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

Philip Willan - January 26, 2011

The decades-long battle between Silvio Berlusconi and Italy’s most famous prosecutor is entering its final round. The prime minister’s career and Italy’s democracy hang in the balance.

Last week, the Italian magazine Panorama published a huge photo of Ilda Boccassini, Milan’s 61 year-old public prosecutor, on its front cover under the title “Il Vizietto,” the Little Vice. The vice in question was not that of the magazine’s owner, Silvio Berlusconi, who is the current and long-time object of Boccassini’s investigatory ardor. The misbehavior that the magazine intended to highlight was the magistrate’s own — namely, her relentless persecution of the Italian prime minister. Indeed, in seeking an indictment of Berlusconi for the better part of the past two decades, Boccassini has herself become a defendant in Italy’s court of public opinion.

Boccassini, who over the course of her career has earned the nickname “Ilda the Red” for both her flame-colored hair and her left-wing sympathies, has polarized a society sharply divided when it comes to the embattled prime minister. An opinion poll published Jan. 23 by the Corriere della Sera newspaper showed that 49 percent of Italians thought Berlusconi should resign because of his latest sex scandal, while 45 percent believed he should not. Boccassini has earned the support of those who dislike Berlusconi: Roberto Saviano, the bestselling author who has a famously contentious relationship with the prime minister, dedicated an honorary law degree he received last week to Boccassini, praising her for fulfilling her “duty of justice.” But for admirers of the premier, the prosecutor has become a symbol of the judiciary’s obsessive, and self-interested, drive to restore its place at the top of the national political hierarchy.

Full story

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Philip Willan knows more about Italian (para)politics than most Italians, and has written two classics on the subject: Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy and The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi.

Andrew Graham-Yooll - 8 November 2010

Emilio Eduardo Massera, former Argentine admiral, was the most complex character of the three commanders who ruled Argentina in the 1970s in the most savage and cruel dictatorship in twentieth century Latin America. He was also the most perverse, a conspirator, blackmailer and murderer of his political captives at clandestine detention centres. He was nobody’s friend, he even sent members of his government to their death.

Marguerite Feitlowitz, a US academic who wrote A Lexicon of Terror (OUP 1998), described Massera as “the grand orator of the dictatorship… master of the majestic rhythm, learned tone, and utterly confounding, but captivating, message.” As a young man he had studied philology, and language was a life-long obsession. In one of his speeches as a member of government on “the infidelity of words to their meanings” in ideological warfare, he announced that, “the only safe words are our words,” which may sound surreal, but appeared to set the tone of his absolute intolerance of opponents.

Massera came from immigrant stock and entered the elite naval academy in 1942 to be catapulted into an upper class of Argentine business and landowners. These had always seen in the navy an ally against Peronism, ever since Juan Perón founded the party in 1945. In 1956, as a young officer, aged 31, a year after the overthrow of Perón, Massera was appointed to a lectureship at the naval college, where he returned to teach in 1971. However, his early anti-Peronism was to suffer some editing.

Full story

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See also:

• Argentina: dead Massera, the Executioner of the fascist P2

Excerpt:

The dozens of affairs which connect him to the Sicilian Mafia are a constant source of irritation for his opponents, but not for Berlusconi himself as he has never been in serious trouble on that score and is widely believed to have pulled his judicial system strings to scare judges off or have them moved to other assignments.

The same is true for his legendary ‘business flair’, which, again, has been largely left unchallenged because of his connections. Conflicts of interest, the introduction of legislation specifically designed to keep the justice system and its allegations and court cases related to alleged financial misdealing and monopolistic practices at bay, his false testimony in the P2 Masonic lodge membership scandal involving prominent business, military, political and secret service personalities, wiretapping – you name it, his name crops up in it.

But the crowning glory of his web of influence – and perhaps the most important – is his almost total control over the country’s most powerful media interests. This stranglehold on the country’s media is so effective that he has been accused by many press freedom organizations of being responsible for the fact that Italy has now been officially classified as a country with limited freedom of expression – the only case of its kind in the West. He is widely believed to control 90% of Italy’s national media and has stifled all legislative efforts to loosen his grip.

