Hide and Seek: The Irish Priest in the Vatican who Defied the Nazi Command. The dramatic true story of rivalry and survival during WWII.

The Pope insisted that these details be kept to a small number of people. He agreed, however, that Osborne could mention them in a letter to Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in the hope that this would have a limited readership. The Pope’s obsession with secrecy was understandable. Everyone was being watched. Every visitor was recorded, every meeting noted. Osborne’s daily habits were routinely logged and the details were stored at the headquarters of the Italian secret police. The Vatican was also in the sights of the German police attaché, who was now recruiting informers across the city to spy on the occupants of the Holy See. Although Italy had yet to officially declare hostilities against the Allies, in Rome an intelligence war was well underway. Caught up in this battle, the Pope knew that a diplomatic process had to be maintained and at the same time was determined that nothing would threaten the status of the Catholic Church. To protect the Church’s interests, he kept lines of communication open with both the Allies and the Germans.

Under the Lateran Treaty of 1929 the Vatican was guaranteed independence. This accord between the Holy See and the Italian state established diplomatic conventions as well as agreements on physical access. Italy recognized the 108-acre site, which included the Vatican and St Peter’s, as an independent sovereign state. The agreement also covered fifty acres outside the Vatican walls and gave protected status to a number of extra-territorial buildings, including three basilicas and Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s country retreat. The accord made the Vatican City the smallest state in the world. In response the Holy See recognized Rome as the capital of the Italian state and pledged to remain neutral in international conflicts. The Pope was not allowed to interfere in Italian politics. While he felt entitled to speak out in general terms about the war, he was worried that his private discussions with Sir D’Arcy Osborne would become public and his role could be misinterpreted.

By the early summer of 1940 some of the Pope’s predictions had come true and, although the overthrow of Hitler by his generals did not happen as expected, the Germans had arrived in the Low Countries that May. A month later, despite a plea from Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini declared war on the Allies. The move would have an immediate personal effect on Sir D’Arcy Osborne. Could he continue to stay in Rome as a British representative while Italy was now at war with Britain? The Vatican solved the predicament and informed the Italian government that it could offer lodgings for diplomats within the Vatican City. As a neutral state, the Vatican could allow ambassadors and other diplomats to reside on its territory.

Back in London, Osborne’s bosses were worried that, although a move into the Vatican would enhance his personal safety, it might make communication between London and Rome more difficult. They offered him the use of a secret radio transmitter. Aware of the dangers of being caught and how such activity would compromise his new hosts, he declined the offer. Three days after Mussolini’s declaration of war, Osborne took down the British coat of arms at his office, gathered up his belongings and furniture, and moved to a pilgrims’ hostel on the south side of St Peter’s, inside the Vatican. He was to be housed temporarily in an annexe of the Santa Marta Hospice known as the Palazzina. There he was given four rooms. He took with him his typist Miss Tindall, his butler John May and his cairn terrier Jeremy. Osborne was now in a new environment, a tiny enclave shut off from the immediate dangers of war, a place where he clearly felt safe.

His temporary home was eventually transformed and at vast expense a new kitchen, bathroom and lavatory were installed. Osborne made himself comfortable, putting up paintings, portraits of the royal family, and maps of western Europe to plot the progress of the war. For the next four years this would be the headquarters of the British Vatican envoy. Sir D’Arcy Osborne and Hugh O’Flaherty were now neighbours. Theirs was a relationship which would be crucial to the operation of the Allied Escape Line.

Osborne’s new address placed him high on the list of the Italian secret police. They put him under surveillance and wanted to know if he was spying for British intelligence or passing on messages to anti-fascists in Italy. The British envoy knew he was being watched and he recorded his thoughts: ‘I believe that daily reports are sent out on our doings. They must be damned dull reading.’

As it did for Osborne, the war would have a profound effect on O’Flaherty’s daily life. While hostilities continued across Europe, the monsignor’s official job in the Holy Office started to change. By 1941 tens of thousands of Allied servicemen were being held in prisoner of war camps across Italy. The Vatican accepted that it was important that the POWs’ welfare was routinely checked to ensure they were being held in accord with international conventions. Pope Pius wanted two of his officials to visit the camps regularly. He appointed Monsignor Borgoncini Duca as his Papal Nuncio and, needing an English speaker to deal with the British prisoners, he asked Monsignor O’Flaherty to act as Duca’s secretary and interpreter. The Pope’s decision changed O’Flaherty’s life.

