The Soviet smear of Pius XII.

For decades Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius the XII, has come under intense fire for his purported Nazi sympathies and his alleged inaction in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust. The truth is that Pius XII, who demonstrated his greatness by shepherding the Catholic Church through the darkness of World War II, has been the victim of an intense smear campaign begun and orchestrated by the Soviet KGB. That's the stunning revelation from Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa--the highest-ranking intelligence officer to ever defect from a Soviet Bloc nation.

Writing in National Review Online, Pacepa recalled: "In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a super-secret plan for destroying the Vatican's moral authority in Western Europe." The plan called for a smear campaign against Pius XII, who had died two years earlier in 1958, because "dead men cannot defend themselves." Pacepa himself was a prominent figure in the Kremlin's espionage campaign against the Vatican.

According to Pacepa, the end result of the effort to smear Pius XII--code named "Seat-12"--was the creation of The Deputy, a play that suggested Pius XII supported Hitler and the Holocaust. Long thought to be the work of West German Rolf Hochhuth, Pacepa says it was really a KGB production. "In 1963, General Ivan Agayants, the famous chief of the KGB's disinformation department, landed in Bucharest to thank us for our help" said Pacepa. "He told us that 'Seat-12' had materialized into a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII, entitled The Deputy.... Agayants took credit for the outline of the play, and he told us that it had voluminous appendices of background documents put together by his experts with help from the documents we had purloined from the Vatican"