A Catholic CIA director had previously unknown back-channel dealings with two popes during the 1960s, according to a memo in the newly released JFK files.

But what those dealings were isn’t clear.

The revelation, reported by The New York Times on Friday, turned up at the end of a June 1973 seven-page memo from a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency employee that is part of the thousands of documents pertaining to President John F. Kennedy. President Donald Trump ordered the documents released shortly after taking office in January 2025.

The missive was produced at a time when the agency was under fire for activities that some members of Congress and others considered illegal and immoral.

The memo, marked “Secret/Sensitive,” was written by Walter Elder to the CIA director at the time, William Colby, to describe what Elder called “examples of activities which to hostile observers or to someone without complete knowledge and a special kind of motivation could be interpreted as activities exceeding CIA’s charter” during the tenure of director John McCone (1902-1991) in the early 1960s.

Such items include wiretapping newspaper columnists to find out their sources, breaking into a French consulate in Washington and taking documents, and contaminating Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union, among other things.

Elder also mentioned McCone’s decision to fly Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and opera singer Maria Callas in a U.S. Air Force airplane from Rome to Athens in July 1964. (Onassis and Callas were in a relationship at the time, though not married. This was before Onassis married Jack Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, in 1968.)

“Finally, and this will reflect my Middle Western Protestant upbringing,” Elder wrote, “McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, would and could raise eyebrows in certain quarters.”

McCone, a Catholic, served as director of the CIA from November 1961 to April 1965, spanning the last two years of Kennedy’s time as president and the first year and a half of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

McCone’s tenure overlapped with the last year and a half of the papacy of St. John XXIII, who died June 3, 1963, and the first year and 10 months of the papacy of St. Paul VI, who succeeded him.

What were those dealings?

The memo doesn’t say.

That leaves historians thirsting for more, as The Times reported, quoting Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, a research center hosted by George Washington University.

“This opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the C.I.A., which, boy, would be explosive if we could get documents about it,” Kornbluh, co-author of the 2014 book Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana, told The Times.

McCone, a Republican, was a wealthy businessman from California. He served as undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force during the Truman administration and chaired the Atomic Energy Commission during the Eisenhower administration.

As CIA director, he played an important role during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.