the so-called "Black Friars" of P2

Stark

"...  At the age of seventeen, Gelli enrolled as a volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion and went to fight in Spain, where his brother Raffaele was killed at Malaga in April 1938. After returning to Italy Gelli enlisted in an infantry regiment in 1940. A year later he volunteered to join the parachute regiment but was invalided out after an accident in training. In 1942 he was sent to the small port of Cattaro in Yugoslavia as a aide-de-camp to a Fascist Party official. There he is reported to work for SIM, the wartime secret service, and come into contact with representatives of the British and Soviet secret services. At the time the Italians were holding the Yugoslav nation  gold reserves in the town before transporting them to Rome and were warding off attempts by the British, Germans and Yugoslav Resistance to 'liberate' the gold. The fact is sometimes cited as a possible explanation for Gelli's subsequent wealth. His boss, Piero Parini, was reportedly involved in putting out secret feelers on behalf of Mussolini to both Soviet and Western representatives. If Gelli was involved in these negotiations it may have given him his first opportunity to enter into contact with secret services from both sides of the future Iron Curtain.

"In 1943 he returned to Italy to become liaison officer for the German forces in his home town of Pistoia, with the rank of sergeant-major in the Herman Goring Division of the German SS. It was during the closing stages of the war that he began to show the talent for deviousness and double-dealing for which he would later be renowned and which would make it so difficult to identify him and his true political colours. Overtly committed to the fascist Salo regime but facing the certainty of an imminent Allied victory, Gelli had to resolve a further dilemma: with which partisan camp should he throw in his lot? Given hostility between the Communists and the other anti-fascist forces, having collaborated with one group would not necessarily guarantee protection from the other. As a natural survivor, Gelli appears to have hedged his bets. His biographers cite descriptions of him as a ferocious torturer of Italian partisans and deserters. But other accounts have him leading German troops on fruitless searches of the Italian countryside having first tipped off the Resistance about their plans."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 50-51)

Gelli during his youth

"Gelli's agreement to continue to spy for the Communists after the war was instrumental in saving his life when he faced an anti-Fascist commission sitting in Florence. The evidence that he had tortured and murdered patriots was deemed, after discrete intervention by the Communists, to be insufficient...

"... Gelli also continued spying for the Communists until 1956. The termination of his espionage work for the Communist coincided with the commencement of his work for the Italian secret services. Part of the fee for spying on his own country was the closure of the file the secret service had on him. This occurred in 1956..."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pg. 103)

"This did not preclude him from engaging in profitable trading relations with Romania while, according to one report, P2 members in the finance police turned a blind eye to customs irregularities. Gelli's involvement in the clothes and textile trade with Romania in the 1970s is frequently cited by those who claimed he was in East Bloc agent. Given the independent foreign policy line pursued by President Nikolai Ceausecu and the favor, including an English knighthood, that it won him in the West, the argument is not entirely convincing. The Italian secret service can hardly expect to be believed when it generates a report describing Gelli as a potential communists 'sleeper' at a time when he is on intimate terms with the heads of the service, who also happen to belong to his masonic lodge..."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pg. 56)

Nikolai Ceausecu, the last Communist president of Romania, whose brutal secret services (Securitate) were heavily staffed with  "former" members of the fascist Iron Guard whom (like GellI) had numerous dealings in Latin America during the Cold War

"Additional wealth came from Gelli's involvement in operating the Vatican 'ratlines' with Father Krujoslav Dragonovic. Gelli's fee was 40% of the total cash on hand from each fleeing 'rat.' This demand, coupled with the Vatican's take of 40 to 50%, left the Nazis penniless when they arrived in Argentina and other neutral countries. One of the most notable rats helped by Gelli was Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyons.' The Vatican sheltered the Gestapo chief for several months before placing him under the care of Gelli. Barbie was not obliged to pay the Vatican or Gelli. The cost was borne by the United States Counterintelligence Corps that kept Barbie in its employee until 1951."

(The Vatican Exposed, Paul L. Williams, pg. 112)

Barbie

"In the late thirties, Licio Gelli – an officer in Mussolini's black shirts who had once served as an intelligence officer under Hitler – was sent to Spain to support Franco's insurrection of the Spanish people. Escriva and Gelli quickly struck up an enduring relationship.

"Escriva and Gelli were at his side when Franco came to power in 1939. Opus Dei quickly infiltrated Franco's cabinet and brought about ruthless suppression of the Spanish people – the clandestine cult providing the ideology and Franco providing the executioners. Together they murdered more than a million innocent people...

"Gelli's Rat Line funneled Nazis to South America. Though Gelli gets the historical credit because he headed it up, the Rat Line was an Opus Dei scheme of which Gelli was an operations officer.

"In 1946, Escriva and Gelli enlisted Carlos Fuldner into the ranks of Opus Dei. Fuldner  had been an officer in Hitler's SSGuard and an old friend of Escriva, the reason why Escriva was able to make his remark in 1941 'Hitler will take care of the Jews...' Only the SS Guard knew what was going on in the death camps at that time.

"Gelli and Fuldner ran rescue efforts from Madrid to Argentina for Nazi war criminal seeking refuge. Among those rescued were Adolf Eichmann and Joseph Mengele though there are conflicting reports the latter may have escaped through the Pius XII Rat Line  – a network of monasteries from Poland to Naples to South America."

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pgs. 128)

Opus Dei founder Escriva

"...  earlier he had followed the same path on which he had sent some many members of the Third Reich to South America, aligning himself with extreme right-wing elements in  Argentina, where he became a close friend and confidant of General Juan Peron. When Peron was excommunicated by the Catholic Church, Gelli experienced one of his few failures in attempting to intercede with the Vatican. Peron's anti-clerical campaign, which had led to his excommunication, weighed more heavily with the Church than Gelli's assurances that the General was a greatly misunderstood genius. When Peron left the country after a military coup in 1956, Licio Gelli promptly set about befriending the incoming junta. Slowly and carefully Gelli set about building a power base that began to stretch through much of South America. It was always the rich and powerful, or the potentially rich and powerful whom Gelli courted..."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 103-104)

Peron

"...  the CIA shopfront Permindex [Permanent Industrial Expositions] was incorporated in Basel with Nagy as president in 1956, on the eve of the Hungarian uprising. Nagy was also director of the World Trade Centre (aka CMC or Centro Mondiale Commerciale) in Rome, and president of its American board. Both outfits were conduits for the CIA's covert worldwide commercial activities, including arms and drug trafficking, white-washing money, lubricating extremist organizations close to Gladio and running deals with European gangsters. Permindex had an offshoot in Italy, where P2's puppet master Licio Gelli sat on the board. New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, arrested and questioned in connection with the JFK assassination, was for a time on the Permindex American board. These companies had the curious distinction of seeming very well oiled, while never actually engaging in any visible commercial transactions..."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 141-142)

Nagy

noted Italian statesman and Freemason Giuseppe Garibaldi

"...  Italian freemasonry is divided into two principal groupings, commonly referred to by the name of their Rome headquarters. The Grand Orient, with between 15,000 and 20,000 members, had its headquarters in Palazzo Giustiniani, while its chief rival, with 5,000- 10,000 affiliates, was based in the central Piazza del Gesu. The revival of freemasonry in Italy after the war was encouraged by both the British and the Americans and lodges sprang up in the wake of the advancing Allied armies is the period of fascist persecution of masons came to an end. A secret service report on 'Freemasonry in Italy' highlighted the influence of British and American freemasonry on Italian lodges. 'Washington's policy is to direct European states towards interests and objectives that fall into the United States' orbit, concerned as it is not to lose Western Europe and to counteract Moscow's attempts to engineer the break-up of NATO,' it observed. The masonic influence of the United States coincided with its military presence. According to Guiseppe D'Alema, American lodges have been set up for every NATO base in Italy, beginning with the Benjamin Franklin, established in Livorno on 25 July 1959. Palazzo Giustiniani owed a particular debt of gratitude to US freemasonry as it only recovered its headquarters, which had been confiscated under Mussolini, after American pressure on the Italian government. A key role in the negotiations was played by one Frank Gigliotti, former OSS and then CIA agent. The agreement to return the building to the Grand Orient was signed in 1960 by the Italian finance Minister Grand Master Publio Cortini. Witnesses at the ceremony were US Ambassador James Zellerbach and Frank Gigiotti.

 "Also in 1960, Palazzo Giustiniani received official recognition from the powerful North American masonic District. Part of the deal was that the Grand Orient should agree to merge with a small Scottish rite lodge headed by the right-wing Sicilian Prince Giovanni Alliata di Montereale. Despite its diminutive size, Alliata's  lodge, based in Via Lombardia in Rome, already enjoyed the recognition of the North American district. It is a good indication of the political complexion of US-sponsored Freemasonry that Alliata  would later be implicated in both the Borghese and Rosa dei Venti coup plots, as well as being linked to the Mafia."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 57-58)

Alliata

"Gelli joined a conventional Masonic Lodge in November 1963. He rapidly rose to third degree membership, which made him eligible to lead a lodge. The then Grand Master Giordano Gamberini urged Gelli to form a circle of important people, some of whom might eventually become Masons but all of whom could be useful to the growth of legitimate Freemasonry. Gelli leapt at the opportunity. What he in fact conceived was an illegal secret organization. This group was given the name Raggruppamento Gelli – P2. The P stood for Propaganda, the name of an historic lodge of the nineteenth century. Initially he brought into it retired senior members of the Armed Forces. Through them he obtained the entry of  active Service Heads . The web he spun was gradually to cover the entire power structure of Italy..."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 104-105)

Gamberini

"P2 was formed in the late 1960s, allegedly at the behest of Giordano Gamberini, a Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy and friend of Giulio Andreotti. But he was much closer to Francisco Cosentino, who also was well introduced in Vatican circles. Either Andreotti or Cosentino, or perhaps both, were said to have suggested the creation of a secret cell of trusted right-wing personalities in key national sectors, but especially banking, intelligence and the press, to guard against what they perceived as 'the creeping Marxist threat.' "

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pgs. 263-264)

Andreotti, the "Divine Julius"

"... Frank Gigliotti of the US Masonic Lodge personally recruited Gelli and instructed him to set up an anti-communist parallel government in Italy in close cooperation with the CIA station in Rome. 'It was Ted Shackley, director of all covert actions of the CIA in Italy in the 1970s,' an internal report of the Italian anti-terrorism unit confirmed, 'who presented the chief of the Masonic Lodge to Alexander Haig.' According to the document Nixon's military adviser General Haig, who had commanded US troops in Vietnam and thereafter from 1974 to 1979 served as NATO's SACEUR, and Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger 'authorized Gelli in the fall of 1969 to recruit 400 high ranking Italian and NATO officers into his Lodge'..."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 73-74)

Ted Shackley, another intelligence figure with links to the Kennedy assassination

"... within the membership of P2 in Italy alone (there were, and still are, powerful branches in other countries) were the Armed Forces Commander Giovanni Torrisi, the Secret Service Chiefs Generals Giuseppe Santovito and Giulio Grassini, the Head of Italy's Financial Police, Orazio Giannini, cabinet ministers and politicians of every political shade (except of course the Communist), thirty generals, eight admirals, newspaper editors, television executives, top industrialists, and bankers, including Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona. Unlike conventional Freemasonry, the list of members of P2 was so secret that only Gelli knew all the names."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pg. 105)

"God's Banker" Roberto Calvi (top) and Michele "The Shark" Sindona (bottom)

"... Politicians in the lodger recruited from every political party except the Radical and Communist Parties. The membership lists discovered in 1981 showed that 195 high-ranking officers from all branches of the military belong to the lodge. There were fifty-two officers from the carabinieri paramilitary police, six from the police and thirty-seven from the finance police; nine belonging to the Air Force, twenty-nine to the Navy and fifty to the Army. Most significantly, the heads of both the domestic secret service (SISDE) and military intelligence (SISMI) were affiliates. 'As can be seen at a glance, the membership lists reveal a map of the highest levels of military power, with individuals who have often played a central role in particularly significant moments of the recent history of our country, as well as in the events of a subversive nature,' the P2 Commission commented."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pg. 59)

the insignia/logos of the Carabinieri (top), SISDE (middle) and SISMI (Bottom)

"If the information was authentic than it meant Luciani was virtually surrounded by Masons and to be a Mason meant automatic excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church. Before the Conclave there have been various murmurings that several of the leading papabili were Masons. Now on September 12th, the new Pope was presented with the entire list. With regard to the issue Freemasonry, Luciani held the view that it was unthinkable for a priest to become a member. He was aware that a number of the lay Catholics he knew were members of various Lodges – in much the same way that he had friends who were Communist. He had learned to live with that situation but for a man of the cloth there was in Luciani's view a different criterion. The Roman Catholic Church had decreed long ago that it was implacably opposed to Freemasonry. The new Pope was open to discussion on the issue, but a list of 121 men who were confirmed members hardly constituted discussion.

 "Secretary of State Cardinal Villot, Masonic name Jeanni, Lodge number 041/3, enrolled in a Zürich Lodge on August 6, 1966. Foreign Minister Monsignor Agostini Casaroli. Cardinal Vicar of Rome Ugo Poletti. Cardinal Baggio. Bishop Paul Marcinkus and Monsignor Donato de Bonis of the Vatican Bank. The disconcerted Pope read a list that seemed like a Who's Who of Vatican City. Noting...  even included Pope Paul's secretary, Monsignor Pasquale Macchi..."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pg. 164) 

Pope John Paul I

"...  Excluding Italy there are still branches functioning in Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, France, Portugal and Nicaragua. Members also active in Switzerland and the USA. P2 interlocks with the Mafia in Italy, Cuba and the USA. It interlocks with a number of the military regimes of Latin America, and with a variety of groups of neo-Fascists. It also interlocks very closely with the CIA. It reaches right into the heart of the Vatican. The central common interest of all these elements is apparently a hatred and fear of Communism...

"Licio Gelli's contacts and associates spread far and wide. They include Stefano Delle Chiaie, Pierluigi Pagliani and Joachim Fiebelkorn, all members of the private army set up in Bolivia by ex-Gestapo Chief Klaus Barbie. The group took the name 'Fiances of Death.' Political assassinations were performed to order, including that of Bolivian Socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Cruz. The 'Fiances of Death'  were also instrumental bringing to power in Bolivia in 1980 General Garcia Meza. Klaus Barbie used his Nazi training as security advisor to Colonel Gomez, a man with a great deal of Bolivian blood on his hands.

"The group that Barbie controlled with the blessing of the Bolivian junta expanded its activities after a coup of 1980. The murders of political opponents, investigating journalists, labor leaders and students increase. Added to this work was the task of regulating the cocaine industry – destroying the small dealers to ensure that the big drug traffickers could flourish with the junta's protection. In 1965, Barbie's activities in Bolivia had included arms deals not only on behalf of Bolivia but also for other right-wing South American regimes and Israel. It was through such arms deals that Klaus Barbie, an unrepentant member of the SS, and Licio Gelli became business partners: Barbie, who between May 1940 in April 1942 was responsible for the liquidation of all known Freemasons in Amsterdam, and Licio Gelli, the Grand Master of Masonic Lodge P2. The two men had much in common, including the mutual high regard they had for men like Stefano Delle Chiaie. The Italian Delle Chiaie has been involved in at least two attempted coups in his own country. When a civilian government returned to office in Bolivian in October 1982, Delle Chiaie fled to Argentina. There he was given comfort and aid by Jose Lopez Rega, the creator of the notorious Triple A death squads."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 106-107)

Klaus Barbie (top), Stefano Delle Chiaie (middle) and Jose Lopez Rega (bottom)

"... Tthe truth of the matter... is that the P2 Lodge was part of a secret right-wing network created with the Vatican's blessing as part of the Occident's bulwark against Marxism. The P1 Lodge was in France and the P3 Lodge was in Madrid. The P3 was headed by a former minister of justice, Pio Cabanillas Gallas." 

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pg. 264)

Cabanillas Gallas

"There been over the past two decades a number of bomb outrages in Italy which remain unsolved. If the Italian authorities ever catch Gelli they will be in a position, if he chooses to talk and tell the truth, to solve some of those mysterious attacks. These include: Milan 1969, the Piazza Fontana bomb attack – 16 people killed; Bologna 1974, bomb attack on the Rome-Munich express, 'The Italicus', near Bologna – 12 people killed; Bologna 1980, railway station bombing – 85 people killed, 182 injured. According to a disenchanted follower of  Gelli, a neo-Fascist called Elio Ciolini, this last outrage was planned at a P2 meeting held in Monte Carlo one April 11th, 1980. Licio Gelli was the Grand Master at that meeting.  Again, according to the sworn testimony of Ciolini, three of the men allegedly responsible for the railway station bombing are Stefano Delle Chiaie, Pierluigi Pagliani and Joachim Fiebelkorn."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pg. 110) 

"The Bologna bomb trial prosecutors cited numerous accounts of the close relationship Gelli enjoyed with many of Italy's most influential public figures. In the written indictment, they referred to the testimony of Gelli's two secretaries, describing how the chairman of Fiat, Italy's most powerful industrialist, Ginni Agnelli, had presented their boss with a 'golden telephone', as a gift. They also cited the account of P2 Commission functionary Giovani Di Ciommo of a meeting with Gelli's Rome secretary Nara Lazzerini. The sense of what she said was this: Gelli had such widespread connections that he was in contact and not merely superficial contact with people ranging from Agnelli to Delle Chiaie. Lazzerini was never formally interrogated by the P2 Commission. When a communist commissioner suggested that she should be, his proposal was rejected after objections from Christian Democrat Deputy Bernardo D'Arezzo pertaining to 'the witness's morality'. Lazzerini had been Gelli's  mistress, but it was what she might have said, rather than her sexual morality, that seems to have caused D'Arezzo's embarrassment."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 71-72)

the Bologna railway station bombing

"A second major bombing in the summer racked of the political tension still further, making 1974 the only year in Italian history to be characterized by two such outrageous. One 4 August...  a bomb exploded on the 'Italicus' Rome-Munich express train as it left a tunnel never the village of San Benedetto Val di Sambro, not far from Bologna. Twelve people were killed and 105 injured by the blast and subsequent fire. In December 1986 two Tuscany neo-fascists, Mario Tuti and Luciano Franci, were given life sentences for the bombing by a Bologna court. The P2 Commission stated emphatically that the secret lodge have provided 'the essential economic, organizational and moral background' to the bombing. There was keen expectation of a coup in masonic circles at this time. One mason, Angelo Sambuco, told Grand Master Lino Salvini of his intention to take his family abroad on holiday. Salvini replied that 'he would not be leaving Florence because he was expecting a coup'."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pg. 135)

the aftermath of the Italicus Express bombing

"Maybe the best-documented atrocity carried out by the secret soldiers in Western Europe in their anti-Communist battle is the Piazza Fontana massacre which hit Italy's political capital Rome and Italy's industrial capital Millan shortly before Christmas on December 12, 1969. On that day four bombs exploded in Rome and Milan killing 16 citizens indiscriminately, predominantly farmers who after a day on the market wanted to deposit their modest earnings in the Banca Nationale Dell' Agricultura at Piazza Fontana in Milan, while 80 were maimed and wounded. One bomb in Piazza Fontana did not explode because it's timer had failed, yet upon arriving on the scene the Italian military secret service SID together with the police immediately destroyed the compromising evidence and made the bomb go off after its discovery. The massacre was carried out exactly along the secret warfare strategies drafted by Guerin Serac. The Italian military secret services blamed the massacre on the left and planet parts of a bomb as evidence in the villa of the well-known leftist editor, Giangiacomo Felrinelli, and arrested immediately numerous Communists.

"A classified internal report of the Italian military secret service SID dated December 16, 1969 had already alleged at the time that the massacres of Rome and Milan had been carried out by the political right with support of the CIA. Yet the Italian public had been made to believe that the strong Italian Communists had begun using violence to achieve power. Presumably the massacre had been carried out by the Italian right-wing groups Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale which cooperated closely with the stay-behind armies in the secret war. Italian right-wing extremist Guido Giannettini who was directly involved in the massacre cooperated closely with the Lisbon-based Aginter Press. 'In these investigations data has emerged which confirms the links between Aginter Press, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale'  judge Salvini explained to the Italian Senators investigating the secret war in Italy and beyond. 'It has emerged that Guido Giannettini had contacts with Guerin Serac in Portugal ever since 1964. It has emerged that instructions of Aginter Press... came to Rome between 1967 and 1968 and instructed the militant members of Avanguardia Nazionale in the use of explosives.' Judge Salvini concluded that based on the available documents and testimonies it emerges that the CIA front Aginter Press had played a decisive role in secret warfare operation in Western Europe and had started the great massacres to discredit the Communists in Italy."

(NATO'S Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 119-120)

the aftermath of the Piazza Fontana bombing

The mysterious above-mentioned secret armies were a part of what is generally referred to as Operation Gladio, of which much more will be said in a future installment. For now it is worth addressing in brief the bizarre organization known as Aginter Press and its founder, who is sometimes referred to as "God's Terrorist."

The former was founded in Lisbon, Portugal in 1966. At this time Portugal was the last European colonial power with holdings in Africa and controlled by the dictator Salazar. In 1961 it had become involved in a series of wars in Africa that included theaters in Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique. These conflicts would drag on until 1974, when Portugal's dictatorship was finally overthrown by a coup.

Salazar

The resources of Portugal were stretched thin early on and it was willing to accept help in what ever form it may come in. Thus, like neighboring Spain, Salazar's Portugal became a haven for various Nazis and fascists. Many of the more militant types were recruited into Aginter Press, a shadowy organization that was founded with the assistance of PIDE, Portugal's secret service, and foreign fellow travelers.

"Aginter Press was no press at all. The organisation did not print books or anti-Communist propaganda leaflets but trained right-wing terrorists and specialized in dirty tricks in secret warfare in Portugal and beyond. The mysterious and brutal organization was supported by the CIA and run by European right-wing officers who with the help of the PIDE recruited fascist militants. The investigation of the Italian Senate into Gladio and the secret war and massacres in Italy discovered that Italian right-wing extremists had also been trained by Aginter Press. While in Portugal it was revealed that a sub-branch of Aginter Press called 'Organisation Armee contre le communism International' (OACI) had also operated in Italy. The Italian Senators found that the CIA supported Aginter Press in Portugal and that the secret organization was led by Captain Yves Guillon, better known by his adopted name of Yves Guerin Serac, a specialist in secret warfare who had had received war hero metals from the United States including the American Bronze Star for his involvement in the Korean War. 'Aginter Press,' the Italian Gladio report concluded, 'in reality, according to the latest documents acquired by the criminal investigation, was an information centre directly linked to the CIA and the Portuguese secret service, that specialized in provocation operations."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pg. 115)

"In 1966, following the Tricontinental Congress which proceeded without Ben Barka, a counterfront, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), was chartered in Seoul, South Korea by hardline reactionaries from the world over. That same year Aginter Press, sponsored by WACL and the intelligence agencies of the United States, France, and Portugal, was created in Lisbon as a cover for OAS terrorists and other European Fascists. Led by the Frenchman Yves Guerin-Serac, its aims was the subversion, through espionage, sabotage and murder, of all the Tricontinental Congress had stood for."

(The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger, pg. 207)

a conference of the notorious World Anti-Communist League (WACL)

the banners of Ordine Nuovo (top) and Avanguardia Nazionale (bottom)

"God's Terrorist" Yves Guerin-Serac

"The Christian fascists in whose circles Guerin-Serac moved boasted their own chaplain, Father Georges Grasset, an inspiration for the Vatican's ratline smuggling refugees from the Algerian rising to Portugal and Spain. He was a prominent acolyte of Jean Ousset  (1919-1994), the Portuguese-born founder of his own Christian Fascist sect known as La Cite Catholique. Guerin-Serac was an early recruit, and in due course had  pressing need of the reverend father specialized travel agency. Ousset specialized in a distinctly unusual catechism, which combined fierce emotional piety with counterrevolutionary warfare techniques and trusty methods of torture to extract confessions..."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pg. 119)

Jean Ousset

Venerable Grand Master Licio Gelli (top) and "God's Terrorist" Yves Guerin Serac (bottom), the founder of Aginter Press

"... Marcinkus was transferred to the English section of the Vatican Secretary of State's office in 1952. Tours of duty attached to the Papal Nuncios of Bolivian Canada followed, then in 1959 he returned to Rome and the Secretary of State's Department. His fluency in Spanish and Italian insured his constant employment as an interpreter.

"In 1962 the Cardinal of New York, Francis Spellman, advised Pope Paul during one of his frequent trips to Rome that Marcinkus was a priest with an excellent potential. In view of the fact that Spellman headed the wealthiest diocese in the world at the time, and was frequently referred to as 'Cardinal Moneybags' – a tribute to his financial genius – the Pope began quietly to monitor Paul Marcinkus.

"In 1964, during a visit to down-town Rome, the over-enthusiastic crowds were in danger of trampling the Vicar of Christ underfoot. Suddenly Marcinkus appeared. Using shoulders, elbows and hands he physically clove a path through the crowds for the frightened Pope. The following day the Pope summoned him for personal thanks. From then on he became the unofficial bodyguard to the Pope and his nickname, The Gorilla, was born.

"In December 1964 he accompanied Pope Paul to India; the following year to the United Nations. By now Marcinkus had taken over the duties of security advisor on such trips. Personal bodyguard. Personal security advisor. Personal translator. The boy from Cicero had come far..."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 93-94)

Marcinkus

"In 1963, when Paul VI began monitoring his career, Marcinkus was supervising the construction of Rome's most luxurious priests' residents, the Villa Stritch. Paul VI asked him to help his personal secretary, Father Pasquale Macchi, organize the Eucharist Congress planned for Bombay at the end of the year. Marcinkus and Macchi hit it off well. For the next few years they virtually ran the papal household, and anyone hoping for a confidential chat with the Holy Father had to pass through them. Marcinkus  masterminded the Pope's eight remaining foreign journeys, and saved Paul's life by overpowering a knife-wielding assailant as he lunged through the crowd at Manila's international airport.

"After Spellman's death in 1967, US contributions to the Vatican decreased significantly. Father Macchi suggested that Marcinkus might be the man to reverse the situation. The idea appealed to the pontiff who decided to shift Marcinkus into a vacant position at the IOR, under the octogenarian Cardinal Di Jorio. Marcinkus  was an excellent organizer but had no experience as a banker. He requested time off to visit a couple of big money-centre banks, study their systems and see from the inside how they operated. The request granted, he went to Chase Manhattan in New York, in his own words, 'for a day or two... to see how stocks and stuff operated', and then to Continental Illinois in Chicago, where he was given 'a kind of three-day course, taking me through everything'. He spent another day with the Continental Finance Corporation in Chicago to learn about trust operations, followed by a final day-long tour of a small bank. In those seven days, Marcinkus became an international banker, equipped to play a leading role in managing the Vatican's finances. On Christmas Eve 1968, Paul VI made him titular Bishop of Orta, and two weeks later confirmed the new bishop's appointment as the IOR's secretary. Marcinkus's starting salary was $6,400 per annum."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pgs. 239-240)

"After graduating from the University of Messina in 1942 with a degree in tax law, Michele Sindona earned a lucrative living by buying and selling on the black market. He bought food and supplies that had been stolen from the American PX in Palermo and smuggled it to Messina where it was sold to the starving population for a huge profit. To gain permission to engage in this business, Sindona turned to the Archbishop of Messina who introduced him to Vito Genovese, who had returned to Sicily after being accused of the gangland slaying of Ferdinand 'the Shadow' Boccia, a small-time crook in America.

"Genovese, who was known as 'Don Vitone,' was one of the leading figures in Murder, Inc. As underboss to Lucky Luciano (Salvatore Lucania), he ran the narcotics racket and the white slavery trade in Manhattan. Along with his boss, Genovese he had planned and executed the murder of Joe Masseria, the American Mafia's 'boss of all bosses.'

"The arrangement worked well. Sindona granted Genovese a percentage of his profits for protection and Genovese granted the young entrepreneur freedom to operate without interference from other Mafiosi. Sindona was not alone in this enterprise. Everybody in the Sicilian Mafia from the capos to the lowest piciotto was making a bundle. Almost everything that Italians ate, wore, smoke, and drove during the Allied Occupation came from American military bases. 'How did I accumulate my fortune?' Don Luciano Leggio  explained to his prosecutors in court many years later. 'I did the black market during and after the war. Just think! You could buy a quintal of grain from the Farm Board for  2,000 , 2,500 lire and sell it on the black market for 15,000.'

"Don Luciano Leggio was not only a Mafia capo but also the leader of Anonima Sequestri, a quasi-fascist political group in Palermo. Leggio befriended Sindona and accepted him into his crime family. Through the capo, Michele came to know Fr. Agostino Coppola, who later was accused of master-minding one murder and the kidnapping of several Italian business and political leaders. Fr. Coppola was not the only Catholic priest in the Sicilian Mafia. The clergy regularly crossed the line of peaceful co-existence with the mob. In 1962, four Franciscan monks were tried, convicted and sentenced to 13 years imprisonment for conspiracy, extortion, and manslaughter. In 1978, Fr. Fernando Taddei, prior of St. Angelo's Cathedral in Rome, was arrested for buying ransom money – at 70% of face value – from his Mafia family and washing it through Vatican financial institutions. Such laundering was necessary since ransom money was numbered and easily traced. Sindona, from the start of his career, learned to look upon Catholic prelates not only a spiritual pastors but also as potential partners in crime."

