Authors: Philip Willan
Other witnesses have confirmed the presence of bishops and cardinals in the P2 lodge, not impossible if one accepts the assumption that the membership lists discovered in 1981 were incomplete. A former general and P2 member claimed as much to the P2 Commission and Gelli’s biographer Pier Carpi alleged in a magazine interview that senior churchmen belonged to an ‘Ecclesia Lodge’ in contact with Michael Duke of Kent, the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England. It had been active in the Vatican since 1971, he claimed: ‘More than 100 cardinals, bishops and curia monsignors belong to it. They manage to maintain the most absolute secrecy, but not to the point of evading the investigations of Opus Dei’s men.’
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When I asked Gelli about the existence of the Vatican lodge, he replied cryptically: ‘What you’re saying belongs to the secrets of the Vatican. The Vatican is full of secrets.’
A particularly effective bridge between freemasonry and the Vatican was offered by Gelli’s friend and fellow P2 member Umberto Ortolani. Ortolani, a lawyer by training, worked for Italian military intelligence during the war before throwing in his lot with the anti-fascist resistance. His contacts with western intelligence agencies appear to have continued ever since. After the war Ortolani made a career for himself in public administration, finance and the media. As owner of the Banco Financiero Sudamericano (Bafisud), based in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, he did business with both Sindona and Calvi, helping the latter to establish his Latin American banking network. A close friend of Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro of Bologna, he lent the cardinal his villa at Grottaferrata in the Alban Hills for a pre-conclave meeting with colleagues from the college of cardinals in June 1963; Lercaro and his friends decided to back Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan for the papacy. Once elected, Pope Paul VI was quick to show his gratitude to Ortolani for his helpful gesture, appointing him a ‘Gentleman of His Holiness’, an honour
that was only withdrawn in 1983, after the breaking of the P2 scandal and the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano.
Licio Gelli developed his own strong contacts in the Vatican. He used to lunch regularly with the conservative Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani – ‘his sister was more fascist than Mussolini’, he observed to me. Cardinals Giovanni Benelli and Lercaro, both considered progressives, were also counted among his friends, as well as numerous
monsignori
from the middle ranks of the hierarchy within the curia (the papal court). He provided an illuminating account of how he managed to insinuate his way into the Vatican in an unpublished first draft of his book
La Verità.
As a director of the Permaflex mattress company, he came up with the bright promotional idea of offering a specially made mattress to the Holy Father. The gesture gained him access to the private papal apartments in the Vatican and at the pope’s summer residence of Castelgandolfo and won him a series of private audiences both with Pope Pius XII and Paul VI. At the end of a meeting with the latter, Paul VI asked him with a smile: ‘If I should need to get in contact with you, how, with what name, and where can I call you?’ The pope then gave him a piece of paper and asked him to write down his telephone number ‘and the name of the person I should ask for’. Gelli wrote down the details and then waited while the pope disappeared behind a curtain to have them typed up, returning to hand him back the piece of paper with a benevolent smile. The implication was clear: the pope intended to call him for the kind of delicate services that were better carried out under an assumed name.
It would appear that such services were satisfactorily performed. The published version of
La Verità
contains a letter from the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, dated 13 December 1965, informing him that the Grand Master of the Order, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, had appointed him a
commendatore
(commander). It was a
significant honour, coming from a Catholic order of chivalry whose head is a cardinal directly appointed by the pope. It was all the more astonishing given that Gelli was a leading freemason. The name of Tisserant has been associated with a curious financial scandal known as the ‘Vatican Connection’ that connects, in its turn, to the last days of Roberto Calvi. In 1980 the P2 chief was promoted to Grand Officer of the order, a title that would later be accompanied by an honorary degree in financial science – appropriately enough for a convicted bankrupt! – from the Opus Dei-linked Pro Deo University in the United States. His long and prestigious career would also be recognized by the civil authorities. On the recommendation of industry minister Giulio Andreotti, he was made a
commendatore
of the Italian Republic in June 1966, and in 1980 Italy’s king in exile, Umberto II, conferred on him the title of count, an honour to be passed down through the male line ‘to his legitimate and natural descendants’. The Vatican, the Italian state and the exiled royal family had all found significant ways of expressing their appreciation. His many international honours, including letters putting forward his name for the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1995, are published in a large hagiographical tome titled: ‘Licio Gelli, European Poet’.
