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

by Paul L. Williams

He had survived by a miracle.

By the end of the day, Luciano Infelisi, the magistrate who had been assigned to the investigation, concluded: “There are documented proofs that Mehmet Ali Ağca did not act alone.” The proof, in part, consisted of the variety of casings found in the vicinity. Such evidence did not appear in court, neither did the investigating magistrate. Infelisi, who came to know too much, was quickly removed from the case and assigned other duties.29

During the trial, Sister Letizia, a Franciscan nun from Genoa, identified Ağca as the would-be killer and stated her belief that he acted alone. But the nun’s testimony was undermined by a photograph that had been taken by an American tourist. The photo showed a man running away from the scene with a pistol in his hand.

Neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney made note of the sighting of two unlikely figures at the scene of the crime: former CIA agents Theodore Shackley and Tom Clines. The presence of such prominent spooks in St. Peter’s Square at that particular time and at that particular hour remains unexplained.

Ağca was sentenced to life in prison with one year of solitary confinement. Despite this sentence, the prisoner soon received an ongoing stream of surprising visitors, including Francesco Pazienza, General Santovito, Fr. Morlion, members of the Camorra (including fellow prisoner Raffaelo Cutolo), agents from the CIA, and Monsignor Marcello Morgante, who represented Archbishop Marcinkus of the IOR.

During his daily visits, Pazienza, with Cutolo at his side, showed Ağca photographs of Antonov and several Bulgarians they wished to implicate in the assassination attempt.

By the fall of 1981, Ağca was singing a new song to Italian prosecutors—he had acted in service to the KGB; the assassination team had included an accountant and a military attaché from the Bulgarian Embassy in Rome; and the plans were drafted in the Rome apartment of Sergei Antonov.36 Antonov was arrested and subjected to daily and nightly interrogations by the Italian police. He proclaimed his innocence and denied any ties to the KGB or the CSS. The grilling continued with injections of psychotropic drugs. Antonov, although disoriented, continued to insist that he played no part in the assassination attempt. He was kept in prison for three years. By the time of his release he was psychologically damaged and physically disabled.

On August 1, 2007, he was found dead in a barren apartment in Sofia.

Despite these discrepancies, the Bulgarian thesis might have remained credible save for the work of Uğur Mumcu, one of Turkey’s leading journalists.

Mumcu, working with the Turkish police, established Ağca’s ties to the Grey Wolves and right-wing terrorists. He realized that the would-be assassin had performed executions, including the murder of İpekçi, with Abdullah Çatlı and Oral Çelik. What’s more, he was able to identify Çelik as the gunman who was running from St. Peter’s Square with pistol in hand.43 The Turkish journalist made more discoveries, including the ties of Ağca, the Grey Wolves, and the babas to Stibam International and the CIA. He pinpointed Henri Arsan as a key figure in the massive smuggling operation and the Hotel Vitosha as the center of mob gatherings. He also established that Sergei Ivanov Antonov was neither an agent nor double agent. He was simply a dupe.44 Uğur Mumcu would pay for making these revelations. He was killed when a car bomb exploded outside his home on January 24, 1993. No arrests were made. When Mumcu launched his probe into the attack on John Paul II, Paul Henze tried to convince him that the would-be assassins were agents of the Soviet Union. The reporter refused to follow the information trail provided by the CIA station chief, opting instead to investigate the ties between Ağca and the babas. Henze advised him to abandon the probe, reportedly saying, “If you do not, you might find a nice surprise in store.”

Six months before the attempted assassination of John Paul II, Italian judge Carlo Palermo launched an investigation into the smuggling of heroin within northern Italy.

Palermo became aware that the heroin was arriving in police cars that were provided by Karah Mehmet Ali, an agent of the Turkish Mafia. The leading importer of the smack was Karl Kofler, a key figure in a kidnapping ring.

In January 1981, Kofler was taken into custody and began to provide details about the Balkan route, the babas, the Sicilian Men of Honor, and Stibam International, which had become the hub of the drug trade. He said that Huseyn Cil, one of the leading babas, was responsible for transporting the heroin to the United States on ships owned by Bekir Çelenk. He spoke of the arms from the NATO bases that were being supplied in exchange for the drugs. The weapons, Kofler testified, included tanks, helicopter gun-ships, aircraft, and three freighters.2 On March 7, 1981, Kofler was found murdered in his cell within a prison in Trento. He had been placed in solitary confinement and was under twenty-four hour surveillance. Kofler’s throat had been slit and his heart pierced by a very fine needle. No one was ever charged with the crime.

Making inquiries to the CIA, Palermo was told that Arsan should not be taken into custody, since he worked undercover for the US Drug Enforcement Administration.5 The magistrate opted to ignore this disinformation and ordered a raid on Stibam’s headquarters in Milan on November 23, 1982. The raid resulted in the arrest of Arsan and two hundred of his leading accomplices in arms trafficking:

Based on the testimony of the suspects in custody, Palermo issued an arrest warrant for General Santovito, the head of SISMI. Santovito was not only the key figure in protecting the Stibam pipeline, but also a principal player in the strategy of tension and the attempted murder of the pope. At the direction of Licio Gelli and his CIA overlords, the SISMI general had planted false leads in the Bologna bombing case and had washed away vital evidence from St. Peter’s Square on the day of the shooting.13 Santo-vito appeared in court, posted bail, and fled to the United States. Coaxed by the CIA to return and face charges, the general returned to Italy, no doubt believing that no harm could befall him since he was a steadfast military official who had devoted his life to the fight against Communism. Santovito was placed in a holding cell, where he was found dead under mysterious circumstances.14 He had dropped dead immediately before his scheduled interrogation by Italian detectives. No autopsy was conducted. In 1983, the same strange jailhouse fate befell Henri Arsan. The Stibam executive was discovered on the floor of his cell in the prison of San Vittore. His eyes were bulging from their sockets, his lips bright purple, and his skin was an ashen shade of grey. No autopsy was conducted. His jailors merely announced that he had died of a heart attack.

After the mysterious deaths of Arsan and Santovito, Palermo relocated to Sicily in order to continue his probe into the relationship of the Sicilian Mafia to the arms for drugs network. Shortly after opening his office within the House of Justice in Trapani, a car loaded with TNT exploded along the side of the highway through Pizzolungo. It was set to detonate just as the judge passed by, traveling from his house in Bonagia to Trapani in an armored Fiat 132. The explosion toppled the car, severely injuring Palermo and several of his bodyguards. The blast also blew apart a Volkswagen Sirocco, killing Barbara Rizzo Asta, 30, and her twin sons. In the wake of this incident, Palermo resigned from the judiciary.

After the raid on Stibam, the CIA created new shipping companies to perpetuate the drugs-for-arms trade.

Heroin had become a $400 billion business, with two hundred million users throughout the world.23 The CIA’s share of this business was used to finance the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the guerrilla forces in Angola, the Contras in Nicaragua, the puppet regimes in South America, and the death squads in El Salvador.24 Paul E. Helliwell’s brainstorm had produced an intelligence agency with seemingly limitless funds for seemingly endless operations.

The increased flow of heroin impacted all regions of the world, including Pakistan. Before the CIA program, there were fewer than five thousand heroin users in Pakistan. At the end of the Soviet-Afghanistan war, there were 1.6 million heroin addicts.28

Arthur Hartmann, another director of BCCI, was an old hat in the spy game, having worked for decades with British and Saudi intelligence. Hartmann also served as the president of the Rothschild Bank of Zurich. In June 1982, Hartmann’s bank in Zurich received a morning delivery from BCCI—a suitcase stuffed with $21 million in cash. The money was to be used for the murder of Roberto Calvi.

Seven days after John Paul II was shot, Calvi was arrested for the illegal transfer of funds out of the country and locked up in Lodi prison, twenty minutes south of Milan. As soon as this happened, Calvi’s family contacted Archbishop Marcinkus to seek his help in springing the banker from his cell.

