The Last Supper (29 page)

Izzo’s evidence about the Calvi case deserves careful consideration because of his direct knowledge of the links between right-wing extremism and the Magliana Band in Rome and his contacts with right-wing terrorists on the run in London – some of the suspected players in Calvi’s murder. In a statement made to Milan magistrates on 17 December 1993, following his recapture, Izzo spoke of his acquaintance with Loris Facchinetti, a senior right-winger and freemason who was allegedly involved in cold war operations behind the Iron Curtain on behalf of western secret services. Facchinetti had helped Josef Stalin’s daughter to escape to the West and had been involved in the funding of the Afghan resistance with money supplied by masonic interests in Central and South America, Izzo claimed.

In his lengthy statement to Judge Guido Salvini, Izzo made a number of surprising claims that appeared to imply detailed knowledge of some of the most secret aspects of the Ambrosiano affair. Some of the information made him seem particularly knowledgeable, but there was one small drawback: it had already been published in books. Izzo’s overall conclusions, however, had not, and they were illuminating.

Izzo had spent time in prison with another right-wing extremist, Valerio Fioravanti, who is serving a life sentence for the Bologna railway station bomb massacre. Fioravanti had confided to him that he had once travelled to Sydney, Australia, to kill an American banker linked to the CIA. ‘The motive for the murder was that there had been losses in the laundering of $15 million coming from the Banco Ambrosiano, which had passed through the murdered banker’s institution and
had been laundered at the BCCI in Manila,’ Izzo claimed. (In a statement full of spelling mistakes, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International came out as BCCA.) ‘The money was destined for the Afghan resistance.’

Izzo went on to explain that the Central Intelligence Agency had been forced to seek alternative sources of funding for the Afghan guerrillas because President Jimmy Carter had refused to authorize their support. The money had been obtained from the South American cocaine cartels, from Turkish mafia families dealing in Afghan-produced heroin, and from contributions made by Saudi Arabia and important masonic circles. In Italy, he said, the money came from the drug earnings of the Sicilian mafia and from the Italian Socialist party (PSI). The money from the latter organization was managed by a friend of Henri Arsan (spelt Eri Harsan in the statement), the latter ‘an Armenian from Aleppo who works for the CIA’. Henri Arsan, as we shall see, ran a drugs and arms trading business out of an office in Milan rented from the Banco Ambrosiano. The money from Italy passed via the Banco Ambrosiano to a Panamanian company called Piramid [sic] Corporation, Izzo claimed. The company was run by an official of the Banco Ambrosiano of Managua and one of its board members was a South American cocaine boss, Gabriel Abuchibe [sic]. ‘The man who pulled all the strings is an important Saudi businessman who lives in Khartoum because he’s a fundamentalist,’ Izzo said. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, although the portrait seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to the biography of Osama Bin Laden. Another bank implicated in the international money laundering was BCCI, Izzo alleged.

Some of the details of Izzo’s story reflect the results of a US Customs Service investigation into the laundering of drug money in the Miami area, an inquiry that led the US investigators to take an interest in the Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd (BAOL) in Nassau. ‘Operation Greenback’ had examined
the alleged laundering of $34 million through the BAOL and the names Gabriel Abuchaibe and Pyramid Corporation had emerged in the course of the inquiry. Curiously, evidence had also emerged of phone calls between some of the suspects and telephone numbers in Italy connected to Michele Sindona and Licio Gelli. Impressive access to confidential information on Izzo’s part? Not necessarily. Details of Operation Greenback – including the roles of Abuchaibe and Pyramid – had been published in 1991 in a book
The Marcinkus Case
by journalists Leonardo Coen and Leo Sisti. The arming of the Afghan resistance, however, does not appear to have been previously connected to the Ambrosiano affair.

