Morales assassins: Bolivia gang "fought in Balkans"

[Magda Hassan]

And get hubby to translate the Hungarian.

Magda - as and when your husband is available, the following looks very interesting:

http://www.hirszerzo.hu/cikk.kommandos_a...05152.html

Will do. It is interesting that the article claims him as Hungarian born.

[Magda Hassan]

Újabb találgatás: Rózsa-Flores volt a vezető, egy horvát üzletember a szervező

Hírszerző összeállítás
2009-04-18 15:24
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Még mindig nincs hivatalos tájékoztatás az állítólagos Morales elnök elleni merényletet szervező Rózsa-Flores és társai meggyilkolásáról. A hatóságok hallgatása a találgatások terjedéséhez vezetett: egy szenátor szerint egy horvát-bolíviai üzletember az elnök elleni összeesküvés szervezője. Rózsa-Flores Eduardót eltemették.
hirdetés

Kapcsolódó cikkek

• Rózsa Florest eltemették, mi lesz a többi holttesttel?
  
• Terrorista volt Rózsa-Flores? - Folyik a vita
  

Még mindig nincs hivatalos tájékoztatás arról, hogy mi történt pontosan csütörtök hajnalban, amikor négy emberre - köztük Rózsa-Flores Eduardóra, a magyar-származású íróra - kommandósok támadtak, és kettőt közülük agyonlőttek Santa Cruz városban egy szállodában.

De Bolíviában sem értik, hogy pontosan mi történt. Mint a helyi La Red hírrádió ügyeletes szerkesztője elmondta, az ügyben továbbra is sok a zavaros tényező, és kétségek is felmerültek az ügy természetét illetően is.

A hatóságok hallgatása a találgatások terjedéséhez vezetett: van már olyan nyilatkozat kormánypárti politikus részéről, hogy a horvát usztasák tevékenykednek régóta Bolíviában. Ennek a kijelentésnek az lehet az oka, hogy Zágrábban már közölték, hogy a csoport tagjai közül ketten - Rózsa-Flores Eduardo és Mario Tadic - horvát állampolgársággal is rendelkeztek.

Egy üzletember tervelte ki az akciót?

A legfrissebb nyilatkozat szerint egy horvát-bolíviai üzletember az elnök elleni összeesküvés szervezője. A Bolíviában kormányzó Mozgalom a Szocializmusért egy szenátora, Ricardo Diaz szenátor szerint a Santa Cruzban élő Branko Marinkovic állt "a terrorista összeesküvés" mögött, ő volt a szervezkedés értelmi szerzője - jelentette szombaton a horvát HINA hírügynökség a Los Tiempos című bolíviai lapra hivatkozva.

Tóásó Elődöt és Mario Tadicot kihallgatták a hatóságok (Fotó: MTI/EPA)

Morales elnök egyébként már tavaly azzal vádolt több Santa Cruz-i politikust és üzletembert, hogy erőszakos tüntetéseket szerveztek ellene, igyekeztek destabilizálni kormányát. Név szerint is említette Marinkovicot.

Víctor Hugo Escóbar, a bolíviai rendőrség országos parancsnoka pedig azt mondta a bolíviai állami televízióban, hogy a magyar-bolíviai Rózsa-Flores Eduardo volt "a Morales meggyilkolását tervező banda" vezetője. Rózsa-Flores egy Bolíviában élő unokatestvére határozottan tagadta, hogy rokona terrorista lett volna, azt mondta, hogy filmkészítés céljából látogatott Santa Cruzba - jelentette a bolíviai média.

Eltemették Rózsa-Florest

Mindeközben pénteken Rózsa-Flores Eduardó holttestét a családtagjai kikérték és eltemették a férfi szülővárosában, Santa Cruz fő temetőjében. A Hírszerző egyik olvasója, aki 1991-ben Horvátországban Rózsa-Flores alatt szolgált, úgy emlékezett vissza levelében: "nehéz helyzetekben, sok ember életét megmentette, de sokszor saját emberei életét feleslegesen kockáztatta".

Mint szerkesztőségünkhöz eljuttatott levelében írta, csapatában az állandó idegfeszültség és belső ellentétek voltak jellemzők. "Voltak gyanús ügyei, de ezek nem voltak igazán mérvadóak. Nem volt drogcsempész vagy terrorista."
Az ír és a "román-magyar" fiatalember maradványaival a halottasház illetékesei egyelőre várnak, hogy az ügyükben illetékes diplomaták a helyszínre érkezzenek, mert meg akarják vizsgálni azokat.

Tadicot és Tóásót - utóbbi védelmét a Jeruzsálemi Szent János Szuverén Máltai Lovagrend Autonóm Perjelségek Szövetsége látja el a jövőben - pedig védőik jelenlétében kihallgatták, de a hatóságok nem erősítették meg azt az értesülést, miszerint bevallották volna, hogy ők hajtották végre a szerdai merényletet Julio Terrazas bíboros háza ellen. Ezt a támadást ugyanis a helyi hatóságok szintén ennek a csoportnak tulajdonítják.

Kommandósok csaptak le

A bolíviai rendőrfőnök még csütörtökön jelentette be, hogy két magyart és egy bolíviait lelőttek az Evo Morales bolíviai elnök ellen tervezett merénylet felszámolása közben. A Caracasban tartózkodó Evo Morales elnök úgy számolt be az esetről: még előző nap adott utasítást a külföldi zsoldosok és bűntársaik letartóztatására, és csütörtökön kapta azt a tájékoztatást, hogy Santa Cruz városban, egy szállóban félórás lövöldözés volt.

A nyomozást végző ügyészi stáb pedig szűkszavúan annyit mondott, hogy sikerült felgöngyölíteniük a csoport tevékenységét, amelynek célja terror kiprovokálása volt "egy nagyobb horderejű céllal", amelyet azonban nem fedtek fel. A jelek szerint - írta az újság - sikerült információkat nyerni a szállodában talált számítógépből. Ezen kívül térképeket, különféle dokumentumokat, informatikai eszközöket találtak a kommandósok, de részleteket a hatóságok addig nem közölnek, amíg "az értelmi szerzőket teljesen nem azonosították".

(Forrás: MTI)
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl...05244.html

Local Bolivian Croatian ustashi connections. Roszes and Tadic had Croatian passports and citizenship. Branko Marinkovich by name. Also mentioned is St. John of Jerusalem Knights of Malta Sovereign Autonomous Priory Association.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Local Bolivian Croatian ustashi connections. Roszes and Tadic had Croatian passports and citizenship. Branko Marinkovich by name. Also mentioned is St. John of Jerusalem Knights of Malta Sovereign Autonomous Priory Association.

Excellent find.

I can't say I'm particularly surprized.

Meanwhile, the father's full name is Jorge Rózsa Obermayer. Obermayer is, of course, more German or Austrian than Hungarian.

In addition, in the immediate cash-strapped aftermath of WW2, the French government are paying (through a grant) this "Hungarian" to study Egyptian art and then travel to Bolivia as part of an ethnographic expedition.

Ethnography in this context means, essentially, social or cultural anthropology. Who were the French so interested in studying in Bolivia in 1952?

The indigenous Aymara?

Or the German population - many of whom had arrived via the Nazi/Vatican ratlines?

[Jan Klimkowski]

To expand the ethnographic thought - entirely speculatively - Nazi Black Sun mysticism has a great interest in Bolivia. The SS sent ethnographic expeditions to Bolivia, and Tiwanaku was another object of intense study.

If we throw in Opus Die, the Knights of Malta and Miguel Serrano (the "Esoteric Hitlerist), then we have clues to the mystical background to Eduardo Rosza Flores' National Anarchism.

For the record, the link to National Anarchism is from Rosza Flores' wiki entry and his own blog pages:

http://hu.metapedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_R%C3%B3zsa_Flores

http://www.blogger.com/profile/07721437098775709513

[Jan Klimkowski]

The image - if it can be displayed properly - is of Eduardo Rosza Flores and a table full of weapons.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HtSI6QxIfSg/Se...duardo.jpg

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Hungarian far-right in Bolivia--Eduardo Rózsa-Flores
It didn't quite work out. The Bolivian police, under not entirely clear circumstances, killed three foreign "terrorists" and arrested two. The group is accused of plotting to assassinate Bolivian president Evo Morales. The Bolivian president is convinced that Washington is behind the assassination attempt, but this is highly unlikely given the cast the characters. Unfortunately, most of the news accounts that I read shed little light on the would-be assassins. What, they asked, was the common bond among the five men (names often misspelled) involved in the plot? Perhaps the Balkan wars where at least two of the five fought on Croatia's side against Serbia. My feeling is that Croatia and the Balkan wars have mighty little to do with this case.

