PART 4:OPERATION GLADIO:THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE VATICAN,CIA AND THE MAFIA

I really do not know which is more disgusting, this government and the CIA or the Catholic Church.The CIA had it hands down,but this book has the scum in the Institution that calls itself a church gaining quickly down the stretch.Catholics the world over should be up in arms over this piece of garbage becoming Pope.He has so much blood on his hands,it is just crazy.Chapter 8 will open your eyes to this despicable person at the top of this corrupt organization,that has been in bed with the united states government now for over 70 years. 

CHAPTER 7

FALSE FLAG TERRORISM

The official figures say that alone in the period between January 1, 1969 and December 31, 1987, there have been in Italy 14,591 acts of violence with a political motivation. It is maybe worth remembering that these “acts” have left behind 491 dead and 1,181 injured and maimed—figures of a war without parallel in any other European country. 

Giovanni Pellegrino, president of Italy's 

parliamentary commission investigating Gladio 

(quoted in Daniele Ganser's NATO's Secret Armies) 

The strategy of tension gained increased impetus after US president Richard Nixon took office in 1969. Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Adviser, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts. Kissinger was deeply concerned about the monumental gains made by the Italian Communist Party in national and regional elections. The financial spigots were opened without concern of leakage. In addition to the millions being channeled to P2 by CIA officials, millions more were funneled to Sindona for the implementation of the strategy through US ambassador Graham Martin. In 1970 alone, Sindona received more than $10 million from the Ambassador.1 

The first major attack occurred on December 12, 1969, when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan's Piazza Fontana. Seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight injured. The victims, for the most part, were farmers who had deposited their meager earnings in the bank. Within an hour, three bombs exploded in Rome, one in a pedestrian underpass, which injured fourteen people, and two on Victor Emmanuel's monument, which houses Italy's Unknown Soldier.2 

ARRESTING ANACHISTS 

The acts of terrorism were attributed to left-wing radicals, and eighty suspects were rounded up, including Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist railway worker. In the course of the interrogation, Pinelli died, falling from the fourth floor window of the police station. Despite serious discrepancies in the official police account, an Italian court ruled that Pinelli's fall had been caused by a sudden loss of consciousness (malore).3 

Pietro Valpreda, another anarchist, was also taken into custody for the Piazza Fontana bombing, after a taxi driver identified him as a passenger he had transported to Banca Nazionale that day. After his alibi was judged insufficient, the anarchist was held for three years in preventive detention before being sentenced for the crime. Sixteen years later, Valpreda was exonerated, after evidence established that the attack had been conducted in accordance with Operation Gladio.4 

DAMNING EVIDENCE 

But the Italian police investigators were neither completely corrupt nor totally incompetent. Months after the Piazza Fontana bombing, Ordine Nuovo (ON the New Order), a neo-fascist organization founded by Pino Rauti,[TL] came under suspicion. On March 3, 1972, Giovanni Ventura,[TR] Franco Freda,[B] and Rauti were arrested and charged with planning the terrorist attack. The evidence against them was compelling. The composition of the bombs used in Piazza Fontana was identical to the explosives that Ventura hid in a friend's home a few days after the incident. The bags in which the bombs were concealed had been purchased a couple of days before the attacks in a shop in Padua, Freda's hometown.5 Despite such findings, the three men were acquitted. 

During the trial, alarming claims were made. Ventura told the court that he was an agent of the CIA. In support of the claim, he directed court officials to a safety deposit box he had opened at Banca Popolare in the names of his mother and aunt. Within the box were confidential CIA files. One document, dated May 4, 1969, listed a number of detailed steps to be taken, including “a possible wave of terror attacks to convince public opinion of the dangers of maintaining the [government's] alliance with the left.”6 

When asked if he had been manipulated by the CIA or an outside intelligence agency, Franco Freda said: “The life of everyone is manipulated by those with more power. In my case, I accept that I have been a puppet in the hands of an idea, but not the hands of men in the secret services here [in Italy] or abroad. That is to say that I have voluntarily fought my own war, following the strategic design from my ideas. That is all.”7 

SWORN TESTIMONY 

Thirty years after the Piazza Fontana massacre, during the trial of three other ON operatives, General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counterintelligence, said that the massacre had been carried out by the Italian stay-behind army and right-wing terrorists on the orders of the CIA. In his sworn testimony, Maletti told the court, “The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of holding what it saw as a slide to the left, and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism.”8 He added, “Don't forget that Nixon was in charge and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician, but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives.” 

Similarly, Paolo Emilio Taviani, the Christian Democrat in Italy, told investigators that the Italian military intelligence service was about to send a senior officer from Rome to Milan to prevent the bombing, but decided to send a different officer from Padua in order to put the blame on left-wing anarchists. In an August 2000 interview for Il Secolo XIX newspaper, Taviani said: “It seems to me certain, however, that agents of the CIA were among those who supplied the materials and who muddied the waters of the investigation.”9 

THE AMERICAN COMMANDER 

In the course of the thirty-year investigation, Italian officials were able to put into place the key planners of the Piazza Fontana bombing. Hung Fendwich, a leading engineer for Selenia, oversaw the proliferation of attacks and coup preparations. Selenia, with offices in Rome, specialized in electronic security and defense. The company was owned by Finmeccanica, a conglomerate with a long history of ties to the CIA. Fendwich was a typical éminence grise. He studied and refined plans, drew up analyses of the political situation, and left the dirty work of execution to the ON and other neo-fascists groups in service to the Agency.10 

The bombing was allegedly commandeered by Navy Captain David Carrett, a CIA operative attached to the NATO command in Verona.11 Carrett worked in tandem with Gladio commander Sergio Minetto and Carlo Digilio, the CIA mole within Ordine Nuovo. Preparations for the bombing had been made at an isolated house near Treviso.12 

THE GOLPE BORGHESE 

On December 7, 1970—the feast of the Immaculate Conception—the Gladio unit launched the Golpe Borghese (the “Borghese Coup”), an attempt to topple the Italian government. Named after Junio Valerio Borghese, the Black Prince, the coup attempt involved hundreds of Gladiators (including Gelli and Sindona), along with members of the Corpo Forestale della Stato (Italy's state forest police). The planners intended to kidnap Italian President Giuseppe Saragat and to murder Angelo Vicari, the head of the national police department. At the last minute, the plans were cancelled. News arrived that Saragat's Christian Democratic government knew of the plan and stood ready to declare martial law.13 

Borghese had been busy during the Cold War. He continued to recruit former members of Decima Mas and right-wing activists, including Stefano Delle Chiaie, for Gladio, and helped to establish Fronte Nazionale (FN), an organization designed (in the words of Borghese) “to subvert the institutions of the state by means of a coup.”14 He set up his military headquarters for the coup in Rome at a shipyard owned by Remo Orlandini, one of the country's leading industrialists. According to newspaper accounts, Jesus James Angleton arrived at the shipyard before the coup attempt and left as soon as the planned attack was cancelled.15 

BORGHESE'S FAREWELL 

When Borghese died in Spain in 1974, Delle Chiaie said the Black Prince had been poisoned because investigations into the 1970 coup had begun in Italy and too many people wanted him dead.16 

Thirty years after the Golpe Borghese, French investigative journalist René Monzat uncovered evidence that the military attache at the U S Embassy in Rome was intricately involved in the plot. Monzat also discovered that President Nixon had carefully monitored the preparations and remained constantly informed of the developments by CIA officials. These findings were confirmed through a Freedom of Information request from La Repubblica in December 2004.17 

THE PETEANO ATTACK 

On May 31, 1971, a car bomb exploded in a forest near the Italian village of Peteano. The explosion gravely wounded one and killed three members of the carabinieri, Italy's paramilitary police force. The carabinieri had been summoned to the site by an anonymous phone call. Inspecting an abandoned Fiat 500, one of the policemen opened the hood and triggered the bomb. Two days later, another anonymous call implicated the Red Brigades, the far-left Communist group that had engaged in assassinations and kidnappings. Two hundred Communists with an affiliation to the group were rounded up and held in custody.18 

THE ARMS DUMP 

The case against the Brigades was eventually weakened by a discovery made near Trieste by the carabinieri on February 24, 1972. The Italian officers stumbled upon an underground arms dump containing automatic rifles, grenades, and Composition C-4, the most powerful plastic explosive in the world at that time.19 The officers initially thought that the cache must belong to a criminal group such as the Camorra or the ’Ndrangheta if it did not belong to the Brigades. But the C-4 baffled the investigators. The Mafias and the Brigades relied on explosives made of gelignite; C-4 was an explosive that was used almost exclusively by NATO and US forces.20 

A week later, more arms were found in a nearby cave. This second discovery prompted General Gerardo Serravalle, the commander of Gladio and Italian military intelligence, to order the dismantling of all the arms dumps in forests, meadows, church basements , and cemeteries throughout Italy. In addition to explosives, the dumps contained portable arms, ammunition, hand grenades, knives and daggers, 60 mm mortars, several 57 mm recoilless rifles, sniper rifles, radio transmitters, binoculars, and various tools.21 The weapons were removed from the 137 burial sites and transported by the secret service plane (Argo 16) to the Gladio base in Sardinia. The aircraft exploded in flight on November 23, 1973, and may have been sabotaged by aggrieved Gladiators. This suspicion gained credence by the fact that Serravalle was supposed to have been a passenger on the plane.22 In 1990, Serravalle told the press that he had been shocked to discover the extremist views of those in his command. “I found myself an officer in the service of the Italian Republic at the head of an armed band,” he said.23 

THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 

In 1984, after twelve years of intense investigation, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a leader of ON, was taken into custody and questioned about the Peteano incident. After confessing in court that he had planted the car bomb, Vinciguerra said: 

With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages;…[it] lies within the state itself. There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity that is, to organize a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army…. A secret organization, a super-organization with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them…. A super-organization which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on NATO's behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.24 

Following his conviction and sentence to life in prison, Vinciguerra, in an interview with the Guardian, said, “The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix. The Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo, were being mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organizations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance.”25 

THE BRESCIA BLAST 

Despite the setbacks, including the discovery of the arms dump, the attacks continued. On May 28, 1974, a bomb exploded within a garbage container that had been placed in the midst of Piazza della Loggia in Brescia. The incident took place during a demonstration against the Movimento d'Azione Rivoluzionaria (MAR), yet another neo-fascist group. 

Three weeks before the bombing, Carlo Fumagalli, a CIA operative and the founder of MAR, had been arrested for starting a fire at the Pirelli-Bicocca tarpaulin depot. The damage was estimated at a thousand million lire at the time and a thirty-year old worker lost his life in the blaze. Years later, Gaetano Orlando, a MAR spokesman, admitted, “The MAR group's plan was that the attack should be put down to the Red Brigades which were on the rise at the time.”26 Brescia, where the bombing took place, was the town in which Fumagalli and the MAR had established their headquarters. 

The Brescia blast killed eight people and wounded one hundred more. The attack, it was later learned, had been led by Pino Rauti, the founder of ON, who had been receiving regular paychecks from the US Embassy in Rome.27 An hour and a half after the bombing the local police chief ordered firemen to hose down the square. This order caused, in the words of examining magistrate Domenico Vino, “the possible loss of vital evidence and aroused alarming questions as to the haste of the operation.”28 

Following the attack, a series of anonymous callers to the police and the press attempted to implicate Lotta Continua (“Continuous Struggle”), a militant Communist organization, in the incident. Members of the group were rounded up and placed in custody only to be acquitted due to lack of evidence.29 

TERROR ON A TRAIN 

On August 4, 1974, another major terrorist incident occurred when a bomb exploded on the Italicus Rome-Munich Express, as the train pulled out of a tunnel near the village of San Benedetto Val di Sambro. Twelve people were killed and 105 injured. This attack represented a reaction to the May 12 vote that abolished Italy's arcane divorce laws. The outcome represented a sharp rebuke to the Vatican and the Christian Democratic Party. Following the election, Gelli funneled black funds to Augusto Cauchi, who had commandeered the bombing.30 When the police traced the evidence to Cauchi, he fled, with Gelli's assistance, to Argentina. Sixteen years after the incident, Mario Tuti and Luciano Franci—two members of Cauchi's criminal clan—received life sentences for their part in the train attack.31 

THE MASTER PLAN 

In 1976, Gelli and other P2 officials drafted documents outlining their plans for the “Democratic Rebirth” of Italy. The plans called for the infiltration and control of all state institutions, all opposition groups (including the Italian Communist Party), the trade unions, the leading daily newspapers, and the national television stations. The drafters of the plan believed that this takeover could be accomplished by the expenditure of 40 billion lire (approximately $250 million) in black funds. The overall objective was “the establishment of a club where the best level of industry and financial sector leaders, members of the liberal professions, public officials and magistrates, as well as very few, selected politicians are represented…men who would constitute a real committee of trustees respecting those politicians who will take on the honor of implementing the plan.”32 The club would implement a series of electoral, judicial, and constitutional reforms in order to make the country more “governable.” National political life would be subordinated to an oligarchy with no formal political accountability, represented by the secret P2 lodge. Here, and not in state institutions, decisions would be made. Gelli and his Masonic brothers could pull a string and everything would fall into place. Once this system was established, Italy could be steered in the direction determined by P2's American controllers. 

The plans, as outlined in the P2 documents “Memorandum sulla Situazione Italiana” (“Memorandum on the Italian Situation”) and “Piano di Rinascita Democratica” (“Plan of Democratic Rebirth”), were found by the Italian police at the Fiumicino airport in Rome. They had been concealed within the false bottom of a suitcase belonging to Gelli's daughter.33 Also in the suitcase was a top secret US military dossier entitled “Stability Operations—Intelligence—Special Fields,” that had been published under the authority of General William Westmoreland, the US Army's chief of staff. The dossier informed intelligence operatives of appropriate means of response to Communist insurgencies.34 

THE MORO KIDNAPPING 

On March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, Italy's prime minister, was kidnapped while on his way to parliament for the opening of debate on the newly formed government of national unity—a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats. The incident occurred when a white Fiat with diplomatic plates pulled in front of his black limousine, forcing the driver to slam on the brakes. Two men from the Fiat and four other assassins who had been waiting on the sidewalk in Alitalia pilot uniforms, opened fire on Moro's bodyguards, killing all five of them. 

