According to U.S. government sources, some three weeks after their meeting, the president reportedly signed a secret national security directive to push the process along. In clandestine collaboration with the Vatican, money, fax and copying machines, radios, computers, printing presses, and vast amounts of other communications equipment were smuggled into Poland to bolster Solidarity's ongoing campaign. By 1985, it became clear that the movement born five years earlier in the Gdansk shipyard strike was now an unassailable force for reform that the Polish Communists could no longer control, never mind quash. Between Reagan's 1982 Vatican summit with the pope to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, according to Bernstein and Politi, the United States reportedly spent some $50 million to underwrite Solidarity.
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Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
The money and materiel were funneled into the movement by the CIA. The pope did not inquire too deeply about the details, and his discretion was a hallmark of the confidential relations between the Vatican and the White House. Vernon Walters reportedly visited the pontiff at roughly six-month intervals between 1981 and 1988 to share highly secret military economic and political intelligence. Among the information, by Allen's account, were satellite photos and other evidence of Soviet SS 20 nuclear missile deployments, shown to John Paul "with great delicacy." The Reagan administration, hoping to deploy intermediate-range and cruise missiles in Europe, anticipated the political furor and was anxious to head off criticism, especially from the influential Catholic Church. And when the U.S. weapons were deployed, the Vatican remained silent.
In February of 1985, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko went to the Vatican and surprised the pope with the message that Moscow was interested in establishing diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Four months later, John Paul responded with an encyclical, "Apostles to the Slavs," that sought to strengthen Vatican contacts with churches in the Soviet Union. On a parallel course, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had assumed power shortly after Gromyko's Rome visit, began his perestroika economic reforms. As these changes slowly took hold, relations between church and state in Poland began to gradually improve. In 1986, General Jaruzelski loosened the screws of martial law by ordering a general amnesty that included the release of more than 200 high-profile political prisoners and the dropping of slander charges against Walesa. John Paul returned to Poland in 1987, celebrating an open-air mass at the Gdansk shipyard before an ecstatic crowd of 750,000. Reiterating that Polish workers had the right to self-government, the pope concluded: "There is no struggle more effective than Solidarity." At farewell ceremonies in Warsaw, Jaruzelski bitterly responded to the pontiff with open disrespect. "How often in recent days has [Poland] been the victim of outside manipulation so offensive to the common sense of our people?" he said. "May the word 'Solidarity' be heard from this land by all people who continue suffering from racism, neocolonialism, exploitation, unemployment, reprisals, and intolerance." The general's disparaging words astounded the crowd, and his insolence signaled to many—and most likely to John Paul—that the regime was beginning to crumble. In mid-1989, Poland held the first free, multiparty elections behind the Iron Curtain. Solidarity candidates routed the Communists, and the Warsaw Pact dominoes began tumbling. Hungary opened its border with Austria, allowing its citizens and East Germans to flee to West Germany. Independence demonstrations erupted in the Soviet republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Half a million coal miners went on strike. Demands for freedom spread to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. In East Germany, the Berlin Wall was razed. The train of Communist transformation that began with a papal pilgrimage in 1979 was now rolling relentlessly toward its final historic destination.
As the revolution spread, Gorbachev refused to send in the Red Army to prop up the falling regimes, abandoning Moscow's satellites to their fate. In December of 1989, he visited the pope in Rome, and after a lengthy private conversation, the pontiff invited the premier's wife to join them. Gorbachev paid his host a high compliment: "Raisa, I introduce you to His Holiness John Paul II, who is the highest moral authority on Earth, besides being a Slav like us." The tribute was perhaps an acknowledgement that the deep malaise infecting Russian society—drugs, crime, absenteeism, indifference—might benefit if the nation's religious authorities and its churches were encouraged to become more involved in tackling social ills. After these cataclysmic events of 1989, the Soviet Union stood alone, by the pope's assessment the last European bastion of "godless ideology." In 1991, John Paul helped deliver the coup de grâce by touring Poland and the Baltic republics where his relentless anti-Communist message was easily carried across the Soviet border. And on New Year's Eve in Moscow, as thousands of celebrants gathered in Red Square to bid farewell to the old system and lower the hammer and sickle for the last time, a man went to Lenin's tomb carrying a statue of Our Lady of Fátima in his hand. It was an iconic and powerful symbol of the pope's integral political role in bringing down the Iron Curtain. The Sovietis European Communist empire that Lenin had launched in 1917 as chairman of the new Soviet Republic, that Stalin had cemented at Yalta in 1945, and that the Kremlin had reinforced with its invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 had finally crumbled. "I didn't cause this to happen," John Paul was later to say. "The tree was already rotten. I just gave it a good shake."
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