The leader of the group, now dead, was Eduardo Rózsa-Flores. He was born in Bolivia but spent his teens and most of his adult life in Hungary. We can find ample information about him and his family on his blog "Sic Semper Tyrannus" (http://eduardorozsaflores.blogspot.com/), roughly translated as "Death to the Tyrant." His father, György Rózsa, was a painter and university professor who left Hungary in 1948 and married Nelly Flores Arias, a Spanish high school teacher. The couple settled in Bolivia, where Eduardo was born in 1960. In 1973 they moved to Chile, but the family left after Pinochet's military coup. For a couple of years they lived in Sweden as political refugees. In 1975 the Rózsa-Flores family moved to Hungary, where Eduardo attended a Budapest high school. He then spent three years at the country's military academy but left without graduating. Two years later he enrolled at ELTE, the Budapest university, from which he subsequently received an M.A. He was the last KISZ (Communist Youth Organization) secretary of ELTE. He later claimed that the only reason he took the job was to show that he could win the post against the wishes of people like Ferenc Gyurcsány. (I suspect that this is revisionist history.) After university he dabbled in journalism, taking advantage of his fluency in Spanish. For example, he wrote articles for La Vanguardia, a Spanish daily. He also supplied news to the BBC's Spanish language radio. He first reported from Croatia as a journalist but later volunteered to serve in the Croatian army. He fought in the battles of Osijek and Vukovár. The Croats appreciated his services and bestowed citizenship on him. President Franjo Tudjman promoted him to the military rank of major. A year later he became a colonel. He was wounded at least three times in different battles. In 1994 he returned to Hungary and published seven volumes of poetry. I didn't manage to find the seven volumes of poetry, but I did find five other books dealing mostly with the Croatian-Serbian war. During his stay in Croatia his name was associated with shady deals involving weapons and drug sales. According to rumors two journalists, one from Switzerland and another from Great Britain, who were investigating these transactions disappeared into thin air. In 2002 Ibolya Fekete made a documentary of his life, "Chico," that won first place in the documentary category at the Thirty-third Hungarian Film Festival. Next Tuesday MTV will air another documentary that is apparently the last testament of Rózsa-Flores. It was made in September before he embarked on his journey to Bolivia. One has to wonder how truthful these recollections are. Here, by the way, is a recent picture of Rózsa-Flores.

In 2003 he converted to Islam and called himself the spokesman for the Independent Iraqi Government, but that flirtation was short-lived and soon enough he showed up in Hungarian far-right circles. Yesterday the Jobbik website mourned his loss. "With deep sorrow we report that our friend and fellow editor, Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, passed away. He died for his country."

And this leads us to two other alleged co-conspirators. One is Árpád Magyarosi who is among the dead and the other is Előd Tóásó who is in Bolivian custody. Both are Transylvanian Hungarians who most likely knew each other for a long time because both attended high school in Sovata (Szováta) in Romania. After finishing high school both moved to Hungary. Magyarosi sounds like a real loser: he kept changing high schools and tried several colleges as well. He had musical ambitions with only scant talent. He organized several rock groups that all failed. And as we can see from this photo, Magyarosi's interests weren't confined to music. The other Transylvanian, Előd Tóásó, was another drifter who never managed to finish any of the colleges he attended. He too was interested in the military and attended the Miklós Zrínyi Military Academy for a while. He speaks Romanian, English, and Spanish in addition to Hungarian. Both men joined a group, founded in 2002, that purported to promote rock climbing, the Székely Légió (Legion Siculus). In 2006 the group became front page news in Hungarian papers because Ziua, a Bucharest daily, claimed that the Legion was a paramilitary organization planning attacks on Romania in order to establish an autonomous Hungarian (Szekler) area in the middle of Transylvania. The Romanian paper claimed that there were thousands enrolled in the Legion. The leaders of the Legion protested: it is an innocent organization that gives advice to young men and women interested in rock climbing. However, the Legion's internet website talked about survivor trips where the members carried heavy backpacks (20 kg) in addition to "weapons." They were schooled in marksmanship and the ability to detect mines. These don't sound like innocent rock climbing activities.

The third man who died in the raid is an Irishman called Michael Martin Dwyer who was apparently obsessed by weapons and who is described as a "soldier of fortune," a man obsessed with guns and assassins. According to accounts, he served as a mercenary in the Balkan wars. Rózsa-Flores who is described as the head of the group, might have met Dwyer in Croatia. I found this picture of Dwyer on the internet. As you can see, he is obsessed all right.

And now comes the real bombshell. There is a periodical called Kapu (Gate) http://members.chello.hu/kapu/ The last issue can be downloaded in pdf form. Real right-wing stuff. Rózsa-Flores was an important contributor and a good friend of the editor-in-chief, Zoltán Brády. Brády, after hearing of his friend's death, told MTI (Magyar Távirati Iroda) that it was Rózsa-Flores and he who were responsible for leaking Ferenc Gyurcsány's infamous speech at Balatonőszöd! He didn't reveal from whom they received the transcript or to whom they passed it on. Maybe yes, maybe no. In any case it is intriguing.

Meanwhile Rózsa-Flores, Árpád Magyarosi, and Michael Martin Dwyer are dead. These guys all seemed to be well versed in guerilla warfare. The Hungarian crew, at least, was also involved in far-right activities. Why they went to Bolivia I don't know, but perhaps it's a good thing they went there. The plot was foiled. Can you imagine if they decided to kill, for example, the Hungarian prime minister or the president? I think they would have been capable of it. The Hungarian far right is convinced that there is a communist dictatorship in Hungary and, after all, "sic semper tyrannis."

http://esbalogh.typepad.com/hungarianspe...livia.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

Some info from Hungary: Yesterday a crowd gathered at Rózsa Flores's house, there was strong police presence too. A commemorative service was held after. The office of state security searched Flores's house, but is not releasing any details. The Interpol did not yet contact the Hungarian police about the matter.

Yesterday the family of Előd Tóásó asked the Order of Malta to provide legal assistance. Today an officials said they will be providing assistance since Tóásó was travelling with Hungarian passport.

http://www.politics.ie/foreign-affairs/6...pt-50.html

So, Rozsa Flores is an Opus Dei spokesman. Előd Tóásó is linked with the Order of Malta.

Aka this bunch:

The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), Order of Malta or Knights of Malta for short) is a Roman Catholic order based in Rome, Italy. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a sovereign subject of international law.[1]

It takes its origins from the Knights Hospitaller, an organization founded in Jerusalem in 1050 as an Amalfitan hospital to provide care for poor and sick pilgrims to the Holy Land. After the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 during the First Crusade, it became a Catholic military order under its own charter. Following the loss of Christian territory to Islamic conquerors of the Holy Land, the Order operated from Rhodes (1310-1523), and later from Malta (1530-1798), over which it was sovereign.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_malta

[Jan Klimkowski]

Rosza Flores' father was somehow linked with Che Guevara in Bolivia.

Guevara's body ended up in a Knights of Malta hopital.

Two doctors,. Moisés Abraham Baptista and José Martínez Cazo, at the Hospital Knights of Malta, Vallegrande, Bolivia, sign a death certificate for Che Guevara. The document states that "on October 9 at 5:30 p.m., there arrived...Ernesto Guevara Lynch, approximately 40 years of age, the cause of death being multiple bullet wounds in the thorax and extremities. Preservative was applied to the body." On the same day, and autopsy report records the multiple bullets wounds found in Guevara’s body. "The cause of death," states the autopsy report, "was the thorax wounds and consequent hemorrhaging." (U.S. Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia, Airgram, 10/18/67)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB5/index.html

Guevara's hands were chopped off - officially for identification purposes.

However, there are allegations that other body parts of Che were taken from the Knights of Malta hospital as grisly "trophies".

The leader of the CIA hit team on Guevara was, of course, Felix Rodriguez. As Magda points out above, Rosza Flores' claim that Rodriguez was a Stalinist is entirely unbelievable.

Felix Rodriguez was, rather, a leader of Operation 40.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Of course over the years many researchers have found crucial leads ending up with SMOM.

Here's an old, but important, Covert Action article:

"The Catholic Right and the Knights of Malta, in particular Baron Franz von Papen (see sidebar), played a critical role in Hitler's assumption of power and the launching of the Third Reich's Twentieth Century Crusade."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


From ......... COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN

Issue title: SPECIAL: NAZIS, THE VATICAN, AND CIA

WINTER 1986 Number 25

Pages 27-38

[1 of 4 ....... 27-29]

KNIGHTS OF DARKNESS

THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA

INTRODUCTION

The Sovereign Military and Hospitaler Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, known also as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, or SMOM, is juridically, politically, and historically unique in the world today.

Representing initially the most powerful and reactionary segments of the European aristocracy, for nearly a thousand years beginning with the early crusades of the Twelfth Century, it has organized, funded, and led military operations against states and ideas deemed threatening to its power. It is probably safe to say that the several thousand Knights of SMOM, principally in Europe, North, Central, and South America, comprise the largest most consistently powerful and reactionary membership of any organization in the world today.

Although an exclusively [Roman] Catholic organization, in this century it has collaborated with, and given high awards to non-Catholic extremists in its current crusade against progressive forces in the West, the national liberation movements, and the socialist countries.

To be a Knight, one must not only be from wealthy, aristocratic lineage, one must also have a psychological worldview which is attracted to the "crusader mentality'' of these "warrior monks." Participating in SMOM Ñ including its initiation ceremonies and feudal ritual dress Ñ members embrace a certain caste/class mentality; they are sociologically and psychologically predisposed to function as the ''shock troops" of Catholic reaction. And this is precisely the historical role the Knights have played in the wars against Islam, against the Protestant "heresy,'' and against the Soviet ''Evil Empire."

The Catholic Right and the Knights of Malta, in particular Baron Franz von Papen (see sidebar), played a critical role in Hitler's assumption of power and the launching of the Third Reich's Twentieth Century Crusade.

SMOM's influence in Germany survived World War II intact. On November 17, 1948 SMOM awarded one of its highest honors, the Grand Cross of Merit, to Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi chief of intelligence on the Soviet front. He was subsequently installed by the Americans as the first chief of West Germany's equivalent of the CIA, the Bundesnachtrichtdienst (BND: federal secret service), under West German Chancellor Adenauer, a devout Catholic who had received the Magistral Grand Cross personally from SMOM Grand Master Prince Chigi.

