Posted on 10/06/2025 2:10:53 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
For years, Israel’s Mossad monitored and secretly influenced a violent communist faction that carried out the March 16, 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro, veteran investigative journalist Eric Salerno has documented.
Having worked closely alongside multiple Italian heads of state during his 30-year career as a correspondent, Salerno published an expose of their secret relationship with Israeli intelligence in 2010 called Mossad Base Italy.
The reporter told The Grayzone that Moro, who was arguably Italy’s most important leader, became a thorn in the side of powerful forces who sought to keep his country firmly lodged in the pro-Western bloc. Salerno believes Italy’s long-term foreign policy would have developed differently if Moro had survived, adding, “that’s what they were afraid of in the United States.”
Moro was kidnapped in 1978 by the radical Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigades faction, in a daring and highly-professional daytime operation which left all five of his bodyguards dead. He was executed two months later. The still-unresolved case shocked the nation, and remains a deeply unsettling chapter in the period of intelligence intrigues and political terrorism known by Italians as The Years of Lead.
Gladio, plural of Roman sword name Gladius
For some of Italy’s most knowledgeable sources, the crimes bore strong similarities to those of Operation Gladio, a covert effort which saw the CIA, MI6 and NATO train and direct a shadow army of fascist paramilitary units across Europe that carried out false flag terror attacks, robberies, and assassinations aimed at neutralizing the socialist left.
Moro, who belonged to the progressive wing of the Christian Democrat Party and served five terms as prime minister, threatened to upend the traditional postwar order in Italy by forging a “compromesso storico” (historic compromise) with the Italian Communist Party. “It was something that probably part of the Italian political establishment was afraid of, even in his own party,” Salerno notes.
While this part of Moro’s history is well known among Italians, Salerno has documented a less understood aspect of his legacy: his arrangement with Palestinian resistance groups, likely mediated by Libyan President Moammar Gaddafi, which allowed the PLO and others to smuggle weapons and travel freely through Italy in exchange for the country itself being spared from terror attacks. That deal, which scholars consider to be an evolving and “dynamic process,” came to be known as the “Lodo Moro.”
The pact is widely believed to have been forged in 1973, during Moro’s tenure as foreign minister, when Italy secretly released a group of Palestinian fighters who sought to attack a plane belonging to Israel’s El Al airline as it departed from Rome’s Fiumicino airport. It was spurred in large part by Italy’s desire to maintain a level of independence from the US-led Western bloc, which was targeted by an oil embargo in retaliation for Washington’s support for Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
While Salerno stopped short of alleging the Mossad directly ordered the abduction and execution of Moro, he told The Grayzone, “I think their idea was, ‘we’ll see what happens, and if it’s necessary, and we think it’s the right time, we can help one way or another.’”
For over a decade, the Lodo Moro deal insulated Italy from the violence that plagued other nations across the Mediterranean. These plots became increasingly commonplace in the region following the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states including Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
But it was only a matter of time before the violence consumed Moro’s life as well. 
Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Red Brigade captivity, 1978
Salerno’s book, Mossad Base Italy, is perhaps the most comprehensive chronicle of the intimate and ongoing relationship between Israeli intelligence and Italy’s political leadership. Published in 2010, the book remains almost completely unknown in the English speaking world.
Its author illustrates how the secret Israeli-Italian alliance predated the May 1948 creation of Israel, with Rome providing covert support to Zionist militias like the Haganah. Individuals affiliated with Benito Mussolini and neofascists within Italy’s post-war security apparatus supplied them with weapons and training to crush Palestinian resistance and assist their campaign of ethnic cleansing.
“The Israelis didn’t want Rome to become a satellite of the Soviet Union, and the US had the same position. The country was essentially the West’s front line against the Eastern bloc,” Salerno explained to The Grayzone. “Italy bordered Yugoslavia, was not far from Warsaw Pact nations, and support for Communism and the Soviet Union was strong in the wake of World War II. It was also a kind of aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, which people would land on and go off to other places.” With nearly 5,000 miles of coastline, and just 90 miles separating the island of Sicily and Tunisia, Italy has often been described as the “gatekeeper” of the Mediterranean Sea.
Salerno concluded that every Italian administration since World War II has secretly aided Mossad and Israeli military intelligence. A review of his book by veteran Haaretz intelligence correspondent Yossi Melman noted, “Israeli espionage agents confirm that Italy’s intelligence services are among the friendliest in the world toward their Israeli counterparts.”
Salerno argues persuasively that both the Mossad and Israeli Air Force were effectively “born in Rome,” and reveals Tel Aviv entrusted Italian intel with conducting “extremely classified missions” on their behalf. Strikingly, his book has never been translated into English.
The reporter attributes the consistent pro-Israel bias of Italian intelligence to a combination of political expediency and lingering collective guilt over Rome’s complicity in the crimes against Jews during World War Two. Since then, Italy’s governments have largely “felt… that they had to help the Jews because the Jews had been suffering under the previous regime.”
The traditional dynamic between Rome and Tel Aviv was challenged by the emergence of Italian Christian Democrat Party governments, including Moro’s. Within months, Israel began responding to this defiance with apparent acts of sabotage inside Italy, according to a variety of well-placed figures.
