Cracks in the Masonry:
Terzuolo, Eric R.
Cracks in the Masonry ERIC R. TERZUOLO "MEN OF INTELLIGENCE, culture, wisdom, and, above all generosity, with a moral and intellec-tual drive to work solely for the good of mankind. . . ." Thus...
...In early 1979, Mino Pecorelli, an investigative journalist of neofascist persuasion and a long-time member of the P2, obtained a copy of the document in which Gelli had named the collaborators...
...Alignments formed during the war years continue to influence and shape the conduct of Italy's political power structure...
...It seems, in fact, that Gelli may have feared revelations concerning his wartime conduct...
...On the other hand, membership in the P2 also reflected a highly developed sense of self-interest and perhaps a lack of "public spirit" in the Anglo-Saxon sense...
...At one point, in fact, the German SS, the police of Mussolini's rump government, and the partisans were all after Gelli...
...The gardens and courtyards have a rather specific origin in the climate, population density, and urban development of Italy...
...More recently, it is the upper classes that have come, fleeing the Communists, fleeing an economy that they themselves help destroy...
...In their initiation oaths, they promised above all to aid, comfort, and defend each other...
...Such an analysis is not convincing...
...A good deal of the Lodge's influence lay in the fact that it could marshal an impressive set of connections at both the national and international levels...
...Trecca's reward was a position at the medical school at the University of L'Acquila...
...The list includes Gelli and other prominent piduisti, but most of those listed are not Masons...
...Needless to say, his scalpels languished...
...The functions of such organizations and the motivations of those who join them are perhaps not so different as those on this side of the Atlantic might like to believe...
...The P2 seems to have had its fingers in every scandal of substance...
...What were the sources of its cohesion and power...
...Rather, they take their money out of the country, they seek prosperity through overseas connections, they export their sons and daughters to the United States for an education and a future, and sometimes they emigrate themselves...
...Licio Gelli was not only the Venerable Master of the Lodge but also the best incarnation of the values and worldview it represented...
...Indeed, while dismantling the Lodge may help break up several networks of corruption, one fears it will do little to overcome the antipatriotic sentiments and actions of many who could offer Italy a great deal...
...In the course of his rise, Trecca acquired all the trappings of contemporary high-technology machismo: a red Ferrari, a pilot's license, scuba equipment, and, through the help of some friendly admirals, a captaincy in the naval reserves...
...Even John Le Carre, hardly known for simplicity of plot, would find it difficult to include more than a small portion of the P2 affair in a single novel...
...Did the organization as such have any overall goals...
...Finally, it is important to consider what the P2 affair can add to our understanding of Italian society and politics...
...Although there are indications of some ties to the Mafia, most of the connections were of a fairly standard business and public relations nature...
...Leaving aside the question of P2 involvement in the killing, Gelli's wartime record is an important key to understanding the nature of the organization he came to head...
...It also includes virtually no one who could be described in any sense as courageous...
...Trecca's case is perhaps somewhat extreme, yet along with the stories of Gelli and other P2 members it suggests that the Lodge was essentially a conspiracy of mediocrities...
...He was very well acquainted, for example, with Vice-President Bush...
...they were bureaucrats, party hacks, and military officers whose talent and competence were insufficient to win them the promotions they coveted...
...Will the Communists take power...
...He put himself at the service of a famous surgeon in his declining years, attending to social details, correspondence, and providing company...
...He was virtually a professional sidekick...
...That is a lot of guilt to be carrying around...
...The story is enough to make even the most solemn journalist's heart race...
...and the list is unhappily only the tip of an imposing iceberg...
...It appears, for example, that Skull and Bones at Yale has provided a rather disproportionate number of American foreign policy makers, and its initiation rites are by any account far more closely guarded than those of the Italian Freemasons...
...The Official Preppy Handbook contains a list of private clubs at the most prestigious American universities which are in many respects cousins of the P2...
...The news makes fascinating, though often confusing, reading...
...Those who have had exasperating dealings with the Italian bureaucracy might suggest that Gelli's efficiency legitimated his claim to influence...
...is a total lack of principle . . . only concern with a successful career, a hurry to get rich, a fear of being blackmailed...
