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Vatican City

Popular Documents

June 2007

The KGB vs. Vatican City. Folder 29. The Chekist Anthology.

In this entry Mitrokhin describes the history of chilly diplomatic relations between the KGB and Vatican City from the 1960s through the mid 1980s.

July 5, 1994

The Chancellor's [Helmut Kohl's] Meeting with the Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China, Li Peng, on 4 July 1994 from 9.55 to 11.05 a.m. at the Federal Chancellery

Kohl and Li Peng discuss human rights in China and the Chinese interpretation of the Tiananmen   Square protests and massacre of 1989. Moreover, they review the relationship between the Vatican and China, German policy on Taiwan, China and  GATT, China and the USA as well as EC trade restrictions vis-à-vis China.

December 4, 1989

Rezső Nyers’s handwritten Notes on Gorbachev’s Briefing on the Malta Summit at the Meeting of the Warsaw Pact Leaders in Moscow on 4 December

Unofficial hand-written notes by Rezső Nyers, President of the Hungarian Socialist Party, taken took during a briefing by M. Gorbachev at a Soviet Bloc summit in Moscow on 4 December, just a day after the meeting with President Bush at Malta.

June 3, 1983

Information from the Security Services of the BPC: Reference Report on Case Agca

Biographical information about Mehmet Ali Ağca as well as the "groundless accusations" against Bulgaria and other communist bloc states.

June 2007

The Vernii (Devoted) Case. Folder 92. The Chekist Anthology.

In this entry, Mitrokhin draws upon KGB files to describe Ivan Illarionovich Ortinskii-“Vernii” (b. 1922), a native of the Lvov region, Ukraine. A priest in a Greco-Catholic church, Vernii pursued his religious studies at the Vatican and lectured at a seminary in Rome in 1964. Beginning in 1973, Vernii lived in Ingolstadt, Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). According to the entry, the KGB established contact with Vernii when the latter visited his parents and kin in Lvov in 1968. In 1971, Vernii was recruited as an agent by the KGB branch of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Between 1971 and 1974, collaboration between Vernii and the KGB took place within the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. As an agent, Vernii provided the KGB with information regarding his church, and the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

Mitrokhin’s summary of KGB documents indicates that Vernii transmitted information to the KGB through his sister, Ukrainian SSR agent “Chestnaya” (born Ortinskaya).
Mitrokhin concludes the entry by stating that in 1978, Vernii informed the KGB from Vienna that he would no longer work as an agent, since he had aroused much suspicion within the Greco-Catholic Church.