Customer Reviews

Spies in the Vatican: Espionage and Intrigue from Napoleon to the Holocaust (Modern War Studies)

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Professor Alvarez has done his homework, although I do believe his presentation on how the Vatican has conducted its intelligence does not actually reflect the sometime morbid tone Vatican efforts sometimes undertook. I believe Profesor Alvarez could have been more helpful with the issue of the Croatians and the Vatican as to the terrible treatment of members of the Jewish faith there is concerned in WW II, and the terrible conduct that some clergy exhibited in Croatia. The Professor would have been well advised to look more into the role of members of the Sovereign Military Order of St. John Hospitaller, as some of its membership in WWII was of deep significance and use to the Vatican's overall intelligence attempts to understand and combat Facism and Nazism.

Alvarez has done yeoman work in sifting through mountains of material, and I congratulate his effort. For all interested in understanding how wrong Stalin was when he asked "How many legions has the Pope?", read Spies in the Vaticam. One may be surprised.

Though a book on espionage and the Vatican from the mid 19th century to the end of WWII, its first chapters are rather awkward and biased by the religious views of the author, the later chapters on the 1920's through the 1940's are truly brilliant. In an exciting but well researched manner, Alvarez shows that the biggest problem in Vatican relations with others was that the major powers completely misunderstood the Vatican, and the Vatican completely misunderstood its intelligence capabilities (e.g. only one of several Vatican codes was ever broken, despite the fact that everyone from the Nazis to the Americans was trying to break them, but the Vatican had the false belief that they had already been broken). This book, simply through facts, exonerates Pope Pius XII, who did everything possible to fight Nazi Germany, including personally warning the Belgians and French about the impending invasion of their countries by Germany, giving them the exact dates of the invasion as given to him by the anti-Nazi German opposition, and simply shunning any Germans in Rome who had any pro-Nazi leanings. It also shows, like few other books, that Nazi Germany considered Catholics and the Vatican as their second major enemy after the Jews, and while they could not start a Catholic Holocaust because of the millions of Catholics conscripted into the German Army, the Nazi leaders, and especially the SD chief, the architect of the Holocaust, Heydrich, was determine to destroy Catholicism as soon as Germany won the war. And Alvarez isn't even trying to be pro-Vatican or pro-Catholic, but his research brings out objective facts that show the complex world of the Vatican, but one where a concern for the good of others permeated through its walls, something other countries, whether in the Axis or the Allies, could scarcely understand, and still to this day don't understand.

I read this book to further develop my understanding of the Vatican's inner workings from 1870 through WWII, so my writing and its premise reflect the true historical context. This is a necessary resource in achieving such a purpose.

Don't be put off by the slowness of your initial read in the first chapter. Alvarez provides solid background for understanding the Vatican during this time frame. His assessment of why the Vatican succeeded or failed in areas of communication and intelligence are well substantiated by his presentation of facts. He does a nice job of demonstrating the different countries attempts at infiltrating the Vatican. I did not expect this book to be one of amusement. Those moments proved to be a pleasant surprise.

This is quite an extraordinary work. It seeks to correct the impression, held by Allen Dulles, many world leaders, and myself, that the Vatican, as with other select religious organizations like B'Nai Brith, is a world-class intelligence network.

Although the book spends as much time discussing efforts by the Italians, Germans, and others to penetrate the Vatican, as it does discussing the Vatican's mixed and often non-existent intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities, on balance this is an extremely good personal effort, based on some unique documents and research, and it can be regarded as a cornerstone for any future research into Vatican intelligence.

The book suggested to me three "big" ideas that need to be considered by every national intelligence service:

1) Structure and capabilties are needed to study religious intelligence and counterintelligence. Renegade mid-level drop-outs from the specified religious order should be identified and leveraged as required. Taking the Muslim brotherhood as an example (see Robert Baer's new book, SLEEPING WITH THE DEVIL), it is absolutely unforgivable and unprofessional of both the US Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency to have been prevented from studying the fundementalist and extremist religious movements in Arabia from the 1970's forward. Bottom line: we need to have relgious "orders of battle" and a clear understanding of what this important international player has in the way of capabilities and perceptions.

2) Secure communications make a very important contribution to candor and accuracy. Perhaps the most interesting part of the author's story can be found in his many annecdotes about how lack of a secure communications system led to self-deception, fantasy, conspiracy, and inaccuracy. The author is also quite credible in discussing the mediocrity of most Papal cryptographic systems, the lack of manpower and resources for improving this, and the negative results that came about because of a lack of a reliable and truly trusted communications system.

3)Finally, while the author does not cover Vatican betrayals of its own people through the Inquisition, of Muslims through the Crusades, and of Jews during the Holocaust, it is clear from this book that for all its limitations, the Catholic Church is an important global player whose local nuncios and bishops and priests and lay personnel can and should be legally and ethically leveraged for sounder understandings across many cultural divides. I would go so far as to resurface Richard Falk's 1970's idea about a world council of peoples and religions, with a twist: each Foreign Ministry must establish a separate Bureau of Religious Understanding, and devote considerable resources to studying and interacting with religious organizations (and cults, although these can be dealt with on a confrontational law enforcement basis).

Religons are one of the seven tribes of intelligence (the others are national, military, law enforcement, business, academic, and NGO-media). The author has made a very important contribution here (albeit with no help from the publisher--the index *stinks*). This book is highly recommended for adult students of intelligence, for policy makers, for religous leaders, and for citizens interested in how their religious affiliation could be legally employed (or illegally abused) in the pursuit of a global information society.

I got this book from the library and was pretty excited to start reading it. It's possible that most of the book is great, but I won't find out as I struggled to make it through the first chapter before returning it. That chapter is filled with nothing but long lists of "this guy did that" and "another guy did something else" that was boring, disconnected and pretty repetitive.

I guess it's possible the author felt he had to lay down the foundation for the rest of the book, but the first chapter was absolutely brutal to read.

If you're interested in the book, I'd suggest you skim (or even skip) the first 40 pages or so.