As the Vatican waits for a new pope under a cloud of scandal, the
journalist at the center of the Vatileaks case is revealing the
high-stakes, cloak-and-dagger operation he undertook to protect the
butler who went public with the secrets.
Investigative journalist
Gianluigi Nuzzi told NBC News' Richard Engel how he met Paolo Gabriele
in public squares and used old-fashioned public phones to set up
rendezvous to make it harder for anyone to eavesdrop on their
blockbuster conversations.
He gave Gabriele a code name -- Maria -- and would leave it on the
door buzzer he was to press for meetings in a Rome apartment, Nuzzi said
in a "Rock Center with Brian Williams" interview.
"He was excited, he was careful, he was afraid," Nuzzi said.
"Then
I understood why: because the Vatican has a very strong security
system...Once Paolo Gabriele told me a confidence, which I do not know
if it is true. He told me the cameras inside the Vatican as so powerful
that they can even read the lips of people."
Their first sit-down, set up by intermediaries before Nuzzi even knew who he was meeting, was a "dangerous encounter," he said.
A
dozen or so more followed, during which Gabriele gave Nuzzi photocopies
of the pope's personal papers, including letters from a top aide,
Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò, who had investigated the alleged
corruption. In one of the letters, Viganò complained that he felt he was
being slandered and sidelined from the inside. He was eventually
transferred off the case, and moved to Washington, D.C., to become Papal
Nuncio, the Vatican’s diplomatic envoy.
Nuzzi used the documents
for broadcast reports and a book that shed light on the infighting and
dysfunction at the highest level of the church bureaucracy last year.
Gabriele,
who said he was trying to help the pope and the church by shining a
light on the dark underbelly of the Vatican, was eventually unmasked as
the source of the leaks and sentenced to 18 months in Vatican custody.
He was later pardoned by the pope and given a job in a hospital.
Pope
Benedict XVI commissioned three retired and independent cardinals to
investigate the leaks and they presented him with a report late last
year, weeks before the pontiff shocked the world by announcing his
abdication.
The Vatican has since denied reports that the
cardinals' dossier contains details of a gay cabal in the Vatican and
blackmail threats. Allegations of a gay Vatican subculture predate the
Vatileaks scandal.
In 2010, journalist Carlo Abbate went undercover and
filmed Rome priests cavorting with other men.
Abbate doesn't buy the Vatican denials.
"In
my opinion, Pope Benedict XVI's move represents his last attempt to
save the Catholic Church from the public exposure of the contradictions
of the church in the matter of sexuality," he said. "In a sense, he is
casting himself aside in order to let those contradictions rise to the
surface."
Benedict cited his age when he announced his resignation
on Feb. 11 though he has also referred to the Vatican's difficulties.
The 115 cardinals who will elect his successor have assembled in Rome
but they will not see the Vatileaks report because Benedict decreed that
only the next pontiff will get a copy.