(The Vatican Exposed, Paul L. Williams, pgs. 103-105)

Don Vito Genovese, longtime head of the Genovese crime family and one of the most powerful figures in the annuals of organized crime, was Sindona's initial patron

"The Mafia family Gambino were particularly taken with the young Sindona and his dexterity at placing dollar investments without reference to tiresome tax regulations. The Gambino family has global interest but it's two main power centres are New York and Palermo. The former is controlled by the Gambinos, the latter by their Sicilian cousins the Inzerillos. On November 2nd, 1957 there was a 'family' reunion in the Grand Hotel des Palmes, Palermo. Also invited to enjoy the wine and food was Michele Sindona.

"The Gambino family made Sindona an offer he accepted with enthusiasm. They wanted him to manage the family's re-investment of the huge profits just beginning to accure from the sales of heroin. They needed a laundryman. Sindona, with his proven abilities at moving amounts of money in and out of Italy without disturbing the tranquility of the Government's taxation departments, was an ideal choice. Added to this ability was the fact that he was by the time of the Mafia summit conference already a director of an increasing number of companies. He frequently said to grateful clients, 'No, I'll take payments in some shares in your company.' He had also begun to perfect the technique of acquiring troubled companies, dividing them up, selling off pieces, merging other pieces, shuffling everything sideways  and then selling at a large profit. It was dazzling to behold, particularly if you were not paying the conjuror.

"Within seventeen months of the Mafia summit conference Sindona bought his first bank, aided by Mafia funding. Sindona had already discovered one of the cardinal rules of theft: the best way to steal from a bank is to buy one. "

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 96-97)

"In 1959, the same year in which he acquired BPF, Sindona made another very shrewd investment. The Archbishop of Milan was trying to raise money for an old people's home. Sindona stepped in and raised the entire amount: 2.4 million dollars. When Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini opened the Casa della Madonnina, Sindona was by his side. The two men became firm friends, with Montini relying more and more on Sindona's advice in problems other than diocesan investments.

"What Cardinal Montini may not have known is that the 2.4 million dollars were supplied to Sindona very largely from two sources: the Mafia and the CIA. Former CIA agent Victor Marchetti was later to reveal:

In  the 1950s and the 1960s the CIA gave economic support to many activities promoted by the Catholic Church, from orphanages to the missions. Millions of dollars each year were given to a great number of Bishops and Monsignors. One of them was Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini. It is possible that Cardinal Montini did not know where the money was coming from. He may have thought it was coming from friends."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 97-98)

Pope Paul VI (Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini), who may have unwittingly opened the Vatican up to a host of unsavory influences

"... In 1970 the CIA had asked him to buy a 2 million bond issue from the National Bank of Yugoslavia. Sindona obliged. The CIA placed the bonds in Yugoslavia in what they considered 'friendly hands.' Sindona also moved money on behalf of the CIA into the hands of right-wing groups in Greece and Italy."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pg. 119) 

Did the CIA-funded Rome Daily America play a key role in bringing together Marcinkus, Sindona and the P2 network?

"Sindona, made other important friends, including...  David Kennedy, President Nixon's first Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company. Sindona managed to have the bulk of the Vatican's investment in U.S. stocks funneled through Conneaut Illinois. Similarly, Kennedy arrangde for Continental Illinois to purchase 20% of Sindona's Banca Privata Finanziaria in Milan. Kennedy became a director of Fasco International, one of Sindona's holding companies, and was later sued for $54 million by the Italian government for illegally conspiring with Sindona to sell Talcott Corporation, an asset of Banca Privata Finanziaria, to a group of Utah businessman.

"Sindona also became friendly with Richard Nixon. The two lunched together on several occasions. Nixon, in fact, had recommended to many of his clients and associates that they should avail them selves of Sindona's expert investment banking services."

(The Vatican Exposed, Paul L. Williams, pg. 125)

"Hitchcock took full advantage of his unlimited borrowing privileges at Fiduciary... he  poured over $500,000 into unregistered 'letter stocks' (the kind that aren't traded publicly but tend to show dramatic gains on paper) associated with the Mary Carter Paint Company, later known as Resorts International. It was the single largest chunk of money raised by Resorts, an organizations suspected of having ties to organized crime. Resorts International proceeded to build a casino on an exclusive piece of Bahamian real estate called Paradise Island. A star-studded cast was on hand for the grand opening of the gambling spa, complete with tennis courts, swimming pools, albino beaches, and the clear blue waters of the Caribbean. It was New Year's Eve 1968 and the guest of honor at the gala event was none other than Richard Nixon, who was about to launch a successful bid for the White House. James Crosby, president of Resorts International, contributed $100,000 to Nixon's campaign. Crosby and Bebe Rebozo, Nixon's best friend, mingled with a bevy of movie stars, jetsetters, gangsters, and GOP faithful. Billy Hitchcock was also there, idling among the heavies with drink in hand."

(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pg. 245)

Hitchcock is to the right; this researcher has written much more on Hitchcock and the Mellon family before here

"For the moment, Sindona soared on top of the world. He owned a score of banks around Italy, which he proceeded to milk to build a personal fortune approaching $500 million. This collection fitted neatly with his humming cash register in the heart of the Vatican. He shipped at least $40 million in St. Peter's Pence through the IOR to his private accounts in Switzerland. Marcinkus creamed off millions in fees for the church poor box, P2 and of course, himself. Sindona now made the elementary mistake of many ambitious men who reach for the sky. The son of an impoverished Sicilian family yearned for a truly heavyweight American bank to command real respect. He duly got it in 1972, in the shape of Long Island's Franklin National. He was Icarus now, gradually feeling the heat. In April 1974, Franklin National plunged south in the worldwide stock market crunch and so did Sindona. In the autumn, Franklin National was declared insolvent. Sindona's vast network of swindles was thus revealed to the world. The lifeboat victims included, thanks to Marcinkus, the Holy See, to the tune of $30 million. Sindona was hung out to dry on a string of conspiracy charges in the United States and Italy. Like other figures finding themselves in similar difficulties... it would all end – as such matters are wont to do in Italy – with a morning sip of prison coffee."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 225-226)

Sindona pre-prison coffee

"Roberto Calvi was born in Milan on April 13th, 1920, but his family roots are in the Valtellina, a long alpine valley near the Swiss border... After studying at the prestigious Bocconi University he fought for Mussolini on the Russian front in the Second World War. Then he followed his father into banking. In 1947 he went to work for Banco Ambrosiano in Milan. Deriving its name from St. Ambrose, the bank exuded religiosity. Like Banca Cattolica del Veneto it was known as 'The Priest's Bank'. Baptismal certificates establishing the holder was Catholic were obligatory before a bank account could be opened. Prayers thanking God for the annual figures were offered at the end of board meetings. In the early 1960s there was a greater air of reverence inside the bank than in a number of nearby churches. The Knight with the ice-cold eyes had other plans for the sleepy diocesan bank which included among its customers the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Montini. By the time Montini became Pope Paul VI in 1963 Calvi had advanced within the bank to Central Manager. When Pope Paul decided to call Sindona into the Vatican to relieve the Church of its embarrassingly large Italian holdings, The Shark in The Knight were close friends. They were already plotting to gain control of Banco Ambrosiano and transform it into a very special kind of international banking institution. In 1971, Calvi became Managing Director of the Bank. At fifty-one years of age he had risen far above his father's humble clerical position. The average man might have been content to rest on his laurels for a while and enjoy leading the prayers of the board meeting. The only thing that was average about Roberto Calvi was his height. His ability to dream up crooked schemes for laundering Mafia money, exporting lire  illegally, evading tax, concealing the criminal acts of buying shares in his own bank, rigging the Milan Stock Market, for bribery, for corruption, for perverting the course of justice, arranging a wrongful arrest here, a murder there – his ability to do all of this and more puts The Knight in a very special criminal class. Calvi was prone to advise all and sundry that if they really wanted to understand the ways of the world that they should read Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather. He carried a copy everywhere, rather like a priest with his Bible.

"Calvi and was introduced to Bishop Marcinkus by Sindona in 1971 and instantly joined the very select Vatican clan of 'uomo di fiducia', men of trust: that select group of laymen who worked with and for Vatican Incorporated ..."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 128-129)

ever faithful

"When the  Milan Stock Exchange began to fall in 1974, among those to be hurt was Banco Ambrosiano. Calvi was particularly vulnerable. The main ingredient in international banking is confidence. It was known that he was a close associate of Sindona. When Il Crack occurred, the banking world began to take a more cautious view of The Knight. Credit limits to Ambrosiano were cut back. Loans on the international market became difficult to obtain and, most ominous of all, the demand by small investors for the Bank's shares began to diminish, with a consequent drop in the price. Magically, at what was fast becoming the eleventh hour for Ambrosiano, a company called Suprafin SA with a registered office in Milan, entered the market. This finance house began to display supreme confidence in Signor Calvi. It bought shares in his bank daily and before there was time for the name Suprafin to be written on the list of shareholders, the shares were resold to companies in Liechtenstein and Panama. Confidence in Calvi began to return and Suprafin kept on buying. In 1975, 1976, 1977 and 1978, throughout all of these years Suprafin continued to display massive faith in the future of Calvi'ss bank – 50 million dollars' worth of faith.

"Suprafin clearly knew something no one else did. Between 1974 and 1978 Ambrosiano shares continued to fall, yet Suprafin acquired over 15 per cent of the bank. Suprafin was officially owned by two Liechtenstein companies, Teclefin and Imparfin. In theory these were technically owned by the Vatican bank. That was the technical theory. In practice Suprafin was owned by Calvi. Consequently, with the complete knowledge of the Vatican bank, he was supporting the market value of Ambrosiano shares by massive purchases – a totally illegal activity. The money to finance the fraud came from international loans made to the Luxembourg subsidiary and from the parent bank in Milan.

"The Vatican Bank received huge annual payments for providing the facilities for The Knight to operate a gigantic international fraud. This money was paid in a variety of ways. All Vatican deposits with Ambrosiano banks received interest payments of at least 1 per cent higher than other depositors. Another method was for Ambrosiano  to buy shares from the Vatican. On paper the Vatican Bank would sell a block of shares to a Panamanian company at a price approaching 50 per cent more than the shares were actually worth. The shares would never leave the Vatican portfolio and the bank that Marcinkus controlled would be millions of dollars better off. The Panamanian company, usually with a capital of only a few thousand dollars, would borrow the millions from Banco Ambrosiano Overseas in Nassau where Marcinkus was a director. The Nassau branch would have been loaned the money initially by the Luxembourg company, who in turn had borrowed the money from international banks.

"Calvi was obviously hoping against hope that the price of Banco Ambrosiano shares would eventually pick up so that he could offload them. By 1978 he was walking on a knife-edge. As if this entire operation was not enough to keep the banker awake at nights, he was also contending with the problems of laundering Mafia money. Allied to that were the constant demands being made by P2 for funds. This involved further embezzlement. He was also suffering from the aftereffects of a blackout campaign by Michele Sindona."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 132-134)

"Banco Occidental concentrated on developing outlets in Latin America and Florida by acquiring participations in small commercial banks and buying hotels. A member of Occidental's legal department also suspected that Calvi used Banco Occidental as the hinge for arms transactions with Latin American dictatorships. These transactions required Calvi's frequent presence in Madrid. But to stay overnight in the Spanish capital would have attracted attention, so United Trading purchased an executive jet to carry him to and from Madrid in the same day. Instructions were given to Occidental staff never to mention the Learjet when talking on the telephone with the Ambrosiano offices in Milan, suggesting that the staff in Milan was not supposed to know of the aircraft's existence."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pg. 266)

Bishop Paul Marcinkus

"... a huge hole appeared in Franklin National Bank, a financial institution that Sindona bought in 1972, as result the Shark's fraudulent removals. The appearance of the hole seemed inexplicable. Franklin National was the 18th largest bank in the United States and one of the healthiest, with assets of $3.3 billion. But Sindona within two years managed into the empty Long Island institution of its coffers. The U.S. government, fearing the collapse of the Long Island bank could have serious repercussions throughout the country, provided Sindona with unlimited funds to keep the banks solvent. Between September and October 1974, over $1 billion flowed from the Federal Reserve into Franklin. Such efforts proved to be of no avail. On October 8, Franklin National collapsed, causing losses of over $2 billion to the Federal Deposit Insurance Company. It was the biggest bank failure in American history and the first since the Great Depression.

"Combing the ashes of the Franklin National, U.S. officials discovered that Sindona had pilfered $45 million from the bank on the eve of its demise – an amount that he squandered in his attempts to manipulate foreign currency speculations and to shore-up the losses in his Italian operations."

(The Vatican Exposed, Paul L. Williams, pgs. 142-143)

"In 1972, the democratic congress to cut off funds for President Nixon's war in Central America. Nixon engaged Sindona to acquire control of the Franklin National Bank. Two years later it collapse.

"The courts determined Sindona and Nixon had siphoned off large sums of the bank's money to Somoza and other dictators in Central America to suppress the revolution of the poor there. The Patrimony of the Holy See took a $40 million hit when the Franklin Bank went under to the extent the IOR had guaranteed the transactions."

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pg. 352)

Sindona

"Throughout the 1970s the Vatican bank had established close ties with Banco Ambrosiano in Milan, where Calvi remained as the chief executive officer. Bishop Marcinkus sat on the board of one of Ambrosiano's subsidiary branches in the Bahamas. Banco Ambrosiano was a Catholic bank, a financial firm for Catholic families and Catholic charities, where no one could own more than 5% of the stock. For this reason, it represented a perfect laundry for P-2 and the Mafia. But two problems remain to be solved. First was the problem of gaining control of the bank without arousing unnecessary suspicion among the directors. Second was the challenge of getting vast amounts of money out of the Milan bank without arousing the attention of criminal investigators.

"Calvi solved both problems with help of his friend Bishop Paul Marcinkus and the Vatican Bank. He began to loan huge sums of Ambrosiano's money to eight 'dummy' corporations. To give these corporations and aura of legitimacy, the loans were diverted to the Vatican Bank (causing Ambrosiano bank directors to believe that the corporations were concerns of Holy Mother Church). Six of these corporations were in Panama: Astolfine S. A., United Trading Corporation, Erin S. A., Bellatrix S. A., Belrose, S. A., and Starfield S. A. The seventh firm – Manic S. A.  – was located in Luxembourg; the eighth – Nordeurop Establishment in Liechtenstein. These corporations used the borrowed millions to accomplish the following objectives:  (1) to increase the personal wealth of Calvi and his Mafia cohort; (2) to fund the nefarious operations of Licio Gelli; and (3) to purchase shares of Ambrosiano stock. When asked for collateral for  the loans, the Panamanian companies simply posted the Ambrosiano stock they had purchased along with statements of inflated assets and projections of future profits from exports."

(The Vatican Exposed, Paul L. Williams, pgs. 165-166)

"... Calvi was ostensibly in Buenos Aires to discuss with Argentine authorities the opening of a local Banco Ambrosiano branch. In fact, Calvi, Gelli...  invited the entire naval general staff to dinner. At the end of the meal the admirals asked how they might finance the purchase of fifty AM39 Exocet missiles for their naval aviation. Each Exocet  cost $1 million, so the admirals were talking about a $50 million package. As Exocets  were manufactured in Italy under license from the French firm of Aerospatiale, Calvi  was able to provide an easy answer. He arranged for financing which, as no record of it was uncovered in the Ambrosiano accounts, one supposes was routed through the United Trading network."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pg. 251)

"... Calvi had opened a branch of his empire in Managua in September 1977. The bank was called Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial. It's official function was 'conducting international commercial transactions.' Its actual function was to move from the Nassau branch, with director Bishop Paul Marcinkus' approval, a large amount of the evidence that would reveal the fraudulent and criminal devices used in the share  pushing/acquisition of the Milan parent bank. Nicaragua removed the evidence  even farther from the eyes of the Bank of Italy. As always there was a price to be paid. Gelli had smoothed the way with introductions to Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza. After several million dollars had been dropped into the dictator's pocket, he announced that it would be an excellent ideal for Calvi to open a branch in his country. One of the side benefits for Calvi was the acquisition of a Nicaraguan diplomatic passport, something he retained to the end of his life.

"Calvi and Gelli appraised the political situation in Nicaragua with its growing possibility of Sandinistan rebel role in the not too distant future. These men, who had carried both Fascist and Partisan membership papers during the Second World War, had not changed a lifetime's habit of being double-faced or, in banking terms, prudent. Calvi gave equally large amounts of money to the rebels – some went to buy grain, someone to buy arms.

"Early in 1979 the left-wing takeover of Nicaragua became a reality. Like many left-wing takeovers before, this one promptly nationalized all foreign banks – with one exception: the Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial continued to trade under Roberto Calvi. Even left-wing idealists, it would seem, have a price."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pg. 265)

Calvi

"It is the thesis of Avro Manhattan, the bank scandal transactions which occurred before the fall of Somoza (July 1979) were funneled to Somoza to halt the Sandinistas impending takeover of Nicaragua.

"Manhattan was on firm ground in thinking this way.

"For March 14, 1979 through July 14, 1979, the Patrimony – the Vatican's central bank – transferred $383 million under the guise of 'loans' to shell companies in the Ambrosiano  branch in Managua Nicaragua. The related notes were in the name of the IOR.

"By mid-August the Sandinistas had seized manufactured plants, banks and other facilities that had supported Somoza. Among these was the Ambrosiano branch in Managua. The balance in the shell company accounts the Vatican had loaned $383 million was 'zero.' "

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pg. 355)

The Patrimony of the Holy See (top) is the actual Vatican central bank and not the IOR (bottom) as is commonly claimed

Somoza

"After the Sandinistas seized the Nicaraguan branch, Ambrosiano opened a branch in Peru. From this point on the scandal money – $970 million – was deposited in the IOR by the Lima bank and then loaned to the Panamanian and European offshore shell companies.

"Of this, $444 million was transferred to a Panamanian affiliate of the First International Bank of Houston. The related IOR notes were issued to shell companies operating throughout Central America...

"Let us step back a bit. On the eve of the Sandinistas' takeover, a plane disguised with Red Cross markings flew into Managua and rescued two hundred of Somoza's National Guardsmen and flew them to a CIA compound in Miami. On October 16, 1979, they were flown to a CIA training camp in Honduras bordering Nicaragua.

"There are other Contra groups operating in Central America. Yet, these are what we are speaking when we say 'Contras' – remnants of Somoza's army trained by the CIA with a mission to contain the Sandinistas within Nicaragua and possibly destroy them altogether...

"On October 16, 1979 – a year to the day John Paul II took office and the same day on which the Contras were flown into Honduras by the CIA – the Lima branch made a deposit of $134 million in the IOR which 'loaned' it through the Patrimony of the Holy See to a Panamanian shell company United Trading Corporation. It was followed by another $330 million to the other Panamanian shells. It disappeared and no one has ever found out what happened to it.

"The Lima branch deposited another $463 million in the account of the IOR and the Patrimony which 'loaned' it to shell companies in Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. This money was partially recovered by the courts that tried the case in the 1980s...

"The courts determined the money that disappeared in Nicaragua and Panama was drawn down in cash – not wired to banks and investment houses; they were not able to determine what happened to it.

"One could speculate private men – Calvi, Gelli and Sindona – drew the money in Nicaraguan currency – Cordoba– and laundered it through the local black market for a fraction of its face value. This makes no sense when they could have run all the money through the Ambrosiano Nassau  or other 'offshore' branches. It would have been readily available in European currencies with no risk at all.

"Of the $463 million wired to Liechtenstein and Luxembourg $215 million was recovered. $248 million had been drawn down in cash and the courts were unable to determine what happened to it.

"The courts charged that the shell companies the Vatican 'loaned' the $1.3 billion were actually owned by the Vatican.

"Generally, this could not be proved because of immunity of the Holy See from Italian courts provided under the Lateran Treaty. Yet, the courts did prove Ambrosiano created the shell 'United Trading Company' in 1970 and the IOR had acquired all its shares in 1974.

"On the other hand, the same courts determined that a half-dozen of the Panamanian shells, including Astolfine, Erin and Fisalma, had been created by the CIA for espionage activities in connection with the Cold War. This may have been linked to – reasonable but not proved – CIA Director George Bush who was the chairman of the First International Bank of Houston at the time of the bank scandal."

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pgs. 356-358)

Bush I may have played a role in these shenanigans while serving chairman of the First International Bank of Houston

"Calvi's letter dated June 5th, 1982 to the Pope is rather more than a plea for papal intercession to save his life. Certainly he realises that he is in severe trouble. He also recognises that whatever protection may once have been extended by P2 and by Licio Gelli in particular is no longer available. He has also been cut loose by Marcinkus. Calvi  began by warning the Pope that Banco Ambrosiano was about to collapse, which he said would be a disaster for the church. Then he turned to the 'millions of dollars' which he had devoted to papal projects in South America and Eastern Europe. 'There are many of those who promised me helped me on the condition that I would not talk about activities I conducted on the part of the church – and especially many of those who would like to know if I supplied arms and weapons to some South American regimes to help them combat our common enemies, and if I had supplied economical means to Solidarnosc  and other financing to the countries of the East. Summing up, I asked that all the sums that I gave to the projects of serving political and economic expansion of the church, that the thousands of millions of dollars which I gave to Solidarnosc with the express will of the Vatican and the sums which I have employed to organise the financial centres (banks) and the political power in five South American countries, will be returned to me. These sums would amount to $1.75 billion.' Calvi concluded his epistle by saying that he was seeking 'serenity and merely to live in peace.' The sum that he mentioned as owing to him was close to the $1.3 billion shortfall investigators identified in the books of Banco Ambrosiano."

(Gladio: NATO'S Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pg 228)

John Paul II was apparently unmoved by Calvi's pleas

the Rothschild coat of arms

"The next phase of the $260 million Rizzoli deal took place at the end of April, with a $95 million transfer from Banco Ambrosiano Andino to the account of the Zirka Corporation, Monrovia, at Rothschild Bank in Zürich. This money was labeled as a loan to Bellatrix, a Panamanian company. Bellatrix was a child of United Trading. The $95 million for Bellatrix joined another $46.5 million that had been transferred to Rothschild Bank from Ambrosiano Services, Luxembourg, earlier that year, supposedly to purchase a block of 189,000 Rizzoli shares held at Rothschild Bank, at a price twenty times over market value. To these transfers would be added another $8 million, bringing the total amount received by Bellatrix to around $150 million. But there were several anomalies here that only came to light following later investigations. First, although Bellatrix belonged to United Trading, it was Ortolani and Bruno Tassan Din, the Rizzoli managing director, who controlled its operations. Second, Rothschild Bank claimed it had no Bellatrix account on its books. Third, the name of Bellatrix did not appear on Rizzoli's share register."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pg. 271)

"Bellatrix, a dummy firm in Panama, had been created by Calvi and Marcinkus along with a trinity of P-2 members –Licio Gelli, Umberto Ortolani (who had received the Vatican title of 'Gentleman of His Holiness' from Pope Paul VI) and Bruno Tassan Din, managing director of the huge Rizzoli publishing firm. Bellatrix used a portion of the $184 million it milked from the Ambrosiano cash cow to purchase Exocet missiles for Argentina in its struggle with England over the Falkland Islands. The dummy corporation had received this loan, secured on paper with Ambrosiano stock, with cash capital of less than $10,000..."

(The Vatican Exposed, Paul L. Williams, pg. 166)

"In another transaction, Ambrosiano transferred funds from and... account which bought shares in a Rothschild bank. Calvi manipulated the value of the shares which resulted in a $142 million swell in Ambrosiano and an offsetting deflation in Rothschild.

"Courts determined Calvi... siphoned off the Ambosiano 'swell' to the dictator Somoza in Nicaragua and ruling regimes in El Salvador/Guatemala to suppress the revolution of the poor. It was this deal that caused some to believe Rothschild directors had been involved in the  Roberto Calvi  murder  – never proved in the courts."

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pg. 351)

Rothschild coat of arms

"Other blasphemies requiring attention included those made by Swiss banker Jurg Heer. He had been credit manager of Rothschild Bank in Zürich, responsible for managing the Bellatrix account until fired by his superiors. Put out by his rough handling, Heer lifted the lid on Pandora's box. He claimed that in 1982 he had received a phone call from Licio Gelli requesting him to fill a suitcase with $5 million in bank notes and handed over to two men who arrived at the bank in an armor-plated Mercedes. Heer said he later asked for an explanation. 'The money was for the killers of Calvi,' he was told.

"Rothschild Bank, it should be remembered, was where $150 million transferred from Banco Ambrosiano's offshore network to Bellatrix, a member of the United Trading family, became side-tracked. Less than 20 per cent of that money was recovered by the Ambrosiano liquidators. Heer's revelation raised an interesting question: were Calvi's  killers paid with monies belonging to United Trading?

"Heer was questioned by an examining magistrate in Zürich and then disappeared. He was last seen in Madrid around Christmas 1992. He purchased an air ticket for Thailand, where charges against his credit card ended a few months later. Heer's disclosure raised considerable interest among investigators working on the Calvi case. They would like to interview the banker. But there is real concern that he may no longer be alive."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Htchison, pgs. 350-351)

"There are important clues to be found in the chain of high-end bank robberies that began in London on 25th November 1983. Each one could be related in some manner to Calvi. The robbery of the Brinks Mat high-security warehouse at London's Heathrow Airport stunned the UK by its sheer audacity. In all, diamonds and precious metals worth £26 million were seized. Evidence presented in court insisted the thieves were shocked by three tonnes of gold (with strange elasticity, ten tonnes according to other accounts) which they found awaiting them. This is unlikely. What is quite certain is that a fencing operation on that scale would amount to a considerable challenge; but for the Italian Mafia, and particularly the master smuggler and fencer 'Toni' Chichiarelli, a fairly straightforward prospect. Kenneth Noye, a legendary South London criminal with affiliations to the US and Italian Mafioso, was sent down to serve fourteen years for handling the looted gold. He was released after serving only eight years (although later re-imprison for murder). The Brinks Mat investigation was confounded from the start by an internal civil war and rampant corruption raging within Scotland Yard. A significant number of well-placed officers had fallen under the sway of criminal gangs, to such an extent that inquiries like Brinks Mat were mostly conducted away from the Yard's premises. In one bizarre episode, Noye stabbed to death an undercover officer he found lurking in his back garden, yet he escapes scot-free on grounds of self-defense. The rather lame excuse was offered that most of the stolen bullion was buried somewhere, or melted down to make jewelry. Yet the political undertones connecting the London raid, and two more that followed, indicated a chain that led directly to Rome. Documents relating to Calvi, Banco Ambrosiao and the Institute of Religious Works were discovered missing when the investigators moved in.

"Four months later the Brinks Securmark safe deposit centre in Rome was hit (on 24th March 1984) by the gang led by Chichiarelli, posing as members of the Red Brigades. Brinks is an international company of long-standing, specialising in the transit of high-value cargoes and sensitive documents. Its general practice is to organize franchise partnerships in the countries where it operates. One of the founders of Securmark, precursor of the Brinks operation in Rome, was Mark Antinuci, a US citizen and partner of Michele  Sindona in the Daily American, a chain of US-based local newspapers. A business partner of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, a Yugoslav called Stefano Falez, was on the board of  Brinks in the mid-seventies. Another figure connected with Brinks Securmark was Luigi Mennini, one time executive director of the Vatican's private bank. Mennini was a member of P2. He was regarded as Calvi's general bag carrier within the IOR..."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 228-229)

"Toni" Chichiarelli

Aldo Moro

"The firm's legendary watertight secrecy in shifting high value cargoes and sensitive documents exercised a natural appeal to Sindona. His private investment bank was among Brinks Securmark's first clients. So were the IOR and Banco Ambrosiano, forming with Sindona's private operations the troika of bank subsequently exposed as rotten to the core. Three days after the raid, Sindona – by now repatriated from the US – was sentenced to 25 years in an Italian jail for a string of bank frauds. So, was this the Mob's typical crossword puzzle signpost clue that by hook or by crook, they intended to recover everything that Michele Sindona, Roberto Calvi, and Paul Marcinkus had stolen from them? I suspect the answer is yes, with qualifications. The real aim of the raid led by such a prominent neofascist, and Gladio affiliate to boot, was to recover a host of compromising documents relating to Calvi, his activities within the Vatican and the death of the journalist Mino Pecorelli. Equally, the 15 to 20 billion lire difference that Chichiarelli claimed to have pocketed was the reward money for pulling off the successful raid.

"On 12th July 1987 the Knightsbridge safe deposit vaults in London were robbed by an Italian neofascist, Valerio Viccei. He was a colleague in Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari  with Roberto Fiore, who was busily assembling a business fortune in the UK at that time. Italian neofascist breaking into supposedly closely-guarded high security premises in the UK are a decidedly rare species, particularly when they are connected to figures such as Sergio Vaccari Agelli. He was an Italian art dealer based in London who enjoy business and political contacts with Chichiarelli, Licio Gelli – and Roberto Calvi. Ageli was the last person to see Calvi alive, at the Chelsea Cloisters suites, where the disgraced banker was roosting. Agelli was also connected to the disappearance and murder of Jeanette May Bishop, the divorced socialite wife of Baron Evelyn Rothschild , a member of the iconic Jewish banking and investment clan. She and her local guide disappeared late on 29th November 1980, during a house-hunting expedition near Macerata, an ancient city on central Italy's Adriatic coast. Their well-hidden bodies were discovered by boar hunters two years later, entirely devoured by wild animals down to the bones. After the usual leisurely trawl of the evidence, the Italian authorities concluded the pair were murdered, by whom remains unsolved. A link was traced between Bishop and a robbery at Christie's auction rooms in Rome in 1980. It was organized jointly by that well-known pair of connoisseurs and are traffickers, Sergio Agelli and Chichiarelli. The story ran that some of the valuables found their way to Bishop, whether purloined or as a present from Agelli, with whom she evidently had become intimate in London. A middle-aged divorcee, she was often in desperate need of money. But there is an alternative explanation.

