Propaganda Due (Italian pronunciation: [propaˈɡanda ˈduːe]), or P2, was a Masonic lodge operating under the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy from 1945 to 1976 (when its charter was withdrawn), and a pseudo-Masonic, "black", or "covert" lodge operating illegally (in contravention of Article 18 of the Constitution of Italy banning secret associations) from 1976 to 1981. During the years that the lodge was headed by Licio Gelli, P2 was implicated in numerous Italian crimes and mysteries, including the collapse of the Vatican-affiliated Banco Ambrosiano, the murders of journalist Mino Pecorelli and banker Roberto Calvi, and corruption cases within the nationwide bribe scandal Tangentopoli. P2 came to light through the investigations into the collapse of Michele Sindona's financial empire.[1]
P2 was sometimes referred to as a "state within a state"[2] or a "shadow government".[3] The lodge had among its members prominent journalists, members of parliament, industrialists, and military leaders—including Silvio Berlusconi, who later became Prime Minister of Italy; the Savoy pretender to the Italian throne Victor Emmanuel; and the heads of all three Italian intelligence services (at the time SISDE, SISMI and CESIS).
When searching Licio Gelli's villa, the police found a document called the "Plan for Democratic Rebirth", which called for a consolidation of the media, suppression of trade unions, and the rewriting of the Italian Constitution.[4]
Outside Italy, P2 was also active in Uruguay, Brazil and in Argentina, with Raúl Alberto Lastiri, Argentina's interim president (between July 13, 1973 to October 12, 1973) during the height of the "Dirty War" among its members. Emilio Massera, who was part of the military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla from 1976 to 1978, José López Rega, minister of Social Welfare in Perón's government and founder of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance ("Triple A"), and General Guillermo Suárez Mason were also members.[5]
Masonry in Italy had been outlawed by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, but it was reborn after the Second World War under USA encouragement. However, its traditions of free thinking under the Risorgimento morphed into a fervent anti-communism.
The activities of the P2 lodge were discovered by prosecutors while investigating banker Michele Sindona, the collapse of his bank and his ties to the Mafia.[10] In March 1981, police found a list of alleged members in Gelli's house in Arezzo. It contained 962 names, among which were important state officials, important politicians and a number of military officers, including the heads of the three Italian secret services.[7] Future Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was on the list, although he had not yet entered politics at the time.
In July 1982, new documents were found hidden in the false bottom of a suitcase belonging to Gelli's daughter at Fiumicino airport in Rome. The documents were entitled "Memorandum sulla situazione italiana" (Memorandum on the Italian situation) "Piano di rinascita democratica" (Plan of Democratic Rebirth) and are seen as the political programme of P2. According to these documents, the main enemies of Italy were the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the trade unions. These had to be isolated and cooperation with the communists (the second biggest party in Italy and one of the largest in Europe), which was proposed in the historic compromise by Aldo Moro needed to be disrupted.[7]
Gelli's goal was to form a new political and economic elite to lead Italy towards a right-wing, authoritarian form of democracy, with an anti-communist pre-occupation.[12] P2 advocated a programme of extensive political corruption: "political parties, newspapers and trade unions can be the objects of possible solicitations which could take the form of economic-financial manoeuvres. The availability of sums not exceeding 30 to 40 billion lire would seem sufficient to allow carefully chosen men, acting in good faith, to conquer key positions necessary for overall control."[7]
In 1977 the P2 took control of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, a leading paper in Italy. At the time, the paper had run into financial trouble and was unable to raise bank loans because its then editor, Piero Ottone, was considered hostile to the ruling Christian Democrats. Corriere's owners, the publishing house Rizzoli, struck a deal with Gelli. He provided the money with funds from the Vatican Bank directed by Paul Marcinkus. Ottone was fired and the paper's editorial line shifted to the right.[7][14]
The paper published a long interview with Gelli in 1980. The interview was carried out by the television talk show host Maurizio Costanzo, who would also be exposed as a member of P2.[15] Gelli said he was in favour of rewriting the Italian constitution towards a Gaullist presidential system. When asked what he always wanted to be, he replied: "A puppet master".[7][16]
P2 members Gelli and the head of the secret service Pietro Musumeci were condemned for attempting to mislead the police investigation of the Bologna massacre on August 2, 1980, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 200.[17]
