Archiving: 'Operation Gladio' by Paul L. Williams (Chapters 6-8)
Kidnappings, coups, and other schemes that were hatched to 'own the left'...
This article is the third installment in our series covering Paul L. Williams’ book ‘Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia’. You can find the first installment here.
Chapter 6: The Rise of Michele Sindona
In 1957, mafia banker Michele Sindona attended a mob gathering in Palermo, where the Sicilian mob gave American intelligence officers an ultimatum: they knew there were a number of rebellious upstart street gangs in the United States, and so the mob told the Americans that “if you do not deal with us, we will deal with them [instead]”. Sindona benefited the most from this ultimatum, as he would later come to control the flow of drug money coming from the streets of America’s inner cities into the Vatican Bank.
After mob kingpin, Vito Genovese, was sent to prison in 1959, Sindona rose up to take his place. Sindona used CIA funds to create a fake holding company in Liechtenstein as a means of transferring the drug money. From this, Sindona purchased his own dodgy bank—the BPF (Banca Privata Finanziara). Sindona would also go on to acquire Banca di Messina, which gave the mob unlimited financial access to Sicily. As the drug trade grew, so did Sindona’s money and influence. As a result of this trade, heroin addiction in NYC would spike sharply, with conservative government estimates putting the rise at 7,000-9,000 new addicts per year.
By 1969, Sindona was one of the most globally important and powerful figures in international finance. Then, in the spring of 1969, Sindona was summoned to the Pope’s office for a private audience. The Pope wanted to raise a serious concern: that the Christian Democrat government was now moving to discard the bill that gave the Vatican tax exemption in Italy. The Pope told Sindona that there was no more of an urgent matter than this one. Sindona responded by proposing a strategy to move Vatican resources and money out of Italy and into the US and tax-free Euro market via his money laundering firms. Pope Paul VI agreed to this, and gave Sindona the nod, even giving him an official papal document of approval (the highest level of personal trust one could possibly receive from a Pope). Sindona proceeded by liquidating the Vatican’s Italian shares to private buyers, and then reinvesting the money into US companies such as Chase Bank, Colgate, Proctor & Gamble, and Standard Oil. Many of these companies just also happened to be under the control of David Rockefeller (who had his own nefarious connections to American intelligence and the ‘deep state’)...
1969 was also an important year for Gladio itself. The momentum needed for the Italian Left was fueled by a reaction to the Vietnam War, the breakdown of traditional Catholic doctrine post-Vatican II, and the creation of the likes of Che Guevara as popular counterculture folk heroes. The CIA now knew that it needed, more than ever, to interfere in order to push Gladio through this turbulent period.
Chapter 7: False Flag Terrorism
It was Henry Kissinger then, that implemented the series of coups and terror attacks needed to cut through the post-1969 tension. Millions upon millions of dollars were made out to P2 members, and to Sindona specifically. The first major attack happened in December 1969, when a bomb went off in Milan’s Piazza Fontana. Seventeen people were killed. Within an hour, three bombs had also exploded in Rome. These acts of terrorism were attributed to ‘left-wing radicals’, including Anarchist rail worker Giuseppe Pinelli (who later “fell” from the fourth-floor window of a police station within hours of his interrogation beginning). Another Anarchist, Pietro Valpreda, was arrested and sentenced to prison. Sixteen years later, Valpreda was given a clear name, after the evidence established that the attack had indeed been conducted by Gladio.
In December 1970, Gladio then launched the failed Borghese Coup—a coup to topple the (left-leaning) Italian government. The planners intended to kidnap the President, Giuseppe Saragat, and to murder Angelo Vicari (head of the police). At the last minute, the coup was cancelled, as it emerged that the Christian Democrats had discovered the plans, and were about to launch a state of martial law. Following this, and over the next few years, there would then be a subsequent string of similar Gladio false flag terror attacks and crimes.
In 1976, Licio Gelli and other P2 members drafted plans for a “democratic rebirth” of Italy. The plans boiled down to an infiltration and takeover of all public and political institutions, including the Communist Party itself. They estimated that they would need $250 million in black money, and the operations would be controlled entirely by P2 Freemasons.
Then in 1978, former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped. Moro’s policy of compromising productively with the communist party was denounced by both the USSR and the USA. But Kissinger was perhaps the most infuriated. Kissinger had warned Moro that he would “pay for it” if he had continued on his current course. The Italian establishment immediately blamed radical leftists for the kidnapping, and Moro would indeed be trialed by the Red Brigades (a militant far-left organization) for “crimes against the revolution”. They demanded that if 16 of the Brigade’s prisoners were not immediately set free, then Moro would be killed. Shortly after, the Brigades killed Moro via gunshots.