"The Zürich branch of the Rothschilds became hopelessly entangled in a typically convoluted web of financial transactions devised by Calvi, on behalf of P2. The intention was to acquire the Rizzoli newspaper group. The bonus would be the control of Italy's most prestigious newspaper, the Milan-printed Corriere Della Sera. This was Calvi's last big throw of the dice, and undoubtedly formed a significant marker on the trail that led to Blackfriars Bridge. He created a magic carousel through which Ambrosiano lent $142 million to a Panamanian shell company called Bellatrix SA, which then deposited the funds at Rothschilds in Zürich to pay for the shares. That was the straightforward part. Bellatrix was then to pay an inflated price for the Rizzoli  shares – ten times market value – in order to generate a cash windfall for the real bidders, who were P2 represented by Gelli and Calvi. The dynamite element came from the claims circulating in Rome and Milan that the $142 million was in part the proceeds of the Christie's robbery, and thus mob property. The pack of cards came tumbling down when Italian regulators torpedoed the deal on a technicality. The bid was to be made through Ambrosiano's Luxembourg office, and that made it a foreign acquisition. The fatal torpedo was actually fired by the sitting premier, Arnaldo Forlani, a weak puppet standing in for the Divine Julius Andreotti.

"Il Divo had decided that Licio Gelli had grown too big for his boots and it was time to cut him down to size. The Rizzoli deal would have given Gelli and P2 commanding influence in the event that il piano di rinascita democratica had succeeded. There was now a two-horse race between Gelli and Calvi to get at the hoard stashed in Zürich. With the whole scheme dropped on the floor, Calvi decided that the $142 million sitting in Zürich was his own private 'reserve fund.' His final destination was supposed to be Zürich, not London. Sergio Agelli knew every nut and bolt of this project. If he had divulged the details to Jeanette May Bishop, she might have been tempted to blackmail her former husband's family firm, given her appetite for money. This would be quite sufficient to earn the attention of Gladio subcontractors organized by Italian secret services."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 229-231)

Bishop

"The action began when Matthews and eight other men pledge their sacred honor and declared war against the Zionist Occupied Government in a makeshift ceremony at Matthew's Metaline Falls homestead. The first nervous stickup occurred on October 28, 1983, at an adult bookstore in Spokane, Washington, with a total take of $300. Two months later a shifting cast of characters robbed  $25,000 from a Seattle bank and $3,600 from a Spokane bank. In between they took $8000 from a Shoney's restaurant courier and started counterfeiting $50 bills. In March 1984 they hit their first armored car and came away with $43,000. A month later they targeted the same Seattle car, this time clearing $230,000 in cash. On April 29, a synagogue in Boise was bombed.

"On June 1 they murdered one of their own. Two gang members took Walter West out in the woods, hit him on the head with a hammer, shot him, and buried him. They were afraid he would talk. His body was never recovered.

"On June 17 Matthews and three others gunned down a Denver Jewish radio talkshow host, Alan Berg, who was known for his on-air quarrels with anti-Semites. The murder was the basis for Eric Bogosian's play Talk Radio. Just one month later, on July 9, 1984, they staged the most successful heist, $3.6 million from a Brinks truck on the highway outside Ukiah, California."

(Blood and Politics, Leonard Zeskind, pg. 98)

the aftermath of the Brinks robbery

Robert Jay Matthews Aryan Nations in turn had a host of curious connections, but for our purposes here one stands out: links to a certain international organization that was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair. At the time this organization was being fronted by General John Singlaub, an OSS veteran and long time fixture in the US intelligence community.

"The Canadian branch of WACL, the Canadian Freedom Foundation, headed by John Gamble, works closely with the U.S. Counsel for World Freedom (USCWF) and Singlaub. Together USCWF and the Canadian Freedom Foundation formed the North American regional unit of WACL (NARWACL). Gamble and Singlaub alternate as chair of  NARWACL. Gamble was implicated in the Iran-Contra funding network when a firm for which he served as treasurer and director, Vertex Investments, was discovered to have invested in the arms sales to Iran through two of his partners. The Canadian Freedom Foundation (CFF) and Vertex both operate out of Gamble's law office.

"At least two CFF leaders are active anti-Semites: Pat Walsh is the Canadian correspondent for the quasi-Nazi Liberty Lobby newspaper the Spotlight and Paul Fromm helped found the neo-Nazi Western Guard.

"The Western Guard is led by John Ross Tyler, who served fifty-one months in detention for pro-Nazi activities during World War II. Taylor also leads Canadian contingents to Aryan Nations meetings, including a commemoration of the deaths of members of the Order, a paramilitary offshoot of Aryan Nations that engaged in robberies and murder in its effort to overthrow the U.S. Government."

(Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, Russ Bellant, pg. 67)

Singlaub

"Calvi's zigzag escape route took in a private jet from Milan to Venice, thence a fast dash to Trieste by car, a brief respite in an Austrian ski chalet before turning up in Heathrow on a false passport. In Trieste, he picked up a pair of minders with gold carat mob connections. One was the widely feared gang boss Giuseppe 'Pippi' Calo, known as the Mob's Cashier, a man with a dedicated efficiency in setting overdue accounts. The last hours of Calvi's life were spent in the Chelsea Cloisters, frantically working the telephone. The by-now ex-chairman of Banco Ambrosiano was clearly facing an imminent deadline. Sometime during the evening of the 17th June, he stepped out in his usual expensive top had and favorite hand-made loafers. He was next seen suspended from an orange rope strung from builders' scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge. As even the uninitiated generally know, orange is the keynote colour the Masonic Craft. Calvi's body was loaded with ballast, about forty kilos of stones stuffed into his pockets and bizarrely, his trouser flies. His calves' leather wallet contained £10,000 in sterling, Swiss francs, and Italian lira notes. His expensive though unwaterproofed Swiss watch stopped at just before 2 a.m., the point at which it was dipped in the water by the rising river tide. After 2:30 am, the level of the water would  not have been sufficiently high to reach Calvi 's wrist.

"That suicide would demand amazing agility for an overweight sixty-two-year-old man suffering from poor eyesight and pronounced vertigo. In a statement of doubtless unintended irony, Superintendent John White of the London river police declared: 'The long and the short of it is that we do not know how he came to be at the end of that rope.' The scene of the crime was drenched with mystical significance. The bridge lies in the area of London where the black-capped Dominican friars establish themselves in the mid-1300s. Black is the colour most often associated with fascism."

(Gladio: NATO'S Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 232-233)

"The site of Calvi's demise immediately arouses suspicion. Members of various Masonic lodges in Italy where black robes and address each other as friar. 'Black friars' – fratelli neri  – is an Italian nickname for Freemasons. The fact that masonry in the form of bricks was found on the body was deemed significant, as well as the Masonic oath stipulating that traitor should be 'roped down' in the proximity of the rising tide."

(The Vatican Exposed, Paul L. Williams, pg. 170)

the so-called "black friars" of P2

Dominican founder Saint Dominic

"... In 2003, prosecutors made sure of this with a preliminary conclusion that even if Cosa Nostra had sufficient motives to kill Calvi, they also acted to prevent his blackmailing 'politico-institutional figures.' This was an oblique pointer to high-ranking members of P2 in the Vatican Bank. Marcinkus had already taken precautionary vows of silence and self-imposed internal exile in the papal statelet. From this moment he was known as 'the Prisoner of the Vatican.' Gelli was placed under investigation but escaped formal indictment, though not before he made matters hot for the Papacy by suggesting looted funds control by Calvi had found their way to Polish Solidarity. This was an accusation with strong foundations... Five charges were laid against the grand cashier Calo and Flavio Carboni, the second of the mob's ushers who escorted Calvi up to London. Carboni  typified the extent of the unexposed iceberg beneath the case. He had a conviction for fraud at Banco Ambrosiano. He could be traced to associates with known connections to SISMI (military intelligence) and the Roman Magliana criminal gang implicated in the murder of Aldo Moro. Carboni's connections extended to General Giuseppe Santovito, the boss of  SISMI military intelligence and a P2 affiliate bound up in so many political and terrorist scandals of the period.

"After twenty months hearing reams of evidence, the presiding judge, Mario Lucio d'Andria, suddenly aborted the trial for lack of evidence. He also reversed the earlier London verdict of suicide to 'murder by persons unknown.' This patently confusing and contradictory ruling at least offered a crumb of comfort to Calvi's family. But it drew gasps of astonishment from the legal profession and the critical media. It can only be explained by interference at the highest levels to halt the case before more damaging exposures rocked the Italian establishment. Italians composed a short list of suspects containing exactly two names: the P2 junior novitiate and serving Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and the coiled asp, Il Divo Andreotti, senator for life since 1991."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 233-234)

Silvio Berlusconi, three time Italian prime minister and former P2 initiate

"Michele Sindona was not around hear the final verdict on his old friend and ally. The serpent had long since struck his flapping tongue. Submitting to unrelenting pressure from Italian authorities, the US finally surrendered Sindona to the Italian judicial system for the crime of commissioning the murder of Georgio Ambrosoli, the lawyer investigating his bank frauds. He received a life sentence, which he proceeded to serve in the prison at Voghera in Lombardy, a peaceful small city renowned for its restoring sub-Alpine airs and fine lace. On the morning of 22nd March 1986, Sindona, now 66, portly and balding, drank his last cup of coffee, laced with potassium cyanide..."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pg. 234)

Sindona

Marcinkus (top), Sindona (middle) and Calvi (bottom)

Stark

"In practice, the search for Moro's prison was co-ordinated by the Interior Ministry and a special crisis committee, many of whose members belonged to or later joined P2, the right-wing masonic lodge which opposed Moro's policy toward the PCI. Among the eight P2 members appointed to the committee were the heads of the domestic and military intelligence services, the head of the finance police and the regional commander of the carabinieri. Given their political orientation it would not be entirely surprising if they did less than their utmost to secure Moro's release. The minutes of the committee's meeting on 17 March give an idea of the quality of their contribution to the task at hand. SISMI Director Giuseppe Santovito informed the group that he believed two Japanese and a West German had participated in the Via Fani attack. He also drew the committee's attention to the imminent arrival of a ship from Cyprus at the port of Marina di Grosseto. There is no evidence whatever that his contribution had any grounding in fact. Santovito continued to provide the committee with misleading information, reporting the next day on the need for increased patrols on the Yugoslav border.

"On 24 October 1977, Parliament had passed a bill reforming the secret services, replacing the Defensive Information Service (SID) with the Military Security Information Service (SISMI) and the domestic Democratic Security Information Service (SISDE). This reorganization would be used as an excuse to argue that the security services were 'without eyes and without ears' at the time of the Moro kidnap. The reform effectively led to the demolition of the most reliable anti-terrorism organization and to the appointment of P2 members at the top of the new agencies..."

 (Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pg. 225)

General Giuseppe Santovito, one of the more notorious P2 initiates in the Italian secret services

"There are a number of testimonies that appear to implicate Gelli in the Moro affair. One of them was found among notes confiscated from the home of Gelli's secretary, Nara Lazzerini, who worked for the P2 boss in Rome between 1976 and 1981. The documents described a meeting with Gelli on the day of Moro's kidnapping, news which comes over the radio as Lazzerini is driven by taxi from the station to Gelli's headquarters in the Hotel Excelsior, on the prestigious Via Veneto. Lazzerini wants to 'freshen up' and is accompanied by Gelli to his bedroom. 'While I am in the bedroom to tidy myself up, Licio receives two people in the sitting room whom I'm unable to see, but I hear them say: "The major part is over. Now we'll see the reactions." ' Questioned by a magistrate from Bologna, Lazzerini was confident that she had not misheard. 'The phrase struck with me and I noted it down that same morning in the hotel, taking advantage of the fact that Gelli had left,' she said, adding that she had received frequent death threats in the years following Gelli's flight from Italy. The P2 Commission found her evidence altogether too embarrassing and turned down a proposal that she should be called as a witness. Christian Democrat commissioner Bernardo D'Arezzo, in particular, opposed the suggestion on the grounds of the witness's morality: Lazzerini had been Gelli's mistress. This high moral stand contrasts with the remarkable patience shown by the commission in the face of the lies and evasions of secret service chiefs who had belonged to Gelli's lodge.

"A memorandum sent in 1982 to the office of the Florence public prosecutor by Federico Federici, a Florentine time lawyer and P2 member, makes a similar claim. In it Federici said he had been told that Gelli reacted to the news of the kidnap with the words: 'We have finally resolved the Moro problem.' Federici, who died of a heart attack in 1988 while he was defense lawyer for a number of suspects in the Bologna bomb trial, is by no means a reliable witness. He was, however, close enough to Gelli to have access to sensitive information and it is interesting that both he and Lazzerini should have drawn attention to a possible link between the Master of P2 and the Moro affair. As we shall see later, Gelli himself found it expedient to do likewise, making it clear to the journalist Marcelo Coppetti that he was privy to inside knowledge about the kidnap.

"Gelli may have been dropping a hint to this effect when he granted an interview to the Corriere della Sera newspaper in 1980 (five October). The interviewer was a fellow lodge member, Maurizio Costanzo, and the article appeared as part of a series on 'The Discreet Charm of Secret Power.' 'What is democracy for you?' Costanzo  asked half-way through the interview. 'I'll tell you about a meeting I had with Moro when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs,' Gelli replied. 'He said to me: "You mustn't hurry things. Democracy is like a saucepan of beans: to be good they must cook very, very slowly." I interrupted him, saying: "Be careful that the beans don't boil dry, minister, because then you might burn them." ' Reading between the lines, one may perhaps discern the message: I warned Moro and we all know what happened to him."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 228-229)

Gelli

"The Moro Commission raised the issue of P2's role during the Moro kidnap in its majority report. It highlighted the presence of lodge members at the head of the security services and the fact that the organization represented political and material interests that would have been severely threatened if Moro's policy of accommodation with the PCI have been implemented. The commission said there was no proof that the failures and omissions of the security apparatus during the fifty-five days of Moro's imprisonment were deliberate. But it added that very grave examples of negligence had been recorded, 'which appear to be inexplicable unless they were motivated by a desire not to see a positive conclusion to the drama or by a substantial lack of interest in what was happening.' The commission also declared that it did not exclude the possibility of direct P2 involvement in the activities of the Red Brigades, given the shared objectives of 'those who seek an authoritarian change and those who prepare the ground for it with  blind and irresponsible violence.' The commission concluded that it should not rush to grave conclusions in the absence of a serious investigation of the subject. The P2 Commission failed to carry the investigation forward, giving the distinct impression that many of the commissioners considered the matter was simply too delicate to tackle..."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 230-231)

Moro

John Paul I

John Paul greeting Metropolitan Nikodim

"During that night, after only thirty-three days in office, John Paul I died. The scrambling that followed for his succession bore the markings of a minutely prepared coup d'etat. However much one might wish to believe otherwise, the surprise Pope in whom so many had placed such hope was unlikely to have died from natural causes and – in spite of all that has been written and said on the subject – the indications are strong that a cover-up of the real cause of death was engineered by a Vatican clique convinced it was acting to protect the Church and her sacred teachings.

"The facts surrounding the discovery of the Pope's death are bizarre to say the least. They prove that the Vatican did not, in the first instance, tell the truth and may not still be telling the truth. The first fact it attempted to hide was that Sister Vincenza found the Pope dead at 5 a.m. when she brought him his thermos of coffee. She said he was sitting upright in bed, his lips twisted. She noticed that he was clutching a sheaf of papers. An unsettled dispute persists as to the nature these papers, for they have disappeared. One explanation is that certain members of the Curia  did not want the outside world to know that a power struggle was in progress inside the Vatican... The papers allegedly detailed the changes that Luciani had intended to decree that same day. But according to Vatican news bulletins, he was holding a copy of The Imitation of Christ.

"Rumours concerning the missing papers and other anomalies surrounding John Paul I's death continued to surface during the next six years until finally, in June 1984 –  intended to dispense with the rumours once and for all – an unsigned memorandum was prepared for a conference of bishops that brushed aside The Imitation of Christ story as a pure invention of the press!

"This account was just as untrue as the first, produced in an attempt to rewrite history. The same memorandum suggested that the papers seem by Sister Vncenza were nothing more than the Pope's notes for his sermon at the Wednesday audience and the Angelus talk on the following Sunday. But the report neglected to mention that the original Vatican communiqué claimed the Pope had been found by Father John Magee, one of the two papal secretaries.

"Sister Vincenza in fact check called Father Magee. His first reaction had been to summon Cardinal Villot from his apartment two floors below. Villot appeared in the papal bedroom a little after 5 a.m. and as camerlingo immediately took charge. According to others present, he did a quick tour of the room, stopping at the Pope's bedside table and at his desk. After his initial visit to the bedroom, a small bottle of Effortil, a liquid medicine used to alleviate low blood pressure, that John Paul kept on his bedside table, went missing. The sheaf of notes also disappeared. No autopsy was requested, no forensic tests were undertaken.

"The Vatican doctor, Renato Buzzonetti, arrived in the bedroom at 6 a.m. and made a brief examination of the body. Buzzonetti informed Villot  that the cause of death was infarto miocardico acuto– a massive heart attack – and he estimated the time of death at about 11 .p.m. on the previous evening. Without further ado, Villot called for the rapid embalming of the body.

"Almost immediately the other secretary, Father Diego Lorenzi, who had been Luciani's  aide in Venice, telephone the Pope's personal physician, Antonio Da Ros, who had looked after Luciani for more than twenty years in Venice. 'He was shocked. Stunned. Unable to believe it... he said he would come to Rome immediately,' Lorenzi reported. Da Ros had been in Rome two weeks before to examine his patient, and remarked, 'Non sta bene, ma benone'  – 'You're not well, but very well.' But when Da Ros arrived later that same day, he was not allowed near the body...

"... the Vatican information department began creating the legend of the Pope's ill health. But if the Pope's health was so frail, why were no medicines – other than Effortil  – to be found in the papal apartments? And whatever happened to that missing bottle of Effortil? Why was Cardinal Villot never questioned about it? Also not to be forgotten, Edoardo Luciani, the dead pope's brother, was on record as stating that Albino had no history of heart trouble.

"The controversy surrounding Papa Luciani's death hung over the pre-Conclave General Congregations. As camerlingo,Villot found himself under attack by the more progressive cardinals. He admitted that the Vatican Press Office had given misleading information. The dissident cardinals wanted to know why no autopsy have been performed, nor an official death certificate issued, and they pushed for a collegial statement on the Pope's death. The Conservatives reject the idea.

"No more reactionary figure existed in the Roman Curia than Cardinal Silvio Oddi... The Italian authorities had demanded an autopsy, but Oddi claimed that he had already carried out an investigation for the College of Cardinals and found no evidence of foul play. Therefore he opposed an autopsy on the grounds that it would create a precedent, which was untrue. Autopsies have been carried out before. Indeed, Oddi was quoted as saying: 'The College of Cardinals will not examine the possibility of another inquiry at all, and will not accept any supervision from anyone, and will not even discuss the subject... We know... In all certainty that the death of John Paul I was due to the fact that his heart stopped beating from perfectly natural causes.'

"Then on 12 October 1978,  as the second Conclave opened, Father Panciroli, the Vatican spokesman, announced that after all a death certificate had been signed by Professor Mario Fontana and Dr Renato Buzzonetti. The certificate was not, however, a public document. With good reason. It contained a mere five typewritten lines affirming in Italian that the Pope had died in the Apostolic Palace at 23:00 on 28 September 1978 by morte improvvisa– da infarto miocardico acuto. Such a document would not have passed muster in jurisdictions where developed notions of civil law existed."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pgs. 253-256)

"Before Luciani's murder, Calvi associates in P2 had demonstrated their capacity to kill with a variety of appalling bomb outrages. Their ability to kill specific subject was demonstrated with the murder of Vittorio Occorsio. After the death of the Pope, murder and mayhem began to match the tempo of the gigantic thefts in which Calvi was indulging. The fact that Emilio Alessandrini, Mino Pecorelli, Giorgio Ambrosoli, Antonio Varisco and Boris Giuliano are all dead, is the most telling evidence of the kind of company that Roberto Calvi kept. The fact that the Governor of the Bank of Italy and one of his most trusted colleagues could be falsely charged, that Sarcinelli was forced to endure two weeks of imprisonment, that for years men who knew the truth were frightened to act, is a demonstration of the terrifying power at the command of Calvi:  power that came from many sources including Licio Gelli, Grand Master of P2.

"Licio Gelli was the Puppet Master with a few thousand strings from which to select. Strings appear to have led everywhere: to the heart of the Vatican, to the White House, to the presidential palaces in a wide range of countries. It was Gelli who gave his singular device to senior P2 members that they should always carry a fatal dose of digitalis. A lethal dose will cause, to use a lay term, a heart attack. In a subsequent examination by a doctor that is merely external, will confirm that death has been caused by a myocardial infraction. The drug is odorless and is impossible to trace unless an autopsy is performed.

"Why did Licio Gelli use such a strange codename, 'Luciani', whenever he called his P2 paymaster on the special hotline? Was mere mention of the name enough to send the millions upon millions flowing from Calvi into Gelli's various bank accounts?

"According to the members of Calvi's family, he attributed all his problems to 'the priests.' He made it clear which priest he had in mind – those in the Vatican. In September 1978 one priest in particular represented to Roberto Calvi the greatest threat with which he had ever been confronted. Calvi was with Gelli... in South America in August 1978, planning new schemes. Can anyone really believe that Gelli...  would merely shrugged their shoulders when Calvi told them that Albino Luciani was about to take a course of action that would mean the party was over?

"The murder of a magistrate or a judge or a policeman could be effected openly. The death would remain a mystery or be blamed on one of the many terrorist organizations then rampaging throughout Italy. But the murder of a Pope to cover up what was ultimately a billion dollar theft would have to be achieved by stealth. It would have to arouse as little concern as possible. For the murder to achieve its aim, the death would have to appear natural.

"The cost, no matter how high, in bribes, contracts, fees or commissions, was irrelevant. If the object of the Pope's death was to protect and sustain Roberto Calvi while he continued to steal millions, then there was a virtual well truth to draw upon. The problem of deputy chairman Roberto Rosone, which Calvi discussed at great length with fellow Mason Carboni, was intended to be resolved with the contract murder of Rosone. He lived, but Carboni still paid 530,000 dollars, the day after the attack, to the surviving gangster Ernesto Diotavelli. Half a million for a deputy chairman. How much for a Pope? When you have an entire bank at your disposal?...

"This book has already recorded many instances of the power and influence that Gelli  has exerted. At the time of Albino Luciani's death in September 1978, Licio Gelli, to all practical purposes, ran Italy. His access to any person or any place within the Vatican City State was unrivaled. The fact that he was in South America at the time of Luciani's  death is no alibi in the conventional legal sense. Sindona was enjoying an early evening dry Martini in New York at the precise moment that Giorgio Ambrosoli was murdered by William Arico in Milan..."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 296-298)

Gelli In this researcher's estimation Yallop only misses the mark by a narrow margin. Calvi's financial intrigues likely did not begin in earnest until after Pope John Paul I's death, when John Paul II was sitting upon the throne of Saint Peter. It is much more likely, as noted above, that Pope John Paul's lax attitude concerning Communism and support for liberation theology was deemed a major threat to powerful forces without the US and Italian deep states and that these forces had him promptly removed and replaced with Pope who was more agreeable (and a certain attempted assassination that shall be addressed in the next installment surely quashed any flights of fancy John Paul II may have been considering).

"He began, 'It makes sense members of P2 who were maintenance workers in the Vatican concealed themselves in the valet's quarters and waited for the early hours of the morning. The only other rooms not occupied at night were the dining room, kitchen and salon – often visited into the wee hours. Lorenzi happened to be sleeping in the secretary's office which otherwise would have been vacant.'

" 'Yes, I told him, 'it was a godsend the valet's brother happened to have died a few days before John Paul's death.'

" 'If P2 was involved,' he corrected me, 'it was no godsend.'

" 'They would have had to vacate one of the quarters. The valet's rooms were annexed the Pope's rooms were best suited. This does not necessarily mean Casaroli and Caprio or other men-of-the-cloth could not have been sharing the valet's rooms that night; just that they would have been fools to have committed the deed itself.

"Regardless, the day following Marcinkus' call, I searched the library microfilm for the obituary of the valet's brother.

"The thirty-year-old had fallen from a sixth floor balcony in Arezzo south of Florence. Unwitnessed, police could not determine if it was an accident or suicide. By providential coincidence, the Grand Master of P2, Licio Gelli, had his villa in Arezzo."

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pg. 287)

an aged Marcinkus

Calvi

"Pope John Paul II was shot at close range on 13th May 1981. His limousine was circling St. Peter's Square, just before the popular Wednesday general audience. A vast throng of  20,000 excited pilgrims clamoured around the papal conclave. Then, amid the jostling and cheering, and according to the reports of some witnesses – partially, at least, confirmed by one television recording – two sharp cracks rang out. These were attributed to a 9-mm Browning semi-automatic revolver fired at close quarters by a 23-year-old Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, member of the (literally) howling Gray Wolves Turkish terror organization. He was charged with attempted murder.

"But the mystery of exactly how many shots and more precisely who fired them, with what type of weapon, and from what angle, now began to colour the many differing versions of events that day. There seems to be a striking overlap with the confusion at Dallas almost thirty years earlier. There was confusion over the number of shots, whether fired by a single gunman or task force. The chief suspicion fell on Agca, a brainwashed patsy in the mold of Lee Harvey Oswald. And not least a mysterious grainy image, captured by bystander, showing an unidentified figure hurrying from the piazza moments after the gunshots. According to his trial testimony, Agca  insists that he fired 'two or three shots in rapid succession.' Three shots struck John Paul. One slapped into lower intestine, the others struck his left hand, passing through his abdomen, and his right arm. Two people in the dense crowd were, injured either collaterally by the same bullets, or by others aimed from a different direction.

"Thousands packed into the crowded space burst into tears, or screamed and fell to their knees in disbelief. Agca was grabbed and wrestled to the ground by onlookers, including a nun and Camillo Cibin, veteran chief of Vatican security renowned for his lightning karate chop. A small diversionary explosion was set off in a corner of the square. Significantly this crucial item was never properly addressed in the trial. Photographs depict Agca holding a pistol with both hands, scarcely a meter or so from the Pope, who is standing and waiting. He seemed to be aiming carefully, allowing for the crush around him, holding the pistol on the eye-line profile. Witnesses described the Turk as seemingly drugged and oddly unanimated. None apparently saw him whip out the concealed weapon and take aim, which is strange considering the closely packed crowd.  Literally bleeding to death, John Paul was rushed to the Vatican hospital complex. In a gloomy prognosis his doctors quickly established he had lost almost two-thirds of his blood. The Pope's life flickered in the balance...

"The arrest warrant, signed by Rome's prosecutor general, Achille Gallucci, stated that Agca attacked the Pope 'in collaboration with other persons whose identity remains unknown.' Luciano Inffelisi, a renowned independent-minded crusading magistrate assigned to investigate the attack concluded the following after his initial sifting of the evidence: 'There are documental proofs that Mehmet Ali Agca didn't act alone.' This was a reference to the variety of casings found in the vicinity, subsequently suppressed in the following court proceedings. Infelisi was implying a conspiracy. For such imprudence he was promptly shifted to other duties. The two most important officials immediately summoned to the case dismissed the lone gunman theory out of hand. Why, then, did the wind suddenly shift in a different direction?"

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 265-266)

Pope John Paul II moments before the assassination attempt; Agca is circled in red

"... Graduating from street gang violence Catli became a brutal enforcer for the Grey Wolves as a member of the Counter-Guerrilla operating under the direction of the Special Warfare Department. After the military coup in 1971 Catli rose quickly within their ranks, emerging second in command in 1978. It was in that year that he had to go underground because the police had linked him to the murder of seven left-wing activist. Supported by other right-wing terrorists Catli linked up with notorious Italian right-wing terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and together they traveled to Latin America and the United States. Closely linked to terror operations in Turkey and abroad Catli cultivated excellent contacts with the Turkish elite. He died near Susurluk on November 3, 1996 in a car crash together with high officials of the Turkish state."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 237-238)

Catli

Delle Chiaie

"Next to Catli the most famous Grey Wolf and Counter-Guerrilla member was his friend Ali Agca, who became world-famous when on May 13, 1981 he shot John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in Rome. The Pope was gravely wounded, but survived. During his student years in the 1970s Agca had been a well-known fascist militant, who allegedly in one of his less-violent operations had shot two students in their legs during an attack on a leftist hostile. His notoriety in terrorist circles was such that leftist tried to kill him on a number of occasions. Together with Catli, Agca participated in the killing of Turkey's most prominent newspaper editor, Abdi Ipekci on February 1, 1979. Ipekci had been deeply concerned about the domestic terror of the Turkish right and the support it enjoyed from the CIA and allegedly had urged CIA chief of station Paul Henze to stop the violence...

"After the assassination of editor Ipecki, Agca was arrested and he quickly confessed to the crime. Yet when he threatened in court to name 'the truly responsible parties' the signal was clear enough and the next day a group of Grey Wolves smuggled Agca  through eight checkpoints out of a high security prison. After his attack on the Pope he was once again arrested. Testifying in Rome in September 1985 Catli disclosed that he had supplied Agca with fake IDs and had given him the pistol that wounded the pontiff. Had the Grey Wolves been seriously investigated in the wake of their assassination attempt on the Pope, the Turkish state-behind Counter-Guerrilla most certainly would have been exposed. Yet this did not happen as the CIA in order to divert attention blamed the KGB to have recruited the Grey Wolves for the operation."