After the appointment of Knight of Malta William Casey as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and another Knight, James Buckley, as head ot U.S. propaganda against Eastern Europe at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, several historians noted with interest President Reagan's call during the summer of 1982 for a "crusade" against the "Evil Empire" in Eastern Europe.

[ including Balkans ...... JP ]

In addition to Casey, and James Buckley, its current members, or Knights, after the feudal fashion, include Lee Iacocca, John McCone, William Buckley, Alexander Haig, Alexandre de Marenches (the chief of French Intelligence under Giscard d'Estaing, himself a Knight of SMOM), Otto von Hapsburg, and various leaders of the fascist P-2 Masonic lodge in Italy. While its organizational funding is relatively modest, its leverage is maximized by the presence of its Knights in key positions in other private and governmental structures throughout the world.

FRANZ von PAPEN

A leading figure in Hitler's coming to power was SMOM Franz von Papen, known as "the devil in a top hat." A devout Catholic aristocrat from an old family of Westphalian nobility, a former military attache and spy against the United States in 1915, von Papen became Chancellor in May 1932, with the support of the Nazis. In June he ordered the dissolution of the Reichstag, calling for new elections in July, in which the Nazis emerged as the largest party in the new Reichstag. After a meeting with Hitler, von Papen persuaded President von Hindenberg to offer Hitler the Chancellorship, which he assumed on January 30, 1933. Von Papen became his Vice-Chancellor.

In April 1933 von Papen was elevated to Knight Magistral Grand Cross of SMOM. After the murder of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss in Vienna in July 1934, von Papen became Hitler's Ambassador to Austria, and, in March 1938 stood by the Fuhrer's side at his triumphal entry into Vienna. From 1939 until August 1944 he was the Nazi Ambassador to Turkey, and at the Nuremberg trials he was charged with conspiracy to wage aggressive war. He was one of several Nazi leaders acquitted, and subsequently received a generous pension from the first postwar Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer.

Page 28

The President of the American Eastern Association of SMOM is J. Peter Grace, President of W.R. Grace Company, who was a key figure in Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists to the U.S. 1

SMOM's Sovereign Diplomacy

As its name suggests, SMOM is both a ''sovereign'' and, historically, a "military" organization. Its headquarters, occupying a square block in Rome at 68 Via Condotti, enjoys the extra-territorial legal status granted to an embassy of a sovereign state. The Italian police are not welcome on its territory, it issues its own stamps, and has formal diplomatic relations and exchanges ambassadors with a number of countries.

On November 13, 1951 Italian President Alcide de Gasperi recognized the diplomatic sovereignty of SMOM, although he held off formal exchange of diplomatic envoys.2 On January 11, 1983 the New York Daily News announced that,

"The Vatican and the order of the Knights of Malta, believed to be the smallest sovereign state in the world, have agreed to establish full diplomatic relations, a joint statement said today. "

President Reagan's Ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, is, coincidentally, a Knight of Malta.3

On September 5, 1984 French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson signed a formal protocol with SMOM for various cooperative projects includlng "aid to victims of conflicts."4 (See below on Americares.)

Historical Antecedents

Already in existence at the time of the first Crusade in 1099, in 1113 the Order of St. John was given its independence by Pope Pascal II, permitted to elect its own Grand Master, and soon the Order began military participation in the Crusades along with with the Knights Templar and Teutonic Knights. The Order of St. John recruited successfully among the Eurupean aristocracy and soon controlled extensive estates throughout the continent, assimilating those previously belonging to the Knights Templar which it had helped crush during the first two decades of the 14th Century, with the Templar leadership burned alive as heretics.

J. Peter Grace and Project Paperclip

On January 16, 1980 ABC-TV broadcast a special "News Closeup," "Escape from Justice: Nazi War Criminals in America" which discussed Grace's Role in Project Paperclip.

The transcript of the program, available from ABC on request, states,

"Project Paperclip ....... from the end of WW II to the mid-1950's brought more than 900 German scientists to the United States. ..... Otto Ambros ..... was a chemist and a Director of the notorious I.G. Farben Company which supplied gasoline and rubber for Hitler's war effort. Ambros ...... played a supervisory role in the construction of Farben's plant in the Polish village of Auschwitz. For I.G. Farben, Auschwitz concentration inmates provided a plentiful source of cheap labor. ..... The Nuremberg prosecution charged that each day at Farhen's plant one hundred people died from sheer exhaustion. ...... Otto Ambros was convicted of slavery and mass murder and sentenced to eight years in prison. But even while on trial at Nuremberg, Ambros was a target for U.S. recruiters from 'Project Paperclip.' His prison sentence was commuted after only three years by American officials and he was helped in a bid to enter the United States by ...... J. Peter Grace, President of W. R. Grace, a major American chemical company. .....

An internal State Department document describes how J. Peter Grace helped Otto Ambros in his efforts to enter the U.S. In a memorandum to the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Grace acknowledges that Ambros was a war criminal. But he adds that in the years he's known Ambros, ...... 'we have developed a very deep admiration, not only for his ability, but more important, for his character in terms of truthfulness and integrity.'

Today Otto Ambros does consulting work tor W. R. Grace and Company and lives here in Mannheim, Germany. In a recent telephone interview Ambros [said] 'I'm happy to still be working as a chemist ...... but it's funny. Now I'm helping the Americans.' "

In June 1981, largely in response to the efforts of well known war crimes researcher Charles Allen, Yeshiva University cancelled a $150-a-plate dinner it had organized to honor Grace. (See also, Joe Conason and Martin A. Rosenblatt, "The Corporate State of Grace," 'Village Voice', April 12, 1983.)

When the scandal broke in West Germany over the Flick company paying huge sums of money to various politicians and parties, it was learned that additionally Flick had taken improper tax waivers and used the money to pump millions of dollars into W. R. Grace Co., becoming a major shareholder. Friedrich Karl Flick himself sits on the Grace Board. As the Moscow New Times reminded its readers (No. 8, 1983, citing Der Spiegel), Friedrich Karl's father, Flick Sr., had poured money into the coffers of the Nazi party in January 1933, and, ''after Goering had promised the Ruhr magnates that "the March 5 elections will be the last elections in this decade and perhaps in this century,'' he contributed another 200,000 marks; this sum was handed to SS Reichfuhrer Himmler. Flick Sr. was subsequently sentenced at Nuremberg to seven years for using slave labor, spoliation and being an accessory to the crimes of the SS. To ensure a good beginning for his son, the war criminal sent him after the war for early training with W. R. Grace.

Page 29

In 1187 the Order was driven militarily from Jerusalem by Saladin. The Knights were forced to flee successively to Acre, Cyprus (1291), and finally Rhodes (1310) where they subdued the local population and establishcd a military dictatorship enjoying territorial sovereignty for the first time. In 1522 they were defeated by Sultan Suleiman's forces of 200,000 troops and 250 ships after a six-month siege. By 1530 under Grand Master Villiers de l'lsle-Adam, the Knights established their headquarters on the island of Malta which had been given to them by Charles V.

Martin Luther was born in 1483, the same year that Torquemada unleashed the fury of the Inquisition, and while the Knights waged war against foreign heresies, they were soon confronted by the liberalizing Reformation challenge to Catholic Orthodoxy.

In England Henry Vlll's assertion of an independent national policy was complicated by his marriage to Katherine who was the aunt of Emperor Charles V, patron of the Knights of Malta who in England were a militant bastion of Papal loyalty. By 1534 Pope Clement VII had excommunicated the King and two years later Pope Paul III published a Bull deposing the King and charging the Emperor with its execution. According to King and Luke's authoritative history 5 of the Order in England

The staunchest supporters of Papal supremacy were naturally to be found among the religious Orders, and ....... the Knights were the loyal servants of the Pope, whose claims to universal dominion [the King] had repudiated, ....... it was thus a sheer impossibility for the King to permit the existence in England of an Order so powerful and so highly organized unless it was prepared to renounce its loyalty to his most determined enemy. Inevitably the Knights would become a center of disaffection and a rallying point for all the forces of reaction. ......

In July 1539, after two of the Knights had already chosen the martyr's crown, the King wrote letters to the Grand Master which practically constituted an ultimatum, demanding that the Papal supremacy should cease to be recognized by the Order in England. ..... But it was impossible to accept the King's conditions. In April 1540 ..... Parliament passed an Act dissolving the Order in England and conferring its estates upon the Crown. ...... 6

Meanwhile on the continent and in the Mediterranean the wars against the infidels of the East continued. Since the military defense of Christendom required naval support, the Order created a powerful fleet and patrolled the seas of the Eastern Mediterranean fighting many naval actions.

Military operations ranged as far as Egypt and Syria, and by 1565 under Grand Master Valette, they resisted the Turkish siege of Malta. In 1571 SMOM's fleet participated in the defeat of the Turks at the naval battle of Lepanto, and remained a major military presence in the Mediterranean until 1789 when Napoleon defeated the Knights and occupied the island. The Order finally sought temporary protection under the Russian Emperor Paul I in 1797; in 1834 Pope Leo XIII established its headquarters in Rome.

- END QUOTE -

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"All studies [of the post-WWII Nazi networks] have shown the determining role played by the [Roman] Catholic Church in the flight of war criminals."