In late 1973, five members of the Black September Palestinian militant group were arrested thanks to a tipoff from the Mossad, which claimed they were preparing to shoot down an Israeli commercial airliner at Rome’s largest airport with ground-to-air missiles. However, Moro arranged for them to be released a month later, then transported to Libya.
The Black September members were first flown to Malta on an Italian transport plane known as Argo 16 — which was routinely used to ferry Operation Gladio operatives to a secret training base in Sardinia, and deliver CIA/MI6 weapons to secret depots dotted around the country. When Mossad observed the Palestinians there and realized they’d been freed, they became “very annoyed,” according to Rome’s then counterespionage chief, Ambrogio Viviani.
On November 23 1973, Argo 16 crashed shortly after taking off from Venice Airport, killing the entire veteran crew.
An initial probe concluded the tragedy was an accident, but the case was reopened by the Venice prosecutor’s office in 1986. That investigation faltered as well, when security and intelligence officials refused to testify, and began withholding evidence. However, the judge overseeing the case, Carlo Mastelloni, told Salerno there was no doubt, based on “objective evidence,” that the plane’s downing was Israel’s dirty work.
“It’s all tied to the famous ‘Moro agreement,’” Mastelloni asserted. Argo 16’s sabotage was not only “retaliation” for the release of the arrested Palestinians, but a “warning” over Italy’s “concessions” to “Tel Aviv’s enemies,” he stated. Still, Lodo Moro continued to hold despite the implicit threat of violence, which raises the question of whether Mossad felt the need to up the ante.
Argo 16 was not the only fatal incident to take place during Italy’s Years of Lead which seemed to bear the Mossad’s fingerprints. When a hand grenade was lobbed at Milan’s police headquarters in May 1973, killing four civilians and injuring 45, the culprit presented himself as an anarchist following his immediate apprehension. However, subsequent investigations revealed the perpetrator, Gianfranco Bertoli, to be a longtime Italian military intelligence informant, as well as a member of numerous neofascist organizations, including the Gladio-linked Ordine Nuovo (New Order).
Bertoli had spent the two years leading up to the attack residing off and on in Kibbutz Karmiya in Israel, where he frequently hosted representatives of French far-right faction Jeune Révolution, while maintaining contact with French intelligence. Such incidents prompt Salerno to ask: “was the Mossad part of the strategy of tension?” This was the precise conclusion reached by Ferdinando Imposimato, an Italian magistrate who oversaw initial trials of Red Brigades operatives regarding Moro’s murder.
“It must be acknowledged the Israeli secret services had perfect knowledge of the Italian subversive phenomenon from its very beginning, engaging in it with constant ideological and material support,” Imposimato noted in 1983. “Mossad had decided to transfer the Middle Eastern conflict to Italy,” he concluded, “driven by the aim of political and social destabilization.” Israel’s purpose was “to induce America to see Israel as the only allied point of reference in the Mediterranean and thus gain greater political and military support,” he stated.
During his March 1999 testimony to a parliamentary inquiry into terrorism in Italy, Red Brigades fighter Alberto Franceschini stated the group was approached by the Mossad through an intermediary after the Red Brigades’ kidnapping of a magistrate named Mario Sossi in April 1974. According to Franceschini, the Mossad made a “disturbing” proposition to finance his group, stating that rather than seeking to control the Red Brigades, Israel sought only to ensure the group continued to operate:
“We don’t want to tell you what you have to do. That is, what you do is fine with us. We care that you exist. The very fact that you exist, whatever you do is fine with us.”
Describing “the political motivations” for Mossad’s position, Franceschini noted: “from the perspective of American relations… the more destabilized Italy was, the more unreliable it became, and the more Israel became a reliable country for all Mediterranean policies” from Washington’s perspective. In his final years, Franceschini revealed Israel “offered weapons and assistance” to the Red Brigade, declaring: “their stated goal was to destabilize Italy.”
As Salerno noted to The Grayzone, “in one of his last interviews,” Franceschini “confirmed to my colleague from Corriere della Serra that the Mossad had been in contact from the very beginning with the Red Brigades,” interactions which the correspondent stresses were “very normal in the way the Mossad acted with all kinds of, let’s call them subversive organizations, all over Europe.”
The notion of a potential Israeli hand in shaping the Moro plot — or hindering efforts to resolve it peacefully — is bolstered by statements from a number of influential Italian politicians, which also indicate Israel both “co-financed” and “influenced” the group which took credit for killing Moro. These disclosures have so far been universally ignored by mainstream English-language outlets.
In July 1998, Giuseppe De Gori, a lawyer who represented Moro’s Christian Democrat party in numerous trials related to the case, told a parliamentary commission on terrorism that Mossad “had always controlled” the Red Brigades, without formally infiltrating the group. He recorded how in 1973, a Mossad major and colonel “presented themselves” to the group, exposing infiltrators in their ranks, and offering “weapons and whatever they wanted as long as they pursued a different policy.”
