PART 3: OPERATION GLADIO:THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE VATICAN,CIA AND THE MAFIA

CHAPTER 5 

THE SECRET SOCIETY

The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion. 

“Declaration on Masonic Associations,” 

The Sacred Congregation of the Faith, 

November 26, 1983. 

Paolo Taviani

Throughout the 1950's, hundreds of Italian clerics and members of the Church's “black nobility” joined the Mafia in support of Operation Gladio. Paolo Taviani, one of the founders of the Christian Democratic Party and the country's new Minister of Defense, became one of the commanders of the 622 stay-behind units in Italy. Each unit consisted of twelve to fifteen troops, all of which were trained by US and British forces at the Capo Marargiu base on the northern tip of Sardinia. The units established 139 arms caches, mostly in northeast Italy near the Gorizia Gap, through which any Soviet invasion was expected to come.1 

By 1955, ecclesiastical units of the stay-behind operation—known as Catholic Gladio—popped up in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a region of Italy bordering the Communist bloc. Cardinal Giuseppe Siri and the Italian Episcopal Conference supervised its establishment.2 The Catholic units were led by Augustin Bea, rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute; Agostino Casaroli, his Privy Chamberlain; and Fiorenzo Angelini, Master of Pontifical Ceremonies. These three clerics, who had been dispatched by the Holy Father, were soon joined by Michele Giordano, a diocesan assistant of Catholic Action.3 All four prelates eventually were elevated to the College of Cardinals for their work in the clandestine undertaking. Leading lay figures of the Catholic nobility also became prominent in Catholic Gladio, including Giulio Andreotti, a cofounder of the Christian Democratic Party, and Umberto Ortolani, the “secret Chamberlain of the Papal Household” and member of the inner circle of the Knights of Malta.4 

Thousands of priests and bishops were now trained not only for the ideological war against Communism but also for actual combat in case the Cold War became hot. So many ethnic Slovenes with leftist leanings were terrorized by the antics of Catholic Gladio troops that two-thirds of them moved to more hospitable locations.5 Throughout the 1950's, money for the activities of Catholic Gladio was provided by the CIA, which annually allocated $30 to $50 million to covert operations in Italy. These funds were not only washed by the Vatican but also funneled by the pope to groups and organizations that met with his approval.6 Former CIA agent Victor Marchetti later testified: 

In the 1950's and the 1960's the CIA gave economic support to many activities promoted by the Catholic Church, from orphanages to missions. Millions of dollars each year were given to a great number of bishops and monsignors. One of them was Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini [who became Pope Paul VI].7 

BIRTH OF P2 

To protect the clandestine nature of Catholic Gladio and the other stay-behind units, meetings of the anti-Communist forces were conducted in Masonic lodges. Eventually, several “stay-behind” units in Italy evolved into covert Masonic organizations. One such unit became known as Propaganda Due, or P2. 

The name P2 was derived from Propaganda Massonica, a lodge formed in 1877 by members of the Piedmont nobility in Turin. This lodge was distinctly different than most, since many of its members were Mafiosi and military officers, who were more concerned about political beliefs than other Masons. Initiates who entered Propaganda Massonica were threatened with “certain and violent death” if they revealed any of the society's secrets. The presence of the Mafia among the lodge members guaranteed that this demand for omerta was not an idle threat.8 In 1924, Freemasonry in Italy was outlawed by Mussolini as politically subversive and the Propaganda Massonica shut its doors and rolled up its ledgers.9 

Giordano Gamberini

The revitalization of the lodge as Propaganda Due, or P2, met with the full approval of Allen Dulles, the CIA director and a thirty-third degree Mason, who realized that the split in the Italian Socialist Party, resulting in the creation of the Italian Social Democratic Party, was “entirely provoked by Freemasons in the United States and Italy” through orchestrated infiltration.10 The anti-Communist animus within the Grand Orient of Italy (the organization that governed the lodges) pulled Italian Freemasonry to the right. In the 1950's the lodges were able to provide ex-fascists with democratic cover and also gave them contacts in the American Masons who were ready to raise funds to address the Red Menace. Giordano Gamberini, the Grand Master of Italian Masons and a CIA operative, became known as the “traveling salesman of anti-Communism.”11 Thanks in part to his efforts, lodges popped up on NATO bases throughout the country, beginning with the Benjamin Franklin, which was established on July 25, 1959.12 

THE BLIND EYE 

Pius XII, by his silence, appeared to endorse the rise of Freemasonry in postwar Italy. This tacit approval was stunning since the Roman Catholic Church had condemned Freemasonry and banned its members from participating in Masonic rites, under threat of excommunication.13 The dangerous errors of this fraternal organization had been set forth as follows: 

God as described in Masonic works is an impersonal ‘Great Architect of the Universe,’ not the personal God of the Patriarchs, the One True God of Revelation, the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit. 

Masonic writings specifically deny that God has revealed Himself and His truths to us, or that He ever established a Church. 

In Masonry Jesus Christ is portrayed as merely a man, a great teacher, on a par with Buddha or Mohammed and His Divinity is denied. 

The Trinity is denied and compared to the ‘trinities’ of pagan religions. 

Christianity is considered a derivative of ancient pagan religions and like all religions deliberately ladens itself with error. God is portrayed as a deceiver who leads many men away from truth as not all are worthy of it. 

All truth is relative according to Masonry, thereby rejecting objective, absolute truth and therefore the dogmas of the Catholic faith. 

Freemasonry is portrayed as the foundation of all religion and it is built on Naturalism, a system of belief that makes human nature and human reason supreme in all things. 

At the various degrees when an oath is sworn, even the initial ones, it is a blood oath swearing for example, ‘binding myself by no less penalty than that of having my throat cut from ear to ear, my tongue torn out by its roots, and buried in the sands of the sea.’14 

But such teachings suddenly paled in importance before the rise of Marxist doctrine. 

MAFIA MASONS 

Propaganda Due also became a magnet for the Mafia, since both the Mafia and the Freemasons were secret societies that had been banned by the fascists. Cesare Mori, whom Mussolini placed in charge of eradicating the Mafia, employed a means of interrogation, known as the cassetta. By this technique, a suspect was tied to a wooden crate, whipped with a leather lash that had been soaked in salt water, and shocked with a cattle prod while his genitals were squeezed in a vice. Hundreds of Mafia leaders, or “reprobates” as Mori called them, were tracked down and subjugated to this means of torture.15 

Greco              Cottone

At the close of World War II, prominent Men of Respect, including Salvatore Greco (“the Engineer”) and Antonio Cottone (leader of the Mafia of the Gardens, which was responsible for the fruit markets and citrus growers), became active in Masonic lodges.16 The soldiers in the service of such dons closed ranks by submitting to Masonic initiation. By 1955, the Grand Orient of Italy could boast of such Mafiosi Masons as Antonino (“Nino”) Salvo, Pino Mandalari (master accountant for the Sicilian clans), and Giuseppe “Pippo” Calderone.17 Over the next two decades, 2,411 members of the Mafia took orders within Sicily's 113 lodges. Concerning this development, Sicilian mobster Leonardo Messina said: “Many uomini d'onore [men of honor], in particular, those who succeed in becoming Mafia bosses, belong to the Freemasonry…because it is in the Freemasonry that they can have total relationships with the entrepreneurs and with institutions.”18 

By 1960, the ’Ndrangheta—a branch of the Mafia whose criminal activities came to count for 3 percent of Italy's GDP—had opened their own Masonic lodge in the tiny Calabrian town of Roccella under Baron Pasquale Placido, a local aristocrat.19 This lodge would eventually unite with P2 in an attempt to overthrow the Italian government.20 

CATHOLIC MASONS 

By 1965, the membership roll of P2 contained the names of many ecclesiastical dignitaries, including: 

Alberto Alblondi, Bishop of Livorno; 

Msgr. Gottardi Alessandro, President of Fratelli Maristi; 

Cardinal Augustin Bea, the Vatican Secretary of State; 

Salvatore Baldassari, Bishop of Ravenna; Bishop 

Annibale Bugnini, Secretary to the Commission on Liturgical Reform; 

Msgr. Agostino Cacciavillan (later a cardinal), Secretary of the Nuncio to the Philippines and Spain; 

Msgr. Umberto Cameli, Director of the Office of Ecclesiastical Affairs in Italy; 

Agostino Casaroli (later a cardinal), Undersecretary of the Sacred Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs; 

Bishop Fiorenzo Angelini, Vicar General of Roman Hospitals; 

Fr. Carlo Graziani, Rector of the Vatican Minor Seminary; 

Fr. Angelo Lanzoni, Chief of the Office of Vatican Secretary of State; 

Virgilio Levi, Assistant Director of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano; 

Cardinal Achille Liénart, Bishop of Lille and Grand Master of Masonic Lodges; 

Bishop Pasquale Macchi, Pope Paul VI's private secretary; 

Msgr. Francesco Marchisano (later a cardinal), Prelate of Honor of the Pope and Secretary for Seminaries and Universities; 

Abbot Salvatore Marsili, head of the Order of St. Benedict of Finalpia; 

Bishop Marcello Morgante (later a cardinal), spiritual head of Ascoli Piceno in east Italy; 

Bishop Virgilio Noè (later a cardinal), head of the Sacred Congregation of Divine Worship; 

Vittore Palestra, legal counsel of the Sacred Rota of the Vatican State; 

Archbishop Michele Pellegrino (later a cardinal), spiritual head of Turin; 

Fr. Florenzo Romita, member of the Sacred Congregation of the Clergy; 

Fr. Pietro Santini, Vice-Official of the Vicar of Rome; 

Msgr. Domenico Semproni, member of the Tribunal of the Vicarate of the Vatican; 

Bishop Dino Trabalzini, Bishop of Rieti and Auxiliary Bishop of Southern Rome; 

Fr. Vittorio Trocchi, Secretary for the Catholic Laity in the Consistory of the Vatican State Consultations; 

Fr. Roberto Tucci (later a cardinal), Director General of Vatican Radio; and 

Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, Secretary of State under Paul VI.21 

Over the next decade, scores of additional Vatican officials, including cardinals, Roman Catholic hierarchy, and prominent bishops and archbishops, would become members of Masonic lodges— many with ties to P2.22 It is difficult to believe that the supreme pontiffs (Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI) were blissfully unaware that so many of the Church's dignitaries were practicing Freemasons. And it remains equally mind-boggling that the pontiffs elevated these clerics to loftier positions upon learning of their membership in P2 and other Masonic lodges. 

