As US forces advanced through the Wagnerian ruins of the Third Reich in May 1945, they stumbled upon research facility after facility that indicated that the Germans had technologies far beyond their own.
This was especially the case in aeronautics and rocket science—which in itself led to the conspiracy theory that the Nazis of the Thule Society had hitched up with aliens—and so the US deemed it advantageous to “relocate” leading German scientists and technicians across the Atlantic, where their expertise could be put to work on behalf of Uncle Sam. Or, as Major-General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of the US Air Force in Europe put it:
Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research. If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited.
Importing the German boffins Stateside also denied their use to the perfidious Russians, who were quickly going from being friends to foes. (Actually, America also wanted to deny the technology to the British, who remained so-called “friends”.) There was a little local difficulty, however, in that some of the German scientists were full-blown members of the SS, even war criminals—and Truman had expressly ordered that anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism” would be excluded from a welcome in the Land of the Free. To circumvent this tiresome legal and moral objection, in 1946 the US War Department began Project Paperclip, named after the technique of identifying useful German personnel by putting a paperclip on their file; sought-after German scientists had their records cleansed of mentions of war crimes/SS and Nazi membership or were given wholly false records to enable their entry into the US. During Paperclip more than 1,600 German technicians and scientists were hired in, many of them beginning their new lives at the military research facility of Fort Bliss, Texas.
Werner von Braun, the V-2 rocket man, was one of the most prominent SS members whitewashed and recycled by the Truman government. He ended up playing a leading role in NASA, masterminding many of the moonshots. A number of those processed through Paperclip had partaken in medical “experiments” in Dachau and other Nazi concentration/death camps; Hubertus Strughold, later called “the father of space medicine” and designer of Nasa’s on-board life-support system, had headed a team at Dachau and Auschwitz which had frozen inmates and put them in low-pressure chambers to study the effects. Paperclip hireling Arthur Rudolph was hardly higher on the moral scale; another die-hard Nazi, he was chief operations director at Nordhausen, where 20,000 slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles.
So dense was the Paperclip paper trail cover-up that many of the SS/Nazi hirelings were never properly identified thereafter.
Project Paperclip. Or how the US establishment learned to stop worrying about morals and love the bomb.
Clarence G. Lasby,
PROPAGANDA DUE (P2)
During a raid on the Arezzo villa of Italian businessman Licio Gelli in March 1981 for evidence of his possible link to the Vatican Bank’s laundering of Mafia money police turned up something far more sinister about Signor Gelli than dealings with dodgy money. He was the leader of the banned Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due (Propagation Two). And Propaganda Due (P2) was scheming to take over Italy.
A list of 962 P2 conspirators found in Gelli’s safe included three cabinet ministers, forty MPs, the heads of the Army and Navy, police chiefs, intelligence officers, fourteen judges, numerous industrialists (among them one Silvio Berlusconi) and Victor Emmanuel, Prince of Naples. Shortly afterwards, police found under the false bottom in Gelli’s daughter’s briefcase a copy of a document entitled
The origins of P2 date back to 1877 when a Masonic Lodge was chartered by the Grand Orient of Italy as Propaganda Due; a century later the Lodge had become so infiltrated by the
Born in 1919, Gelli was a Mussolini-era fascist who had fought with the SS on the Eastern Front before fleeing to South America, where he was a financial backer of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. Returning to Italy, he became a Mason in 1963 before taking over P2 in 1966. Under his tutelage P2 expanded nearly a hundredfold to 1,000 members, including branches—all funded by Mafia lira—in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Raul Lastiri, Argentina’s president during part of the “Dirty War” in the seventies was a P2 member, So was Jose Lopez Rega, the Social Welfare minister under Peron.
The Mafia wasn’t P2’s only financial provider. According to P2 supergrass Mino Pecorelli, the Lodge was funded by the CIA, and Gelli himself was a CIA officer. (Pecorelli was later found shot dead.) A 1990 article in the London
Two of Gelli’s principal sidekicks were Michele “The Shark” Sindora, a banker in the clutches of the Mafia, and Roberto Calvi, chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank. Sindora and Calvi were duly hired by another P2 member Archbishop Marcinkus, head of the Vatican bank, to manage the Vatican’s money; when police raided Gelli’s safe in Arezzo they found evidence that Calvi had created hundreds of fictitious bank accounts to launder Mafia drug money. An ensuing audit of Banco Ambriosiano, Italy’s largest bank, revealed that 1.3 billion dollars was missing from the bank’s account. Calvi fled to London. On 18 June 1982, Calvi was found hanging at the end of a rope under Blackfriar’s Bridge, his pockets stuffed with bricks. It is widely assumed that “God’s Banker” was “suicided” by either P2 or the Mafia because he intended to name P2 members involved in corruption. The London coroner’s conclusion was “cause of death” unknown; an Italian court, meanwhile, formally indicted Gelli for conspiring to murder Roberto Calvi.
Calvi is just one of the few associated with the P2 scandal to have died a mysterious death or disappeared off the face of the Earth. Sindona died in a Milan prison cell complaining he had been poisoned. Gelli vanished from a Swiss prison where he was being held for extradition, and has never been seen since.
Some investigators charge P2 with the mysterious death of John Paul I. After announcing on 28 September 1978 that he intended to remove Archbishop Marcinkus from the Vatican bank, John Paul I was found dead next morning.
P2 was formally banned by the Italian authorities in 1981. Its “work” might be said to linger on. Just before he disappeared into thin air, Gelli told
Luigi DiFonzo,