Moro's policy of working with and bringing the Communists into the government was denounced both by the USSR and the United States. But no one had been more outraged at the Italian prime minister's attempt at rapprochement than US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. In 1974, when Moro paid a visit to the United States, Kissinger warned him: “You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration, or you will pay dearly for it.”35 Kissinger's threat had such a profound effect upon Moro that the prime minister became physically ill and contemplated retirement from government.36 

The military secret service and acting prime minister Giulio Andreotti immediately blamed the left-wing terrorist organization Red Brigades for the kidnapping and proceeded to crack down on the left. Seventy-two thousand roadblocks were erected and 37,000 houses were searched. More than six million people were questioned in less than two months. While Moro was held captive, his wife Eleonora spent the days in agony together with her closest family and friends, even asking Pope Paul VI for help.37 

THE CRISIS COMMITTEE 

Steve Pieczenik, a former US State Department hostage negotiator and international crisis manager, claimed that he played a “critical role” in Moro's fate. He had been sent to Italy on the day of the kidnapping by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, who viewed Moro's project of accommodation with the Communists with great disdain.38 

In Rome, Pieczenik worked with a crisis committee, headed by Francesco Cossiga[L], Italy's interior minister. Cossiga, who became Italy's prime minister in 1979 and president in 1985, had strong ties to Gelli and Gladio.39 Indeed, all of the officials who served on the crisis committee were members of P2—including Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, head of General Staff of the Defense; General Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI; Walter Pelosi, head of CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies); General Raffaele Giudice, head of the Guardia di Finanza; and General Donato Lo Prete, chief of General Staff of the Guardia di Finanza.40 Giulio Grassini[R], the head of the newly appointed Anti-Terrorism Inspectorate, was also a member of the lodge. Throughout the investigation, Grassini remained in constant contact not only with the committee but also Gelli.41 

On May 9, 1978, the committee forged a memo, attributed to the Red Brigades, stating that Moro was dead.42 Pieczenik said that the memo, which was leaked to the press, served a dual purpose: to prepare the Italian public for the worst and to let the Red Brigades know that the state would not negotiate for Moro and considered him already dead. “The decision was made in the fourth week of the kidnapping, when Moro's letters became desperate and he was about to reveal state secrets,” Pieczenik later testified. “It was an extremely difficult decision, but the one who made it in the end was interior minister Francesco Cossiga, and, apparently, also prime minister Giulio Andreotti.”43 When pressed about the committee's action, Pieczenik added: “We had to sacrifice Aldo Moro to maintain the stability of Italy.”44 

A STONE IN THE MOUTH 

In a cryptic article, appearing in a May 1978 issue of Osservatore Politico, investigative journalist Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli drew a connection between the death of Moro and Gladio. Moro's body, he noted, had been left in the trunk of a car parked next to an ancient Roman amphitheater where runaway slaves and prisoners fought to the death in gladiatorial combat. “Who knows what there was in the destiny of Moro that his death should be discovered next to that wall?” Pecorelli wrote. “The blood of yesterday and the blood of today.”45 

In another article, Pecorelli wrote that Moro's kidnapping had been carried out by a “lucid superpower” and was inspired by the “logic of Yalta.” He described the crime as “one of the biggest political operations carried out in recent decades in an industrialized country integrated into the Western system.”46 In one of his last articles, published on January 16, 1979, Pecorelli had written, “We will talk about Steve R. Pieczenik, who participated for three weeks in the interior ministry's expert meetings, then returned to America before Moro was killed, and reported to Congress that the measures taken by Cossiga on the Moro affair were the best possible in the circumstances.”47 

Several months after making these claims, Pecorelli was gunned down near his office on Via Orazio in Rome. The barrel of a gun had been shoved down his throat and the trigger pulled twice. As a classic gesture of the Mafia's practice of sasso in bocca (stone in the mouth), police officers discovered a stone within Picorelli's mouth as an announcement that the journalist never again would divulge a secret.48 

THE HYPERION LANGUAGE SCHOOL 

The fact that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by the CIA and the Italian secret services remains no longer contested. The purpose of the strategy of tension was to encourage violence from the radical left in order to convince the Italian people of the need to repress the rise of communism. The Brigades were a perfect foil. With unflinching radicalism, they considered the Italian Communist Party (PCI) too moderate and Moro's opening too compromising. 

Thanks to the infiltration, which occurred in 1973, the Brigades began to work closely with the Hyperion Language School in Paris, with most brigadiers unaware that it had been founded by the CIA. Hyperion opened an office in Italy shortly before the kidnapping and closed it a few months later. An Italian police report singles out Hyperion as “the most important CIA office in Europe.”49 Founded by Corrado Simioni, a CIA operative who worked with Radio Free Europe; Duccio Berio, an informant to the P2-controlled Italian military intelligence; and Mario Moretti, the CIA operative who was later convicted of killing Aldo Moro, the “school” acted as an intermediary for meetings between Italian and foreign terrorist groups, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Red Army Faction of Germany, and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (the Basque revolutionary army).50 

THE RED BRIGADE MYSTERY 

In 1974, four years before the kidnapping, Red Brigade founders Renato Curcio[L] and Alberto Franceschini[R] had been arrested in Rome. Franceschini immediately accused Mario Moretti of turning them in, stating that Moretti and Giovanni Senzani, another leading Red Brigade member, were, in fact, CIA spies.51 “From a military point of view,” Franceschini told an Italian parliamentary commission, “those of you who know the people who were supposed to have carried out the [Moro] operation will be perfectly aware that they were not capable of it.” 

Franceschini's testimony is supported by the several facts: (1) the gunmen who mowed down Moro's bodyguards were highly trained assassins with skills that far exceed those of known brigadiers; (2) the assassins were obliged to wear Alitalia uniforms in order to identify each other; (3) Moro had been held captive in an apartment complex owned by SISMI, Italy's military agency; and (4) the bullets that riddled Moro's body were treated with a special preserving paint that characterized the ammunition found in the Gladio arms dumps.52 

In 1981, Moretti was arrested, apparently by accident, and eventually confessed to the kidnapping. He received six life sentences for the murder but never cooperated with investigators. Cossiga, when he became president of Italy in 1985, pressed for a pardon. Moretti was paroled after fifteen years and presently resides in Milan.53 His early pardon by the Italian court has never been explained. 

VATICAN PIECES OF THE PUZZLE 

Fr. Felix Morlion, a Belgian priest, was affiliated with the Hyperion Language School and served to establish a branch of the “school” in Rome.54 During World War II, he had worked closely with Wild Bill Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services by creating Pro Deo a Catholic intelligence agency. When the Nazis seized control of Western Europe, Donovan relocated Morlion and his agency from Lisbon to New York.55 In 1945, the priest relocated to Rome, where he became the private emissary of Pope Pius XII and four of the pope's successors. Throughout the 1960's, he remained a pivotal US intelligence agent, as witnessed by his key role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.56 At JFK's urging, the Dominican priest had attended a strategic meeting in Andover, Massachusetts, where he established a communication channel between Moscow and Washington, mediated by Pope John XXIII, through whom messages were passed that brought an end to the threat of a nuclear war. In 1966, Morlion established, with funding from the CIA, the Pro Deo University which became Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (the International University of Social Studies). As president of the new university, Morlion became a force in the formation of the right-wing policies of the Italian government. He also reportedly began recruiting of terrorists and assassins, including Moretti and Mehmet Ali Ağca (who attempted the hit on John Paul II).57 