Thanks to CIA infiltration of the Red Brigades, the Brigades later started to work closely with the Hyperion Language School (HSL) in Paris, with the Brigades being unaware that the HSL had been essentially opened by the CIA. Fr. Felix Morlion was a Belgian Priest that was affiliated with the HSL, and was planning to open a new branch of the HSL in Rome. During WW2, he had worked closely with the OSS and Bill Donovan by creating an international Catholic intelligence network, and he would later go on to play a key role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Questions quickly arose about Morlion’s potential involvement in the Moro kidnapping and execution. A photo was even snapped of Morlion meeting beforehand with secret police leaders…
But ultimately, Gladio’s role in all of this “tension-cutting” might have gone unnoticed, were it not for the 1980 Bologna Massacre. 84 people were killed in a train station bomb blast, making it the most lethal attack in Italy since WW2. Blame was quickly pinned on the Red Brigades, but it later came to light that the bomb that was used in this attack was both highly expensive and sophisticated—more specifically, it was a TNT device that had been developed for use by the US military.
The blame was then quickly shifted to an organisation called the European National Fascists, and they were then purported to have been trained by the Palestine Liberation Organisation… But too many mistakes were made in this cover-up, and during the investigation, a raid on Gelli’s villa would unearth a list of 962 P2 masons. The list included some of the most important and influential figures in Italian politics and public institutions. The publication of the list in the media then resulted in the collapse of the Italian government, although the list did not shed any further light on the Bologna Massacre... However, the missing link would later be found in Gelli’s daughter’s suitcase at an airport, where two documents outlining the P2 Lodge’s master plans were found, alongside a top-secret US document…
Chapter 8: Gladio: South of the Border
After WW2, Latin America started to concern the CIA, as their politics tended to lean left. In tandem with the Vatican, the CIA launched ‘Operation Condor’, which was the Latin American version of Gladio. Most famously, they successfully launched a coup in Brazil, using graduates of the Brazilian Advanced War College to overthrow the left-wing government.
When Condor was launched in 1969, Argentina was one of the few major Latin American countries that posed no serious threat to the US ideology. The country had (mostly) remained conservative and Catholic. After Juan Peron won the election, Peron knelt at the feet of the P2 Worshipful Master. He was in full cooperation with the Gladio intelligence network and the mob. But thirteen months after Peron won, he died of a heart attack.
Peron’s successor, his wife, Isabel, was not able to resist the militant Guevarist fighters, and the country was plunged into violent terror attacks. This rising violent ideology gave birth to a new philosophy that went one step further than threatening CIA interests: it threatened to deconstruct the Catholic roots of Argentina. To be very brief about it, this philosophy (or theology) was what we now call “liberation theology”. Even Nelson Rockefeller saw this theology as a threat to US interests in Latin America. Priests would go on to form left-wing groups in most major Latin American countries, sending Pope Paul VI to his ‘wits end’. After trying to appease these priest and bishops with a few ‘social justice’ encyclicals, he concluded that he could only assert his Papal supremacy by force. Catholic organisations then needed to start working with President Nixon and the CIA, in order to stamp out this new theological movement. The result would be the Vatican involving itself in the business of drug cartels and political coups, including the murder of Archbishop Romero, a leading figure in liberation theology.
The violence hit almost unbelievable levels following the 1976 military coup in Argentina. Recently declassified documents prove that the CIA and US State Department were, throughout the entire brutal military regime, the coup’s main sponsors. Kissinger was even warned that the coup would lead to bloodshed on a historic level, to which Kissinger simply replied “Yes, but that is in our interest”.
Bishops were also very much involved in this bloodshed. Fr. Jalics and Fr. Yorio, two priests under the jurisdiction of Bishop Bergoglio were arrested by the military regime after being accused of being communists. After five months, the pair were found (alive) half-naked in a field. Bergoglio insisted that he had secured their release, but Fr. Yorio—in a later trial against the military junta—claimed that Bergoglio had handed them over to the infamous ‘death squads’. He also said Bergoglio had him expelled from a Jesuit teaching school, by claiming that Yorio was a communist and a guerilla soldier that stalked women.
Bergoglio was also accused of other crimes. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group dedicated to finding stolen children during the ‘Dirty War’, states that Bergoglio’s Jesuits failed to come to the aid of a family of five that were awaiting execution. Bergoglio had supposedly sat on the case for several months, not acting, and eventually palming it off to a local bishop. One lady, whose family had been executed, said that Bergoglio had been a coward on the subject of the junta kidnapping babies. She claims that Bergoglio knew everything and was not ignorant of the baby stealing. In 2005, one lawyer even filed a lawsuit against Bergoglio, accusing him of being actively involved in the kidnappings of Fr. Jalics and Fr. Yorio. Bergoglio refused to appear in court, invoking his privileges as a Vatican official.
In 2013, Bergoglio ascended to the Papal throne, becoming Pope Francis I…
This concludes our summary of chapters 6,7, & 8, of ‘Operation Gladio’. Subscribe and stay-tuned for more to come.