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The Black
Prince and the Sea
Devils:
The Story of Valerio Borghese and the
Elite Units of the Decima Mas
by Jack Greene and Alessandro
Massignani
Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2004 284 pages, hardcover, $27.50
The career
of the Roman "Black
Prince," Junio Valerio Borghese, gruesomely illustrates how virtually
all
modern "international terrorism" and all assassinations of heads of
state
and government such as President John F. Kennedy, former Italian Prime
Minister
Aldo Moro, or the numerous attempts on France's President Charles de
Gaulle,
derive from the postwar Nazi International, sponsored by the
Anglo-American-led
Synarchy and its intelligence services. To trace all the ramifications
of
that career, is to open a door onto the centuries-old highest level of
the
financial oligarchy—the Synarchy: the aristocratic families of the
"black
nobility," the
Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta, and the
heirs of what Pope
John Paul I called the "ancients" of Venice.
The fascist
Borghese founded Mussolini's elite naval warfare squadron, which he
turned into a savage irregular
warfare unit in northern Italy by the end of World War II. Picked up by
Allen
Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and other anti-Franklin Delano Roosevelt
operatives
of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Borghese and his men
would
be involved in every major postwar coup attempt or terrorist
outbreak in Italy
until 1970, when he fled to Spain after the failed coup attempt
most closely
associated with his name. From Italy, and then while in Spain, he
maintained connections all over Europe and with the bloody Operation
Condor torture-and-murder
syndicate in Ibero-America. An examination of Borghese's career enables
one
to peer beneath the surface of terrorism and spectacular
assassinations,
into the netherworld whence these actions are launched: where
international
high finance; ancient aristocratic families; pro-fascist elements of
the
Curia of the Catholic Church; leading fascists of the Hitler-Mussolini
era;
and the Anglo-American intelligence services, in particular those of
NATO, are all unified in a war against the modern nation-state.
The British
and U.S. intelligence
services' files on Borghese are still classified, as are the Borghese
family
archives in the Vatican after 1922, when Mussolini seized power. The
present
book is the first biography of Borghese in English. When correlated
with
other recent exposés of Gladio, the post-World War II NATO
"stay-behind"
network in Europe, and when all are situated within the work of Lyndon
LaRouche
and his associates on the Synarchy, it is a notable contribution to
unmasking
international terrorism, though the book's authors are perhaps not
always
aware of the full implications of what they present.[1]
Borghese
belonged to a principal
family of Rome's ostensibly Catholic "black nobility," many members of
which
claim descent from the elite of the Roman Empire. Numerous Popes and
cardinals
came from the Borghese and allied families, such as the Pallavicini,
the
Colonna, and the Orsini; these families maintained enormous power into
the
20th Century, and still today, in the Curia, the administration of the
Vatican.
Their faction within the Church helped construct the infamous
"rat-line"—run,
in part, through monasteries and convents—which spirited thousands of
Fascists
and Nazis out of Europe after the war, into Ibero-America, Asia, and
the
Middle East.
Whether the Borgheses indeed originated with the Roman
Empire, as they claim, or only rose in the early
16th Century, as records suggest, they could boast of one Pope, Paul V
(Camillo Borghese, reigned 1605-21), and several cardinals, while a
Borghese prince married Napoleon's sister. They lost their fortune in
the 19th Century, and thus the 20th Century saw Junio Valerio Borghese
going to war.
In the first
half of the book,
naval warfare specialists Greene and Massignani recount the development
of
Italian naval irregular warfare on the eve of World War II, which
involved light craft, frogmen, and sabotage. Borghese was an innovator
in this field, beginning with his sabotage efforts for Franco during
the Spanish Civil War
of the late 1930s. He founded Mussolini's naval special warfare unit,
the
Decima MAS, commonly known as the X MAS. (MAS was originally an
acronym for
Motoscafi Anti Sommergibili, anti-submarine motorboats, but soon
became
the generic term for any light craft.)
The X MAS was a kind
of personal
squadron of Italy's Venice-centered oligarchy, staffed by officers from
leading
noble families. One of them was the nephew of Italy's royal
House of Savoy,
Prince Aimone of Savoy, the Duke of Aosta. The X MAS thus mirrored
the oligarchical
coloring of the OSS, where the leadership was so dominated by
bluebloods,
such as Wall Street's pro-fascist Allen Dulles, that it earned the
sobriquet
"Oh So Social." The two organizations were destined to collaborate
closely.
Its
aristocratic pedigree enabled
the X MAS to operate as largely independent from Mussolini. As
Greene and
Massignani note, "Key personnel inside the X MAS were of noble
stock, and
this enabled them to win the support of top-level officers. It also
made
it possible for them to be in direct contact with the companies that
supplied
and developed craft, new weapons, and equipment for the flotilla."
Soon after
taking power in mid-1943,
the new royalist Italian government signed an armistice with the
Allies.
The royalists captured Mussolini in July, and held him in a remote
prison
in the Appenine Mountains. He was freed in a daring raid (so the story
goes), led by Hitler's chief commando, Otto Skorzeny, who was later to
become, like Borghese, a kingpin of postwar international terrorism.
The Nazis disbanded Italy's army and sank most of its navy, so that
they could not be used against them, but some diehards, notably
Borghese and his X MAS, chose to fight on for fascism. Many other
Italians were organized by Italy's political parties, including the
Communist Party, into partisan warfare bands, which fought
both the Germans and Mussolini's 1943-45 Nazi-run rump Salò Republic in
northern Italy. Hitler's henchman for the German occupation of northern
Italy, SS
Gen. Karl Wolff (formerly Himmler's private secretary), ordered Borghese
and his X MAS to move onto land, where they became infamous for
anti-partisan
warfare, including the systematic use of torture and the summary
execution
of Italian civilians as a "lesson" to the partisans. Greene and
Massignani report that in the 600 days of the Salò Republic, the
X MAS raised a force of 50,000 men, and that in the bloody civil
war which followed the armistice, probably more Italians died than in
the entire war before then.
The
X MAS was nominally committed
to the Salò Republic; however, it never swore allegiance to Salò, and
never
flew any flag but its own. Reports flooded back to Mussolini that
Borghese
was maintaining contact with all sides, so Il Duce had Borghese
arrested
in early 1944, though he soon released him. Indeed, Borghese had either
established
contact or worked with: the SS security service (Sicherheitsdienst),
with
which he worked closely; the Abwehr (German army counterintelligence);
the Italian royalist government; British Secret Intelligence Service;
James Jesus Angleton, chief of the OSS counter-espionage branch in
Italy; and Allen Dulles, OSS Berne, Switzerland station chief. He also met several times
with SS General Wolff.
Wolff and
Dulles plotted the Anglo-American redeployment of fascist operatives
after the war, among them Borghese. Indeed, Wolff declared, "Where the
person of Borghese and his Decima Mas is concerned, I have spoken
several times . . . with a representative
of Mr. Dulles." In late 1944, Rome's black aristocracy asked the Allied
military
governor in Italy, Vice Adm. Ellery Stone, to intervene in favor of the
"terrible
boy," Junio Valerio. A friend of the Borghese family and lover of a
Roman
baroness, Stone needed little convincing. As the partisans closed in on
Borghese
in May 1945, Stone instructed Angleton to warn him, which the latter
did
personally. On May 19, the Americans formally arrested Borghese, thus
saving
him from scheduled execution by a partisan firing squad.
The
Americans and the British showed a keen interest in the X MAS
wartime activities, especially its Vega
battalion, which had operated behind enemy lines. As one X MAS
leader put
it, foreshadowing Borghese's later deployment as part of Gladio, "For
the
Allies we were important because we had infiltrated the Communist
bands,
we knew their secrets and tactics and therefore developed the first
anti-guerrilla procedures. . . . They wanted to know how we
carried out the anti-communist
war. . . . They wanted to exploit our knowledge." The Germans
had also developed
"stay-behind" units to function behind Allied lines in Italy, and the
X MAS
were almost certainly part of that operation as well. Several members
of
the X MAS were taken to the United States for debriefing.
Borghese's
friends in high places
ensured that the Allies would clear him of war crimes. The Italian
government,
however, demanded that the Allies hand him over for trial in Milan in
late
1945. His friends again intervened, and his trial was transferred to
Rome,
where Dulles, Angleton, et al. had ensured that many of the old Fascist
bureaucrats
remained in office, and where the courts were much more conservative.
After
two years in prison, he was finally found guilty in early 1949 of
collaborating
with the Nazis (though not in war crimes) and sentenced to 12 years in
prison.
As one frustrated observer put it, "The crimes of Borghese's band were
too
obvious, and the verdict had to be life imprisonment. But the court,
through
a scandalous application of extenuating circumstances, pardons, and
remissions,
reduced the sentence." The judge then decided he had served enough
time,
and released him, an action that would have been politically impossible
before
Britain's Winston Churchill announced the beginning of the Cold War
with
his 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri.
Borghese's
new career was about
to begin.
Shortly after his release
from
prison, Borghese became president of the Italian Social Movement (MSI)
party,
composed largely of former Fascists. The MSI was a mixture of
"national"
and "international" ("universal") fascists. Borghese was committed to
the
latter outlook, which today is openly espoused by neo-con Michael
Ledeen,
himself a protégé of a Mussolini Cabinet minister, the Venetian oligarch
Vittorio Cini. Cini, in turn, was a key collaborator of the real
architect
of Mussolini's regime, its longtime Finance Minister, the Venetian
Count
Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata.
Greene and
Massignani describe
Borghese's universal fascism and its plans for a Europe free of
nation-states,
but "unified" under NATO: "Fascism in the postwar era was different
from
its pre-war variety. Although it had splintered into many different
factions,
it had two powerful drives. One was that it was anti-communist. It was
this
element that made Borghese acceptable to the mainstream parties and
national
secret services. He was ultimately pro-NATO, as was the rest of this
wing
of fascism. The other one was the realization that in the postwar
environment
no single European nation could stand up to the two superpowers, and
hence,
that Europe would be a third force. That is, Europe would be
`opposed
to the twin imperialisms of international communism and international
finance
capitalism, both of which were perceived as being materialistic,
exploitative,
dehumanizing' " (emphasis in original).
Borghese's "united Europe"
was the scheme promoted, from the early 1920s on, by his fellow
oligarch,
the Venetian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, which became an
explicit goal
of the Synarchist International in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, the seed
crystal
of that "united Europe" has become the Maastricht Treaty-generated
European
Union and its European Central Bank. The same vision of a united Europe
had
also inspired Hjalmar Schacht, the financial architect of Hitler's
regime,
though Schacht viewed Hitler's conquest of Europe as the pathway to
achieve
it. It was also the vision for which the Synarchy deployed one of its
most
notorious agents of the 20th Century, Alexander Helphand Parvus. Parvus
first
financed the Bolshevik Revolution, and then, after it was victorious,
became
the most ferocious "anti-Bolshevik," proclaiming that only a "united
Europe"
could stop the communist menace.