Questions about Morlion's involvement in the Moro matter first arose from the discovery of photos, taken by Pecorelli, of the prominent priest in the company of leading Italian military intelligence officials at the time of the kidnapping. Such questions became more pressing when the Rome office of the Hyperion School, which Morlion helped to establish, opened shortly before the Moro kidnapping, only to close the following autumn.58 Even more puzzling is the fact that the Pro Deo founder received prominent mention in the secret files of Licio Gelli (which were seized by the Italian police in 1982).59 

Fr. Antonio Mennini, a Vatican official, served as the intermediary between Moro and his family during the time of the captivity. How Fr. Mennini came to serve in this capacity raises questions about the extent of the Vatican's involvement in the crime. Fr. Mennini, who claimed to have heard Moro's last confession, was the son of Luigi Mennini, who served under the direct supervision of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Why would the brigadiers—avowed atheists—employ the services of a priest? And why would they seek the service of the son of a high ranking IOR official? Were Luigi or Antonio somehow in league with the kidnappers? Fr. Mennini, following Moro's death, rose through the ranks of Holy Mother Church and presently serves as the papal nuncio to Great Britain. And the Vatican, to this day, continues to shield Moro's confessor from ever having to testify in state hearings concerning the Prime Minister's abduction and death.60 

THE BOLOGNA BOMBING 

Gladio's role in the strategy of tension might have gone undetected save for the massacre in Bologna. At 10:25 a.m. on August 2, 1980, a time bomb within an unattended suitcase exploded in the crowded, air-conditioned waiting room of the Central Station in Bologna, destroying most of the main building. Eighty-four people were killed in the bombing and more than two hundred wounded, making it the most savage attack to take place on Italian soil since World War II.61 

Blame, of course, was placed on the Red Brigades and the radical left. But there was a problem that could not be resolved by the roundup of the usual suspects. The bomb that had been used in Bologna was not an ordinary explosive. It was a sophisticated device made of TNT and Composition B—a device that had been developed for use by the US military. What's more, the bomb was very similar to the explosives which the Italian police had found in the arms dump near Trieste. The planners had made a mistake—a mistake that was complicated by the presence of members of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR, “Armed Revolutionary Nuclei”) at the train station. The NAR, like Ordine Nuovo, was a violent neofascist group, and its leader Valerio Fioravanti, had been slightly injured by blast.62 

A WEB OF DECEPTION 

On August 26, the prosecutor of Bologna issued arrest warrants for twenty-six NAR members, who were interrogated in Ferrara, Rome, Padua, and Parma. All, thanks to the intervention of SISMI, were released from custody.63 Gelli and his fellow gladiators were now forced to lead investigators in the wrong direction by bringing forward believable suspects. The web of deception was allegedly woven by Michael Ledeen, a US operative who worked closely with P2 controlled SISMI.64 Ledeen, at the time, was serving at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank that had been established by the CIA. In 1981, Henry Kissinger maintained an office at CSIS along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.65 

The carefully constructed new report, which was leaked to the Italian press by SISMI, placed the blame for the bombing on a group of international terrorists known as the European National Fascists, whose leader was Karl Heinz Hoffman.66 Hoffman's group, the phony report alleged, had been trained for the attack in Lebanon by Salah Khalef (also known as Abu Iyad), a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. This report seemed credible. Eight weeks after the Bologna bombing, on September 26, a member of Hoffman's group had blown himself up at Oktoberfest in Munich, killing 12 others and wounding 215. A week later in Paris, a bomb planted by the group in front of a synagogue had killed 4 persons and wounded 13.67 This explanation might have held despite the fact that it was denied by the PLO and could not be verified by prosecutor Aldo Gentile, who made several trips to Lebanon. 

THE UNCOVERED LIST 

But too many mistakes had been made. Nagging questions remained about the Composition 4, the mysterious arms dumps, and the collective testimony of the suspects who had been taken into custody from 1969 to 1980—the so-called “years of lead” (Anni di Piombo—a reference to the number of bullets that were fired during this decade). What's more, on March 7, 1981, a raid on Licio Gelli's villa uncovered a list of 962 P2 members that included top Italian intelligence, military, media, and political officials in SISMI, along with several prominent Argentines. Some of the more interesting names were as follows: 

Silvio Berlusconi—businessman, future founder of the Forza Italia political party, and future prime minister of Italy 

Michele Sindona 

Roberto Calvi 

Umberto Ortolani 

Franco Di Bella, director of Corriere della Sera, the leading Italian daily newspaper 

Angelo Rizzoli Jr., owner of Corriere della Sera 

Bruno Tassan Din, general director of Corriere della Sera 

General Vito Miceli, chief of the Italian Army Intelligence Service from 1969 to 1974 

Federico Umberto D'Amato, leader of an intelligence cell (Ufficio affari riservati) in the Italian Minister of Interior 

General Giuseppe Santovito, chief of the Italian Army Intelligence Service from 1978 to 1981 

Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, Chief of the General Staff of the Army 

General Giulio Grassini, head of Italy's central intelligence service (SISDE) from 1977 to 1981 

General Pietro Musumeci, deputy director of Italy's Army Intelligence Service, SISMI 

General Franco Picchiotti 

General Giovan Battista Palumbo 

General Raffaele Giudice, commander of the Guardia di Finanza from 1974 to 1978 

General Orazio Giannini, commander of the Guardia di Finanza from 1980 to 1981 

Carmine Pecorelli, the journalist who was assassinated on March 20, 1979 

Maurizio Costanzo, a leading television talk show host 

Pietro Longo, secretary of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PSDI) 

Emilio Massera (Argentina), a member of the military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla in Buenos Aires from 1976 to 1978 

José López Rega (Argentina), Argentina's Minister of Social Welfare in Perón's government and founder of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (“Triple A”) 

Raúl Alberto Lastiri, president of Argentina from July 13, 1973, to October 12, 1973 

Alberto Vignes, Argentina's Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1973 to 1975 

Carlos Alberto Corti, Argentina's Naval Commander admiral 

Stefano Delle Chiaie, Italian neofascist with ties to the military junta in Argentina 68 

The publication of the names created a national furor that resulted in the collapse of the government of Arnaldo Forlani, Italy's prime minister The Italian people were aghast to learn that their most powerful political, military, and media leaders were members of the clandestine lodge. But the discovery did not directly link the lodge with the Bologna bombing or the other attacks that had taken place during the years of lead. That link would be eventually found in the Rome airport within the suitcase of Gelli's daughter. The two documents outlining the master plan of the Masonic group, coupled with the top secret US Army document, were enough to convince Judge Felice Casson and his team of investigators that P2 had been involved in the attacks and that the secret society was acting as a proxy for the CIA.69 What's more, the investigators realized that the secret society, acting under orders of US officials, had been initiating acts of terror throughout the Western World, and most particularly in Argentina, under the watchful eye if not the blessing of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would ascend to the papal throne as Pope Francis I.

CHAPTER 8

GLADIO:SOUTH OF THE BORDER

Operation Condor is the code name given for intelligence collection on leftists, communists and Marxists in the Southern Cone Area. It was established between cooperating intelligence services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorist activities in member countries with Chile reportedly being the center of operations. Other participating members include: Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia. Members showing the most enthusiasm to date have been Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. 