Licio Gelli

As it transformed into one of the world's richest and most powerful institutions, the Roman Catholic Church shed many of its long-held doctrines for the sake of political expediency and financial gain, including the condemnations of Freemasonry and usury. This transformation crystallized with the pope's embrace of Licio Gelli—an avowed atheist and the Grand Master of P2 —who became a Knight of Malta, one of the favored sons of Holy Mother Church. 

GLADIO EXPOSED 

By 1963, when Licio Gelli became a Freemason and Giovanni Battista Montini became Paul VI, Gladio was no longer a clandestine operation. Information about the project had surfaced almost as soon as the secret armies were established. In June 1947, Édouard Depreux, France's Socialist Minister of Interior, announced to the press: “Toward the end of last year, we uncovered the existence of a black resistance movement, composed of resistance fighters of the far-right, Vichy collaborators, and monarchists. They had devised a secret attack called ‘Plan Bleu’ which should have gone into action either by the end of July or on August 6, 1947.” Depreux's remarks created a public outcry and the secret army was dismantled, only to be reassembled within the year by Henri Alexis Ribière, the head of Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), France's military secret service.23 

THE AUSTRIAN SPORTS CLUB 

In 1947, Theodor Soucek and Dr. Hugo Rössner were arrested in Vienna when the Austrian police discovered that they had recruited a secret army of former Nazi soldiers and right-wing partisans to prepare for a Soviet invasion and had amassed a cache of sophisticated weapons that included German rocket artillery. In court, prosecutors argued that Soucek and Rössner had concocted plans to attack and kill members of the Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs). Instead of refuting this allegation, the two men presented themselves as defenders of the homeland and maintained that their efforts were funded by the newly created CIA. The realization that a covert army, funded by a foreign government, was operating on Austrian soil sent shockwaves throughout the country. Soucek and Rössner were convicted of sedition and sentenced to death in 1949. However, after serving a short stint in prison, they were pardoned by Austrian Chancellor Theodor Körner without reason or explanation.24 

Franz Olah

By 1950, Franz Olah, a member of the Austrian Parliament, had regrouped the covert unit under the code name Österreichischer Wander-, Sport- und Geselligkeitsverein (Austrian Hiking, Sports, and Society club), with funding from the CIA. “We bought cars under this name,” Olah later said, “and installed communication centers in several regions of Austria.” He added that the army of “a couple of thousand people” was trained in the use of “weapons and plastic explosives.”25 

OTTO'S OUTBURST 

The presence of Gladio in Germany came to light in 1952 when Hans Otto, a former SS officer, walked into a police station in Frankfurt and announced that he “…belonged to a political resistance group, the task of which was to carry out sabotage activities and blow up bridges in case of a Soviet invasion….” He said that, although the initiative was made up of former Nazis, new recruits were not expected to espouse neo-fascist beliefs but only to manifest a deep-seated hatred of Communism. Otto added that the unit, which bore the name Technischer Dienst des Bundes Deutscher Jugend (TD-BDJ) —the Technical Service Branch of the League of German Youth, had amassed a blacklist of hundreds of leftists “who were to be assassinated in case of emergency.”26 

Upon questioning, Otto told the Hessen authorities that the TD-BDJ received millions in funding from “an American citizen [named] Sterling Garwood,” whom, he identified, as “an agent of the CIA.”27 He further said that the unit had been organized by Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, who remained sheltered within Vatican City. 

Georg August Zinn, the Hessen prime minister, became so alarmed by Otto's testimony that he ordered the arrest of one hundred members of the TD-BDJ and called for a full-scale investigation of the resistance group. Zinn's request was denied by the Bundesgerichtshof, the country's highest court (located in Karlsruhe, in southwest Germany), and all members of the secret army were released without comment. Baffled by the high court's decision, the prime minister said, “The only legal explanation for these releases can be that the people of Karlsruhe declared they acted upon American direction.”28 

SWEDEN'S SECRET ARMY 

In 1953, additional information about Gladio surfaced in Sweden with the arrest of Otto Hallberg, a notorious racist and former SS commander, on charges of promoting terrorism. Hallberg openly admitted that he was the leader of a covert army named “Sveaborg” that had been created by US intelligence officers to ward off any Soviet plans for the annexation of Scandinavia. Relaxed and confident, the former Nazi commander rightfully predicted that any investigation into his unit and any police charges raised against him would be squashed by higher authorities, since no Swedish official wanted news to surface concerning the extent to which the Swedish government remained under the direct sway of the CIA and NATO.29 

GLADIO'S FIRST COUP 

Col. Alparslan Türkeş

In 1960, the Gladio operation turned strategic when the Turkish stay-behind unit, known as Counter Guerrilla, joined with the military to stage a coup d’état against the government of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. Menderes, who was planning a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid, was cast into prison, put on trial by a hastily assembled court, and executed on the island of İmralı.30 After civilian rule was restored by a democratic election, Col. Alparslan Türkeş, one of the leaders of the uprising, formed the Nationalist Action Party and its paramilitary youth group, the Grey Wolves, with CIA funds. The new party espoused a fanatical pan-Turkish ideology that called for reclaiming large sections of the Soviet Union under the flag of a reborn Turkish empire.31 

THE PINK POPE 

But Italy remained the center of attention for Gladio officials as the PCI reemerged from its years of domination by the Christian Democrats to make monumental gains among the populace. By the early 1960's, the Italian Communist Party boasted a membership of 1,350,000, making it once again the largest Communist party in the free world. Most alarming for Gladio, the party began to receive annual support from the Soviet Union that fluctuated in amount from $40 to $50 million.32 

Yet the Vatican under Pope John XXIII, the successor to Pius XII, failed to condemn this development. Instead, the new pope issued an encyclical, Pacem in Terris—an official letter from the pope to the bishops, titled “Peace on Earth”—which represented an attempt at rapprochement between Catholicism and Communism. In addition, John came to develop a fondness for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, with whom he held a private audience.33 

In May 1963, John McCone, director of the CIA and a Knight of Malta, received a memorandum from James Spain, of the agency's Office of National Estimates, on the ramifications of Pope John's policies. There is “no doubt,” wrote Spain in a fifteen-page memo, “that vigorous new currents are flowing in virtually every phase of the church's thinking and activities….[This has] resulted in a new approach toward Italian politics which is permissive rather than positive.”34 

When Spain visited the Vatican, posing as a visiting scholar on a foreign affairs grant, he voiced his concerns about major gains made by the Italian Left, including the PCI, in the 1963 election. Many members of the Curia felt the Left's success was attributable to Pope John's conciliatory attitude toward the Communists. This was the first election in which the Christian Democrats were not officially endorsed by the Italian Bishops Conference. John XXIII insisted upon maintaining a neutral stance in order not to jeopardize his Soviet initiative.35 

LEARNING A LESSON 

As author Martin A. Lee wrote, 

Director McCone now took a personal as well as professional interest in the Vatican situation. Thomas Kalamasinas, the station chief in Rome, was instructed to raise the priority of the Vatican spying operation. But the CIA ran into a snag when it learned that some of its best contacts—for example, the conservative prelates who held key posts in the Extraordinary Affairs Section of the Papal Secretariat, were shut out by John XXIII's tendency to circumvent his own bureaucracy when dealing with the Kremlin. The pope evidently feared that his diplomatic efforts might be sabotaged by some Machiavellian monsignor. For this reason, he pursued his goal outside the normal channels of the Curia. A small group of trusted collaborators served as couriers for the pope, who rarely used the telephone to speak with anyone outside the Vatican for fear that the line might be tapped.36 

When John XXIII died of stomach cancer on June 3, 1963, the CIA under McCone became intent upon influencing the outcome of the conclave so that another “pink pope” would not ascend to the throne of St. Peter. The Agency's favored candidate was Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the former Bishop of Milan, whose father had been the director of Catholic Action and a member of the Italian Parliament.37 

THE RIGGED PAPAL ELECTION 

Montini was an ardent supporter of Catholic Gladio. He had served the OSS during World War II in the so-called Vessel Operation and had received millions in black funds from the CIA for his charitable work as the Archbishop of Milan.38 The relationship between Montini and the US Intelligence community was so close that his ascendancy to the See of St. Peter may have been rigged. Time correspondent Roland Flamini uncovered evidence that showed CIA officials were able to confirm the election of Montini in advance of a puff of white smoke emanating from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and expressed their pleasure that the conclave had proceeded according to plan.39 

Pope Paul VI

One of Montini's first acts as Pope Paul VI was the appointment of Gelli as Equitem Ordinis Sancti Silvestri Papae (a Knight in the Order of St. Silvester), one of Catholicism's highest awards.40 The knighting was extraordinary since Gelli remained an avowed atheist who had never performed an act in the service of Holy Mother Church. Nevertheless, the ceremony was of profound significance to Gladio operatives, since it served to confirm the close ties between the Vatican and P2, as well as the Holy See's reliance on Gelli and other CIA agents to maintain its privileged place of power and independence within Italy. 

