U.S. Spies on the Vatican

When Trump declared Pope Leo “terrible for foreign policy,” the U.S. intelligence community took the president’s remarks as a directive to prioritize spying on the Vatican.

It has for years, sources tell me. The CIA has human spies working inside the Holy See bureaucracy. The NSA and CIA seek to intercept telecommunications, emails, and texts. The FBI investigates crimes committed against and by the Vatican. The State Department closely follows the ins and outs of Papal diplomacy and politics. All of these agencies liaise with the Vatican’s own foreign policy, intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump said in an April 12 social media post. Trump went on to cite several specific foreign policy grievances, including the Pope’s criticism of the Iran War and the abduction of Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro. Trump said:

“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States …”

Tension between the Vatican and the White House is nothing new, but historically it has taken place through surrogates, policy statements, or pointed silence. Trump’s very public swipe against Pope Leo cast the American-born head of the Roman Catholic church as a threat to U.S. interests. It is an unprecedented label.

My first hint of the government’s interest in this subject was a recent job posting by SOS International, a major national security contractor headquartered in Reston, Virginia. It is looking for an Italian speaker to work for an unnamed “U.S. Government Client” to “provide social media monitoring, translation, and current event awareness” on subject matters including “religion.”

It is a pretty innocuous contractor job, and though it does not require a security clearance, it lists as a preferred qualification “experience supporting the Intelligence Community.”

But it got me thinking: Just what does the U.S. do to spy on the Pope and the Vatican? What I found, after some reporting, was a portrait of a longstanding — and quietly extensive — relationship between the U.S. national security apparatus and the Vatican. It involves genuine diplomatic, law enforcement, and even cyber security cooperation, all of which serves as both genuine cooperation and convenient cover for collecting intelligence.

FBI documents I obtained show that the first Trump administration sought to beef up its coordination with Italian intelligence agencies and Vatican officials on things like cyber security, white collar crime, human trafficking, art theft and other issues. One particular project was to help the Vatican actively thwart, cyber intrusions into its networks. The FBI also regularly provides threat intelligence to the Pope during his travels (though it’s unclear whether that cooperation still exists).

The CIA is represented in the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican and the Agency has been penetrating (or attempting to penetrate) the Vatican government and diplomatic corps for years. The NSA intercepts Vatican communications, working independently and through a joint NSA/CIA “Special Collection Service.”

The State Department, meanwhile, maintains a daily Vatican-centric news digest circulated to diplomats worldwide, according to another document I reviewed. The department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research has analysts dedicated to producing classified assessments on Vatican affairs — a function that, given the current climate, is unlikely to be winding down.

Even the U.S. military has a Vatican-specific language code on its books as a distinct linguistic capability. “QLE” designates Ecclesiastical Latin — the Vatican’s preferred liturgical register — as distinct from classical Latin (”LAT”), which is used primarily for historical and legal documents. It’s a small detail, but an illustrative one: the national security state is thorough, and it has been thorough about the Vatican for a long time.

Trump’s broadside against Pope Leo didn’t create this machinery for spying on the Vatican — it just pointed it in a new direction by labeling Pope Leo himself (a U.S. citizen, by the way) as a threat to America. Intelligence collection is rarely a switch that gets flipped; it’s a dial that gets turned up or down depending on where the Washington leadership wants to focus. Though not a part of formal priorities, Trump has made it clear that he wants the skinny (and any dirt) on Leo.

There’s also a geopolitical dimension worth noting. Pope Leo has emerged as one of the few global figures willing to publicly challenge the Trump administration on multiple fronts simultaneously — the Iran conflict, immigration enforcement, Venezuela, even ethics and culture. That makes him not just a religious leader in Washington’s eyes, but a political actor with a global platform and moral authority that rivals many heads of state.

The intelligence community may grumble privately but it ultimately exists to inform the president, not to just collect for its own interests. Nobody wants to be that guy who has to answer some question from Trump (or J.D. Vance) by saying that the U.S. doesn’t have “any visibility on that.”

The Vatican, for its part, is not naive about any of this. The Holy See has its own intelligence apparatus — discreet, ancient in its methods, and highly attuned to the political currents swirling around it.

In a move unusual for a Pope, Leo addressed Italy’s top intelligence officials directly last December, in a speech that landed with considerably more weight than its diplomatic setting implied. He opened by thanking them — expressing gratitude for Italian intelligence’s efforts in securing the Vatican — but then turned to the abuses he’s seen, including blackmail.

“In several countries,” Leo said, “the Church is the victim of intelligence services that act for nefarious purposes, oppressing its freedom.”

He laid out a framework for what legitimate spy work should look like: proportionate to the common good, respectful of private and family life, freedom of conscience, and the right to a fair trial. The activities of intelligence services, he said, “must be governed by laws that are duly promulgated and published, subject to the control and supervision of the judiciary, and their budgets must be subject to public and transparent controls.”

Leo continued: “Strict vigilance is required to ensure that confidential information is not used to intimidate, manipulate, blackmail or discredit politicians, journalists or other civil society actors. All this also applies to the ecclesial sphere.”

What we’re watching, in other words, is not American spying on an unsuspecting institution. It’s two very old hands sizing each other up — one with a global moral platform, the other with a signals intercept capability that blankets the globe.

National security, as I’m fond of pointing out, is everywhere around us. Even in the pews.