Authors: Philip Willan
No convincing evidence has emerged to connect the three foreigners named by Ciolini with the Bologna station bombing. Fabricated evidence bearing a remarkable similarity to Ciolini’s claims did however emerge, thanks to the efforts of the P2-dominated military intelligence service, SISMI. On 13 January 1981 – six months after the Bologna bombing, and ten months before Ciolini began making his claims – weapons and explosives similar to those used in the bombing, together with two French and two German newspapers, were found in a suitcase on a train en route between Taranto and Milan, while it was standing at Bologna station. The find was the result of ‘brilliant intelligence work’ by SISMI, which reported that the transport of explosives was the work of a terrorist alliance involving Stefano Delle Chiaie, French extremists and members of Germany’s Hoffman group. A Mab submachine gun, it would later emerge, had been obtained from an arms cache under the control of the Magliana Band (Banda della Magliana), the Roman underworld organization linked to the
secret services and Italian right-wing extremists – and which would be implicated in Calvi’s flight from Italy.
A senior SISMI officer, General Pasquale Notarnicola, told Rome prosecutors in 1984 that he was first alerted to the intelligence operation about a month before the find. He had been summoned to Rome’s Ciampino military airport by the head of SISMI, General Giuseppe Santovito, to be brought abreast of new intelligence concerning planned terrorist attacks on trains or railway nodes. Santovito had just returned from a meeting in France with the head of the French secret service, and was in the company of Francesco Pazienza and the American journalist Mike Ledeen, who would come to prominence two decades later as a neo-con adviser to President George W. Bush.
Ciolini’s account may indeed have been inspired by the SISMI disinformation campaign, but it is inconceivable that he could have based it simply on news reports of the investigation. His account was much more detailed than the SISMI version and the SISMI reports were still covered by state and judicial secrecy. The similarity between the two versions is nonetheless remarkable. Pazienza and two SISMI officers were convicted by a court in Rome in 1985 of organizing the SISMI disinformation operation known as ‘terror on the trains’. It is hard to imagine they would have embarked on this risky course of action – actually planting fabricated evidence of a right-wing conspiracy – unless they had good reason to want to protect the real Bologna bombers.
Federico Federici, the Florentine lawyer known as ‘
Papillon
’ for the bow ties he habitually sported under a thick brown beard, was a business partner of Ciolini’s before falling out with him over money. He provides an interesting glimpse of Ciolini’s activities and interests in a detailed ‘confidential report’ on their dealings. According to Federici’s report, in the autumn of 1977 Ciolini predicted ‘a grave political event’ in Italy’s near future. In spring the following year the
extreme left-wing Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, the chairman of the Christian Democrat party and one of the most influential politicians of the time. Ciolini also appears to have succeeded in accurately predicting the revival of the ‘strategy of tension’ in the spring and summer of 1992, in a letter to Bologna magistrates. His information was not always so accurate, however. Ciolini offered information to the Italian authorities on a number of high-profile judicial cases that turned out to be extravagant or simply false. In his ‘confidential report’, Federici summed up his own reaction to Ciolini’s ambiguities: ‘The reader should not be surprised if a man of my professional experience and so-called intelligence . . . should have fallen into such a concatenated series of traps, because all the stories that Ciolini recounted, all the lies he told found some minimal confirmation, so that often, if not to say always, one ended up being induced, if not to believe him, at least to wait, perhaps perplexedly, on the evolution of events.’
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Given Ciolini’s fascination for the turbid elements of Italy’s recent history, it would have been surprising if he didn’t have something to say about the Calvi case. And indeed he did. A secret service report dated 13 July 1982 reveals that Ciolini had asked Judge Gentile in Bologna to put him in touch with a member of the service so that he could supply him with ‘the complete itinerary of Roberto Calvi from Italy to London’. The source of the information, according to the report, was ‘friends of Ciolini (presumably Gelli, Ortolani, etc.) currently gathered at a villa between Lausanne and Geneva belonging to Francesco Pazienza’.
Ciolini’s account of the Calvi affair – to be taken, as always, with a generous pinch of salt – is set out in a series of notes dating from August 1986, written in French in a spidery hand and with frequent use of cryptic abbreviations. Once again though, it is worth considering, given Ciolini’s alleged contacts with some of the protagonists and the resemblance of certain
elements of his account to that offered by the Italian secret services themselves. It has now emerged that one of the Italian police and secret service’s primary sources of information on Calvi’s flight was indeed Ciolini.
The source of the information contained in one of Ciolini’s notes is clearly Francesco Pazienza: ‘Pazienza informs that the Calvi operation was ordered by P2 because Calvi wanted to put pressure on those he had given money to! Money of Gheddafi – mafia – coca – blackmail of Gelli – group (Pazienza consultant of Italian secret services and adviser on Italian problems to Kissinger USA). According to Pazienza, Calvi was supposed to meet [Prince Victor Emanuel of] Savoy in London thanks to Gelli for funds (Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy IOR). Marcos and Shah. Pazienza considers Gelli responsible in that he knows the mafia. [Mafia boss Pippo] Calò and others, with the agreement of Anderson [allegedly the pseudonym of a CIA officer operating in the south of France] and of the mafia, decide on Calvi’s death.’
Ciolini elaborated on the theme in another note about the activities of Licio Gelli. ‘Calvi wanted back the money given to P2 to finance political parties and for the activities of Gelli[,] Anderson, for ENI and for bribes. PSI see votes and above all the list of 500 that Calvi received from Sindona. The list of 500 is now: 1 copy Anderson 1 copy Pazienza, which he gives to Kissinger via Ledeen. The list deals with the real power of Italian politicians and collusion with the “old mafia” since 1965. Gelli allegedly ordered the elimination of Calvi . . . Calvi also wanted the money he had given to Ortolani’s Banco Financiero Montevideo. Mafia connections. The mafia had also given money to Calvi via Gelli and don’t let’s forget the Vatican, which wanted its money and partly recovered it. So one can say that P2 commissioned the Calvi murder! At the end Calvi was doing blackmail. Anderson, P2 and Gelli said they would “see” him.’
The ‘list of 500’ is something of a phoenix in Italian conspiracy mythology. It is commonly considered to be a list
of wealthy Italians who benefited from favourable treatment at Michele Sindona’s banks, for the illegal export of currency in particular. More specifically, the list is believed to contain the names of individuals who exported currency though Finabank in Geneva and who were repaid by Finabank despite Sindona’s bankruptcy and despite a freeze on repayments ordered by the Bank of Italy in July 1974. Ciolini’s note adds that ‘a certain Carboni, a friend of Pazienza’ brought a part of Calvi’s documents to Pazienza in the Swiss town of Gland, where he met Gelli, Ortolani and Pazienza on 15 July 1982. The meeting took place at the Villa La Crique, belonging to the Swiss businessman [Peter] Notz, who was a business partner, in the Middle East and Caribbean, of the Saudi arms broker Adnan Kashoggi and Ortolani. Notz has denied any connection to the Calvi affair.
Ciolini’s personal contacts and business activities return us to firmer ground. An investigation into Federici’s involvement in the arms business turns up an unexpected connection to Roberto Calvi, suggesting the Ambrosiano chief may have been more deeply and personally involved in weapons trading than had previously been understood. An undated secret service report relates information received from an ‘occasional source’ when Ciolini was living in Key Biscayne, Florida. The Bologna supergrass was working as a car collector for the Hertz car hire firm and had recently provided hospitality at his home to his friend Federici. ‘He is in the custom of using “bugs” to record conversations and exploit them for extortion,’ the report said. ‘The source also reports that Ciolini, Pazienza and Federici are in close contact with one another and that the three are in contact with Stefano Delle Chiaie in Costa Rica.’
Federici, in his turn, was in close contact with the American journalist Michael Ledeen, as testified by the intimate tone of their phone calls, intercepted by police, and Federici’s own testimony to Bologna magistrates. He said he had known Ledeen since the American had first come to do historical
research in Florence in 1968. One of the topics he had discussed with Ledeen, he said, was his [Federici’s] plan for the publication of a book of memoirs by another friend: Licio Gelli.
Federici’s ‘confidential report’ on his dealings with Ciolini refers frequently to their activities in the arms sector. During a visit to Argentina he had met the army minister, who had shown himself to be ‘extremely interested in the purchase of certain types of light and semi-light weapons, as well as assault pontoons’. Federici’s claims were backed up by correspondence confiscated from him by the police. The correspondence reveals that Federici was in contact with an arms dealer – a man who was, in his turn, in contact with Calvi. The arms dealer, Alberto Sensenhauser, was a German-born director of an Italian mine-producing company called Misar SpA.
