Tag: CIA

Did Permindex do away with Mattei? And was having Lemnitzer in charge of Gladio and the assassination specialist Bill Harvey in Rome part of the endgame for JFK?

Clay Shaw in Italy: Amid Permindex and Gladio, Part 2

In Part 1, we have established the enormous influence of Licio Gelli and Propaganda Due, and its association with Permindex/Centro Mondiale Commerciale. This was through someone, only Michele Metta discovered, namely, Roberto Ascarelli. As noted, both groups met in his offices, and he served on the board of Permindex/CMC. Now that we have presented this new and compelling information, it is appropriate to review some already established material before proceeding forward again.

As noted, Clay Shaw always denied he had any association with the CIA. He did this in public, and he also declared it under oath on the stand at his trial. This, of course, turned out to be a canard. The declassified record adduced by the ARRB has proven it as such. As William Davy showed in his book, Shaw had a covert security clearance, and he was so valued that he was issued a Y file. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 195, p. 199). As Joan Mellen later discovered, Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract agent. (Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54-55) In an internal communication, the ARRB’s CIA analyst, Manuel Legaspi, stated that the Agency had severely altered Shaw’s 201 file. But, as previously mentioned, we do know that Shaw did work for the CIA “over a five year span in Italy.” (Davy, p. 100)

When Ference Nagy first announced plans for a business organization in Basel, this met with criticism in the papers due to some of the people involved. That would include Nagy himself, since the year before he had been referred to as “a long-time asset of CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Frank Wisner.”(Maurice Phillips’ blog, 10/15/10) According to the Soviets, Nagy had a role in the Hungarian uprising of 1956. (New York Times, 11/8/56) In declassified documents by the ARRB, Nagy was revealed to be “a cleared contact of the International Organizations Division. His 201 file contains a number of references to his association with the World Trade Center.” (CIA document of 3/24/67)

When the financial banking for Nagy’s new enterprise was announced, it raised even more controversy. (State Department Memo, 1/15/57) The first bank announced was J. Henry Schroder’s. This bank was closely associated with the CIA and Director Allen Dulles. The Dulles law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, used Schroder’s in dealing with the Nazis in the late thirties. When Dulles became director, that bank was a repository for a 50-million-dollar contingency fund he controlled. (Davy, p. 96) That financial conglomerate was a prime source as a conduit for CIA fronts like the Kaplan Foundation and a half dozen others like it. (ibid)

So Schroder’s now denied its backing. Another bank stepped in, namely, Hans Seligman’s. The State Department was curious about this since Seligman’s was a much smaller house than Schroder’s. When the American consul interviewed Nagy and Seligman, he found them to be rather cautious in revealing the firms backing the project. But Seligman had a reputation for cooperating with the fascists during the war. And also, like Schroder’s, Seligman’s bank was also in the Sullivan and Cromwell financial orbit. (State Department cables of 2/1/57 and 11/7/58; S. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, p. 297)

Due to the characters involved, the questionable backing, plus attacks in the press, the project stalled. But it was now ascertained that the International Trade Mart was a model for Permindex, and that Clay Shaw of the ITM had shown “from the outset great interest in the Permindex project.” (State Department cables of 4/9/58 and 7/18/58) This prompted a visit to New Orleans by certain Swiss officials in 1957. (State Department cable of 11/7/58) In the spring of 1958, Enrico Mantello and his father Giorgio—a main player in the Permindex scheme—traveled to New Orleans and met with Shaw. This was after an exchange of letters between the two parties. (Nagy collection at Columbia University, sourced by Ed Berger.) Nagy seemed to be determined now to move to Rome, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles somehow heard of this. In a memo of September of 1958 requesting aid for Nagy in Italy, the document originates at Commerce but it has Foster Dulles’ name on it at the end.

Nagy then announced that Permindex would be opening up an affiliate called Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome. According to a Time-Life internal memo, Shaw visited their new HQ prior to its official opening. This was a 37,000 square foot office building originally constructed in 1942. Shaw was then reported by the State Department to be on the Board of Directors. (State Department cable of 11/7/58)

As Maurice Phillips and Metta have pointed out, there was a Canadian connection to CMC. This was through former Major Louis Bloomfield. In a letter written by Bloomfield on February 4, 1960, he noted that Nagy had met with David Rockefeller the previous day. Bloomfield was supposed to be there, but due to a temporary health affliction, he could not attend. Bloomfield described the meeting as successful, and he planned on meeting with Rockefeller in a week or so. (From Bloomfield to Ernest Wolf) As the Bloomfield archive, as excavated by Maurice Phillips, showed, it was not just Rockefeller who was in the Permindex outer circle, but also Baron Edmund de Rothschild. Both men were being solicited as investors. In other words, those involved in Permindex were in contact with two of the richest and most powerful men in the world at that time. (Letter by Bloomfield to Abraham Friedman of April 1, 1959)

