Luigi Corvaglia
Religious polarisation
On 8 January 2023, thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro raided the Congress building and also stormed the Federal Court in Brasilia to protest against the election of his rival Lula. In part a repeat of the storming of Capital Hill two years earlier by Donald Trump supporters. While in Washington many of the rioters were fundamentalist Christians and many also adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory who flaunted their affiliation on T-shirts and signs, in Brasilia most of the participants in the storming were evangelical Pentecostals who gathered and prayed amid the devastation. Some turned their rosaries towards the police riot squad. This shows how important religion is when it comes to determining the moves of the masses on the geopolitical chessboard.
Religious soft power
The term soft power was coined in the 1990s by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Nye sees it as a form of exercising power that represents an alternative to the use of military force and aims to influence public opinion, primarily through mass culture and the media. Such operations are a low-intensity but effective strategy for influencing public opinion. This is a strategy of hybrid warfare. The use of religion as a tool of influence has a long history.
The CIA's first religious tool was Catholicism, which “became the model through which intelligence agencies could understand and manipulate other world religions” (Michael Graziano coined the phrase). Under the guise of the Church's profound power of persuasion, the OSS, the CIA predecessor, mobilised the European population against its Nazi (and later Soviet) occupiers.
However, the primacy of Catholicism, so great that the CIA was nicknamed the “Catholic Intelligence Agency", has waned over time. In Latin America, the Catholic continent par excellence, the Roman Church is increasingly losing ground to the various evangelical denominations. One reason for this is the fact that the position of the more conservative Evangelicals was directly supported during the Cold War by the United States, which saw the religious group as a useful bulwark against communism in Latin America, an area where liberation theology had given Catholicism a dangerous flavour.
The Rockefeller Report of 1969 and the Santa Fe Declaration of 1980 illustrate the use of religion by North American intelligence in defence of American interests in South America.
The Rockefeller Report states that the US must strive to win the battle for the hegemony of consciousness by exposing Latin America to the influence of the American way of life “through the control of the traditional socializing apparatuses of civil society: family, school and church”.
The Santa Fe document, prepared for the Council on Inter-American Security and presented to the Republican Platform Committee in 1980 by a team of ultra-conservative advisors, states that “US foreign policy must begin to counter (and not react to) liberation theology as used in Latin America by liberation theology clergy.” The paper refers to the work already done in this direction:
The experience gained in Vietnam through programmed population control was exported by many A.I.D. agents and other U.S. services to Latin America, particularly Guatemala. Some cults were founded by psychological warfare specialists who had been entrusted with the control of political space and hegemony over consciences. (emphasis mine)
The Santa Fe document is clear and does not mince its words. Through the National SecurityAgency (NSA), the United States is creating “cults” “ that are able to "control the political space and the hegemony of consciences”. In charge are “specialists in psychological warfare.”
Jesus Garzia Ruiz writes in a text entitled “La notion relative aux sectes en Amérique latine” that in Latin America " all cults are work of the United States and are financed from abroad." A note from the Mexican Ministry of the Interior states that
Sects carry out the most subtle part of the process of domination and North Americanisation of underdeveloped societies by using religious preaching, which is part of the ideological struggle, within civil society.
To support this policy, the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), an interfaith organisation, was established in 1981 and funded by right-wing institutions, including the Smith Richardson and the Mellon Scaife Family Foundation. Both served as financial conduits for the CIA. The IRD unleashed a propaganda campaign against church activists who were at the forefront of opposing US aid to the government of El Salvador and other repressive regimes in Latin America.
The project was successful. Today, the influence of evangelicals on society in these countries is enormous in terms of electoral potential. The expansion of evangelical churches in Latin America, especially the neo-Pentecostal churches, which have considerable fundings that make them more “competitive” with the Catholic Church, has contributed to the rise of “right-wing” personalities and political forces close to the interests of the economic-financial powers, especially the American ones. Behind these phenomena there seems to be a very specific strategy, which consists of replacing “left-wing Catholic” Christians (because they are interested in social issues) with “right-wing evangelical” Christians (who are very interested in moral issues, but little in social issues).
