Men in Black: The Hidden History of the Knights of Malta Part I

In all the annuals of conspiracy literature there is probably no other organization more misunderstood and misrepresented than the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), more commonly known as the Knights of Malta. The Maltese knights trace their origins back to the Order of the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, more commonly known simply as the Knights Hospitaller. For a time they were also known as the Knights of Cyprus and Rhodes and a host of other such variations. The Order has an almost totally unbroken lineage that stretches back to the eleventh century, hundreds of years before many of the more common bugaboos of conspiracy literature can be reliably dated.

As regular readers of this blog are no doubt well aware that I've touched on SMOM quite extensively in the past and as such, there will be some overlap with the data presented in previous series. For the sake of brevity I will probably not delve too much into the modern intrigues of SMOM or those of the countless splinter groups and mimic orders the Maltese knights have spawned over the years. Some of the more notorious, such as the Sovereign Order of Saint John (SOSJ), have already been chronicled elsewhere (see "Unspeakable Cults, Churches and Secret Societies" sidebar).

Still, this leaves me with a rather extensive amount of history to cover and as such, I shall mainly focus on the aspects of the Order that no doubt most interest my readers: namely, its ties to espionage and the occult. It is for this reason the series is entitled "Men in Black" (MIB).

The Men in Black are of course staples of UFO literature, but reports of them predate the modern era. Gray Baker, one of the earliest MIB chroniclers, noted:

"Dennis Stanley, in a chapter that appeared in The Truth About the Men in Black... believes that 'visits by unknown agents are seeded throughout UFO literature and newspaper accounts of flying saucer sightings. For many years, they were overlooked or not recognized for what they were. Today, just about every UFO investigator has encountered these Men in Black. The history of demonology, witchcraft, and the occult filled with similar incidents, leading one to speculate that the UFO phenomena are at least partly "psychic" in nature.

"UFO magazine editor Allen H. Greenfield has pointed out that there is usually a consistent reference associating the term 'Black Man' with the Devil, along with a mention of an Indian-like appearance supposedly attributed to the Devil by witches. Greenfield has noted that there was a concentration of such cases beginning at the time of the Elizabethan, post-Reformation era in the 1600s. Several occult volumes classify these beings into a group of their own and refer to them as Men in Black, Demons, Devils, Apparitions, or Black Men – the latter being the most commonly used. 

"The writings of arch which-hunter Cotton Mather mention a 'Black Man' associated with the Indians. And there was mention of a man dressed in black during the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts." 

(Men in Black: The Secret Terror, Gray Baker, pg.41)

Historically these Men in Black were viewed as tricksters and tempters, and often appeared in relation to witchcraft and ritual magic. But in modern times, with the advent of UFO lore, they have become suppressors par excellence. Numerous reports exist of them harassing UFO researchers, stealing evidence and so on in an effort to hide the truth from the public. This perception has seeped into pop culture with a vengeance, eventually inspiring a film series. The influence of the MIBs is felt beyond even UFO-related material, with The Matrix memorably using MIBs (dubbed "Agents") as suppressors of the Demiurgic nature of reality.

Curiously, the black grabbed Maltese knights may have been serving a similar function for centuries in regards to the occultic and arcane. With that in mind, let us leap head long into the Order's mysterious origins.

Murky Beginnings in the Holy Land

It is generally agreed that the Knights Hospitaller grew out of a hospital established in Jerusalem to treat Christian pilgrims via papal edict in the seventh century. Some four hundred years later, in the early eleventh century, it was destroyed by Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. During the 1020s, efforts were made to rebuild it with the project falling under the sway of the Benedictine order.

The stage was set for the appearance of the Knights Hospitaller when an alleged lay brother of the Benedictine order known only as Gerard was appointed to head the Hospital of Saint John at some time around 1080. "Blessed" Gerard is the mysterious first Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller. Virtually nothing is known about his life prior to his arrival in the Holy Land, though it has long been claimed that his birthplace was Amalfi.

Blessed Gerard

What is known is that he first rose to prominence during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099. Reportedly, his assistance proved to be invaluable to the Christian Crusaders and for reasons that went beyond medical care. 

"One of the ejected Christians was Blessed Gerard, master of the Amalfi hostel in the city, who immediately approached the Christian leaders to assist them with first hand knowledge of the layout and the defenses of Jerusalem. Needless to say, his intelligence was indeed most welcome. The crusading leaders ensured that their plans for the city's fall would encompass and indeed utilize Gerard's inside information."

(The Sword and the Green Cross, Max J. Ellul, pgs. 76-77)

Thus, the Order's proto history can be linked directly to espionage. This is a well the Order would return to time and again, as we shall see. But moving along.

Needless to say, the Crusader leaders did not forget Blessed Gerard's good work and his Hospital soon found itself the recipient of lavish donations. However it was not till Garard's successor, Raymond du Puy, that  the true Hospitaller order began to emerge. It was du Puy that transformed the Order's mission from simply administering medical care to pilgrims (apparently with some intelligence gathering) to actively guarding them. To this end, the famed Hospitaller knights arrived.

Not only did these endeavors receive Papal blessings in 1113, but recognition from one of the premier European powers of the era fairly early in the game. In 1185, 67 years after du Puy succeeded Blessed Gerard as Grand Master and militarized the Order, it received protection and a charter of privileges from Frederick Barbarossa, arguably the greatest Holy Roman Emperor of the Middle Ages. This would mark the beginning of a longstanding relationship between the Order and the Holy Roman Empire that continues in a fashion to this day. The Order would grow especially close to the Habsburg dynasty that ruled the Holy Roman Empire for well over four hundred years.

the imperial banner of the Holy Roman Empire

One such Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, granted the Knights Hospitaller Malta in 1530 after they lost their holdings in Rhodes. In 1607, the Grand Master was awarded the status of Reichsfurst, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The connection between the Order and the Habsburg dynasty continued well into the later half of the twentieth century, as was noted in my examination of the mysterious organization known as Le Cercle, which featured ample backing from both the Maltese knights and the Habsburgs (noted here and here). But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the Holy Lands the Order frequently rubbed shoulders with two darlings of conspiracy literature: the Knights Templar and the Nizari, more commonly referred to as the Assassins or Hashshashins. As to the latter, it would appear that the Hospitaller ad the Nizari established a relationship so close by the late thirteenth century that it reportedly bordered on heresy.

"... By 1228, the Syrian Nizaris had in fact become tributaries to the Hospitallers under the terms of a cooperative pact, while they continue to pay tribute to the Templars. It was also around this time that the Nizaris began to lend occasional support to the military orders in their campaigns against some of the Christian rulers of the Latin states; and at least the Hospitallers reciprocated by defending the Nazaris against the encroaching forces of Antioch and Tripoli. The Nizari involvement in the Hospitaller campaign of 1230 launched by Krak des Chevaliers against Bohemond IV of Antioch represented one such instance of cooperation.