II

There was another side to Permindex/CMC. As William Davy notes in his book about Jim Garrison, Ferenc Nagy was a close acquaintance to, and supportive of, Jacques Soustelle. (Let Justice be Done, p. 99) Soustelle had been the governor-general of Algeria and had worked for President Charles DeGaulle. But he had broken with the president over his policy of an independence solution to the war with Algerian rebels—a policy which President Kennedy had advocated since 1957. Soustelle had traveled to Washington in the early sixties and met with CIA officers. He was pleading for support for the OAS, a group of breakaway military officers trying to overthrow and/or kill DeGaulle. According to Andrew Tully in his book CIA: The Inside Story, the meeting was a success. Many years later, it was revealed to the Church Committee that the Agency had aided in a scheme to assassinate DeGaulle. (Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1975)

We should also note something on a lower level that is pertinent. In the 1961 raid on the weapons cache in Houma, Louisiana DA Jim Garrison discovered that some of the arms that were lifted and sent to Guy Banister’s office were CIA stockpiled weaponry on loan to the OAS group. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 90) In tracing the money used to finance the plots against DeGaulle, French intelligence discovered that about $200,000 in covert funding had been sent to Permindex accounts in the Banque de la Credit Internationale. In 1962, Banister sent to Paris his lawyer colleague Maurice Gatlin, who was a member of Banister’s Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. Gatlin reportedly had a suitcase full of money for the OAS, estimated at around $200,000. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, pp. 499-500)

This relates to another explosive disclosure by Michele Metta in his first book on the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. Enrico Mattei was the miracle man who turned the National Fuel Trust (ENI) of the Italian government into a formidable force in petroleum markets on the world stage. Mattei was controversial in his policies as he made key petroleum deals in the Middle East and significant agreements with the USSR. In the former instance, he agreed to lower concessions in order to gain new drilling rights. In the latter case, he agreed to purchase 12 million tons of Russian crude oil. (Time, 11/2/62)

Mattei’s maneuvering weakened the Rockefeller/Shell/British Petroleum-controlled Seven Sisters oil monopoly that had dominated oil markets through the 20^th century. (The attorney for that oil monopoly was John McCloy of the Warren Commission.) Mattei also broke with tradition in his policies toward countries where the oil was discovered. He insisted that they get up to 75% of the profits. He stated that he thought the giant foreign oil companies were preying on the Italian market by rigging higher prices. In a clear jab at the Seven Sisters, he once said:

The policy I am following has permitted me not only to free my country from the grip of the cartel, but to benefit from prices lower than those which our neighbors pay. (Ibid)

Mattei was so successful in his endeavors that he expanded the reach of the ENI into motels, cafes, service stations, newspapers and factories producing synthetic rubber. ENI was estimated to be worth 2 billion in 1962. Mattei was said to have played a major role in spurring the enormous growth in the Italian economy during his years as director. He donated his salary to an orphanage. And one should also note this: like Kennedy and DeGaulle, he wanted France out of Algeria.

III

Mattei’s brilliant reign came to an end on October 27, 1962. He perished in a mysterious plane crash, which recalled the murder of Dag Hammarskjold the previous year. (See the book Who Killed Hammarskjold? by Susan Williams) At the beginning of 1962, Mattei’s pilot discovered an attempt to sabotage his plane. Therefore, Mattei now ordered an identical aircraft which he would choose between on short notice. After his death, the wreckage was removed very quickly, and the identical plane was sold off in parts to parties in America. Film director Francesco Rosi commissioned a script after a journalist reported a significant discovery in the case. That journalist then disappeared –forever. But not before he said, “I have a scoop that is going to shake Italy.” (See, “The Mystery of Enrico Mattei’s Death” at Ecco le marche web site; see also La Repubblica, story by Attilio Bolzoni 6/18/2005)

Although Rosi did make his film, it did not get very much exposure in America, and neither did Mattei’s death. But the matter did inspire much private inquiry in Italy. Vincenzo Calia was one of the more important researchers. In fact, Calia changed the verdict about the crash for most later biographies of Mattei. His work altered those references from a plane malfunction to sabotage of Mattei’s aircraft. Calia advanced powerful evidence that the plane went down because of an explosion. (Michele Metta, CMC, p. 132)

Metta was loaned Calia’s research materials. In one of the interviews Calia did, he talked to a writer named Fulvio Bellini. In one of Bellini’s books, he had gone over the problems Mattei was having with his immediate superior, who was opposed to some of his policies and, in fact, was close to Borghese. Bellini referred to the Centro Mondiale Commerciale as: “The terminal in Italy of the group who attend to all the dirty work in world politics, including the assassination of Enrico Mattei.” (Italics added)

Bellini then went even further. He said that, to understand the death of Mattei, one had to follow the trail to none other than Soustelle. Bellini said Soustelle was given the job of performing, what he referred to as, Operation Mattei. He then concluded that Soustelle was given around 100,000 dollars to do so from Montreal through Permindex. (Ibid., p. 133)

We can speculate about the Montreal connection. That is where Bloomfield operated from with the shares of Permindex stock. And he was enlisting the likes of David Rockefeller and Edmund de Rothschild as investors. I do not have to refer to how much interest Rockefeller had in the Seven Sisters: two of the seven were Rockefeller-controlled, Chevron and Exxon.