(NATO'S Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 238-239)

Agca

"... Based explicitly on the Pan-Turkish movement, the Grey Wolves derive their name and flag – the head of a Grey Wolf – from the legend that the grey wolfs led the Turk peoples out of Asia to their homeland in Anatolia. As 80 per cent of the population in Turkey belong to the ethnic group of the Turks, Colonel Turks with his nationalist and right-wing ideology was able to capture the hearts and minds of millions. Those who did not admire the Grey Wolves feared them...

"It was this national fascist movement which the CIA exploited and supported while running it secret army in Turkey. After the discovery of NATO secret stay-behind armies across Western Europe in 1990 it was revealed in Turkey that CIA liaison officer Turks had recruited heavily among the Grey Wolves to staff the secret stay-behind army which in Turkey operated under the name Counter-Guerrilla. Yet due to the broad public support which the Grey Wolves enjoyed, and due to their known brutality even in the 1990s few in Turkey and beyond had the courage to address the issue in frank terms..."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 228-229) 

the logo of the Grey Wolves

"In any event, Agca himself said nothing about any Bulgarian connection until five or six days after the shooting. By this time he was receiving a steady procession of important visitors to his prison cell at faraway Ascoli Piceno. Instead of more convenient confinement in Rome, Agca finds himself in the distant province of Marche, close to Italy's Adriatic coast. Nor, significantly, has he mentioned up to that point that he had accomplices. At his trial he insisted that he acted alone. The presiding judge, Severino Santiapichi, was not convinced. He acknowledged there were 'grave questions referring to the possibility [that]... a high-level conspiracy [had] arisen.' Agca had demonstrated a grasp of 'intricate phenomena, of intimate mechanisms, which he wouldn't be able to know without being involved in some manner in a criminal enterprise...'

 "For all the official denials that Agca was expertly coached to denounce his six alleged Bulgarian accomplices, the compelling evidence to that effect is overwhelming. Agca received so many important visitors they were bound to excite attention in the confined quarter of a prison..."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 269-270)

"... Five Bulgarians and one Turk were immediately singled out. Egged on by the disinformation machine, the media instantly convicted the accused before the court of public opinion. American newspapers especially made play with an especially tragic figure snared in the trap. He was Sergei Ivanov Antonov, manager of the Balkan Airlines office in Rome, who attracted much attention in the media because of his sinister Russian-sounding name. All the Bulgarians except Antonov, plus the lone Turk, Bekir Celenk, quietly slipped away once the prosecutor general, Antonio Marini, announced in the early spring of 1988 there was no evidence to support the charges. Mehmet Ali Agca was again the lone marksman...

"Antonov was muddled with Antony Ivanov Antonov, a near namesake who lived in Turkey for years, a cog in the Sicilian dope smuggling ring. Who denounced him, while subordinates in Rome then mangled the names? The wrong Antonov was also named as an East German double agent. Markus Wolf, head of the GDR General Intelligence Administration (Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung), took the unusual and possibly unprecedented step of speaking directly with Italian state intelligence SISDE. His message was simple: There is no agent by that name on my payroll. Please improve your homework."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Hear of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 275)

Sergei Ivanov Antonov, one of Agca's alleged Bulgarian accomplices who was later acquitted

"In 2002, a red-herring parliamentary commission hand-picked by the stupendous opportunist Silvio Berlusconi purported to investigate the extent of KGB influence over prominent figures in Italy. No credible evidence on any count was ever adduced to the committee, which otherwise relied on innuendo, the standard instrument in black propaganda dating back to the Holy Inquisition. Its principal task was to slander the dreary dead-pan opposition leader Romano Prodi (an ex-Christian Democrat, former Goldman Sachs consultant and EU Commission chief) as Moscow's stooge in Rome, in advance of upcoming elections. Aside from the usual rumpus in the Italian kitchen, international headlines were seized when the commission's chairman, the shameless, mercurial opportunist Paolo Guzzanti (left, right or centre, on any given day) claimed to have 'proven' the KGB's hand in the shooting of the Pope. Guzzanti is a prominent editorial ornament in the former premier Berlusconi's media empire..."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 293-294) 

Silvio Berlusconi, yet another P2 luminary who continues to wield considerable power in modern day Italy

"About a month before the Pope was shot, Count de Marenches passed a warning to the Vatican's security services to anticipate an attack by an unspecified 'foreign power.' M. le Comte was clearly working from a short list of one. He was also building a case. This scarcely-disguised inference that the Soviets planned to kill the Pope formed the supporting platform for all the later claims to that effect. If the warning was passed to the Pope, as it probably was, then His Holiness almost certainly dismissed it with a scornful wave of the hand. He knew from his experience in his homeland that he had nothing to fear from the Soviets. Marenches could not have known of the Pope's secret financial dealings with the Kremlin. Few did, except for the innermost members of his court. But Marenches did reflect the growing alarm among the Western allies at the Vatican's dangerous foreign policies, especially the increasingly warm relations with Moscow. Alexandre de Marenches was a perfect trinity contained in a single being: he was a member of the ruling inner circle of the ultra Right-minded Maltese Knights; a top-drawer intelligence chief; and the joint proprietor of a private enterprise spook outfit accustomed to taking on dirty work for the CIA. Who better to sow a rich layer of confusion around the crime of the century?"

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pg. 269)

Count Alexandre de Marenches

the notorious "Splendid Blond Beast" Ted Shackley

the coat of arms for the Sovereign Military Order of Malta

"The world was now plunged into turmoil over the sudden projection of a KGB plot behind the events in St. Peter's Square. The first claims broke in West Germany eight days after the shooting, from a source with longstanding associations to the Gray Wolves, and moreover to the Turkish Gladio organisation code named Counter-Guerrilla. As the Pope's life wavered in the balance, a hitherto unknown Turk called Musa Serdar Celebi sprang to the headlines at a press conference in Hamburg. In the course of an excitable performance, Celebi poured high-octane fuel on KGB conspiracy theories. The cynics noted that he failed to produce a shred of supporting evidence. But those who delved into his murky past soon uncovered his reasons for trumpeting a Soviet plot, aside from revelling in five minutes of fame. For a start, Celebi knew Agca extremely well. He was also the head of the German Gastarbeiter ('guestworker') branch of the Gray Wolves' political wing, the National Action Party. The NAP enjoyed warm relations with West German intelligence, the BND. In 1982 Celebi was suddenly arrested and charged with physically aiding Agca with money and weapons to shoot the Pope. Unintended consequences followed when the police uncovered a web of connections leading to high officials of Germany's Christian Democratic party renowned for their extreme Right opinions. They in turn maintained close links to Turkey's far Right Extreme nationalists."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 271-272)

Celebi

"Another man of mystery now comes to the surface, a certain Ruzi ('Rusty') Nazar, an Uzbek who seems to have led many lives. He was in the Ukraine when WW2 broke out, and either hid from the Red Army, or more promptly, deserted when the Germans arrived on their way to Moscow. He is written into one of the forgotten chapters of WW2, the decision by thousands of Muslims drafted in the Red Army to switch sides and fight for Hitler. Nazar volunteered for an SS Turkic-speaking unit, where he was quickly spotted as highly promising material. After a spell of grooming in officer training, he graduated to the staff of the German High Command. If the war had gone a different way, he might have found himself raised to Obersturmbannfuhrer of the subject Turkic Union, which sparkled in Hitler's post-war visions. Instead, with the defeat of Germany, he was evacuated by the famous Nazi ratline run by General (and future West German intelligence chief) Reinhard Gehlen. The CIA were quick to spot his talents. Before long, he was an important figure in the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism --known for short as Amcomlib. On the surface it was a band of worthy patriot businessmen, writing checks to spread the gospel of democracy. Underneath, it was a CIA front to manage the propaganda-churning stations Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Liberty. From there he was drawn into the thick of CIA scheming and plotting in Turkey, which eventually dragged the country into the internal Turkish dirty war of the '60s and '70s. This is one of the darkest episodes of Turkish history. Thousand were killed, or thrown into jail and tortured horribly on the grounds they were Left-wing activists or sympathisers. The violence was the excuse for the CIA-backed coup d'etat by the hard-liner General Kenan Evren in September 1980. Earlier he commanded Counter-Guerrilla, Turkey's Gladio secret army. Counter-Guerrilla and the Howling Wolves paramilitaries were chiefly responsible for provoking the reign of terror that brought Evren to power.

"Under the new regime, 'Ruzi Bey' was a darling of the cocktail party circuit in Istanbul. Then came a transfer to Bonn, where he was instructed to nurse Right-wing elements among the masses of Turks living in Germany. The signs suggest that Nazar may have been a key mechanic of the Papal plot, with the task to stick the pin in the Bulgarians. He worked with the late Paul Henze, a serial confabulator of KGB conspiracies and former CIA station chief in Ankara. It was Nazar who introduced Celebi to his flickering appearance before the footlights of history in Munich in the days after the Pope was shot. On or about 12th March 1983, Ruzi Bey vanished from CIA records, his cover blown."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 275-276)

Paul B Henze, the long time CIA station chief for Turkey (and later Ethiopia), who would go on to play a key role in the far right Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank; much more will be said concerning Mr. Henze in the next installment

"Interestingly. the always reliable Ugur Mumcu tracked Nazar to the former US embassy in Bonn. Mumcu stated he was assigned to work with Grey Wolves units on behalf of the CIA, while retaining close links to the great Basbug Colonel Turkes. He was therefore in post in Bonn during the run up to the attempted assassination and is therefore the key to the German Connection through BND."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pg. 276 n50)

Nazar

"Dylan Storm Roof was shown in the national media with a Confederate States of America license plate on June 18, the day which began with the breaking news that the US Supreme Court had upheld the ban on Confederate license plates by the state of Texas (as far as those plates being issued by the state itself). Coincidence? 

"Roof’s heinous killings occurred on the 33rd degree of north parallel latitude in Charleston, South Carolina, headquarters of the most powerful masonic body in the world, the Scottish Rite. Coincidence?

"Other news media have reported that Mr. Roof has in the past taken the psychotropic drug Xanax. (He was facing felony drug charges prior to the massacre he perpetrated). Was he drugged during his shooting spree? The Establishment media don't ask, and they also don’t ask why he wasn’t tested for drugs or alcohol being present in his system when he was apprehended. Many other youths who initiated massacres (Kip Kinkle and the Columbine High killers for example) were under the influence of a hypnotic pharmaceutical drug when they committed their crimes.

"The New York Times issued a graph yesterday purporting to show that Black people are the chief victims of hate crimes in the United States, but these statistics are cooked. It is very difficult to have black on white crime officially listed as a hate crime. Such crimes are too often dismissed as non-racial, random violence...

"The politically correct issues here are racism and gun control, and the suppressed issues are mind control pharmaceuticals and Manchurian candidates..."

Hoffman

Mr. Roof sporting his Rhodesia and Apartheid-era South Africa patches while dressed in black

"Jones said on Thursday that the shooting, which resulted in the deaths of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, did not feel like a 'false flag' attack to him because of the lack of what he called 'talking points' from the media. He also said that the suspect, 21-year-old Dylan Roof, 'looks like the textbook-case lunatic.' "

Jones

"Operation Gladio was first made public in August 1990, when then-Prime Minister Giulio Anderotti admitted its existence to the Italian Parliamentary Committee on Terrorism. To this day much about Gladio remains mysterious. It seems that planning for the operation began to take place in 1951... Gladio was incorporated into Office 'R' of SIFAR in 1956. On paper, Gladio was a NATO-backed 'Stay Behind' operation: Any Soviet attack on Italy would encounter a pre-established resistance network, a militarily-trained underground with access to secret arms caches hidden across the country. To implement Gladio, SIFAR established a sabotage training school in Sardinia in 1954. Technically, Gladio was made up of two principal branches: 40 S/B (Stay Behind) units trained in guerrilla warfare, and five rapid deployment units with names like Alpine Star, Sea Star, Rhododendron, and Azalea. American-supplied weapons, including hand grenades, sniper rifles, and explosives were also buried in 139 hiding spots.

"The Italian government claimed initially that Gladio was part of a general agreement with NATO. NATO, however, officially denied any involvement. Revelations that Gladio-type organizations existed in non-NATO nations like Austria, Spain, and Switzerland further eroded the NATO cover story. Gladio really seems to have been what its name means: a double-edged sword to be used against the Soviets and any element inside Italy, from either left or the right, that might try to take Italy out of NATO. Gladio also served as the backdrop for the 'strategy of tension,' which repeatedly destabilized Italian politics with bombings and other terror attacks. Popular fear of terrorism, from either the 'left' or 'right,' could then be used to justify a suspension of constitutional law or even, in a worst-case scenario, a military-backed Pinochet-like 'white coup' to insure Italy's continued allegiance to the West."

(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan. pg. 332)

a patch used by Italian Gladio "Gladiators"

Moro during his alleged kidnapping by the Communist Red Brigades

the emblem of The Order

the logo of Stormfront

"... The last hours of Calvi's life were spent in the Chelsea Cloisters, frantically working the telephone. The by-now ex-chairman of Banco Ambrosiano was clearly facing an imminent deadline. Sometime during the evening of the 17th June, he stepped out in his usual expensive top had and favorite hand-made loafers. He was next seen suspended from an orange rope strung from builders' scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge. As even the uninitiated generally know, orange is the keynote colour the Masonic Craft. Calvi's body was loaded with ballast, about forty kilos of stones stuffed into his pockets and bizarrely, his trouser flies. His calves' leather wallet contained £10,000 in sterling, Swiss francs, and Italian lira notes. His expensive though unwaterproofed Swiss watch stopped at just before 2 a.m., the point at which it was dipped in the water by the rising river tide. After 2:30 am, the level of the water would  not have been sufficiently high to reach Calvi 's wrist.

"That suicide would demand amazing agility for an overweight sixty-two-year-old man suffering from poor eyesight and pronounced vertigo. In a statement of doubtless unintended irony, Superintendent John White of the London river police declared: 'The long and the short of it is that we do not know how he came to be at the end of that rope.' The scene of the crime was drenched with mystical significance. The bridge lies in the area of London where the black-capped Dominican friars establish themselves in the mid-1300s. Black is the colour most often associated with fascism."

(Gladio: NATO'S Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 232-233)

Calvi's dead body

Calvi's body

Delle Chiaie

"Roof also lived for a time in Lexington, just a few miles away, which is home to onetime Aryan Nation leader and Christian Identity pastor August Kreis – whose activity and influence has waned as a result of severe diabetes and his arrest last year on child sex abuse charges."

August Kreis III

"The Canadian branch of WACL, the Canadian Freedom Foundation, headed by John Gamble, works closely with the U.S. Counsel for World Freedom ( USCWF) and Singlaub. Together USCWF and the Canadian Freedom Foundation form the North American regional unit of WACL (NARWACL). Gamble and Singlaub alternate as chairs of NARWACL. Gamble was implicated in the Iran-Contra funding network when a firm for which he served as treasurer and director, Vertex Investments, was discovered to have invested in the arms sale to Iran through two of his partners. The Canadian Freedom Foundation (CFF) and Vertex both operate out of Gamble's law office.

"At least two CFF leaders are active anti-Semites: Pat Walsh is the Canadian correspondent for the quasi-Nazi Liberty Lobby newspaper the Spotlight and Paul Fromm helped found the neo-Nazi Western Guard.

"The Western Guard is led by John Ross Taylor, who served fifty-one months in detention for pro-Nazi activities during World War II. Taylor also leads Canadian contingents to Aryan Nations meetings, including a commemoration of the deaths of members of The Order, a paramilitary offshoot of Aryan Nations that engaged in robberies and murder in its efforts to overthrow the U.S. Government."

(Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, Russ Bellant, pgs. 67)

Miller

"He trained for his current post under his klan-mate mentor, Pennsylvania's Mark Thomas. This Christian Identity preacher exposed by the Daily News three years ago grew quiet after two disciples, skinhead brothers Bryan and David Freeman, pleaded guilty in December to murdering their parents and brother in February 1995. Kreis helps another pal, Jim Wickstrom, run the local Posse Comitatus. Wickstrom served three years of a 38-year prison sentence after his conviction for conspiracy to pass counterfeit money to build a racist guerrilla army..."

James Wickstrom

"James Wickstrom published an Intelligence Update in February, 1989, in which he wrote: 'ZOG thought the "Posse Comitatus" was just a tax rebellion movement. But to their surprise some years later, ZOG found that the movement was loaded with former military officers being used in an advisory manner. In Wisconsin alone, Posse Comitatus officers from 36 states were trained in all types of leadership positions in guerrilla warfare. Other training sites handled the other states.' "

(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 169)

"Richard Lee Guthrie Jr., son of a CIA employee, discharge from the Navy for painting a swastika on the side of a ship and threatening superiors, his childhood friend Peter K.  Langan, and Shawn Kenny, went on to form the nucleus of a group known as the Midwest Bank Bandits. The group stole more than $250,000 from 22 banks between January, '94 and December, '95 in a spree that led them across Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri. The four member group would often wear FBI jackets to taunt the Bureau, and create diversions to foil police, including leaving behind inert pipe-bombs to slow pursuit. The bandits even had a macabre sense of humor, wearing a Santa Claus suit during a hold up around Christmas, and an Easter basket with a gold painted pipe-bomb left inside a bank in Des Moines.

" 'Wild Bill' Guthrie also admitted to a West Virginia sheriff that he had held Butler's Aryan Nations raise another quarter million dollars through fraud. Both Guthrie and Langan were regular visitors to the Hayden Lake compound...

"Interestingly, the Secret Service recruited Langan as an informant in August 1993 to keep an eye on his friend Guthrie, who had made threats against the lives of Presidents Clinton and Bush. Langan was released from his Georgia jail cell (serving time for robbing a Pizza Hut with Guthrie) and set up in a house in Ohio, where he was to assist the Secret Service in locating his old friend...

"Langan went south on the Secret Service six weeks later, and soon located his old friend Guthrie. The two set themselves up in a safe house in Pittsburg, Kansas, from which they were alleged to have launched their notorious crime spree.

"In November, '94, Mark Thomas, the local Aryan Nations representative, united the two with others of their kind. Thomas' farm, located rather appropriately next to a toxic waste dump, has been the site of skinhead and neo-Nazi rallies such as White Pride Day and the annual Hitler Youth Festival, where participants enjoyed such wholesome activities as pagan rituals and cross-burnings.

"Thomas introduced the pair to Pennsylvania native Scott Stedeford, a rock musician and artist, and Kevin McCarthy, bassist in a white-power band name 'Day of the Sword.' Thomas was instrumental in helping the men form an alliance which they would call the Aryan Republican Army (ARA)...

"The Pennsylvania Posse Comitatus leader would also introduce Stedeord and McCarthy to Michael Brescia, a Philadelphia native and rock musician who would go on to form a speed metal band with McCarthy and Stedeford called 'Cyanide.' The rock 'n' roll bank robbers decided to recruit the 24-year-old La Salle University student after planning the heist of a large bank in Madison, Wisconsin, which the trio robbed on August 30, 1995.

"The three men came to know 'Grandpa Millar' at Elohim City courtesy of Thomas, and Brescia was soon engaged to Millar's granddaughter, Ester. Brescia wound up living at the reclusive compound for two years. It was there that he would meet his new roommate, Andreas Carl Strassmeir, the mysterious German who settled there in 1991. It was also at Elohim City that Brescia would meet Timothy McVeigh..."

(The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, David Hoffman, pgs. 119-121)

"As the Cold War ended, following juridical investigations into mysterious acts of terrorism in Italy, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to confirm in August 1990 that a secret army existed in Italy and other countries across Western Europe that were part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Coordinated by the unorthodox warfare section of NATO, the secret army have been set up by the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 or SIS) after the end of the Second World War to fight communism in Western Europe. The clandestine network, which after the revelations of the Italian Prime Minister was researched by judges, parliamentarians, academics and investigative journalists across Europe, is now understood to have been code-named 'Gladio' (the sword) in Italy, while in other countries the network operated under different names including 'Absalon' in Denmark, 'ROC' in Norway and 'SDRA8' in Belgium. In each country the military secret service operated the anti-Communist army within the state in close cooperation with the CIA or the MI 6 unknown to parliaments and populations. In each country, leading members of the executive, including Prime Ministers, Presidents, Interior Ministers and Defense Ministers, were involved in the conspiracy, while the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC)...  coordinated the network on the international level. The last confirmed meeting of ACC with representatives of European secret services took place on October 24, 1990 in Brussels.

"As the details of the operation emerged, the press concluded that the 'story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller.' The secret armies were equipped by the CIA in the MI6 with machine guns, explosives, munitions and high-tech communication equipment hidden in arms caches in forests, meadows and underground bunkers across Western Europe. Leading officers of the secret network trained together with the US Green Berets Special Forces in the United States of America and the British SAS Special Forces in England. Recruited among strictly anti-Communist segments of the society the secret Gladio soldiers included moderate conservatives well as right-wing extremists such as notorious right-wing terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie and Yves Guerain Serac. In  its strategic design the secret army was a direct copy of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which during the Second World War had parachuted into enemy-held territory and fought a secret war behind enemy lines.

"In case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe the secret body of soldiers under NATO command would have formed a so-called stay-behind network operating behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy-held territory, evacuating shot-down pilots and sabotaging the supply lines and production centres of the occupation forces with explosives. Yet the Soviet invasion never came. The real and present danger in the eyes of the secret war strategists in Washington and London were the at-times numerically strong Communist parties in the democracies of Western Europe. Hence the network in the total absence of a Soviet invasion took up arms in numerous countries and fought a secret war against the political forces of the left. The secret armies, as the secondary sources now available suggest, were involved in a whole series of terrorist operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists in order to discredit the left at the polls. The operations always aimed at spreading maximum fear among the population and ranged from bomb massacres trains and market squares (Italy), the use of systematic torture of opponents of the regime (Turkey), support for right-wing coup d'etats (Greece and Turkey), to the smashing of opposition groups ( Portugal and Spain)..."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 1-2)

a patch used by Italian Gladio assets

Shackley

"... In 1966, a significant (and lasting) development occurred, namely the establishment in Taiwan – following on plans later earlier in the South Korean capital, Seoul – of the CIA-sponsored World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The organisation arose from a previous regional effort, the Asian People's Anti-Bolshevik League, sponsored by the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang regime. Financial backers for the new anti-communist world ring included cash-hungry Korean cult tycoon Sun Myung Moon, whose recruitment methods and renowned mass nuptials uncannily mirrored certain CIA experiments in brainwashing. The tentacles of this sprawling octopus eventually extended to all corners of the planet. This was visibly the Fascist International, the huge global Gladio ... It was charged with  the ... brief to 'overcome and eliminate' any governments or forces considered sympathetic to communism. The means were not precisely specified, save for talking about warfare in psychologically political terms. Yet WACL was tracked to Operation Condor, death squads in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, the twin Kennedy assassinations and general oiling of Iran-Contra in life-after-death mode. So, it would not be surprising to discover WACL fingerprints thickly plastered all over The Enterprise of drug and arms dealings in its latter-day formation. In Europe, WACL was tied up with various neo-fascist fronts, particularly Licio Gelli's  P2/Gladio activities, in Italy as well as South America. The liquidations of both Aldo Moro (communist fraterniser) and Olof Palme (Iran-Iraq meddler, irritating Palestine interloper) have been cited as promoted in some degree by WACL."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 123-124)

a meeting of the WACL

Draper

Pinckney

this image from The Godfather Part III was inspired (like much of the film) by Calvi's saga

"... Among the early callers on Agca's cell was Francesco Pazienza, a P2 lodge member connected with the disappearance of funds from Roberto Calvi's stricken Banco Ambrosiano. From 1979 to late 1981, Pazienza was a SISMI agent, important enough to become adjutant to the director, General Giuseppe Santovito, a Maltese Knight and another close acolyte of Licio Gelli. Santovito was later traced directly to attempts to expunge the Turkish Mafia presence from St. Peter's Square. Pazienza was a close associate of another P2 clansman... the neo-fascist Stefano Delle Chiaie.

"In September 1981, General Santovito resigned as general director of SISMI. His position was indefensible. He had been named as a P2 affiliate in the famous list discovered in Gelli's villa in Arezzo in the spring of that year. Santovito was the perfect example of the 'diseased culture' of the Italian secret services mentioned by crusading magistrate, Carlo Palermo. He was under suspicion for complicity in the bombing of Bologna railway station in August 1981. He was deeply involved in the accelerating crash of Banco Ambrosiano. He perverted the course of justice in the papal investigation. His close friends included the murdered General of the Carabinieri, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the equivocal figure closely connected to the murder of Aldo Moro. Fearing a similar fate, he fled to the United States. He returned the following year, and was promptly arrested for involvement in the Bologna station bombing. He died in 1982, the unresolved charges hanging over his head.

"For all the official denials that Agca was expertly coached to denounce his six alleged Bulgarian accomplices, the compelling evidence to that effect is overwhelming. Agca received so many important visitors they were bound to excite attention in the confined quarters of prison. They certainly did not elude a fellow incarcerate, the famous Camorrista, Giovanni Pandico. He was the legendary 'super-computer,' considered the most important pentito in the history of the battle against the Mafia. He denounced practically a fill battalion of Neapolitan mobsters in 1983, based on his amazing total recall of all their names and infamies. Pandico confirmed that he frequently saw Francesco Pazienza in Agca's cell. Another VIP who paid his respects was General Giuseppe Santovito, DG (Direttore Generale) of SISMI. In the ancient manner of the Vatican, the prison chaplain, Father Pietro Santini, dutifully repeated these comings and goings to his Bishop, Msg. Marcello Morgante. He in turn sent regular reports to Archbishop Marcinkus, the brooding spider at the centre of the web in Rome.

"Pazienza spent hours with Agca, coaching him to memorise a dossier containing photos of the Bulgarian stooges. Agca rapidly absorbed the smallest details --uneven teeth, facial tics and blemishes --it seemed hypnotically. Three months later, six new suspects --five Bulgarians and a single Turk --were suddenly named by Judge Martella and arrested..."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 270-271)

General Giuseppe Santovito, one of the most corrupt figures in the history of the Italian secret services, a truly Herculean accomplishment in and of itself

"At about this time General Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI, Italy's military intelligence establishment, hired as his agency's Vatican and Palestinian specialist Francesco Pazienza. Born in 1946 at Taranto, southern Italy, into a staunchly Catholic family, Pazienza held a degree in 'deep-sea physiology.' Blessed with an idiomatic command of five languages, he knew a welter of international celebrities, including Aristotle Onassis, NATO commander-in-chief Alexander Haig, international swindler Robert Vesco, the PLO's Yasser Arafat and a range of Saudi princes. He also had excellent contacts in Latin America, particularly Argentina, where he claimed the nuncio, Archbishop Pio Laghi, was a close friend, as was the Vatican's permanent representative at the United Nations, Archbishop Giovanni Cheli."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pgs. 268-269)

P2  initiate Francesco Pazienza, who turns up in a host of intrigues

General Alexander Haig, one of several key Knights of Malta members who turn up in the P2 story

"According to Salmi, Turkey's underworld was comprised of ten families, whose biggest criminal enterprise was smuggling opium and morphine base out of the country, and arms back in. The arms were sold to the Kurds, a disenfranchised minority group in Eastern Turkey, fighting insurgent wars in Iran and Iraq. Narcotics going out of the country were often hidden in the trucks and cargo of Turkish workers going to Germany. One group of smugglers set up the Overland Company specifically to move morphine base to Europe and return with weapons. 'It was an Overland truck that was carrying the drugs in the Watermelon case,; Salmi says, 'but we didn't learn about the guns until a few weeks later, when another Overland truck packed with weapons, was seized in Austria on its way back to Turkey. So by 1967 there was a proven correlation between arms and drug smuggling. We knew the Turks were involved, how the payoffs were made, and the routes they used through Bulgaria and Hungary.'

"The involvement of East Europeans in the drug trade and the movement of guns to the Kurds were issues of tremendous interest to the CIA station in Turkey. As a way of exploiting the situation for its own purposes, the CIA convinced the FBN that a surge in terrorism in Turkey was not the result of internal political unrest, but of the KGB's control of the Bulgarian drug trade. The FBN was glad to assist the CIA by providing the spy agency with Interpol reports identifying drug traffic transit ports in Bulgaria. The CIA also professed to share an interest with the FBN in making a case on the Kulecki and Cil clans, the dominate alliance in the guns-for-drugs trade between Turkey and Bulgaria. But both families were very well protected. Mehmet Kulecki, owner of the Kennedy Hotel in Istanbul, was arrested in 1965 for possession of 147 kilograms of opium, but before the case got to court, the opium was exchanged for river mud and Kulecki was set free. Huseyin Cil, the owner of several hotels on the Syrian border, was so well protected that he actually got away with murder. But daring Dick Salmi decided to go after them anyway."

(The Strength of the Wolf, Douglas Valentine, pgs. 402-403)

Turkey has long been one of the cornerstones of the international heroin market

"The BNDD's real enforcement success came as a result of the friendship, forged in 1968, between Salmi and the aftermentioned Dewey Clarridge, CIA liaison to the Counter-Guerrilla Center with its terrorist Grey Wolves unit. As Salmi noted, he and Clarridge established personal trust...

"In 1971, CIA headquarters directed Clarridge to officially join the war on drugs. 'With Dewey it was informal,' Salmi adds. 'He didn't know what to say in his reports, so I told him.' Salmi provided information on major crime families, trends, and analysis. In exchange, Clarridge gave Salmi a list of airstrips, shipping companies, and political figures the CIA knew to be involved in drug trafficking. Clarridge was interested in how arms traffickers were smuggling guns to the ever-rebellious Kurds in Western Turkey. Salmi knew that the gun runners worked with Turkish, Iranian, Syrian and Jordanian traffickers, and he knew which Israelis (ever instigating trouble in Muslim nations) were facilitating shipments to Iran to selected Kurdish insurgents. Using the information gathered and provided by Salmi, Clarridge shined at Langley.