That Roberto Calvi should have been in regular contact with the German-born arms dealer is surprising. Sensenhauser’s 1981 diary shows he met the Ambrosiano chairman at least seven times during the month of January and the meetings continued at less frequent intervals during the spring. Within the pages of Sensenhauser’s diary were two faxes received from Federico Federici and a handwritten note showing quantities of ammunition and prices in dollars. It bore the heading: ‘Your request Iraq’. Iraq was at that time at war with Iran, so Calvi may have been venturing into dangerous territory in his dealings with Mr Sensenhauser.
Ciolini was most successful in his account of the right-wing circles connected to Stefano Delle Chiaie, providing information that was at that time unknown to Italian investigators and that leads, curiously, to other protagonists of the Calvi affair. Only his spelling was at times at fault. In a note dated December 1981, Ciolini identified two companies that he said belonged to the terrorist organization behind the Bologna bombing. They were Promicon, a company based in the northern city of Bergamo, and Odel [sic] Prima, with offices in Via Satrico in Rome.
The subsequent police investigation established that a Bergamo company called Promecon was the property of Alfredo Graniti, a right-wing extremist who was arrested on 24 April 1981 after a shootout with the police. Graniti was attempting to cross the border into Switzerland in the company of another right-winger, Massimo Carminati, who lost an eye in the exchange of fire. Carminati was a Roman and in close contact with members of the Magliana Band, the Roman underworld organization, as well as with Valerio Fioravanti, one of the two terrorists eventually convicted for the Bologna massacre. The Rome company, Odal Prima, turned out to be run by two brothers, Roberto and Carmine Palladino. The latter, an associate of Stefano Delle Chiaie, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the Bologna bombing and was murdered in prison by a fellow right-winger on 10 August 1982. Most intriguingly though, a third partner in the Odal Prima financial consultancy was a man called Pietro Citti.
A right-wing extremist who had also been in contact with Delle Chiaie in the 1970s, Citti had moved after a while to work for another Rome company, Sofint, where his boss was Flavio Carboni. The two men fell out after Citti purloined sensitive documents from the company and attempted to extort money from Carboni. Citti’s initial statement to a Rome prosecutor and the Sofint documents he presented in evidence subsequently disappeared from the court file, according to his own later evidence to Bologna prosecutors. When Odal Prima was formed its principal and in fact only client was Sofint, Citti told the Bologna magistrates. Rome magistrates had issued a warrant for Citti’s arrest in December 1975, following the discovery of an arms cache at an apartment rented in his name. He and the other right-wing extremists connected to the flat – four were arrested on the occasion of the police raid – were subsequently acquitted for lack of evidence. Citti himself described the acquittals as ‘paradoxical’ in his statement to the Bologna magistrates.
If Ciolini’s evidence constitutes a flimsy, if intriguing, connection between Calvi and the Bologna bombing, there is other evidence that renders it potentially less fanciful. When Gelli was arrested in a branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in Geneva on 13 September 1982 he was attempting to withdraw a large sum of money from the bank. To help him with the operation he had a number of documents with him to remind him of some of the details of his personal financial affairs, which were confiscated from him by the Swiss police. One of the most curious was a table showing payments to a man called Marco Ceruti, a Florentine restaurant owner. The typewritten schedule appears to show that Gelli and Ortolani paid Ceruti a total of $11.6 million between 3 September 1980 and 15 February 1981. Much of the money went into a Ceruti account at the UBS named ‘Bukada’. The table bears the heading: ‘BOLOGNA – 525779 – X.S.’ a reference to the north Italian city that has never been explained.
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Ceruti actually received considerably more from his P2 benefactors. A handwritten note in Gelli’s possession referred to cash payments to M.C. of 5,000,000 and 1,000,000, without specifying the currency, made between 20 and 30 July 1980 and to another bank deposit at the UBS on 1 September 1980 for the amount of $4 million. At least some of the money originated from two $10 million payments made on Calvi’s orders from the Banco Ambrosiano Andino in Lima on 22 August 1980 and 26 February 1981. The money passed to Gelli and Ortolani via a Liechtenstein nominee company, Nordeurop Establishment, one of ten offshore companies for which the IOR issued two ‘letters of patronage’ on 1 September 1981. The letters confirmed that the IOR ‘directly or indirectly’ controlled the companies and was aware of their indebtedness towards the Banco Ambrosiano. They were a fraudulent device issued at Calvi’s request and on the understanding that they would not be shown outside the Banco Ambrosiano; in a ‘parallel letter’, dated 26 August 1981 and outlining the
favour he was requesting, Calvi indemnified the Vatican bank against any losses resulting from its notional assumption of responsibility.