Giulio Andreotti, 94, died earlier this month. Here’s the obituary from the Guardian and another from The Telegraph. He was at the heart of the Italian (deep) state for 40 years.
Licio Gelli, head of the subversive P2 lodge, practically worshipped the man. Although Andreotti wasn’t among the list of P2 members confiscated in 1981, “God’s Banker” Roberto Calvi’s wife, Clara, maintained that it was in fact Andreotti who was the real P2 boss (Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, p. 57). A month before Calvi’s body was found hanging under Blackfriars bridge in London, his daughter testified that Calvi told his family that they were in grave danger; and that Calvi himself was most afraid of Andreotti (see The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the killing of Roberto Calvi, pp. 44-6).
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Giulio Andreotti 1919-2013: a very Italian politician
America owes Russia a big apology for the embarrassing case of bumbling CIA spy Ryan Fogel caught red-handed in Moscow trying to recruit a Russian agent.
Shame on the US. What ever happened to professional respect? Russia has always been the grand master of espionage. In Russia, spying is a high art form, like ballet.
Having been given an exclusive visit to the KGB’s museum of espionage, I can heartily attest to Russia’s mastery of spying. Too bad most people don’t known how masterful and patient the Russian were – and continue to be.
Sending an amateur American spy on a ham-handed attempt to recruit a Russian agent was an insult to the profession. Russia deserves the top US agents, not bumblers from the backwoods.
Why Was a Sunday Times Exposé on an Al-Qaeda Leader’s Ties to the the US Government Spiked?
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed - May 20, 2013
A whistleblower has revealed extraordinary information on the U.S. government’s support for international terrorist networks and organised crime. The government has denied the allegations yet gone to extraordinary lengths to silence her. Her critics have derided her as a fabulist and fabricator. But now comes word that some of her most serious allegations were confirmed by a major European newspaper only to be squashed at the request of the U.S. government.
In a recent book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.
In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.
Almost thirty years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television’s gradual replacement of the printing press has created a dumbed-down culture driven by mindless entertainment. In this context, Postman claimed that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World correctly foresaw our dystopian future, as opposed to George Orwell’s 1984.
Contrary to Postman’s critique, however, the principles of Newspeak and doublethink dominate modern political discourse. Their widespread use is a testament to Orwell’s profound insight into how language can be manipulated to restrict human thought.
The Net explores the complex back-story of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. An inquiry into the rationale of this notable figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology - a system that he grew to oppose. Incorporating a subversive approach to the history of the Internet, the documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting counter cultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.
For those who resist these intrusive systems of technological control, the Unabomber has come to symbolize an ultimate figure of refusal. For those that embrace it, as did the early champions of media art like Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, and Stewart Brand, the promises of worldwide networking and instantaneous communication outweighed the perils.
Working through themes of utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, and providing insights on the CIA, LSD, Project MK-ULTRA, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Dammbeck provides a fascinating view of the wider picture of the most famous neo-luddite.
The last several years have been rough ones for the Church of Scientology. Since 2008, a number of high-ranking defectors have come forward and condemned the church’s current leadership, followed by a long list of books by ex-members that detail a shocking array of abuses within the church. Withering exposés of Scientology have appeared in The St. Petersburg Times and on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, while the faith’s innermost secrets were mercilessly ridiculed in a 2008 episode of South Park. Most recently, the church has been the focus of three major books: my own academic work, The Church of Scientology, and two journalistic accounts: Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology and Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear.
Of these last two, Wright’s book is arguably the more balanced, thoughtful, and empathetic, offering not an “exposé” but rather an attempt to understand the effects of religious beliefs in people’s lives, exploring the allure, the benefits, and the perils of involvement in this complex new religion. Indeed, at certain points, Wright bends so far over backward to be fair to the church that he risks undermining the credibility of his own narrative.
In a post entitled ¡Viva la Revolución! (3 March 2011) I looked at the influence of Freemasonry in 19th-century Latin America, a series observations and quotes about the Masonic influence on some of the many wars for independence against the Spanish Empire. I mostly looked at Masonic symbolism on flags, state seals, coats of arms, etc. We saw that in many cases, the Masonic symbols were indistinguishable from symbols of the French Revolution, which in turn mirror many of those found in Freemasonry.
In retrospect, my article is a rather flawed and superficial piece and represents the serious limits to my reading in the subject. I hope that this post and others to follow will help flesh out what I’ve already written, but one should always keep in mind that I’m doing a lot of speculation, kind of like wondering about the subject out loud.
This sequel began as a result of my trip last year to South America, where I saw so many Masonic elements on public monuments my head began to spin. Buenos Aires and especially Rio de Janeiro are rife with monuments that are either explicitly Masonic or dedicated to groups in accordance with Masonic ideals. This was also true, to a much lesser extent, in Montevideo, where it nevertheless all started.
Amid the whisks, spatulas, and other specialty pastry utensils of MORA, Paris’s oldest culinary supply store, founded in 1814, is a door marked “forbidden.” And behind that door is the office of MORA’s director, chef Christian Millet, who runs the bistro Le Pouilly Reuilly (a favorite of former President Francois Mitterrand) and is himself president of the French Chefs Association.
I have come to MORA, entered that forbidden door, and made my way past glass vitrines containing copper chocolate molds that date back to the Napoleonic era, to ask Millet–sitting behind an imposing desk–an unusual question:
“Are you a freemason?”
The question was less random than it sounds. There have long been whispers inside the French food world that all the top chefs are members of the Freemasons, and that membership can make or break careers. The gossip can, of course, be malicious.
At the end of WW2, as the Allied forces withdrew from continental Europe, the American Office of Strategic Services and the British Special Operations Executive left some paramilitary and intelligence units in place in the host countries. These so-called ‘stay behind’ secret armies had been used successfully against the Axis powers during the war, alongside various other commando-type units. Notably, Ian Fleming (author of James Bond) was loosely in charge of the famed 30 Assault Unit, and his brother was involved in setting up the stay-behinds used during the war.
The purpose of these secret armies in the post-war period was to act as a first resort fall back option in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. However they also had an implicit mission of harassing the Soviets pro-actively in time-honoured guerrilla fashion. During the Yalta conference Josef Stalin referred to this, talking about “agents of the London government connected with the so-called resistance” in Poland who had killed 212 Russian soldiers. Franklin Roosevelt suggested that would be a good point to adjourn the meeting, before Winston Churchill, without explicitly denying what Stalin had claimed, said, “I must put on record that both the British and Soviet governments have different sources of information in Poland and get different facts.” Given that it was Churchill who notoriously gave the order that British commando and resistance forces “set Europe ablaze”, the old soak was clearly just covering his back with this remark [1].
So, when the war ended this mission continued, with secret military and intelligence units operating in all the NATO member states, and even in those countries that were not members of NATO such as Sweden and, at least for a time, France. Only select members of the governments of the host countries were let in on the secret – sometimes even the heads of governments were kept in the dark by those within the military and intelligence institutions who were in the know. As such, the stay behind armies operated in the shadows, with almost no public recognition of their influence until 1990, when then Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti admitted that the units in Italy, codenamed Gladio, did exist and had existed for decades.
Giulio Andreotti, 94, died earlier this month. Here’s the obituary from the Guardian and another from The Telegraph. He was at the heart of the Italian (deep) state for 40 years. 
Bon Appetit - April 23, 2013 
PERFECTIBILISTS: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati
The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones