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Holy Smoke and
Mirrors
The Vatican
Conspiracy
In its zeal to stamp out communism,
the Vatican set up alliances during World War II with various secret societies,
fascist groups and spying agencies and has maintained these networks ever
since.




Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 7, Number
5 (August-September 2000) or September-October 2000 in
the USA only.PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia.  editor@nexusmagazine.comTelephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381From our
web page at:  http://www.nexusmagazine.com/
© 2000 by David G. Guyatt © 2000Correspondence c/- NEXUS UK
Office55 Queens RoadEast Grinstead,W. SussexRH19 1BGUnited
KingdomE-mail:  goldbug@goldbug99.freeserve.co.uk


THE MAFIA, THE CIA, AND THE VATICAN'S INTELLIGENCE
APPARATUS

Albert Vincent Carone is one of
those people who spent his life dancing between raindrops and turning invisible
wherever a shadow lingered. He existed and also didn't exist. Al Carone--unlike
his near namesake, Al Capone--truly was a paradox wrapped in a mystery concealed
behind an enigma.
Carone was a detective in the New York Police Department, but
this didn't stop him from becoming a "made" man in the Genovese crime family. He
knew all the leading Mafiosi of his day, including Vito Genovese, Sam Giancana,
Santos Trafficante, Joe Colombo and Pauley Castellano amongst others. To
Carone's daughter, Dee, they were all known as "Uncle". When she got married,
her father arranged two different reception rooms to separate the Mob guests
from the NYPD guests. But this was more window-dressing than anything else. One
of Carone's principal functions in the NYPD was to act as the "bagman" in
protecting shipments of CIA drugs to the various Mafia families.
Carone died in 1990 under mysterious circumstances. This
followed a period of great personal disenchantment with his life, following a
secretive mission to Mexico in 1985 when a large number of innocent women and
children died unnecessarily. His death was horrific, reports Mike Ruppert,
editor of From The
Wilderness newsletter, who has investigated
Carone's life story and written a special report on it (see
acknowledgements).
Meanwhile, another "Uncle" was Bill Casey, Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency during the Reagan Administration. Casey had been
with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. During the
1970s, he became Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which
regulates the US investment industry. During his tenure in that role, Casey used
Carone as a "cut out" to pass sensitive insider information to Mob capo Pauley
Castellano, says his daughter, Dee.
Carone was also a Full Colonel in the US Army, where he had
operated in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corp (CIC). Unsurprisingly, in view
of his close friendship with Bill Casey, he was also a covert operative for the
CIA. But that wasn't half of it. Carone was also a Grand Knight of the Sovereign
Military Order of Malta (SMOM), which historically has been the military arm of
the Vatican and is regarded as a separate State with full powers of statehood,
including issuing its own diplomatic passports.
In more recent decades SMOM has acted as a funding conduit, a
black market gold channel and money laundry for the CIA, amongst others, and is
known to act as the Vatican's intelligence arm. It was alleged to be involved
in, for example, the disappearance of Russia's gold reserves--over 2,000 metric
tonnes--which vanished during 1991, around the time that Soviet Premier Mikhail
Gorbachev was ousted from office.
Malta knighthoods are awarded to many leading individuals who
are part of the military and intelligence community. The CIA's Bill Casey, for
example, was a Knight of Malta. Former NATO General and later US Secretary of
State Alexander Haig is also a Malta Knight. Another is General Vernon Walters,
the former Deputy Director of the CIA under DCI George Bush, and later appointed
a roving ambassador during the Reagan Administration. The legendary head of the
OSS (the WWII precursor of the CIA), "Wild" Bill Donovan, was made a Knight
along with his wartime compatriot and later CIA Chief of Counterintelligence,
James Jesus Angleton. And John McCone, another prominent member of the US
"spook" agency, was also distinguished with a Malta knighthood. The list goes
on. Most interesting is Reinhard Gehlen, the former Nazi intelligence expert
recruited by the US in 1945&endash;46 to head the Gehlen Org--a secret,
German-based intelligence arm of the United States that was composed of former
SS and Gestapo agents, many of whom, including Klaus Barbie, were wanted Nazi
war criminals. The foregoing names amount to a listing of some of the most
powerful and influential members of the Western intelligence community over the
last five decades.
