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

by Paul L. Williams

The goodwill payment to Ambrosiano creditors from the coffers of Opus Dei did not close the criminal probe of the massive bank collapse. On February 26, 1987, the investigating magistrates concluded that the Vatican Bank had acted as an umbrella for Roberto Calvi’s illicit transactions, that it owned a substantial share of Banco Ambrosiano as well as the dummy corporations, and that it was responsible for the theft of $1.75 billion. Arrest warrants were issued for the three top IOR officials: Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, Luigi Mennini, and Pellegrino del Strobel.

The three Vatican bankers remained safe from extradition within the sanctity of the Sovereign State of Vatican City.48 Marcinkus remained under papal protection until 1991, when he took up residence in Sun City, Arizona. Italian authorities throughout the next decade attempted to persuade US officials to return the Archbishop to Italy so he could face a jury. But such efforts proved fruitless. The US Justice Department made the strange ruling that Marcinkus possessed a Vatican passport and could not be extradited to Italy even though his crimes took place on Italian soil. No one in the CIA wanted the Gorilla to testify in court about his ties to P2 and the Sicilian Mafia, nor about the transfer of funds to Solidarity, the opponents of liberation theology, and the right-wing regimes in Latin America. And so, he stayed sheltered from justice not within Vatican City but Sun City, Arizona, where he joined a prestigious country club, played daily rounds of golf, and smoked expensive cigars.49 He died of undisclosed causes on February 20, 2006.

In 1987 Licio Gelli turned himself over to Swiss authorities in South America, claiming that he was at “the end of his tether” and suffering from heart problems. He surrendered only after negotiating the terms of his return to Italy. He would be charged only with financial offenses. After serving less than two months behind bars, Gelli complained of deteriorating health and was released on parole. In 1992 he was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for his involvement in the Ambrosiano affair. The sentence was reduced to twelve years upon appeal.50 For the next six years Gelli remained under house arrest (detenzione domiciliare) at his luxurious villa in Tuscany. In 1998, when the police came to transport him to a public facility, Gelli disappeared again. In the villa, police discovered 363 pounds of gold bars buried in patio flowerpots among his geraniums and begonias. The grand master of P2 had stolen the gold from the Yugoslavian government while operating the ratlines for the Nazis.

In the reorganization of the Vatican finances under Opus Dei that got underway in 1989, a new five-member supervisory board of “lay experts” was set up at the IOR. Its president was Angelo Caloia, head of the Mediocredito Lombardo bank. The vice president was Philippe de Weck. The other three were Dr. José Sánchez Asiaín, former chairman of Banco Bilbao; Thomas Pietzcker, a director of the Deutsche Bank; and Thomas Macioce, an American businessman. The new managing director of the IOR was Giovanni Bodio, also from Mediocredito Lombardo.

José Sánchez Asiaín was a disciple of Bishop Álvaro del Portillo, who served as the general president of Opus Dei.

Thomas Pietzcker was a last minute replacement for Hermann Abs, the head of the Deutsche Bank and Pietzcker’s boss. Abs had been forced to resign from the committee due to the outcry from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles about his role as “Hitler’s banker” and a director of IG Farben, which ran its own slave labor camp at Auschwitz. After the war, Abs was placed in charge of allocating funds from the Marshall Plan to German industry. This position made him a pivotal figure in the establishment of Gladio. Abs, like Macioce, was a knight of the SMOM.53 The finances of Holy Mother Church were now in the hands of a secret Catholic society that remained in the service of the CIA and a clandestine group of global economists.

At the time of Sindona’s strange death, the CIA’s main concern was no longer left-wing political activity in Italy and Western Europe but rather the situation in Afghanistan.

To drive the “evil empire” to the point of total collapse, the CIA continued to infuse the holy war with munitions and money, until the war in Afghanistan became the Agency’s most expensive covert undertaking.1 By 1985, the Afghan rebels were receiving $250 million a year in dirty money from the CIA to battle the 115,000 Soviet troops occupying the country. This figure was double the number of Soviet troops who had been deployed to Afghanistan in 1984. The annual payments to the Muslim guerrillas reached nearly $1 billion by 1988.

In an effort to supply recruits to the jihad, the CIA once again focused its attention on America’s black community. This development was understandable. The Agency realized that millions of African Americans, who felt disenfranchised by the system, had converted to Islam, which they saw as “the black man’s religion.”

By 1980, CIA began to send hundreds of militant Muslim missionaries, all members of the radical Tablighi Jamaat, into American mosques to call on young black men to take up arms in the holy war to liberate their Muslim brothers. Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, one of the first of these missionaries to arrive, convinced scores of members of the Yasin Mosque in Brooklyn to head off to guerrilla training camps in Pakistan with an offer of thousands in cash and the promise of seventy houris in seventh heaven, if they were killed in action. The cash came from the CIA’s coffers.

To provide more support for the mujahideen, the CIA used Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s mentor, to set up a cell of al-Qaeda within Masjid al-Farooq on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn,

By 1992, al-Farooq mosque had become a haven for Arabian veterans from the great jihad in Afghanistan, who were granted special passports to enter the United States by the CIA. A feud erupted between the older African American members of the mosque and the Arab newcomers, which resulted in the murder of Mustafa Shalabi, the fiery imam of the mosque, on March 1, 1991. The crime has never been solved.

In 1980, the Agency deployed Dewey Clarridge, its top agent in Latin America, to establish ties with Honduran drug lord Juan Matta Ballesteros, who operated the airline SETCO. SETCO agreed to transport narcotics to gangs north of the border and arms to a warehouse in Honduras that was operated by CIA operatives Oliver North and Richard Secord.