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From ......... COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN

Issue title: SPECIAL: NAZIS, THE VATICAN, AND CIA

WINTER 1986 Number 25

Pages 27-38

[2 of 4 ....... 30-33 ]

KNIGHTS OF DARKNESS

THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA

Page 30

The American Association of SMOM

In Europe SMOM's membership had been traditionally limited to those who could prove a requisite purity of noble blood for several generations. Nevertheless, as a concession to the rising political, economic, and military power of the United States, in 1927 SMOM agreed to incorporate an American National Association whose members were not obliged to prove their genealogical pedigree.

When the American Association of SMOM was created in 1927 the founding members included Patrick Cardinal Hayes, Edward L. Hearn, Nicholas F. Brady, Howard F. Carry, Patrick E. Crowley, James A. Farrell, James A. Fayne, Edward N. Hurley, James J. Phelan, Morgan J. O'Brien, John J. Raskob, and John D. Ryan.

By 1941 Francis Cardinal Spellman was listed as the "Grand Protector" and "Spiritual Advisor" of the Order, with John J. Raskob as Treasurer. Members included John Farrell, then President of U.S.Steel, Joseph P. Grace, and John D. Ryan. In 1934 Raskob, inspired by the French fascist Croix de Feu, and working closely with Morgan Bank's John Davis, had been a principal financier in the plot to organize a fascist coup in the U.S. The plan failed when General Smedley Butler, who had been set up to lead the project, denounced it.

The 1941 list also included Joseph J. Larkin. According to Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy (see review in this issue),

Joseph J. Larkin . . . [vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank in charge of European affairs] kept the Chase Bank open ....... in Nazi-occupied Paris throughout World War II. .... [He] had received the Order of the Grand Cross of the Knights of Malta from Pope Pius XI in 1928. He was an ardent supporter of General Franco and, by extension, Hitler. Morgenthau first suspected him as a fascist sympathizer in Octoher 1936. ..... With the encouragement of Schacht, Larkin took on the Franco account and the Reichsbank account, though the Reichsbank was under the personal control of Hitler. ..... 7



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The Role of Felix A. Morlion

In the latter part of April 1948 the Romanian Timpul published an article, "The Vatican Espionage Service," cited in the Soviet journal New Times, No.31, 1948, at pp. 5, 6. As reported, the article indicated that,

"In 1946 the Pope entrusted the Dominican friar [Felix A.] Morlion, a Belgian, with the reorganization of the Vatican intelligence service and its merger with the jesuit espionage network. The central intelligence department of the Vatican is headed by Janssens, a general of the Jesuit Order. His deputy is Montini, the acting Vatican Secretary of State, and his assistants are Schmider, the administrative director of the central jesuit espionage bureau, and Morlion, director of Centro d'informazione pro Deo. The central intelligence department is subdivided into branches and sections dealing with the various countries. One of the main branches is the so-called 'special division' which operates under the signboard of the Centro d'informazione pro Deo press agency. Similar divisions have been set up in the Centro d'informazione pro Deo units in all parts of the world. In New York the 'special division' is directed by Cardinal Spellman, in Innsbruck (Austria) by Regent, the rector of a jesuit college, in Coblenz (Germany) by the Catholic priest Poelaert who is also director of the Catholic press agency. The branch in charge of espionage in Eastern and Southeastern Europe is supervised by Schmider and Preseren, the jesuits' chief expert on the Slav countries and adviser to the Vatican Secretary of State."

In August 1966, Morlion approached H. L. Hunt for funding Vatican anti-Communist operations in Latin America. Hunt gave an interview to the British Guardian Weekly, February 27, 1969:

" 'I was approached by Paolo Cardinal Marella, who said he spoke for the Pope and asked if I would supply members of my [20,000 member] Youth Freedom Speakers' movement who spoke Spanish to be sent south [to Latin America] to engage in speechmaking and activities. I was told the Pope was thinking in terms of 11 million dollars a year support for the entire movement against communism in Spanish-speaking countries.' ......... The project was now centered in New York, at the Asian Speakers Bureau, with the Free Pacific Association, Inc., on Riverside Drive [another front for the Rev. Moon's Unification Church]. A key figure in this papal concern over Leftist threats to the Vatican's greatest stronghold was thc Rev. Felix A. Morlion, who was present at the original discussions. "

Subsequently, Morlion emerged as a key figure in the "Bulgarian Connection" hoax when the fascist Grey Wolf Agca attempted to assassinate the Pope: It appears that Morlion lived in Rome directly below the apartment of the Bulgarian Antonov, and was a possible source of Agca's description of Antonov's apartment. (See, Il Mondo, April 8, 1985; L'Espresso, May 19, 1985.)



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The American-Italian Conneclion

From 1932 until 1938 Myron Charles Taylor was the Chairman of U. S. Steel. In 1939 he became the U.S. envoy to Pope Pius XII, a post he would maintain until 1950. Meanwhile, according to Anthony Cave Brown, OSS chief William Donovan secretly had established an intelligence connection with the Vatican as early as 1941, when he evacuated from Lisbon to New York the Dominican Father Felix A. Morlion, who had founded "a European Catholic anti-Comintern'' called Pro Deo. (See sidebar.) Throughout the war Donovan financcd Morlion's Pro Deo service and in June 1944 he "went to considerable expense, time, and trouble to transport Morlion from New York and establish him at the Holy See.''8

Subsequently Morlion became a key figure in Vatican intelligence, working closely with Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI.

According to Frederic Laurent,

"All studies [of the post-WWII Nazi networks] have shown the determining role played by the Catholic Church in the flight of war criminals. Since April 1943, following negotiations between Pius XII and the ultra-reactionary American archbishop Francis Spellman, the Holy See became the clandestine center of Anglo-American espionage in Italy. This collaboration in fact had begun the previous year ...... between Earl Brennan, a veteran of the American State Department and Gian Battista Montini, at the time a bishop and Under-Secretary of State at the Vatican. This close collaboration between the future Paul VI and the Ameriean secret services continued after the war through the intermediary James Angleton. ..... 9"

With the American Grand Protector of SMOM already in contact with the Vatican, and Allen Dulles busy negotiating with Nazis in Switzerland, the Amerieans entered Rome June 4, 1944. On July 7 General Mark Clark was made a Knight Grand Cross of SMOM.

According to British journalist Stuart Christie,

25 April 1945 [three days before the German forces capitulate in Italy] Admiral Ellery Stone, U.S. Proconsul in occupied Italy, instructs James Angleton to rescue Prince Valerio Borghese from the possibility of arrest by the Resistance Committees which had sentenced him to death for war crimes .......... Stone is a close friend of the Borghese family.10

Borghese was to be heard from again on the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (See below.)

- Truman's Vatiean envoy Myron C. Taylor received SMOM's Gran Croci Al Merito Con Placca May 23, 1945.

- On June 12, 1945 Admiral Ellery W. Stone was awarded the Croci Al Merito Di Prima Classe Con Corona from the SMOM.

- On December 27, 1946 James Angleton received the Croci Al Merito Seconda Classe from the Order, the same day as George Raymond Rocca. Rocca went on to become Angleton's deputy chief of Counterintelligenee Division of the CIA and was the liaison between the Warren Commission and the CIA following the Kennedy Assassination. (See sidebar.)

[Also, about this same time, head of OSS "Wild Bill" Donovan was decorated by the papacy ....... JP ]

According to declassified documents from the American Department of State, in February 1948, in anticipation of the upcoming elections scheduled for April 18, the Vatican created organizations called 'Civic Committees' under the leadership of Luigi Gedda, a 45-year-old doctor from Turin who was also the leader of the rightist 'Catholic Action'. By March 17, 1948 Gedda became a Knight of the Grand Priory of Lombardy and Venice. The liaison to Gedda was through an Ecclesiastical Assistant, Mgr. Fiorenzo Angelini, a member of the National Executive of the Civic Committees, who had become a ranking member of the Rome Priory of SMOM also on March 17, 1948.11 At that time the Grand Priory was headed by Ferdinando Thun Hohenstein, Director of Ceremonies of SMOM, a member of the all powerful five-member Sovereign Council of the Order, and nephew of a former SMOM Grand Master.

Page 32

On March 22, 1948 the New York Times reported that Gedda had appealed to American Catholics to provide financial assistance to Italian Catholics in their fight against communism. On April 5, it was reported that

"Myron C. Taylor arrived from Madrid for what Catholic circles described as an 'important mission' closely related to the Italian general elections."

By April 13 the paper reported that Taylor would meet with Pius once a week, and that based on the information recently received, the Pope was "considerably more optimistic'' about the outcome of the elections.

Page 33

Two days later with the Italian military staging massive parades and as fascist gangs attacked leftists in the streets, C. L. Sulzberger reported from Rome that Catholic Action "is armed, active, and tough."

The State Department documents cite Angleton as "feel[ing] quite strongly that Gedda can be effectively used to further our interests in Italy in the political, labor and social fields," and that the Civic Committees were to receive CIA funds. The Pope had allegedly met with Gedda three times during the month after the elections.