 "In Istanbul, Clarridge and Salmi discovered some startling information about Bulgaria. Through a defector, Clarridge learned that the Bulgarian Secret Service, at the behest of the KGB, was facilitating the gun and drug smuggling activities of Turkish crime families through a Bulgarian tourist agency known as Kintex. Salmi obtained further information about complicit Bulgarian spies from his Interpol contacts. Clarridge helped Salmi investigate and together they were able to chart the flow of Turkish drugs west, through Bulgaria to France, Germany, Italy and east into Afghanistan and Iran. Nothing, however, came of their efforts to implicate the Bulgarians. The archangels in Washington had other priorities and, in November 1971, Customs and BNDD officials traveled to Sofia and began to instruct Bulgarian customs officials in American drug interdiction techniques. The Kintex scandal was swept under the carpet as part of the investigation."

(The Strength of the Pack, Douglas Valentine, pgs. 130-131)

if its corporate headquarters are any indication, Kintex is still doing well for itself

"Drenched by decades of unremitting propaganda, the well-fertilised public will believe the worst of the Soviets and their allies overpowered the uncritical media. Soon the Soviet plot acquired the status of established fact, helped along by Paul Henze, and the professional CIA whitewasher Claire Sterling. She worked out of the CIA station in Rome, posing as a reporter, the classic espionage cloak. Her 1981 book, The Terror Network, which blamed the Soviets for causing all terrorist violence in the world, uncannily chimed with the forthcoming attack on the Pope. Retrospectively, it looks suspiciously like an overture. As Henze was the CIA's point man with Turkish intelligence MIT, he was naturally familiar with every nut and bolt of the narcotics and arms carousel. He was the chess master who knew the moves of every Turkish gangster roaming Europe..."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pg. 279)

Henze

"The CIA station chief in Rome at the time of the papal shooting was Duane Dewey Clarridge, who had served with the Agency in Turkey in the early and mid-1970s when armed bands of Grey Wolves unleashed a wave of bombings and political assassinations that culminated in a military coup at the turn of the decade. Disclosures by Turkish human-rights groups indicate that during this period, the Grey Wolves worked in tandem with the Turkish army's Counter-Guerrilla Organization, which functioned as the Turkish branch of the CIA's multinational 'stay behind' program.

 "At the same time, members of the Grey Wolves were immersed in the international drug trade. Serving as couriers for the Turkish Mafia, they criss-crossed the infamous smugglers' route passing through Bulgaria, which served as a transit point for sizable shipments of arms and heroin. An inquiry by Italian magistrates disclosed that large quantities of sophisticated NATO weaponry --including machine guns, Leopold tanks, and U.S,-built Cobra assault helicopters --were smuggled from Western Europe to countries in the Middle East during the 1970s and early 1980s; deliveries were often made in exchange for consignments of heroin that filtered back, courtesy of the Grey Wolves and other smugglers, to northern Italy, where the drugs were received by Mafia middlemen and transported to North America. Turkish morphine formed the basis of the infamous 'pizza connection' which flooded the United States with high grade heroin for years. 

"The bristling contraband operation that traveled Bulgaria was a magnet for secret-service agents on both sides of the Cold War divide. Crucial, in this regard, was the role of Kintex, a Sophia-based, state-controlled import-export firm that played a pivotal role in the arms trade. Kintex was riddled with Bulgarian and Soviet spies --a fact that encouraged speculation that the KGB and its Bulgarian proxies were behind the 1981 papal shooting. But Western intelligence also had its hooks into the Bulgarian smuggling scene, as evidenced by the CIA's use of Kintex to channel weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in the early 1980s. Although the CIA's link to the arms-for-drugs trade in Bulgaria was widely known in intelligence circles, Congress preferred to emphasize the testimony of former CIA agents and right-wing conspiracy theorists, who alleged the Bulgarian secret service and the Soviet KGB had plotted to kill the pope. It proved to be one of the most efficacious disinformation schemes hatched during the Reagan era, reinforcing the notion that the USSR was an 'Evil Empire' while deflecting attention from extensive --and potentially embarrassing --ties between U.S. intelligence and Turkish neo-Nazis."

(The Beast Reawakens, Martin A. Lee, pgs. 202-203n)

Duane "Dewey" Clarridge has long been alleged to have been a key player in the Iran-Contra affair (of which P2 was involved in up to its eyeballs, as has been noted throughout this series) and in recent years has taken to managing his own private intelligence network

"As the 1980s opened Judge Carlo Palermo --a former Italian MP, bustling lawyer and painstaking magistrate --was quietly sifting through a stack of reports at his chambers in the mountain city of Trento. He was searching for clues to the Sicilian Mafia's heroin-running activities in collusion with drug cartels in Eastern Europe. Powerful incriminating evidence has started to filter from the wreckage of Michele Sindona's banking and money laundering empire. About the same time, Ugur Mumcu --fearless investigator for the Istanbul daily Cumhuriyet --established in 1983 the facts of the vast east-west arms and drug trafficking carousel, passing through a niche of the Soviet bloc:

"And the interesting thing is that the weapons smuggled in Bulgaria are weapons produced in NATO countries. Don't the Bulgarian police know or see how all these arms from NATO nations clandestinely enter a Warsaw Pact member nation? They know --and see.

"Ugur Mumcu would pay for this and other revelations surrounding the Turkish deep state, including the attack on the Pope, with his life. He was assassinated by a car bomb outside his home on 24th January 1993. Judge Palermo joined the ranks of diligent magistrates who took a great personal risk in exposing many dangerous secrets harboured by the Italian deep state. He almost paid the same price, narrowly escaping assassination in a booby-trapped car. Palermo's detective work confirmed a network which linked several eastern countries, including Bulgaria and Turkey, operating through a major junction in Italy. But, unwittingly at the time, he tripped over an even bigger stone: the sinews linking the narcotics racket, the massive NATO arms scam and the involvement of western intelligence in all of those activities.

"On 24th November 1983, Palermo issued no less than two hundred arrest warrants in the great arms and drugs merry-go-round. In a later memoir he wrote: 'I was [informed] by Milan's Finance Office about the role carried out by an important Islamic credit institution, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a bank founded by the Pakistani mafia operating all around the world, entailed to the drugs and weapons traffic, and even to terrorism. That report also included some inculpating elements among those high level complications, and some of our mysteries: that of Banco Amrosiano, the P2, Calvi's suicide in London, that of our deviated secret services, the most recent that of the attempt to kill the Pope...'

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pg. 274)

Judge Carlo Palermo (top) and journalist Ugur Mumcu (bottom)

"It is clear that Jews were, like many other minorities, a constituent in the global drug connection. More importantly, they were an important part of the financial infrastructure of that connection – but even at this level they did not operate alone. The global drug connection combined Jewish banks in Florida and Switzerland with those of Teochew, Fujian, and Hokkien Chinese in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, the Muslims of Bank Intra and later BCCI in the Middle East, and furthermore Italian banks like those of Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, both members of the intelligence-linked Masonic Lodge P-2, and both murdered after their banks failed from mafia involvement. It is my impression that none of these ethnic minority elements ever surpassed in power the dominant role of figures from the mainstream, like [William] Donovan and [Paul] Helliwell."

Knight of Malta William "Wild Bill" Donovan

"In 1953-54 the CIA drew on old China hands with exposure to KMT traffic (Chennault, Willauer, William Pawley, Howard Hunt)  to set up the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala, an operation which at least contemplated the use of 'Puerto Rican and Cuban gangsters.' As part of this operation, we see CIA officer Howard Hunt, a veteran with friend Lucien Conein and Conein's friend WerBell of OSS operations in China under Helliwell, helping in 1954 to set up what would eventually become the Latin American branch of the KMT-backed World Anti-Communist League..."

(The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger and Peter Dale Scott, pg. 16)

"Peter Dale Scott writes: 'Spas T. Raikin was also the Secretary-General of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a small but vigorous group of right-wing revanchiste Eastern Europeans in direct touch with the FBI... and Army intelligence – and also with the Gehlen spy organization in West Germany; the Kuomintang in Taiwan, the mother of Madame Ndu, right-wing Cubans like Oswald's DRE contact Carlos Baringuier, and other elements of a shadowy "World Anti-Communist League." This WACL had contacts with U.S. anti-Communists in New Orleans, in the building with the Camp St. address... used by Oswald on his pro-Castro literature, and also by the CIA's Cuban Revolutionary Council of which Bringuier had once been press secretary. As I have indicated in my book, The War Conspiracy, Mr. Raikin's personal correspondents in Taiwan (the Asian People's Anti-Communist League) were intelligence agents involved in the Kuomintang's narcotics traffic – a fact dramatically illustrated by the 1971 arrest in Paris of the Chief Laotian Delegate to the APACL, whose suitcase contained 60 kilos of high-great heroin, which have been worth $13.5 billion in the streets of New York...'... "

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli Jr., pg. 440n)

a young Spas Raikin

"As the story unravelled, it became inseparable from the hard evidence appearing from Judge Palermo's stunning paper trail. Large quantities of sophisticated NATO weaponry, including tanks and American-made Cobra helicopters, were routinely purloined from the Alliance and smuggled around the world throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. It was the world's most powerful clandestine arms trafficking organisation, eclipsing anything previously known. Moreover, it ignored the political barriers which divided Europe. I was told by several contacts, while involved in Bulgarian matters, that American accents were heard as cargoes were shifted between planes at the capital city's rundown airport. Anonymous-looking, white-painted aircraft usually recognized as part of the CIA's private fleet were said to be regular visitors. On 24th November 1982, Judge Palermo issued arrest warrants against two hundred suspects of a dozen nationalities implicated in the vast weapons and narcotics cycle 'which sent heroin to the West and weapons to the East... dominating this traffic in both directions from Turkey and the Near East to all of Western Europe and the United States.' Palermo named Bekir Celenk as the leading figure on his list. The dogged magistrate put his finger on the real Bulgarian Connection, the overwhelming quantities of arms and drugs waved through Bulgaria under the unseeing eyes, as Ugur Mumcu described them, of the Bulgarian customs agents.

"Italy was the hub. The heroin which paid for the arms was then marketed by American and European crime syndicates, most of that siphoned through Sindona's and Calvi's banks or the ones they controlled, including the Vatican's Institute of Religious Works. Propaganda Due brought together all the necessary political contacts and infrastructure needed to control the operation. More nuts and bolts were supplied by the usual services of Stibam International Transport. The Syrian (or Armenian) Henri Arsan, who ran the outfit, would sometimes boast he worked undercover for the US Drug Enforcement Administration. This was a rather provocative indication of his real connections. Arsan, alternatively Arsanaylan, was known as the 'playboy Mafioso,' out of his addiction to gaudy clothes and flamboyant gold jewelry. The playboy's big friend in the Turkish Mafia was none other than Celenk, Palermo's chief smuggling suspect and the baba named in the plot to kill the Pope. Stibam's offices in Milan were conveniently situated right above Roberto Calvi's palatial suite in the Banco Ambrosiano building. But Arsan held other keys, as a confidante of Licio Gelli: namely, the crucial P2 connection."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 277-278)

Turkish Mafioso Bekir Celenk

"... Gelli's address book, confiscated from his office at Castiglion Fibocchi, contains the name of another Loris Scricciolo, a socialist Member of Parliament and a second cousin of the Red Brigades terrorist of the same name. Also listed was Piero Scricciolo, a busisness man living in Arezzo and Luigi Scricciolo's uncle. Both had been members of P2. Moreover, Luigi Scricciolo, the trade unionist who put the Red Brigades in touch with the Bulgarian secret services, was in regular contact with the American embassy in Rome, calling on officials there almost every week. It would therefore appear that the Scricciolo family could provide a potential bridge between P2 and the CIA on the one hand and the Red Brigades on the order..."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pg. 338)

Gelli

"Abdullah Catli, the high-ranking Grey Wolves member who gave Ali Agca the gun that was used to shoot the pontiff, later stated under oath in a Roman court that he had been approached by the West German BND spy organization, which allegedly promised him a large sum of money if he implicated the Bulgarians and the Soviets in the papal plot..."

(The Beast Reawakens, Martin A. Lee, pg. 202n)

Catli

Maltese Knight Reinhard Gehlen

"Juan Arias --the Spanish philosopher and close intimate of John Paul --observed that 'the fact that the P2 in some way, directly or indirectly, participated in the papal attempt has always been a taboo that everyone wanted to avoid.' This is one of the most significant and revealing assertions in connection with St. Petersgate. Coming from a trusted confidant, it demonstrated the Pope knew exactly whose hand was on the trigger. As much had been suspected by General Ambrogio Viviani, chief of SISMI's counter-intelligence division (1970-74). Before he turned pentito, Viviani was an affiliate of P2. Speaking to the Turin daily La Stampa in 1994, he suggested that to 'analyse the assassination of the century it is necessary to write the facts of what was happening by then in Poland, Agca's movements and what was happening in Italy...'

"Vanni Nistico, formerly the press officer of the Italian socialist party, and another P2 affiliate, circulated an odd tale around Rome that Licio Gelli once showed him some photographs of John Paul relaxing au naturel at his swimming pool at the Castel Gandolfo summer papal retreat. According to Nistico, Gelli commented enigmatically: 'If it's possible to take these pictures of the Pope, imagine how easy it is to shoot him.' Put another way, as Nistico obviously suspected, how easy it was for Gelli --whose personal rake from the Sindona scams has been estimated at $500 million --to pay his papal informers to snatch such intimate moments. These revealing holiday snaps, if anything more than apocryphal, confirm Judge Palermo's critique of 'our deviated secret service.' "

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 278-279)

Calvi's body

"The US-funded anti-Communist parallel government P2 and the US-funded anti-Communist parallel army Gladio cooperated closely during Italy's First Republic. Licio Gelli, who after the discovery of the P2 had escaped arrest and fled to South America, after the end of the Cold War was happy to confirm that the secret army was made up of staunch anti-Communist. 'Many came from the ranks of mercenaries who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and many came from the fascist Republic of Salo. They chose individuals who were proven anti-Communist. I know it was a well-constructed organization. Had Communist strength grown in Italy, America would have assisted us, we would have unleashed another war and we would have been generously supplied with arms from the air.' Gladiators were paid well, Gelli  elaborated, for the US spent a lot of money on the network: 'The Americans paid them large sums of money, the equivalent of an excellent salary. And they guarantee the financial support of the families in case the Gladiator was killed.'

" 'The aim of Gladio and other similar organizations which existed in all countries of Western Europe was to counter the invasion of the Red Army or the coming to power by coup d'etat of the Communist parties,' Gelli stressed the twofold function of the secret network. 'That PCI, during all those years, has never come the power, although they have tried to do so repeatedly, is the merit of the Gladio organization.' Gladio researcher Francovich, with an implicit reference to the numerous massacres Italy had suffered from, asked Gelli: 'How far would you have gone in your campaign against Communism? to which Gelli vaguely replied: 'Ah, number one enemy was Communism [silence] – we were an association of believers – We did not admit non believers – We wanted to stop Communism in its tracks, eliminate Communism, fight Communism.' "

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pg. 75)

Gelli

"As the Cold War ended, following juridical investigations into mysterious acts of terrorism in Italy, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to confirm in August 1990 that a secret army existed in Italy and other countries across Western Europe that were part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Coordinated by the unorthodox warfare section of NATO, the secret army have been set up by the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 or SIS) after the end of the Second World War to fight communism in Western Europe. The clandestine network, which after the revelations of the Italian Prime Minister was researched by judges, parliamentarians, academics and investigative journalists across Europe, is now understood to have been code-named 'Gladio' (the sword) in Italy, while in other countries the network operated under different names including 'Absalon' in Denmark, 'ROC' in Norway and 'SDRA8' in Belgium. In each country the military secret service operated the anti-Communist army within the state in close cooperation with the CIA or the MI 6 unknown to parliaments and populations. In each country, leading members of the executive, including Prime Ministers, Presidents, Interior Ministers and Defense Ministers, were involved in the conspiracy, while the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC)...  coordinated the network on the international level. The last confirmed meeting of ACC with representatives of European secret services took place on October 24, 1990 in Brussels.

"As the details of the operation emerged, the press concluded that the 'story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller.' The secret armies were equipped by the CIA in the MI6 with machine guns, explosives, munitions and high-tech communication equipment hidden in arms caches in forests, meadows and underground bunkers across Western Europe. Leading officers of the secret network trained together with the US Green Berets Special Forces in the United States of America and the British SAS Special Forces in England. Recruited among strictly anti-Communist segments of the society the secret Gladio soldiers included moderate conservatives well as right-wing extremists such as notorious right-wing terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie and Yves Guerain Serac. In  its strategic design the secret army was a direct copy of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which during the Second World War had parachuted into enemy-held territory and fought a secret war behind enemy lines.

"In case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe the secret body of soldiers under NATO command would have formed a so-called stay-behind network operating behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy-held territory, evacuating shot-down pilots and sabotaging the supply lines and production centres of the occupation forces with explosives. Yet the Soviet invasion never came. The real and present danger in the eyes of the secret war strategists in Washington and London were the at-times numerically strong Communist parties in the democracies of Western Europe. Hence the network in the total absence of a Soviet invasion took up arms in numerous countries and fought a secret war against the political forces of the left. The secret armies, as the secondary sources now available suggest, were involved in a whole series of terrorist operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists in order to discredit the left at the polls. The operations always aimed at spreading maximum fear among the population and ranged from bomb massacres trains and market squares (Italy), the use of systematic torture of opponents of the regime (Turkey), support for right-wing coup d'etats (Greece and Turkey), to the smashing of opposition groups ( Portugal and Spain)..."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 1-2)

a patch used by the "gladiators" of Gladio

"Despite all official assurances to the contrary, there is a strong suspicion that a complete list of Gladio members, if that should ever be made public, would contain numerous names of right-wing extremist, possibly of people implicated in acts of terrorism. Magistrates in Brescia, for example, have begun examining the possibility that Gladio may have been in some way involved in the 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing. Judge Casson's investigations have revealed that the gladiators were unusually thick on the ground in that part of the world. One particularly encumbering name discovered by Casson on the cover of an almost empty secret service file pertaining to a Gladio member is that of Gianfranco Bertoli. The secret services insist that it is just a coincidence and that the person involved has nothing to do with the man who attempted to blow up the Interior Minister with a bomb in 1973. It is significant that Vincenzo Vinciguerra, one of the first insiders to lift the veil on secret service manipulation of terrorism, has drawn attention to Bertoli's attack as a particularly good example of secret service-inspired terrorism. He has also claimed that he was himself invited to carry out an assassination attempt on the same minister some two years earlier. The proposal was put to him, he told magistrates, by two members of Ordine Nuovo whom he suspected of being in contact with the secret services. Much of what Vinciguerra had alleged in the past appears to meet with confirmation in Andreotti's revelations about Gladio.

"Perhaps where Gladio gets closest to direct involvement in terrorism is with the Peteano bombing, carried out by Vinciguerra himself. It may have been to preserve the secrecy of Gladio that the secret services organized their heavy-handed cover-up over the affair. On 24 February 1972,  at Aurisina in north-east Italy, not far from Peteano, some children playing in the woods discovered one of the Gladio arms caches and reported their findings to the carabinieri. A week later, more arms were found in a cave nearby. In both cases, it appears, the dumps had been interfered with and some of the explosives were missing. The then commander of Gladio, General Gerardo Serravalle, used this incident as a pretext to recommend the dismantling all the Gladio dumps. As we shall see, he had come to suspect the democratic reliability of many of his own men. The remaining explosives were immediately detonated by the carabinieri and the secret services busied themselves in concealing the true nature of the arms caches, encouraging investigators to pursue the theory that the weapons belonged to international arms traffickers rather than to the guardians of Italian democracy. Three months later, on 31 May 1972, Vinciguerra staged the Peteano bombing and there is a strong suspicion that the explosives used in that attack may have originated in one of the Aurisinia dumps. When Casson attempted to investigate this hypothesis some eighteen years later, he was told by the carabinieri that all the documentation relating to the discovery have been destroyed. It is quite possible that the secret service cover-up over Peteano may have been intended simply to preserve the secret of Gladio. But it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the anti-communist organization may have been more directly involved in the bombing and that someone in the know may have tipped off members of Vinciguerra's  group about where they could obtain their explosives.

"Some of the most serious doubts about the reliability of the gladiators stemmed from the testimony of General Serravalle, commander the organization from 1971 to 1974, who is one of the first secret service officers to lift the veil of secrecy about the organization in evidence to Judge Mastelloni. Serravale has described how, shortly after his appointment, he made a point of meeting some of the men under his command and was shocked by the extremist views that many of them expressed. Rather than waiting for a Soviet invasion, half of the gladiators were eager to set about eliminating Italian communists without delay. 'I found myself, an officer in the service of the Italian Republic, at the head of an armed band,' the general told the parliamentary commission on terrorism. He was even more specific in the course of a television interview: the Gladio arms dumps, he said, were 'an absolute threat to the stability of the country.' The discovery of the Aurisina dump provided him with a convenient excuse to recommend the dismantling of all the arms caches on the grounds that they were no longer secure.  But he did not share his suspicions with his secret service superiors because he had so little faith in them. 'Miceli [SID director] was a man of honor, but I was afraid of the other people around him, who had been in SIFAR and were involved in Piano Solo,' he told me."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 152-154) 

General Gerardo Serravalle

General Vito Miceli

 "... Nor is it reassuring to learn that the gladiators were in large part armed with Eastern Bloc weapons. Secret service director Admiral Fulvio Martini  told the parliamentary commission on terrorism that the Gladio arms dumps contained Kalashnikovs and other Soviet weapons, as well as explosives from Czechoslovakia. It is interesting to remember, in this context, Richard Brenneke's claim to have bought weapons in Czechoslovakia on behalf of the CIA. It is hard to imagine what advantage the gladiators could derive from the use of Eastern Bloc weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion. Their use for acts of terrorism in peacetime, on the other hand, would conveniently point the finger of blame at the communist bloc. It would be interesting to know, for example, how many of Gladio's Soviet-made weapons ended up in the hands of the Red Brigades."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pg. 158)

"As usual [Paul] Marcinkus overshadowed this very strange affair with his customary aplomb. Late in 1980, he entertained a group of visiting CIA dignitaries for an excellent lunch followed by a bracing round of golf. Thus restored, they agreed the Vatican Bank would act as a conduit for a $200 million slush fund, with the theoretical intention to boost the fledging Solidarnosc movement. The money would enter the Vatican from forwarding banks in Panama and South Africa, together with Coutts, snooty London bankers to the British Royal Family, and the Sindona network. It was understood that profits from the CIA's off-radar activities would count among the proceeds. More would be sourced from various government agencies, Right-wing think tanks and the American AFL-CIO labor movement. There was many hands rubbing with glee at the prospect of a share in these gala proceedings. But Solidarnosc was just the cover story of a much grander drama.

"The token archbishop himself sometimes mused in retirement over the Red Gold sifting through his fingers. A clue as to what he meant came from Elizabeth Wasiutynski, who ran the Solidarnosc office in Brussels in the early 1980s. She was adamant that she never saw such galactic sums passing through her hands. At most she handled about $200,000 petty cash every year. Moreover, what need had Solidarnosc of such amazing amounts, given its main financial pressures arose from the need to fork out meager amounts of occasional strike pay? Richard Pipes, one of Reagan's key advisers, soon began to question exactly where the $200 million, which he suspected (rightly) was only the tip of the financial iceberg, actually went after it vanished in the CIA plugholes. The ardent Zionist Pipes, like all Zionist-Likudnik neo-conservatives no bosom chum of the CIA, suspected its dirty tricks department working hand-in-hand with the notoriously corrupt Vatican on some grand smoke and mirrors deception. Indeed it was, in classic Italian fashion. Even as Reagan heaped fiery rhetoric on the Evil Empire, hands were moving behind the scenes to disable the Soviet Union with the most effective weapon of all: money.

"It is time to resurrect again that grand master of duplicity and financial chancery, Robert Maxwell, who above all knew how an intricate web of shell companies, operating under an anonymous group umbrella, could shuttle funds unseen around the globe. Maxwell was the key to the Red Gold and the Pope's Kremlin connection. By the end of the 1970s, intelligent realists in the KGB and in particular one man, the hard-line but coldly practical KGB boss and Politburo member Vladimir Kryuchkov, understood that the USSR was bankrupt politically and financially. It could only be repaired by importing the precepts of the West. Kryuchkov is of course remembered chiefly for his role in the short-lived 1991 coup against Gorbachev. This was a classic Russian-style false-flag operation, which effectively destroyed the last remnants of the rigid conservative base holding out against sweeping reforms of the Soviet system. As the future presidential candidate General Alexander Lebed said afterwards: 'There was no putsch as such. It was a provocation, planned with genius, carried out brilliantly, large-scale and unprecedented, where roles were set down for both the clever and the stupid.'

"Gorbachev was a designated heir of the briefly-reigning, long-sighted Yuri Andropov, the only true intellectual ever to head the Politburo, although Kryuchkov, his former deputy at the KGB, was of the same stripe. With Andropov's encouragement, he set about the papal Noah's Ark project. It was to quietly escort the most senior inner party members to the safe haven of about 600 companies established on western lines, to secure a future in the inevitable transition from the command economy to western-style corporatist capitalism. From the seed corn capital transmitted through the Vatican, giants such as Gazprom arose from the ashes of the communist party. The recipients of this secret nourishment were destined to flower as the all-powerful oligarchs who came to dominate post-communist Russia (and Poland too, where a similar project was bearing fruit). By weaving trading links with Western companies and learning through their expertise, these KGB front companies would obtain access to the refreshing energies of capitalism."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 284-285)

Vladimir Kryuchkov

"... the Org, which served as a kind of subcontracting syndicate for harebrained CIA rollback schemes, guerrilla airdrops, and other ill-fated covert attempts to topple Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In addition to providing plausible deniability, Gehlen had access to former leaders of virtually every Nazi puppet government from the Baltics to the Black Sea, as well as an assortment of Waffen SS fanatics who joined the American-led campaign to 'liberate' their native lands. 'It was a visceral business of using any bastards as long as he was anti-Communist,' explained Harry Rositzke, ex-head of CIA operations in the Soviet Union. 'The eagerness to enlist collaborators meant that you didn't look at their credentials too closely.' 

"In the wake of successive paramilitary fiascoes in Eastern Europe, some CIA officers wondered if Soviet agents had infiltrated the Org. Clearly Gehlen was a political hot potato. A conflict raged within U.S. intelligence as to what advantages the United States had in fact accured by supporting a shadowy spy network run by a moody ex-Nazi officer. The CIA's James Critchfield, who worked with Gehlen on a daily basis for nearly eight years, recalled that 'hundreds of flaps... kept breaking out between the [Org] and elements of the occupation. Suspicions were such that the CIA and the army both began spying on the Org. Born of concern that U.S. intelligence lacked effective control over its surrogate, Operation Campus became the designated codename for a secret army investigation into Gehlen's activities.

"American army sleuths discovered that Gehlen's agents had employed various stratagems to undercut U.S. intelligence. During interrogations at displaced-persons camps, for example, his men would warn inmates not to talk with the Americans on the grounds that the United States was secretly still in cahoots with the Soviets. The Agency also learned of a rabidly nationalist newsletter, Orientierung, that circulated among Gehlen's staffers, giving rise to 'the uneasy feeling that we, namely U.S. intelligence, were being misused for German nationalistic purposes,' as one CIA operative put it. But as long as Allen Dulles ruled the roost, Gehlen continued to live a charmed existence. 'He's on our side and that's all that matters,' Dulles said of his German counterpart. 'Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club.'

"Was Gehlen really on America's side, as Dulles glibly asserted? 'What we had, essentially, was an agreement to exploit each other, each in his own national interest,' said Critchfield, who considered Gehlen 'a consummate political operator.' It seemed to work as long as Gehlen's objectives coincided with the CIA's, but being on the U.S. payroll did not guarantee abiding loyalty. While Gehlen sought to satisfy his sponsor's craving for details on their mutual enemy, he also pursued another agenda, which entailed running interference for the legions of war criminals who flocked to the Org for cover. By coopting the CIA's anti-Communist bias, Gehlen was able to neutralize the immediate threat posed by U.S. intelligence, which otherwise might have pursued a more rigorous denazification program. 

