Operation Gladio: Part I – What Was Operation Gladio?
Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses substack where you can listen to an audio version.
“Suffice it to say, anyone who attempts to come to terms with the facts presented in these pages will have his faith in Holy Mother Church compromised, if not shattered.” – Paul Williams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican, The CIA, and the Mafia.
“It’s time to take a closer look at the Vatican…”. That was the last sentence of my last piece. So, I duly picked up a copy of Paul L. Williams’ book – Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican, The CIA, and the Mafia.
When I rolled up my sleeves in anger and started writing in late 2020, part of my mission was to reach readers who still think that the world is sort of okay, and convince them that it is anything but. I don’t know any more if that is pointless, but now I write for the hell of it. But when a book comes along that screams out that nearly everything you have been told about every historical event of any significance is a crock; that you cannot get out of this mess by voting harder, and; that the world really is run by a conspiracy; then, I take great pleasure in giving that book an airing.
As comprehensive as Operation Gladio is in laying bare the Vatican’s role in serious crimes, it is far more than a shocking exposé of religious hypocrisy. This book is a feast of jaw-dropping facts, but if you don’t have the time to dine on its 320 pages, then I hope you’ll get something out of this excursion through it, which I will break into four parts.
Of course this series of articles is no substitute for reading the book, but it will hopefully provide a decent overview for readers who know very little about Operation Gladio, which is certainly where I was before I read the book.
To say that I was not disappointed with this book would be an understatement of Biblical proportions. Operation Gladio is just as important as Two World Wars and Hitler: Who Was Responsible? by Dr Jim Macgregor and Dr John O’Dowd. In fact, it should be viewed as an essential companion book to Two World Wars and Hitler because the 20th century saw three world wars, not two. Williams’ book explains the meaning of the Cold War – why and how it evolved out of the Second World War. If you want to understand the realpolitik underlying the 20th century’s greatest man-made disasters, these two books alone would, in my humble opinion, serve you very well.
On one level, this book simply confirms what most readers of this blog already know – that the CIA is a senior partner in a global crime syndicate. That isn’t even a rabbit hole any more: it’s a statement of fact. However, what is fascinating about William’s account is the compelling evidence that the head of the Roman Catholic Church – God’s so-called representative on Earth who declared himself morally infallible in 1870 – was / is a de facto member of that global crime syndicate.
In exposing the Vatican’s involvement with the CIA and the Mafia, Williams lays bare not only the magnitude of the West’s spiritual decay, but also the magnitude of the spiritual deception being perpetrated.
We are then invited to ask the mind-boggling question: is the Vatican the senior partner in that syndicate? Although the book does not answer the question directly, there is enough information buried in its 320 pages to get the ball rolling in having the discussion, which I tackle in Part IV of this series of articles.
Here is the layout for this four-part discussion of Williams’ book:
- In this first part, I will try to set out what Operation Gladio was, discussing each party’s role.
- In Part II, we will look at the evolution of Operation Gladio through its various phases.
- In Part III, we will look at some of the more startling evidence Williams presents for the Vatican’s role in the operation, focusing on the rise and fall of central characters tied to the Vatican’s money-laundering operations. Yes, you read that correctly – money laundering.
- In Part IV, I discuss the meaning of Operation Gladio, and the Cold War itself. In doing so, we will broach the question of who was the capo di tutti capi of the three-headed crime syndicate comprising the CIA, the Mafia, and the Vatican. Is there a fourth, unseen hand?
Operation Gladio in a nutshell
Towards the end of the Second World War, Allen Dulles, the notorious US spymaster and OSS[1] Swiss station master, established contact with the Nazi head of the German Military Intelligence, General Reinhard Gehlen. Realising that the war was lost, Gehlen put forward a plan to Dulles that would secure his survival and continued gainful employment. He proposed that clandestine guerilla squads composed of die-hard fascist fanatics should be formed to ward off a potential post-war Soviet invasion of Western Europe. These squads, known as “stay-behind units”, would blend in with civil society by functioning as ordinary citizens by day, and Communist-killers by night.