While the Red Brigades refused, “from that moment on, it was clear Mossad” kept a close eye on the militant faction. De Gori testified that Israeli intel “hated” the “anti-Zionist” Moro, and began taking advantage of its ability to “smuggle” information to the Red Brigades, which could influence their actions.
As the lawyer explained, there was “no need” for the Mossad to directly penetrate the Red Brigades. De Gori hinted the group’s decision to kill Moro after almost two months in captivity resulted from such indirect Israeli intervention. While Italian government officials refused any negotiation with his kidnappers, at a private meeting on May 8, 1978, elements within the Christian Democrats proposed independently brokering a deal to secure Moro’s release.
“Moro was killed immediately afterward, so someone must have been there who reported this news,” De Gori testified. In 2002, the lawyer told author Philip Willan that Mossad made Moro’s execution a fait accompli by enlisting the services of a skilled forger to fabricate a letter from the Red Brigades to authorities in mid-April 1978. The communique claimed the statesman was already dead. “After that… Moro could no longer be saved,” De Gori explained.
De Gori is not the only well-placed source to blame Mossad for Moro’s death. In May 2007, Giovanni Galloni, former vice president of the Italian judiciary’s High Council, boldly proclaimed that “not all participants” in the premier’s abduction had been members of the Red Brigades. That conclusion was spurred by Moro’s bodyguards being executed with “just two weapons, used by exceptionally experienced men.” In addition to never being identified, these assassins displayed a level of shooting expertise no known Red Brigades operative seemed to possess.
Galloni strongly insinuated the killers were hired by Washington and/or Tel Aviv. He revealed that “a few months before his capture,” Moro confided to him that he was “worried” the US and Israeli “secret services had infiltrated the Red Brigades.” Moro reported this to Italy’s US ambassador, prompting an “ambiguous denial” from the State Department, to the effect Washington had always told Italian intelligence “everything we know.”
Galloni enquired: “Which secret services? The real ones, or the ones that were in their hands?” He was clearly referring to the parallel Anglo-American spying and terror nexus in Rome known as Operation Gladio.
Further evidence of an Israeli role in Moro’s murder can be found in testimony delivered to an Italian parliamentary committee in June 2017 by a former magistrate named Luigi Carli, who was intimately involved in the original investigation. Unnoticed in the English-speaking world, and unmentioned in the committee’s official reports, Carli claimed the Red Brigades had been “co-financed” by Mossad.
When asked why Israel would subsidize an armed communist faction in Italy, Carli stated that “several” former Red Brigades collaborators had told him the Mossad had agreed to “take care of co-financing the Red Brigades,” proposals which he considered “strange.”
They explained, however, that any efforts which ended up “weakening, or helping to weaken, Italy’s internal situation” would “enhance Israel’s prestige and authority” in the Mediterranean, Carli testified.
Highly illuminating interviews with former Italian president Francesco Cossiga, published by the Bulletin of Italian Politics in the wake of his death in August 2010, shed further light on Mossad’s motives for assassinating Moro, and for targeting Rome with mass casualty false flag bombings. Cossiga was the first Italian politician to acknowledge the existence of the Lodo Moro. Cossiga stated the US was “of course” aware of the agreement, while he himself and much of Italy’s political class were in the dark.
Cossiga recalled that while he was Prime Minister in November 1979, police in a coastal town intercepted a truck carrying a surface-to-air missile. He subsequently received a telegram from Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine chief George Habbash admitting ownership of the missile, and reassuring the Italian premier it was not intended for use in Italy. Habbash thus demanded the weapon be returned and called for the driver’s release.
Habbash warned that any failure to comply would represent a violation of the PFLP’s “agreement” with Rome. “No one could tell me what this part meant,” Cossiga insisted. Only “many years later” did he learn of the Lodo Moro agreement.
At the time of Cossiga’s interviews, the Italian state reopened investigations into the August 1980 bombing of Bologna Centrale railway station, which killed 85 people and wounded over 200. The probe resulted in convictions in absentia for members of the neofascist, Gladio-tied Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari. Several chief suspects, including a confirmed MI6 asset named Robert Fiore, escaped to London, where Britain refused to extradite them. The Bulletin of Italian Politics identified the missile seizure, and the existence of Lodo Moro itself, as key considerations in the new investigation.
One possibility explored by the inquiry was whether the Bologna bombing was “carried out by the US or Israel to punish Italy for its pro-Arab stance.” Having long complained that Rome “never really had space for its own foreign policy” due to its subservience to US interests, Cossiga acknowledged that Italy “pursued a national agenda” in the Middle East and “took certain liberties towards the Arab world and Israel.”
“People forget” the Christian Democrats were “always a pro-Arab party,” Cossiga stated, pointing specifically to Moro and his associate Giulio Andreotti, another former Italian head of state who famously exposed Operation Gladio in October 1990. Cossiga claimed, “Andreotti has always believed — though he’s never said it,” that the US caused him “judicial problems” over his Arab sympathies.
Though Salerno disputes the characterization of Andreotti as “pro-Arab,” describing him instead as “pro the rights of Arabs,” he told The Grayzone that the longtime Italian leader once personally declared to him: “if I was born in Gaza, I would be a terrorist.”
