THEIR KINGDOM COME -- INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI

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17. Kremlin on the Tiber

The Work is a family and a militia at the same time.

-- Cronica VII, 1964

OPUS DEI'S HIGHEST AUTHORITY IS THE PRESIDENT (NOW PRELATE) general. Internally, he is addressed as the Father. The symbol of his succession is a piece of the 'True Cross' that he wears like an amulet around his neck. His authority is absolute. His term of office is indefinite. He is assisted in carrying out God's wishes by a vicar general. The statutes stipulate that both the Father and his vicar general must be priests, each with at least five years of sacerdotal experience, and not younger than forty. Their place of residence is the Villa Tevere, which is also the seat of Opus Dei's central government.

The Father rules through two administrative councils -- a General Council for the Men's Section and a Central Advisory for the Women's Section. Each sits at the Father's pleasure, meeting to no fixed schedule. The General Council corresponds to a presidential cabinet of ministers. Its sessions are held in secret, around a council table polished to an immaculate sheen by an army of assistant women numeraries, under the gaze of the Virgin Mary whose portrait dominates the council chamber. In addition to the vicar general, the council consists of a procurator general, who as well as handling relations with the Roman Curia serves as Opus Dei's secretary of state, three deputy secretaries, each a vocal for one of the Archangels, a prefect of studies and a general administrator, who acts as the minister of finance. He is assisted by a Consulta Tecnica General staffed only by inscribed numeraries. The cabinet is completed by the priest secretary, who handles relations with the Women's Section, a central spiritual director, who watches over the common spiritual direction of all members, and a number of regional delegates representing the various regional vicariats around the world.

The women's Central Advisory, as the name suggests, is purely advisory. The Women's Section, for example, may express an opinion on who, in its view, should be the Father's successor, but women have no elective role and in general little impact on forming the Work's overall policies. Presided over by the Father, assisted by his vicar general and central priest secretary, the Central Advisory has a composition that mirrors the General Council.

Members of the central government are appointed for eight-year terms. The Council and Advisory each have a Permanent Commission, which in the case of the men corresponds to a standing inner cabinet. Appointments to and movements within the Council and Advisory are reported in a semi-annual bulletin, Romana, which is available upon subscription to the general public.

Authority over the fifty or so regions is vested with the Father. He is represented within the boundaries of each region by a regional vicar. The regional vicars serve at the Father's discretion. They must supply him with reports about all developments of importance in their jurisdictions. Each regional vicar is assisted by a Regional Council and a Regional Advisory. A Regional Council usually consists of ten members:

• Secretary -- a layman, he co-ordinates the work of the Regional Council;
• Priest secretary -- the regional vicar's assistant, he handles liaison between the Regional Council and the Women's Section;
• The defender -- always a layman, insures that the statutes are properly implemented and maintained;
• Regional administrator -- equivalent to the minister of finance;
• Vocal of St Raphael -- oversees the recruiting and formation of new members;
• Vocal of St Gabriel -- oversees the spiritual well-being of the supernumeranes;
• Vocal of St Michael -- looks after the spiritual, physical and material well-being of the numeraries;
• Studies delegate -- primarily concerned with the Work's theology and philosophy programmes;
• Regional delegate -- he also sits on the General Council in Rome and is Opus Central's official liaison with the region;
• Regional spiritual director -- a priest, he is a non-voting member of both regional councils for men and women.

In some respects the regional delegate acts as a countercheck to the regional vicar, as both report directly to Rome. The regional spiritual director, although he has no vote, may also act as Opus Central's coadjutor, reporting directly to the Father or his vicar general if required.

Some regions -- e.g., Spain, Italy, Mexico and the United States (except California and Texas) -- are so large or important in terms of membership that they are divided into delegations, equivalent to sub-regions. Each sub-region is governed by a vicar delegate, assisted by delegation councils which are structured like regional councils. California and Texas are both constituted as separate regional vicariats.

Opus Dei's third level of government is the local management committee that runs each centre or residence. A management committee usually consists of a director, assistant director, secretary and chaplain. The director and his two assistants are always lay persons and the only priest -- the chaplain -- is non-voting. But because lay members are subject to an authoritarian form of clericalism, they are expected to follow suggestions of the non-voting priest.

In any event, regional vicariats and local centres enjoy little autonomy because they must abide by a 'Praxis' which interprets all policy handed down by the General Council in Rome. Described as 'an operating manual that tells Opus Dei members how absolutely everything must be done', it is regularly updated and kept in a series of loose-leaf binders. It used to be available for consultation in every centre but was withdrawn after some parts were photocopied by persons leaving Opus Dei to be used against it. Together with copies of Cronica and other sensitive documents, it must now be kept in each centre's safe, and may only be consulted with the specific permission of the local director:

Opus Dei denies the existence of a Praxis manual and when I mentioned it to Andrew Soane, the UK information officer, he replied: 'Perhaps you could send me your copy, as we do not have one.' The problem may have been that Soane truly did not recognize the manual under that name. Its proper title is the Vademecum and it comes in seven colour-coded volumes, covering internal publications (red), local councils (navy blue), apostolate of public opinion (orange), liturgy (burgundy), priests (purple), management of local centres (green), and ceremonies (grey).

It is available in Spanish only. And it describes in encyclopaedic detail everything a member needs to know about the spirit, life and customs of the institution -- from how the Founder's birthday must be celebrated to a correct specimen for a will which new numeraries are required to draft in their own hand, leaving blank the date, names of heirs, legatees, executors and the fees to be paid to the executors. Nothing is left to individual judgement; everything is regimented so that numerary members are fully programmed. More leeway is permitted married members, but they too must follow a code of behaviour established by Opus Central in Rome.

Villa Tevere is more than the seat of Opus Dei's central government; it is the nerve centre of an empire that receives information from around the world through an efficient intelligence gathering network. The intelligence is sifted by an army of analysts who prepare reports for the permanent commissions or in some instances directly for the vicar general. Just as directives from Rome never go through the mails but are hand-carried by special couriers, the most confidential incoming reports are likewise not entrusted to public-access communications systems.

It took twenty-five years to complete the remodelling of Villa Tevere. The facade of what originally had been the Hungarian embassy to the Holy See remained mostly intact, although raised to six stories. But the rest when viewed from the exterior has an austere fortress-like aspect, though from inside the whimsical jumble of architectural styles resembles a Disneyland for clerics.

The gardens of the original villa have disappeared under a mass of concrete and brick. The inner courtyard has a classic Florentine touch to it. Two new wings were added: the Casa del Uffici, which houses the men's central government; and the equally Florentine Villa Sacchetti, headquarters of the women's section, with a separate entrance in the side-street of the same name. While the entire complex retains the Villa Tevere name, the original building is now called the Villa Vecchia. Its courtyard entrance is guarded by two imperial eagles perched on stone columns. A monumental reception hall with stained glass windows has a ceremonial staircase in stone leading to the Father's office and living quarters. An eighteenth-century tapestry depicting a biblical scene that was donated by a wealthy family in Rio de Janeiro hangs in the stairwell. The furniture throughout is in dark, massive wood, the chairs covered in red velvet. In addition to the main library and treasure vault, the Villa Vecchia contains an important juridical section and the apartments of the Vicar General and Procurator General.

Semi-attached to the Villa Vecchia is a high tower called the Casa del Vicolo. On a different level behind the Villa Sacchetti is La Montagnola, a six-storey building given over to the Central Advisory and the apartment of the central directress. The women's compound also includes the Casetta, Il Ridotto and Il Fabbricato Piccolo. All street-level windows are barred, which in Rome only seems prudent, but also the higher windows of the Casa del Vicolo and some other upper-storey windows as well.

The complex contains no less than a dozen chapels, among them one dedicated to the Holy Family of Nazareth and another to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Two of the more distinctive are the Chapel of Relics and Chapel of Chalices. What became the Prelatic Church of Our Lady of Peace is entirely finished in bluish marble. The high altar is austerely set with six tall candlesticks. At the back of the apse is a throne-like armchair for the Father, surrounded on either side by six chairs for his principal ministers. Fisac designed the prelatic church to accommodate two hundred worshippers. At the Father's request, the gallery for women numeraries was angled in such a way that the congregation below cannot see the women in the blue sky above them.

After ten years as head of the Venezuelan women's section, Maria del Carmen Tapia was summoned back to Opus Central to appear before the Father. By her own account, Opus Dei had transformed her into a religious fanatic. She was totally dedicated to the cause. During her years in Caracas she had religiously transmitted the required tithe -- 10 per cent of the revenues from the Venezuelan women's section -- to an Opus Dei account at the IOR, representing a considerable fortune for the young women, admittedly all from wealthy families. She thought the money went towards training priests at the Roman College of the Holy Cross. When she arrived back in Rome she was placed under house arrest in the Villa Sacchetti, cut off from the outside world. The charges against her were never specified, yet she was repeatedly pressed to confess her guilt. Callers were told she was absent or unwell. She felt like her. world had caved in. The directress was coldly distant. For weeks she was permitted no other human contact. At forty-five her hair turned' white. Finally, word came from the Father that, having refused to repent, she must resign. He said her management of the women's section in Venezuela had damaged the Work's unity. As far as she could tell, this referred to her insistence that women numeraries in Venezuela be allowed to confess to the Opus Dei priest of their choice. After devoting twenty years to the Work, Maria del Carmen suddenly found herself standing on the doorstep of 36 via di Villa Sacchetti with only her passport and little more than the clothes on her back, without ever understanding why.

That she was abandoned, Opus Dei told the relator general of the Causes of Saints, was a perfect lie. Maria del Carmen Tapia was expelled, the postulator affirmed, because she had perverted a group of women numeraries by practising upon them 'the worst sort of sexual aberrations'. Moreover she had caused the Father such grief that he subjected himself to extra flagellation for her salvation. And, after all the harm she had done, he helped her find a job when she left, the' postulator maintained.

Maria del Carmen Tapia was not alone in receiving this kind of charity. Staying in the room next to her at the Villa Sacchetti was Aurora Sanchez Bella, sister of Alfredo. She wanted to leave the Work and return to Spain. But this was refused. She was a nervous wreck and paced the floor night after night. Another numerary who passed through Rome on her way from Mexico to London was Rosario 'Piquiqui' Moran. She also was unhappy and wanted to leave. After arriving in London she jumped out of a top-floor window at the Rosecroft House residence and broke her pelvis. According to Eileen Clark, who lived in the same Rosecroft residence but was absent that day, another resident gave this description of the incident:

During the morning meditation, we heard almighty screaming. I can still see the person who continued to read aloud from The Way as if she was a puppet. There was general chaos. Afterwards, as we had an aperitif to celebrate something or other, one of the Directresses announced that if members of the Work had been privileged to bear witness to something (she never named that 'something', nor did the priest, who also talked about it in a meditation), we had a duty to live 'holy discretion'. When I was eventually allowed to see her, she was in a public ward in the Royal Free. I remember protesting and pleading for a private room for her. I can clearly remember her first words were 'you were a long time coming', but needless to say I was never allowed to be alone with her again. [1]

Piquiqui Moran was left a permanent invalid. After months on traction at the Royal Free, she was transported back to Spain, where she died of cancer after receiving treatment at the University of Navarra hospital.

Except for the difference in size -- the Kremlin being somewhat larger -- the physical similarity between the two seats of government was striking. Both are a maze of towers, chapels and secular buildings linked by courtyards, interior patios, covered passageways and underground tunnels crammed within the narrow confines of a walled city state. 'Behind the entrance to [the Villa Tevere1in Rome is a gigantic machine by which the superiors of Opus Dei manipulate their members, men and women, like puppets throughout the world,' Maria del Carmen said. [2]

Opus Dei's secretariat of state at the Casa del Uffici is the guardian of the organization's Strategic Plan. The Plan's existence is unknown to the ordinary run of members, but it shapes the Work's apostolate of penetration. It is administered by a small corps of priestly technocrats hand-picked by the Vicar General for their devotion and discipline, and they function behind closed doors without any manner of public oversight.

