The Last Supper (18 page)

Another person to telephone while the premises were still being inspected was Licio Gelli himself, who was out of the country at the time. The venerable master urged his secretary to do everything in her power to prevent the police from taking away his documents. A recording of his call revealed his remarkable ability to think on his feet. ‘Use the [informal]
tu
form and call me Dad, do you understand?’ he instructed the secretary, who promptly fell in with his suggestion to foil possible eavesdroppers.

Other documents seized by the finance police showed the close interest Gelli had been taking in Calvi’s business affairs. There was a file on the dealings between Calvi and the
publisher Angelo Rizzoli, former owner of the
Corriere della Sera
newspaper, and another containing the text of a confidential agreement between Calvi and the cement magnate Carlo Pesenti. A memo found among the papers read: ‘The Calvi case is the most sensational and disquieting of recent times, both because it is linked to many of Sindona’s operations, and, in particular, to deals carried out on behalf of the Vatican.’
³
A number of envelopes contained secret service reports marked ‘secret’ and ‘confidential’. According to one of his closest associates, Gelli claimed that the daily intelligence briefing prepared for the prime minister was delivered to him, as well, every morning.

Suspected but unconvicted of a thousand unsolved crimes, Licio Gelli and his masonic lodge came to symbolize the malaise of Italian society in the second half of the twentieth century. The vices attributed to them ranged from nepotism and political intrigue to plotting to overthrow the elected government, terrorism and murder. Gelli’s exercise of secret power was based fundamentally on access to privileged information and the exploitation of that information for blackmail purposes. On joining the lodge, new members were invited to bring information on other people of potential interest. General Giovanni Allavena, a former head of the military intelligence service then known as SIFAR (Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate), made a particularly valuable contribution. He brought thousands of pages of sensitive secret service dossiers with him when he joined the lodge in 1967.

The courts have been unable to prove almost any of the accusations levelled against Gelli, in some cases because the terms of his extradition from Switzerland shielded him from trial and in others because they simply weren’t able to muster the proof. The suspicion is inevitable that the P2 octopus, infiltrated into the ganglions of the state, worked well to protect its master. In the end, the only crime for which he served a term of house arrest in his luxury Tuscan home, named Villa
Wanda in honour of his wife, was complicity in the fraudulent bankruptcy of the Banco Ambrosiano. The trial showed that Gelli had received $83 million from the bank between 1975 and 1982, only outdone by Ortolani, who received almost $224 million in the same period.

The son of a Tuscan miller, Gelli was born in Pistoia on 21 April 1919. A convinced fascist, he enrolled as a volunteer in the 735th Blackshirts battalion at the age of 17 and went to fight for Franco in Spain. It was the beginning of an adventurous career in which he would rarely find himself far from the front line of ideological conflict. His elder brother Raffaello was killed at Malaga in April 1938. Raffaello, a lieutenant, was shot and wounded while fighting beside his brother and died later in a military hospital. Gelli’s friend and biographer Pier Carpi recorded Licio’s reaction to the traumatic event: ‘Raffaello, I swear that I will dedicate my entire life, all myself, to fighting that communism that has killed you.’
⁴
Though controversy persists about Gelli’s true political allegiance, if any, it appears that he remained fundamentally true to that promise for the rest of his life.

Gelli expressed pride in his political militancy when I interviewed him at Villa Wanda in the autumn of 2005. Elegantly dressed in a grey suit and black tie, with a narrow white beard and moustache, he was stooped by age but still mentally alert despite his 86 years, the very image of inoffensive respectability. He received me in a spacious drawing room that could have been mistaken for an annex of the Uffizi gallery, with old master paintings on the walls, a large statue of a ‘Madonna and Child’ in one corner and a ceramic bas-relief of ‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’ on the end wall. The $83 million he had allegedly stolen from the Banco Ambrosiano had evidently been put to good use! The victory over Bolshevik forces in Spain was communism’s first military defeat and he had been proud to play a part in it, Gelli said. ‘If communism had not been defeated in Spain it would have spread and conquered
the whole of Europe, because the Communist party was very strong then. It was a victory for which the whole of Europe should be grateful to the legionnaires.’

