Operation Gladio: Part IV – The Meaning of Gladio

Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses substack where an audio version is also available.

---

Part I, Part II, and Part III of this series of articles covered the beginnings of Operation Gladio, its evolution through distinct phases, and key figures at the centre of the more publicised banking scandals associated with the operation. In this final Part IV, I look at the meaning of Gladio, both material and spiritual.

The meaning of Operation Gladio, and indeed the entire Cold War, can be dissected under the following framework:

• What is the role of secret societies in how the world works? Secret societies are not an unfortunate and random sociological by-product of human nature; they are the manifestation of the will to dominate and, left unchecked by the economically dominant West, they are threatening to completely debase all of humanity.
• What was the true driving animus of Operation Gladio and the Cold War?
• Who was the capo di tutti capi?
• Closely related to the above question – What is the significance of the Vatican’s deep involvement in Gladio? Does it simply represent the worst excesses of organised religion or is there more to it than that?

How the world works – the Secret Society hierarchy

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: history is just one damned conspiracy after another. That’s why I couldn’t resist doing this four-part analysis of Paul L. Williams’ book – Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican, The CIA, and the Mafia.

Intelligence agencies, secret societies, and the Mafia ran the Cold War, and financed it largely with illicit drug money. As far as conspiracies go, that’s a humdinger, and Williams proves it. The Mafia itself started out as a secret society, but its secrecy went out the window as it became the victim of its own success.

There is essentially no difference between an intelligence agency and a secret society, both of which operate according to the same principle – infiltration of the institutions whose actions they seek to manipulate and control. Their success depends entirely on how well they achieve this infiltration. We see time and again that the CIA and P2 had enormous successes, but they also had many failures.

Not everyone in government institutions, the military, and the media was a P2 member, CIA asset, or knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). When ordinary people in positions of relative power tried to do their jobs, they had some success in exposing the criminals and bringing them to justice, but they were also putting their lives at risk in doing so. Hundreds died serving the truth.

While this seems like stating the obvious, I think it’s worth emphasising that these criminal syndicates are not completely in control. But we are on the back foot. The only reason I am able to write this article is because courageous people risked their lives to expose evildoers, and conscientious authors have done amazing investigative work trawling through the available archives and piecing things together.

Francesco Di Carlo, the heroin traffic manager for the Sicilian Mafia, testified that he had been approached by the Corleonesi crime family to kill Roberto Calvi. According to Di Carlo, the job was done by someone else. In an interview in 2012, he said:

“I was not the one who hanged Calvi. One day I may write the full story, but the real killers will never be brought to justice because they are being protected by the Italian state, by members of the P2 Masonic Lodge. They have massive power. They’re made-up of a mixture of politicians, bank presidents, the military, top security and so on.”[1]

This is how the world works. It isn’t ‘conspiracy theory’. It’s a fact, confirmed by cabal insiders. This is the way the world is run – government of the cabal, by the cabal, for the cabal.

What is presented in Williams’ book, and others like it, comes straight from the mouths and written documents of the criminals involved. There is, therefore, a stupefying obtuseness behind the mental gymnastics involved in rejecting this information and its implications. The main barrier we face is the ongoing denial of what is thrown in our faces. Ultimately, the people who have died putting this information into the public domain are callously betrayed when their work is dismissed with the thought-terminating cliché of ‘conspiracy theory’.

The fact that this denial is practiced disproportionately by people with the highest levels of education in the West – the Professional Managerial Class – must lead to the logical conclusion that too much ‘learning’ is a dangerous thing.

Operation Gladio: the battle against communism or the elimination of competition?

“The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, six million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an “American Holocaust”. The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threat to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, and the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War.” – Steve Kangas: A Timeline of CIA atrocities (1994)

Given the origins of the CIA and the people who led it when Gladio was hatched, I am of the view that the primary purpose of Gladio was to oppose, by any and all means, any form of social and economic polity that threatened to dilute the wealth of the Anglo-American money cartel on whose patronage and guidance the CIA was founded.