Opus Dei has been accused of playing a behind-the-scenes role in unlikely situations ranging ·from Latin American coups d'etat to international weapons deals. Needless to say, Opus Dei denies such involvements. Nevertheless one of its senior members in Ireland designed an armoured personnel carrier that entered the weapons inventories of at least three armies. The vehicle was manufactured under licence in Chile by Explosivos Industriales Cardoen, a firm that also manufactured 500-lb cluster bombs. During the first Gulf War Cardoen sold planeloads of cluster bombs to Iraq.

Towards the end of Paul VI's reign a battle erupted in the Roman Curia between Progressive and Conservative factions. The Progressive faction, which wanted tighter financial controls and opposed greater influence for Opus Dei, was led by Paul's closest aide, Archbishop Benelli. He was credited with resolving one of the most serious crises of the post-Conciliar Church -- the break-up of the Company of Jesus, a project that allegedly had its roots inside the Villa Tevere. Benelli's efforts insured that the 26,000 Jesuits remained under the command of one general superior, who at the time was Don Pedro Arrupe.

Benelli was said to have wanted to keep the Company of Jesus intact because it represented the only effective counter-balance to Opus Dei. Moreover, Benelli also made known his distaste for the mercantile morals of Bishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican bank whom he regarded as an Opus Dei sycophant. One would have thought that Benelli, as Paul's under-secretary of state, was in a good position to make his concerns heard. But when a showdown finally occurred, Benelli lost out.

In June 1977, Paul gave Benelli a red hat and sent him to Florence. The Pontiff had little more than a year of life left in him. It was almost as if by separating himself from Benelli the fire in his heart was extinguished. Their collaboration had spanned more than thirty years. But by making Benelli a cardinal and sending him into the field to gain pastoral experience, Paul must have realized he was placing his favourite son among the front-runners for his succession.

_______________

Notes:

1. Eileen Clark, Op. cit., p. 12.

2. Maria del Carmen Tapia, Hinter der Schwelle -- Ein Leben im Opus Dei, Benziger Verlag, Zurich 1993, p. 23.

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18. Dictators and Jesuits

If one of my children abandons the fight and leaves the war, or turns his back, let him know that he betrays us all, Jesus Christ, the Church, his brothers and sisters in the Work; it would be treason to consent to the tiniest act of unfaithfulness.

-- Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, Cronica 1972

DURING THE LAST YEARS OF FRANCO, WITH GOVERNMENT IN THE hands of the Opus Dei technocrats, Madrid became an important hub for European investment and political interest in Latin America. This development was encouraged by the Vatican, and supported by the right-wing Christian Democrats in Italy and Spain.

The Occident's regard towards Latin America, and particularly Argentina, reflected the interests of the anti-Communist lobby, whether led by the Church or purely secular, to stop the spread of Marxist subversion. To strengthen these forces, partly due to a strategy directed from Rome but also because of the affinity of a common cause, the Masonic movement in Europe became seeded with Conservative Catholics. The principal strategists behind this evolution were Italy's Giulio Andreotti and Spain's foreign minister Gregorio Lopez Bravo. They were supported by the great Vatican door-opener, Umberto Ortolani, his general dogsbody, Lido Gelli, and a Masonic notable, Pio Cabanillas, who was one of the founders of Spain's Alianza Popular.

Of the five, Andreotti took precedence in matters of policy, being nearest to the power structures of the Church and the Free World's political systems. Andreotti was the closest layman to Paul VI and he had his admirers in every capital of the Western Alliance. In European councils he befriended Lopez Bravo, with whom he shared -- so he said -- the same religious values. Andreotti had been on an Opus Dei retreat at the Castle of Urio on Lake Como, in northern Italy, and was received at the Villa Tevere by Escriva de Balaguer.

Umberto Ortolani, a Roman lawyer, was a secret chamberlain of the Papal Household and a member of the inner council of the Knights of Malta. He was the senior member of the group, and, according to some sources, the illegitimate son of Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro. Andreotti and Gelli were the same age, being born in 1919. Lopez Bravo was their junior by six years.

The subversive forces in Argentina had understood the importance of severing the investment pipeline from Europe. They mounted a series of daring attacks against foreign interests, bringing their underground war to the business and financial districts of Buenos Aires. Two of their most chilling successes were the assassinations in broad daylight of financier Francisco Soldatti, dean of the Swiss community and patriarch of the country's richest family, and businessman Giuseppe Valori, through whom most of Italy's heavy investment in Argentina was channelled.

Madrid during these years had become a haven for Latin American political refugees. The most prominent was the former Argentine strongman, Juan Domingo Peron, who had invested $250,000 of the loot he had stolen from the Argentine treasury in a luxury villa on the city's northern outskirts which he named the Puerta de Hierro (the Gate of Iron). The larger part of his fortune, including an immense hoard of gold, had been placed under the tutelage of the Spanish government as an unstated condition for his asylum in Spain.

Although no greater rogue had appeared on the political scene since his exile in the mid-1950s, Peron's charm and personal prestige paradoxically attracted a certain nostalgia for the 'good times' when Argentine meat and cereals sold well in world markets and the country enjoyed relative stability. The Crusading forces began to view the ageing caudillo of the 'shirtless ones' -- the Argentine workers -- as the key to defeating the leftist guerrillas and restoring political equilibrium to a country that otherwise faced civil war.

Opus Dei was active in Argentina during these unstable times. Its first emissaries had arrived in 1950 and by the mid-1960s the institute had recruited 1,000 members throughout the country. General Juan Carlos Ongania was one of them. Ongania's coup in June 1966 was welcomed by the middle-class entrepreneurs, by Peron, and by the trade unions. Peron told journalists who visited him in Madrid, 'I regard this [development] with sympathy, because ... Ongania has ended a period of complete corruption. If the new government acts well it will succeed. It is the last opportunity for Argentina to avoid a situation where civil war is the only way out.' [1]

Ongania's four-year dictatorship was described by the American writer Penny Lernoux as 'the forerunner of Argentina's virulently right-wing regimes in the late seventies'. Ongania felt himself 'personally called' to shape the country's destiny during a religious retreat at an Opus Dei centre shortly before his 1966 coup, and many of the generals and industrialists appointed to his cabinet shared his belief that the 'Christian and military virtues of Spanish knighthood' -- a mix of authoritarian clericalism and enlightened dictatorship would restore mental, cultural, social, and political discipline to Argentina. [2]

Ongania's belief in an elite corps of lay people -- professional and military -- called by God to serve the nation was pure Opus Dei dogma. He abolished political parties and purged the universities. Popular discontent with his Conservative ideals began to crystallize towards the end of 1969 with a wave of guerrilla attacks on police stations, army outposts and banks. Ongania's growing inability to cope marked a first failure for authoritarian clericalism in Argentina.

In June 1970 General Alejandro Lanusse took power and opened negotiations with Peron's chef de cabinet, Jose Lopez Rega. Known as the Rasputin of the Pampas, or El Brujo (the Wizard), Lopez Rega belonged to a right-wing Christian sect of which relatively little is known. He had made a fortune selling a youth tonic formula in Brazil, and joined Peron's staff in 1966, soon casting a spell over the leader and by the same token charming his wife, Isabelita. She and Lopez Rega began to promote Peron as the only person capable of restoring civil order to Argentina.

One of the most dedicated supporters of Peron's return was Giancarlo Elia Valori, younger brother of the assassinated Giuseppe Valori. In 1960, when twenty-three, he had been named a secret chamberlain of the Papal Household, becoming one of Umberto Ortolani's proteges. In the mid-1960s, he was named secretary of the newly formed Institute for International Relations, a more formalized version of the Pinay Group. As such he knew just about every prominent anti-Marxist on three continents. When Peron came to Rome, he stayed at Valori's villa, while conducting his business during the day from the Hotel Excelsior in the Via Veneto. If Peron wanted an introduction to the head of Banco Ambrosiano, Valori arranged it. If he wanted a meeting with the Vatican's secretary of state, Valori saw that it was done. One day Ortolani called Valori to his office and introduced him to Licio Gelli who suggested that Valori should join the P2 Masonic Lodge. Valori did not reply immediately. But when in April 1973 he gave a lecture at the University of Madrid on The Concept of the Christian State, he sent a warmly worded letter to Gelli inviting him to attend.

On Peron's next visit to Rome, Valori was not surprised to find Gelli cruising the lobby of the Excelsior. Gelli rushed over and asked to be introduced to the General's personal secretary, Lopez Rega. 'Your excellency,' the suave Gelli said in perfect Spanish, 'they say you are a man of God.' Indeed Lopez Rega believed he spoke directly with the Archangel Gabriel. Gelli charmed Lopez Rega, who he soon initiated into the P2 Lodge. Gelli described Peron as a 'misunderstood genius'.

By the early 1970s it was apparent that if the military remained in power, the Argentine state would collapse. Lanusse wanted to hand over to a legally elected president but an existing law prevented Peron from again holding public office. Lopez Rega and Isabelita counselled Peron to nominate one of his more pliant followers, Dr Hector J. Campora, to run for president in his stead, knowing that if Campora won he could change the law and call new elections.

Lanusse announced new presidential elections for May 1973 which Campora won easily. Following the script written in Madrid, he repealed the ban against Peron, called new elections for the autumn and resigned. Lopez Rega is said to have requested the support of the Opus Dei technocrats in organizing the strongman's return. Peron was in need of a mountain of cash to bribe the Montoneros guerrillas into acquiescence and cover the costs of the Campora as well as his own presidential campaigns.

With Opus Dei's Luis Coronel de Palma as governor of the Banco de Espana, the Villa Tevere strategists would have known that the Spanish government was tutor for the 400 tons of gold that belonged to the Argentine bully boy of the 1950s. The Conservative Right bargained that Peron still retained sufficient charisma to restore order to a country which since his departure had known eleven governments and spiralling inflation. However, the Spanish government's approval was needed for Peron's gold to be placed on the market. According to intelligence sources an arrangement was concluded that required the proceeds of a bullion sale to be placed in a foundation for furthering social causes (such as forming Peronista ministers) in Argentina.

Peron's 400 tons of bullion came very close to equalling the Bank of England's bullion reserves. At then current market rates, it was worth in the neighbourhood of £700 million. In early 1973 it was put on sale in an off-market operation code-named BOR 1345. The seller was not disclosed, but an account used for the transaction was opened at the Swiss Credit Bank branch in Chiasso, on the border with Italy, under the name of VITALITA. The seller's agent, a Chilean businessman living in Madrid, was offering a commission of 10 US cents per ounce to go-betweens. The transfer agent was Professor Vincenzo de Nardo, an Inspector-General of the Italian Finance Ministry.

When contacted, De Nardo confirmed that he was connected with the transaction. But he quickly added: 'This operation has nothing to do with my official functions at the Italian Ministry of Finance. It is a private operation and the Italian government is not involved.' He stressed that the origin of the gold was 'quite normal'. It came with a certificate of authenticity. The origin of the certificate, he said (note the certificate, not the gold), was European.

When asked whether the merchandise was of South American origin he answered evasively: 'The merchandise is being held by a government. The government did not sequester it. This government will certify to its legality. But this is not a commercial operation of the government concerned; it is of a political nature. A sale on the bullion market did not suit the government in question ... Officially, the seller of the merchandise will be me. When I get a letter of credit from a prime Swiss bank I will send confirmation of the gold's existence. The merchandise will be delivered to a Swiss bank ... I was asked to handle the operation because the government in question did not want to be mentioned in the contract of sale.'

Interested parties were requested ,to address a letter from a top-rated bank to the seller's agent or Professor de Nardo at the Italian Ministry of Finance confirming their intention to close the sale.

I have no idea what ultimately happened to the gold. Later that autumn bullion prices shot up, as if an unseen but deeply felt market constraint had been removed. And though nothing more was heard of the BOR 1345 transaction, one of the passengers on the plane that carried Juan Peron, Isabelita and Lopez Rega back to Argentina was Licio Gelli. After Peron's triumph in the September 1973 election, the Venerable Master of the P2 Lodge was appointed the honorary Argentine consul in Florence and became one of the government's economic advisers.

