John Bevilaqua Posted December 2, 2009 Share Posted December 2, 2009 (edited) Sir Barry Domville was indicted as a British Nazi spy yet found kindred spirits at SKOM with Lord Malcom Douglas-Hamilton who entertained Rudolph Hess after he parachuted into Great Britain and was later part of The Cliveden Set whom Alger Hiss blamed for his persecution and prosecution. All Draper cronies. Every one of them. Willoughby, Fellers, Corso, del Valle, Malcolm Douglas-Hamilton, Barry Domville, etc. Condon's informant may have come from SKOM, too. Both FDR's coup attempt and JFK's coup originated from members of SMOM and SKOM... How many of Condon's Dirty Dozen are in this article below all of whom conspired to kill JFK? 1) Maj Gen Charles Willoughby who almost led MacArthur into launching World War III against the Chi Comms during Korea and allowed the Japanese surprise attack to hit BOTH Pearl Harbor and the Phillipines (The 2nd Pearl Harbor) without launching a single plane 2) Brig Gen Bonner Fellers who sent info about Montgomery's tank movements in Northern Africa to a young James Angleton in Rome who promptly sent them along to General Rommel directly. Desert Fox my a** he had inside info from Fellers. 3) James Angleton himself and/or his Mussolini supporting father who ran the NCR franchise in Italy 4) William F. Buckley who was a member of SMOM, started YAF and wrote God and Man at Yale for William F. Regnery Press 5) Charles Edison who funded William F. Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom with his $100 Million legacy from Thomas Alva Edison his father Philip J. Corso has not yet been found in The Manchurian Candiate, but he was attache to Giovanni Battista Montini and went to work for ManCand'er Sen. J. Strom Thurmond. Robert J. Morris worked for Patrick J. Frawley at Schick Safety Razor and at Technicolor. Morris, William F. Buckley and James Bozzelle was it Buckley's brother in law donated serious funding to an Orange County Jesuit Seminary and another Buckley brother in law, Gerald Davies, was it, was related to H. Smith Richardson through marriage who personally funded the Bridgewater State Mental Hospital involuntary experiments on patients for the MK/ULTRA program as part of the CIA Manchurian Candidate training. Frawley of course funded INCA whose PsyOps mastermind, Edward Scannell Butler later interviewed Oswald on the New Orleans Radio program where Oswlad "admitted" he was a Marxist under coercion. PsyOps Warfare specialist and INCA director Alton Ochsner, Jr. was later head of The Council for National Policy which was also headed up by Presidents like Nelson Bunker Hunt, Thomas F. Ellis, Rev. Tim LaHaye, Malcolm "Reverend Pat" Robertson whose father Willis Robertson the "other" Senator from Louisiana put G.L.K. Smith up to murdering Senator Huey Long, Edwin Meese III, and several other stalwarts from the radical right. These guys stop at nothing to get their way. GLK Smith, Draper and Vonsiatsky were chosen to head up the "Snuff Team" for JFK because they ALL had experience with the FDR plot as well as several other "Snuff Teams". - Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.: also a Knight of the Order of St. Sylvester of which William [ head of WWII OSS .... JP ] "Wild Bill" Donovan was a member. He is a longstanding funder of right-wing causes including Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. His wife is a Dame of SMOM and is Publisher of the National Catholic Register of California, whose editor, Francis X. Maier was formerly with National Review. Maier was the first Chairman of the Catholic Center for Renewal, whose President, Philip F. Lawler, is the Director of Studies of the Heritage Foundation (which was chaired by Knight of SMOM Frank Shakespeare, newly appointed Ambassador to Portugal). How many of these guys went after FDR in the 1930's according to Major General Smedley Butler, mostly Irish Catholics? When the American Association of SMOM was created in 1927 the founding members included Patrick Cardinal Hayes, Edward L. Hearn, Nicholas F. Brady, Howard F. Carry, Patrick E. Crowley, James A. Farrell, James A. Fayne, Edward N. Hurley, James J. Phelan, Morgan J. O'Brien, John J. Raskob, and John D. Ryan. Nicholas F. Brady from The Brady Bunch his son or grandson was later Treasury Secretary then Secretary of War... John D. Ryan related to Cornelius J. Ryan later of YAF whose son roomed with Doug Caddy at Georgetown James A. Farrell ocupation unknown John J. Raskob, see The Plot to Seize the White House where all of these guys were indicted and exposed How many of these guys were involved with Gen. John Patton's Punitive Campaign against Pancho Villa? 1) Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby 2) William F. Buckley's father 3) George Otis Draper uncle to Wickliffe Draper 4) Col. Robert F. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune Henry and Claire Booth Luce from Life Magazine were in SMOM as well. Some obviously objected to the concept of "Killing Commies for Christ" but the fact is that is exactly what these guys believed in and what they were doing... And the article on "Killing Commies for Christ the King" seems to have disappeared from this site because Kathy Beckett disapproved. How the heck would she know anything about this? Anything at all? Can anyone else find it? I can't. She should stick to other topics with which she may be vaguely more familiar for the betterment and enhancement of this site. Now we have our own little group of "content censors" like the book-burning committees of the John Birch Society, too? Great! Fahrenheit 451? Deja vu all over again? What a country! Will articles here now be redacted, rejected, restricted or rewritten too just because some moderator doesn't like the contents? First Don, the nosy boy, and clueless one Jeffries then Kathy Beckett of all people. Do you guys even know the significance of Fahrenheit 451? That is the temperature at which the paper in books ignites. Go rent the movie. Don Jeffries should stick to writing really lousy Science Fiction for kids. Why don't you censor that anarchist crap about "Nanothermite in the World Trade Center" wreckage instead? Or that "ditto head" crap about indicting an entire Foundation for the crimes of its funding recipients committed 5 years later? What despicably lousy journalism! What utter horse manure! "The Catholic Right and the Knights of Malta, in particular Baron Franz von Papen (see sidebar), played a critical role in Hitler's assumption of power and the launching of the Third Reich's Twentieth Century Crusade." From ......... COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN Issue title: SPECIAL: NAZIS, THE VATICAN, AND CIA WINTER 1986 Number 25 Pages 27-38 [1 of 4 ....... 27-29] KNIGHTS OF DARKNESS THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA INTRODUCTION The Sovereign Military and Hospitaler Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, known also as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, or SMOM, is juridically, politically, and historically unique in the world today. Representing initially the most powerful and reactionary segments of the European aristocracy, for nearly a thousand years beginning with the early crusades of the Twelfth Century, it has organized, funded, and led military operations against states and ideas deemed threatening to its power. It is probably safe to say that the several thousand Knights of SMOM, principally in Europe, North, Central, and South America, comprise the largest most consistently powerful and reactionary membership of any organization in the world today. Although an exclusively [Roman] Catholic organization, in this century it has collaborated with, and given high awards to non-Catholic extremists in its current crusade against progressive forces in the West, the national liberation movements, and the socialist countries. To be a Knight, one must not only be from wealthy, aristocratic lineage, one must also have a psychological worldview which is attracted to the "crusader mentality'' of these "warrior monks." Participating in SMOM Ñ including its initiation ceremonies and feudal ritual dress Ñ members embrace a certain caste/class mentality; they are sociologically and psychologically predisposed to function as the ''shock troops" of Catholic reaction. And this is precisely the historical role the Knights have played in the wars against Islam, against the Protestant "heresy,'' and against the Soviet ''Evil Empire." The Catholic Right and the Knights of Malta, in particular Baron Franz von Papen (see sidebar), played a critical role in Hitler's assumption of power and the launching of the Third Reich's Twentieth Century Crusade. SMOM's influence in Germany survived World War II intact. On November 17, 1948 SMOM awarded one of its highest honors, the Grand Cross of Merit, to Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi chief of intelligence on the Soviet front. He was subsequently installed by the Americans as the first chief of West Germany's equivalent of the CIA, the Bundesnachtrichtdienst (BND: federal secret service), under West German Chancellor Adenauer, a devout Catholic who had received the Magistral Grand Cross personally from SMOM Grand Master Prince Chigi. After the appointment of Knight of Malta William Casey as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and another Knight, James Buckley, as head ot U.S. propaganda against Eastern Europe at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, several historians noted with interest President Reagan's call during the summer of 1982 for a "crusade" against the "Evil Empire" in Eastern Europe. [ including Balkans ...... JP ] In addition to Casey, and James Buckley, its current members, or Knights, after the feudal fashion, include Lee Iacocca, John McCone, William Buckley, Alexander Haig, Alexandre de Marenches (the chief of French Intelligence under Giscard d'Estaing, himself a Knight of SMOM), Otto von Hapsburg, and various leaders of the fascist P-2 Masonic lodge in Italy. While its organizational funding is relatively modest, its leverage is maximized by the presence of its Knights in key positions in other private and governmental structures throughout the world. FRANZ von PAPEN A leading figure in Hitler's coming to power was SMOM Franz von Papen, known as "the devil in a top hat." A devout Catholic aristocrat from an old family of Westphalian nobility, a former military attache and spy against the United States in 1915, von Papen became Chancellor in May 1932, with the support of the Nazis. In June he ordered the dissolution of the Reichstag, calling for new elections in July, in which the Nazis emerged as the largest party in the new Reichstag. After a meeting with Hitler, von Papen persuaded President von Hindenberg to offer Hitler the Chancellorship, which he assumed on January 30, 1933. Von Papen became his Vice-Chancellor. In April 1933 von Papen was elevated to Knight Magistral Grand Cross of SMOM. After the murder of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss in Vienna in July 1934, von Papen became Hitler's Ambassador to Austria, and, in March 1938 stood by the Fuhrer's side at his triumphal entry into Vienna. From 1939 until August 1944 he was the Nazi Ambassador to Turkey, and at the Nuremberg trials he was charged with conspiracy to wage aggressive war. He was one of several Nazi leaders acquitted, and subsequently received a generous pension from the first postwar Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Page 28 The President of the American Eastern Association of SMOM is J. Peter Grace, President of W.R. Grace Company, who was a key figure in Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists to the U.S. 1 SMOM's Sovereign Diplomacy As its name suggests, SMOM is both a ''sovereign'' and, historically, a "military" organization. Its headquarters, occupying a square block in Rome at 68 Via Condotti, enjoys the extra-territorial legal status granted to an embassy of a sovereign state. The Italian police are not welcome on its territory, it issues its own stamps, and has formal diplomatic relations and exchanges ambassadors with a number of countries. On November 13, 1951 Italian President Alcide de Gasperi recognized the diplomatic sovereignty of SMOM, although he held off formal exchange of diplomatic envoys.2 On January 11, 1983 the New York Daily News announced that, "The Vatican and the order of the Knights of Malta, believed to be the smallest sovereign state in the world, have agreed to establish full diplomatic relations, a joint statement said today. " President Reagan's Ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, is, coincidentally, a Knight of Malta.3 On September 5, 1984 French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson signed a formal protocol with SMOM for various cooperative projects includlng "aid to victims of conflicts."4 (See below on Americares.) Historical Antecedents Already in existence at the time of the first Crusade in 1099, in 1113 the Order of St. John was given its independence by Pope Pascal II, permitted to elect its own Grand Master, and soon the Order began military participation in the Crusades along with with the Knights Templar and Teutonic Knights. The Order of St. John recruited successfully among the Eurupean aristocracy and soon controlled extensive estates throughout the continent, assimilating those previously belonging to the Knights Templar which it had helped crush during the first two decades of the 14th Century, with the Templar leadership burned alive as heretics. J. Peter Grace and Project Paperclip On January 16, 1980 ABC-TV broadcast a special "News Closeup," "Escape from Justice: Nazi War Criminals in America" which discussed Grace's Role in Project Paperclip. The transcript of the program, available from ABC on request, states, "Project Paperclip ....... from the end of WW II to the mid-1950's brought more than 900 German scientists to the United States. ..... Otto Ambros ..... was a chemist and a Director of the notorious I.G. Farben Company which supplied gasoline and rubber for Hitler's war effort. Ambros ...... played a supervisory role in the construction of Farben's plant in the Polish village of Auschwitz. For I.G. Farben, Auschwitz concentration inmates provided a plentiful source of cheap labor. ..... The Nuremberg prosecution charged that each day at Farhen's plant one hundred people died from sheer exhaustion. ...... Otto Ambros was convicted of slavery and mass murder and sentenced to eight years in prison. But even while on trial at Nuremberg, Ambros was a target for U.S. recruiters from 'Project Paperclip.' His prison sentence was commuted after only three years by American officials and he was helped in a bid to enter the United States by ...... J. Peter Grace, President of W. R. Grace, a major American chemical company. ..... An internal State Department document describes how J. Peter Grace helped Otto Ambros in his efforts to enter the U.S. In a memorandum to the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Grace acknowledges that Ambros was a war criminal. But he adds that in the years he's known Ambros, ...... 