Saturday Stories: How the Americans got the Catholic Church on side to bankrupt the USSR

Pope John Paul II led the Vatican into a clandestine alliance with the CIA to bring about the fall of Communism, according to General Vernon Walters, the agency's former deputy director who has revealed that he made regular visits to the Pope during the Eighties taking with him satellite pictures of Soviet troop movements. It was, in the words of President Reagan's national security adviser Richard Allen, "the greatest secret alliance of modern times".

There had been reports of links between the Vatican and CIA earlier this year in a book by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi but commentators had dismissed them as wild. Now it appears they they were true.

"The first one I showed the Pope," says the general, in a BBC documentary tomorrow night, "was a satellite photograph of a Soviet missile launching site in which there were 13 silos, each containing a missile with 10 warheads and I said: `This is the death of 130 American cities'." The Pope, Walters says, asked detailed technical questions when he was shown the photographs.

Walters and Allen were speaking to BBC producer Paul Sapin for his mammoth Everyman documentary on the history of relations between the Vatican and the Kremlin, Rivals for Paradise. "I was surprised at how political over the years the Vatican has been," said Paul Sapin, who is himself not a Catholic. "What kept disturbing me was that this very religious institution had such a complex political profile. I was shocked at how secular were their interests and pursuits."

The programme begins by revealing, for the first time, that shortly after the Russian Revolution Pope Benedict XV sent two archbishops to secretly negotiate with Lenin. It then charts the Vatican's pact with Hitler and Mussolini, which was intended to combat communism, but which ended with a compromised Pius XII unable to speak out when Germany invaded Poland making him complicit by silence in the Holocaust.

But it is the programme's treatment of the relations between Ronald Reagan and the present Pope that is most startling. Richard Allen reveals how he and the future president sat in Santa Barbara and watched on television the Pope's first visit to Poland. The people's response convinced Reagan that they were ready to fight Communism.

Under President Carter, his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski discloses in the programme, the CIA supplied striking Polish workers with photocopiers, video cameras, underground radio broadcasting equipment and even devices to help them break into official radio broadcasts. But the process was rapidly accelerated under Reagan who came to believe, after both he and the Pope survived assassination attempts, that they had been saved by divine providence. He was convinced the attack on the Pope was a KGB plot.

The Russians were certainly worried. The former Polish prime minister General Jarulzelski tells the BBC how, every time he met the Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, the agitated Russian leader would cry: "A counter-revolution is sweeping Poland." Jarulzelski recalls how he was told by the Soviet Union's top military strategist: "We are fighting on three fronts: China, Afghanistan and Poland - and Poland is our biggest headache."

But the secret meetings between the Polish Pope and the CIA chief were not focused on Poland. Their subject was the Star Wars plan to throw a stratospheric anti-ballistic shield around the US. Walters was sent to explain why US social security services were being cut as spending on Star Wars increased.

Previous presidents had aimed no higher than containing the Soviet Union, Walters claims. But Reagan had a plan to bring it down by destroying its economy through forcing it into a massive arms over-spend. The worry was that the Pope might condemn the project; he had criticised the arms race in the past and top bishops were speaking out against Reagan. "It was very important to him [Reagan] to prevent the Pope from saying something critical about defence expenditure at a time when that was our principle tool," Walters says. Had the Pope said "No", the Americans reckoned they would not have been able to place Star Wars missiles in Europe.

"It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, briefing the Pope," Walters says. "I would like to think that it had some success. He did not criticise our defence programmes and that was all we wanted." More than that, the Pope watered down the text of a document on Star Wars by the US bishops and suppressed a strongly critical report by his hand- picked Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Later, the programme claims, Reagan made it clear to the Pope that he would like to see priests disciplined who supported liberation theology in Latin America. Shortly afterwards the Pope went to Nicaragua and when Ernesto Cardinale, one of the three priests who were ministers in the government there, fell to his knees on the tarmac to kiss the Pope's ring, the pontiff withdrew his hand and subjected the man to a fierce reprimand with much finger wagging. On the same trip, an angry Pope shouted "Silenzio" to the congregation at mass in Managua who were chanting: "We want peace".

None of the priests and nuns martyred by American-backed guerrillas in Central America were ever honoured by the Vatican, the programme notes, in contrast to the case of Fr Jerzy Popieluszko, the priest killed by Polish security forces, for whom the Vatican swiftly began the process of beatification which leads to sainthood.

Everyman: `Rivals for Paradise', BBC1, Sunday, 10.35pm.