The Eternal City of Spies
From the Cold War to Cyber-Espionage, Rome Has Long Been a City of Secrets
The 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square sent ripples across Rome. The sudden crack of gunfire, blood on a white cassock, the pontiff collapsing into the arms of his aides.
The city held its breath as the surgeons worked for nearly six hours to save the pontiff’s life. Even before John Paul returned from a three-week convalescence at Gemelli Hospital, the Vatican had implemented a sweeping security changes that are still in place. Reforms included a permanent police presence in the square and airport-style screenings before entering Vatican buildings.
Then the rumors began. Was Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Ağca ordered to kill the pope by the neo-fascist Grey Wolves group he belonged to? Was he sent by the Bulgarians? The Iranians? The Soviets? There were even whispers in the press about the involvement of English extremists or militant factions within the Vatican itself.
The most tenacious investigator was Claire Sterling, a Rome-based American journalist convinced Ağca was a “tool” of the Bulgarian Secret Service, acting under orders from the KGB. To Sterling, the attempt on John Paul’s life was another front in the intensifying Cold War.
According to Freck Vreeland -- a diplomat, sometimes spy, and man about Rome (more on him below) -- Sterling’s reporting had “provoked some dangerous people.” Vreeland and Sterling both lived in Trastevere, and so he volunteered to warn her.
“The deputy chief of Rome’s CIA unit learned from Italian intelligence services that Claire’s life was in danger,” Vreeland writes in his yet-unpublished memoir, Call Me Freck. “I took the report seriously and Claire seemed to as well. When she asked what I thought she should do, I suggested she should leave Rome for a while. She seemed grateful for the warning and immediately started to pack.”
But Sterling later told the story differently. In her 1983 book The Time of the Assassins, she accused the CIA of covering up the KGB’s involvement in destabilizing events, including the attempt on John Paul’s life. She cast Vreeland as a central player.
“She wrote about my warning in a completely distorted way,” Vreeland writes. “She was essentially accusing me of being part of a CIA cabal” seeking to influence Soviet succession, even if it was at the cost of turning a blind eye to crimes.1
Whose version of events was accurate? Of course, nobody will ever know for sure.
A History of Hidden Motives
The name for the phenomenon is dietrologia -- another of the great Italian terms that is difficult to translate but essential to understand.
It’s the conviction that nothing happens by chance, that behind every public act lies a hidden motive, that unseen forces -- political, criminal, clerical, corporate, intelligence -- can shape events from the shadows.
Dietrologia has been an article of faith in Italy for generations.
It colored every major mystery of the era: not just the assassination attempt on John Paul II, but also the 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro; the abduction of U.S. Army General James Dozier in 1981-82; the 1962 plane crash that killed Italian industrialist Enrico Mattei; “Gladio,” the codename for a clandestine NATO army stationed in Italy from the late 1940s to 1990; and even the sudden death of John Paul I just 33 days into his papacy in 1978.
It’s also why the complete truth about the intrigue between Sterling and Vreeland will never be clear.
A Cold War Crossroads
It’s easy to understand why Rome became a center for international espionage after World War II.
Moscow funded what was the West’s largest and most sophisticated Communist Party while the U.S. supported the anti-communist and centrist parties including Christian Democrats, which held a major role in every Italian government from 1946 until the party collapsed amid scandal in 1994. Italy was the most politically divided country among the founding members of NATO, the anti-Soviet alliance.
Italy’s location was between NATO’s southern flank and Eastern Europe’s Warsaw Pact, and at a crossroads between the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East -- all strategically important regions.
The country averaged around one government a year between the end of World War II and 1990, something that -- combined with overlapping and competing police and intelligence services2 -- made organizations easier to infiltrate. And the cosmopolitan nature of post-war Rome made it a magnet for artists, journalists, diplomats, clerics, and adventurers, a perfect cover for spies to blend in.
According to Antonio Talia, author of La Stagione delle Spie (Season of the Spies), Italy has also had a long tradition of what he called geopolitical “double relationships” -- working with countries on both sides of a divide.
“Italy has tried to have good relations with both Israel and the Arab world,” Talia told me. “They were in NATO, but they also had industrial interests with the Soviet Union. The political school of trying to have moderately good relationships with everyone often puts the country in difficult situations.”
