Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the Cia, and the Mafia

by Paul L. Williams

In addition to his law practice, Allen Dulles was elected in 1927 as the first president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an organization of high-ranking government officials, wealthy industrialists, and prominent bankers. The purpose of the CFR was to engineer a US foreign policy of interventionism in order to “make the world safe for democracy.”

As soon as the ink dried on the Yalta agreement, Dulles transported Gehlen and his top representatives to Fort Hunt, Virginia, where they were wined and dined by Donovan and other US officials. An agreement was reached. Gehlen would return to Germany under US protection to establish the Gehlen Organization, which would receive full funding from US Army G-2 (intelligence unit) resources. The primary purpose of this organization would be the maintenance of the existing stay-behind armies and the recruitment of new guerrilla soldiers from the ranks of Third Reich veterans with staunch anti-Communist credentials.13 These soldiers would no longer be known as werewolves. They were to be known as “gladiators,” and they would be commissioned to ward off Communist invaders in the great theater of postwar Europe. The operation in which they were engaged was to be known as Gladio,

On May 15, 1945, when Borghese was arrested and charged with war crimes, Angleton managed to secure his release into US Army custody. The Black Prince was dressed in an American uniform and transported from Milan to Rome. Angleton needed Borghese and the 10,267 fascists who fought under his command to help establish the stay-behind units that would ward off any Soviet aggression.

a secret army that could manipulate Italian affairs throughout the coming decades.19 To create this government, the US State Department issued a mandate by which the “operational resources” of the Italian police, the Italian military intelligence, and the Italian secret service were placed at the disposal of Angleton and the SCI.

By 1946, when the OSS morphed into the Central Intelligence Group (the precursor of the CIA), hundreds of Gladio units were in place throughout Western Europe.

Few federal officials knew of its existence. The $200 million in original funding came from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations.

Within Kunming, a town within the South China province of Yunnan, Helliwell observed that General Chiang Kai-shek’s, leader of the Kuomin-tang (KMT—the Chinese National Army), sold opium to Chinese addicts in order to raise funds for his army’s planned war against the Communist forces of Mao Zedong.2 Since Helliwell’s task was to provide covert assistance to the KMT, what better help could he provide than steady shipments of opiates for the good general?

Burma’s Shan Plateau would grow from a relatively minor poppy-cultivating area into the largest opium producing region of the world.

Helliwell came up with another brainstorm—a surefire means of gaining covert funding for Gladio and other security operations.9 The new agency, he realized, could obtain cold cash by adopting the same measures as General Chiang. It could supply heroin to the black community in America’s ghettos.

opiates were becoming the rage of the jazz scene in Harlem, and the demand for heroin was increasing day by day among black musicians in New York, where a hit could cost as much as one hundred dollars. Helliwell, dealing with the drug lords of Burma, was keenly aware of this fact.

Dulles was a Princeton graduate and the senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations, and cartels.

Donovan was an Ivy League lawyer and had married Ruth Ramsey, the heiress of one of the richest families in America.

Donovan, Angleton, and Dulles viewed Helliwell’s proposal as answered prayer. Selling smack to the black jazz subculture would provide US intelligence with a steady supply of revenue for Gladio throughout the postwar era. The Truman Administration had set aside no funds for covert, postwar operations in the federal budget. And cold cash, Donovan knew, would become the key weapon of the new agency he remained hell-bent on establishing as soon as he got back to Washington. It alone could provide the means to purchase the services of foreign agents, foreign politicians, and foreign assassins without the approval of any elected official.

Before World War II, America had less than twenty thousand heroin addicts and less than one thousand kilos were produced annually throughout the world.

Earl Brennan, the OSS director in Italy, reached out to Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the Vatican Undersecretary of State who would become Pope Paul VI, for help in locating opponents to the fascist regime in Sicily. Montini suggested that Brennan reach out to Calogero “Don Calo” Vizzini, the capo di tutti capi—“boss of all bosses”—of the Vizzini/Agostino crime family, who had been imprisoned by Mussolini

Luciano had been born less than fifteen miles from Villalba, where his Mafiosi relatives still worked for Don Calo.