US Department of Defense Document, October 1, 1976 

From 1965 to 1981, scores of additional terrorist attacks by Gladio units took place in countries throughout Europe. Several of the more notable incidents are as follows: 

1965 In Portugal the CIA established Aginter Press, a stay-behind unit under the command of Captain Yves Guerin Serac. The unit was trained in covert action techniques—including hands-on bomb terrorism, silent assassination, subversion techniques, clandestine communication, and infiltration and colonial warfare. The unit was responsible for the murders of Humberto Delgado, founder of the left-wing Portuguese National Liberation Front on February 13, 1965; Eduardo Mondlane, leader of the FRELIMO Independence Movement in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, on February 3, 1969; and Amilcar Cabral, the Marxist spokesman for African Party Independence Movement of Guinea and Cape Verde on January 20, 1973.1 In 1967, Aginter Press guerrilla leaders traveled to Italy at the instigation of the CIA to train members of Avanguardia Nazionale in the use of explosives for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing.2 

1966 In France President Charles de Gaulle denounced the secret warfare of the Pentagon and expelled the European headquarters of NATO. De Gaulle's actions were triggered by a series of attempts by the French Gladio unit to assassinate him.3 

1967 In Greece the Hellenic Raiding Force (Lochos Oreinon Katadromon), which had been integrated into Gladio, overthrew the Greek Defense Ministry, ousted the left-leaning Center Union of George Papandreou, and set up a military dictatorship. When the colonels who led the coup asked Gust Avrakotos, the leading CIA operative in Greece, what to do with Papandreou, he reportedly said: “Shoot the motherfucker because he's going to come back to haunt you.”4 They ignored this advice and under heavy pressure from American academics, including John Kenneth Galbraith, agreed to release him. In 1974, Papandreou returned to Greece to form the Panhellenic Socialist Movement. 

1970 In Spain Stefano delle Chiaie and other terrorists from Italy's stay-behind army became “security consultants” for General Francisco Franco's secret police, conducting over a thousand violent attacks and committing an estimated fifty murders. Among their victims were members of the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, who had been fighting for Basque independence.5 After Franco's death in 1975, delle Chiaie moved to Chile, where he set up “death squads” under CIA-installed dictator Augusto Pinochet. 

1977 In Spain the secret stay-behind army, with support of Italian right-wing terrorists, carried out the Atocha massacre, attacking a lawyer's office where members of the Workers’ Commission Trade Union and the then clandestine Communist party of Spain had gathered. Five people were killed in the attack.6 

1980 In Turkey the commander of the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla, General Kenan Evren, and the Grey Wolves, Turkey's Gladio unit, initiated yet another successful military coup to seize control of the government.7 Like Italy, Turkey remained of pivotal concern to Gladio during the Cold War. It guarded one-third of NATO's total borders with Warsaw Pact countries and maintained the largest armed forces in Europe. Knowing that a Communist takeover of Turkey would be catastrophic, the Gladio forces, at the instigation of the CIA, opened fire on a rally of a million trade union supporters in Taskim Square. The massacre of 1977 resulted in the deaths of thirty-eight demonstrators and the wounding of hundreds more. 

1981 In Germany a large stay-behind arsenal was discovered near the German village of Uelzen in the Lüneburger Heide. Rightwing extremists had used the arsenal in the previous year to carry out the Munich Oktoberfest massacre in which 13 people were killed and 213 wounded.8 

LATINS LEAN LEFT 

But Latin America emerged as an area of such nagging concern that the CIA, in tandem with the Vatican, launched Operation Condor as a Latin American version of Gladio. Like Gladio, the new undertaking arose from concern over the spread of Communism that would spell disaster for US political and economic concerns and Catholic teaching. The word communist, by this time, was applied so liberally and so loosely to revolutionary or radical regimes by US intelligence that any government risked being so labeled if it advocated nationalization of private industry (particularly foreign-owned corporations), radical land reform, autarkic trade policies, acceptance of Soviet aid, or an anti-American foreign policy.9 

THE GAME PLAN 

The game plan of Operation Condor was developed, in part, in the 1950s at the Brazilian Advanced War College (Escola Superior de Guerra), a carbon copy of the US National War College.10 The Advanced War College was responsible for national security studies, development of military strategy, and the implementation of the plan for “nation building.” This plan, adopted from the Pentagon and the US Army's experience of reconstructing postwar Japan, stemmed from what Karl Haushofer called the “science” of geopolitics. 

Brazilian geopolitics, as developed by the War College, was based on the premise of a permanent world war between the forces of Communism and the West. Because by size and geographical position Brazil dominated the South Atlantic, it had a duty to keep that part of the world (in the words of Woodrow Wilson) “safe for democracy and free enterprise.” A corollary of this assertion was that Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay should become satellites of their much larger neighbor. That objective was eventually achieved by economic imperialism and “living frontiers”—that is, by Brazilian colonists invading poorly protected border lands, such as the Upper Paraná River basin of Paraguay.11 

Students at the Advanced War College, including Humberto Castelo Branco and Golbery do Couto e Silva, were taught by US military and intelligence officials, including Lieutenant Colonel Vernon Walters, the CIA's chief coup engineer.12 In 1964, the graduates of the college united into a junta that overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government of João Goulart. Following the coup, Castelo Branco emerged as the new Brazilian president and Silva as the head of Brazil's first national intelligence service.13 

The coup could not have been accomplished without the outlay of more than $20 million from the CIA, and the military officials who formed the junta were duly grateful. To show their appreciation, the officials accepted the entire package of US demands, including a generous new profit remittance law and an investment guarantee treaty covering US subsidiaries. Within two years of Goulart's overthrow, thanks to these concessions, foreign companies gained control of 50 percent of Brazilian industry—often through the expediency of what the Brazilian Finance Ministry called “constructive bankruptcy,” a combination of fiscal and monetary measures that forced local firms to sell to foreign interests or go broke. By 1971, fourteen of the country's twenty-seven largest companies were in foreign hands; of the remainder, eight were state-owned and only five were private Brazilian firms.14 

PERÓN AND P2 

When Condor was launched in 1969, Argentina—unlike Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay— posed no real problem. The majority of the country remained deeply conservative and devoutly Catholic. Juan Perón had returned from exile to defeat President Héctor Cámbora in the general election. This, for the Church and the CIA, was a happy development. Cambora, during his short term, had restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and had granted amnesty to all political prisoners. The country had fallen into chaos as six hundred social conflicts, strikes, and factory occupations erupted throughout the country. Perón, to no one's surprise, received a whopping 62 percent of the vote and began his third term as president on October 12, with Isabel, his wife, as vice president. 