"The CIA eventually found out that the Nazi old-boy network nesting inside the Org had a dangerous and unexpected twist to it. By bankrolling Gehlen, the Agency had unknowingly laid itself open to manipulation by a foreign intelligence service that was riddled with Soviet spies. Although former Nazis gravitated to the West, some went over to the Soviets, who took advantage of every opportunity to infiltrate the Gehlen network. Certain Third Reich veterans collaborated with the Russians while also pawning secrets to the Americans, the British, and the French, depending on who offered more money. Willi Hottl, the SS disinformation adept who later worked for U.S. Army intelligence and the Gehlen Org, described the free-for-all that ensued at war's end: 'The German Secret Service is broken and scathered both to East and West. Some serve the Americans and some the Russians. Others lie low and watch which way the wind blows. Some play with fire on both sides of the Iron Curtain...' "

(The Beast Reawakens, Martin A. Lee, pgs. 38-39) 

Gehlen

the coat of arms of the Sovereign Oder of Malta

"...  Grey Wolves member Abdullah Catli ranged among the most notorious Counter-Guerrillas during the 1970s. Graduating from street gang violence Catli became a brutal enforcer for the Grey Wolves as a member of the Counter-Guerrilla operating under the direction of the Special Warfare Department. After the military coup in 1971 Catli rose quickly within their ranks, emerging second in command in 1978. It was in that year that he had to go underground because the police had linked him to the murder of seven left-wing  activist. Supported by other right-wing terrorists Catli linked up with notorious Italian right-wing terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and together they traveled to Latin America and the United States. Closely linked to terror operations in Turkey and abroad Catli cultivated excellent contacts with the Turkish elite..."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniel Ganser, pgs. 237-238)

Catli

the nations who participated in Operation Condor

the logos of the neo-fascist terror networks Grey Wolves, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale, all of which have been linked to Gladio

Pope John Paul II

Paul Marcinkus (top), MIchele Sindona (middle) and Roberto Calvi (bottom), the key figures in the Great Vatican Banking Scandal

a patch used by the "legionaries" of Gladio

"Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organization of international dimensions. Though its actual membership is relatively small (estimates vary between 60,000 and 80,000), its influence is vast. It is a secret society, something which is strictly forbidden by the Church. Opus Dei denies that it is a secret organization but refuses to make the membership list available. It was founded by a Spanish priest, Monsignor Josemaria Escriva, in 1928. It is to the extreme right wing of the Catholic Church, a political fact that has ensured that the organization has attracted enemies as well as members. Its members are composed of a small percentage of priests, about 5 per cent, and lay persons of either sex. Though people from many walks of life can be found among its members, it seeks to attract those from the upper reaches of the professional classes, including students and graduates who are aspiring to executive status. Dr. John Roche, an Oxford University lecturer and former member opus Dai, described it as 'sinister, secretive and Orwellian.' It may be that its members' preoccupation with self mortification is the cause for much of the news media hostility that has been directed towards the sect. Certainly the idea of flogging yourself on your bare back and wearing strips of metal with inward-pointing prongs around the thigh for the greater glory of God might prove difficult for the majority of people in the latter part of the twentieth century to accept. No one, however, should doubt the total sincerity of the Opus Dei membership. The are are equally devoted to a task of wider significance: the takeover of the Roman Catholic Church. That should be cause for the greatest concern not only to Roman Catholics but everybody...

"This organization has, according to its own claims, members working in over 600 newspapers, reviews and scientific publications, scattered around the world. It has members in over 50 radio and television stations. In the 1960s three of its members were in the Spanish dictator Franco's cabinet, crating Spain's 'economic miracle.' The head of the huge Rumasa conglomerate in Spain, Jose Mateos, is a member Opus Dei; he is also currently on the run after building a network of corruption similar to that of the Calvi empire, as recently revealed. Opus Dei is massively wealthy. Until recently, when it changed hands, anyone walking into an Augustus Barnett wine store in England was putting money into Opus Dei."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 250-251)

Escriva, Opus Dei's founder

"Penitential practices fall under paragraph 260 of the 1950 Constitution:

The pious custom of chastising the body and reducing it to servitude by wearing a small cilice for at least two hours a day, by taking the discipline at least once a week, and by sleeping on the ground, will be faithfully maintained, taking into account only a person's health.

"The 'instruments of mortification' are given to members in little brown sacks. One former member alleged they had been given to children only fifteen years of age. The same young man was told that the amount of mortification he undertook could be increased with the approval of his spiritual director. He was also told how Escriva's blood spattered the walls of the bathroom from the ferocity with which he beat himself.

"A report in the Liverpool Catholic newspaper, the Catholic Pictorial, for 29 November 1981 described the introduction of young girls into the organization. They were introduced gradually to 'the "mortifications" practiced by Opus Dei members. They were encouraged to kiss the floor upon rising instantly to the morning door knock.' They had 'cold showers and long periods of silence.' They wore the cilis (sic) – a spiked chain – around the thigh for a two-hour period each day (not on Sundays and Feast days) 'and applied a rope whip to their buttocks once a week.'

"Some of these practices still exist within Opus. They are an integral part of the spiritual formation of its members. The way Escriva beat himself with the discipline is obviously a matter of pride to the members. And it is also the case that, with the increasing understanding of the unhealthy psychology of these basically masochistic acts, they have quietly been dropped from the customary behavior of other religious orders."

(Opus Dei, Michael Walsh, pgs. 110-111)

a cilis

"One pious practiced urged upon readers of Camino is the very impressive, if somewhat morbid and theologically doubtful, suggestion that they are to put themselves before a plain wooden cross and to imagine themselves upon it... The first requirement of the section of the 1950 Constitution devoted to 'The observance of pious customs' requires that: 'Where three or four members live together as a family there should be set up in an appropriate place a black cross without the figure of the crucified. On the feast day of the Invention and Exaltation of the Cross it should be adorned with crowns of flowers from morning to night' (paragraph 234). 'From morning to night' should more strictly be translated 'from Prime to Vespers,' the first and next to last 'hours' or divisions of the divine office. The feasts of the 'Invention' (commemorating the finding by St. Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, of the cross) and the 'Exaltation,' 13 May and 14 September, respectively, are major feasts in the Opus calendar."

(Opus Dei, Michael Walsh, pgs. 107-108)

"... In Belgium this milieu has largely been represented by the Vatican and US intelligence-linked right wing of the PSC, and coincidentally, besides numerous accusations of child abuse against PSC members, some have also been accused of ritual abuse and Satanism, albeit largely through Opus Dei. 

"First up are the claims of Jacques Thoma, who once was a treasurer of the PSC youth division. His boss was the notorious CEPIC member Jean-Paul Dumont, the alleged child abuser..:

Jacques Thoma was at a restaurant with Sara de Wachter (01/10/55) when he broke down in tears. He participated in 1985-86 in several satanic sessions close to Charleroi. 

He is very afraid. He was a treasurer of the youth section of the PSC. He often met with Michel Dewolf, Philippe Sala and Jean-Paul Dumont. They tried to direct Thoma toward Opus Dei what they considered Nec Plus Ultra [Latin for 'nothing further beyond']. 

Under the pretext of initiation tests for Opus Dei he was brought to a Black Mass with sexual acts. He mentions the presence of girls from a country in the East (13-14 years)... He was drugged before being taken into a room with masked people who had dressed in black robes. The participants drank blood. He was placed in the presence of a naked little girl laying down on an altar - she had died.

He encountered the grand master, Francois-Joseph, who told him that he was a police informant and that he had to be careful... Francois-Joseph is a notary implicated in the trafficking of girls for prostitution from the East.

He wanted to leave but was drugged again. He woke up the following day in his car. He left the party [PSC] and made a declaration to the BSR [Special Investigations Unit of the gendarmerie] in Charleroi. 

"X4, who also claimed to have been taken to Satanist black masses, fingered Paul Vanden Boeynants, Dumont's boss, as a violent abuser and added that Opus Dei members (like these) had belonged to her most sadistic clique.."

Paul Vanden Boeynants

" 'Berlingske Tidende can reveal that Absalon is the Danish branch of the international Gladio network. This has been confirmed by a member of Absalon to Berlingske Tidende who wishes at present to remain unnamed,' a Danish daily newspaper sensationally headlined its discoveries in 1990. The source, named Q by the newspaper, confirmed what Colby had revealed in his book. 'Colby's story is absolutely correct. Absalon was created in the early 1950s,' the source Q related. The network, according to Q, was composed of right-wing men in order to guarantee staunch anti-Communism. 'Colby was member of the world spanning laymen catholic organization Opus Dei, which , using a modern term, could be called right-wing. Opus Dei played a central role in the setting up of Gladio in the whole of Europe and also in Denmark,' Q claimed. 'The leader of Gladio was Harder who was probably not a Catholic. But there are not many Catholics in Denmark and the basic elements making up the Danish Gladio were former [World War II] resistance people – former prisoners of Tysk, Vestre Faengsel, Froslevlejren, Neuengamme and also of the Danish Brigade.' "

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 169-170)

Colby

"The sense of all this was that Opus Dei's methodology consisted of using, if necessary, unclean hands to achieve certain of its secular aims and that Calvi, Gelli, Ortolani and the Propaganda network, having similar political aims, where appropriate assets to be exploited and then abandon. As far as pouring resources into the battle against Marxist subversion in Latin America was concerned, Opus Dei allegedly decided that a secondary Spanish bank would make a good partner for Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano.

"In the mid-1970s, Calvi started to show an interest in Banco Occidental of Madrid. Its shares were listed on the Madrid stock exchange. A block of 100,000 shares, representing 10 per cent of its capital, was held privately by Swiss company, Zenith Finance S.A. Dr Arthur Wiederkehr was not one Zenith board at the time but would become a director in 1980. Calvi acquired the shares for 80 million Swiss francs, ten times more than the going market price which was an unusual thing for an astute banker to do. He placed them in a company owned by United Trading.

"Banco Occidental belonged to Gregorio de Diego, an enterprising freebooters originally from Salamanca. Diego represented everything that Opus Dei admired in the free enterprise ethic. He was clever, aggressively inquisitive and obviously someone gifted for attracting capital...

"Diego died of a heart attack in the arms of his mistress. Though not a point in his favor, it could hardly be held against the son, also called Gregorio de Diego, who inherited the family empire. Although he had no banking experience Diego II became Occidental's managing director, appointing as chairman of the Conde Tomas de Marsal, a Spanish grandee who, like Ortolani, was a secret knight of the papal household.

"Under Conde de Marsal, Banco Occidental moved into the investment banking field, taking positions in industrial concerns, such as cement works which fitted well with Diego's property development activities. In the early 1970s, the bank opened a representative office in Rome, primarily for Tomas de Marsal's convenience as frequently he visited the Vatican.

"In 1976, Banco Ambrosiano made a loan to Occidental which it used to purchase 1 per cent of Ambrosiano stock. At the same time, Banco Ambrosiano increased its holding in Banco Occidental to 510,000 shares, for which it paid another 40 million Swiss Francs (roughly $18 million), and Calvi went on Banco Occidental's board of directors. In addition to Conde de Marsal, who insiders described as a religious fanatic, other directors included Pio Cabanillas, the Venerable P3 Master. Like his P2 counterpart, Cabanillas kept secret files on most of Spain's important people...

"Diego surrounded himself with Opus Dei members. In this respect his bank was to all intents an Opus Dei bank. His aide-de-camp was supernumerary Eloy Ramirez, for many years the representative in Mexico for Banco Espanol de Credito (Banesto), Spain's largest commercial bank. Diego hired him for his Latin American contacts. He always accompanied Diego on foreign trips. When they arrived in the country for the first time, Ramirez would pay a visit to his brothers in the faith and they opened all the necessary doors. But the real eminenve grise was Diego's brother-in-law, Fernando Perez Minguez, an art connoisseur and antiques dealer who kept an office in the bank although he was not officially on the payroll. Like the Ramirez couple, Fernando Perez and his wife were Opus Dei supernumeraries.

"Banco Occidental concentrated on developing outlets in Latin America and Florida by acquiring participations in small commercial banks and buying hotels. A member of Occidental's legal department also suspected that Calvi used Banco Occidental as the hinge for arms transactions with Latin American dictatorships. These transactions required Calvi's frequent presence in Madrid. But to stay overnight in the Spanish capital would have attracted attention, so United Trading purchased an executive jet to carry him to and from Madrid in the same day. Instructions were given to Occidental staff never to mention the Learjet when talking on the telephone with the Ambrosiano offices in Milan, suggesting that the staff in Millan was not supposed to know of the aircraft's existence.

"In Madrid, Calvi  met frequently with Cabanillas to discuss the possibility of bidding for control of El Pais, because it was feared that Madrid's largest circulation newspaper was leaning too far to the left. The project fitted in well with Opus Dei's Apostolate of Public Opinion and also the P2 and/or Vatican plans to take control of Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper. Matias Cortes Domingues, a top Madrid lawyer who acted as Banco Occidental's independent counsel, was said to be advising Cabanillas on the takeover plans. Matias' brother, Antonio, also lawyer, was an Opus Dei numerary."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pgs. 264-266)

Venerable P3 Grand Master Pio Cabanillas

"How these right-wing organizations operated in harmony is best demonstrated by the interrelationships of some of the players.

"Agostio Casaroli was a longtime friend of Licio Gelli, founder of the clandestine Masonic Lodge, Propaganda Due (P2), and José Maria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei. An Opus Dei member since the world war, Agostino Casaroli was inducted into the Zürich branch of P2 Lodge No. 041-076 on September 28, 1957.

"As Foreign Minister with a focus on communism, Casaroli spent much time at the front in Poland. It was he who served as the link between the Polish Cardinal of Krakow –Karol Wojtyla– and Opus Dei which eventually made possible Wojtyla's rise to the papacy.

"He also introduced Karol Wojtyla to Licio Gelli. It was that Wojtyla and Gelli were avid skiers which molded their friendship. According to Wojtyla's secretary –Stanislaw Dzwisz – John Paul II took more than one hundred ski vacations during his papacy, most of them to ski lodges in the Abruzzo region owned by Gelli.

"Opus Dei established a substantial treasury after the war when in its alliance with Franco it was paid handsomely for arranging the escape of Nazi war criminals through Madrid to Argentina. By 1950 it had emerged as a major investment house in Europe.

"The Opus Dei-P2 coalition went back to before the world war when Jose Maria Escriva– founder of Opus Dei – and Licio Gelli – founder of P2 – were partners in the Franco regime cabinet.

"In addition to the commonality of Escriva and Gelli, the key operating officers of Opus Dei held the corresponding jobs in P2. For example, José Mateos as treasurer of both organizations pulled the purse strings of the Opus Dei-P2 coalition; both organizations dealing with the same commodities in the same markets with the same bank – Ambrosiano; the reason the Opus Dei-P2-Ambrosiano coalition emerged as the largest foreign investor in Central America.

"This clandestine union was defined by the courts that tried both the terrorist activities and the bank scandal many times.

"For example, in connection with their convictions involving the Bologna bombing and other terrorist activities, in April 1998 Licio Gelli and Jose Mateos were brought to trial in connection with the Vatican bank scandal. The prosecution proved they had conspired with the Vatican and factions in the CIA in the scandal. Sentenced to twelve years, Gelli disappeared on the eve of his imprisonment.

"Yet some officers of Opus Dei – believed to be – not proved to be – officers of P2 escaped trial; immunized from the Italian courts by John Paul II's authorization of the Prelature of Opus Dei retroactive to the day before Banco Ambrosiano went under."

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pgs. 319-320)

Gelli

"Jose Mateos, known as Spain's richest man, funneled millions into Opus Dei. A considerable amount of this money came from illegal deals with Calvi, perpetuated in both Spain and Argentina. P2 paymaster and Opus Dei paymaster: could this be what the Church means when it talks of God moving in mysterious ways?"

"In God's Name, David Yallop, pg. 251)

Mateos

"On August 23, 1982, the Vatican announced John Paul II had 'authorized Opus Dei a Prelature of the Holy See' effective August 5, 1982 immunizing its officers from Italian courts. The timing of the Prelature retroactive to the precise day before the bank's collapse is compelling evidence the Pope knew officers of Opus Dei had been involved in the fraudulent deception of European investors – The Great Vatican Banking Scandal– and the murders surrounding it.

"The Pope was attempting to immunize those outside the Vatican namely Opus Dei Primate Alvaro Portillo and its Treasurer Jose Mateos and its wealthiest member Licio Gelli. He was not trying to protect those inside the Vatican including himself, Casaroli, Caprio or Marcinkus as they were already immunized by the sovereignty of the Vatican afforded under the Lateran Treaty."

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pgs. 373-374)

Pope John Paul II

"...  Throughout Latin literature there are many references to 'the Dog Days' which followed the helical rising of Sirius in the summer. These hot, parched days were thought by that time to derive some of the ferocity and dryness from the 'searing' of Sirius. Traditions arose of Sirius being red because it was in fact red at its helical rising, just as any other body at the horizon is red. When marking rhetorical allusions to the Dog Days, the Latins would often speak of Sirius being red at that time, which it was."

(The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple, pg. 86) 

Aurora shooter James Eagan Holmes, who has been in the news of late after being found guilt of the shooting spree and is now facing the death penalty

Alex Jones in Joker makeup

"The 23/17 enigma, simply stated, refers to the belief that many incidents of synchronicity are directly connected to the numbers 23… 17… or some combination or modification of these numbers. Uncle Bob Wilson (aka: Robert Anton Wilson) credits William S. Burroughs as being the first person to identify the 23 enigma. Wilson, in his book The Cosmic Trigger, related the following story:

" 'More important to our narrative, William S. Burroughs (author of ‘Naked Lunch’) introduced me to the 23 Enigma while I was at Playboy... In the early '60s in Tangier, Burroughs knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that he'd been running the ferry 23 years without an accident. That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody aboard. In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast told about the crash of an Eastern Airlines plane on the New York-Miami route. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23... Burroughs began keeping records of odd coincidences. To his astonishment, 23s appeared in a lot of them.'

"Burroughs wrote a short story in 1967 called '23 Skidoo.' The term '23 skidoo' was popularized in the early 1920s and means 'it's time to leave while the getting is good.' This expression appeared in newspapers as early as 1906.

"Wilson, along with co-author Robert Shea of “Illuminatus!” fame, more clearly identifies the 23/17 phenomenon, in that both numbers are tied to the Discordian Law of Fives. The Discordian holybook, the Principia Discordia states that: All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5. To Discordians, 23, a corollary of the law of fives, is considered either lucky, unlucky, sacred to their goddess Eris, sinister, sacred to the unholy gods of the Cthulhu Mythos, or significantly strange. 

"In Illuminatus!, the character Simon Moon illustrates this rational using the following mathematical-numerological-magical formula… in 23: 2 + 3 = 5, and in 17: 1 + 7 = 8 = 2³ ...clear as mud, right? To clarify, Moon pulls in another enigmatic number… 40. In the following excerpt from Illuminatus!, Moon further clarifies…

" 'That brings me to the 40 enigma. As pointed out, 1 + 7 = 8, the number of letters in Kallisti. 8 x 5 = 40.'

"'More interestingly, without invoking the mystic 5, we still arrive at 40 by adding 17 + 23. What, then, is the significance of 40? I've run through various associations… Jesus had his 40 days in the desert, Ali Baba had his 40 thieves, Buddhists have their 40 meditations, the solar system is almost exactly 40 astronomical units in radius (Pluto yo-yos a bit)—but I have no definite theory…  yet.'" 

"Houser signed up for an account with Tea Party Nation in June 2013, but he was not an active commenter.

"Posts on other forums reveal Houser’s belief that the U.S. was racist against white people, sterilization should be mandatory for welfare recipients and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was a more historically significant figure than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

" 'Hitler accomplished far more than any other through "pragmatically forming,” ' Houser posted in January 2015. 

"He wrote something of a manifesto in March 2013, when he asked for help channeling his anger and frustration as a white Christian man living under President Barack Obama...

"Houser argued in a January 2014 forum post that the United States needed a right-wing party like Greece’s neo-Nazi 'Golden Dawn' faction to restore its greatness..." 

Houser

because who wants to talk about what effects this will have on Greece, for instance?

Calvi's body

the seal of Opus Dei

"The Knights of Malta are understandably a rather misty concept. They inspire comparisons with Dan Brown's mystical fantasies of Vatican conspiracies bordering on black magic. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta (an abbreviated title from a previously far grander and longer one) is an extremely ancient Catholic lay order of chivalry, dating from the First Crusade (1096-99). The Order's former territories (Rhodes and Malta) have long since melted away. To compensate, there is a world-wide network of medical missions operating in 120 countries. According to Wikipedia, the Knights are supported by some 12,000 active members who oversee and support 20,000 medical personnel. So much for the worthy field of good endeavors. However, the charitable functions are far overshadowed by the Order's status as a recognized sovereign state, complete with an observer seat at the UN, and the full kit bag of diplomatic privileges. These include the precious facility of couriers passing borders without hindrance, which any espionage organization is bound to prize. But surely, even a subliminal state with exactly three registered citizens need some kind of government? The Sovereign Order has one, an inner council of the Knights, which in turn response to the absolute authority of the Vatican.

"The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has argued that behind the cover of charitable functions, the Knights are waging a cultural war on behalf of Christianity. He claims their fertile recruiting grounds include the highest levels of the American state and related friendly powers, the secret services and the Pentagon. Speaking in Washington DC at Georgetown University's Foreign Policy School in January 2011, he said: 'They do see what they're doing... it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.' Of course Hersh got the full Dan Brown treatment for the eye-rolling US media. But Hersh's central theme is absolutely correct. The Vatican, aided by the sovereign Maltese Knights and secretive inner cults like Opus Dei, is an essential component of the totemic pathology that we recognize as the war on terror."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 267-268)

the flag of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta

"He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, 'are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.' ”

"Keating’s use of “alleged” here is curious, given that the membership of Reagan-era CIA director Bill Casey in the Knights of Malta has been a fact widely reported in the press and never denied by Casey himself. Historian Joseph E. Persico, a former Republican speechwriter for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the co-author of Colin Powell’s autobiography, includes Casey’s membership in a routine list of charitable accomplishments, in his sympathetic biography Casey: from the OSS to the CIA (Penguin 1990). (Casey’s membership is asserted on Page 105 of the paperback.)...

"In addition to Casey and McCone, the Knights of Malta also counted among their members former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton — a fortuitous alliance as Angleton led the postwar intelligence efforts to subvert Italy’s 1948 elections. His success partnering with organized crime, right-leaning former fascists and the Vatican not only marginalized Italy’s homegrown Communist Party, it also encouraged Congress in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.

"Conservative luminary and National Review founder William F. Buckley — who spent two years after college as a CIA 'political action specialist' in Mexico City — was also a Knight, as was none other than William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, the head of the CIA’s precursor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). From 1970 to 1981, France’s intelligence agency was also headed by a member of the Order, Alexandre de Marenches. De Marenches would go on to be a co-founder of the Saudi-funded private intelligence group the Safari Club — one of George H. W. Bush’s many end-runs around congressional oversight of the American intelligence establishment and the locus of many of the worst features of the mammoth BCCI scandal."

Knight of Malta Alexandre de Marenches, whom we first encountered in part seven

".., Joseph Schmitz, like Erik Prince and other executives of Blackwater, was a Catholic and a Christian fundamentalist. Some would go so far as to say he was a religious fanatic obsessed with implementing 'the rule of law under God.' In numerous speeches given during his time as Pentagon Inspector General, Schmitz articulated his vision and understanding of the global war on terror, employing the rhetoric of Christian supremacy. 'No America today should ever doubt that we hold ourselves accountable to the rule of law under God. Here lies these fundamental difference between us and the terrorists,' Schmidt said in June 2004 speech, just after returning from trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. 'It all comes down to this – we pride ourselves on our strict observance to the rule of law under God.' On his official biography, Schmitz proudly lists his membership in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a Christian militia formed in the eleventh century, before the first Crusades, with the mission of defending 'territories that the Crusades had conquered from the Moslems.' The Order today boasts of being 'a sovereign subject of international law, with its own constitution, passports, stamps, and public institutions' and 'diplomatic relations with 94 countries...'

(Blackwater, Jeremy Scahill, pg. 367)

Schmitz

"One of Gelli's closest P2 associates was Italian lawyer and businessmen Umberto Ortolani. Like 'The Puppet Master,' Ortolani learned early in life the value of secret information. During the Second World War he became head of two large operational units of SISMI, the military intelligence agency in Italy. His specialty was counterespionage. A Roman Catholic, he appreciated while still a young man that one of the real centres of power was across the Tiber within Vatican City. Consequently his penetration of the Vatican and its quarters of influence was total..

"...  He subsequently received many more Vatican honours and awards. He even succeeded in affiliating Licio Gelli, a non-Catholic, to the Knights of Malta and the Holy Sepulchre. A close friend of Casaroli, the man usually referred to as Vatican's Kissinger because of his major involvement in foreign policy, lawyer Ortolani provided his P2 master with an unrivalled access to any Vatican dignitary. Like his master, Ortolani is a man who, on paper at least, is the citizen of many countries. Born in Vierbo in Italy, he has since become a Brazilian national. A useful byproduct of that arrangement is that no extradition treaty exists between Italy and Brazil."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 107-108)

"Count" Umberto Ortolani

"... Clara Calvi, widow of Banko Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi, that the real head of P2 had been Giulio Andreotti, followed at the top of the organization by Francesco Cosentino, secretary-general of the Chamber of Deputies, and businessman Umberto Ortolani: according to this hierarchy, Gelli was only fourth in the pecking order of the Lodge?"

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 57)

Andreotti

• General Alexander Haig: The SMOM member who green lighted Gelli's involvement in P2 (noted in part one)
• General William "Wild Bill" Donovan: the founder of the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA who, as noted in part eight, helped establish an underground network of financial institutions engaged in the laundering of drug money and arms transactions that included the banking empires of Sindona and Calvi
• Alexandre de Marenches: long time director of SDECE (France's primary external intelligence service from 1944 until 1982) and co-founder of the Safari Club; played a key role in falsely linking the Soviet Union to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, as noted in part seven
• Reinhard Gehlen: head of the Gehlen Org, a collection of veterans of Nazi Germany's Eastern intelligence network enlisted by the CIA and who later established the BND (Germany's primary intelligence service) as was as playing a key role in coordinating the German wing of Gladio; the BND seems to have played an extensive role in the attempted assassination of John Paul II, as noted in part eight and nine
• William Colby: the CIA director also closely linked to Opus Dei who played a key role in establishing Gladio (noted in part ten)

Maltese Knights Haig (top), Donovan (top middle), Gehlen (bottom middle) and Colby (bottom)

• William Casey: CIA director who "encouraged" (potentially via the attempted assassination) Pope John Paul II to back the Polish Solidarity movement as well as the Contras
• General Vernon Walters: a close Reagan affiliate who made dozens of trips to the Vatican during the peak of its involvement with the Contras
• Colonel Albert Carone: an SMOM member who served as Oliver North's bagman during Iran-Contra as well as a go between with the Mafia
• J. Peter Grace: the wealthy industrialist whose various "charitable" activities in Central America helped fund the Contras and like organizations

Casey (top), Walters (top middle), Calone (middle bottom), and Grace (bottom)

"As we search British history to find an unfinished temple as a basis for an exclusively British secret society, we find just one answer, in the religious order that often called itself by that simple name alone: the Temple. Jacques de Molay and his predecessors signed documents over the title Magister Templi, Master of the Temple. And that temple, taking its name from the Temple of Solomon, certainly was left unfinished upon the murder of its masters, who also had been tortured to reveal their secrets by three assassins who ultimately destroy them. Not Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, but Philip the Fair of France, Pope Clement V, and the Order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. Many who have read only the Catholic Church's summations of the Templar suppression may object, stating that only the King of France could be considered the 'assassin' of the Knights Templar, having done all the dirty work and having coerced a weak pope to help him. True, that is the church's usual version to this very day, but the historical facts speak somewhat to the contrary, if we look again at events described earlier in this book.

"When Edward II of England declined to torture the Templars, the Pope could have thrown the problem back to Edward's father-in-law, the king of France: no one forced Clement V to dispatched ten church torture specialist to London. The Pope could have lived with the acquittal of the Templars on Cyprus: No one forced him to demand a new trial, or to dispatch a torture team with the power to draw upon the local Dominicans and Franciscans if extra help was required. Nor did the king of France prevail in his desire that only one of his family be made the head of a combined Hospitaller/Templar order, with full access to their combined wealth. And if Clement V had been merely a timorous puppet pope with Philip pulling the strings, as church historians would have us believe, the king of France would have been the new owners of the Templar properties in France, not the Hospitallers. The pope was much tougher, or at least much more obstinate, than we had been led to believe and it would appear that he had contrived a plan of his own in concert with the Hospitallers.

"That order has managed to escape any criticism in the matter of the Templar suppression, but apparently only because it had kept a low profile throughout, probably for the very good reason that its role and its reward had been worked out in advance. It is well known that the papacy was in favor of the union of the Templars and Hospitallers and had already determined that Foulques de Villaret, Master of the Hospitallers, would be the Grand Master of the combined orders. The Templars, at their headquarters on Cyprus, had heard of the serious intent to combine the orders and had taken the time to prepare a written rebuttal. The Hospitallers, at their own headquarters on that same island, must have received the same information, yet they prepared no rebuttal, written or verbal. In fact, de Villaret managed to stay away from the meeting in France altogether, with no recorded papal criticism for his absence. That was undoubtedly because his presence wasn't needed and because there was no point in chancing a confrontation between the two orders, especially since the pope was already dedicated to looking after the interests of the Hospitallers. Not only did the Hospitallers offer no objection to the concept of the merger, but they made no attempt whatever to speak up for their brother warrior-monks as they were arrested and tortured. They simply stayed out of it and bided their time, until Clement V, much to the anger of King Philip, declared that all of the confiscated Templar property would go to the Knights Hospitaller and that all released Templars could be taken into the Hospitaller order, thereby achieving de facto the union he had been planning all along, with full Hospitaller approval and cooperation. If one looks for motive, the Hospitaller order was the major beneficiary of the suppression of the Templars, as had probably been planned from the beginning. The pope and Hospitallers together thwarted the aims of Philip of France, and there should be no doubt that the Hospitallers rank as one of the three assassins of the Order of the Temple."