The monsignor would develop empathy for prisoners and would become more sympathetic to the Allied cause.

Duca and O’Flaherty began to travel around the country together, but they took very different approaches to the job. Duca was more relaxed and seemed unhurried and when he travelled by car he usually managed to see only one prison camp a day. O’Flaherty used his time differently. He accompanied the Papal Nuncio to the camps, but in the intervals between visits he would return to Rome on the overnight train. Once back in the capital he would pass on messages from prisoners to Vatican Radio to ensure that their relatives knew they were safe. The monsignor also speeded up the delivery of Red Cross parcels and clothing and helped in the collection of thousands of books for the prisoners.

O’Flaherty’s work clearly improved the morale of the POWs, but he did more than supply them with creature comforts. He became their champion, a significant move for a man who in his youth had little good to say about those who wore the uniform of the British Army. The monsignor began to lodge complaints about the way the men were being treated and his protestations led to the removal of the commandants at the hospitals at Modena and Piacenza. He also visited South African and Australian prisoners at a camp near Brindisi. There he distributed musical instruments including mandolins and guitars. Much to the annoyance of the prison’s management, the trip boosted the morale of the inmates and lowered that of their captors.

By now the monsignor was seen by the Italian military’s high command as a troublemaker. Pressure was exerted on the Vatican to remove him and eventually O’Flaherty resigned his position. Officially the Italian authorities claimed that the monsignor’s neutrality had been compromised. They said he had told a prisoner that the war was going well. It was a feeble excuse. Unofficially they wanted him out of the way because he was exposing the mistreatment of prisoners.

His visits to the prison camps made O’Flaherty increasingly aware that more needed to be done to help those who were suffering during the war. He may not have realized it at the time, but it seems likely that his meetings with Allied POWs helped to crystallize his thinking. When hostilities had first begun across Europe, he had viewed the conflict as an independent neutral observer, deliberately refraining from taking sides. He had always felt that both the Allies and the Germans were guilty of propaganda and he didn’t know what to believe. He had even once remarked, ‘I don’t think there is anything to choose between Britain and Germany.’

Now, as the war came ever closer to the streets of Rome, Hugh O’Flaherty discovered where his loyalties lay.

Chapter Four SECRETS AND SPIES (#ulink_940f6b7c-b41d-5aca-995c-fbb471ba1e1b)

‘I take my hat off to him’

Sir D’Arcy Osborne on British escapee Albert Penny

Autumn 1942

Gripping the handlebars of his bicycle, Albert Penny nonchalantly pedalled his way into St Peter’s Square. Dressed in workman’s overalls, he blended in with the crowd and managed to evade the gaze of the normally observant Swiss Guards. As escape bids went it was a first-class display of chutzpah. Days earlier the young British seaman had walked out of a POW camp at Viterbo, obtained some clothes, and under his own steam made his way to Rome. In the shadow of the Basilica, he confidently rode around the fountains and slipped into the gardens of the Vatican and soon found himself outside the Santa Marta Hospice. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck.

Suddenly he was approached by Anton Call, who was most surprised to have discovered a British serviceman on the run. Call, with eight years’ experience in the Vatican gendarmerie under his belt, had a vague recollection that the Vatican’s special international status might help in this situation. Instead of returning the sailor to the Italian police, he contacted Sir D’Arcy Osborne, who was just yards away on the top floor of Santa Marta.

The British envoy admired Penny’s courage, later declaring, ‘I take my hat off to him.’ He officially petitioned the Vatican authorities to allow the escapee to stay, arguing that this was permissible as the Vatican was a neutral state. Permission was given and Penny lived in Osborne’s flat while his fate was decided, and eventually he was exchanged for an Italian prisoner. The episode clearly struck a chord with Osborne and his neighbour Hugh O’Flaherty. Now for the first time they had an escaped Allied serviceman to deal with.

