Authors: David Yallop
Gelli joined a conventional Masonic Lodge in November 1963. He rapidly rose to third degree membership, which made him eligible to lead a Lodge. The then Grand Master Giordano Gamberini urged Gelli to form a circle of important people, some of whom might eventually become Masons but all of whom could be useful to the growth of legitimate Freemasonry. Gelli leapt at the opportunity. What he in fact
conceived was an illegal secret organization. This group was given the name Raggruppamento Gelli – P2. The P stood for Propaganda, the name of an historic lodge of the nineteenth century. Initially he brought into it retired senior members of the Armed Forces. Through them he obtained the entrée to the active Service Heads. The web he spun was gradually to cover the entire power structure of Italy. The ideals and aspirations of genuine Freemasonry were rapidly abandoned, though not officially. Gelli’s aim was somewhat different: extreme right-wing control of Italy. Such control would function as a secret state within a state, unless the unthinkable happened and the Communists were elected to power. If that happened then there would be a coup. The right wing would take over. Gelli was confident that the Western Powers would accept the situation. Indeed, from the early formation of P2, he had the active support and encouragement of the CIA operating in Italy. It may sound like the scenario of a madman, doomed to the fate of all such schemes, but it should be noted that within the membership of P2 in Italy alone (there were, and still are, powerful branches in other countries) were the Armed Forces Commander Giovanni Torrisi, the Secret Service Chiefs Generals Giuseppe Santovito and Giulio Grassini, the Head of Italy’s Financial Police, Orazio Giannini, cabinet ministers and politicians of every political shade (except of course the Communists), thirty generals, eight admirals, newspaper editors, television executives, top industrialists, and bankers, including Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona. Unlike conventional Freemasonry, the list of members of P2 was so secret that only Gelli knew all the names.
Gelli used a variety of techniques to increase the power of P2. One of them was the innocuous method of personal contact and introduction from an already existing member. Others were less tasteful. Blackmail was the most prevalent. When a ‘target’ joined P2 he was obliged to demonstrate loyalty by placing at Gelli’s disposal documents that would compromise not only the new member but other possible targets. Confronted with the evidence of their own misdeeds the targets joined P2. This technique was used for example on the President of ENI, the State oil company, Giorgio Mazzanti. Shown the evidence of his own corruption concerning proposed huge bribes and pay-offs on a pending Saudi oil deal, Mazzanti caved in and joined P2, bringing to Gelli even more compromising information.
Another technique Gelli used to seduce a new member was to ascertain from already corrupted sources the shortlist of three on a top job. He would then telephone all three applicants and announce that he
intended to fix it for them. Next day he would have one very grateful new member of P2.
On the surface P2 was, and still is, a fanatical insurance policy against potential Communist governments. Excluding Italy there are still branches functioning in Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, France, Portugal and Nicaragua. Members are also active in Switzerland and the USA. P2 interlocks with the Mafia in Italy, Cuba and the USA. It interlocks with a number of the military regimes of Latin America, and with a variety of groups of neo-Fascists. It also interlocks very closely with the CIA. It reaches right into the heart of the Vatican. The central common interest of all these elements is apparently a hatred and fear of Communism.
In fact, P2 is not a world conspiracy with the aim of preventing the spread of Marxism or its many variations. It is an international grouping with a number of diverse aims. It combines an attitude of mind with a community of self interest, its main goals being not the destruction of a particular ideology but an insatiable greed for power and wealth and the furtherance of self, hiding behind the acceptable face of ‘defenders of the free world’. In the world of P2, however, nothing is free. Everything has a price.
Licio Gelli’s contacts and associates spread far and wide. They included Stefano Delle Chiaie, Pierluigi Pagliani and Joachim Fiebelkorn, all members of the private army set up in Bolivia by ex-Gestapo Chief Klaus Barbie. The group took the name ‘Fiancés of Death’. Political assassinations were performed to order, including that of Bolivian Socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Cruz. The ‘Fiancés of Death’ were also instrumental in bringing to power in Bolivia in 1980 General Garcia Meza. Klaus Barbie used his Nazi training as ‘security adviser’ to Colonel Gomez, a man with a great deal of Bolivian blood on his hands.