'we have developed a very deep admiration, not only for his ability, but more important, for his character in terms of truthfulness and integrity.' Today Otto Ambros does consulting work tor W. R. Grace and Company and lives here in Mannheim, Germany. In a recent telephone interview Ambros [said] 'I'm happy to still be working as a chemist ...... but it's funny. Now I'm helping the Americans.' " In June 1981, largely in response to the efforts of well known war crimes researcher Charles Allen, Yeshiva University cancelled a $150-a-plate dinner it had organized to honor Grace. (See also, Joe Conason and Martin A. Rosenblatt, "The Corporate State of Grace," 'Village Voice', April 12, 1983.) When the scandal broke in West Germany over the Flick company paying huge sums of money to various politicians and parties, it was learned that additionally Flick had taken improper tax waivers and used the money to pump millions of dollars into W. R. Grace Co., becoming a major shareholder. Friedrich Karl Flick himself sits on the Grace Board. As the Moscow New Times reminded its readers (No. 8, 1983, citing Der Spiegel), Friedrich Karl's father, Flick Sr., had poured money into the coffers of the Nazi party in January 1933, and, ''after Goering had promised the Ruhr magnates that "the March 5 elections will be the last elections in this decade and perhaps in this century,'' he contributed another 200,000 marks; this sum was handed to SS Reichfuhrer Himmler. Flick Sr. was subsequently sentenced at Nuremberg to seven years for using slave labor, spoliation and being an accessory to the crimes of the SS. To ensure a good beginning for his son, the war criminal sent him after the war for early training with W. R. Grace. Page 29 In 1187 the Order was driven militarily from Jerusalem by Saladin. The Knights were forced to flee successively to Acre, Cyprus (1291), and finally Rhodes (1310) where they subdued the local population and establishcd a military dictatorship enjoying territorial sovereignty for the first time. In 1522 they were defeated by Sultan Suleiman's forces of 200,000 troops and 250 ships after a six-month siege. By 1530 under Grand Master Villiers de l'lsle-Adam, the Knights established their headquarters on the island of Malta which had been given to them by Charles V. Martin Luther was born in 1483, the same year that Torquemada unleashed the fury of the Inquisition, and while the Knights waged war against foreign heresies, they were soon confronted by the liberalizing Reformation challenge to Catholic Orthodoxy. In England Henry Vlll's assertion of an independent national policy was complicated by his marriage to Katherine who was the aunt of Emperor Charles V, patron of the Knights of Malta who in England were a militant bastion of Papal loyalty. By 1534 Pope Clement VII had excommunicated the King and two years later Pope Paul III published a Bull deposing the King and charging the Emperor with its execution. According to King and Luke's authoritative history 5 of the Order in England The staunchest supporters of Papal supremacy were naturally to be found among the religious Orders, and ....... the Knights were the loyal servants of the Pope, whose claims to universal dominion [the King] had repudiated, ....... it was thus a sheer impossibility for the King to permit the existence in England of an Order so powerful and so highly organized unless it was prepared to renounce its loyalty to his most determined enemy. Inevitably the Knights would become a center of disaffection and a rallying point for all the forces of reaction. ...... In July 1539, after two of the Knights had already chosen the martyr's crown, the King wrote letters to the Grand Master which practically constituted an ultimatum, demanding that the Papal supremacy should cease to be recognized by the Order in England. ..... But it was impossible to accept the King's conditions. In April 1540 ..... Parliament passed an Act dissolving the Order in England and conferring its estates upon the Crown. ...... 6 Meanwhile on the continent and in the Mediterranean the wars against the infidels of the East continued. Since the military defense of Christendom required naval support, the Order created a powerful fleet and patrolled the seas of the Eastern Mediterranean fighting many naval actions. Military operations ranged as far as Egypt and Syria, and by 1565 under Grand Master Valette, they resisted the Turkish siege of Malta. In 1571 SMOM's fleet participated in the defeat of the Turks at the naval battle of Lepanto, and remained a major military presence in the Mediterranean until 1789 when Napoleon defeated the Knights and occupied the island. The Order finally sought temporary protection under the Russian Emperor Paul I in 1797; in 1834 Pope Leo XIII established its headquarters in Rome. - END QUOTE - [ continue to 2 of 4 ] COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN P.O.BOX 50272 WASHINGTON, DC 20004 http://mediafilter.org/MFF/ "All studies [of the post-WWII Nazi networks] have shown the determining role played by the [Roman] Catholic Church in the flight of war criminals." From ......... COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN Issue title: SPECIAL: NAZIS, THE VATICAN, AND CIA WINTER 1986 Number 25 Pages 27-38 [2 of 4 ....... 30-33 ] KNIGHTS OF DARKNESS THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA Page 30 The American Association of SMOM In Europe SMOM's membership had been traditionally limited to those who could prove a requisite purity of noble blood for several generations. Nevertheless, as a concession to the rising political, economic, and military power of the United States, in 1927 SMOM agreed to incorporate an American National Association whose members were not obliged to prove their genealogical pedigree. When the American Association of SMOM was created in 1927 the founding members included Patrick Cardinal Hayes, Edward L. Hearn, Nicholas F. Brady, Howard F. Carry, Patrick E. Crowley, James A. Farrell, James A. Fayne, Edward N. Hurley, James J. Phelan, Morgan J. O'Brien, John J. Raskob, and John D. Ryan. By 1941 Francis Cardinal Spellman was listed as the "Grand Protector" and "Spiritual Advisor" of the Order, with John J. Raskob as Treasurer. Members included John Farrell, then President of U.S.Steel, Joseph P. Grace, and John D. Ryan. In 1934 Raskob, inspired by the French fascist Croix de Feu, and working closely with Morgan Bank's John Davis, had been a principal financier in the plot to organize a fascist coup in the U.S. The plan failed when General Smedley Butler, who had been set up to lead the project, denounced it. The 1941 list also included Joseph J. Larkin. According to Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy (see review in this issue), Joseph J. Larkin . . . [vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank in charge of European affairs] kept the Chase Bank open ....... in Nazi-occupied Paris throughout World War II. .... [He] had received the Order of the Grand Cross of the Knights of Malta from Pope Pius XI in 1928. He was an ardent supporter of General Franco and, by extension, Hitler. Morgenthau first suspected him as a fascist sympathizer in Octoher 1936. ..... With the encouragement of Schacht, Larkin took on the Franco account and the Reichsbank account, though the Reichsbank was under the personal control of Hitler. ..... 7 The Role of Felix A. Morlion In the latter part of April 1948 the Romanian Timpul published an article, "The Vatican Espionage Service," cited in the Soviet journal New Times, No.31, 1948, at pp. 5, 6. As reported, the article indicated that, "In 1946 the Pope entrusted the Dominican friar [Felix A.] Morlion, a Belgian, with the reorganization of the Vatican intelligence service and its merger with the jesuit espionage network. The central intelligence department of the Vatican is headed by Janssens, a general of the Jesuit Order. His deputy is Montini, the acting Vatican Secretary of State, and his assistants are Schmider, the administrative director of the central jesuit espionage bureau, and Morlion, director of Centro d'informazione pro Deo. The central intelligence department is subdivided into branches and sections dealing with the various countries. One of the main branches is the so-called 'special division' which operates under the signboard of the Centro d'informazione pro Deo press agency. Similar divisions have been set up in the Centro d'informazione pro Deo units in all parts of the world. In New York the 'special division' is directed by Cardinal Spellman, in Innsbruck (Austria) by Regent, the rector of a jesuit college, in Coblenz (Germany) by the Catholic priest Poelaert who is also director of the Catholic press agency. The branch in charge of espionage in Eastern and Southeastern Europe is supervised by Schmider and Preseren, the jesuits' chief expert on the Slav countries and adviser to the Vatican Secretary of State." In August 1966, Morlion approached H. L. Hunt for funding Vatican anti-Communist operations in Latin America. Hunt gave an interview to the British Guardian Weekly, February 27, 1969: " 'I was approached by Paolo Cardinal Marella, who said he spoke for the Pope and asked if I would supply members of my [20,000 member] Youth Freedom Speakers' movement who spoke Spanish to be sent south [to Latin America] to engage in speechmaking and activities. I was told the Pope was thinking in terms of 11 million dollars a year support for the entire movement against communism in Spanish-speaking countries.' ......... The project was now centered in New York, at the Asian Speakers Bureau, with the Free Pacific Association, Inc., on Riverside Drive [another front for the Rev. Moon's Unification Church]. A key figure in this papal concern over Leftist threats to the Vatican's greatest stronghold was thc Rev. Felix A. Morlion, who was present at the original discussions. " Subsequently, Morlion emerged as a key figure in the "Bulgarian Connection" hoax when the fascist Grey Wolf Agca attempted to assassinate the Pope: It appears that Morlion lived in Rome directly below the apartment of the Bulgarian Antonov, and was a possible source of Agca's description of Antonov's apartment. (See, Il Mondo, April 8, 1985; L'Espresso, May 19, 1985.) The American-Italian Conneclion From 1932 until 1938 Myron Charles Taylor was the Chairman of U. S. Steel. In 1939 he became the U.S. envoy to Pope Pius XII, a post he would maintain until 1950. Meanwhile, according to Anthony Cave Brown, OSS chief William Donovan secretly had established an intelligence connection with the Vatican as early as 1941, when he evacuated from Lisbon to New York the Dominican Father Felix A. Morlion, who had founded "a European Catholic anti-Comintern'' called Pro Deo. (See sidebar.) Throughout the war Donovan financcd Morlion's Pro Deo service and in June 1944 he "went to considerable expense, time, and trouble to transport Morlion from New York and establish him at the Holy See.''8 Subsequently Morlion became a key figure in Vatican intelligence, working closely with Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI. According to Frederic Laurent, "All studies [of the post-WWII Nazi networks] have shown the determining role played by the Catholic Church in the flight of war criminals. Since April 1943, following negotiations between Pius XII and the ultra-reactionary American archbishop Francis Spellman, the Holy See became the clandestine center of Anglo-American espionage in Italy. This collaboration in fact had begun the previous year ...... between Earl Brennan, a veteran of the American State Department and Gian Battista Montini, at the time a bishop and Under-Secretary of State at the Vatican. This close collaboration between the future Paul VI and the Ameriean secret services continued after the war through the intermediary James Angleton. ..... 