One of those reported to have loeen involved in interference in the April 18 election was Baron Luigi Parrilli. Parrilli, son of an Italian admiral, and who had reportedly worked for the American firm Kelvinator before the war, was a fascist and had extensive industrial interests in Italy. He was made a Knight of Malta on December 7, 1942 and by early 1945 had excellent contacts with the top Schutzstaffel (SS: elite guard) and Sicherheitsdienst (SD: secret service) German officers in Northem Italy. By April 1945 he became a representative of SS General Karl Wolff to Allen Dulles and U.S. Gen. Lemnitzer during the period that the latter two were involved in private negotiations to recruit top Nazis before the end of the war. It has been rumored that Parrilli also had "concocted a plan to transport ex-Nazis from Germany to Paraguay."12 (See article by Peter Dale Scott in this issue.)

In 1949 SMOM published an Official General Roll of the Grand Magistery with a preface by Pius XII which referred to "The ancient laurels collected on the battle-fronts" of earlier wars. As noted above, among only four recipients of the Order's Gran Croci al Merito con Placca at the time was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's Chief of Intelligence on the Eastern Front, who received the award November 17, 1948.

By this time Reinhard Gehlen's brother had already been in Rome serving as the Secretary to Thun Hohenstein. Conveniently for Reinhard, who was negotiating with the U.S. for the preservation of his Nazi colleagues, Thun Hohenstein was Chairman of one of SMOM's grand magistral charities, the Institute for Associated Emigrations, and had arranged for two thousand SMOM passports to be printed for political refugees.

Thun Hohenstein was also related to the leading German Knights of SMOM, and at a crucial time in an internal SMOM controversy after the war had received the active support of Prince Frederic von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Honorary Chairman of the Silesian Association of the Order, the head of the Catholic Hohenzollerns, of which several members were Knights of SMOM. The Silesian Knights, led by their Chairman Prince von Hartzfeld and Graf Henckel von Donnersmark, maintained a refugee camp at Ulm which in 1951 alone had received 134,000 refugees from the East.13 Meanwhile, both the Polish and Hungarian Associations of SMOM had also relocated safely to the West.

In 1950, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism was created. The trustees included J. Peter Grace, Charles Edison, William Henry Chamberlain, H. J. Heinz II, Isaac Don Levine, and Eugene Lyons. The Committee (now known as Radio Liberty), under the guiding hand of the CIA's Frank Wisner, funded numerous emigre "research institutes'' which, according to John Loftus [see UNHOLY TRINITY ], were "little more than front groups for ex-Nazi intelligence officers.''14



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CROCI AL MERITO

(PRO PIIS MERITIS)

GRAN CROCI AL MERITO CON FASCIA

10 4 1948 S.E. Gen. PAUL DARIUS DASSAULT

CRAN CROCI AL MERITO CON PLACCA

23 5 1945 S. E. HAROLD ALEXANDER, visconte di Tunis

23 5 1945 S. E. MYRON C TAYLOR

11 11 1948 Brig. Gen. Barone DEAN de MARGUERITTES

17 11 1948 REINHARD GEHLEN

Document shows SMOM's honor bestowed on Hitler's intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen and on U.S. Admiral Ellery W. Stone.



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footnotes

1. See generally, Clarence G. Lasby, Project Paperclip (New York: Atheneum, 1975). Grace had also served as the Chairman of the Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Fund, a CIA front infested with Nazi collaborators, and of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), another CIA-funded organization. The Chairman of the W. R. Grace Executive Committee Felix Larkin, is also a SMOM. The Chancellor of the Order, John D. J. Moore, was a Director of the Grace company until at least 1982 having been with the company since 1946 managing its Peruvian operations from 1947-1950. From 1969-1975 Moore was the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland. See sidebar on J. Peter Grace.

2. Roger Peyrefitte, Knights of Malta (New York: Criterion Books, 1959), at p. 137.

3. See the illustrated feature story on SMOM in Town and Country, April 1984, pp. 194, ff. 4. Point de Vue, September 23, 1983.

5. Sir Edwin King and Sir Harry Luke, The Knights of St. John in the British Realm, 2d ed. (London: St. John's Gate, 1967).

6. Ibid., pp. 103-105. Subsequently in England in the 19th Century, since each monarch has the authority to create any Order it wishes, Queen Victoria chartered, alongside the Rome-based British Association of SMOM, a predominantly Anglican Order called "The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem" under the aegis of the British crown.

On November 26, 1963 the Venerable Order and the Bntish Association of SMOM signed a treaty of mutual recognition and respect which can be seen in the Library of the Venerable Order in London. SMOM continues to regard the Venerable Order with somewhat amused score; while SMOMs are members of the highest levels of the Venerable Order, there do not appear to be any Anglican members of the Venerable Order in the British Association of SMOM.

7. Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: An Exploration of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933 -1949 (New York: Delacorte, 1983), pp. 20-31.

8. Anthony Cave Brown, Wild Bill Donovan, The Last Hero (New York: Times Books, 1982), pp. 683, 684.

9. Frederic Laurent, L'Orchestre Noir (Paris: Editions Stock, 1978), at p.29; see also Charles Allen, The Vatican and the Nazis, in Reform Judaism, Spring/Summer and Fall 1983; and Saul Friedlander, Pius XII and the Third Reich (New York: Knopf, 1966).

10. Stuart Christie, Stefano delle Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy Magazine, 1984), at p.6. One member of the family, S.E. Don Giangiacomo, Principe Borghese, had been a Bailiff Grand Cross Of Honor and Devotion of SMOM since June 4,1932. Christie's book includes a photo of Borghese driven by an unidentified SS officer in 1944, with the caption, ``Borghese was then [1944] head of 'XMAS' (Decima MAS), a special forces corps of 4,000 men founded in 1941. Borghese assumed command after the Italian armistice and XMAS was officially recognized by the Nazi High Command on September 14, 1943. Under his direction, XMAS was responsible for the torture and mass murder of Italian partisans. Ibid., p. 7; see also Laurent, op. cit., n.9.

11. Declassified documents of May 17, 1948 and October 11, 1948. Gedda was listed as a member of the "Comite de Patronage" of the French neo-Nazi 'Nouvelle Ecole' in April 1982 along with Robert Gayre. Gedda also served on the Advisory board of Gayre and Pearson's Mankind Quarterly from at least the mid 1960s until 1979.

12. R. Harris Smith, OSS, The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1972), at p.114; and Bradley F. Smith & Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise (New York: Basic Books, 1979). And see Peter Dale Scott's article in this issue.

13. See, Peyrefitte, op. cit., n. 2, pp. 172, 173, 214.

14 John Loftus, The Belarus Secret, ed. by Nathan Miller (New York Knopf, 1982), pp. 106-107, 178. [and see UNHOLY TRINITY by Loftus]

- END QUOTE -

[ continue to 3 of 4 ]

COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN

P.O.BOX 50272 WASHINGTON, DC 20004

http://mediafilter.org/MFF/

[Jan Klimkowski]

Covert Action on the Sovereign Military Order of Mala continued:

From ......... COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN

Issue title: SPECIAL: NAZIS, THE VATICAN, AND CIA

WINTER 1986 Number 25

pages 27-38

Pages picture captions, from page 32 and 34-35

[3 of 4 ]

KNIGHTS OF DARKNESS

THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA

[Picture caption] - Plaque on SMOM headquarters' door proclaims sovereign status of the building; SMOM has been called "the smallest country in the world," but it has diplomatic relations with more than 40 countries.

[Picture caption] - State room of the Grand Magistry; Grand Master Fra Prince Angelo de Mojana di Cologna, seated, flanked by Grand Chancellor, left, and Hospitaller, right.

[Picture caption] - James Jesus Angleton.

[Picture caption] - Prince Valerio Borghese with SS officer, Italy, 1944.

[Picture caption] - Roger Pearson.

[Picture caption] - Document shows SMOM's honor bestowed on Hitler's intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen and on U.S. Admiral Ellery W. Stone.

[Picture caption] - A view through the well-fortified courtyard of the Knights of Malta building on Rome's Via Condotti.

[Picture caption] - The February 11, 1985 issue of 'Spotlight', the weekly of Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, featured this photograph of J. Peter Grace in the Washington, D.C. offices of Liberty Lobby giving a cordial interview to 'Spotlight' Managing Editor Vincent J. Ryan.

[Picture caption] - Bishop Paul Marcinkus, still runs IOR.

From page 32

THE CHECKERED CAREERS OF JAMES ANGLETON AND ROGER PEARSON

Both James Jesus Angleton and George Raymond Rocca were forced into retirement in December 1974 following Seymour Hersh's revelations that Angleton's Division had been involved in illegal domestic operations, known as "the family jewels."1

By the Winter of 1977-78 Angleton became one of two Associate Editors of the Journal of International Relations under General Editor Roger Pearson. The other Associate Editor was Gen. Robert C. Richardson III; the Publisher was John Fisher, President of the American Security Council.

Pearson is perhaps the most important neo-Nazi contact and racist propagandist in the U.S. today and had been a former Editor of Willis Carto's Western Destiny.

According to Replica of January 1978, when the Executive Committee of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) met December 10 and 11, 1977 to plan for their upcoming conference in Washington D. C., ''The main speaker was ..... General Robert C. Richardson III who delivered a brilliant speech on the theme of USA-USSR nuclear balance ...... [and] ......... Dr. Roger Pearson [President of North American Regional WACL and later President and host of WACL in 1978] also made a brilliant exposition."