"It was against this background that Bohemond V (1233-57), the next prince of Antioch and Raymond's brother, wrote Pope Gregory IX complaining that the Grand Master of the Hospitallers was then in league with the 'Assassins.' In response to this complaint, on 26 August 1236, Pope Gregory wrote to the Archbishop of Tyre and the bishops of Sidon and Beirut insisting that the Hospitalers should terminate any compromising connections with

the Assassins, the enemies of God and of the Christian name, who formerly dared to slay treacherously Raymond [son of Bohemond IV]... and many other magnates and Catholic princes, and are striving to overcome our faith by force... and what is far graver still the aforesaid Assassins, on account of the promise made by the after mentioned Master and brethren [of the Hospital] to support and protect them Christian attacks, and undertaken to pay them a certain sum of money every year. Therefore we have sent them orders writing to desist from defending these same Assassins... And so we now charge you that if the said Master and brethren should fail to observe this our command, you shall compel them to abandon this understanding by the censures of the Church, without right of appeal, after giving them due warning."

(The Assassin Legends, Farhad Daftary, pgs. 75-76)

the Nizari showing why they are forever remembered as "Assassins"

Over the years there has been much speculation over the Nizari, who became infamous throughout Christian and Islamic lands during the Middle Ages for their curious ability to assassinate heads of state (hence the reason why the word "assassin" derives from "Hashshashins"). Frequently these assassinations occurred in broad daylight and in crowded place where the assassin had no chance to escape after the deed was done. As such, it was common for a Nizari to die immediately after taking out their target.

The killers were reportedly so stoic in performing their deeds, despite their own certain death, that the methods employed to produce such dedicated killers has spurred much interest over the years. The CIA itself even referenced the legendary founder of the Assassins branch of the Nizari, Hassan-i-Sabbah, in an early assassination manual.

"... A 1952 draft version of the manual describes a man named Hasan-Dan-Sabah who used the drug hashish to 'induce motivation in his followers, who were assigned to carry out political and other murders, usually at the cost of their lives.' Hasan-Dan-Sabah's credo with his closest initiates and most skilled assassins was: 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted.' States the CIA's manual, 'Assassination is a term thought to be derived from "Hashish," a drug similar to marijuana.' It is certainly intriguing, for a number of reasons, that the Agency included this reference in its assassination manual. First and foremost is the nexus among Hasan-Dan-Sabah (also known as the Old Man of the Mountain), Hassan-I-Sabbah, an Iranian born in 1056 near modern day Tehran, and the Knights Templar, a legendary group that nearly all of the CIA's founders and earliest employees openly admired and sought to emulate."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pgs. 263-264)

Hassan-i-Sabbah

Contrary to popular belief, there is no real compelling evidence that Hassan-i-Sabbah used hashish to induce his followers into committing assassinations, or that the Nizari that followed him indulged in it. Most of these allegations likely derive from the reign of Hassan's great-grandson, Hassan II (the fourth lord of Alamut), in which standards had become much more lax since Hassan's day.

In point of fact, Hassan-i-Sabbah was known for sobriety and rigid discipline was imposed upon his sect. It was likely this that served as the cornerstone of the sect's brainwashing, namely relentless religious indoctrination combined with physical deprivation induced by long days and lack of proper nutrition. Such methods are still used to good effect by modern day cults such as the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon.

Still, it is curious that the CIA would look to the Nizari in the early 1950s for inspiration in conducting assassinations at the same time their numerous behavioral modification experiments were in fools swing. Even more curious is the fact that many key early members of the CIA such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton had had close dealings with the Knights of Malta, the direct descendants of the Medieval Knights Hospitaller, who were warned by the papacy for their close ties to the Nizari, the "enemies of God and the Christian name." As is often the case, many have continued to focus on the interest the early CIA had in the Knights Templar while ignoring the actual membership many key CIA officials had in the Maltese knights.

But back to the Holy Land. The Nizari were but one of several strange sects, along with the likes of the closely related Druze, the Yazidis, and the Mandaens, engaged in highly esoteric practices that the Hospitallers and other Crusaders encountered in the Holy Lands. The Sufi movement was also in its infancy at this time and its possible that remnants of the Harran Sabians could still be found in Syria at the same time the Knights Hospitaller were rubbing shoulders with the Nizari.

ruins of the legendary city of Harran

The Harran Sabians were a curious bunch. The Sabians were mentioned several times in the Quran as "peoples of the Book" and are now believed by many scholars to be derived from the Mandaens, Johnites whose belief system is closely related to Gnosticism. The Harran Sabians, by contrast, appear to have adopted the name Sabian to spare their pagan beliefs after the Islamic conquest. At the core of their belief system was a reverence for Hermes Trismegistus.

"Notable in this process of translation and research was the Sabian intellectual community of Baghdad, which thrived under an enlightened caliphate between the ninth and mid-tenth centuries AD. The Sabians had, in order to qualify for respect as 'people of the Book' as directed by the Koran, taken the philosophical writings of Hermes Trismegistus as their prophetic work, their holy book.

"The philosophy of Hermes was congenial to Baghdad's Muslim authorities because it represented the unity of God and the cosmos. Hermes was congenial to the so-called Sabians because they had originally come from Harran in northern Syria, where the lights of the cosmos were venerated; Harran had seven temples, each dedicated to a planet."

(The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians, Tobias Churton, pgs. 103-104)

I've digressed to discuss the Harran Sabians here because the Maltese knights appear to have developed quite an interest in alchemy several centuries later and it is generally felt that Western alchemy arose from Hermeticism. And the Harran Sabains were one of the key conduits to transfer Hermeticism from the ancient world to the Middle Ages. They were also reported to be early alchemists as well.

As such, there would have been no shortage of esoteric creeds ranging from Hermeticism, Gnosticism and Isma'ilism, among others, for the Crusading knights to absorb. As one of the wealthiest and most influential orders of the Crusader era, the Knights Hospitaller would have been especially well placed to study such creeds. But their potential involvement with these sects has been largely overshadowed by their far more famous rivals, the Knights Templar.

The Hospital and the Temple

The relationship between the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller has long been shrouded in controversy. The Hospitallers predated the Templars and there appears to have been an early influence. But the Templars took up arms before the Hospitallers, which no doubt led to the transformation of the latter into a full blown military order. Many accounts insist, however, on an ever growing rivalry between the two orders that appeared headed towards open conflict in the years leading up to the suppression of the Templars.

"As part of the planning of a new Crusade, the pope had indicated that he wanted to discuss the proposal that the Templars and the Hospitallers be merged into one order, an idea that had been coming up more more frequently in recent years. Just two years earlier a Dominican friar, Raymond Lull, had written a merger plan that had aroused much interest. He proposed that the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem and the Knights of the Temple of Solomon be combined into a single order to be called the Knights of Jerusalem, and that all of the rulers of Europe combine their Crusading forces under a single commander to be known as the Rex Bellator, the 'War King.' A few years earlier a French priest, Pierre de Bois, had submitted a written plan for the recuperation of the Holy Places called De Recuperatione Sanctae, in which he cited the efficiencies to be achieved by combining the military orders. 

"The pope had responded favorably to the merger concept. The Hospitalers had brought new hope for a crusade and new respect to themselves by the recent invasion of the island of Rhodes, and the pope leaned towards the appointment of Foulques de Villaret, Grand Master of the Hospitallers, as Grand Master of the proposed combination."

(Born in Blood, John J. Robinson, pg. 128) 

Pope Clement V, who oversaw the persecution of the Knights Templar

This proposed merger was effectively carried out with the suppression of the Knights Templar in 1312, of which the Knights Hospitaller were one of the chief benefactors of.

