There is little doubt that the Vatican is a very odd place that lends itself to intrigue, rumour and conspiracy. A tiny territory in the middle of Italy’s capital city that presides over a global religion with some 1.3 billion adherents, it has always been a site of secrecy, plotting and scandal, not least because of the intensely hierarchical and paranoid way in which the place has been governed. This book presents itself as ‘an astonishing history of the priests and missionaries whose “special ops” serve the Holy See’. Yvonnick Denoël claims to have drawn on ‘freshly released archives’ to reveal ‘eighty years of shadow wars and dirty tricks’. 

Yet the book doesn’t really do this. The material from ‘freshly released archives’ is rather thin on the ground. Most of the small number of sources cited are published books, many of them by journalists, and often with a conspiracy-theory-type outlook. There is also no guide to the archival sources used. This set a few alarm bells ringing.

Moreover, although this book purports to be about Vatican spies, it ranges far and wide. A more accurate title might have been ‘Vatican Scandals’. The author tells a series of (often unconnected) stories concerning the Vatican over a period ranging more or less from the end of the Fascist regime