Archiving: 'Operation Gladio' by Paul L. Williams (Chapters 1 & 2)
Why did the CIA team up with the Sicilian Mafia to sell heroin in Harlem, and how did the Vatican get involved?...
Editor’s note:
Last week, our IAA librarian gave us a glimpse into some of the strange and diabolical historical developments and connections that he’s been uncovering while perusing through our eclectic book collection here at the Archive, and there was one book in particular which he highlighted, that seemed to be most worthy of a follow-up deep-dive. The following piece will be the first in a series of chapter-by-chapter summaries of Paul L. Williams’ ‘Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia’, outlined by our librarian. The book features 22 chapters in total, and details the stranger-than-fiction entanglement that began as a clandestine plan to fight Communism in Italy and Eastern Europe, and ended in a trail of murders, political coups, and financial scandals that reached all the way up to the Vatican and the highest levels of Italian politics…
Chapter 1: The Stay Behind Units
Allen Dulles, the director of the OSS, came to the conclusion in 1942 that the USA was fighting the “wrong enemy”. Dulles believed that a truce between the USA and Hitler would not only give the Nazis a pathway to focus solely on defeating the Soviet Communists, but that a strong Nazi Germany was crucial for battling off the Bolsheviks. Therefore, Dulles expressed multiple times to William Donovan, the OSS ‘chief’, that they should pursue the peace deal with Hitler. According to Dulles, the Soviets had committed genocides and mass murders that far outweighed anything the Nazis had done (at least according to the knowledge they had at the time).
Dulles went on to establish connections with Nazi high command, and conducted meetings with Reinhard Gehlen (head of the Nazi military intelligence) in Bern. After these meetings, Dulles would inform Donovan and the OSS that Gehlen could be the key contact for securing an anti-Bolshevik peace pact with Hitler. The planning of this task would be called ‘Operation Sunrise’. Stalin would quickly come to learn about these planned talks, and was said to have gone ‘ballistic’, consequently forcing President F.D. Roosevelt to intervene, and tell Stalin that his accusations were ‘vile misrepresentations’ of the reality of the situation.
Following the War, in 1945, Dulles' worst fears regarding the Soviets would begin to materialise. After the meeting of the Big Three at Yalta, parts of Western Europe were handed over to the Soviet Communists. As soon as the ink had dried on the Yalta agreement, Dulles transported Gehlen to Virginia, arranging for him to be returned to Germany with full US protection. The aim of this move was to maintain ‘stay behind’ armies, which would recruit ex-Nazi soldiers with strong anti-Communist credentials. The sole purpose of these soldiers, who would be known as ‘gladiators’, was to fend off potential Communist threats from the Soviet side of the border.
Another OSS official involved in this area of work was James Jesus Angleton, who Williams describes as being one of the ‘strangest spooks’ to have emerged from US intelligence. Angleton was an Anglophile and a staunch Catholic, who bred orchids, wore a black homburg hat, and drank bourbon for breakfast. He was also close friends with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Furthermore, Angleton’s father, who had also worked for the OSS, was closely connected to Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, a member of the ‘Catholic Black Nobility’.
Borghese was the leader of the X MAS Italian naval commando unit. Borghese’s work for the Nazis after the formation of the Solo Republic left thousands hanging by lampposts and flag poles. In May 1945, Borghese was charged with war crimes, but Angleton was able to secure his release to US custody. Angleton, Donovan, and other OSS members, even toyed with the idea of making Borghese King of Italy. But instead, they made Borghese leader of a shadow government with its own secret army that could silently manipulate Italian politics for the decades to follow. Under Borghese and the US, Italy would have their own secret gladiators (‘gladio’), which would be divided into forty main groups, composed of clusters that would specialise in things like propaganda, sabotage, espionage, and guerilla warfare. A ‘stay behind army’ training camp was even set up in Sardinia.
However, with all this going on, a money problem arose. Gladio was a secret operation that required hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars. The $200 million in original funding had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations. But now they were expanding into Italy, and a new stream of money had to be found immediately.