Replica is the journal of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL) which Jack Anderson revealed to be a CIA created anti-Semitic controller of neo-Nazi death squads.2

Pearson was removed as head of the U.S. branch of the World Anti-Communist League after its 1978 conference in Washington, D.C. because his ties to the neo-Nazi international were too extreme even for WACL which then included death squads, former Nazis, and Nazi collaborators.3

In the July 1978 issue of the racist Mankind Quarterly, the Editor-in-Chief, and Pearson's mentor, Robert Gayre, announced that Pearson would take over publication of the magazine. Robert Gayre had received the Grand Cross of Merit from SMOM in 1963, having already been editor of the Mankind Quarterly for three years. In June 1979 Pearson was listed as a member of the 'Comite de Patronage' (the Advisory Board) of the French neo-Nazi journal Nouvelle Ecole.

Today Pearson continues to publish in Washington, D.C. several journals including Mankind Quarterly; The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies; and The Journal of Indo-European Studies; he remains on the Board of Trustees of the American Foreign Policy Institute.4

According to Joseph C. Goulden,

"Brigadier General Robert C. Richardson ........ had served as deputy chief of staff for science and technology for the U.S. Air Force Systems command; he later was a field commander of the Defense Atomic Support Agency at the supersecret Sandia Base, New Mexico. When Richardson retired in 1967 he became a consultant in defense affairs; one of his positions, which he was to take in 1973, was a vice-president of Ed Wilson's Consultant's International.''5

Gen. Richardson is today one of the key members of the American Security Council (ASC) and the Coalition for Peace Through Strength (CPTS) and is Executive Director of the American Foreign Policy Institute of which Pearson, John Fisher, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, and Gen. Daniel O. Graham are members of the seven member Board of Trustees.

Angleton today is the Chairman of the Security and Intelligence Fund whose President is former Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow (the Chairman of the American Foreign Policy Institute) and whose Secretary-Treasurer is Robert C. Richardson III. Until its move in late 1984 to 1010 Vermont Avenue, N.W. in Washington, D.C., it shared offices with the ASC and the CPTS. The letter heads of the three organizations show extensive membership overlaps.

1. See, Seymour Hersh's stories in the New York Times, December 22 and 30, 1974; and Fensterwald and Ewing, Coincidence or Conspiracy? (New York: Zebra Books, 1977), at pp .182, 183, 186.

2. See, Jack Anderson stories of January 12, 13, 23, 26, 30 and February 9. See also, Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup (Boston: South End Press, 1980), and the series in the New York 'Village Voice' by Joe Conason, May 1 and 14, 1985.

3. See, Paul Valentine Fascist Specter behind the World Anti-Red League in the Washington Post, May 28, 1978.

4. See generally, Michael Billig, Psychology, Racism & Fascism, London: 1979; and Searchlight magazine, September 1984, no. 111; both available from Searchlight publications, 37B New Cavendish Street, London W1M 8JR. 'See also', Robert Gayre's entry in the British Who's Who.

5. Joseph C. Goulden, The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P. Wilson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 47.

Page 34

In 1953 Catholic fanatic Clare Boothe Luce [ wife of Henry Luce ..... JP ] became U.S. Ambassador to Rome, and was made a Dame of Malta in 1956. In 1954, with the backing of Cardinal Spellman and the machinations of General Edward G. Lansdale, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem became Prime Minister of South Vietnam.

[ Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, was closely associated with Cardinal Spellman. See picture of Cardinal Spellman, Henry Luce and Ngo Diem in Luce and His Empire by Swanberg, published by Scribner ..... JP ]

Commenting on the events in Hungary in 1956, two Soviet journalists wrote,

...... we spoke with Count Karoly Khuen Hedervary [who] bears a great responsibility for the crimes the fascists had committed in Europe [but he] was not tried as a war criminal after 1945. ..... After Mindzenty's return to Budapest during the counter-revolutionary events, Karoly Khuen Hedervary took advantage of his being an old friend of the cardinal to meet Mindzenty several times, during which he received instructions for the organization [set up by the former fascist minister of industry Geza Bornemisza]. Hedervary served also as the liaison man of the organization and the Duke of Lichtenstein, who came officially to Budapest during the October events in the capacity of the representative of the International Red Cross, but actually as the representative of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta which had helped actively in promoting the counter-revolution in Hungary.15

By November 1961, President Kennedy 16 appointed John McCone as Director of the CIA. In 1963, when it became clear Diem could no longer stay in power in South Vietnam, McCone oversaw his regrettably necessary assassination. McCone is listed as a member of SMOM in the 1980 list.17

With McCone heading the CIA and Angleton as his Chief of Counterintelligence, another Knight of Malta of fascist fame, Italian General Giovani De Lorenzo, who had been the chief of the secret service (then known as Sifar) and in 1962 head of the carabinieri, organized an attempted fascist coup on July 14, 1964 (the Plan Solo) and later became a deputy from the fascist MSI party.18

Six and a half years later, on the night of December 7, 1970 Angleton's Prince Borghese gave the order for Stefano delle Chiaie to proceed with seizure of the Interior Ministry in Rome along with 50 fellow neo-Nazis. (See A Killer's Career, in this issue; and see The Fascist Network, in CAIB, Number 22.) This plot to trigger a fascist coup was called off at the last minute, and Borghese and his neo-Nazi protege delle Chiaie fled to Spain where former SS Commando Skorzeny among others was waiting. 19

SMOM and P-2

Freemasonry generally purports to be hostile to Catholicism, and conversely, the Vatican has at various times forbidden Catholics to join Masonic organizations. Nevertheless, in December of 1969 an exclusive meeting was held in the Rome office of Count Umberto Ortolani, the Ambassador of the Order of Malta to Uruguay, who has been called "the brains" behind the fascist P-2 Masonic Lodge, which had been established in the mid-1960s.20 In addition to Ortolani, the meeting included only Licio Gelli, Roberto Calvi, and Michele Sindona.21

Gelli had fought for Franco (who was himself a Bailiff Grand Cross of SMOM) with Mussolini's troops during the Spanish Civil War. He was a committed fascist during WW II and at the end of the war was wanted by the partisans for collaborating with the Nazis. After the war he developed extensive interests in Latin America where he became close friends with the Argentinean dictator Juan Peron; he was also the Grand Master of P-2.22

Calvi had fought on the Eastern front during the war and was decorated by the Nazis. At the time of the 1969 meeting he was a senior officer at Banco Ambrosiano.

Sindona had set up business in 1943 with the help of Vito Genovese, whose Mafia contacts facilitated the American landing on Sicily. By 1948 Sindona had received a letter of introduction to Vatican intelligence operative Montini [later pope .... JP].

Page 35

According to Larry Gurwin's The Calvi Affair,

One of Sindona's first steps in cultivating the Vatican's money men occurred in the late 1950s when through a priest, he met Prince Massimo Spada, a Vatican nobleman and the senior layman at IOR. [Massimo Spada had become a Knight of Malta on September 21, 1944. IOR, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (Institute for Religious Works), known generally as the Vatican Bank, was created in 1942 by Pius XII.] At the same time he nurtured his friendship with Giovanni Montini, who had become cardinal-archbishop of Milan in 1954.

In 1959 Montini needed to raise a large sum of money for an old people's home, and he turned to Sindona for help. Sindona reportedly raised $2 million in a single day. In 1960 Sindona purchased a small Milanese bank called Banca Privata and, thanks to his Vatican friendships, it soon began receiving deposits from IOR. Three years later Montini was elected Pope Paul VI and Sindona's Vatican connections were unbeatable."23

The Italian journal L'Espresso of June 28, 1981 indicates that numbers of high ranking members of the Italian military intelligence organizations were both SMOMs and members of P-2. The list of dual members included General Santovito, the former head of SISMI; Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, the head of the general staff of the Army, and General Giovanni Allavena, head of the intelligence service (then Sifar, which was later split into SISDE and SISMI).

The conclusion of the affair is generally known. When, in 1983, the Vatican was finally forced to establish an "independent'' commission to study the relationship between its IOR (since 1970 Ñ and still Ñ headed by Chicago-born Bishop Paul Marcinkus) and the P-2/Banco Ambrosiano criminal fascists, two of the three members selected were Hermann Abs and Joseph Brennan.

Abs, who features in nearly every book on the Third Reich and the Nuremberg trials, was Hitler's paymaster, as chairman of the Deutsche Bank from 1940 to 1945, and was a member of the board of I.G. Farben. He regained the board chairmanships of both firms after the war, even though in Yugoslavia he had been convicted of war crimes in absentia. In 1953 he received the Great Federal Service Cross for his services in restoring West Germany's financial power; and in 1960 he was decorated by Franco for his "services" to fascist Spain.24

The choice of Abs for the Vatican commission of inquiry was so outrageous that at the urging of Charles Higham, the Wiesenthal Center issued a special packet of documents clearly showing Abs's involvement in war crimes and publicly protested to the Vatican, all to no avail.

Joseph Brennan is the Chairman of the executive committee of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York and a Knight of Malta.

SMOM, Americares, and Central America

Just as World Medical Relief and Refugee Relief International are fronts for Waffen-SS worshipping editors of Soldier of Fortune magazine, so too the SMOM advertises itself Ñ to those who believe in the Tooth Fairy Ñ as a "charitable'' organization greatly concerned for the suffering of the poor and sick around the world.

The New York Times of August 13, 1985 reported that the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (NFF), one of many front groups for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, channelled $350,000 to the Americares Foundation in Connecticut.25 Clare Boothe Luce, a Dame of SMOM, is on the Board of Moon's Washington Times, and is a director of the NFF with fellow SMOM, William Simon [former U.S. Treasurer]. J. Peter Grace is the Chairman of the six member Advisory Board of Americares, which includes fellow Knight William Simon along with former CIA Director George Bush's brother, Prescott Bush, Jr.