Two more elements should be mentioned regarding this Metta discovery. A young man named Jules Ricco Kimble was a friend of David Ferrie’s who introduced him to Clay Shaw. One day in late 1961—perhaps early 1962—Ferrie called him and asked if he wanted to take a plane ride with him. Kimble agreed and met Ferrie at the airport, where he learned that Shaw would be joining them. Ferrie made some stops to refuel, but their last stop was Montreal. The trip was for an overnight stay, and Shaw did not rejoin them until the next morning. A bit later, Ferrie called him again to make another flight into Canada, but Kimble declined. (Garrison, p. 118)

Finally, to add more intrigue to what Bellini noted, Metta reports that Soustelle was meeting with former Italian prime minister Fernando Tambroni in Rome in the latter part of 1961. Tambroni had been financed by a member of P2. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 362) Tambroni’s son-in-law was a member of the CMC. Tambroni had been involved in the central government in three different positions for eight years prior to becoming prime minister. But he was so right-wing that riots took place against him, and he lost office after about five months. Tambroni and Soustelle met at the building housing a reactionary group of Tambroni’s called Civil Order. Italian intelligence also suspected it to be the headquarters of the OAS in Italy. (Metta, CMC, p. 131)

IV

Gladio experts Philip Willan and Daniele Ganser mention the role of Frank Gigliotti in reviving masonry, and aiding Gladio in Italy after the war. Willan, for instance, describes Gigliotti as a former OSS and CIA agent. (Puppetmasters, p. 58) Gigliotti, who had spent years in Italy as a young man, was a Presbyterian pastor who was anti-communist and pro-Mussolini in the thirties. He then became an OSS agent against Il Duce during the war. He joined up with the CIA afterwards and, as noted, was quite active in the revival of Italian masonry. In 1960, he was very much pro-Nixon and anti-Kennedy. (Metta, CMC, pp. 10-12)

Beyond that, more than one source has stated that it was Gigliotti who secretly recruited Licio Gelli. The Tina Anselmi P2 Commission thought it was important to note that when Gigliotti left the scene, Gelli took the stage. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 65) According to Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies, it was Gigliotti who instructed Licio to construct an anti-Communist network in Italy associated with the Rome CIA station. In fact, CIA Director Allen Dulles was actually contributing millions of lire to funding this kind of militant neo-fascist network there. (Metta, CMC, p. 15)

What makes this even more intriguing is this: one of Kennedy’s enemies, William Harvey, was stationed in Ganser’s Rome CIA station in 1963. Another enemy, Lyman Lemnitzer, ran NATO forces and, therefore, Gladio, in that same year. Both men had been guilty of insubordination at the White House in 1962.

Lemnitzer’s rise in the Pentagon was largely owed to General Dwight Eisenhower; Lemnitzer planned operations in North Africa and Italy. Once he became president, Eisenhower made him commander of Far East forces, then Army Chief of Staff, and then JCS chair—all in the space of five years. (Cottrell, pp. 86-87) According to James Bamford, “in Lemnitzer’s view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over.” (Ibid., p. 92)

To put it mildly, this was not what JFK thought. As chair of the Joint Chiefs, Lemnitzer was opposed to Kennedy’s policies in both Vietnam and Cuba. He was close to Col. Edwin Lansdale, who was in charge of Operation Mongoose. Lemnitzer had been in on a false flag plan against Cuba under the Eisenhower administration. (John Newman, Into the Storm, p. 372) Lansdale himself now thought up the idea of staging a fake Cuban attack at Guantanamo in order to provoke an American invasion. This actually preceded the infamous Operation Northwoods, the series of false flag plans devised by the Joint Chiefs to provoke an invasion of the island.

The problem was that not only was Kennedy against such a provocation, he did not even want to hear about it. (Newman, p. 385) Yet on March 13, 1962, Northwoods was presented to JFK. Then Lemnitzer suggested that America did not even need a pretext; we could just invade, which Kennedy was clearly against.

On Vietnam, Lemnitzer said that Kennedy’s policy would lead to “communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.” He even said Australia and New Zealand would be threatened. (Newman, p. 391) Notably, this was after the November 1961 Kennedy decision that there would be no combat troops in Indochina, only advisors. According to a conversation John Newman had with the present writer, the JCS knew there were ICBM missiles in Cuba before Kennedy did. They wanted to force JFK’s back against the wall to see how he would respond. They did not care for the peaceful and equitable result. Kennedy ended up removing Lemnitzer in the fall of 1962 (Newman, p. 396). But he made a mistake and sent him to Europe to oversee NATO forces.

