Mason indicted over murder of 'God's banker'

By John Phillips in Rome

Magistrates investigating the death of the Italian banker Roberto Calvi under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 are focusing on Licio Gelli, the former "grand master" of the illegal P2 Masonic lodge that plotted against Italian democracy in the 1970s.

Mr Gelli denies he was involved but has acknowledged that the financier, known as "God's banker" because of his links with the Vatican, was murdered. He said the killing was commissioned in Poland.

This is thought to be a reference to Calvi's alleged involvement in financing the Solidarity trade union movement at the request of the late Pope John Paul II, according to the sources quoted by La Repubblica newspaper.

Two Roman investigating magistrates, Judge Maria Monteleone and Judge Luca Tescaroli, sent Mr Gelli a judicial letter informing him that he is formally under investigation on charges of ordering the murder along with four other people - Flavio Carboni, a shadowy businessman with secret service contacts, his girlfriend Manuela Kleinsing, the Cosa Nostra boss Giuseppe Calo and an entrepreneur, Ernesto Dioatallevi. The four other suspects were indicted on murder charges in April and are to stand trial in October.

Investigators believe that Calvi was murdered as "punishment" for having used his position as head of the Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank, to seize large sums of money belonging to the Sicilian Mafia and to Mr Gelli.

The indictment also says that the five ordered Calvi's murder to prevent the banker "from using blackmail power against his political and institutional sponsors from the world of Masonry, belonging to the P2 lodge, or to the Institute for Religious Works [the Vatican Bank] with whom he had managed investments and financing with conspicuous sums of money, some of it coming from Cosa Nostra and public agencies".

Nearly 1,000 prominent public figures including businessmen such as the current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, senior army and police officers, politicians and civil servants belonged to Mr Gelli's Propaganda Due (P2) clandestine Masonic lodge, dissolved in 1981 for plotting to establish an authoritarian regime.

When interrogated by magistrates in the presence of his lawyer on 4 July, Mr Gelli strongly denied having ordered the murder of Calvi, the sources said.

The former grand master said he had known Calvi since 1975 when he was introduced to him by Umberto Ortolani, another leading P2 member, but that he had few dealings with the Banco Ambrosiano, the collapse of which in 1982 sent Calvi fleeing to London.

The only dealing he had was in 1981 when he loaned $10m to the bank's Nassau subsidiary in the Bahamas, which was repaid to him one month later, he said.

"Calvi's death was made to look like suicide," he told the magistrates. Mr Gelli said the murder was related to Calvi's dealings with the Vatican Bank, which has always denied any moral responsibility in the Ambrosiano affair. "One evening I was at dinner with Calvi. He was angry, black in the face. He told me that the next day he had to go and see 'the most Holy one' in the Vatican to get $80m that he had to pay for bills relating to Poland and that if he did not get the money everything would blow up," Mr Gelli was quoted as saying in La Repubblica.

"This happened between 1979 and 1980, and that is why I said that to find Calvi's assassins one ought to have investigated in Poland," Mr Gelli was quoted as telling the magistrates.

Magistrates investigating the death of the Italian banker Roberto Calvi under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 are focusing on Licio Gelli, the former "grand master" of the illegal P2 Masonic lodge that plotted against Italian democracy in the 1970s.

Mr Gelli denies he was involved but has acknowledged that the financier, known as "God's banker" because of his links with the Vatican, was murdered. He said the killing was commissioned in Poland.

This is thought to be a reference to Calvi's alleged involvement in financing the Solidarity trade union movement at the request of the late Pope John Paul II, according to the sources quoted by La Repubblica newspaper.

Two Roman investigating magistrates, Judge Maria Monteleone and Judge Luca Tescaroli, sent Mr Gelli a judicial letter informing him that he is formally under investigation on charges of ordering the murder along with four other people - Flavio Carboni, a shadowy businessman with secret service contacts, his girlfriend Manuela Kleinsing, the Cosa Nostra boss Giuseppe Calo and an entrepreneur, Ernesto Dioatallevi. The four other suspects were indicted on murder charges in April and are to stand trial in October.