There is ample evidence of US funding of all kinds of churches, Christian and non-Christian. For example, the CIA funded churches in Kerala, India, and this interference in Indian politics came to light in 1978 when the former ambassador to that country, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published the information in his book “A Dangerous Place” In addition to the interference in Kerala, the American churches also supported the terrorists in Nagaland on a large scale. These terrorists received blatant help from the American establishment in the form of so-called human rights reports and public statements of support from high-ranking politicians like Jimmy Carter.
The CIA worked with agents of DINA, the Chilean secret police, to build a very sophisticated intelligence system in Chile that utilised the Pentecostal “Message” cult and the Colonia Dignidad facility, founded as a Nazi refugee colony and run by Pastor Paul Shafer, for covert operations. Paul Shafer, a former Nazi and security agent for Pastor William Branham in Germany, worked with the DINA (Chilean secret police) to interrogate, torture and murder opponents of the Pinochet regime.
Religion plays a very powerful role in culturally influencing and orienting the masses. Religions are an extraordinary instrumentum regni because they can dilute the religious identity of some population groups by creating new forms of mutual recognition (in-group) that become manoeuvrable constituencies when they are not useful for processes of social polarisation that can lead to uprisings or real revolutions. For example, Carl Gershman, director of the National Endowment for Democracy (Ned), told the US Congress in 2018 that Ned had spent $3,381,824 on programmes prior to the 2014 popular uprising in Ukraine, which took place under the name “Euromaiden”, including support for those non-governmental organisations that fuelled the uprising. The role of the various churches and cults in the Euromaiden affair was significant. Among them were the Greek Catholics. This does not mean that Euromaiden was carried out by “sects” or “Satanists",” as has been claimed, but only that the religious element played a role in social polarisation.
Two Chinese cults
In 2019, the television channel NBC revealed that Donald Trump's most important advertising supporter - after his election committee - was the newspaper The Epoch Times. This is a multilingual, far-right newspaper run by the Chinese religious movement Falun Gong. Much of the newspaper's efforts are dedicated to promoting the right in America, but also in Europe, a work that has included the dissemination of false data about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 US elections. The Epoch Times is also one of the main disseminators of conspiracy theories. The most important is that of QAnon, the bizarre theory that sees Trump as the possible saviour of the world from the satanic-pedophile dome that secretly rules it.
In 2020, the New York Times called the paper a “disinformation machine of global scale.” According to Media Matters for America, the main goal of the Epoch Times - which is now published in 36 countries under the supervision of a network of non-profit organisations - is not to make a profit, but to organise a long and extensive “influence operation” The aim of this influence operation, in turn, is to “foment anti-Chinese Communist Party sentiment". The cult is actually being persecuted in its own country.
It has been said that The Epoch Times was the main financier of Donald Trump's election campaign. However, it is not clear where Falun Gong's funding came from. Steve Bannon, the guru of Trump's New Right, has collaborated with Falun Gong in the production of a documentary for New Tang Dinasty TV (NTD), a channel owned by the cult's holding company, and said that in conversations with these interlocutors he was under the impression that they had unlimited resources.
The conclusions frequently drawn over the years, not only during Trump's presidency, about a connection between the Chinese cult and the CIA in an anti-Chinese capacity are based on sporadically filtered and reported press reports. As early as 2010, the Washington Post reported $1.5 million in funding from the US State Department for the Global Internet Freedom consortium, which is based in the US but linked to the Falun Gong spiritual movement. More recently, in 2021, the US media reported on a State Department grant to a software development team owned by Falun Gong. Oddly enough, Steve Bannon himself is involved.
