Operation Gladio: Part III – Is the Pope “The Man of Lawlessness”?

Archbishop Paul Marcinkus and Pope John Paul II. (Source – David Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I)

Audio:

In Part II, I summarised the key phases of Operation Gladio in order to get a better understanding of how it evolved and adapted to its challenges. In Part III, we look more closely at the complicity of senior Vatican officials, also focusing on a major banking collapse in which the Vatican was embroiled.

I had thought there was a strong possibility that Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican, The CIA, and the Mafia would go some way to confirming why some Protestants believe that the Man of Lawlessness described in 2 Thessalonians 2 will be embodied in the person of the Pope.

According to this characterisation of the Man of Lawlessness, he is “quintessentially lawless” in that “he considers himself absolutely above the law… subject to no law and no lawgiver and no authority.” A reading of Operation Gladio will leave you in no doubt that the Pope not only considers himself above the law, but actually is above the law.

We saw in Part I how Pope Pius XII embraced the Vatican’s entanglement with the CIA and the Mafia. We now take a closer look at specific individuals in the Vatican and their role in its financial dealings. We should first set the scene by getting an overview of the Vatican’s vast financial wealth.

In 1951, not long after Vatican Bank had been incorporated, the Holy See owned an astonishing array of companies, including Italiana per il Gas (Italy’s central source of natural gas); several banks; and a conglomerate that owned the Italia shipping line, Alitalia Airlines, Alfa Romeo, Italy’s telephone system, and 90% of Italy’s steel.[i] In 1969, at the point that Mafia don and P2 lodge freemason Michele Sindona was granted the title of “the leading banker of the Roman Curia”, the papal assets included:

“major interests in the Rothschild Bank in France, the Chase Manhattan Bank with its 57 branches in 44 countries, the Credit Suisse in Zurich and also in London, the Morgan bank, the Bankers Trust, General Motors, General Electric, Shell Oil, Gulf Oil, and Bethlehem Steel…The Holy See controlled two shipping lines, the Alfa Romeo car manufacturer…But the Vatican’s central holding was Societa Generale Immobiliare, a construction company that had produced a fortune in earnings for the Holy See since it had been acquired in 1934.”[ii]

What would Jesus say? Well, Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”[iii] He also said: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”[iv]

As far as I’m aware, no Pope has ever fully explained how to reconcile these tenets of Christianity with the vast wealth under the Vatican’s control, and the murky financial dealings that have accompanied this wealth.

Popes with dirty hands? The cases of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini and Fr Jorge Bergoglio

In 1939, Montini was appointed papal undersecretary of state, a position he held until November 1954, when he was appointed Archbishop of Milan. In 1958, he was named a Cardinal, and held that position until 21 June 1963.

Given the drivers of Operation Gladio and the main rogues, Rome was an apt choice for the establishment of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ (FBN) first overseas operation. The FBN worked with Montini to establish a complex diversion of cash flows through a host of parochial banks in Italy before their arrival at Vatican Bank.[v]

Former CIA agent Victor Marchetti testified that the CIA funnelled millions of dollars each year to a number of bishops and monsignors, including Montini.[vi]

On 21^st June 1963, Montini was elected Pope, choosing to be known as Paul VI. Williams notes that “a Time correspondent…uncovered evidence that showed CIA officials were able to confirm the election of Montini in advance of a puff of white smoke emanating from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and expressed their pleasure that the conclave had proceeded according to plan.”[vii]

In Part I, the suppression of leftism and liberation theology under Operation Condor in Latin America was discussed. Two Argentine Jesuit priests, Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio, who espoused liberation theology – anathema to the Vatican and Gladio proponents – were disappeared in 1976 while under the charge of their superior, Fr Jorge Bergoglio, Provincial General of the Society of Jesus in Argentina.[viii]

The two liberation theology priests were released after five months in captivity, during which they were brutally tortured. While Bergoglio subsequently insisted that he had tried to secure their release, both priests asserted unequivocally that Bergoglio had in fact commended them into the hands of the junta for punishment. At the 1985 trial of the junta leaders, Fr Yorio and Fr Jalics both stated that Bergoglio had denounced them to the junta as communists and subversives. Fr Jalics supported his claim with reference to 30 documents he was able to access after his release, and statements of an official.