"That order has managed to escape any criticism in the matter of the Templar suppression, but apparently only because it had kept a low profile throughout, probably for the very good reason that its role and its rewards at been worked out in advance. It is well known that the papacy was in favor of the union of the Templars and Hospitallers and had already determined that Foulques de Villaret, master of the Hospitallers, would be the Grand Master of the combined orders. The Templars, at their headquarters in Cyprus, had heard of the serious intent to combine the orders and had taken the time to prepare a written rebuttal. The Hospitallers, at their own headquarters on the same island, must have received the same information, yet they prepared no rebuttal, written or verbal. In fact, de Villaret managed to stay away from the meeting in France altogether, with no recorded papal criticism for his absence. That was undoubtedly because his presence wasn't needed and because there was no point in chancing a confrontation between the two orders, especially since the pope was already dedicated to looking after the interests of the Hospitallers. Not only did the Hospitallers offer no objection to the concept of the merger, but they made no attempt whatever to speak up for their brother warrior-monks as they were arrested and tortured. They simply stayed out of it and bided their time, until Clement V, much to the anger of King Philip, declared that all of the confiscated Templar property would go to the Knights Hospitallers and that all released Templars could be taken into the Hospitaller order, thereby achieving de facto the union he had been planning all along, with full Hospitaller approval and cooperation. If one looks for motive, the Hospitaller order was the major beneficiary of the suppression of the Templars, as it probably been plan from the beginning. The pope and the Hospitallers together thwarted the aims of Philip of France, and there should be no doubt that the Hospitallers rank as one of the three assassins of the Order of the Temple." 

(Born in Blood, John J. Robinson, pgs. 272-273)

There's a lot to taken in here. A good starting point may be the little-remarked upon role the above-mentioned Ramon Llull played in the suppression of the Templars. A Spanish Franciscan monk, was one of the earliest and most vigorous supporters of merging the Templars and the Hospitallers. Llull had ventured to the island of Cyprus in 1299 to convert the infidel and appears to have been poisoned in 1302. He was ultimately saved by Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar who famously burned at the stake.

Jacques de Molay

Afterwards Llull reportedly pitched de Molay his merger plan, which the Grand Master was not favorably disposed towards. Despite de Molay having saved his life, Llull continued to promote his merger plan and went on to argue for the confiscation of Templar property by the Knights Hospitaller in the wake of the suppression of the former order. 

In addition to being a Franciscan with some sway in the Catholic hierarchy, Llull was also a mystic and early alchemist. One would expect him to be very interested in the ideas the Templars and the Hospitallers were being exposed to in the Holy Lands and to be sympathetic in general to the plight of the Templars. Not only had his life been saved by de Molay, but he was a fellow heretic operating within the frame work of the Catholic Church. And yet he backed the Hospitallers.

Ramon Llull

Was there something about the Knights of the Hospital that intrigued Llull beyond their ability to continue the Crusades? Unfortunately, this is a question little explored. But moving along.

The above reference Robinson makes to the "three assassins of the Order of Temple" is a reference to Masonic myths surrounding the Biblical figure of Hiram Abiff, whom the Masons claim as their founder. In Masonic lore Hiram is murdered by three unworthy craftsmen (some times referred to as "Ruffians") while working on the Temple of Solomon. Robinson speculated that these "Ruffians" (referred to as Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum) were stand-ins for the suppression of the Templar order, with the three unworthy craftsmen representing King Philip of France, Pope Clement V and the Knights Hospitaller.

This is in stark contrast to much conspiracy literature, which tends to depict the Knights of Malta as lackeys of the Freemasons. There is little evidence of this, however. The Scottish Rite degree named after the Knights of Malta appears to reflect Robinson's take on the Maltese knights as assassins (while still showing a certain admiration for the Order). And famed nineteenth century Freemason Albert Mackey, in his encyclopedia of Masonry, proclaimed the Maltese knights to be longstanding foes of the Masons:

"As regards Freemasonry it may be said in general that the Knights were antipathetic to it, or to any such teachings or truths as Masons held at any period. In particular, the Order was twice used in attempts to destroy Freemasonry, and it therefore has at one time or another belong to that long chapter of the history of the Fraternity which is called Anti Masonry.

"It has been an open and confessed military arm of the Vatican before the Pope issued their first Bull against Freemasonry in 1738, and it was ordered to oppose Freemasonry wherever it could. In about 1800 it was instrumental in driving Freemasonry out of Russia. When Metternich after 1815 and the Congress of Vienna became the dictator of Europe he made the complete climination of the Fraternity one of his open and principal aims; and to a large extent he succeeded for some years, and may be described as the most powerful Anti-Mason of the nineteenth century.

"The Knights of Malta were one of the agencies employed by him..."

(Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, Vol. 3, Albert Mackey, pg. 56)

In recent years the linkage between the Knights of Malta and Freemasonry has been revived by no less than Pope Francis himself, who has demanded that the Maltese knights purge Freemasons from their ranks.

Pope Francis

The presence of Freemasons among the Maltese knights is deceptive, however. In modern times this connection was laid bare in the scandal surrounding Propaganda Due (P2), the infamous Italian Masonic lodge linked to Operation Gladio and a host of terror attacks in Italy and beyond. As was noted before here, the upper echelon of P2 was almost totally dominated by the Maltese knights and the closely related Opus Dei. In other words, reactionary Catholic orders were using Masonic lodges (as there were other Propaganda lodges across Europe) as cover for a host of illegal and immoral activities. Some have suggested that this use of "unclean hands" was to further distance the Maltese knights from the deeds they were engaged in.

This is compelling, but I suspect there was another motive: to give yet another black eye to a longstanding foe of the Order. P2 has provided much fodder to conspiracy researchers obsessed with Masons (virtually all of them, in other words) who in turn almost totally ignore the dominating influence the Maltese knights had over P2. In many ways, it would be difficult for a reactionary Catholic order to come up with a more perfect cover.

***

And with that I shall wrap things up for now with the following thoughts: the Knights of Malta emerged during the Crusades and spent nearly two centuries roaming the Holy Lands. There they likely encountered a host of esoteric ideologies from the likes of the Nizari, Mandeans, Yazidis, Druze and possibly even the Sabians and Sufis. It has been long suspected that their fellow Crusading military order the Knights Templar adopted some type of esoteric doctrine derived from some combination of these groups.

The Templar are then suppressed and persecuted in Europe, with the Knights Hospitaller ending up with their properties, members and possibly whatever occultic doctrines the Templars subscribed too. Certainly this more than echoes modern encounters of Men in Black who perform a similar function in regards to UFO revelations.

For the Knights of Malta, this was only the beginning. In the years to come they would encounter even more strange doctrines that they potentially embraced internally while suppressing among the general public. On the whole this is in rather stark contrast to speculative theories of the Knights Templar. If the Templars did in fact inspire Freemasonry, they ultimately made a host of esoteric doctrines accessible to the public at large through their lodges. The Knights of Malta, by contrast, preferred to keep this knowledge hidden.