Throughout Moro’s 55 days in Red Brigades captivity, Italian officials declared that the “state must not bend” to “terrorist demands,” making it clear the Italian government would neither negotiate with the Red Brigades nor release any of its jailed members in return for the PM. The former Italian Prime Minister was subsequently bundled into a car trunk, shot 10 times, and left in the vehicle in central Rome for authorities to find.
Today, many Italians view Rome’s inflexible approach with deep suspicion, given the government’s willingness to negotiate with terrorists both before and after Moro’s murder. Magistrate Mario Sossi, whose kidnap by the Red Brigades purportedly prompted Mossad to approach the group, was released in 1974 after one month in captivity in exchange for some of the radical faction’s imprisoned members.
When the Red Brigades kidnapped Christian Democrat politician Ciro Cirillo in April 1981, Italian authorities bargained directly with his abductors, paying a ransom for his release. That December, when the Red Brigades abducted US General James Dozier, he was “located and freed in a blitz” by a joint US-Italian taskforce.
Former Italian general Roberto Jucci contrasted Dozier’s treatment with that of Moro in a 2024 interview. “One of them, they wanted to set free; I have my doubts about the other,” he stated. Jucci was among the few Italians in a position to judge, having been placed in charge of training a special forces squad at a base in Tuscany, which was ostensibly meant to rescue the abducted Prime Minister. Today, he believes “the real goal was to get me out of the way” and ensure Moro was never found. No raids were conducted during his 55 days in captivity.
Jucci told La Repubblica that the formal committee to rescue Moro was “advised by a man sent by the US,” and “composed largely” of representatives of fascist, Gladio-affiliated Masonic lodge P2. These individuals “wanted things to go in a different way from what all honest people were asking for,” and wished for Moro “to be destroyed politically and physically.”
Had Moro survived, “Italy’s politics would have developed differently.” Jucci believed the Italian leader could’ve “been freed if all the institutions had worked in this direction.” Declassified British Ministry of Defence files dating to November 1990 show officials in London were well-aware of the role played by P2 in sabotaging official efforts to rescue Moro. The Masonic lodge was described as just one “subversive” force in Rome, employing “terrorism and street violence to provoke a repressive backlash against Italy’s democratic institutions.”
Those documents further noted “circumstantial evidence” indicated “one or more of Moro’s kidnappers was secretly in touch” with Italy’s “security apparatus,” and investigators “deliberately neglected to follow up leads which might have led to the kidnappers and saved Moro’s life.”
Today, there is little trace of any pro-Arab tendencies in mainstream Italian politics. According to Salerno, the US and Israel no longer have any need to “destabilize Italy” as the country is economically “weak.” Rome’s government now is for all intents and purposes “a continuation, even an extension, of the old fascist regime,” he says, adding, “there are people in the government that have statues of Mussolini in their houses.”
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has made clear she harbors little sympathy for the Palestinians, and little intention of recognizing a Palestinian state – even after it was revealed in November 2024 the Mossad had been employing a private Italian intelligence firm to target Meloni and her ministers. “I think that basically, the government that we have here in Italy at the moment is a government that would like to criticize many things that are happening,” but “it can’t criticize Israel too much because of what the Italian fascist regime did to the Jews during the war,” Salerno explains.
Regarding recent mass protests and strikes across Italy in support of Gaza, Salerno explains, “What is happening today in Palestine in Gaza is something exceptional.” But “as nothing has been taught or spoken about in Italy about the plight of Palestinians for many years… the great population of Italy and the governments of Italy” have “never done very much to really help the Palestinians.” Now, once again, “all of a sudden, we have discovered we have the Middle East and the Palestinian question.”
To this day, Mossad continues to carry out operations in Italy. The Italian-Israeli intelligence relationship was most recently highlighted in a bizarre incident in May 2023, in which a houseboat capsized in Italy’s Lake Maggiore, killing four people among the 23 aboard. Though legacy media initially framed the case as a tragic accident at a birthday celebration, it quickly became clear everyone on the boat — bar the captain and his wife — were Israeli and Italian spies.
The 10 surviving Israelis were hurriedly flown back to Tel Aviv on a military aircraft before they could be questioned by police, with the apparent blessing of Italian authorities. Subsequent investigations suggested the gathering was a joint intelligence operation into “Iranian non-conventional weapons capabilities,” aimed at either surveilling local industry or wealthy Russians living nearby who were suspected of helping Moscow obtain drones from Tehran.
A eulogy for the dead Israeli spy, whom Italian media named as Erez Shimoni, was personally delivered by Mossad director David Barnea, strongly suggesting he was a significant figure at the intelligence agency. While the captain of the ship has since been convicted of negligent homicide, Italy’s military police immediately announced they would not be investigating the activities of the spies on board.
On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy’s legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the ‘deep state’ of the Italian government itself.
The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as ‘Gladio’.
The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite Andreotti’s attempts to airbrush the group as ‘patriots’ it appeared evident to much of the rest of the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know. Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.
The moniker ‘Gladio’ (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including: ‘P2’ In Italy, ‘P26’ in Switzerland, ‘Sveaborg’ in Sweden, ‘Counter-Guerrilla’ in Turkey and ‘Sheepskin’ in Greece. This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt shebang.