P2 became the target of considerable attention in the wake of the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano (one of Milan's principal banks, owned in part by the Vatican Bank), and the suspicious 1982 death of its president Roberto Calvi in London, initially ruled a suicide but later prosecuted as a murder. It was suspected by investigative journalists that some of the plundered funds went to P2 or to its members.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, headed by Anselmi, concluded that the P2 lodge was a secret criminal organization. Allegations of surreptitious international relationships, mainly with Argentina (Gelli repeatedly suggested that he was a close friend of Juan Perón) and with some people suspected of affiliation with the American Central Intelligence Agency were also partly confirmed
Licio Gelli
During the 1970s, Gelli brokered three-way oil and arms deals between Libya, Italy and Argentina through the Agency for Economic Development, which he and Umberto Ortolani owned.[6]
As grand master of Propaganda Due, Gelli allegedly assumed a major role in Gladio's "strategy of tension" in Italy, starting with the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. Gladio was a clandestine "stay-behind" operation sponsored by the CIA and NATO to counter communist influence in Western European countries; it has been involved in terrorist false flags operations in Italy.[7][8][9][10]
In 1990, a report on RAI Television alleged that the CIA had paid Licio Gelli to foment terrorist activities in Italy.[11] Following this report, which also claimed that the CIA had been involved in the assassination of the Swedish Prime minister Olof Palme, then President Francesco Cossiga requested the opening of investigations while the CIA itself officially denied these allegations.[12] Critics have claimed the RAI report to be a fraud because of the inclusion of testimony from Richard Brenneke, who claimed to be a former CIA agent and made several declarations concerning the October surprise conspiracy. Brenneke's background was also investigated by a U.S. Senate subcommittee, which dismissed Brenneke's claims of CIA employment.[13] On November 23, 1995, the Court of Cassation (Corte di Cassazione) convicted Licio Gelli (grand master of P2), Francesco Pazienza and SISMI officers Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte of diverting investigations in relation to the Bologna Massacre.
On the run, Licio Gelli escaped to Switzerland where he was arrested on September 13, 1982 while trying to withdraw tens of millions of dollars in Geneva.[17] Detained in the modern Champ-Dollon Prison near Geneva, he managed to escape[22] and then fled to South America for four years. In 1984 Jorge Vargas[disambiguation needed], the secretary general of the Union Nacionalista de Chile (UNACH, Nationalist Union of Chile, a short-lived National Socialist party [23]) and a former member of the Movimiento Revolucionario Nacional Sindicalista (National-Syndicalist Revolutionary Movement [23]), declared to La Tercera de la Hora that Gelli was then in Chile.[24]
Finally, Gelli surrendered in 1987 in Switzerland to investigative judge Jean-Pierre Trembley.[25] He was wanted in connection with the 1982 collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano [26] and on charges of subversive association in connection with the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing, which killed 85 people.[26][27]
He was sentenced to two months in prison in Switzerland,[28] while an Italian court in Florence sentenced him on December 15, 1987, in absentia, to 8 years in prison on charges of financing right-wing terrorist activity in Tuscany in the 1970s.[29]
In 1992 Licio Gelli was sentenced to 18 years and six months of prison after being found guilty of fraud concerning the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano in 1982 (a "black hole" of $1.4 billion was found). The Vatican bank, Istituto per le Opere di Religione, main share-holder of the Banco Ambrosiano, consequently had a "black hole" of $250 million. This sentence was reduced by the Court of Appeal to 12 years.
In April 1998, the Court of Cassation confirmed a 12 year sentence for the Ambrosiano crash.[38] Gelli then disappeared on the eve of being imprisoned, in May 1998, while being under house arrest in his mansion near Arezzo.[38] His disappearance was strongly suspected to be the result of being forewarned. Then, finally, he was arrested in the French Riviera in Cannes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licio_Gelli" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;A few years after the Ambrosiano scandal, many suspects pointed toward Gelli with reference to his possible involvement in the murder of the Milanese banker Roberto Calvi, also known as "God's banker", who had been jailed in the wake of the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano. On July 19, 2005, Gelli was formally indicted by Roman Magistrates for the murder of Roberto Calvi, along with former Mafia boss Giuseppe Calò (also known as "Pippo Calò"), businessmen Ernesto Diotallevi and Flavio Carboni, and the latter's girlfriend, Manuela Kleinszig. In his statement before the court Gelli blamed people connected with Calvi's work in financing the Polish Solidarity movement, allegedly on behalf of the Vatican. He was accused of having provoked Calvi's death in order to punish him for having embezzled money owed to him and the Mafia. The Mafia also wanted to prevent Calvi from revealing how the bank had been used for money laundering.