Military documents from 1976 uncovered by a journalist confirmed Bergoglio’s refusal to help the two priests.[ix] In 2005, when an Argentine human rights attorney filed a criminal suit against Bergoglio, accusing him of complicity in the kidnapping and torture of Fr Yorio and Fr Jalics, along with six members of their parish, he invoked immunity from prosecution as a Vatican official.

In March 2013, Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis I. Argentinian journalists and scholars who were aware of his activities in their country labelled him “Washington’s Pope”. By the end of 2013, Francis, the first Pope to be charged with crimes against humanity, had achieved an approval rating of 88% among American Catholics.[x]

Michele Sindona

Sindona started his career as a tax lawyer before branching out into the illicit world of black market trading, where he came into contact with the Mafia and ended up as one of the Sicilian Mafia’s leading advisors. By 1955, he had become a CIA operative and would eventually play a crucial role in the CIA-mob-Vatican nexus. At the end of 1964, Sindona was inducted into the P2 lodge.[xi]

Following a mob gathering in 1957 in Palermo to strategise over the multibillion dollar heroin trade, Sindona emerged as the controller of the cash flows from America’s drug-addled inner cities to the Vatican Bank.[xii] Using mob and CIA money, he created a Lichtenstein company that was then used to purchase his first bank – Banca Privata Finanziara (BPF). The CIA then arranged for Hambros Bank and Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago to each take a 22% stake in BPF, thus implicating these apparently staid institutions in drug money laundering. BPF’s role was to redirect drug money from Vatican Bank to Gladio purposes.[xiii]

Through his dealings with the Chicago bank, Sindona forged a relationship with up-and-coming Illinois cleric Monsignor Paul Marcinkus. A colourful character known as “the Gorilla”, Marcinkus stood at six feet four inches and was “a gifted street fighter, and a lover of good bourbon, fine cigars, and young women.”[xiv] Sindona helped Marcinkus into the position of head of the Vatican Bank, and the Gorilla was initiated into the P2 lodge in July 1963.

Sindona went on to oversee complex banking operations in which billions of dollars from the narcotics trade flowed from Sicily to Switzerland. However, the purpose of the banks was not to generate profits and dividends for their shareholders but rather to “chalk up losses in a bewildering array of bogus ventures.” In June 1967, when the US Inland Revenue Services opened an investigation into Sindona’s illicit activities, the CIA intervened to shut it down.

This protection from the law afforded to CIA assets is a theme that permeates the book.[xv] This is hardly surprising given that the CIA became the chief originator and beneficiary of the illicit drug trade. This was corroborated in 1998 by the former chief of an elite Drug Enforcement Administration unit who noted wryly that:

“In my 30-year career in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”[xvi]

By 1969, Sindona’s tentacles spanned six banks, an international hotel chain, and 500 other companies. 40% of publicly traded shares in Italy were under his control. Hailed by former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti as the “saviour of the lira”, Sindona was about to become the saviour of the Vatican’s vast wealth. In early 1969, Paul VI solicited Sindona’s services to solve what the Pope described as “a terrible problem”. The problem was the threat of having to pay tax; a condition that the poor must bear stoically but the super-rich treat as metastatic cancer.

In that year, the Vatican-friendly Christian Democratic party collapsed, and the new government moved to terminate the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which would end the tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church’s holdings. The Mafia don and P2 freemason was summoned by a lugubrious Pope to find a solution. The Pope described the gravity of the situation frankly: “No matter is of greater importance.”[xvii]

Among other measures, Sindona proposed sheltering the papal assets in a network of offshore financial firms. Sindona was handed an agreement that had already been prepared in advance of the meeting that made him “the leading banker of the Roman Curia. It granted him complete control over the Vatican’s foreign and domestic investment policy.”[xviii]

Sindona, together with Roberto Calvi (discussed in more detail in the next section) and Archbishop Marcinkus, was instrumental in the collapse of a major Italian bank, Banco Ambrosiano, which was used as a vehicle for Vatican Bank laundering activity. Banco Ambrosiano was a Catholic bank established in 1894 to provide banking with Christian ethics. The three engineered the acquisition of a large stake in Ambrosiano by the Vatican Bank using opaque shell companies, and then orchestrated loans from Ambrosiano to these shell companies. The loans were not repaid, but used instead for Gladio operations.

