Mossad and Vatican II: Key Facts

By Lawrence Erickson

A couple of years ago I wrote an article documenting the strong evidence that the Israeli Mossad has been operating an organized blackmail ring in the Vatican for quite some time, one that is analogous to their operation in the United States government, formerly spearheaded by Jeffrey Epstein.

The highly suspicious nature of the Second Vatican Council and the rise of Pope John XXIII was one of the central topics in that article. While my original article provided an overview of some of these points, I have since conducted additional research and expanded on these discoveries with a book entitled Vatican Coup: Blackmail and Espionage in the Catholic Church, published early this year.

Since the book is nearly 300 pages, I figured it would helpful to summarize some of the key facts on this substack, so that readers can more easily make others aware of this information. This first article will cover the hidden history of Vatican II, and in future articles we will examine the death of John Paul I, the papacy of John Paul II, and the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI.

Key Fact #1: Israel’s Motive

To some extent, Israel’s motive for reversing the Catholic Church’s opposition to organized Jewry should be self-explanatory. While most are familiar with the historic hostility between the Church and Jewry, I would guess that far fewer are familiar with some of the more direct conflicts between the Church and the State of Israel in the years preceding Vatican II.

Dr. Amnon Ramon, a Senior Researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, details how the Catholic Church led the effort to deny Israel sovereignty over Jerusalem:

The most important act of the Holy See was drafting its own diplomatic corps, and that of the entire Catholic world to approve the resolution on internationalization of Jerusalem in the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1949.

The resolution on internationalization was approved, as is well known, by an exceptional coalition, including countries considered “Catholic,”the countries of the Communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union, and the Arab and Muslim states. In the eyes of the leaders of Israel it was the Vatican that was the central factor in creating this “unholy” alliance.

On December 13, 1949, Ben-Gurion claimed in a Knesset debate that “the power of world Catholicism, which for very many years had not displayed the power it revealed on this occasion, [drafted] about 30 nations throughout the world, and it is evident that this resulted only from its pressure since there are states that changed their mind in the course of the day.” He predicted that the decision to make Jerusalem the capital “will be used as a weapon by the Vatican” because “they have an old account with the Jews for two thousand years.“

The words of Sharet and Ben-Gurion reflect the depth of historical residue felt by the Israeli leadership towards the Catholic Church and the Vatican. Many of the decision makers in Israel attributed to the Vatican nearly unlimited powers, and they seem to have brought this image from their Eastern European upbringing. The Vatican was considered in Israel a central force on the world scene, seeking – together with the United Nations, the Arab states and the entire international community – to make Israel give up its control over Jerusalem and withdraw from much of the territory it captured in the 1948 war.

In other words, Ben-Gurion saw the Church as leading the substantial international pressure against Israel at the time. The UN at the time only had 59 nations, so the Church’s ability to rally 30 of them meant that the Church could use more than half of the UN to squeeze Israel.

Although Israel regularly ignores UN resolutions today, this was not a trivial matter in 1949, when Israel had just been officially recognized and was heavily dependent on international support for its existence. The flipping of the Church’s position meant that the largest institutional opposition to Israel in the West disappeared.

Key Fact #2: John XXIII’s History with Israeli Officials

To try to rectify the dilemma with the Church, Ramon discusses how Israel dispatched a diplomat named Maurice Fisher to the Vatican, shortly before the death of Pius XII.

Another initiative was the decision to dispatch to the Vatican in early 1957 Maurice Fisher, one of the notable early diplomats in the Israeli foreign service, who was well- versed in Christian affairs ever since his stint as an officer in the Free French army in Lebanon during World War II. On January 1957, Fisher departed, full of good will, for a six-week mission to Rome, in order to try to establish the first direct ties with the Vatican.

Fisher happened to have close ties with Cardinal Roncalli (future Pope John XXIII) stretching back more than ten years. At this time, Roncalli was not thought to be a serious contender for pope.