Izzo continued his story, claiming he had heard allegations that the Calvi murder was the work of right-wing fugitives from justice living in Britain. That reminded him of the presence in London of Italian antiques dealers who trafficked in works of art and currency, he said. ‘I remember that one of these antiquarians was called Vaccari.’ Izzo said he had been given further details of the Calvi case by a friend, Maurizio Maggio, who had lived in England. According to Maggio: ‘Calvi went to England because he was in great financial difficulty, taking with him documents with which he intended to blackmail members of the United Grand Lodge of England and [a named English bank].’ In a story peppered with elements that he could have gleaned from reading the newspapers, from the prison grapevine or from sources with direct knowledge of the facts, Izzo said Calvi had been put in contact with members of the Magliana Band whom he was using to try and pacify angry representatives of the Sicilian mafia worried about their money that had gone missing from the Banco Ambrosiano. Picking up an item of gossip that was current in the criminal underworld, he said Calvi had been the lover of a woman who had also been the mistress of Danilo Abbruciati, the Magliana boss killed in an attack on Roberto Rosone. Neyde Toscano, a glamorous Brazilian, had allegedly had a number of affairs
with important figures from the worlds of finance, the judiciary and organized crime. Her sister, Lilian, was married to a member of the Camorra with alleged links to Licio Gelli. If the rumour, confirmed by a number of underworld sources, proved true, it would revolutionize the image of Calvi as a staid banker and devoted family man, as well as placing him in uncomfortably intimate contact with the criminal milieu suspected of his murder.

‘Returning to Calvi and his flight to England, Maggio told me he had heard that in that country Calvi had fallen in with dangerous people. He specified that the dangerous people were Vaccari and his friends.’ These individuals had shown Calvi a pornographic film showing the torture and murder of a young woman and threatened that his daughter would star in the next film if he didn’t hand over his blackmailing documents, Izzo claimed. The story resembles that told by Frank Jennings to the journalist Charles Raw, and that may indeed be the source. Raw’s book
The Money Changers
had been published a year earlier and was also inspiring the affabulations of one of Izzo’s friends, the right-wing terrorist Valerio Viccei, who kept a copy of it with him in his prison cell while trying to convince the justice authorities of the validity of his testimony as a
pentito.
Izzo, however, said the story came from Maggio, who had heard it in his turn from Andrea Ghira, one of Izzo’s accomplices in the San Felice Circeo massacre. Ghira told him that Vaccari and his group had killed Calvi and that Ghira himself had then killed Vaccari on the orders of the man who had originally commissioned the Calvi murder. The documents Calvi had with him and which he intended to use to ‘blackmail the [named English bank] and American freemasonry, concerned the huge money-laundering operation in support of the Afghan revolutionary war’. Izzo may have meant British, rather than American freemasonry here, and his word, as always, has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It does appear to be true, however, that his friend Ghira spent
a period on the run in London and that there was a colony of right-wing refugees there with contacts in the Magliana Band who might have contributed to the murder. But his most interesting contribution regards motive: if Calvi had indeed been threatening to reveal the role of the Banco Ambrosiano in channelling criminal funds to the Afghan rebels his threat would have set alarm bells ringing far and wide. Judge Salvini sent the deposition to his colleagues in Rome, but there is no indication that any serious effort was made to investigate the substance of his claims.

The essence of Izzo’s hypothesis receives confirmation from a distant and unexpected quarter. Felipe Turover, a key witness in the corruption scandal that helped bring down the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin in 1999, witnessed the end of the Cold War and its aftermath from a privileged vantage point. Descended from a family of Spanish Jews who had fled to the Soviet Union to escape the dictatorship of General Franco, he had subsequently worked as a financial consultant on both sides of the Iron Curtain, collaborating in post-communist Russia’s first tentative steps towards a somewhat piratical capitalism. His work as a debt collector for the Banca del Gottardo gave him a particular insight into the financial world that had once done Roberto Calvi’s bidding. Armed with personal experience of high-level business activities across the Iron Curtain, he offered a confident analysis of the Calvi affair that coincided in many respects with that of Angelo Izzo.

‘The whole of Gelli and Calvi’s story can be called Stay Behind,’ he said, referring to the secret NATO resistance network set up across Europe after the Second World War. ‘This was the financial bed of Operation Stay Behind.’ Established as a clandestine resistance organization that would go into action in the event of a Soviet invasion, the Italian branch of Stay Behind – known as Gladio after the short stabbing sword of the Roman
legionnaires – has been suspected of involvement in domestic Italian terrorism. Gladio or related clandestine organizations are believed to have pre-empted the Soviet invasion, using the terrorist techniques of unconventional warfare to battle their domestic communist foes. Coup plots and indiscriminate terrorist outrages – to be falsely blamed on the left – were part of their repertoire. ‘This whole problem descends from the Yalta Accord [the pact dividing Europe into communist and western spheres of influence at the end of the war in 1945],’ Turover said. ‘Italy was politically [rather than physically] divided. And it’s from there [the Yalta Pact] that all modern terrorism and proxy wars have come. The Banco Ambrosiano was exactly the same thing as the BCCI, used to finance the mujahedin in Afghanistan, to break the Soviet empire in Asia.’

