Operation
Gladio Part 1
On
January 20, 1981, at the moment Reagan completed his twenty-minute inaugural
address, after being sworn in as President, the 52 American hostages were
released by the Iranians into US custody, having spent 444 days in captivity However,a
srevealed.by Gary Sick,a US Navy officer who served on the National Security
Council staff under Ford, Carter and Reagan, in October Surprise:
America’s Hostages in Ian and the Election of Ronald Reagan, the Reagan campaign
for the presidency had involved secret talks with Iranian leaders to stall the
release of the hostages in order to undermine Carter’s credibility. The deal
involved US and Israeli arms shipments, which the Iranians needed for their war
with Iraq, thus beginning a series of transactions that would burgeon into the
Iran-Contra operation.
In the same year,
leading neoconservative Michael Ledeen, a chief Iran-Contra operator and
go-between with the Israelis, began to serve as “anti-terrorism” advisor to
Alexander Haig, now the new Secretary of State. Ledeen had just returned to
Washington from his involvement in the Strategy of Tension, perpetrated with
his and Haig’s assistance by Italy’s Gladio network. In effect, the tragedies
that happened in Italy appear to have been in preparation for the CIA’s use of
terrorism in the Islamic world which began soon after.
When Helms lied
about the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of the democratically-elected but
left-leaning President Salvador Allende in 1973, he was forced to resign and
was succeeded by William Colby. After having supported the setting up of Gladio
terrorist networks in Scandinavia, William Colby in 1953 was transferred to the
CIA station in Rome to combat communism in Italy where he helped promote the
Gladio network there as well.1 According Colby, the network was “a
major program.”2 As the press noted that the NATO secret armies were
“the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War
II,” it was not until the 1990s that the full international scope of the
program was disclosed to public knowledge, which has now been treated in detail
in NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe,
by Daniele Ganser.
The various Gladio networks, composed of former Nazis and other fascists
of various stripes, who served as the shock troops of America’s covert war on
communism, would be responsible for much of the brutality perpetrated by
various dictatorial regimes around the world. A 1992 BBC2 documentary, Operation
Gladio, revealed Gladio to be a secret army operated by the CIA and
MI6 through NATO, which killed hundreds of innocent Europeans and attempted to
blame the acts of terror on the Baader -Meinhof gang, Red Brigades and others.
In Turkey in 1960, the stay- behind army working with the military staged a
coup d’état and killed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. In Algeria in 1961, the
French stay-behind army staged a coup with the CIA against the French
government of Algiers, which ultimately failed. In 1967, the stay-behind army
of Greece imposed a military dictatorship. In 1971 in Turkey, the stay-behind
army engaged in “domestic terror” after a military coup and killed hundreds. In
1977 in Spain, the stay-behind units carried out a massacre in Madrid.3
In Italy, where it was known as Gladio, the stay-behind network was responsible
for the infamous “Strategy of Tension” during the 1970s to destabilize the
country.4
The intent of the
Strategy of Tension was to discredit the political left, as the Italian
Communist Party (PCI) was very close to entering government. The campaign began
with the Piazza Fontana’s bombing in 1969, and culminated in the Bologna train
station bombing of 1980 in which 85 people were killed.5 The main
philosophical inspiration of these Gladio networks would come from the occult
fascist thought of Julius Evola, and united an international network of
neo-Nazis, Freemasons and even the UFO religion of the Order of the Solar
Temple. Evola inspired the Italian Social Movement (MSI) and other
extreme-right groups by proffering the ideal of the “active nihilist,” who is
prepared to act with violence against modern decadence. Giorgio Almirante, the
MSI leader, hailed Evola as “our Marcuse—only better.”6 Evola’s
journalism and his pamphlet Orientamenti (Orientations) stressed a
“legionary spirit” and “warrior ethic” and outlined how ideals, elites and
order could be maintained by the MSI, police and army taking over the state.7
According to Adriano Romauldi, a leading neo-fascist, Evola was the
intellectual hero of militant right-wing youth in Italy “because the teaching
of Evola is also a philosophy of total war.”8
According to one
scholar, “Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and
consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular
systems in the twentieth century.”9 In Evola’s The Metaphysics of
War can be discerned an inspiration for terrorism. Evola describes how war
can be a means through which a warrior can be called to a higher spiritual
existence. He mentions armies of the past who have waged war for a spiritual
cause, listing the examples of the knights of the crusades, the Jihad of
the Muslims, the pagan Asatru, and so on, where those martyred in battle were
seen as heroes and as having gone to a “higher place” when they died. Evola
therefore rejected pacifism as a mark of weakness, whil death.” Evola therefore
called for the “reawakening of heroic ideals” and spiritualism through war.
The most
important extreme right organization of the period was Ordine Nuovo (New
Order). Ordine Nuovo was a splinter group of the neofascist Italian Social
Movement (MSI), which had joined Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement in creating the
National Party of Europe (NPE). The motto of Ordine Nuovo was also that
of the Nazi SS: “Our honor is our loyalty.” The overtly Nazi and anti-Semitic Ordine
Nuovo was established in 1956 by Pino Rauti, one of Evola’s closest
disciples, who served as editor of his journal Imperium. Pino Rauti
worked for the Armed Forces, and was an agent of the Italian Secret Services
(SID), employed in the recruitment of extremists into the Gladio network.