If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice. And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis an overview of the remarkable, if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, ‘Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia’. Though there are other books on the subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser’s seminal tome, ‘NATO’s Secret Armies’, and Richard Cottrell’s recent and stylishly written, ‘Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe’), it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.
Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst ‘Gladio’ was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990; Washington and NATO having ever after refused ‘comment’ on the matter), and its multifarious organs and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted. The historical context of ‘Gladio’, then, is really the quintessential backdrop to understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.
Of Spooks and Made Men
The general origins of this labyrinthine network of deep state actors lay in the so-called ‘stay-behind-armies’ set up at the end of WW2 by the Allied powers (principally the US) ostensibly to act as resistance forces should the Soviets ever decide to invade Europe. Quickly, however, the raison d’etre of the ‘armies’ transmogrified into a mission to counteract, not external invasion, but ‘internal subversion’. Such would eventually result in the undermining not just of post-war European socialism, but of Italian, Greek – and later global – democracy itself.
But we get ahead of ourselves.
The primal author of the ‘stay-behind-armies’, Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had “concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics” ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as ‘werewolves’.
Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.
The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the ‘werewolves’ were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as ‘gladiators’. Operation Gladio was born.
In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, ‘Gladio’ was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.
In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist ‘problem’. The arrival of the ‘made men’ was the result of Donovan’s efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS’s off-books’ operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.
Still, the threat remained. Fully half the Italian electorate were communist sympathizers and, moreover, leftist politics pervaded much of the rest of the diseased European body. More would have to be done. The problem, however, was money. There simply wasn’t enough of it. Thus, the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA’s covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch.
Paul Helliwell was an inner member of the original OSS (along with key scions of the Morgan, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, DuPont and Ryan families) and, according to Williams, likely the greatest unsung hero of the nicknamed ‘Oh-So-Social’ club. It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing – in the United States itself.
Thus, it was at his suggestion that Donovan elected to forge the deep bond (and that exists to this day) between the nation’s intelligence services and organized crime. Enter stage left such notables as ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and the Trafficante and Gambino crime clans. Quickly the streets of, first, New York, and later many an American metropolis, were flooded with heroin. These early, halcyon days would soon lead to the infamous ‘French Connection’, thence to the ‘Golden Triangle’ (where the CIA’s very own ‘Air America’ transported drugs out of South East Asia during the Vietnam War) and, later, to the Balkan, Mexican, and Colombian drug cartels.
All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that?
The Vatican Connection
Article 2 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was clear and unequivocal. The Article, which served to regulate matters between the Holy See and the Italian state, expressly forbade any interference of the latter in the affairs of the former. It is hardly conceivable, of course, that the framers of the Treaty ever foresaw what such immunity could actually mean in practice. But then they probably hadn’t reckoned on the fiendish formation of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), or more colloquially, the Vatican Bank.
Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered. Already in 1945 the pope had held private audiences with Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio and where, as Williams reports, Donovan was knighted as an anti-Communist crusader with the Grand Cross of the Order of Sylvester. Prior to this time Pius XII had proven himself a loyal ally in working with Dulles and the OSS to establish the ratlines used to help prominent Nazis escape Europe. Now, new horizons beckoned. The first duty at hand, of course, was to destroy the communist menace in respect of the 1948 elections. To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the ‘made men’ in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished.
The second duty at hand, however, was longer term. Communism, socialism and, indeed, any Godless form of progressive government, anywhere, had to be stamped out at source. For this money would be needed. Lots of money. Untraceable money. Drug money. Now in the months before the 1948 election the CIA deposited some $65 million into the Vatican Bank. The source of these monies came from heroin produced by the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, and which was then transported by the Sicilian mob into Cuba where it was cut and then distributed to New Orleans, Miami and New York by the Santo Trafficante family. Lucrative though this trade was, it was not nearly enough to suit the needs of the CIA and ‘Gladio’. More would be required. More drug networks and more banks. Gladio was about to global.
To start with a new alliance was forged with the Corsican mafia. Unlike the Sicilian mob, the Corsicans had extensive experience in processing heroin, a skill they had picked up through years of working with Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese technicians in French Indochina. A supply route then emerged running from Burma through Turkey to Beirut and thence to Marseille. Alas, there was a slight hitch when the leftist dockworkers in Marseille, being sympathetic to the rebel army under Ho Chi Minh, refused to load and unload the boats from Indochina. No worries. A deft bit of terror administered by the Corsican boys (and funded by the CIA), and problem solved. By 1951, then, Marseille had become the center of the Western heroin industry. Voila, the ‘French Connection’.
Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donovan had ‘resigned’ from the CIA to form the World Commerce Corporation (WCC) whose primary function was to facilitate the arms-for-drugs deals with the KMT. Paul Helliwell lent a needed hand at the helm by heading up Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front company gainfully employed in shipping heroin from Bangkok. By 1958 the whole operation was so successful that a second supply route was established running through Saigon. Here, the help of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US installed despot of South Vietnam, proved invaluable.