In June 2024, the finance director of Epoch Times, Weidong Guan, was arrested for alleged involvement in a multi-year money laundering scheme involving at least 67 million dollars in illegally acquired funds. According to the indictment, Guan allegedly used a cryptocurrency platform to purchase prepaid cards with illicit funds, including unemployment benefits, at a discount. Interestingly, following the arrest of the finance director, Falun Gong spiritual leader Li Hongzhi wrote two articles that appear to be aimed directly at the media company's leadership and were published prominently on the Epoch Times homepage:
You were thinking that it’s hard to fight the CCP’s persecution without funds, and wanted to make money for this cause; and that the U.S. government would be understanding if something wasn’t handled quite right - Li wrote in an article published on 5 June -But that was your own thinking.
The Falun Gong leader, who apparently distances himself from the newspaper's leadership, which allegedly orchestrated the scam without his knowledge, describes the publication's mission (to fight the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong) and refers to the complacency that this leadership would have expected from the U.S. government in case the illicit operation became known.
On what premise should a money laundering activity conducted by a Chinese cult would have met with such complacency? So the New York District's investigation was embarrassing.
However, in order to understand how a work of influence takes place, I am reporting here on a fact that is small (but perhaps not even that small) but extremely significant from the point of view of international political relevance: In 2022, the main international, but mainly Italian and Canadian newspapers published an alarming news story about the proliferation of secret Chinese police stations scattered around the world, tasked with monitoring compatriots abroad. This alarm was based on a report by the Madrid-based non-governmental organisation Safeguard Defenders, whose leading figure is Peter Dahlin, who co-founded it with Michael Caster. A quick Google search was all it took to find out that Dahlin writes for the Epoch Times (Figure 74).
Does this mean that the issue of the Chinese police stations is a fake? We cannot say. It may very well be true as far as a person outside of this intelligence dynamic could know. However, it should be noted that national and supranational agencies and bodies are also acting on the basis of information coming from organisations linked to a cult that has been described as a disinformation machine on a global scale.
However, another Chinese cult has come to the fore undermining Falun Gong. This is the Church of Almighty God, also known as the Lightning of the East, which is considered the most persecuted religious movement in the world. The financing of this cult, too, is also unknown. It must be much larger than that of Falun Gong, because this movement, which worships the reincarnation of Jesus Christ in a Chinese woman, is known for an intense artistic production that includes films, songs, ballets, musicals and various shows of dizzying quantity and outstanding quality.
It is unclear where the Church of Almighty God, a minority and persecuted cult, gets the huge sums of money needed to produce such a large amount of artistic material, produced with great professionalism (among other things, translated into almost every language in the world, in which it is dubbed with equal professionalism). This is an immense commitment from people such as directors, actors, scriptwriters, set designers, authors, dancers, choreographers, costume designers, singers, translators, dubbing actors, cameramen, editors, etc. The money required is enormous and the organisation complex: logistical difficulties, studios, rehearsal times that are incompatible with the daily work of a non-professional, etc.
Video 2 - One of the thousands of ballets and musicals produced by the Church of Almighty God
One of the stars of these films is Li Yanli, who staged a suicide attempt at Madrid airport on 3 November 2023 to avoid being deported to China. Although she was a follower of a cult that was far from Catholicism, she was supported by a broad front of Catholic extremism that managed to collect over 60,000 signatures to present a petition to the judges to grant the actress political asylum. Part of this broad front was the association “Abogados Cristianos”, an ultra-Catholic lobby closely linked to the far-right party Vox, but also to such fundamentalist lobbies as CitizenGo, HazteOir or El Yunque, of which HazteOir appears to be only a screen-organization.