Another Ordine Nuovo member and
leading representative of the far-right was Evola’s most important intellectual
disciple, Franco Freda. In 1963, Freda founded the Group of Ar, based on the
philosophy of Evola and managed a far-right library. Later, when the Group of
Ar was disbanded he founded the Edizioni di Ar, that promoted the idea
of a pre-historic Indo-European heritage, and also published an annual
review, Risguardo, which contained articles on the ancient Aryans, the
New Europe and Third Position. Edizioni di Ar produced books by
Traditionalist figures Evola and René Guénon.
Freda frequently like reprinted and cited Evola’s two most militant
tracts, Metaphysics of War and Aryan Doctrine, in praise
of “heroic,” “exemplary” action without a decided purpose. Freda also
published all the writings of Adolf Hitler including Mein Kampf. He also
later published a German translation of Savitri Devi’s Gold in the Furnace,
and the fourth volume of Risguardo was devoted to her as the “missionary
of Aryan Paganism.” From 1971 onwards, Freda was put on trial several times,
notably for involvement in the Piazza Fontana bombing. Although eventually
acquitted he spent several years in jail for the crime of “subversive
association.”
Other important organizations involved in
the Strategy of Tension were Avanguardia Nazionale or Fronte
Nazionale, who began using violent means, including false-fl ag
terrorist o parliamentary left-wing militant organizations. The original Fronte
Nazionale was founded in 1968 by Junio Valerio Borghese who was d political
activities of the MSI. Borghese was an Italian Navy commander during the regime
of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and was a prominent hard-line
fascist politician in post-war Italy. He was born into one of the leading
families of the Black Nobility, the House of Borghese, of which Pope Paul V was
a notable member and which maintains close ties to the Vatican. At the end of
the war, he was rescued by OSS officer and later CIA head James Jesus late Angleton. Borghese was then
tried and convicted of collaboration with the Nazi, but offered a reduced
sentence, due to his valorous expeditions during the war. With his record as a
war hero, Borghese became figurehead for pro fascist,, anti-communist groups,
acquiring the nickname of the “Black Prince.” Borghese wrote an introduction to
Evola’s Men Among the Ruins, affirm political ideology of a neo-fascis
in the Golpe Borghese, a failed coup attempt aimed against what was
perceived as the growing risk of a Communist takeover of Italy, launched in
December 1970.
According to one leader of the Gladio affiliated Ordine Nuovo, “Ourwork since 1953 has been to transpose Evola’s
teachings into direct political action.”10 As stated in sworn
testimony by Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a former member of the Avanguardia
Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo who is currently serving a life-sentence
for the murder of three policemen by a car bomb in Peteano in 1972, and who
quoted Evola and Guénon in justification
of his actions:
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.11
A communist
government in Italy would likely have opposed Italy’s involvement in NATO and
therefore threatened to undermine America’s sphere of influence. In 2000, a
Parl the Strategy of Tension had been supported by the US to “stop the PCI, and
to a certain degree also the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), from reaching
executive power in the country.”12 Vinciguerra explained to The
Guardian in 1990: “I say that every single outrage that follow matrix… Avanguardia
Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo… were being mobilized into the battle
as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organizations
deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and
specifi cally from within Atlantic Alliance.”13 The
pretext of the US involvement in Gladio’s Strategy of Tension was revealed in a
Pentagon document, titled Field Manual FM 30-31B, detailing the methodology
for launching terrorist attacks in nations that “do
not react with sufficient effectiven manual
states that of particular concern is when leftist groups “renounce the use of
force” and embrace the democratic process. It is then that “US 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.”14
Deeply implicated
in the Strategy of Tension and its operation of Gladio was Michael Ledeen.