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What might Gelli have done to deserve all these honours? One intriguing suggestion comes from Arrigo Molinari, a former deputy police chief in Genoa whose name features on the P2 lists, and whose account links Gelli to Calvi in an extremely delicate political activity. Questioned by the Trento public prosecutor, Carlo Palermo, in May 1984, Molinari said he had joined P2 in order to gain access to information that would be useful to him in his police work. Molinari said the senior P2 official who had recruited him had told him that the P2 archive was stored in the United States and that the lodge was led by senior figures from the worlds of finance and politics in America. He said he had learned from another
source of a meeting at the US embassy in Rome involving Gelli, representatives of the US and Italian secret services and multinational companies, to discuss their response to electoral gains made by the PCI in June 1975. ‘Since a coup-type solution did not seem possible, being alien to our mentality, the most feasible solution to be put forward was that of taking control of the press as a channel for influencing the masses,’ Molinari told the magistrate. Large sums were put up by Italian multinationals for this purpose and went into the pockets of Gelli, Calvi and the Italian secret services, he said. In 1976 the money was returned. ‘I presumed from that that the money was managed by the secret services rather than by Gelli and Calvi, who probably wouldn’t have returned it.’
The idea of taking control of the press remained alive in P2 circles, however. In 1981, Molinari said, Gelli was involved in a plan to take control of the
Corriere della Sera
via Calvi. ‘Calvi . . . was in contact with the secret services of half the world, in particular the Americans, . . . [and] able to exert a direct influence on the political affairs of various countries, particularly Argentina, through his banking and masonic contacts,’ Molinari said. He added that Calvi had tried to force his way into an exclusive sector of English freemasonry by financing the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands; a strange way to seek acceptance in London! The Falklands war did in fact coincide with the last weeks of Roberto Calvi’s life and there have been suggestions from elsewhere that it may have had a bearing on his death.
Molinari was stabbed to death in September 2005 in the hotel room where he lived in a small town on the Ligurian coast. The 42-year-old man who admitted responsibility said he had been surprised by Molinari when he broke into his room with the intention of stealing his handguns. There has been no suggestion that his death was connected to his allegations about P2 some 20 years earlier, but Molinari was still an active political campaigner at the age of 73. He had recently
brought a suit against the Bank of Italy, disputing its legal right to print banknotes for the state.
Gelli spoke highly of his friend Calvi when I interviewed him in 2005. ‘My relations with Calvi were very cordial. He was a serious man, dedicated to his family and his work, very Catholic, timid. I don’t think he ever had an affair with a woman. He didn’t discuss his work,’ Gelli recalled. There were further words of praise for Calvi in Gelli’s memoirs. ‘I was a sincere friend of Roberto Calvi, generally recognized as a man of rare intelligence, one of Italy’s best bankers and currency experts,’ he wrote. Calvi was a man of quick reflexes, extreme reserve, pragmatism and sense of organization, he added, meticulous in his business and, ‘as far as I know’, with a profound respect for the law.
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Had Calvi been the heir of Sindona in terms of their position in the Italian financial world? I asked. ‘I am not aware of that. If you’re saying that, perhaps you have more information than I do. Relations between them were not very close,’ Gelli replied. He had been more forthcoming in an interview with his biographer Francesco De Rosa a few years earlier, suggesting the existence of an extremely significant relationship between the two men. After an initial period of hostility, Gelli told De Rosa, the two bankers realized that they were better off forming a common front against their difficulties. ‘After their pact I surmised, and it was more than a hypothesis, that many of the things that Sindona knew had been passed on to Calvi. And I am not just talking about financial questions, agreements, possible future alliances, but also about compromising material, documents and other things that could have unleashed an earthquake. This, I believe, could be what links their deaths,’ Gelli said.
