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

by Paul L. Williams

Based in Chicago, Continental Illinois was the seventh-largest bank in the country, with billions in assets, including shares in an Opus Dei bank in Barcelona. In 1955, Kennedy became a “conspicuous friend” of the conservative Catholic religious order.15 This friendship resulted in Kennedy’s bank becoming the main channel for the Vatican’s real estate and corporate investments, an arrangement that brought him in close contact to Prince Massimo Spada, the lay delegato of the IOR, and Michele Sindona, Spada’s dutiful assistant. Through this connection, Kennedy emerged as one of Gladio’s key agents, and Continental Illinois came to serve as a major conduit for the flow of covert CIA funds into the newly created BPF. In this way, the Sindona bank served as the principal means of launching the 1967 coup d’état in Greece, a Gladio undertaking spearheaded by a group of right-wing army officers.