THE RAT KING 

The son of a Tuscan miller, Gelli was born in Pistoria on April 21, 1919. At the age of seventeen, he enrolled as a volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion and went to fight in Spain, where his brother Raffaele was killed by Communist forces at Málaga in April, 1938. Upon his return to Italy, he became the key liaison officer to the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Hermann Goring. During the Allied occupation in 1943, he escaped incarceration by volunteering to serve with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army.41 In this capacity, he worked in close contact with William Colby, the O.S.S agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the O.S.S director, in the establishment of the Office of Reserve Affairs. This shadowy agency, located on Rome's Via Sicilia, was manned by a secret force of the carabinieri (the Italian national police) under the command of Federico Umberto D'Amato, a former member of Decima MAS. Its sole purpose was to exercise control “over the most delicate activities of the state.”42 

Through Colby, a devout Roman Catholic, Gelli gained entry to the Vatican, where he united with Fr. Krunoslav Draganović, a Franciscan monk and member of the Ustashi (a Croatian fascist group during World War II) , to set up the ratlines by which war criminals, including members of the Nazi High Command, could escape to South American and other havens of refuge.43 Many of the escapees were issued Vatican passports and traveled to their new hiding places in clerical garb.44 A memo from an intelligence official working at the US State Department in 1947 explained that “the Vatican justifies its participation by its desire to infiltrate not only European countries, but Latin American countries as well, [dealing with] people of all political beliefs as long as they are anti-Communists and pro-Catholic Church.”45 

NEW NAZI HAVENS 

The management of the ratline required Gelli to make frequent visits to Argentina, the favored country of Nazi fugitives, where he became a confidant of President Juan Perón.46 By the early 1950's, the South American country was swarming with Nazi criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer responsible for carrying out “the final solution to the Jewish problem.” The situation caused US Ambassador Spruille Braden to say, “There is no country in the world where the Nazis find themselves in such a strong position as Argentina.”47 Thanks in part to Gelli, over sixteen hundred Nazi scientists and their dependents made their way to the United States to inaugurate the space age. Many of these Nazis ended up working as aircraft designers and engineers at the Glenn L. Martin Company (later the Lockheed Martin Corporation) and Republic Aviation.48 The efforts of Gelli and Fr. Draganović were supported by Counter-Intelligence Corps (C.I.C) officials, who realized that many of the Nazi scientists, doctors, intelligence officers, and engineers could be of critical importance in the battle against Communism. By 1947, the C.I.C was shelling out $1,400 to Fr. Draganović and Gelli for each war criminal who was sent to their care.49 

KLAUS BARBIE

 

One of the most notorious Nazis to come under the care of Gelli and Fr. Draganović was Klaus Barbie. The so-called “Butcher of Lyons” was responsible for 4,342 murders and 7,591 deportations to death camps during his two-year posting in the French city. After the war, US intelligence placed him in a safe house in Augsburg, provided him with a sanitized identity, and granted him a generous stipend of $1,700 a month. In 1983, the Justice Department belatedly admitted that US intelligence officials had arranged for Barbie's escape to Bolivia (where he became known as Klaus Altmann and opened a sawmill in La Paz), and that they had lied by denying to French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld that he was under their protection.50 

Hugo Banzer Suárez

Throughout his twenty-year stay in South America, Barbie proved to be of crucial importance to the CIA by forging close ties to La Mafia Cruzena (a drug cartel formed by Hugo Banzer Suárez, a man trained by the US military at Fort Hunt and the Escuela de Golpes in Panama), and, thereby, securing a new source of funding for mounting attacks against leftist regimes.51 

THE NAZI GOLD 

Martin Bormann

The operation of the ratline brought Gelli in close contact with the future Pope Paul VI. At the close of the war, Monsignor Montini had been placed in charge of Caritas Italiana, a Vatican charity that provided “protection” for German soldiers and Nazi sympathizers. The protection came to include the issuance of refugee travel documents (replete with new identities) to such illustrious figures as Hans Hefelman, a principal figure in the Third Reich's euthanasia program, and Martin Bormann, Hitler's personal secretary.52 

In addition to the ratline, Gelli played a key role in the smuggling of over $80 million in gold and silver bars from the Ustashi treasury in Croatia to the Vatican Bank. Holy Mother Church was very pleased to receive the deposit for “safe-keeping,” even though Gelli squirreled away 150 gold bars for himself.53 

NEW VATICAN FRIENDS 

Count Umberto Ortolani

Gelli, after making the gold deposit, became a frequent guest at dinner parties hosted for Vatican dignitaries at the palatial home of Count Umberto Ortolani, the former head of military intelligence in Italy and Rome's most powerful layman. At these affairs, he befriended Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, who became one of the four moderators of the Second Vatican Council; Monsignor Agostino Casaroli, who would become the Vatican's secretary of state under John Paul II; Giulio Andreotti, the cofounder of the Catholic Democratic Party; Massimo Spada, the lay delegato of the IOR; and Michele Sindona, Spada's financial assistant.54 At this time, Sindona, as previously noted, was the principal bag man for the Sicilian Mafia and the CIA. His duties included not only depositing drug money for the Genovese and other crime families in the IOR and parochial banks throughout Italy, but also conveying satchels of cash to prominent Catholic clerics, including Archbishop Montini.55 

Through Sindona, Gelli strengthened his ties not only to the IOR but also the Sicilian Mafia (including Luciano Leggio of the Vizzini family and Salvatore Riina of the Corleonesi clan), the Camorra of Naples, and the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria. Gelli proved to be of inestimable value by introducing Italy's leading Men of Respect to his old friends in South America, including Klaus Barbie. The scenario was now set for the development of the cocaine trade, an undertaking in which the CIA took a keen interest. 

OPERATION DEMAGNETIZE 

Frank Wisner

In 1956, Gelli returned from Argentina to his native Italy, where he opened a mattress factory in Pistoria and became a director of Permindex, a CIA front organization that was set up in Basel. Permindex, managed by CIA operative Frank Wisner, represented a branch of Gladio that provided arms to Imre Nagy and his rebel forces in Communist Hungary. New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, who was arrested and questioned in connection with the JFK assassination, was a member of the Permindex American board.56 

In Italy, Gelli served as the CIA's liaison to General Giovanni de Lorenzo, who, upon the recommendation of US Ambassador Claire Booth Luce, had become the head of the Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate (SIFAR), Italy's armed forced information service. SIFAR was the clandestine agency that coordinated the activities of Gladio units throughout the country. With the appointment of General de Lorenzo came a directive from William Harvey, chief of the CIA station in Rome, initiating Operation Demagnetize, and authorizing SIFAR to make use of all possible tactics— political, psychological, and paramilitary—to diminish the power of the Italian Communist Party. The directive represented an authorization of the “strategy of tension,” which would get underway on October 27, 1962, with the assassination of Enrico Mattei, the founder of Italy's largest oil concern ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi).57 Such attacks, Gelli later told BBC correspondent Allan Francovich, were conducted in accordance with US Army Field Manual 30–31B, which outlined the new tactics to be employed by the Gladio units.58 

PIANO SOLO 

On Election Day in April 1963, the CIA nightmare materialized. The Communists gained strength, amassing 25 percent of the vote, while all other parties lost seats, and Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party, in an effort to assuage the growing number of leftists in his government, named Socialists to cabinet posts. But the Communists were not pacified by Moro's appointments. They too wanted key government positions. In May 1963, the large union of construction workers, under the influence of the PCI, held a demonstration in Rome. The CIA became alarmed and members of Gladio, disguised as police, smashed the rally, leaving more than two hundred demonstrators injured.59 

SIFAR now sought a means to install a government of “public safety” consisting of right-wing Christian Democrats, top political managers, and high-ranking military officials. General de Lorenzo, together with twenty other senior army officers, drafted the plan for a silent coup d’état in close cooperation with CIA secret warfare expert Vernon Walters, William Harvey, chief of the CIA station in Rome, and Colonel Renzo Rocca, director of the Gladio units within the military secret service.60 To implement the coup, SIFAR recruited four thousand agents provocateurs to work with Rocca and his Gladio army. The recruits came to include members of the Mafia, Italian street gangs, and neofascist organizations such as Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI)—Italian Social Movement; Ordine Nuovo (ON)—New Order; and Avanguardia Nazionale (AV)—National Vanguard. They were trained at a Gladio base near Capo Marargiu, which was accessible only by helicopter. Upon completion of the training in terrorism and sabotage, they were provided with weapons and explosives.61 

Piano Solo was to have concluded with the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the installation of Christian Democrat Cesare Merzagora as Italy's new president. But the coup was called off at the final moment when a compromise was reached between the socialists and right wing Christian Democrats.62 

MYSTERIOUS DEATHS 

When news of the formation of a terrorist squad emerged in 1968, Colonel Rocca was found dead within his office in Rome of a gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide despite the fact that Rocca's hands bore no trace that he had fired a weapon and the bloodstains indicated that he must have been lying flat on the floor while pulling the trigger. Such findings prompted General Carlo Ciglieri, the former head of the carabinieri, to commission an investigation into SIFAR. On April 27, 1969, General Ciglieri was found dead on a dirt road outside Padua—the victim of a mysterious car accident. General Giorgio Manis, who was to provide evidence to the commission, dropped dead on the streets of Rome on June 25, 1969. His assistant, Colonel Remo D'Ottario shot himself in the heart a month later.63 

THE THIRTY-THIRD DEGREE 

The compromise with the socialists was a setback and pointed to the necessity of creating a “state within the state”—an organization that could control the Italian government by money, murder, and mayhem. To accomplish this objective, Gelli, at the bidding of Vernon Walters and other CIA officials, underwent the initiation rite of Freemasonry and joined the Romagnosi lodge in 1963. Almost overnight, he rose to the thirty-third degree of membership, which permitted him to serve as the leader of a lodge. 