The first buds of change appeared only upon the death of Pius XII in October 1958. The election of the new pope, John XXIII, who was thought to be more favorably inclined towards the Jewish people and Israel and who had close ties with Maurice Fisher from their days of service together in Paris…

If Fisher was meeting with Roncalli during this visit, it would not be the first time that Roncalli had been used as Israel’s main emissary in the Vatican. Roncalli also met with Moshe Sneh and helped arrange a meeting between Sneh and the Vatican secretary of state. Moshe Sneh was a former commander for the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization that was engaging in large-scale terrorism against the British in Palestine. Per The Jerusalem Post:

In 1947, following a request from Father Alexandre Glasberg, Roncalli met Dr. Moshe Sneh. This story was told to me by former minister Yair Zaban, who served as personal assistant to Dr. Sneh in those days.

Moshe Shertok (Sharett) asked Sneh to go to the Vatican and convince its leaders not to interfere in the stance of many Latin American countries (deeply influenced by the Church) that otherwise were inclined to vote for the partition of Palestine in the UN, thus paving the way for the establishment of the Jewish state.

Roncalli succeeded in arranging a meeting for Dr. Sneh in Rome with then-secretary of state Domenico Tardini. Roncalli even traveled to Rome to be close to the scene.

Key Fact #3: John XXIII’s History with Israeli Intelligence

Roncalli’s history with Israel was even more extensive and suspicious than his history with its diplomats. During WWII, Roncalli was in Istanbul, and he worked with Zionist agents to organize the immigration of Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. Slate magazine summarizes:

That was where Hirschmann came to rely on Roncalli. In a series of exchanges that summer, the War Refugee Board – working alongside the Jewish Agency, a network of underground agents tied to the Jewish authorities in Palestine – made arrangements to transfer packets of immigration certificates to Roncalli, who then forwarded them via church networks to Jewish communities in Hungary.

One of the main Zionist agents behind this effort was Teddy Kollek. Kollek was appointed as the deputy head of intelligence for Jewish Agency in 1942 and served throughout the war. It would be difficult to find a figure more deeply embedded in Israeli espionage efforts than Kollek, who was described by Haaretz as one of the “founders of the Israeli intelligence community.” The same article discusses how Kollek also helped establish formal connections between the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. Kollek would later reflect on how he “commiserated” with Roncalli.

Chaim Barlas, the chief Jewish delegate from Palestine, wrote that Roncalli cried when told about what was happening to Jews. He said, ”I am going to fast and to pray for the people and our people”. Teddy Kollek, a delegate from Palestine in Istanbul during the darkest years of the Holocaust who for three decades was mayor of Jerusalem recalled : ”He commiserated together with us. He wasn’t able to do very much. But what he could, he did”.

Key Fact #4: Cardinal Spellman Conquers the Vatican

Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York from 1939-1967, became one of the most powerful and influential members of the Church in the time shortly before Vatican II. Spellman was the leading Catholic representative of the nation that provided more donations to the Vatican than the next twelve combined, and he was well aware of the power this afforded him. John Cooney’s biography of Spellman, entitled The American Pope, documents how even Pope Pius XII became powerless in the face of Spellman’s financial heft:¹

In Rome churchmen frantically wondered what had gone wrong. How could a mission that was expected to be upgraded wind up being demolished? They blamed Spellman. Suddenly, it became clear that the Cardinal hadn’t pushed the cause dynamically. Knowing Spellman, the Pope understood the American had some hidden motive for sitting on his hands, and Pius was furious. What further infuriated the Pope was that there was little he could do to strike back. What became clear to him was how much he relied upon Spellman for just about everything – money, political influence, the anti-Communist crusade – even the floor waxers used at the Vatican came from Spellman. Everywhere Pius looked, Spellman was the axle around which many Church wheels spun.

Unfortunately for the Church, Cardinal Spellman was a practicing homosexual who was almost certainly being blackmailed. Cooney reports how “Numerous priests and others interviewed took his homosexuality for granted.”² Two of the men Cooney interviewed even claimed to have had sexual intercourse with Spellman.