9" With the American Grand Protector of SMOM already in contact with the Vatican, and Allen Dulles busy negotiating with Nazis in Switzerland, the Amerieans entered Rome June 4, 1944. On July 7 General Mark Clark was made a Knight Grand Cross of SMOM. According to British journalist Stuart Christie, 25 April 1945 [three days before the German forces capitulate in Italy] Admiral Ellery Stone, U.S. Proconsul in occupied Italy, instructs James Angleton to rescue Prince Valerio Borghese from the possibility of arrest by the Resistance Committees which had sentenced him to death for war crimes .......... Stone is a close friend of the Borghese family.10 Borghese was to be heard from again on the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (See below.) - Truman's Vatiean envoy Myron C. Taylor received SMOM's Gran Croci Al Merito Con Placca May 23, 1945. - On June 12, 1945 Admiral Ellery W. Stone was awarded the Croci Al Merito Di Prima Classe Con Corona from the SMOM. - On December 27, 1946 James Angleton received the Croci Al Merito Seconda Classe from the Order, the same day as George Raymond Rocca. Rocca went on to become Angleton's deputy chief of Counterintelligenee Division of the CIA and was the liaison between the Warren Commission and the CIA following the Kennedy Assassination. (See sidebar.) [Also, about this same time, head of OSS "Wild Bill" Donovan was decorated by the papacy ....... JP ] According to declassified documents from the American Department of State, in February 1948, in anticipation of the upcoming elections scheduled for April 18, the Vatican created organizations called 'Civic Committees' under the leadership of Luigi Gedda, a 45-year-old doctor from Turin who was also the leader of the rightist 'Catholic Action'. By March 17, 1948 Gedda became a Knight of the Grand Priory of Lombardy and Venice. The liaison to Gedda was through an Ecclesiastical Assistant, Mgr. Fiorenzo Angelini, a member of the National Executive of the Civic Committees, who had become a ranking member of the Rome Priory of SMOM also on March 17, 1948.11 At that time the Grand Priory was headed by Ferdinando Thun Hohenstein, Director of Ceremonies of SMOM, a member of the all powerful five-member Sovereign Council of the Order, and nephew of a former SMOM Grand Master. Page 32 On March 22, 1948 the New York Times reported that Gedda had appealed to American Catholics to provide financial assistance to Italian Catholics in their fight against communism. On April 5, it was reported that "Myron C. Taylor arrived from Madrid for what Catholic circles described as an 'important mission' closely related to the Italian general elections." By April 13 the paper reported that Taylor would meet with Pius once a week, and that based on the information recently received, the Pope was "considerably more optimistic'' about the outcome of the elections. Page 33 Two days later with the Italian military staging massive parades and as fascist gangs attacked leftists in the streets, C. L. Sulzberger reported from Rome that Catholic Action "is armed, active, and tough." The State Department documents cite Angleton as "feel[ing] quite strongly that Gedda can be effectively used to further our interests in Italy in the political, labor and social fields," and that the Civic Committees were to receive CIA funds. The Pope had allegedly met with Gedda three times during the month after the elections. One of those reported to have loeen involved in interference in the April 18 election was Baron Luigi Parrilli. Parrilli, son of an Italian admiral, and who had reportedly worked for the American firm Kelvinator before the war, was a fascist and had extensive industrial interests in Italy. He was made a Knight of Malta on December 7, 1942 and by early 1945 had excellent contacts with the top Schutzstaffel (SS: elite guard) and Sicherheitsdienst (SD: secret service) German officers in Northem Italy. By April 1945 he became a representative of SS General Karl Wolff to Allen Dulles and U.S. Gen. Lemnitzer during the period that the latter two were involved in private negotiations to recruit top Nazis before the end of the war. It has been rumored that Parrilli also had "concocted a plan to transport ex-Nazis from Germany to Paraguay."12 (See article by Peter Dale Scott in this issue.) In 1949 SMOM published an Official General Roll of the Grand Magistery with a preface by Pius XII which referred to "The ancient laurels collected on the battle-fronts" of earlier wars. As noted above, among only four recipients of the Order's Gran Croci al Merito con Placca at the time was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's Chief of Intelligence on the Eastern Front, who received the award November 17, 1948. By this time Reinhard Gehlen's brother had already been in Rome serving as the Secretary to Thun Hohenstein. Conveniently for Reinhard, who was negotiating with the U.S. for the preservation of his Nazi colleagues, Thun Hohenstein was Chairman of one of SMOM's grand magistral charities, the Institute for Associated Emigrations, and had arranged for two thousand SMOM passports to be printed for political refugees. Thun Hohenstein was also related to the leading German Knights of SMOM, and at a crucial time in an internal SMOM controversy after the war had received the active support of Prince Frederic von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Honorary Chairman of the Silesian Association of the Order, the head of the Catholic Hohenzollerns, of which several members were Knights of SMOM. The Silesian Knights, led by their Chairman Prince von Hartzfeld and Graf Henckel von Donnersmark, maintained a refugee camp at Ulm which in 1951 alone had received 134,000 refugees from the East.13 Meanwhile, both the Polish and Hungarian Associations of SMOM had also relocated safely to the West. In 1950, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism was created. The trustees included J. Peter Grace, Charles Edison, William Henry Chamberlain, H. J. Heinz II, Isaac Don Levine, and Eugene Lyons. The Committee (now known as Radio Liberty), under the guiding hand of the CIA's Frank Wisner, funded numerous emigre "research institutes'' which, according to John Loftus [see UNHOLY TRINITY ], were "little more than front groups for ex-Nazi intelligence officers.''14 CROCI AL MERITO (PRO PIIS MERITIS) GRAN CROCI AL MERITO CON FASCIA 10 4 1948 S.E. Gen. PAUL DARIUS DASSAULT CRAN CROCI AL MERITO CON PLACCA 23 5 1945 S. E. HAROLD ALEXANDER, visconte di Tunis 23 5 1945 S. E. MYRON C TAYLOR 11 11 1948 Brig. Gen. Barone DEAN de MARGUERITTES 17 11 1948 REINHARD GEHLEN Document shows SMOM's honor bestowed on Hitler's intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen and on U.S. Admiral Ellery W. Stone. footnotes 1. See generally, Clarence G. Lasby, Project Paperclip (New York: Atheneum, 1975). Grace had also served as the Chairman of the Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Fund, a CIA front infested with Nazi collaborators, and of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), another CIA-funded organization. The Chairman of the W. R. Grace Executive Committee Felix Larkin, is also a SMOM. The Chancellor of the Order, John D. J. Moore, was a Director of the Grace company until at least 1982 having been with the company since 1946 managing its Peruvian operations from 1947-1950. From 1969-1975 Moore was the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland. See sidebar on J. Peter Grace. 2. Roger Peyrefitte, Knights of Malta (New York: Criterion Books, 1959), at p. 137. 3. See the illustrated feature story on SMOM in Town and Country, April 1984, pp. 194, ff. 4. Point de Vue, September 23, 1983. 5. Sir Edwin King and Sir Harry Luke, The Knights of St. John in the British Realm, 2d ed. (London: St. John's Gate, 1967). 6. Ibid., pp. 103-105. Subsequently in England in the 19th Century, since each monarch has the authority to create any Order it wishes, Queen Victoria chartered, alongside the Rome-based British Association of SMOM, a predominantly Anglican Order called "The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem" under the aegis of the British crown. On November 26, 1963 the Venerable Order and the Bntish Association of SMOM signed a treaty of mutual recognition and respect which can be seen in the Library of the Venerable Order in London. SMOM continues to regard the Venerable Order with somewhat amused score; while SMOMs are members of the highest levels of the Venerable Order, there do not appear to be any Anglican members of the Venerable Order in the British Association of SMOM. 7. Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: An Exploration of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933 -1949 (New York: Delacorte, 1983), pp. 20-31. 8. Anthony Cave Brown, Wild Bill Donovan, The Last Hero (New York: Times Books, 1982), pp. 683, 684. 9. Frederic Laurent, L'Orchestre Noir (Paris: Editions Stock, 1978), at p.29; see also Charles Allen, The Vatican and the Nazis, in Reform Judaism, Spring/Summer and Fall 1983; and Saul Friedlander, Pius XII and the Third Reich (New York: Knopf, 1966). 10. Stuart Christie, Stefano delle Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy Magazine, 1984), at p.6. One member of the family, S.E. Don Giangiacomo, Principe Borghese, had been a Bailiff Grand Cross Of Honor and Devotion of SMOM since June 4,1932. Christie's book includes a photo of Borghese driven by an unidentified SS officer in 1944, with the caption, ``Borghese was then [1944] head of 'XMAS' (Decima MAS), a special forces corps of 4,000 men founded in 1941. Borghese assumed command after the Italian armistice and XMAS was officially recognized by the Nazi High Command on September 14, 1943. Under his direction, XMAS was responsible for the torture and mass murder of Italian partisans. Ibid., p. 7; see also Laurent, op. cit., n.9. 11. Declassified documents of May 17, 1948 and October 11, 1948. Gedda was listed as a member of the "Comite de Patronage" of the French neo-Nazi 'Nouvelle Ecole' in April 1982 along with Robert Gayre. Gedda also served on the Advisory board of Gayre and Pearson's Mankind Quarterly from at least the mid 1960s until 1979. 12. R. Harris Smith, OSS, The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1972), at p.114; and Bradley F. Smith & Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise (New York: Basic Books, 1979). And see Peter Dale Scott's article in this issue. 13. See, Peyrefitte, op. cit., n. 2, pp. 172, 173, 214. 14 John Loftus, The Belarus Secret, ed. by Nathan Miller (New York Knopf, 1982), pp. 106-107, 178. [and see UNHOLY TRINITY by Loftus] - END QUOTE - [ continue to 3 of 4 ] COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN P.O.BOX 50272 WASHINGTON, DC 20004 http://mediafilter.org/MFF/ From ......... COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN Issue title: SPECIAL: NAZIS, THE VATICAN, AND CIA WINTER 1986 Number 25 pages 27-38 Pages picture captions, from page 32 and 34-35 [3 of 4 ] KNIGHTS OF DARKNESS THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA [Picture caption] - Plaque on SMOM headquarters' door proclaims sovereign status of the building; SMOM has been called "the smallest country in the world," but it has diplomatic relations with more than 40 countries. [Picture caption] - State room of the Grand Magistry; Grand Master Fra Prince Angelo de Mojana di Cologna, seated, flanked by Grand Chancellor, left, and Hospitaller, right. [Picture caption] - James Jesus Angleton. [Picture caption] - Prince Valerio Borghese with SS officer, Italy, 1944. [Picture caption] - Roger Pearson. [Picture caption] - Document shows SMOM's honor bestowed on Hitler's intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen and on U.S. Admiral Ellery W. Stone. [Picture caption] - A view through the well-fortified courtyard of the Knights of Malta building on Rome's Via Condotti. [Picture caption] - The February 11, 1985 issue of 'Spotlight', the weekly of Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, featured this photograph of J. Peter Grace in the Washington, D.C. offices of Liberty Lobby giving a cordial interview to 'Spotlight' Managing Editor Vincent J. Ryan. [Picture caption] - Bishop Paul Marcinkus, still runs IOR. From page 32 THE CHECKERED CAREERS OF JAMES ANGLETON AND ROGER PEARSON Both James Jesus Angleton and George Raymond Rocca were forced into retirement in December 1974 following Seymour Hersh's revelations that Angleton's Division had been involved in illegal domestic operations, known as "the family jewels."1 By the Winter of 1977-78 Angleton became one of two Associate Editors of the Journal of International Relations under General Editor Roger Pearson. The other Associate Editor was Gen. Robert C. Richardson III; the Publisher was John Fisher, President of the American Security Council. Pearson is perhaps the most important neo-Nazi contact and racist propagandist in the U.S. today and had been a former Editor of Willis Carto's Western Destiny. According to Replica of January 1978, when the Executive Committee of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) met December 10 and 11, 1977 to plan for their upcoming conference in Washington D. C., ''The main speaker was ..... General Robert C. Richardson III who delivered a brilliant speech on the theme of USA-USSR nuclear balance ...... [and] ......... Dr. Roger Pearson [President of North American Regional WACL and later President and host of WACL in 1978] also made a brilliant exposition." Replica is the journal of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL) which Jack Anderson revealed to be a CIA created anti-Semitic controller of neo-Nazi death squads.2 Pearson was removed as head of the U.S. branch of the World Anti-Communist League after its 1978 conference in Washington, D.C. because his ties to the neo-Nazi international were too extreme even for WACL which then included death squads, former Nazis, and Nazi collaborators.3 In the July 1978 issue of the racist Mankind Quarterly, the Editor-in-Chief, and Pearson's mentor, Robert Gayre, announced that Pearson would take over publication of the magazine. Robert Gayre had received the Grand Cross of Merit from SMOM in 1963, having already been editor of the Mankind Quarterly for three years. In June 1979 Pearson was listed as a member of the 'Comite de Patronage' (the Advisory Board) of the French neo-Nazi journal Nouvelle Ecole. Today Pearson continues to publish in Washington, D.C. several journals including Mankind Quarterly; The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies; and The Journal of Indo-European Studies; he remains on the Board of Trustees of the American Foreign Policy Institute.4 According to Joseph C. Goulden, "Brigadier General Robert C. Richardson ........ had served as deputy chief of staff for science and technology for the U.S. Air Force Systems command; he later was a field commander of the Defense Atomic Support Agency at the supersecret Sandia Base, New Mexico. When Richardson retired in 1967 he became a consultant in defense affairs; one of his positions, which he was to take in 1973, was a vice-president of Ed Wilson's Consultant's International.''5 Gen. Richardson is today one of the key members of the American Security Council (ASC) and the Coalition for Peace Through Strength (CPTS) and is Executive Director of the American Foreign Policy Institute of which Pearson, John Fisher, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, and Gen. Daniel O. Graham are members of the seven member Board of Trustees. Angleton today is the Chairman of the Security and Intelligence Fund whose President is former Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow (the Chairman of the American Foreign Policy Institute) and whose Secretary-Treasurer is Robert C. Richardson III. Until its move in late 1984 to 1010 Vermont Avenue, N.W. in Washington, D.C., it shared offices with the ASC and the CPTS. The letter heads of the three organizations show extensive membership overlaps. 1. See, Seymour Hersh's stories in the New York Times, December 22 and 30, 1974; and Fensterwald and Ewing, Coincidence or Conspiracy? (New York: Zebra Books, 1977), at pp .182, 183, 186. 2. See, Jack Anderson stories of January 12, 13, 23, 26, 30 and February 9. See also, Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup (Boston: South End Press, 1980), and the series in the New York 'Village Voice' by Joe Conason, May 1 and 14, 1985. 3. See, Paul Valentine Fascist Specter behind the World Anti-Red League in the Washington Post, May 28, 1978. 4. See generally, Michael Billig, Psychology, Racism & Fascism, London: 1979; and Searchlight magazine, September 1984, no. 111; both available from Searchlight publications, 37B New Cavendish Street, London W1M 8JR. 'See also', Robert Gayre's entry in the British Who's Who. 5. Joseph C. Goulden, The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P. Wilson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 47. Page 34 In 1953 Catholic fanatic Clare Boothe Luce [ wife of Henry Luce ..... JP ] became U.S. Ambassador to Rome, and was made a Dame of Malta in 1956. In 1954, with the backing of Cardinal Spellman and the machinations of General Edward G. Lansdale, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem became Prime Minister of South Vietnam. [ Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, was closely associated with Cardinal Spellman. See picture of Cardinal Spellman, Henry Luce and Ngo Diem in Luce and His Empire by Swanberg, published by Scribner ..... JP ] Commenting on the events in Hungary in 1956, two Soviet journalists wrote, ...... we spoke with Count Karoly Khuen Hedervary [who] bears a great responsibility for the crimes the fascists had committed in Europe [but he] was not tried as a war criminal after 1945. ..... After Mindzenty's return to Budapest during the counter-revolutionary events, Karoly Khuen Hedervary took advantage of his being an old friend of the cardinal to meet Mindzenty several times, during which he received instructions for the organization [set up by the former fascist minister of industry Geza Bornemisza]. Hedervary served also as the liaison man of the organization and the Duke of Lichtenstein, who came officially to Budapest during the October events in the capacity of the representative of the International Red Cross, but actually as the representative of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta which had helped actively in promoting the counter-revolution in Hungary.15 By November 1961, President Kennedy 16 appointed John McCone as Director of the CIA. In 1963, when it became clear Diem could no longer stay in power in South Vietnam, McCone oversaw his regrettably necessary assassination. McCone is listed as a member of SMOM in the 1980 list.17 With McCone heading the CIA and Angleton as his Chief of Counterintelligence, another Knight of Malta of fascist fame, Italian General Giovani De Lorenzo, who had been the chief of the secret service (then known as Sifar) and in 1962 head of the carabinieri, organized an attempted fascist coup on July 14, 1964 (the Plan Solo) and later became a deputy from the fascist MSI party.18 Six and a half years later, on the night of December 7, 1970 Angleton's Prince Borghese gave the order for Stefano delle Chiaie to proceed with seizure of the Interior Ministry in Rome along with 50 fellow neo-Nazis. (See A Killer's Career, in this issue; and see The Fascist Network, in CAIB, Number 22.) This plot to trigger a fascist coup was called off at the last minute, and Borghese and his neo-Nazi protege delle Chiaie fled to Spain where former SS Commando Skorzeny among others was waiting. 19 SMOM and P-2 Freemasonry generally purports to be hostile to Catholicism, and conversely, the Vatican has at various times forbidden Catholics to join Masonic organizations. Nevertheless, in December of 1969 an exclusive meeting was held in the Rome office of Count Umberto Ortolani, the Ambassador of the Order of Malta to Uruguay, who has been called "the brains" behind the fascist P-2 Masonic Lodge, which had been established in the mid-1960s.20 In addition to Ortolani, the meeting included only Licio Gelli, Roberto Calvi, and Michele Sindona.21 Gelli had fought for Franco (who was himself a Bailiff Grand Cross of SMOM) with Mussolini's troops during the Spanish Civil War. He was a committed fascist during WW II and at the end of the war was wanted by the partisans for collaborating with the Nazis. After the war he developed extensive interests in Latin America where he became close friends with the Argentinean dictator Juan Peron; he was also the Grand Master of P-2.22 Calvi had fought on the Eastern front during the war and was decorated by the Nazis. At the time of the 1969 meeting he was a senior officer at Banco Ambrosiano. Sindona had set up business in 1943 with the help of Vito Genovese, whose Mafia contacts facilitated the American landing on Sicily. By 1948 Sindona had received a letter of introduction to Vatican intelligence operative Montini [later pope .... JP]. Page 35 According to Larry Gurwin's The Calvi Affair, One of Sindona's first steps in cultivating the Vatican's money men occurred in the late 1950s when through a priest, he met Prince Massimo Spada, a Vatican nobleman and the senior layman at IOR. [Massimo Spada had become a Knight of Malta on September 21, 1944. IOR, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (Institute for Religious Works), known generally as the Vatican Bank, was created in 1942 by Pius XII.] At the same time he nurtured his friendship with Giovanni Montini, who had become cardinal-archbishop of Milan in 1954. In 1959 Montini needed to raise a large sum of money for an old people's home, and he turned to Sindona for help. Sindona reportedly raised $2 million in a single day. In 1960 Sindona purchased a small Milanese bank called Banca Privata and, thanks to his Vatican friendships, it soon began receiving deposits from IOR. Three years later Montini was elected Pope Paul VI and Sindona's Vatican connections were unbeatable."23 The Italian journal L'Espresso of June 28, 1981 indicates that numbers of high ranking members of the Italian military intelligence organizations were both SMOMs and members of P-2. The list of dual members included General Santovito, the former head of SISMI; Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, the head of the general staff of the Army, and General Giovanni Allavena, head of the intelligence service (then Sifar, which was later split into SISDE and SISMI). The conclusion of the affair is generally known. When, in 1983, the Vatican was finally forced to establish an "independent'' commission to study the relationship between its IOR (since 1970 Ñ and still Ñ headed by Chicago-born Bishop Paul Marcinkus) and the P-2/Banco Ambrosiano criminal fascists, two of the three members selected were Hermann Abs and Joseph Brennan. Abs, who features in nearly every book on the Third Reich and the Nuremberg trials, was Hitler's paymaster, as chairman of the Deutsche Bank from 1940 to 1945, and was a member of the board of I.G. Farben. He regained the board chairmanships of both firms after the war, even though in Yugoslavia he had been convicted of war crimes in absentia. In 1953 he received the Great Federal Service Cross for his services in restoring West Germany's financial power; and in 1960 he was decorated by Franco for his "services" to fascist Spain.24 The choice of Abs for the Vatican commission of inquiry was so outrageous that at the urging of Charles Higham, the Wiesenthal Center issued a special packet of documents clearly showing Abs's involvement in war crimes and publicly protested to the Vatican, all to no avail. Joseph Brennan is the Chairman of the executive committee of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York and a Knight of Malta. SMOM, Americares, and Central America Just as World Medical Relief and Refugee Relief International are fronts for Waffen-SS worshipping editors of Soldier of Fortune magazine, so too the SMOM advertises itself Ñ to those who believe in the Tooth Fairy Ñ as a "charitable'' organization greatly concerned for the suffering of the poor and sick around the world. The New York Times of August 13, 1985 reported that the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (NFF), one of many front groups for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, channelled $350,000 to the Americares Foundation in Connecticut.25 Clare Boothe Luce, a Dame of SMOM, is on the Board of Moon's Washington Times, and is a director of the NFF with fellow SMOM, William Simon [former U.S. Treasurer]. J. Peter Grace is the Chairman of the six member Advisory Board of Americares, which includes fellow Knight William Simon along with former CIA Director George Bush's brother, Prescott Bush, Jr. Americares' published "Fact Sheet'' recites as specific projects: Medical Shipments to El Salvador: Since November 1983 AMERICARES has shipped almost 700,000 pounds of medicines and supplies valued at over $8,000,000 in 15 sea shipments with local distribution being handled through the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta (SMOM). Guatemala: In response to a request for aid from the Order of the Knights of Malta, 10 sea shipments of medical supplies worth over $4,000,000 have been sent to the people of Guatemala since January 1984. Honduras: Since August 1984, three sea shipments of high priority medical supplies worth over $ 1,000,000 were sent to the people of Honduras in response to a request for aid from the Order of the Knights of Malta. ..... Brazil, October 1984: A shipment of vitamins worth $156,075 were sent to Brazil, again in response to a request from the Order of the Knights of Malta (SMOM) who serve as our consignees in Central and South America. The "Fact Sheet" also discusses an ''offshoot" of Americares called "Doctors To All Peoples" said to be "dedicated to the eradication of leprosy in the Americas.'' Leprosy is the mos publicized international "charity project" of SMOM. footnotes 15. A. Belokon and V. Tolstikov, The Truth About Hungary (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), pp. 58-61; Mary Bancroft in Autobiography of a Spy (New York: Wm. Morrow, 1983), p.260, reports that towards the end of WWII, "A contingent of White Russians, who had been fighting in the German Army, had recently crossed the Liechtenstein frontier and had been given asylum." 16. The President's father, Joseph Kennedy, who became a Knight of SMOM March 13, 1945, had been withdrawn as U.S. Ambassador to London when his sympathies for the Third Reich became known. See, e.g., Higham, op. cit., n. 7., at p. 181. 17. McCone, from a senior post at ITT, was later to play a key role in the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973. At the time of the coup J. Peter Grace was Chairman of the AIFLD, and a director of First National City Bank and Kennecott Copper Co., all of which played a role in the fascist coup. ('See', Fred Hirsch and Richard Fletcher, CIA and the Labor Movement (London: Spokesman Books, 1977), pp. 16, ff.; and NACLA Report Amazing Grace: The W. R. Grace Corporation vol.X, no.3, March 1976.) W. R. Grace Company senior vice-president Anthony Navarro, who had earlier been involved in armed fighting against the Castro govemment in Cuba, was recently nominated to the Advisory Committee of Radio Marti; the Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Board on Radio Broadcasting to Cuba, Jorge Mas Canosa, according to the New York Times of Aug.5, 1984, is a Cuban businessman in Miami, who took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and was a commentator on Radio Swan, an anti-Castro station that was operated by the CIA. 18. See, Laurent, op. cit., n. 9; and Christie, op. cit., n. 10. 