At the start of 1964, Gelli was appointed secretary of P2 under Giordano Gamberini, another CIA contractor; Vatican insider Count Ortolani (mentioned above); and Giulio Andreotti (the leader of the Christian Democratic Party who would become Italy's Prime Minister). 64 By the end of the year, Michele Sindona was inducted into the lodge in an elaborate ceremony held within a villa in Tuscany.65 

THE GRAND MASTER 

By 1970, Gelli had emerged as P2's new Worshipful Master and became known by the code name Filippo 66 The lodge now received massive infusions of cash—estimated at $10 million per month— from the CIA's black funds. This money was used to purchase the weaponry and material necessary to mount terrorist attacks throughout Italy, Greece, Turkey, and South America. 

By 1969, Gelli's lodge could boast of such members as Italy's Armed Forces Commander Giovanni Torrisi; Secret Service chiefs Giuseppe Santovito and Giulio Grassini; Orazio Giannini, the head of Italy's financial police; Italy's Chief Surgeon Dr. Joseph Miceli Crimi; General Vito Miceli of the SID; General Raffaele Giudice of the Financial Guard; Supreme Council Magistrate Ugo Zilletti; and Vatican banker Michele Sindona. In addition, the membership list contained the names of leading cabinet ministers, along with thirty generals, eight admirals, and numerous newspaper editors, television executives, and top business executives.67 

Gelli took special pride in the induction of Carmelo Spagnuolo to his secret society. Spagnuolo was the chief public defender in Milan and, later, the president of the Italian Supreme Court. This ensured that P2, despite its acts of terrorism, would have justice on its side.68 

Within ten years of Gelli's emergence as Worshipful Master, P2 had branches in Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, France, Portugal, Nicaragua, West Germany, and England. Within the United States, its members and associates included not only leading figures from the Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese crime families, but also such notable political figures as General Alexander Haig, President Nixon's Chief of Staff, and Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's Secretary of State. 69 

INSIDE THE LODGE 

The lodge, as members of Italy's P2 Commission later described, was a pyramid with Gelli at the apex. But joined to the apex of this pyramid was another, inverted, one, containing the people responsible for the overall strategy. These people passed their orders down to the lower pyramid through Gelli, whose sole function was to follow orders. Antonio Bellochio, a P2 commissioner, said in 1984, “It is a sad reflection on Italian political life that a man of Gelli's modest intellectual abilities, for all his shrewdness and cunning, should have wielded such influence.”70 

During the week, Gelli conducted court in rooms 127, 128, and 129 of the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. The rooms were interconnected so that dignitaries, petitioners and lackeys could enter room 127, where sentries stood guard. Once cleared, they could proceed to room 128, where Gelli, flanked by P2 officials, sat behind a massive mahogany desk. Upon completion of their business, they exited past more guards in room 129.71 

GATHERING DIRT 

In preparation of Piano Solo, the CIA conducted massive surveillance of Italian political, religious, and business leaders in order to single out the Communist sympathizers. Once the new military order was established, these sympathizers were to be rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps on the island of Sardinia.72 As a result of this surveillance, Gelli and General de Lorenzo compiled files on more than 157,000 people of prominence, including tapes and photographs that could be used for blackmail or simple coercion.73 Copies of these files, some of which were as thick as dictionaries, were sent to the Vatican and to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.74 

NUDE PHOTOS OF JOHN PAUL II 

As the new leader of P2, Gelli continued to amass telling documents not only on leftist officials but also members of his lodge. When a recruit joined the order, he was obliged to demonstrate his loyalty by conveying to Gelli documents that would compromise not only himself and his family but also other possible candidates. When these potential candidates were confronted with the evidence of their misdeeds, they generally caved in and submitted to the initiation rite without a word of protest. This proved to be the case with Giorgio Mazzanti, the new president of ENI. Faced with incriminating evidence showing he had accepted huge bribes and payoffs from a pending Saudi oil deal, Mazzanti took the vow of secrecy, joined the elite Masonic lodge, and handed over to Gelli even more compromising information.75 

Eventually, Gelli's files came to contain not only embarrassing material on nearly every prominent Italian government official, but also nude photos of John Paul II next to a swimming pool. While displaying the photos of the naked pontiff, the P2 Grand Master reportedly quipped: “If it's possible to take these photos of the pope, imagine how easy it is to shoot him.”76

CHAPTER 6

THE RISE OF MICHELE SINDONA

So long as the bank invests those [drug] deposits in overnight money and is able to cover when the deposits are withdrawn, there is no financial threat to the bank other than the peripheral one of perhaps affecting the confidence that people have in it because of known associations with criminals…. The fact that a bank does business with criminals, or is even owned by them, is of minor importance to the overseers of the nation's banks. 

Paul Homan, deputy controller of the 

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency 

(quoted in Penny Lernoux's In Banks We Trust) 

In 1957, Michele Sindona attended a mob gathering at the Grand Hotel des Palmes in Palermo with such criminal luminaries as Lucky Luciano, Joseph (“Joe Bananas”) Bonanno, Carmine Galante, Frank Costello, Don Giuseppe Genco Russo (the head boss of the Sicilian families), Salvatore Ciaschiteddu (“Little Bird”) Greco, and the La Barbera brothers. The three-day event, which was held from October 3–5, resulted in the organization of a Sicilian Commission that would oversee all aspects of the multi billion dollar heroin trade. “The Sicilians,” according to FBN agent Martin F. Pera, “gave the Americans an ultimatum at Palermo. They knew there were a number of rebellious young hoods in America, so they told their bosses, ‘If you don't deal with us, we'll deal with them.’ Not having control over narcotics would have put all their other rackets at risk, so the Americans had no choice but to go along.”1 

Little Bird Greco emerged from the conference as primus inter pares (“first among equals”).2 The elevation of Greco was prompted by his pivotal role in the narcotics trade. He owned a fleet of ships that sailed under the Honduran flag and, through Frank Coppola, moved heroin to Santo Trafficante Jr., in Cuba via food shipments.3 But no one benefited from the gathering more than Sindona, who gained complete control of the flow of cash from the mean streets of America's inner cities to the Vatican Bank.4 

THE APALACHIN CONFERENCE 

But the unification of the American mob, which had been brought about by Luciano in 1931, was crumbling. In October 1957, Vito Genovese, still serving as Lucky's under boss, forged an alliance with Carlo Gambino for the execution of Albert Anastasia, the head of the Mangano crime family. Anastasia had ruffled the feathers of Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante Jr. by attempting to gain control of the lucrative flow of heroin from Havana. One month after Anastasia's murder, Genovese presided over the Apalachin Conference, a follow-up American Mafia summit to the event in Palermo, in which he anointed himself “boss of all bosses” (capo de tutti capi); appointed Carlo Gambino the new head of the Mangano clan; and ruled that the mob should not be involved in trafficking in narcotics outside of Harlem and other black neighborhoods.5 In the midst of the conference, the Pennsylvania State Police staged a raid that resulted in the arrest of Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano (a Gambino capo regime—boss), Joseph Bonanno, and Santo Trafficante Jr., the head of the South Florida family and the pivotal mob figure in Cuba. Others in attendance were Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo, Nick Civella of Kansas City, Sam Giancana of Chicago, and representatives from families in Milwaukee, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.6 

The Apalachin Conference was a milestone in the annals of organized crime in America, wiping out previous myths and misunderstandings about La Cosa Nostra, including the statements of J. Edgar Hoover that the Mafia, in fact, did not exist. The raid that caused the breakup of the mob meeting captured national headlines for weeks, infuriating the Mafiosi and embarrassing US government officials. The public now knew for the first time that an organized syndicate of mob families controlled the flow of illicit drugs throughout the country.7 

VITO'S COMEUPPANCE 

Luciano, outraged by the presumption of his under boss and the outcome of the conference, recruited Carlo Gambino to take part in a scheme to clip the wings of Vito Genovese, the self-proclaimed capo of the American Commission. Gambino, at Lucky's insistence, sought out Nelson Cantellops, a small time crook serving a stint in Sing Sing, and persuaded him by a gift of $100,000 to offer testimony that he had witnessed Genovese making massive drug buys. Cantellops complied. In 1958, Genovese and twenty-four members of his gang were collared for violating the new Narcotics Control Act. At the trial, Cantellops testified that he not only had witnessed the buys but had acted as a courier for Genovese by transporting heroin from Harlem to black communities throughout the country. The jury was reportedly rigged and, based almost entirely on the testimony of Cantellops, Genovese and his soldiers were sentenced to fifteen years in prison.8 With Genovese tucked away in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, Santo Trafficante Jr., upon the occasion of Luciano's death in 1962, became by default the head capo of the international heroin trade. At fifty-seven, he was one of the most effective mob leaders. Avoiding the ostentatious lifestyle of Cadillac's and diamond rings that characterized many of the Mafiosi, Trafficante cultivated the austerity of the old Sicilian dons and manifested a self-effacing attitude that contributed to his considerable influence over the Sicilian and American families. Despite his prestige among the Men of Respect, his good sense prevented him from campaigning for a leading position on the mob's national and international commissions. He stayed, for the most part, in the shadows, thereby becoming “the least known and most underestimated leaders of organized crime.”9 

MICHELE'S RISE 

Michele Sindona

The fall of Vito Genovese propelled the rise of Michele Sindona. The aspiring mob lawyer, with the blessing of his dons Giuseppe Genco Russo (Don Calo's successor) and Lucky Luciano, now developed close ties to the Gambino crime family, which, by marriage, included the Inzerillo and Spatola clans in Sicily. Aware of Sindona's pivotal position with the CIA and IOR, the Gambinos did not hesitate to take him under their protective wing. “Don Michele,” they would say, “you are the greatest of all Sicilians. Let us help you with your problems. Tell us whom you want killed. Tell us who the bastards are.”10 

Several weeks after the conference in Palermo, Sindona used mob money and CIA funds to create Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company that became the cornerstone of his financial empire.11 Through Fasco, he purchased his first bank—the Banca Privata Finanziaria (B.P.F) in Milan. Founded in 1930 by a Fascist ideologist, the B.P.F served as a conduit for the illegal transfer of funds from Italy for a favored few.12 

The B.P.F now served as a principal means of transferring drug money from the I.O.R for the purpose of Gladio. William Harvey, the new CIA station chief in Rome, arranged for the financial firms of Sir Jocelyn Hambro, the owner of the Hambros Bank, and David M. Kennedy, chairman of the Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago, to become minority shareholders, with each firm purchasing 22 percent of the bank's stock.13 

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS 

Sir Jocelyn Hambro and Sindona, by all appearances, were strange bedfellows. The son and heir of one of England's most prestigious merchant banking families, Hambro spent his days hobnobbing with the world's elite. Surely, the peasant from Patti would have been a most unwelcome guest at the Hambro family estate in Kidbrooke Park, Sussex, let alone at the Jockey Club in Newmarket, which was one of Sir Jocelyn's favorite haunts. The mystery of the relationship was compounded by the fact that Sindona was neither an established figure nor a member of the international banking community. Indeed, his major asset, at the time of their meeting, was a newly created shell company. 

