Fr dear Fr: Is there some substance in the old rumour that for some years there was a Soviet mole working inside the Vatican, lining up the pope for a pot shot from the KGB on the rooves of the Urbanianum on the Gianicolo Hill overlooking the apartments of St Peter’s Square? Any truth to all of this speculation?

Rumour or not, or just speculation of an idle nature from an idle cleric, nevertheless, the Americans it is said did take this stuff quite seriously and indeed despatched an agent codenamed “Lone Wolf” at the height of the Cold War from 1987 to 1995, after being alerted to the presence of a mole inside the Vatican elites by a young American mystic woman from Long Island, and so this “Lone Wolf” agent was despatched to track down the said so-called Soviet agent or a Sovca agent and the operation was called “Broken Arrow” after the Red Indian theme of the same but also after an operation that did go wrong in the Ukraine funnily enough in the way back when period. Technically the epithet “Broken Arrow” refers to the loss of a nuclear warhead to a terrorist gang and it was a great fear at that time on the part of the Americans, hence the mad, mad, mad rush on their part to have the warheads of Kazakhstan and Ukraine inside the pale of safe hands, safely conceded back to Russia. But the two agents did meet once or twice and became friends funnily enough, and they continued meeting for some time at the Cafe Barroque on the Navona in Rome, from the end of the Cold War in 1992 right up to the retirement of the Sovca agent back to Britain in 2002, and thence his death from Covid maybe in 2019, one of the first to die of Covid in Chinese Britain at that time. Yes, they became friends and the “Lone Wolf” hunter killer agent never reported that he had in fact found the Soviet mole inside the Vatican all that time. He was too nice. A nice ending from the height of the Cold War. Two later written agents, reporting to a newsdesk in California at San Francisco to a handler from the jesuits called “Pearl Habour” based in Rome for a while and then in Hawaii and then in San Francisco, these two USA style agents called Cassiopeia and Cygnus, thence called the two black swans, were then despatched towards the end of this period to Rome to find out more about the mole, but by this time he had died and there was no more speculation around Rome about the Sovca individual. Evidently he had maybe been a mole with a difference, deploying a divorcee that he had kitted out to shadow a cardinal, but with his death the KGB and then FSB lost interest in a mole inside SCV-ville. America also lost interest in 2019. A sad story, as he was able to inflict much damage on the German army in that city, much damage, even though he did not know that he was himself shadowed and his phones bugged by the CCCs. Hallo Hallo.