Sindona’s banking and business empire was a labyrinthine network of fraudulent activity that was destined to crater the capital structure of his banks. Things began to unravel with the collapse in September 1974 of his banking operations, and the knock-on effect sent shockwaves throughout financial institutions in Europe. With warrants issued by the Italian authorities for his arrest, Sindona sought refuge in the US under the protection of the CIA. There he lived comfortably, notwithstanding being sentenced in absentia by a Milan court to three and a half years in prison for embezzlement.[xix]

In April 1973, before the Sindona banking collapse, US investigators, having sniffed out the links between Sindona and the Vatican Bank, saw fit to question Archbishop Marcinkus about his personal and financial dealings with Sindona. At that juncture in the debacle, he told them:

“Michele and I are very good friends. We’ve known each other for many years.”

Two years later, once the wheels were well and truly coming off the Sindona bus, and with the press claiming that the Vatican had lost up to $1 billion because of him, he told an Italian magazine:

“The truth is that I don’t know Sindona. How can I have lost money because of him.”[xx]

The Pope came under attack from both Leftist and conservative factions within the Church, the former accusing him of having placed “the Church’s future in the hands of the devil”, while the latter called him “a traitor to the Church.”

Sindona avoided extradition proceedings in the US with deft legal manoeuvres, while his pursuers in Italy were ruthlessly dealt with. When Giorgio Ambrosoli, an Italian lawyer who had worked on the liquidation of Sindona’s Italian bank, began supplying US authorities with damning evidence relating to the collapse of his US bank – Franklin National Bank (FNB) – Ambrosoli was shot and killed outside his apartment on 11 July 1979. Ambrosoli had obtained information from one Lt. Col. Antonio Varisco about Sindona’s relationship with Licio Gelli, the head of the P2 lodge at the centre of Operation Gladio. Two days after Ambrosoli was shot, Varisco was gunned down. Giorgio Giuliano, the deputy head of the Palermo police department, who had been working with Ambrosoli on the Sindona case, was shot dead on 21 July 1979, and replaced by a P2 member.[xxi]

However, a close associate of Sindona, Carlo Bordoni, had been detained in Caracas at the behest of US authorities in connection with Sindona’s US banking activities. Bordoni was extradited to the US in June 1979 and was ready to spill his guts in a US trial set for 10 September. On 2 August 1979, Sindona walked out of his luxury hotel suite in New York.[xxii] He was on $3 million bail and was required to report daily to the US Marshal’s office.

A very desperate Sindona was now gearing up to blackmail his bosses in the CIA and P2 in order to stay out of jail. Armed with files of information and a list of 500 names of P2 members in prominent positions, he boarded a plane to Vienna where, under the care of the Gambino and Spatola crime families, he hatched a plot to stage his own kidnapping. Failure to meet the ‘kidnappers’’ ransom demands would result in the release of the names and papers in Sindona’s possession.

Gelli, the P2 Master, summoned the delusional Sindona to his villa and spelt out the dire consequences for Sindona and his family should he make good on his threats. A sober Sindona agreed to return to the US and face the music, but not before engaging in an elaborate face-saving ruse of agreeing to be shot in the leg to give as much authenticity as possible to the kidnapping story.

