Authors: Philip Willan
Pazienza confronted suspicions that he may have played a role in Calvi’s murder head on when he gave evidence at the trial in Rome. In the mid 1980s prime minister Bettino Craxi was convinced that Pazienza was responsible for Calvi’s flight from Italy and death in London on the basis of what he had
been told by his intelligence chief, Admiral Fulvio Martini. ‘If Martini was telling the truth then I am responsible for Calvi’s death,’ Pazienza told the court. ‘Alternatively, he may have been lying to cover for Mr Carboni and Mr Calò, or perhaps for somebody else altogether.’
Pazienza had spent the night of 11 June at the Dorchester Hotel in London before flying out to America. It was the right sort of time to be in London if arrangements were to be made in advance for Calvi’s murder. He had twice called a London company called Fairways Marine Ltd – perhaps to book a boat for use on the Thames? He was asked about the calls by the public prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, whose faulty English pronunciation made it necessary to spell out the company’s name letter by letter. It was a travel agency and he had called to book a flight, Pazienza said at first. No, said Tescaroli, it was a boat hire company. ‘I don’t remember,’ said Pazienza. ‘At the time, if I was renting a boat it would have been a large boat. It must have been a yacht broker.’
Pazienza conceded that he had become exasperated with Calvi in the latter part of their relationship, frustrated by his stop-go approach to business projects. He had been asked to find a buyer for the Vatican’s Vianini construction company and the
Corriere della Sera
publishing group only to have the rug pulled from under him at the last minute by Calvi. Calvi had reacted in a similarly inconsistent manner in response to his efforts to find an American buyer for the Banco Ambrosiano itself. The financier Robert Armao and Rockefeller interests had been contemplating taking a controlling stake, he said. ‘The problem is this: everything is fine with Calvi if you say “well done,
bravo
”. But if you say that everything is not fine, he starts to talk about treachery. It’s true that I used to cut him down to size. I know Carboni used to treat him differently, “Yes,
presidente
, yes,
presidente
”.’ Pazienza bobbed his head from side to side, mimicking a servile Carboni in the presence of the chairman of the bank.
Pazienza had claimed to have the Ambrosiano’s salvation within his grasp when he was interviewed for the British television documentary programme
Panorama
more than 20 years earlier. Two American investors, three Saudi individuals and two banks had been prepared to pay $1.2 billion for a 12 per cent stake in the Banco Ambrosiano to be purchased from Calvi’s Panamanian companies, he said, in rather unimpressive spaghetti-English. It would have solved Calvi’s problems ‘absolutely 100 per cent’. But Calvi’s problems could not be solved so easily. Buying control of the Banco Ambrosiano meant gaining access to his unconfessable secrets, and there were few, if any, whom he could contemplate trusting with them.
If Pazienza was not responsible for Calvi’s death, then who was? The former secret agent declined to be drawn on the subject when questioned in court. ‘If I knew who had killed Calvi, I would tell you. I have my own fairly clear ideas, but they are the ideas of an analyst not a witness. I’m in prison, I won’t fall into the trap of calumny, I’m not permitted to,’ he said. But Pazienza did offer a cryptic hint to the court, inviting it to reflect on who benefited from the banker’s death. ‘
Cui prodest
[who gains from] Calvi’s death? I leave the answer to you,’ he said, then added in Latin, after a moment’s reflection: ‘
Sinite parvulos venire ad me.
’ Who was he evoking with Christ’s words: ‘Let the little children come unto me’?
Pazienza has indicated on several occasions that his collaboration with Calvi had given him access to highly sensitive information about the Vatican’s financial activities. In an interview conducted in 1986 from his prison cell, while on remand pending the outcome of the Bologna bombing trial, he blamed the Ambrosiano’s collapse on its vertiginous rate of expansion in the last three years of Calvi’s life. This was the result, he told the news magazine
L’Espresso
, of its strategic accord with Paul Marcinkus. ‘The Ambrosiano was to represent the modern, secular arm of the church in the world. The
new temporal power was seen as the penetration and control of financial and publishing activities to counterbalance the secular and Marxist influences that were becoming ever more preponderant in Italy.’ Pope Paul VI did not have such an aggressive secular programme as John Paul II, so Marcinkus had not needed so much money in the past. The pope’s foreign policy was focused on Poland and new activities in the Third World, Pazienza explained. ‘I will give you a little example. The company Erin SA, controlled by the Vatican, owed the Ambrosiano more than $60 million in 1981. Well, in mid 1981 the German secret services and the CIA received a report from the English security services asking them to investigate the purchase of strategic material by a well-known German arms dealer, material that was destined for the IRA [Irish Republican Army]. The report referred to “a Panamanian company, considered close to Catholic circles and probably the Vatican, named Erin SA”.’ The Vatican had been buying arms for a terrorist organization? Not something the Holy See would like to see publicized, if true!