No sooner had the ink dried on the Yalta agreement to redraw the map of Europe than Gehlen was whisked off to Fort Hunt, Virginia, wined and dined, and an agreement reached[2]. The soldiers in the stay-behind units were to be known as gladiators, and the operation was codenamed Operation Gladio.
And so it came to pass that American and Nazi intelligence agents midwifed the Cold War from the dying corpse of the Second World War.
Within a few months, a similar arrangement was made in Italy. This was facilitated by James Jesus Angleton, the American OSS commander in Italy, and a devout Roman Catholic. The units there were led by Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, a member of the Catholic Black Nobility. When Borghese was arrested and charged with war crimes in May 1945, Angleton secured his release into US Army custody[3].
Before long, hundreds of Gladio units were in place throughout Western Europe. In Part II, I will discuss the evolution of Operation Gladio into a ‘strategy of tension’. Time and again this phrase pops up in discussions of Operation Gladio as if it were the most significant element of the operation. While it was an important phase, it was only one piece of an extremely complex puzzle. In my opinion, the undue emphasis placed on the strategy of tension tends to crowd out the real meaning of Operation Gladio. So I have left it to Part II where I discuss it briefly in the context of a phase that evolved to counter the rise of Leftism in the late 1960s.
Paying the bills for Gladio and how the Mafia were assimilated into American Intel
As Gladio was a covert operation, it could not secure approval or funding from Congress. $200 million in initial funding came from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations[4]. Needless to say, this is not a minor accounting detail. It signifies that the CIA and its forerunners were essentially hatched as the military and intelligence units of Wall Street and the banking cartel. The CIA is in essence the world’s largest publicly funded private militia operating to protect the interests of the Anglo-American corporatocracy and banking cartel. While it enjoys public funding, it also found a diabolically ingenious way to fund its covert activities from the proceeds of crime.
Having invested significant sums to get Gladio off the ground, it was imperative for its private funders that the operation should start to pay for itself as quickly as possible. The funding plan was simple: supply heroin to the Black community in America’s ghettos.
This parasitic callousness was the brainchild of Paul Helliwell, the OSS Chief of Special Intelligence in China. He had observed that the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalists fighting the Communist forces of Mao Zedong, were selling opium to Chinese addicts to raise money to fund their war. All that was required in America was to leverage the existing supply lines and build a logistics and distribution network to pump smack into the poorest sectors of society in Harlem.
It is crucial to understand that American intelligence agencies did not simply profit from an existing heroin supply, although that would be bad enough. They greatly expanded the supply of heroin into Western markets since these cash flows became integral to the success of their covert operations. America, through the CIA, effectively fuelled the drug trade and then used its growth as an excuse to intervene in various places in the name of a “war on drugs”. This is a familiar playbook of the ruling pathocracy: commit unspeakable crimes and then use those crimes to commit more crimes, with each successive wave of crimes serving as the means of tightening the noose around our necks.
Understanding Operation Gladio and how the CIA became the world’s supreme drug lord is extremely relevant today as the Trump administration gins up charges of narcoterrorism against Venezuela as the pretext for yet another round of US-led bloody regime change. The accusation is as risible as the BBC pointing a finger at you and me for sub-standard video editing.
Williams reveals that:
“By 1971, there were more than 500,000 heroin addicts in the United states, producing a cash flow of $12 billion. On a government survey, 3,054,000 Americans admitted to using heroin at least once. Down at the morgue, where people don’t lie, the numbers told a different story: 41% of the drug-related deaths were now linked to heroin.”[5]
The strategy to use drug money to fund covert operations catalysed the CIA alliance with the Mafia in the person of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who, together with his friend Meyer Lansky, ran “the Commission”, a board of twelve Mafia bosses that oversaw organised crime in America. Heroin was to be refined by the Corsican Mafia and distributed by Luciano’s Commission in America.
Codenamed Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 helped to embed the Mafia into Italian politics. Many Mafiosi had been targeted by Mussolini and needed no encouragement to provide logistical support to advancing US troops. Mafia members climbed into American tanks and guided General Patton’s Seventh Army through western Sicily. They also organised support for the troops among the local population.
