Nexus - 0705 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Gelli had numerous powerful friends, including former Italian to death around 100,000 Jews, mostly women and children, by dictator Benito Mussolini. He was also a personal friend of pumping exhaust fumes into the back of an hermetically sealed Argentina's General Juan Perén, and his close associations with van. Argentina would later lead him to be a key figure in shipping a Another important link between the Vatican and SS escape supply of French Exocet missiles to sink British Task Force ships routes was Friedrich Schwendt, who was also the man in charge during the Falklands War. In this endeavour he worked closely of laundering forged SS banknotes. Before WWII, Schwendt was with Ronald R. Rewald, founder of the Hawaiian-based financial an international arms dealer who shipped weapons to China and institution Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong—a Russia. He was also the investment manager of the family fortune CIA proprietary company and forerunner of the CIA-owned of his first wife's aunt, Baroness Gemmingen-Guttenberg, of the Nugan Hand Bank. vastly wealthy Argentina-based Bunge family, of the massive The involvement of a CIA front company engaged in financing transnational firm Bunge Corporation that is also known as "the and providing weapons to be used against a key American ally Octopus". (Britain) with the wholehearted public support of the US This title is interesting, for it may connect to the so-called Government may seem somewhat duplicitous. However, in the "Octopus" that ties in to murdered freelance journalist Danny world of "black ops", "friends" and "enemies" are interchangeable Casolaro, who at the time of his death in 1991 was investigating a words and working both sides of the fence is accepted practice. number of high-level illegalities including the theft by the In terms of hierarchy, Gelli reported to Umberto Ortolani, Department of Justice of a "tracking" computer program known as described by one writer as "the great Vatican door-opener" and "PROMIS". Casolaro was writing a book about what he had dis- "secret chamberlain of the papal household". covered. He originally titled it "Behold, A Pale In addition to his P2 connections, Ortolani is Horse", but later modified it to "The Octopus". also a member of the inner council of the In a draft page of the book, he described this Knights of Malta and has military intelligence The foregoing group as an "international cabal whose free- connections that date back to WWII. lance services covered parochial political connections lend intrigue, espionage, sophisticated weapon tech- THE OCTOPUS AND THE SPIDER themselves to a nologies that included biotoxins, drug traffick- There are numerous other masonic groups . ing, money laundering and murder-for-hire". and secret societies in Europe which move in larger picture of Casolaro further stated that this cabal was and out of focus at various times. Almost all global, interlocking, "spawned thirty years ago in the shadow of the of them are Catholic in nature. . . . Cold War". One of these is the Priory of Sion (Prieuré right-wing fascist After Casolaro's death, journalist Carol de Sion)—a secretive order that first came to groupings that Marshall (a pen name) followed up his investi- public attention via the best-selling book, The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, pub- lished in 1982. The Priory is closely con- nected with the alleged treasure of Solomon which is said to have found its way to the small village of Rennes-le- Chateau in southwestern France, where it is said to have been buried by the Knights Templars, forerunners of the Knights of Malta. The Priory, whose headquarters were gation and wrote an (as yet) unpublished manuscript, titled "The Last Circle". In this, Marshall describes her investigation of Robert Booth Nichols—one of the cen- tral figures of the Octopus, whom she describes as being part of a secretive group known as "the Chosen Ones" and who wore "skull and crossbones rings and shared a common interest, if you could call it that, in the old German SS occultism, its tribal and inner circle rites". located at Annemasse, near Geneva on During her continuing investigation into the Swiss border, are styled as the the Octopus, Marshall found that the SS "guardians" of Solomon's treasure, but, most interestingly, they occultism outlined above was connected to Lt. Col. Michael A. have numerous subterranean connections to fascists and those on — Aquino, a former US Green Beret who is a self-professed Satanist the far right that date back to WWII. Meanwhile, it has to be and who held a Top Secret security clearance for his work in mili- noted in passing that Annemasse is said to have been the centre tary intelligence and on classified psychological warfare matters. operate in the shadowland of deniable military and intelligence operations... for the anti-communist Stay Behind units of Operation Gladio. Aquino officiated at SS black-magic ceremonies held at If this is not intriguing enough, another fact stretches coinci- Wewelsburg, the castle once used by SS chief Heinrich Himmler dence to the point of bursting. In recent years, the Priory of Sion to create an SS order of Teutonic knights based on the Knights has moved its headquarters to Barcelona and now boasts a Templars. Spanish Grand Master. This, one could conclude, is to enable it The foregoing connections lend themselves to a larger picture to be physically closer to the historical heartland of Opus Dei, of global, interlocking, right-wing fascist groupings that operate which was founded in Spain in 1928. in the shadowland of deniable military and intelligence operations If Otto Skorzeny was a leading force in running the SS associated with profit during WWII and, later, throughout the Brotherhood escape routes—Der Spinne, the Spider—after the Cold War. war, and SS General Karl Wolff was the lead negotiator with OSS In this respect, it is intriguing to note that the Priory of Sion, one Swiss Chief, Allen Dulles, then another Nazi, Walter Rauff, head _ of the foremost Catholic groups under discussion, uses as a symbol of the Milan SD, was one of two liaisons with the Vatican something that is variously described as an octopus or a spider involved in the establishment of the Nazi-smuggling system. (araignée) on its documents. The Priory's association with the Earlier in his career, Rauff had overseen the development of the octopus could easily relate to the so-called Octopus described Nazis' mobile gas vans, known as "Black Ravens", which gassed above, where organised crime works hand in glove with operatives The foregoing connections lend larger picture of global, interlocking, right-wing fascist groupings that operate in the shadowland of and intelligence operations... NEXUS - 29 themselves to a deniable military AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2000