In 2021, Wikileaks published “The Intolerance Network", ” consisting of 17,000 documents revealing the relationships between CitizenGO, HazteOir, the far-right party Vox and the occult organisation El Yunque. The latter is a Mexican secret society organised as a paramilitary corps with the aim of restoring the Kingdom of Christ. Basically the same agenda as Tradition, Family and Property. It is therefore interesting to read what is written about the situation in Spain in the report “Modern-Day Crusaders in Europe", prepared for the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights:
[...] in 2003 a new organisation called Hazte Oir appeared which seems to fit many of the characteristics often associated with TFP (see section 5), including: grass-roots mobilisation combined with fundraising, multiplicity of branding, youth outreach, the same US contacts, intense contact with other TFP organisations and, finally, exercising traditionalist pressure on the Catholic Church. It diverges from TFP characteristics primarily in its branding, and, while Catholic-inspired, Hazte Oir is by no means a religious movement, and there are no references to Corrêa de Oliveira. Hazte Oir (literally, ’make yourself heard’) plays a watchdog role on Spanish political life and launched a social mobilisation platform “CitizenGo” which would appear to be a 21st century digital version of the direct mailing techniques TFP pioneered in the 1970s (see section 8). Hazte Oir may be the reincarnation of TFP-Covadonga (name of the Spanish branch of TFP, ed.) under a new set of circumstances where there are limits as to how openly it may display its affiliations in Spain26 (see section 6). Whether Hazte Oir is formally part of the TFP family or not, it shares many of the characteristics of TFP organisations and occupies the same niche. (Bold mine)
After all, representatives of another organisation that is closely linked to the TFP via Alleanza Cattolica (see the fourth part of this report), namely the Centre for the Study of New Religions (CESNUR), expressly apologise to CitizenGo and also describe it as a “meritorious organisation".
We know about the persecution to which the Church of Almighty God is subjected by the Chinese Communist Party mainly thanks to an Italian publication issued by the think tank CESNUR, which emerged from Alleanza Cattolica. It is called Bitter Winter. Not that the backers of Bitter Winter, a daily magazine in eight languages with news from China, a country from which it is not easy to export news, and which is published by a non-profit organisation based in Turin, CESNUR, are clear either. But the news about religious persecution in China used by the US State Department is that of the Turin-based magazine. The Department, whose documents represent the official US position and are supposed to guide US policy, openly admits in its report on religious freedom that much of the information comes from Bitter Winter. Its editor, Massimo Introvigne, rightly boasts of this and writes
Readers of Bitter Winter will forgive us if we mention that, in the section on China, Bitter Winter remains, as it was in the report of last year, the single most quoted source. We were quoted 74 times in 2020. The quotes became 85 in 2021.
It is evident that the sources accessed by the Catholic Lawyer's magazine are more reliable than those accessed by the US intelligence services.
In an exchange on Facebook between a member of the Italian “anti-cult” community and Introvigne, faced with the paradox that Bitter Winter could have more information than the American services, Introvigne commented with a short text containing the following statements: “I have known the people who produce these reports for decades" and “there are people in China, but not only there, who prefer to pass on information to scholars who do not work for American government agencies or those of other countries”. With this, the editor of CESNUR and Bitter Winter confirms both the direct and long-standing knowledge of the report writers and that his magazine actually knows more than the CIA because Chinese citizens are willing to talk to its editors rather than the agencies the magazine will later report to anyway. The post lasted the minutes it took the author to realise that it was inappropriate to leave it online and delete it. However, the screenshot was photographed before it was deleted (Fig. 75). A few days later, returning to the same topic on the same social network, the director of CESNUR had a new fit of unbridled self-congratulation, going so far as to boast that “a small magazine published in Turin has become the main source of official documents on religion in China from the most important country in the world” (Fig. 76).
It is therefore ironic that a magazine and an organisation capable of such intelligence capabilities should fall for a hoax such as the one perpetrated on it by a Ukrainian pseudo-scientist: Oleg Maltslev. This is the leader of an Odessa-based organization with whom CESNUR developed an instant affectionate relationship and for whom it gave in to an exculpatory impulse after this organization came under heavy criticism in 2014 from Russian and Ukrainian anti-cult associations.
According to a well-known script, the exchange of cordiality and appreciation then began between CESNUR and the leader of the group vilified by the evil anti-cultists, Maltslev. A monographic issue of CESNUR's magazine was dedicated to him in 2018. The monographic issue was preceded by an exchange of courtesy visits in 2016. Malstlev had first been invited to the CESNUR headquarters in Turin, and then the CESNUR director had returned the favour with a visit to Odessa, where he gave a lecture to Maltslev's supporters on the blatantly discriminatory actions of the anti-cult movement. The CESNUR director reportedly called Meltslev “a scientist whose scientific research deserves much attention”; the Ukrainian instead referred to the Italian as a star of great magnitude that “shining in the sky of Odessa”.