Ledeen, who is among Washington’s leading neoconservatives, is an avid
proponent of Machiavelli. Ledeen’s fascist views had been shaped by George
Mosse, a German Jewish émigré, best-known for
his books and
articles that redef Nazism. Mosse argued that fascism was
not merely brutal and oppressive, but a European-wide mass movement that
succeeded in mobilizing large numbers of people. fascism, Mosse argued,
mediated between people and leaders, through rituals, ceremonies, festivals,
and striking images. Not overt manipulation or coercion, but the ability to
provide millions of people with a meaningful sense of belonging to a community,
along with the ability to compromise and achieve tangible economic success,
ultimately accounted for the ability of fascist regimes to rule by consensus
rather than force, in Germany even more than in Italy.15
Mosse directed Ledeen to Italy in
1965, where he was adopted by two senior figures, Renzo De Felice and Communications
in Mussolini’s wartime cabinet, who provided him access to the Masonic archives
in Rome and Venice. De Felice is best known for a massive seven volume
biography of Benito Mussolini. He argued that Mussolini was a revolutionary
modernizer in domestic issues, but a pragmatist in foreign policy who continued
the Realpolitik policies of liberal Italy, 1861-1922.16 In The
Illuminati and Revolutionary Mysticism, 1789-1900, De Felice traced fascism
to the Masonic and Martinist lodges that organized the Jacobins in the
French Revolution of 1789. In the same work he wrote, “I have always had a
certain taste a psychological and human interest in a particular kind of
personality that is both cold- blooded and Luciferian. There is something in
common between my Jacobins and a certain kind of Fascism.”17
In 1974, Michael
Ledeen moved to Rome to study the history of Italian fascism. Two years
earlier, he authored a doctoral dissertation titled Universal fascism:
The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936. Like
Mosse, the work denounces the popular notion that fascism succeeded in
gaining the support of millions “solely because they had been hypnotized by the
rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skillful propagandists.” “It
seems more plausible,” Ledeen counters, “to attempt to explain their enthusiasm
by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had
a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.” For Ledeen, as for the
fascist theoretician, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism
was “the
Revolution of the
20th century.” “For the
first time,” maintained Ledeen, “there was an attempt to mobilize the
masses and to involve them in the political life of the country,” and he
described the fascist state as “a generator of energy and creativity.”18
Shedding light on the basis of his involvement in Gladio, he says in the book:
In order to achieve the most noble
accomplishments, the leader may have to ‘enter into evil.’ This is the chilling
insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired and challenging… we are
rotten… It’s true that we can achieve greatness if, and only if, we are
properly led.19
Ledeen remained
in Italy into the late 1970s, when he had been consulting for Italian military
intelligence and cultivated strong connections to the right-wing in Italy,
including the P2 Masonic lodge, or Propaganda Due.20
According to John Michael Greer in The
Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, P2 was a “textbook example” of an
attempt to establish a synarchy, as it united politicians, the Catholic Church,
economy guaranteed by the histori substances.21 P2 operated under
the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy from 1945 to 1976 as a
pseudo-Masonic or “black” or “covert” lodge. The Grand Orient of Italy was
founded in 1805, for which both Garibaldi and Mazzini had been Grand Masters.22
Initially known as “Propaganda,” P2 was founded in 1877 as “Propaganda
Massonica.” The name was changed to “Propaganda Due” following World War
II, when the Grand Orient of Italy numbered its lodges.
P2 operated illegally though, in
contravention of the Italian constitution banning secret lodges and membership
membership organizations. Adhering to a fascist ideology, P2 was headed
by Licio Gelli, known as the
“Puppet-master.”23 Gelli was a member of the Memphis-Misraïm Masonic
Lodge, the synarchist branch of Freemasonry, prior to his founding of P2.
During the war, Gelli had been a member of Mussolini’s notorious
“Blackshirts” and later
acted as liaison officer to the
Hermann Goering SS division. Gelli also fought for Franco with Mussolini’s
Blackshirts, and at the end of World War II was arrested and faced possible
execution, but was rescued by joining the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps.24
He later fl to Argentina following disclosures that he had been involved in the
torture and murder of Italian partisans.25 Gelli became intimately
involved with Juan Peron’s regime and remained in Argentina for twenty years
before returning to Italy with the position of honorary Argentine consul.26
In the 1950s, Gelli was recruited by SIFAR, the Italian secret armed forces
intelligence unit, staffed in part with former members of Mussolini’s secret
police. SIFAR later changed its name to SID. In 1969, he developed close ties
with General Alexander Haig who was then Assistant to National Security Advisor
Henry Kissinger. As head of P2, through this network, Gelli became chief
intermediary between the CIA and the SID.27
Gelli and Haig
were joined together as members of the Knights of Malta, which has close
associations with the CIA and the Vatican. Martin A. Lee in his article “Their
Will Be Done,” stated that the American branch of the Sovereign Military Order
of Malta (SMOM) is one of the most important communication channels between the
CIA and the Vatican, being able to transfer money in and out of countries to
which neither the CIA nor the Vatican has access.28 SMOM has very
close ties to the CIA, where at least three directors have been members of the
order: William Donovan, John McCone, and William Casey. Additionally, James
Jesus Angleton, another Knight of Malta, was the long-time chief of
Counterintelligence at the CIA, as well as the head of the CIA’s Vatican Desk
and Israel Desk. It was Angleton who had rescued Junio Valerio Borghese after
the war. Other known members of the Knights of Malta include Lee Iacocca, Skull
and Bones member William F. Buckley, Alexandre de Marenches (the chief of
French Intelligence under Giscard d’Estaing, himself a Knight of SMOM), as well
as Otto von Hapsburg of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s synarchist Pan-European Union.
P2 was composed
of many members of the MSI, which included Licio Gelli. P2 was sometimes
referred to as a “state within a state” or a “shadow government.” During a
fraud investigation, a search of Gelli’s villa discovered a list of 953 members
of P2. The coded list mentioned three cabinet ministers, thirty generals, eight
admirals, including the head of the armed forces, the heads of two intelligence
services as well as the civilian collator of intelligence, 43 MPs, police
chiefs of Italy’s four main cities, the mayors of Brescia and Pavia and the
editor of the influential Milan daily Corriere della Sera. 29 P2 also
included eventual Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi. 30 . Also a member
was the heir to the Italian throne Victor Emmanuel IV, of the House of Savoy,
who had been early members of “Propaganda Massonica” and long-standing
supporters of the Italian Fascists, and who Evola regarded as belonging to the
tradition of the Grail through Ghibelines.31
Also involved in
P2 was a leading member of the Italian Secret Service, the notorious
international terrorist Stefano Della Chiaie, who was alleged to have acted as
its “regulator.”32 One of Evola’s most devoted followers, Della
Chiaie abandoned the MSI in 1958 and joined the newly formed Ordine Nuovo,
and was the mastermind of many bomb attacks in Italy during the 1970s and
1980s. 33 Delle Chiaie decided to leave Ordine Nuovo and set
up his own neo-fascist organization, which eventually became known as Avanguardia
Nazionale (AN), soon to be regarded as the “cudgel of black extremism.” He
became a close ally of Junio Valerio Borghese and was suspected with him in the
Golpe Borghese, but was acquitted because at the time he was in
Barcelona, Spain.