At Donovan’s request, Commander Haffenden again appeared at Lucky’s cell with a request for help. Luciano complied by drafting a communiqué that was then airdropped near Don Calo’s farmhouse.29 Two days later, American tanks rolled into Villalba after driving fifty-five miles from the beachhead of General Patton’s Seventh Army in Palermo. Don Calo and his men climbed into the tanks and spent the next six days guiding the division through western Sicily and organizing support among the local populace for the advancing US troops.30 Thanks to the success of Operation Husky (the code name for the Allied invasion of Sicily), Don Calo was appointed Mayor of Villalba.31 As soon as he assumed public office, Don Calo murdered the local police chief, whom he found “too inquisitive.”

The first concern of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency was funding (since it had received no allocation in the federal budget), which would be solved with the implementation of the brilliant idea of Col. Paul E. Helliwell.

Meyer Lansky and Helliwell would work in tandem to handle the financial aspect of the narcotics venture through General Development Corporation, a shell company in Miami.52 Angleton would handle any legal disputes between the mob and the CIA through New York lawyer Mario Brod.53 The two hundred kilos of heroin for the test run would come from Schiaparelli, one of Italy’s most respected pharmaceutical companies.54 The product would be shipped by the Sicilian mob in crates of oranges. Half the oranges in the crates would be made of wax and stuffed with one hundred grams of pure heroin.55 Additional heroin would be packed in cans of sardines, wheels of caciocavallo cheese, and barrels of olive oil.56 The drugs would arrive in Cuba, where the heroin would be cut in laboratories controlled by the Trafficante clan. The drugs would then be shipped to New York for distribution in the jazz clubs of Harlem.

Helliwell’s analysis had been correct. The jazz clubs were the perfect spots to peddle heroin. Soon some of the country’s leading black musicians—Billie Holiday, Theodore “Fats” Navarro, and Charlie Parker—became hopeless junkies, some of whom would die by overdose.

Col. Albert Carone, a New York City policeman, served the new drug network as “a bagman for the CIA,” paying law enforcement officials to “look the other way” when drugs were being distributed in Harlem and other black communities.

In recognition of his service, the cop/bagman became a Grand Knight of the Sovereign Military of Malta, which has been described as “the military arm of the Holy See.”

nothing in 1947 seemed more of a threat to the peace and stability of America and the Western World than the threat of a Communist takeover in Italy.

Of course, the money for the muscle could not be paid to Lucky and the Don Calo clan directly. It had to be channeled 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.

The bank remains a sovereign financial agency within a sovereign state.

The bank resides under the direct jurisdiction of the pope. He owns it; he controls it.1 Swiss guards are stationed to guard the entrance to the bank, and the hermetically sealed bronze doors open only to select members of the Roman Curia—the governing body of the entire Roman Catholic Church.

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 Church to fund its political mission.6 And, according to Moneyval (the anti-money-laundering committee of the Council of Europe), it remains one of the world’s leading laundries for dirty cash under Pope Francis.

In Cuba, Santo Trafficante and his family continued to cut the heroin with sugar before delivering it to distributors in New Orleans, Miami, and New York.

The movement of the product throughout the country was facilitated by Jimmy Hoffa and other leaders of the International Brotherhood of Team-sters working with Mafia-owned trucking companies,

The CIA’s black money for mob muscle was paid out by the Vatican bank from ecclesiastical organizations, including Catholic Action.

Throughout 1948, in Sicily alone, the CIA-backed terror attacks resulted in the killing of on average five people a week.

Monsignor Don Giuseppe Bicchierai, acting upon papal authority, assembled a terror gang charged with the task of beating up Communist candidates,

On Election Day, Don Calo and his men stuffed ballot boxes and bribed voters

The mob’s tactics worked, and the Christian Democrats triumphantly returned to power. In his memoirs, William Colby, who would later become the director of the CIA, wrote that the Communists would have gained 60 percent of the vote without the Agency’s sabotage.

The CIA funds were deposited by members of Don Calo’s crime family in Catholic banks throughout Italy, including Banco Ambrosiano. These banks, thanks to the Lateran Treaty (which established Vatican City as a sovereign state), were safe from scrutiny by the Bank of Italy and Italy’s treasury department.

Pius XII continued to tighten his ties with the CIA into a Gordian knot that no one could unravel. The CDP continued to receive more than $20 million in annual aid from the CIA and, in return, the CIA established a “Vatican desk” under Angleton.34 The Vatican desk reviewed all of the intelligence reports that were sent to the Holy See from papal nuncios (diplomats) who were stationed behind the Iron Curtain.

On February 3, 1947, the Communist-Socialist labor coalition (Confederation Generale du Travail) convened a meeting of the Marseilles dock workers that resulted in the publication of a manifesto demanding all unions launch “the most effective means possible against the war in Vietnam”—a strike. The plans to transform the French port city of Marseilles into the center of the heroin industry came to a screeching halt.2 THE STRIKE BREAKERS To break the strike, Lucky Luciano made contact with Antoine and Barthelemy Guerini, the leaders of the Corsican Mafia, who initiated a series of attacks against the strikers and labor leaders. The attacks, funded by the CIA, continued until 1950, when the Guerinis finally gained complete control of the waterfront.

By 1951, only months after the Corsican and Sicilian Mafias took control of the waterfront, the Guerinis recruited a host of French chemists and opened their first opium refineries.4 The French connection to the Sicilian clan of Don Calo and the American crime family of Lucky Luciano had been established.

The leading opium broker within the Anatolian plains of Turkey was Sami El-Khoury, a slick Syrian opium merchant, who had become the leading supplier of opium paste to the Middle East.

El-Khoury secured the route by paying off Lebanese police and customs agents with Luciano’s cash. From Lebanon, the base was transported to the new laboratories in Marseilles. From the French port, the heroin was shipped on freighters to Cuba under CIA protection.

Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam, and Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who served as his chief advisor. Diem, a devout Roman Catholic, had been instructed by the pope to cooperate with the strategies of the U S government to thwart the gains of Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese.20 The cooperation was deemed so important by the Vatican that Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York formed a pro-Diem lobby in Washington. Through speeches and pamphlets, Spellman presented the people of Vietnam as a terrified throng cowering before the cruel and bloodthirsty Viet Minh—the Vietnamese independence coalition led by Ho Chi Minh—to the God-fearing Diem for salvation. Such tactics raised the ire of British writer Graham Greene, himself a devout Catholic,

the CIA, under Allen Dulles, initiated Operation Mockingbird in 1953. This operation involved recruiting leading journalists and editors to fabricate stories and create smoke screens in order to cast the Agency’s agenda in a positive light.

Entire news organizations eventually became part of Mockingbird, including the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps Howard, Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald Tribune. With over four hundred journalists now involved, along with mainstream news outlets, the Agency could operate without fear of exposure.

The transactions were supervised by Massimo Spada, a senior official at the Vatican Bank. Spada, a Knight of Malta, chaired or served on the boards of the astonishing array of companies owned by the Holy See,

For assistance in managing the billions, Spada turned to tax attorney Michele Sindona, a leading figure in the Sicilian Mafia.

Sindona now formed an integral part of the nexus between the CIA, the mob, and the Vatican, and he would come to play a crucial part in a chain of events that would result in the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter, and widespread financial devastation.

Throughout the 1950s, money for the activities of Catholic Gladio was provided by the CIA, which annually allocated $30 to $50 million to covert operations in Italy. These funds were not only washed by the Vatican but also funneled by the pope to groups and organizations that met with his approval.6 Former CIA agent Victor Marchetti later testified: In the 1950s and the 1960s the CIA gave economic support to many activities promoted by the Catholic Church, from orphanages to missions. Millions of dollars each year were given to a great number of bishops and monsignors. One of them was Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini [who became Pope Paul VI].

In 1924, Freemasonry in Italy was outlawed by Mussolini as politically subversive and the Propaganda Massonica shut its doors and rolled up its ledgers.9 The revitalization of the lodge as Propaganda Due, or P2, met with the full approval of Allen Dulles, the CIA director and a thirty-third degree Mason,

Giordano Gamberini, the Grand Master of Italian Masons and a CIA operative, became known as the “traveling salesman of anti-Communism.”

By 1965, the membership roll of P2 contained the names of many ecclesiastical dignitaries,