In 2024, things took a turn for the worse: Ukrainian law enforcement and security services gathered evidence of psychological abuse, blackmail, threats and harassment against supporters and journalists after a lengthy investigation. Those who questioned Maltslev's authority, his titles (which were apparently all fake) and his merits were harshly persecuted on social networks, for example by spreading accusations of paedophilia accompanied by edited audio and video files. In addition, many people who were persecuted by Maltslev's organisations were bombarded with calls with threatening content from unknown numbers. One person died of a heart attack as a result. But that's nothing.
On 1 September, almost six months late, the Ukrainian press reported that on 5 March law enforcement officers had arrested the closest associate of the “guru'”, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Unsolved Crimes” (one of the organisation's productions) Konstantin Slobodyanyuk, and taken him to a pre-trial detention centre. The latter was accused of an impressive series of crimes. These include the payment of bribes to an official, criminal conspiracy and illegal burglary of computer equipment, but above all high treason under martial law (Part 2 of Article 111 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code). For the latter offence, he and Malstlev himself, who was on the run, face a life sentence.
The intelligence investigation revealed that Oleg Maltsev had set up a spy organisation that worked for the Russian enemy. It was a full-fledged sabotage unit consisting of 23 people, including an assault group, a sniper, a reconnaissance group, an operational support group and even a communications officer.
This story is ironic for two reasons. The first reason is that the “anti-cult movement” have been accusing them of being close to Russia by cult apologists for years. So being caught by the Ukrainian security services in the vicinity of a traitor working for the Russian enemy is just as embarrassing as a conservative being caught red-handed with a tranny. This guy will of course be able to say: “I did not know that",” and if he is not particularly bright, there is also a risk that it is true.
The second element that makes me smile is that the director of CESNUR, who likes to describe me as “sometimes funny but not brilliant” - as is common among academics - said that CESNUR's magazine, Bitter Winter, would be able to gather much more information about the misdeeds of the Chinese Communist Party than the CIA. However, it had failed to realise that the group they were exchanging mutual appreciation, besides being (it seems) a criminal syndicate, was also working for Russia. They also were betrayed. Funny, but not brilliant.
If you want a little amusement, you can read Willy Fautré's (HRWF) heartfelt defence of Maltslev, who is allegedly the victim of a conspiracy. Among the hilarious things expressed in his article, Fautré cites as the most likely of the hypotheses about the architects of the plot against poor Maltslev the martial arts schools, which would have been very concerned about the new form of fighting invented by the Ukrainian “scientist”. No kidding. It is written here: Ukraine, Suspicion of Fabrication of a Criminal Case. The less authoritative newspaper publishing this piece of journalism is an old acquaintance, The European Times, the publication linked to Scientology (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue).
Back to China. One of the most horrific accusations levelled at the Chinese Communist Party is that it harvests organs from living people (or kills them to harvest their vital organs), especially from “prisoners of conscience” such as followers of Falun Gong and the Church of Almighty God. According to a 2017 Washington Post report, investigations and reports have refuted the claim that China is currently secretly performing 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants per year. Data compiled by US-based Quintiles IMS showed that China's demand for immunosuppressant drugs, which are needed to prevent patients' bodies from rejecting transplanted organs, was roughly equal to the number of transplants China said it was performing. On 14 November 2018, Mark Field of the UK Foreign Office responded to a specific question in a debate on the issue in the House of Commons in London: “We disagree with claims of systematic organ harvesting from political prisoners of conscience, assessing that the evidence they present does not substantiate that claim.” A similar position was taken by Australia. However, a London-based independent tribunal called the China Tribunal - Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China has confirmed the veracity of organ harvesting. This body was founded by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC). However, if you look at ETAC's website, you will find that many members of its “management” have close ties to the Epoch Times, the Falun Gong newspaper! If you go through the list of ETAC management, these Falun Gong connections appear in almost all of them. ETAC is clearly a Falun Gong front organisation. Of course, this does not mean that the findings and conclusions of this tribunal are necessarily false, but its vaunted independence does. The problem is that it is the judgement of this tribunal that Bitter Winter refers to in his articles on this subject. Let us remember that Bitter Winter is the main source of information on China for the US State Department.