Pazienza has hinted strongly that he was aware of links between Monsignor Marcinkus and the Central Intelligence Agency. In his autobiography,
Il Disubbidiente
, he said an American lawyer of his acquaintance had been asked to provide the IOR chief with legal advice in the wake of the Ambrosiano’s collapse. The request came from a fellow lawyer, the Catholic director of the CIA, William Casey. ‘Was Paul Marcinkus in contact with the American espionage organization?’ he asked rhetorically. Pazienza provided his own answer in a handwritten note presented by his defence lawyers at the Bologna bomb trial and titled: ‘Ambrosiano– IOR–CIA’. The text, dated 23 January 1983, reads: ‘The CIA transferred (according to Calvi) money to Poland via the IOR and the Catholic Church.’ There was a slight hitch, however, the note continued: Marcinkus asked Calvi to advance him a few million dollars, which would be more than compensated
when the CIA funds arrived. ‘The problem was that these funds never arrived and Marcinkus swindled the good Calvi.’
Calvi had been convinced that Robert Armao and another American financier interested in acquiring a controlling stake in his bank were linked to the CIA, who knows why? Pazienza reflected. ‘It occurred to me that the diabolical Marcinkus had not just “fucked” Calvi but the CIA as well, helping himself to the Ambrosiano dollars. It is very probable, in fact, that Marcinkus found himself in the Turner–Casey interregnum at the CIA and needed Calvi’s “emergency assistance”. But then he must have forgotten to pay. It happens to the best of us.’ By 1983 Pazienza was disenchanted with the CIA, the Vatican and Calvi; hinting at a knowledge of explosive political secrets might have been no more than a desperate defensive ploy by someone facing the prospect of long years in jail. But given Pazienza’s delicate professional role and secret service contacts, it may have been more than just a legal bluff.
Jesus Christ outlined his approach to temporal power when he instructed his followers to render unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s – coins bearing the effigy of the Roman emperor – and to God what was God’s – their spiritual allegiance. He taught that his kingdom was not of this world and allowed himself to be put to death by Roman soldiers. The relationship between the Christian religion and temporal power changed significantly when the Emperor Constantine publicly converted to Christianity in AD 313, bringing to an end the Roman persecution of the early church. A new church would emerge, combining spiritual and temporal powers, with its own territories, its own state administration and its own armies. Most of that temporal power was stripped away at the end of the nineteenth century by the Risorgimento, the movement for the liberation and unification of Italy in which freemasons such as Giuseppe Garibaldi played a leading role. The pope’s temporal reign would be confined from then on to the 43 hectares of the Vatican City. This did not mean that the Vatican’s temporal ambitions had come to a complete end. They would simply be pursued more discreetly, and money – Caesar’s coin – would play an increasingly important role.
The Vatican bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion, was founded by Pius XII on 27 June 1942, while the Second World War was raging. It was intended to facilitate the movement of funds on behalf of church bodies in a violently
fractured world; global reach and secrecy would be essential. The Vatican Yearbook describes its mission more blandly: ‘The purpose of the Institute is to provide for the care and administration of the capital destined for the works of religion.’ The IOR absorbed an earlier institution, the Administration of the Works of Religion, which Leo XIII had set up in 1887. It was believed to have deposits of around $2 billion – making it the equivalent of a regional bank in the United States – when Archbishop Paul Marcinkus joined its staff in 1968. Much of the Vatican’s lands and buildings had been confiscated from it by the new Italian state when Rome was incorporated into it in 1870. Almost 60 years later the Vatican was paid compensation of around $80 million by the government of Benito Mussolini on the signing of the Lateran Pact in 1929. The money was not administered by the IOR, however, but by a specially created Vatican administration. When Marcinkus took over the IOR the money derived from the seized real estate assets that had once made up the Papal States was under the control of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), a rival centre of financial power within the Vatican.