Gelli has been implicated in Aldo Moro's murder, since the Italian chief of intelligence, accused of negligence, was a piduista (P2 member).
Carmine Pecorelli
Carmine Pecorelli (September 14, 1928 – March 20, 1979), known as Mino, was an Italian journalist, shot dead in Rome a year after former prime minister Aldo Moro's 1978 kidnapping and subsequent killing. He was described as a "maverick journalist with excellent secret service contacts."[1] According to Pecorelli, Aldo Moro's kidnapping had been organized by a "lucid superpower" and was inspired by the "logic of Yalta". Pecorelli's name was on Licio Gelli's list of Propaganda Due masonic members, discovered in 1980 by the Italian police.[2] In 2002, former prime minister Giulio Andreotti was sentenced, along with Mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti, to 24 years' imprisonment for Pecorelli's murder. The sentence was thrown out by the Italian Supreme Court in 2003.
He founded a press agency, called Osservatorio Politico (OP), which quickly became a newsletter, specializing in political scandals and publishing many first-hand stories that Pecorelli was able to obtain through his numerous contacts in the government, including in secret services. Pecorelli publicly acknowledged that his best pieces were the ones which had NOT been published on OP, due to agreements with the parts involved, which preferred to pay him hefty sums of money to ensure his silence.
In 1978, Pecorelli wrote that Dalla Chiesa was in danger and would be assassinated. Dalla Chiesa was murdered four years later, in September 1982.
After Aldo Moro's 1978 assassination, Mino Pecorelli published some confidential documents, mainly Moro's letters to his family. In a cryptic article published in May 1978, Pecorelli drew a connection between Operation Gladio, NATO's stay-behind anti-communist organization (whose existence was publicly acknowledged by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in October 1990) and Moro's death. During his interrogations by terrorists, Aldo Moro had made reference to "NATO's anti-guerrilla activities"[1]".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine_Pecorelli" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;Mino Pecorelli was killed in Rome's Prati district with four gun shots, on March 20, 1979. The bullets used to kill him were Gevelot brand, a peculiarly rare type of bullets not easily found on gun markets, legal and clandestine alike. The same kind of bullets were later found in the Banda della Magliana 's weapon stock, concealed in the Health Ministry's basement.
Investigations targeted Massimo Carminati, member of the far-right organization Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR) and of the Banda della Magliana; the head of Propaganda Due, Licio Gelli; Antonio Viezzer; and Cristiano and Valerio Fioravanti.
On April 6, 1993, Mafia turncoat Tommaso Buscetta told Palermo prosecutors that he had learnt from his boss Gaetano Badalamenti that Pecorelli's murder had been carried out in the interest of prime minister Giulio Andreotti. The Salvo cousins, two powerful Sicilian politicians with deep ties to local Mafia families, were also involved in the murder. Buscetta testified that Gaetano Badalamenti told him that the murder had been commissioned by the Salvo cousins, as a favor to Andreotti. Andreotti allegedly was afraid that Pecorelli was about to publish information that could have destroyed his political career. Among the information was the complete memorial of Aldo Moro, which would be published only in 1990 and which Pecorelli had shown to general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa before his death.[3] Dalla Chiesa was also assassinated by Mafia in September 1982.
Roberto Calvi
Roberto Calvi (13 April 1920 – 17 June 1982) was an Italian banker dubbed "God's Banker" by the press because of his close association with the Holy See. A native of Milan, Calvi was Chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in one of modern Italy's biggest political scandals. A source of enduring controversy, his death in London in June 1982 was ruled a murder after two coroner's inquests and an independent investigation. In Rome, in June 2007, five people were acquitted of the murder.
Claims have been made that factors in Calvi's death were the Vatican Bank, Banco Ambrosiano's main shareholder; the Mafia, which may have used Banco Ambrosiano for money laundering; and the Propaganda Due or P2 clandestine Masonic Lodge.