Prison was the worst experience of Calvi’s life. Painfully introverted, he was obsessive in his behavior and fastidious in his personal care. His cellmates passed their time playing cards and listening to rock and roll on the radio. Calvi could neither sleep nor use the toilet in full view of the others. A visitor found him “bloated” and “completely submissive,” meekly obeying the taunting prison guards, and at the brink of physical and mental exhaustion.7 On July 3, when questioned by Milanese magistrates, Calvi broke into tears. “I am just the lowest of the low,” he sobbed. “I am just a dog who serves others.” The magistrates asked, “Then who commands you? Who is the proprietary of the bank?” Collecting himself, Calvi said, “I can’t tell you anymore.”

On July 29, Calvi was sentenced to four years imprisonment and a fine of sixteen billion lire. His lawyer filed an appeal and he was freed on bail. Within a week, he returned to his position as Ambrosiano’s chairman.

In the letter dated June 5, 1982, he wrote, “I have thought a lot, Holiness, and have concluded that you are my last hope…. I

Writing such a letter to the Vatican at this point would not result in Calvi’s living in peace and only produced increased concern that the banker was becoming unhinged and might attempt to make disclosures that would place the CIA’s major covert operation in certain jeopardy. This concern became intensified as Calvi began to pack away documents in his black leather briefcase and to confide in friends, including Prime Minister Andreotti,

Calvi, when he was making these remarks, was not aware that he was being taped. A few days before his departure from Milan, Calvi again complained to Carboni about the Vatican’s refusal to pay its debts. “The Vatican,” he said, “should honor its commitments by selling the wealth controlled by the IOR. It is an enormous patrimony. I estimate it to be $10 billion.

A new warrant was issued for Calvi’s arrest. But the cause of so much turmoil was nowhere to be found. The previous week, Calvi had made his escape from Milan. He was now one of the world’s most wanted fugitives. The day after he vanished, Graziella Corrocher, the banker’s fiftyfive-year-old personal secretary, fell or was hurled from the fifth floor of Ambrosiano. The body landed with a thump on the ramp leading to the bank’s underground garage. No arrests were made and the cause of her death remains undetermined.

On June 17, the body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging from an orange noose under Blackfriars Bridge in London, his feet dangling in the muddy waters of the Thames. He was wearing a lightweight gray suit, an expensive Patek Phillipe watch remained on his wrist, and $20,000 was stuffed in his wallet.

After the publication of the P2 list on March 17, 1981, Licio Gelli was forced to flee the country. News of the generals, admirals, parliamentarians, Italian cabinet members, industrialists, police officers, secret service officials, and ecclesiastical dignitaries who belonged to P2 had been published before, most notably by Mino Pecorelli in his newsletter Osservatore Politico. Many mainstream reporters had dismissed such stories as scabrous examples of yellow journalism. For this reason, the discovery of the P2 list at Gelli’s villa jolted the Italian press into an awareness of the reality of the sinister lodge and its intent to gain control of the government. The discoveries by the carabinieri became headline news throughout Italy and central Europe. The fears of the CIA came to full fruition. John Paul II’s refusal to shore up the losses of the Vatican’s shell companies had resulted in the exposure of P2, the raid on Stibam, and the collapse of Arnaldo Forlani’s Christian Democratic government.12 This exposure prompted General Alberto Dalla Chiesa of the carabinieri to come to the realization that the Red Brigades were a puppet organization of right-wing militants, that these militants were being manipulated by P2, and that P2 fell under the command of SISMI. He also uncovered evidence that the funding for P2 and its strategy of tension was coming from a heroin pipeline that had been established between Sicily and the United States, along with a letter from Aldo Moro t...

