The Fisherman's Tomb. John O'Neill
description of Nero’s slaughter of Christians following the Great Fire of Rome to early second-century Christian accounts.17 The tradition further related that 250 years after Peter’s death, Emperor Constantine had built the first St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as a memorial to Peter directly over his grave.18 Secret excavations by the Church in 1513 and 1683 to verify the truth of the long-standing tradition found only pagan graves, however, and the Church abandoned any further effort to find Peter. While the burial place of Peter is a pious tradition and not a matter of faith, the Church — facing the pressures across Europe, especially in the onslaught of the Protestant Reformation — feared unnecessarily rattling the dearly held beliefs of the Catholic faithful.19 Very likely, discovering a foundation of pagan graves, rather than the tombs of saints, under the Church’s principal and historical seat of authority would have added fuel to the fires of controversy that already raged around Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As later described by Margherita Guarducci, the famous archeologist who would become the heroine of the Vatican excavations: “The fear of finding something down there which would contradict or modify the tradition dear to the faithful overcame the desire to appease a burning curiosity.”20
Since his earliest childhood, Pope Pius XII (who grew up in Rome) had been consumed by stories of the early Roman martyrs. He also believed deeply in the science of archeology. Faced with the discovery of a Christian tomb beneath the Vatican, he decided to recommence the Church’s search for the first pope. Against all odds, Pius XII intended to reach across nearly two thousand years to find Peter.21 It was a brave decision made in the face of repeated historical failure. Yet Pius XII, unlike some of his predecessors, saw science — particularly archeology — as an ally, not an enemy, of Christianity. With the increasing influence across the Western world of the work of men such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx, the pope saw the immense importance of using modern science in the service of religious belief. Numerous secularists denied that the Apostle Peter ever went to Rome at all. Even Martin Luther had cast doubt upon the issue, stating, “It is unknown where in the City [of Rome] the bodies of Saint Peter and Saint Paul are located or even whether they are there at all.”22 Likely Pope Pius XII hoped that discovering the first pope’s bones beneath St. Peter’s Basilica would offer a tangible demonstration of the powerful interplay between faith and science. While an increasingly secular culture tried to pit the two against each other, Pius XII recognized that science and truth go hand-in-hand. Finding Peter would throw the weight of modern science behind a dearly held tradition of the Church, offering a needed boost for the faithful during a dark and often faithless time.
Yet the Church was nearly broke from the Great Depression and the Nazi occupation of Europe, so the pope first had to reach across the ocean for the immense financing necessary to carry out his plan. With his huge fortune and generosity to the Church, Texas oilman George Strake could make Pius’s dream of finding Peter possible.
Strake surprisingly said yes, effectively writing a blank check to the Church. Father Carroll reported the agreement to Pius XII and Montini. Over the ensuing years, the Church privately contacted the Strakes many times about this great project. True to initial intent, both the search for Peter’s remains and Strake’s involvement in the search were kept wholly hidden from the world. Thus, one of the greatest explorations of the twentieth century began in the dark recesses beneath the Vatican, unknown to the outside world and cloaked in total secrecy. Over time the search would lead to the discovery of one of the greatest archeological sites of the ancient world. The adventure would involve an interesting cast of characters, including an American spy for the Vatican. After many overlooked clues and false leads, this ancient puzzle would require an unlikely woman genius and seventy-five years of searching to fully unlock. This woman’s discoveries and battles would rival or exceed those of even the greatest fictional archeologists like Indiana Jones or Robert Langdon of The Da Vinci Code. As we shall see, truth would prove much stranger and more fantastic than fiction.
Chapter Two
George Strake
Early Life and Career
George Strake was at birth an unlikely candidate to become one of America’s wealthiest people. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1894, the youngest of ten children in an impoverished family. His parents and two of his siblings died when he was still very young, and he was raised by his two eldest sisters. The family’s poverty was such that he had to drop out of school before he reached high school. He worked as a Western Union messenger boy, earning nine dollars a week. From his earliest days, he had a remarkably charitable and religious spirit. Of his nine dollars, he faithfully gave two each week to the Sunday collection at the Catholic church. The remaining seven went to his sisters for the remaining children who lived in a three-room St. Louis apartment.23
George was tall and gangly, endowed from the beginning with piercing blue eyes and a commanding presence that marked him as a leader. He loved reading. He was deeply inquisitive about everything and loved to learn how things worked. He didn’t attend high school, but on a lark in 1913 he took the entrance exam for St. Louis University, relying only on his self-taught education. He passed the exam. When the university administrators learned he was self-taught with very little formal schooling and no money, they admitted him on a full scholarship. He was a good student who particularly enjoyed technical, financial, and engineering subjects.
He graduated in 1917, just as World War I came to America. Strake joined the Army Air Corps and became a wireless instructor and operator. After his return home, he and a wealthy young lady from Florida almost got married, but he delayed the wedding because she was rich and he was poor. She suggested he go to Mexico to find his fortune. He followed her suggestion and got a job with Gulf Oil in Tampico, Mexico. It was a wild place. Strake arrived shortly after Pancho Villa was assassinated with more than forty dum-dum bullets. The ghosts of Zapata and Madeira still haunted Mexico. War damage and carnage from the Revolution remained everywhere. Bandits were still common. In a short time, Strake rose to head of the Gulf office in Tampico, supervising nine to ten employees. He also met the woman who would become his wife, Susan Kehoe.
Strake and Susan met while both were on vacation in San Antonio. If George tended to be a bit crusty, Susan was convivial, genial, and outgoing. She never met a stranger. After they got married, it was thanks to Susan’s friendly disposition that they became close friends of their neighbors in Tampico, the William Buckley family. On many occasions, they babysat the Buckleys’ young children, baby Bill Buckley, Jr. (later the famous National Review magazine founder) and his young siblings, Jim and Pat. Their friendship led to a financial partnership. Buckley grew to love the Strakes and indicated to George that if he left Gulf Oil and went on his own, Buckley, with the assistance of some New York banks, would finance and participate in Strake’s exploration ventures.
With this assurance, Strake left the security of Gulf Oil and began pursuing oil prospects on his own as a “wildcatter.” Wildcatters were the brave, slightly mad fringe of the oil industry who pursued oil discoveries in unexplored frontier areas — examples including Glenn McCarthy, portrayed in the movie Giant, and the legendary Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner, who found the vast East Texas oilfield, the largest of America’s oilfields in those early days. Ironically, Joiner hit oil only after selling more than 100 percent of the prospect to unsuspecting investors. Mexico was a dangerous place in the 1920s, still wildly lawless. Life was cheap there, and property rights of little regard. This was the Mexico depicted in John Huston’s great movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But unlike the prospector depicted in the film, Strake amazingly succeeded and began to turn a profit.
Strake also began investing his profits in a small U.S. startup company named Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which dealt in the new technology of “wireless” or radio. Strake knew something about this, since he had used radio in the Army Air Corps. Later, in addition to making radios, RCA started the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Strake was successful in both his technology and oil investments. By the late 1920s, however, Strake instinctively realized the end was coming in Mexico. Strikes began at refineries