In June 1974, Escriva de Balaguer flew to Buenos Aires on the second leg of a grand Latin American tour. He stayed at an Opus Dei retreat and made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Lujan, the patroness of Argentina. People came from as far away as Uruguay and Paraguay to see him. For two of his public appearances his sons rented the Coliseo Theatre in the centre of Buenos Aires, and on each occasion more than 5,000 people crowded through the doors.

Escriva de Balaguer stayed a month in Buenos Aires, then flew to Chile. Two days later General Peron died. Isabelita became president and Lopez Rega her chief minister.

Since the opening of its first centre in 1950, middle-class Chileans had taken to Opus Dei like lemmings in search of spiritual nourishment. Within no time at all, the Work claimed to have 2,000 members and 15,000 co-operators. Chile was reported to be one of Opus Dei's best financed operations in Latin America.

One of the first persons sent from Spain was Jose Miguel Ibanez Langlois, a young priest who became Opus Dei's leading Latin American ideologist. Two of his earliest recruits were right-wing activists Jaime Guzman and Alvaro Puga. In the 1960s both Guzman and Puga became editors of El Mercurio, Chile's oldest newspaper. Ibanez Langlois moonlighted as El Mercurio's literary critic.

The Vatican had initially supported the Christian Democrat leader, Eduardo Frei, but became uneasy about reports from Ibanez Langlois that Frei was building bridges to the radical trade union movement. Until then, the Vatican had regarded Chile as a possible model for social change in Latin America. While Vatican doubts set in, the Jesuits continued to insist that Frei was the only person capable of stopping Marxism in Chile.

This view was not shared by Ibanez Langlois or his politically active recruits. With a Chicago-trained economist Pablo Baraona, they formed a Conservative think tank, the Institute for General Studies, which attracted a following of free-market economists, lawyers, publicists and technocrats.

Frei's social programme made US president Richard Nixon see red, and at his insistence the CIA began financing the Institute for General Studies in the hope that it could form a counter-elite to the Christian Democrat party. Even when Frei's government had almost mastered Chile's runaway inflation, Nixon still wanted Frei 'hammered' should he be returned to the presidency in the next elections. The right-wing extremists led by Guzman and Puga fractured the Conservative vote, with the result that Salvador Allende won instead by a narrow margin.

The Madrid technocrats were opposed to Allende. The Spanish ambassador in Santiago contacted his American counterpart to see what could be done about the 'smiling doctor', as Allende was sometimes known. A broad section of Chileans regarded Allende's election success as a promise of national renewal, but his radical left wing did not wait to consolidate their position constitutionally. They launched 'People's Power', consisting of Peasant Councils that took over the larger farms and Workers' Assemblies that occupied the factories.

Under such conditions, the extreme right was not long in making itself felt. The 'spoiling operation' ordered by the CIA was planned inside the Institute for General Studies and resulted in the September 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet. His spokesman was the Institute's co-founder Alvaro Puga. Another Institute director, Herman Cubillos, became Pinochet's foreign minister, and the Institute's co-founder, Pablo Baraona, was minister of the economy. The third Institute co-founder, Jaime Guzman, drafted the new constitution. At least two members of the military junta, Admiral Jose Merino and General Jaime Estrada Leigh, were said to be 'sons' of Escriva de Balaguer. Estrada, who previously headed the Nuclear Energy Commission, became housing minister.

Guzman wrote Pinochet's Declaration of Principles which promised to 'cleanse our democratic system of the vices that had facilitated its destruction'. The nation's educational system was taken in hand by three successive Opus Dei ministers, an Opus Dei superintendent of education and an Opus Dei dean of the Catholic University. The Opus Dei technocrats who surrounded Pinochet administered the country very much as their counterparts had done in Spain. Before long, however, a power struggle developed between the technocrats and the military over the activities of Pinochet's secret police, the DINA. Having learned from earlier experiences in Spain and Argentina, the Institute strategists wanted gently to shift Pinochet aside, as the Spanish technocrats had done with Franco. Pinochet became suspicious and fired foreign minister Cubillos.

Escriva de Balaguer stayed in Santiago for ten days, visiting the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Lo Vasquez, 100 kilometres from the capital, and then left for Lima. The mayor of Las Condes, a well-to-do suburb of Santiago, had been so enthusiastic about his meeting with the Spanish prelate that he named a street after him. Not long afterwards, Alvaro Puga wrote a book about his campaign to bring down Allende. Titled Dario De Vida de Ud, it was published with a CIA grant [3] and reprinted a collection of Puga's most biting El Mercurio columns during the Allende years. In the foreword, fellow Opusian Enrique Campos Menendez, an El Mercurio editor, pointed out that Puga had accurately predicted key political assassinations, Allende's death, and the date of the military coup. Campos concluded: 'Nobody could have known of these future events, except through magic parapsychology or divine premonition.' [4] Divine premonition was something that the Father had claimed almost forty years before when he foretold the death of the Nationalist bureaucrat who threatened to denounce one of his apostles for treason. As for Puga's brother in the faith, Jaime Guzman, he was convicted but never sentenced for the machine-gun slaying of a former military chief of staff judged too soft on Allende. After his election as senator Guzman was assassinated by Marxist. terrorists and was also honoured with a street named after him.

Under John Paul II, Chile's episcopacy was purged of its 'soft' bishops and replaced by Opus Dei prelates. Opus Dei also opened the University of Los Andes in Santiago. Liberation Theology -- a theology that promoted 'a more viable option for the poor of Latin America' -- was not on the syllabus.

Liberation Theology had been the brainchild of Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest who had become disillusioned by the insensitivity and corruption of the so-called Christian Democrats in Latin America who were doing everything possible to enrich themselves with what Gutierrez regarded as the complicity of the Church. To better understand the causes of social oppression, Gutierrez turned towards Marxism, using Marxist analysis while rejecting its ideology to assess the problems of the poor. In 1968 he published his thesis on a new pastoral approach that encouraged 'the efforts of the people to develop their own grass-roots organizations for the ... consolidation of their rights and the search for true justice'. [5] Liberation Theology upheld the right of the poor to think out their own faith and social development. As such, it stood in direct opposition to authoritarian clericalism. Escriva de Balaguer rejected Liberation Theology and his campaign to suppress it became the first major battleground between the Jesuits and Opus Dei.

Given his roots, it is hardly any wonder that Escriva de Balaguer believed Liberation Theology was dangerous. In Opus Dei it was taught that the poor must work to improve their earthly lot within existing social structures while preparing through devotion and obedience for eternal salvation. This meant that they should remain meek and hard toiling throughout their lives on earth in order to enjoy the majesty of after-life in Christ's kingdom.

Gutierrez described the world of Latin American poor as a universe ruled by injustice to which the 'Church of the Rich' contributed. Nine out of ten Latin Americans were baptized Catholics, but four out of every five were born to die poor. Not only were they deprived of the liberation promised by Christ, they were not even aware of his promise. 'In the final analysis, poverty means lack of food and housing, the inability to attend properly to health and education needs, exploitation of workers, permanent unemployment, lack of respect for human dignity, and unjust limitations placed on personal freedom in the areas of self-expression, politics and religion. Poverty is a situation that destroys people, families, and individuals ... Misery and oppression lead to a cruel, inhuman death, and are therefore contrary to the will of the God,' he wrote. [6]

The Jesuit General Pedro Arrupe urged his troops to become more involved with social justice and did not rule out 'a critical collaboration with Marxist-inspired groups and movements'. [7] This placed Arrupe on a direct confrontation course with Opus Dei, whose members were very much part of the 'Church of the Rich'. The first battle was for control of the Catholic universities in Latin America. The flash point was Piura, a rapidly developing industrial city 1,000 kilometres north of Lima. The well-to-do bourgeoisie of Piura wanted a conservative university for their sons and daughters. They claimed the Jesuit-run university in Lima was too far to the left. That the university in Lima had become a hotbed of Liberation Theology could not be denied. The wealthy families around Piura told the papal nuncio that they were willing to finance the kind of university they wanted. Opus Dei backed them and offered to take charge of the project. In the summer of 1966, sociologist Alberto Moncada and another numerary were sent from the University of Navarra to take the project in hand.

In Peru, Moncada came face to face with what he described as the 'enormous rift between the teachings of Escriva de Balaguer and the stark realities facing Third World Catholics'. After three years in Piura he quit the Work. 'In addition to controlling universities, what Opus Dei wanted,' Moncada contended, 'was to enter the economic and political superstructure in Latin American countries. In this they were successful in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, while in Peru, where they were trying to organize a coalition of entrepreneurs and high-ranking bureaucrats, it was much harder [because the ruling junta was leftist-oriented] until they persuaded the nuncio to appoint six Opus Dei bishops,' he explained. [8]

That Opus Dei was hostile to Liberation Theology and attempted to prevent Catholic progressives from operating in Latin America was first brought to my attention by Father Giuliano Ferrari. In the late 1950s he became a lay assistant to Cardinal Eugene Tisserant until discovering he had a late vocation. He was ordained in 1962, after completing a degree in theology at Tubingen University, where he decided to found an ecclesiastical services organization to assist under-manned dioceses in Latin America. Tisserant encouraged Ferrari and enrolled him in the Pontifical Academy for Ecclesiastics, the Vatican's diplomacy school. At that time the Academy only accepted fifteen candidates a year. Each was given 'a suite with bathroom and a bar stocked with the best duty-free champagnes ... At the Academy it is difficult to accept that Jesus Christ in his original incarnation was merely a carpenter.' [9] Academy graduates are accorded the right to call themselves monsignors.

John XXIII's call for priests to go to Latin America gave Father Ferrari the idea of founding the Society of God for Humanity. His plan was to recruit volunteers in the Philippines, which he regarded as a crossroads between east and west. In Manila he ran into his first opposition, coming from an Irish priest, Father Eamon Byrne, who raised so many obstacles that the nuncio told him to return to Rome and report to Archbishop Antonio Samore at the Secretariat of State. The conservative Samore, Ferrari said, virtually controlled the Church in Latin America, and was very close to Opus Dei. He had been nuncio in Bogota before John XXIII brought him back to Rome. But John soon accused him of 'unspeakable manoeuvrings' and would have nothing more to do with him. [10] 'I give the orders around here,' Samore warned Ferrari. 'If you don't obey me, I'll have the Pope excommunicate you!' [11]

Ferrari spoke five languages and had a quick mind. He understood the workings of the secular world better than most clerics, having been in business for his own account before going to work for Tisserant. He was full of passion for the Church, and his creative exuberance somehow seemed suited to his scuffed shoes and ruffled cassock. Ferrari's free spirit was certainly the antithesis of Opus Dei's neatly regimented world. As with Samore, Ferrari was not destined to hit it off with the priestly sons of Escriva de Balaguer.

After setting up an office in Guayaquil, Ecuador's main port and largest city, to conduct a diocesan census, he flew to Germany to ask Bishop Hengsbach, overseer of Adveniat, for funding. He had been asked to conduct similar surveys in San Salvador and Guatemala City, but neither archiepiscopacy had the money to pay for them.

Hengsbach told Ferrari that he would need favourable opinions from two prelates who vetted projects for Adveniat in Latin America. One was a professor at Louvain and the other a doctor of theology in Madrid. He spoke to both but never received a reply. Ferrari concluded that Opus Dei had acquired veto power over Adveniat's disbursements in Latin America.

Still hounded by Samore, in January 1969 he moved to San Salvador to begin the census there. He rented a house and hired a servant recommended by the archdiocese. Soon afterwards he started having headaches and his blood pressure rose dangerously. He consulted a doctor who prescribed medicine to stop the headaches, but his blood pressure remained abnormally high. His fingers and ankles swelled and, getting up from table one evening, he was overcome by dizziness and collapsed. He remained partially paralysed for three days.