V

Bill Harvey began his career in the FBI, but he was too much of a hard drinker for J. Edgar Hoover to tolerate. So he joined the CIA, and he liked to needle the Ivy League officers by pulling out his gun during meetings and spinning the cylinder. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 469) He supervised the Berlin station and got to know Reinhard Gehlen and his network there. When he returned stateside, he wanted to run the Soviet Russia division, but he was assigned to Staff D, signals intelligence, with which he worked on with the National Security Agency. (ibid., pp. 470-71)

Buried inside Staff D was a project called ZR/Rifle. This was the development of an assassination program commissioned by Dick Bissell. Prior to this, James Angleton supervised a small assassination team run by Colonel Borish Pash. (James Douglas, JFK and The Unspeakable, p. 143) Both men, Angleton and Harvey, visited with British intelligence officer Peter Wright about the subject of assassinations. (Wright, Spycatcher, p. 204) In fact, the Church Committee discovered that Harvey had made notes about blaming an assassination on a communist–either a Czechoslovak or a Soviet. He also noted that the patsy’s CIA 201 file should be rigged in advance. Which, as HSCA staffer Betsy Wolf showed, Oswald’s was. (Vasilios Vazakas, “Creating the Oswald Legend, Pt. 4” at Kennedys and King.) According to the Church Committee, both QJ WIN and WI ROGUE were Harvey’s recruits, and both were sent to Congo to take part in the plot to eliminate Patrice Lumumba. (See Midnight in the Congo, by Lisa Pease, Probe, Vol. 6 No. 3)

In 1962, Harvey was supervising Task Force W, directly involved with Cuba. Bobby Kennedy was the ombudsman of the overall project called Mongoose. Harvey deeply resented RFK’s fastidious veto power over CIA requests for operations. As David Corn showed in his book on Ted Shackley, Allen Dulles approved of these by rote orally. Bobby wanted them in writing and in detail. Harvey grew to hate the Kennedy brothers, especially Robert. He said his actions bordered on treason. (Talbot, p. 472)

What the Kennedys did not know was that Harvey was also in charge of the second phase of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro, which were going on while Mongoose was proceeding. Harvey had teamed with mobster John Roselli to try to assassinate Fidel. This went on for months on end; there is evidence that it extended into the spring of 1963. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, pp. 148-49) But what got Harvey in deep trouble was his actions during the Missile Crisis. At one of the hottest points of that confrontation, Harvey sent teams of “sixty agents into Cuba to support any conventional military operations”. (Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 151) Bobby Kennedy was enraged by this. At that moment, the slightest provocation could have brought on atomic warfare. RFK wanted him fired, but Richard Helms shuffled him off to Rome.

VI

While in Rome, Harvey formed an alliance with General Giovanni DeLorenzo, who, as we saw in part one, planned a 1964 coup called Piano Solo. Harvey was also friendly with the notorious Michele Sindona, the fraudster who almost caused the Vatican bank to collapse. Harvey also met with a man who was instrumental in the Strategy of Tension, Renzo Rocca. Harvey gave Rocca a list of names of far-right zealots who would help in carrying out that strategy. As with ZR/Rifle, Harvey wanted to create a team of thugs who would be “capable of killing, placing bombs and firebombs, and promoting propaganda.” One of the first people whom Rocca talked to after this meeting was Valerio Borghese, Angleton’s friend, and the man who would attempt another coup in 1970. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 88)

Harvey was continuing an old CIA policy first implemented by Allen Dulles in a 1951 document. Dulles wanted the Christian Democrats to treat the Italian communists not as Italians but as communists. He wanted them discriminated against through legislative enactments, administrative harassment, suppression and also control. The project was called Operation Demagnetize, and it was cooperated on between the CIA and SIFAR, the then Italian secret service. (Ibid., p. 43) Years later, the Christian Democrats were very worried about how their full cooperation with the CIA would look if it was fully exposed to the Anselmi Commission on P2. And in fact, Anselmi’s notes make it clear that the Christian Democrats did all they could to close down her investigation. (ibid., pp. 64-65)

The fear was real. Because eventually Judge Felice Casson came to the conclusion that P2 had been involved in the attacks of the strategy of tension “and that the secret society was acting as a proxy for the CIA.” And that inquiry concluded that P2 and Gelli were not just doing so in Italy but in Argentina, and that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who later became Pope Francis I, was cognizant of it. This is how powerful Gelli and P2 were. (Paul Williams, Operation Gladio, p. 110) They were involved with the assassination program in South America called Operation Condor. (Cottrell, p. 127)

The only other part of Gladio that was likely as impactful as the P2/ Permindex aspect was Yves Guerin-Serac, who led another CIA shell company called Aginter Press. Guerin-Sac was part of the OAS plots to kill DeGaulle. When they failed, he fled to Portugal for what he called, “ …a truly western league of struggle against Marxism.” (Cottrell, p. 118) And, in fact, Aginter Press was involved in the Strategy of Tension in Italy by blowing up a bank in Milan in 1969. Guerin-Sac and Aginter Press were allied with Otto Skorzeny and his gun-for-hire Paladin Group. At one time, in the Paladin group bureau in Zurich, offices of both Permindex and the CMC were located. (Cottrell, p. 125)

In Rome, Harvey’s deputy was F. Mark Wyatt. Wyatt acted as a buffer between the rather unrefined Harvey and the locals; and unlike Harvey, he spoke fluent Italian. He was knowledgeable about Harvey’s attempts through SIFAR and Rocca to carry out bombings on Christian Democrat offices and blame them on the left. (Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 475). Harvey also entertained the idea of using the Mafia to murder Italian communists. On the day Kennedy was killed, Harvey blurted out some disturbing remarks that stayed with Wyatt the rest of his life. In fact, his children wanted him to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He declined.

