Word: pucci
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...gratifying to get on the record (TIME, July 22) the fact that on behalf of the New York Times Rome bureau it was I who was the first of the postliberation correspondents to fire Msgr. Enrico Pucci as Vatican tipster...
...moot fact or two: first, when I gave him the bad news, Pucci had the superb crust to suggest, even as I spoke, that of course if I wanted his servizio speciale-at a higher rate-I would undoubtedly get better results...
...others, had hired the monsignor as Vatican legman. He turned in such a sloppy, inaccurate report of an important Papal speech that the Times's Rome bureau chief Milton Bracket had to repudiate the story next day. Eventually Bracker fired him, as did almost every U.S. news service. Pucci had handed the A.P. and other agencies a story that the then Msgr. Francis Spellman was planning a trip to the Middle East to review the troops; it turned out that he had read "Middle West" in a French newspaper and got the story wrong...
Last week the Italian Government charged that Msgr. Pucci had been saving his best wartime news tips for somebody else. Pucci's name was included in a list of Mussolini's secret police, OVRA. Investigation showed, said the Government, that Pucci had acted as a spy inside the Vatican and reported on anti-Fascist activities of the Catholic Action group. (In 1931, Pope Pius XI, fearing a Vatican leak, had sent Msgr. Spellman to Paris to publish the famed anti-Fascist Encyclical Non Abbi-amo Bisogno...
When his name was published, Msgr. Pucci sat down to write a letter, protesting his innocence, to Giornale d'ltalia. A few hours later he had what was announced as a stroke. Vatican observers predicted a prolonged, diplomatic illness...