The CIA also made business arrangements with other drug lords, including Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the “godfather of the Mexican drug business,” whose ranch became a training ground for right-wing guerrilla armies,12 and Miguel Nazar Haro, the leader of the Guadalajara Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful narcotics network.13 By 1990, more than 75 percent of all the cocaine entering the United States came through Mexico. Mexico also became a leading source of heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamines. The business was generating $50 billion a year; the CIA had found a source of funding to augment its ongoing heroin trade with the Turkish babas and the Sicilian Mafia. The new alliance meant that the Agency could launch operations even more ambitious than Gladio.

In 1988, as the first half of the Soviet contingent began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, Operation Gladio came to an end in Western Europe.

At this writing, the Gladio files remain classified as confidential and unavailable for inspection. The refusal to disclose any information about the undertaking is in keeping with Operation Mockingbird. Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and a Mockingbird operative, said, “There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets

After Andreotti broke his silence regarding Gladio, he was dragged in front of two Italian courts for cooperating with Toto Riina and the Sicilian Mafia in criminal activities and for issuing the orders for the assassination of journalist Mino Pecorelli.34 In the midst of these trials, Pope John Paul II took time in the Vatican to clasp Andreotti’s hands and to offer the beleaguered prime minister what appeared to be an “embrace.” Following this incident, the Holy Father was challenged as he spoke from the pulpit of St. Peter’s Cathedral by an irate student who was offended by the “endorsement.” It was the first time a Vicar of Christ had been challenged within the confines of his own church in seven hundred years.35 Eventually, Andreotti was exonerated on both charges. But in 2002 an appeals court in Perugia ruled that the former prime minister was guilty of complicity in the murder and sentenced him to twenty-four years in prison. Hearing the verdict, Silvio Berlusconi, the present prime minister, called it an example of “justice gone mad.”36 Berlusconi’s outcry was, for many, only to be expected. Like Andreotti, he had been an active member of P2 during the years of lead.

the murder verdict was overturned by Italy’s Supreme Court in October 2003. Andreotti, who rubbed shoulders with Licio Gelli, Michele Sindona, Roberto Calvi, and John Paul II, died on May 6, 2013, at the age of 94.

After fleeing from St. Peter’s Square, Çatlı had been arrested for drug smuggling in Switzerland and, in 1987, placed in a maximum security prison. He didn’t remain long in the lockup. One night, he managed to escape when the doors to his cell and his cellblock suddenly opened and a NATO helicopter mysteriously appeared to whisk him away. In 1989, he appeared in England, where—although one of the world’s most wanted fugitives—he was granted a British passport.

In 1991, he arrived in Chicago, married an American while assuming his Ozkay identity, and was granted a green card. The US immigration officials seemed to be blissfully unaware that he was a prison escapee,

From Chicago, Çatlı was sent on US intelligence missions by the CIA to the newly created republics in Central Asia that had been part of the Soviet Union. Within these countries, he initiated acts of terrorism, including an armed insurrection to topple the government of Heydar Aliyev in Azerbaijan.11 Çatlı also made trips to the Chinese province of Xinjiang where he helped the Uyghurs (the Turkish-speaking Muslims living in northwestern China) mount insurrectionary attacks that killed 162 people.

Çatlı’s acts of political agitation among the Uyghurs were designed to further the CIA’s goal of transforming the Chinese province into a new Islamic republic, which the Agency had named East Turkistan. Since Xinjiang remained the primary source of oil and natural gas for much of mainland China, the creation of East Turkistan would serve to deprive the country of its vital natural resources,

The new country was officially formed in Washington, DC, on September 14, 2004. Amidst the waving of American and Uyghur flags, Anwar Yusuf Turani, the prime minister, spoke of the new country’s need of economic assistance and international recognition. Following the speech, Turani returned to his home—not in Xinjiang but in Fairfax, Virginia.

Turkey was the perfect proxy; a NATO ally and a puppet regime… This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

Thanks to Gladio, the CIA had controlled Turkish affairs for decades. Çatlı, as a disciple of Türkeş, was an extremely useful agent provocateur – an operative capable by expanding both the drug trade and the strategy of tension within Xinjiang and Central Asia. Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of Uyghurs were transported to Afghanistan by the CIA for training in guerrilla warfare by the mujahideen. When they returned to Xinjiang, they formed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and came under Çatlı’s expert direction.21 Graham Fuller, CIA superspy, offered this explanation for radicalizing the Chinese Muslims: The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them [Muslims] against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.22

The killing of the Kurds, who had their own plans for Central Asia, was a key factor in accomplishing this objective. The Kurds were a major stumbling block to the unification of Central Asia. They were not Turks but Iranians (Persians). They had a different culture from Turks, spoke a different language (Kurdish), and practiced a different form of Sunni Islam.

The Kurds were oil-rich and their leaders were Marxists. And they were violent. Clashes between the PKK and the Turkish government had resulted in the deaths of thirty-seven thousand people.25 The problem with these different and difficult people had to be settled before the strategy of tension could be fully implemented in the new republics. In the weeks before Çatlı’s death, ninety-one leading Kurdish businessmen were murdered, including Ömer Lütfü Topal, the “king of the gambling joints.” Topal was killed on July 28, 1996. Çatlı’s fingerprints were found on the Kalashnikov rifle that was discovered at the crime scene.

But Çatlı’s replacement was already in the wings in the form of a Muslim preacher named Fethullah Gülen.

Fethullah Gülen, who presently governs one of the world’s “most powerful and best-connected” Muslim networks,28 has been said to be the “strongest and most effective Islamic fundamentalist in Turkey”

His movement, which seeks to create a New Islamic World Order, has amassed approximately ten million supporters—many of whom contribute between 5 percent and 20 percent of their income to his movement—and his tentacles stretch from Central Asia to the United States.30 With an estimated $50 billion in assets,