In an unusually frank moment, Gelli hinted there may have been a link between his P2 masonic lodge and the NATO stay-behind network known as Gladio, which has been suspected of involvement in right-wing terrorism in Italy. ‘It was an invisible army, just as Gladio was an invisible army,’ he said of the lodge. ‘Remember that Gladio was formed in 1948 with men recruited from among the Spanish legionnaires and from elements who had fought for the Republic of Salò [Benito Mussolini’s last-stand fascist regime in northern Italy], because they were young and knew how to use arms and they were anti-communist and ruthless. You’ll notice that both in Gladio and in P2 there have been no
pentiti.
There was only one
pentito
, [the journalist Maurizio] Costanzo. He said he joined the lodge because he was a cretin. Among so many people there is always going to be one cretin.’ Realizing he might have said too much, Gelli subsequently backpedalled on the P2/Gladio connection. ‘Gladio, as far as one knows, was a military organization. The P2 masonic lodge was a social and cultural matter. There was no connection.’ But weren’t there many military personnel present in the lodge membership? I asked. ‘Certainly,’ he replied, ‘from the chiefs of staff to the heads of the secret services. But the fact they were members of P2 didn’t mean anything. They might just as well have been members of the
carboneria
[an anti-clerical secret society that plotted against the temporal power of the church in the nineteenth century] if it had still existed.’
⁵

The Propaganda Due lodge was originally founded in the 1890s but almost immediately ran into trouble when its grand master got caught up in the scandal of the Banca Romana, a major banking crisis that in many ways foreshadowed the Banco Ambrosiano affair. Reputations in the government, parliament and the Vatican were all damaged by the messy
bankruptcy, which involved the printing of false banknotes and the payment of bribes to cardinals, politicians and freemasons. P2, membership of which was kept secret to protect the privacy of the lodge’s important members and prevent them from being importuned by less well-to-do ‘brothers’, went into a state of extended hibernation. It was Gelli who was called on to revive the sleeping creature almost a century later, when he was appointed organizing secretary in 1971.

Freemasonry was outlawed in Italy under Mussolini’s fascist regime but revived at the end of the war with the encouragement of Italy’s American and British liberators. When Gelli began his masonic career in 1965, joining the Romagnosi lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy, Italian freemasonry was divided into two principal groupings commonly referred to by the name of their Rome headquarters. The Grand Orient, with between 15,000 and 20,000 members, had its headquarters in Palazzo Giustiniani. Its chief rival, with 5,000 to 10,000 affiliates, was based in the central Piazza del Gesù, next to the headquarters of the Christian Democrat party.

Gelli needed all his considerable talent for survival to pass unscathed through the latter part of the Second World War and thrive in the early years of peace. A certain amount of double-dealing and contacts with the secret services on all sides of the new ideological divide were almost certainly required. The complexity of his experiences during the war and the fact that he was not shot as a fascist at the end of it have given rise to speculation that he was at some point recruited by the Italian Communist party, the largest force in the anti-fascist resistance, and went on subsequently to serve the interests of the Soviet KGB. There are equally suggestions that he was prepared to betray his fascist comrades to the communists’ western allies and that by October 1944 he had begun collaborating with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the American Fifth Army. The parliamentary P2 Commission concluded there was persuasive evidence that Gelli had worked for the Italian secret services
after the war, operating under the cover name of Filippo and providing a contact telephone number that corresponded to an office of military intelligence in Florence.

There is little doubt that Gelli used his position within freemasonry to pursue the ideological struggle against communism that he had begun in Spain. In his interview with me, he recalled his participation at the first conference of the World Organization of Masonic Thought and Assistance in Rio de Janeiro in the mid 1970s: ‘I made a very strong speech there, declaring that communism was a tumour on the world. After that conference our troubles began, because the KGB began working hard against us.’

This anti-communist commitment naturally led him into contact with the western superpower that was the principal protagonist of that very same struggle. Richard Brenneke, as we have seen, has described the secret relationship he claimed existed between the P2 chief and the CIA, but there were also overt contacts between Gelli and senior members of the American political establishment. Gelli was invited to attend the inaugural ceremonies of presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, and was ‘the only Italian invited to Reagan’s inaugural lunch’.
⁶
Such an honour appears all the more curious in the light of Brenneke’s allegations about a Gelli role in the ‘October Surprise’ negotiations that supposedly preceded Reagan’s election.