David Yallop, writing in 1984 before the end of the Cold War, had, in my opinion, sussed something important:

“In fact, P2… is an international grouping with a number of diverse aims. It combines an attitude of mind with a community of self-interest, its main goals being not the destruction of a particular ideology but an insatiable greed for power and wealth and the furtherance of self, hiding behind the acceptable face of ‘defenders of the free world’.”[2]

Commentators with a right-leaning bent fixate on the ‘communist’ bogeyman. However, Britain’s and Wall Street’s calculated support for the Bolshevik revolution is a circle that is difficult to square. The same Russian communist ideologues then embedded themselves in Mao’s communist catastrophe, and were instrumental in aiding his starvation of an estimated 55 million peasants in China.

After Mao had starved and persecuted millions under the Great Leap Famine and the Cultural Revolution, David Rockefeller visited China and shook hands with him in 1973. Rockefeller, that iconic representative of the Anglo-American money cartel and senior member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who helped to birth and nurture the CIA and the Gladio battle against Communism, had this to say about Mao’s experiment with Communism:

“The social experiment under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history. Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose.”

The Secret Team behind Gladio was as happy with the results of Communism as it was with the results of Gladio. Gladio was about suffocating any truly egalitarian democratic movements that posed a threat to wealth concentration, and Communism was about breaking the human spirit. That was what Rockefeller meant by “fostering high morale and community of purpose.” China had broken its people and was ready to create a new brand of capitalism without competition; capitalism without even the veneer of freedom and individuality – techno-fascism.

The US then normalised relations with China under the guise of weakening Russia. How are we to make sense of a ruling class that: promoted rampant capitalism in the pre-war era while simultaneously backing the Bolshevik revolution; promoted rampant capitalism in the post-war era while simultaneously ‘normalising’ relations with the Communist sleeping giant in China, and; began promoting a technology transfer to China before the Cold War had ended?

Richard Werner notes in his analysis of the Chinese success story:

“The list of ten foreigners honoured by China at its 40^th anniversary of Deng’s reform programme in 2018 included Klaus Schwab, Maurice Greenberg and Robert Kuhn.” [Emphasis added]

Beneath all the sound and fury of classic ‘great power’ geopolitical conflict, there is a constant undercurrent of quiet, and very effective, cooperation. Countries that really get hurt are those that pose a real threat to the military-industrial complex’s agendas, like Libya, or those that are expendable in the furtherance of those agendas, like Ukraine. I do not see China and Russia getting hurt because they are part of the planned grand synthesis of East and West.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Kissinger acolyte and fellow CFR planner, foretold the desired synthesis of Communism and Capitalism, of East and West:

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities… Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the stepping stones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society… This regionalization is in keeping with the Tri-Lateral Plan which calls for a gradual convergence of East and West, ultimately leading toward the goal of one world government. National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept.” [emphasis added]

If rampant capitalism and its so-called liberal democracy is the thesis, then Communism was the antithesis. The oligarchy has always despised competition. The aim is global governance by cartel.

The conservative right, including those in the freedom movement, seem convinced that if the Communist or Marxist bogeyman can be defeated, the natural order of things will be restored. They don’t mind the existence of billionaires per se; it’s the ‘Commie’ billionaires like Soros they despise. Musk, on the other hand, not a Commie, has been lionised.

The right-leaning section of the freedom movement – that is to say, about 80% of the movement – does not seem able to wrap its head around the fact that there are no good billionaires. ‘Good billionaire’ is an oxymoron. A billionaire is the fruit of a tree that plants itself in the rich soil of humanity, taking everything it can and giving as little as possible in return. If all parasitic billionaire ‘wealth’ were to mysteriously and suddenly evaporate, humanity would be faced with an extraordinary period of calm in which we could confront the spiritual decay that has resulted in the surrender of our energy, resources and creativity to a cabal of venal sociopaths.

Who was the capo di tutti capi?

In assessing the evidence for the very real Cold War conspiracy between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia, one of the questions we must ask is which of these three had the most power? I’ve already strongly hinted at that in the section above, but let’s explore further because there may be other candidates.