Sindona was upbeat in the days leading up to his trial on 6 February 1980 as it appeared that senior Vatican officials, including Archbishop Marcinkus, had agreed to testify on his behalf. One day before the Vatican officials were due to testify, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Casaroli, informed prosecutors that they would not be testifying. In a letter to a concerned friend, Gelli attributed the betrayal to the natural propensity for “certain classes of humanity…to help the strongest and wound the weakest.” Gelli concluded: “Thus not even the Church could keep from denying [betraying] the man it once called ‘the one sent by God’.”[xxiii]

On 27 March 1980, Sindona was convicted of 68 counts of fraud, misappropriation of bank funds, and perjury. In June 1980, the man known as “St Peter’s banker” was sentenced to 25 years in jail and fined $207,000.[xxiv] But just when he thought he had hit rock bottom, things got even worse. In 1982, while serving his time in the US, the Sicilian courts issued indictments stemming from his faked kidnapping in 1979 and the clues he had recklessly left behind.

In 1984 he was extradited to Italy to face the music there. The worse things got for him, the more freely he talked to anyone who would listen, including an American journalist, Nick Tosches, writing for the New York Times and Rolling Stone. He told Tosches about the US government’s protection of the drug trade, how US agencies functioned not to find dirty money but to create it, and about the Vatican Bank’s involvement in laundering dirty money.[xxv]

In March 1985, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraudulent bankruptcy. On 18 March 1986, he was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Ambrosoli murder. On 20 March, he was dead from a lethal dose of potassium cyanide in his coffee. Williams’ grim postscript:

“His death was only to be expected. The Gladio agents possessed the keys to every prison. They could manage the escape of Agca from a cell in Turkey and Gelli from a jail in Switzerland. They could arrange the jail-house deaths of Henri Arsan of Stibam [Gladio’s Sicilian drug shipping company] and General Santovito of SISMI [Italian army intelligence]. And they could poison the coffee of a celebrated Mafiosi who remained in solitary confinement within a maximum-security prison.”

The fallout from the Sindona saga, and then the Calvi affair discussed in the next section, was monumental. The Vatican’s failure to assist Sindona led indirectly to the discovery by the Italian police of a treasure trove of documents that exposed Gelli and numerous others as the movers and shakers within the P2 lodge that was the beating heart of Gladio strategy and tactics.

In the eyes of the overseers of Gladio – the emphasised phrase will be the subject of further analysis in Part IV – the Pope had made two grave errors. First, by refusing to shore up the losses that Ambrosiano had made in ‘loans’ to Vatican shell companies, the Vatican had precipitated a banking collapse that catalysed the exposure of the Gladio operations. John Paul II had refused to acknowledge the Vatican’s responsibility for the Ambrosiano debts for fear that this acknowledgement in itself would expose the true nature of the Vatican’s involvement.[xxvi]

Second, John Paul II, despite his direct involvement in supporting the Solidarity movement in Poland, had inexplicably decided to seek rapprochement with the Soviets.[xxvii] For the overseers of Gladio, this was a cardinal sin that tipped the scales in favour of a decision by the SMOM, P2 and Kissinger’s Safari Club to assassinate the Pope.[xxviii]

The assassination attempt on 13 May 1981 was botched, but this development is significant for its potential to provide clues about the overall power structure. I will broach this in Part IV in a discussion of the many deeper meanings of Operation Gladio.

Roberto Calvi – dubbed “God’s banker” – and Banco Ambrosiano

In the same year (1969) that Sindona stepped in to save the Vatican’s assets from the taxman’s claws, he befriended Roberto Calvi, a fellow P2 member and assistant manager at Banco Ambrosiano.[xxix] Banco Ambrosiano was established in 1894 to provide banking with Christian ethics. Shareholders had to produce a letter of good standing from their parish priest, and no shareholder could hold more than 5% of the stock.