Licio Gelli was a guest of honor at the inauguration. Following the ceremony, Perón knelt at the feet of the P2 Worshipful Master. Italy's prime minister Andreotti was also in attendance but failed to receive such a gesture of obeisance from the Argentine president.15 The act was more than symbolic. Gelli had mustered substantial support for Perón's return from the CIA and funneled over $70 million in black funds to Perón's Civic Front of National Liberation. The day before his return to Buenos Aires, Perón had knelt before Gelli in a secret ceremony to become a member of the P2. The rite was performed within Perón's villa in the Puerta de Hierro district of Madrid.16 Following the ceremony, Perón boarded an Alitalia plane that had been chartered by Gelli for his triumphant return to his native land.17 

In 1974, Perón issued a decree granting Gelli the Gran Cruz de la Orden del Libertador, Argentina's highest honor, and appointing him the honorary ambassador to Italy.18 By this time, a P2 lodge had been established in Argentina. Among its charter members were Admiral Emilio Massera; Raúl Alberto Lastiri, former Argentine president; José López Rega, Perón's minister of social welfare and the founder of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (“Triple A”); Alberto Vignes, Perón's minister of foreign affairs; and naval commander Carlos Alberto Corti.19 

THE COMMUNIST UPRISING 

But thirteen months after his return to office, Perón died after suffering a series of massive heart attacks. He was succeeded by Isabel, who proved to be incapable of coping with mounting resistance from the Guevarist ERP (Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo—People's Revolutionary Army)— which continued in the tradition of Che Guevara, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary who had been killed in 1967 by CIA-assisted forces in Bolivia—and the Montoneros (Movimiento Peronista Montonero, or MPM), a group of indigenous people who opposed the Spanish colonization of their land. Throughout 1974, the two left-wing groups launched attacks on business and political leaders throughout the country, killing executives from General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, and raiding military bases for weapons and explosives. By 1975, the guerrillas had conducted ambushes on the police and pitched battles against the army. An estimated ten thousand Argentine's were killed in the struggle.20 

But along with the bloodshed came something from Argentina that was infinitely more sinister in the eyes of the Vatican—an ideology that threatened not only the fundamental purpose of US imperialism but also the very core of Roman Catholic doctrine. 

THE NEW HERESY 

This ideology first reared its hoary head at a conference of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia in 1968, when the bishops, instead of upholding the latest encyclicals from Pope Paul VI, called upon the Vatican in their official proclamation to “defend the rights of the oppressed” and to uphold a “preferential option for the poor” in the struggle for social justice. The bishops condemned the Holy See's alignment with the powerful elite and denounced the oppression of the Latin American people not only by strong-arm dictators but also by the United States and other First World countries. The most pressing issue of the day, they declared, was not economic development but political oppression. What's more, in an official proclamation known as the Medellin document, the clerics declared that violence is sometimes necessary when directed against the government and social institutions.21 

New York governor Nelson Rockefeller foresaw the danger of the new theology. After his 1969 tour of Latin America on President Nixon's behalf, he warned the US business community of the anti-imperialist nature of the Medellin document. The Rockefeller Report, which became the basis of Nixon's Latin American policy, spoke of the need for the emergence of military regimes that would put an end to the movement and warned the Nixon Administration that it had better keep an eye on the Catholic Church south of the border, since it suddenly had become “vulnerable to subversive penetration.”22 

PRIESTS IN REVOLT 

The report proved prescient. Priests formed left-wing organizations in seven countries, some doing so in open support of coups against democratic governments, as in Chile and Bolivia. In several dioceses ugly clashes erupted between priests and bishops. Thirty diocesan priests in Mexico demanded the resignation of Bishop Leonardo Viera Contreras, and in Maracaibo, Venezuela, twenty two pastors called on Archbishop Domingo Roa Pérez to resign. Several hundred priests and laymen petitioned the Guatemalan Congress to expel Archbishop Mario Casariego, cardinal of Guatemala City. In Argentina a group of priests from Cordoba and Rosario demanded the dismissal of Bishop Victorio Bonamín, chief military chaplain. Similarly, activist priests in Rio de Janeiro and Peru insisted on their right to elect the local archbishop, while Chile's left-wing religious movement, Christians for Socialism, attacked Santiago's Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez.23 

Pope Paul VI was at his wit's end. After trying to appease the leftists with a series of social justice encyclicals and pronouncements, he realized that the only way he could reassert his papal authority was by force. Such force, of course, could not be overt. It could only be unleashed by Catholic organizations, including Opus Dei and Catholic Action, working in tandem with the Nixon Administration and the CIA. 

CATHOLIC CONDOR 

Operation Condor, a program intended to eradicate Communist groups and movements throughout South America, got underway in the early 1970's, when Opus Dei elicited support from Chilean bishops for the overthrow of the democratically elected government of president Salvador Allende. The Catholic group began to work closely with CIA-funded organizations such as the Fatherland and Liberty, which subsequently became the dreaded Chilean secret police. In 1971, the CIA began shelling out millions to the Chilean Institute for General Studies (IGS), an Opus Dei think tank, for the planning of the revolution. IGS members included lawyers, free-market economists, and executives from influential publications, such as Hernán Cubillos, founder of Qué Pasa, an Opus Dei magazine, and publisher of El Mercurio, the largest newspaper in Santiago (and one that was subsidized by the CIA). After the coup, a number of IGS technocrats became cabinet members and advisors to the ruling military junta, and Cubillos came to serve as Chile's new foreign minister.24 Immediately upon seizing control of the presidency, General Agusto Pinochet rounded up thousands of alleged Communists in the national stadium for execution.25 

“GOD WILL PARDON ME” 

The full fathom of the Vatican's involvement in Condor has never been sounded. But every phase of the operation, including the purging of the left-wing clerics, received the tacit approval of the pope. Leaders of the military juntas, including General Pinochet, were devout Catholics. Indeed, when Pinochet was taken into custody in England for the murder of thousands of Chileans in 1998, he was mystified by the charges. His bafflement was justifiable. When Pinochet initiated his pogrom, Archbishop Alfonso López Trujillo, general secretary of the Latin American Episcopal Conference, said, “The military junta came into existence as a response to social and economic chaos. No society can admit a power vacuum. Faced with tensions and disorders, an appeal to power is inevitable.”26 Following Pinochet's arrest, Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Angelo Sodano, on behalf of the Holy Father, sent a letter to the British government demanding the general's release.27 

When General Pinochet finally went on trial in 2005, a Chilean judge asked him about his reign of terror, which had resulted in the murder of over four thousand Chileans, the torture of over fifty thousand, and the “disappearance” of hundreds of thousands. The general piously answered, “I suffer for these losses, but God does the deeds; He will pardon me if I exceeded in some, which I don't think I did.”28 

BOLIVIA GETS THE BIRD 

In 1975, the Bolivian Interior Ministry—a publicly acknowledged subsidiary of the CIA—drew up a master plan with the help of Vatican officials for the elimination of liberation theology. Dubbed the “Banzer Plan”—after Hugo Banzer Suárez, Bolivia's right-wing dictator, who fancied himself the “defender of Christian civilization,” the scheme was adopted by ten Latin American governments.29 Banzer had come to power in Bolivia as the result of a three-day coup in August 1971 that left 110 people dead and 600 wounded. The coup, as recently declassified US State Department documents show, was funded by the CIA as part of Operation Condor.30 

In order to mount the master plan, Banzer relied on Klaus Barbie, who recruited a mercenary army of neofascist terrorists, including Stefano delle Chiaie.31 To fund the army, Banzer ordered coca trees to be planted throughout the country's ailing cotton fields. Between 1974 and 1980, land in coca production tripled.32 The coca was exported to Colombian cartel laboratories, including Barbie's Transmaritania. A multi billion dollar industry was born. The tremendous upsurge in coca supply from Bolivia sharply drove down the price of cocaine, fueling a huge new market and the rise of the Colombian cartels. The street price of cocaine in 1975 was fifteen hundred dollars a gram. Within a decade, the price fell to two hundred dollars per gram.33 The CIA became an active participant in this new drug network by creating a pipeline between the Colombian cartels and the black neighborhoods of Compton and Los Angeles. The pipeline was unearthed by Gary Webb, a reporter for San Jose Mercury News, in 1996. Webb's findings resulted in an investigation by the US Senate, which served to confirm his claims.34 

THE “PERFECT CRIME” 

Even prior to the enactment of the Banzer Plan, the Vatican played a key role in the emergence of the cocaine trade by offering the drug cartels its money-laundering service in exchange for stiff fees. To initiate this process, the Holy See established a chain of shell companies in Panama and the Bahamas that transferred deposits from the cartels to Banco Ambrosiano and the Italian banks under Sindona's control. From these private and parochial banks, the money flowed to the IOR and from the IOR to financial firms in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein. The first shell company established by the Vatican for this purpose was the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in the Bahamas. 