Father Ferrari noticed that each time he left San Salvador on business the symptoms subsided. In June 1969, his house was broken into. The police arrested his servant as an accomplice and held her for three days. She was released for lack of proof, but in any event Ferrari dispensed with her services. Almost immediately his health improved. Two doctors examined him and concluded that he had been ingesting an unknown, odourless, colourless drug -- possibly digitalis, a potent cardiac glycoside: the intention could only have been to provoke heart failure. Ferrari said he suspected the attempted poisoning was the work of Samore's agents, [12] although he had no proof.

In December 1969, Father Ferrari moved to Guatemala, a country where, in the 1940s, roughly 98 per cent of the cultivated land had been owned by a mere 140 families and one or two corporations. It was a desperate situation that needed social change. After Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected president in 1950 he introduced sweeping land reform, expropriating 400,000 acres of idle banana plantations belonging to the United Fruit Company, and was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup d'etat, thereby saving Guatemala from 'falling into the lap of international Communism'.

When Father Ferrari arrived in Guatemala City he found the archdiocese in the hands of smartly starched Opus Dei priests. They had literally taken over the local curia and were running it for Cardinal Mario Casariego. The Cardinal was inflexible in his dislike of 'Marxist-tainted' peasants. He preferred the company of the country's strongman, Colonel Carlos Arana, a former military attache in Washington who slaughtered thousands of 'subversive' Guatemalan peasants. [13] Casariego had become Archbishop of Guatemala City in December 1964. By the late 1960s he was so detested that several hundred priests and laymen petitioned the Guatemalan Congress to have him expelled. [14] But he enjoyed Colonel Arana's protection.

When Paul VI made Samore a cardinal and placed him in charge of the first section of the Secretariat of State, it became impossible for Ferrari to continue running the Society of God for Humanity in Latin America. The last of his funds were cut off, and so he decided to cancel the society's charter and return to Rome. And when Cardinal Tisserant died, Ferrari found himself without a protector. He eventually returned to pastoral work in the slums of Guatemala City, but not for long. One day he was summoned to the archdiocese, still in the hands of Opus Dei priests, and told that his work in the favellas was more political than pastoral and therefore he was no longer welcome in Guatemala. He was given a one-way air ticket to Switzerland for the next day. To insure that he didn't miss the flight, two Opus Dei priests picked him up at his lodgings and drove him to the airport. In the car they told him that should he return to Latin America they would learn about it and his life would be in jeopardy.

When I met Ferrari for the last time in 1978, he gave me a copy of the book he had written about his Latin American experience and another not authored by him on the Vatican's finances. He wanted me to write about his having been hunted and finally hounded out of Latin America because he supported the Church of the Poor. He said that what he knew about the misuse of Vatican funds in Rome and Latin America would cause a major scandal. I proposed that he gather together some documentation so that we could discuss the project further at our next meeting. But I never heard from him again. Some weeks later, I asked the friend who first brought us together, 'Where's Giuliano?'

'Haven't you heard?' he replied. 'He was found dead in a train between Geneva and Paris.'

Father Ferrari, forty-eight, was reported to have died of a massive heart attack. But as far as could be determined, no autopsy was performed -- at least not by the Department of Legal Medicine in Geneva -- and sixteen years later a copy of his death certificate was no longer to be found in the archives of the city and canton of Geneva.

Ferrari's death came weeks before the first of the 1978 conclaves. He had been devoted to the Church and deeply concerned by the problems of moral permissiveness, poverty and drug addiction. But also he was aware that in a quarter of a century the population of Latin America had more than doubled from 164 million to 342 million. From what he had seen in San Salvador and Guatemala he was convinced that Capitalism was not going to look after these souls. Who, then, was going to feed them?

Opus Dei could only have agreed that moral permissiveness and drug abuse were agents of the Devil. But as far as the sons and daughters of Escriva de Balaguer were concerned, Capitalism remained preferable to Marxism, and Liberation Theology was the invention of Lucifer, who after all was the first revolutionary. Opus Dei's opinions about how to bring social justice to the world had placed it in direct opposition to the Company of Jesus. Over the next few years Jesuit influence would come under increasing attack, undermined in part by an anonymous campaign of pilleria. The battle lines for the next conclaves had already been drawn. The doctrinal Conservatives were aligned against the Progressives, supported by the New Theologians who had found expression in the Church as a result of Vatican II.

_______________

Notes:

1. Primera Plana, Buenos Aires, 30 June 1966.

2. Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People, Penguin, New York 1991, p. 160. On p. 305 Lernoux states that Opus Dei organized the retreat.

3. Fred Landis, 'Opus Dei: Secret Order Vies for Power', Covert Action, Washington, Winter 1983.

4. Idem.

5. Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, SCM Press, London, revised version, 1988, p. 68.

6. Gutierrez, Op. cit., pp. xxi-xxii.

7. Eric O. Hanson, The Catholic Church in World Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1990, pp. 88-89.

8. Interview with Alberto Moncada, Madrid, 1 March 1995.

9. Giuliano F.G. Ferrari, Vaticanisme, Perret-Gentil, Geneva 1976, p. 22.

10. Hebblethwaite, John XXIII (Op. cit.), p. 483.

11. Ferrari, Op. cit., p. 89.

12. Ibid., p. 241.

13. Lernoux, Op. cit., pp. 186-187.

14. Ibid., p. 43.

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19. Death of the Founder

If it should happen that anyone should teach you something different from what I have taught you, whether it be ourselves or an Angel from Heaven, let him be anathema.

-- St Paul [Galatians 1:8]

ESCRIVA DE BALAGUER WAS UNABLE TO HIDE HIS ILL HUMOUR OVER Archbishop Giovanni Benelli's efforts to block Opus Dei's transformation into a Personal Prelature. He and Alvaro del Portillo were determined to force the issue. They went ahead with convening an Extraordinary General Congress of Opus Dei members to align the Work's statutes with the new decrees relating to Personal Prelatures following the Second Vatican Council. The Congress had adjourned in September 1970 and a staff of rapporteurs at Opus Central spent the next two years analysing the results. Once set to paper, Escriva de Balaguer asked the secretary of state, Cardinal Villot, to arrange a new audience with the Pope. It took place on 25 June 1973. Paul VI was said on this occasion to have been more receptive. What, then, lay behind this apparent softening of attitudes?

The only threatening cloud on the Vatican's horizon at the time was its finances. The costs of running the Curia and maintaining St Peter's in a state of perpetual splendour were escalating. As a result, the Vatican City State began reporting a long series of financial deficits that in the years ahead would bring it to the brink of bankruptcy. There is little doubt, though no actual proof, that at the June 1973 audience Opus Dei's two senior prelates tabled a proposition, which I call the Portillo Option, to assist the Vatican with its financial problems. After first falling upon deaf ears, the Option began to find favour in the papal chambers. According to some sources, a deal was finally struck whereby Opus Dei would be elevated to a personal prelature in return for taking in hand the Vatican finances.

A preliminary protocol was said to have been signed, setting out the modalities of the Portillo Option. A copy of it turned up among the papers of an Italian Parliamentary Commission investigating the P2 affair (see Chapter 23), but subsequently disappeared. However the Milan banker Roberto Calvi told his family that he assisted Opus Dei in elaborating such a plan, which included Opus Dei's assuming control of the IOR, the Vatican bank. Indeed it was said that the head of the Vatican bank, Bishop Paul Marcinkus, went to Madrid to discuss aspects of the plan with senior Opus Dei bankers there. Opus Dei denies that any such deal was cut -- i.e., that the Portillo Option never existed.

'The Holy Father was pleased and encouraged our Father to continue with the work of the General Congress,' was all that Don Alvaro reported about the June 1973 audience. [1] For the moment, then, the question 'remained open'. But one thing is certain. Portillo used the interval to move closer to Cardinal Villot. Paul, increasingly ill, deferred more to Villot. Marcinkus also realized he had an ally in Opus Dei and in Cardinal Villot. They all feared Benelli; he overshadowed Villot, wanted Marcinkus sent back to Chicago and his feelings for Opus Dei were well known.

Opus Dei's discussions on how to cure the Vatican's financial problems only really began in September 1974, after Escriva de Balaguer and Portillo completed the last leg of their triumphant journey to South America. The timing was significant. Unfortunately for the Vatican, its most trusted financial partner at the time, Michele Sindona, was a major currency speculator. Prior to the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 Sindona had speculated the wrong way on the dollar and when the forward contracts began to unwind, his empire -- wired together by an uncommon system of back-to-back deposits -- collapsed.

In September 1974, a ministerial decree placed Sindona's Milan bank in liquidation. The losses were more than $386 million. A month later in New York, Sindona's Franklin National Bank went to the wall, becoming the largest banking failure in U.S. history up to that time. In January 1975, the Swiss authorities closed Finabank in Geneva, in which the Vatican held a 20 per cent interest. Sindona was by then a fugitive from Italian justice.

According to Prince Massimo Spada, a former IOR general manager, the Vatican lost $55 million in the crash of Sindona's empire. But Charles de Trenck, the general manager of Finabank, estimated that 'the Vatican's overall loss on investments in the Sindona group ran as high as $240 million.' Whatever the final sum, Paul VI was said to have been devastated.

Reticence to accept the Portillo Option began to fade. But the papal advisers insisted on conditions. They wanted the amount of Opus Dei's contribution to be fixed in advance. Any protocol between Opus Dei and the Holy See would remain domiciled in the Vatican's secret archives. According to the missing parliamentary commission document, the Pope -- or was it really Opus Dei? -- insisted on protecting the privileged arrangement between the IOR and Banco Ambrosiano. [2]

While negotiations continued, in February 1975, Escriva de Balaguer returned to Venezuela. His visit was another immense success. According to Opus Central, his four public appearances were attended by sixteen thousand people. They came from as far afield as Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and the questions they put to him steamed up 'like bubbles racing to the surface in a boiling kettle'. [3]

A different description was given by Caracas lawyer Alberto Jaimes Berti. With a friend, Pedro Jose Lara della Pegna, he went to hear the Founder talk about his career in the service of the Church. Berti said that at the end of an unexceptional speech the audience was invited to ask questions. A long silence followed. Finally Lara della Pegna, the uncle of Cardinal Jose Rosalio Castillo Lara, asked rather innocently whether Opus Dei was really a secret organization as people often claimed. Escriva de Balaguer stared coldly at Lara della Pegna. 'What is your profession?' he asked.

'I am a lawyer,' Lara della Pegna replied.

'Well you must be a third- or fourth-rate lawyer to ask such a silly question,' the Father observed curtly. He then moved into a stinging harangue of Lara della Pegna. His sudden rage created a shock and people started to leave. Seated close by was the rector of the Catholic University of Caracas, Jose Luiz Aguilar Gorrondona. Berti noticed that Aguilar had recorded the speech on a cassette recorder. When Opus Dei learned that the incident had been taped, they pressured Aguilar to relinquish the cassette. The pressure became so intense that finally the rector handed it over, but not before allowing Berti to make a copy. Claimed Berti, 'When Opus Dei realized I had a copy and wouldn't give it to them, they set out to destroy me. But they were patient and waited for the right moment. You know, in the end they almost succeeded.' [4]

From Caracas, Escriva de Balaguer went to Guatemala City and stayed a few days with Cardinal Casariego. But the Father did not feel well and cut short his visit, returning to Rome on 23 February 1975. Towards the middle of May he was feeling better again and set off on his last trip to Spain, to view the progress of the basilica at Torreciudad. The following morning, the Municipality of Barbastro conferred upon him the keys to the city, acknowledging him as Barbastro's most famous living son. The Father had finally recouped the family's lost honour.

Back in Rome, he visited the new campus of the Roman College of the Holy Cross at Cavabianca. He described it as his 'second folly', the first being the Villa Tevere, and Torreciudad his last. Cavabianca was in the same sumptuous style as Opus Dei's other architectural achievements.

Then on Thursday, 26 June 1975, he set off after breakfast with Don Alvaro and Don Javier Echevarria for Castelgandolfo, where he visited the Villa delle Rose. Upon arriving at the centre he went into the oratory and knelt in prayer, as required of every member upon entering and before leaving an Opus Dei house. Afterwards, while talking with his daughters, he again felt unwell and was immediately driven back to the Villa Tevere. He mounted the stairs to his study, then called out to Don Javier for assistance. He collapsed and died before Don Javier could reach him. He was gazing, we are told, at the portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, given to him during his 1970 visit to Mexico. He was seventy-three years of age.

