Pope Pius XII and Russia - Operation Seat 12 - KGB Disinformation Campaign To Impugn Pius

KGB Disinformation Campaign To Impugn Pius

Seat 12 also known as Operation Seat 12 was a disinformation campaign of communist propaganda during the Cold War to discredit the moral authority of the Vatican because of its outspoken anti-communism. In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev authorized a covert plan to discredit the Vatican's moral authority in Western Europe with a campaign of disinformation due to its fervent anticommunism, Venerable Pope Pius XII being the prime target. The motto of Seat 12 was "Dead men cannot defend themselves" since Pius died in 1958.

The plot was revealed by Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian general who headed the secret service before defecting in 1978 (the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Warsaw Pact). He reports that General Ivan Agayants, chief of the KGB’s disinformation department, created the outline for what was to become a play mischaracterizing the Pope as a Nazi sympathizer, The Deputy, that the purported research for the play consisted of forgeries and the research was done not by its claimed author Rolf Hochhuth but by KGB agents and that the play's producer, Erwin Piscator, founder of the Proletarian Theater in Berlin who had sought asylum in the USSR during the war, was a devout Communist who had long established ties with the USSR. The play had its debut at east Berlin's Freie Volksbühne ("Free People's Theater") The play toured the Eastern Bloc and then proceeded to tour the free world.