Chapter 2: The Lucky Break: Negroes and Narcotics
Whilst serving in China, an idea came to OSS officer Col. Paul E. Helliwell: a union between US intelligence and organised criminals. He stole the idea from a Chinese General, who sold opium to addicts in order to raise funds for his army. Following the war, to cut a long-story short, Helliwell heard about the need to fund Gladio, and came up with the idea of supplying heroin to the black American ghettos. As immoral as it sounds, the OSS had already had some dealing with opium in Burma and China, so the suggestion was not off the table.
In short time, Dulles, Donovan, and Angleton, would come to view Helliwell’s proposed idea as a godsend. It was perfect for raising their secret funds. Donovan realised that this new scheme would allow him to make use of Charles Luciano and the Sicilian Mafia.
“Lucky” Luciano was close business partners and friends with Meyer Lansky (two characters from Boardwalk Empire, if you’ve seen it). At the end of the prohibition, when Luciano really thrived, he started importing Chinese heroin. Luciano, by 1936, also owned 1200 prostitutes in NYC. In short, Luciano ended up being imprisoned, and Donovan/OSS started to visit him in his cell.
Luciano, through his connections, was able to supply the OSS with successful information to thwart an enemy military movement in Italy. As a result of all this, multiple mafia members ended up being maneuvered into positions of political power in Italy. The ‘ascendancy’ of the Mafia became even clearer when Luciano’s right-hand man, Vito Genovese, was made chief translator for the US Army headquarters in Naples. Thanks to the success of this mafia insurgency into Italian politics, Luciano enjoyed a lot of media hype, with Walter Winchell (a famous radio broadcaster) openly saying that Luciano should receive a Medal of Honor.
Now the Mafia were in control of the Italian ports, the time was now for Helliwell’s plan—a plan that needed Luciano’s network of drug dealers. The plan thus required Genovese to return to the USA, but the issue was that he was a wanted man for murder in the States. However, following his return to the USA, the two key witnesses for the trial were found dead in the weeks leading up to the court trial. All charges against Genovese were then dropped.
In 1945, a meeting was held by the mafia in Havana at the request of US intelligence in order to discuss the plans. Frank Sinatra also made his Havana debut here in honour of Luciano. But many of the Mafia expressed disgust at Luciano’s plans, saying that dealing drugs was beneath them. By the end of the conference, however, most members were convinced of the plans, on the logic that dealing heroin was just giving the “niggers” what they wanted, and who cared what happened to them. The drugs would be run via ports in Italy under the cover of things like sardine tins.
In September 1945, President Truman abolished the OSS and replaced it with the SSU. In 1947, the CIA was created, replacing the SSU. Truman gave Dulles permission to help supervise the creation of the CIA. Again, the main issue was funding, and they would turn once again to Helliwell’s plan to find gold.
In the summer of 1947 then, the loose end between the CIA and the Mafia were tied up by Angleton. Angleton would work as the go-between for disputes between the mob and the CIA, which primarily consisted of paying off police officers and detectives. The Helliwell plan hit Harlem, and with great financial success for both parties.
But the CIA’s attention would soon be turned back to Italy, where the Communist Party looked set to seize power. Post-war Italy looked like it was becoming the first post-War western communist country. If there was to be Communist success in Italy, it would not only threaten the Helliwell plan (though the Communists had made reassuring promises to the Mafia), it would also undermine everything the US and anti-Communist West had stood for. The paranoia over this gave rise to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination. The dirty money that was needed to pay the mafia in Italy and Sicily had to get there from the USA somehow, and this channel was likely to be exposed, with the Communists looking likely to take the wheel. The money could not be paid to Luciano and Don Calo directly… Somehow, it had to be channeled through a financial firm that was immune to US Treasury scrutiny, and there was only one organisation that had such immunity… the Vatican.
This concludes our summary of chapters 1 & 2 of ‘Operation Gladio’. Subscribe and stay-tuned for more to come.