It’s clear to me that the Mafia can be ruled out in a consideration of who is top dog. They were co-opted into the partnership in the same way that an old-fashioned bank robber needs a good safe-cracker or a get-away driver. Many Mafiosi also ended up taking the rap when things unravelled for the crime syndicate. However, no CIA or Vatican officials served jail time for their involvement in the unholy alliance. The Mafia was too often the fall guy, effectively hiding the real power.

As I have repeatedly stressed, the CIA is the military and intelligence arm of Wall Street and the banking cartel. It is the world’s largest publicly funded private militia operating to protect the interests of the Anglo-American money cartel. As Williams reminds us:

“From the bowels of the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] came the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1946, General Hoyt S. Vandenbergh…recruited Allen Dulles, a lawyer for the House of Morgan and the President of the CFR, ‘to draft proposals for the shape and organisation of what was to become the [CIA]…David Rockefeller assumed control of the inner core of the CFR and the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations allocated $34 million for the new agency to engage in covert activities.”[3] [emphasis added]

As we know, Allen Dulles went on to head the CIA in 1953, having served in its forerunner, the OSS, during WW2.

Williams also quotes Thomas Braden, who headed up the CIA’s International Organizations Division:

“I often briefed David [Rockefeller] semi-officially and with Allen’s permission. [David] was of the same mind as us, and very approving of everything we were doing… Sometimes David would give me money to do things which weren’t in the budget. He gave me a lot of money for causes in France.”[4] [emphasis added]

So, there is a Secret Team that gives the CIA its strategic direction. The fingerprints of the Rockefellers and the Council on Foreign Relations are all over Operation Gladio, as are the fingerprints of the entire money-laundering banking cabal of the Anglo-American establishment. These fingerprints provide the clue to the identity of the Secret Team.

Colonel Fletcher Prouty, an intelligence and Pentagon insider who wrote The Secret Team, explained it in 1989:

“The book I wrote, called The Secret Team, is autobiographical. It explains my nine years work in the Pentagon in this kind of business. Actually I had been in intelligence type work long before I came to the Pentagon … All this period, beginning way back in the ‘40s, it was clear that even though I was working close to men like Winston Churchill…you would see that they would be carrying out some kind of instruction. I’ve worked in a room… with Allen Dulles, with John Foster Dulles right there, and listened to the two of them talking about how we’re going to do this or how we’re going to do that. And then I’ve seen John Foster Dulles pick up the telephone and call somebody overseas. And you’d realise they’re taking input, taking instructions. They’re not the top men. There is a high cabal – the words that Churchill used – that runs things. Now, we’ll never describe those people. They’re greatest strength is their anonymity and they know that”. [emphasis added]

That team is the clique who own most of the world’s resources, and making sure that their wealth is not dissipated is what keeps them up at night. The CIA is their attack dog, and should leaders like Jacobo Arbenz, president of Guatemala in 1950, emerge with strange ideas about returning stolen land to the people, the CIA’s job is to ensure that these leaders are ruthlessly dealt with.

Even the Pope himself, when he sought rapprochement with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, was placed in the cross-hairs of The Secret Team. Pope John Paul II, in seeking to rewrite the script, had gone off-piste. According to the rule book of the Secret Team, he had forfeited his ‘infallibility’, and thus became the victim of a botched assassination attempt in May 1981.

So here’s me arriving, yet again, at my now well-worn conclusion – it’s the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital, right? Not so fast! We need to discuss the Vatican more fully to open up an exploration of the role of spirituality. This could lead to a nuancing of the OCGFC blame game.

The Vatican’s significance to the Cold War: Spiritual perversion

The Anglo-American establishment in the West was fighting a threat they believed to be real. They called that threat ‘Communism’, but the real threat was democracy and egalitarianism. And Vatican Inc., a multi-billion-dollar religious franchise, was just as much at risk of having its gains dissipated as the Anglo-American money cartel was.

Vatican Inc. qualifies for membership in the Secret Team by virtue of being a billionaire corporation. And, like Rome, that wealth was not built in a day. When the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, he gave colossal wealth to the then Pope, Silvester I, thus creating the first rich Pope.[5] It’s therefore not unreasonable to argue that the Vatican and the Western money cartel are joined at the hip.