Roberto Calvi was the chairman of Italy's second largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, when it went bankrupt in 1982. In 1978, the Bank of Italy produced a report on the Banco Ambrosiano, which found that several billion lire had been exported illegally, leading to criminal investigations. In 1981, Calvi was tried, given a four-year suspended sentence and fined $19.8 million for transferring $27 million out of the country in violation of Italian currency laws. He was released on bail pending appeal and kept his position at the bank.
The controversy surrounding Calvi's dealings at Banco Ambrosiano echoed a previous scandal in 1974, when the Holy See lost an estimated $30 million upon the collapse of the Franklin National Bank, owned by the Sicilian-born financier Michele Sindona. Bad loans and foreign currency transactions led to the collapse of the bank. Sindona later died in prison after drinking coffee laced with cyanide.[2]
On 5 June 1982, two weeks before the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, Calvi wrote a letter of warning to Pope John Paul II, stating that such a forthcoming event would “provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage."[3] Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in June 1982 following the discovery of debts (according to various sources) between 700 million and 1.5 billion US dollars. Much of the money had been siphoned off via the Vatican Bank (strictly named the Istituto per le Opere Religiose or Institute for Works of Religion), which was Banco Ambrosiano's main shareholder.
On 10 June 1982, Calvi went missing from his Rome apartment, having fled the country on a false passport in the name of Gian Roberto Calvini. He shaved off his moustache and fled initially to Venice. From there, he apparently hired a private plane to London. At 7:30 am on Friday, 18 June 1982, a postman found his body hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge on the edge of the financial district of London. Calvi's clothing was stuffed with bricks, and he was carrying around $15,000 worth of cash in three different currencies.[4]
Calvi was a member of Licio Gelli's illegal masonic lodge, P2, and members of P2 referred to themselves as frati neri or "black friars". This led to a suggestion in some quarters that Calvi was murdered as a masonic warning because of the symbolism associated with the word "Blackfriars".[5]
Calvi's death was the subject of two coroner's inquests in the United Kingdom. The first recorded a verdict of suicide in July 1982. The Calvi family then secured the services of George Carman QC. At the second inquest, in July 1983, the jury recorded an open verdict, indicating that the court had been unable to determine the exact cause of death. Calvi's family maintained that his death had been a murder. Following his exhumation in December 1998, an independent forensic report, published in October 2002, concluded that he had been murdered as the injuries to his neck were inconsistent with hanging and he had not touched the bricks found in his pockets. Additionally, there was no trace of rust and paint on his shoes from the scaffolding over which he would have needed to climb to hang himself. When Calvi's body was found, the level of the Thames had receded with the tide, giving the scene the appearance of a suicide by hanging, but at the exact time of his death, the place on the scaffolding where the rope had been tied could have been reached by a person standing in a boat.
In July 1991, the Mafia pentito (a mafioso turned informer) Francesco Marino Mannoia claimed that Roberto Calvi had been killed because he had lost Mafia funds when Banco Ambrosiano collapsed.[11][12] According to Mannoia, the killer was Francesco Di Carlo, a mafioso living in London at the time. The order to kill Calvi had come from Mafia boss Giuseppe Calò and Licio Gelli. When Di Carlo became an informer in June 1996, he denied he was the killer, but admitted he had been approached by Calò to do the job. However, Di Carlo could not be reached in time. When he later called Calò, the latter said that everything had been taken care of. According to Di Carlo, the killers were Vincenzo Casillo and Sergio Vaccari, who belonged to the Camorra from Naples and were later killed.[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Calvi" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;In July 2003, the Italian prosecutors concluded that the Mafia acted not only in its own interests, but also to ensure that Calvi could not blackmail "politico-institutional figures and [representatives] of freemasonry, the P2 lodge, and the Institute of Religious Works with whom he had invested substantial sums of money, some of it from Cosa Nostra and Italian public corporations".[13]
On 19 July 2005, Licio Gelli, the grand master of the Propaganda Due or P2 masonic lodge, received a notification – required by Italian law – informing him that he was formally under investigation on charges of ordering the murder of Calvi along with Giuseppe Calò, Ernesto Diotallevi, Flavio Carboni and Carboni's Austrian ex-girlfriend, Manuela Kleinszig. The four other suspects were already indicted on murder charges in April in a separate indictment. According to the indictment, the five ordered Calvi's murder to prevent the banker "from using blackmail power against his political and institutional sponsors from the world of Masonry, belonging to the P2 lodge, or to the Institute for Religious Works (the Vatican Bank) with whom he had managed investments and financing with conspicuous sums of money, some of it coming from Cosa Nostra and public agencies".[14]
Gelli was accused of provoking Calvi's death to punish him for embezzling money from Banco Ambrosiano that was owed to him and the Mafia. The Mafia allegedly wanted to prevent Calvi from revealing that Banco Ambrosiano was used for money laundering. Gelli denied involvement, but acknowledged that the financier was murdered. In his statement before the court, he said the killing was commissioned in Poland. This is thought to be a reference to Calvi's alleged involvement in financing the Solidarity trade union movement at the request of the late Pope John Paul II, allegedly on behalf of the Vatican.[14] However, Gelli's name was not in the final indictment at the trial that started in October 2005.