The sole explanation for the bizarre partnership resides in the long-standing ties of Hambro to the intelligence community. He was one of the founders of the O.S.S, and his presence on the board of the World Commerce Company (W.C.C) smacks of complicity in the heroin trade.14 

ANOTHER ODD COUPLE 

David M. Kennedy's partnership with Sindona appears equally puzzling. Raised on a ranch in Utah, Kennedy was a devout Mormon whose grandparents (John Kennedy and Peter Johnson) formed the Bank of Randolph. In 1951, he became president of Continental Illinois after serving sixteen years as the debt manager for the Federal Reserve. 

Based in Chicago, Continental Illinois was the seventh-largest bank in the country, with billions in assets, including shares in an Opus Dei bank in Barcelona. In 1955, Kennedy became a “conspicuous friend” of the conservative Catholic religious order.15 This friendship resulted in Kennedy's bank becoming the main channel for the Vatican's real estate and corporate investments, an arrangement that brought him in close contact to Prince Massimo Spada, the lay delegato of the I.O.R, and Michele Sindona, Spada's dutiful assistant. Through this connection, Kennedy emerged as one of Gladio's key agents, and Continental Illinois came to serve as a major conduit for the flow of covert CIA funds into the newly created B.P.F. In this way, the Sindona bank served as the principal means of launching the 1967 coup d’état in Greece, a Gladio undertaking spearheaded by a group of right-wing army officers.16 

THE GORILLA 

Through Kennedy, Sindona developed a close friendship with Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, an up-andcoming cleric from Cicero, Illinois, the hometown of Al Capone. Known as “the Gorilla,” Marcinkus stood six feet four inches in his stocking feet. He was a scratch golfer, a gifted street fighter, and a lover of good bourbon, fine cigars, and young women. Marcinkus had worked closely with Kennedy in overseeing the Vatican's American investments through Continental Illinois and became a director of the bank's branch in Nassau. 

Within the effete and rarified environment of the Vatican, Marcinkus was singled out to serve as Paul VI's protector. On one occasion, the Gorilla picked up the tiny pope and carried him through an overly enthusiastic crowd that threatened to trample him to death.17 On another, he saved the Holy Father from an attack by a knife-wielding Bolivian artist by breaking the would-be assailant's arm.18 

Sindona was instrumental in getting the Gorilla the position as head of the Vatican Bank. This position made Marcinkus a bishop, a prelate d'onore, and he was assigned as a special assistant to Cardinal Alberto di Jorio. The gruff cleric from Cicero was now responsible for more than ten thousand accounts belonging to religious orders and to private Catholic dignitaries, including the Pope.19 Sindona's ties to the new bishop were tightened by the fact that Marcinkus, in defiance of Canon 2335 (the papal ban on Freemasonry), was a fellow Mason who had submitted to initiation on July 2, 1963. The Gorilla's Masonic code name was “Marpa.”20 

A NEW BANK 

Sindona next acquired the Banca di Messina, which gave the Gambino, Inzerillo, and Spatola crime clan unlimited access to a financial firm in Sicily. The Sicilian financier went on to buy a third bank —the Banque de Financement (Finabank)—in Geneva, which was largely owned by the I.O.R and, like the B.P.F, used as a conduit to move money out of Italy.21 After Sindona's purchase of majority interest, the Vatican retained a 29 percent share based on its awareness of the benefits of owning a Swiss bank for the transfer of laundered funds.22 Hambro and Kennedy, on behalf of their financial firms, gobbled up the remaining shares. 

The peasant from Patti now emerged as one of the most influential figures within international financial circles. Working with the important Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, Sindona bought controlling interest in Libby, McNeill and Libby, Inc., the massive American food processing chain with over thirteen hundred workers in the Chicago area.23 

THE CHICAGO CONNECTION 

Sam Giancana

“Family Jewels,” a set of CIA reports recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that Sam Giancana, a Mafia capo from Chicago, became one of the Agency's underworld agents in the 1960's and one of the pivotal figures in the money-laundering process.24 Members of the Giancana family made deposits in Continental Illinois that were transferred to Sindona's banks and enterprises in Liechtenstein and Milan. More money was transported by Giancana's men to Washington, DC, where it was converted into bonds and forwarded to Finabank in Geneva. Still more money was transported from Chicago to Mexico in suitcases carried by thugs dressed as Catholic priests. The money was then sent to a string of shell companies in Panama before arriving at the Vatican Bank. Throughout this process, the CIA, with the cooperation of Harry “Hank” Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), worked closely with Archbishop Marcinkus.25 According to Tullius “Tully” Acampora, a former CIA operative, “Hank was so close to Marcinkus that he could get Anslinger's friends an audience with the Pope.”26 

BANKING ON LOSSES 

Sindona's banking enterprise flourished as billions of dollars from the narcotics trade flowed from Sicily to Switzerland. At the same time, he was learning one of the cardinal rules of theft: The best way to rob a bank is to buy it. Much of the stolen money, however, did not end up in Sindona's wallet or a safe within an Italian-American club in Brooklyn. Used to mount Gladio's strategy of tension— and other covert ventures that would erupt in the coming decade—the $22 billion eventually lost by Sindona and his compatriots in their banking ventures seemed to vanish into thin air. Financial analysts, to this date, remain mystified by the missing money.27 

Few have come to realize that the purpose of acquisition of banks by CIA operatives, including Paul Helliwell, William Colby, Donald Beazley, David Kennedy, and Sindona, was not to produce dividends for shareholders but rather to chalk up losses in a bewildering array of bogus ventures.28 Other bankers who shared Gladio's vision of a New World Order created through the dissolution of political ideologies hostile to American capitalism were willing to have their institutions undergo financial hemorrhages for the cause. David Rockefeller, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, appears to fall into this category as suggested by the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses that came from Chase Manhattan's investments in South America at the behest of the CIA.29 As Gladio emerged into an international operation, the billions from the drug trade proved insufficient to provide for the mounting expenses. 

While Sindona was purchasing banks with funding from the Mafia, the Vatican, and the CIA, Paul E. Helliwell and Meyer Lansky were setting up Castle Bank & Trust in Miami and the Bahamas.30 Unlike Sindona's banks, which were used to mount attacks in Italy, Turkey, and Western Europe, Castle Bank & Trust became “the conduit for millions of dollars earmarked by the CIA for the funding of clandestine operations directed at countries in Latin America and the Far East.” 

SPREAD OF THE PLAGUE 

The appearance of these firms testifies not only to the expanding covert activities of the CIA but also the enormous growth of the heroin industry. In 1967, the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic in San Francisco opened a special section for heroin addicts. Of the addicts served by the clinic, about 25 percent (classed as “old-style junkies”) had first used heroin before January 1964; about 20 percent (classed as “transitional junkies”) first used heroin between then and January 1967; and the remaining 55 percent or so were “new junkies,” who began to use heroin after January 1967.31 Heroin was also the drug at the heart of the problem that President Nixon cited in 1969, when he laid out a ten-point plan for reducing illegal drug use—an effort for which New York was the proving ground. “New York City alone has records of some 40,000 heroin addicts, and the number rises between 7,000 and 9,000 a year,” Nixon wrote in his July 14, 1969, message to Congress. “These official statistics are only the tip of an iceberg whose dimensions we can only surmise.”32 

INSIDE SINDONA'S BANK 

Sindona was more than a CIA operative and Vatican financial adviser. He was also a thief. In 1966, Carlo Bordoni, a financier with Mafia connections and years of experience in making multi million dollar foreign exchange deals, examined the activities at the BPF and was overwhelmed by his discoveries. Twelve years later, Bordoni related these discoveries to authorities in Milan from a prison hospital in Caracas. In a sworn affidavit, he wrote: “When I started to go to the BPF during the summer of 1966, I was deeply affected by the chaos that reigned in the various sectors. It was a tiny bank that was able to survive only thanks to the margins that emanated, duly masked, of course, from a myriad of ‘black operations’ which BPF effected on behalf of Credito Italiano, Banca Commerciale Italiana, and other important national banks. These foreign currency black operations, a vast illegal export of capital, took place daily and large figures were involved. The technique was really the most coarse and criminal which can be imagined.”33 

Bordoni found a vast number of overdrawn accounts without any real guarantees and for amounts far in excess of the legal limit of a fifth of the capital and reserves. He also found massive incidents of theft. The staff at the BPF was transferring large amounts of money from the accounts of depositors without their awareness. These sums were funneled into an account held by the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank, in turn, transferred the amounts, minus a 15 percent commission, to Sindona's private account at Finabank in Geneva, which was named MANI for his two sons: MA stood for Marco, NI for Nino.34 

If a client at the BPF complained that a check had bounced or that his account should contain more than was listed, he was told to take his business elsewhere. If he continued to complain, a manager would appear and say, “It's simply an accounting error that we shall rectify.” If he threatened to contact the authorities, he would spend his last moments “swimming with the fishes.” 

