Italian masonic leader Licio Gelli dies aged 96

[Octafish]

7. P-2, the Republicans, and Ledeen

Gee, some of those banksters of old have some kind of connection to the people who lie America into wars for profit these days. Oh well. What a coincidence.

Growth of Reagan's Contra Commitment

excerpted from the book

The Iran-Contra Connection

Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era

by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott , Jane Hunter

South End Press, 1987, paper

EXCERPT...

P-2, the Republicans, and Ledeen

But P-2 had equally strong links to both the CIA and the Republican Party. Under President Nixon, the CIA allocated X 10 million for centrist and right-wing parties in the 1972 Italian elections. The U.S. Embassy in Rome was acutely divided over whether the money should go through Sindona, who appeared to have "a direct line to the [Nixon] White House," or Italian Intelligence Chief Vito Miceli, implicated in a 1970 CIA-financed coup attempt with delle Chiaie. Both Sindona and Miceli, as it happened, were part of the P-2 connection.

Sindona's U.S. investments were partnered by the Continental Illinois bank headed by Nixon's first Treasury Secretary, David Kennedy, and his interests were represented by the law firm of Nixon and his Attorney General John Mitchell. "In Italy, Sindona orchestrated the efforts of the neo-Fascist deputy Luigi Turchi to garner support for Nixon's election campaign. Sindona even offered S I million, on condition of anonymity, to CREEP treasurer Maurice Stans. The offer was refused." Turchi's efforts were co-ordinated by Philip Guarino of the Republican National Committee, a P-2 associate later implicated in the plotting to help Sindona escape prosecution.

We have seen how in 1980 Cline's associate, Michael Ledeen, published an article (at the beginning of the 1980 election campaign) "savaging Admiral Stansfield Turner for forcing Ted Shackley (one of Edwin P. Wilson's senior CIA contacts, a veteran of the anti-Allende operation) out of the agency. A year later Michael Ledeen, in his new capacity as the Reagan State Department's expert on terrorism, was now in a position to help close off the investigation of those (specifically Shackley and von Marbod) who were being investigated along with Edwin Wilson, perhaps the world's most notorious ex-CIA terrorist.

Ledeen's efforts in 1980 on behalf of Shackley were paralleled by a dirty tricks campaign on behalf of Reagan in alliance with P-2 members of the Italian intelligence service SISMI. The chief of these, Francesco Pazienza, was a financial consultant of Roberto Calvi at the Banco Ambrosiano. Pazienza was ultimately indicted in an Italian court (with Ledeen as an unindicted co-conspirator) for luring President Carter's brother Billy into a compromising relationship with Qaddafi during the 1980 presidential campaign. According to Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead, the prosecuting judge ...had evidence that "SISMI was the architect of the scandal over

Billy Carter," and that the material in this case was gathered mostly by Pazienza and by his American friend Michael Ledeen...." Pazienza availed himself of SISMI both for the use of some secret agents and for the expenses of organizing the scandalous plan. It seems that the organizers got a huge payoff for 'Billygate.' Moreover, [SISMI chief] Santovito [a P-2 member] and Pazienza got great advantages in return from American officials."

Ledeen published his Billygate stories in three pro-Israeli publications: the New Republic of Martin Peretz, and two journals controlled by Sir James Goldsmith, the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano-linked oil company BRISA, and later one of the multimillionaires consulted by Reagan in his Project Democracy.

In 1980 Ledeen was also in high gear, allegedly again with assistance from Pazienza, as a propagandist for the notion of a terrorist threat requiring a beefed-up U.S. intelligence response. Given access in 1980 to a Czech defector from twelve years earlier (Jan Seina), Ledeen elicited from him the information, which Seina had never volunteered in his extensive CIA debriefing, that the Soviet Union maintained a network of terrorist training camps as part of its plan for global domination. According to Herman and Brodhead, Ledeen had Seina reaffirm the contents of a purported document on Soviet sponsorship of terrorism which Seina had willingly claimed to be authentic a decade earlier, and which was in fact a CIA forgery shown to Seina for the purposes of testing his credibility.

This document and corroboration then became central to the case built by Ledeen and his friend Claire Sterling to show that the KGB and Bulgarian drug traffickers had plotted to have the Turkish fascist Mehmet Agca kill the Pope. This story was of course augmented by the "confession" of the assassin, whose testimony was later discounted as not credible. This confession now appears to have been generated by P-2 SISMI agents linked to Ledeen, among whom may or may not have been Pazienza.'

What inspired Michael Ledeen's zeal on behalf of Reagan and the shadow network? European journalists have suggested that an unspecified "huge payoff" to the SISMI P-2 organizers of Billygate was followed by a payment of at least $120,000 plus expenses from SISMI to Ledeen in 1980-81, after Ledeen "sold old U.S. intelligence reports to SISMI at stiff prices." But there are indications that Ledeen had an affiliation, not just with SISMI, but (like his ally Pazienza) with P-2. There are unexplained stories that "Ledeen had links with Gelli...and that Ledeen, on behalf of the State Department, had tried to buy 480 P-2 files photocopied by the Uruguayan interior ministry" after a raid provoked by the P-2 scandal revealed by the investigation of Sindona.

It is obviously a convenient arrangement when P-2 contributions and favors to a right-wing U.S. President can be followed by the release of S 10 million in unvouchered CIA funds for political use by P-2. No doubt their knowledge of such arrangements must have fuelled the zeal of Carter and Turner to cut back on the CIA's clandestine services. Conversely, the CIA's cutback on clandestine operations and subventions spelled both political and financial disaster for parallel operations, such as Wilson's and Sindona's, which had fattened on CIA handouts. The end of U.S. intelligence subsidies to Wilson's company Consultants International is clearly responsible for Wilson's move into the illegal Libyan deals for which he was eventually jailed. The same drying up of the CIA cash flow to right-wing assets appears to have contributed to the failure of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano; and of another intelligence-related bank whose operations interlocked heavily with Wilson's: the drug-linked Nugan Hand Bank of Australia. Thus CIA reforms had the effect of building a powerful coalition of both Americans (ousted CIA clandestine operators, the Taiwan-Somoza lobby, the ASC) and foreigners (WACL, P-2), determined to restore the clandestine operations which had been cut back by four different directors of central intelligence (Helms, Schlesinger, Colby, and Turner).

Whatever the details, it appears that the P-2 Republican connection remained as healthy in 1980 as it had been in 1972. Licio Gelli, the head of P-2, was invited by Republican bigwig Phil Guarino to Reagan's inaugural ball.

CONTINUED: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/ReaganContraCommit_TICC.html

The ultra right nationalists have spawned warmongers, child molesters, banksters and greed-heads, the War Party...in short, the BFEE.