By the end of 1942 the monsignor had ended his work as an official Red Cross visitor to the Allied POW camps but he still wanted to help Allied servicemen. O’Flaherty and Osborne probably did not realize it then but the Penny episode was about to be repeated on their doorstep dozens of times. The seaman had not intentionally decided to become a trail-blazer but with his daring escapade on a bicycle he would become a forerunner for the many hundreds of servicemen who would later make a beeline for the Vatican.

The incident was not without repercussions and the biggest loser was Anton Call, the sympathetic policeman who had discovered Penny and handed him over to Sir D’Arcy Osborne rather than taking him to his superiors. The Italian authorities blamed Call for the affair. The policeman was arrested on a trumped-up charge, expelled from the Vatican and put in prison, although he was later released and given a minor role with the carabinieri. Osborne was furious about Call’s treatment and would record his thoughts privately: ‘It all makes me, against my will, very anti-Vatican and anti-Italian.’

By the autumn of 1942, watching the activities of the Vatican had become one of Herbert Kappler’s top priorities. In October the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, paid a three-day visit to Rome. He was temporarily running the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Main Office, because its head, Reinhard Heydrich, had been killed by Czech resistance fighters some months earlier. In this capacity Himmler was interested in the continued presence of foreign diplomats in the Vatican. He was convinced they were spying for their respective countries and he wanted the Vatican to expel them. It was made clear to Kappler who should be targeted.

In Himmler’s sights were two diplomats in particular: the British Minister to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, and the USA’s Chargé d’Affaires to the Holy See, Harold Tittmann. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the Americans’ entry into the war, Tittmann was asked by his bosses in Washington to move into the Vatican. The American diplomat lived under the same terms as Osborne and, like his British counterpart, resided in the Santa Marta Hospice.

German surveillance of the Vatican took many forms. Some of it was done by simply watching and listening. Diplomats such as Osborne and Tittmann also assumed that, as well as being observed, their mail and phone conversations were monitored. Osborne began to resent it and at one stage complained that it was like being ‘a prisoner in a concentration camp’.

Much of the minutiae of the targets’ daily life was recorded. In the case of Osborne and O’Flaherty, details of their visitors, their lunch partners, and anyone they met on walks around the Vatican were all catalogued. Kappler had first become interested in O’Flaherty’s activities when the monsignor visited Allied POW camps, and he knew that he was a close friend of Osborne. At this stage O’Flaherty and Osborne had not begun to operate the Escape Line and Kappler’s suspicions about them simply revolved around suggestions that they were passing on intelligence to the Allies. Kappler desperately wanted evidence that the two men were spying, for this would put pressure on the Vatican authorities to act against them. Ambitious and keen to show his superiors in Berlin that he was effective, he knew this evidence needed to be good.

Kappler’s most reliable information about the personalities in the Holy See came from a 28-year-old translator named Alexander Kurtna, who worked in the Vatican. Kurtna had first been recruited by Kappler in 1939 and the police attaché regarded him as his best source. In recent months Kappler had been able to inundate his bosses in Berlin with intelligence reports peppered with Kurtna’s observations.

Kurtna’s personal journey to becoming an agent in Rome was a fascinating one. He was born in 1914 in Tsarist Estonia, where his father was a civil servant and his mother a teacher. After spending time in the Estonian Army he decided to become a Catholic priest. He converted from Russian Orthodox and attended a Polish seminary run by the Jesuits. He was then awarded a scholarship and went to Rome to study at the Pontifical Russian College, which educated priests who were to be sent on missions to the Soviet Union.

But life in the holy orders was clearly not for Kurtna. Although he was academically gifted and fluent in several languages, including Russian and German, the Jesuits decided that the young Estonian was not suited for the priesthood. He left the Pontifical Russian College and managed to get work as a translator with the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, a Vatican department which looked after priests based in eastern Europe.

Kurtna’s new job required him to translate letters and reports and brought him into contact with a small circle of priests, monsignors and Vatican officials. He became acquainted with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant and Monsignor Giovanni Montini.

Before long Kurtna took on outside work, putting his language skills to greater use. Keen to develop his contacts, he began to make connections with Rome’s German community. He met Dr Ferdinand Bock, the director of the German Historical Institute, which officially supported a series of research projects and unofficially was a cover for a German spying network. Bock and the young translator got on well and the academic agreed to fund Kurtna to carry out research. It is clear Bock had other reasons to support a young student with good connections within the Vatican.