One Vatican group that has extremely close ties to the Knights
of Malta is the ultra-right-wing Opus Dei. This is an immensely powerful faction
in the Vatican today, and its public "do good" activities eclipse a plethora of
the darkest political and financial machinations known to man. It will not come
as a surprise, perhaps, that Carone was closely associated with Opus Dei and, in
particular, with a covert operation that had its origin back in 1944. This was
Operation Amadeus.
 
FROM RATLINES TO DRUG SMUGGLING ROUTES
This highly secretive operation was part of the Operation
Sunrise negotiations conducted
between Allen Dulles--the then senior wartime OSS officer in Switzerland, but
later to become the Director of the CIA--and SS General Karl Wolff. This
debonair and well-connected SS officer commanded the SS and Gestapo contingents
in Italy at the time.
The result of these negotiations (at least those parts that are
now known about) was an agreement affording amnesty to an extensive roster of
SS&endash;Gestapo forces, in exchange for their agreement to shift their
allegiance to the West in the pre-planned, covert battle aimed at defeating the
Soviet communist "menace"--in other words, the "Cold War".
One spin-off of these Dulles&endash;Wolff arrangements were
the Vatican-run "ratlines" that aided wanted Nazi war criminals to slink to
safety. Tens of thousands of SS and other Nazis escaped capture as a result of
the ratlines. These included such figures as Franz Stangl, commandant at
Treblinka extermination camp, and his friend Gustav Wagner, who ran the Sobibor
death camp. Others to escape in this manner included Adolf Eichmann, the
architect of the Holocaust. Eichmann was later captured by Israeli intelligence
agents, smuggled to Tel Aviv where he stood trial and was eventually executed.
In comparison, Dr Joseph Mengele--known as "the White Angel", a war criminal
wanted for his cruel and inhuman experiments on death camp inmates at
Auschwitz--escaped to Argentina and lived a long life.
Operation Amadeus was exclusively concerned with the flight of SS and Nazi war criminals
to the South American continent and their later ferocious covert actions against
the indigenous populations justified under the banner of "anti-communism". One
individual engaged in Amadeus activities was former Gestapo officer Klaus
Barbie, known to the world as "the Butcher of Lyon".
The principal means of funding Operation Amadeus activities was the hugely profitable
narcotics business. Large stocks of SS morphia had been smuggled out of Europe
and into "Catholic" South America at the end of the War in accordance with the
Sunrise agreement. The morphia
was accompanied by looted SS gold and large quantities of counterfeit British
banknotes, forged in concentration camps by captive but skilled counterfeiters
as part of an SS scheme known as Operation Bernhardt.
The escape "lines" used to move wanted men around South
America, away from the prying eyes of Israeli agents, also proved ideal as
smuggling routes for drugs. Decades later, the stocks of heroin smuggled into
the United States for distribution by the CIA-protected Mafia would be
complemented with locally grown cocaine.
One of the figures to emerge into the spotlight during the
1980s who was deeply involved in this narcotics traffic was Colonel Oliver
North, who authorised the exchange of guns for drugs to finance Contra
operations. Oliver North was known to Al Carone under his "work" name, "John
Caffrey". This was the time when Carone was engaged in CIA-controlled cocaine
transactions with Joe "Pickles" Percilia, a member of the Colombo crime
family.
