The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

20. The word «freedom» brings out the communities of men to fight against every kind of force, against every kind of authority, even against God and the laws of nature. For this reason we, when we come into our kingdom, shall have to erase this word from the lexicon of life as implying a principle of brute force which turns mobs into bloodthirsty beasts.

21. These beasts, it is true, fall asleep again every time when they have drunk their fill of blood, and at such times can easily be riveted into their chains. But if they be not given blood they will not sleep and [will] continue to struggle.

P2 (Propaganda Due)

In the course of their sniffing around the Vatican Bank scandal which claimed the life of Roberto Calvi, Italian magistrates repeatedly encountered the name of Licio Gelli, Grandmaster of the Italian Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due (P2). Eventually, in March 1981, enough proof of Gelli’s role in the Vatican’s money-laundering operation emerged for the police to raid his villa in Arezzo, where they found evidence that P2 was engaged in a crime far larger and more sinister than dealing dodgy money. It was plotting to take over Italy.

A list of 962 P2 conspirators found in Gelli’s safe included three cabinet members, 40 MPs, the heads of the army and navy, police chiefs, intelligence officers, 14 judges, numerous industrialists (among them one Silvio Berlusconi) and Victor Emmanuel, Prince of Naples. Shortly afterwards, police found under the false bottom in Gelli’s daughter’s briefcase a copy of a document entitled Piana di Rinascita Democratica («A Plan for the Rebirth of Democracy»). The title was a misnomer: the document set out a plan for a fascist coup in which unions would be banned and the media put under state control. Following the discovery of the P2 list and Piana di Rinascita Democratica the then prime minister Arnaldo Forlani was obliged to resign, causing the fall of the Italian government. Later a court indictment charged that P2’s infiltration of the Italian state had «the incredible capacity to control a state’s institutions to the point of virtually becoming a state-within-a-state».

Born in 1919, Gelli was a Mussolini-era fascist who had fought with the SS on the Eastern Front before fleeing to South America, where he was a financial backer of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. Returning to Italy, he became a Mason in 1963 before taking over P2 in 1966. Under his tutelage P2 expanded nearly a hundredfold to 1,000 members, including branches in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Funding P2 was the Mafia, whose role in the Lodge was so conspicuous that in 1976 the Italian Masonic authorities officially closed P2 down, after which it was obliged to meet in secret.

The Mafia wasn’t P2’s only provider. According to supergrass P2 member Mino Pecorelli, the Lodge was funded by the CIA and Gelli himself was a CIA officer. (Pecorelli was later found shot dead.) A 1990 article in the London Observer cited declassified US secret papers which linked Gelli to the CIA’s Rome station and the continuance of the notorious Operation Gladio, the CIA-funded and — armed anti-Communist network set up in Italy in the wake of the Second World War. There have been frequent accusations of P2 complicity in the 1978 assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the 1980 Bologna railway bombing, events which were part of the «strategia della tensione» intended to create the conditions for a P2 coup. (According to former CIA agent Richard Brenneke, Gelli and P2 were also entangled in everything «black» from the assassination of Swedish politician Olof Palme to the Iran-Contra Scandal.) In 1994 Gelli and other P2 members were acquitted of charges of «conspiracy against the state», though, as Gelli’s detractors were quick to point out, the state which was judging him was still riddled with P2 members. Gelli was, however, convicted on charges relating to the Banco Ambrosiano crash and in 2005 was formally indicted for conspiring to murder Roberto Calvi.

P2 was formally banned by the Italian authorities in 1981. Gelli seemingly found some solace in his prison cell from the activities of Silvio Berlusconi’s government outside, telling La Repubblica: «I look at the country, read the newspaper, and think: ‘All [the Piana di Rinascita Democratica] is becoming a reality little by little, piece by piece.’»

The P2 lodge plotted a fascist coup in Italy: ALERT LEVEL 9

Further Reading

Philip Willan, The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi, 2007

Rainbow Warrior