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

by Paul L. Williams

1980 In Turkey the commander of the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla, General Kenan Evren, and the Grey Wolves, Turkey’s Gladio unit, initiated yet another successful military coup to seize control of the government.7 Like Italy, Turkey remained of pivotal concern to Gladio during the Cold War. It guarded one-third of NATO’s total borders with Warsaw Pact countries and maintained the largest armed forces in Europe. Knowing that a Communist takeover of Turkey would be catastrophic, the Gladio forces, at the instigation of the CIA, opened fire on a rally of a million trade union supporters in Taskim Square. The massacre of 1977 resulted in the deaths of thirty-eight demonstrators and the wounding of hundreds more.

Latin America emerged as an area of such nagging concern that the CIA, in tandem with the Vatican, launched Operation Condor as a Latin American version of Gladio.

When Condor was launched in 1969, Argentina—unlike Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay—posed no real problem. The majority of the country remained deeply conservative and devoutly Catholic. Juan Perón had returned from exile to defeat President Héctor Cámbora in the general election. This, for the Church and the CIA, was a happy development. Cambora, during his short term, had restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and had granted amnesty to all political prisoners. The country had fallen into chaos as six hundred social conflicts, strikes, and factory occupations erupted throughout the country. Perón, to no one’s surprise, received a whopping 62 percent of the vote and began his third term as president on October 12, with Isabel, his wife, as vice president. Licio Gelli was a guest of honor at the inauguration. Following the ceremony, Perón knelt at the feet of the P2 Worshipful Master. Italy’s prime minister Andreotti was also in attendance but failed to receive such a gesture of obeisance from the Argentine president.15 The act was more than symbolic. Gelli had mustered substantial support for Perón’s return from the CIA and funneled over $70 million in black funds to Perón’s Civic Front of National Liberation. The day before his return to Buenos Aires, Perón had knelt before Gelli in a secret ceremony to become a member of the P2. The rite was performed within Perón’s villa in the Puerta de Hierro district of Madrid.

But thirteen months after his return to office, Perón died after suffering a series of massive heart attacks. He was succeeded by Isabel, who proved to be incapable of coping with mounting resistance from the Guevarist ERP (Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo— People’s Revolutionary Army)

Throughout 1974, the two left-wing groups launched attacks on business and political leaders throughout the country, killing executives from General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, and raiding military bases for weapons and explosives. By 1975, the guerrillas had conducted ambushes on the police and pitched battles against the army. An estimated ten thousand Argentines were killed in the struggle.

This ideology first reared its hoary head at a conference of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia in 1968, when the bishops, instead of upholding the latest encyclicals from Pope Paul VI, called upon the Vatican in their official proclamation to “defend the rights of the oppressed”

The bishops condemned the Holy See’s alignment with the powerful elite and denounced the oppression of the Latin American people not only by strong-arm dictators but also by the United States and other First World countries.

New York governor Nelson Rockefeller foresaw the danger of the new theology. After his 1969 tour of Latin America on President Nixon’s behalf, he warned the US business community of the anti-imperialist nature of the Medellin document. The Rockefeller Report, which became the basis of Nixon’s Latin American policy, spoke of the need for the emergence of military regimes that would put an end to the movement and warned the Nixon Administration that it had better keep an eye on the Catholic Church south of the border, since it suddenly had become “vulnerable to subversive penetration.”

Pope Paul VI was at his wit’s end. After trying to appease the leftists with a series of social justice encyclicals and pronouncements, he realized that the only way he could reassert his papal authority was by force. Such force, of course, could not be overt. It could only be unleashed by Catholic organizations, including Opus Dei and Catholic Action, working in tandem with the Nixon Administration and the CIA.

Operation Condor, a program intended to eradicate Communist groups and movements throughout South America, got underway in the early 1970s, when Opus Dei elicited support from Chilean bishops for the overthrow of the democratically elected government of president Salvador Allende. The Catholic group began to work closely with CIA-funded organizations such as the Fatherland and Liberty, which subsequently became the dreaded Chilean secret police. In 1971, the CIA began shelling out millions to the Chilean Institute for General Studies (IGS), an Opus Dei think tank,

After the coup, a number of IGS technocrats became cabinet members and advisors to the ruling military junta,

Following Pinochet’s arrest, Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Angelo Sodano, on behalf of the Holy Father, sent a letter to the British government demanding the general’s release.27 When General Pinochet finally went on trial in 2005, a Chilean judge asked him about his reign of terror, which had resulted in the murder of over four thousand Chileans, the torture of over fifty thousand, and the “disappearance” of hundreds of thousands. The general piously answered, “I suffer for these losses, but God does the deeds; He will pardon me if I exceeded in some, which I don’t think I did.”