These curious and usually concealed connections between
governments (in the form of the military and intelligence community), organised
crime, the Vatican and Nazi war criminals have some significant history. Not
least was the secret agreement reached between US Naval Intelligence officers
and Mafia don Charles "Lucky" Luciano during World War II. This resulted in the
Mafia's decision to aid and assist the Allies by contacting Mob figure Vito
Genovese in 1943 to prepare the way for the Allied landing in Sicily. As earlier
outlined, it was primarily those SS&endash;Gestapo units located in Italy
under command of SS General Wolff that were initially concerned in the Operation
Sunrise
negotiations.
And while large numbers of former Nazis were fleeing south to
fight the communist menace in Latin America--and, more importantly, to profit
personally from their involvement in the lucrative drug and gun business--in
Europe, the spadework was being laid to overthrow or thwart democratically
elected governments via a network of fascist-manned "Stay Behind units",
organised under the aegis of Operation Gladio. Not surprisingly, this would also lead
to certain involved figures making personal fortunes out of other people's
misery--a circumstance that is so commonplace it is barely worth
mentioning.
These neo-fascist activities would come to prominence in the
early 1980s following the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the death of Italian
banker Roberto Calvi, who was "suicided" and left hanging under London's
Blackfriars Bridge. This would lead to sensational disclosures about the role of
the Vatican Bank, the IOR, in Calvi's financial empire and would quickly grow to
include the activities of Mafia financier Michele Sindona--whose activities, in
turn, would implicate leading blue-blood banks in Europe and America in Mafia
activities. Both Sindona and Calvi were close to Opus Dei, which lost around $55
million when Sindona's empire crashed. According to his family, Roberto Calvi
was deeply engrossed in helping Opus Dei take control of the IOR when he was
killed.
Meanwhile, both Calvi and Sindona were members of the secretive
Propaganda Due (P2) masonic
lodge, which is said to have been a "parallel government" in waiting and which
planned to effect a coup d'état
in Italy following a Communist Party victory at the polls.
P2 was run by former Italian fascist and member of the Nazi SS,
Licio Gelli--dubbed "the Puppet Master" by the Italian press. Gelli's
connections to the ultra-hard-right and fascists in Europe and Latin America
were extensive. In fact, he had been deeply involved in establishing the
Vatican-run ratlines that aided the worst Nazi war criminals to escape Allied
justice at the end of WWII. All told, an estimated 50,000 Nazis were helped to
freedom.
Gelli had numerous powerful friends, including former Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini. He was also a personal friend of Argentina's General
Juan Perón, and his close associations with Argentina would later lead him to be
a key figure in shipping a supply of French Exocet missiles to sink British Task Force
ships during the Falklands War. In this endeavour he worked closely with Ronald
R. Rewald, founder of the Hawaiian-based financial institution Bishop, Baldwin,
Rewald, Dillingham & Wong--a CIA proprietary company and forerunner of the
CIA-owned Nugan Hand Bank.
The involvement of a CIA front company engaged in financing and
providing weapons to be used against a key American ally (Britain) with the
wholehearted public support of the US Government may seem somewhat duplicitous.
However, in the world of "black ops", "friends" and "enemies" are
interchangeable words and working both sides of the fence is accepted
practice.
In terms of hierarchy, Gelli reported to Umberto Ortolani,
described by one writer as "the great Vatican door-opener" and "secret
chamberlain of the papal household". In addition to his P2 connections, Ortolani
is also a member of the inner council of the Knights of Malta and has military
intelligence connections that date back to WWII.
 
THE OCTOPUS AND THE SPIDER
There are numerous other masonic groups and secret societies in
Europe which move in and out of focus at various times. Almost all of them are
Catholic in nature.
One of these is the Priory of Sion (Prieuré de Sion)--a
secretive order that first came to public attention via the best-selling book,
The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, published in 1982. The Priory is closely connected with the alleged
treasure of Solomon which is said to have found its way to the small village of
Rennes-le-Château in southwestern France, where it is said to have been buried
by the Knights Templars, forerunners of the Knights of Malta.
