Adding to the treasure trove of information came proof that Sindona, Calvi, and Marcinkus were members of the secret society; that Gelli had been instrumental in setting up branches of Banco Ambrosiano in Latin America; and that the Vatican's shell companies had been used by P2 as a means of providing arms to right-wing regimes and rebel armies. The Italian police officials were now aware that US political leaders, including the vice president, the secretary of state, and the US ambassador to Italy were intricately involved in the inner workings of the lodge.
All of these discoveries were made possible by John Paul II's failure to provide assistance to Sindona—a failure that led to the fake kidnapping, the visit to Arezzo, and Sindona's incarceration in a New York prison, where he was beginning to break out in song. What's worse, the jailed don issued a one hundred thousand dollar contract for the murder of John Kenney, who now served as the chief prosecutor in his extradition hearings.1
GROWING CONCERNS
By refusing to shore up the losses incurred by the IOR's shell companies, the pope had been remiss. The payments of the loans should have been made through the Holy See from the seemingly bottomless reservoir of black funds, but John Paul II intransigently refused to acknowledge such debts for fear that the common laity might come to learn that Holy Mother Church was a very worldly institution. This refusal resulted in a massive investigation by the Bank of Italy into the affairs of Calvi and Banco Ambrosiano and the revelation that hundreds of millions of dollars had been illegally exported out of Italy to the Vatican's strange-sounding companies. What, the investigators began to wonder, was the parochial purpose of the offshore firms that had received over $1.5 billion in “loans” from Ambrosiano? Surely, the companies, now gorged with cash, couldn't be engaged simply in selling rosary beads, scapulars, and garish backyard statuary to impoverished Latinos.
The probe, thanks to John Paul II's inaction, continued to gather steam with each passing day. And, if the investigation was not halted, it would lead to the office of Stibam International, which was located on Ambrosiano property, and the discovery of the massive drugs-for-arms deal that was underway to make the world safe for democracy.
THE RAID'S RESULTS
The raid at Arezzo produced another devastating result: the loss of power for the Christian Democrats in Italy. Since 1947, the CIA had bolstered the party with over $65 million in cash, making sure it would remain in control of the Italian government.2 But the names of three leading members of the cabinet of Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani were on the P2 list, along with the heads of Italy's military intelligence, commanders of the Guardia di Finanza, prominent journalists (including the editors and publishers of Corriere della Sera), powerful judicial officials, and leading military figures. The government of Forlani, the geostrategists within the CIA realized, could not weather the crisis and would collapse within the year, and the Agency would lose control of the financial police who were in charge of the Ambrosiano investigation.3 The military intelligence would no longer be able to plant evidence against the Italian Communists; judges would no longer issue the prescribed ruling; and journalists would no longer provide the proper spin to the daily news.
The overseers of Gladio, at the bidding of the elite members of the Trilateral Commission, had engineered the pope's election and catered to his every demand.4 They had directed covert action against the proponents of Liberation Theology. They had bolstered the Christian Democratic Party so that it would remain the dominant governing force in Italy. They had engaged in the arrest and execution of troublesome laymen and priests, including Bishop Óscar Romero. And they had shelled out more than $200 million in black funds to Solidarity.5 Elizabeth Wasiutynski, who ran the Solidarity office in Brussels, expressed wonder at the galactic sums of money flowing through her tiny office every day.6 John Paul II, in his naivety, simply assumed that such support was his proper due as the Vicar of Christ. Ingratitude, while grating, was permissible, but the pope's sudden decision to undermine the fundamental objective of Gladio by seeking a rapprochement with the Soviets was intolerable.