17 Over Blackfriars -Updated 6/21/15

On the night of June 17th your humble researcher sat down to his laptop after a particularly miserable  day only to be confronted by the early reports concerning the shooting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church located in Charleston, South Carolina. I was immediately confronted with a sickness in the pit of stomach that took several moments to clear. Upon regaining my senses, a peculiar thought popped into my mind: "The intellectual masturbation linking this shooting to Freemasonry is going to be off the chain, especially among the proponents of 'twilight language'."

While it took a full day for the posts to start appear, I can now at least say I was not disappointed in this regard. The remarks of famed "revisionist historian" (and likely fascist sympathizer) Michael A. Hoffman II were especially predictable. The longtime foe of the Judaic-Masonic-Communist conspiracy noted:

"Dylan Storm Roof was shown in the national media with a Confederate States of America license plate on June 18, the day which began with the breaking news that the US Supreme Court had upheld the ban on Confederate license plates by the state of Texas (as far as those plates being issued by the state itself). Coincidence? 

"Roof’s heinous killings occurred on the 33rd degree of north parallel latitude in Charleston, South Carolina, headquarters of the most powerful masonic body in the world, the Scottish Rite. Coincidence?

"Other news media have reported that Mr. Roof has in the past taken the psychotropic drug Xanax. (He was facing felony drug charges prior to the massacre he perpetrated). Was he drugged during his shooting spree? The Establishment media don't ask, and they also don’t ask why he wasn’t tested for drugs or alcohol being present in his system when he was apprehended. Many other youths who initiated massacres (Kip Kinkle and the Columbine High killers for example) were under the influence of a hypnotic pharmaceutical drug when they committed their crimes.

"The New York Times issued a graph yesterday purporting to show that Black people are the chief victims of hate crimes in the United States, but these statistics are cooked. It is very difficult to have black on white crime officially listed as a hate crime. Such crimes are too often dismissed as non-racial, random violence...

"The politically correct issues here are racism and gun control, and the suppressed issues are mind control pharmaceuticals and Manchurian candidates..."

Hoffman

Hoffman also makes heavy use of a Texas Freemasonic license plate in this post (as well as comments left on Loren Coleman's Twilight Language blog), seemingly implying that the access Texans have to Masonic license plates and not those sporting the stars and bars of the Confederacy somehow played somehow contributed to the shooter's rampage.

Other such revelations made by Hoffman is his erroneous claim that the shooter Dylan Storm Roof was abusing Xanax. In point of fact, Roof had been arrested for illegal possession of Suboxone back on February 28th, a point even the neo-con propaganda outlet known as World Net Daily got right. As a former psychology major and an individual who has spent his fair share of time around pill poppers (a largely unavoidable state of affairs for someone living in Florida), I have long been concerned about the pharmaceutical drugging of America. Hence, this is easily the most compelling point Hoffman makes, especially after recent studies have linked opioid-based painkiller use to higher rates of violence.

Suboxone, however, is designed to dull certain opioid receptor modulators, and thus has effects somewhat different that conventional opioid painkillers such as Xanax. This researcher has had extensive dealings with individuals whom have used Suboxone and did note the kind of radical shifts in behavior and mood that regular painkillers or anti-anxiety meds can produce. In point of fact, Suboxone seems to ease the motivations of its users. Major weight gain, for instance, is a side effect I have personally noticed and have seen reported online. Hence, I am not especially convinced that the drug itself could have been a catalyst (though it certainly could have contributed to the shooter's diseased mind). But obviously I am hardly an authority on such things (though neither are any number of online conspiracy theorists who will play up the prescription drug angle).

Racism has of course been widely downplayed by Hoffman and many conservative commentators despite the fact that the shooting took place a historically significant African American church, all the victims were black, and that the shooter published photos of himself on Facebook sporting the banners of Apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia on a black jacket as well as another one in which he is seen sitting on the hood of car with a Confederate flag on its license plate. Charleston, South Carolina may be a highly important city to Freemasonry, but it is also the city that played host to the first battle of the Civil War with the First Battle of Fort Sumter in 1861. And of course, the shooter has apparently acknowledged that the shooting was driven by a desire to spark a race war.

Mr. Roof sporting his Rhodesia and Apartheid-era South Africa patches while dressed in black

But clearly the Masonic conspiracy, and especially the fact that Masonic licenses plates are still available in Texas while the Confederate flag has been banned, is the main catalyst. Just keep telling yourself that.

Meanwhile, Alex Jones, the proverbial Venerable Grand Master of conspiratorial right, has remarked that he does not detect evidence of a false flag operation. Raw Story reports:

"Jones said on Thursday that the shooting, which resulted in the deaths of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, did not feel like a 'false flag' attack to him because of the lack of what he called 'talking points' from the media. He also said that the suspect, 21-year-old Dylan Roof, 'looks like the textbook-case lunatic.' "

Jones

In point of fact, the shooting certainly bares traces of a textbook Operation Gladio attack. That Jones would not point this out is hardly surprising, however. Despite ample evidence of the program's existence, Operation Gladio is rarely addressed by the conspiratorial right in America. There is a reason for this, as shall be noted in a moment. But first, a bit about Gladio:

"Operation Gladio was first made public in August 1990, when then-Prime Minister Giulio Anderotti admitted its existence to the Italian Parliamentary Committee on Terrorism. To this day much about Gladio remains mysterious. It seems that planning for the operation began to take place in 1951... Gladio was incorporated into Office 'R' of SIFAR in 1956. On paper, Gladio was a NATO-backed 'Stay Behind' operation: Any Soviet attack on Italy would encounter a pre-established resistance network, a militarily-trained underground with access to secret arms caches hidden across the country. To implement Gladio, SIFAR established a sabotage training school in Sardinia in 1954. Technically, Gladio was made up of two principal branches: 40 S/B (Stay Behind) units trained in guerrilla warfare, and five rapid deployment units with names like Alpine Star, Sea Star, Rhododendron, and Azalea. American-supplied weapons, including hand grenades, sniper rifles, and explosives were also buried in 139 hiding spots.

"The Italian government claimed initially that Gladio was part of a general agreement with NATO. NATO, however, officially denied any involvement. Revelations that Gladio-type organizations existed in non-NATO nations like Austria, Spain, and Switzerland further eroded the NATO cover story. Gladio really seems to have been what its name means: a double-edged sword to be used against the Soviets and any element inside Italy, from either left or the right, that might try to take Italy out of NATO. Gladio also served as the backdrop for the 'strategy of tension,' which repeatedly destabilized Italian politics with bombings and other terror attacks. Popular fear of terrorism, from either the 'left' or 'right,' could then be used to justify a suspension of constitutional law or even, in a worst-case scenario, a military-backed Pinochet-like 'white coup' to insure Italy's continued allegiance to the West."

(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan. pg. 332)

a patch used by Italian Gladio "Gladiators"

A few points need to be clarified. While Gladio was in theory an equal opportunity operation that targeted the Left and Right as the climate dictated, the Italian deep state went out of its way to implicate leftists in terror plots while down playing the threat from right wing extremists. In point of fact, neo-fascist organizations such as Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale were routinely recruited to both infiltrate the Left and carry out terror attacks to implicate them. This researcher has already chronicled such developments in his examination of the kidnap and murder of Italian states Aldo Moro (addressed here, here and here) as well the role neo-fascist played in the terror bombings (noted before here) that rocked Italy during the period known as the "Years of Lead."