The Priory, whose headquarters were located at Annemasse, near
Geneva on the Swiss border, are styled as the "guardians" of Solomon's treasure,
but, most interestingly, they have numerous subterranean connections to fascists
and those on the far right that date back to WWII. Meanwhile, it has to be noted
in passing that Annemasse is said to have been the centre for the anti-communist
Stay Behind units of Operation Gladio.
If this is not intriguing enough, another fact stretches
coincidence to the point of bursting. In recent years, the Priory of Sion has
moved its headquarters to Barcelona and now boasts a Spanish Grand Master. This,
one could conclude, is to enable it to be physically closer to the historical
heartland of Opus Dei, which was founded in Spain in 1928.
If Otto Skorzeny was a leading force in running the SS
Brotherhood escape routes--Der Spinne, the Spider--after the war, and SS General Karl Wolff was the lead
negotiator with OSS Swiss Chief, Allen Dulles, then another Nazi, Walter Rauff,
head of the Milan SD, was one of two liaisons with the Vatican involved in the
establishment of the Nazi-smuggling system. Earlier in his career, Rauff had
overseen the development of the Nazis' mobile gas vans, known as "Black Ravens",
which gassed to death around 100,000 Jews, mostly women and children, by pumping
exhaust fumes into the back of an hermetically sealed van.
Another important link between the Vatican and SS escape routes
was Friedrich Schwendt, who was also the man in charge of laundering forged SS
banknotes. Before WWII, Schwendt was an international arms dealer who shipped
weapons to China and Russia. He was also the investment manager of the family
fortune of his first wife's aunt, Baroness Gemmingen-Guttenberg, of the vastly
wealthy Argentina-based Bunge family, of the massive transnational firm Bunge
Corporation that is also known as "the Octopus".
This title is interesting, for it may connect to the so-called
"Octopus" that ties in to murdered freelance journalist Danny Casolaro, who at
the time of his death in 1991 was investigating a number of high-level
illegalities including the theft by the Department of Justice of a "tracking"
computer program known as "PROMIS". Casolaro was writing a book about what he
had discovered. He originally titled it "Behold, A Pale Horse", but later
modified it to "The Octopus". In a draft page of the book, he described this
group as an "international cabal whose freelance services covered parochial
political intrigue, espionage, sophisticated weapon technologies that included
biotoxins, drug trafficking, money laundering and murder-for-hire". Casolaro
further stated that this cabal was "spawned thirty years ago in the shadow of
the Cold War".
After Casolaro's death, journalist Carol Marshall (a pen name)
followed up his investigation and wrote an (as yet) unpublished manuscript,
titled "The Last Circle". In this, Marshall describes her investigation of
Robert Booth Nichols--one of the central figures of the Octopus, whom she
describes as being part of a secretive group known as "the Chosen Ones" and who
wore "skull and crossbones rings and shared a common interest, if you could call
it that, in the old German SS occultism, its tribal and inner circle
rites".
During her continuing investigation into the Octopus, Marshall
found that the SS occultism outlined above was connected to Lt. Col. Michael A.
Aquino, a former US Green Beret who is a self-professed Satanist and who held a
Top Secret security clearance for his work in military intelligence and on
classified psychological warfare matters. Aquino officiated at SS black-magic
ceremonies held at Wewelsburg, the castle once used by SS chief Heinrich Himmler
to create an SS order of Teutonic knights based on the Knights
Templars.
The foregoing connections lend themselves to a larger picture
of global, interlocking, right-wing fascist groupings that operate in the
shadowland of deniable military and intelligence operations associated with
profit during WWII and, later, throughout the Cold War.
In this respect, it is intriguing to note that the Priory of
Sion, one of the foremost Catholic groups under discussion, uses as a symbol
something that is variously described as an octopus or a spider (araignée) on its documents. The Priory's
association with the octopus could easily relate to the so-called Octopus
described above, where organised crime works hand in glove with operatives from
US intelligence and the military. If one decides, on the other hand, that the
Priory symbol is a spider, there is the intriguing notion of the Vatican-run
Nazi escape lines of Austrian Catholic Otto Skorzeny and his SS Brotherhood's
Der Spinne (the
Spider).
