Thank you for listening to another episode of the War on the Rocks podcast series.

I'm sitting here with two marks, Mark Rebling and Mark Stout.

Mark Rebling is the author of the new book, Church of Spies.

He's a historian and policy analyst. This is about the Pope's

secret war against Hitler and there's a really exciting new story to be told there.

We're also joined by Mark Stout who is a senior editor here at War on the

rocks and he also directs the Intelligence

Studies program at Johns Hopkins University here in Washington, D.C. and he's a former

analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department.

And we're going to call Mark Stout,

stout, and we're going to call Mark Riebly Mark

so we don't get confused.

But this is actually a really fascinating book. And before I sort of mostly turn it on over to you two,

I want to hear Mark, what made you want to write this book and what sort of new story did you

have to tell about something that's actually been written about quite a lot?

Well, I was raised Catholic and one of the things I learned was that if I express a kind of heterodox idea that the nuns could always

souse me out because they had a really awesome informant system. So I didn't think

it was too incredible or unlikely when I later read in the work of another scholar that the Vatican ran the world's oldest and perhaps best intelligence service.

So this is something that I kind of had been thinking about for a long while.

And in the process of writing my last book, I was able to come in contact with some people in the intelligence community who had been involved in penetrating the Vatican during World War II when we occupied Rome in 1944 and 1945.

And based on some of the things that were said to me by these sources, I developed a strong opinion that a lot of what had been written about Pope

Pius the 12th, his silence during the show, the attitudes of the institutional church,

...