One American contact of the enterprising Gelli was Philip Guarino, an Italo-American ex-priest who was director of the Senior Citizens Division of the Republican party National Committee and who had been introduced to Gelli by Michele Sindona. In a letter dated 28 August 1979, a copy of which was found in the police raid on Gelli’s office, the P2 chief asked Guarino whether General Alexander Haig, a former commander of NATO troops in Europe, would be the Republicans’ next presidential candidate. ‘As you know, we are able to help both through the Italian press, to influence Italo-Americans and Italians resident in your country,
and through other channels, as well as economically,’ Gelli wrote. Guarino replied on 19 September, informing Gelli that there was no doubt that Ronald Reagan would win the White House. He made it clear: ‘General Haig is a good man but he has no political base.’ Guarino’s reply was evidently a bit late. In the meantime the
Corriere della Sera
, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper, recently bought with Banco Ambrosiano money and now under the editorial control of P2, had already dedicated three-quarters of a page to a glowing portrait of the general, in which it observed that he might make ‘the president best suited to the times, perhaps among the best of the century’.
⁷
It didn’t matter in the end. The Republican National Committee was happy to grant Gelli a ‘Citation’: ‘In recognition of dedicated and untiring service to the Republican party’. Gelli published the award in his memoir
La Verità
(The Truth), where it sits proudly across the page from a reproduction of his invitation to the ‘Inauguration of Ronald Wilson Reagan as President of the United States of America’.
⁸

The war on communism brought Licio Gelli into contact with another natural ally: the Vatican. Atheist communism had mounted a global onslaught against Christianity, confiscating and destroying church property and suppressing religious activity wherever it held sway. It was natural that the church should seek to react, allying itself with those temporal powers that were likely to prove the most effective: among them the United States of America and international freemasonry. The fact that until 1983 Catholics who joined a masonic lodge were punishable by excommunication was not an insurmountable hurdle for a man of Gelli’s ingenuity. Gelli had been tasked with improving relations with the Catholic church early in his masonic career and masonic representatives discussed the harmonization of biblical texts with representatives of the Vatican as part of this initiative. P2 meetings often opened with a reading from the Gospel of St John, the evangelist being considered a kind of patron saint of freemasonry, he told me.

It is hard to imagine churchmen joining an organization seen as hostile to the Vatican and which Catholics had been banned from joining for more than two centuries, since the papal bull of Pope Clement XII,
In Eminenti,
in 1738. But the suspicion that priests had indeed done so has long existed and was particularly strong when Roberto Calvi was head of the Banco Ambrosiano and doing business with the church. The ideal place for bishops and cardinals, if they were going to become freemasons, was Licio Gelli’s Propaganda Due, where members’ identities were kept rigorously secret both to protect the rich and powerful and to shield those who had political, ideological or moral reasons for wanting to conceal their affiliation.

In September 1978, with the short-lived Pope John Paul I recently elected to the throne of St Peter, the maverick weekly magazine
Osservatore Politico
(
OP
) published a picture of a cardinal wearing a black hood on its front page and the title: ‘The Vatican Grand Lodge’. ‘On Monday 28 August we came into the possession of a list of 121 cardinals, bishops and senior prelates identified by a membership number and codename as members of freemasonry,’ the magazine, published by the journalist Mino Pecorelli, wrote. Pecorelli, who was renowned – or perhaps notorious – for his journalistic scoops, had excellent secret service sources, was himself a member of P2, and would be shot dead by a still unidentified killer in a Rome street less than a year later. Pecorelli’s ‘list of presumed masons’ contained the names of many progressive church leaders and has been attributed by some to a manoeuvre by traditionalist circles close to the rebel Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The list included the names of Cardinal Jean Villot, the then secretary of state, of his successor Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus (said to have joined on 21 August 1967, membership number 43/649, codename MARPA), his deputy at the IOR Donato De Bonis, and Pope Paul VI’s personal secretary Pasquale Macchi.