Meanwhile, the influence of Bitter Winter also seems to be having an effect in Italy. This is evidenced by the fact that, as Introvigne himself writes on the website of HRWF, the Belgian organisation chaired by Willy Fautrè, more and more followers of the Church of Almighty God (CAG) are finding asylum in Italy precisely because of the magazine. Interestingly, Italy is the main refugee country for the Chinese cult. Introvigne writes:
On June 14, in an exemplary decision judging a CAG asylum seeker, represented by specialized lawyers Amalia Astory and Laura Bondi, as deserving “the higher level of protection” in Italy, the Tribunal of Rome answered the question by mentioning as “reliable sources” “Bitter Winter,” reports by the U.S. and other governments that quote “Bitter Winter,” and a statement by the late sociologist PierLuigi Zoccatelli, who was deputy director of CESNUR, “Bitter Winter”’s parent organization.
Reference is made to the case of a woman who was refused asylum at first instance in 2018. The author speculates that the court was influenced by Chinese propaganda. That may be, but the real objection was that it was not credible that in a closed, non-democratic, high-tech surveillance country, an influx of believers from a church persecuted by the government into Italy, all of whom with their proper passports, was possible. It was Bitter Winter's men who made it clear to the court that corruption of officials is extremely widespread in China and therefore it is not very difficult even for members of the Church of Almighty God to obtain a passport to leave the country. On what basis did they prove this? Introvigne says:
Quoting Italian government sources, which in turn refer to “Bitter Winter,” “a study by sociologist Pier Luigi Zoccatelli,” and the U.S. State Department reports on religious liberty (which also quoted “Bitter Winter”) […]
Oh, okay then...
Bitter Winter not only informs the West about China's persecution of spiritual minorities, but also campaigns vigorously against the “anti-cult narrative” promoted by organisations it assumes are linked to the governments of France, Russia and China. Another conspiracy the editors are keen to address is the artificial origin of the coronavirus, which allegedly escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
It may be a coincidence, but a recent study conducted by the University of Urbino has shown that most of the nodes of the disinformation network about the Covid 19 pandemic in Italy lead directly to the website of the Church of Almighty God.
Certainly, some doubts about the reliability of Bitter Winter, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not have it, have instead been expressed by sources that have no connection with the Chinese government, which could have an advantage in discrediting the magazine. For example, from a Korean Protestant publication (see screenshot below) and from the website BZBriefs, which is affiliated with China Source, a non-profit Christian “ministry” based in the U.S. that seeks to reduce the CCP's pressure on Christian churches. These critics speculate about a connection between Bitter Winter and the Church of Almighty God. It must be said that China Source later rectified its claim by publishing that it understood that Bitter Winter is not connected to the Church of Almighty God in private discussions with Bitter Winter .
However, no one dares to speculate with whom this church is in turn connected.
We only know that the persecutions of the CCP, real and alleged, are absolutely useful in demonstrating the godlessness of the Chiana government. There is one small problem, however: what is going on in China is hard to know. But that's not a problem for Bitter Winter. The magazine is a useful megaphone of persecution. Ifit did not exist, the American services would have had to invent it.