The Italian government was left with no option save to mount a criminal investigation to determine whether the Holy See had been the culprit in a shell game that had caused the financial ruin of thousands of families throughout Italy. Documents were unearthed in the records of the Banca del Gottardo in Switzerland that the Vatican, indeed, had set up and controlled the dummy corporations to plunder the assets of the Milan bank. One, dated November 21, 1974, and signed by Vatican officials, was a request for the Swiss bank to open accounts on behalf of its newly created company: United Trading Corporation of Panama.19 Other documents found within other banks revealed more acts of fraud by the Holy See.

Still the Pope refused to acknowledge the Vatican’s ownership of the companies, for fear such an admission would reveal that the Bride of Christ was no longer pure and without blemish but had engaged in wanton acts of covetousness and greed. The impasse would have to be addressed by another decisive act.

On June 22, 1983, Emanuela Orlandi, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee, disappeared without a trace while on her way to her home in Vatican City from a music lesson at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, a building attached to the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in the heart of Rome.

Critical insight into the possible fate of Emanuela came from Sabrina Minardi, the former lover of De Pedis and high-class call girl. Emanuela, she testified, had been kidnapped by De Pedis, who held her at an apartment on the coastal town of Torvaianica, not far from Rome. Archbishop Marcinkus, Ms. Minardi said, visited Emanuela several times while the school girl remained in captivity. The victim, she continued, was eventually killed and chopped into pieces, and the remains were cast into a cement mixer.36 In a 2010 interview with Gianluca Di Feo of L’Espresso, Ms. Minardi said that she had ongoing sexual relations with Roberto Calvi and Archbishop Marcinkus. She claimed that she had received a villa in Monte Carlo from Calvi, while Marcinkus provided a Vatican position for one of her relatives. Ms. Minardi added that she had provided Marcinkus with a steady stream of prostitutes and had delivered to him large sums of cash from De Pedis in a Louis Vuitton bag. “I left him the money,” she said, “but I kept the bag.”37

most investigators, including Judge Parisi, had come to the conclusion that the kidnapping case revolved around sex and the problem of pedophilia that was mounting within the Holy See. If the matter was simply financial, Archbishop Marcinkus would have provided the restitution. If the matter was political, the resolution would have been made by Cardinal Casaroli, the Secretary of State. But the extortion appeared to revolve around a considerably more sinister episode. Rumors had been rampant about Archbishop Marcinkus’s taste for young girls and for sex parties within his private apartments.44 A scenario was gradually compiled that served to explain the kidnapping, the Vatican’s attempts at obstruction, and Cardinal Poletti’s participation in the payoff. Emanuela, by this account, had been sexually molested by Marcinkus. When the Banda received news of the incident, they kidnapped the girl in order to blackmail the IOR head for the money they had lost through Ambrosiano. Exposure of the statutory rape would have been devastating in the wake of the Sindona episode, the P2 headlines, the collapse of the Vatican’s shell companies, and the strange death of Roberto Calvi. Emanuela represented a $200 million baby. Marcinkus, after personally verifying that the girl was in the Banda’s custody, worked through P2 and Cardinal Poletti—not to secure Emanuela’s immediate release but to ensure her perpetual silence.

On May 24, 1984, a “good will payment” of $250 million was made by the Vatican to Ambrosiano creditors at the headquarters of the European Trade Association in Geneva.1 The money for the reparation came from a mysterious deposit made in the IOR by Secretary of State Casaroli in the amount of $406 million.2 The source of the cash was Opus Dei (“Work of God”), a deeply conservative Catholic organization that had amassed an estimated $3 billion in assets.

Because Opus Dei was vehemently anticommunist, in 1971 the CIA began to funnel millions into its coffers to thwart the growth of liberation theology in Latin America.

The Spatolas, the prosecutors came to realize, were one of the four Mafia families forming a transatlantic colossus. The Cherry Hill Gambinos were another. This explained the participation of John and Rosario Gambino in the staged abduction. The Inzerillos, the closest of all Sicilian clans to Stefano Bontade, were the third. Bontade was a member of P2 and his brother-in-law Giacomo Vitale (another Freemason) had arranged Sindona’s travel. The fourth were the Di Maggios of Palermo and southern New Jersey.