Still, there was a potential cloud on the horizon, i.e. word of all these shenanigans was bound to leak out. What to do? The first reflex, naturally, was to pin the blame for the West’s growing heroin problem on the Communist Chinese under Mao Zedung. Check. The second, more considered response, was to organize an ongoing campaign to deflect attention away from, and burnish the image of, the CIA. And to this end, in 1953, did the CIA establish ‘Operation Mockingbird’. Under ‘Mockingbird’ the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company’s ‘benign’ activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of ‘Mockingbird’.
But back to the Vatican. The IOR, solid banking pillar of the Gladio community that it was, could hardly be expected to do all the heavy lifting itself. After all, the global heroin industry would, by 1980, be pulling in a cool $400 billion annually. En route an extensive and orchestrated financial network would be required to supplement God’s Bank. As with any fine orchestra it helps to have a maestro of exquisite genius to run the show. A nice round of applause, then, for one Michele Sindona. The biography of Sindona begins, humbly enough, with his degree in tax law from the University of Messina in 1942 after which, in quick succession, he rockets to stardom as a leading financial adviser to the Sicilian mafia, an agent for the CIA, and, thereafter, a financial intimate of the Holy See. By the late 1950s Sindona had become the lynchpin in a nexus between the mob, the CIA and the Vatican that would eventually, as Williams chillingly puts it, “result in the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation.”
Though a full elaboration of this bewilderingly complex financial system is best left to the author, it is worth briefly savouring a few highlights. To begin with Sindona purchased Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company and through which he purchased his first bank – the Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF). The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d’etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit.
It was through his Chicago contacts that Sindona first met Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, popularly known as ‘the Gorilla’. The Gorilla was six foot four, “a gifted street fighter…and a lover of bourbon, fine cigars and young women”. Under Sindona’s patronage Marcinkus would soon rise to become both Pope Paul VI’s personal body guard and the head of the IOR. A third musketeer in the person of Roberto Calvi (the assistant – and later full – director of the famous, Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano) came to complete the three Vatican amigos. Together they would cut a dramatic, collective figure in the global banking underworld all through the ‘anni di Piombo’ (the Gladio ‘years of lead’ in Italy from 1969 to 1987). Exactly how dramatic is illustrated, par excellence, by Calvi’s eventual dark demise. Who among us, old enough to remember, can forget the macabre spectacle (June, 1982) of Calvi’s body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, his feet dangling in the Thames and pockets stuffed with five masonry bricks. Sindona would also later be murdered (1986) by means of a cyanide-laced cup of coffee whilst in jail and under ‘maximum protective custody’.
Calvi was a key figure in establishing a series of eight shell companies (six in Panama, two in Europe) through which drug lords like Pablo Escobar in South America were encouraged to deposit their ill-gotten loot. (The CIA put shoulder to wheel by helping ferry the Escobar cocaine in a fleet of planes operating out of Scranton airport in Pennsylvania). The monies were then transferred via Banco Ambrosiano to the IOR which took a 15 to 20 percent processing fee. From there funds were distributed to a host of European banks set up by Sindona for use by Gladio units spread throughout the continent. In addition to the flow of cash from the cartels, funds were bled from Banco Ambrosiano into the eight shell companies – again for use by the CIA in funding its covert operations.
This points up a general operating procedure of the entire Gladio ‘banking’ system, i.e. the system, far from being designed to turn a profit, was expressly designed to ‘lose’ money; that is, to have it siphoned off into covert ops. Such explains the regular and spectacular failure of a host of CIA-related banks including: Franklin National Bank (purchased by Sindona), Castle Bank & Trust, Mercantile Bank & Trust (both set up by the ubiquitous Paul Helliwell), Nugan Hand Bank (in Australia, and from which funds were diverted to undermine Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during the Vietnam War), and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (based in Karachi in aid, primarily, of the Southeast Asian heroin trade). Indeed, it was precisely the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano itself that brought both Calvi and Sindona to their untimely ends.
Finally, it is worth noting here that these august institutions were linked in a tight criminal embrace with many of the most prestigious financial firms in America including Citibank, the Bank of New York, and the Bank of Boston. The base of the iceberg, in short, extended far and wide. But then, what was all this money really doing?
The Terror
Following the thwarting of Italian democracy in 1948 the Gladio ‘secret armies’ entered into a period of what one might characterize as pregnant incubation. Thus, it was during the 1950s that the various drug supply routes and financial networks were being created, as were some of the principal political organizations. Probably the most important of the latter was ‘Propaganda Due’ otherwise known as ‘P2’.
Created in 1877 as a Freemasonry lodge for the Piedmont nobility, it was banned by Mussolini in 1924 only to be resurrected post-war with the approval of Allen Dulles, himself a thirty-third degree Mason. The lodge, though at first dominated mainly by spooks, spies, military and mafia figures, would soon encompass a who’s who of Italian political, corporate, banking and media supremos to boot. Indeed, the organization would eventually spread shoots throughout Europe as well as North and South America, and its members would come to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig.