Video 3 - Massimo Introvigne on TV 2000 (Italy) in October 2023. The journalist hints at his relationship with the secret services
Appendix: Italy and the fabulous Frank Gigliotti
In an article that appeared in the ‘San Diego Union' on 23 January 1947, it was reported that the evangelical pastor Frank Gigliotti, who lived in La Mesa near San Diego, had received a letter from the Italian government informing him that the commission charged with drafting the constitution of the new republican state had adopted the 'religious freedom' amendment he had proposed on 19 December 1946. The thing did not stop there. In March of the same year, Gigliotti travelled to Italy to work personally on the articles of the Italian constitution concerning religious freedom. The ‘San Diego Union reported on 17 July that the respected citizen had returned home after drafting the articles of the Italian constitution. It is very strange that an American citizen, who holds no institutional position, would lay his hand on the constitution of a foreign country. And yet it was again the San Diego Union that reported on 6 October 1970 that the Italian state had awarded Gigliotti the Republic's Medal of Merit for his help in founding the Republic itself. In the article, Gigliotti stated: "I helped to draft Articles 17, 18 and 19 of the Italian Constitution, which deal with freedom of assembly, religion and association". But who was the man who was called ‘the fabulous Frank Gigliotti’? Antonio Nicaso, an essayist and expert on organised crime, explains this in an interview with journalist Ferruccio Pinotti for the book ‘Fratelli d'Italia’ (BUR, 2007):
Frank Bruno Gigliotti was a Protestant pastor of Calabrian origin, but grew up in the United States. He first came into contact with the OSS, the Office of Strategic Service, and then with the CIA. in 1942, Gigliotti and the OSS founded the American Committee for Italian Democracy, which was supported by the Sons of Italy, an organisation of Mafiosi and secret agents who were preparing the landing in Sicily. Lucky Luciano also hired the very young Michele Sindona to connect the OSS with Sicilian mafia bosses. Gigliotti had so much influence that he forced Italian Freemasonry - which had just been resurrected after the hostilities of Fascism - to accept the secret lodge of Prince Alliata di Montereale from Palermo into its ranks in exchange for the return of Palazzo Giustiniani [the palace, the historic seat of Freemasonry, had been acquired by the state after Freemasonry had been banned under Fascism. Author's note]. Prince Alliata di Montereale was investigated for the Portella delle Ginestre massacre - and acquitted in a preliminary trial. In 1947, Gigliotti was the architect of the first recognition of the Grand Orient of Italy of Palazzo Giustiniani, which was to become the mother house of Lodge P2, by the prestigious Northern Circumscription of American Freemasonry.
In other words, Frank B. Gigliotti was a CIA agent and Freemason who was active in Italy in the immediate post-war period. He became famous among historians for his reconstruction of Italian Freemasonry as an organisation subordinate to the American one. It is widely agreed that this work was part of the US plan to combat communism. In fact, the American secret services had found in Freemasonry, the Catholic Church, the Mafia and the ex-fascists the ideal allies to fight communism in the Western country with the largest communist party (and bordering the Soviet bloc). As Nicaso says, "some American lodges had been active in Italy since 1941, in association with the OSS, whose leaders were all Scottish Rite Freemasons and members of knightly orders".
In 1960, Gigliotti promoted the union of the masonic obedience Grand Orient of Italy (GOI) with the Supreme Council of the Most Serene Grand Lodge of the ALAM of the Sicilian Prince Giovanni Alliata di Montereale (whose name would be associated with the events of the Borghese coup, the Rosa dei venti and the Mafia organisations, in addition to the Portella delle Ginestre massacre), which later ended in the P2 lodge.
The commission on P2 led by Tina Anselmi wrote:
It seems that the union of the Grand Orient with the strongly conservative Freemasonry of Alliata was the condition that Gigliotti, fuelled by a visceral anti-communism, set in exchange for American intervention in the negotiations with the Italian government over Palazzo Giustiniani [... from these events it is clear not only that the project of unifying Italian Freemasonry does not seem to correspond only to domestic interests, but also that Gelli appeared on the scene after Gigliotti's disappearance, in a chronological order and with an identity of functions that are not without significance.
This is not enough. Sergio Flamigni writes in ‘Trame Atlantiche’ that
Among the conditions that Frank Gigliotti dictated to Italian Freemasonry in order to gain the recognition of US Freemasonry and thus obtain American support for the recapture of Palazzo Giustiniani was permission to establish extraterritorial American lodges in Italy [...]
