{"id":3244,"date":"2007-01-25T10:38:36","date_gmt":"2007-01-25T10:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/is-this-for-real.html"},"modified":"2007-01-25T10:38:36","modified_gmt":"2007-01-25T10:38:36","slug":"is-this-for-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/is-this-for-real.html","title":{"rendered":"Is this for real?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 <\/a>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 <\/em>emerged from the cloud of influence of the KGB:<\/p>\n

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In 1963, General Ivan Agayants, the famous chief of the KGB\u2019s disinformation department, landed in Bucharest to thank us for our help. He told us that \u201cSeat-12\u201d had materialized into a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII, entitled The Deputy<\/em>, an oblique reference to the pope as Christ\u2019s representative on earth. Agayants took credit for the outline of the play, <\/em>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<\/em>\u2019s producer,<\/em> 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 \u201cemigrated\u201d to the United States. In 1962 Piscator had returned to West Berlin to produce The Deputy<\/em>. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s self-serving claim. He was a living legend in the field of desinformatsiya<\/em>. In 1943, as the rezident<\/em> 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 \u201csafety\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201cUncle Joe\u201d 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. \u201cThe cripple\u2019s mine!\u201d he reportedly exulted. <\/p>\n

Just a year before The Deputy<\/em> 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<\/em>. The manuscript was attributed to Maxim Litvinov, n\u00e9 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 \u201cnon-aggression\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The Deputy<\/em> saw the light in 1963 as the work of an unknown West German named Rolf Hochhuth, under the title Der Stellvertreter. <\/em>Ein christliches Trauerspiel<\/em> (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\u2019s victims. The original text presents an eight-hour play, backed by some 40 to 80 pages (depending on the edition) of what Hochhuth called \u201chistorical documentation.\u201d In a newspaper article published in Germany in 1963, Hochhuth defends his portrayal of Pius XII, saying: \u201cThe facts are there \u2014 forty crowded pages of documentation in the appendix to my play.\u201d In a radio interview given in New York in 1964, when The Deputy<\/em> opened there, Hochhuth said, \u201cI considered it necessary to add to the play a historical appendix, fifty to eighty pages (depending on the size of the print).\u201d <\/span>In the original edition, the appendix is entitled \u201cHistorische Streiflichter<\/em>\u201d (historical sidelights). The Deputy<\/em> has been translated into some 20 languages, drastically cut and with the appendix usually omitted.<\/p>\n

Before writing The Deputy<\/em>, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma (Abitur<\/em>), 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 \u201ca series of questions\u201d 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And speaking of espionage, if you haven’t yet, check out Sandro Magister’s article on Polish efforts in regard to JPII:<\/a><\/p>\n

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There\u2019s no lack of surprises. Many would like to discover the identity of \u201cSeneka,\u201d 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 \u201cWojtyla.\u201d Now the whole world, and not just Poland, knows how to say the name \u201cWojtyla.\u201d But back then, just after the war, it was a cipher that could lead to an error, that could be turned to \u201cWojdyla.\u201d And that\u2019s where our story begins. <\/p>\n

Krakow, November 17, 1949. The mole, using the code name \u201cZagielowski\u201d (but who also used the name \u201cTorano\u201d and in the future would give his real signature), sent the police a \u201ctop secret\u201d report on a meeting in the curia during which this \u201cWojdyla\u201d was pointed out as someone to keep an eye on. <\/p>\n

\u201cZagielowski\u201d 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 \u2013 a sexual weakness. In 1953 a note from Department IV of the interior ministry, the one charged with watching
\nover the Church, gave this assessment of him: \u201cHis evaluation is good. He is the only one working in Krakow who can be approached.\u201d He was the pastor at Saint Nicholas, and was the friend \u2013 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\u2019t explain how he climbed the ecclesiastical ranks so easily. A document written in 1960 contains this outburst: \u201cI don\u2019t 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

The infiltrators didn\u2019t know each other. That\u2019s 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 \u201cTygodnik Powszechny,\u201d the Catholic weekly dear to the future John Paul II. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nIs this for real? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/is-this-for-real.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is this for real? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Well, this is big news, isn’t it? Or am I just out of the loop? 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}