Between the
wars, this "united
Europe" scheme was momentarily eclipsed by the "national fascisms" of
Mussolini,
Salazar, Franco, and Hitler, though all were installed by the same
Europe-based,
London-centered Synarchy. But, after the war, write Greene and
Massignani,
Borghese's universal fascism was the wave of the future, as well as the
incubator
of international terrorism. "In Italy, it was the Fascist faction that
possessed
the many international ties that stretched between Franco's Spain,
South
America, and South Africa. It was from this faction, too, that many
of
the acts of terrorism of the `Black International' sprung"
(emphasis
added).
Postwar
Italian politics may appear to be a wilderness of mirrors, with its
rapid changes of government, multiple coup attempts, and spectacular
outbreaks of terrorism. Going back
to the Nazi occupation of northern Italy during World War II, however,
to
examine the various British, American, and Nazi actors and their
respective
ties to different Italian factions, the reality quickly becomes
apparent:
that the Anglo-American Synarchists merely replaced—and to a great
extent
subsumed—the Nazis and Mussolini's Fascists as the would-be fascist
occupying
power, locked in mortal struggle against those Italian patriots, both
"conservatives"
of the Christian Democracy and "leftists" of the Italian Communist
Party,
who wished to establish a sovereign Italy.
The battle
for a sovereign Italy
centered on economic policy. In 1950, forces around wartime partisan
leader,
later industrialist Enrico Mattei effected a radical shift within the
ruling
Christian Democracy, away from free-market policies toward a dirigistic
program
of rapid industrial growth. With an extraordinary series of
state-sponsored
corporations, and projects such as the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno
(Southern
Italy Development Fund) based on the model of U.S. President Franklin
Roosevelt's
Tennessee Valley Authority, Italy experienced an economic miracle, with
annual
growth of over 7% for almost a decade. A linchpin of this was the newly
founded
national oil company, ENI, which Mattei headed in a war for energy
independence
against the synarchists' Seven Sisters.
Enraged at
Italy's developing sovereignty, the Anglo-Americans deployed terrorism
and assassinations to
stop it. Borghese's activities run like a black dye through all of this
history, until he fled to Spain in 1970. Let us now examine the scene
in which he
was to be so prominent an actor.
Already
during World War II, Allen Dulles and other Anglo-American Synarchists,
who had sponsored both Mussolini and Hitler in the first place, were
trying to negotiate a peace
with the Nazis which would leave them in power, sans Hitler and
a
handful of others. This Nazi puppet-regime would then ally with the
British
and the United States to conquer the Soviet Union, establishing a
Synarchist
world empire. Dulles's negotiating partner SS General Wolff said that
he
wanted "to build a bridge to the West," which would entail handing
northern
Italy over to the Allied military forces, but with German troops
remaining
in place, as "part of the proposed police force of the Western
powers against Russia."[2]
U.S.
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, by contrast, wanted to crush the fascist regimes, and
foresaw a
postwar world in which the colonial empires of all the European powers,
starting
with the British, would be abolished, and the United States and the
Soviet
Union—wartime allies—would cooperate in a grand program of global
economic
growth, into which the rest of the world would be drawn as well.
Dulles and
his fellow Synarchists
did not achieve their full scheme, but they did establish NATO as an
occupation
authority for Europe, which prepared for war against the Soviet Union.
Lord
Bertrand Russell's early 1946 call for pre-emptive nuclear warfare
against
the Soviet Union is typical. In the name of "fighting communism,"
Europe
would be kept under AngloAllen Dulles American domination through NATO,
and
any and all means would be authorized toward that goal. Upon FDR's
death
in April 1945, the Synarchist puppet President Harry S Truman adopted
these "anti-communist" schemes, which led immediately to the Cold War.
When the
North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) was established in 1949, a secret clause in its
treaty
specified that each nation that wished to join must first establish a
"national
security authority" to fight communism, including through the
deployment
of clandestine citizen cadres. This demand grew out of a secret
committee
set up by the British and the U.S. within the Atlantic Pact, the
forerunner
of NATO. Truman's National Security Council issued directives
authorizing
the Armed Forces to use military force against Communist Parties, which
commanded
strong popular support in several European countries as a result of the
war,
even if those parties gained participation in government through
elections.
For this purpose, NATO and the Anglo-American intelligence services set
up
"stay-behind" units in all European countries.
According to
Italian Gen. Paolo
Inzerilli, who commanded Italy's Gladio unit from 1974-86, the
Clandestine
Planning Committee (CPC) and its Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC)
were
the "interface between NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
(SHAPE)
and the Secret Services of the member states as far as the problems of
non-orthodox
warfare were concerned." The CPC, said Inzerilli, was dominated by an
inner
executive group of the United States, Britain, and France, while the
ACC
was essentially a technical committee to coordinate expertise in
explosives,
"repression," or related problems of clandestine warfare. Italian Gen.
Gerardo
Serravalle testified that the members of the CPC were the officers
responsible
for the stay-behind apparatus in the various European countries, and
that
"At the stay-behind meetings representatives of the CIA were always
present,"
as well as "members of the U.S. Forces Europe Command."
The
mid-1970s U.S. Congressional
investigative committee under Sen. Frank Church, which examined illicit
actions
by U.S. intelligence services and the military, found that the Pentagon
had
requested the CIA's covert branch, the Office of Policy Coordination
(OPC),
to take the point in establishing stay-behind armies in Europe. The
early
plans were focussed on the Soviet Union, as the Church report noted:
"Until
1950 OPC's paramilitary activities (also referred to as preventive
action)
were limited to plans and preparations for stay-behind nets in the
event
of future war. Requested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these projected
OPC
operations focussed on Western Europe and were designed to support NATO
forces
against Soviet attack." However, the Pentagon soon went much further. A
Joint
Chiefs of Staff directive of May 14, 1952 set up "Operation
Demagnetize,"
in which the CIA and the military secret services were instructed to
reduce
the "magnetic attraction" of the large Communist Parties of Italy and
France
through all means, including "political, paramilitary and psychological
operations."
The directive stated, "The limitation of the strength of the Communists
in
Italy and France is a top priority objective. This objective has to be
reached
by the employment of all means. The Italian and French
government
may know nothing of the plan `Demagnetize,' for it is clear that
the plan
can interfere with their respective national sovereignty" (emphasis
added).
Operationally,
the stay-behind units were run by the military secret services of each
NATO nation, as directed by the CPC/ACC. Some light was shed on
Pentagon and NATO thinking of this
time in a Pentagon field manual, found along with the lists of members
of
the elite Propaganda Due (P2) freemasonic lodge in P2 Grand Master
Licio
Gelli's villa in Arezzo, Tuscany in 1981. Although issued in 1970,
Field
Manual 30-31B (FM 30-31B) reflected earlier Pentagon and NATO
planning. It
emphasized that military and other secret service leaders in each
country
should be recruited as U.S. (or NATO) agents: "The success of
internal stabilisation operations, which are promoted in the context of
strategies
for internal defence by the U.S. military secret service, depends to a
large
extent on the understanding between the U.S. personnel and the
personnel
of the host country. The recruitment of senior members of the secret
service
of the host country as long time agents is thus especially important."
This process
began already
in 1944-45, when the Anglo-American synarchists re-constructed Italy's
military secret service and its military police, the Carabinieri. Some
of the key individuals
whom they installed or sponsored later turned up as members of P2, from
where
they oversaw the terrorism and assassinations of the late 1960s and
1970s,
as well as the cover-ups. Like Borghese, some of these leaders had been
recruited
by Angleton himself. One of them was Federico Umberto D'Amato, chief of
the
UAR, a secret section of the Interior Ministry which coordinated the
terrorist
actions under NATO direction, in conjunction with the military secret
services.[3]
Furthermore,
stated the FM 30-31B,
"There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or
indecision
in the face of communist subversion and according to the interpretation
of
the U.S. secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness.
Most
often such situations come about when the revolutionaries temporarily
renounce
the use of force and thus hope to gain an advantage, as the leaders of
the
host country wrongly consider the situation to be secure. U.S. army
intelligence
must have the means of launching special operations which will convince
Host
Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent
danger."
FM 30-31B was issued in 1970; coup attempts against the Italian
government
under precisely the circumstances it describes, were launched using
Gladio
personnel (including Borghese) that year, and three more times through
1974.
The manual stressed, "These special operations must remain strictly
secret.
Only those persons who are acting against the revolutionary uprising
shall
know of the involvement of the U.S. Army in the internal affairs of an
allied
country. The fact, that the involvement of forces of the U.S. military
goes
deeper shall not become known under any circumstances."[4]
As in
virtually everything
to do with imperial strategies, the relevant U.S. circles were being
carefully guided by their senior partners, the British, under the old
rubric, "British
brains and American brawn." Gladio was modelled on the actions of the
Special
Operations Executive (SOE) behind enemy lines during World War II,
which
had been created by the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) in 1940 under
orders
from Churchill to "set Europe ablaze." In charge of the SOE was
Minister
of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton, who said, "We have to organize
movements
in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in
Ireland,
to the Chinese Guerrillas now operating against Japan, to the Spanish
Irregulars
who played a notable part in Wellington's campaign or—one might as well
admit
it—to the organizations which the Nazis themselves have developed so
remarkably
in almost every country in the world" (emphasis added).
The SOE was
closed down at war's
end and replaced by the Special Air Services (SAS), which helped
Britain's
foreign secret service, MI6, to train the stay-behind armies of Europe.
Gladio
specialist Daniele Ganser of the Center for Security Studies at Zurich
Technical
University observed, "Many within the stay-behind community regarded
the
British to be the best in the field of secret warfare, more experienced
than
the military officers of the U.S."
The British
set up a base for training stay-behind units at Ft. Monckton outside
Portsmouth, England, and another in Sardinia. One of the stay-behind
operatives trained at Ft. Monckton recalled, "We were made to do
exercises, going out in the dead of night and
pretending to blow up trains in the railway stations without the
stationmaster
or the porters seeing you. We crept about and pretended to lay charges
on
the right part of the railway engine with a view to blowing it up." In
the
Gladio-coordinated blind terror which ravaged Italy from 1969 through
1980,
trains and railway stations were to be a favorite target, notably the
1974
bombing of the Rome-Munich Italicus Express, which killed 12 and
injured 48,
and the explosion in the Bologna rail station in August 1980, which
killed 85 and seriously injured or maimed 200. Lyndon LaRouche first
emphasized
within hours of the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2001 which
killed
200 and wounded thousands more, that they were not the work of "Islamic
terrorists,"
but followed the pattern of the 1980 Bologna bombing.