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE 

For Bordoni, the activities at Banque de Financement in Geneva were equally hair-raising. Mario Olivero, the general manager, and other bank managers and IOR officials, spent all day playing the stock, commodity, and currency markets. If they lost, the losses were transferred to the accounts of the clients. If they won, they transferred the earnings to their personal accounts.35 

The Vatican Bank, in addition to owning 29 percent of the bank, maintained several accounts at the Banque de Financement. Upon investigation, Bordoni discovered that these accounts “reflected exclusively gigantic speculative operations that resulted in colossal losses.”36 A shell company called Liberfinco (Liberian Financial Company) had financed these losses, along with the losses of other major speculative investors. In 1966, at the time of Bordoni's inspection, Liberfinco was displaying a loss of $30 million. In 1973, when Swiss banking officials appeared on the scene, the losses of the shell company had climbed to $45 million. When the Swiss informed Sindona, the Vatican, Continental Illinois, and Hambros that they had forty-eight hours to close Liberfinco or they would declare Banque de Financement bankrupt, Sindona closed Liberfinco only to set up Aran Investment of Panama, another shell company, which displayed an instant deficit of $45 million.37 

After uncovering such shenanigans in Sindona's banks, Bordoni tried to distance himself from his employer. Sindona responded by a tried and true business technique of P2 and the Mafia: blackmail. Bordoni had broken the law in his own foreign speculations. Sindona threatened not only to report these transgressions to the bank of Italy, but also to use his powerful friends to wreak financial destruction upon his colleague's family. “You will never be a real banker,” Sindona said, “because not only are you unable to lie, you are also a man with principles.” Duly humbled, Bordoni stayed and assisted Sindona in the formation and operation of a massive international brokerage company called Moneyrex.38 He had no other choice. To report Sindona's crimes would constitute an exercise in futility. Sindona was much more than a made man. He was wired to the Italy's most powerful business and political officials.39 

THE MONEY KING 

Created in 1964, Moneyrex established relations with 850 client banks throughout the world and conducted business in excess of $200 billion a year.40 Through this brokerage firm, Italy's richest and most powerful individuals could squirrel away enormous fortunes illegally and safely in foreign banks. Sindona performed this service for a commission that fluctuated between 15 to 20 percent. He also kept a private ledger that incriminated his “confidential clients.”41 This list would serve as his lifesaver when his bloated corporate vessel sank. 

In June 1967, Internal Revenue Service agents became aware that Sindona was involved in the drug trafficking of the Gambino-Inzerillo-Spatola clan. The case came to center not on heroin but “the illicit movement of depressant, stimulant and hallucinogenic drugs between Italy, the United States and possibly other European countries.”42 But the investigation, thanks to the CIA's intervention, came to a dead end. 

SINDONA AND SAIGON 

Southeast Asia continued to remain of critical importance to the global narcotics market. Sindona developed a friendship with Chaing Kai-shek and members of the general's family.43 On several occasions, he traveled to Formosa to provide funds to Chaing and the remnants of the K.M.T, who continued to cultivate the poppy fields of Laos and Thailand with members of the Hmong people. 

In 1967, CIA operatives Theodore Shackley and Thomas G. Clines were assigned to establish heroin refineries with the aid of the Corsican Mafia who permeated Saigon's underworld. In 1968, Shackley (known as the “Blond Ghost”) arranged for Santo Trafficante Jr. to visit Saigon and meet with drug lord Vang Pao in the Continental Palace Hotel.44 The meeting concerned Vang's ability to provide the supply for the ever-increasing demand. During his stay, Trafficante also met with prominent Corsican gangsters to assure them of increased shipments to their laboratories in Marseilles.45 

When the old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (B.N.D.D) launched Operation Eagle in 1968, it found itself arresting scores of CIA employees—many of whom were working directly for Trafficante. But although it arrested several of his deputies, the B.N.D.D could not get the Johnson or Nixon administrations to go after Trafficante directly. 46 

By 1971, Congress was getting so many complaints about G.Is returning home addicted that the B.N.D.D began to investigate. This investigation, too, went nowhere. The CIA insisted on loaning some of its select special agents to the B.N.D.D as “investigators.” The agents turned out to be the same men who had assisted in setting up the Laotians and Thais in the heroin business in the first place.47 

A PAPAL PROBLEM 

1969 proved to be a banner year for Sindona. He stood as the most powerful financial figure in Italy. The “Gruppo Sindona” included six banks, the international CIGA hotel chain, and five hundred other companies. He controlled the stock market in Milan, where 40 percent of the shares traded on any given day were under his control. His ability to influence Italy's financial condition was so profound that former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, a former member of P2, proclaimed him “the savior of the lira.”48 

In the spring of that year, Sindona was summoned late at night to the pope's private study on the fourth floor of the Apostolic Palace. The short, slender, and well-spoken Mafia don wore a meticulously tailored navy blue suit, a white shirt with gold cuff links, and a gray silk tie. He appeared fresh and confident. The pope was seated in one of his satin-covered chairs. His body was bent forward, and he appeared tired and ill. The Holy Father did not offer his ring for Michele to kiss; instead they greeted each other with the handshake of old friends.49 

“There is a terrible problem,” Paul VI told Sindona. He was referring to the collapse of the “first republic” and the long reign of the Christian Democratic Party. The new government had moved to discard the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and the tax-exempt status of Catholic holdings throughout the country. The measure spelled financial destitution for the Church and an annual tax bill in excess of $250 million. Even worse, the measure could prompt other countries to follow suit, leaving the Holy Mother Church stripped naked of her vast wealth. “No matter,” the pope said, “is of greater importance.”50 Sindona replied by proposing a strategy to move Vatican resources out of Italy into the United States and the tax-free Eurodollar market through a network of offshore financial firms.51 This move would not only cloak the Vatican's holdings in omertà—a quality the Holy See valued as much as the Mafia—but it would also demonstrate to other countries that the Roman Catholic Church was financially powerful and that any interference with the Vatican's finances could produce dire consequences for national economies.52 

THE PAPAL COMMISSION 

Upon hearing the proposal, Pope Paul handed Sindona an agreement he already had prepared. The agreement was even more than the Mafiosi could hope for or dare to suggest. It named Sindona Mercator Senesis Romanam Curiam, “the leading banker of the Roman Curia,” and granted him complete control over the Vatican's foreign and domestic investment policy.53 In accordance with the agreement, Sindona would work closely with Bishop Marcinkus, who now became secretary of the I.O.R, and Cardinal Sergio Guerri, governor of Vatican City. However, both clerics remained merely his advisers. The agreement placed the Vatican's billions at Sindona's disposal. 

When the Mafia chieftain turned to the last page, he looked up at the Holy Father and smiled. The pope already had signed and sealed the document. It was the highest display of trust anyone could hope to receive from the Vicar of Christ.54 Such trust, of course, was not blind. It was based on the pope's awareness that Sindona remained in almost sole control of the billions in black funds that were flowing into the Holy See. 

THE VATICAN'S ASSETS 

Before Sindona took control of its assets, the Vatican held major interests in the Rothschild Bank in France, the Chase Manhattan Bank with its fifty-seven branches in forty-four countries, the Credit Suisse in Zurich and also in London, the Morgan Bank, the Bankers Trust, General Motors, General Electric, Shell Oil, Gulf Oil, and Bethlehem Steel. Vatican officials sat on the board of Finsider, which, with its capital of 195 million lire spread through twenty-four companies, produced 90 percent of Italian steel. The Holy See controlled two shipping lines and the Alfa Romeo car manufacturing company. What's more, controlling shares of the Italian luxury hotels, including the Rome Hilton, were in the Vatican portfolio.55 

But the Vatican's central holding was Società Generale Immobiliare, a construction company that had produced a fortune in earnings for the Holy See since it had been acquired in 1934. In 1969 Immobiliare shares were selling for 350 lire. Sindona purchased 143 million shares from the Vatican at double the market price—700 lire per share—with money that had been illegally converted to his account from deposits at Banca Privata Finanziaria.56 Sindona was willing to pay double the market value. The money, after all, would be spent, in part, to bring about significant changes in the political order. 