 
THE BUSINESS OF GOD
Al Carone was, as mentioned earlier, a "made" man of the
Genovese Mob in addition to his other associations. It is curious, therefore, to
note that one of the leading lights of the Octopus, according to writer Carol
Marshall, was ultra-right-wing oil tycoon Clint Murchison, owner of the Dallas
Cowboys football team. Murchison's oil company, Murchison Oil Lease Company, was
20 per cent owned by Gerardo Catena, the chief lieutenant of the Genovese crime
family.
Throughout the Second World War and thereafter there was,
according to author Charles Higham in his book, Trading
With The Enemy, a "general agreement of certain major
figures of American, British and German commerce to continue their relations and
associations after Pearl Harbor". Higham adds that he also learned that "certain
figures of the warring governments had arranged to assist in this [activity]".
Higham's subsequent research proved that this high cabal--which he dubbed "the
Fraternity"--not only existed but benefited handsomely throughout WWII. This led
the author to ask:
What would have happened if millions of Americans and
British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had
learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey managers shipped the enemy's
fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel?
Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris
after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the
enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan? Or that Ford
trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with
authorisation from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head
of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to
Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems
and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the
Focke-Wulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial
ball-bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with
the collusion of the Vice-Chairman of the US War Production Board, in
partnership with Göring's cousin in Philadelphia, when American forces were
desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in
Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?
Higham's "Fraternity" has similar characteristics to the
so-called "Octopus", and also shows certain similarities to Colonel Oliver
North's "Enterprise". All have engaged in the most dubious and illegal
activities for profit, and all operate hand in glove with organised crime. All
lean so far to the right, ideologically speaking, that the word "fascist" can be
used without reservation. Meanwhile, none of them cares very much for the woes
of humanity and, indeed, they appear committed to stomping on ethics and moral
values wherever they meet them.
The octopus--or "Oct Opus", as one European documentary film
producer renders the spelling when referring to Opus Dei (which began life on 2
October 1928)--has eight arms that surround its mouth (ensuring a constant
supply of food) and three hearts, and is therefore not prone to starving or
dying. But it can also be identified by these oddities. Opus Dei, the group that
is now in control of the Vatican, is undoubtedly one arm of this global criminal
network, in this writer's view. Or are the three hearts of the octopus more
vital to identify? Could they be analogous to the "Church, State and Mafia, the
forces that prevail beneath the play of the shadows of the world" (as described
by Nick Tosches in his book, Power On
Earth, which tells the life story of murdered Mafia
financier Michele Sindona)?
There is yet another interesting twist to this accumulation of
associations: Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands. The Prince was the founding
chairman of the publicity-shy Western power elite, the Bilderbergers. This
shadowy and secretive group meets over a weekend in May/June each year, under an
almost total media blackout [see deBriefings this issue]. Powerful and very
influential figures from the world of banking, business, politics, the media,
trades unions and academia are invited. Included regularly, for example, are Dr
Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and Italy's "king-maker", Gianni Agnelli.
The first meeting took place in May 1954.
This, strangely, was the same year that Prince Bernhard became
head of the Johanitter Orde in Nederland, one of four orders that make up the Chivalric Alliance of Orders of
Saint John (Alliance de Chevalerie des Hospitaliers de
Saint Jean de Jérusalem). The stated purpose of these
four, known as "the Alliance"--which is composed of northern European nations
Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and Great Britain, the latter being an ancient
order known as "the Most Venerable Order"--is "to reduce to silence the enemies
of Christ". The headquarters of the Alliance are located in
Switzerland.
