How Irish diplomats were caught up in tangled web of wartime deceit

WHILE at the National Archives previewing the State papers, which were officially released yesterday, I happened to be sitting beside Prof Ronan Fanning when I came across a letter written to him by the Irish ambassador to the US in 1977.

The ambassador was looking for information about secret Irish cooperation with US intelligence during World War II.

A former CIA employee, R Harris Smith, had sensationally alleged in his book, The OSS, that Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) had furnished the Americans with information from the Papal Nuncio in Japan on strategic bombing targets in Tokyo. “The intelligence from the Japanese capital was sent to a contact at the Vatican, then relayed to the Irish embassy in Rome,” Smith wrote. “With the secret approval of President de Valera, the information passed by Irish diplomatic pouch to Dublin.”