Michele Sindona
Michele Sindona (May 8, 1920 - March 22, 1986) was an Italian banker and convicted felon. Known in banking circles as "The Shark", Sindona was a member of Propaganda Due (#0501),[1] a secret lodge of Italian Freemasonry, and had clear connections to the Sicilian Mafia. He was fatally poisoned in prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli.
Born at Patti, Sicily, of poor parents, Michele Sindona was educated by the Jesuits, showing very early in his life an unusual aptitude for mathematics and economics. He graduated with a law degree from Messina University in 1942. Then he moved from Sicily to the north where he worked as a tax lawyer and an accountant for companies such as Società Generale Immobiliare and Snia Viscosa, but immediately turned away from the law and began working in smuggling operations with the Mafia.[citation needed] He soon moved to Milan and his skill and dexterity in transferring money to avoid taxation soon became known to Mafia bosses. By 1957 he had become closely associated with the Gambino family and was chosen to manage their profits from heroin sales.
Within a year of the Gambino family choosing him to manage their heroin profits, Sindona had bought his first bank. He also became a friend of future Pope Giovanni Battista Montini who was at the time Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Milan. By the time Montini became Pope, Sindona had acquired, through his holding company Fasco, many more Italian banks and his progress continued right up to the beginning of his association with the Vatican Bank in 1969. Huge amounts of money moved from Sindona's banks through the Vatican to Swiss banks, and he began speculating against major currencies on a large scale.[citation needed]
In 1972, Sindona purchased a controlling interest in Long Island's Franklin National Bank. He was hailed as "the saviour of the lira" and was named "Man of the Year" in January 1974 by US ambassador to Italy, John Volpe. But that April a sudden stock market crash led to what is known as Il Crack Sindona. The Franklin Bank's profit fell by as much as 98% compared to the previous year, and Sindona suffered a 40 million dollar loss, with the result that he began losing most of the banks he had acquired over the previous seventeen years. On October 8, 1974, the bank was declared insolvent due to mismanagement and fraud, involving losses in foreign currency speculation and poor loan policies.[2]
According to the Mafia pentito Francesco Marino Mannoia, Sindona laundered the proceeds of heroin trafficking for the Bontade-Spatola-Inzerillo-Gambino network. The mafiosi were determined to get their money back and would play an important role in Sindona's attempt to save his banks.[3]
On July 11, 1979, Giorgio Ambrosoli, the lawyer who was commissioned as liquidator of Sindona's banks, was murdered in Milan. Milanese Councilman Antonio Amati turned the case over to a young judge, Giuliano Turone. It was discovered that Michele Sindona ordered Ambrosoli's murder (which was carried out by an American assassin). At the same time the Mafia killed police superintendent Boris Giuliano in Palermo. He was investigating the Mafia’s heroin trafficking and had contacted Ambrosoli just two weeks before to compare investigations.[citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Sindona" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;He was convicted in 1980 in the United States on 65 counts, including fraud, perjury, false bank statements and misappropriation of bank funds. He was represented by one of the nation's leading attorneys, Ivan Fisher. While he was serving time in US Federal Prison, the Italian government applied for the extradition of Sindona back to Italy to stand trial for murder. "The Shark" was sentenced to 25 years in Italian prison on March 27, 1984. On March 18, 1986, he was poisoned with cyanide in his coffee, in his cell at the prison in Voghera while serving a life sentence for the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli.[5]