With centuries of financial and political experience to draw on, it is no wonder that the Vatican was singled out for praise by former CIA director William Colby. Colby asserted that the global intelligence services maintained by the Vatican left the CIA in the shade. Small wonder then that the Vatican allied with the CIA and the Mafia to further cement its foothold in the temporal world.

So, it seems logical that the Vatican would insinuate itself into a relationship with the CIA and the Mafia.

At this point, it’s worth pointing out that there was as much dissent within the Catholic Church as there was within society at large. When Jesuit priests in Latin America failed to follow the memo issued by the Vatican, and opted instead to advocate for liberation theology, they were ruthlessly dealt with. And, as discussed in Part III, the Vatican was only too happy to deliver these dissidents into the hands of torturers and murderers. The Catholic Church is obviously not a zombie monolith blindly obeying every letter of Vatican diktat.

The question of who was in charge gets more complicated when you start probing Operation Gladio’s spiritual paraphernalia, of which the Vatican was a major component. Why are all the key figures in both the CIA and the Mafia knighted by the Pope? What is the significance of bestowing ‘spiritual’ honours on the Gladio psychopaths who stalked Western Europe and Latin America in the 20^th and 21^st centuries? What kind of ‘spiritual’ honour is that anyway? Given what we know about the Vatican’s involvement with the Mafia and the CIA, who in their right minds would wish to receive a knighthood of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, an ‘honour’ that seems to be the calling card of the most venal, mendacious and, above all, the most effective Gladio operatives?

Knights are defenders of a kingdom. What kingdom are they defending? Because it sure as hell isn’t a Christian one.

I believe that all political positions are underpinned by spiritual positions, whether that spiritual position is a consciously selected one or an unconscious default. We become what we worship, “worship” here also signifying what we focus our attention on. Is it therefore not reasonable to ask whether an SMOM knight’s ultimate loyalty is in fact to the Vatican, their spiritual overlord? If so, there were, and probably still are, a lot of very powerful psychopaths all advancing a Vatican agenda. And if that’s true, what is that agenda?

Although I don’t have the answer to that question, the question itself is not outlandish when one takes into account the Vatican’s deep immersion in political, material, and spiritual intrigue for far longer than the modern Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital.

The question then becomes: is this material spirituality, masquerading as Christianity, going to be part of a greater spiritual deception? I don’t have the answer to that question either, but I think it’s worth asking. The more evil something looks, the less capable it is of deceiving us. The atheists in the audience might mock Biblical references, but the Beast system referred to by Christians is ultimately one in which we will not be able to exercise our conscience and free will. When simplified in those humanistic terms, it’s clear that a Beast system is in an advanced stage of preparation.

And when The Establishment sought to rob us of our ability to exercise our free will to reject mass ‘vaccine’ experimentation, what was the Vatican’s response? Well, the Vatican Bank issued a commemorative coin to promote the “need to be vaccinated”. Here it is:

That coin exquisitely alchemises the root of all evil (money) and the suppression of free will.

What we ought to understand about the Beast, Satan, is that he is the ultimate deceiver. Obvious evil is not deceptive, and is therefore more likely to be rejected. If a diabolical deception awaits us, it will be one in which people marvel at the Beast:

“For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.” – Matthew 24:24

So perhaps the greatest psyop of all is still to come. A diabolically ingenious psyop that convinces the vast majority that the ultimate evil is the ultimate good – that to surrender your conscience and free will is serving the ultimate ‘good’. Spiritual inversion is accelerating, with Christians proving themselves to be as susceptible to it as any other group. The fever that gripped American religious conservativism at the death of Charlie Kirk is mind boggling. A Christian Zionist – a most perverse oxymoron if ever there was one – was virtually beatified by his followers, with a lot of help from the Trump administration.

A big part of me finds it hard to accept that it is possible to ignite a cultural religious transformation in a single generation. But, while change is often said to be glacial in matters of human evolution, we also know that the individual psyche is naturally inclined towards the kind of change that is fast and easy – cosmetic change that doesn’t require a painful overhaul of stubborn psychological traits like identity and values. Herein lies the paradox. The change that is most needed but hardest to effect (i.e. the ‘glacial’ change) is resisted in favour of fast and superficial change.

