Pipeline Closed

Monsignor Enrico Pucci of the Vatican had a great fondness for food, drink and cards. His apartment in the heart of Rome was furnished more like a garconniere than the chaste retiring place of a church dignitary. And he liked money. In the '305 he made as much as $1,000 a month as tipster to foreign correspondents.

Pucci, handsome and impressive looking, gave visiting newsmen to understand that he was the only real pipeline to the Vatican. Whether he was or not, no one really knew and he frequently had information in advance of other sources; he did, in fact, scoop the world on the election of the last two Popes. But with the coming of war Pucci's stock fell. Soon he was reduced to supplying items to a handful of German and Jap newsmen in Rome. After liberation, new correspondents, who had never heard of him, began covering the Vatican as they would any important foreign office, without benefit of Pucci.

The New York Times, among others, had hired the monsignor as Vatican legman. He turned in such a sloppy, inaccurate report of an important Papal speech that the Times's Rome bureau chief Milton Bracket had to repudiate the story next day. Eventually Bracker fired him, as did almost every U.S. news service. Pucci had handed the A.P. and other agencies a story that the then Msgr. Francis Spellman was planning a trip to the Middle East to review the troops; it turned out that he had read "Middle West" in a French newspaper and got the story wrong.

Last week the Italian Government charged that Msgr. Pucci had been saving his best wartime news tips for somebody else. Pucci's name was included in a list of Mussolini's secret police, OVRA. Investigation showed, said the Government, that Pucci had acted as a spy inside the Vatican and reported on anti-Fascist activities of the Catholic Action group. (In 1931, Pope Pius XI, fearing a Vatican leak, had sent Msgr. Spellman to Paris to publish the famed anti-Fascist Encyclical Non Abbi-amo Bisogno.)

When his name was published, Msgr. Pucci sat down to write a letter, protesting his innocence, to Giornale d'ltalia. A few hours later he had what was announced as a stroke. Vatican observers predicted a prolonged, diplomatic illness.

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