Cisalpine had been set up by Sindona, Roberto Calvi, and Archbishop Marcinkus through Banco Ambrosiano Holding, a Luxembourg company under the Holy See's control. By the time Operation Condor got underway, Cisalpine was receiving regular deposits of millions in cash from Pablo Escobar and other Latin American drug chieftains. Cisalpine functioned solely as a laundry for black money. On any given day, throughout the 1970's, the shell company held $75 million in cash deposits. Cisalpine's immediate success caused Archbishop Marcinkus to proclaim that the shell company represented a “perfect crime.”35 

Once the Banzer Plan got underway, Bolivian officials began compiling dossiers on church activists; censoring and shutting down progressive Catholic media outlets; planting Communist literature on church premises; and arresting or expelling undesirable foreign priests and nuns. The CIA also funded anti-Marxist religious groups that engaged in a wide range of covert operations, from bombing churches to overthrowing constitutionally elected governments. The plan gave rise to a series of clerical assassinations, culminating in the murder of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, a leading proponent of liberation theology.36 

THE DIRTY WAR 

But no Latin American country, not even Pinochet's Chile, could equal the levels of violence that followed the military coup of March 24, 1976, in Argentina. Indeed, the only regime to create a state of fear approximating that of Argentina was Hitler's Germany.37 (There were other parallels to Nazism, including a government-sponsored hate campaign against the country's four hundred thousand Jews.) As many as thirty thousand political prisoners (including students, union organizers, journalists, and even pregnant women) were killed or disappeared during the 1976–1983 “Dirty War,” which was fully endorsed by the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.38 Political killings took place on the average of seven a day in 1977. Nor were Argentine's the only victims. An estimated fourteen thousand refugees from other South American military regimes were told to leave the country or face the possibility of arrest. Torture was automatic for anyone arrested, according to a spokesman for the World Council of Churches.39 

THE US ENDORSEMENT 

Recently declassified National Security documents show that the CIA and the US State Department remained primary sponsors of the military junta, which was led by General Jorge Videla. On February 16, 1976, six weeks before the coup, Robert Hill, the US ambassador to Argentina, reported to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the plans for the coup were underway and that a public relations campaign had been mounted that would cast the new military regime in a positive light. Hill added that even though “some executions would probably be necessary,” the leaders of the junta remained determined “to minimize any resulting problems with the US”40 

On March 25, 1976, two days after the coup, William Rogers, assistant secretary for Latin America, advised Kissinger that the military takeover of Argentina would result in “a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood.” To this warning, Kissinger responded, “Yes, but that is in our interest.”41 

On March 30, 1976, Ambassador Hill sent a seven-page assessment of the new regime to Kissinger. In the report, Hill wrote, “This is probably the best executed and most civilized coup in Argentine history.” One week later, US Congress approved a request from the Ford Administration, written by Kissinger, to provide $50 million in aid to the new military regime.42 

THE JEWISH POGRAM 

With such aid in hand, the junta launched not only its purge of left-wing dissidents but also an attack on the Jewish community. Bookstores and kiosks were flooded with cheap editions of works by Hitler and Goebbels; Jewish schools, synagogues, newspapers, and businesses were bombed; prominent Jewish citizens were kidnapped, blackmailed, and intimidated; and a series of crude anti-Semitic programs were aired on Argentine television. In August 1976 unidentified thugs drove through Buenos Aires's Jewish quarter, Barrio Once, strafing shops and synagogues with machine guns. The walls of the city of Mendoza in northwestern Argentina were painted with swastikas and slogans such as “Be a patriot! Kill a Jew!” In April 1976 the public was invited by two groups calling themselves the Aryan Integral Nationalist Fatherland and the Pious Christian Crusade to attend Masses in the Buenos Aires cathedral “for the eternal rest of our blood brother in Christ, Adolf Hitler.”43 

CATHOLIC COMPLICITY 

On the eve of the coup, General Jorge Videla and other plotters received the blessing of the Archbishop of Paraná, Adolfo Tortolo. The day of the takeover itself, the military leaders had a lengthy meeting with the leaders of the bishop's conference. As he emerged from that meeting, Archbishop Tortolo said that although “the Church has its own specific mission, there are circumstances in which it cannot refrain from participating even when it is a matter of problems related to the specific order of the state.” He went on to urge all Argentine's to “cooperate in a positive way” with the new government. After thousands had disappeared, the bishop said: “I have no knowledge, I have no reliable proof, of human rights being violated in our country” and praised the military regime, saying that the armed forces were simply “carrying out their duty.”44 

The vicar for the army, Bishop Victorio Bonamín, characterized the campaign as a defense of “morality, human dignity, and ultimately a struggle to defend God…. Therefore, I pray for divine protection over this ‘Dirty War’ in which we are engaged.” He told a university audience in December 1977 that the world was divided into “atheistic materialism and Christian humanism.” Though he denied any knowledge of individual cases, he said: “If I could speak with the government, I would tell it that we must remain firm in the positions we're taking: foreign accusations about disappearances should be ignored.”45 

PAPAL SANCTION 

General Videla, who is currently serving a life sentence for his part in the Dirty War, told reporters that he had conferred with Cardinal Raúl Francisco Primatesta, the leading Argentine cleric, about the regime's policy of eradicating left-wing activists. He further insisted that he maintained ongoing conversations with Pio Laghi, the papal nuncio, and the leading bishops from Argentina's Episcopal Conference. These dignitaries, he insisted, advised him of the manner in which the junta should deal with all dissidents, including clerics who advocated liberation theology.46 

The general's claim is supported by Bishop Tortolo, who in 1976 said that the clergy was advised of all actions made by the junta, particularly in regard to troublesome priests and nuns.47 Tortolo made this statement when questioned about the disappearance of two Jesuit priests—Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio—and six members of their parish. The disappeared priests were under the charge of Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Provincial General of the Society of Jesus in Argentina. They were espousing liberation theology among the slum dwelling poor of Buenos Aires.48 

THE TORTURE CHAMBER 

Fr. Jalics and Fr. Yorio—the two Jesuit priests in Bergoglio's charge, were taken to the notorious Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in Buenos Aires. ESMA was the most important of the military government's 340 detention and torture centers. A trip to ESMA typically began with an introduction to “Caroline,” an electric prodding rod with two prolonged wires. The visitors were stripped and tied to a steel bed frame. Electricity was applied to the victims, who were periodically doused with water to increase the effects. If the subject was a woman, the interrogators went for the breasts, vagina, or anus. If a man, they applied the wires to the genitals, tongue, or neck. Sometimes victims twitched so uncontrollably that they not only lost control of their bowels but also shattered their own arms and legs. Fr. Patrick Rice, an Irish priest who had worked in the slums and was detained for several days at ESMA, recalled watching his flesh sizzle as the electricity flowed through his body. What Fr. Rice most remembered was the smell: “It was like bacon,” he said.49 Children were tortured in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. One torturer estimates that about sixty babies passed through the facility and that all but two (whose heads had been smashed against the walls) were sold to suitable Argentine couples.50 