In the same way, Sindona purchased the Vatican's majority ownership of Condotte d'Acqua, Italy's water company, and Ceramica Pozzi, a chemical and porcelain company. To spare the pope any embarrassment, he also bought Serono, the Vatican's pharmaceutical company that produced contraceptive pills.57 

SUB SILENTIO 

These transactions were conducted with extreme secrecy in order to escape the attention of Italy's tax collectors. The shares of Immobiliare were transferred first to Paribas Transcontinental of Luxembourg, a subsidiary of the Banque de Paris et des Pay-Bas, and next to Fasco AG in Liechtenstein. Paribas Transcontinental was closely linked with Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi businessman, who was later convicted of fraud in a $504 million corruption scandal that centered on the French oil company Elf Aquitaine.58 Auchi, like Sindona, possessed strong ties to the intelligence community and, for many years, served as the “bagman” for Saddam Hussein. In recent years, the Baghdad billionaire became a major contributor to the political campaign of Barack Obama.59 Along with Auchi, David Rockefeller, another financier and former US intelligence official, and members of Rockefeller's family, were shareholders in Paribas.60 

Despite Sindona's diversionary tactics, the press got word of the sales of the Vatican companies and pressured the Holy See for a response. Through a spokesman, Pope Paul said: “Our policy is to avoid maintaining control of our companies as in the past. We want to improve investment performance, balanced, of course, against what must be a fundamentally conservative investment philosophy. It wouldn't do for the Church to lose its principal in speculation.”61 When Sindona was asked about the sales, he refused to comment, saying that he was obliged to maintain the confidentiality of his client, Holy Mother Church.62 

LIQUIDATION SALE 

Sindona proceeded to liquidate the Church's remaining holdings in Italian companies to buyers, including Hambros Bank, Continental Illinois, and the American conglomerate Gulf & Western.63 He invested much of the Vatican's revenue from these sales in American companies, such as Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil, Westinghouse, Colgate, Proctor and Gamble, and Dan River.64 Several of these firms remained under the control of David Rockefeller.65 

The liquidation of the Vatican's holdings, as engineered by Sindona, produced a disastrous effect on the Italian economy. The shares of the Italian companies in which the Holy See had invested plummeted to record low levels. The lira dropped precipitously in value. Unemployment rose. The cost of living increased. The savings of millions of families were wiped out almost overnight.66 

LIFE IMITATING ART 

During this time, Sindona developed a close relationship with Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western. The two men engaged in trading worthless stock back and forth at face value to create a false market. In 1972, the US Securities and Exchange Commission demanded a halt to the ceaseless exchange of securities between the two associates. 

Also during this time Gulf & Western—through its motion picture company, Paramount Pictures— was filming The Godfather, a glamorous look at life in the Mafia. Immobiliare, the giant real estate and construction firm Sindona had purchased from the Vatican, owned Paramount Studios in Hollywood, where the film was shot. Through arrangements with Bluhdorn, profits from the Coppola epic flowed into Sindona's banks and holding companies, along with billions from the heroin trade.67 Life was imitating art. 

THE WORLD WITHOUT LIMITS 

The rise of Sindona, the father of the “financial Mafia,” was made possible by the combination of the following factors: 

...The global economy had yet to emerge and there existed an almost complete lack of central control over “international banking activities…. The ‘Agreement of Basel,’ which established a number of rules (such as last instance lender's responsibility),”68 did not come into effect until May 1983. 

...“In spite of some exceptions, bank-secrecy [remained] a basic rule. Moreover, the…tendency to liberalize the service-supplies on the one hand, and the increasing privatization of financial activity on the other,…contribute[d] to a lack of clarity” regarding banking transactions. 

...“A complex of credit instruments and intermediaries (holding and trust companies, atypical stocks, etc.) complicated” accounting and made instances of money laundering particularly difficult to control. 

...“The presence of various tax havens allow[ed] the possibility of tax-evasion[-facilitated] financial juggling and sheltered interpenetrations between licit and illicit activities.” Such havens were “not mere byproducts of ‘financial conjuring;’…they play[ed] a basic role within the…financial world.” 

...“The combination of [national] economic interests with [international] politico-military ones” was a new development. Gladio thrived because few world leaders were aware of the scope of the operation and the threat that it posed to sovereignty and independence. 

ANOTHER NEW FRIEND 

In 1969, Sindona made another new friend—a mousey accountant with a dark mustache and brooding black eyes. Roberto Calvi, a fellow member of P2, served as the assistant manager of Banco Ambrosiano, a wealthy, parochial bank in Milan. Few banks were more prestigious. Established in 1894, Banco Ambrosiano operated “to provide credit without offending the ethical principles of Christian teaching,” an explicit rebuke to lay lending institutions.69 To ward off the interests of outsiders, the statutes of the bank required shareholders to produce a voucher of their good character from their parish priest. In addition, no shareholder could own more than 5 percent of the bank's wealth.70 

Archbishop Marcinkus

Sindona realized that the “priests’ bank” would be an ideal complement to his growing financial empire. Nothing he controlled could match Ambrosiano for resources or its standing in Milan. Best of all it had no dominant shareholder, so that those who ran it had an unfettered hand. Sindona and his new friend quickly came up with a plan to gain control of Ambrosiano through the creation of a series of shell companies in Panama, the Bahamas, and Luxembourg. The scheme would require the participation of Archbishop Marcinkus, since the Catholic nature of the companies would have to be verified. The Archbishop, of course, was most pleased to cooperate and arranged for Calvi to be appointed as Ambrosiano's new direttore generale (general manager).71 

TIME FOR ACTION 

1969 was also a banner year for Operation Gladio. The radical left was on the rise throughout Italy and the Western World. The momentum was provided by the reaction against NATO's involvement in Vietnam, the breakdown of traditional Catholic doctrine in the wake of Vatican II and the implementation of aggiornamento (updating), and the rise of a counterculture that viewed Che Guevara and Chairman Mao as folk heroes. In the national election, Italy's Communist Party (PCI) gained 27 percent of the overall vote. To make matters worse, the country established regional elections, which enabled the Communists to gain control of Bologna, Florence, Tuscany, Umbria, Liguria, the Marches, Piedmont, and Emilia-Romagna and to form a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and the Italian Socialists in Rome, Milan, and Turin.72 

The time was right for the CIA to unleash the full force of Gladio through a strategy of tension, which would cause the people of Italy to view the Communists as a threat to their lives and well being. Such a strategy would serve as an antithesis to the prevailing Zeitgeist and the means of inaugurating a New World Order.

next

false flag terrorism

footnotes

CHAPTER FIVE: THE SECRET SOCIETY 

1. William Scobie, “Stay Behind Units,” London Observer, November 11, 1990. 

2. Natalino Zuanella, Gli anni bui della Slavia: attività delle organizzazioni segrete nel Friuli orientale (Cividale del Friuli: Società Cooperativa Editrice Dom, 1996). 

3. Ibid. 

4. Robert Hutchinson, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006), pp. 208–9. 

5. Ibid. 

6. Editors, “The CIA in Western Europe,” Wake Up Magazine (UK), 2007, http://www.american-buddha.com/cia.westeurope.htm (accessed May 20, 2014). 

7. David Yallop, In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), p. 108. 

8. Luigi DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker: Michele Sindona (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983), p. 68. 

9. Alphonse Cerza, “The Truth Is Stranger than Fiction,” Masonic Service Association, September 1967. 

10. Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 201. 

11. Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terror in Italy (London: Constable, 1991), p. 32. 

12. Ibid., p. 30. 

13. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Declaration on Masonic Associations,” November 26, 1983, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19831126_declaration-masonic_en.html (accessed May 20, 2014). 

14. “Ten Reasons Catholics Cannot Be Masons,” Consecration, Militia of the Immaculata, Liberty, Illinois, 2013, http://www.consecration.com/default.aspx?id=46 (accessed May 20, 2014). 

15. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 116. 

16. Peter T. Schneider and Jane C. Schneider, Reversible Destiny: Mafia, AntiMafia, and the Struggle for Palermo (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2003), p. 76. 

17. Ibid. 

18. Donatella Della Porta and Alberto Vannucci, Corrupt Exchanges: Actors, Resources, and Mechanisms of Political Corruption (Chicago: Aldine Transaction, 1999), p. 168. 

19. Patricia Clough, “Spirit of the Masons Lives on in the Murky Recesses of Italian Life,” The Independent (UK), July 18, 1993. 

20. Ibid. 

21. P2 list, as found among the papers of Licio Gelli, Deep Politics Forum, posted September 2008, https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?1222-List-of-P2-Members (accessed May 20, 2014). 

22. Ibid. 

23. Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop, La Piscine: Les Services Secrets Francais: 1944-1984 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985), p. 85. 

24. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), pp. 86–89. 

25. Ibid. 

26. Daniele Ganser, “Terrorism in Western Europe: An Approach to NATO's Secret Stay-Behind Armies,” The Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, Winter/Spring 1985. 

27. Ibid. 

28. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Portland, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 61. 

29. Richard Cottrell, Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe (Palm Desert, California: Progressive Press, 2012), p. 57. 

30. Ibid. 

31. Ibid., p. 112. 

32. Carl Colby, dir., The Man Whom Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby, New York: Act 4 Entertainment, September 2011. 

33. Edward Pentin, “Why Did Vatican II Ignore Communism?” Catholic World Report, December 10, 2012, http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/1798/why_did_vatican_ii_ignore_communism.aspx#.UkyiQNK1EYE (accessed May 20, 2014). 

34. Martin A. Lee, “Their Will Be Done,” Mother Jones, July/August 1983, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1983/07/their-willbe-done (accessed May 20, 2014). 

35. Ibid. 

36. Ibid. 

37. Andrea Lazzarini, Paolo VI (Rome: Casa Editrice Herder, 1978), pp. 20–21. 

38. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 35. See also, Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 116. 

39. Roland Flamini, Pope, Premier, and President: The Cold War Summit That Never Was (New York: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 186– 89. 

40. “Letter Written by Fr. Luigi Villa to All Cardinals regarding Pope Paul VI,” The Laitytude, November 21, 2012, http://mumbailaity.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/letter-written-by-fr-luigi-villa-to-all-cardinals-regarding-pope-paul-vi-and-who-wasappointed-to-uncover-freemasonry/ (accessed May 20, 2014). 

41. Andrew Gavin Marshall, “Operation Gladio: CIA Network of ‘Stay-Behind’ Secret Armies,” Global Research, July 17, 2008, http://www.globalresearch.ca/operation-gladio-cia-network-of-stay-behind-secret-armies/9556 (accessed May 20, 2014). 

42. Cottrell, Gladio, p. 219. 

43. David Yallop, In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), p. 113. See also Philip Willan, “Meeting Licio,” Interview 1989, http://www.philipwillan.com/gelli.html (accessed May 20, 2014). 

44. Lernoux, In Banks We Trust, p. 175. 

45. Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 70. 