Moro during his alleged kidnapping by the Communist Red Brigades

Nor was Gladio restricted to Italy or even Western Europe. It was in fact an international operation with Gladio being simply the Italian component. In South America it was known as Operation Condor while a similar operation was conducted during the Vietnam War known as the Phoenix Program. Amongst all these operations a reoccurring pattern emerges: acts of terrorism in various forms that are blamed on the Left and used to shock the population at large.

For years the international umbrella organization that directed Gladio was known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The WACL brought together a curious assortment of US military and intelligence officers, international drug and arms traffickers, various Third World dictators and religious extremists of various stripes and the inevitable unreconstructed Nazi war criminals. Much more on the WACL and its links to terrorism can be found here. Its ties to Gladio have been addressed in brief here.

The WACL also had its tendrils in the United States. As was noted before here, it had ties to the Aryan Nations in the 1980s through a Canadian affiliate. During this time the Aryan Nations was playing host to the terror outfit known as The Order as well Frazier Glen Miller, who was recently arrested for shooting up a Jewish synagogue. The Aryan Nations was also in contact with Colonel William Porter Gale, a "former" military intelligence officer who created the Posse Comitatus, which much of the modern Patriot movement derives its ideology from. More information on Gale can be found here while the links to the Order and the Aryan Nations to a broader, US-backed international fascist network, can be found here.

the emblem of The Order

Thus, Jones and his ilk do well to not address Gladio as a compelling argument can be made that the neo-Nazi and Patriot movements in these United States are essentially the US component of this network.

That being said, there is no evidence as yet that Dylan Storm Roof had ties to this broader network. But consider: Stormfront, the premier US neo-Nazi website, has been linked to over 100 murders in its day. The forums of this website attract a host of angry and disillusioned young men, more than few already pre-disposed to violence. A well trained psychological warfare specialists for the FBI, CIA or military intelligence (most likely) would find any number of compelling subjects herein that could be pushed over the edge without much prodding. Their work would be even easier if some of these young men were pill poppers, an increasingly regular character trait amongst the kids.

the logo of Stormfront

While I have no evidence whatever that this is what happened, it is at least as plausible as any number of other theories making the rounds.

Before wrapping up, I can't resist in throwing in my own twist in on the Masonic conspiracy theories making the rounds concerning Roof. Easily the most credible evidence of some type of modern Masonic conspiracy emerged in the form of Italy's Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic lodge. As I've noted before in an ongoing series, P2 was linked extensively to terrorism and drug and arms trafficking in both Italy and abroad. But as noted before, it was hardly a regular or mainline Masonic lodge. A thorough examination of the actual forces behind P2 will soon be forth coming on this blog.

Easily the most famous event linked to P2 was the bizarre, ritualistic death of financier Roberto Calvi. Here are a few details:

"... The last hours of Calvi's life were spent in the Chelsea Cloisters, frantically working the telephone. The by-now ex-chairman of Banco Ambrosiano was clearly facing an imminent deadline. Sometime during the evening of the 17th June, he stepped out in his usual expensive top had and favorite hand-made loafers. He was next seen suspended from an orange rope strung from builders' scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge. As even the uninitiated generally know, orange is the keynote colour the Masonic Craft. Calvi's body was loaded with ballast, about forty kilos of stones stuffed into his pockets and bizarrely, his trouser flies. His calves' leather wallet contained £10,000 in sterling, Swiss francs, and Italian lira notes. His expensive though unwaterproofed Swiss watch stopped at just before 2 a.m., the point at which it was dipped in the water by the rising river tide. After 2:30 am, the level of the water would  not have been sufficiently high to reach Calvi 's wrist.

"That suicide would demand amazing agility for an overweight sixty-two-year-old man suffering from poor eyesight and pronounced vertigo. In a statement of doubtless unintended irony, Superintendent John White of the London river police declared: 'The long and the short of it is that we do not know how he came to be at the end of that rope.' The scene of the crime was drenched with mystical significance. The bridge lies in the area of London where the black-capped Dominican friars establish themselves in the mid-1300s. Black is the colour most often associated with fascism."

(Gladio: NATO'S Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 232-233)

Calvi's dead body

Black is course the color Dylan Storm Roof has been shown wearing most commonly since the shooting emerged. Indeed, he seems to have spent a fair amount of his time in the months leading up to the shooting dressed entirely in black. But of course, this may not have been a reference to fascism.

The date of the church shooting is more curious, however: June 17, 2015. Roberto Calvi was murdered on June 17, 1982. This is thirty-three years to the day of Calvi's murder. The number thirty-three is of course highly significant in Freemasonry in part because thirty-three is the highest grade in the Scottish Rite, which has its headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina.

But P2 was not part of the Scottish rite and hardly a mainline Masonic lodge. They referred to themselves as "Black Friars" in their meetings and the implications of this are quite eye opening. This blog will soon consider these implications at length. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 6/21/15:

Reports are now coming in that Roof's ideology was heavily influenced by the website for the Council of Conservative Citizens. This far right organization is part of the peculiar legacy of Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, a military intelligence officer hailing from a phenomenally wealthy New England whom dedicated a considerable amount of his fortune advancing a far right nationalist agenda. Much more information can be found on the Colonel and the host of intrigues he was involved in here.

the Colonel

Propaganda Due: A Strange and Terrible Journey Into the Heart of the Deep State Part VI

Welcome to the sixth installment in my examination of the Propaganda Due Masonic lodge, commonly referred to as P2. For years the lodge has been surrounded by rumors of dark intrigues ranging from terror attacks, drug trafficking and political assassinations. With the first installment of this series I considered the background of the lodge's Venerable Grand Master, former Blackshirt and SS man Licio Gelli.

With the second installment I outlined the lodge's links to a series of bombings that rocked Italy during a period known as the "Years of Lead" as well as P2's ties to the neo-fascist terror network known as Aginter Press as well as the notorious World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The WACL was a global network that brought together a bizarre assortment of US military and intelligence officers, religious extremists of various stripes, international drug and arms traffickers, assorted Third World dictators and neo-fascist terrorists along with the inevitable unreconstructed Nazi war criminals. This researcher has considered the WACL at great length before here.

With the third installment I began to chronicle P2's links to what is commonly referred to as the "Great Vatican banking scandal" or the "Banco Ambrosiano affair" by focusing in on its three key players: Bishop Paul Marcinkus and financiers Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi. Sindona nd Calvi were both P2 members while Marcinkus was suspected of being an initiate. It is known that Sindona also had extensive dealings with the Mafia and such ties likely existed with Marcinkus and especially Calvi.

Marcinkus (top), Sindona (middle) and Calvi (bottom)

During part four I outlined the likely catalyst of the Vatican banking scandal, namely the arming of the Somoza in Nicaragua and the later funds made available for arms to various groups in Central America that became known as the Contras. With the fifth and most recent installment I considered the involvement of the Rothschild banking dynasty in the scandal, a series of bizarre robberies involving militant neo-fascist and Nazi groups typically involving Brinks armored cars and the even more bizarre, ritualistic death of Roberto Calvi.