Delle Chiaie was
a prime intermediary of the international neo-fascist network involved in
Gladio. He had taken part in Aginter Press, founded in Portugal in 1966,
a front organization directed by Captain Yves Guérin-Sérac, a veteran of the
OAS. Aginter press operations were designed to contribute to the “Strategy of
Tension,” training its members in covert action techniques, including bombings,
assassination insurgency. The idea, explains Stuart Christie, was “to bring
about, apparently because of labor and left-wing activity, such social
disruption and uncertainty that the populace would favour the installation of a
strong-arm government pledged to restore ‘order’.”34 According to a
report by the post-1974 Portuguese intelligence service, Aginter Press provided
a front for an espionage bureau run by the Portuguese secret police and,
through them, the CIA and the West German BND or Gehlen Organisation.
Aginter Press was also intended as a front for an international
fascist organization called Order and Tradition, with a clandestine
paramilitary wing called Organisation Armee contre le communisme
International (OACI), set up by Guérin-Sérac and Otto Skorzeny. Otto
Skorzeny’s Paladin hired the services of Delle Chiaie, whose leadership
qualities were immediately recognized by Skorzeny who took him under his wing
as his protégé.35 Skorzeny was employed by Franco’s secret service
as a “security consultant” and hired Delle Chiaie to target opponents of Franco
in both Spain and abroad. Members of Delle Chiaie’s secret army, including
Italian right-winger Aldo Tisei, later confessed to Italian magistrates that
during their Spanish exile they had tracked down and killed anti-fascists on
behalf of the Spanish secret service. Delle Chiaie carried out well over a
thousand violent attacks, including an estimated 50 murders.36
When P2 came under increasing scrutiny in
1979, Gelli had reportedly made his base of operations the Montecarlo Comite.
Reported members were Gelli, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and Michael
Ledeen. It was in 1974 that Gelli met secretly with Alexander Haig. Formerly
the NATO Supreme Commander, Haig had meanwhile become President Nixon’s White
House Chief of Staff. The secret meeting was held in the US Embassy in Rome.
Receiving the blessing of Henry Kissinger, the US National Security Adviser,
Gelli left the
meeting with a
promise Gladio network and its plan for the “internal subversion.”37
P2 was
outlawed and disbanded in 1981 in the wake of the Banco
Ambrosiano scandal,
whichVaticanwasBanklinked. When Gelli required additional funds to support P2
and operation Gladio, he turned to P2 member Roberto Calvi, Chairman of Banco
Ambrosiano, the largest non-state owned bank in Italy. Calvi began to illegally
siphon money from his bank using the Vatican bank, the Istituto per de
Religione (IOR) to launder it. Calvi thus bankrupted his bank in the
process making it one of modern Italy’s biggest political scandals. A source of
enduring controversy, his Masonically symbolic death by hanging beneath
Blackfriars Bridge near the
City of London, was first ruled as s pressure
from Calvi’s family.
Gelli was
involved in most of Italy’s scandals in the last three decades of the twentieth
century. In addition to the Banco Ambrosio scandal was the kidnapping and
murder of Aldo Moro in 1978 by the so-called Red Brigades, a pro-Soviet
terrorist group. Recognizing their growing support, Moro wished to reach an
accommodation with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and offer their leaders
cabinet posts in a new centrist ruling party. During a meeting with Henry
Kissinger, Moro was told that such a move would be viewed by the Americans as
“profoundly dangerous and mistaken.” In a later meeting with an unnamed intelligence
official, Moro was
told he must abandon any idea
of cooperating with the
communists “or you will pay dearly for it.” The official continued by warning Moro that “groups on the fringes of the official secret services might be brought
into operation” if he didn’t desist in his plans..38
Evidence now
exists that shows Moro’s murder was orchestrated by P2 Masonic Lodge, and that
both the “Red” and “Black” brigades were heavily penetrated by US intelligence
who are credited with “running” them.39 The Red Brigades, or Brigate
Rosse in Italian, were a leftist terrorist organization formed in 1970.