(Born in Blood, John J. Robinson, pgs. 271-273)

"Another hypothesis that tickled the imaginations of some was that Opus Dei's directorate in Rome had considered attempting a takeover of the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John of Jerusalem, called of Rhodes, called of Malta, as it was the only church institution to hold the status of an independent state. Some titled Opusian gentleman were already members of the Order and its sovereign council in Rome feared a coup d'etat. As Marquise of Peralta, Escriva de Balaguer might have thought he was eligible for the highest rank of the Maltese Cross as the Order's regulations permit only celibate knights of noblesse to become Grand Master. In addition to being recognized as a sovereign head of state, the Grand Master holds a rank in the church that is equivalent to a cardinal and this, too, would have appealed to the newly titled prelate. But when it was learned that the Grand Master had been a secular person, this plan was dropped."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pgs. 152-153)

de Balaguer

• Part One: Herein a broad overview of P2 was given as well as a biography of its Venerable Grand Master, former Blackshirt and SS man Licio Gelli
• Part Two: This installment addressed P2's ties to a host of terror bombings that rocked Italy during a period known as the "Years of Lead" as well as the lodge's ties to the Lisbon-based terror network known as Aginter Press
• Part Three: Here I began to break down the role P2 played in what is commonly referred to as "the Great Vatican banking scandal" or "the Banco Ambrosiano affair" by considering the backgrounds of three of its chief participants: Bishop Paul Marcinkus (long suspected of P2 membership) and financiers Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi (known P2 initiates and money launderers for the Mafia)
• Part Four: The likelihood that the schemes of Sindona and Calvi were being used to finance death squads in Central America at the behest of the Vatican (and the US intelligence community) were considered here
• Part Five: The final installment addressing the Great Vatican banking scandal; the involvement of the Rothschild banking dynasty and the ritualistic death of Calvi were explored here as well as a series of armed robberies that unfolded in the mid-1980s typically involving Brinks that may have tied back to the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano (and possibly a Fascist International)
• Part Six: With this installment I began to consider the role P2 played in a series of assassination plots beginning with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of famed Italian statesman Aldo Moro as well as the sudden death of Pope John Paul I after thirty-three days on the job
• Part Seven: Here I began to address P2's role in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II with a special emphasis on the involvement of the Turkish terror network known as the Grey Wolves
• Part Eight: This installment primarily dealt with the "Bulgarian connection," a massive smuggling network deeply involved in the illegal drugs and arms trade bookended by Turkey and Italy and featuring Communist-controlled Bulgaria at its heart; the links this network had to Pope John Paul II's attempted assassination and the ever present specter of P2 behind these intrigues
• Part Nine: At this point I began to address the forces behind P2 beginning with the role played by the US intelligence community via Operation Gladio and the ultimate objectives behind the collaboration between US and Soviet intelligence personnel in Bulgaria as well as the motives for the attempted assassination of John Paul II (and no, it doesn't involve some Judaic-Marxist-Freemasonic World Government my poor, deluded Alex Jones bots)
• Part Ten: With this installment I noted the extensive presence of the shadowy Catholic secret society (some would say cult) Opus Dei behind P2 as well as a brief background of the order
• Part Eleven: The most recent installment noted the even more extensive amount of Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM, more commonly known as the Knights of Malta) members both within P2 (including Gelli himself as well as powerful members such as Umberto Ortolani and General Giuseppe Santovito) and the infrastructures (i.e Operation Gladio and the international drug trade) that made its existence possible as well as the very real possibility that P2 was a puppet of SMOM and Opus Dei (and the Vatican by default, contrary to claims of the conspiratorial right)

the symbols of Opus Dei (top) and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (bottom), the seeming puppetmasters behind P2

"When Michele Sindona joined P-2 in 1964, he appeared before Grand Master Licio Gelli and took the following oath: 'I swear to all who were present, I swear to all whose identities are sealed in the vaults of Propaganda Two, and especially I swear to you Worshipful Master –Naja Hannah (' King Cobra' – Gelli's Masonic name) – that I will be loyal to our brothers and to the cause. I swear on this steel (Gelli handed Sindona an axe) to fight against the evils of communism, to strike a blow in the face of liberalism, and to fight for the establishment of a presidential government. I swear to help my brothers and never betray them. And if I fail, if I should perjure myself (Gelli, at this point in the ceremony, cut a photograph of Sindona into four pieces), my body should be cut into pieces (Gelli tosses the pieces into a fire) and burned to ashes like the ashes of this image.' "

(The Vatican Exposed, Paul L. Williams, pg. 120) 

Sindona

"I recall the particularly tensed political situation in ltaly in December 1988, something was happening. On Monday evening of December 12th, the Scarlet Woman and I, had witnessed the appearance of a Divine Sign. We were somewhere in Veneto and we saw a Sphere of green energy darting across the sky. The Ark of the heavenly Alliance (not to be confused with the earthly one), had cast an energy field. That was the sign announcing the fall of communist ideology. 

"In July 1989, we paid a visit to Licio Gelli (former head of the dissolved P2 lodge). In one of his letters, he wrote: 'the time when we met was short and circumstances didn't allow us to talk any longer, however, if You like, in the next future, whenever you'll have the chance to come to Tuscany, I shall be pleased to meet you.'

"He kindly welcomed us in his villa, a country house in the green. Gelli led us into a huge hall and made us sit in two of the twelve armchairs arranged in a semi-circle, six of them on each side. 

"We started to talk and, at a certain moment, he said: 'We have two enemies: the communists and the Catholic Church.'

" 'Especially the Jesuits,' I specified.

"Then I asked him the usual question: 'When will these two ideologies come to an end?'

" 'We must be patient,' he answered.

" 'Being young, maybe I am not that patient,' I replied.

"And a few months later, the Synarchy had overthrown communism the whole world over. The cold war was over.

"Nobody seemed to have realized how quickly the Soviet Union and its allied had faded away. Even the most pessimistic politilogists had thought that communist would have lasted another hundred years, while in a few months, it had totally collapsed. Isn't that strange?"

the likely delusional Ripel

"...  the Rite of Memphis was founded in 1814 by Samuel Honis, an expatriate French-man living in Cairo, Egypt. After Napoleon's demise, Honis returned to France and started up a lodge,  'Le Disciples de Memphis,' in Montauban in 1815. Honis had created a dizzying 95 degrees of initiation (with an honorary 96th for the ruling Grand Hierophant). The lodge lasted one year, initiating one Gabriel-Mathieu Marconis de Negre, whose son Jacques-Etienne jump-started it again in 1838. The younger Marconis had also been a member of the Rite of Mizraim (concocted in Milan in 1805, carrying 90 degrees), was kicked out, joined in a different city under another name, and then ran into trouble in 1841 with the French police who suppressed the Rite of Memphis as a subversive secret society. The Rite had indeed attracted radical members, many of whom also belong to the Philadelphes, a major revolutionary secret society.

"After the revolution of 1848 Marconis was able to launch the Rite one more time. Charters went everywhere: to Egypt, Romania, the United States. By 1862 Marconis handed it off to the Grand Orient, of France, which let it go to seed. That is, until the advent of one John Yarker.

"Since both the Memphis and Mizraim Rites claimed ancient Egyptian origins, Yarker's brainwave was to combine them into one Rite of Memphis and Mizraim, which he called the Ancient and Primitive Rite, and which he founded in Manchester in 1872. He lost no time in conferring charters and patents (certificates of initiation) all over the place, and produced a magazine for the rite, The Kneph, a term which can referred to the breath of life, a creator deity, or an 'anointed serpent.' The magazine sported occult and Masonic articles, and while the Grand Lodge of England frowned on the whole Memphis-Mizraim business, many European occultists jumped at the chance to join..."

(Ritual America, Adam Parfrey & Craig Heimbichner, pg. 269)

Yarker

Papus also played a key role in popularizing the Tarot during the late nineteenth century

"In 1891, Papus formed an organization called l'Ordre des Supérieurs Inconnus of three degrees, commonly known as the Order of the Martinists, which was based on two extinct Masonic Rites: the Rite of Elus-Cohens or Elected Priests of Martinez Paschalis, or de Pasqually (c.1700-1774 e.v.); and the Rectified Rite of Saint-Martin of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803 e.v.) a student of de Pasqually who wrote under the pseudonym "The Unknown Philosopher." Papus claimed to have come into the possession of the original papers of de Pasqually and to have been given authority in the Rite of Saint-Martin by his friend Henri Viscount Delaage, who claimed that his maternal grandfather had been initiated into the order by Saint-Martin himself, and who had attempted to revive the order in 1887. The Martinist Order was to become a primary focus for Papus, and continues today as one of his most enduring legacies.

"In 1893, Papus was consecrated a bishop of l'Église Gnostique de France by Jules Doinel, who had founded this Church as an attempt to revive the Cathar religion in 1890. In 1895, Doinel abdicated as Primate of the French Gnostic Church leaving control of the Church to a synod of three of his former bishops, one of whom was Papus. In March of the same year, Papus joined the Ahathoor Temple of the Golden Dawn in Paris...

"Papus visited Russia three times, in 1901, 1905 and 1906, serving Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra both as physician and occult consultant. In October 1905, he allegedly conjured up the spirit of Alexander III, the Tsar Nicholas's father, who prophesied that the Tsar would meet his downfall at the hands of revolutionaries. Papus allegedly informed the Tsar that he would be able to magically avert Alexander's prophesy so long as he was alive (his claim proved accurate, Nicholas kept his hold on the throne of Russia until 141 days after Papus's death). Although Papus seems to have served the Tsar and Tsarina in what was essentially a shamanic capacity, he was later curiously concerned about their heavy reliance on occultism to assist them in deciding questions of government. During their later correspondence, he warned them a number of times against the influence of Rasputin.  

"Papus never became a regular (Grand Orient) Freemason. He opposed Masonry as being atheistic, in contrast to the Esoteric Christianity of the Gnostic Church, the K.O.R.C. and the Martinist Order. Despite this, he organized what was announced as an "International Masonic Conference" in Paris on June 24, 1908, and at this conference he received a patent from Theodor Reuss to establish a "Supreme Grand Council General of the Unified Rites of Antient and Primitive Masonry for the Grand Orient of France and its Dependencies at Paris." It was probably on the same occasion that Reuss conferred upon Papus the X° of O.T.O. for France, and Papus in turn assisted Reuss in the formation of the O.T.O. Gnostic Catholic Church as a child of l'Église Gnostique de France. When John Yarker died in 1913, Papus was elected as his successor to the office of Grand Hierophant (international head) of the Antient and Primitive Rites of Memphis and Mizraim."

Papus

"The truth Occult Order (sometimes called the Great White Brotherhood...) manifested in the West in 1886 as the Golden Dawn. Before this specific manifestation, the Brotherhood numbered among its openly unavowed representatives such authorities as Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eliphas Levi, Fred Hockley, Kenneth Mackenzie, Gerald Massey, Fabre d'Olivet and others. Bulwer-Lytton links up historically with the continental Adepts, Eliphas Levi, Gerard Encausse (Papus), Rudolf Steiner and Franz Hartmann – celebrated names in Western occultism. These collateral continental elements constituted what was once known as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light."

(The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant, pgs. 8-9)

Crowley (top) and his controversial follower Kenneth Grant (bottom)

"The swastika has been forever sullied: it can never be used again without arousing memories of the most uncomfortable kind... Besides its adoption as the special sun-sign of the Aryan Race by German anti-Judaic groups in the late nineteenth century, it also played a strange part in linking the events in Germany with no less momentous ones in Russia.

"Alexandra, the last Empress of Russia, inscribed the left-handed swastika... with the date 1918, on the wall of the house in Ekaterinburg where she and her family were murdered by the Bolsheviks. Henry Rollin, in his study of modern anti-Judaism, L'Apocalypse de notre temps (1939), offers several possible explanations: (1) the Empress had adopted the swastika as her talisman as the result of Theosophical contacts in her native Darmstadt or in Russia; (2) she had received it from her physician Badmaieff, a practitioner of Tibetan medicine; (3) she had seen it on holiday in the Baltic, where the peasants use it to decorate their houses; (4) she could have got it from one of the gypsies summoned to the imperial court for fortune-telling.

"However, the swastika serve the Empress not merely as a talisman, but also as a secret sign of recognition in her correspondence. It was used, too, by a group of Russian monarchists who had taken refuge in Kiev and were collaborating with the German occupiers of the Ukraine; their plots for rescuing the Imperial Family were one of the reasons that the latter were removed to Ekaterinburg.

"Upon the defeat of Germany and the triumph of the Bolsheviks, a number of these  Germanophilic Russians – several of them of Baltic origin – gravitated to the entourage of General Ludendorff, protector of Hitler. Among them was Lieutenant Chabelski-Bork, who had been at Ekaterinburg at the moment of discovery not only of the Empress' swastika, but also, in the pathetic handful of possessions left behind, her copy of Serge Nilus' The Great in the Small: the work that contained the infamous forged 'Protocols of the Elders of Sion.' So here was proof, for those eager for it, that the Imperial Family had fallen victim not merely to the Communists but to the great Jewish conspiracy described in the 'Protocols,' of whom the Bolsheviks were agents.

"Chabelski-Bork would be instrumental in distributing the 'Protocols' outside Russia; in Germany, their publication was exactly what was needed to fan to a flame the smoldering antijudaism kindled by the Aryan theorists. In 1919, the swastika served as the flag for the Baltic uprising against the Bolsheviks, led by General von der Goltz. In Berlin, the following year, it flew over the abortive Kapp Putsch. In the summer of 1920, Hitler chose the right-handed swastika as the symbol of the duel struggle against Jewry and Communism. And the rest, as they say, is history."

(Arkos, Joscelyn Godwin, pgs. 51-52)

Empress Alexandra

Cyril

Thule Society founder Rudolf von Sebottendorf

"... These objectives had been defined as the discovery of the Perennial Philosophy, which Encausse called the 'original light.' Ignoring the work of Casaubon on the dating of the Corpus Hermeticus, Encausse and his more serious followers believed that the Perennial Philosophy had been transmitted by Hermes from Ancient Egyptian sources, and they saw in this transmission the source of initiation. Encausse also followed Blavatsky and even Burrow in turning to the Hindus, regarding 'the Indian tradition' as 'the longest lasting historical example of continuity of religious exoterism.' The task of his Independent Group for Esoteric Studies, then, was to 'reassemble these exoteric debris' of Hinduism 'in the light of unceasingly transmitted tradition' –  the initiatic tradition of Hermes..."

(Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick, pgs. 48-49)

Hermes Trismegistus, the mythological founder of Hermeticism from which Traditionalism derived an extensive influence (and obsession with)

"Within a year of joining the Theosophical lodge Isis, Encausse became involved in a quarrel with a senior French Theosophist. This led to the personal intervention of Colonel Olcott, the dissolution of Isis, and the formation of a new Thosophical lodge, Hermes, of which Encausse was appointed corresponding secretary (the same powerful position that Blavatsky held in the Theosophical Society proper). During these events, Encausse and a few followers established a monthly journal, L'nitiation, and in its first issue Encausse continued his attack on contemporary Masons, complaining of their ignorance of the symbolism contained in their own rites. Soon after, he established his Martinist Order, which was intended to be a new Masonry 'on sounder bases.' It was not affiliated with any of the three rival Masonic Obedience then present in France.

"As a complement to the neo-Masonic Martinist Order, Encausse also established in 1889 an Independent Group for Esoteric Studies, the declared purposes of which included preparing people for entry to the Martinist Order and the Theosophical Society, and spreading Perennialism, proclaiming 'that truth is One, and that no school, no religion  can claim it for itself alone.... In every religion can be found manifestations of the single truth....'

"Although the objectives of the Independent Group for Esoteric Studies were compatible with the ideas of Theosophy, the Martinist Order was not. The fictional Tibetan adepts from whom Blavatsky attempted to derive her authority were described as initiates, and by implication Blavatsky herself was initiated in some of their mysteries, but the giving of initiation to others through neo-Masonic orders such as the Martinist Order was never part of Blavatsky's plan. Both the Martinist Order and the Independent Group for Esoteric Studies also constituted threats to Blavatsky's authority – breakaway groups were frequent problem for the Theosophical leadership at this time. Blavatsky therefore organized the establishment of a new journal, La revue theosophique, in which she attacked Encausse for moving away from Theosophy towards Masonry. In response, Encausse founded a second journal, Le voile d'Isis [Veil of Isis], a sarcastic reference to one of Blavatsky's two major books, Isis Unveiled, initially to carry on a polemic against Blavatsky and the Theosophists. As we have seen, Le voile d'sis later became the principal Traditionalist journal. It was published for slightly more than a century, until 1992...

"Once open hostilities had broken out between Encausse and Blavatsky, a number of Theosophists left the Theosophical lodge Hermes for the Martinist Order, and the remaining Theosophists soon dissolved Hermes. Encausse expanded his own organization in France and abroad, until by 1900 there were hundreds of Martinist lodges and related bodies, from America to the Russian Empire."

(Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick, pgs. 46-47)

an altar from a modern Martinist Order

"A mystery that has occupied Guenon's various Traditionalist biographers is the source of his knowledge of Hinduism. Given Traditionalism's later emphasis on authentic transmission from master to disciple, Traditionalists have searched for Guenon's Hindu masters and failed to find anything very substantial. There is a general suspicion that he must have been 'initiated' by 'some Hindus in Paris.' It seems likely, though it cannot be definitively established, that there were no such masters, and that Guenon's understanding of Hinduism derived exclusively from his reading of texts and studies then available in Paris. Nowhere did Guenon claim that this was not the case though he once referred to 'ideas suggested by some Hindus,' and he never visited India. Though such a conclusion may seem unacceptable to later Traditionalist, there is no particular reason why the Guenon of the time should not have considered himself entitled to write about Hinduism without firsthand experience of it. In so doing, he would only have been following the example of many eminent early Orientalists, who also worked almost exclusively from texts. Guenon did, however, occasionally rely on texts generally considered by scholars to be spurious."

(Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick, pg. 49)

Guenon

Evola

"Arturo Reghini (1878-1946) was born in Florence, the descendent of a very ancient feudal family from Pontremoli that branched out and established themselves in Florence and Rome in the second half of the 1700s. Reghini was one of the most famous Italian scholars of the Tradition in the first half of the  twentieth century, the major interpreter of neo-Pythagorean thought, and the exponent of an unmitigated, intransigent, anti-Christian, pagan directive. He exerted considerable influence on Evola's thinking between the years 1924 and 1928, primarily during the period in which he composed his Imperialismo pagano... The book's title actually originates from 1914 article of Reghini's that was later reproduced in the third issue of Atanor.

"Reghini  was the creator (with E. Froini and others) of the 'Italian Philosophical Rite' (1909) within the circle of contemporary Freemasonry; he also welcomed the English magician Aleister Crowley as an honorary member in 1911..."

(Introduction to Magic, "Preface," Renato Del Ponte, pgs. xi-xii, n.1)

Reghini

"In another right-wing manual of the period, La lotta politica di Avanguardia Nazionale (1974-75), the so-called black bomber, Stefano Delle Chiaie, portrayed his followers in Avanguardia Nazionale as an Evolian 'elite of heroes.' Moreover, when Clemente Graziani, the leader of the Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo (MPON), following Pino Rauti's return to the MSI in 1969, sought to defend the need for a truly revolutionary right-wing organization in Italy, he patterned his argument, in Processo a Ordine Nuovo, processo alle idee, on Evolian ideas. The bibliography of the tract was made up almost entirely of books by Evola. Graziani stated succinctly that 'the work of Ordine Nuovo from 1953 to today has been that of transferring Evola's teachings to the political plane.' On the question of violence, he reminded his readers, 'We are not Christians.' No, they were revolutionaries who in the civil war that had already erupted would fight: 'we intend to react, in a virile manner, responsibly, but to react...' Graziani did not oppose violence on principle; but then he asked who did. Perhaps not even the bourgeois revolutionaries, who through violent acts against the established order of their day had founded the modern Italian state, now in its death agony."

(The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, Richard Drake, pg. 131)

Delle Chiaie

"Further information as to the insidious nature of Lodge P2 came to light with the arrest in Switzerland of Elio Ciolini, a P2 'brother', alleged secret service agent and card-carying officer of the Bolivian Interior Ministry. Ciolini had been jailed in Switzerland on charges of swindling, kidnapping and making death threats against a woman by the name of Renata Ball. In the autumn of 1981, from his prison cell in Geneva, Ciolini wrote to Aldo Gentile, the magistrate investigating the Bologna railway massacre, claiming he had inside knowledge and was prepared to make a statement. The magistrate eventually traveled to Switzerland and began taking Ciolini's deposition in mid-March 1982. Ciolini made some remarkable allegations when he began to outline his explanation of the mechanics and reason for the outrage.

"According to the informer, a huge fraud had been planned in Italy involving the massive ENI industrial group (a parasitical corporation which controlled most of Italy's oil, natural gas and chemical industry – which also subsidize the neo-fascist MSI) and a sum of 50 billion lire. Plans for this massive swindle were, according to Ciolini, discussed at a 'special' meaning of Lodge P2 on 11 April 1980 in Monte Carlo. It was decided that Gelli should commission Stefano Delle Chiaie to organise an action of such spectacular dimensions that governmental and public attention would be diverted away from the financial coup. According to Ciolini, Delle Chiaie and Gelli met at the Sheraton Hotel in Buenos Aires to finalise their plans.

"Whether or not Ciolini's allegations were true (and there is considerable doubt about some of them) he was released shortly after giving his statement to the Bologna magistrate. His bail was, according to a letter sent to the chairman of the parliamentary inquiry into the activities of Lodge P2, put up by the carabinieri or another secret service agency. On his release, Ciolini went to see the Bologna magistrates claiming he was passing through on his way to check in at the 'HQ of his service' (carabinieri counterintelligence) and made a further deposition concerning drug and arms smuggling rings centered around Lodge P2. He also went into great detail about the organisation of the Delle Chiaie network abroad, particularly in Latin America."

(Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, Stuart Christie, pgs. 112-113)

the aftermath of the bombing at the Bologna railway station

in at least one account this individual encountered a curious, black-robbed secret order as well

credible?

"After the death of the Prophet Mohammed, the new Islamic community was ruled in succession by four of his close Companions, chosen by the people and called the Rightfully-guided Caliphs. The last of these was Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's son-in-law.

"Ali had his own ardent followers among the faithful, who came to be called Shi'a or 'adherents'. They believed that Ali should have succeeded Mohammad by right, and that after him his sons (the Prophet's grandsons) Hasan and Husayn should have ruled; and after them, their sons, and so on in a quasi-monarchial succession.

"In fact except for Ali none of them ever ruled all Islamdom. Instead they became a line of pretenders, and in effect heads of a branch of Islam called Shiism. In opposition to the orthodox (Sunni) Caliphs in Baghdad these descendants of Prophet came to be known as the Imams.

"To the Shiites an Imam is far more, far higher in rank than a Caliph. Ali ruled by right because of his spiritual greatness, which the Prophet recognized by appointing him his successor (in fact Ali is also revered by the sufis as 'founder' and prototype of the Moslem saint). Shiites differ from orthodox or Sunni Moslems in believing that this spiritual pre-eminence was transferred to Ali's descendants through Fatima, the Prophet's daughter."

(Scandal, Peter Lamborn Wilson, pgs. 35-36) 

Ali

"In early times both the doctrines and organizations of the Shi'a were subject to frequent variations. Numerous pretenders appeared, claiming, with varying plausibility, to be members or agents of the house of the Prophet and, after enriching the mythical description of the awaited redeemer with some new detail, disappeared from human eyes. Their programs varied from moderate, more or less dynastic opposition to extreme religious heterodoxy, far removed from the commonly accepted teachings of Islam. A reoccurring feature is the cult of holy men – Imams and da'is – who were believed to possess miraculous powers, and whose doctrines reflect mystical and illuminationist ideas derived from Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and various Iranian and Judaeo-Christian heresies. Among the beliefs attributed to them are those of reincarnation, the deification of the Imams and sometimes even of the da'is, and even libertinism – the abandonment of all law and restraint. In some areas – as for example among the peasants and nomads in parts of Persia and Syria – distinctive local religions emerged, resulting from the interaction of Shi'ite teachings and earlier local cults and creeds.

"The political programme of the sects was obvious: to overthrow the existing order and instal their chosen Imam. It is more difficult to identify any social or economic program, though their activities were clearly related to social and economic discontents and aspirations. Some idea of these aspirations may be inferred from the messianic traditions that were current, showing what needs the Mahdi was expected to meet. Part of his task was, in the broad sense, Islamic – to restore the true Islam, and spread the faith to the ends of the earth. More specifically, he was to bring justice – to 'fill the world with justice and equality as it is now filled with tyranny and oppression', to establish equality between the weak and the strong, and to bring peace and plenty.

"At first, the leaders to whom the Shi'a gave their allegiance based their claims on kinship with the Prophet rather than on descent from him in the direct line, through his daughter Fatima; some of them, including a few of the most active, were not descendants of Fatima – some not even of Ali, but of other branches of the Prophet's clan. But after the victory and betrayal of the Abbasids, the Shi'a concentrated their hopes on the descendants of Ali and, among these, more particularly on those who sprang from his marriage with the Prophet's daughter. Increasing stress was laid on the importance of direct descent from the Prophet, and the idea gained ground that since the Prophet's death there had in fact been a single line of legitimate Imams, who alone were the rightful heads of the Islamic community. These were Ali, his sons Hasan and Husayn, and the descendants of Husayn through his son Ali Zayn al-Abidin, the solitary survivor of the tragedy at Karbala. Apart from Husayn these Imams had in the main refrained from political activity. While other claimants spent themselves in vain attempts to overthrow the Caliphate by force, the legitimate Imams preferred to function as a sort of legal opposition to the Caliphs in power. They resided in Mecca or Medina, far from the main political centres, and, while maintaining their claims, did little to advance them. On the contrary, they sometimes gave recognition, and even help and advice to the Umayyad, and after them to the Abbasid rulers of the Empire. In the pious Shi'ite tradition, this attitude of the legitimate Imams is given a religious colouring; their passivity was an expression of their devoutness and otherworldliness, their acquiescence an application of the principle of Taqiyya."

(The Assassins, Bernard Lewis, pgs. 23-25)

Muhammad al-Mahdi, one of the most mysterious of the Shiite Imams

"In 765 Shiism gave birth to a new faction that, from the point of view of this history, is decisive. The Ismailis arose from the dispute over succession and the true identity of the seventh Imam. For reasons that are not clear, Jafar all-Sadiq is believed to have disinherited his eldest son, Ismail. Some historians state that Ismail had incurred his father's displeasure by his close relations with extremist groups. Ismail had become associated with Abul-Khattab, a disciple of Jafar's who zealously upheld the authority of the Imam but whose radical religious and political views cause Jafar to publicly curse him. In 756, two years after the Imam's curse, Abul-Khattab was arrested and crucified by the Abbasid authorities. Abul-Khattaab preached a kabbalistic doctrine that focused on discovering the esoteric truth behind appearances. His teachings concerning the nature of the spiritual hierarchy, the divinity of the Imam, and the need for initiated interpretation of the inner meaning of the Koran – all themes that were to infuse the later Ismaili movement.

"Other historians say that Ismail did not succeed Jafar as the seventh Imam because he died before his father. Jafar was believed to have transferred the succession to Ismail's younger half-brother Musa al-Kazim, who is recognized as the seventh Imam by most Shiites. Musa's line continue to the twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who disappeared in 873 (or 878). The reappearance of the twelfth Imam at the end of the world, in triumph as the Mahdi, is still awaited by the majority of Shiites, who are known as the Twelver Shiites, or Ithna ashariyya. This more moderate branch of Shiism has been the official religion of Iran and Iraq since the sixteenth century.

"An opposing Shiite camp supported the succession of Ismail. Some claim that Jafar had announced Ismail's death merely as a ruse to protect him. Others held that after Ismail's death, Jafar recognized Ismail's son Muhammad as the seventh Imam because he understood that the nass passed from father to son, not brother to brother. Still others said that before his death, Ismail had formally passed the nass to his son, making him the true Imam. Many claim that Jafar al-Sadiq had no right to withdraw the nass succession from Ismail even if he was displeased with his politics.

"Those who supported the Imamate of Ismail and his son Muhammad became known as the Ismailis, also referred to as the Sevener Shiites, or Sabiyya. Muhammad ibn Ismail began a series of travel soon after Musa al-Kazim was generally accepted as Jafar's designated successor. He is believed to travel to Persia and then to have disappeared into a period of hiding, isolation, or occultation. A mantle of vagueness covers all further accounts of him.

"Very little is known of the history and doctrines of the Ismaili Imam's from the beginning of the Ismaili movement in 765 until the establishment of the by the Fatimid Caliphate in 909. By the time the Fatimid Imam revealed himself, however, the Ismaili doctrine he openly proclaimed for the first time was mature. The Ismaili Imams, working in relative secrecy and isolation for over a century, developed a coherent body of theological teachings that resonated with intellectual and emotional appeal. Beginning after the middle of the ninth century, they began to emerge from their obscurity with an energetic preaching. The Ismaili mission is known as the dawa, or 'summons,' to allegiance to the Imam. The dawa is represented by the dai, or 'summoner,' who spreads the teachings of the faith through his propagandizing and missionary efforts.

"Philosophically the Ismailis replace the chaotic speculation and superstitions of earlier Shiite sects with a series of distinguished philosophical doctrines. While scant early Ismaili literature survives, anonymous manuscripts were apparently circulated privately among trusted sectarians. The Ismaili teachings were synthetic, including respect for the Koran combined with an intellectual appreciation for the profundities of Greek Neoplatonic thought and Hindu mysticism. Ismailism's emphasis on the living Imam offered an opportunity for emotional fulfillment by allowing the disciple to direct an intensely spiritualized love towards his or her Master. Finally, Ismailism included a well-organized opposition movement that attracted the politically disaffected."