Vincenzo
Vinciguerra, an Italian
neo-fascist terrorist who was jailed for life and who had been bitter
about
the secret service's "manipulation" of neo-fascist groups ever since
1945,
explained how Gladio (and any sister organizations) worked: "You had to
attack
civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people
far
removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were
supposed
to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask
for
greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the
massacres
and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannot
convict
itself or declare itself responsible for what happened."
After Prime
Minister Giulio Andreotti exposed the existence of Gladio in 1990, the
BBC's "Newsedition"
undertook its own examination of Gladio. It reported in April 1991,
"Britain's
role in setting up stay-behinds throughout Europe was absolutely
fundamental."
More crucial
than the stay-behinds,
were the secretive bodies which coordinated them, such as P2. Here,
too,
the British led the way. Already in 1944-45, the British set up a
proto-P2
masonic lodge composed of House of Savoy monarchists, aristocrats, and
Mussolini
loyalists. A Jan. 2, 1945 OSS report noted: "The lodge is under British
authority
and will request their political and economic aid, things which the
members
cannot get through their respective parties without exposing themselves
to
accusations of being paid by the British."
OSS official
James Jesus Angleton
saved Borghese in 1945, and then set up the clandestine structure in
the
Italian military and secret services, which produced the Italian
section
of Gladio. Angleton was a devout Anglophile and a pro-fascist, who had
spent
much of his boyhood in Italy, where his father, James Hugh Angleton,
owned
the Italian subsidiary of National Cash Register. The outspokenly
pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini senior Angleton also headed the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce in Italy, and had extensive contacts with Mussolini's
intelligence services.
Some accounts report that he was a business partner of Allen Dulles.
Both
he and his son were to work for the special counterespionage unit of
OSS,
X-2, which had been set up at the demand of the British. Though it was
nominally
an American organization, the headquarters of X-2 for all of Europe,
and
even most of the globe, was London. X-2 was trained and de facto run
throughout
the war by the British, as its operatives were dispatched across
Europe.
From late 1943 through the first half of 1944, Lt. Col. James Hugh
Angleton
was X-2's liaison to Marshal Pietro Badoglio and other leaders of the
Italian
army, and to the army's intelligence service, building upon his
excellent
contacts in pre-war Italy.
The junior
Angleton landed
in Italy as an X-2 operative in October 1944. Borghese was one of his
informants/agents
from shortly thereafter, until the Italian government demanded that the
OSS
turn him over for prosecution. The U.S. mandated that the "operational
resources"
of the Italian police and all of the military intelligence and secret
services
be put at the disposal of X-2, which was led by Angleton. This,
naturally,
set the pattern for decades to come. Bespeaking his patronage by Dulles
and
the British, young Angleton rose from chief of the X-2 unit in Rome, to
chief
of all OSS counterespionage in Italy. By age 28, he was chief of all
secret
activity, intelligence as well as counterintelligence, in Italy for the
Strategic
Services Unit, the short-lived successor to OSS, and predecessor to the
operational
section of the CIA, which was established in 1947. In this he was aided
immensely
by the fact that many patriotic OSS officers, such as Max Corvo, head
of
OSS operations in Italy from 1943-45 and later a friend of Lyndon
LaRouche,
had been purged by the Dulles faction the day after FDR's death.
Essential to Angleton's
activities,
to the establishment of the first stay-behind units in Italy, and to
the
organization of the Vatican-linked "rat-lines" which smuggled fascists
out
of Europe at war's end, was the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
(SMOM).
The Rome-based SMOM was a nominally Catholic organization with
membership drawn from the highest ranks of the European oligarchy, in
particular Italy's black nobility. The SMOM awarded Angleton one
of its highest decorations
in 1946. A member of the "Black Prince's" family, S. Giacomo, Prince
Borghese,
had been a Bailiff Grand Cross of Honor of Devotion in the SMOM since
1932,
while P2 founder Licio Gelli and several of his top members, including
secret
service heads, also belonged.
By 1949
Angleton was a special
assistant to CIA chief Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, and by 1955, CIA
chief
Allen Dulles (1953-61) had appointed him to head the
counterintelligence department
of the CIA. He held that post until he was fired by CIA chief William
Colby
in 1974, after having done untold damage to U.S. intelligence
capabilities.[5]
As Angleton
rose in U.S. intelligence,
maintaining his close ties to Italy, NATO was constructing the
foundations
of Gladio. Under NSC directives issued in 1949 and 1950, the CIA helped
the
Italian police set up secret units of counterinsurgency specialists,
largely
drawn from veterans of Mussolini's secret police. A new military
intelligence
agency, SIFAR, was organized under the direction of a covert American
intelligence
operative, Carmel Offie, nicknamed "the godfather." Simultaneously,
Borghese
was organizing paramilitary units for use against the PCI, in
coordination
with CIA operatives under the purview of Angleton (who was formally
assigned
to Italy by Allen Dulles when Dulles became CIA chief in 1953). On Dec.
2,
1951, Borghese was named honorary president of the MSI, and in a speech
to
the party's convention, proclaimed that the MSI could not be
"conscientious
objectors" if the Cold War turned hot, as he expected. That same month,
two
MSI members travelled to NATO headquarters in Paris to swear their
organization's
allegiance to NATO. By 1952, the NATO-directed "Operation Demagnetize"
was
in place, and SIFAR was directed to adopt political and psychological
operations
against the PCI, including the covert use of armed force, to diminish
the
PCI's influence in all fields. The U.S. poured a staggering $4 billion
into
"anti-communist" Italy between 1948 and 1953.
Borghese and
his old X MAS
cadre figured prominently in these plans. Indeed, some people in U.S.
intelligence
had briefly toyed with the idea of promoting Borghese as a new King of
Italy,
until an uproar from the House of Savoy and its supporters forced them
to
drop the idea. The royalists and the MSI were often allies, and
Borghese's
X MAS had sometimes worked with the royalist Osoppo brigade during
1943-45.
Greene and Massignani observe that, "Interestingly enough, the core of
the
future Gladio stay-behind organization started with the Osoppo
partisans."
Since Borghese's X MAS was also a chief recruiting ground for the
early Gladio
units, the wartime collaboration clearly continued.
In 1953,
Borghese led some 500
MSI volunteers, among others, to launch an uprising in the north
Adriatic city of Trieste, a city which was claimed by both Italy and
Yugoslavia. Under the slogan "To Trieste with Valerio Borghese,"
Borghese re-enacted the 1919
march on Fiume by the fascist (and Martinist freemason) Gabriele
D'Annunzio,
a precursor to Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome. The neo-fascists acted
on
behalf of the "Committee for the Defense of Italians of Trieste and
Istria,"
whose weapons were delivered by the Italian secret services. The
following
year, Trieste was returned to Italy.
In 1955,
Borghese became president
of the union of former soldiers of the Salò Republic, a key recruiting
ground
for Gladio. He was later to become one of the leaders of the "Tricolor
Committee
for the Italianity of the Alto Adige." The Alto Adige, or South Tyrol,
in
Italy saw one of the earliest known uses of stay-behind units. Though
Italian
territory, the area was German-speaking, and a fruitful area for
promoting
ethnic conflict.
In 1956,
NATO formally established
Gladio. According to documents discovered in Italy in 1990, Gladio's
forces
there were divided into 40 main groups, 10 specialized in sabotage, 6
each
in espionage, propaganda, evasion and escape tactics, and 12 in
guerrilla
activities. A special Gladio training camp was set up on Sardinia, off
Italy's
western coast, run by the Americans and the British.
That same
year, 1956, U.S. Ambassador
to Italy Clare Booth Luce—a Dame of Malta and the wife of Time
and
Life magazine publisher Henry Luce, a key sponsor of the fascist
Congress
for Cultural Freedom—"recommended" a fellow SMOM member, Gen. Giovanni
De
Lorenzo, as the new head of SIFAR. In 1962, the CIA helped install De
Lorenzo
as head of the Carabinieri, while he still maintained control over
SIFAR.
He began purging officers deemed not sufficiently "anti-communist," in
either
his eyes or or those of U.S. military attaché Vernon Walters.
CIA Rome
station chief William
Harvey, meanwhile, was recruiting "action teams" to throw bombs and
attack
leftists. These teams launched an attack on a peaceful demonstration in
Rome
in 1963, leaving 200 people injured and heavy damage to part of the
city.
The action was later linked to Gladio, in testimony by a general of the
secret
service.
In 1963,
Borghese became president
of the Banco di Credito Commerciale e Industriale, a very high-paying
"ceremonial
post" which was designed to build up his capabilities. The bank had
been
the very first one owned by the Sicilian financier Michele Sindona, a
Fascist
during World War II, who later laundered heroin funds for the Sicilian
mafia,
and then became a power in P2. Borghese's bank was involved with a
"vast
sector" of conservative economic interests, including the son of
Dominican
Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, Franco's Spain, and reactionary
circles
in the Vatican and the Christian Democratic Party. Ultimately the bank
collapsed,
but Borghese got off almost scot-free. "What is significant," write
Greene
and Massignani, "is that Borghese clearly had many contacts on a
national
as well as an international scale. These connections extended to very
high
levels. It also appears that the financial wherewithal that he needed
to
survive may have come from such sources after the end of the war." The
authors
also note that his career closely parallels that of former SS commando
Otto
Skorzeny in Spain.
From 1962 to
1964, the Synarchy initiated a phase change in international affairs
with the Cuban Missiles Crisis, the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy (and Enrico Mattei),
the attempts on France's President Charles de Gaulle, and the launching
of
the war in Vietnam and the youth rock-drug-sex counterculture, among
other
things. Italy was not exempt.
As Prime
Minister Aldo Moro in 1964 was negotiating his first government with
Socialist participation,
the synarchists unleashed a coup threat under the name "Plan Solo." Its
chief public figure was State President Antonio Segni, and Borghese was
a protagonist.
The usual
accounts of Gladio-related
coup threats invariably emphasize Moro's "opening to the left" as the
reason
for them. However, there is another reason, internal to Italy itself
(in
addition to the global ramifications of a coup in Italy), but one which
is
entirely coherent with the Synarchy's attempt to stop Italy's economic
development.
This other dimension emerges clearly in the account of Plan Solo by EIR
counterterrorism and Italian affairs expert Claudio Celani: "Segni, a
right-wing
Christian Democrat, was manipulated by an intelligence officer, Col.