A ‘P2’ denizen of especial significance was Licio Gelli. The latter’s pedigree was impressive: a former volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion, a former member of the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Goering and, thereafter, a chummy employee of the US Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and ‘80s South America). Moreover, in 1972, Gelli would emerge as P2’s supreme ‘Worshipful Master’ under whose leadership the lodge would reach its full, horrific flowering. Finally, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that it was as a result of a police raid on Gelli’s villa in 1981 that the full, tentacled structure of Gladio would come to light. But we digress.
One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. The ‘stay-behind-army’ in Turkey known as Counter-Guerilla, in alliance with the Turkish military, quickly disabused him of any such delusions by arresting and executing him. Throughout the 1970s both Counter-Guerilla and its youth wing, the Grey Wolves, would stage “ongoing terror attacks…that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers and politicians”.
Counter-Guerilla would also figure in the Turkish coup of 1980 when its commander, General Kenan Evren, toppled the moderate government of Bulent Ecevit. According to Williams, US President Jimmy Carter phoned in his approval to the CIA station-chief in Ankara, Paul Henze, with a jubilant, ‘Your boys have done it!’ What they had done, of course, was set up a tyranny in which thousands more would be tortured while incarcerated. The Turkish Gladio boys would also be unleashed in the 1980s upon the PKK – the Kurdistan Workers Party. All of this was in keeping with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s (Carter’s national security advisor) core vision of the importance of controlling Central Asia to which Turkey was both a vital portal and, thus, a key NATO ally.
Alas, Gladio would prove something of a disappointment in France, where, after having backed a series of assassination attempts against the regrettably too independent President Charles de Gaulle, it found itself on the receiving end of de Gaulle’s boot. Actually, it was NATO itself – at the time, headquartered in Paris – that was unceremoniously kicked out of France (in 1966, whence it took up its present cozy and famously corrupt abode in Brussels). But, of course, de Gaulle was ahead of the curve and understood all too well who was really behind the mayhem and murder.
Greece, unfortunately, did not fare as well. In 1967 the ‘Hellenic Raiding Force’, a franchise of Gladio and playing to a NATO authored script entitled Operation Prometheus, overthrew the left-leaning government of George Papandreou. The ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1974 though this would hardly signal the end of Greece’s tribulations. From 1980 until near the turn of the millennium, the nation would suffer under a reign of terror and political assassinations nominally attributed to ‘November 17’, an alleged Marxist revolutionary group, but which in fact (and here I briefly tag-team with authors Cottrell and Ganser) was yet another faction of Greek-Gladio known as ‘Sheepskin’.
This illustrates a point originally brought home by Ganser’s research to the effect that virtually every alleged ‘leftist revolutionary’ group said to have been operating in Europe throughout the post-war years was, in truth, either a Gladio ‘secret army’ unit or else had been completely infiltrated by state intelligence services, and was subsequently being steered by them for Gladio-style state-terrorist ends. Such is well documented for the ‘Red Brigades’ in Italy and the ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’ in Germany (the ‘gang’ being conveniently and cold-bloodedly exterminated on the ‘night of the long knives’, Oct.18, 1977, whilst under custody in Stammheim prison). It also, just by the by, speaks to the universally attested prior association of many a modern-day ‘terrorist’ and their police and intelligence handlers.
In Spain, during the early ‘70s, Stefano delle Chiaie and fellow Gladio agents from Italy provided their consulting expertise to General Francisco Franco’s secret police who conducted over a thousand violent acts and some fifty murders. Following Franco’s death in 1975, delle Chiaie moved to Chile to lend a fatherly hand in helping the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet set up his death squads. In later years the Spanish Gladio unit would find gainful employment hunting down and assassinating the leaders of the Basque separatist movement.
Of Italy we have already mentioned the ‘years of lead’, but just to capture a few highlights. The ‘strategy of tension’ unleashed in 1969 in Italy – the same year ‘Condor’ was unleashed in Latin America – was in response to the renewed popularity of Communism throughout the country and which, itself, was partly in response to the uptick in revolutionary sentiment globally as a result of antipathy towards the US war on Vietnam. The antidote, naturally, to this woeful state of progressive affairs was a healthy dose of terror. According to Williams, “Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts.” The terror attacks began on December 12, 1969 when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in which seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight injured. Over the ensuing years (from 1969 to 1987) there followed more than ‘14,000 acts of violence with a political motivation’. The most infamous of these was, of course, the Bologna bombing in August of 1980 and which led to the initial exposure of Gladio in Italy.
Of the many attempted coups and related high-level political machinations engineered by Gladio forces in Italy (1963, 1970, 1976) and Sicily (more or less continually on tap throughout the decade), the kidnapping on March 16, 1978 – and murder a month or so later – of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was likely the most sensational. Moro had dared to include communists in his new coalition government. At first blamed on the usual suspects, i.e. the Red Brigades, further investigation (to begin with by journalist Carmine ‘Mino’ Pecorelli who paid with his life) led to the real usual suspects including CIA operative Mario Moretti (eventually convicted of the killing) and thence up the line to Gelli, then to Italy’s interior minister Francesco Cossiga and onwards to Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The high-level intrigue did not stop at the murder of a prime minister however. At least two Popes felt the sharp end of the Gladio sword as well. In August of 1978, Pope Paul VI died. His successor, the preternaturally timid John Paul I, soon gave his handlers a very real shock when, after looking at the IOR accounts, he issued a ‘call for reform’. The very next day the otherwise fastidiously health-conscious pontiff – in office barely a month – was dead. Not just dead but expired with the telltale bulging eyes and horrific grimace of acute poisoning. His autopsy was definitively thwarted by an illegal and hastily contrived embalming, and his personal papers disappeared without a trace. Archbishop Marcinkus, having been temporarily removed prior, was returned to office whilst Calvi and Sindona, also under scrutiny at the time, breathed a (temporary) sigh of relief.