Investigators believe that Calvi was murdered as "punishment" for having used his position as head of the Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank, to seize large sums of money belonging to the Sicilian Mafia and to Mr Gelli.

The indictment also says that the five ordered Calvi's murder to prevent the banker "from using blackmail power against his political and institutional sponsors from the world of Masonry, belonging to the P2 lodge, or to the Institute for Religious Works [the Vatican Bank] with whom he had managed investments and financing with conspicuous sums of money, some of it coming from Cosa Nostra and public agencies".
Nearly 1,000 prominent public figures including businessmen such as the current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, senior army and police officers, politicians and civil servants belonged to Mr Gelli's Propaganda Due (P2) clandestine Masonic lodge, dissolved in 1981 for plotting to establish an authoritarian regime.

When interrogated by magistrates in the presence of his lawyer on 4 July, Mr Gelli strongly denied having ordered the murder of Calvi, the sources said.

The former grand master said he had known Calvi since 1975 when he was introduced to him by Umberto Ortolani, another leading P2 member, but that he had few dealings with the Banco Ambrosiano, the collapse of which in 1982 sent Calvi fleeing to London.

The only dealing he had was in 1981 when he loaned $10m to the bank's Nassau subsidiary in the Bahamas, which was repaid to him one month later, he said.

"Calvi's death was made to look like suicide," he told the magistrates. Mr Gelli said the murder was related to Calvi's dealings with the Vatican Bank, which has always denied any moral responsibility in the Ambrosiano affair. "One evening I was at dinner with Calvi. He was angry, black in the face. He told me that the next day he had to go and see 'the most Holy one' in the Vatican to get $80m that he had to pay for bills relating to Poland and that if he did not get the money everything would blow up," Mr Gelli was quoted as saying in La Repubblica.

"This happened between 1979 and 1980, and that is why I said that to find Calvi's assassins one ought to have investigated in Poland," Mr Gelli was quoted as telling the magistrates.

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Excerpt from pp. 179-183 of Martin Bormann, Nazi in Exile

The SS sergeant said that much later he had met up with Bormann’s companion of those fateful ten days; he assured him that the party minister had made it safely through the British lines by following the Autobahn to the outskirts of Flensburg, where he was to make contact with Grand Admiral Doenitz.

Martin Bormann, in the interim, had met Heinrich Mueller, who had slipped out of Berlin earlier and was waiting in a prearranged safe house. Mueller told Bormann it would not be wise to meet with the new Reich president, who by now had carried out the unconditional surrender in both Rheims and Berlin. He predicted a war crimes trial of all German leaders, and said that Bormann would be inviting serious difficulty if he surfaced at this particular time. Martin Bormann secluded himself in a private German sanitarium in Schleswig-Holstein. The Gestapo chief, taking on the security of the new party minister and of his safe transportation to South America by assorted routes, made the exact plans that he would effect at precisely the right time.

Mueller had already initiated a strategy of deception to explain his own disappearance from prominent circles in Berlin. The week he slipped out of the German capital, his grieving family gathered for his “funeral.” A coffin was borne to a cemetery where it was buried with appropriate ceremony. The grave was marked with a headstone bearing the words “Our Dear Daddy,” Mueller’s name, his birthdate, and the date of his alleged death in Berlin in 1945.

Several years following this incident, an editor of a German news magazine, acting on an informer’s tip generated by the master deceptionist Mueller himself, from South America, obtained a court order in 1963, and the grave was opened. When the coffin in question was unearthed and opened, the editor and the attending officials found three skeletons, none remotely matching Heinrich Mueller’s short and thick-set measurements, or his markedly prominent forehead.