The group that Barbie controlled with the blessing of the Bolivian junta expanded its activities after a coup of 1980. The murders of political opponents, investigating journalists, labour leaders and students increased. Added to this work was the task of ‘regulating’ the cocaine industry – destroying the small dealers to ensure that the big drug traffickers could flourish with the junta’s protection. From 1965, Barbie’s activities in Bolivia had included arms deals not only on behalf of Bolivia but also for other right-wing South American regimes and Israel. It was through such arms deals that Klaus Barbie, an unrepentant member of the SS, and Licio Gelli became business partners: Barbie, who between May 1940 and April 1942 was
responsible for the liquidation of all known Freemasons in Amsterdam, and Licio Gelli, the Grand Master of Masonic Lodge P2. The two men had much in common, including the mutual high regard they had for men like Stefano Delle Chiaie. The Italian Delle Chiaie has been involved in at least two attempted coups in his own country. When a civilian Government returned to office in Bolivia in October 1982, Delle Chiaie fled to Argentina. There he was given comfort and aid by P2 member José Lopez Rega, the creator of the notorious Triple A death squads.
Rega had also created a large cocaine-smuggling connection between Argentina and the USA. Clearly Licio Gelli is as skilful at selling his particular vision of the world as he once was selling mattresses. To have a range of close friends and associates that includes a man like José Lopez Rega, Klaus Barbie and the esoteric Cardinal Paolo Bertoli is a considerable achievement. Like Gelli, the Cardinal is a Tuscan. His career includes forty years in the Vatican diplomatic service. Bertoli was not without support in the Conclave that elected Albino Luciani.
Cardinal Bertoli was only one of the many doors to Gelli’s entry into the Vatican. He dined with Bishop Paul Marcinkus. He had a number of audiences with Pope Paul. Many a cardinal, archbishop, bishop, monsignor and priest, who today would deny all knowledge of Licio Gelli, was only too pleased to be seen in his company in the 1960s and the 1970s.
One of Gelli’s closest P2 associates was Italian lawyer and businessman Umberto Ortolani. Like ‘The Puppet Master’, Ortolani learned early in life the value of secret information. During the Second World War he became head of two large operational units of SISMI, the military intelligence agency in Italy. His speciality was counterespionage. A Roman Catholic, he appreciated while still a young man that one of the real centres of power was across the Tiber within Vatican City. Consequently his penetration of the Vatican and its corridors of influence was total.
Vatican dignitaries were frequent dinner guests at Ortolani’s Rome house in Via Archimede. An indication of how far back Ortolani’s excellent Vatican contacts reached can be gauged from the fact that he was first introduced to Cardinal Lercaro in 1953. Lercaro had immense influence within the Church and was destined to become one of the four ‘moderators’ of the Second Vatican Council. He was widely regarded as one of the liberal enlightened influences which helped to ensure that many of the reforms which flowed from the
Council became realities. Ortolani was generally known as the Cardinal’s ‘cousin’, a misconception he actively encouraged.
In the run-up to the Conclave which elected Paul VI, the central issue was whether the work of Pope John XXIII would continue or whether the Papacy should revert to the reactionary ethos of Pius XII. The ‘liberals’ needed a safe house to debate strategy. Lercaro, one of the liberal front-runners, asked Ortolani to host the meeting. It was held at Ortolani’s villa in Grottaferata, near Rome, a few days before the Conclave. A large number of Cardinals attended, including Suenens of Brussels, Doepfner of Munich, Koenig of Vienna, Alfrink of Holland and ‘Uncle’ Giacomo Lercaro.
This highly secret meeting was the single most important factor in what subsequently occurred in the Conclave. It was agreed that if Lercaro’s very considerable support should prove insufficient then his votes should swing to Giovanni Battista Montini. Thus on the third ballot Montini suddenly found himself twenty additional votes nearer to the Papacy he eventually acquired.
Within months the new Pope bestowed upon Umberto Ortolani the Vatican award of ‘Gentleman Of His Holiness’. He subsequently received many more Vatican honours and awards. He even succeeded in affiliating Licio Gelli, a non-Catholic, to the Knights of Malta and the Holy Sepulchre. A close friend of Casaroli, the man usually referred to as the Vatican’s Kissinger because of his major involvement in foreign policy, lawyer Ortolani provided his P2 master with an unrivalled access to any Vatican dignitary. Like his master, Ortolani is a man who, on paper at least, is the citizen of many countries. Born in Viterbo in Italy, he has since become a Brazilian national. A useful byproduct of that arrangement is that no extradition treaty exists between Italy and Brazil.