But during an interview Wyatt did with a French journalist at his retirement home in Lake Tahoe in 1998, he did say something quite provocative. As the writer left, he said: “You know, I always wondered what Bill Harvey was doing in Dallas in November 1963.” The reporter was shocked. Wyatt explained that he bumped into Harvey on a flight to Dallas a bit before the assassination. When he asked his boss what he was doing there, Harvey said rather nebulously: “I’m here to see what’s happening.” (Talbot, p. 477) And thanks to the Luna committee we have just found out that CIA documents reveal that Harvey had permission to fly under an FAA-approved alias in 1963 in the USA.

As the reader can see, those attempting to label Permindex a Russian disinformation story– like Max Holland–are simply and utterly wrong. It and P2 and Gladio and the Strategy of Tension were all too real.

Click here to read part 1.

A new and wider look at what Clay Shaw was up to in Italy, set against the backdrop of Gladio, the Strategy of Tension,  Propaganda Due and the utmost fascist: Licio Gelli.

Clay Shaw in Italy: Amid Permindex and Gladio

Back in 1992, when I initially went to New Orleans, I interviewed some of Clay Shaw’s remaining family and friends. One of the things that was repeated to me was that he liked to travel; it was not just part of his job as a businessman and as the face of the International Trade Mart. We know about some of these journeys through declassified records. For instance, Shaw filed reports with the CIA from various countries in Europe and Latin America: Peru, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Czechoslovakia. (William Davy, Let Justice Be Done, pp. 198-99)

But further, Shaw was such a valued asset that the Agency gave him what was called a “Y” number. Shaw’s reports under that rubric include “Observations on International Fairs at Milan, Brussels, Basel, Paris and London/Comments on Western European Economics and Desire to Trade with the Soviet Bloc.” (Davy, p. 199). These journeys explain why Shaw frequented the VIP room of Eastern Air Lines and used his alias of Clay Bertrand to sign in there. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 278)

But from these relatives, I understood that Shaw’s favorite countries in Europe were England, and even more so, Italy. Shaw was likely introduced to Britain during his service in World War II. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 76) But it is clear through Anthony Frewin–writing under the pen name Anthony Edward Weeks– that Shaw still held British contacts after the war. One of the pieces of evidence that DA Jim Garrison recovered from Shaw’s home was his address book. Since Frewin lives in England, he began to look up some of these persons and penned a 12-page article on the subject. He wrote that the first thing that struck him about the address book was that Shaw’s British contacts all lived in the best, most expensive areas, e.g., Belgravia, Mayfair, Kensington, etc. (see Lobster, No. 20) On a phone call I had with the author, he stated, this guy was not Joe Sixpack. As we shall see, that is an understatement.

About Shaw’s visits to Italy, the FBI seems to have understood that they were not just social. As the Garrison investigation discovered through an acquaintance of Bureau official Regis Kennedy, “Shaw was a CIA agent who had done work, of an unspecified nature, over a five-year span in Italy.” (Davy, p. 100) As William Davy comments, this almost has to be in reference to Shaw’s service with Permindex/Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome. As Davy suggested, this is fascinating, and not just because of Permindex itself. But because one of the main organizers of that business group was Ferenc Nagy, the former prime minister of Hungary. Nagy fled Hungary due to a leftist overthrow in 1947. From the USA, he then became a backer of the Hungarian anti-communist émigré community.

But Nagy was also a friend of Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle was a former Governor-General of Algeria under Charles de Gaulle. But he split with the French president over the issue of independence for Algeria. Soustelle became a backer of the OAS, the rebel military group that tried to both assassinate and overthrow de Gaulle over the independence movement in Algeria, which Soustelle opposed. There is very little doubt that Soustelle had implicit backing from the CIA on this issue. (Davy, p. 99; James DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, pp. 99-100) And, as we shall see, Soustelle figures into the whole Permindex black op backdrop.

There is another connection with Permindex and Shaw, which is important to note in advance. It was not revealed until 2003, perhaps as one of the Assassination Record Review Board’s (ARRB) delayed declassifications. An Agency document dated from June 28, 1978 described Clay Shaw’s service to CIA as encompassing from 1949-72. That document made reference to a claim “that CIA used Shaw for service in Italy with U.S. agent Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield.” Shaw’s part is described as making connections with political circles and the business world in Rome, and also with developing relationships with extreme rightwing groups. As we shall see, this was accomplished, and the Canadian high-powered lawyer Bloomfield was an integral part of it. (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 389)

II

Since 1948, Italy had been a high priority for the then-nascent Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, it was the subject of the first National Security Council meeting in late 1947. (John Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 115) Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was concerned about a communist victory in the 1948 Italian elections. Therefore, a directive was issued initiating propaganda and psychological warfare activities to marginalize the leftist parties and promote the Christian Democrats as a bulwark against them. Both the CIA and the State Department participated in this campaign. It was implemented through both the Agency’s Office of Special Operations and, according to Christopher Simpson’s book Blowback, also through the law offices of Sullivan and Cromwell. The latter being the home of the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen. At that location, Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, James Angleton, Bill Colby and others went to work supervising the rigging of the vote.