At ESMA, which also served as a disposal site for other naval camps, corpses were initially buried under the sports field. After the field was filled, the bodies were burned daily, at 5:30 in the afternoon, usually after having been cut up with a circular saw. Eventually, the ESMA officials hit upon the idea of aerial disposal at sea. The dead were dumped from airplanes hundreds of miles off the coast of Buenos Aires, along with torture victims who had been drugged into a comatose state. One pilot testified that prisoners fell like ants from the planes.51 

Declassified documents show that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance continued to support the military junta in Argentina. One communique establishes that Vance was fully informed of the situation within ESMA but opted to allow the horrors to persist.52 

THE QUESTION OF BERGOGLIO

Fr. Jalics and Fr. Yorio—the two Jesuit priests—were released five months after captivity. They were found half-naked in a field outside Buenos Aires. Fr. Bergoglio later insisted that he had secured their release but no documentation exists that he had intervened on behalf of the two priests in his charge. Fr. Yorio, at the 1985 trial of the leaders of the junta, said that Bergoglio had handed them over to the death squad: “I am sure that he himself [Fr. Bergoglio] gave over the list with our names to the navy.”53 He further refuted the claim that Bergoglio had saved the lives of the priests, saying, “I do not have any reason to think he did anything for our release, but much to the contrary.” 

In addition, Fr. Yorio said that Bergoglio had expelled him from a teaching position at a Jesuit school and had spread false rumors to the Argentine high command, stating that Yorio was “a communist” and “a subversive guerrilla, who was after women.”54 

Fr. Jalics also refuted Bergoglio, saying, “From subsequent statements by an official and 30 documents that I was able to access later, we were able to prove, without any room for doubt, that this man [Bergoglio] did not keep his promise [to protect the priests], but, on the contrary, he presented a false denunciation to the military.”55 Fr. Jalics, who has retreated to a monastery in Germany, said that he is now reconciled with the past because “forgiveness is a central tenet of Christianity.” 

Journalist Horacio Verbitsky recently uncovered a military document from 1976 in the archives of Argentina's Ministry of Foreign Affairs that appears to provide proof that Fr. Bergoglio provided damning testimony about the two priests in his charge to the junta. The document, bearing the signature of Anselmo Orcoyen, who served as the director of the Catholic Division on Ministry, appeared on the front page of Página/12, the Argentine daily newspaper, on March 17, 2013.56 It reads: 

Father Francisco Jalics 

Activity of Disseverment in the Congregation of Religious Sisters (Conflicts of Obedience) 

Detained in the Navy School of Mechanics 24/5/76 XI/76 (6 months)—accused with Fr. Yorio of suspicious contact with guerrillas. 

They lived in a small community which the Jesuit Superior dissolved in February of 1976 but they refused to obey the order to leave the community on March 19. The two were let go. No bishop of Buenos Aires would receive them. 

This notification was received by Mr. Orcoyen and given to him by Fr. Bergoglio, who signed the note with special recommendations not to approve of their requests. 

(signed) Orcoyen 

The Vatican, at the time of this writing, continues to affirm Bergoglio's innocence in this matter, insisting that there has never been a “concrete or credible accusation” against him.57 

THE THEFT OF BABIES 

But other criminal allegations have been directed against Bergoglio. The Grandmothers of the Plaza of Mayo, a human rights group established to locate children stolen during the Dirty War,” states that the Jesuit's provincial general failed to assist a family of five, who were awaiting execution by the death squad. One member of the family, Elena de la Cuadra, was a pregnant young woman. The five had appealed to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus at the Vatican. The Superior General turned the matter over to Bergoglio, who remained the provincial general of the order in Argentina. Bergoglio, in turn, sat on the case for several months, only to pass it off to a local Catholic bishop. The bishop reportedly returned to Bergoglio with a letter from the junta stating the four members of the family had been killed but the young woman had been kept alive long enough to deliver her baby.58 No one in the junta apparently wanted to be accused of abortion. The baby was given to a prominent family and could not be returned to its maternal grandmother or any other blood relative.59 

Fr. Bergoglio later claimed that he had no knowledge of stolen babies, of which there were hundreds, if not thousands, until the collapse of the regime. He said that he did what he could but had little influence “to save people from the regime.”60 

“HE KNEW EVERYTHING” 

“Bergoglio has a very cowardly attitude when it comes to something so terrible as the theft of babies,” said Estela de la Cuadra, whose husband, brother, brother-in-law and pregnant sister had been executed. “He doesn't face this reality, and it doesn't bother him. The question is how to save his name, save himself. But he can't keep these allegations from reaching the public. The people know how he is.”61 

Ms. de la Cuadra also expressed her outrage that Bergoglio, when serving as the head of the Argentine Bishops’ Conference, refused to defrock Fr. Christian von Wernich, even after he had been jailed for life in 2007 for seven killings, forty-two abductions and thirty-four cases of torture, in which he told victims, “God wants to know where your friends are.”62 Von Wernich had served the dictatorship as chaplain of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. 

“I've testified in court that Bergoglio knew everything, that he wasn't—despite what he says— uninvolved,” Ms. de la Cuadra said.63 

CRIMINAL CHARGES 

In 2005, Argentine human rights attorney Myriam Bregman filed a criminal suit against Bergoglio, who had been elevated to the College of Cardinals, accusing him of complicity in the kidnapping and torture of Fr. Yorio and Fr. Jalics, along with six members of their parish. Bergoglio refused to respond to the subpoena to appear in court, invoking his immunity from prosecution under Argentine law as a Vatican official.64 

“He finally accepted to see us in an office alongside Buenos Aires cathedral sitting underneath a tapestry of the Virgin Mary,” Ms. Bregman said. “It was an intimidating experience. We were very uncomfortable intruding in a religious building.” She added that Bergoglio did not provide any significant information on the two priests. “He seemed reticent, I left with a bitter taste,” she said.65 

Later, in an interview with Sergio Rubin, his official biographer, Bergoglio said that he regularly hid people on church property during the Dirty War and once gave his identity papers to a fugitive with similar facial features so the man could escape across the border. But, Bergoglio added, these acts were performed in secret since church leaders were called upon to support the junta.66 

Responding to these comments, Ms. Bregman said that Bergoglio's words condemn him and prove that he condoned the torture and the killing. “The dictatorship could not have operated without this key support,” she said.67 

BERGOGLIO TRIUMPHANT 

On March 13, 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio ascended to the throne of St. Peter as Pope Francis I. The nagging questions about his background may never receive a satisfactory answer. Nor will concerns that the CIA manipulated the election as it had in the past with Juan Perón.68 Argentine journalists and scholars with insight into the Agency's activities in their country already have labeled Bergoglio “Washington's Pope.”69 Certainly, the new pontiff upheld the interests of General Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera during the Dirty War, and served to suppress all manifestations of liberation theology. And, certainly, he can serve to influence policy (including the agenda of neoconservatives) throughout South and Central America. His installation, it has been noted, took place one week following the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.70 By the end of 2013, Bergoglio emerged as the most popular cleric on planet earth, earning an approval rating of 88 percent among American Catholics.71 Few appear to take heed that Francis is the first pope to be charged with crimes against humanity

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