A deception plan for Bormann had been completed by Mueller in Berlin. Tops in police work and crafty beyond imagining, he provided for a matching skeleton and skull, complete with identical dental work, for future forensic experts to ponder over and to reach conclusions that suited his purpose. Mueller was a former inspector of detectives in the Munich police department; he had been brought into the higher echelons of the Gestapo by Reinhard Heydrich because of his professionalism and brilliance. He had risen to the rank of SS chief group leader and senior general of the Waffen SS. The solution was elementary; his motivation was protection and enhancement of the highest authority of the state. To this principle, Mueller had been devoted for a decade as chief of police.

His scheme of substituting a stand-in for Martin. Bormann’s body in the freight yards of Berlin was told to me three different times by three different individuals. One was an agent whose career was in the Secret Intelligence Service of the British Foreign Office, one served the Federal Republic of Germany, and one was a member of Mossad, the exterior service of Israeli intelligence. The first tip came over dinner in 1947, in the U.S. press club in Frankfurt. It was the day I returned from Berlin and a personal meeting with General Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the U.S. Zone of Occupation. General Clay had offered me the position of his civilian deputy, but I had turned it down with some reluctance, preferring to remain a European reporter for American newspapers. During the press club dinner, the British agent and I discussed the fascinating and bizarre disappearance of Reichsleiter Bormann; this source said flatly that Mueller had engineered Bormann’s escape, using the device of a concentration camp look-alike to throw future investigators off the scent. Many years later, in 1973, on a visit to Bonn, a conversation with one of General Gehlen’s aides in the Federal Republic intelligence service confirmed the 1947 British tip. The German stated: “The skull represented as Bormann’s is a fraud. Naturally the West German government wishes to bury the past and establish Bormann’s death once and for all. They have been constantly unsettled by continued revelations and scandals.” In 1978, an Israeli Mossad agent with a German specialization said to me that they had never closed the Bormann file in Tel Aviv. “We know he is in South America. We are not very compelled to find him because he was never personally involved in the ‘final solution.’” The Israeli added: “Bormann’s business was business, and from what I know personally he did a thorough job of shifting German assets away from the Third Reich.”

To piece my information together: General Heinrich Mueller initiated his Bormann scheme during the waning months of the war in the time frame when the Reichsleiter was moving to transfer German assets to safe havens in other places. At Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen he examined several inmates in the special elite group known as Sonderkommando, those who had been working in the German counterfeit operation of British pound notes and of other currencies. Documents prepared by them would also be used by SS men in their flight at war’s end (eventually, over 10,000 former German military made it to South America along escape routes ODESSA and Deutsche Hilfsverein). The Sonderkommando, placed in a special context within the camp, were treated as the skilled professionals they were—engravers, documents specialists, and quality printers— who had been rounded up from occupied countries and put to work for the Third Reich.

Peter Edel Hirschweh, who participated in this special work and survived, described it as follows:

All of the inmates, without any exceptions, were Jews or descendants of mixed marriages. We were “bearers of secrets.” Even if those two qualifications had not alone been sufficient to classify us as a death command, we received additional confirmation and proof through the following events: If some of the prisoners felt slightly ill, received an injury on the finger (while engraving) or the like they were taken to the doctor, heavily guarded, to receive treatment there; the physician was not allowed to talk to them at all. Persons who were seriously ill were not allow to go to the infirmary, even if they could be cured there. They were isolated in the washroom and if this did not help, they were liquidated, i.e., killed.

When Heinrich Mueller visited Sachsenhausen he walked through the engraving, printing, and document areas looking for any inmates who might resemble Bormann. In one he noticed two individuals who did bear a resemblance in stature and facial structure to the Reichsleiter. He had them placed in separate confinement. Thereupon a special dental room was made ready for “treatment” of the two men. A party dentist was brought in to work over and over again on the mouth of each man, until his teeth, real and artificial, matched precisely the Reichsleiter’s. In April 1945, upon completion of these alterations, the two victimized men were brought to the Kurfuerstenstrasse building to be held until needed. Dr. Blaschke had advised Mueller to use live inmates to insure a believable aging process for dentures and gums; hence the need for several months of preparation.