Stefano Bontade was an integral member of the clan. Through his ties with P2, the extended family gained the protection of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and, in turn, the CIA.

the police moved in on the Gambinos. In March 1980, John and Rosario were arrested in their restaurant, Valentino’s, for alleged participation in an international heroin-smuggling operation. They were acquitted of those charges—but more than sixty members of the Sicilian Mafia were eventually convicted in the case.

The bust produced profound repercussions in Sicily. A substantial amount of the confiscated heroin belonged to the Corleonesi, the crime family of Calogero Vizzini (“Don Calo”), which was now headed by Luciano Leggio and Salvatore “Toto” Riina. The two capos demanded compensation for their loss,

What followed was a bloodbath.

To top it off, the multibillion dollar Gambino-Inzerillo-Spatola holdings were seized by the state.

On January 25, 1982, Sindona was indicted in Palermo, Sicily, along with seventy-five members of the Gambino, Inzerillo, and Spatola crime families.

In the fall of 1982, after the raid on Gelli’s villa and the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, Sindona finally broke and began to prattle from his cell at Otisville.

Sindona went on to talk not only about the Vatican’s subversive attempts to gain control of Ambrosiano but also about his involvement in P2 and the secret society’s support for right-wing guerrilla units.

Alarms were sounded. The CIA dispatched Carlo Rocchi, one of its Italian agents, to monitor Sindona’s behavior within the federal prison. Rocchi gained the Mafia financier’s trust by presenting him with an affidavit from the Department of Justice. The affidavit said that Rocchi was a “reliable person” and that President Reagan was prepared to grant Sindona a “full pardon.”30 Sindona could not believe that such an affidavit from a “reliable” government official would be bogus. He took the bait and refrained from making further statements until September 24, 1984, when the US Justice Department issued the order for his extradition to Milan. Upon hearing the news, Sindona went ballistic. He said, “If I finally get there, if no one does me in first—and I’ve already heard talk of giving me a poisoned cup of coffee—I’ll make my trial into a real circus. I’ll tell everything.”

On the Ides of March 1985, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The prosecutor, Guido Viola, calling Sindona “one of the most dangerous criminals in judicial history,” had asked for fifteen years.39 Sindona’s trial for the murder of Ambrosoli began on June 4, 1985. It would drag on for nine months,

In a letter to Rocchi dated February 5, 1986, Sindona wrote, “I want to talk about scandalous matters that constitute grave moral and penal irregularities about which I have remained silent until now to maintain the professional reserve to whom I have always wished to be faithful.”40 Rocchi responded by writing, “Let the great battle against you-know-who begin and let me have all the necessary documents. Take care not to forget anything, neither the national aspects nor the USA ones.”41 Sindona, still unaware that Rocchi was a CIA agent, surrendered all of his notes and documents.

On March 18, 1986, Mercator Senesis Romanam Curiam (“the leading banker of the Roman Curia) was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

On March 20, Sindona rose from his cot to take breakfast. As always, his plastic plate and pressed foam coffee cup were sealed. It was eight-thirty. He carried the coffee cup with him through the door that led to the toilet. Minutes later, the Mafia don emerged from the bathroom, his shirt covered with vomit, his face convulsed with horror. “Mi hanno avvelenato,” he screamed. “They have poisoned me!”45 These were his last words. Sindona was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was found to be in an irreversible coma. A lethal dosage of potassium cyanide was detected in his blood. That afternoon a priest administered extreme unction. Forty-eight hours later, Michele Sindona—the man known as “St. Peter’s banker”—was dead.46 His death was only to be expected. The Gladio agents possessed the keys to every prison. They could manage the escape of Ağca from a cell in Turkey and Gelli from a jail in Switzerland. They could arrange the jail-house deaths of Henri Arsan of Stibam and General Santovito of SISMI. And they could poison the coffee of a celebrated Mafiosi who remained in solitary confinement within a maximum-security prison.