Seat 12

Seat 12, also known as Operation Seat 12, was a disinformation campaign of communist propaganda during the Cold War to discredit the moral authority of the Vatican because of its outspoken anticommunism. The plot was disclosed in 2007 by Ion Mihai Pacepa, a general who headed the Romanian secret service before defecting to the West in 1978.

According to Pacepa, in February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev authorized a covert operation to discredit the Vatican's moral authority in Western Europe with a campaign of disinformation due to its fervent anticommunism, Pope Pius XII being the prime target. The motto of Seat 12 was "Dead men cannot defend themselves", since Pius died in 1958. Pacepa states that General Ivan Agayants, chief of the KGB’s disinformation department, created the outline for what was to become a play mischaracterizing the Pope as a Nazi sympathizer, The Deputy, that the purported research for the play consisted of forgeries, that the research was done not by its claimed author Rolf Hochhuth but by KGB agents, and that the play's producer, Erwin Piscator, founder of the Proletarian Theater in Berlin who had sought asylum in the USSR during the war, was a devout Communist who had long established ties with the USSR.

Pacepa states that the KGB employed Romanian spies to feign that Romania was preparing to reestablish diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Under this ruse, Pacepa states he obtained entry into Vatican archives from the Church's head of secret discussions with the Warsaw Pact, Monsignor Agostino Casaroli. Three communist spies in the guise of priests over two years secreted materials out of the archives for copying and transfer to the KGB. "In fact," Pacepa reported, "no incriminating material against the pontiff ever turned up." According to Pacepa, General Ivan Agayants, head of Soviet disinformation, informed him while in Bucharest in 1963 that the disinformation campaign had "materialised into a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII", Agrayants having authored the outline of The Deputy and overseen KGB's compilation of the "research" which incorporated documents Pacepa's agents had purloined from the Vatican.

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