Spellman did not make much effort to hide his illicit activities. One of Spellman’s friends for more than 25 years was Lewis Rosenstiel, a man who was Epstein before Epstein. According to Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan Rosenstiel, her husband hosted parties including boy prostitutes, and set up hidden microphones around his apartment during these parties, for the sake of obtaining priceless blackmail.³ Famed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was subjected to this blackmail, and it was at Rosenstiel’s place that Hoover met Cardinal Spellman.⁴

Susan Rosenstiel’s testimony under oath was considered credible and praised by the former chief counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and committee investigator William Gallinaro, and critical aspects of her testimony were later backed up by another two witnesses who had not heard Rosenstiel’s story.⁵ Shockingly, Mrs. Rosenstiel also claimed that Roy Cohn, a frequent guest at the parties and a fellow blackmail merchant, would openly take pleasure in telling her about the sexual proclivities of Cardinal Spellman.⁶

The question of whether Spellman was subject to blackmail seems beyond doubt, the only question would be who ended up holding the blackmail.

Since Hoover was at Rosenstiel’s parties⁷ and was also blackmailed, it’s logical to assume that whoever had blackmail on Hoover probably had blackmail on Spellman as well. There are two people who we know had blackmail on Hoover. There’s the Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky⁸ and the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James Angleton.⁹

Lansky was a friend of Rosenstiel and an Israeli partisan, helping to illegally smuggle weapons to Zionist militants. Interestingly, it was Teddy Kollek who was helping to organize the smuggling of weapons from Jewish gangsters like Lansky.

James Angleton was someone who was so close to Mossad that he was widely suspected of being co-opted and completely loyal to them. Angleton’s biographer, Tom Mangold, stated: “I would like to place on the record, however, that Angleton’s closest professional friends overseas, then and subsequently, came from the Mossad and that he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death.”¹⁰

Given that Spellman’s blackmail was likely held by two Israeli loyalists, it should be unsurprising that Spellman would frequently deploy his influence in service of Israel. When Israel needed the support of Latin American countries to be accepted into the United Nations, Spellman conducted a bonanza of phone calls to Latin American officials and delegates, asking all of them to support Israel. Spellman had extensive connections with the Latin American U.N. Delegates through his position in the Church and given that these nations made up roughly a third of the U.N., his support may have well been decisive in helping Israel clear the required two-thirds threshold. Future Israeli U.N. Ambassador Moshe Tov reported that Latin American cardinals had a sudden change of heart and began to look favorably on the Israeli cause.¹¹

Key Fact #5: John XXIII’s History with Cardinal Spellman

Cardinal Roncalli was an obscure figure and it seems hard to believe that he rose to the papacy without any powerful supporters or allies within the Vatican. Given that Spellman dutifully served Israel and Roncalli was deeply entwined with Israeli intelligence, it seems that Spellman would be the logical one to suspect as Roncalli’s benefactor.

It turns out that these suspicions are very well supported. Spellman knew Roncalli stretching back to the 1920’s when they were together in Rome.¹² Shockingly, Spellman was even sending money to Roncalli for unclear reasons. Vatican journalist and Oxford Professor Peter Hebblethwaite stated in his book, John XXIII: Pope of the Council, that Spellman was in fact an old friend of Roncalli’s, and that Spellman “kept Roncalli supplied with Mass stipends during the depression years.“¹³

Spellman ended up involved in Roncalli’s efforts to evacuate Jews from Europe during WWII. While in Istanbul, Chaim Barlas brought a report to Roncalli claiming the mass killing of Jews was occurring. Then “two days later, Cardinal Francis Spellman passed through Istanbul on his way home to New York. Roncalli instructed Barlas to write a letter describing the desperate situation, which he would give to Spellman… Roncalli prepared Spellman for the shocking news and arranged a meeting with Barlas.“

Spellman’s fingerprints appear all over Roncalli’s career. Not only was he sending him money in the 30’s, but he seems to have been involved in Roncalli’s “big break.” This occurred due to a conflict between Charles de Gaulle and Pius XII, where Pius XII chose Spellman to negotiate with de Gaulle. After the conflict, Pius XII decided to punish de Gaulle by devaluing the position of ambassador to Paris, which had traditionally been an elite appointment. He did this by appointing Roncalli to this position, someone who Pius XII and Spellman both found to be ridiculous.¹⁴ It seems more likely that this idea came from the mind of Spellman rather than Pius XII, and this elite position became the springboard for Roncalli’s career.