(The Templars and the Assassins, James Wasserman, pgs. 80-81)

a calligraphy showing the name of Ismail and his male ancestors

"The Ismaili challenge to the old order was now closer and stronger, and was maintained by a great power – for a while the greatest in the Islamic world. The Fatimid Empire at its peak included Egypt, Syria, North Africa, Sicily, the Red Sea coast of Africa, the Yemen and the Hijaz in Arabia, with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In addition the Fatimid Cailph controlled a vast network of da'is and commanded the allegiance of countless followers in the land still subject to the Sunni rulers of the East. In the great colleges of Cairo, scholars and teachers elaborated the doctrines of the Ismaili faith and train missionaries to preach them to the unconverted at home and abroad. One of their main areas of activity was Persian and Central Asia, from which many aspirers after the truth found their way to Cairo, and to which in due course they returned as skilled exponents of the Ismaili message. Outstanding among them was the philosopher and poet Nasir-i Khusraw. Converted during a visit to Egypt in 1046, he returned to preach Ismailism in an eastern lands, where he exercised a powerful influence."

(The Assassins, Bernard Lewis, pg. 31)

Fatimid Caliphate at its peak

"... al-Hakim (r. 996-1021), a moody and eccentric leader who may have been mentally unbalanced. He took great interest, however, in the arts and sciences and in the activities of the dawa. In 1005, he founded the Dar al-Hikma, or House of Wisdom, as a training center for dais... On the other hand, al-Hakim persecuted both Jews and Christians. In 1009, he ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. This ended the truce his father had negotiated with the Byzantine emperor and was contributing cause of the Crusades. His intolerance extended to the Sunnis as well. He subscribed to the Shiite practice of cursing the first three Caliphs as usurpers of Ali's rights.

"The Druze movement arose in 1017 as a dissident Ismaili group, soon to become an altogether different faith. A number of al-Hakim's dais began to preach extremist ideas concerning the physical divinity of the  Fatimid Imam. The Fatimid recognized the Imam as the divinely appointed, infallible and sinless, sole spiritual leader of mankind – but human. The Druze carried this a giant step further, thereby incurring Fatimid wrath. The Druze leader was assassinated and 1018, but the movement continued to grow, becoming an ever-threatening source of religious and political dissent. The Druze stated that al-Hakim was the Qaim, the final Imam whose reign heralded the Qiyama, the end of Islam and the abrogation of Shariah. (These potent themes of Shiite radicalism would reemerge with the Nizaris a century later...) Today there are some three hundred thousand Druzes, living mainly in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, who continue to await the return of al-Hakim."

(The Templars and the Assassins, James Wasserman, pgs. 86-87)

al-Hakim

"The Isma'ili movement was rent by a major schism in 1094, which had drastic consequences for its future. During the long reign of the Fatimid caliph-imam al-Mustansir (1036-94), the caliphate had already begun his general decline, especially after the 1050s. The dispute over al-Mustansir's succession in 1094 split the Isma'ili movement itself into two rival branches, the Nizaris and the Musta'lians.

"Al-Mustansir had designated his eldest son Abu Mansur Nizar As his successor. However, al-Afdal, who a few months before al-Mustansir's death had succeeded his own father, Badr al-Jamali, as the all-powerful vizier and military dictator of the Fatimid state, had different plans. Aiming to retain the reins of the state, al-Afdal favored the succession of al-Mustansir's youngest son Abu'l-Qasim Ahmad, who would be entirely dependent upon him. At the time, the youthful Ahmad was married to al-Afdal's sister. At any rate, in what amount to a palace coup d'état, al-Afdal placed Ahmad on the Fatimid throne with the title of al-Musta'li billah, speedily obtaining the endorsement of this act from the notables of the Fatimid state and the leaders of the Isma'ili da'wa organization in Cairo.

"The dispossessed Nizar, whose succession rights were never revoked by his father, hurriedly fled to Alexandria, where he received strong local support and rose in revolt. After some initial success, however, his revolt was crushed in 1095. Nizar himself was captured and taken to Cairo where he was executed on al-Musta'li's orders. As a result of these developments, the unified Isma'ili movement of the latter decades of al-Mustansir's rule was now split into two rival factions, which were to remain bitter enemies. The imamate of al-Musta'li, who had been firmly installed to the Fatimid caliphate, was recognized by the bulk of the Isma'ilis in Egypt, by many in Syria, and by the whole Isma'ili community in Yaman and its subsidiary Indian community in Gujarat. These Isma'ilis, known as the Musta'liyya, maintained their relations with the central headquarters of the da'wa in Cairo. On the other hand, almost all the Isma'ili communities of the Muslim East, headed by the Persian Isma'ilis who were already under the leadership of Hasan Sabbah, as well as a large number in Syria, upheld Nizar's succession rights, recognizing him as the nineteenth Imam in succession to his father. These Isma'ilis, known as the Nizariyya, permanently severed their relations with the Fatimids and Cairo, which had now become the seat of the Musta'lian da'wa."

(The Assassin Legends, Farhad Daftary, pgs. 28-29)

Alexandria during the Medieval period

The Donald

"The October synod was a disaster for Pope Francis. Before it started, he had successfully tweaked the Catholic mood music relating to divorcees and gay people. The line ‘Who am I to judge?’, delivered with an affable shrug on the papal plane, generated friendly headlines without committing the church to doctrinal change. Conservatives were alarmed but had to acknowledge Francis’s cunning. ‘Remember that he’s a Jesuit,’ they said.

"Then Francis did something not very cunning. Opening the synod, which would normally be a fairly routine affair, he encouraged cardinals and bishops to ‘speak boldly’. Which they did, but not in the way he intended.

"The Pope’s first mistake was to invite Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s 81-year-old retired head of ecumenism, to set the agenda for the synod by addressing the world’s cardinals back in February. Kasper told them that the church should consider giving Holy Communion to remarried Catholics.

"Even if Francis supports this notion — and nobody knows — his choice of Kasper was a blunder because the cardinal, in addition to being a genial and distinguished scholar, is leader of a German-led faction that represents, in Catholic terms, the far left of the theological spectrum. In 1993 Kasper, then Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, co-signed a letter by German bishops demanding that Catholics living ‘in a canonically invalid union’ should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to receive the Eucharist. The German church is a law unto itself: although its services are empty, it is rich, thanks to the country’s church tax, and arrogant. To cut a long story short, this faction — which had ruthlessly undermined Benedict XVI’s authority when he was pope –  tried to hijack the synod.

"They messed it up. The synod’s ‘special secretary’, the Italian archbishop Bruno Forte, wrote a mid-synod report suggesting that the participants wanted to recognise the virtuous aspects of gay unions. In doing so, Forte — an even more radical figure — overplayed his hand. Most synod fathers wanted no such thing. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal George Pell, head of the Vatican’s finances, were horrified. They ensured that the final report kicked Communion for divorcees into the long grass and did not even mention homosexual relationships. ‘Synod rebuffs Francis on gays,’ reported the media — the last thing the Pope wanted to read."

Cardinal Walter Kasper, a key mentor to Pope Francis

"Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

"The conservative rebellion is taking on many guises — in public comments, yes, but also in the rising popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at Vatican reformers.

"In his recent comments, Burke was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes."

"A measure of the church’s long history of intrigue has spilled into the Francis papacy, particularly as the pope has ordered radical overhauls of murky Vatican finances. Under Francis, the top leadership of the Vatican Bank was ousted, as was the all-Italian board of its financial watchdog agency.

"One method of pushback has been to give damaging leaks to the Italian news media. Vatican officials are now convinced that the biggest leak to date — of the papal encyclical on the environment in June — was driven by greed (it was sold to the media) rather than vengeance. But other disclosures have targeted key figures in the papal cleanup — including the conservative chosen to lead the pope’s financial reforms, the Australian Cardinal George Pell, who in March was the subject of a leak about his allegedly lavish personal tastes.

"More often, dissent unfolds on ideological grounds. Criticism of a sitting pope is hardly unusual — liberal bishops on occasion challenged Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI. But in an institution cloaked in traditional fealty to the pope, what shocks many is just how public the criticism of Francis has become.

"In an open letter to his diocese, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., wrote: 'In trying to accommodate the needs of the age, as Pope Francis suggests, the Church risks the danger of losing its courageous, countercultural, prophetic voice, one that the world needs to hear.' For his part, Burke, the cardinal from Wisconsin, has called the church under Francis 'a ship without a rudder.'

"Even Pell appeared to undermine him on theological grounds. Commenting on the pope’s call for dramatic action on climate change, Pell told the Financial Times in July, 'The church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.' ” 

Cardinal George Pell

 "And now another voice is being heard. The last pope is neither dead nor senile nor as silent as we thought he was going to be. In the last month Benedict XVI has written to the ex-Anglicans of the Ordinariate expressing delight that they now worship in the former Bavarian chapel in Warwick Street, London; to Rome’s Pontifical Urban University about the dangers of relativism; and, most significantly, to supporters of the old liturgy. ‘I am very glad that the usus antiquior [the traditional Latin Mass] now lives in full peace within the church, also among the young, supported and celebrated by great cardinals,’ he said. In fact, very few cardinals celebrate in the old rite. But one who does is Raymond Burke. ‘Benedict is well aware of that,’ says a Ratzinger loyalist. ‘He’s not under the illusion that he’s still pope, but he was appalled by the sight of Kasper trashing his legacy and he is making his displeasure clear.’ "

"Last year, the Pope Emeritus slapped down his old adversary Cardinal Walter Kasper, a left-wing German theologian, for suggesting that, when he was still Professor Ratzinger, he supported communion for divorced and remarried Catholics — Kasper’s pet cause. He has warned the Church against ‘any wavering from the Truth’...

"Most of these interventions can be interpreted as implicit criticism of Pope Francis. The ‘wavering from the Truth’ comment was directed at Kasper, a mentor to Francis whose radical ideas provoked fury at last October’s Synod on the Family. (Significantly, the Vatican tried to keep Benedict’s words from reaching the press.) The Ordinariate letter is unlikely to have bothered the Pope, but the message to Latin Mass supporters will have annoyed him. When Benedict praised ‘great cardinals’, he had in mind the arch-conservative Raymond Burke — whom Francis sacked as head of the Vatican’s legal tribunal...

"Liberal Catholics will dismiss Benedict’s comments as the embittered musings of a disappointed 88-year-old and point instead to the million-strong crowd Francis drew in Ecuador this week. They overlook something obvious to visitors to many British parishes: younger clergy and worshippers in the West tend to be natural Benedictines, not Franciscans. My own parish is not ‘traditionalist’ but its liturgy has become more solemn, the music more classical and a crucifix has appeared on the altar: a trademark of the hermeneutic of continuity because the priest symbolically faces east, as once he did literally."

Pope Benedict in "retirement"

Pope Jon Paul I

the emblem of the Society of Jesus

"In 1981, John Paul II did an extraordinary thing when he intervened with the Constitutions of the Jesuit order to impose his own leadership on their religious order. The Pope did not like the leadership of Father Pedro Arrupe, who encouraged Jesuits to embraced liberation theology and base communities. When Arrupe had a stroke in 1981, the pope appointed his own man to head the order and forbade the Jesuits to elect their own leader for two years.

"In 1984, Ratzinger attacked liberation theology in an article in the Communion and Liberation journal 30 Giorni in which he complained that the movement liberation theology 'does not fit into accepted categories of heresy because it accepts all the existing language but gives it new meaning.' In March, Ratzinger sent a delegation from his Inquisition Office to Bogota, Columbia, to push for a condemnation of liberation theology from CELAM, the conference of bishops of Latin America..."

(The Pope's War, Matthew Fox, pg. 27)

John Paul II

emblems of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (top) and Opus Dei (bottom)

a seal of the Propaganda Due Masonic lodge

"Towards the end of Paul VI's reign a battle erupted in the Roman Curia between Progressive and Conservative factions. The Progressive faction, which wanted tighter financial controls and opposed greater influence for Opus Dei, was led by Paul's closest aide, Archbishop Benelli. He was credited with resolving one of the most serious crises is of the post-Conciliar Church – the break-up of the Company of Jesus, a project that allegedly had its roots inside the Villa Tevere. Benelli's efforts ensure that the 26,000 Jesuits remained under the command of one general superior, who at the time was Don Pedro Arrupe.

"Benelli was said to have wanted to keep the Company of Jesus intact because it represented the only effective counter-balance to Opus Dei. Moreover, Benelli also made known his distaste for the mercantile morals of Bishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican bank whom he regarded as an Opus Dei sycophant..."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pg. 206)

Bishop Paul Marcinkus

"Pope Francis has said he might have only two or three years left to live.

"On a plane trip back from South Korea, he told journalists he believed he only had limited time left to complete his reforms of the Roman Catholic Church.

"Asked about how he copes with his popularity, he said: ‘I try to think of my sins, my mistakes, so as not to think that I am some- body important.’

"He then added with a smile: ‘Because I know this is going to last a short time, two or three years and then… to the house of the Father.’

"According to a Vatican source, the 77-year-old has previously told those close to him that he thought he only had a few years left."

Hasan-i Sabbah

"Buzurgumid was one of Hasan's most trusted general; he had commanded the castle of Lammassar, the second most important Assassin fortress, for over two decades. During the last months of his fatal illness, Hasan summoned Buzurgumid to Alamut and appointed him his successor. Hassan is said to have whispered to Buzurgumid that as long as he remained worthy, Hasan's spirit would console him. Buzurgumid inherited the large Nizari Persian territories, composed of three regional centers some fifteen hundred miles apart: the first at Alamut; the second to the southeast in Girdkuh; the third in Quhistan farther to the southeast in central Persia. The fledgling Syrian branch of the Nizaris was also under his command. Confounding the expectations of his enemies, Buzurgumid was an able administrator and a courageous leader...

"The political and religious isolation of the Nizari community made their continual survival and expansion all the more unexpected. Under Buzurgumid's leadership, Alamut even operated its own mint. Buzurgumid remained a powerful force with which to be reckoned by both Sunni and Shiite powers, and he expanded the Nizari state to its ultimate territorial limits."

(The Assassins and the Templars, James Wasserman, pgs. 113-115) 

a portion of the Nizari state, i.e their castle strongholds

"Just days before his death, Buzurgumid passed the leadership to his son Muhammad, a conservative man whose ascension to power indicated a new phase for the Nizari state. For one thing, the succession to the Master of Alamut would henceforth be passed from father to son. For another, Muhammad's overall ambition for expansion was limited. His military activity, for example, was considerably more provincial than his father's. Fourteen assassinations were recorded during his twenty-four year reign, most taking place during his first five years. No significant military operations were undertaken outside the region of Alamut and the other established Nizari centers, although some of his local campaigns were quite aggressive...

"An increasing number of Nizaris at Alamut began to feel frustrated that the fire had gone out of their movement. The limit of Muhammad's quest for territorial expansion seemed to be his mission to Afghanistan. To many it seemed that the grand vision of world conquest and domination had become trivialized into local raids and cattle theft. A nostalgia for the spiritual frenzy that had animated the community in earlier times became pronounced. People were impatient for the promised appearance of the long-awaited Imam."

(The Assassins and the Templars, James Wasserman, pgs. 115-116)

Alamut

"Among them there was still some who harked back to the glorious days of Hasan-i Sabbah – to the dedication and adventure of his early struggles, and the religious faith that inspired them. They found a leader in Hasan, the son and heir apparent of the Lord of Alamut, Muhammad. His interest began early. 'When he had nearly approached the age of discretion he conceived the desire to study and examine the teachings of Hasan-i Sabbah and his own forefathers; and... he came to excel in the exposition of their creed... With... the eloquence of his words he won over the greater part of the people. Now his father being altogether lacking in that art, his son.... appeared a greater scholar beside him, and therefore... the vulgar sought to follow his lead. And not having heard the like discourses from his father they began to think that he was the Imam that had been promised by Hasan-i Sabbah. The people's attachment to him increased and they made haste to follow him as their leader.'

"Muhammad did not like this at all. A conservative in his Ismailism, 'he was rigid in his observance of the principles laid down by his father and Hasan[-i Sabbah] with regard to the conduct of propaganda on behalf of the Imam and the outward observance of Muslim practices; and he considered his son's behavior to be inconsistent with those principles. He therefore denounced roundly and having assembled the people spoke as follows: "This Hasan is my son, and I am not the Imam but one of his da'is. Whoever listens to these words and believes them is an infidel and atheist." And on these grounds he punished some who had believed in his son's Imamate with all manner of torturers and torments, and on one occasion put 250 persons to death on Alamut and then binding their corpses on the backs of 250 others condemned on the same charge he expelled these latter from the castle. And in this way they were discouraged and suppressed.' Hasan bided his time, and managed to dispel his father's suspicions. On Muhammad's death in 1162 he succeeded him without opposition. He was then about 35 years old."

(The Assassins, Bernard Lewis, pgs. 70-71)

"Ismaili accounts of what happened are preserved in the later literature of the sect and also, in somewhat modified form, in the Persian chronicles written after the fall of Alamut. They tell a curious tell. On the 17th day of the month of Ramadan, of the year 559 [8 August 1164], under the ascendancy of Virgo and when the sun was in Cancer, Hasan ordered the erection of a pulpit in the courtyard of Alamut, facing towards the west, with four great banners of four colours, white, red, yellow, and green, at the four corners. The people from the different regions, whom he had previously summoned to Alamut, were assembled in the courtyard – those from the East on the right side, those from the West on the left side, and those from the North, from Rudbar and Daylam, in front, facing the pulpit. As the pulpit faced west the congregants had their backs towards Mecca. 'Then,' says an Ismaili tract, 'towards noon, the Lord [Hasan], on his mention be peace, wearing a white garment and white turban, came down from the castle, approached the pulpit from the right side, and in the most perfect manner ascended it. Three times he uttered greetings, first to the Daylamis, then to those on the right, then to those on the left. In a moment he sat down, and then rose up again and, holding his sword, spoke in a loud voice.' Addressing himself to 'the inhabitants of the worlds, jinn, men, and angels,' he announced that a message had come to him from the hidden Imam, with new guidance. 'The Imam of our time has sent you his blessing and his compassion, and has called you his special chosen servants. He has freed you from the burden of the rules of Holy Law, and has brought you to the Resurrection.' In addition, the Imam named Hasan, the son of Muhammad, the son of Buzurgumid, as 'our vicar, da'i and proof. Our party must obey and follow him both in religious and worldly matters, recognize his commands as binding, and know that his word is our word.' When he had completed his address, Hasan stepped down from the pulpit, and performed two prostrations of the festival prayer. Then, a table having being laid, he invited them to break their fast , join in a banquet, and make merry. Messengers were sent to carry the glad tidings to the east and west. In Quhistan, the chief of the fortress of Mu'minabad repeated the ceremony of Alamut, and proclaimed himself as the vicar of Hasan, from a public facing the wrong way; 'And that day on which these ignominies were divulged and these evils proclaimed in the nest of heretics, Mu'minabad, that assembly played harp and rebeck and openly drank wine upon the various steps of the pulpit and within its precincts. In Syria too the word was received, and the faithful celebrated the end of the law."

(The Assassins, Bernard Lewis, pgs. 72-73)

Hasan II's proclamations curiously addressed djinns among other beings

"The new dispensation brought an important change in the status of the Lord of Alamut. In the sermon in the castle courtyard, he declared to be the vicar of the Imam and the Living Proof; as the bringer of the Resurrection (qiyama), he is the Qa'im, a dominating figure in Ismaili eschatology. According to Rashid al-Din, after his public manifestation Hasan circulated writings in which he said that, while outwardly he was known as the grandson of Buzurgumid, in the esoteric reality he was the Imam of the time, and the son of the previous Imam, of the line of Nizar. It is possible that, as some have argued,  Hasan was not claiming physical descent from Nizar, which in the age of the Resurrection had ceased to signify, but a kind of spiritual filiation. There are indeed precedents in early Islamic messianic movements of such claims to spiritual or adoptive descent from the house of Prophet..."

(The Assassins, Bernard Lewis, pg. 74)

"When Hasan II proclaimed the Great Resurrection, which marks the end of Time, he lifted the veil of Concealment and abrogated the religious Law. He offered communal as well as individual participates in the mystic's great adventure, perfect freedom.

"...  he acted on behalf of the Imam, and did not claim to be the Imam himself. (In fact he took the title of Caliph or 'representative'.) But as the family of Ali is the same as perfect consciousness, then perfect consciousness is the same as the family of Ali. The realized mystic 'becomes' a descendant of Ali (like the Persian Salman, whom Ali adopted by covering him with his cloak, and who is much revered by the sufis, Shiites and Ismailis alike). In reality, in haqiqah, Hasan II was the Imam because, in the Ismaili phrase, he had realize the 'Imam-of-his-own-being.' The Qiyamat was thus an invitation to each of his followers to do the same, or at least to participate in the pleasures of paradise on earth.

"The legend of the paradisal garden at Alamut where the houris, cupbears, wine and hashish of paradise were enjoyed by the Assassins in the flesh, may stem from a folk memory of the Qiyamat. Or it may even be literally true. For the realized consciousness this world is no other than paradise, and it's bliss and pleasures are all permitted. The Koran describes paradise as a garden. How logical then for wealthy Alamut to become outwardly the reflection of the spiritual state of the Qiyamat."

(Scandal, Peter Lamborn Wilson, pg. 40) 

The Prince of Persiaprovides the mythological perception of Alamut; was this perception never meant to be a reality, biut a state of being?

"In 1166 Hasan II was murdered after only four years of rule. His enemies were perhaps in league with conservative elements of Alamut who resented the Qiyamat, the dissolving of the old secret hierarchy (and thus their own powers as hierarchs) and who feared to live thus openly as heretics. Hasan II's son however succeeded him and established the Qiyamat firmly as Nizari doctrine.

"If the Qiyamat were accepted in its full implications however it would probably have brought about the dissolution and end of Nizari Ismailism as a separate sect. Hasan II as Qa'im or 'Lord of the Resurrection' had released the Alamutis from all struggle and all sense of legitimist urgency. Pure esotericism, after all, cannot be bound by any form.

"Hasan II's son, therefore, compromised. Apparently he decided to 'reveal' that his father was in fact and in blood a direct descendent of Nizar. The story runs that after Hasan-i Sabbah had established Alamut, a mysterious emissary delivered to him the infant grandson of Imam Nizar. The child was raised secretly at Alamut. He grew up, had a son, died. The son had a son. This baby was born on the same day as the son of the Old Man of the Mountain, the outward ruler. The infants were surreptitiously exchanged in their cradles. Not even the Old Man knew of the ruse. Another version was the hidden Imam committing adultery with the Old Man's wife, and producing as love-child the infant Hasan II.

"The Ismailis accepted these claims. Even after the fall of Alamut to the Mongol hordes the line survived, and the present leader of the sect, the Aga Khan, is known as the forty-ninth in descent from Ali (and pretender to the throne of Egypt!). The emphasis on Alid legitimacy has preserved the sect as a sect. Whether it is literally true or not, however, matters little to understanding of the Qiyamat.

"With the proclamation of the Resurrection, the teachings of Ismailism were forever expanded beyond the borders imposed on them by any historical event. The Qiyamat remains as a state of consciousness which anyone can adhere to or enter, a garden without walls, a sect without a church, a lost moment of Islamic history the refuses to be forgotten, standing outside time, a reproach or challenge to all legalism and moralism, to all the cruelty of the exoteric. An invitation to paradise."

(Scandal, Peter Lamborn Wilson, pgs. 41-42)

a depiction of al-Qiyama After the death Muhammad II, Hasan II's son, there were repeated efforts to reinstitute the Shariah and bring the Nizari back in to the mainline Islamic community, with varying degrees of success. Hasan III, Muhammad II's son, would be the most successful in this regard. His successor, Muhammad III (often referred to as Aladdin) would attempt a middle ground.

"In the third and final phase of their history during the Alamut period, the Nizaris, who had become increasingly weary of their isolation within Muslim society, attempted a tactical rapprochement with the Sunni world. Immediately upon his accession in 1210, Jalal al-Din Hasan III (1210-21), the sixth Lord of Alamut, publicly repudiated the teachings associated with the declaration of the Resurrection and proclaimed his adherence to Sunni Islam, ordering his followers to observe the sacred law of Islam in its Sunni form. The Nizari community, viewing the unprecedented proclamations of their infallible imam as a reimposition of dissimulation (taqiyya), obeyed Hasan III's orders without dissent. The outside world too, accepted Hasan III's proclamations; and the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir (1180-1225), who in the aftermath of the disintegration of Saljuq rule was reviving the power and prestige of the caliph at Baghdad, issued a decree confirming the Nizari leader's new policy. Hasan III's bold accommodation to the outside world accorded the Nizari community a valuable respite from the continued Sunni persecutions. During the reign of Hasan III's son and successor, Ala al-Din Muhammad III (1221-55), however, enforcement of Sunni law was gradually relaxed and the Nizari  community openly reverted to its earlier traditions.

"The long reign of Muhammad III coincided with a turbulent period in the medieval history of Persia and the Muslim East, which now experienced a foretaste of the Mongol devastations. Muhammad III attempted in vain for some time to establish friendly relations with the Mongols and to save his community from their wrath. The Mongols had already been turned against the Nizari Isma'ilis by the Sunni scholars at their court; and fresh complaints about them from the Sunni judges of Qazwin and other Persian cities flowed into the Great Khan's court in Mongolia. As a result, when the Great Khan Mongke (1251-9) decided to complete the Mongol conquest of western Asia, he assigned first priority to the destruction of the Nizari community in Persia..."

(The Assassin Legends, Farhad Daftary, pgs. 42-43)

an image done by Marco Polo allegedly of Muhammad III (who died a year after Polo was born)

"The Nizaris developed a new doctrinal turn in order to reconcile the Qiyama teachings with the behavior of Hasan III. It was said that Qiyama was a time of the outward revelation of the true spiritual identity of the Imam in all his glory to the community, during which direct communication with God was possible. In periods of the radiant presence of the Imam, concepts like Shariah became meaningless, if not blasphemous. On the other hand, there are also periods of occultation, when the Imam chooses to conceal his true self from the community, even when he is physically present. During these times, the outward observance of Shariah is required to maintain the purity of the Law. This phase of  allegiance  to the sharia was designated as Satr, the period during which the Imam hides his true spiritual status by appearing to act merely as the worldly ruler of the Nizaris, rather than as the Qaim of the Qiyama, which is the true potential of every Nizari Imam. The alternation between the open and hidden phases of the Imam, between Qiyama and Satr, takes place at his discretion. Thus, under the reign of Muhammad III, as in pre-Qiyama Alamut, there was an observance of the Shariah, although not so strictly enforced as under his father's rule."

(The Templars and the Assassins, James Wasserman, pg. 124)

"Mr. Farook, a United States citizen, was born in Illinois to Pakistani immigrant parents. Family members said he had been a devout Sunni Muslim, and on a dating website several years ago, he listed Urdu as his mother tongue. He had gone to Saudi Arabia multiple times, including a 2013 trip for the annual hajj, the trip to Mecca that all Muslims are expected to complete at least once, federal officials said.

"Mr. Bowdich said that Mr. Farook visited Pakistan last year, and that he and Ms. Malik entered the United States from Pakistan in July 2014. She traveled on a Pakistani passport and entered the United States on a K-1 visa, a 90-day visa given to fiancés planning to marry Americans. The couple applied on Sept. 30, 2014, for a permanent resident green card for Ms. Malik, which requires passing pass criminal and national security background checks using F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security databases, and she was granted a conditional green card in July 2015."

"The F.B.I. has begun treating its inquiry as a counterterrorism investigation, two law enforcement officials said Thursday. The suspects’ extensive arsenal, their recent Middle East travels and evidence that one had been in touch with people with Islamist extremist views, both in the United States and abroad, all contributed to the decision to refocus the investigation."

Farook

"All these recent developments are especially disconcerting because of the visible deterioration of governmental relations between Washington and the Gulf states, and the emergence of strong disagreements concerning the Muslim Brotherhood and the future of the region between the Gulf states themselves, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qater.

"Saudi-U.S. relations frayed after the Bush administration's adoption of the neocon agenda of change in the Middle East, particularly by the plans, which King Abdullah publicly oppose, for an Iraqi war in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein...

"In March 2014 Saudi Arabia designated the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists, along with two al-Qaedist groups (the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham) backed by Qater in Syria. This was after Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey, in alliance with Qatar, hailed the Muslim Brotherhood as an ally for creating an emerging new order in the Middle East."

(The American Deep State, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 80)

the logo of the Muslim Brotherhood

the Russian jet after it was hit

Crowley

"... two of the lines passing through Disneyland continuing north and eastward into the Inland Empire. These lines pass within less than ten miles of downtown San Bernardino. A third line, emanating from another set of spiraling lines, passes along what used to be called Route 66, the legendary national highway. The ley energy that flows west-east along old Route 66 follows the road right into town along Fifth Street, bisecting the city with its energy path.

"If one accepts the notion of ley energy, the entire San Bernardino area is full of it, so to speak... an entire system of ley energy winds and loops throughout San Bernardino and neighboring areas. The main nodal point of power is to be found in the heart of our mystery: Urbita Springs Park...  

"... we propose that the perpetrator(s) of the deaths we suspect for murders were influenced by a belief in such a ley (telluric) power grid. Thus, we suggest Cora Stanton met her fate literally yards from what the perpetrator(s) believed was a ley nodal point. Their purpose was to prime the pump, so to speak, with the life energy of the victims to get the power grid going and serve their aim."

(Empire of the Wheel Book I, Walter Bosley & Richard B. Spence, pgs. 207-210) 

an example of possible ley lines

the Inland Center Mall

"Orta Hedges died in Redlands, also crossed by leys and reputedly one of the most haunted towns in America known for rumors of devil worship as well as plentiful ghost stories. Her home sat upon an intersection of two telluric 'leys'.

"Likewise, the allegedly tormented E. P. Braid took his life in Redlands – his place of death also on the intersection of two such lines. Both telluric intersections where Hedges and Braid died included such lines following directly from the major nodal point in Urbita Springs Park."

(Empire of the Wheel Book I, Walter Bosley, pgs. 210-211)

Sundance and Etta Place