The list of P2 members grew ever larger. In 1981 when a huge quantity of Gelli’s secret documents were seized in Tuscany, they revealed that the secret society had nearly 1,000 members in Italy alone. But that 1,000 is merely the tip of the iceberg. SISMI, Italy’s military intelligence agency, puts the membership at nearly 2,000. Gelli himself puts the figure at 2,400. In either event a number of Europe’s intelligence agencies are agreed that the identity of the majority of P2 members has yet to be revealed and that within their ranks are nearly 300 of the most powerful men in what it pleases the twentieth century to call the free world.
When the Italian exposure of nearly 1,000 members of this illegal secret society occurred in 1981, one P2 member, Senator Fabrizio
Cicchitto, stated a fundamental truth: ‘If you wanted to make it to the top in Italy in the 1970s the best way was Gelli and P2.’
The close relationship between P2 and the Vatican was, like all relationships formed by Gelli, self-serving to both parties. Gelli played on the almost paranoid fear of Communism existing within the Vatican. He was particularly given to quoting pre-Second World War statements that had justified Fascism, including one by Cardinal Hinsley of Westminster who had told Catholics in 1935: ‘If Fascism goes under, God’s cause goes under with it.’
The most bizarre factor in the close and continuous contacts that existed between P2 and the Vatican is that various cardinals, bishops and priests could smile so benevolently on this bastard child of orthodox Masonry. The Roman Catholic Church has viewed Freemasons for many hundreds of years as sons of evil. The organization has been repeatedly condemned and has inspired at least six Papal bulls that have been specifically directed against it; the earliest being ‘In eminenti’ from Pope Clement XII, in 1738.
The Church regards this secret society of self-interest as an alternative religion controlled by the godless. It considers that one of Freemasonry’s principal aims is the destruction of the Catholic Church. Consequently any Catholic discovered to be a member has been subjected to automatic excommunication from the Church.
There can be little doubt that many historical revolutionary movements utilized Freemasonry in their quarrels with the Church. A classic example is the Italian patriot Garibaldi, who forged the Masons of the country into a force that aroused the general populace, overthrew Papal domination, and resulted in a unified Italy.
Today Freemasonry means different things in different countries. All Masons contend that it is a force for good. Non-Masons view this self-serving, secret society with varying degrees of hostility and suspicion. But until very recently the Roman Catholic Church has maintained an entirely consistent position: Freemasonry is a profound evil and all who belong to it are in the eyes of the Church anathema. If this was the thinking of the Church on conventional Freemasonry, then it makes the close ties between P2 and the Vatican even more extraordinary: one of the smallest but most powerful States on earth embracing a state within a state. The overwhelming majority of P2 members were, and are, practising Roman Catholics.
Though the complete Italian Lodge of P2 never met in its entirety (they would have needed to hire La Scala for that), there were undoubtedly meetings of selected groups. Discussions were not confined merely
to lamenting the evils of Communism. Active steps were planned to combat and contain what Gelli and his friends saw as the ultimate disaster, a Communist Government democratically elected to power.
There have been over the past two decades a number of bomb outrages in Italy which remain unsolved. If the Italian authorities ever catch Gelli they will be in a position, if he chooses to talk and tell the truth, to solve some of those mysterious attacks. These include: Milan 1969, the Piazza Fontana bomb attack – 16 people killed; Bologna 1974, bomb attack on the Rome–Munich express, ‘The Italicus’, near Bologna – 12 people killed; Bologna 1980, railway station bombing – 85 people killed, 182 injured. According to a disenchanted follower of Gelli, a neo-Fascist called Elio Ciolini, this last outrage was planned at a P2 meeting held in Monte Carlo on April 11th, 1980. Licio Gelli was the Grand Master at that meeting. Again, according to the sworn testimony of Ciolini, three of the men allegedly responsible for the railway station bombing are Stefano Della Chiaie, Pierluigi Pagliani and Joachim Fiebelkorn.