SECRET NEGOTIATIONS
In January 1981, John Paul II met with Wałęsa and an eight-strong Solidarity delegation, who sought his presence among the union workers to ward off any plans of Leonid Brezhnev for a Soviet invasion of Poland. The pope said that he could not provide such personal intervention. He could only provide spiritual solace to his fellow Poles during this time of turmoil. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a member of the delegation, recalled the meeting:
The Pope was speaking about Solidarity directly to some of its founding fathers but I felt he was also speaking beyond us to the wider world. He said: ‘Solidarity is a movement that is not only fighting against something but is also fighting for something.’ He made it clear that he saw Solidarity as a movement for peaceful change.7
Neither Mazowiecki nor Wałęsa nor any other delegation member realized that John Paul II was engaged in talks with the Kremlin to bring about a political rapprochement between the Soviet leaders and the union organizers.8 The pope felt uniquely qualified to forge an accord. As Archbishop of Krakow, he had dealt with Communist leaders on a pragmatic basis. He realized that the godless Soviets and devout Catholics could live together under the same roof. The vast majority of Poles espoused Marxist doctrine during the week and trooped off to Mass on Sunday morning. The pope understood this peculiar brand of Christian humanism.9 In December 1980, Soviet Central Committee chairman Vadim Zagladin made the pilgrimage to Vatican City where he secretly met with the Holy Father to come to an agreement over the labor problems in Poland.10
But an accord between Solidarity and the Kremlin forged by the Holy See would violate the claims and trust of the Reagan Administration, which spoke of the “evil empire” in order to spend $2.2 trillion on new weapons, including the Star Wars initiative, a fanciful technology supposed to vaporize any Soviet missiles approaching the United States from outer space.11 What's more, John Paul II's unwanted efforts would undermine the CIA's anticipated victory in the Cold War. The Soviets, after all, had stumbled into “their own Vietnam,” and the Agency was very busy shipping to Afghanistan not only missiles and weapons but also Tennessee mules uniquely capable of carrying the munitions to the mujahideen in the mountains.12
To make matters worse, the Holy Father was negotiating with the Kremlin about other matters, including an agreement for nuclear disarmament and recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization.13 He had entered a political arena, where his presence was neither warranted nor welcomed.
THE SOLIDARITY CRISIS
On March 28, 1981, Solidarity mounted the largest strike in the history of the Soviet Union in protest of the beating of four Polish workers by the communist security service. Between twelve and fourteen million Poles took part in the protest.14 A general strike to shut down all labor and commerce was set for March 30. The Soviets, in response, planned an invasion. The strikers, however, were not afraid. They believed a report from a French diplomat that the pope would leave Vatican City to stand with his people against the invaders.15
At the last moment, Wałęsa received a letter from John Paul II, who condemned the union's intransigence and asked for the strikers to return to work. The effects of this communication were immediate. The general strike was called off; Wałęsa toned down his inflammatory rhetoric; and Solidarity became greatly weakened as a force in Polish affairs.16 A few days after this decision was made, Wałęsa told interviewers:
The Pope wrote to us and the Primate, pleading for reason and reflection. Tomorrow we may achieve more, but we may not go to the brink. At the same time I know what is good today may turn out tomorrow to be bad. And the historians, when they come to judge may say: ‘But he was crazy, the authorities were bluffing, they were weak, their bark was worse than their bite, it would have been possible at long last to put the country straight, they could have won and they flunked it.’ They can judge me like that in 10 or 50 years. And we don't yet know if I was right, or those who
took the other view. In my opinion, the risk was too great.17
BAD TIMING
The pope's timing could not have been worse for Gladio. In Belgium, plans were being drawn for the Brabant Massacre, which would result in the killing of eight people, including an entire family. The same unit was training for an attack on a police station in the sleepy southern Belgian town of Vielsalm, where they would steal weapons in order to plant them among communist agitators.18 In Spain, the Gladio unit continued to hunt down and assassinate the leading members of the Basque separatist movement.19 In France, the secret army was preparing to murder Marseilles police inspector Jacques Massié and his entire family, since Massié had launched an investigation into drug trafficking and Gladio.20 In Germany, the Gladio unit under Heinz Lembke had launched a major terror attack in Munich. The weapons used in the attack came from a large arms dump in the Lüneburger Heide district.21 In Italy, the gladiators had just completed the Bologna bombing. But nowhere was Gladio at a more decisive stage than in Turkey.