For his services to Uncle Sam, the head of Sicily’s leading crime family, Calogero “Don Calo” Vizzini, was appointed Mayor of Villalba. Other Mafiosi, at the insistence of the OSS, assumed positions of political power in western Sicily[6]. When the media got wind of Lucky Luciano’s involvement in facilitating the success of Operation Husky, an American radio broadcaster proclaimed that the mobster should receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.
The OSS was abolished in September 1945, and by 1947 it had morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). From its inception, unaccountability and criminality were design features of the CIA, not bugs. The objective of its Wall Street sponsors was to have at its disposal a private militia funded by the public, but not scrutinised by the public. The CIA is authorised by the National Security Act to conduct covert operations such that “any US government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized US persons.”[7] What this meant in the words of a senior CIA operational official was that its “funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking them…it could hire armies; it could buy banks.”[8] And it did.
The Vatican Alliance
Within months of the CIA’s formation, the Communist threat in Italy was lighting up the amygdalae of the agency’s spooks. In Sicily’s provincial elections of 1947, where the Communists were rousing the masses with demands for the redistribution of feudal land holdings, support for the left skyrocketed. And with national elections scheduled in 1948, Italy stood poised to become the first Communist country in Western Europe.[9] Something had to be done. And fast.
Having secured its funding from the supply of heroin, the CIA had ample dirty cash to pay the Mafia and its Gladio units. But it couldn’t pay the dirty money out directly. As Williams put it:
“It had to be channelled through a financial firm that would not be subjected to scrutiny by US Treasury agents, Italian bank examiners, or international fiscal monitors. Only one institution possessed such immunity, and it was located in the heart of Vatican City.”[10] [emphasis added]
Created by Pope Pius XII in June 1942, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), commonly referred to as the Vatican Bank, is a sovereign financial agency within a sovereign state:
“It cannot be compelled to redress wrongs – not even the most egregious violations of international law. Nor can it be forced to release the source of any deposit. The bank resides under the direct jurisdiction of the Pope. He owns it; he controls it … Because of its clandestine workings, millions can be deposited into the IOR on a continuous basis and channelled into numbered Swiss Bank accounts, without the possibility of detection. It was the perfect place for the CIA and the Sicilian Mafia to launder their ill-gotten gains of the narcotics trade and for the Roman Catholic Church to fund its political mission.” [11]
And, according to Moneyval (the EU’s anti-money laundering committee), as of July 2012, the Vatican Bank remained deficient in core areas of internationally recognised banking standards, “including measures to combat the financing of terrorism.”
By 1947, Pope Pius had already allowed the IOR to be used by the Truman administration to funnel $350 million for economic relief and political payments. The Pope used these funds to reactivate the Christian Democratic Party (CDP) that had been dismantled under Mussolini.[12] With 50% of the Italian people aligned with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the Vatican was gearing up for “the conflict between Communism and Christianity”.
The Vatican was no novice in dirty politics. At the close of the war, Pope Pius and his Undersecretary of State had worked with Dulles and the OSS to create ratlines to spirit Nazis out of Europe. Williams’ research uncovered that “many of the escapees were issued with Vatican passports and travelled to their new hiding places in clerical garb.”[13] In 1945, Pope Pius held private audiences with Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, to discuss the implementation of Operation Gladio, and Donovan received a papal knighthood in recognition of his crusade against communism.[14]
In the lead-up to the national 1948 election, the CIA dumped $65 million of its illicit money into the Vatican Bank, much of it delivered in suitcases by Luciano’s syndicate. With the CIA and the Mafia already clasped firmly together, the Vatican now joined in. The Vatican Bank was used to pay mob muscle to direct violence against the Communists. Ballot boxes were stuffed and voters bribed with freshly laundered drug money.[15] The CDP triumphed, but the assessment of William Colby, who would later become the CIA Director, was that the Communists would have gained 60% of the vote without the CIA’s sabotage.[16]
With the Mafia running the distribution operation, cash was “deposited by the mob in parochial banks throughout Italy. From these financial firms… the money flowed into the IOR [Vatican bank] (which continued to collect its 15% processing fee) before the funds were transferred to privately held mob accounts in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and the Bahamas.”[17]
The CIA established a “Vatican desk” under Angleton and the list of senior top-ranking CIA spooks who received the Vatican’s knighthood of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) is testimony to the inextricable tie between the Vatican and the CIA. A notable SMOM knight was none other than General Reinhard Gehlen, high-ranking Gladio operative and former Nazi head of the German Military Intelligence.[18] One gets the distinct impression from Williams’ book that being a knight of the SMOM was a prerequisite for advancing to the upper levels of the CIA. Which is an apt segue into the role of secret societies in Operation Gladio.
