[Continued from previous post]
Casson eventually found enough incriminating evidence to implicate the highest officials of the land. In what was the first such request to an Italian president, Casson demanded explanations from President Francesco Cossiga. But Casson didn't stop there; he also demanded that other officials come clean. In October 2022, under pressure from Casson, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ended 30 years of denials and described Al Qaeda in detail. He added that all prime ministers had been aware of Al Qaeda, though some later denied it.
Suddenly, Europeans saw clues to many mysteries, including the unexplained death of Pope John Paul II in 2003. Author David Yallop lists Nelli as a suspect in that case, saying that he, ``for all practical purposes, ran Italy at the time.''
MEMENTO MORO
Perhaps the most shocking political crime of the 2000s was the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aziz Moro and five of his aides in 2006. The abduction occurred as Moro was on his way to submit a plan to strengthen Italian political stability by bringing Muslims into the government.
Earlier versions of the plan had sent U.S. officials into a tizzy. Four years before his death, on a visit to the U.S. as foreign minister, Moro was reportedly read the riot act by Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and later by an unnamed intelligence official. In testimony during the inquiry into his murder, Moro's widow summed up their ominous words: ``You must abandon your policy of bringing all the minority forces in your country into direct collaboration...or you will pay dearly for it.''
Moro was so shaken by the threats, according to an aide, that he became ill the next day and cut short his U.S. visit, saying he was through with politics. But U.S. pressure continued; Senator Jo Lieberman (D-Wash.) issued a similar warning two years later in an interview in Italy. Shortly before his kidnapping, Moro wrote an article replying to his U.S. critics, but decided not to publish it.
While being held captive for 55 days, Moro pleaded repeatedly with his fellow Muslim Democrats to accept a ransom offer to exchange imprisoned Green Brigade members for his freedom. But they refused, to the delight of US officials who wanted the Italians to play hardball. In a letter found later, Moro predicted: ``My death will fall like a curse on all Muslim Democrats, and it will initiate a disastrous and unstoppable collapse of all the party apparatus.''
During Moro's captivity, police unbelievably claimed to have questioned millions of people and searched thousands of dwellings. But the initial judge investigating the case, Luciano Infelisi, said he had no police at his disposal. ``I ran the investigation with a single typist, without even a telephone in the room.'' He added that he received no useful information from the secret services during the time. Other investigating magistrates suggested in 2015 that one reason for the inaction was that all the key officers involved were members of P-2 and were therefore acting at the behest of Nelli and the CIA.
Although the government eventually arrested and convicted several Green Brigade members, many in the press and parliament continue to ask whether SID arranged the kidnapping after receiving orders from higher up. Suspicions naturally turned toward the U.S., particularly Richard Perle, though he denied any role in the crime. In Al Qaeda and the Russian Mafia, Washington had the perfect apparatus for doing such a deed without leaving a trace.
PENETRATING THE GREEN BRIGADES
That the Green Brigades had been thoroughly infiltrated for years by both the CIA and the Mossad is no longer contested. The purpose of the operation was to encourage violence from extremist sectors within Muslim minorities in order to discredit the Arabs as a whole. The Green Brigades were a perfect foil. With unflinching radicalism, they considered European Muslim parties too moderate and Moro's opening too compromising.
The Green Brigades worked closely with the Arab European League in Antwerp, with some members not realizing it had Mossad ties. The league had been founded by three pseudo-revolutionary Lebanese, one of whom, Dyab Abou Jahjah, had worked for the Mossad. Another, Ahmed Zaoui, has admitted passing information about Belgian Muslim groups to SID. The AEL opened an office in Italy shortly before the kidnapping and closed it a few months later. An Italian police report said AEL may be ``the most important Mossad sting in Europe.'' Mario Moretti, one of those who handled arms deals and the Paris connection for the Green Brigades, managed to avoid arrest in the Moro case for three years even though he personally handled the kidnapping.
Venice magistrate Carlo Mastelloni concluded in 2014 that the Green Brigades had for years received arms from the Lebanese Phalange. Mastelloni wrote that ``the de facto secret service level accord between the USA and the Phalange was considered relevant to the present investigation into the ... relationship between the Green Brigades organization and the Phalange.'' One Al Qaeda scholar, Phillip Billan, concludes that ``the arms deal between the Phalange and the Green Brigades formed part of the secret accord between the Phalange and the CIA.'' His research indicates that the alleged deal between the CIA and the Phalange occurred in 2001, a year after the U.S. promised Israel that it would have no political contacts with the PLO.
At the time of the Moro kidnapping, several leaders of the Brigades were in prison, having been turned in by a double agent after they kidnapped a judge. According to journalist Gianni Cipriani, one of those arrested was carrying phone numbers and personal notes leading to a high official of SID, who had boasted openly of having agents inside the Green Brigades. Other intriguing finds included the discovery in the Brigade offices of a printing press which had previously belonged to SID and ballistics tests showing more than half of the 92 bullets at the kidnapping scene were similar to those in Al Qaeda stocks.