The Father's remains were placed in a mahogany coffin lined with zinc. The municipal medical officer signed the death certificate and gave permission for the body to be laid to rest under the floor of the prelatic church. At six in the afternoon a final Solemn Funeral Mass was celebrated and the coffin, head nearest the altar, was lowered into its tomb, which was covered with a greenish-black slab of marble.

The next morning, Saturday, 28 June 1975, six cardinals, a Papal legate -- Archbishop Benelli -- and a host of civil dignitaries, among them Giulio Andreotti, attended a memorial service at Sant' Eugenio, the basilica whose construction Opus Dei had helped finance.

Don Alvaro had been at Escriva de Balaguer's side for forty years, thirty of them as the Father's confessor. Together they had built Opus Dei into a disciplined body enjoying world-wide influence. Together they had fended off the attacks of liberal Catholics and attempts from within the Curia to dismantle the Work. Don Alvaro liked to give the impression that he lived in the shadow of the Father. But he was in fact the real architect of Opus Dei's spectacular growth. By then the Work had 60,000 members in eighty countries. For all of them, Don Alvaro now assumed the role and title of the Father. Around his neck the new prelate general wore the piece of the True Cross which the Founder had wanted passed on to each of his successors.

On 15 September 1975, Opus Dei's General Congress approved Don Alvaro del Portillo y Diez de Sollano -- to give him his fully reconstructed name -- as the Work's second president general. There was said to have been but one dissenting vote, cast by Don Florencio Sanchez Bella, the regional vicar for Spain. Within the month Don Alvaro banished Sanchez Bella to Mexico, where he became a teacher in one of Opus Dei's local primary schools.

General Franco outlived the Founder by another five months. He died in November 1975, and Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon ascended the throne. During the coming year, a coup d'etat in Argentina brought the generals back to power, while in Spain Opus Dei's Banco Atlantico had to be bailed out of trouble by Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos, a secret Opus Dei member and self-made business phenomenon who had become Spain's richest citizen. As a result of Ruiz-Mateos's financial sacrifice, Opus Dei would be able to mount its assault on the Vatican establishment, assuring that at the close of the second millennium it would attain a position of power in the Church unknown since the Knights Templar.

_______________

Notes:

1. Alvaro del Portillo, 'Transformation of Opus Dei into a Personal Prelature', Memo, 23 April 1979, paragraph 10.

2. Jose Maria Bernaldez, 'The Rumasa Affair Soils the Vatican and Opus', Tiempo, Madrid, 1 August 1983.

3. Vazquez de Prada, Op. cit., p. 472.

4. Interview with Dr. Alberto Jaimes Berti, London, 6 December 1993.

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20. Rumasa

Ask the Lord for money, because we are in great trouble. But ask him for millions! He owns everything anyway. To ask for five million or fifty million requires just the same effort, so while you're at it ...

-- Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer

SINCE 1857, THE RUIZ-MATEOS FAMILY HAD BEEN INVOLVED IN THE sherry business. And the family enterprise had gradually expanded. In 1958, when Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos was a young sherry broker in Jerez de la Frontera, he succeeded in becoming Harvey's of Bristol's exclusive supplier. Harvey's accounted for approximately 1°per cent of the world sherry trade. Under the contract it had with Ruiz-Mateos the Bristol firm undertook to purchase 20,000 casks of sherry a year at £200 per cask, implying a gross annual turnover of £4 million. The contract left Ruiz-Mateos with enough disposable income to invest in a Spain that was beginning to emerge from decades of economic stagnation. Harvey's, meanwhile, were so pleased with their agent that when the contract came up for renewal they extended it to ninety-nine years.

While Jose Maria's father had implanted in the future sherry magnate a deep business sense, his mother had instilled in him an equally religious one, including a deep veneration for the Virgin Mary, which remained one of the motivating forces of his life. His adoration for the Virgin was reinforced when in the mid-1950s he was introduced to Opus Dei. He regularly attended the Saturday benediction services at an Opus Dei centre on the way to the airport, until 1963 when he and his wife decided to write their separate letters to the Father asking to become members.

After the ministerial changes of 1957, Spain's economy had come to life. The tourist industry led the boom, with more than 6 million holidaymakers pouring $300 million annually into the economy, a figure that would rise to more than $3,000 million a year by the 1970s. With the Harvey's of Bristol 'mine' working well, Jose Maria found he had sufficient capital on hand to branch into other fields. He had attracted the attention of Luis Valls Taberner, the newly-appointed deputy chairman of Banco Popular Espanol. With Valls involved at a top management level, Banco Popular's commercial loan portfolio had increased by 300 per cent in one year and, looking for more business, he requested his assistant Rafael Termes to arrange a meeting with the sherry broker. On the appointed day, Ruiz-Mateos came to Banco Popular's Presidencia in Madrid, never dreaming that within two decades he would be acclaimed Spain's most successful entrepreneur.

Two more disparate characters were hard to imagine. Whereas Luis Valls was austere, reserved, not to say icy-cold, the younger Ruiz-Mateos was droll, agile and overflowing with the sun of Andalusia. He was accompanied by his brother-in-law, Luis Baron Mora-Figueroa, like himself an Opus Dei supernumerary. Ruiz-Mateos wanted to acquire the Banca de Jimenez in Cordoba, but although his sherry business was expanding, he lacked the necessary capital. With Banco Popular's assistance he bought the small private bank and later changed its name to Banco de Jerez. Thereafter Ruiz-Mateos joined with Banco Popular's Termes and another associate, Paco Curt Martinez, who although not a member was close to Opus Dei, in several tourist development ventures on the Costa del Sol. They formed a company together under the name of Ruiz-Mateos y Cia.

Luis Valls also introduced Ruiz-Mateos to Gregorio Lopez Bravo, a thirty-seven-year-old naval engineer who in July 1962 was named minister of industry and seven years later became Spain's foreign minister. Valls considered that both Ruiz-Mateos and Lopez Bravo possessed exceptional qualities. Of Ruiz-Mateos the banker said, 'You are someone capable of creating and maintaining thousands of jobs.' Of Lopez Bravo, whom he called 'Mr. Efficiency', he said, 'You will provide the motor for Spain's economic growth.'

That same year, to insure that he possessed sufficient stocks to fulfil the Harvey's contract, Ruiz-Mateos acquired a major sherry producer. But Harvey's had come under new ownership, and early in 1966 changed its commercial strategy and cancelled the contract with Ruiz-Mateos. By then Jose Marfa had been securely wired into the Opus Dei network and, under the watchful eye of Valls and Termes, he was busily extending his interests into vineyards, food processing, construction and tourism, with the result that he hardly noticed a drop in cash flow. Moreover, Harvey's shift in strategy transformed the Jerez firm from faithful ally into major competitor, as Ruiz-Mateos now directly entered the world sherry market under his own Dry Sack label.

After moving to Madrid, in February 1968 he renamed his holding company Ruiz-Mateos Sociedad Anonima, known in its abbreviated form as Rumasa. Over the next ten years, Rumasa became Spain's largest conglomerate in private hands. Jose Maria launched it on a whirlwind acquisition programme, building it into a multinational giant that controlled 350 industrial, shipping, pharmaceutical, tourism and agribusiness enterprises, and twenty banks. It counted 40,000 employees and was one of Spain's most prolific foreign exchange earners, exporting annually goods and services worth in excess of $260 million. [1]

Ruiz-Mateos was not only a devout Catholic but a compulsive workaholic. An image of the Virgin Mary adorned the entrance lobby of every Rumasa building and next to the boardroom he installed a Marian chapel. He chose the bee as his corporate emblem because it was the symbol of the industrious worker. His staff referred to him as the 'King Bee'. On his desktop, among a forest of family portraits -- his wife, Teresa, blessed him with seven daughters and six sons -- he kept a statuette of the Virgin, two crucifixes and a leather-bound copy of The Way. Living God's Work as a vocation meant keeping a portrait of the Father on his bedside table, confessing weekly to an Opus Dei priest, confiding in his spiritual director, attending the weekly circle to which he was assigned and pumping on average $1.65 million a year into the Work's coffers. 'I received money from God,' he said, 'and so I gave money to God.'



Whereas Vila Reyes of Matesa had used Opus Dei for its contacts, Ruiz-Mateos really believed that he was indispensable to God's Work. He allowed the Opus Dei strategists to use his corporate empire, though as far as he was concerned he remained in control. Nevertheless, eight of his fifteen managing directors were Opus Dei members. And because Opus Dei left him 'free' to operate his business as he thought best, he did not perceive the paradox when told by his spiritual mentors that he must remain discreet and deny he was a member of Escriva de Balaguer's Corps Mobile.

He described his spiritual director, Salvador Nacher March, as 'a saint, a wonderful man'. A lay numerary and lawyer from Valencia, 'Boro' Nacher became his alter ego. Ruiz-Mateos trusted him: no subject was too intimate not to be discussed among them. In fact, there was only one person he trusted more and that was Luis Valls Taberner.

With Ruiz-Mateos and Rumasa once again we collide with Opusian double-speak, for the organization claims it does not interfere with the professional lives of its members. 'When Opus Dei has given [members] the spiritual help they need, its job is finished. From then on, as far as the Prelature is concerned, members are on their own, as they make up their own mind in all professional, family, social, political and cultural matters -- matters which the Church leaves open to the free decision of the faithful. Opus Dei does not get involved, indeed cannot get involved. Even hostile former members agree that this is so, not just in theory, but also and always in practice,' Opus Dei apologist William O'Connor affirmed. [2]

While the entire statement sounds like a denial of reality, the last sentence is particularly striking. Which 'hostile former members'? Not one is named. With good reason. Not one would make such a statement unless a gun was held to his head. But within the context of the 'Spiritual Help/Job Finished' claim, Ruiz-Mateos was a good example of what can happen. Rumasa was all the more carefully controlled because he had created the almost perfect corporate structure for the particular needs of Opus Dei. First, Rumasa was privately owned by Ruiz-Mateos, his four brothers (one of them an Opus Dei priest) and sister. Because it was privately held, Rumasa could do things that publicly held companies, with shares listed for trading on a stock exchange, could not. Second, the Rumasa Group became extremely diversified with its own banks at home and abroad, and large foreign exchange operations. This meant it could be used, on the one hand, to camouflage international transfers, while being milked with the other for contributions. Third, for Opus Dei it was expendable. Thus Rumasa possessed in the green eyes of the Work the qualities of confidentiality, flexibility, availability and expendability, all important considerations for the men governing the finances of Opus Dei.

Optimistic by nature, Ruiz-Mateos became one of the Father's most faithful, obedient and profitable sons. He was fawned upon and spiritually cuddled. He grew to love the Work, and the Work loved him. When told that his help was needed in taking over an ailing Opus Dei auxiliary operation, such as a faltering bank, he did it 'freely' and in good faith. When counted upon to provide $10 million for the University of Navarra, he produced the money willingly and in good faith.

Opus Dei's financial requirements were vast. With five South American universities modelled upon the University of Navarra, a dozen other higher academic institutions in existence or planned around the world, and a $30 million sanctuary at Torreciudad under construction, it needed to draw upon a score of enterprises like Rumasa. A constant pressure existed to find not only new members, but new sources of capital. With such heavy demands the strategists were prepared to bleed a major contributor dry and pass on responsibility for paying off the creditors to the governments concerned. This was high-risk business, for if the failed enterprise was large enough it could place entire sectors of the economy in jeopardy. Even so, it was impossible to imagine that harm might come to a concern as flexible as the Golden Bee. In fact only one major hiccup in the economy was needed. It came in 1974. The economies of the industrial world almost gagged to death over a quadrupling of world oil prices, whose significance -- especially in Rome, where Opus Dei was engaged in a battle for greater influence within the Curia - was not realized for many months, and against all expectations the rumblings it brought on continued to cause problems for another decade.