TERROR IN TURKEY
In 1980, General Kenan Evren, the commander of the Counter-Guerrillas, a Gladio unit, had staged a coup that toppled the government of Bülent Ecevit and the Democratic Left Party. Upon hearing the news, President Jimmy Carter phoned Paul Henze, the CIA station chief in Ankara, and said, with great relief, “Your people have made the coup!” Henze confirmed with enthusiasm, “Yes, our boys have done it.” The takeover did not really come as a surprise to Carter. Before the coup, Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor, had said: “For Turkey, a military government would be the best solution.”22
Upon assuming power, Evren dissolved Turkey's parliament and suspended legislation governing the civil liberties and human rights of Turkish citizens, stating that such acts were needed to establish political stability.23 But the violence did not come to an end; it was transferred from the streets to the prisons. Thousands were tortured while incarcerated. Dozens were executed and scores remain missing.24
The coup was successful due to the intensive training the Gladio units, including the youth division of Counter-Guerrilla, known as the Grey Wolves, had received in sabotage, bombing, killing, torture, and rigging elections. This training was conducted at paramilitary centers set up by the CIA in Ankara, Bolu, Kayseri, Buca (near İzmir), Çanakkale, and Cyprus. Select officers were sent for advanced training at Fort Benning in Georgia and at the Ensenada Naval Base, near the Mexican border.25
WOLVES EAT DOGS
Throughout the 1970s, Counter-Guerrilla and the Grey Wolves were responsible for ongoing terror attacks in Turkey that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers, and politicians. At the time of the coup, there were seventeen hundred organizations of Grey Wolves throughout Turkey. Total membership reached two hundred thousand members and the movement had millions of admirers.
Although Evren expressed fear of the Wolves, the CIA unleashed them to fight the PKK—the Kurdistan Workers Party. Formed in 1978, the PKK sought to establish a Marxist-Leninist state in a swath of land encompassing eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria, which they called Kurdistan—“land of the Kurds.”26 The Wolves were also deployed against the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), a group dedicated to putting an end to NATO imperialism. Trained in the Beirut camps of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the ASALA was responsible for the assassination of at least thirty-six Turkish diplomats.27 Both groups represented an obstruction to Gladio's creation of a new world order.
The key to gaining control of northern Eurasia, according to Brzezinski and other members of the Trilateral Commission, remained Turkey, once the heart of the great Ottoman Empire. The central Asian republics—Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan—all shared a common Turkish heritage and a common Islamic faith. Although they remained part of the Soviet Union, the republics, in the eyes of geostrategists, could easily be united under a pan-Turkish banner.28
THE WOLVES HOWL
The pan-Turkish banner was unfurled by the Grey Wolves, who published their statements of belief in Bozkurt, their official newsletter: “Who are we? We are the Grey Wolves (Bozkurtcu). What is our ideology? The Turkism of the Grey Wolf (Bozkurt). What is the creed of the Bozkurtcu? We believe that the Turkish race and the Turkish nation are superior. What is the source of this superiority? The Turkish blood. Are the Bozkurtcu Pan Turks? Yes. It is the holy aim of the Bozkurt Turks to see that the Turkish nation grows to a nation of 65 million. What justification do you have for this? The Bozkurtcu have long declared their principles on this issue: You do not receive right, you get it yourself. War? Yes, war, if necessary. War is a great holy principle of nature. We are the sons of warriors. The Bozkurtcu believe that war, militarism, and heroism should receive the highest esteem and praise.”29 Believing this credo would unite central Asia, the Wolves became the favored lap dogs of the bureaucrats at Langley and untold billions were spent upon the pack.