From the start, secrecy was one of the major assets of the financial institution that conducted its business from behind the stout medieval walls of the Bastion of Nicholas V, just inside the Vatican’s St Anne’s Gate. Italian banking authorities had no jurisdiction over it and it declined to publish its accounts. Its activities were nominally supervised by a committee of five cardinals, but the committee met rarely and when it did the cardinals were given a concise statement of the bank’s activities, which they were not supposed to take away. Their restraint was customarily rewarded with a cheque for the equivalent of $5,000 contained in an envelope attached to the IOR statement and marked: ‘For Your Eminence’s personal charities’.
When Marcinkus joined the bank there were around 9,000 depositors. They included religious orders, ecclesiastical colleges, dioceses, parishes and other religious institutions.
Senior prelates, accredited Vatican diplomats and other select lay people could hold personal accounts in return for the pledge that part of the funds would be made available for good works. The
New York Times
journalist Paul Hoffmann described the atmosphere there at that time in his book
Anatomy of the Vatican.
‘No mistake, the well-lit office was a bank. It might look a little old-fashioned with marble floors and glass partitions, tellers in correct civilian suits, and customers – priests, nuns, a few laymen, hardly ever a laywoman – making deposits or withdrawals. The atmosphere was almost that of a church; loud words were seldom heard, and a crucifix hung on a wall. The mother superior of some order, flanked by another elderly nun, probably their community’s treasurer, shoved a bundle of cheques across the marble counter; at the next window a young priest looking like a junior curialist [curia official] counted the dollar bills he had just received.’
An account at the IOR was a much coveted but little publicized privilege, Hoffmann explained. Money deposited there was safe from Italy’s ‘stringent, confusing, and often outright vexatory fiscal and currency regulations. A resident of Rome might on any business day walk through the Gate of St Anne into the pontifical enclave with a satchel full of 100,000 lire bills and deposit them at the Institute for the Works of Religion if he (or she) had an account there. He could expect to get interest on the money that he wouldn’t have to report on his Italian income tax return, or he might transfer funds to Switzerland, Luxembourg or the Bahamas.’ In the early 1980s the bank promised the government it would observe Italian fiscal laws in its dealings with Italian clients. An accommodating friend with a foreign passport and an account at the Institute became a particularly valuable commodity.
1
The Vatican had an opportunity to participate in geopolitics at the end of the Second World War, when it joined with
western allies in a bid to counter the spread of communism with a buffer zone of Christian democracies in central Europe. It was hoped that a kind of resuscitated Austro-Hungarian Empire might fill the void between the Baltic and the Aegean with a Pan-Danubian Confederation, halting the westward expansion of Soviet power. The instrument for achieving this goal was Intermarium, an anti-communist Catholic lay organization founded in Paris by a former Tsarist general in the mid 1930s. The organization had been funded by British and French intelligence before the war and after it Intermarium recruited supporters from 16 central European nations bent on liberating their home territories from the Soviet yoke. Almost inevitably its members were drawn, at least in part, from exfascists and Nazi collaborators, among them Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croatian priest wanted as a war criminal for his role in the persecution of Croatia’s Serbian minority. As well as supporting the work of Intermarium, Draganovic played a leading role in the Vatican-run ratline that enabled many Nazi war criminals to escape to South America.
Itermarium’s most active branch was in Rome and it participated in the battle against atheistic communism under the direct leadership of the pope, according to British author Stephen Dorril. ‘The branch campaigned among the Allies for permission to establish a volunteer anti-communist army for use in an imminent war against the USSR,’ Dorril wrote in his history of the British foreign intelligence service,
MI6.
Senior Vatican priests and bishops became leading members of Intermarium, an activity that inevitably led them into contact with the intelligence services of the major western powers. Some of them were hardliners, happy to assist anti-communist Nazis and their collaborators in their flight from Europe even when they were wanted for war crimes. Intermarium was one of the first organizations to campaign openly for freedom for Waffen-SS prisoners of war, Dorril wrote. The Vatican appears to have provided a discreet financial channel to support another
transnational anti-communist organization, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), at about this time. ‘ “Vast sums” were being paid to the ABN by MI6 through a Vatican channel, to disguise its true source,’ Dorril claimed.
2
Such discreet support for the clandestine operations of western secret services could well have continued until the Sindona and Calvi eras and provide a possible key to understanding Calvi’s demise.