Having thus pretty thoroughly addressed the Vatican banking scandal, it is now time to move along to the various prominent political assassinations P2 is suspected of playing a role in. I would like to begin with the kidnapping and eventual murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro.

The Moro assassination has often been described as Italy's Kennedy assassination and not without reason. Moro was abducted on March 16, 1978 shortly after the Christian Democrat luminary agreed to the "Historic Compromise," a move that would have allowed members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into a coalition government. This move was strongly opposed by the United States inevitably on the basis of the domino theory: namely, a democratically elected Communist Party in Western Europe would have led to another and another until all of NATO was red.

Many would perceive this as a major boon for Communism. Thus, it has long baffled researchers as to why Moro would be abducted by the Red Brigades, a revolutionary Marxist outfit, at this juncture. Or at least that is the official version of Moro's kidnapping and murder. But as I noted extensively before here, here and here, there is ample reason to believe the US intelligence community and P2 were the actual puppetmasters behind the Moro kidnapping. Interestingly, the notorious LSD baron Ronald Hadley Stark likely played a key role in this operation.

Stark

As I've already dealt with Moro's kidnapping and murder at length in that series, I would like to focus here on the role P2 played in the affair. For starters, its interesting to note that the Moro Crisis Committee, the body appointed by the Italian government to handle Moro's kidnapping, was stacked with P2 members.

"In practice, the search for Moro's prison was co-ordinated by the Interior Ministry and a special crisis committee, many of whose members belonged to or later joined P2, the right-wing masonic lodge which opposed Moro's policy toward the PCI. Among the eight P2 members appointed to the committee were the heads of the domestic and military intelligence services, the head of the finance police and the regional commander of the carabinieri. Given their political orientation it would not be entirely surprising if they did less than their utmost to secure Moro's release. The minutes of the committee's meeting on 17 March give an idea of the quality of their contribution to the task at hand. SISMI Director Giuseppe Santovito informed the group that he believed two Japanese and a West German had participated in the Via Fani attack. He also drew the committee's attention to the imminent arrival of a ship from Cyprus at the port of Marina di Grosseto. There is no evidence whatever that his contribution had any grounding in fact. Santovito continued to provide the committee with misleading information, reporting the next day on the need for increased patrols on the Yugoslav border.

"On 24 October 1977, Parliament had passed a bill reforming the secret services, replacing the Defensive Information Service (SID) with the Military Security Information Service (SISMI) and the domestic Democratic Security Information Service (SISDE). This reorganization would be used as an excuse to argue that the security services were 'without eyes and without ears' at the time of the Moro kidnap. The reform effectively led to the demolition of the most reliable anti-terrorism organization and to the appointment of P2 members at the top of the new agencies..."

 (Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pg. 225)

General Giuseppe Santovito, one of the more notorious P2 initiates in the Italian secret services

During investigations following Moro's murder Licio Gelli's name came up repeatedly.

"There are a number of testimonies that appear to implicate Gelli in the Moro affair. One of them was found among notes confiscated from the home of Gelli's secretary, Nara Lazzerini, who worked for the P2 boss in Rome between 1976 and 1981. The documents described a meeting with Gelli on the day of Moro's kidnapping, news which comes over the radio as Lazzerini is driven by taxi from the station to Gelli's headquarters in the Hotel Excelsior, on the prestigious Via Veneto. Lazzerini wants to 'freshen up' and is accompanied by Gelli to his bedroom. 'While I am in the bedroom to tidy myself up, Licio receives two people in the sitting room whom I'm unable to see, but I hear them say: "The major part is over. Now we'll see the reactions." ' Questioned by a magistrate from Bologna, Lazzerini was confident that she had not misheard. 'The phrase struck with me and I noted it down that same morning in the hotel, taking advantage of the fact that Gelli had left,' she said, adding that she had received frequent death threats in the years following Gelli's flight from Italy. The P2 Commission found her evidence altogether too embarrassing and turned down a proposal that she should be called as a witness. Christian Democrat commissioner Bernardo D'Arezzo, in particular, opposed the suggestion on the grounds of the witness's morality: Lazzerini had been Gelli's mistress. This high moral stand contrasts with the remarkable patience shown by the commission in the face of the lies and evasions of secret service chiefs who had belonged to Gelli's lodge.

"A memorandum sent in 1982 to the office of the Florence public prosecutor by Federico Federici, a Florentine time lawyer and P2 member, makes a similar claim. In it Federici said he had been told that Gelli reacted to the news of the kidnap with the words: 'We have finally resolved the Moro problem.' Federici, who died of a heart attack in 1988 while he was defense lawyer for a number of suspects in the Bologna bomb trial, is by no means a reliable witness. He was, however, close enough to Gelli to have access to sensitive information and it is interesting that both he and Lazzerini should have drawn attention to a possible link between the Master of P2 and the Moro affair. As we shall see later, Gelli himself found it expedient to do likewise, making it clear to the journalist Marcelo Coppetti that he was privy to inside knowledge about the kidnap.

"Gelli may have been dropping a hint to this effect when he granted an interview to the Corriere della Sera newspaper in 1980 (five October). The interviewer was a fellow lodge member, Maurizio Costanzo, and the article appeared as part of a series on 'The Discreet Charm of Secret Power.' 'What is democracy for you?' Costanzo  asked half-way through the interview. 'I'll tell you about a meeting I had with Moro when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs,' Gelli replied. 'He said to me: "You mustn't hurry things. Democracy is like a saucepan of beans: to be good they must cook very, very slowly." I interrupted him, saying: "Be careful that the beans don't boil dry, minister, because then you might burn them." ' Reading between the lines, one may perhaps discern the message: I warned Moro and we all know what happened to him."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 228-229)

Gelli

It is interesting to note that at the time of this interview Gelli's colleague and fellow P2 member Roberto Calvi was attempting to purchase the Rizzoli publishing empire (addressed in parts four and five), which owned Corriere della Sera. So yes, these remarks were made among very favorable company. But continuing with Wilan:

"The Moro Commission raised the issue of P2's role during the Moro kidnap in its majority report. It highlighted the presence of lodge members at the head of the security services and the fact that the organization represented political and material interests that would have been severely threatened if Moro's policy of accommodation with the PCI have been implemented. The commission said there was no proof that the failures and omissions of the security apparatus during the fifty-five days of Moro's imprisonment were deliberate. But it added that very grave examples of negligence had been recorded, 'which appear to be inexplicable unless they were motivated by a desire not to see a positive conclusion to the drama or by a substantial lack of interest in what was happening.' The commission also declared that it did not exclude the possibility of direct P2 involvement in the activities of the Red Brigades, given the shared objectives of 'those who seek an authoritarian change and those who prepare the ground for it with  blind and irresponsible violence.' The commission concluded that it should not rush to grave conclusions in the absence of a serious investigation of the subject. The P2 Commission failed to carry the investigation forward, giving the distinct impression that many of the commissioners considered the matter was simply too delicate to tackle..."

(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 230-231)

Moro

But enough on Moro and P2's links. Researchers looking for a more in depth examination of Moro's kidnapping and murder are again pointed towards my series on the notorious LSD baron Ronald Stark. For the time being let us move along to P2's involvement in the long rumored murder of Pope John Paul I.