Americares' published "Fact Sheet'' recites as specific projects:

Medical Shipments to El Salvador: Since November 1983 AMERICARES has shipped almost 700,000 pounds of medicines and supplies valued at over $8,000,000 in 15 sea shipments with local distribution being handled through the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta (SMOM).

Guatemala: In response to a request for aid from the Order of the Knights of Malta, 10 sea shipments of medical supplies worth over $4,000,000 have been sent to the people of Guatemala since January 1984.

Honduras: Since August 1984, three sea shipments of high priority medical supplies worth over $ 1,000,000 were sent to the people of Honduras in response to a request for aid from the Order of the Knights of Malta. .....

Brazil, October 1984: A shipment of vitamins worth $156,075 were sent to Brazil, again in response to a request from the Order of the Knights of Malta (SMOM) who serve as our consignees in Central and South America.

The "Fact Sheet" also discusses an ''offshoot" of Americares called "Doctors To All Peoples" said to be "dedicated to the eradication of leprosy in the Americas.'' Leprosy is the mos publicized international "charity project" of SMOM.



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footnotes

15. A. Belokon and V. Tolstikov, The Truth About Hungary (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), pp. 58-61; Mary Bancroft in Autobiography of a Spy (New York: Wm. Morrow, 1983), p.260, reports that towards the end of WWII, "A contingent of White Russians, who had been fighting in the German Army, had recently crossed the Liechtenstein frontier and had been given asylum."

16. The President's father, Joseph Kennedy, who became a Knight of SMOM March 13, 1945, had been withdrawn as U.S. Ambassador to London when his sympathies for the Third Reich became known. See, e.g., Higham, op. cit., n. 7., at p. 181.

17. McCone, from a senior post at ITT, was later to play a key role in the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973. At the time of the coup J. Peter Grace was Chairman of the AIFLD, and a director of First National City Bank and Kennecott Copper Co., all of which played a role in the fascist coup. ('See', Fred Hirsch and Richard Fletcher, CIA and the Labor Movement (London: Spokesman Books, 1977), pp. 16, ff.; and NACLA Report Amazing Grace: The W. R. Grace Corporation vol.X, no.3, March 1976.) W. R. Grace Company senior vice-president Anthony Navarro, who had earlier been involved in armed fighting against the Castro govemment in Cuba, was recently nominated to the Advisory Committee of Radio Marti; the Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Board on Radio Broadcasting to Cuba, Jorge Mas Canosa, according to the New York Times of Aug.5, 1984, is a Cuban businessman in Miami, who took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and was a commentator on Radio Swan, an anti-Castro station that was operated by the CIA.

18. See, Laurent, op. cit., n. 9; and Christie, op. cit., n. 10.

19. See, Christie, op. cit., n. 10; and Laurent, op. cit., n. 9.

20. Journal de Geneve, November 11, 1981.

21. Larry Gurwin, The Calvi Affair (London: Pan Books, 1984), p.15.

22. Gelli had chartered the plane which brought Peron back to Argentina in 1972 and was an honored guest at his inauguration; shortly thereafter Lopez Rega, Peron's Minister of Social Welfare who ran the Argentine death squads and who was an astrologer and mystic, joined P-2.

23. Gurwin, op. cit., n. 21, pp. 11, 12. See also, David A. Yallop, In God's Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Bantam, 1984).

24. Yallop, op. cit., n. 23, p. 323; National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany, Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany (Berlin: Documentation Center of the State Archives Administration of the German Democratic Republic, n.d. [c. 1966]), p. 39.

25. See also, Washington Post, May 9, 1985, p. 34.

- END QUOTE -

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[4 of 4 ....... 36-38 ]

KNIGHTS OF DARKNESS

THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA

Page 36

The Washington Post of December 27, 1984 reported as follows:

A private humanitarian organization called the Americares Foundation, working with the Order of the Knights of Malta, has channeled more than $14 million in donated medical aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala over the last two years. ......

Part of $680,000 in aid to Honduras went to Miskito Indians linked to U.S. backed rebels fighting the leftist government in Nicaragua, according to a Knights of Malta official in Honduras.

Much of the $3.4 million in Americares' medical aid to Guatemala has been distributed through the armed forces as part of its resettlement program of "model villages" aimed at defeating leftist insurgents, said the official, Guatemalan businessman Roberto Alejos.

Alejos, co-chairman of the Knights of Malta in Honduras [said], ...... the Guatemalan army delivers Americares medicine to people in model villages, which are along the Mexican border.

Alejos, a major sugar and coffee grower, lent his Guatemalan estates to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1960 to train Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Asked why the Knights of Malta turned to Americares rather than to established aid groups, such as the Red Cross, Grace said,

"The Knights have been doing this for 900 years. They have their own cross [the Maltese cross]. ... They'd consider themselves way beyond the Red Cross." ....

At least one pro-government group, the Air Commando Association of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., claims to have used Knights of Malta warehouses in El Salvador. Retired general H. C. Aderholt, head of the 1,500-member group, said that the commandos delivered food and medicine to the Knights' facilities and that together they ''get good support from the Salvadoran air force commander."

Aderholt said the association has distributed to El Salvador $4.5 million in food and medicine provided by the Christian Broadcasting Network and World Medical Relief. He said liberals in Congress have tried to "tie to some sinister plan with the CIA" [sic], which he said is incorrect.

While the Post story does mention that CIA Director William Casey is a SMOM, it fails to point out that Aderholt is the "Unconventional Operations'' Contributing Editor of Soldier of Fortune and was a member of the ''Singlaub panel'' of the Pentagon, set up to devise new counterinsurgency strategies in the developing countries.

Russ Bellant, in the Detroit Metro Times of October 9, 1985, says Aderholt claimed that Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network had given the Knights of Malta $2 million for operations in Central America.

CONCLUSION

For many years progressive groups in the U.S. and else where have been engaged in extensive research into so-called "secular" state and private organizations such as the CIA, NSC, the military, private corporations, and foundations.

This article highlights the operative importance of members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which unlike traditional corporate, governmental, and foundation entities, has not yet adequately come under the scrutiny of progressive researchers. Curiously, European researchers have all but ignored the Orders of Chivalry in analyzing The structural role of their own aristocracy in organizing support for international reaction and fascist terror.

Research into the current role of SMOM and its individual members is just beginning. The most serious problem is the dearth of documents available, due to the extreme secrecy of the organization. Except for a few scattered references in various books, magazines, and newspapers, and a few romanticized stories about ancient glories of the Order, the necessary amount of materials has not yet surfaced. and this account represents only a starting point for further research.26

In the U.S., for example, although the 1980 membership list was published (National Catholic Reporter, October 14, 1983), since then the Order in the U.S. has grown and been divided into an Eastern, Southern (based in D.C.), and Western Association. The published 1980 list comprises primarily members in the Northeast. Although some others are known, complete and current lists of members in other regions is obviously crucial. Lists for other countries would also be helpful.

CAIB in its Winter 1983 issue, The CIA and Religion, and Spring 1985 issue, Disconnecting the Bulgarian Connection, began to explore the operational role of specific religious, or non-secular, organizations such as Opus Dei 27 and the fascist Masonic lodge P-2 in western intelligence operations and in furthering imperialism's plans.

Page 38

The recent P-2 scandal in Italy and new evidence on the importance of various ancient Orders of Chivalry (in particular SMOM) indicate that further research into these additional non-secular "parapolitical'' structures is necessary both to understand their role as independent organizations and to gain a better understanding of factional alignments within organizations which have already come under scrutiny.

As with "secular" organizations, rivalries among these "non-secular" organizations takes place within an environment of selective interlinking memberships which include secular structures as well. The way competing policies and loyalties of these non-secular structures influence members in their secular roles needs considerable further research.



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SMOM, GRACE, and OBANDO Y BRAVO

On August 1, 1985 the New York Times reported that during a visit to New York in May, Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua said that he is actively directing efforts by his diocese to prevent the government from imposing a communist system in Nicaragua. The Archbishop said efforts included ''dividing his diocese into old and new units, including parishes, districts and smaller groups, for leadership and religious training.'' He claimed the training he established in Managua was for ''pastoral cadres, not military cadres. .... '' Following a meeting with Archbishop Obando, executives at W. R. Grace arranged for the Sarita Kenedy East Foundation to contribute copies of the Bible, rosary beads and other supplies to aid the church effort, a company executive said. The foundation is headed by J. Peter Grace.

Whatever the real purpose of the "leadership training" and "pastoral cadres," it apparently seemed like such a splendid idea to the Knights that a June 21, 1985 press release from the Erlich-Manes & Associates News Service of Bethesda, Maryland stated that the Southern Association of SMOM had sent a $5.5 million shipment of "40 massive containers'' to be loaded on the ship "Freedom'' to be sent to Maputo, Mozambique. "Roughly half of the shipment will go to aid agricultural development in northern Mozambique; and half will be distributed directly to the poor through the Archbishop of Maputo's Catholic Charities.'' Eugene I. Kane, a Knight and head of the trucking company Intermodal, Inc. organized the project. Official documents of SMOM list such "charitable" projects in many countries throughout the world.