19. See, Christie, op. cit., n. 10; and Laurent, op. cit., n. 9. 20. Journal de Geneve, November 11, 1981. 21. Larry Gurwin, The Calvi Affair (London: Pan Books, 1984), p.15. 22. Gelli had chartered the plane which brought Peron back to Argentina in 1972 and was an honored guest at his inauguration; shortly thereafter Lopez Rega, Peron's Minister of Social Welfare who ran the Argentine death squads and who was an astrologer and mystic, joined P-2. 23. Gurwin, op. cit., n. 21, pp. 11, 12. See also, David A. Yallop, In God's Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Bantam, 1984). 24. Yallop, op. cit., n. 23, p. 323; National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany, Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany (Berlin: Documentation Center of the State Archives Administration of the German Democratic Republic, n.d. [c. 1966]), p. 39. 25. See also, Washington Post, May 9, 1985, p. 34. - END QUOTE - [ continue to 4 of 4 ] COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN P.O.BOX 50272 WASHINGTON, DC 20004 http://mediafilter.org/MFF/ From ......... COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN Issue title: SPECIAL: NAZIS, THE VATICAN, AND CIA WINTER 1986 Number 25 Pages 27-38 [4 of 4 ....... 36-38 ] KNIGHTS OF DARKNESS THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA Page 36 The Washington Post of December 27, 1984 reported as follows: A private humanitarian organization called the Americares Foundation, working with the Order of the Knights of Malta, has channeled more than $14 million in donated medical aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala over the last two years. ...... Part of $680,000 in aid to Honduras went to Miskito Indians linked to U.S. backed rebels fighting the leftist government in Nicaragua, according to a Knights of Malta official in Honduras. Much of the $3.4 million in Americares' medical aid to Guatemala has been distributed through the armed forces as part of its resettlement program of "model villages" aimed at defeating leftist insurgents, said the official, Guatemalan businessman Roberto Alejos. Alejos, co-chairman of the Knights of Malta in Honduras [said], ...... the Guatemalan army delivers Americares medicine to people in model villages, which are along the Mexican border. Alejos, a major sugar and coffee grower, lent his Guatemalan estates to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1960 to train Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Asked why the Knights of Malta turned to Americares rather than to established aid groups, such as the Red Cross, Grace said, "The Knights have been doing this for 900 years. They have their own cross [the Maltese cross]. ... They'd consider themselves way beyond the Red Cross." .... At least one pro-government group, the Air Commando Association of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., claims to have used Knights of Malta warehouses in El Salvador. Retired general H. C. Aderholt, head of the 1,500-member group, said that the commandos delivered food and medicine to the Knights' facilities and that together they ''get good support from the Salvadoran air force commander." Aderholt said the association has distributed to El Salvador $4.5 million in food and medicine provided by the Christian Broadcasting Network and World Medical Relief. He said liberals in Congress have tried to "tie to some sinister plan with the CIA" [sic], which he said is incorrect. While the Post story does mention that CIA Director William Casey is a SMOM, it fails to point out that Aderholt is the "Unconventional Operations'' Contributing Editor of Soldier of Fortune and was a member of the ''Singlaub panel'' of the Pentagon, set up to devise new counterinsurgency strategies in the developing countries. Russ Bellant, in the Detroit Metro Times of October 9, 1985, says Aderholt claimed that Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network had given the Knights of Malta $2 million for operations in Central America. CONCLUSION For many years progressive groups in the U.S. and else where have been engaged in extensive research into so-called "secular" state and private organizations such as the CIA, NSC, the military, private corporations, and foundations. This article highlights the operative importance of members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which unlike traditional corporate, governmental, and foundation entities, has not yet adequately come under the scrutiny of progressive researchers. Curiously, European researchers have all but ignored the Orders of Chivalry in analyzing The structural role of their own aristocracy in organizing support for international reaction and fascist terror. Research into the current role of SMOM and its individual members is just beginning. The most serious problem is the dearth of documents available, due to the extreme secrecy of the organization. Except for a few scattered references in various books, magazines, and newspapers, and a few romanticized stories about ancient glories of the Order, the necessary amount of materials has not yet surfaced. and this account represents only a starting point for further research.26 In the U.S., for example, although the 1980 membership list was published (National Catholic Reporter, October 14, 1983), since then the Order in the U.S. has grown and been divided into an Eastern, Southern (based in D.C.), and Western Association. The published 1980 list comprises primarily members in the Northeast. Although some others are known, complete and current lists of members in other regions is obviously crucial. Lists for other countries would also be helpful. CAIB in its Winter 1983 issue, The CIA and Religion, and Spring 1985 issue, Disconnecting the Bulgarian Connection, began to explore the operational role of specific religious, or non-secular, organizations such as Opus Dei 27 and the fascist Masonic lodge P-2 in western intelligence operations and in furthering imperialism's plans. Page 38 The recent P-2 scandal in Italy and new evidence on the importance of various ancient Orders of Chivalry (in particular SMOM) indicate that further research into these additional non-secular "parapolitical'' structures is necessary both to understand their role as independent organizations and to gain a better understanding of factional alignments within organizations which have already come under scrutiny. As with "secular" organizations, rivalries among these "non-secular" organizations takes place within an environment of selective interlinking memberships which include secular structures as well. The way competing policies and loyalties of these non-secular structures influence members in their secular roles needs considerable further research. SMOM, GRACE, and OBANDO Y BRAVO On August 1, 1985 the New York Times reported that during a visit to New York in May, Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua said that he is actively directing efforts by his diocese to prevent the government from imposing a communist system in Nicaragua. The Archbishop said efforts included ''dividing his diocese into old and new units, including parishes, districts and smaller groups, for leadership and religious training.'' He claimed the training he established in Managua was for ''pastoral cadres, not military cadres. .... '' Following a meeting with Archbishop Obando, executives at W. R. Grace arranged for the Sarita Kenedy East Foundation to contribute copies of the Bible, rosary beads and other supplies to aid the church effort, a company executive said. The foundation is headed by J. Peter Grace. Whatever the real purpose of the "leadership training" and "pastoral cadres," it apparently seemed like such a splendid idea to the Knights that a June 21, 1985 press release from the Erlich-Manes & Associates News Service of Bethesda, Maryland stated that the Southern Association of SMOM had sent a $5.5 million shipment of "40 massive containers'' to be loaded on the ship "Freedom'' to be sent to Maputo, Mozambique. "Roughly half of the shipment will go to aid agricultural development in northern Mozambique; and half will be distributed directly to the poor through the Archbishop of Maputo's Catholic Charities.'' Eugene I. Kane, a Knight and head of the trucking company Intermodal, Inc. organized the project. Official documents of SMOM list such "charitable" projects in many countries throughout the world. WELL-KNOWN KNIGHTS In addition to those listed in the article, the following are some other Knights of SMOM of interest: - Francis Vincent Ortiz, Jr.: according to the 1982-83 'Who's Who in America', had been, among other posts, "dep. chief of mission Am. Embassy, Montevideo Uruguay, 1970-73,charg'e d'affairs,1973; country director for Argentina, Uruguay, and . Paraguay, Dept. of State 1973-75, dep. exec. sec., 1975-77; Amb. to Barbados and Grenada, spl. rep. to Antigua, Dominica, St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, from 1977; U.S Amb. Guatemala 1979-81, to Peru 1981-; spl. asst. for international affairs U.S. So. Command, Panama 1980-" since November 18, 1983 he has been the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. - Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.: also a Knight of the Order of St. Sylvester of which William [ head of WWII OSS .... JP ] Donovan was a member. He is a longstanding funder of right-wing causes including Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. His wife is a Dame of SMOM and is Publisher of the National Catholic Register of California, whose editor, Francis X. Maier was formerly with National Review. Maier was the first Chairman of the Catholic Center for Renewal, whose President, Philip F. Lawler, is the Director of Studies of the Heritage Foundation (which was chaired by Knight of SMOM Frank Shakespeare, newly appointed Ambassador to Portugal). - Paul-Louis Weiller: Grand Cross of Merit SMOM, a close friend of Richard Nixon, member of the Board of Directors of Renault and several other French industrial corporations, former Administrateur of Air France, whose son married the cousin of Spanish King Juan-Carlos. (See also, Jim Hougan, Spooks (New York: William Morrow, 1978), pp. 209-225, which suggests that Weiller was "the French Connection. ") - Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: Munich correspondent of William Buckley's National Review. - Admiral James D. Watkins, Reagan's recently named Chief of Naval Operations. - Thomas Bolan: law partner of Roy Cohn. Bolan is also Counsel to the Human Life Foundation of which former CIA officer and Managing Editor of National Review, Priscilla Buckley (William's sister) is a Director. - Jeremiah Denton: U. S. Senator from Alabama, 1980-present; former rear admiral, captured by the Vietnamese while murdering people and held as a POW 1965-1973, consultant to Pat Robertson of Christian Broadcasting Network, 1978-80. - Pete Domenici: U.S. Senator from New Mexico 1972 - present. - Spiros S. Skouras: President Prudential Lines 1960-present, bought Grace Lines 1969. - William A. Schreyer: President Merrill Lynch 1978-present; Chairman since 1981. - Walter J. Hickel: former governor of Alaska 1966-69, Secretary of the Interior 1969-1970. [ Governor of Alaska again in early 90s .... JP ] - Antoine Pinay: Grand Cross of Merit, head of Government in France in 1952. He led the right-wing party CNIP and was linked to the ''Sniffing-plane" scandal, as well as a project with Brian Crozier and American agents to make Franz Joseph Strauss head of the German government. - Mme. Raymond Barre: Grand Cross of Merit, wife of the rightist French politician. - Bernard Dorin: French attache to Ottawa 1957-1959, Ambassador to Haiti 1972-1974, and Ambassador to South Africa from 1978 until at least 1981. THE "OTHER" ORDERS OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA Not only are there many existing orders of chivalry today, generally under the aegis of a reigning monarch or ruling house, but there are also rival organizations each claiming to be the rightful heirs to the same order. Nowhere is this more true than with the Knights of Malta. According to the Catholic Herald of August 23, 1985, there are more than twenty organizations claiming to be the "real" Knights of Malta. On September 9, 1985, evidently in response to growing interest in the question, the 'Wall Street Journal' ran a cover story, "Looking for a Title or Hot Controversy? See Knights of Malta. The Problem Is Which Ones; Catholic Order Maintains Rival Groups are Bogus." (The New York Sunday News had described the rivalry as early as June 15, 1975.) The legitimacy battle is often intense and steeped in the presentation of increasingly obscure documentation. Arnaud Chaffanjon and Bertrand Galimard Flavigny's Ordres et Contre-Ordres de Chevalerie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1982), is one of the more useful references. Some of the rival "Orders of Malta,'' all with slightly different names, in fact claim important and extremely rightwing members. We believe that the Catholic, Rome-based Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) remains