Ruiz-Mateos was sufficiently strong-minded to assume an equilibrium in his relations with the Work that most other brothers in the faith were unable to achieve. On one occasion, when the Opus Dei directors asked him to hire an untested banker, Jose Ramon Alvarez Rendueles, to run Rumasa's banking division, Ruiz-Mateos refused. This was one Opus Dei suggestion that the King Bee would regret having rejected. Opus Dei was intent on insuring that Alvarez Rendueles's career remained upwardly mobile and, in fact, he later became governor of the Banco de Espana.

Ruiz-Mateos was well aware that obedience in all matters was the key to being a good son of the Work. He called it 'terrifying obedience'. One of his former advisers and close friend, not an Opus Dei member, remarked, 'Numerary and supernumerary members take vows of obedience. Opus Dei calls them "promises", but they amount to the same thing. Any hesitation to follow the slightest suggestion -- in fact an absolute imperative -- of one's superiors is interpreted as a refusal to obey God. It is a rejection of God. Jose Maria; who for twenty years fought with his conscience to justify the power that the Work holds over its members, said of the people of Opus Dei, "My God, if they adhere to this terrifying obedience they will do nothing without consulting their spiritual director."

'Under such a regime of submission, a member must obey without asking the reason. To question an order is a serious offence. If a spiritual director suggests that it would be a good thing for a member to leave his job and take another, the member must do so immediately. And if a member is asked to move to another country, or never to return to the country where he was born, he must carry out this order without asking for an explanation. To insist otherwise would provoke the anger of his superiors or even a threat of expulsion from Opus Dei.'

Ruiz-Mateos was said to have been devastated by the death of the Founder, to whom he believed he owed everything. By then Rumasa's annual turnover accounted for 2 per cent of Spain's GNP. It was an extremely profitable enterprise and, by juggling its accounts, could fund alone virtually any Opus Dei project, except perhaps the Portillo Option. He religiously paid over the required tithe of 10 per cent of Rumasa's profits, arranging to make quarterly transfers to Opus Dei accounts in Switzerland, though Spain continued to maintain exchange controls until joining the Common Market in 1986. The arrangements were handled directly between Carlos Quintas Alvarez, head of Rumasa's banking division, and Juan Francisco Montuenga, Opus Dei's treasurer for Spain. While Quintas was one of seven top Rumasa executives who were not Opus Dei members, his wife, Mercedes, was a supernumerary.

In addition to these regular payments, Opus Dei made other occasional demands that were destined to have a serious impact on Rumasa's ongoing development. The most significant was Rumasa's 1977 bail-out of Banco Atlantico. The operation proved costly, both to Rumasa and Opus Dei.

Atlantico's problems had begun three years before. The 1974 world liquidity crisis had not been kind to it and by 1977, although its deposits had risen to $730 million, it was experiencing treasury problems and its stock was dropping in the marketplace. Continental Illinois decided to dump its Atlantico shares. Rather than face the possibility of an embarrassing collapse, Opus Dei's' Spanish hierarchy asked Ruiz-Mateos -- behind the backs of Atlantico's managing directors -- to take over the bank and save it from going under. Ruiz-Mateos structured a buy-out by Rumasa that brought Atlantico an immediate infusion of almost $50 million.

With his usual optimism, he highlighted the positive side of the operation. 'It was important for Rumasa to have a strong banking network. Atlantico gave us elements we were lacking. We made Continental Illinois an offer to purchase their 18 per cent, and it was an attractive offer because the stock was on its way down. Rumasa bought the shares, then we went in and explained the situation to Bofill and Ferrer.' [2]

When informed that Rumasa had acquired Continental Illinois's block of stock, Jose Ferrer went white and remained speechless for a good ten minutes. Ruiz-Mateos understood that if a man of Ferrer's calibre remained dumbstruck for so long it meant that he was professionally finished. Opus Dei's 'terrifying obedience' demanded that he accept the fait accompli, no matter how unpalatable the consequences.

But in order to complete the majority takeover of Banco Atlantico, the Opus Dei directors required Ruiz-Mateos to buy Banco Latino as well, and at a very high price. Banco Latino had advanced significant loans to Fundacion General Mediterranea and other Opus Dei related concerns which had been filed as uncollectable receivables. 'In acquiring Banco Latino, we assumed these liabilities and wrote them off,' the King Bee explained. Thus Rumasa pumped another $13.5 million into Esfina, Fundacion General Mediterranea and Atlantico itself to acquire their equity in Latino. With the loan write-offs added, it proved an expensive lifeboat operation. But it permitted Atlantico's former charitable affiliate, the Fundacion General Mediterranea, with assets of $100 million, to continue operating for another sixteen years. Finally, by acquiring Atlantico Ruiz-Mateos inherited the services of the Zurich lawyer Arthur Wiederkehr.

Hoping to soften the blow for Bofill and Ferrer, during one of their meetings Ruiz-Mateos passed them a note. He had already told them that he hoped they would remain on Atlantico's board. The note said: 'With me, you will never have problems.' But the 'terrifying obedience' had other intentions for them. Pablo Bofill was sent to London to teach economics at an Opus Dei school. Jose Ferrer moved to Argentina where his family had important interests, and where also another Fundacion General Mediterranea existed that financed the neo-Peronista movement.

With such demands on Rumasa's treasury, it was hardly astounding that in 1978 the Banco de Espana warned Ruiz-Mateos to slow its expansion. Moreover, the Banco de Espana asked Rumas to supply the state comptrollers with audited financial statements and assigned a deputy governor, Mariano Rubio, to insure that it complied. Although Rumasa was entirely in the hands of the Ruiz-Mateos family, some of the companies it controlled were publicly listed, their stock being held by 100,000 minority investors. But Ruiz-Mateo was unwilling to produce audited accounts as they would show Rumasa's undeclared transfers to the Opus Dei network abroad. Fearing government retaliation, with Arthur Wiederkehr's help he started diffusing Rumasa's assets, an exercise that required several sets of books, but only one of them apparent. Nobody ever accused Ruiz-Mateos of being dumb. He remained as crafty as a fox, and he trusted Luis Valls Taberner.

_______________

Notes:

1. Memorandum on The Rumasa Group by WW Finance S.A., Geneva, November 1979, p. 2.

2. Interview with Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos, Madrid, 2 March 1995.

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21. United Trading

You can't run the Church on Hail Marys.

-- Archbishop Paul Marcinkus

RUIZ-MATEOS WAS NOT ALONE IN MAINTAINING THAT OPUS DEI controlled a transnational network of banks and financial institutions. In addition to Banco Popular Espanol and Credit Andorra, he believed that the network included Nordfinanz Bank in Zurich. But one supposes other components existed in Argentina, Peru, Hong Kong or Singapore, wherever the Work did business. Opus Dei did not insist on physical control of the banks in its network, and always the links remained well hidden, almost impossible to detect. One theory we shall now explore is that Opus Dei wanted to control, imagined it controlled, or actually did control Milan's Banco Ambrosiano. As always in these situations, Opus Dei would have worked through a restricted circle of people, some unaware that they were being used, while others, if they suspected, remained unsure as to who was manipulating whom and for what purposes.

One of the key figures in the Ambrosiano affair was Paul Casimir Marcinkus, a priest from Chicago who was known in Rome as a fixer. Marcinkus was ambitious, wanting to become the first American Curial cardinal and grand elector of future popes. He thought he could achieve this by assuming control of the papal purse strings. Early on in his career he had caught the eye of Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York who advised Paul VI to take the young American prelate under his wing. Affable, golf-playing and occasionally cigar-smoking, Marcinkus worked at the time as a translator in the Secretariat of State.

From the outset, financial matters dominated Paul VI's pontificate. The Italian government announced it was going to tax Vatican holdings, which caused the papal money managers to seek ways of diversifying the Holy See's investments. This led to the sale by the IOR of its choicest bank holding, Banca Cattolica del Veneto, which had deposits of $700 million. An option to buy the bank was given to Milan lawyer Michele Sindona, regarded at the time as one of Italy's leading financial wizards. In early 1969 details of Sindona's dealings with the Vatican were leaked to the press and overnight he became a national figure. One of Sindona's closest friends in Rome was Mark Antinucci, an Italo-American businessman who owned the Rome Daily American, a newspaper that had CIA connections. Antinucci and Marcinkus played golf together at Rome's Holy Waters Golf Club. As early as 1967, Antinucci talked to Sindona about Marcinkus.

In 1963, when Paul VI began monitoring his 'career, Marcinkus was supervising the construction of Rome's most luxurious priests' residence, the Villa Stritch. Paul VI asked him to help his personal secretary, Father Pasquale Macchi, organize the Eucharist Congress planned for Bombay at the end of the year. Marcinkus and Macchi hit it off well. For the next few years they virtually ran the papal household, and anyone hoping for a confidential chat with the Holy Father had to pass through them. Marcinkus masterminded the Pope's eight remaining foreign journeys, and saved Paul's life by overpowering a knife-wielding assailant as he lunged through the crowd at Manila's international airport.

After Spellman's death in December 1967, US contributions to the Vatican decreased significantly. Father Macchi suggested that Marcinkus might be the man to reverse the situation. The idea appealed to the pontiff who decided to shift Marcinkus into a vacant position at the IOR, under the octogenarian Cardinal Di Jorio. Marcinkus was an excellent organizer but had no experience as a banker. He requested time off to visit a couple of big money-centre banks, study their systems and see from the inside how they operated. The request granted, he went to Chase Manhattan in New York, in his own words, 'for a day or two ... to see how stocks and stuff operated', and then to Continental Illinois in Chicago, where he was given 'a kind of three-day course, taking me through everything'. [1] He spent another day with the Continental Finance Corporation in Chicago to learn about trust operations, followed by a final day-long tour of a small local bank. In those seven days, Marcinkus became an international banker, equipped to play a leading role in managing the Vatican's finances. On Christmas Eve 1968, Paul VI made him titular Bishop of Orta, and two weeks later confirmed the new bishop's appointment as the IOR's secretary. Marcinkus's starting salary was $6,400 per annum.

Sindona transferred the Banca Cattolica option to Roberto Calvi, a central manager at Milan's Banco Ambrosiano. Calvi became Sindona's understudy in the hidden-hand operations that now evolved between Milan and the Vatican. The two had met some months previously. Sindona, who rarely had a good word to say about anybody, sensed that Calvi wanted to place some of Ambrosiano's offshore funds in joint ventures with him. Sindona implied that Calvi was interested not only in operating offshore, but off-the-books. Not long after getting to know Sindona, Calvi was promoted to general manager.

Founded in 1896, Banco Ambrosiano's statutes stipulated that its operations should be devoted to furthering the Christian virtues of faith and charity. It is difficult to believe that either of these virtues led to the founding in 1956 of a Liechtenstein company called Lovelok. This concern, which became the bank's largest shareholder, was of unknown ownership. It may have been controlled by Carlo Canesi, Ambrosiano's then managing director and Calvi's boss, but this is only speculation. More probably it belonged to a hidden partner whose identity mayor may not have been known to Canesi. If taken to the furthest absurdity, the shroud of secrecy surrounding Lovelok meant that it could have been controlled by the Pope himself, or Opus Dei. One year later, Lovelok formed Banca del Gottardo in Lugano, placing 40 per cent of Gottardo's capital with the Ambrosiano. Then in May 1963, Lovelok founded a Luxembourg subsidiary called Compendium S.A. to buy more Banco Ambrosiano shares, mainly from cash-squeezed Church institutions, with monies borrowed from the Ambrosiano itself.

Calvi was a character out of a Dostoyevsky novel. Of medium height, balding, with large, brooding eyes, he had served as a cavalry officer on the Russian front, keeping a live chicken under his greatcoat during the winter campaigns to warm his hands. In 1943, his tour of battlefront duty ended, he returned home and found work as a clerk with Banca Commerciale Italiana, a state-owned bank where his father was a manager. Because of his war experience, Calvi spoke fluent German. His English and French were less proficient. He joined the foreign department of Banco Ambrosiano in 1947, the same year that Marcinkus was ordained and Escriva de Balaguer moved permanently to Rome.