Calvi’s enemies, he told me, were ‘in a certain freemasonry, which wasn’t P2, in which he intended to seek refuge when
he went to London’. Gelli described Calvi as an ‘intelligent, complicated, blackmailed man’ who had aroused the appetite of many adversaries. ‘In the last contacts he had before fleeing Italy, he said that if the Vatican did not make up its mind to pay back the money it had received from his institution, he would make known events and facts that were so grave that the Holy See would simply have been forced to leave Italian territory . . . He certainly had information. Calvi represented at that time a certain way of doing business in Italy. A financial sector that paid large sums to the political world.’ There can be little doubt today that Calvi was intending to blackmail the Italian political world when he found himself with his back to the wall and that that decision could have contributed in no small measure to his death. In his interview with De Rosa, Gelli also spelled out the nature of the information his friend may have been threatening to use against the Vatican, saying Calvi had confided to him: ‘If tomorrow the “most holy one” doesn’t pay me the $80 million for the bills that I have paid for Poland, I will destroy him.’ ‘I don’t know what he was alluding to with those words, but I know he said them to me personally, in the presence of
avvocato
[lawyer] Umberto Ortolani.’
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Gelli confirmed the latter episode when I visited him at Villa Wanda, describing an agitated Calvi letting off steam one evening over dinner. Calvi was threatening to force the Vatican to sell off some of its antiquities if it refused to honour its debt, he said. ‘He was threatening to reveal what he had done.’
The P2 boss had no qualms about discussing Calvi’s death, a crime for which he is himself a suspect, repeating his conviction that the banker had been ‘suicided’. But who might have been behind it? I asked. ‘I have always asked myself that,’ Gelli replied. ‘He didn’t have enemies. I think of the famous briefcase. He used to keep it close to his leg, always in contact, when we were at lunch together. “Do you take it to bed with you? Have you made it a set of pyjamas?” we used to rib him.
There’s a monsignor involved, [Armando] Corona [a rival masonic leader], this Carboni, whom I have never met.’
Gelli has long been under investigation in a secret, parallel judicial inquiry intended to fill in the gaps in the investigation that led to the Rome murder trial and, above all, identify who gave the order for Calvi’s assassination. A two-page SISMI report dated 25 August 1982, just two months after Calvi’s death, provides a succinct summary of the situation at the time and appears to point an accusing finger at Gelli himself. ‘Calvi’s crisis begins with the decision of the Bank of Italy to carry out an inspection of the Banco Ambrosiano to clarify the financial situation of its foreign affiliates and the resulting need to eliminate the bank’s deficit,’ the secret service report observed. ‘According to a confidential source, Calvi turned first to the IOR and then to influential political personalities without obtaining any concrete results. He therefore resumed contacts with Licio Gelli to resolve all outstanding financial disputes between the two and to find the best way of avoiding the imminent financial collapse. He therefore went to London to meet Gelli or his emissaries, taking with him highly blackmailing documents. Here he was killed and the documentation taken from him.’
The report went on to say that Calvi’s documents were now either in the possession of Flavio Carboni’s lawyer, [Gianfranco] De Petri, in Lugano, or held at a villa between Geneva and Lausanne belonging to Peter Notz, a partner of Pazienza in the company TAG AMJ. The official secrecy covering intelligence service documents is often a convenient screen for the irresponsible collation of gossip and tittle-tattle that is unsuitable for public consumption because libellous or unreliable. In the Calvi case, however, secret service documents deserve the most careful scrutiny. The world of P2, which gravitated around Calvi, permeated the secret services that were drawing up the reports. It was in many ways a family affair, and the secret service officers reporting the story were, in some sense, spying on themselves.
If Licio Gelli professed admiration and affection for his friend Roberto Calvi, it cannot be said that the banker reciprocated, at least not to judge by a letter that he wrote towards the end of his life. The text, without a date or recipient, was found in Calvi’s famous black briefcase when it surfaced again some four years after his death. The letter gives an insight into Calvi’s strained relationship with the Vatican and his equally fraught dealings with Gelli; an entanglement which it dates from 1977 and a meeting in Umberto Ortolani’s office in Rome’s central Via Condotti. Gelli had assured him of P2’s link to the Grand Mother Lodge in London and outlined to him the national and international advantages if he were to become a member.