Renzo
Rocca, head of the economic division of SIFAR, the military secret
service.
Rocca (who, after his stint at SIFAR went to work at the automaker FIAT
in
Turin [of the oligarchical Agnelli family—ed.]) reported to Segni that
the
financial and economic establishment predicted a catastrophic economic
crisis,
if the Socialists joined the government. In reality, a few large
monopolies
(in the hands of the same families who had supported Mussolini's
regime)
feared that the new government would introduce reforms to break their
power
in real estate, energy, finance, and economic planning."
Advised by
Rocca, Segni called
the head of SIFAR, Gen. Giovanni de Lorenzo, and asked him to prepare a
list
of political leaders to be rounded up in case of an insurgency. De
Lorenzo prepared "Plan Solo," which included a list of 731 individuals
to be interned
at the Gladio camp in Sardinia. Greene and Massignani observe,
"Supporting
the Carabinieri were politically sanitized civilians largely made up of
former
Decima Mas, paratroopers, and soldiers and sailors of the RSI [Salò
Republic]."
"Borghese was De Lorenzo's friend" and was scheduled to personally
participate
in the coup, according to Remo Orlandini, a top Borghese collaborator
and
heir to a shipbuilding empire. The coup did not eventuate, leaving a
very
"angry Borghese."
In early May
1965, a meeting took place at the Parco Dei Principi Hotel in Rome,
which Italian prosecutors consider the planning meeting for the 1969-74
"Strategy of Tension." It was
sponsored by an institute run by the chief of the general staff of
Italy's
armed forces, on the theme of "Revolutionary Warfare." Participants
plotted
how the alleged threat by the PCI must be forestalled by
"counterrevolutionary
war." (The PCI's vote totals were generally rising through the second
half
of the 1960s.) Present were leaders of the fascist terror groups,
Avanguardia
Nazionale (AN) and Ordine Nuovo (ON), pro-fascist journalists, the
military,
and various secret services. One of the fascist journalists present was
Guido
Giannettini, also an operative of the Italian secret services, who four
years
earlier had taught a seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy on "The
Techniques
and Prospects of a Coup." Though Borghese himself was not present, his
lieutenant
Stefano Delle Chiaie, the nominal chief of AN, was. Delle Chiaie had
probably
been recruited by the UAR secret unit of Italy's Interior Ministry as
early
as 1960, and was to be Borghese's chief lieutenant in the 1970 coup
plot.
During the
1960s through his coup attempt in 1970, Borghese either founded or was
intimately involved
in at least three fascist terror organizations: Delle Chiaie's AN; the
ON;
and the Fronte Nazionale (FN), which Borghese founded in 1968 for the
sole
purpose, according to a document of SID (as SIFAR was renamed after
1965),
"to subvert the institutions of the state by means of a coup." Two of
these were represented at the Parco Dei Principi meeting. All three
were run by operatives of NATO or Italy's clandestine services, notably
the UAR and SIFAR/SID.
Borghese lieutenant Delle Chiaie was almost certainly a UAR agent, and
"AN
itself was suspected of being the creation of UAR." Greene and
Massignani
report that "many members of the FN, ON, and AN had been trained in
disinformation
and guerrilla warfare at the special [NATO] camp in Sardinia," while ON
bomber
Vincenzo Vinciguerra charged that the "right-wing movements such as AN
or
ON were not only connected with Italian and NATO secret services, but
manned
by them."
NATO
interventions were not limited to Italy. In Greece in 1967, despite a
wave of terror, the left-of-center
Center Union under former Prime Minister George Papandreou was expected
to
return to power. On the night of April 20-21, 1967, the Greek military
pulled
a coup. It involved the Greek stay-behind army, LOK, and was based on
the
Prometheus plan, a NATO contingency plan for combatting a "communist
insurgency."
The coup was partially financed by P2's Michele Sindona, and, before
long,
Italians were being sent to Greece for paramilitary training.
By 1968,
Gladio had stepped up its training at the NATO base in Sardinia.
"Within a few years, 4,000 graduates
had been placed in strategic posts. At least 139 arms caches, including
some
at Carabinieri barracks, were at their disposal," reported Arthur E.
Rowse,
who has examined Gladio's Italian operations in depth. Terrorism
exploded
in Italy, with 147 attacks in 1968, another 398 in 1969, and peaked at
2,498
in 1978. Borghese's efforts were a key part of this.
One of the
first members of the FN, Borghese's project for a state "beyond the
center, right and left,"
was P2 boss and Knight of Malta Licio Gelli. Like Borghese, Gelli had
fought
for Franco and Mussolini, and was recruited by SIFAR in the 1950s.
Gelli
was the "main intermediary" between the CIA and De Lorenzo.
In the FN,
Borghese was known as "the Commander," and he established "action
groups" all over the country.
The FN (like the AN) had a two-part structure: "A" groups, which were
the
public side of FN, and clandestine "B" groups, whose existence was
usually
unknown even to the members of their respective A groups. The B groups
were
to be used in terrorism, in the "Strategy of Tension" aimed at
producing
a change in the Italian government, which exploded with the Piazza
Fontana
massacre on Dec. 12, 1969, in which 16 were killed and 58 wounded.
Members
of the Borghese-connected ON were arrested on suspicion of the crime,
but
cover-ups run by P2 and the secret services ensured their release.
The terror
and coup attempts escalated after U.S. President Nixon took office in
1969. His National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger issued orders to
Licio Gelli through Kissinger's deputy,
Gen. Alexander Haig, and Gelli maintained many high-level contacts in
the
U.S. Republican Party. The synarchist Kissinger was bitterly opposed to
a sovereign Italy. With the Socialist Party in the government at the
time,
the United States opened the financial spigots to "anti-communist"
forces—including
the neo-Fascist MSI—and poured in $10 million in 1970 alone. "The money
funneled
to [U.S. Ambassador Graham] Martin came through the Vatican banker and
Borghese's
friend and patron, Sindona," observe Greene and Massignani.
On June 1,
1970, Borghese appointed
Delle Chiaie to head the "B" groups, and moved forward with plans for a
coup.
U.S. Ambassador Martin handled some of the funding, through his chief
contact,
Gen. Vito Miceli, who took over as head of the SID in October 1970.
Before
he became head of the SID, Miceli had met with Borghese several times
at
the home of Remo Orlandini, Borghese lieutenant and shipbuilding heir.
Martin
was no ordinary diplomatic appointee: The fiercely right-wing Colonel
Martin
had just come from the Embassy in Thailand, where he had strong-armed
the
Thai government into joining the United States in Vietnam, and he would
leave
Italy in 1973 to take up the post in Saigon. During 1970, Martin
maintained
multiple liaisons with Borghese, including through FN operative Pier
Talenti,
who owned a bus company that would be utilized in the coup attempt, and
through
probable CIA operative Hugh Fenwich, who was meeting with Orlandini.
Borghese set
up the political and military headquarters for the coup in Rome, the
military one at one of Orlandini's shipyards. On the night of Dec. 7,
1970, a group of 50 AN paramilitaries
led by Delle Chiaie was let into the Interior Ministry's armory at the
instruction
of Angleton's old recruit, UAR head Federico D'Amato. According to
newspaper
accounts, Angleton himself arrived in Rome just before the coup
attempt,
and left just afterwards. Other troops moved into place in Rome, Milan,
and
elsewhere, and the mafia in Calabria was scheduled to don Carabinieri
uniforms
and play a role. Borghese prepared a statement to be read on TV to
justify
the coup, and he intended for Italian troops to be sent to Vietnam. At
the
last minute, he received a phone call and called off the coup.
Borghese
fled to Franco's Spain,
where his activities until his death in 1974 remain mysterious. It is
known
that he and Delle Chiaie met dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile on
April
29, 1974. Also present was the head of Chilean police intelligence,
Col. Jorge
Carrasco, a protagonist in Operation Condor's tortures and murder.
Borghese
died in Spain in 1974. Delle Chiaie said that he was poisoned,
apparently
because investigations into the 1970 coup were under way in Italy.
After
Franco's death the following year, Delle Chiaie left for Chile, to play
a key role in Operation Condor, then continued that work in Bolivia, in
conjunction
with the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie.
The extent
of terrorism, assassinations,
and the re-shaping of Europe's political landscape through Gladio and
related,
NATO-directed units is stunning.
However, a
vital caveat must be added here. The apparatus behind the "strategy of
tension" terror that
destabilized Europe over much of the Cold War era, was first and
foremost a private synarchist apparatus embedded in the NATO
and national secret service organizations, including "official"
clandestine agencies like Gladio.
These "parallel" networks, populated by veterans of the wartime Fascist
and
Nazi apparatus, and associated with secret societies like P-2, and
fronts
like Rosa dei Venti and Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato, at times had
their
agents posted in top positions in the "official" structures, creating
the
dangerously tempting but false appearance that the official agencies
per
se—including NATO—were directing the terror/destabilization programs.
Confusion on
this point is both
dangerous and understandable. When the P-2 membership list was revealed
in the early 1980s, following the death of banker Roberto Calvi, it
became clear that the secret lodge had penetrated virtually the entire
security apparatus and political party structures of Italy and several
other countries of Europe and Ibero-America.
The carnage
carried out by this
"parallel" apparatus was stunning. In Italy alone, the chief theater of
Gladio
warfare, there were 14,591 "acts of violence with a political
motivation,"
according to Italian Sen. Giovanni Pellegrino, head of the
Parliamentary
Committee on the Failed Identification of the Authors of Terrorist
Massacres
("Terrorism Committee," in operation 1994-2001, which looked into both
Gladio
and the P2 lodge). "It may be worth remembering that these `acts' have
left
behind 491 dead and 1,181 injured and maimed, figures of a war, with no
parallel
in any other European country."
Besides
NATO's Gladio base
in Sardinia, logistical support for Gladio in Italy and France was run
out
of a NATO front in dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal,
Aginter
Press, which also ran the stay-behind units there. It was headed by a
former
member of the anti-de Gaulle, pro-fascist Secret Army Organization
(OAS),
Yves Guerin Serac, who moved to Portugal after de Gaulle surrendered
Algeria.
Said Guerin Serac, belying the goals of his synarchist masters, "After
the
OAS I fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its
proper
dimensions—which is to say, a planetary dimension." He outlined
his
plan to "defeat communism," using NATO-organized "communist terrorism"
as
the excuse:
"In the
first phase of our
political activity we must create chaos in all structures of the
regime. Two
forms of terrorism can provoke such a situation: The blind terrorism
(committing
massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims), and
the
selective terrorism (eliminate chosen persons). This destruction of the
state
must be carried out as much as possible under the cover of `communist
activities.'