In 1975, the Bolivian Interior Ministry—a publicly acknowledged subsidiary of the CIA—drew up a master plan with the help of Vatican officials for the elimination of liberation theology. Dubbed the “Banzer Plan”—after Hugo Banzer Suárez, Bolivia’s right-wing dictator, who fancied himself the “defender of Christian civilization,” the scheme was adopted by ten Latin American governments.29 Banzer had come to power in Bolivia as the result of a three-day coup in August 1971 that left 110 people dead and 600 wounded. The coup, as recently declassified US State Department documents show, was funded by the CIA as part of Operation Condor.30 In order to mount the master plan, Banzer relied on Klaus Barbie, who recruited a mercenary army of neofascist terrorists, including Stefano delle Chiaie.

The first shell company established by the Vatican for this purpose was the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in the Bahamas. Cisalpine had been set up by Sindona, Roberto Calvi, and Archbishop Marcinkus through Banco Ambrosiano Holding, a Luxembourg company under the Holy See’s control. By the time Operation Condor got underway, Cisalpine was receiving regular deposits of millions in cash from Pablo Escobar and other Latin American drug chieftains. Cisalpine functioned solely as a laundry for black money. On any given day, throughout the 1970s, the shell company held $75 million in cash deposits.

The CIA also funded anti-Marxist religious groups that engaged in a wide range of covert operations, from bombing churches to overthrowing constitutionally elected governments. The plan gave rise to a series of clerical assassinations, culminating in the murder of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, a leading proponent of liberation theology.

But no Latin American country, not even Pinochet’s Chile, could equal the levels of violence that followed the military coup of March 24, 1976, in Argentina. Indeed, the only regime to create a state of fear approximating that of Argentina was Hitler’s Germany.37 (There were other parallels to Nazism, including a government-sponsored hate campaign against the country’s four hundred thousand Jews.) As many as thirty thousand political prisoners (including students, union organizers, journalists, and even pregnant women) were killed or disappeared during the 1976–1983 “Dirty War,” which was fully endorsed by the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.38 Political killings took place on the average of seven a day in 1977.

Recently declassified National Security documents show that the CIA and the US State Department remained primary sponsors of the military junta, which was led by General Jorge Videla. On February 16, 1976, six weeks before the coup, Robert Hill, the US ambassador to Argentina, reported to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the plans for the coup were underway and that a public relations campaign had been mounted that would cast the new military regime in a positive light.

On March 25, 1979, two days after the coup, William Rogers, assistant secretary for Latin America, advised Kissinger that the military takeover of Argentina would result in “a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood.” To this warning, Kissinger responded, “Yes, but that is in our interest.”41 On March 30, 1976, Ambassador Hill sent a seven-page assessment of the new regime to Kissinger. In the report, Hill wrote, “This is probably the best executed and most civilized coup in Argentine history.” One week later, US Congress approved a request from the Ford Administration, written by Kissinger, to provide $50 million in aid to the new military regime.

On the eve of the coup, General Jorge Videla and other plotters received the blessing of the Archbishop of Paraná, Adolfo Tortolo. The day of the takeover itself, the military leaders had a lengthy meeting with the leaders of the bishop’s conference.

General Videla, who is currently serving a life sentence for his part in the Dirty War, told reporters that he had conferred with Cardinal Raúl Francisco Primatesta, the leading Argentine cleric, about the regime’s policy of eradicating left-wing activists. He further insisted that he maintained ongoing conversations with Pio Laghi, the papal nuncio, and the leading bishops from Argentina’s Episcopal Conference. These dignitaries, he insisted, advised him of the manner in which the junta should deal with all dissidents, including clerics who advocated liberation theology.

Fr. Jalics and Fr. Yorio—the two Jesuit priests—were released five months after captivity. They were found half-naked in a field outside Buenos Aires.

Fr. Yorio, at the 1985 trial of the leaders of the junta, said that Bergoglio had handed them over to the death squad: “I am sure that he himself [Fr. Bergoglio] gave over the list with our names to the navy.”53 He further refuted the claim that Bergoglio had saved the lives of the priests, saying, “I do not have any reason to think he did anything for our release, but much to the contrary.”

[Bergoglio] did not keep his promise [to protect the priests], but, on the contrary, he presented a false denunciation to the military.”

Journalist Horacio Verbitsky recently uncovered a military document from 1976 in the archives of Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that appears to provide proof that Fr. Bergoglio provided damning testimony about the two priests in his charge to the junta.