Their primary support came partly from the PLO, but they
had also been simultaneously infiltrated Mossad since 1974.40 It
was in 1974, when Red Brigades founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini
were arrested, that Franceschini later accused two top members, Mario Moretti
and Giovanni Senzanian, of being spies for the Italian and US secret services.41
With the two founders out of the way, Moretti rose up through the ranks of the
Red Brigades. The Red Brigades worked closely with the Hyperion Language School
in Paris, which was founded by Corrado Simioni, Duccio Berio, and Mario
Moretti. Simoni had worked for the CIA at Radio Free Europe (which was the
brainchild of Reinhard Gehlen), Duccio Berio had been supplying the SID with
information of leftist groups, and Moretti was the mastermind and murderer of
Aldo Moro.42
In an interview with Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI), the Italian
state owned public service broadcaster, and the biggest television company in
Italy, Richard Brenneke, claiming to be a former agent of the CIA, maintained
that Gladio was also involved in the October Surprise conspiracy, to stall the
release of the American hostages in Iran, as well as in the Iran-Contra
operation. He
further alleged that P2, under the
guidance of Gelli, used some made available by the CIA to set up agencies in
West Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He also maintained that George Bush,
then director of the CIA, not only knew about these CIA activities in Italy,
but was in fact one of the masterminds behind them. He said:
There is no doubt. The P-2 since the
beginning of the 1970s was used for the dope traffi c, for destab secretly to
keep people from knowing about the involvement of the US government. In many
cases it was the CIA in Rome and in some other cases through CIA centers in
other countries.43
P2 also had
branches in France, Switzerland, US and South America. P2 included among its
members several Argentinian leaders involved in that country’s Dirty War of
1973 to 1981. They included Raul Alberto Lastiri who was interim president of
Argentina from July 13, 1973 until October 12, 1973. His brief tenure marked a
turn towards right-wing policies and factions within the Peronist Party. He
organized new elections in 1973 and delivered Argentina’s government to Juan
Peron, who had just returned to the country after twenty years of exile since a
coup in 1955. The return of Peron in June 20 saw the Ezeiza massacre organized
by Jose Lopez Regrua, Lastiri’s father-in-law, and another P2 member and friend
to Gelli. When Peron’s arrival was greeted by millions, Lopez Rega had
positioned snipers under Peron’s stage who
opened fire on
the crowds and
When Juan Peron died of a heart attack
in 1974, he was succeeded by his third wife and vice-president Isabel Peron,
and Lopez Rega became her Minister of Social Welfare. Lopez Rega was known as El
Brujo (the Warlock) and the Argentine Evola.44 According to his
biography by Marcelo Larraquy, Lopez Rega developed a passion for the occult, a
common interest that linked him to Isabel Peron. After winning Isabel’s trust,
Lopez Rega traveled to Spain where hePeron’sworkedsecuritybefore becoming firstthecouple’sfor
personal secretary. It was Lopez Rega who brought the Perons into contact with
Licio Gelli, who became an adviser to Peron. Gelli and Lopez Rega then founded
the Argentinian wing of P2, the Pro-Patria lodge.45 Rega was the
creator of the paramilitary organization Argentine Anticommunist Alliance
(“Triple A”), which specialized in reprinting Nazi anti- Semitic literature in
Spanish as well as providing auxiliaries for the security services of Latin
American dictatorships.46
Triple A death
squads consisted of personnel provided by Skorzeny’s Paladin Group, which
included Stefano Delle Chiaie. When, with the advent of a new regime in Spain
Neo-fascist groups formerly hosted by Franco ceased to be welcome, many of
them fled to South America, in particular Pinochet’s Chile and
Argentina.. The original pro-Nazi network in Latin America maintained by
Skorzeny, Luft waffe hero Hans Ulrich Rudel, ex-Goebbels employee Johannes von
Leers and Klaus Barbie, had been established in the late sixties by recruits of
Aginter Press director Yves Guérin-Sérac and his network of OAS exiles. In
1972, Barbie had named Skorzeny as the chief of the Die Spinne network,
which he claimed commanded the loyalty of 100,000 fascist sympathizers in 22
countries, and funded by Nazi gold controlled by Skorzeny.47 In The
Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger disclosed that the International
Fascist created by Skorzeny was:
…not only the first step toward fulfilling the dream of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid, exile
Jose Lopez Rega, Juan Peron’s grey eminence, and prince Junio Valerio Borghese,
the Italian fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the hands
of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz
James J. Angleton.48
As Isabel’s as
Minister of Social Welfare, Lopez Rega conducted an unpopular policy of
implementing neoliberal policies in Argentina. In 1975 his protégé Celestino
Rodrigo, Minister of Economy, devalued the Argentine peso by 50%, causing
massive economic havo hardship for the middle and lower classes. Attacked
because of Rodrigo’s economic policies, Lopez Rega had to resign on July 11,
1975, after which he was hurriedly appointed ambassador to Franco’s Spain by
Isabel Peron, where he decided to bring the Triple A, who joined
the fight against ETA, the Basque freedom fighters..49
Triple
A became part of Operation Condor, which wa in 1975 at a meeting in Santiago,
Chile, between the chief of the political police, the Chilean secret police, Direccion
de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) and representatives of the CIA, as a secret
operation whereby the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America united their
“services” against activists and progressive opponents to military regimes.50
The goal of Operation Condor was to eradicate “Marxist subversion and terrorist
activities,” and to eliminate the principal obstacles to the neoliberal
economic policies Washington sought to impose on Latin America in collusion
with the World Bank and the IMF.51 Condor’s key members were the
governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The
United States provided support, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more
peripheral roles.
In 1976, Isabel
was overthrown by a coup instigated by Videla, the senior commander in the
Argentine Army, and another P2 member, initiating the National Reorganization.