After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the
juridical
power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a
solution,
and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus.
. . .
Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being
represented
as the only instrument capable of saving the nation. It is obvious that
we
will need considerable financial resources to carry out such
operations."
Aginter
Press's representative
in Italy, according to the ON's Vincenzo Vinciguerra, was Stefano Delle
Chiaie.
Delle Chiaie "allegedly carried out well over a thousand bloodthirsty
attacks,
including an estimated 50 murders in Spain," according to Daniele
Ganser.
In
assassinations within Portugal
or its colonies, Aginter Press worked with the Portuguese secret
service,
PIDE. According to Portuguese journalists, it was involved in the
assassination
of Eduardo Mondlane, president of the Mozambican Liberation Front
(Frelimo)
in 1969, and of Amilcar Cabral, national liberation leader in
Guinea-Bissau
in 1973. And, according to the most recent revelations from former
Italian
Sen. Sergio Flamigni, the "parallel" apparatus coordinated the kidnap
and
assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro through its Red
Brigades
unit on March 16, 1978, the day on which a PCI-supported DC government
under
Giulio Andreotti was finally going to be sworn in.
Were the
Synarchist networks infiltrated into the NATO and Gladio structures
involved in other assassinations
of heads of state or government, as well?
The Nov. 22,
1963 assassination
of President John F. Kennedy was coordinated by the Rome and New
Orleans-headquartered
Permindex corporation, which French intelligence, SDECE, discovered had
also
put up $200,000 for an attempt on de Gaulle. Even a cursory examination
of
the hard-core fascist outlook and connections of most of the
Permindex/CMC
personnel, their numerous ties to high-level Anglo-American
intelligence,
along with their financial connections, leaves no doubt that Permindex
and
its Rome-based arm, Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), were part of the
parallel
NATO/Gladio structure.
Permindex
was registered in Berne, Switzerland, Dulles's old stomping grounds. It
was chaired by a high-ranking
veteran of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the OSS, the
Canada-based
lawyer and financier, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, the majority
shareholder in Permindex (who also owned 50% of CMC). Its board was a
mélange of devout "anti-communists," aristocrats, and fascists of
various intelligence pedigrees.
These included Count Guitierez di Spadafora, former undersecretary of
agriculture
to Mussolini, secretary of a British-sponsored Sicilian separatist
movement,
and in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, the master financier of the postwar Nazi
International;
Carlo d'Amelio, a Rome attorney who oversaw the financial holdings of
the
House of Savoy, and, according to some accounts, also of the
Pallavicini
family, and was the founding president of the CMC; Giuseppe Zigiotti,
head
of the Fascist National Association for Militia Arms; several other
wartime
fascists; and former OSS London and SOE veteran Col. Clay Shaw, the
operations
officer for the assassination.
Permindex
was chaired by Canada's
Bloomfield, while its international arm, CMC, was based in Rome, and
Clay
Shaw's firm in New Orleans, International Trade Mart, was a subsidiary
of Permindex/CMC. According to documents released through the Freedom
of Information
Act (FOIA), OSS veteran Shaw worked for the CIA, as well. There was
ample
evidence of Shaw's involvement in the assassination, for which he was
indicted
by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Notably, one of the
names
found in Shaw's personal phone book was that of Princess Marcella
Borghese,
a member of the Black Prince's family. And one of the lower-level
figures
in the ambit of the plot, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby (who
assassinated
patsy Lee Harvey Oswald), charged repeatedly in letters from jail, that
"the
Nazis and the Fascists were behind the Kennedy murder." According to
the
highly credible Torbitt manuscript, "Ruby was much more knowledgeable
about
the conspiracy than most."
Huge
financial resources flowed
through Permindex/CMC for no commercial purpose. Some of these funds,
at least,
were provided through banks which had earlier financed the Nazis,
including
one intimately associated with Allen Dulles from the time of his 1930s
work
with Nazi cartels, through to his 1953-61 stint as CIA chief. Some
hints of
where the money was going could be found in French and Italian press
reports that CMC official Ferenc Nagy, the fiercely anti-communist
former Prime Minister
of Hungary, was financing Jacques Soustelle and the OAS, along with
other
European fascist movements; or in New Orleans District Attorney
Garrison's
observation about "Shaw's secret life as an Agency [CIA] man trying to
bring
Fascism back to Italy."[6]
NATO units
were also involved in at least some of the numerous assassination
attempts on France's President Charles de Gaulle in 1962-63, which was
no doubt a factor in de Gaulle's withdrawing
France from NATO's military command in 1966. France, after all, had
been
a key target of NATO's "Operation Demagnetize" in the 1950s, and the
"anti-communist,"
bitterly anti-de Gaulle OAS operatives like Guerin Serac, were natural
partners
of NATO. Adm. Pierre Lacoste, director of the France's military secret
service
DGSE (1982-85), admitted after Andreotti had exposed Gladio's existence
in
1990, that some "terrorist actions" against de Gaulle and his plans to
liberate
Algeria were carried out by groups involving "a limited number of
people"
from the French Gladio organization!
A five-year
investigation by France's SDECE intelligence agency of a 1962
assassination plot against de Gaulle found that the assassination had
been planned in the Brussels headquarters
of NATO by a specific group of British and French generals, who
employed
former fascists for the planned wetwork.
And then,
there is the case of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who was
assassinated on Feb. 28, 1986
in Stockholm. While there is no hard proof that parallel Gladio
networks
were involved, it has been suspected by Swedish investigative
journalists.
On April 28, 1992, Sweden's top daily, Dagens Nyheter, carried
the
headline: "A Top-Secret Intelligence Network Within NATO Is Behind the
Death
of Olof Palme." Journalist Goran Beckerus charged that the operative
branch
of NATO's Allied Clandestine Committee, known by its initials SOPS,
oversaw
the assassination under the code name "Operation Tree."
In order to
discover the real authors of international terrorism, we must move into
territory at which
Greene and Massignani only hint.
Time and
again, Italian investigators
of Gladio and P2 have suggested that the evidence before them was only
the
superficial tracings of a far-reaching, well-established power
structure's
activity. For instance, Senator Pellegrino, head of the Italian
Parliament's
"Terrorism Committee," is convinced that P2 Grand Master Gelli was the
front
man for hidden circles of far greater power; that if P2 were a "port,"
then
Gelli, who has recently resurfaced to brag that he is "running the
country,"
would be merely the "Port Authority." Who, or what, constitutes this
greater
power? From outside the country, it is the Anglo-American synarchists.
But
Gladio and the embedded "parallel Gladio" could not possibly function
within
Italy only by recruiting leaders of secret services; its protection had
to
involve some of the most powerful forces inside Italy itself.
Greene and
Massignani note that
the X MAS—which became a key component of Gladio—counted among its
leadership
a number of Italy's top aristocrats, though they name only two: the
"Black
Prince" himself, and the claimant to the throne of Italy, Prince
Aimone,
Duke of Aosta. In fact, the Duke was favored by many of Rome's black
nobility
over Victor Emmanuel III, who reigned from 1900-45, and who therefore
was
King during the era of Mussolini, who was nominally the King's prime
minister.
The recognized leader of Italy's black nobility, Princess Elvina
Pallavicini,
once proclaimed, "The Duke of Aosta would have been much better, but
now
we are stuck with Victor Emmanuel." How many other aristocrats among
the
X MAS leadership also became key figures, like Borghese, in NATO's
Gladio
organization?
It is
certain, that aristocrats
played vital roles in one of the "parallel" Gladio's most infamous
operations,
the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro. Looked at more
carefully,
that is no real surprise: Members of the most powerful international
organization
of the world's aristocracy, the SMOM, played essential
roles in the establishment
of the Vatican/British intelligence/CIA "rat-lines" and other crucial
"anti-communist"
activities at the end of World War II. Allen Dulles and James
Angleton were
SMOM members. Numerous SMOM members were also prominent in the P2
lodge;
however, of the two organizations, the SMOM is incomparably the more
senior
and powerful; in fact, from available evidence, P2 is more
appropriately
thought of as an "operational" spin-off of the SMOM. Let us briefly
look
at the role of these aristocrats in the Moro assassination, and then in
more
detail at the SMOM itself.
The Gladio
structure was named
after the short Roman sword, gladio. When Aldo Moro was killed
on May
9, 1978, ostensibly by the Red Brigades, he was dumped outside a Roman
stadium
where gladiators used to fight to the death. The symbolic connection
was
clear, as emphasized by investigative journalist and sometime
mouthpiece for
elements within the SID, Mino Pecorelli. The Red Brigades leader in
charge of the operation was Mario Moretti. Former Senator Flamigni has
documented
in a recent book, that Moretti was a protégé almost from childhood of
an
important aristocratic family, the Casati Stampa. The Marchesa
Annamaria
Casati Stampa kept several neo-Fascist youth as lovers, one of whom was
probably
Moretti, whose high school education she paid for. Under Gladio
direction,
the neo-Fascist Moretti later turned into a "leftist" and headed the
Red
Brigades.[7] Connections
to Fascism ran
deep in the Casati Stampa family: her husband's uncle, Alessandro, had
been
a minister in Mussolini's first government, and then, when Mussolini
was
dumped, became a minister in the first royalist government.
The closest
friend of the Casati
Stampa family was Liberal Party Sen. Giorgio Bergamasco. Bergamasco, in
turn,
was one of the founders of the Committee of Democratic Resistance, led
by Piedmontese aristocrat Count Edgardo Sogno Rata del Vallino. Sogno
had fought for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and then for
Mussolini, and in 1943 went over to the British SOE. He was also on the
payroll of Allen Dulles
for years for 10 million liras a month, and his Committee became
another
nucleus of the extended Gladio organization. Sogno led an attempted
coup
in 1974, which was foiled by Defense Minister Giulio Andreotti.
Flamigni
demonstrated in his book how the hardline Moretti-led faction of the
Red
Brigades was in reality run by Sogno's NATO-controlled organization.