Istanbul wasn’t the last time Spellman and Roncalli saw each other. There’s indication that Spellman was prepared quite early to push Roncalli as a candidate for the papacy. In February 1954, Pius XII came down with a dangerous illness which appeared to put him on the verge of death. Robert A. Ventresca, author of Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII, notes that

…in February 1954, the pope fell gravely ill. Muench recorded in his diary that those with access to the papal court were preparing for Pacelli’s imminent death. The pope was said to be in a fragile state. Weeks without solid food had left the gaunt Pacelli emaciated. Discreetly, Muench prepared the draft of an obituary for the news agencies.¹⁵

Just three months later, Spellman met Roncalli again for the first time in years. This was in Venice for the feast of the Ascension.¹⁶ Pius XII would end up recovering and survived until 1958, but it is certainly interesting timing that Spellman and Roncalli chose to meet at a time when the next papal conclave appeared to be imminent.

Key Fact #6: James Angleton Penetrates the Vatican

Earlier we discussed how CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton had acquired damaging photos of J. Edgar Hoover, and likely Cardinal Spellman as well. We also discussed how Angleton was an Israeli loyalist, and a Wall Street Journal article published shortly after his death illustrates that:

• “Mr. Angleton, who died of cancer May 11 at age 69, almost single-handedly ran the Israeli account” at the CIA until 1974.”

• “During his many years on the job, Mr. Angleton was instrumental in dramatically strengthening U.S.- Israeli intelligence cooperation in a host of areas.”

• “Mr. Angleton’s counterparts at the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service, were deeply disappointed when Mr. Angleton retired, and suspected that Mr. Angleton’s extraordinarily close connection to the Mossad was one reason Mr. Colby wanted him out.”

• “But even after retiring, Mr. Angleton retained his personal ties to some of Israel’s best intelligence agents. They often visited him at his suburban Virginia home and dined with him at local Chinese restaurants. ”

Angleton’s influence in the Vatican wasn’t just limited to Cardinal Spellman, however. Angleton was head of the OSS in Rome after WWII. Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas reports how Angleton claimed he was welcomed into the Vatican “with open arms,” and it states he was “given full access to the Vatican’s unparalleled information gathering service through Italy.”¹⁷ Information assessed by the Vatican was immediately passed to Angleton,¹⁸ and he held control over America’s intelligence relationship with the Vatican even into the 1960’s.¹⁹

According to former CIA station chief William Eveland, Angleton also arranged an intelligence exchange agreement with the Israeli Mossad.²⁰ This agreement gave Angleton access to Israel’s considerable intelligence on the Arab States, which the CIA came to rely on, as well as intelligence from the many new immigrants that had come to Israel from the USSR. It can be presumed that in exchange for this valuable information, Israel was allowed access to the intelligence at Angleton’s disposal. One unfortunate mistake by Pius XII therefore essentially gave the Israeli Mossad access to the Vatican’s entire intelligence apparatus.

John XXIII and Angleton also happened to work with some of the exact same Jewish spies. As an example, Angleton also worked with the Jewish underground during WWII, and one of his contacts there was Teddy Kollek, who became a “close personal friend.”²¹

Remarkably, the signs of Angleton’s influence do not end there. Pope Paul VI, then Cardinal Montini, was in fact Angleton’s first direct source in the Vatican, and their relationship went back to the spring of 1945. According to Cloak and Gown by Yale Professor Robin Winks, Angleton in 1945 “had been cultivating his source directly within the Vatican – later identified as Giovanni Battista Montini, then a Bishop and under secretary of state at the Vatican and later Pope Paul VI.”²²

The Washington Post editor Jefferson Morley expanded on this in his 2017 book The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton. He describes how well-placed Americans in Italy were quietly discussing how “young Jim Angleton had great sources in the Vatican. Some went so far as to say he was meeting on a weekly basis with Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the Vatican’s undersecretary of state for Italian affairs.”