...On the eve of the June 1975 local elections, the wife of General Raffaele Giudice, a Lodge member now in prison in connection with an oil tax evasion scandal, put her fears rather succinctly: "What will happen...
...After the Italian armistice of September 8,1943, he returned to Italy and collaborated closely with the German occupiers in Tuscany...
...An instinctive example of unrestrained careerism is Gelli's lieutenant, Fabrizio Trecca...
...Gelli was a compulsive accumulator and organizer of documents, testimony, photographs, and other assorted data...
...Although the war seems rather distant to most Americans, one must bear in mind that, between 1943 and 1945, Italy experienced a kind of civil war, not just an anti-German struggle...
...Indeed, Gelli once described the Lodge as an organization devoted to protecting those who had been unjustly accused...
...Gelli served as a Blackshirt in the Spanish Civil War and with the Italian occupation forces in Yugoslavia...
...It might also be instructive to compare the gatherings at Bohemian Grove to the workings of the P2...
...The members were managers rather than genuine entrepreneurs and political second-raters rather than statesmen...
...In the early years of this century, poor Italians came to the United States...
...A report on the ABC news program 20/20 portrayed the Lodge as an expression of an Italian desire for seclusion or privacy, reflected also in the building of internal courtyards and enclosed gardens...
...They seemed to share a general fear of somehow being exposed publicly...
...Perhaps in an anthropological sense, one could find certain parallels between the P2 and the Mafia, but it still seems difficult to account for this in terms of some distinctly Italian quality...
...At the same time, however, he seems to have maintained extensive relations with Italian partisans...
...At war's end, he was officially accused of collaborationism for turning over an officer who had conducted anti-German sabotage...
...The Lodge members could not be termed "amoral familists" in the strict sense, since they transferred some loyalty to an organization beyond the nuclear family...
...A rotund repository of amusing anecdotes, Trecca made his way into high society, becoming personal physician to prominent journalists and finally Gelli, a noted hypochondriac...
...Thepiduisti were also obsessed with protecting the wealth and privileges they had already secured...
...After reading the motley membership list, one Italian journalist remarked: "What holds these people together...
...Gelli was even in a position to predict that Alexander Haig would become Secretary of State well before last November's election...
...One distinguishing feature of the Lodge members was a cult of personal survival and personal aggrandizement at the expense of any other considerations...
...More important for the Lodge's cohesion was the fact that Gelli had intimate knowledge of each member's private life and business dealings, each member's needs and personal inclinations...
...To WHAT extent is the P2 affair a distinctly Italian phenomenon...
...Pecorelli made some use of it in a series of scathing attacks on the Masons, and apparently threatened to publish the list...
...Perhaps the P2 affair fits in a bit better with the image of Italians in works such as Edward Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society...
...The list of 953 members confiscated from Gelli contains the name of not one thinker, not one scientist, not one artist, not one creative or innovative individual...
...His wartime record would have put any mere double agent to shame...
...The appeal of secrecy, arcane rituals, and "brotherhood" seems universal, not simply Italian...
...Indeed, they are anxious to lead the chorus...
...Some reports even presented him as a dangerous Communist agent...
...The members of the P2 Lodge, with their oaths to each other and to the Venerable Master, but not to their country, were part of a much larger category: those who have given up any attempt to help Italy out of its political, social, and economic impasse...
...One pities any future historian who attempts a coherent narrative account...
...was no accident that precisely those two parties were best represented in the Lodge...
...On March 20, 1979, Mino Pecorelli was murdered...
...The Venerable Master may not have been an especially charismatic leader, but he was certainly a first-class file clerk...
...But not only in Italy is it possible to gain power by accumulating and organizing information...
...Furthermore, for every one who leaves the country, untold members with the same attitudes remain...
...The members of the P2 joined because they realized full well their personal weakness and the fact that they needed help to succeed...
...In any case, the flexibility of the P2's program indicates that simple preservation of privilege, rather than any particular view of Italy's future or the national interest, lay at the heart of the Lodge's political activity...
...Gelli's archive has included material as diverse as a CIA memorandum alleging links between the KGB and red terror in Italy, copies of contracts for the purchase of Saudi Arabian oil, and photos of Pope John Paul II sunbathing naked by the pool...