Henry Kissinger and secretary of inter-American affairs William Rogers gave the
green light to his dictatorship to “eliminate subversion within ten months.”52
The first cooperation a between the CIA and anti-Castro groups and Rega’s
Triple A death squads.
The Triple A became
part in Operation Condor overlapped with Argentina’s Dirty War which lasted
from 1976 to 1983. Triple A’s infamous death squads were responsible for the
death of 1,500 left-wing activists and militants, including trade unionists,
students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers.
From 1976 onwards, DINA and the Secretaría de Inteligencia (SIDE),
the premier intelligence agency of the Argentine Republic, were its
front-line troops. DINA had also been involved in Skorzeny’s Paladin organization.53
The SIDE had also assisted Bolivian general Luis Garcia Meza Tejada’s Cocaine
Coup in Bolivia, with the help of Delle Chiaie and Nazi war criminal Klaus
Barbie.54
In 1991, Chile’s
National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation concluded that a number of
people apprehended by the DINA were really taken to the bizarre Nazi community
in Chile known as Colonia Dignidad, which according to Miguel Serrano
was a UFO base in contact with the Nazi base in Antarctica.55
Located in an isolated area of central Chile, Colonia Dignidad, later
known as Villa Baviera, was founded by a group of German emigrants in
1961. The colony was secretive, surrounded by barbed wire fences, searchlights
and a watchtower. The cult-like community was led by ex-Nazi Paul Schaefer
(“Permanent Uncle”), a former Luftwaffe paramedic who had left Germany after being
accused of sexually abusing two boys.
In 1997, Shaefer fled Chile, pursued by
authorities investigating charges that he had molested 26 children of the
colony.
In June and July
2005, Chilean police found two arms caches in the colony, including weapons
that were as many as forty years old, as well as a battle tank. Both the CIA
and Simon Wiesenthal have presented evidence of the presence at the colony of
Josef Mengele.56 Interestingly, Mengele was among hundreds of
flNazieeingwarcriminals who had found safe haven in Paraguay, South America
called Nueva Germania, founded in 1886 by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth
and her husband.57 The idea of such an Aryan colony had been
conceived of by composer Richard Wagner, who was greatly admired by Nietzsche
and his sister. All that was left of the colony when it was visited by a Vice
Magazine reporter in 2008 were two strange decrepitude, who were rumored by
the locals to be cannibals.58
At Colonia
Dignidad, it was discovered that those apprehended were “held prisoner
there for some time, and that some of them were subjected to torture, and that
besides DINA agents, some of the residents there were involved in these actions.”59
Jack Anderson gave a few details in his column “Operation Condor, An Unholy
Alliance” of August 3, 1979:
Assassination teams are centered in
Chile. This international consortium is located in Colonia Dignidad, Chile.
Founded by Nazis from Hitler’s SS, headed by Franz Pfeiffer Richter, Adolf
Hitler’s 1000-year Reich may not have perished. Children are cut up in front of
their parents, suspects are asphyxiated in piles of excrement or rotated to
death over barbecue pits.60
The activities of the Triple A were
later taken over by Videla’s junta and orchestrated by another P2 member, a
military of Massera during which 30,000 persons were “disappeared.” However,
the National Commission for Forced Disappearances (CONADEP), led by writer Ernesto
Sabato, was created in 1983, and two years later, the Trial of the Juntas
largely succeeded in proving the crimes of the various juntas, known as
the National Reorganization Process. Most sentenced to life imprisonment,
including Vidella and Massera.
As evidence of the deep connection between Gladio and the occult
tradition, Jose Lopez Rega was also the leader of the Umbanda voodoo cult which
was strong in Argentina in the 1970s.61 This would make him very
likely the model for a character in Umberto Eco’s international bestseller Foucault’s
Pendulum , published in 1988, which inspired the genre followed by Dan
Brown’s Da Vinci Code. The novel shows that Eco is intimately
acquainted with not only the myriad complexities of the occult, but that he
must also have been well familiar with the intricacies of the Gladio network,
as he also recognizes its sordid connections with the political underworld,
terrorism, and international fascism.
The plot of Eco’s
novel revolves around three friends Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon who, after
reading one too many manuscripts about occult conspiracy theories, decide they
can do better and set out to invent their own conspiracy for fun. They call
this satirical intellectual game “The Plan.” But when adherents of other conspiracy
theories learn about The Plan they take it seriously, and Belbo finds himself
the target of a very real secret society that believes he possesses the key
to the lost treasure of the Knights Templar.
According
to the novel, Casaubon had been a student in 1970s Milan, working on a thesis
on the history of the Knights Templar while observing the revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary activities of the students around him, during the heyday
of the Strategy of Tension. Belbo invites Casaubon to review the manuscript of
a Templarssupposedly. The book, by a Colonel Ardenti, postulates that the
Templars were the guardians of a secret treasure, perhaps the Holy Grail, which
he suspects was a radioactive energy source. According to Ardenti, after the French
monarchy and the Catholic Church disbanded the Templars, some knights escaped
and established cells throughout the world. Ultimately, these cells will
reunite to rediscover the Grail’s location and achieve world domination.
Hinting at Nazi involvement, according to Ardenti’s calculations the Templars
should have taken over the world in 1944. Evidently the plan had been
interrupted. The three friends later find out that Ardenti was a Nazi SS collaborator andveteran of the French
Foreign Legion.