But other criminal allegations have been directed against Bergoglio. The Grandmothers of the Plaza of Mayo, a human rights group established to locate children stolen during the Dirty War,” states that the Jesuit’s provincial general failed to assist a family of five, who were awaiting execution by the death squad. One member of the family, Elena de la Cuadra, was a pregnant young woman. The five had appealed to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus at the Vatican. The Superior General turned the matter over to Bergoglio, who remained the provincial general of the order in Argentina. Bergoglio, in turn, sat on the case for several months, only to pass it off to a local Catholic bishop. The bishop reportedly returned to Bergoglio with a letter from the junta stating the four members of the family had been killed but the young woman had been kept alive long enough to deliver her baby.58 No one in the junta apparently wanted to be accused of abortion. The baby was given to a prominent family and could not be returned to its maternal grandmother or any other blood relative.59 Fr. Bergoglio later claimed that he had no knowledge of stolen babies, of which there were hundreds, if not thousands, until the collapse of the regime. He said that he did what he could but had little influence “to save people from the regime.”

On March 13, 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio ascended to the throne of St. Peter as Pope Francis I. The nagging questions about his background may never receive a satisfactory answer. Nor will concerns that the CIA manipulated the election as it had in the past with Juan Perón.

mounting evidence shows that the Agency often acted without any input from the executive or legislative branches of the government.

the Senate established the Church Committee in 1974 to probe into the activities of the CIA. In its final report, the committee upheld the following: The overwhelming number of excesses continuing over a prolonged period of time were due in large measure to the fact that the system of checks and balances—created in our Constitution to limit abuse of Governmental power—was seldom applied to the intelligence community. Guidance and regulation from outside the intelligence agencies—where it has been imposed at all—has been vague. Presidents and other senior Executive officials, particularly the Attorneys General, have virtually abdicated their Constitutional responsibility to oversee and set standards for intelligence activity.

On the other hand, the record reveals instances when intelligence agencies have concealed improper activities from their superiors in the Executive branch and from the Congress, or have elected to disclose only the less questionable aspects of their activities. There has been, in short, a clear and sustained failure by those responsible to control the intelligence community and to ensure its accountability.

Ignoring the recommendations of the Church Committee and the stipulations of the Foreign Assistance Act, President Jimmy Carter, during the Iranian hostage crisis, encouraged the CIA not to inform Congress of its undertakings in Tehran.5 The Agency needed no encouragement. From the time of its creation, it had opted not to inform any elected official of the full scale of its undertakings, including Gladio, let alone the source of its funding.

If the situation was being manipulated by the CFR, the puppeteers most probably were the elite group within the organization who formed the Trilateral Commission in 1973. David Rockefeller became the chairman of the new commission, which openly sought to create a new world order controlled by multinational corporations and banks. During Operation Condor, Rockefeller traveled throughout South America, telling the newly installed dictators how to run their governments.24 The effects of his visits south of the border were crystallized in Chile, where in 1976 the military regime under General Augusto Pinochet ignored international condemnation and the congressional cut-off of American aid (due to its terrorist activities), thanks to $927 million in loans from Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Morgan Guaranty Trust, and other US banks. The Trilateral Commission, in effect, had made American bankers a higher authority than the elected representatives of the American people.

Shortly after the stroke of midnight on October 4, 1974, Licio Gelli made a call to Sindona, who was staying at a chalet in Switzerland, to inform him that the Italian government was preparing two warrants for his arrest: one for a false 1971 balance sheet and the other for filing a fraudulent statement of bankruptcy. “Leave Switzerland before they notify Interpol,” Gelli said. “Get out of there so that they can’t extradite you. If you don’t, our enemies will torture you. They may even kill you…. It is very dangerous, Michele. Things have changed.”35 Things, indeed, had changed. Throughout Europe, prominent bankers had lost a fortune, thanks to Sindona’s financial shenanigans, and were now demanding the arrest of “the pope’s banker.” Sindona heeded Gelli’s advice. He packed his bags and headed back to New York, where he could remain under the protection of the Mafia and the CIA within his luxurious suite in the discreetly elegant Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue.

As Italian investigators uncovered the Vatican’s ties to Banca Privata, Pope Paul VI became an object of scorn and derision. Stories appeared in the press claiming the Holy Father had lost up to $1 billion because of his clandestine deals with Sindona.

The trial date for Sindona was set for September 10. But St. Peter’s banker was not terribly worried. He believed he would be protected by the US intelligence officials he had served so long and so well. After all, his only crime was to make the world safe for democracy by “opening the floodgates of black funds.”