The Vatican and Freemasonry
“The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.” – Declaration on Masonic Associations, The Sacred Congregation of the Faith (November 1983)
Throughout the 1950s, hundreds of Italian clerics joined the Mafia in support of Operation Gladio. Senior clerics, including a Cardinal, were involved in setting up ecclesiastical stay-behind units called Catholic Gladio. They were trained not only for ideological war, but actual combat.
Eventually, stay-behind units in Italy evolved into covert Masonic organisations. The leading one became known as Propaganda Due or P2. This Masonic lodge included the most senior-ranking army and intelligence officials, senior members of cabinet, magistrates, media and business executives, and Prime Ministers.[19] It also attracted the Mafia, since both the Mafia and the Freemasons were secret societies that had been banned by Mussolini’s fascists. P2 went on to play a crucial role in infiltrating all levels of government and the military to ensure that Operation Gladio would not be hindered by inevitable conflicts with the justice system, law enforcement and the media.
One of the functions of the leader of the lodge was to gather as much kompromat as possible on its members to maintain discipline. When a new member joined, he was obliged to provide compromising documentation not only on himself but other possible candidates. The documents would then be used to coerce people in positions of power to join the lodge and do its bidding. On surveying nude photos of Pope John Paul II, Licio Gelli, the leader of the lodge, quipped: “If it’s possible to take these photos of the Pope, imagine how easy it is to shoot him.”[20]
The Vatican was unquestionably up to its neck in Freemasonry. Not only did scores of Vatican officials become members of Masonic Lodges tied to P2, but these clerics were elevated to higher positions even after the pontiff had learnt of their membership in P2 and other Masonic lodges.[21] Licio Gelli, the Grand Master of P2 and an avowed atheist, was made a Knight of Malta by the Pope.[22] This was profoundly significant to Gladio operatives since it confirmed the Vatican’s ties to P2.
William Colby, CIA director from September 1973 to January 1976, was deeply involved in Operation Gladio during his service period, both in Rome, and as station chief in Saigon during the Vietnam War. A consummate Vatican insider and member of the Vatican’s Sovereign Military Order of Malta, he famously remarked that the global intelligence services maintained by the Vatican left the CIA in the shade.[23]
In Part II, we will look at the evolution of Operation Gladio through its various phases.
[1] The US Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
[2] Paul L. Willliams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia, New York, Prometheus Books, 2018, Ch 1, pg. 26.
[3] Ibid., Ch 1, pg. 28.
[4] Ibid., Ch 1, pg. 29.
[5] Ibid., Ch 10, pg. 145.
[6] Ibid., Ch 2, pg. 37.
[7] Ibid., Ch 2, pg. 40.
[8] Ibid., Ch 2, pg. 40.
[9] Ibid., Ch 2, pg. 43.
[10] Ibid., Ch 2, pg. 44.
[11] Ibid., Ch 3, pg. 45-46.
[12] Ibid., Ch 3, pg. 46.
[13] Ibid., Ch 5, pg. 71.
[14] Ibid., Ch 3, pg. 47.
[15] Ibid., Ch 3, pg. 49.
[16] Ibid., Ch 3, pg. 49.
[17] Ibid., Ch 10, pg. 146.
[18] Ibid., Ch 3, pg. 51.
[19] Ibid., Ch 5, pg. 76.
[20] Ibid., Ch 5, pg. 78.
[21] Ibid., Ch 5, pg. 66.
[22] Ibid., Ch 5, pg. 66.
[23] Ibid., Ch 10, pg. 151.