To explain the unlikely connection with Umbanda, Eco writes of Casaubon
having a romance with a Brazilian woman named Amparo. Casaubon leaves Italy to
follow her and spends a few years in Brazil. While living there, he learns
about South American and Caribbean spiritualism and meets Agliè, who could be
based on Jose Lopez Rega. Agliè is an elderly man extensively knowledgeable
about the occult, who implies that he is the mystical Comte de Saint-Germain.
Casaubon and Amparo also attend an occult event—an Umbanda rite—in Brazil.
Umbanda is a cult that blends African
religions with Catholicism and indigenous lore. It is related to and has many
similarities with other Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé and Quimbanda,
which have their origin in the cult brought to south America by African slaves
from West Africa called Vodun, but known elsewhere as Voodoo. The name was
derived from the god Vodun of the West African Yoruba people, who lived in
eighteenth and nineteenth century Dahomey, which occupied parts of today’s
Togo, Benin and Nigeria. Slaves brought the religion with them when they were
forcibly shipped to Haiti and other islands in the West Indies.
According to Eco,
the practitioners of Vodun in Africa were the heirs of the Hellenistic
mysteries. He explains:
In the centuries of the late emp all the
religions of the Mediterranean and condensed them into a package. Europe was
corrupted by Christianity as a state religion, but Africa preserved the
treasures of knowledge, just as it had preserved and spread them in the days of
the Egyptians, passing them on to the Greeks, who wreaked such great havoc with
them.62
It’s a remarkable
suggestion, since the Vodun of West Africa does in fact share a number of
surprising parallels with the Western occult tradition. Vodun is a religion
distinct from the various traditional animistic religions in the interiors of
the same countries where it is found. Vodun features could be characterized as
mystery rites, and worshipped a thunder-god named Xango, whose symbol is the
double-axe, just like the numerous thunder- gods of the ancient Middle East.
Particularly remarkable is the presence of a symbol for the god Dan, which is a
serpent biting its own tail, exactly like the Ouroborous of the Gnostics.
According to recent research based on
the dynastic tradition of the Oyo Empire of the Yoruba of Nigeria, the ancient
kings mentioned are Israelite, Assyrian and Babylonian rulers. The deportation
of the Ten Lost Tribes is remembered in the tradition preserved by the palace
bards of Oyo as the Igboho exile.63 Similarly, the Igbo Jews of
southeastern Nigeria, who practice Judaism, claim descent from the Lost Tribes
of Israel, specif tribes of Ephraim, Naphtali, Menasseh, Levi, Zebulun and Gad.
An estimated 30,000 Igbos were practicing some form of Judaism in 2008, and
there are currently 26 synagogues of various sizes.64
Igbo
Jews are said to have originated from Syrian, Portuguese and Libyan Israelite
migrants into West Africa. These may have been Portuguese Marrano traders who
began arriving in the Greek Anthropologist Dienekes Pontikos has noted that
some deep Sub-Saharan African populations show evidence of Eurasian admixture,
and to be mostly West rather than East Eurasian.65 Dienekes further
argues that the admixture seems to have the closest connection to the Sardinian
and Basque populations of Europe, which are among those with the least
Indo-European impact genetically.66 A primary example is the R1b1c
Haplogroup found in the northern tip of Cameroon, which also borders northern
Nigeria, at the south of Lake Chad. It is found there at a very high frequency,
where it is considered to be caused by a pre-Islamic movement of people from
Eurasia.
Like R1b1a2,
R1b1c is a branch of R1b, and is the most frequently occurring Y- chromosome
haplogroup in Western Europe, with its highest concentrations in Ireland and
Scotland, indicating that they share a common ancestor with the Egyptian
Pharaohs. Besides the Atlantic and North Sea coast of Europe, hotspots for R1b
include the Po valley in north-central Italy (over 70%), the Ossetians of the
North Caucasus (over 40%) and nearby Armenia (35%), the Bashkirs of the Urals
region of Russia (50%), Turkmenistan (over 35%), the Hazara people of
Afghanistan (35%), the Uyghurs of North-West China (20%) and the Newars
of Nepal
(11%). R1b-V88, a
subclade sp 60 to 95% of men in
northern Cameroon. The history of R1b and R1a, which is particularly common in
a large region extending from South Asia and Southern Siberia to Central Europe
and Scandinavia, are intricately connected to each other. Whereas R1b1 is found
in such places as the Levant or Cameroon, R1b1b most likely originated in
north-eastern Anatolia. Potentially corroborating the claim of descent from the
Lost Tribes, or at least descent from Jewish peoples, is the fact that R1b
featured a back migration from Asia to Africa estimated to have taken place
around 15,000 years ago. A group of R1b1* people moved from the Levant to
Egypt, Sudan and spread in different directions inside Africa to Rwanda, South
Africa, Namibia, Angola, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Nigeria,
Ivory Coast, and Guinea-Bissau.67
Eco’s
fictional account gives furthe the Gladio networks, which shows a connection
with the Order of the Solar Temple, a UFO religion based upon a legend of the
continuing existence of the Knights Templar. In Belgium and France the Gladio
networks were known as Plan Bleu, La Rose des Vents and Arc-en-ciel,
the regional branch of Gladio of Lyon headed by François de Grossouvre. In
1981, de Grossouvre became the adviser of former Cagoule member, President
Francois Mitterrand, for secret operations. Mitterrand’s connection to the
occult was popularized in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, where the glass
pyramid he had constructed at the Louvre, becomes the purported burial place of
the Holy Grail. The pyramid is constructed of exactly 666 panes of glass, and
is also mirrored by a pyramid below ground, resembling the star of David, which
is a symbolic representation of the Hermetic dictum of “as above, so below,”
mentioned in the Emerald Tablet, being the microcosm and
macrocosm. The lower portion represented a three-dimensional ‘shadow’ of
a hyperdimensional cube that he called a “porte cosmique,” or
cosmic portal.