Kurtna’s skills were now in demand. His frequent trips to Russian-occupied Estonia and his relationship with the Vatican had also been spotted by Soviet intelligence officers. The Russians were particularly interested in Kurtna’s relationship with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, the director of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, the group that Kurtna translated for. The cardinal was believed to be trying to smuggle priests into eastern Europe to promote Catholicism. Kurtna was asked to watch events in the Vatican and report back to a Russian diplomat based at the embassy in Rome. He agreed. The former seminarian was now living an exciting life and playing a dangerous game and it was about to become even more complicated.

Dr Bock was a friend of one of the most important people in Rome: Herbert Kappler. It was a friendship that would ultimately benefit Kurtna. Within days he found himself sitting opposite Kappler in his office at the German embassy. As they talked the SS commander was impressed by the Estonian’s contacts and experience, and a deal was struck. Kurtna was quickly put to use by the police attaché and tasked with preparing reports on Vatican–German relations and in particular the activities of the Catholic Church in Poland and the Baltic States. Using his contacts in the Vatican and through his role as a translator, Kurtna was able to discover much confidential information on the Church’s work in German-occupied areas of eastern Europe.

Kappler’s relationship with the young man was complex and problematic. He knew that Kurtna was a double agent and understood that whatever information the Estonian discovered about the Vatican would go straight back to Moscow. He also knew that Kurtna could report German activities as well, which meant he could get the translator to feed his Soviet handlers misleading information. Even though the entire exercise was difficult, Kappler clearly felt it was a risk worth taking. The former seminarian offered the police attaché an insight into the Vatican which to date no one else had been able to match.

In his reports to Berlin Kappler did not hide Kurtna’s Soviet links and, while he did not identify his source, he put the Russian connection to good use, informing his boss that he had established links with the Soviet intelligence service.

Kappler’s dossiers would be passed to the foreign ministry of the RSHA, based in Berlin. The RSHA was one of twelve SS administrations and had been set up in 1939 to bring together the Nazi Party and other similar government groups. It had a foreign-intelligence division, Amt VI, and Reinhard Heydrich, its overall head until his assassination in June 1942, had made the gathering of such intelligence a priority.

Heydrich also had a track record of targeting the Vatican. In an instruction to staff in 1940 he had encouraged his agents in the field to exploit intelligence opportunities surrounding bishops and priests and to step up surveillance relating to theological students in Rome. In particular, Heydrich was keen to learn more about Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, one of Kurtna’s main contacts. In the wake of the German advance across eastern Europe, he was sure that the French-born cardinal wanted to spread the Catholic faith to Russia and other Baltic states. The RSHA firmly believed that the Vatican’s ultimate goal was to convert thousands of people so that Germany would eventually be surrounded by Catholic countries.

The ambitious Kappler, keen to keep his boss Heydrich happy, used Kurtna’s information to the full. His star agent’s discoveries formed the basis for a series of his reports, and the police attaché felt that he was making great progress in infiltrating the Vatican and keeping tabs on its leading personalities. But it didn’t last for long, for Kurtna was unmasked by Italian military intelligence through a piece of old-fashioned detective work. Having placed a flat in Rome under surveillance, they raided it and discovered a transmitter hidden behind a radiator which was being used to communicate with Moscow. The Italians then intercepted radio messages from Russia. One transmission had directed the contact to go to another flat in the city to deliver a message to the occupants. The messenger was told that when he went to the apartment he would meet a couple, a blonde woman and a man dressed as a priest. The man who would have the appearance of a priest was in fact Kurtna; the woman was his wife, Anna Hablitz from Leningrad, whom he had just married. Members of Italy’s military intelligence arrested Hablitz outside her flat and then waited at the railway station for her husband, who was returning from Estonia. Kurtna’s arrest and incarceration in the summer of 1942 brought to an end Kappler’s drip-feed of quality information on figures within the Vatican. The Estonian had been his most important source inside the Vatican, so it was an enormous blow to the police attaché.

Other contacts continued to pass on details of Church matters to Kappler, but their intelligence could not match that of the Estonian. Two German nationals provided occasional pieces of information. They were an academic called Engelfried and a woman, Frau Kühn-Steinhausen, who worked in the Vatican’s Archives.

