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Ken Klippenstein has published a report confirming that U.S. intelligence agencies have, for years, been spying on the Vatican — and that President Donald Trump’s April 12 broadside against Pope Leo XIV has now turned that surveillance into an operational priority.
According to Klippenstein’s reporting, when Trump declared Leo “terrible for foreign policy,” “the U.S. intelligence community took the president’s remarks as a directive to prioritize spying on the Vatican.”
The CIA, he writes, “has human spies working inside the Holy See bureaucracy.” The NSA and CIA seek to intercept Vatican telecommunications, emails, and texts. The State Department circulates a daily Vatican news digest. The U.S. military maintains a distinct linguistic capability code — “QLE” — for Ecclesiastical Latin.
Klippenstein’s record makes the report difficult to dismiss.
He left The Intercept in April 2024 to build one of the most influential independent newsrooms in American journalism, with more than 200,000 subscribers and a deep bench of national security sources.
His prior reporting includes the leaked FBI report admitting the Bureau had “no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement” in the May 2020 George Floyd protests, the hacked JD Vance opposition dossier the corporate press refused to publish in September 2024, and a steady stream of disclosures about the U.S. national security state that no one else is consistently breaking.
When he writes that “sources tell me” the United States has been spying on the Vatican “for years,” the sentence carries the weight of a journalist whose bombshells routinely survive scrutiny.
The trigger for the new prioritization is now part of the public record. On April 12, in a Truth Social post I covered at the time, Trump called Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” citing the pope’s criticism of the Iran war.
The first American pope, a U.S. citizen by birth, responded the next day with three words: “I am not afraid.”
That a sitting U.S. president has now branded the Bishop of Rome a threat to American interests has no clean precedent in modern American history. The genuine novelty lies in the institutional machinery being aimed downstream of the insult.
In 1944, OSS director William Donovan met privately with Pius XII to lay the groundwork for what would become the longest-running intelligence partnership between Washington and the Holy See.
By the early 1980s, William Casey’s CIA and Pope John Paul II were running a coordinated clandestine operation in support of Solidarność against the Soviet bloc — a partnership that helped collapse an empire and was, for decades, treated by both sides as an alliance of conscience.
Klippenstein is careful to situate the surveillance inside a much wider partnership. He describes “a longstanding — and quietly extensive — relationship between the U.S. national security apparatus and the Vatican” that “involves genuine diplomatic, law enforcement, and even cyber security cooperation, all of which serves as both genuine cooperation and convenient cover for collecting intelligence.”
FBI documents he obtained show that the first Trump administration sought coordination with Italian and Vatican officials on cybersecurity, white-collar crime, human trafficking, and art theft, with the Bureau helping the Holy See thwart cyber intrusions and providing threat intelligence to the pope during foreign travels.
The relationship has, in other words, been a real one. That is part of what makes the present moment so disorienting.
Eighty years after Pius XII's meeting with US intelligence services, the alliance has been turned inside out. The president who claims Reagan’s mantle is pointing Reagan’s intelligence services at the Holy See itself, treating the first pope born in the United States as a foreign-policy adversary.
The contractor job posting that put Klippenstein onto the story — an SOS International contract for an Italian-speaking analyst tracking “religion” for an unnamed “U.S. Government Client” — is the small, public artifact of a much larger operational shift.
Klippenstein puts it plainly: “Intelligence collection is rarely a switch that gets flipped; it’s a dial that gets turned up or down depending on where the Washington leadership wants to focus.” Trump inherited the surveillance machinery; the choice of target is his.
As Klippenstein notes, Pope Leo saw this coming. In December, in a speech to the leadership of Italy’s intelligence agencies that almost no American outlet covered, the new pope named the abuse directly.
“In several countries,” Leo said, “the Church is the victim of intelligence services that act for nefarious purposes, oppressing its freedom.”
He called for “strict vigilance” to ensure that “confidential information is not used to intimidate, manipulate, blackmail or discredit politicians, journalists or other civil society actors.”
Read against Klippenstein’s reporting, those words land with new precision.
Leo was naming, in the soft cadence of papal diplomacy, the precise misuse he and his Curia were already enduring — a pattern that, given the long-documented history of intelligence-service surveillance of papal conclaves and Vatican diplomats, has clearly been routine for some time.
Hold this steady in the mind. The leader of one 1.4 billion Catholics, an American by birth, is being treated by his own government as a spy target — and the reason is his moral authority, which Washington now reads as foreign-policy interference. The violation here reaches past foreign sovereignty into conscience itself.
A pope who has called the Iran war unjust and demanded that the good of the Venezuelan people “must prevail over every other consideration” is, in this White House’s view, a problem to be managed by signals intelligence.
To me, it’s simple: either the United States honors a pope’s right to preach the Gospel without being wiretapped, blackmailed, or filed away in a classified daily digest — or it does not. Where do you stand, between the surveillance state and the Vicar of Christ?
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope, a U.S. citizen by birth, and the moral conscience of 1.4 billion Catholics — against an intelligence apparatus that has been quietly aimed at the Holy See and is now being pointed on behalf of a president who treats criticism as treason.
In an era poisoned by surveillance, contempt, and the cynical use of state power against religious leaders, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to be intimidated, manipulated, or filed away in a classified daily digest.
We believe the freedom of the Church is the freedom of conscience itself, and that no government — not even our own — has the right to wiretap the global leader of the Catholic Church.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for moral clarity in a moment when the spy agency reports to a man who calls the pope weak. Standing with Pope Leo is the simplest expression of Catholic loyalty in a country whose government has decided that the Vicar of Christ is an intelligence target.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against an administration that treats the Bishop of Rome as a foreign adversary — I am asking you to join us.
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