Daniele Ganser writes in his book ‘Nato's Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe’, that Licio Gelli, the later Venerable Master of the P2 lodge, was personally recruited by Gigliotti to fight the communist front with the support of the CIA. The relationship between P2 and the strategy of tension in Italy and the involvement in the operations of Gladio, NATO's secret anti-communist structure, is history.
All this is acquired knowledge. Instead, Gigliotti's in some ways even more disturbing work as ghostwriter of the articles of the Italian Constitution concerning religious freedom remains rather obscure. Here too, it is difficult to imagine that the interests at stake were exclusively ‘domestic', that Gigliotti's work was aimed solely at defending the rights of Italian citizens. The commitment seems inappropriate, out of scale for a simple pastor and characterised by an exaggerated and ostentatious zeal. Thus we read in ‘L'Unità’ of 15 January 1950 that the Reverend Frank Gigliotti, Presbyterian pastor of Lemon Greve (California), declared that 'American Protestants will declare war on the Italian government if the persecution of Italian Protestants is not curbed". The issue of ‘religious freedom’ is used in politics as a weapon of blackmail and intimidation. This allows to retrodate the decision to regard religious freedom as a fundamental objective of American foreign policy, as enshrined in the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.
The CIA's contiguity with the Vatican, which went so far as to nickname the agency ‘Catholic Intelligence Agency’, was not convenient for it to remain exclusive, just as it was not favourable for it to remain exclusive with the political parties of the far right. It was no coincidence that Gigliotti was responsible for the split of Giuseppe Saragat's Socialist Party of Italian Workers (PSLI), later the Italian Social Democratic Party (PSDI), from the Italian Socialist Party in 1947. The PSI, led by Nenni, represented maximalism with a revolutionary matrix close to the PCI, while the wing represented by Saragat was reformist. The fact that Frank Gigliotti was behind this split is confirmed by many. Penny Lernoux writes in ‘In Banks We Trust :Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican’ that ‘according to a former prominent Italian Freemason, the split in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), from which the Italian Social Democratic Party (PSDI) emerged, "was “entirely provoked by the Freemasons in the United States and Italy”' (p. 201).
Giuseppe Casarrubea, a scholar of relations between the Mafia and the secret services, whose father was killed by the gang of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano, the author of the Portella delle Ginestre massacre, says that Frank Gigliotti was the architect of the socialist split in Palazzo Barberini under the leadership of Saragat’ (Storia segreta della Sicilia. Dallo sbarco alleato a Portella delle Ginestre, Bompiani, 2007, p. 146). The support of the parties of the moderate left enabled those behind Gigliotti to have a variety of anti-communist forces and possible alternatives at their disposal when the facts had rendered the forces of the right useless. A good example of this was the situation that arose when President Truman supported the De Gasperi government on condition that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was excluded. However, an eventual Christian Democrat-led government would have created a Catholic supremacy that would have been poorly tolerated by various Protestant circles overseas and would have led to a polarisation between secular and clerical forces. As Roberto Faenza and Marco Fini rightly note in ‘Gli Americani in Italia’, many figures such as Truman, Marshall and Welles, who were known as representatives of Freemasonry and therefore tended to defend the secularism, would have reacted to excessive clerical influence. Therefore, Gigliotti's influence - once again - helped bring Saragat into government by stemming the clerical tide to appease the US government of the day. Saragat did indeed enter the 4th De Gasperi government.
The function of religious diversification is probably similar. Relying solely on the Vatican and the network of parishes is not advisable, and sometimes it may be necessary a work of influence that clash with Catholic interests. The Assemblies of God In Italy (ADI), a Pentecostal congregation founded in 1947, to which Gigliotti and his associate Charles Fama, also a Freemason, were very close and which had links with the American Assemblies of God, benefited most directly from this. And not only that.
Go to the next chapter: Fascists, spies and gurus. 8. cults and far right
Fascists, spies and gurus. 2. Mind Games
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