The pyramid was part of a Pharaonic undertaking, known as the “Grand
Projects of François Mitterrand.” It was an architectural program to provide
modern monuments in Paris, the city of monuments, symbolizing France’s role in
art, politics and economy at the end of the twentieth century. The grandiose
plan cost the Government of France 15.7 billion francs. His monuments’ esoteric
symbolism is acknowledged even by mainstream writers, such as Marie Delarue in
her 1999 study tellingly entitled, A Republican Pharaoh. She refers to
the Parisian buildings as “a journey for initiates,” noting that they “seem to
relate more to personal destiny and François Mitterrand’s pronounced taste for
hermeticism and the Sacred Science, than to the politics of socialist governments.”68
But his personal favorite is the 1989 Monument to the “Rights of Man and the
Citizen” in the Parc du Champs-de-Mars, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
Modeled on an Egyptian funerary temple and aligned to the Sun on the summer
solstice, it is covered in esoteric symbolism, much of it obviously Masonic.
After Mitterrand’s death his staff revealed that he often visited it at night,
silently meditating.69
Grossouvre asked
Constantin Melnik, leader of the French secret services during the Algerian War
of Independence, who had been in comfortable exile in the US, to return to
activity. Melnik, who was the head of the SDECE and trained by the RAND
Corporation, conceived of La Main Rouge (“the Red Hand”), a group of
state-sponsored terrorists who operated in the Algerian War. Constantin Melnik
is alleged to have been involved in the creation in 1952 of the Ordre
Souverain du Temple Solaire (OSTS), an ancestor of the Order of the Solar
Temple. It was created by former members of the neo-Rosicrucian organization,
Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), in which was involved the
SDECE, France’s external intelligence agency from 1944 to 1982. French
journalist Serge Hutin reported links between AMORC, the CIA, P2, the the
Corsican Mafia, the SAC (Service d’Action
Civique, France’s Civic Action Service) and various other knightly
orders, and their involvement in international terrorism.70 The
OSTS’s Gladio connection explains the military aspects about the order that its
members noticed.71
The Solar Temple
is closely associated with a similarly named organization, the Sovereign Order
of the Solar Temple, founded at the chateau of Arginy in the Beaujolais region
of France in 1952. Involved in the founding of the order was Eugene Canseliet,
who had also been a member with Schwaller de Lubicz of the Brotherhood of
Heliopolis, according to whom Melchizedek was the emissary of a planet called
Heliopolis, which orbits Sirius. The
Order soon attracted members of
high society, being officially sponsored by Prince Rainier III of Monaco , with his wife
Princess Grace becoming a member. On December 21, 1997 Channel Four in
the UK aired a special by investigative reporters David Carr-Brown and David
Cohen, where the man who claimed to have been the chauffeur of a member of the
order, Joseph Di Mambro, disguised under the alias of “Georges Leroux,”
according to whom Princess Grace contributed $10 million to the OTS and agreed
to pay another $ 6 million. She then became disillusioned with Di Mambro and
threatened to expose him. On September 13, 1982, she died in a car accident,
and “Leroux” implies that foul play may have been involved, orchestrated by Di
Mambro.
According to the Solar Temple, the star
Sirius was the
home of a number of Ascended Masters,
also known as the Great White
Brotherhood, who came to earth and
inhabited Agartha. The reason of the suicide of the members of the Solar Temple was ostensibly to return “home”
to the Sirius system. Documents posted
to the media by the leaders of the cult stated: “The Great White Lodge of Sirius has decreed the Recall of the last
authentic Bearers of an Ancestral Wisdom.” Also, the Solar Temple placed emphasis on the Great
Pyramid at Giza as the focus for some immanent
event in the coming years. As well, the Solar Temple stressed the importance of
the Great Pyramid, which they claimed would be the focus for some momentous event
in the coming years. 78
Between 1994 and
1997, a number of Solar Temple members
were murdered in ritualistic fashion or committed mass suicide. The deaths
occurred in Cheiry and Salvan, in western Switzerland; Vercors, France; and Morin Heights and Saint-Casimir,
Quebec. The Solar Temple in Canada was specifically linked with the electricity
corporation Hydro-Québec. French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau
investigated the sect for two years. A few days after the mass murder, he reported that the sect was financed
by the proceeds of gun-running to Europe
and South America. Simultaneously, Radio Canadaannounced that the group earned hundreds of millions of dollars laundering the
profits
through the infamous BCCI. Montreal’s La Presseobserved: “Each new
piece of information only thickens the mystery.” 79
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