Although the Turkish people in large numbers esteemed the Wolves, they remained blissfully unaware of Gladio, let alone that the right-wing youth group was a stay-behind unit. In 1978, Doğan Öz, a public prosecutor in Ankara, uncovered the existence of such units and issued the following report to President Ecevit:
There is such an organization. It includes people from security forces, such as the army and the secret service. During the first and second National Front governments, in particular, they largely adopted the state mechanisms to their own purposes. Their ultimate aim is to introduce a fascist system in Turkey, with all the associated organs.30
Within days of issuing this warning, Öz was gunned down and killed in front of his house. There were several witnesses, and Ibrahim Çiftçi, a leader of the Wolves, was arrested and sentenced to death. The Military Supreme Court immediately overturned the verdict and Ciftci was returned to his lair.31 A similar scenario took place several years later when Haluk Kırcı, a Wolf known as “Idi Amin,” was arrested for participating in the murder of Öz. He too was tried, convicted, and sentenced to execution seven times only to be “conditionally” released from Bursa Prison.32
REASONABLE EXPENSES
The CIA's financial support for the Wolves was also necessitated by the need to protect the Balkan route and the flow of heroin into the Anatolian plains from Afghanistan and Iran—said to be worth $3 million an hour.33 They also safeguarded the smuggling of weapons into the country. The scale of this smuggling may be discerned from the fact that the following illegal arms were confiscated in Turkey between 1980 and 1984: 638,000 revolvers; 4,000 submachine guns; 48,000 rifles; 7,000 machine guns; 26 rocket launchers; and 1 mortar.34
The Wolves were so integral to the drugs-for-arms enterprise that it became almost impossible to make a clear-cut distinction between this Gladio unit, the Turkish Mafia, and Turkey's National Intelligence Operation (MIT), a so-called unofficial arm of the CIA. All three organizations were interlocked in Ergenekon, a clandestine ultranationalist movement that operated as a shadow state.35
THE BASTARD SON
Ergenekon was the bastard son of Gladio—the illegitimate offspring of US intelligence and the babas—that would come to direct many of the critical events in Turkey and central Asia into the twenty-first century. In many ways, it represented the culmination of the dreams of Allen Dulles, William Donovan, Paul Helliwell, and James Jesus Angleton. Ergenekon enabled street thugs, assassins, and drug lords to act with impunity. Even if incarcerated, such criminals had little to fear. Ergenekon could arrange their escape; it could create false identities; it could arrange the transfer of large sums of cash. After its formation in 1978, Ergenekon, by controlling the heroin trade from the Golden Triangle, became worth more than 20 percent of Turkey's earned income.36
NUTURING CUBS
Throughout the 1970s, Henry P. Schardt, Duane (“Dewey) Clarridge, and other CIA operatives in Turkey allegedly had nurtured several of Abuzer
Uğurlu's Wolf cubs, including Abdullah Çatlı and Mehmet Ali Ağca.37 Çatlı, who became the vice-chairman of the Wolves, performed scores of high-profile assassinations, including the murder of seven left-wing activists in 1978. Working with the Agency, he became an agent provocateur in the 1980 coup.38
Ağca began his criminal career as a drug smuggler on the Balkan route. He rose to become one of Uğurlu's trusted couriers, making regular trips to deliver messages and payments to Henri Arsan at Stibam in Milan. Eventually, he became one of the baba's bodyguards and hit men, working with Çatlı and Oral Çelik.39
KILLING IPEKCI
On February 1, 1979, Ağca took part in the murder of Abdi İpekçi, the editor-in-chief of Milliyet, one of Turkey's leading daily newspapers. When taken into custody, Ağca quickly confessed, saying, “Yes, I shot and killed İpekçi. I was alone and I fired four or five times.” But there was a problem with his testimony. A total of thirteen spent cartridges were found at the scene of the crime.40
İpekçi was one of Turkey's most distinguished journalists and his assassination shocked the nation. Ağca received a life sentence and was incarcerated in an Istanbul prison. After serving six months, he “escaped” wearing an army uniform. There was, in fact, no flight. He simply strolled from the jail in August 1979, with Abdullah Çatlı as his escort.41 The babas needed him to get back to work.
THE IDEAL CANDIDATE
Three days after his escape, Ağca wrote a letter to Milliyet, which made it clear that he was the perfect choice for a hit on the Holy Father. He wrote:
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