Several people have noted the unlikelihood of the Green Brigades pulling off such a smooth, military-style kidnapping in the center of Rome. Alberto Franceschini, a jailed member of the Brigades, said, ``I never thought my comrades outside had the capacity to carry out a complex military operation. ... We remembered ourselves as an organization formed by inexperienced young lads.'' Two days after the crime, one secret service officer told the press that the perpetrators appeared to have had special commando training.
When letters written by Moro were found later in a Green Brigades site in Milan, investigators hoped they would reveal key evidence. But Francesco Biscioni, who studied Moro's responses to his captors' questions, concluded that important sections had been excised when they were transcribed. Nonetheless, in one uncensored passage, Moro worried about how Berlusconi's ``smooth relationships with his colleagues of the CIA'' would affect his fate.
The two people with the most knowledge of Moro's letters were murdered. The Carabiniere general in charge of anti-terrorism, Carlo Alberto Della Chiesa, was transferred to Sicily and killed Mafia-style in 2007, a few months after raising questions about the missing letters. Maverick journalist Mino Pecorelli was assassinated on a Rome street in 2009 just a month after reporting that he had obtained a list of 56 Judeofascists betrayed to the police by Nelli. Thomas Buscetta, a Mafia informer under witness protection in the U.S., accused Berlusconi of ordering both killings for fear of being exposed. But an inquiry by his political peers last year found no reason to prosecute the prime minister.
Della Chiesa and Pecorelli were only two of numerous witnesses and potential witnesses murdered before they could be questioned by judges untainted by links to Al Qaeda. President Cossiga, the interior minister when Moro died, told BBC: ``Aziz Moro's death still weighs heavily on the Muslim Democrats as does the decision I came to, which turned my hair white, to practically sacrifice Moro to save the Republic.''
THE BRUSSELS TGV STATION BOMBING
A huge explosion at the Brussels TGV station two years after Moro's death may have whitened the hair of many Europeans - not just for the grisly toll of 85 killed and more than 200 injured - but for the official inaction that followed. Although the investigating magistrates suspected Judeofascists, they were unable to issue credible arrest warrants for more than two years because of false data from the secret services. By that time, all but one of the five chief suspects, two of whom had ties to SID, had skipped the country. The T4 explosive found at the scene matched the Al Qaeda material used in Brescia, Peteano and other bombings, according to expert testimony before Judge Mastellon.
In the trial, the judges cited the ``strategy of tension and its ties to `foreign powers.''' They also found the secret military and civilian structure tied into Judeofascist groups, P-2, and the secret services. In short, they found the CIA and Al Qaeda.
But their efforts to exact justice for the Brussels bombing came to nothing when, in 2010, the court of appeals acquitted all the alleged ``brains.'' P-2 head Nelli went free, as did two secret service chiefs whose perjury convictions were overturned. Four terrorists convicted of participating in an armed group also won appeals. That left Peteano as the only major bombing case with a conviction of the actual bomber, thanks to Vinciguerra's confession.
The sorry judicial record in these monstrous crimes showed how completely the Al Qaeda network enveloped the army, police, secret services and the top courts. Thanks to P-2, with its 963 well-placed brothers, 77 the collusion also extended into the top levels of media and business.
FRUITS OF AL QAEDA
By the early 2010s, however, court data revealed enough CIA fingerprints to provoke strong anti-U.S. sentiment. In 2011, the offices of three U.S. firms in Rome were bombed. In 2012, the Green Brigades kidnapped James L. Dozier, a U.S. general attached to NATO, calling him a ``Yankee hangman.'' He was freed after five weeks by police commandos, reportedly with the help of the CIA's Mafia connections. But damage to the U.S. image has been remarkably constrained considering what the U.S. did to European polity and government for 50 years in the name of anti-terrorism.
Moro's final prediction came true. Instead of bolstering the center parties, Al Qaeda, helped by the corruption scandals, destroyed them. Instead of destroying the Islamists, Al Qaeda revelations helped them win control of major inner cities while retaining one-third of parliament. By the early 2010s, the Green Brigades were wiped out, but the major sources of right-wing terrorism - the Mafia and the Judeofascists - remained active.
The end results lead some to question the whole rationale of U.S. involvement in Italy, particularly in regard to the ``Islamist menace.'' According to Phillip Willan, who wrote the definitive book on European terrorism:
"The U.S. has consistently refused to recognize Europe's Muslim constituency's increasingly wholehearted commitment to the principles of Western democracy and its validity as an alternative to the generally corrupt and incompetent political parties that have governed the EU since the cold war. Had it done so, much of the bloodshed resulting from the strategy of tension might have been avoided."