Sindona’s dream of an independent Sicily was shared by the CIA not only because of its strategic location for US military bases but also because of the island’s pivotal importance to the narcotics industry. By 1970, the Mafia had established hundreds of laboratories within Sicily for the refinement of heroin. One was an orange-roofed stucco villa on the Via Messina Marina; another was a decrepit storefront near Brancaccio.1 The capos no longer needed the services of the Corsicans. They had established their own connections to the drug lords of Southeast Asia and had obtained the services of talented French scientists.2 To maintain their monopoly on the trade, the Sicilian mob worked with the Nixon administration in launching the so-called war on drugs. The war resulted in raids by Interpol on Corsican laboratories throughout the French Riviera, eradicating the only source of competition. Business was booming. By 1971, there were more than 500,000 heroin addicts in the United States, producing a cash flow of $12 billion.

So much opium was flowing into Saigon that 30 percent of the American servicemen in Vietnam became heroin addicts.5 Some of this same heroin was smuggled into the United States in body bags containing dead soldiers. When DEA agent Michael Levine attempted to bust this operation, he was warned off by his superiors, since such action could result in the exposure of the supply line from Long Tieng.

Castle Bank & Trust was joined at the hip to Mercantile Bank and Trust, another CIA operation that was set up in the Bahamas by Helliwell. Castle owned a large block of stock in Mercantile, and vice versa,

In 1976, Mercantile was closed by the Bahamian Government after investors discovered that the bank’s holdings were worthless. This came as a surprise to the shareholders since Price Waterhouse, the prestigious accounting firm, had certified a few months before the collapse that Mercantile possessed $25.1 billion in assets.

Investigators obtained evidence that the source of much of the money deposited in the bank by underworld figures was the heroin trade in Southeast Asia. Such evidence led to a grand jury investigation. But after the jury was assembled, the investigation was called off. The CIA had issued a warning to the US Justice Department that the pursuit of criminal proceedings against the Castle Bank would endanger “national security.”

William Colby served as legal consul. After organizing the Gladio unit in Scandinavia,27 he was dispatched by the Agency to Rome, where he worked with the Vatican in thwarting the growth of the Italian Communist Party.28 His budget for black ops in Italy was $25 million a year.

He once famously remarked that the global intelligence services maintained by the Vatican left the CIA in the shade.

As the commander of the CIA station in Saigon, Colby ran intelligence operations during the Vietnam War, including Operation Phoenix, a Stalin-like program that resulted in the assassination of an estimated forty thousand South Vietnamese civilians who were suspected of collaborating with the Viet Cong. From September 1973 to January 1976, he served as the director of the CIA. He was removed from this position by President Ford after revelations of domestic spying by the Agency captured national headlines.

Throughout his career, Colby remained loyal to the Vatican. Like so many of his fellow spooks, he was a member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) and held clandestine meetings with fellow knight Gelli.

Colby met with a mysterious end. Late one stormy night in May 1996, he stepped away from a half-eaten supper of clams and white wine at his riverside home in Rock Point, Maryland, apparently gripped by a sudden desire to go fishing minus his usual life jacket. Despite continuous sweeps, it took a week for divers to find his body, which remained a few feet from the empty skiff.

the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Once the major gateway to the world market for Laotian heroin laboratories, Saigon now became a dead end for Southeast Asia’s drug traffic, thanks to the antidrug policies of the Viet Cong.

Southeast Asia could no longer remain the main source of heroin revenue for Gladio. New poppy fields had to be planted in countries that possessed the proper climate and terrain—cool plateaus above five hundred feet.

Such intensive work required not only a slave labor force but a strong-arm government that could benefit from the production of narcotics. Before the outbreak of the Vietnam War, Turkey was an important source of opium in Europe and the United States. But in 1967 the Turkish government announced its plans to abolish opium production. Within a matter of months, the number of Turkish provinces producing poppies declined from twenty-one to four. The total ban was imposed in 1972.40 The elite CIA and US State Department officials in charge of Operation Gladio were at their wits’ end. The threat of communism had not been eradicated. The world was still not safe for democracy.

the source of funding for the creation of the New World Order was in jeopardy.

Soon after Pope Paul suffered his first heart attack, the Agency arranged for Cardinal John Cody, the Archbishop of Chicago, to travel to Poland for a meeting with Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the Archbishop of Krakow, who had attracted the attention of the US intelligence community with his strong stance against Communism and his openness to the strategy of Operation Gladio.6 Cody, by his own admission, was a CIA operative who had served the Agency since the time of its establishment.

During the 1970s, Cody diverted millions of dollars via Kennedy’s Chicago bank to Marcinkus at the IOR. Marcinkus, in turn, would channel the money to cardinals in Poland, including Wojtyła.