Kurtna’s detention by the Italians meant Kappler had to rely on a disparate and often bizarre group of potential informers who were motivated by politics, personal circumstances, and very often money. One such individual was Charles Bewley, who had served as the Irish Ambassador to Germany and the Vatican. Bewley had an impressive background and a close examination of his CV shows why he was of interest to German intelligence. A member of a Dublin family well known in business circles, he had been brought up as a Quaker and became a Catholic while a student at Oxford. He had a successful academic career in England and was the only Irishman apart from Oscar Wilde to win the Newdigate Prize for English verse. He returned to Dublin to practise law and became involved in politics, supporting Sinn Fein during its early years. Fervently anti-English and holding pro-Nazi views, he had gained experience of dealing with German officials during his years in Berlin.

When Bewley was appointed as Ireland’s envoy to the Vatican one journalist prophetically wrote, ‘As a student of affairs he is well aware that the first representative of the Irish government will need to walk very warily if he is to avoid pitfalls.’ When Bewley left the Irish diplomatic service he retired to Italy and kept up his German and Vatican contacts. Kappler was informed by his bosses in Berlin that Bewley was an Amt VI agent and was paid monthly. The Irishman was a regular on the social scene and used such occasions to garner information which he included in the reports he sent to Berlin.

For Kappler it may also have seemed an ideal way to target Hugh O’Flaherty. On paper it would have seemed logical that Bewley as an Irishman with what appeared to be good contacts in the Vatican was well placed to uncover details about the activities of his fellow countryman in Rome. However, there was a major problem with Bewley’s ‘intelligence’: it was mainly gossip he had picked up from parties or from Vatican contacts and he was unable to answer specific questions Kappler put to him.

At one stage German intelligence chiefs thought it would be possible to use Bewley’s Irish connections to good effect. Kappler was told to ask the former ambassador to make contact with Irish theology students who were in the Vatican, in the hope of gaining some intelligence. Bewley was unable to provide a list of the students’ names and in the end the idea was abandoned.

By now the war had entered its most frightening stage, for the Nazis had begun to put in place the Final Solution, an unprecedented plan to exterminate millions of Jews. Deportations from Germany began and death camps were established in remote areas of German-controlled Poland. By the summer of 1942 a million Jews within Nazi-controlled Europe had died. German military intelligence chiefs were anxious to know how Pope Pius XII would respond to the mass deportations of Jews. If he condemned the Nazi regime’s actions, how would this change its relationship with the Vatican? Berlin decided to put extra effort into intelligence-gathering in Rome and Kappler was now helped with extra staff, including Helmut Loos, who became his special assistant and had specific responsibility for organizing intelligence on the Holy See.

The arrival of Loos aided Kappler’s efforts to penetrate the Vatican, for his new assistant had an exemplary track record. He had worked as a Vatican specialist for Amt VI, the RSHA’s foreign-intelligence section, and had experience of running agents. In Rome he quickly made contact with a series of people who had been recruited by Amt VI. They included people such as aspiring journalists, translators and publishers. Even so, the quality of information Loos was offered varied greatly. Some of it was of genuine interest, but, like the material offered by Charles Bewley, much of it was merely gossip and rumour. For Kappler and his assistant it was crucial to learn how to differentiate fact from fiction. Their intelligence-gathering operation received a boost when Berlin approved the installation of a radio transmitter on the roof at Via Tasso. It meant Kappler could send reports back to Germany in an instant. Previously he had used the German embassy’s radio transmitter, which was considered safer than the telephone. As Kappler and Loos’s fight against the Vatican entered a new phase, on the coast of Sicily dramatic events were about to change the course of the war.

In the early hours of 10 July 1943 British, American and Commonwealth troops landed. The arrival of a 160,000-strong force raised hopes among the people of Italy that Mussolini’s men would surrender soon and that it would speed up an Allied march on Rome. The Italian capital was now in the sights of British and American commanders, but, worryingly for those in the Vatican, the Allies were looking at the city from the air and not the ground.

Chapter Five THE END OF MUSSOLINI (#ulink_e90b9340-455d-5dcc-8997-c0e7f8385964)

‘At this moment you are the most hated man in the country’

King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy

to Benito Mussolini