The Lago Maggiore Affair
The end of the Cold War shifted geopolitical battlegrounds. But espionage in Italy adapted.
Two years ago, a sudden, violent downburst over northern Italy’s Lago Maggiore at first attracted modest local media attention when it capsized a mid-sized pleasure boat with 23 people on board, killing four. But the story went international when it was discovered that everyone on board except the captain and his wife were connected to Italian or Israeli intelligence agencies.
Dietrologia reared its head again. Was it sabotage? Were they monitoring Russian oligarchs living near the lake? Or Iranian-linked businesses in the area?
The official line was that it had been an innocent social gathering. But of course, we’ll never know for sure. Within hours, Israel dispatched a military aircraft to whisk Israeli survivors home, before they could be interviewed by investigators. And in Italy, the prime minister’s office declared all details from the incident “state secrecy.” The Italian media dubbed it la strage dei 007 -- “the massacre of the 007s.”
The Lago Maggiore tragedy was not an isolated case.
After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Italy expelled dozens of Russian “diplomats” accused of working as spies, and in 2023 a Rome court sentenced Navy officer Walter Biot to 30 years behind bars for selling classified NATO documents to Moscow.
Beijing has accused the CIA of recruiting Chinese nationals in Italy, and earlier this year, the U.S. requested the extradition of Xu Zewei, a Chinese biotech executive in Milan on espionage charges related to Covid-19 research.
Italian media has reported on a complex Iranian spy network in Italy as Rome hosted multiple rounds of U.S.-Iran nuclear disarmament talks. Italian prosecutors have opened a probe into alleged Russian drones flying over the European Joint Research Center, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is near Lago Maggiore.
Even Italy’s own intelligence services have come under scrutiny. Giorgia Meloni’s government has faced accusations of spying on journalists and Rome was recently pressured to end its contract with Israeli software company Paragon amid charges it was using the company’s technology to hack into the phones of government critics.
In the end, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Rome’s natural gift for ambiguity persists: geography, corruption, and the cosmopolitan nature of Rome remain camouflage for those living double lives.
Thanks to the Vatican’s status as a sovereign state and the presence of three UN food agencies in the capital, Rome is estimated to have more embassies than any other city -- creating even more diplomatic cover for would-be spooks.
Talia, the author, said that even Italy’s history of geopolitical “double relationships” continues to the present day.
“There’s an anti-European Union sentiment in the country, even if the government remains officially committed to the bloc, and there are economic sectors cozying up to China, looking to increase investment even as leaders are focused on strengthening ties with Washington and Donald Trump,” Talia said.
What does it add up to?
“It’s hard to quantify this kind of thing because so much remains hidden,” said Talia. “But there’s little doubt that Rome still plays in the Serie A of global spy capitals.”
📌 And another thing
It’s not clear whether Freck Vreeland’s memoir Call Me Freck will ever appear on bookshelves. But Vreeland -- the Rome diplomat who for decades had one foot in the U.S. embassy and the other in the shadows -- hardly needs a book to secure his legacy.
I’ve only read excerpts from the transcript, but it’s clear that Vreeland’s unflinching assessments of the events he was part of and his willingness to name names could give a fact checker nightmares … and make any publisher have its legal team on alert.
Vreeland is the son of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland. He was a career diplomat whose posts included West Germany, France, Italy, and finally, Morocco, where he was President George H. W. Bush’s ambassador.
During a stint on the U.S.’s National Security Council, the colorful Vreeland was part of the small circle that helped craft John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 declaration Ich bin ein Berliner (“I am a Berliner”) at the Berlin Wall. Vreeland reportedly even coached the president on how to pronounce the German-language phrase correctly.
Vreeland, now 98, still lives in Rome with his wife Sandra Zwollo Vreeland.
Come back next week for another dispatch.
Sterling passed away in Tuscany in 1995, age 75.
Italy has long had separate security agencies and police forces vying for influence and power. Since 2007, they are the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna, the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna, and the Dipartimento delle Informazioni per la Sicurezza. It also maintains four major, distinct police forces: the Polizia di Stato, the Carabinieri, the Guardia di Finanza, and local municipal police.
Wish I knew about this when I lived on Lago Maggiore for a few months - could've asked some questions and probably made some enemies!
Great read as always!