...Maybe the fact that so many of the members were arrivistes in the social sense gave the acquisition of wealth a particular importance...
...In February of this year, Gelli rewarded Trecca's loyalty with the presidency of CIT, the travel agency operated by the Italian state railroads...
...THE P2 POLITICAL platform had only one fixed plank: anti-Communism...
...Gelli's solution at that time called for tightening control over all the information media, a two-year ban on trade union activity, creation of a strong party to the right of Christian Democrats, and forcible suffocation .of any protest...
...A difference probably does exist, a difference of method rather than underlying intent...
...Some have gone so far as to suggest that Gelli was really a modern social democrat in the German style, although one suspects that Chancellor Schmidt might be less than pleased with the analogy...
...Unfortunately, however, the P2 affair does offer considerable insight into the state of national feeling among the upper class and upper middle class of Italy...
...Indeed, it is clear that the members were seeking protection...
...The cast of characters includes politicians ranging from neofascists through socialists, generals, admirals, colonels, captains, virtually all the top people in the Italian intelligence community, the Knights of Malta, physicians, high prelates, administrators, financiers...
...Among the few things common to all Lodge members was the sense that the Italian Communists were a major threat to those privileges...
...It would appear that Gelli's visceral anti-Communism, coupled with his impressive array of international connections, made him persona grata with some American policy makers...
...Even from his Paraguayan exile, he can threaten many influential people with the files still in his possession...
...Furthermore, if one were to generalize about the Italians (a dangerous proposition at best), "secretive" probably would not be one of the first adjectives that came to mind...
...He saved himself by providing Italian counterespionage with a list of his old Fascist comrades who had collaborated actively with the Nazis...
...To cite only one well-known £ase, it was precisely Stalin's willingness to attend to menial detail and organizational matters that permitted him to triumph over his more brilliant but less clerically-minded colleagues like Trotsky and Bukharin...
...In the mid-1970s, Gelli offered a plan for Italy's salvation to the president of the Republic, Giovanni Leone (later ousted in connection with the Lockheed bribery affair...
...Particularly striking was Gelli'&desire and ability to play all the angles simultaneously in any given situation...
...TI P2's dealing involved arms, Libyan and Saudi Arabian oil, Argentine beef, Canadian uranium, the Rizzoli publishing empire, vast amounts of cash, positions in government and business...
...Already as a young medical student, Trecca understood that powerful patronage could compensate for professional or intellectual inadequacies...
...Thus did Licio Gelli, Venerable Master of the P2 Lodgj, describe his brother Masons in an October 1980 interview . In the last two months, however, it has become clear that the members of the Lodge sought only (and very effectively) their own personal advantage, constructing in the process Italy's most intricate political and economic conspiracy since the end of the Second World War...
...We have to think about our money, our position...
...The Italians have a word that suits Trecca to perfection: portaborse, which might be translated as "briefcase carrier...
...The organized distribution of influence and perpetuation of elites is pernicious enough, but the P2 Lodge also conducted genuinely fraudulent and criminal activity on an impressive scale...
...Unlike most immigrants, they lack any willingness to defend the Old Country from criticism...
...We run the risk of losing everything...
...In this unfortunate sense, the P2 was representative...
...As the matter now moves from the phase of revelation to the phase of investigation and, one hopes, prosecution, it seems worthwhile to pose a few general questions: What kind of man joined the P2...
...The settings are diverse and often exotic: Italy, the United States, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, even Rumania and Iran...
...It "You're right...
...Yet fraternal organizations devoted to promoting the success of their members are by no means alien to the Anglo-Saxon world...
...Gelli established an extensive network of informants, but strengthened his own hand by doing everything himself when it came to organizing the information and maintaining the dossiers...
...An instrument more typical of the P2 was, quite simply, information...
...Along with extensive reports on the P2, the May 31 edition of the weekly L'Espresso carried a list of 181 people arid companies guilty of illegal exportation of capital...
...In more recent years, however, the supple Gelli had come to view a strong alliance between the Christian Democrats and the Socialists as the only viable bulwark against Communism...
Vol. 108 • September 1981 • No. 16