Exact dental fidelity was to play a major part in the identification of Hitler’s body by the invading Russians. It was to be of significance in Frankfurt twenty-eight years later, when the West German government staged a press conference to declare that they had “found Bormann’s skeleton proving he had died in Berlin’s freight yards May 1-2, 1945.”

Dr. Hugo Blaschke was the dentist who had served both Hitler and Bormann. He had offices in the fashionable professional area of Uhlanstrasse, but he always went to the chancellery for his two most important clients. Bormann had established a well-equipped dental office there, where Dr. Blaschke and his nurse, Fraulein Kaete Heusemann, would take care of the dental requirements of the Fuehrer and the Reichsleiter. The dental records for both were kept in the chancellery. When the Russians had threatened Berlin, Dr. Blaschke prudently moved his practice to Munich, but Fraulein Heusemann had stayed on. Hitler’s dental charts were never found, because Bormann had removed them from the chancellery files. However, the Russians, who had wanted complete identification of Hitler after the fall of Berlin, brought Fraulein Heusemann to Soviet headquarters. She had identified the dental fittings gathered in a cigar box as belonging to Adolf Hitler. This was confirmed by the dental technician, Fritz Echtmann, who had made the fittings for Hitler on order of Dr. Blaschke.

Once they had made the identifications, both were shipped off to Moscow, remaining there in prison so that they could not communicate with others for several years. They were classified by the Russians as among the chancellery group who had survived the bunker; they would spend years in Russian prisons and slave camps until the Kremlin leaders decided how to handle their public announcement of Hitler’s death—suicide in the bunker, or escape to Spain and South America, as Stalin first believed.

In Bormann’s case, the problem was more complex, more challenging. Yet under Mueller’s skillful guidance, two bodies were planted; their discovery was made possible when an SS man, acting on Mueller’s orders, leaked the information to a Stern magazine editor as part of a ploy to “prove” that Bormann had died in the Berlin freight yard. The stand-ins for Bormann were two unfortunates from Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen, who had been killed gently in the Gestapo basement secret chambers with cyanide spray blown from a cigarette lighter (a killing device used later by the KGB in 1957 and 1959 against Lev Rebet and Stephen Bandera, two leaders of the Ukrainian ÎmigrÎs in Munich). At Gestapo headquarters, the night of April 30, the bodies were taken by a special SS team to the freight yards near the Weidendamm Bridge and buried not too deep beneath rubble in two different areas. The Gestapo squad then made a hurried retreat from Berlin, joining their leader, SS Senior General Heinrich Mueller, in Flensburg.

The funeral and burial caper was to be a Mueller trademark throughout the years of searching for Martin Bormann. The Mossad was to point out that they have been witnesses over the years to the exhumation of six skeletons, two in Berlin and four in South America, purported to be that of Martin Bormann. All turned out to be those of others, although in Frankfurt in 1973 the dental technician, Fritz Echtmann, after years as a Russian prisoner, was to say that the dental work found in the skull of the skeleton declared to be the remains of Bormann resembled those fillings he had worked on in 1944. Simon Wiesenthal, director of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, had been invited to Frankfurt by West German authorities who were presenting the press event, with the CIA in the background. He said that, while the skull resembled Bormann’s, he doubted it was Bormann. Still, Heinrich Mueller had done his job well, and from South America he pointed the Bonn government’s investigators through intermediaries toward this second planted Bormann skeleton. So my sources state; the fabrications of 1945 continue to provide the party minister with his “passport to freedom.”

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Up to 200 Italian police 'ran parallel anti-terror force'

by John Philips
THE INDEPENDENT

Up to 200 police officers and former intelligence operatives are being investigated by Italian magistrates on charges of organising an illegal "parallel" police force to combat terrorism.