Shortly
after Moro's assassination,
LaRouche's associates in Italy published a pamphlet, "Who Killed Aldo
Moro?"
which drew attention to the oligarchical Caetani family in Rome, near
whose
palace Moro's body had been found. Later investigations by others
charged
that the actual head of Gladio was the English aristocrat Hubert
Howard,
a British intelligence official in World War II and for decades
afterwards,
who had married Princess Lelia Caetani, daughter of Roffredo Caetani,
17th
Duke of Sermoneta. Howard and his wife lived in the Caetani palace, as
did
one Igor Markevich, a double or triple agent of Western, Israeli, and
Soviet
intelligence services. He and Howard were leaders of high-level
"esoteric"
masonry, and, according to some accounts, had led the "negotiations"
with
the Red Brigades for the freedom of Moro—a convenient cover for
constant
liaison. British intelligence veteran Howard was also named by some as
the
secret head of Gladio. The account is credible. Howard was a member of
one
of the most powerful families in Britain, the Dukes of Norfolk, and the
Catholic
Howards had had intimate connections with the Italian aristocracy,
particularly
of Venice, since at least the 18th Century. His mother, for instance,
was
a member of the powerful Giustiniani family of Venice and Genoa, which
claimed
descent from Emperor Justinian. One Howard had been the Cardinal-Bishop
of
Frascati outside Rome in the 19th Century, a post held a couple of
centuries
earlier by a Caetani. Although long a power in the Church—Benedetto
Caetani
was crowned Pope Boniface VIII at the end of the 13th Century—the
Caetani
were part of the nominally "enlightened" wing of Italy's aristocracy by
the
20th Century, and still wielded great influence under Mussolini and
afterwards.
No account
of the Italian aristocracy's
role in promoting fascism and terrorism can omit the role of Princess
Elvina
Pallavicini. As head of the integrist international association of
Catholic
nobility, "Noblesse et Tradition," Pallavicini was a chief sponsor,
both
in Rome and worldwide, of the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre,
who
was excommunicated by Pope John Paul II in 1988. Until her recent
death,
the Princess was also a chief sponsor of neo-Fascist groups in Italy,
including
setting the stage for the emergence of former porn star Alessandra
Mussolini,
granddaughter of Il Duce, as the candidate for an electoral coalition
of
neo-Fascist parties.
Wherever one
turns in investigating
P2, Gladio, the "black aristocracy," international terrorism, or the
Nazi
International, one encounters the SMOM—the Sovereign Military and
Hospitaller
Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta, known as "the
Knights
of St. John" or the "Knights of Malta."
They were
omnipresent in the establishment of the financial and human
infrastructure of modern international terrorism already during World
War II, and immediately thereafter. SMOM member Baron Luigi Parilli, an
industrialist with high-level connections into both Hitler's SS and SD
in Italy, and to Mussolini's intelligence services, was
the main liaison between SS Gen. Karl Wolff and Allen Dulles in Berne.
SMOM bestowed one of its highest awards, Gran Croce Al Merito Con
Placca,
on U.S. Ambassador to Italy Ellery Stone, who had saved Borghese, and
who
became a postwar vice-president of the ITT corporation, which helped
organize
the Sept. 11, 1973 overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende and
the
installation of dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The SMOM awarded its Croce
Al Merito Seconda Classe to Italy's OSS chief James Jesus Angleton
in
1946, around the same time it honored his boss, Allen Dulles. The
following
year, it bestowed the Gran Croce al Merito con Placca upon
Hitler's
Eastern Front intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, one of only four
recipients
of this award at the time. Gehlen's brother was the secretary to Thun
Hohenstein,
one of the five-member ruling Sovereign Council of the order. As head
of
the Institute for Associated Emigrations, Hohenstein printed some 2,000
passports,
which were used to relocate leading Nazis to safe hiding places around
the
world.
Other
leading Knights included
CIA chiefs Allen Dulles, John McCone, and William Casey. Nazi
International
figure Otto Skorzeny was a Knight, as was businessman J. Peter Grace,
who
used the SMOM's diplomatic immunity as a cover for Iran-Contra
activities.
Numerous
leaders of Italy's military intelligence organization were members of
both SMOM and P2, including Gen. Giuseppe Santovito (former head of
SISMI, which replaced SID after 1977), Adm. Giovanni Torrisi, Chief of
the General Staff of the Army, and Gen. Giovanni
Allavena, head of SIFAR. Another key P2 member who was a Knight was
Count
Umberto Ortolani, a member of the SMOM's ruling inner council, and a
veteran
of Mussolini's counterespionage service. Some say he was the real
brains
behind P2, and he did sponsor the entrance of P2 boss Licio Gelli into
the
SMOM. Ortolani was a financier who, among other things, owned the
second-largest
bank in Uruguay, where he commanded enormous influence; the fascist
Gelli
had been in exile in Ibero-America until higher powers brought him back
to
Italy in the early 1960s to set up what became the P2 lodge.
As with any
organization, not all of its members are guilty, and sometimes not even
witting of the organization's
crimes. In this case, however, given the nature of the beast, that
would
be relatively rare. Besides the repeated surfacing of SMOM members in
terrorist-related
activities near the end of World War II, one of their more recent
operations
illustrates the organization's essential nature.
In 1978,
following hard upon the assassinations of Dresdner Bank head Jürgen
Ponto, German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, and Aldo Moro, the
Knights of Malta were caught red-handed
coordinating an assassination operation against Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
LaRouche
was the intellectual author of the Bremen summit of that year, where
French
President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, West German Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt,
and British Prime Minister James Callaghan (the last under duress)
signed
the Bremen Communiqué, which announced the formation of the European
Monetary
System. The EMS, in the words of one West German official, was intended
to
be "the seed crystal of a new world monetary system." Bremen struck
horror
into the hearts of the world's oligarchy. Said one senior officer of
the
Banque Bruxelles-Lambert, owned by the Belgian Rothschilds, "It is
recognized
that it was LaRouche's program that went through at Bremen. If it goes
through
now, certain important financial centers are going to lose their power.
A
lot of people are not going to like that." The director of a
Knights-run
institute in Belgium was more succinct: "LaRouche is the first enemy of
the
London group." In New York, Knight Henry S. Bloch, director of Warburg,
Pincus
investment bank, whose hands investigators discovered to be holding
many
of the strings of the plot, proclaimed LaRouche to be "very dangerous,"
and
pointedly compared him to Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965.
In their
investigations of the
SMOM, LaRouche's associates "discovered to their surprise that the mere
mention
of its name inspires awe and terror in the minds of highly placed
government
officials, central bankers, senior military and business leaders, and
senior
diplomatic and intelligence executives," as recorded in a pamphlet
issued
by the LaRouche organization at the time, "The `Black International'
Terrorist
Assassination Plot to Kill Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr." The pamphlet
further
reported, "The power that the Order concentrates is primarily
financial,
through direct control of most of the Western world's leading
investment
houses" and far, far more. The pamphlet also noted, "A second source of
power
is an absolutely unmatched intelligence capability." Which is to say,
the
SMOM is a leading organizational arm of the Synarchy, bringing together
the
world's leading aristocrats, financiers, and particularly military and
intelligence
officials. Its members yearn for the ultramontane world which existed
before
the rise of sovereign nation-states during the Renaissance, which meant
a
loss of power and privilege of their families. To them, that vanished
world
is as if yesterday. Indeed, it has by no means entirely disappeared,
but
lives on, centered—like the Knights themselves—on the
Venetian-descended
"independent central banks" of virtually every nation in the world, as
LaRouche
has emphasized.
The Knights
of St. John were founded in the late 11th Century, and rose to
prominence in the First Crusade of 1095. In 1120, Pope Urban II
officially recognized them as a military religious
order, and for centuries they remained one of the most powerful
military
forces in Christendom, first from their headquarters on the island of
Rhodes,
and then on Malta, from which they were finally driven by Napoleon in
the
late 18th Century. The Knights were recognized as a sovereign state by
a Hapsburg
Emperor in the 16th Century. They remain a sovereign state, run from
their
headquarters at 68 Via Condotti in Rome. They maintain their own fleet
of aircraft, have diplomatic relations with 92 nations as well as the
United Nations and the Holy See, and enjoy diplomatic immunity. The
order is entirely Roman Catholic, and its higher ranks must document an
aristocratic lineage
and coat-of-arms of at least three centuries. The Grand Master of the
order
is both a secular prince, and a cardinal of the Church. Reflecting its
history,
its membership is still heavily comprised of individuals with a
military
or intelligence background. Pope Pius XII ordered an investigation of
this nominally Catholic organization in the 1950s. The Papal Commission
charged, among other things, that the Order should not have the
sovereignty of a state, and ordered modifications of the SMOM "to bring
them into conformity with decisions of the Holy See." However, Pius XII
died before the Order could be fully reined in.
In addition
to the Roman Catholic
SMOM, there are four Protestant orders of the Knights, all founded
within
the last 150 years or so, and all run by ruling houses of Europe. The
Roman
Catholic and Protestant orders effectively merged on Nov. 26, 1963,
four days
after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Sovereign Head of the
British
Knights is Queen Elizabeth, while the Netherlands Knights were headed
until
his death by the former SS official, Prince Bernhard of the
Netherlands, consort
of Queen Juliana.
In 1927, the
Rome-based SMOM authorized the establishment of an American chapter,
whose members did not
have to prove their aristocratic lineage. Its Treasurer and lay
controller
was John J. Raskob, the bitterly anti-FDR head of the Democratic
National
Committee, who in 1934 helped finance a coup attempt against Roosevelt.
Its
Grand Protector and Spiritual Advisor was Cardinal Francis Spellman of
New
York, one of whose closest Cold War associates was Time/Life
publisher
and Congress for Cultural Freedom co-founder Henry Luce.
Another
Knight, who played
a profound role in Italy's postwar financial, economic and political
history
was Prince Massimo Spada, the leading lay financier of the Vatican's
Institute
for Religious Works, commonly called the "Vatican Bank." Spada gave the
mafia-connected
heroin launderer and later P2 financier Michele Sindona his entrée into
the
Vatican's finances, which, given the tax-sheltered, sovereign status of
the
Church within Italy (as negotiated in the 1929 Concordat between
Mussolini
and the Holy See), was invaluable for running all kinds of dirty
operations.
However, in
examining the Vatican,
one must always be careful to ask, "Whose Vatican? That of all the
modern
popes? Or that of the black aristocracy?" And to really unravel that
question,
insofar as it intersects Ortolani, Gelli, Calvi, Spada, and their
"Vatican-connected"
associates, and the deeper, "permanent" infrastructure of terror in
Italy,
one must delve deeply into history, particularly that of Venice, to
understand
the enormous power still wielded by those whom Pope John Paul I,
called "the
ancients," during the time he was Patriarch of Venice. After all, as
LaRouche
has stressed, those "ancients" of Venice have given us the modern
Anglo-Dutch parliamentary system, with its privately controlled central
banks, and the Synarchy's present drive for world rule. Under
Anglo-American direction,
those Venetian "ancients" also brought Mussolini to power in the first
place,
and then organized the financial world of the Vatican, into which
Ortolani,
Gelli, Calvi et al. were inserted.