For Clara Canetti, Roberto Calvi was the man with a 'Clark Gable moustache'. They met on the beach at Rimini during the summer of 1950 and Roberto courted her while Clara's 12-year·old brother acted as chaperon. She found him not at all shy. In fact she noted that he was even a bit presumptuous. From a well-to-do Bologna family, Clara was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, an asset for any rising banker. They married a year later and after a honeymoon in the shadows of Monte Rosa they moved into a small apartment in the centre of Milan.

They had two children -- Carlo and Anna -- and the family's closeness was the envy of many in their circle of friends. They bought a country estate overlooking the village of Drezzo, near Como; Clara considered it her personal corner of paradise. They were often seen walking through the narrow streets of Drezzo hand in hand, as if on a perpetual honeymoon.

Calvi's first act when promoted Banco Ambrosiano's general manager was to bring Compendium out of its secret existence. He renamed it Banco Ambrosiano Holding S.A., and made it the spearhead of the group's offshore operations. This gave Ambrosiano's hidden partner, Lovelok, increased power in the group's affairs. To what extent this was part of a plan agreed to or even devised by Lovelok's true owners can only remain conjecture. Of course even the name of Banco Ambrosiano Holding was ambiguous as at the outset it was only 40 per cent owned by the supposed parent, Banco Ambrosiano. Another 20 per cent was held by Banca del Gottardo, and the remaining 40 per cent was controlled by still another mystery nominee, Radowal AG of Liechtenstein, through an account at the IOR.

Banco Ambrosiano Holding formed a subsidiary bank in the Bahamas, which began its existence under the name of Cisalpine Overseas Bank, but was eventually changed to Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Limited. To simplify matters, from the outset we will call it Ambrosiano Overseas. Canesi confirmed Calvi's appointment as Ambrosiano Overseas's chairman. In April.1971, the IOR became a minority shareholder of the Nassau bank, acquiring 32 per cent of its voting rights. By then Marcinkus had succeeded Di Jorio as the IOR president.

So ironclad was the IOR's confidence in this untested offshore bank that within a year it had no less than $73.5 million on deposit with it. Furthermore, 'Mr. Paul C. Marcinkus' accepted to become an Ambrosiano Overseas director. According to Sindona, Marcinkus enjoyed playing the role of international banker. He also enjoyed golfing on Nassau's Paradise Island championship course. Shortly after Marcinkus attended his first Nassau board meeting, Banco Ambrosiano exercised the option to acquire control of Banca Cattolica del Veneto. This came about in August 1971 but was not made public until the following March.

How Calvi acquired the Banca Cattolica del Veneto option is in itself an interesting tale. He had bailed Sindona out of a heap of trouble by taking off his hands a lame-duck company called Pachetti for $40 million. Sindona had used Pachetti, a one-time leather goods manufacturer, for stock promotion purposes and, hyped out of its corporate socks, it was not worth the quarter of what Calvi paid for it. To sweeten the deal, however, Sindona had thrown in the option to buy 50 per cent of Banca Cattolica del Veneto for $46.5 million. In addition, Sindona was alleged to have paid a $6.5 million commission to Calvi and Marcinkus for taking over Pachetti. Through these operations, Banco Ambrosiano temporarily solved both Sindona's and the IOR's liquidity problems. Very strong! But the question could now be asked whether the Ambrosiano bought Banca Cattolica del Veneto with the IOR's own money? The answer would appear to be yes, unless -- another possibility -- it was fiduciary money belonging to an anonymous client, for example Lovelok or Radowal.

Before consummating the Banca Cattolica transaction, Calvi asked Marcinkus to arrange a private audience with the Pope. Although the Vatican denies that the meeting took place, in a recorded conversation between the banker and a Sardinian businessman by the name of Flavio Carboni that later fell into the hands of the Milan magistrates, Calvi explained that he had insisted on seeing the Pope in order to be certain that the Holy Father was aware of what Marcinkus was up to. Not only was the Pope informed, Calvi said, but he thanked the banker for Ambrosiano's support.

Unlike Sindona and Marcinkus, Calvi had been a bank employee all his professional life and Carlo Canesi had chosen him as his personal assistant for his discretion, innovation and high integrity. Calvi spoke rarely of professional matters outside of the bank. But he was not given to being oblique with the truth either. When he told his wife that he had dealings with Opus Dei, she certainly believed him. He neglected, however, to tell her when these dealings began and with whom he dealt. But one thing is certain. In 1971 Calvi started travelling regularly to Rome, and his business dealings there intensified in the winter of 1974-75. Among the names he did mention were Dr Francesco Cosentino, secretary-general of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (whom she said advised her husband on political matters), Flaminio Piccoli, chairman of the Christian Democrat party, and Loris Corbi, chairman of Condotte d'Acqua. Both Piccoli and Corbi were known to be dose to Opus Dei, or, as in the case of Corbi, dose to high-level Opus Dei people. Through Cosentino, Calvi also got to know Andreotti, Ortolani and Gelli. Clara referred to the former as the Great Intriguer, and she called the latter two il Gatto e la Volpe, after the Cat and the Fox who stole the gold pieces from Pinocchio. [2]

In 1974, Caivi made the first charted use of Dr Arthur Wiederkehr's Zurich law firm, acquiring United Trading Corporation S.A., a Panamanian shell company. Everything indicates that Calvi was not acting on behalf of the Ambrosiano group but for a confidential client of the IOR, or for the IOR itself, as the IOR took possession of United Trading's entire share capital. But what gives us the greatest insight into the identity of Ambrosiano's hidden partner is that United Trading took over the assets of Radowal and Lovelok, as both were wound up.

What the IOR wanted to achieve with United Trading, into which Calvi folded about $80 million of existing debt, is an interesting question. A logical explanation would be that the transferred debt had been incurred in a first instance by the IOR's confidential client and guaranteed -- as far as Calvi was concerned -- by the IOR itself. Otherwise why would the Vatican bank accept such a miserable deal?

United Trading remains one of the great mysteries of the Vatican's financial operations up through the 1980s. The fact that it came out of the offices of Arthur Wiederkehr, who was chairman of Nordfinanz Bank, a Zurich bank suspected of being a turntable for Opus Dei monies, provides us with another clear hint of who stood behind it. United Trading had a subsidiary, Nordeurop AG, registered in Liechtenstein. Over the next few years Nordeurop (note similarity of name with Nordfinanz) came to owe nearly $400 million to Banco Ambrosiano's unit in Lima, Peru. Nordeurop would play an important role in the dealings that followed between Ambrosiano, the IOR and the undisclosed mystery client or, as Marcinkus later expressed it, the 'missing counterparty'.

In trying to cast new light on United Trading's significance, we must look at what was happening in the world financial system, and remember that 1974 was at least the fifth consecutive year in which the Vatican ran a deficit. The year had started well enough. But few bankers or economists foresaw the consequences of the December 1973 decision by the Islamic oil producing states to quadruple the world price of oil. This produced a vast demand for dollars and from a 5 per cent annual growth rate, the world economy shifted in 1974 to a nil or minus growth rate and 12 per cent inflation. [3] The dollar squeeze led to the downfall of the Sindona banking empire, producing a loss to the Vatican estimated as high as $240 million, an earthquake of major proportions. Indeed, the quadrupling of world oil prices was later described as the most destructive economic event since the Second World War, with the Islamic oil producers siphoning out of the world economy an extra $80,000 million a year equivalent to 10 per cent of all world exports. The rise of Islam in the West can be said to have commenced from this date.

Being prudent, Calvi had Banca del Gottardo in Lugano draw up a management contract for United Trading. It was boiler plate, except it stated that United Trading had been formed on instructions from the IOR. Monsignor Donato de Bonis and another IOR employee, Dr. Pellegrino de Strobel, signed the management contract. But Marcinkus later claimed that the contract was undated when they eventually signed it and then backdated by Calvi once he became executive chairman in November 1975. This assertion was strongly denied by Fernando Garzoni, Banca del Gottardo's chairman, and his general manager. Both assured the Milan magistrates that they had already signed and dated the contract when Calvi took it to Rome, and that 'the IOR knew it was operative as of that date'.

This automatically cast doubt on the authenticity of a letter on Banco Ambrosiano stationery that was initialled (not signed) by Calvi. In this letter, with the hand-written date of 26 July 1977, Calvi acknowledged that the IOR was holding the United Trading shares on behalf of Banco Ambrosiano. The letter undertook to indemnify the IOR as the fiduciary owner and absolved it of responsibility for United Trading's affairs. At that point the IOR had advanced around $200 million to United Trading.

In the best of cases the letter demonstrated the IOR's awareness that United Trading was a deceptive device. At worst, it was a forgery drafted long after the events to which it related. No copy of the document was uncovered in the files of Banco Ambrosiano, from where it is alleged to have originated. It contains elementary grammatical errors, suggesting it was written by someone whose mother tongue was not Italian. But when the Italian judiciary wished to examine the letter, it was unable to do so as the only extant version of the document was in the hands of the IOR. As the IOR is not domiciled in Italy, but in the Vatican City, the document could not be subpoenaed for scientific examination.

In sworn testimony given in Milan in January 198'9, Banca del Gottardo's general manager told magistrates, 'Marcinkus confirmed to me that Calvi had been mandated by the IOR to act on its behalf.' [4] What could be more condemning? He had no reason to commit perjury. Marcinkus, on the other hand, refused to give evidence, preferring to hide behind the Vatican's Leonine Walls.

In addition to owning a large block of Banco Ambrosiano shares, United Trading also controlled a rainbow of Latin shell companies that owed Ambrosiano a lot of money. But Calvi would have been unlikely to allow such a heavy concentration of unsecured debt to build up unless he was following the orders of Ambrosiano's largest shareholder and hidden partner. Because of United Trading's growing debt, during the second half of 1977 the first cracks began to appear in Ambrosiano's corporate edifice.

At the time Sindona, then a fugitive from Italian justice, was languishing in his million-dollar suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York, wondering how he was going to pay his legal bills. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York had sunk $1,700 million into his bankrupt Franklin National Bank. Sindona then had the idea of asking Calvi to contribute $500,000 to his defence fund. Calvi prevaricated with the result that when Banco Ambrosiano employees arrived for work on 13 November 1977 they found Milan's financial district plastered with posters accusing their chairman of 'fraud, issuing false accounts, dissimulating assets, illegal export of currency and tax swindling'. The posters also alleged that Calvi had received tens of millions of dollars in undeclared kickbacks from his dubious dealings with Sindona. Calvi sent out a clean-up squad to remove the posters, but the Italian news magazine l'Espresso got hold of one and published the story.

Luigi Cavallo, known as il Provocatore, was the artist behind this attack on Calvi's integrity. He ran a news service called 'Agenzia A'. After the Espresso story appeared, he wrote to Calvi threatening further disclosures if he did not reconsider 'the possibility of honouring the undertakings so freely made by you some years ago'. Calvi decided to meet Sindona's attorney in Rome, and eventually agreed to pay the $500,000 into a numbered account in Switzerland. The money was transferred from a United Trading account in Nassau. [5]

As a result of Luigi Cavallo's hi-jinx, the Bank of Italy ordered an investigative audit of Banco Ambrosiano. In April 1978, a Bank of Italy inspector, Giulio Padalino, arrived at the Ambrosiano headquarters in Milan with a team of fifty auditors. Calvi seemed unperturbed. After weeks of digging and sifting, Padalino found that the Ambrosiano's domestic operations were, on the whole, successful and well run. The bank's foreign operations, on the other hand, were of such complexity that he suspected they covered a way of transferring Italian currency out of Italy. Padalino confronted Calvi. The banker denied any wrongdoing. However the audit indicated that breaches of the exchange control laws had occurred. Irked by Calvi's lack of co-operation, Padalino promised further enquiries. Confident that the threat would come to nothing, Calvi left Milan on an extended business trip to South America.

