LIECHTENSTEIN, THE VATICAN & RENE BRULHART

Intelligence is a Risky Business

On the heels of Frank Schneider’s troubles with the OneCoin crypto-currency scam, and his subsequent disappearance, another of my contacts while directing an intelligence service for Prince Albert II of Monaco has fallen on hard times.

Rene Brulhart was head of Liechtenstein’s Financial Intelligence Unit when I established a liaison relationship with that country—and he was very enthusiastic about not only working together against money launderers but also helping me to create an intelligence association of micro-European countries.

Such a club had never been done before. Europe’s intelligence services had its Club of Berne. But micro-Europe was left in the dark, beholden to the larger European countries, which had a tendency to use micro-states as a backdoor for their own dirty dealings.

For instance, before my arrival on the scene, the CIA dealt with Monaco through Paris, Liechtenstein through Switzerland, San Marino through Italy and Andorra through Spain. (I believe the same extended to how the British and French intel services dealt with European micro-states.)

Micro-European countries were not even in contact with one another to share intelligence until I created such channels.

We called our club The Columbus Group, taking our name from Hotel Columbus in Monaco, where participants from Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Malta stayed and met in February 2007. (The Republic of San Marino joined our association soon after.)

The purpose of our association was to share intelligence on money launderers from Russia and elsewhere who made the rounds of micro-states/tax havens to open confidential and anonymous (ciphered) bank accounts.

As part of our program, I visited Vatican City in early July 2006 to meet Domenico Giani, who had been appointed one month earlier to oversee all security and intelligence and to personally brief His Holiness.

I made my pitch for the Vatican to join our micro-Europe intelligence association.  Giani was quick to give us his blessing but could not understand why I would believe the Vatican (the world’s smallest country at 0.2 square miles, surrounded by Rome) to be a micro-state.  So far as Giani was concerned, the Vatican is a macro-state, with global reach.  (Later, Alberto Manenti, operations chief of Italy’s foreign intelligence service, SISME, who had arranged my introduction to Giani, joked with me over lunch that all priests are case officers, all parishioners are agents, all confessions duly noted, cross-indexed and filed away…). 

Back to Rene Brulhart, who immediately grasped the significance of such liaison relationships between micro-states and helped grow them with me.

In 2014, six years after I departed Monaco (and the Columbus Group disintegrated), Brulhart got head-hunted by the Vatican to run their Supervisory and Financial Information Authority.

Five years later, Rene was forced to resign after being charged with “abuse of office” by Vatican prosecutors for overseeing a multi-million dollar transaction that went south.

According to Religionnews.com, Brulhart “failed to prevent a catastrophic real estate deal that prosecutors say cost the Catholic Church $384 million.”

“I always confronted my superiors with transparency,” maintains Brulhart, who briefed Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and Pope Francis directly. “I am firmly convinced I have not committed any crime.”

Indeed. It appears Brulhart never personally benefited from the transaction but got entangled in the shenanigans of Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra (chief of staff to the Vatican secretary of state) and an entrepreneur named Gianluigi Torzi, both of whom are charged with fraud, embezzlement and money laundering.

As the trial continues, I am once again reminded that Intelligence can be hazardous to one’s well being.