In 1582, the
40 or so families
which controlled the vast fortunes and far-flung intelligence
capabilities
of Venice, split into two factions: the nuovi (the "new"
houses, or
families) and the vecchi (the "old" houses). On the surface,
the appellations
seemed to refer to those families ennobled since the serrata,
the
closing of the Grand Council in 1297, who were called the nuovi;
whereas
those who had already held titles of nobility, were the vecchi.
In
fact, the upheaval was the result of the establishment of sovereign
nation-states
for the first time in history, as a consequence of the Renaissance. The
city-state
of Venice, never more than 200,000 people, could not stand against the
new
powers that were coming into being, founded to promote the Common Good
of
their citizenry; the sheer numbers, the science and technology, the
military
power, were too much for even the powerful and devious masters of La
Serenissima
(as Venice is famously called).
The nuovi
realized that,
notwithstanding the bloody religious warfare which Venice had unleashed
in Europe following the failure of the League of Cambrai to defeat
Venice in
1511, its days were ultimately numbered. They took several strategic
actions.
First, under the leadership of Paolo Sarpi, they created the philosophy
of
empiricism, as a sense-certainty-based fraud whose purpose was to
destroy
the creative method of Platonic hypothesizing. Second, also under
Sarpi's
leadership, they launched a fierce war against the Vatican, posing as
the
bastion of "enlightened" Europe against obscurantist Rome. Third, they
brought the newly emerging Protestant powers England and Holland (whose
rise came largely thanks to Venice itself), into what had always been
the cornerstone
of Venice's fortunes—its trade with the East Indies. The Venetians
founded
the British East India Company in 1600 (from a merger of the
England-based
Venice Company and the Turkey Company) and the Dutch East India Company
in
1602, and the wealth derived from this trade helped create or enrich a
number
of great aristocratic families in both countries, along the Venetian
model.
And, as LaRouche has often emphasized, the British East India Company
became
the foremost power in the world in 1763, in the wake of the
British-rigged
Seven Years' War among contending European powers, in the classic
Venetian "divide and conquer" method. Fourth, they moved much of their
fortunes (and
even some of their families) north, first into Holland, and then into
England,
where they created what would be known in the 18th Century as "the
Venetian
Party." As part of this, they established the famous Wisselbank
(Exchange
Bank) of Amsterdam in 1609—the most powerful bank in the world—modelled
upon
their own private, patrician-controlled banks, followed by the Bank of
England
in 1694, both serving as the models upon which all central banks have
been
established since then.
In part
because of these redeployments,
Venice's financial power remained huge well into the 18th Century, as
did
its legendary spy system, brilliantly chronicled by Friedrich Schiller
in
his novella Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer), and
American
intelligence operative James Fenimore Cooper in his novel The Bravo.[8] Barings
Bank in England, the
bank of the British East India Company, for instance, was the vehicle
for
Venetian funds in Britain, and was at the center of the "Venetian
Party,"
together with the Bank of England.
Napoleon
Bonaparte had been partially sponsored and funded by Venetian and
Genoese families: The Genoese Princess Pallavicini of that era famously
punned that her family owned "la buona parte"—"the best part"—of
him. His Corsican family had been retainers
for the Genoese and Venetian nobility for centuries; and, as noted
above,
his favorite sister married a Borghese. When Napoleon's ravages had
ended,
Count Giovanni Capodistria, a Venetian nobleman acting as a government
minister
of Russia, almost single-handledly wrote the essential documents issued
by
the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, which established the ultra-reactionary
Holy
Alliance. Capodistria also pulled together the modern nation of
Switzerland,
in part as a repository for Venetian family funds (fondi), which
were
also used to found several insurance companies in the late 18th
Century.
These later
included
the Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà (RAS) and the Assicurazioni Generali
di
Venezia e Trieste.[9]
At the turn
of the 20th Century,
the "ancients" of Venice, although diminished, still commanded
important
financial and intelligence power, both on their own behalf, but also
because
they deployed as part of the British- (and subsequently
Anglo-American-)
dominated world which their ancestors had created. In the wake of the
split/redeployments
of 1582, they cloned themselves and their institutions and methods to
dominate
northern Protestant, often freemasonic Europe, while they still
maintained
their power in their historic seats of control in the formerly
Hapsburg-ruled
southern, more Catholic portions of Europe, in particular in Italy and
Spain,
and in the Church at Rome. They played a crucial role in organizing the
Balkan
Wars which laid the immediate basis for World War I, for which Britain's
King Edward VII had schemed for decades. In the early 20th Century, a
group
of Venetian financier patricians, led by Count Piero Foscari of an
ancient
family of Venetian Doges, established a number of companies and banks.
Chief
among the latter, was the Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI), and in
particular
its Venice branch.[10]
Though
Foscari was the undisputed
leader of this Venetian group, its most active public figure was
Giuseppe
Volpi, later known as Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, after his
early-1920s
rule of Italian-occupied Libya on behalf of Mussolini. Acting as the
point-man
for an international financial syndicate including the Bank of England,
the
Mellons, and the House of Morgan, Volpi organized Mussolini's rise to
power,
precisely as Schacht did later for those same forces in installing
Hitler
in Germany. Volpi was Mussolini's Finance Minister from 1925 to July
1928,
following which he became a member of the Grand Council of Fascism,
and, in
1934, chairman of the Industrialists Association. He designed
Mussolini's economic doctrine of corporatism along the model originally
laid down by Alexandre
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), the founder of the Synarchy of
Empire
movement, and the inspiration for the Martinist freemasonic lodges
through
which the modern Synarchy was organized. Nominally a tripartite pact
among
corporations, the state, and labor, it was basically rule by
corporations,
i.e., private financiers.
In 1929,
Volpi oversaw the famous
Concordat between Italy and the Vatican, in which, among other things,
Italy
recognized the Vatican as a sovereign state, and paid financial
compensation
for the Papal States in central Italy which it had taken over in the
second
half of the 19th Century. The compensation was 1,550 billion liras, a
sizeable
sum at the time. One Bernardino Nogara was chosen, seemingly "out of
the
blue," to manage this fortune. The prominent American diplomat George
Kennan
wrote in his Memoirs: 1925-1950 about the extraordinary power
commanded
by Nogara: "A so-called `mystery man,' an Italian banker by the name of
Bernardino
Nogara, had been granted sole control by the papacy over the entire
fortune
of $92.1 million the church had received from the Lateran treaty.
. . . No
Vatican official, not even the Pope himself was allowed veto power over
Nogara's
decision. Nor would the banker permit any religious or doctrinal
policies
of the church to stand in his way. . . . Never before in
modern Church history
had anyone been granted such sweeping authority by the church, not even
popes
themselves, with all their supposed infallibility, let alone a layman,
and
non-Catholic (Jewish), as in Nogara's case." His impact on the Church
may
also be judged by the epitaph delivered upon his death in 1958 by the
head
of the SMOM in America, New York's Cardinal Spellman: "Next to Jesus
Christ,
the greatest thing to happen to the Catholic Church is Bernardino
Nogara."
Whether or
not he was Jewish, the "mystery man" was no mystery at all. Nogara had
been managing director
for a Venetian firm run by Foscari, Volpi, et al. in the Ottoman Empire
already
back in 1901. Reflecting his Venetian ties, Nogara became Italy's
representative
on the Ottoman Debt Council, a sort of IMF for the Ottoman Empire,
whose
purpose was to bleed it and carve it up. The British sponsored
freemasonic
lodges in Salonika, from which the "Young Turks" were organized to oust
the
Sultan. The freemason Volpi was intimately involved in the coup, as,
undoubtedly,
was Nogara. Nogara was the head of the BCI branch in Istanbul, and was
Volpi's
chief intelligence agent in the Ottoman Empire until that empire
disappeared
in the World War I which Volpi and his friends had done so much to
help organize,
through the masonic lodges and through Venice's ancient financial and
familial
ties in the Balkans.
After Nogara
had been chosen Delegate of the Special Administration (later known as
the Administration
of the Holy See Patrimony) to oversee the investment of the wealth
flowing
from the Concordat, he became vice president of the BCI, upon whose
postwar
premises the P2 lodge would be founded. Nogara established intimate
financial
relations with the cream of the Synarchy, including the Paris and
London
Rothschilds, Crédit Suisse, Hambros Bank in London, J.P. Morgan Bank,
and
the Bankers Trust Company in New York, and the Paris-centered Banque de
Paris
et des Pay Bas (Paribas), a stronghold of the Synarchy in France in the
interwar
and postwar years. He also promoted a cadre of uomini di fiducia,
"men of confidence," Vatican lay Catholic or even non-Catholic
financiers,
who would oversee the enormous new Vatican holdings. Nogara bought
large
or controlling interests in dozens of major banks, utilities, insurance
companies, and industrial corporations, even as he reorganized previous
Vatican holdings, such as the "Catholic banks" which were generally
Catholic-owned, and which
did business with the Church and its officials, as opposed to the
"secular"
banks.
The most
important of these "men of confidence" was Prince Massimo Spada (a
Vatican title), who had been
inducted as a Knight of Malta in 1944. Spada either chaired or sat on
the
board of an astounding array of the holdings Nogara purchased. Noting
only a few of the more important (and their capital), as of the late
1960s, these included: He was vice-president of the Banco di Roma (one
of Italy's largest banks, historically associated with Rome's black
nobility), and sat on the board of its Swiss subsidiary; Italy's
biggest domestic gas company, Società Italiana per il Gas (37,412
million liras); president of the Trieste-based Riunione Adriatica di
Sicurtà insurance company (4.320 billion liras); vice president and
managing director of the L'Assicuratrice Italiana; vice president of
both the Unione Subalpina di Assicurazioni and of the Lavoro e Sicurtà
(750 million liras); Shell Italiana, the Italian subsidiary of Royal
Dutch
Shell (129 billion liras invested in Italy); vice president of the
Istituto
Bancario Italiano (10 billion liras) and the Credito Commerciale di
Cremona
(2 billion liras); board member of the Banca Privata Finanzaria; board
member
of the huge financial holding companies, Società Meridionale
Finanziaria
(122 billion liras) and the Istituto Centrale Finanziario (150 million
liras);
vice president of the Finanzaria Industriale e Commerciale; president
of
the Banca Cattolica del Veneto (3 billion liras); board of directors of
FINSIDER,
a state-controlled holding company (195 billion liras), which is part
of
IRI, the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, formed during the
Fascist
regime, which constituted the country's largest cartel and controlled
the
biggest shipyards; the Italia shipping line; Alitalia airlines; Alfa
Romeo;
and the entire telephone system. FINSIDER produced at the time over 90%
of
Italy's steel and was the backbone of IRI. Spada was also a board
member
or executive of dozens more banks, insurance, and industrial companies.