These are Protestant orders rather than Catholic, but it is of
significance that, on 26 November 1963, the Alliance was "consolidated with the
signing of a joint declaration between the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and
the Most Venerable Order, at St John's Gate, London, by the Grand Chancellor of
the SMOM, the Prince of Resuttano, and Lord Wakehurst, Lord Prior of the Most
Venerable Order". In other words, the Catholic and Protestant orders bound
themselves to work together to "silence the enemies of Christ"--a clear
reference to communism.
Interestingly, it has been suggested that the Knights Templars
were "infected" with the Johannite or Mandaean heresy that denounced Jesus as a
"false prophet" and in his place recognised John the Baptist as the true
Messiah. Meanwhile, two early Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion are said to
have had Johannite tendencies: Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton.
Notwithstanding that, the famous founder of the Knights Templars, Hughes de
Payens, has been accused by the Vatican of being a Johannite.
Leaving aside this brief foray into esoteric history, it is as
well to note that Prince Bernhard, in addition to his Bilderberg role and as
head of the Dutch Johannite Order, was also an honorary member of Himmler's SS
and worked in NW7, the global intelligence arm of I.G. Farben which acted in the
interests of the Nazi cause. The activities of NW7 in Latin America before,
during and after World War II are deeply interwoven in this story.
In facilitating and aligning itself with many of the foregoing
activities, the Vatican aimed to help eradicate a communist ideology that
despised Christianity. Opus Dei and a host of other Catholic-cum-fascist secret
groups engaged in a litany of murder, money laundering, drug peddling, arms
trafficking, concealment of WWII loot, embezzlement, manipulation of financial
markets and many other consummate illegalities. The purpose of all these
activities was, arguably, to allow the Vatican to remain the spiritual bulwark
of the Christian West.
But if such business is the business of a Church preaching of a
God in Heaven, then Caesar on Earth had better watch out. A new landlord has
fallen into town.
 
AcknowledgementsIn preparing
this essay, I drew upon an indispensable group of published/unpublished work and
sources, as follows:
¥ The full account of the unique story of Al Carone, by Mike
Ruppert (available to order online at  http://www.copvcia.com/).¥ Trading With The Enemy, by Charles Higham (St Edmundsbury Press, Suffolk, UK, 1983).¥
Their Kingdom Come, by Robert
Hutchison (St Martin's Press, New York, 1997).¥ Web
of Gold, by Guy Patton and Robin Mackness (Sidgwick
& Jackson, London, 2000).¥ Ratlines, by Mark Aarons and John Loftus
(Mandarin, London, 1991).¥ The Bormann
Brotherhood, by William Stevenson (Arthur Baker,
London, 1973).¥ Unpublished manuscript by Peter Dale Scott on Barbie, Dulles
and Operation Sunrise. It
details how the OSS&endash;SS preserved each other while serving their true
masters: transnational corporations.¥ The Last
Circle, an unpublished manuscript by Carol Marshall,
which investigates the so-called "Octopus".¥ My thanks also go to Catherine
Austin Fitts ( http://www.solari.com/)
for her invaluable help.-- David G. Guyatt
About the Author:Following a
28-year career as a professional international banker based in the City of
London, David Guyatt now pursues a career researching, writing and producing material for TV
documentaries, films and magazines. His feature articles have appeared in
diverse publications including BusinessAge, NEXUS, Fortean Times, The X
Factor and Lobster.In addition to his commercial
writing, David has prepared background papers on anti-personnel electromagnetic
weapons for the International Committee on the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as for
Scientists for Global Responsibility. He has also written for the World
Development Movement on his "insider" knowledge of international weapons
financing.David was engaged as an expert consultant for the two-part
World in Action TV documentary,
broadcast in the UK in April 1997, that exposed Britain's weapons trail to
Indonesia; and he assisted Swiss TV in a documentary on non-lethal weapons, also
broadcast in early 1997. At present, he is pursuing an in-depth investigation
into the real secrets surrounding the enigma of Nazi gold and WWII treasure
looted by both German and Japanese "plunder teams". It will also unravel some of
the more enduring secrets of the gold market.
 







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