To the criminally minded, the bank’s unparalleled reputation in Milan made it the perfect vehicle for window-dressing insalubrious business activity. The absence of a dominant shareholder also meant that whoever ran the bank had a free rein. Sindona and Calvi agreed that these were qualities worthy of exploitation and, with the help of the Gorilla (Archbishop Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank), Calvi was promoted to general manager of Ambrosiano.[xxx]

Calvi, Sindona, and Marcinkus then hatched a plan for the Vatican Bank to gain a controlling interest in Banco Ambrosiano, using shell companies in offshore havens as the vehicles for control. To get around the 5% restriction on total stock per shareholder, an opaque web of shell companies in Panama, the Bahamas, and Luxembourg was constructed. These companies, incorporated by the Vatican Bank, then took up shares in Banco Ambrosiano. The Vatican Bank duly vouched for the Catholic bona fides of these structures but, crucially, did not disclose its ownership in them, since to do so would reveal a breach of the shareholding limit. By the start of 1981, the Vatican had effectively acquired 16% of Ambrosiano’s shares.[xxxi]

Worse still, Calvi, now at the helm of Ambrosiano, began funnelling huge amounts of Ambrosiano cash, in the form of loans, to this opaque web of shell companies.[xxxii] He convinced the bank’s directors that these firms were Vatican concerns for the export of parochial goods.[xxxiii] The loans would not be repaid. Instead the cash was used for the terrorist Gladio operations. One of the shell companies, Bellatrix, used the loans to purchase Exocet missiles for the Argentinian war against England in the Falklands. The Vatican, through its control of these shell companies, became directly involved in terrorism and war in Italy and Latin America.[xxxiv]

The shell company scam was also used to fund the anti-communist Polish workers’ party, Solidarity. In a secretly taped conversation with a CIA intermediary, Calvi was heard saying:

“Marcinkus must watch out for Casaroli, who is the head of the group that opposes him. If Casaroli should meet one of those financiers in New York who are working with Marcinkus, sending money to Solidarity, the Vatican would collapse…goodbye Marcinkus, goodbye Wojtyla [Pope John Paul II], goodbye Solidarity.”[xxxv]

Following Sindona’s escape from the Italian authorities and his enforced exile in America, Calvi assumed the role of principal banker for the heroin trade.

In June 1978, the situation started to get decidedly uncomfortable for Calvi and the Vatican when the Bank of Italy launched a probe into Ambrosiano’s affairs. Though inconclusive, it was enough to trigger an investigation by Italy’s financial police. From here, things began to snowball. In January 1981, a group of Ambrosiano shareholders wrote to Pope John Paul II, setting out their concerns:

“The IOR [Vatican bank] is not only a shareholder in Banco Ambrosiano, but also an associate and partner of Roberto Calvi. It is revealed by a growing number of court cases that Calvi stands today astride one of the main crossroads of the most degenerate Freemasonry (P2) and of mafia circles, as a result of inheriting Sindona’s mantle. This has been done once again with the involvement of people generously nurtured and cared for by the Vatican, such as Ortolani, who move between the Vatican and powerful groups in the international underworld.”[xxxvi]

The Pope did not see fit to respond.

Pursuant to the ongoing investigation into Ambrosiano, Calvi was arrested only one week after the assassination attempt on John Paul II (13 May 1981). On 29 July he was sentenced to four years in prison and fined 16 billion lire. Consequent to filing an appeal he was released on bail and returned immediately to the chairmanship of Ambrosiano.[xxxvii]

The shareholders kept insisting that Calvi provide proof that the shell companies that had drained Ambrosiano of its cash, and left a $1.75 billion hole in its balance sheet, were in fact Vatican concerns. Following pressure by Calvi on Archbishop Marcinkus to assuage the shareholders, Marcinkus crafted a formal letter from the Vatican confirming that the entities were “directly or indirectly” under the Vatican’s control and that these shell companies were indebted to Ambrosiano.[xxxviii]

Running parallel to this development was an attempt, initiated by the CIA, to plug the $1.75 billion hole in Ambrosiano’s balance sheet by arranging a purchase of the shell companies by a consortium of two American investors, some Saudi businessmen, and two banks.[xxxix] One of the American investors was allegedly David Rockefeller. The Vatican, being the owner of the shell companies, would receive the cash and then apply it to make good on Ambrosiano’s dud loans to these companies. The consortium were presumably untroubled by investing some $1.2 billion into these shells since, as crime syndicate vehicles, they were capable of generating huge sums of cash from the multi-billion dollar illicit drug trade.