The shadowy group appears to have set itself up as a private security firm, offering protection to senior figures, and illicitly using official police resources. Its leaders have been accused of "usurping" public functions and illegal usie of classified data.

Judge Francesco Lalla, Genoa's chief prosecutor, said the self-styled "Department for Anti-terrorist Strategic Studies," (Dssa) maintained an arsenal of weaponry, stored by its accused commanders Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindaco, both with links with the Italian far right. The revelations have heightened many Italians' unease about the strategies of the government of Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, against Islamist terrorism.

Judicial sources said the Dssa recruited from police, paramilitary carabinieri, finance police and the armed services and presented itself to Italian institutions as well as potential recruits as an elite body specialising in fighting Islamic and Marxist terrorism.

Mr Saya, now under house arrest, had applied for €32m (£21.6m) in European Union finance and had allegedly sought contact with the Vatican to try to obtain a contract to protect of Pope Benedict against terrorist attack.

Magistrates focused on the Dssa after it allegedly claimed to have a video of the murder in Iraq of the Italian hostage Fabrizio Quatrocchi and tried to sell the footage. Investigators are trying to determine what official support the organisation may have had.

The Interior Minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, has suspended dozens of police officers who joined the network. But Carlo Taormina, an MP from Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, insists Dssa was a bona fide security company with nothing to hide and "the high commands of the police and intelligence services were aware of its existence".

Il Messaggero quoted an investigator who said it was particularly disturbing that phone intercepts suggested Dssa members had been planning to kidnap Cesare Battisti, a Red Brigades activist living in exile in Paris. "We were seeing the genesis of something similar to the death squads in Argentina," the magistrate is reported to have said.

The group was charged with making unauthorised use of interior ministry data bank information as well as equipping cars with sirens and flashing lights and the official "lollipop" sticks, used by Italian police to stop traffic or wave as they break traffic regulations.

Gilberto Di Benedetto, an associate of Mr Saya who acted as a middleman with the Vatican, said most members had joined the Dssa in good faith, despite its farcical aspect. "There were people who were hoping for power or to become private investigators, but there also were many police officers and sergeants who believed the Dssa would advance their careers," he said.

La Repubblica newspaper quoted Michael Scheuer, a former CIA agent and head of the "Bin Laden unit" at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, until last November, as saying the head of Italy's military intelligence agency Sismi had authorised the CIA to abduct Abu Omar, a militant Islamic cleric who was flown from Milan to Egypt and reportedly tortured.

Mr Berlusconi's government denies knowledge of the affair, which became public after Milan magistrates issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents.

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Italy probes 'parallel police'

BBC NEWS

Italian police have launched a big inquiry into a "parallel" intelligence agency, say Italian news reports.

The Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA) was reportedly created after the 2004 Madrid bombings to combat Islamic extremism.

Genoa-based investigators carrying out a probe into the DSSA have arrested two people and placed more than two dozen others under investigation.

Anti-terror squads have also carried out raids in nine Italian regions.

'Regular employees'

Many of those under investigation are said to be employed by regular law-enforcement bodies. Prosecutors believe that DSSA "employees" were sometimes using official police badges and other equipment to carry out their own investigations.

The alleged parallel force is also accused of illegally using the Interior Ministry database for its own purposes.

The DSSA operated its own website, which was disabled after the arrests were reported on Friday morning.

Reports say the site was available in four languages - Italian, English, French and Spanish - and profiled terror organisations as well as urging the public to come forward with information.

Kidnap inquiry

Italian state radio Rai later reported that the two arrested men may have had links with Gladio, the Italian branch of a secret paramilitary network set up in post-war Europe with the backing of the CIA.

There are also reports of a possible connection with a far-right political group.

The investigation that uncovered the alleged parallel structure is an offspring of a previous inquiry into the death of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, one of four Italians kidnapped in Iraq in April 2004.

Mr Quattrocchi was shot dead by the abductors, while his colleagues were eventually released.

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