Of Holy Spies

Monsignor Giuseppe Righi, a tall, erect Vatican diplomat, is flying to New York to take up his post as the Holy See's observer to the United Nations. During a stopover at London's Heathrow Airport, he is accosted by a pair of thugs, bundled into a waiting truck and whisked off into the night. When Righi's ongoing flight departs, the "prelate" in his seat is Colonel Vladimir Panin of the Soviet KGB, physically the monsignor's double, and now fully disguised with a black suit, clerical collar, and a briefcase on his knee.

So begins Requiem per una Spia (Requiem for a Spy), a tantalizing espionage yarn that was no sooner published in Italy last week than it drew critical praise for the authenticity of its Vatican and U.N. settings. Small wonder: the author is Monsignor Alberto Giovannetti, 65, a retired papal diplomat of 30 years standing. The stout, deceptively cherubic Giovannetti was the Holy See's observer to the U.N. for nine years; he obviously knows as much about the murky subterfuge that pervades the corridors of the U.N. as Jacques Cousteau knows about the deep.

Not that Giovannetti is, or ever was, a spy. Nevertheless, the monsignor readily admits that Requiem for a Spy, which he describes as "part autobiographical" and "part political fantasy," is a roman `a clef based on his long experience and his personal acquaintance with a number of spies he has known, if not always loved. "I knew all the spies in the U.N. organization itself, but they were not up to much," he says. "The big spies are in the various delegations. In any case the book is not based on any particular episode, and there is no real model for Panin."

Through 307 pages of intrigue and skullduggery, the book takes assorted sideswipes at the windy futility of the U.N. as well as the trundling bureaucracy of the Vatican. The author concedes that it was an opportunity to get some personal peeves off his chest. Sitting through one especially ineffectual debate, for instance, Panin reflects that "all the great tragedies of our time have been resolved without recourse to the U.N." The book's digs at the Vatican are gentler but nonetheless pointed; in one instance a cardinal complains that priests in the Roman Curia too often forget that "their mission before everything else is to make themselves useful to people."

The point at which Giovannetti says fact swerves most sharply into fiction is a budding romance between the Soviet colonel and a beautiful woman agent in an Israeli intelligence ring he has infiltrated. "I have been told that the Israeli girl is so well described that I must have had such a relationship myself," says Giovannetti. "Not true. Some of the people are real, with names changed, some are half real, but the girl is one of the inventions." Nevertheless he does note that spy and priest, ironically, have something in common in their abstinence and discipline. "Panin could dream what Righi could not," says the author, "but in the final analysis they were both committed to an austere life."

An avowed anti-Communist who once wrote a pseudonymous indictment of religious persecution in East bloc countries, Giovannetti intended his novel to dramatize the conflict between Marxism and Christianity. Progressively affected by his priestly role, Panin in the end undergoes a spiritual conversion. He defects to the Vatican, and after offering himself in exchange for the real Righi (who has been kept alive by the Soviets for a possible exchange in case Panin was captured) goes to his execution in Moscow's Lubyanka prison.

The Vatican has officially ignored the book's publication, and Giovannetti says he was cautioned in advance that he was embarking on a decidedly undiplomatic enterprise. Recalled from the U.N. in 1973, he was offered no post that interested him. Giovannetti withdrew from the diplomatic service to the "more congenial" pursuit of writing books. Last week, at his retirement villa outside Rome, the author who came in from the cold said with a philosophic shrug: "I am no longer in the limelight, the airline no longer gives me free tickets, and many of my old friends don't know me any more. But I regret nothing."

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