The papal legate, Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who would later become Pope John XXIII, proved to be a fund of good intelligence and a vigorous antifascist. Like so many in wartime Istanbul, Roncalli was playing a double game, dining with Papen and taking his wife’s confession while using his office to smuggle Jewish refugees out of occupied Europe. A few months after they became friends, Elliott discovered that Roncalli’s assistant, one Monsignor Rici, “a most unattractive little man,” was a spy “operating a clandestine wireless set on behalf of the Italian military intelligence.”
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