The Vatican was a natural partner in the enterprise, being an historic opponent of communism and having helped Nazi leaders escape from Europe at the end of the war so that they could contribute to the struggle against the new global enemy. ‘The Banco Ambrosiano was the BCCI of Operation Stay Behind,’ Turover explained, when I met him in a pretty lakeside town in Switzerland. ‘Stay Behind was an enormous political operation.’ With the Americans playing the leading role, the clandestine funding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland served to split the Warsaw Pact, Turover said. Switzerland’s Banca del Gottardo, controlled by the Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican, had played a key role in clandestine activities involving Italy and the Eastern Bloc, he claimed. Italy and the Banco Ambrosiano had been chosen as the financial motor for penetrating the Catholic, Spanish-speaking world in Latin America. ‘Marcinkus was the shadow finance minister of Operation Stay Behind. I don’t know if he was a CIA informant or an officer. He dealt with the White House and the CIA worked for him.’

Turover declines to pass moral judgement on the events of this period, saying criminal and immoral methods were used
by both sides. ‘In 1982 the destiny of the Cold War was being decided. It was the final, frontal battle, the battle of Waterloo,’ he said. The shooting of Pope John Paul II the previous year was part of this same titanic struggle, he suggested. ‘It was a really brutal message. The aim was to destroy this whole financial mechanism.’ Cosa Nostra naturally had a role, both in the clandestine activities of the Cold War and the funding of secret operations with drug money, and in the death of Roberto Calvi. ‘This was a clandestine strategic operation, in which you always find criminality, thievery and fraud. Clandestine operations feed on the worst of human qualities,’ he said. The mafia had remained faithful to the OSS and CIA since the days when it had helped prepare the ground for the American landings in Sicily during the Second World War and had been poorly rewarded for its loyalty. An ally such as Cosa Nostra, with its blanket control of the territory, would be precious in any conflict and invaluable in a situation such as the American occupation of Iraq. ‘In the art of war it is not so important to seize territory as to be able to hold on to it afterwards. We saw that with the Soviets in Afghanistan,’ he said.

Calvi fell from favour with his cold war masters because he had the temerity to finance the Italian Communist party (PCI) as well as the client parties of the West. Countries could sometimes get away with playing a double game, but not a banker, Turover said. And he offered a startling hypothesis as to the motive for Calvi’s murder: the banker was planning to defect, with all his sensitive secrets, to the East. ‘I think he wanted to sell all his information to the Russians. He was a walking library of secrets. I believe he was negotiating his surrender to the Bulgarians. The problem was that he wanted to defect and to defect with his documents. He wanted to be exfiltrated from Switzerland, from Zurich. Someone persuaded him to go to London instead. He was sent to a country where he could be killed without problems.’ If Turover’s theory is true, Calvi’s defection would have amounted to an extraordinary propaganda coup for the Soviet
Union. The most secret details of how the West had funded its global war on communism could have been systematically leaked to the press in a propaganda campaign judiciously coordinated by the KGB and lasting for months.

If the mafia was technically involved in Calvi’s killing that did not mean that it necessarily gave the order for the crime, Turover observed. He was not convinced by theories of a British vendetta for Calvi’s alleged role in funding the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands either. ‘Your secret services are very elegant; they would never indulge in a vulgar vendetta like this. The Americans could do it, though. America is a big, honest gorilla. The British staged a cover-up afterwards, that is for sure. It was a way of giving moral support to their cousins from Langley. It was covered up at the highest levels of government, that is absolutely certain. The English police are very efficient: in Britain you don’t have organized crime, you have “authorized crime”.’
¹
The Cold War, the Americans, the shooting of the pope: the noose under Blackfriars Bridge appears to tie them all together.