Edoardo Prettner Cippico (10 October 1905[1]–7 April 1983[2]) was an Italian Catholic priest and official in the Vatican Secret Archive who was imprisoned in 1948 on charges of financial crimes,[3][4] and later revealed to have spied for the Soviet Union.

[5] The Cippico scandal embarrassed the Vatican and the Catholic Church in the buildup to the 1948 general election in which the leftist Popular Democratic Front presented a strong challenge to the Catholic-aligned Christian Democracy government.

[6][4] In late 1932 he joined the Roman Curia as an archivist, first in the Pontifical Commission for Russia; some documents known to have been passed to the Soviets at this time were sent by either Cippico or his predecessor Alexander Deubner.

Cippico's knowledge of Croatian caused Luigi Maglione to choose him to attend, with noncommittal cordiality, to Nikola Rusinović, envoy from the Independent State of Croatia.

[11] Cippico and lawyer Antonio Milo di Villagrazia helped Pascalina Lehnert to prepare a 1943 contingency plan to spirit Pope Pius XII to Francoist Spain in the event that the German invasion of Italy threatened the Vatican City.

[16] According to Sergio Amidei, Cippico secretly funded Paulo William Tamburella's production of the 1946 film Shoeshine;[17] he also planned a biopic of Francis of Assisi.

[20] It was also alleged that he sold goods belonging to the church,[19] and stole US$100,000 worth of jewellery entrusted by Enrico Paolo Salem [it] (son of Anna D'Angeri) the podestà of Trieste until its German occupation.

[42] In 1953 the Italian Communist press responded to reports that Catholic clergy imprisoned in Eastern Europe were religious victims of trumped-up charges by calling them "Cippicos" justly punished for ordinary crimes.

[45] In 1959, Pope John XXIII granted the request and restored Cippico as monsignor,[2] while preventing him from administering sacraments apart from saying Mass in private (sine populo).

[48][49] In the 1960s and 1970s he secretly passed to Warsaw Pact embassies information and copies of internal Holy See documents given by former colleagues, including reports by Corrado Bafile as Apostolic Nuncio in Bonn.

[50] From the 1970s Cippico had a relationship with Gertrude "Traudl" Lechner (née Parth), a divorced former prostitute from Laas, South Tyrol whose official role was as his housekeeper.