the most important, with the endorsement of the Vatican and most of the Catholic ruling houses of Europe, and members like those discussed in the text of this article. The British (and generally, though not exclusively Protestant) Venerable Order, discussed in the text, is affiliated with a number of European, Protestant Orders, such as the Johanniterorden, sometimes known as the Bailiwick of Brandenberg. Two of the "Orders of Malta'' which have received particular attention recently are what may be called the "Shickshinny" Order and the "von Brancovan" Order. The Shickshinny Order, officially called "The Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem," has been headed by Col. Thourot Pichel in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, although a few years ago the Order was torn by serious internal rifts between Pichel and the late Frank Capell, Contributing Editor of the John Birch Society's Review of the News. (See, Rev. Anthony Cekada, Light on the OSJ, from the Oyster Bay, New York The Roman Catholic, December 1981, for an article critical of the Order and discussing some of its recent history.) It traces its legitimacy from a dispute during the time the Order spent in Russia under Czar Paul after it fled Malta. This Order achieved some notoriety a few years ago when it officially recognized the claims of controversial defector Michael Goleniewski to be Aleksei Romanoff, heir to the Russian Imperial House of Romanoff. The case would be less interesting if James Angleton were not one of the principal supporters of Goleneiwski and some extremely rightwing members of the military intelligence community were not listed as members in a document issued by the Order in 1970. The Order listed as members of its Military Affairs Committee, under the Chairmanship of Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd, Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, and Gen. Pedro A. del Valle (who according to Stuart Christie's Stefano delle Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy Magazine, 1984), p. 6, invited Italian neo-Nazi Guido Giannettini to the U.S. to conduct a seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, where del Valle was Commander. Foster & Epstein's Danger on the Right (New York: Random House, 1964), p.79; and Janson & Eismann's The Far Right (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963), p. 154, both call del Valle an anti-Semite.) The Honorary Grand Admiral of the Order is listed as Admiral Sir Barry Domvile who had been jailed by the British during WW II as a Nazi agent, and was listed as a Contributing Editor of Willis Carto's Western Destiny, November 1965, when Roger Pearson was the Editor. The Associate Chief of International Intelligence listed was Herman E. Kimsey, a high-ranking CIA operative, now deceased, who had worked with the Army CIC during the war. The von Brancovan Order, led by someone who calls himself Prince Robert Bassaraba von Brancovan and several other names as well, including Prince Khimchiachvili, is officially titled "The Sovereign Military and Hospitaler Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta Ecumenical.'' It is the order which apparently claims Frank Sinatra as a member. It also claims to include Princes Arnaldo and Basilio Petrucci. It appears to have a connection to Umberto Stafanizzi who, with Francesco Pazienza, signed the incorporation papers for something else called the "Sovereign Order of Saint John, Knights of Malta, Inc.," which was incorporated in New York State, June 22, 1983. footnotes - 26. Interested readers should also refer to the articles by Martin Lee on the SMOM which appeared in the National Catholic Reporter of October 14, 1983 (the issue which included the complete 1980 U.S. membership list), and Mother Jones of July 1983. (These two articles formed the basis for the references to SMOM in Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts The Year of Armageddon (London: Granada Publishing Ltd, 1984).) An interesting discussion of some post-WW II SMOM history based around an account of the 1949-53 attempts by Vatican-centered Rightists to restrict the sovereignty of the Order is Knights of Malta by the conservative French author Roger Peyrefitte originally published by Flammarion in 1957, and translated into English and published in New York by Criterion Books m 1959. King and Luke's The Knights of St. John in the British Realm, op. cit., n. 6, is useful although it does try to elevate Queen Victoria's creation of the Venerable Order to a status equal to that of SMOM. The Italian journal L'Espresso of June 28, 1981 carried an article by Alessandre de Feo on the SMOM-P-2 connection. The rightist French magazine Historia had a special issue in 1980 on various Orders of Chivalry including SMOM. Also in French is the remarkable Souvenirs et Reflections by Yves Marsaudon, former Minister of SMOM in France who was also one of the highest ranking members of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in the country, (Paris: Editions Vitiano, 20 Rue Chauchat, 75009 Paris, 1976). 27. Francis X. Stankard, Knight of SMOM and Chief Executive Officer of the International Division of Chase Manhattan Bank has led "Evenings of Conversation'' at the Opus Dei Headquarters at the Riverside Study Center, 330 Riverside Drive, New York City. Other SMOMs at these sessions included William Simon and Frank Shakespeare (now Ambassador to Portugal), both of whom are Trustees of the Heritage Foundation, of which Shakespeare was Chairman of the Board. Evenings of Conversation, a pamphlet distributed in 1984 by Riverside Study Center. Recognition of the importance of Opus Dei at the highest levels of SMOM had already been established in the summer of 1976 when King Juan-Carlos, himself a Knight of Malta, chose Adolfo Suarez, a member of Opus Dei, as new chief of government following the death of Franco. (Point de Vue, January 14, 1983; Paris.) On Opus Dei see also, New Statesman, 1 March 1985, pp.20,21; London Times, January 12, 1981; Le Morule, August 25, and September 28, 29 1982; National Catholic Reporter, September 10, and November 12, 1982; Financial Times, November 11, 1983; New York Times Magazine, January 8, 1984; Time magazine, June 11, 1984, p.74; New Times (Moscow), No.13, 1982, p.27; Wall Street Journal, December 30, 1982. [Picture caption] - Paul-Louis Weiller, the French Connection? - END QUOTE - [ 4 of 4 ] COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN P.O.BOX 50272 WASHINGTON, DC 20004 http://mediafilter.org/MFF/ 396-157-47-F168FP30R Edited December 2, 2009 by John Bevilaqua Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tom Scully Posted September 12, 2011 Share Posted September 12, 2011 GHW Bush's college roommate was Robert C. Macauley. Bush's Ambassador to Ireland, William H.G. Fitzgerald was: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/08/AR2006010801019.htmlPhilanthropist William H.G. FitzGerald Jan 9, 2006 – William H.G. FitzGerald, 96, a Washington-based private investor who ... He was the senior member of the Order of Malta, a lay religious order ... Fitzgerald's son, Desmond, is a longtime officer of Orbis, Int., and is married to the daughter of Robert G. Stone, Jr., and his wife, a Rockefeller heiress. : http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3733&st=45&p=229378entry229378 Stone Jr.'s brother, David B. Stone, was the Boston trustee of CIA sponsored financing to a student group, a story exposed in Ramparts in the mid 60's. ( http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5596&st=30&p=115034entry115034 - Irving Davidson ) Stone, Jr. drew unwelcome scrutiny through the Harvard endowment's investment in GW Bush's and Alan Quasha's Harken Energy. Ernest L. Byfield, Jr. was the best man in the 1943 wedding of William HG Fitzgerald to Annilese Petschek, daughter of Silesian lignite and iron properties owner, Ernest Petschek, a customer and Silesian partner of Brown Bros. Harriman, associated with an Aryanization scheme of vulnerable Petschek involving Flick. Byfield Jr.'s mother was the JFK family's landlady at the Virginia weekend White House, Glen Ora, Byfield elevated Patrick Hoy to the presidency of the Sherman Hotel Group before Hoy went to work as a Henry Crown hire at General Dynamics. In 2004, 88 years old, and suddenly publicly talkative and Robert S. McNamara retreated into silence after marrying Byfield's widow. Are the side benefits of SMOM, Macauley's Americares, and Desmond Fitzgerald's Orbis Int., an ability to travel internationally, unobtrusively and with little of no customs scrutiny? What is the impact of the Knights of Malta? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/business/30macauley.htmlRobert Macauley, Founder of Humanitarian Aid Group, Dies at 87 By WILLIAM GRIMES Published: December 29, 2010 ...“He was motivated by the belief that if you act quickly you have more impact, and save more lives, than if you act slowly,” said Curtis R. Welling, who succeeded Mr. Macauley as chief executive of AmeriCares in 2002. Robert Conover Macauley, known as Bob, was born on Dec. 11, 1923, in Manhattan and grew up in Greenwich, Conn. After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., he enrolled in Yale, where his roommate was George H. W. Bush. He cut short his education to enlist in the Army Air Corps, serving with the Air Transport Command in North Africa. After leaving the military he returned to Yale, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1945, and went to work for the family’s paper company, M. L. Macauley Corporation. In 1972 he founded Virginia Fibre Corporation, a manufacturer of corrugated box paper, serving as its chairman until 1990. In 1970 Mr. Macauley read an article by the war reporter Gloria Emerson in The New York Times about Richard Hughes, a former journalist who ran hostels for war orphans in Danang and Saigon. He contacted Mr. Hughes and used the money he was planning to spend on a new car to establish the Shoeshine Boys Foundation, a charity he ran out of his offices in New York to support Mr. Hughes’s projects. The name alluded to the fact that the orphans in Mr. Hughes’s hostels earned money shining shoes. In 1977 he joined the board of Covenant House, a New York City agency offering counseling and shelter for teenagers abusing drugs or being exploited for sex. He helped expand it into a large international charity with programs in more than a dozen cities in North, Central and South America. He left Covenant House in 1989. Soon after, the charity came under a cloud when its founder and director, the Rev. Bruce Ritter, resigned after being accused of financial and sexual misconduct with the charity’s residents. Mr. Macauley, who also had homes in New Canaan, Conn., and Brewster, N.Y., is survived by his wife, Leila; a daughter, Melinda, of San Francisco; a son, Robert Jr., of Charlotte, Vt.; a stepson, Bart Rice, of Kapolei, Hawaii; a sister, Sheila Duncan, of Castellaras, France; and four grandchildren. Over the years, AmeriCares extended its reach but remained in many respects the quick organization that Mr. Macauley had conjured into being. “Someone will always give you nine reasons why it can’t be done,” he told The Toronto Star in 1990. “Just mow ’em down. Make things happen.” http://articles.courant.com/1991-08-11/news/0000213209_1_relief-agencies-supplies-aid Americares' Success Hailed, Criticized Charity Uses Clout And Connections Political, Economic And Religious Ties Help Americares Connections Help Charity August 11, 1991|By ANN MARSH; Courant Staff Writer ...Behind it is the office of Robert C. Macauley, founder and chairman of AmeriCares and the wealthy owner of a prosperous Virginia paper mill. Photographs on the office's forest-green walls show Macauley with former President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa. The president's Volunteer Action Award, given to Macauley by Reagan in 1984, hangs in a frame next to awards and commendations from the governments of Guatemala, the Philippines and Honduras. A knock sounds on Macauley's office door, and his secretary brings in a small piece of paper. "This just arrived," she said. Below the simple letterhead, "Aboard Air Force One," is a short scrawled note referring to an AmeriCares mission to Ethiopia: "Dear Bob, "Tell Steve Johnson, Terry Tarnowski and Dr. David Reed that I read their trip reports with keen interest, with admiration and with gratitude to all of them as Americans. "Your friend, George Bush." Macauley's friendship with Bush dates back to childhood. Macauley was born and raised in New Canaan, and together, he and Bush attended Greenwich Country Day School, prep school and Yale University. The relationship is still strong, and the two have frequent contact. "At the end of a work day, Bush will call Bob and say, `Oh, what a day I've had,' and Bob will say, `Poppy, I know what you mean,' " said Doug Ray, former executive director of AmeriCares. Ray now works for an international aid group called TechnoServe in Norwalk. "Poppy" is a childhood nickname of Bush's. Bush, members of his family and other close associates of the president have traveled with AmeriCares over the years and have formal affiliations with the organization. Page 2 ...Bush's son, Jeb, and the president's grandson, George P. Bush, went with AmeriCares to Armenia in 1988 to help survivors of a devastating earthquake. The president's physician, Burton J. Lee III, accompanied AmeriCares on a mission to Romania, in 1988, and sits on the organization's board of medical advisers. The president's brother, Prescott