See also:

• Italy: ‘From P2 to P3: Thirty Years of Politics and Business’

Red Ice

Philip Willan has been specialising in Italian parapolitics, working out of Rome for more than 20 years. He is the author of “Puppetmasters, The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy” and his latest book is called “The Last Supper, The mafia, the masons and the killing of Roberto Calvi“. Philp joins us to talk about The Mafia, the masons, The Vatican, the P2 Lodge, the Murder of Roberto Calvi, the Relationship Between Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican and much more. Topics Discussed: Pope John Paul I, The Money changes, Robert Calvi, Banco Ambrosiano, Vatican Bank, Flavio Carboni, Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), PII lodge, Silvano Vito, Yugoslavia, Austria, Umberto Ortolani, Missing Brief Case, Vatican Right Wing Relationships with the Dictators, Rat Lines, Nazi’s, Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele and many others, Who took care of Calvi when he came to England? The Mafia Connections, Calvi’s Murder Trial, Witnesses, Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, the 5 suspects, bande Delimaniana, Ernesto Diotallevi, Silvano Vittor, Chelsea Cloisters, Calò, According to the Trial Calvi was Murdered, Blackfriars Bridge, Alberto Jaime Berti. You don’t want to miss hour two as we discuss more on Propaganda Due the P2 lodge, their grand master Licio Gelli, we’ll talk about Freemasons and the possible P2 membership of people within the Vatican. We also discuss the murder of Pope John Paul the 1st after only 33 days in office …what’s the message? We talk about the Swiss Connection, not only to Hans Kuntz but the Pontifical Swiss Guard of Vatican City. Is there any connection to the powerful financial force of Switzerland and the fact that they hold the World Economic Forum in Davos every year? We also discuss the card found on Roberto Calvi from the Law Firm “Slaughter and May”. We round things up talking about Operation Gladio and Opus Dei.

Malta Independent

According to a former insider of the Italian secret service (SISMI), Francesco Pazienza, “Italy could not escape from the Nato obligations and thus had to sign an agreement with Malta to protect it in case of an attack by Colonel Gaddafi. This agreement was signed and Gaddafi avenged himself.”

According to Pazienza, who recently gave an interview to Milena Gabanelli that was published in La Repubblica, this is what led to the terrorist attack at the railway station of Bologna on 2 August 1980 and also to the disappearance of an Alitalia plane over Ustica some time earlier.

Pazienza added that no one in the Italian government wanted to blame Libya for the terrorist attack at that time, as there were heavy Italian interests in Libya such as Fiat and Eni, but just two days after the attack Senator Giovanni Spadolini (later a foreign minister) attributed the Bologna massacre in which 86 people were killed to Middle Eastern origins. He also claims that it was also for this reason that the Italian secret service placed a luggage full of the same explosive as that used at Bologna on a train going from Taranto to Milan in January 1981, which did not explode, so that public opinion would think the terrorist attack came from somewhere else.

He has just finished serving 12 years in prison for his involvement with Licio Gelli and the P2 network of secret services, high finance, the Mafia and the Vatican.

In the same interview he also revealed that the Vatican, at that time under Pope John Paul II, had sent $4 million-worth of gold ingots to the Solidarnosc strikers at Gdansk in April 1981 by means of a Polish priest who hid the ingots in a false bottom of a Lada he drove from Trieste to Gdansk.

ALİ İHSAN AYDIN - 12 November 2008

“Towards the end of the investigation, I received a letter. It said: ‘You have come to the door of power. If you try to enter through that door, we do not know what may happen.’

I pushed that door ajar and saw what was inside,” Felice Casson says. Thus the famous Italian prosecutor first uncovered the illegal armed network, Gladio.

He stresses that a prosecutor or a judge cannot enter and go it alone. Having served as an example for many prosecutors in other European countries with his historic investigation in Italy, Casson asserts that powerful political support is a must for the success of any fight against illegal networks such as Gladio or Ergenekon. “A parliamentary commission equipped with special powers should be set up. Prosecutors can go up to a point. But this commission can go wherever it wishes if the government is determined,” he says.

The prosecutor is now a member of the Italian Senate, but without the support of then-Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, he could not have overcome all the difficulties he faced during the Gladio investigation, including vociferous opposition from the president. In his office in the Senate in Rome, the Italian politician spoke to Today’s Zaman about his experiences and the difficulties in his quest to fight Gladio.

For the prosecutor, networks such as Gladio and Ergenekon are only pawns. There are many other illegal networks apart from Gladio in Italy. There is a “power” above that manages all of them, and nobody knows much about this power. Depending on circumstances that change with time, some organizations may be used and wound up, but the “power at the top” continues to assert itself using different means. The prosecutor was even able to jail some generals at the end of the investigation, but wasn’t able to touch the whole of the network.

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FLORENCE, Italy, Nov 1 (Reuters) - The former head of an outlawed masonic lodge linked to some of Italy’s biggest scandals has sparked an outcry by announcing that he will take part in a television talk show to give his version of events.

Licio Gelli, the 89-year old former grandmaster of the shadowy Propaganda 2 (P2) group, will be the main guest in “Venerabile Italia” (Venerable Italy), a programme on Italy’s history from fascism to the 1980s.

The P2 was founded in 1969 and used to be the country’s most powerful secret organisation with prominent politicians, business leaders and military officers as members.

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