Calvi was delighted with the plan since it would solve his and Ambrosiano’s problems. The investors stood to gain a 16% share in one of Italy’s most prestigious banks. However, both Calvi and the investors had not bargained on the Vatican’s intransigence to the deal. The Pope was determined to hold onto Ambrosiano via the Vatican shell companies since, according to the CIA asset who was brokering the deal, it offered the Vatican the prospect of representing “the modern, secular arm of the Church in the world.” Not only did John Paul II want the Church to be seen as a temporal power, he wanted it to flaunt the trappings of the material, secular world. This was a position in diametric opposition to that of his predecessor, John Paul I, whose demise is discussed in the next section.

In March 1982, the Pope underlined his resolve to hold onto Ambrosiano by confirming in an interview with Italy’s Panorama magazine that “Calvi merits our trust” and that he had “no intention of ceding Banco Ambrosiano shares in our possession.”[xl]

The final straw for Calvi was a vote by the Ambrosiano board on 31 May 1982 to comply with the Bank of Italy’s demand for a full accounting of Ambrosiano’s lending to the Vatican shell companies. On 5 June, Calvi wrote to the Pope pleading for the return of “all the money that I gave to the projects of serving the political and economic expansion of the Church…the thousands of millions of dollars that I gave to Solidarity with the express will of the Vatican, and…the sums which I provided to organise the financial centers and political power in five South American countries”.[xli]

The letter contained a veiled threat: a promise not to reveal the Vatican’s dark secrets to which he was privy, while also expressing clear disappointment that “the Vatican ha[d] betrayed and abandoned [him].”Calvi’s position was uncomplicated and, insofar as a fraudster can be correct, he was correct: “the Vatican should honour its commitments by selling the wealth controlled by the IOR [Vatican Bank]”, he told Flavio Carboni, a CIA plant inside Ambrosiano, unaware that his conversation was being taped.

Determined to tell all in a last-ditch attempt to save his bacon, Calvi was now a marked man. On 17 June, Ambrosiano stock went into freefall with the publication of the Bank of Italy’s correspondence on the matter, Calvi was removed from his position at the bank, and the bank was placed in the hands of the Bank of Italy. With a new warrant issued for his arrest, Calvi had already fled.

Threatening to “reveal things, which once known, [would] rock the Vatican”, Calvi had made his way to London where his fate was sealed:

“On June 17 [1982], the body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging from an orange noose under Blackfriars Bridge in London…$20,000 was stuffed in his wallet…five bricks had been stuffed in his trousers.”[xlii]

The symbolism did not go unnoticed by those who have studied Freemasonry. “Black friars” is an Italian nickname for Freemasons, while the masonry, in the form of the bricks found on his body, was deemed significant, as was the stipulation of the Masonic oath for traitors to be “roped down” in the proximity of the rising tide.

Resolution of the Ambrosiano affair

By the end of October 1982, a stand-off had crystallised between the Vatican and Italian government, with the former insisting that it had nothing to do with the dummy corporations at the centre of Ambrosiano’s collapse, and the Italian treasury insisting on the exact opposite. The issue was never resolved to the satisfaction of Ambrosiano’s creditors, although the Vatican did make a “goodwill payment” in May 1984 of $250 million. This did not close the criminal probe of the bank collapse.

In February 1987, investigating magistrates concluded that Vatican Bank had served as a cover for Calvi’s illicit transactions and that, through its shell companies, it was responsible for Ambrosiano’s loss of $1.75 billion. Arrest warrants were issued for three senior Vatican Bank officials, including Archbishop Marcinkus.

The arrests were blocked by the Vatican’s invocation of its 1929 Lateran Treaty with Italy, which grants immunity from any interference in its institutions. The three Vatican bankers were safe while they remained within the confines of the Vatican State.

In 1991, Marcinkus took up residence in Arizona. The Italian authorities’ attempts to have him extradited back to Italy came to naught in light of the US Justice Department’s odd ruling that Marcinkus’ Vatican passport prevented extradition to Italy. Marcinkus “joined a prestigious country club, played daily rounds of golf, and smoked expensive cigars” until his death in February 2006.

Postscript: one good Pope

In August 1978, Paul VI suffered a fatal heart attack and, on 26^th August, was succeeded by Albino Luciani, who called himself John Paul I. He was, on the one hand, a “simple man with a nervous smile” and “an ungainly appearance”, seemingly “afraid of his own shadow.”[xliii] On the other hand, he had grown up surrounded by poverty and, over the course of his career, had become plagued by the Church’s preoccupation with material wealth, and therefore convicted in his belief that the Church should be a church of the poor, for the poor. According to renowned investigative author David Yallop, Luciani “had a deep compassion for the poor, a total indifference to the acquisition of personal wealth and a belief that the Church…should not only be materially poor, but should be seen to be so.”[xliv]

In believing that he would not be a threat to the existing order of things, the CIA and the Sicilian Mafia had completely underestimated the quiet Pope’s resolve to respond to scandalous revelations that previous Popes had accepted as par for the course. In his sensational book – In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I – David Yallop uncovered compelling evidence that the new Pope was determined to act decisively as he learned more about the inner workings of the Vatican, and that he paid the ultimate price for threatening to do so.

Yallop published his investigation in 1984 after being asked by officials within the Vatican, who wished to remain anonymous, to look into the strange and sudden death of Pope John Paul I. Following the 33-day reign of Pope John Paul I, business as usual resumed at the Vatican.

In Part IV, I will round off this series of articles with some thoughts about the meaning of Operation Gladio.

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[i] Paul L. Willliams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia, New York, Prometheus Books, 2018, Ch 4, pg. 60.

[ii] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 90-91.

[iii] Mark 10:25

[iv] Matthew 6:24

[v] Paul L. Willliams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia, New York, Prometheus Books, 2018, Ch 4, pg. 59.

[vi] Ibid., Ch 5, pg. 62.

[vii] Ibid., Ch 5, pg. 70.

[viii] Ibid., Ch 8, pg. 122.

[ix] Ibid., Ch 8, pg. 124.

[x] Ibid., Ch 8, pg. 126-127.

[xi] Ibid., Ch 5, pg. 76.

[xii] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 80.

[xiii] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 82.

[xiv] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 83.

[xv] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 88.

[xvi] Ibid., Ch 4, pg. 56.

[xvii] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 89.

[xviii] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 90.

[xix] Ibid., Ch 9, pg. 139.

[xx] Ibid., Ch 9, pg. 139.

[xxi] Ibid., Ch 9, pg. 142.

[xxii] Ibid., Ch 9, pg. 144.

[xxiii] Ibid., Ch 14, pg. 193.

[xxiv] Ibid., Ch 14, pg. 193.

[xxv] Ibid., Ch 20, pg. 250.

[xxvi] Ibid., Ch 15, pg. 197.

[xxvii] Ibid., Ch 15, pg. 198.

[xxviii] Ibid., Ch 15, pg. 205.

[xxix] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 93.

[xxx] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 93-94.

[xxxi] Ibid., Ch 13, pg. 182.

[xxxii] Ibid., Ch 6, pg. 94.

[xxxiii] Ibid., Ch 13, pg. 180.

[xxxiv] Ibid., Ch 13, pg. 181.

[xxxv] Ibid., Ch 13, pg. 183.

[xxxvi] Ibid., Ch 13, pg. 186.

[xxxvii] Ibid., Ch 18, pg. 224.

[xxxviii] Ibid., Ch 18, pg. 225.

[xxxix] Ibid., Ch 18, pg. 224.

[xl] Ibid., Ch 18, pg. 226.

[xli] Ibid., Ch 18, pg. 227.

[xlii] Ibid., Ch 18, pg. 231.

[xliii] Ibid., 2018, Ch 11, pg. 156.

[xliv] David Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, London, Robinson, 2007, pg. 14.