There was a real possibility that the Italian communists and their allies would win the 1948 elections outright. Which meant they would have a foothold in Western Europe. (Simpson, pp. 89-90) For obvious reasons, this possibility was also a nightmare for the Vatican: to have Godless communism in your own backyard? As Bishop James Griffiths, an American emissary to the Vatican, wrote, they feared a “disastrous failure at the polls which will put Italy behind the Iron Curtain.” (Simpson, p. 90) According to Simpson, the CIA laundered ten million dollars to give directly to the Vatican for anti-communist agitation purposes. This was only one part of an enormous 350 million dollar overall total for the American crusade in Italy.

This fear and this expenditure were justified to these Cold Warriors because in 1946, the Italian Communist party—at that time the largest in the world outside of Russia—and the Socialists had actually outpolled the Christian Democrats for the Constituent Assembly. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, p. 23). But because they were separate parties, they had to settle for a coalition government under a Christian Democrat premier. In 1947, a party of American congressmen stopped off in Italy and announced the theme of the upcoming election:

The country is under great pressure from within and without to veer to the left and adopt a totalitarian-collective national organization. (Blum, p. 24)

The two leftist parties were going to unite in 1948 to form the Popular Democratic Front (FDP), and early in the year had won local elections in Pescara, defeating the Christian Democrats. As Bill Colby later wrote:

It was primarily this fear that led to the formation of the Office of Policy Coordination which gave the CIA the capability to undertake covert political propaganda and paramilitary operations in the first place. (Blum, p 25)

This is how important these elections seemed to Washington. Because there was a question in the CIA Director’s mind about legality, the forming of a new department was created to do such missions in the future. And this had both presidential and congressional permission. (Ranelagh, p. 115)

James Angleton also had a special interest in Italy. His father, who had business in the National Cash Register company, moved his family there when Jim was fourteen. Hugh Angleton was a colonel in the OSS during the war. An operations officer, Max Corvo, said of Hugh’s politics, “He was ultra-conservative, a sympathizer with Fascist officials. He was certainly not unfriendly with the Fascists.” (Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior, p. 33) Hugh sent his son to England to get a boarding school education. During the war, young Angleton started out in the army and was then switched over to the OSS and stationed in London to handle the Italy desk. (ibid., p. 38) He was transferred to Rome in 1944 and made chief of counter-intelligence for the entire country. By all accounts, Angleton liked Italy and stayed there until the end of 1947. When he returned to the USA, he got a high position in the newly birthed CIA. (ibid., p. 44)

III

One of the things that Angleton did before he left Italy is important to note for our subject at hand. He and Junio Valerio Borghese organized what was called ‘Stay-behind’ units in Italy. (Paul L. Williams, Operation Gladio, p. 15) Borghese was a Navy commander during Mussolini’s reign and fought alongside the Nazis against the Allies. By most accounts, he should have been imprisoned for war crimes. But Angleton secured his release into US Army custody. He dressed The Black Prince in an American uniform and shipped him from Milan to Rome. As Paul Williams wrote:

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. (Williams, p. 28)

Angleton got Borghese off with about three years of preventive detention. He wanted The Black Prince to “lead a shadow government, along with a secret army that could manipulate Italian affairs throughout the coming decades.” (ibid) The State Department passed an edict which gave Angleton control over the police, military intelligence and the Italian secret services.

With this power, Borghese was now running the newly formed Gladio forces in Italy, under sectors entitled sabotage, espionage, propaganda, escape tactics and guerrilla warfare. In addition, a training camp for the stay behind units was constructed on the island of Sardinia. This camp was not just for the Italian Gladio trainees but those from Germany, France and Austria. They were sent there by former Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen. (ibid., p. 29) As Angleton had rescued Borghese from post-war justice, Allen Dulles had saved Gehlen. The two war criminals were now in business together. They had lost the war, but—through Angleton and Dulles—they had won the peace. Very soon, there were to be hundreds of these Gladio units infiltrated into Western Europe.

They were not just a contingent military force, but as with Borghese, a potent political one. Borghese joined the MSI (Italian Social Movement), a neo-fascist party that was largely made up of former supporters of Mussolini. But that was not reactionary enough for him. He later formed the Fronte Nazionale (National Front), which wished to abolish parties and trade unions, and was much more devoted to a quasi-military state. (Philip Willan, Puppetmasters, pp. 93-94)

He was hardly alone in this belief. There was also Stefano Delle Chiaie, founder of National Vanguard. That group also wished to work outside the political system to subvert democracy to the point that Italy would return to fascism. And it was not just in Italy; his group carried out bombings and killings in both Spain and Chile. (Williams, p. 112)

These rightwing groups were so powerful and well-organized that they encouraged two coups in six years. The first, in 1964, was called Piano Solo. The previous year, the communists had arranged a large labor rally and, undercover as police, Gladio members smashed it, injuring 200. (Williams, p. 74) As a result, General Giovanni DeLorenzo, assisted by 20 other senior army officers—along with CIA station chief William Harvey, military attache Vernon Walthers, plus the director of Gladio–planned an overthrow which included National Vanguard and the Mafia. Piano Solo was to conclude with the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the installation of a handpicked Christian Democrat as president. It included extensive surveillance and the rounding up of leftwing activists and their imprisonment at a concentration camp in Sardinia. (Wilian, Puppetmasters, p.35) The coup did not proceed since Moro created a compromise between the socialists and Christian Democrats, plus President Segni—who was in on the planning—sustained a cerebral hemorrhage which forced his resignation. (Williams, pp. 74-75)

