Thread by @karolcummins

Next up in the 🐙 series is Licio Gelli:

The fascist “businessman” who became the 'puppet master' of the sinister right-wing organisation, P2 or “Propaganda Due”

“A fascist sympathiser, 18-year-old Gelli fought for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War before serving with Hitler’s SS troops in Italy during the second World War.”

irishtimes.com/news/world/eur…

“When the Nazi German forces began to lose ground to the Allies in Italy in 1944, he began to supply key information about Nazi troop movements to the Italian partisan resistance fighters, thus ensuring his own post-war survival.”

irishtimes.com/news/world/eur…

“Post WWII, Licio Gelli developed a “Plan for Democratic Rebirth”, his blueprint for a new Italy, purged of destructive left-wing influences

Gelli was known as “the puppet master”, or sometimes Niccolo Machiavelli’s Belfagor.”

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“But most commonly he was referred to as Il Maestro venerabile, the venerable master of the P2 freemason's lodge, a sinister organization of right-wing inspiration.”

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“The Masonic lodge gave Gelli a network at the highest levels, providing information for him to dispense, trade and exploit to his advantage.”

abc.net.au/news/2015-12-1…

“Lodge members included top Italian military, police and intelligence officers..

As well as prominent bankers and businessmen, journalists and government officials, and a handful of politicians.”

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“The Lodge provided a perfect infrastructure. ...

And it had its bankers, first Michele Sindona and then Roberto Calvi, head of the country's largest private sector bank, Banco Ambrosiano.”

📌#Sindona
📌#Calvi
📌#BancoAmbrosiano

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

In Gelli’s safe they found the secrets of P2, a list of its 962 members, including Sindona, Calvi and top Rizzoli executives including Silvio Berlusconi (recently convicted of tax fraud), plus a trove of compromising documents.

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

📌A lengthy parliamentary commission of inquiry, led by Tin Anselmi, concluded that P2 was a criminal organisation which had intended to “undermine our democracy”.🐙

irishtimes.com/news/world/eur…

📌By this stage, the resourceful Gelli was on the run in South America, probably in Argentina where, during the previous decade, he had cultivated good relations with populist dictator Juan Peron.

irishtimes.com/news/world/eur…

Peron supported fleeing WWII criminals.

Infamous Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann & Josef Mengele were admitted, even welcomed, into Argentina.

Understanding why Peron allowed this requires examination of Argentina’s history before and during WWII (& OSS).

thevintagenews.com/2017/02/21/arg…

“In his book In God’s Name, David Yallop even claims that Gelli bought Exocet missiles for the Argentinian military regime for use in the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War.”

irishtimes.com/news/world/eur…

📌”It was Calvi who provided the funding by lending Peru $200 million to buy Exocet missiles and thus became a target for the British secret service.”

nytimes.com/1982/07/28/wor…

🔑The sale of the Exocet missiles ties into Reagan’s Iran-Contra Scandal as well.

“The scandal brought about the demise of the government and set in motion a chain of events that led to the led to the $1.4 BILLION collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the death of Calvi himself.”

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

⚠️Nicholas J. Bua - A Judge appt’d by William Barr, accused of covering up the ISLAW/PROMIS case was said to the head of P-2's Grand Mother Lodge for North America, HQ in Chicago. #Rumor

Other locations include Italy, France, England.

nytimes.com/1981/05/24/wor…

P2 was also active in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina.

Among its Argentine members were Raúl Alberto Lastiri, interim president in 1973 during the height of the "Dirty War";

Emilio Massera, who was part of the military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla from 1976 to 1978;

Con’t:

José López Rega, minister 1973–1975, and founder of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance; and

General Guillermo Suárez Mason.

pagina12.com.ar/1998/98-12/98-…

📌”P2 is dedicated to the politics/strategy of tension or strategia della tensione, to promote the overthrowing of representative governments & the revival of fascism, the iron fist, wherein violent struggle is encouraged rather than suppressed.”

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_…

“P2, or Propaganda Due, was an influential secret network that counted politicians, judges, bankers and senior military figures amongst its members.

