Author Debriefing: Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler

SpyCast

Education, News, History

4.4 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2015

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

SPY Executive Director Peter Earnest sat down with author Mark Riebling to discuss his new book on the wartime espionage of the Catholic Church. The Vatican’s silence in the face of Nazi atrocities remains one of the great controversies of our time. History has accused wartime pontiff Pius the Twelfth of complicity in the Holocaust and dubbed him “Hitler’s Pope.” But a key part of the story has remained untold. In fact, Pius ran the world’s largest church, smallest state, and oldest spy service. Saintly but secretive, he skimmed from church charities to pay covert couriers, and surreptitiously tape-recorded his meetings with top Nazis. When he learned of the Holocaust, Pius played his cards close to his chest. He sent birthday cards to Hitler—while secretly plotting to kill him. Church of Spies documents this cloak and dagger intrigue in shocking detail. Gun-toting Jesuits stole blueprints to Hitler’s homes. A Catholic book publisher flew a sports plane over the Alps with secrets filched from the head of Hitler’s bodyguard. The keeper of the Vatican crypt ran a spy ring that betrayed German war plans and wounded Hitler in a briefcase bombing.

Transcript

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1:06.0	That's spycloud.com slash cyberwire and we thank spy cloud for sponsoring our show. Hi and welcome to an author day briefing from the International Spy Museum.
1:30.0	I'm Dr. Vince Houghton, the Museum's historian and curator.
1:33.0	Here at the spy museum we get the world's most interesting authors,
1:36.0	including journalists, scholars, former spies and intelligence officers,
1:40.0	coming in to answer questions about their latest works dealing with
1:43.2	espionage, intelligence, and other national security issues.
1:46.9	Please join me in listening to another of our selected authority briefings.
1:51.1	My guest today is Mark Reebly. He's a historian of particularly US history, an essayist and policy analyst.
2:00.0	He's done a great deal on national security, the history of ideas, and quite a bit on
2:06.2	Vatican foreign policy during the Cold War and the Second World War.
2:11.2	The book I'm most familiar of his is a book called Wedge, which is a very respected work on the sort of, if you will, conflict between the FBI and the CIA during periods actually leading up to the present
2:27.8	because you've done quite a bit on through 9-11.
2:31.6	I'd just like to mention while we're here that Mark has also served in 2002,
2:39.4	2006 as research director for the Center for Policing Terrorism and he partnered with
	...

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