IV

The timing of all this, the huge communist demonstration and the crackdown, can probably be attributed to President Kennedy’s breaking of Dwight Eisenhower’s Italy policy. The idea for funding the Christian Democrats was to defeat the left; so obviously, that policy did not include making the socialists or communists part of the Christian Democratic government. At the urging of Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy was advocating for a policy of apertura, that is, an opening to the left. Schlesinger thought that by including the socialists in the government, one could split them off from the communists. Kennedy thought this was a good idea. So, in his 1963 visit to Italy, he decided to advocate the policy change. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, pp. 464-68)

Both Angleton and former ambassador Clare Booth Luce strongly opposed it. Luce wrote JFK an over-the-top letter, and Angleton spread rumors that Schlesinger was a Soviet agent. CIA officer William Harvey also opposed it and recommended ways to defeat it. Richard Nixon also opposed it. (Michele Metta, CMC: The Undercover CIA and Mossad Station, pp. 40-41) Kennedy ignored this. On his trip to Italy, he talked to the Socialist leader, Pietro Nenni, directly. After which Nenni clasped his wife and started weeping with joy. By the end of the year, apertura was made policy. It was this violation of tradition which likely caused the attempted coup in 1964.

The second coup attempt was in 1970. It was led by Angleton’s favorite son, Borghese. It was supported by Delle Chiaie’s group and over 200 forest guards who arrived in coaches near Rome. Borghese thought he had support from three army regiments, the police and the Air Force. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 91) Also, the plotters had met with the CIA and had financing from a Swiss company in advance.

The Black Prince was so confident of success that he had his speech already planned and, of all things, he was going to back Italy’s intervention in Vietnam! Why? Because Borghese had established contact with President Nixon and with NATO units in Malta to implement the overthrow. One of the connecting points was a man named Pier Talenti, who had worked for Nixon since 1968 and had an estate and business in Italy. Angleton arrived in the country before the coup, and he left shortly after it was aborted. (Willan, Puppetmasters, pp 117-18) In fact, NATO ships were warmed up and ready to go. What went wrong was that the planned call to Nixon was not passed on from Malta. (ibid., p. 93) Another problem was that when the coup did not go as planned, Soviet ships entered the Mediterranean. (Ibid., p. 97)

In addition to the attempted coups, Gladio’s so-called “strategy of tension” also included a series of bombings. The first one was in December of 1969 in Milan’s Piazza Fontana. Seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight were injured. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 123) That same afternoon, three other bombs exploded in Rome, killing fourteen. These bombings went on until the early eighties. The most famous one was the Bologna railway station bombing of 1980, where 73 people were killed and over 200 were injured. Collectively, these were known as the Years of Lead. As time went on, they were discovered to be false flag operations. That is, they were investigated originally as leftist plots but later discovered to be done by neo-fascist groups with support from the CIA. The idea was to destabilize the country out of Kennedy’s centrist/left coalition to a centrist/right one.

V

After Borghese’s failed coup, he fled to Spain. He passed away there in 1974. Many years ago, I noted an entry in Clay Shaw’s address book to a Princess Marcella Borghese, who had married into the Borghese family. In my very early investigation of Shaw, this was one of the first hints that he was not the Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal that he proclaimed himself to be. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 211) Another was the fact that he scrubbed his Who’s Who in the Southwest entry after either 1963 or 1964. Up until that time, his name appeared regularly. In those prior entries, he was listed as a member of the Board of Directors of Permindex. The exposure of Permindex would also have undermined his self-proclaimed liberal pose. Because Permindex and its offspring, Centro Mondiale Commerciale, appear to be a part of Gladio and this stay behind network in Italy. Shaw seemed interested in concealing this association.

And for good reason. At that time, this network was so hidden and such a taboo subject that people literally lost their lives over revealing its scope and power. For example, Mino Pecorelli was an offbeat but insightful journalist in Italy in the sixties and seventies. He had some valuable sources inside “the underground state and secret services.” (Richard Cottrell, Gladio, p. 75). His stories about Gladio and its relationship to the kidnapping and eventual murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro clearly hinted at a connection between the two. Pecorelli was even in receipt of some letters Moro wrote his family while in captivity. Mino hinted that, behind the Moro kidnapping stood a “lucid superpower”, clearly hinting at the USA. He also noted that it was interesting that the State Department sent over a Deputy Secretary to advise the Italian government not to negotiate for Moro’s release. He also indicated a connection between Gladio and the Moro death. Shortly thereafter, he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting near his office in Rome. (Ibid) Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was implicated in his murder. He was first found guilty, then acquitted on appeal. (Richard Cottrell, Gladio, p. 78)