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WELL-KNOWN KNIGHTS

In addition to those listed in the article, the following are some other Knights of SMOM of interest:

- Francis Vincent Ortiz, Jr.: according to the 1982-83 'Who's Who in America', had been, among other posts, "dep. chief of mission Am. Embassy, Montevideo Uruguay, 1970-73,charg'e d'affairs,1973; country director for Argentina, Uruguay, and . Paraguay, Dept. of State 1973-75, dep. exec. sec., 1975-77; Amb. to Barbados and Grenada, spl. rep. to Antigua, Dominica, St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, from 1977; U.S Amb. Guatemala 1979-81, to Peru 1981-; spl. asst. for international affairs U.S. So. Command, Panama 1980-" since November 18, 1983 he has been the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina.

- Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.: also a Knight of the Order of St. Sylvester of which William [ head of WWII OSS .... JP ] Donovan was a member. He is a longstanding funder of right-wing causes including Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. His wife is a Dame of SMOM and is Publisher of the National Catholic Register of California, whose editor, Francis X. Maier was formerly with National Review. Maier was the first Chairman of the Catholic Center for Renewal, whose President, Philip F. Lawler, is the Director of Studies of the Heritage Foundation (which was chaired by Knight of SMOM Frank Shakespeare, newly appointed Ambassador to Portugal).

- Paul-Louis Weiller: Grand Cross of Merit SMOM, a close friend of Richard Nixon, member of the Board of Directors of Renault and several other French industrial corporations, former Administrateur of Air France, whose son married the cousin of Spanish King Juan-Carlos. (See also, Jim Hougan, Spooks (New York: William Morrow, 1978), pp. 209-225, which suggests that Weiller was "the French Connection. ")

- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: Munich correspondent of William Buckley's National Review.

- Admiral James D. Watkins, Reagan's recently named Chief of Naval Operations.

- Thomas Bolan: law partner of Roy Cohn. Bolan is also Counsel to the Human Life Foundation of which former CIA officer and Managing Editor of National Review, Priscilla Buckley (William's sister) is a Director.

- Jeremiah Denton: U. S. Senator from Alabama, 1980-present; former rear admiral, captured by the Vietnamese while murdering people and held as a POW 1965-1973, consultant to Pat Robertson of Christian Broadcasting Network, 1978-80.

- Pete Domenici: U.S. Senator from New Mexico 1972 - present.

- Spiros S. Skouras: President Prudential Lines 1960-present, bought Grace Lines 1969.

- William A. Schreyer: President Merrill Lynch 1978-present; Chairman since 1981.

- Walter J. Hickel: former governor of Alaska 1966-69, Secretary of the Interior 1969-1970. [ Governor of Alaska again in early 90s .... JP ]

- Antoine Pinay: Grand Cross of Merit, head of Government in France in 1952. He led the right-wing party CNIP and was linked to the ''Sniffing-plane" scandal, as well as a project with Brian Crozier and American agents to make Franz Joseph Strauss head of the German government.

- Mme. Raymond Barre: Grand Cross of Merit, wife of the rightist French politician.

- Bernard Dorin: French attache to Ottawa 1957-1959, Ambassador to Haiti 1972-1974, and Ambassador to South Africa from 1978 until at least 1981.



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THE "OTHER" ORDERS OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA

Not only are there many existing orders of chivalry today, generally under the aegis of a reigning monarch or ruling house, but there are also rival organizations each claiming to be the rightful heirs to the same order. Nowhere is this more true than with the Knights of Malta.

According to the Catholic Herald of August 23, 1985, there are more than twenty organizations claiming to be the "real" Knights of Malta. On September 9, 1985, evidently in response to growing interest in the question, the 'Wall Street Journal' ran a cover story, "Looking for a Title or Hot Controversy? See Knights of Malta. The Problem Is Which Ones; Catholic Order Maintains Rival Groups are Bogus." (The New York Sunday News had described the rivalry as early as June 15, 1975.)

The legitimacy battle is often intense and steeped in the presentation of increasingly obscure documentation. Arnaud Chaffanjon and Bertrand Galimard Flavigny's Ordres et Contre-Ordres de Chevalerie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1982), is one of the more useful references.

Some of the rival "Orders of Malta,'' all with slightly different names, in fact claim important and extremely rightwing members. We believe that the Catholic, Rome-based Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) remains the most important, with the endorsement of the Vatican and most of the Catholic ruling houses of Europe, and members like those discussed in the text of this article. The British (and generally, though not exclusively Protestant) Venerable Order, discussed in the text, is affiliated with a number of European, Protestant Orders, such as the Johanniterorden, sometimes known as the Bailiwick of Brandenberg.

Two of the "Orders of Malta'' which have received particular attention recently are what may be called the "Shickshinny" Order and the "von Brancovan" Order.

The Shickshinny Order, officially called "The Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem," has been headed by Col. Thourot Pichel in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, although a few years ago the Order was torn by serious internal rifts between Pichel and the late Frank Capell, Contributing Editor of the John Birch Society's Review of the News. (See, Rev. Anthony Cekada, Light on the OSJ, from the Oyster Bay, New York The Roman Catholic, December 1981, for an article critical of the Order and discussing some of its recent history.) It traces its legitimacy from a dispute during the time the Order spent in Russia under Czar Paul after it fled Malta. This Order achieved some notoriety a few years ago when it officially recognized the claims of controversial defector Michael Goleniewski to be Aleksei Romanoff, heir to the Russian Imperial House of Romanoff.

The case would be less interesting if James Angleton were not one of the principal supporters of Goleneiwski and some extremely rightwing members of the military intelligence community were not listed as members in a document issued by the Order in 1970. The Order listed as members of its Military Affairs Committee, under the Chairmanship of Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd, Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, and Gen. Pedro A. del Valle (who according to Stuart Christie's Stefano delle Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy Magazine, 1984), p. 6, invited Italian neo-Nazi Guido Giannettini to the U.S. to conduct a seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, where del Valle was Commander. Foster & Epstein's Danger on the Right (New York: Random House, 1964), p.79; and Janson & Eismann's The Far Right (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963), p. 154, both call del Valle an anti-Semite.)

The Honorary Grand Admiral of the Order is listed as Admiral Sir Barry Domvile who had been jailed by the British during WW II as a Nazi agent, and was listed as a Contributing Editor of Willis Carto's Western Destiny, November 1965, when Roger Pearson was the Editor. The Associate Chief of International Intelligence listed was Herman E. Kimsey, a high-ranking CIA operative, now deceased, who had worked with the Army CIC during the war.

The von Brancovan Order, led by someone who calls himself Prince Robert Bassaraba von Brancovan and several other names as well, including Prince Khimchiachvili, is officially titled "The Sovereign Military and Hospitaler Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta Ecumenical.'' It is the order which apparently claims Frank Sinatra as a member. It also claims to include Princes Arnaldo and Basilio Petrucci. It appears to have a connection to Umberto Stafanizzi who, with Francesco Pazienza, signed the incorporation papers for something else called the "Sovereign Order of Saint John, Knights of Malta, Inc.," which was incorporated in New York State, June 22, 1983.



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footnotes -

26. Interested readers should also refer to the articles by Martin Lee on the SMOM which appeared in the National Catholic Reporter of October 14, 1983 (the issue which included the complete 1980 U.S. membership list), and Mother Jones of July 1983. (These two articles formed the basis for the references to SMOM in Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts The Year of Armageddon (London: Granada Publishing Ltd, 1984).)

An interesting discussion of some post-WW II SMOM history based around an account of the 1949-53 attempts by Vatican-centered Rightists to restrict the sovereignty of the Order is Knights of Malta by the conservative French author Roger Peyrefitte originally published by Flammarion in 1957, and translated into English and published in New York by Criterion Books m 1959.

King and Luke's The Knights of St. John in the British Realm, op. cit., n. 6, is useful although it does try to elevate Queen Victoria's creation of the Venerable Order to a status equal to that of SMOM.

The Italian journal L'Espresso of June 28, 1981 carried an article by Alessandre de Feo on the SMOM-P-2 connection. The rightist French magazine Historia had a special issue in 1980 on various Orders of Chivalry including SMOM. Also in French is the remarkable Souvenirs et Reflections by Yves Marsaudon, former Minister of SMOM in France who was also one of the highest ranking members of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in the country, (Paris: Editions Vitiano, 20 Rue Chauchat, 75009 Paris, 1976).

27. Francis X. Stankard, Knight of SMOM and Chief Executive Officer of the International Division of Chase Manhattan Bank has led "Evenings of Conversation'' at the Opus Dei Headquarters at the Riverside Study Center, 330 Riverside Drive, New York City. Other SMOMs at these sessions included William Simon and Frank Shakespeare (now Ambassador to Portugal), both of whom are Trustees of the Heritage Foundation, of which Shakespeare was Chairman of the Board. Evenings of Conversation, a pamphlet distributed in 1984 by Riverside Study Center.

Recognition of the importance of Opus Dei at the highest levels of SMOM had already been established in the summer of 1976 when King Juan-Carlos, himself a Knight of Malta, chose Adolfo Suarez, a member of Opus Dei, as new chief of government following the death of Franco. (Point de Vue, January 14, 1983; Paris.) On Opus Dei see also, New Statesman, 1 March 1985, pp.20,21; London Times, January 12, 1981; Le Morule, August 25, and September 28, 29 1982; National Catholic Reporter, September 10, and November 12, 1982; Financial Times, November 11, 1983; New York Times Magazine, January 8, 1984; Time magazine, June 11, 1984, p.74; New Times (Moscow), No.13, 1982, p.27; Wall Street Journal, December 30, 1982.

[Picture caption] - Paul-Louis Weiller, the French Connection?

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