S. Bush Jr. of Greenwich, is a member of AmeriCares' advisory board. And George Bush recently gave AmeriCares $1,000 out of his own pocket to help the group's mission to aid Kurdish refugees in Iraq. AmeriCares gets guidance from other powerful counselors. An eight-member advisory committee is composed mostly of well-connected, politically conservative individuals, many with ties to presidential administrations or experience in intelligence of foreign affairs. The chairman of the advisory committee is J. Peter Grace Jr., a Yale graduate and chairman of W.R. Grace & Co., a leading manufacturer of chemicals. Grace was also chairman of the Grace Commission that examined government overspending during the Reagan administration. Retired Army Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, former deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of intelligence under Reagan, is also on the advisory committee. http://www.google.com/search?q=Richard+Giles+Stilwell+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=0yi&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aunofficial&tbm=bks&source=hp&q=Richard+Stilwell+cia&pbx=1&oq=Richard+Stilwell+cia&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=17803l18960l3l20040l3l3l0l0l0l0l1248l2261l7-2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=6745df5572c675a2&biw=811&bih=493 American war machine: deep politics, the CIA global drug ... - Page 294 books.google.comPeter Dale Scott - 2010 - 396 pages - Google eBook - Preview At this time OPC Far East Director Richard Stilwell was rebuked severely by CIA Director Bedell Smith and transferred to the military. In the Pentagon, “by the end of 1981, Stilwell was running one of the most secret operations of the... Another member is William E. Simon, former U.S. secretary of the treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Simon was also president of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund, a now defunct private group formed by the Washington Times newspaper to send aid to the contras. (The Washington Times is owned by a group that includes officials of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.) Gordon J. Humphrey, a retired Republican senator from New Hampshire who was a member of the Senate foreign relations committee, is also on the committee. And Zbigniew Brzezinski, the conservative former national security adviser for President Carter, is honorary chairman of the AmeriCares board of directors.... "Personally I have some questions about the way they focus," said one longtime worker in international aid. "They're connected into the American Republican power elite. You might say they work in areas where there is a large anti-communist benefit."... criticism has come from writers who contend that AmeriCares made shipments of aid to the contras in Nicaragua... Among the aid AmeriCares sent to Nicaragua in 1985 was newsprint for La Prensa, the anti-Sandinista newspaper... A review of AmeriCares' well publicized airlift missions shows that the organization sends aid rapidly and frequently to "hot spots" of public attention, places where disaster aid from America might reflect favorably on the U.S. government... In 1988, AmeriCares sent a series of airlifts to Armenia in the Soviet Union to help survivors of an earthquake. "That did more for the image of the United States than anything in recent history," Macauley said... In the early 1970s, at a time when his interest in international aid was beginning to coalesce into AmeriCares, Macauley heard about a Catholic priest named Bruce Ritter who was struggling to help runaway children on the streets of New York City... The alliance between Macauley and Ritter led to an audience with Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1982. (Ritter left Covenant House in February 1990 after accusations of sexual misconduct with some male runaways he was helping). The meeting with the pope gave life to AmeriCares. Although Macauley started AmeriCares in 1979, the organization did not go on its first relief mission until 1982, when the pope asked Macauley to send aid to his native Poland. AmeriCares' contacts with important Catholic figures brought it a valuable ally in the Knights of Malta, a Catholic organization that has helped distribute AmeriCares supplies. The Knights of Malta, formally known as the Sovereign Military Order of Knights Hospitallers of St. John and Jerusalem, is a worldwide Catholic charity founded in the 11th century to care for soldiers in the Crusades. Today, the group is based in Rome. J. Peter Grace, a member of AmeriCares' advisory board, is president of the American chapter of the Knights of Malta, based in New York City. William Simon, another AmeriCares advisory committee member, is also a member... The Knights of Malta make AmeriCares' job easier because of its worldwide network of volunteers, said Johnson, the president of AmeriCares. Members of the group, many of whom are independently wealthy, can be trusted to deliver the aid to its intended destination and do so more efficiently than AmeriCares, he said. "By using the Knights, there's very little opportunity for diversion," Johnson said. "They've all made their fortunes. Now they're interested in charity."... Because almost 50 countries afford the Knights of Malta the same status as a sovereign nation, they are often exempt from fees for border crossings and can pass customs inspections more easily. "The host country will generally waive inspection and duty," said Thomas L. Sheer, executive director of the American chapter of the Knights of Malta and an assistant to J. Peter Grace. "We can use that diplomatic status to move right through customs and to not pay customs fees. We can exploit that, particularly within a time of crisis."... Despite his ties to the Roman Catholic Church, Macauley is not Catholic, although he describes himself as a religious man. "They say I'm a right-wing Catholic conservative," Macauley said. "I'm not a Catholic, even though I go to Mass almost every day. I'm a very devout Protestant, I guess you'd call it." AmeriCares also receives small donations from Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. AmeriCares has kept the commitment to Poland it began at the behest of the pope. "We go to Poland every week, either by ship or by plane," Macauley said. Between 1982 and this March, AmeriCares sent $94 million in aid to Poland, almost a quarter of all the aid it has dispensed. When the pope called on Macauley to help Poland, Macauley turned to corporate America for help... To get donations for Poland, he and some colleagues sat down with lists of the boards of directors from the nation's largest pharmaceutical companies. Among them, the group found, they knew at least one person on every board." http://www.businessweek.com/archives/1995/b34261.arc.htmCover Story - BusinessWeek: May 29, 1995 FALL FROM GRACE Feb. 11, 1994, marked the beginning of the coup. Late that night, J. Peter Grace Jr., the octogenarian chairman of W.R. Grace & Co., and his youngest son, Patrick, president of Grace Logistics Services Inc., telephoned Grace Director Robert C. Macauley to say they had something urgent to discuss. They immediately headed over to Macauley's West Palm Beach (Fla.) vacation home. Macauley, ever indulgent of his old friend, remembers being mystified. The company, after all, was going great guns. J.P. Bolduc, who had been chief executive for just a year, had cut costs and sold $2.1 billion worth of Grace's extraneous businesses since becoming president in 1990. Wall Street was finally happy with the longtime laggard: The company's stock, at 457/8, had jumped 32% in less than five months. "REALLY NEGATIVE WAY." But as soon as the Graces arrived, it was clear the problem was Bolduc. As the meeting wore on into the wee hours of the morning, Macauley says the Graces told him of troubling allegations they had unearthed against Bolduc, who had replaced the elder Grace as CEO of the Boca Raton (Fla.) company in January, 1993. The Graces told Macauley that Bolduc had allegedly committed financial improprieties that involved steering Grace company business to his friends and to a company on whose board he served. The Graces' "displeasure with Bolduc came out in a really negative way," says Macauley, who agreed that the allegations had to be pursued. "I wanted to investigate more thoroughly," he says. With that secret meeting--which, along with the questions about Bolduc's financial dealings, has never been disclosed to the full board--the Graces began what appears to have been a concerted, 13-month campaign to push Bolduc from his post. Macauley says none of the allegations of sexual harassment that would eventually cost Bolduc his job were raised. Indeed, far from being the key issue behind Bolduc's resignation, as the company has maintained, a business week investigation reveals that by the time those allegations surfaced more than a year later, they were just the most convenient cover for a long-planned corporate execution.... ...Grace tapped the obscure management consultant as his chief aide in 1982, when Bolduc joined him at a federal cost-cutting group that became known as the Grace Commission. The next year, Bolduc joined W.R. Grace as a senior executive and became Grace's right-hand man. Bolduc made himself indispensable to the prickly tycoon, who always wore a loaded pistol strapped to his leg. He oversaw the release of the Grace Commission report in 1984, then helped Grace form Citizens Against Government Waste with columnist Jack Anderson and former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon. Bolduc also became a member of the Knights of Malta, a secretive, selective Catholic lay order that counted Grace as its leader in the U.S. (BW--May 1). In addition, sources close to the company say Bolduc began managing Grace's personal outside investments, including a West Virginia timber company and Boca Raton-based Brothers Gourmet Coffees Inc., which is now publicly traded. By 1992, Bolduc was Grace's president and chief operating officer. Grace, meanwhile, was diagnosed with cancer of the hip and began undergoing chemotherapy. After a decade of subservience, Bolduc began operating more independently, former executives say. That winter, he asked the board to name him CEO. Since Grace would remain chairman, the board acquiesced. Sources close to Grace say he was displeased but didn't argue against the move. In January, 1993, Bolduc became the first person outside the Grace family to run the company.... ....With praise from Wall Street rolling in, sources close to Bolduc say he failed to realize he couldn't afford to antagonize Grace, who still had the board's solid support. He shrugged off a warning from board member Macauley, who knew Bolduc risked pushing Grace past the breaking point. "This is Peter's board," Macauley says he cautioned Bolduc. "These are friends of his. All 20 of them." Indeed, many of Grace's directors were interconnected by a byzantine network of old family ties, lucrative consulting contracts, investment activities, and joint memberships on other boards. Grace commonly paid many of his directors consulting and other fees in addition to their director's compensation. Over the past decade, Grace's proxy statements show that directors, their companies, or their relatives were paid more than $60 million in additional funds. Despite repeated efforts by business week to contact them, most Grace directors declined to comment. Among Grace's board members, five had become particularly supportive of Peter Grace's efforts to oust Bolduc. This faction included Macauley, Virginia A. Kamsky, Charles H. Erhart Jr., Hampers, and Gordon J. Humphrey, a former U.S. Senator from New Hampshire. Macauley's charitable group, AmeriCares Foundation, counted Peter Grace as a founding board member and a daughter and granddaughter of Peter Grace as staffers. Kamsky's father had long been a top executive at Grace. Her consulting firm, Kamsky Associates Inc., collected $420,000 in fees from W.R. Grace in 1994 alone. Erhart was Peter Grace's second cousin. Humphrey drew consulting fees from the company as well and had long been associated with Peter Grace's various political activities. Humphrey also sat on the AmeriCares advisory committee and was an old friend of New Hampshire resident Hampers. A number of the directors, including Bolduc, also invested jointly with Peter Grace in ventures unrelated to the company, such as Brothers Gourmet Coffees and a private investment partnership, Catterton Group.... http://www.businessweek.com/archives/1995/b342256.arc.htm News: Analysis & Commentary BusinessWeek: May 1, 1995 THE KNIGHTS OF BUSINESS When W.R. Grace & Co. Chief Executive J.P. Bolduc sensed a few months ago that his strained relations with Chairman J. Peter Grace were putting his job in jeopardy, he took his case to a rather unorthodox authority: John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York. At Bolduc's request, the cardinal asked Grace to patch things up, hoping to avoid the scandals and the corporate upheaval that have since cost both men their jobs. Grace rebuffed the advice, say sources close to the company; Grace, Bolduc, and the cardinal won't comment. But why did O'Connor even attempt to referee a boardroom blowup at W.R. Grace, a publicly held chemicals giant? Grace, Bolduc, and three other company directors--former Fidelity mutual fund whiz Peter Lynch, former Borden CEO Eugene Sullivan, and former University of Notre Dame administrator James Frick--all are Knights of Malta, an elite, secretive, Catholic lay order