People would rather join a cult that exalts superficial beauty than question their identity, values and morals. Less than five years ago, the entire Western world was transformed, in a matter of mere weeks, into a zombie army demanding the ostracization, and much worse, of people who were virus or ‘vaccine’ ‘deniers’. ‘Denial’ of received orthodoxy being the greatest heresy that offends the burgeoning modern-day cults. After a brief hiatus, if indeed there ever was one, we have entered the modern-day Inquisitions.

Thus, the majority of the planet, yearning for a cult, did not merely succumb to, but rather begged to be subjected to medical experimentation by a psychopathic ruling class and a Pharma industry that has a criminal record longer than the Old Testament. So, if a religious-cultural movement came along and promised the sort of easy change that humans crave – fast solutions to complex problems, all dressed in the trappings of tradition and culture – I would not be racing to bet against another a mass cult response.

Finally, I have talked about Catholic Social Teaching (CST) in previous pieces, and how it might become the foundation of a religious-social movement. Bear in mind that the core thrust of CST is about learning to prefer the common good to our individual good. As such, it is the ultimate evil presented as the ultimate good, because it entails the surrender of your conscience and free will to serve a ‘good’ defined not by God, but by a worldly ruling class.

The question, as it relates to the Vatican’s involvement in a political movement like Gladio, is: how do we square CST with the Vatican’s unholy alliance with the Anglo-American money cartel?

Firstly, CST should not be mistaken for liberation theology. Liberation theology sought to rectify colonial injustices and, had it not been violently snuffed out (with the help of the Vatican), it may have contributed to more egalitarian societies. CST is, I would argue, the sinister synthesis of the two evils of Capitalism and Communism. As a religious-cultural movement, it therefore fits perfectly into history’s current trajectory. CST urges you to put aside your concerns about individual rights in order to serve a ‘greater common good’. However, that ‘good’ is subject to fluid redefinition to serve the techno-fascist ruling class’s agenda. Will that agenda be lubricated by a religious philosophy skilfully crafted by an army of Vatican-funded priests?

Epilogue

This is a message that many readers will not thank me for conveying. While I entirely agree with it, to soften the blow, I will preface it by pointing out two things: first, it is a message that was conveyed by the one good Pope I wrote about in Part III; and second, it applies to all of us.

There are two reasons why I say it applies to all of us knowing that many reading this don’t consider themselves Christian. First, there is nothing in the New Testament that contradicts sound universal moral conduct. Second, and closely related to the first point, I have befriended people from non-Christian backgrounds who, in my humble opinion, are more Christian than most self-identifying Christians.

Before he became Pope for an eye-blinking 33 days in 1978, Albino Luciani wrote a letter that was published in his diocese magazine. In that letter he quoted two famous Indians, reluctantly concurring with the problematic sentiments they had expressed in relation to the state of Christianity in the West. First he quoted Gandhi who said: “I admire Christ, but not Christians”. Ouch.

Then he quoted Sandhu Singh, expressing the hope that his words would one day no longer be true:

“One day I was sitting on the banks of a river. I took from the water a round stone and I broke it. Inside it was perfectly dry. That stone had been lying in the water for a very long time but the water had not penetrated it. Then I thought that the same thing happened to men in Europe. For centuries they have been surrounded by Christianity but Christianity has not penetrated, does not live within them.”[6]

The collective West, and indeed wherever Christianity is the dominant religion, has not yet learnt that identifying as Christian and being Christian are not the same thing. Successive Popes, apart from Albino Luciani, might have had something to do with hindering that lesson.

It is not a message of hope, but rather one that invites self-reflection – real self-reflection about the convergence of identity and values. That’s never a bad thing.

---

If you liked this article but don’t want to commit to a paid subscription, please consider rewarding my writing using the BuyMeACoffee link below. Thank you!

Buy Me A Coffee

---

[1] Paul L. Willliams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia, New York, Prometheus Books, 2018, Ch 19, pg. 233.

[2] David Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, London, Robinson, 2007, pg. 106.

[3] Ibid., pg. 299.

[4] Ibid., 2018, pg. 300.

[5] David Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, London, Robinson, 2007, pg. 82.

[6] Ibid., pg. 47-8.