The death of John Paul I (Albino Luciani) has long puzzled Vatican watchers as did much about his papacy. He was a surprise choice to succeed Paul VI in August of 1978 and then promptly died thirty-three days later in September. Largely unknown outside of Italy, official accounts of John Paul I typically depict him as a frail and sickly moderate with a strong conservative streak. But both John Paul's health and politics have been strongly contested.

Many close friends and associated have described his health as exceptional for a 65 year old man. John Paul was an early advocate of exercise and seems to have been committed to a healthy existence in era in which such things were not widely accepted. And if his health was as poor as official Vatican accounts often make it out to be, it begs the question: why elect a man to the papacy with practically both feet in the grave already? Certainly popes have been elected in failing health before as part of internal Curia politics but not one seemingly poised to buy the farm at any given moment. The process of electing a pope can be both complex and costly --something the Curia would likely want to buy themselves at least a few years reprieve from before undergoing the whole ordeal all over again.

John Paul I

And then there are John Paul's politics. Compelling evidence has emerged in recent years indicating that this pope was politically quite liberal. His father had been either a socialist or a full blown Communist and Pope John Paul I seems to have been greatly influenced by both his family and his impoverished childhood in the Veneto region of Northern Italy. Pope John Paul embraced liberation theology and is alleged to have favored a less militant stance against the Soviet Union and the Communist world. He had forged close ties with Metropolitan Nikodim, one of the highest officials in the Russian Orthodox Church. Nikodim has long been alleged to have been a KGB agent. He would die suddenly in Rome in 1978 while attending the installation of John Paul as the new pope at the ripe old age of 48. Needless to say, much suspicion surrounds his death as well.

John Paul greeting Metropolitan Nikodim

Thus, at roughly the same time Aldo Moro was pursuing his "Historic Comprise" with the PCI (Italian Communist Party) a new pope much more favorably disposed to Moscow was about to take a seat upon the Chair of Saint Peter. And, "incidentally," both men would be dead before the year had ended. And also, no doubt "incidentally," the specter of P2 would lurk in the background of both deaths. But first, let us consider the night of John Paul's death, an event that has been clouded in mystery for decades now.

"During that night, after only thirty-three days in office, John Paul I died. The scrambling that followed for his succession bore the markings of a minutely prepared coup d'etat. However much one might wish to believe otherwise, the surprise Pope in whom so many had placed such hope was unlikely to have died from natural causes and – in spite of all that has been written and said on the subject – the indications are strong that a cover-up of the real cause of death was engineered by a Vatican clique convinced it was acting to protect the Church and her sacred teachings.

"The facts surrounding the discovery of the Pope's death are bizarre to say the least. They prove that the Vatican did not, in the first instance, tell the truth and may not still be telling the truth. The first fact it attempted to hide was that Sister Vincenza found the Pope dead at 5 a.m. when she brought him his thermos of coffee. She said he was sitting upright in bed, his lips twisted. She noticed that he was clutching a sheaf of papers. An unsettled dispute persists as to the nature these papers, for they have disappeared. One explanation is that certain members of the Curia  did not want the outside world to know that a power struggle was in progress inside the Vatican... The papers allegedly detailed the changes that Luciani had intended to decree that same day. But according to Vatican news bulletins, he was holding a copy of The Imitation of Christ.

"Rumours concerning the missing papers and other anomalies surrounding John Paul I's death continued to surface during the next six years until finally, in June 1984 –  intended to dispense with the rumours once and for all – an unsigned memorandum was prepared for a conference of bishops that brushed aside The Imitation of Christ story as a pure invention of the press!

"This account was just as untrue as the first, produced in an attempt to rewrite history. The same memorandum suggested that the papers seem by Sister Vncenza were nothing more than the Pope's notes for his sermon at the Wednesday audience and the Angelus talk on the following Sunday. But the report neglected to mention that the original Vatican communiqué claimed the Pope had been found by Father John Magee, one of the two papal secretaries.

"Sister Vincenza in fact check called Father Magee. His first reaction had been to summon Cardinal Villot from his apartment two floors below. Villot appeared in the papal bedroom a little after 5 a.m. and as camerlingo immediately took charge. According to others present, he did a quick tour of the room, stopping at the Pope's bedside table and at his desk. After his initial visit to the bedroom, a small bottle of Effortil, a liquid medicine used to alleviate low blood pressure, that John Paul kept on his bedside table, went missing. The sheaf of notes also disappeared. No autopsy was requested, no forensic tests were undertaken.

"The Vatican doctor, Renato Buzzonetti, arrived in the bedroom at 6 a.m. and made a brief examination of the body. Buzzonetti informed Villot  that the cause of death was infarto miocardico acuto – a massive heart attack – and he estimated the time of death at about 11 .p.m. on the previous evening. Without further ado, Villot called for the rapid embalming of the body.

"Almost immediately the other secretary, Father Diego Lorenzi, who had been Luciani's  aide in Venice, telephone the Pope's personal physician, Antonio Da Ros, who had looked after Luciani for more than twenty years in Venice. 'He was shocked. Stunned. Unable to believe it... he said he would come to Rome immediately,' Lorenzi reported. Da Ros had been in Rome two weeks before to examine his patient, and remarked, 'Non sta bene, ma benone'  – 'You're not well, but very well.' But when Da Ros arrived later that same day, he was not allowed near the body...

"... the Vatican information department began creating the legend of the Pope's ill health. But if the Pope's health was so frail, why were no medicines – other than Effortil  – to be found in the papal apartments? And whatever happened to that missing bottle of Effortil? Why was Cardinal Villot never questioned about it? Also not to be forgotten, Edoardo Luciani, the dead pope's brother, was on record as stating that Albino had no history of heart trouble.

"The controversy surrounding Papa Luciani's death hung over the pre-Conclave General Congregations. As camerlingo,Villot found himself under attack by the more progressive cardinals. He admitted that the Vatican Press Office had given misleading information. The dissident cardinals wanted to know why no autopsy have been performed, nor an official death certificate issued, and they pushed for a collegial statement on the Pope's death. The Conservatives reject the idea.

"No more reactionary figure existed in the Roman Curia than Cardinal Silvio Oddi... The Italian authorities had demanded an autopsy, but Oddi claimed that he had already carried out an investigation for the College of Cardinals and found no evidence of foul play. Therefore he opposed an autopsy on the grounds that it would create a precedent, which was untrue. Autopsies have been carried out before. Indeed, Oddi was quoted as saying: 'The College of Cardinals will not examine the possibility of another inquiry at all, and will not accept any supervision from anyone, and will not even discuss the subject... We know... In all certainty that the death of John Paul I was due to the fact that his heart stopped beating from perfectly natural causes.'

"Then on 12 October 1978,  as the second Conclave opened, Father Panciroli, the Vatican spokesman, announced that after all a death certificate had been signed by Professor Mario Fontana and Dr Renato Buzzonetti. The certificate was not, however, a public document. With good reason. It contained a mere five typewritten lines affirming in Italian that the Pope had died in the Apostolic Palace at 23:00 on 28 September 1978 by morte improvvisa – da infarto miocardico acuto. Such a document would not have passed muster in jurisdictions where developed notions of civil law existed."