that counts O'Connor as its spiritual leader in the U.S. The knights trace their history back some 900 years, to a band of warrior-monks who tended to the injured during the Crusades. Though the order has only about 2,600 U.S. members, several have played roles in recent high-profile corporate meltdowns. William J. Agee, ousted in February as CEO of Morrison Knudsen Corp., is a member, as are his wife, Mary Cunningham Agee, and at least two directors, Lynch and headhunter Gerard R. Roche. The boards of both Grace and Morrison Knudsen have come under fire for not living up to their duties to shareholders. At Morrison Knudsen, the board was widely criticized for allowing the company to deteriorate for years without replacing a poor-performing CEO. Grace's board was criticized as being too cozy with the Grace family, which long enjoyed rich company-provided perks. And when Bolduc resigned on Mar. 2, amid sexual-harassment allegations he denies, the board was criticized again for paying out $47 million in separation benefits. The issue in these situations is not religion; nor is it, per se, the Knights of Malta, a benevolent group devoted to charitable works. Rather, the question is whether such close ties among a network of influential executives have affected business decisions. "What does membership mean?" asks activist shareholder Robert A.G. Monks. "With very close bonds [as] Knights of Malta, the board as a group may have loyalty to themselves instead of the shareholders." "SELECT COMPANY." Prominent knights dot the business and political landscapes. Lee A. Iacocca, a knight for decades, is part of a bid by investor Kirk Kerkorian to take over Chrysler Corp., whose directors include at least one other knight--former Health, Education & Welfare Secretary Joseph A. Califano. Other knights include Domino's Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, Chase Manhattan CEO Thomas Labrecque, and public-relations maven Robert Dilenschneider, who counts W.R. Grace as a client. Well-known columnists Michael Novak and William F. Buckley Jr. are knights. So is Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), along with former Cabinet Secretaries William Simon and Alexander Haig. The knights also figure prominently on the board of Ingersoll-Rand Co., which recently agreed to acquire Clark Equipment Co. Peter Grace is a director emeritus at Ingersoll-Rand, and knights Theodore Black and Joseph Flannery serve on the board. Former Ingersoll-Rand CEO Thomas A. Holmes, while not a knight, is now the acting CEO at Grace. In Europe, it takes four generations of noble ancestry to become a knight. In the New World, though, the rules for admission are somewhat relaxed by necessity. Still, being inducted is a big deal. "You're joining select company," says Iacocca. Knights are asked to make regular pilgrimages to Lourdes, a holy site for Catholics, and to be active volunteers in charity work. Joining "had nothing to do with business," says recent inductee Richard Torrenzano, former spokesman for the New York Stock Exchange who now runs his own firm. "It was an opportunity to really do something substantial for people in need." EVEN COZIER? But to some critics, the links between knights reinforce complaints that boards are too frequently chummy, nonconfrontational clubs. "When board members have other allegiances [tying them] together, it may make it difficult for them to be objective in doing their job in an independent fashion," says Harvard business school Professor Jay W. Lorsch. The problem is not being a Knight of Malta, Lorsch notes. Rather, any common membership in an exclusive group can indicate personal ties between some directors and the CEO that should be publicly disclosed. "Public shareholders have the right to know what the connections on that board are," Lorsch says. Simon, for one, would like to see the knights become even more of a force: "There is a close bond when you meet knights in other parts of the U.S. [and] obviously a camaraderie. But [we're] not as close as I'd like to see." In the boardroom, that may not be desirable. Clearly, the ties that bind the knights weren't strong enough to prevent Bolduc or Agee from losing their jobs. But the camaraderie instilled by the Knights of Malta may have affected the speed and character of directors' decisions--and that may have cost their shareholders dearly.... http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/02/23/pulitzer-prize-winner-seymour-hersh-and-the-men-who-want-him-committed/Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh And The Men Who Want Him Committed By Matthew Phelan on Feb 23, 2011 ...So far, so good. In fact, Foreign Policy’s description of the Knights cribs heavily from the Order’s own benevolent self-description. Josh Keating’s ‘explainer’ piece accounts for the litany of paranoid theories surrounding them as merely a by-product of the Knights’ “secretive proceedings, unique political status, and association with the Crusades.” Former CIA Directors William Casey and John McCone, Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca, and GOP fixture Pat Buchanan have all been “alleged members,” he claims, “though none have ever acknowledged membership.” Keating’s use of ‘alleged’ here is curious, given that the membership of Reagan-era CIA Director Bill Casey in the Knights of Malta has been a fact widely reported in the press and never denied by Casey himself. Historian Joseph E. Persico, a former Republican speechwriter for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the co-author of Colin Powell’s autobiography, includes Casey’s membership in a routine list of charitable accomplishments, in his sympathetic biography Casey: from the OSS to the CIA (Penguin 1990). (Casey’s membership is asserted on page 105 of the paperback.) Years earlier, Casey was listed publicly as a member in both Mother Jones (07/1983) and The Washington Post (12/27/1984). The implications of Casey’s membership are even alluded to in Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, in which Casey’s deep Catholicism and the Catholic Church’s opposition to Nicaragua’s left-leaning Sandinista government are both recurring topics. In short: Casey’s membership has been undisputed for so long and across such a broad cross-section of the political spectrum that it raises serious questions about Foreign Policy’s standards for ‘facts’ and ‘allegations.’ (One might also reasonably ask Keating what difference it makes if an outed member of any secret society does not then publicly acknowledge membership. Isn’t that one of the major duties of being in a secret society?) In addition to Casey and McCone, the Knights of Malta also counted among their members former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton—a fortuitous alliance as Angleton led the postwar intelligence efforts to subvert Italy’s 1948 elections. His success partnering with organized crime, right-leaning former fascists and the Vatican not only marginalized Italy’s homegrown Communist Party, it also encouraged Congress in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. Conservative luminary and National Review founder William F. Buckley—who spent two years after college as a CIA ‘political action specialist’ in Mexico City—was also a Knight, as was none other than William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the CIA’s precursor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). From 1970 to 1981, France’s intelligence agency was also headed by a member of the Order, Alexandre de Marenches. De Marenches would go on to be a co-founder of the Saudi-funded private intelligence group the Safari Club—one of George H. W. Bush’s many end-runs around congressional oversight of the American intelligence establishment and the locus of many of the worst features of the mammoth BCCI scandal. So, while crackpot speculations about this particular Catholic order are legion, its ties to intelligence organizations in the U.S. and Western Europe are well-documented. It’s also perfectly understandable: with their unusual status as a recognized sovereign state without territory, the Knights of Malta enjoy full diplomatic rights in many countries—including the ability to bypass customs inspectors by secreting items across borders via “diplomatic pouch.” Sharing far right sympathies, the Roman Catholic Church and Cold War-era Western intelligence officials became natural allies, and the Knights of Malta became a natural conduit for their collaboration. With a lengthy, strategic partnership already forged in the name of anti-communism, a strengthening of this network in the name of the “War on Terror” ought to sound more predictable than paranoid to a student of U.S. foreign policy—particularly given the current pope’s record on Islam. With “medical missions in more than 120 countries,” as Keating points out, a teeming network of government spooks operating under the diplomatic protection afforded the Knights of Malta would certainly have plenty of breathing room to operate unnoticed. And yet, Keating instead positions the Order’s charitable work as evidence that the Knights have left their old military function behind—pointedly ignoring years of charitable work tied to U.S. strategic goals and covert activities during the heady days of the Reagan/Bush era. AmeriCares In Its Own Way Beginning in 1982, The Knights of Malta began an intensely collaborative partnership with the international aid organization AmeriCares—a charity group unique in its selective disaster relief to countries friendly to both U.S. business investment and foreign policy objectives. Literally billing itself as “The humanitarian arm of corporate America,” AmeriCares was founded and headed until 2002 by Robert Macauley: a college roommate of George H. W. Bush, a paper mill millionaire and a self-described (then self-denied) agent in the CIA’s WWII-era precursor, the OSS. Macauley was also the first non-Catholic to receive the coveted Cross of the Commander of the Order of Malta. A look at AmeriCares activity during this period gives the unavoidable impression that Macauley was running the charity, first and foremost, as the velvet glove to Reagan and Bush’s radical hardline approach to communism and indigenous left-wing political movements across the globe. In January 1990, AmeriCares and the German and Hungarian Knights of Malta supplied $1.4 million in supplies to pro-Western factions immediately following the collapse of Romania’s communist regime—proclaiming it “the first privately organized, large-scale relief effort following the revolution.” The partnership frequently worked with the infamous CIA front company Southern Air Transport. And during the Soviet-Afghanistan conflict in 1984, AmeriCares brazenly took sides, evacuating wounded members of the mujahideen to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington D.C. (One likely explanation: President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski—the man responsible for pairing the CIA with these future leaders of Al Qaeda—was an honorary chairman at AmeriCares.) Nowhere was the alliance between the Knights of Malta, AmeriCares and U.S. Intelligence more pervasive and troubling than in Central America. AmeriCares and the Order held off on relief to an economically crippled Panama in 1989 for six whole months, shuttling $2.5 million worth of medical supplies only after the conclusion of Bush Sr.’s lightning war against (former ally) Manuel Noriega. AmeriCares and the Knights declined to participate with the Red Cross in a 1988 hurricane relief effort in left-leaning Nicaragua, only to change on a dime two years later, once the Sandinista government fell. (The group sent 23 tons of medical supplies just three days after the election.) Prior to regime change, AmeriCares also provided one-sided medical aid to the Sandinistas’ bête noire, the right-wing, CIA-backed contras, through a program controlled by the Iran-Contra scandal’s walking nerve center, Oliver North. They even attempted to fly in a planeload of newsprint to the anti-Sandinista newspaper La Prensa. In Guatemala, AmeriCares and Knights of Malta joint activities were handled by the wealthy, right-wing paramilitary figure, Roberto Alejos Arzu, whose plantation had served as a training ground for the CIA’s bungled “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba. On occasion, AmeriCares and the Knights’ humanitarian work served not just as an adjunct to U.S. covert action but also as a welcome excuse for pharmaceutical companies to dump surplus product as charity, netting a high tax write-off. One massive AmeriCares vaccine shipment to the Philippines, where the Knights were supposed to handle distribution, was rejected by local governments as useless. AmeriCares’ sloppily labeled and overwhelming bulk medical shipments to Armenia were roundly criticized by a leading British medical journal, The Lancet. Overall, the group spent the 1980s and 90s in uncomfortable collaboration with the rest of the humanitarian aid community. Many relief groups expressed frustration with AmeriCares’ refusal to coordinate activities, so as to avoid squandered duplicated efforts. Many also expressed private fears of angering its powerful, Bush-connected founder. Doug Siglin, public policy director of the humanitarian community’s umbrella group, InterAction, cautiously summed up their unusual behavior this way: “[AmeriCares’] approach is not the same as other groups.” Seymour Hersh and the Silent Crusade... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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