46. Yallop, In God's Name, p. 114. 

47. Ibid., p. 246. 

48. Memo, Colonel Harlan Holman to Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, August 29, 1957, in the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence's Post 1952 Paperclip files, Washington National records Center, declassified. 

49. Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 70. 

50. Lernoux, In Banks We Trust, p. 175. 

51. Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 178. 

52. John Judge, “Good Americans,” Selected Writings of John Judge, Citizens Watch, 1983, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/GoodAmericans.html (accessed May 19, 2014). 

53. John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 265. 

54. Yallop, In God's Name, pp. 118–19. 

55. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 31. 

56. Cottrell, Gladio, p. 141. 

57. Arthur E. Rowse, “Gladio: The Secret U.S. War to Subvert Italian Democracy,” The Architecture of Modern Political Power, February 23, 1993, http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/gladio.html (accessed May 20, 2014). 

58. Andrew Dilks, “Boston, False Flags and the Strategy of Tension,” Disinformation, April 29, 2013, http://disinfo.com/2013/04/boston-false-flags-and-the-strategy-of-tension/ (accessed May 20, 2014). 

59. Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, p. 70. 

60. Ibid., p. 71. 

61. Giuseppe De Lutiis, Storia Dei Servizi Segreti in Italia (Rome: Editori Riunite, 1984), p. 73. 

62. S. Christie, “Stefano de Chiaie,” Anarchy/Refract, 1984, http://digilander.libero.it/freebintel/bgt.htm (accessed May 20, 2014). 

63. Staff report, “Mio Padre Scrisse a Moro la Verita’ sul Piano Solo,” La Repubblica, December 12, 1990, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1990/12/21/mio-padre-scrisse-moro-la-verita-sul.html (accessed May 20, 2014). 

64. Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 67. 

65. Ibid. 

66. Yallop, In God's Name, p. 115. 

67. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 73. 

68. Ibid., p. 68. 

69. Marshall, “Operation Gladio.” 

70. Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 55. 

71. Ibid., p. 158. 

72. Ibid., p. 46. 

73. Ibid., p. 48. 

74. Ibid., p. 52. See also Pietro Calderoni, Servizi Seareti (Naples: Tullio Pironti, 1986), p. 14. 

75. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 117. 

76. Gelli, quoted in Larry Gurwin, The Calvi Affair (London: Pan Books, 1984), p. 51. 

CHAPTER SIX: THE RISE OF MICHELE SINDONA 

1. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 168. 

2. Pino Arlacchi, Addio Cosa nostra: La vita di Tommaso Buscetta (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994), pp. 60–63. 

3. Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, p. 168. 

4. Luigi DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker: Michele Sindona (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983), p. 86. 

5. Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, pp. 241–42. 

6. Matt Birkbeck, The Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino (New York: Berkley Books, 2013), pp. 124–25. 

7. Ibid., p. 126. 

8. Charles Grutzner, “Ruled Family of 450. Genovese Dies in Prison at 71. ‘Boss of Bosses’ Here,” New York Times, February 16, 1969; Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, pp. 182–83. 

9. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003), p. 74. 

10. DiFonzo, St Peter's Banker, p. 225. 

11. Dean Henderson, Big Oil and Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families, and Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics, and Terror Network (New York: Bridger House Publishing, 2010), p. 284. 

12. David Yallop, In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), p. 108. 

13. R. D. da Scritto, “La Storia Sono Loro: Michele Sindona e il Delitto Ambrosoli,” Polis Blog, September 10, 2010, http://www.polisblog.it/post/8528/la-storia-sono-loro-michele-sindona-e-il-delitto-ambrosoli (accessed May 20, 2014); Stefania Limiti, “L'Ultimo Incontro di Michele Sindona,” Codo in Piedi, May 26, 2013, http://www.cadoinpiedi.it/2013/05/26/lultimo_incontro_di_michele_sindona.html (accessed May 20, 2014). 

14. Peter Dale Scott, “Operation Paper: The United States and Drugs in Thailand and Burma,” The Asia Pacific Journal, 2008, http://japanfocus.org/-peter_dale-scott/3436 (accessed May 20, 2014). See also, Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, p. 260. 

15. Martin A. Lee, “Their Will Be Done,” Mother Jones, July/August 1983, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1983/07/their-willbe-done (accessed May 20, 2014). 

16. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 38; Yallop, In God's Name, p. 109; Henderson, Big Oil, p. 287. 

17. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 8. 

18. Rupert Cornwell, God's Banker: An Account of the Life and Death of Roberto Calvi (London: Victor Gollancz, 1984), p. 52. 

19. Piers Compton, Broken Cross (London: Neville Spearman, 1984), p. 212. 

20. Ibid. 

21. Yallop, In God's Name, p. 109. See also, David Golman, “ADL's Sterling Bank Sued in Italian Mafia Case,” EIR, February 10, 1982. 

22. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 37. 

23. Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 180. 

24. “Family Jewels,” FOI Electronic Reading Room, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Archives (accessed December 2, 2013). 

25. Sam Giancana and Chuck Giancana, Double Cross (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010), pp. 470–71. 

26. Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, p. 167. 

27. Mae Brassell, “Transcription of World Watchers International, Broadcast #495,” May 31, 1981, http://www.maebrussell.com/Transcriptions/495.html (accessed May 20, 2014). 

28. Lernoux, In Banks We Trust, pp. 63–99. 

29. Peter Lattiman, “Willard C. Butcher, Former Chief of Chase Manhattan, Dies at 85,” New York Times, August 27, 2012. 

30. Lernoux, In Banks We Trust, pp. 84–88. 

31. Edward M. Brecher, “The Consumer Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs,” Consumer Reports, 1972, http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cu20.html (accessed May 20, 2014). 

32. Sean Gardiner, “Heroin: From the Civil War to the 70s, and Beyond,” City Limits, July 5, 2009. 

33. Yallop, In God's Name, p. 111. 

34. Ibid. 

35. Kim Andersen, “Vatikanets Penge,” Tagryggen, October 7, 2004, http://www.tagryggen.dk/? tr=true&num=VmF0aWthbmV0cyBQZW5nZQ== (accessed May 20, 2014). 

36. Ibid. 

37. Yallop, In God's Name, p. 112. 

38. Ibid. 

39. “Michele Sindona,” Strano, 1989, http://www.strano.net/stragi/stragi/nomi/sindona.htm (accessed May 20, 2014). 

40. Claire Sterling, Octopus: How the Long Reach of the Sicilian Mafia Controls the Global Narcotics Trade (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 191. 

41. Ibid. 

42. Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Finance (Boston: South End Press, 1980), p. 225. 

43. Michele Sindona, “La Lettera a Reagan,” September 7, 1981, http://ioso.info/2013/09/17/lettera-di-michele-sindona-a-reagan/ (accessed May 20, 2014). 

44. McCoy, Politics of Heroin, pp. 250–51. 

45. Ibid. 

46. Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA, the Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), p. 44. 

47. Ibid., pp. 46–47. 

48. Sterling, Octopus, p. 191. 

49. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 11. 

50. Ibid. 

51. Malachi Martin, Rich Church: Poor Church (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1984), p. 62. 

52. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 11. 

53. Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, p. 62. 

54. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 11. 

55. Piers Compton, Broken Cross (London: Neville Spearman, 1984), p. 212. 

56. Yallop, In God's Name, p. 125. 

57. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 124. 

58. David Pallister and Rory McCarthy, “Corruption Hits Senior Politicos,” Guardian, November 14, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/nov/15/uk.economy (accessed May 20, 2014). 

59. John A. Shaw, “From Baghdad to Chicago: Rezko and the Auchi Empire,” Wikileaks, October 10, 2008, http://wikileaks.org/wiki/From_Bagdad_to_Chicago:_Rezko_and_the_Auchi_empire (accessed May 20, 2014). 

60. G. William Domhoff et al, “Probing the Rockefeller Fortune,” A Report Prepared for Members of the U. S. Congress,” November 1974, http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/Rockefeller.html (accessed May 20, 2014). 

61. DiFonzo, St. Peter's Banker, p. 87. 

62. Ibid. 

63. Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, p. 65. 

64. Ibid. 

65. Domhoff et al, “Probing the Rockefeller Fortune.” 

66. Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, p. 65. 

67. Nick Tosches, Power on Earth: Michele Sindona's Explosive Story (New York: Arbor House, 1986), pp. 113–14. 

68. Umberto Santino, “The Financial Mafia: The Illegal Accumulation of Wealth and the Financial-Industrial Complex,” Centro Siciliano di Documentazione, 1984, http://www.centroimpastato.it/otherlang/finmafiaen.php3 (accessed May 20, 2014). 

69. Cornwell, God's Banker, p. 28. 

70. Ibid. 

71. Ibid., pp. 48–49. 

72. Palash Ghosh, “Green, White and Lots of Red: How Italy Got the West's Biggest Communist Party,” International Business Times, July 26, 2013, http://www.ibtimes.com/green-white-lots-red-how-italy-got-wests-biggest-communist-party-1360089 (accessed May 20, 2014)

FAIR USE NOTICE

THIS SITE CONTAINS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL THE USE OF WHICH HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN SPECIFICALLY AUTHORIZED BY THE COPYRIGHT OWNER. AS A JOURNALIST, I AM MAKING SUCH MATERIAL AVAILABLE IN MY EFFORTS TO ADVANCE UNDERSTANDING OF ARTISTIC, CULTURAL, HISTORIC, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL ISSUES. I BELIEVE THIS CONSTITUTES A 'FAIR USE' OF ANY SUCH COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AS PROVIDED FOR IN SECTION 107 OF THE US COPYRIGHT LAW.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH TITLE 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107, THE MATERIAL ON THIS SITE IS DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PROFIT TO THOSE WHO HAVE EXPRESSED A PRIOR INTEREST IN RECEIVING THE INCLUDED INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL CAN BE REMOVED ON THE REQUEST OF THE OWNER.