(Their Kingdom Come, Robert Hutchison, pgs. 253-256)

The conspiratorial right has long latched on to the fact that John Paul I died thirty-three days into his reign as evidence of a grand Masonic conspiracy. Thirty-three is of course the highest degree in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and long attributed much occult significance (a brief discussion of this can be found here). But there is indeed compelling evidence that P2, which was hardly a a conventional Masonic lodge by any stretch of the imagination and largely outside the purview of mainline Freemasonry, played a role in the Pope's death.

David Yallop, the British researcher who first offered a scholarly critique of the official Vatican line, is convinced that Pope John Paul I was murdered by Licio Gelli and his P2 associates to protect Roberto Calvi's fancy accounting involving the Vatican bank (discussed in parts four and five of this series).

"Before Luciani's murder, Calvi associates in P2 had demonstrated their capacity to kill with a variety of appalling bomb outrages. Their ability to kill specific subject was demonstrated with the murder of Vittorio Occorsio. After the death of the Pope, murder and mayhem began to match the tempo of the gigantic thefts in which Calvi was indulging. The fact that Emilio Alessandrini, Mino Pecorelli, Giorgio Ambrosoli, Antonio Varisco and Boris Giuliano are all dead, is the most telling evidence of the kind of company that Roberto Calvi kept. The fact that the Governor of the Bank of Italy and one of his most trusted colleagues could be falsely charged, that Sarcinelli was forced to endure two weeks of imprisonment, that for years men who knew the truth were frightened to act, is a demonstration of the terrifying power at the command of Calvi:  power that came from many sources including Licio Gelli, Grand Master of P2.

"Licio Gelli was the Puppet Master with a few thousand strings from which to select. Strings appear to have led everywhere: to the heart of the Vatican, to the White House, to the presidential palaces in a wide range of countries. It was Gelli who gave his singular device to senior P2 members that they should always carry a fatal dose of digitalis. A lethal dose will cause, to use a lay term, a heart attack. In a subsequent examination by a doctor that is merely external, will confirm that death has been caused by a myocardial infraction. The drug is odorless and is impossible to trace unless an autopsy is performed.

"Why did Licio Gelli use such a strange codename, 'Luciani', whenever he called his P2 paymaster on the special hotline? Was mere mention of the name enough to send the millions upon millions flowing from Calvi into Gelli's various bank accounts?

"According to the members of Calvi's family, he attributed all his problems to 'the priests.' He made it clear which priest he had in mind – those in the Vatican. In September 1978 one priest in particular represented to Roberto Calvi the greatest threat with which he had ever been confronted. Calvi was with Gelli... in South America in August 1978, planning new schemes. Can anyone really believe that Gelli...  would merely shrugged their shoulders when Calvi told them that Albino Luciani was about to take a course of action that would mean the party was over?

"The murder of a magistrate or a judge or a policeman could be effected openly. The death would remain a mystery or be blamed on one of the many terrorist organizations then rampaging throughout Italy. But the murder of a Pope to cover up what was ultimately a billion dollar theft would have to be achieved by stealth. It would have to arouse as little concern as possible. For the murder to achieve its aim, the death would have to appear natural.

"The cost, no matter how high, in bribes, contracts, fees or commissions, was irrelevant. If the object of the Pope's death was to protect and sustain Roberto Calvi while he continued to steal millions, then there was a virtual well truth to draw upon. The problem of deputy chairman Roberto Rosone, which Calvi discussed at great length with fellow Mason Carboni, was intended to be resolved with the contract murder of Rosone. He lived, but Carboni still paid 530,000 dollars, the day after the attack, to the surviving gangster Ernesto Diotavelli. Half a million for a deputy chairman. How much for a Pope? When you have an entire bank at your disposal?...

"This book has already recorded many instances of the power and influence that Gelli  has exerted. At the time of Albino Luciani's death in September 1978, Licio Gelli, to all practical purposes, ran Italy. His access to any person or any place within the Vatican City State was unrivaled. The fact that he was in South America at the time of Luciani's  death is no alibi in the conventional legal sense. Sindona was enjoying an early evening dry Martini in New York at the precise moment that Giorgio Ambrosoli was murdered by William Arico in Milan..."

(In God's Name, David Yallop, pgs. 296-298)

Gelli

In this researcher's estimation Yallop only misses the mark by a narrow margin. Calvi's financial intrigues likely did not begin in earnest until after Pope John Paul I's death, when John Paul II was sitting upon the throne of Saint Peter. It is much more likely, as noted above, that Pope John Paul's lax attitude concerning Communism and support for liberation theology was deemed a major threat to powerful forces without the US and Italian deep states and that these forces had him promptly removed and replaced with Pope who was more agreeable (and a certain attempted assassination that shall be addressed in the next installment surely quashed any flights of fancy John Paul II may have been considering).

Researcher Lucien Gregoire, whose Murder in the Vatican,is possibly the most thorough examination of John Paul I's death, recounted an interesting conversation he had with Bishop Paul Marcinkus in 2005. Macinkus is of course not the most reliable source as he was a possible member of P2 and involved with Calvi in his intrigues. None the less, the bishop had few qualms about implicating P2.

"He began, 'It makes sense members of P2 who were maintenance workers in the Vatican concealed themselves in the valet's quarters and waited for the early hours of the morning. The only other rooms not occupied at night were the dining room, kitchen and salon – often visited into the wee hours. Lorenzi happened to be sleeping in the secretary's office which otherwise would have been vacant.'

" 'Yes, I told him, 'it was a godsend the valet's brother happened to have died a few days before John Paul's death.'

" 'If P2 was involved,' he corrected me, 'it was no godsend.'

" 'They would have had to vacate one of the quarters. The valet's rooms were annexed the Pope's rooms were best suited. This does not necessarily mean Casaroli and Caprio or other men-of-the-cloth could not have been sharing the valet's rooms that night; just that they would have been fools to have committed the deed itself.

"Regardless, the day following Marcinkus' call, I searched the library microfilm for the obituary of the valet's brother.

"The thirty-year-old had fallen from a sixth floor balcony in Arezzo south of Florence. Unwitnessed, police could not determine if it was an accident or suicide. By providential coincidence, the Grand Master of P2, Licio Gelli, had his villa in Arezzo."

(Murder in the Vatican, Lucien Gregoire, pg. 287)

an aged Marcinkus

Could P2 have used maintenance workers to have reached the papal apartments? Certainly the numbers of individuals with access was severely limited. But P2 had acquired extensive access to the Vatican by this point, had ample motive to assassinate pope John Paul I and likely would be receiving vigorous prompting for this project from their US backers. Given that all of this was unfolding shortly after Moro's kidnapping and murder, of which ample indications of US involvement have emerged, it is hardly a stretch to speculate that similar plans could have been made for a Pope who would resist the US line at a time when the nation was still reeling from its defeat in Vietnam and the following loss of international prestige.

A democratically elected Communist regime in Italy, one of the core nations of NATO, would have been an even more devastating blow. Given what was at stake, it is not hard to see the US taking steps to remove potential threats such as Aldo Moro and Pope John Paul I. And P2, with its extensive ties to US intelligence on the one hand, and organized crime on the other, would have been an idea candidate to carry out such operations.

And with that I shall wrap things up for now. With the next installment I shall move along to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. Stay tuned till then dear reader.