Aldo Moro was a natural target of the stay-behind operations. Why? Because it was he who forged Kennedy’s left/center coalition back in 1963. (Talbot, p. 468). But what made Moro even more dangerous to the Gladio network was that, in the seventies, he was going to widen the window even more. He was going to include the communists, or PCI, in his government. In fact, in a visit to the USA, Henry Kissinger harangued him for advocating this policy, plus the fact that he leaned toward the Arabs in the Middle East dispute. It got so bad that Moro foreshortened his visit. Kissinger then slipped a story about it to the New York Times, warning that Italy could go communist. Senator Henry Jackson warned that if Moro did this, Italy would be kicked out of NATO. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 220-21; see also Williams, p. 103)

After he was kidnapped and held in captivity for 55 days, some of the things he said during his so-called trial at the hands of the Red Brigades leaked out. He reportedly said that the strategy of tension was foreign-inspired but implemented with the help of the secret services. He referred to Gladio guerrilla training in case of occupation. Understandably, since he appears to have had a hand in his demise, he had nothing but venom for Andreotti–who was now acting Prime Minister–and Moro accused him of having meetings with the Agency. Moro also admitted that the Christian Democrats were funded by the CIA. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 291). But, and it’s a big but, his captors insist that he said even more, and these transcripts have been either lost or stolen. (ibid., p. 281, 284)

Moro was kidnapped in a precision-type, carefully planned operation in March of 1978, with the killers in airline pilot costumes. The ambush was brilliantly executed: all five bodyguards were eliminated immediately, but Moro was kept alive in the hail of bullets. This happened on the day the debate about his new communist policy was to begin. (Williams, p. 103) In fact, it was so perfectly done that some commentators felt it was beyond the ability of the Red Brigades.

VI

Was there a central force behind this strategy of tension and the Moro kidnap/murder? There actually does seem to have been, not just a central force but a central character. His name was Licio Gelli, Venerable Master of the infamous Propaganda Due (P2). On the day of the Moro kidnapping, his secretary stated that Gelli was visited by two men. She overheard the following words exchanged: “The major part is over. Now we’ll see the reactions.” (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 228) This testimony was so explosive that the Tina Anselmi P2 Commission would not hear it in open session. In fact, when it was discovered that Gelli was the head of this secret group, the government collapsed. When his villa was raided, it was revealed that P2 had well over 900 members and from almost every power center in Italy: 43 members of Parliament, 4 cabinet members, heads of branches of the secret services, chiefs of the intelligence services (SIFAR and SISMI), leaders of the Treasury, finance ministers and chairmen of banks, among many others. It even included the clergy and the military. (Willan, The Last Supper, p. 115, p. 121; Metta, CMC p. 9). It was later discovered that during the Years of Lead, both prime ministers, Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi, were members of P2. (Williams, p 265)

In other words, the exposure of Gelli confirmed that there was nothing fanciful about the idea that there was a shadow government overseeing the visible government. And if Gelli’s secretary was correct, that shadow government did control the political system. (Willan, The Last Supper, pp. 113-15). About his P2 lodge, Gelli told one writer, “It was an invisible army, just as Gladio was an invisible army.” (ibid., p. 117). And that was no understatement as, in addition to Moro, there was also evidence that Gelli got his intelligence services to plant ersatz leads in the Bologna bombing. (Williams, pp. 218-19)

And there was a direct American connection. Because Gelli attended the inaugurations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 67) Gelli had connections to the Allies’ intelligence network during his service in World War II, and P2 was the main Masonic lodge that kept up relations with the CIA; reportedly, the Agency funded them to the tune of millions per month. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 70, p. 78)

When he was exposed through the raid, and the vast power and reach of P2 was now in the open, he went on the run. About three months later, his daughter arrived at the Rome airport. She was searched, and a false bottom was found in her briefcase. It contained a trove of documents. One of them was entitled “Stability Operations, Intelligence—Special Fields.” It outlined how Army intelligence should respond to communist insurgencies in allied nations. Part of the manual suggested that insurgency movements should be targeted and then infiltrated “with a view to establishing clandestine control by US Army intelligence over the work of such agents.” And this specifically included the leadership level. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 209) This discovery fit into the notion that the Red Brigades had been penetrated, and this is how Gelli knew what was happening with Moro the day he was kidnapped. The question then became: Was he also knowledgeable about Moro’s murder 55 days later, and was this why he ran? We will likely never know since well over 40 members of P2 were involved in working on the Moro case. (Metta, CMC p. 156)

How did Gelli ascend so rapidly in the hierarchy of masonry to become one of the most powerful men in all of Italy? The Anselmi Commission on P2 discovered that Gelli was pointed out by assistant Grand Master Roberto Ascarelli to Grand Master Giordano Gamberini, in terms of his ability to do great things and enlist qualified people to the lodge. Prior to joining P2, Ascarelli knew Gelli though a lodge called Hod. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 59; Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 73)

And here is the capper: Permindex/CMC met in the same place as Gelli’s P2 group; in the offices of Ascarelli in the Spanish Steps area of Rome. Later on, in a book, Gelli admitted to this location. But further, Michele Metta discovered that Ascarelli was on the Board of Directors of Permindex/CMC. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison, pp. 72-73)

There was a crossover between the two rightwing groups. In other words, the man who sponsored Licio Gelli–the most powerful fascist in Italy– served in the same group as Clay Shaw. So much for the myth of Shaw as the Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal.

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