📌Its tentacles 🐙 stretched throughout the upper echelons of the Italian establishment (and elsewhere).

mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-1…

📌P2, or Propaganda Due, amounted virtually to a parallel state, and was implicated directly or indirectly in most of the scandals, plots and acts of terrorism that marked the country's dark decades of the 1970s and '80s, from an attempted 1970 coup

globalresearch.ca/the-untold-sto…

📌”To the kidnap and assassination of prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978 and the Sindona and Banco Ambrosiano financial scandals, with their links to the Mafia and the Vatican, to the 1980 Bologna station bombing and other murders and acts of violence.”

globalresearch.ca/the-untold-sto…

Neofascism

The postwar period to the end of the 20th century

#Nationalism #Authoritarian #Racist #XenophobicScapegoating #AntiSemitic #AntiImmigrant #Populist
🐴👠s abound.

britannica.com/topic/fascism/…

Italy in those years was one gigantic conspiracy theory, in which RW terrorism seemed to overlap with LW terrorism, and the diverse forces of the Mafia, the Church and Freemasonry (and CIA).

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

📌All with a helping hand from the CIA, of course – apparently colluded to deny them. 

How much of P2's activities were orchestrated by Gelli was impossible to say.

@radu_pirlog tells me the Vatican is set to declassify P2 in 2025.

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“After the war he became a successful businessman, & establishing friends & contacts not just in Italy but also in Latin America, where he lived for a while (among those friends, he would claim, was the Argentinian leader Juan Peron.)”

#LatinAmericaNazis

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

🐙”P2 Free Mason lodge was founded in the late 19th century as a discreet network for important public figures.

In 1975 it was officially dissolved, only to assume a new existence, subversive and ultra-secretive, with Gelli at its helm.” OpusDei?🤔

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“The Lodge provided a perfect infrastructure. It had a large clandestine foothold in public life and business.

It controlled Italy's biggest publishing group, Rizzoli, and its most important newspaper, Milan's Corriere della Sera.” #Propaganda

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“And it had its bankers, first Michele Sindona and then Roberto Calvi, head of the country's largest private sector bank, Banco Ambrosiano.”

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

📌”But in 1981 this secret universe was laid bare.

Magistrates investigating the 1970s collapse of Sindona's financial empire followed a lead that took them to Gelli.”

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“The fact that Calvi was a member of Gelli's lodge, whose members called themselves the "frati neri" ("black friars"), & that he was found hanging under Blackfriar's Bridge, his pockets weighted down with bricks..”

smh.com.au/national/who-h…

Raised suspicions that P2 was somehow involved in Calvi’s death.

smh.com.au/national/who-h…

In 2005 Gelli and five others, including the Mafia boss Giuseppe "Pippo" Calo, were formally placed under investigation in Italy on charges of ordering Calvi’s murder.

smh.com.au/national/who-h…

“Over the years, in absentia and in person, Gelli was tried and convicted in Italy on various offences, including fraud relating to the Ambrosiano affair, for which he received a 12-year sentence in April 1998. “

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“Evidently forewarned, Gelli escaped just before he was to be taken to prison,

But his jail term was commuted to house arrest, so that in Italy, despite the enormity of his supposed transgressions, he never spent a day behind bars.”

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

“Instead Gelli lived out his final years at his villa in Arezzo, even appearing from time to time on television.

“I fought for fascism, I am a fascist and I will die a fascist,” he said in 2008.

His real secrets, however, went with him to the grave.”

independent.co.uk/news/obituarie…

📌”Gelli had warm relations with the officers who carried out the 1976 coup in Argentina and was later shown to have played a role in the aborted “Borghese” coup of 1970 in Italy.”

theguardian.com/world/2015/dec…

“During WWII, Gelli was a senior fascist party official, & had been in charge of transporting 60 tons of gold belonging to King Peter II of Yugoslavia.

When Gelli fled Italy to avoid arrest, the police discovered the missing gold ingots.”

theguardian.com/world/2015/dec…

📌 I will dive more deeply into Sindona, Calvi, Marcinkus and Banco Ambrosiano, BCCI, Nugan Hand, OSS/CIA, Operation Gladio, Operation Condor, Iran Contra, Bay of Pigs & the ISLAW/PROMIS scandal & more later.

Yes folks it’s all connected. 🐙

@threadreaderapp unroll please & TY

‼️CORRECTION‼️

The Vatican won’t declassify their P2 files until 2225!!

TWO HUNDRED AND FIVE YEARS in the future.

https://twitter.com/radu_pirlog/status/1237216666800361472?s=21

https://twitter.com/radu_pirlog/status/1237216666800361472