Having been (almost) burned once the overseers of Gladio made sure to engineer the follow-up Papal succession. Thus did Cardinal Karol Wojtyla shuffle onto the historical proscenium as Pope John Paul II. Now, at first, John Paul worked seamlessly with the CIA and Gladio. Together they oversaw the destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, the continued undermining of Italian democracy, and the dispensing of black funds for Solidarity in Poland. Ah, but how the best laid plans do oft go astray. By the spring of 1981 not only were events spinning out of control for Gladio itself, but so too were they for Banco Ambrosiano, and by extension, the IOR. The Pope, inexplicably, refused to act. Compounding this lapse was an unaccountable trifecta of moral turpitude that witnessed the Holy Father suddenly breaking into treasonous song singing the benefits of rapprochement with the Soviets; recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and, egads, nuclear disarmament. The order from on high was given: ‘Kill the Pope’.
But best blame it on the Soviets. So issued the ‘Bulgarian Thesis’ wherein a lowly Bulgarian airline employee (Sergei Antonov) was set up as the patsy. In truth, the key actors in the Papal plot came straight from Gladio central casting. The starring role in the drama fell to General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy’s military intelligence (SISMI) and the commander of the Italian Gladio units. His co-star, Theodore Shackley, was the infamous CIA mastermind who had already served as executive producer on such epics as Operation Phoenix (involving the murder of some 40,000 non-combatants in Vietnam), Operation Condor, the setting up of Nugan Hand Bank, and, along with delle Chiaie, the murder of Salvador Allende. West Germany’s BND (the national security services) garnered a significant credit by harbouring and financing the two actual assassins, Mehmet Agca and Abdullah Cath (both from Turkish Gladio). And, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer, i.e. Operation Mockingbird, figured prominently in the aftermath grinding out endless tunes on the ‘Bulgarian Thesis’ – despite the fact of Agca’s eventual (lone) conviction in the shooting.
The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca’s response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face. Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer.
European Leftists alleging guilt by innuendo.
I saw that episode. Malory Archer killed the Italian Prime Minister.
Quoting the “Hyper-Partisan Left” so as to indict Jews.
Huh.
Grok:
“Max Blumenthal founded and serves as the editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, an independent investigative journalism website launched in 2016. The site features contributions from a small team of writers, but Blumenthal is its primary operator and public face.
The Grayzone’s political leanings are consistently rated as far-left by multiple media bias evaluators. It promotes anti-imperialist views, often criticizing U.S. and Western foreign policies, while supporting governments like Venezuela and amplifying narratives aligned with Russia and Iran. Sources describe it as hyper-partisan left, prone to conspiracy theories, and one-sided reporting on topics like the Ukraine war and Israel-Palestine conflict.”
Do you have any non-hyper-partisan-leftist sources?
(The plural of the Latin word “gladius” is “gladii” )
Standard BS historical revisionism by someone trying to make a buck...
Classic BS propaganda...
Check out this CharlesOConnel guy.
He’s deep into the most wacked out left-wing conspiracy tripe sites of anyone I’ve ever seen here.
What’s his deal?
Max Blumethal, who runs The Gray Zone, via left wing Wikipedia:
“He was a writer for The Nation, AlterNet,[2] The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, Mondoweiss,[3] and Media Matters for America,[4][5] and has contributed to Al Jazeera English, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.[4] He has been a writing fellow of the Nation Institute.[6] He is a regular contributor to Sputnik and RT as of 2022.”
He’s nuts, Jim!
He or she is a member of the Braunhemden ‘ Blame da Joos’ squad that is using FR to pedal there trashie wares. Why not zotted already is beyond me. This is a site for conservatives. Not socialist nazi scum
Wikipedia on the authors’ paychecks from Russia and Iran:
“Several staff, former staff, and freelance writers have previously been employed by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, among them Anya Parampil, Alex Rubinstein, Kit Klarenberg, Wyatt Reed, Mohamed Elmaazi and Jeremy Loffredo.[43][78][96][20] Parampil had previously worked as an anchor and correspondent for RT America.[40] Reed, who was credited as a managing editor as of 2023, made occasional contributions to Iranian state-run Press TV in 2020 and 2021.[97]”
Then there was his whole diatribe on how Eichman was really a Jew lover?
WTAF?
If any of this is true then our gov’t is murderous.
Fanciful speculation, selling books and getting clicks. Menachem Begin would never have authorized any such wild operations.
Money... From the left, probably...
SS worked for Himmler not Goering. Wonder what else this screed get wrong?
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