In
1963 he was appointed Privy Chamberlain of Sword and Cape, one of the
highest
of all Vatican titles, one also held by his brother Filippo.[11]
With all of
this enormous power,
and despite his leading position in the Catholic Church, Spada
sponsored the
rise of Michele Sindona as one of the Vatican's "men of confidence."
His
choice was most peculiar, not only because Sindona had been a Fascist
during
the war, but because during that time he had made connections (through
American
OSS-connected mobster Vito Genovese) to the Inzerillo and Gambino crime
families,
for whom he laundered heroin money.
Reviewing
the picture sketched
above, we thus find that an intricate financial web originally woven by
Count
Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata and his Venetian aristocratic friends and
associates
such as Bernardino Nogara, had grown by 1960 to include Michele
Sindona,
who financed one of Gladio's most important assets, the "Black Prince"
Borghese.
Sindona also "was one of the channels, perhaps one of the most
important,
to back up" the attempted coups of 1970-74, as Greene and Massignani
put
it. Sindona later sponsored the rise of Banco Ambrosiano's Roberto
Calvi,
the P2 financier who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in
London
in 1982, in a ritualistic masonic murder. And, when the P2 financial
scandals
exploded, one of those arrested as a key figure in them, was
Massimo Spada,
the protégé of Volpi's friend Nogara.
The
membership of the ostensibly
Catholic—and therefore ostensibly anti-freemasonic—Rome-centered SMOM
overlapped
with the freemasonic, presumably "anti-clerical" P2 lodge; they were
the
"twins" of Italy's Venice-centered oligarchy.
The
privately run international
monetary system is now collapsing, and the desperate financial
oligarchy
is trying to consolidate a new, worldwide fascism, driven by new waves
of
terror, such as 9/11 and the March 11, 2004 train bombings in Madrid.
In
this context, much of the superstructure of Gladio is finally being
exposed by those opposed to this new fascism. Those exposés are
essential. But, we
must go still deeper, to lift the veil from "the ancients," and through
them
from the Synarchy to which they have given birth, of which they remain
a crucial
component.
[1] The
material in this review
which directly concerns Borghese is almost entirely drawn from Greene
and
Massignani. Additional material on Gladio can be found in Daniele
Ganser's
book, NATO's Secret Armies (London, 2005), "Secret Warfare: Gladio," Arthur E.
Rowse's
"Gladio: The Secret U.S.
War
to Subvert Italian Democracy," and work by
LaRouche and his
associates. The latter includes "Strategy of Tension: The Case of Italy," an
indispensable
four-part series by Claudio Celani, first published in EIR, and
"Terror's Legacy: Schacht, Skorzeny, Allen
Dulles" by Michael
Liebig.
These two articles were republished, together with overviews by
LaRouche,
and numerous other studies, in the Special Report, The Synarchist
Resurgence
Behind the Madrid Train Bombing of March 11, 2004, issued by the
LaRouche
in 2004 campaign committee.
[2] Charles
Higham, American
Swastika (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1985), p. 198.
[3] Sen.
Giovanni Pellegrino,
who chaired the 1994-2001 Italian parliamentary committee investigating
both
the Gladio-orchestrated terrorism, and how Italy's secret services
covered
them up, said that D'Amato "was an old Anglo-American agent, whose
career
started soon after the Liberation under James Angleton." Under
Angleton's
protection, said Pellegrino, "D'Amato became superintendent of the
Special
Secretary of the Atlantic Pact, the most strategic officer of our
apparatus,
as it is the connection between NATO and the U.S.A." From its founding
at
the end of the war, the UAR was filled with hundreds of former
officials
of Mussolini's Salò Republic. D'Amato headed it from 1968-74, the
period
of NATO's "Strategy of Tension."
[4] Since no
English original
of FM 30-31B was ever found, but only Italian translations of parts of
it
(during the raid on Gelli's villa), some investigators query whether
such
a Pentagon manual ever existed. However, the Italian passages are
entirely
coherent with other Pentagon documents of the same general era, such as
the
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff's infamous Operation Northwoods plan, which
called
for unleashing terrorism against the domestic United States, among
other
clandestine provocations.
[5] Angleton
and his associates
in the OSS/CIA had a lifelong fascination with the Trust, the joint
Anglo-American/Soviet
intelligence operation which featured the use of double and triple
agents.
These were actually used by the Synarchists to manipulate both
the
Western powers and the Soviets against the nation-state, toward a kind
of
global condominium. It is not accidental that the "legendary" CIA
counterintelligence
chief Angleton somehow missed noticing that his mentor and his
decades-long
close friend Kim Philby was a "Soviet" (read: Trust) agent. Keeping up
his part in the charade, Philby announced from Moscow that he had
"enjoyed playing
Angleton and Dulles." Angleton and Dulles maintained deep contacts with
the
"internationalist" wing of the Soviet intelligence establishment, just
as
they did with the "universal fascists" like Borghese. The shared goal
was
the destruction of nation-states in favor of world imperial rule. Many
of
Angleton's "fascist" assets in the postwar era turned out to be Soviet
assets,
as well.
[6] When the
CMC first started
up in Rome, its chief public figure, the pro-fascist former Prime
Minister
of Hungary, Ferenc Nagy, announced that it had major financial backing,
including
from J. Henry Schroder Bank and the Seligman Bank in Basel. The
Seligman
Bank was a large stockholder of the CMC, and its principal, Hans
Seligman,
sat on the boards of both the CMC and Permindex. With J. Henry
Schroder,
Nagy had spilled the beans on a most sensitive institution, and the
bank
was quick to deny his claim. J. Henry Schroder Bank had been intimately
involved
in the Dulles/Nazi financial deals from the 1930s, and, as CIA chief,
Dulles
maintained $50 million in "contingency funds" at Schroder under his
sole
control. See William F. Wertz, Jr., "The Plot Against FDR: A Model for Bush's
Pinochet
Plan Today," EIR, Jan. 21, 2005.
For further
details on Permindex/CMC,
including its finances, see a January 1970 manuscript by William
Torbitt;
New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's book, On the Trail of
the
Assassins; and the account in the 1992 edition of the book, Dope,
Inc.:
The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy, by the authors of Executive
Intelligence
Review. EIR maintained a close relationship with Garrison
until
his death in 1992. The Italian left-wing daily Paese Sera also
ran
a series on CMC/Permindex in March 1967, exposing it as a shell for
huge
sums of money that had nothing to do with "commerce," naming some of
its
elite banking connections, and profiling its board members as
Anglo-American
intelligence-connected ex-Fascists and fanatical right-wingers. Earlier
scandals
regarding CMC/Permindex had caused an uproar in Parliament and
elsewhere,
which forced CMC/Permindex to leave Rome for Johannesburg in 1962, the
year
before the entity orchestrated the Kennedy assassination. Garrison
observed
that the Italian government had expelled CMC/Permindex for "subversive
intelligence
activity."
[7] The role of
NATO in running
the Red Brigades is documented by Claudio Celani in "The Sphinx and the Gladiators: How the Head of
the
Red Brigades was an Agent of NATO-Controlled Fascist Circles," EIR, Jan. 21, 2005, based in large measure on a recent book
by
former Sen. Sergio Flamigni, La Sfinge delle Brigate Rosse (The
Sphinx of the Red Brigades).
[8] The
extraordinary financial
power which Venice still commanded in the 18th Century was documented
by
the Venetian nobleman Carlo Antonio Marin, historian of Venice
Frederick
Lane, and others. Its European-wide cultural warfare and espionage
system
was also still highly effective, as evidenced in the international
campaign
of the Paris-based Venetian Abbot Antonio Conti to attempt to destroy
the
reputation of the great scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. An agent
of Venice's
ruling Council of Ten, Count Cagliostro (Joseph Balsamo) organized the
1785
"Affair of the Queen's Necklace," the scandal which, as Napoleon
observed,
was the opening act of the French Revolution, an event financed and run
out
of Britain. Still another notorious Venetian spy of the same era was
Casanova,
who reported directly to the inner Three of the hooded, black-robed
Council
of Ten. The scarlet-robed chief of the Three was known as the
Inquisitor,
and in Venice it was understood that "The Ten will send you to the
torture
chamber, but the Three will send you to your grave."
Schiller
chose to set his masterful
portrayal of the methods of the Venetian intelligence service, as well
as
its Europe-wide reach, in the 18th Century; he clearly was not writing
of
a merely "historical" matter, nor was the patriotic American
intelligence
agent James Fenimore Cooper, in his portrait written several decades
later,
though Cooper set his tale centuries earlier. During the American
Revolution,
Venice put its still-considerable fleet at the service of the British.
[9] One of the
notable financiers
of Borghese in-law Napoleon was the Venetian Salomon Morpurgo, who
later
founded the Assicurazioni Generali di Venezia e Trieste (General
Insurance
Company of Venice and Trieste). Generali has been ruled ever since by a
kind
of central committee of Europe's financier and aristocratic oligarchy.
On
the board of Generali and its sister insurance company, Riunione
Adriatica
di Sicurtà (RAS), over recent decades, one finds such names as
Giustiniani,
Orsini, Luzzatto (an old Venetian family), Rothschild, the Duke of Alba
(whose
ancestor laid waste to the Netherlands for Philip II of Spain), and
Doria
(Genoese financiers of the Hapsburgs). The president of the RAS at one
point
was Sindona's sponsor, Prince Massimo Spada, while Count Giuseppe Volpi
di
Misurata chaired the Generali from 1938-43. Had the 1964 coup been
successful,
the plotters planned to install Cesare Merzagora, chairman of Generali
from
1968-79. Generali's chairman today is Antoine Bernheim, a senior
partner
of Lazard Frères, and member of one of the four families which control
Lazard,
a mainstay of the international Synarchy. Bernheim's daughter married
Prince
Orsini.
Generali and
RAS are merely two important strands of a much larger web of families
and finance, but they illustrate the directions in which one must look
to discover the "port" behind
the "Port Authority" guarded by P2 boss Licio Gelli, as Senator
Pellegrino
insightfully put it.
[10] The
activities of Foscari,
Volpi, et al. as the product of centuries-long Venetian operations in
the
Ottoman Empire, are elaborated in The Roots of the Trust, by
Allen
and Rachel Douglas (unpublished ms., 688 pages, 1997).
[11] The partial
list of Spada's
corporate offices is taken from Conrado Pallenberg, The Vatican
Finances,
(London: Peter Owen, 1971).