Whether the meetings were as frequent as weekly or not, they were definitely regular, and Morley highlights an example of the close relationship between the two. According to Officer William Gowen, shortly after the war, US officials were looking for a number of Croatians who were believed to be carrying stolen goods. After some investigating, Gowen and others came to believe that Montini was sheltering them at a seminary nearby the Vatican. Montini complained to Angleton though, and soon after an order came in from one of Angleton’s allies at the US embassy which commanded the investigators to stand down.²³

Key Fact #7: Spellman and Paul VI

Cardinal Spellman was deeply involved behind the scenes in the elevation of Cardinal Montini to pope. This was a puzzling move, considering Montini was disliked by both Spellman himself and the CIA (with whom Spellman had close contact)²⁴ for being insufficiently anti-communist. Nevertheless, Spellman committed both his own vote and that of his protégé McIntyre, resulting in Spellman heading up a united front for the American cardinals, given that the rest were already supportive of Montini. Cooney describes the situation:

When Spellman approached Montini the candidate was in a receptive mood. When the Cardinal emerged from a closed-door meeting with the candidate, they had reached some sort of agreement… In Spellman, Montini knew he was actually getting two votes. McIntyre was bound to vote the way his mentor told him.²⁵

The Big Picture

It has become somewhat well-known recently that Israel and James Angleton were likely behind the assassination of President Kennedy. It has also become well-known that Israel uses blackmail to infiltrate institutions of power. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find Israel behind the elevation of John XXIII and Paul VI, who forced through the Second Vatican Council, and reversed the Church’s long standing antipathy towards the Israeli state.

It looks like Mossad founder Teddy Kollek and his friend James Angleton acquired blackmail on Cardinal Spellman. They then used Spellman’s influence to push their ally Roncalli into the Papal Throne, and then pushed Montini in after him. Holding the papacy for 20 years allowed Kollek and Angleton to conjure up Vatican II and neutralize any potential threat from the Vatican towards the State of Israel.

Archived Links

Roncalli and Sneh

Roncalli Working With Jewish Agency

Kollek in Istanbul

Roncalli and Kollek

Hoover and Angleton

Kollek and Lansky

1. John Cooney. (1986). The American Pope. (p. 277) Dell.

2. Ibid., p. 153

3. Nicholas Faith. (2007). The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Sea gram. (p. 66) St. Martin’s Griffin.

4. Ibid., p. 67

5. Anthony Summers. (2012). Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. (p. 5 of forward to 2012 edition) Open Road Media.

6. Anthony Summers. (1993). Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. (p. 254 of 1993 edition) Putnam Adult.

7. Nicholas Faith. (2007). The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Sea gram. (p. 66) St. Martin’s Griffin.

8. Summers, A. (2012, January 1). The secret life of J Edgar Hoover. The Guard ian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/01/j-edgar-hoover-secret-fbi

9. J. Edgar Hoover Was Homosexual, Blackmailed by Mob, Book Says - Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-02-06-mn-1078-story.html

10. Tom Mangold. (1991). Cold Warrior. (pg. 362) Simon & Schuster.

11. John Cooney. (1986). The American Pope. (p. 244) Dell.

12. Ibid., p. 179

13. Peter Hebblethwaite. (1984). John XXIII, Pope of the Council. (p. 189) G. Chapman.

14. John Cooney. (1986). The American Pope. (p. 188) Dell.

15. Robert A. Ventresca. (2013). Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII. (pp. 288-289). The Belknap Press.

16. Peter Hebblethwaite. (1984). John XXIII, Pope of the Council. (p. 248) G. Chapman.

17. Gordon Thomas. (2015). Gideon’s Spies : the Secret History of the Mossad. (pg. 214) Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Griffin.

18. Ibid.

19. David Martin. (1980). Wilderness of Mirrors. (pg. 183) Harper & Row.

20. William Crane Eveland. (1980). Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East. (pg. 95) W. W. Norton & Company.

21. Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn. (1991) Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship. (pp. 42-43) Harper Collins Publishers.

22. Robin W. Winks. (1988). Cloak and Gown. (pg. 355) Quill.

23. Jefferson Morley. (2017) The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton. (pp. 33-34). St. Martin’s Press.

24. John Cooney. (1986). The American Pope. (p. 352) Dell.

25. Ibid., p. 354