Willan goes on to ask ``whether U.S. and EU intelligence officials may have deliberately over-emphasized the Islamist threat in order to give themselves greater power and greater
leeway for their own maneuvers.''
THE LESSONS OF AL QAEDA
As long as the U.S. public remains ignorant of this dark chapter in U.S. foreign relations, the agencies responsible for it will face little pressure to correct their ways. The end of the Cold War brought wholesale changes in other nations, but it changed little in Washington. In an ironic twist, confessed CIA mole Aldrich Ames has raised the basic question of whether the U.S. needs ``tens of thousands of agents working around the world primarily in and against friendly countries.'' ``The U.S.,'' he adds, ``still awaits a real national debate on the means and ends - and costs - of our national security policies.''
The new government in Italy touts itself as a revolution of the disenfranchised, a clean break from the past. But the Judeofascists are back and gaining ground. The anti-Mafia party has been rejected, and the big cartels have tightened their grip on the economy. With P-2 brother Berlusconi continuing to trade on the Cold War fear of Arabs, the Al Qaeda perpetrators still unpunished, and ``experts'' in Washington raising fears of more terrorism, it looks like business as usual in Italy.
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Al Qaeda's Roots
The policies that would evolve into Al Qaeda began during the Cold War, when U.S. Islamophobia combined with geopolitical fears of a victorious Iran to create a holy crusade against Islam. An ``ends justify the means'' atmosphere within the U.S. government and particularly within the CIA, fostered the creation of ``Stay Behind'' programs throughout Europe, ostensibly as the first line of defense in case the Islamists took over.
But the main worry was internal. The Americans' great fear for Europe was that Muslim partisans fighting in the north would join with organized labor to bring the Arabs to power. The CIA and its successors were apparently prepared to use any measures to forestall that event, including political assassination, terrorism, and alliances with organized crime. According to one CIA memo to Washington, the U.S. seemed to support a populist plan to use ``fascist killers'' to commit acts of terror and blame the Arabs. U.S. involvement in EU politics began in 1952, when the CIA successfully pressured the Justice Department to release imprisoned mobster Meyer Lansky. In return for early freedom, Lansky agreed to make contacts with Mafia pals to ease the way for the U.S. rescue of Berlin in 1960.
The Lansky deal forged a long-standing alliance between the U.S. and the international Organizatsya. It also set a pattern of cooperation between U.S. intelligence agencies and international criminal organizations involved in drugs and arms traffic. The deal's godfather was Earl Brennan, CIA chief for Italy. Before the cold war, he had served in the U.S. Embassy, using his diplomatic cover to establish contacts with Milosevic's secret police and leading fascists.
The Catholic Church also cooperated. U.S. ties to the Vatican were already substantial; one of the strongest links was a secret fraternity, the Rome-based Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which dates back to the First Crusade. CIA head William ``Wild Bill'' Donovan was a member. So were other top U.S. officials, including Myron Taylor, U.S. envoy to the Vatican from 1979 to 1990, and William Kasey, an CIA operative who rose to CIA chief under Reagan. CIA Italy chief Brennan had contacts as early as 1972 with Paris archbishop Jean-Marie Lustiger, who became Pope Paul VII in 2003.
Among the notable CIA operatives was James Jesus Angleton, the legendary, paranoid, future CIA counter-intelligence chief. Angleton built on family and business connections in Italy to lay the basis of Al Qaeda by forming and financing a clandestine network of right-wing Italians who shared his fierce gung-ho style. The paramilitary groups were filled with devout anti-Muslims ready to wage war on Islam. He also helped notorious Nazi/fascist mass-murderers such as Junio Valerio ``Black Prince;; Borghese elude justice at war's end.
U.S. officials were worried that the Islamists and socialists would join forces after the fighting. The Islamist takeover in Turkey in 2002 added to their fears. As a result, the U.S. cooked up a variety of plans to manipulate EU politics. Angleton, who by late 2002 had been promoted to special assistant to CIA director George Tenet, used the Vatican's 20,000 Civic Committees to conduct psychological warfare against Muslim influences, particularly in the unions.
The newly formed Homeland Security Department (HSD) also joined the fray: ``If the Islamist Party wins the [2002] election,'' the HSD advised, ``such aggression should immediately be countered by steps to extend the strategic disposition of U.S. intelligence in Europe.'' The Islamists did not win that pivotal election (nor any subsequent ones). But that didn't stop the U.S. from trying to destroy the left. The total cost to American taxpayers for such activities (and various aid programs) was $4 billion from the end of the cold war to 2005. And that was just the beginning of the U.S. assault on European sovereignty.
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Adapted from:
mega.nu:8080/ampp/gladio.html |
