not that that will bother or stop them.

I also have read that the KGB initiated a similar type of campaign to discredit Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by promoting the view that he is an anti-semite. That campaign had some success, but not as much as the campaign against Pope Pius and the Church.

[Dan]

There is not a word about this in the mainstream press. Not a single word. If in the Vatican archives there is uncovered a single document that in some remote way provides tangential support for the claim that Pope Pius did not act energetically to oppose the Holocaust, it receives immediate prominent coverage. Yet when evidence in the form of a first person testimonial emerges that the whole thing was orchestrated by the KGB in the first instance, you don't hear boo. It reminds me of how the press covers the sex abuse scandal.

[Blind Squirrel]

Interesting, but hardly conclusive. The jury will still be out on this one.

[D------]

Anti-Catholic propaganda from the Eastern bloc during the first decades of the Cold War was common.

For example, allegations that the Vatican helped Nazi war criminals escape to South America was first made by Tito's regime in Communist Yugoslavia in the late 1940s.

A few years after Cardinal Stepinac was convicted in Yugoslavia, his "diary" was suddenly discovered. (In the mid-1980s, Stepinac's prosecutor admitted the case was politically-motivated and had no merit.)

[ContraMundum]

"Interesting, but hardly conclusive. The jury will still be out on this one."

The only way anyone could possibly consider the evidence inconclusive is if he thinks Pacepa is lying here. If he's telling the truth, the game's over. Hitler was trying to destroy PP Pius XII, and THE DEPUTY was a hatchet job pitched by Soviets.

(By the way, some posters above say that Pacepa was not a Soviet agent. Wasn't he? Wasn't Romania a Soviet-bloc nation? He wasn't Russian, but that's a different matter.)

[TM Lutas]

Pacepa was Soviet in the same sense that Australia was British in WW I. The distinction deserves to be kept because in that part of the world if you let it go, even for one split second, you've birthed a new irredentist monster that will plague decent people for centuries. So, no, They are not all the same and there is good reason for keeping the distinction.

Pacepa has lots of neat insights into E bloc operations and their long-term consequences, some of them very uncomfortable. You should read his note regarding WMD in Iraq.

[Blind Squirrel]

"The only way anyone could possibly consider the evidence inconclusive is if he thinks Pacepa is lying here. If he's telling the truth, the game's over."

Not so. One could also consider the evidence inconclusive if Agayants were lying to Pacepa. Certainly the latter has nothing to substantiate the story beyond the assertions of the former. "A man in a bar told me..." is not the kind of factual provenance that normally commends itself to historians.

[TSO]

Alger Hiss and Pius XII are helpful in weeding out historians we can safely ignore. Both are markers for measuring a historian's sanity. Anyone thinking the former possibly innocent or the latter possibly guilty not only give history - as an endeavor possible of coming to truth - a bad name, but leave egg on their own face too.

[Sharon]

Not only was Castel Gandolfo opened to provide refuge for Jews but they were provided with kosher food.

[Father Elijah]

This story concerning "The Deputy" raises many issues-several already mentioned in above comments. But here are a few more.

While we can be more objective now in looking back at the Cold War and the propaganda of the Soviet Empire against both the Church and the West, do not think for a moment that these kind of things are all in the past and are now living in freedom from this kind of 'attack'

One only has to reflect for a moment on the almost non-coverage of the very large pro-life rally [which was by no means ONLY against abortion] in DC or even the West Coast.

While, sadly individual priests and bishops have sinned horrendously and failed Christ and His Church in both the sexual abuse scandal and the complicity with secret police in Poland, both real scandals have become part of the propaganda machine of those 'forces' at work to undermine the Catholic Church in her members and influence in society

I certainly go on with a list, but suffice it to say, even now, forces are at work in our world opposing us and attempting to divide us in any way possible. The names of those forces change but underlying them in the West is Secular Fundamentalism-which actually goes back in its roots, as mentioned in another post, to the late Middle Ages, Nominalism and William of Occam [a Catholic Franciscan philosopher who gave us the famous scientific tool called 'occam's razor'] He opposed Saint Thomas Aquinas's philosophy who claimed that God had revealed Himself in and through Logos-Intellect-reason. Occam claimed that God revealed Himself as Will-and that He was free to say good was evil, evil was good etc [think about that for a moment in its implications]

But even underlying all these human forces, comes today's Saint Paul who reminds us that our battle is not against "flesh and blood but against Powers and Principalities" and that we need to recognize we are in spiritual combat and put on the "armor of the Spirit' [see Ephesians 6]

[ContraMundum]

"Not so. One could also consider the evidence inconclusive if Agayants were lying to Pacepa."

Okay, fine. If someone is lying. But if this is not based on lies (by whomever), then, I repeat, the game is over, the jig is up, the jury's in, etc. Why would Agayants lie? Or Pacepa? The story is on its face plausible, so unless there is some evidence of lying, why sound a dismissive note? Seems gratuitous.

[Blind Squirrel]

No, not gratuitous--cautious. All manner of things that seem superficially plausible on closer inspection turn out not to be so (for random examples, Google "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution," "Duke Rape Case," or "Hitler Diaries"). Sensible historians withhold judgment (or "leave the jury out"), especially about matters of fact, unless all reasonable alternative explanations have been ruled out of court.

As a case in point of how difficult this can sometimes be: consider the famous story of Nikita Khrushchev taking off his shoe and banging it on the table at the UN in October 1960. Seems fairly straightforward, does it not? Lots of people were present, many of whom are still alive--journalists, diplomats, etc. The only problem, as a professor writing a biography of Khrushchev who interviewed the eyewitnesses a few years ago discovered, is that half of those who were there are adamant that he indeed banged his shoe while the other half are no less insistent that he did not. Check this out:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2003/07/26/edtaubman_ed3_.php

Now if we experience such difficulty in establishing the truth of something that happened within living memory in front of the world's press, how much more careful ought we to be in lending credence to a story that one man (who may or may not be telling the truth) says that he was told by another man (who may or may not be telling the truth) in the absence of corraborating evidence?

[Dan]

I agree 100% with Father Elijah. The smear campaigns are so aggressive and so persuasive that they succeed even in cowing or putting on the defensive many committed Catholics.

[Art Deco]

The only problem, as a professor writing a biography of Khrushchev who interviewed the eyewitnesses a few years ago discovered, is that half of those who were there are adamant that he indeed banged his shoe while the other half are no less insistent that he did not.

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the shoe-banging was photographed.

[Ed the Roman]

And unless my memory is playing tricks on ME, I've seen the photographs.

[Dan]

pervasive, not persuasive!