From ..............

By John Loftus and Mark Aarons

"A bill of indictment, meticulously researched, carefully documented, soberly reasoned... The shadow of these accusations still hangs heavy and dark over the twentieth-century church. " -Morris West

Did Soviet intelligence help the Vatican smuggle Nazi fugitives to America? Unholy Trinity documents the frightening history of the Vatican's involvement with Nazi war criminals, and reveals for the first time the secret connection that fatally compromised Vatican-American intelligence networks behind the Iron Curtain. Like its predecessor, Spycatcher, this highly acclaimed book exposes a spy scandal that Western governments have been trying to conceal from the American public.

The evidence includes not only recently declassified intelligence documents, but also recorded interviews with surviving priests who admitted smuggling Nazi war criminals as part of the Church's titanic struggle against Stalin. It is an ignominious and often sordid story. In the name of anti-Communism, a handful of Vatican officials supplied British intelligence with a secret network of monasteries and convents used for smuggling Fascist fugitives to safety in the West. There they could be trained as "Freedom Fighters" to liberate Eastern Europe from the Communists. On the list were Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl (the commandant of Treblinka), Walter Rauff (the inventor of the "mobile" gas chambers), Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyons") and Ante Pavelic (the bloody dictator of Croatia).

The Nazi smuggling was personally authorized by Pope Pius XII and directed by his political advisor, Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI). Only in 1947 did U.S. intelligence discover the British-Vatican-Nazi network, and then took it over under the codename "Operation Ratlines." The network served Stalin's purposes handily. Years later, the CIA was horrified to discover that the Kremlin had thoroughly penetrated the Vatican's Nazi recruiting program through Kim Philby, a high-ranking Communist spy inside the British Secret Service. When the CIA tried to purge Philby's Nazi agents, the U.S. State Department went behind the CIA's back to hire an alternate Fascist network headed by a Czarist Prince, Anton Turkul.

Neither the Vatican nor the State Department knew that it had jumped from the frying pan into the fire: Turkul was the secret "Prince of Spies" for Stalin's "Red Orchestra."

Unholy Trinity is a disturbing book that reveals the disastrous effects of the Vatican-Nazi connection, and changes our vision of the Church's role in world politics. In the end, the Catholic Church's intelligence operations not only assisted thousands of Nazis to escape justice, but it also handed Soviet intelligence some of its greatest Cold War triumphs. The authors conclude that the Vatican network was the original model for the Iran-Contra affair and other recent scandals, citing explosive documents which finally implicate George Bush

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Attorney JOHN LOFTUS worked for the Justice Department in its Nazi-hunting unit, where he had access to top secret NATO records of the covert recruitment of Fascists during the Cold War. Loftus left the Justice Department in 1981 to write The Belarus Secret, a study of American intelligence operations involving Nazi war criminals. He has appeared as an expert witness before Congress and was featured on CBS's 60 Minutes. MARK AARONS is an internationally award winning investigative reporter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney. As a result of Mr. Aarons' investigative work, Nazi mass murderers are now being prosecuted in Australian and other courts for the first time.

Jacket design (c) 1992 by Irving Freeman

St. Martin's Press 175 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10010 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

UNHOLY TRINITY: The Vatican, The Nazis, & Soviet Intelligence

By John Loftus and Mark Aarons - Pub by St.Martins Press [1991]

Available from Barnes&Noble [1-800-242-6657] or [1-800-843-2665]

ISBN 0-312-07111-6 [hardcover] ISBN 0-312-09407-8 [paperback]