While the Bank of Italy investigations continued, activity at the Villa Tevere centred on preparing a new file for Paul VI concerning Opus Dei's transformation to a Personal Prelature. In June 1978, Pope Paul 'encouraged' Don Alvaro del Portillo to present a formal petition to obtain the 'desired juridical status'. This coincided with a further worsening in the Vatican's finances. Cardinal Villot, now actively on Opus Dei's side, had for two years been pressing Pope Paul to do something about the deteriorating situation. [6] But before Don Alvaro could draft the petition, on 6 August 1978 Paul VI died.

As the cardinals gathered in Rome for the Conclave, Opus Dei's allies made sure that the Vatican's financial problems remained at the forefront of their thoughts. Prior to the Conclave, the new rules decreed by Paul VI before his death required the cardinals to hold daily meetings, called General Congregations, under the chairmanship of the camerlingo (chamberlain) who presides over the Church prior to the election of a new pope. The camerlingo has the task of preparing the De Eligendo Pontifice -- an oration that praises the qualities of the dead pope and sets out the qualities which the cardinals believe are required of the next pope. At Paul's death the camerlingo was Cardinal Villot.

The Vatican's deficit was now running between $30 million and $40 million annually, and in the first General Congregation Cardinal Palazzini asked whether the status of the IOR should be changed to bring it under greater Curial control. Cardinal Villot hastily conducted an investigation. In theory, the IOR was answerable to a commission of five cardinals, chaired by Villot himself. Villot concluded in his report to the cardinals a few days later that the IOR's independent status should be maintained but that a system of stronger internal controls was needed.

In the midst of the General Congregations, Cardinal Wojtyla paid a visit to the Villa Tevere. [7] He entered the Church of Our Lady of Peace, his robes brushing past the seventy-three freshly cut red roses, and knelt to pray beside the tomb of the Founder. This was an unusual gesture for one of the key electors only a week before the Conclave opened.

The election of the Patriarch of Venice, Albino Luciani, was one of the greatest protest votes in the history of papal elections. It marked a rejection of a Conservative-dominated Curia and the Church of Big Business. The new Pope was the son of a bricklayer, quiet, humble and with no diplomatic training nor Curial experience. When the result of the vote was announced, he told his electors, 'May God forgive you for what you have done to me!'

After taking the name of John Paul I, Luciani announced that he wished to be Pastor rather than Pontiff, and that papal pomp was not for him. He told the people of Rome that he intended to commit his Pontificate to applying the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. That by itself, Roberto Calvi later remarked, was a dangerous thing to have said. There was a community within the Church, fundamentalist to the core, that was intent on revising -- i.e., correcting -- the conclusions of Vatican II.

On Sunday, 27 August, after appearing on the balcony of Saint Peter's to bless the noontime crowds, Luciani lunched with Cardinal Villot. Luciani asked Villot to continue as Secretaty of State 'until I have found my way'. [8] Indeed his liberal views on artificial birth control had distressed the traditionalists, and he needed Villot's counsel while forming his 'new-look' administration. The Conservatives reacted to the new Pope's views by assuring the faithful that he was in fact absolutely dedicated to promoting the continuity of the Church's magisterium.

They did this even though they were aware that, when still a bishop, Luciani had wanted the Vatican to relax the rules concerning artificial birth control. Of course, they secretly cursed Luciani's position and immediately after his election a team of trusted priests from the Secretariat of State began cleansing the archives of documents pertaining to the new pope that did not agree with their image of the magisterium. In Venice, according to a former diocesan official, they removed from the Patriarchy's archives all mention of Luciani's views on birth control. Specifically, they were said to have taken with them the notes for a talk Luciani had given to the Veneto region's parish priests during a 1965 spiritual retreat, in which he stated: 'I assure all of you that bishops would be more than happy to find a doctrine that declared the use of contraceptives legitimate under certain conditions ... If there is only one possibility in a thousand, then we must find it and see if, by chance, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we might come across something that has escaped us to date.' [9]

Some months before Humanae Vitae's publication Luciani again addressed the problem of contraception at a diocesan conference on marriage. This time he said, 'It is our hope that the Pope will utter a word of deliverance.' Weeks later, his superior, Cardinal Giovanni Urbani of Venice, asked him to prepare a reserved text on artificial birth control for Paul VI. Luciani consulted doctors, parents and theologians, and produced a cogent theological argument for a revision of the Church's stand on birth control. Cardinal Urbani sent the document to Pope Paul before the final drafting of Humanae Vitae. It reinforced the majority conclusion of the panel of experts appointed by the Pope and was said to have swayed him in favour of a more liberal policy on sexual matters. Only Cardinal Wojtyla's energetic intervention, almost bullying his way into the papal chambers and virtually rewriting some of the Humanae Vitae pages himself, saved the day for the Conservatives. All trace of the Luciani text has since vanished, and today the Holy See denies that such a document ever existed.

In the draft of the papal acceptance speech, prepared for him by the Secretariat of State, Luciani excised all suggested references to Humanae Vitae. Earlier that year, Opus Dei had organized an International Congress in Milan to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the encyclical's publication. Luciani had refused to address the Congress. Instead, Wojtyla took his place. Then within the first weeks of his papacy, Luciani told Villot that he planned to see US Congressman James Scheuer, vice-chairman of the UN Population Fund, the world agency that promoted family planning. Scheuer wanted Vatican support for a UN Population Fund plan to stabilize world population at 7.2 billion by the year 2050. An audience for Scheuer was tentatively scheduled for 24 October 1978. [10] This alarmed the Curial Conservatives. By then Opus Dei was regarded as the strongest Conservative force in the Church. It was -- and remains -- ferociously antagonistic to all forms of family planning other than the natural rhythm method. Shocked by Luciani's intentions, Opus Dei aligned around it all like-minded members of the cardinalate, particularly Hoffner of Cologne, Krol of Philadelphia, Sin of Manila, Siri of Genoa, Wojtyla of Cracow and the Curial Conservatives Baggio, Oddi, Palazzini, Poletti, Samore and, of course, Villot. The outspoken Oddi began openly suggesting that the Holy Spirit had made a mistake in allowing Luciani's election.

Roberto Calvi was in Montevideo when the news of Luciani's election reached him. If anything, he was relieved. Contrary to what was commonly believed, Calvi did not want a cover up of Ambrosiano's dealings with the IOR. At this point he had real grievances and he believed an investigation would result in Banco Ambrosiano receiving the assurances he was seeking. In fact, he regarded John Paul I as one of the few persons likely to instigate a much needed housecleaning at the Vatican bank.

Calvi told his wife and daughter that he no longer trusted Marcinkus. Clara Calvi later testified: 'I knew that he was working on resolving the IOR's problems with the help of Opus Dei. One day he told me that he intended to go to Madrid. "Why?" I asked. He laughed and explained that Opus Dei was very powerful in Spain.' [11]

Apart from the Vatican's deplorable finances, Papa Luciani's two greatest concerns at the outset of his pontificate were to revise Humanae Vitae and to convince Giovanni Benelli to become his Secretary of State. Such a move spelled immeasurable danger for Opus Dei. It was said that Alvaro del Portillo feared Benelli more than any other person in the Church.

_______________

Notes:

1. John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night -- The Death of Pope John Paul I, Penguin edition, London 1990, p. 73.

2. Clara Calvi diaries, p. 33.

3. Robert Solomon, The International Monetary System 1945-1981, Harper & Row, 1982, p. 316.

4. Raw, The Moneychangers, Harvill, London 1992, p. 130. Transcripts of the Bolgiani and Garzoni depositions are contained in the Calvi family archives.

5. Raw, Op. cit., pp. 205-207.

6. Malachi Martin, The Final Conclave, Pocket Books, New York 1978, p. 71.

7. Alain Woodrow, 'Qu'y a-t-il derriere le changement de statut de l'Opus Dei?' Le Monde, Paris, 14 November 1979.

8. Yallop, In God's Name, Corgi Books, London 1984, pp. 240-241.

9. Andrea Tornielli. 'The Hope of a Pastor', 30 Giorni, No. I, Rome 1995.

10. Yallop, Op. cit., p. 246.

11. Clara Calvi's testimony before Milan magistrates Bruno Siclari and Pierluigi dell'Ossa, 25 October 1982, pp. 85-86.

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22. Vatican Coup D'Etat

Desperate situations require desperate remedies.

-- Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer

ACCOMPANIED BY GIACOMO BOTTA, HEAD OF THE AMBROSIANO'S foreign department, the Calvis stopped in Montevideo on the first leg of their Latin American tour to meet with Umberto Ortolani. The great Vatican door-opener had recently been appointed the Knights of Malta ambassador to Uruguay. Ortolani and one of his sons continued with the Calvis and Botta to Buenos Aires, where Licio Gelli, his wife Wanda, and their two sons were waiting. Calvi was ostensibly in Buenos Aires to discuss with the Argentine authorities the opening of a local Banco Ambrosiano branch. In fact Calvi, Gelli and Ortolani invited the entire naval general staff to dinner. At the end of the meal the admirals asked how they might finance the purchase of fifty AM39 Exocet missiles for their naval aviation. Each Exocet cost $1 million, so the admirals were talking about a $50 million package. As Exocets were manufactured in Italy under licence from the French firm of Aerospatiale, Calvi was able to provide an easy answer. He arranged for financing which, as no record of it was uncovered in the Ambrosiano accounts, one supposes was routed through the United Trading network.

While watching the television news in their hotel on the morning of 29 September 1978, Clara and Anna learned that Pope John Paul I had been found dead in his bed. Roberto was stunned. He had already told Clara that he found Luciani 'very courageous, open to dialogue, but very imprudent. In only a month he made it clear that he intended to adopt his own line at the Vatican. He had shown his intransigence, which surely meant that Marcinkus would be compromised.' [1] With a new pope this was no longer certain.

Calvi had explained to Clara that the reasons for the Vatican bank's troubles were to be found in the vaults of Banca del Gottardo, where the accounting secrets of the United Trading family of companies were kept. Later the IOR's chief accountant, Pellegrino de Strobel, went himself to the Gottardo's offices in Lugano to confirm the extent of United Trading's exposed position. Calvi had wondered what John Paul I knew of these dealings. Probably nothing, he supposed.

What Papa Luciani had intended for the IOR was Marcinkus's replacement as chairman. That Luciani wanted to relaunch Paul VI's Ostpolitik also seemed certain. But the opening towards Moscow had been brought to a halt when the Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Leningrad, the forty-nine-year-old Nikodim (widely regarded as a KGB agent), died of a massive heart attack (infarto miocardico acuto) in the Pope's antechamber before their meeting could take place.

A week later, Papa Luciani found on his desk a copy of the latest issue of Mino Pecorelli's Rome scandal sheet, OP. It revealed that 121 senior prelates were Freemasons. The list included the cardinals Villot, Poletti and Baggio. Shocked, Papa Luciani turned for advice to the only member of the hierarchy he trusted. That was Cardinal Benelli, now Archbishop of Florence, who counselled caution because he suspected Pecorelli of 'sharpening someone else's axe'. Luciani asked Benelli to become his secretary of state. Benelli was moved. His return to the Curia would have meant greater Vatican conciliation towards the Communist bloc and an easing of its stance against artificial birth control, two issues that the Conservative cardinals opposed.

On 28 September 1978, Luciani informed Villot that in addition to removing Marcinkus, he proposed sending Sebastiano Baggio to Venice and the Vicar of Rome, Ugo Poletti, to Florence. Finally, he requested Villot's own resignation, intending to replace him with Benelli. [2] Although Luciani had no way of knowing, the four prelates he wanted to remove from the Curia were essential to the success of Opus Dei's intentions, namely canonization of the Founder, its own transformation as a Personal Prelature, and control of the Vatican finances.

During that night, after only thirty-three days in office, John Paul I died. The scrambling that followed for his succession bore the markings of a minutely prepared coup d'etat. However much one might wish to believe otherwise, the surprise Pope in whom so many had placed such hope was unlikely to have died from natural causes and -- in spite of all that has been written and said on the subject -- the indications are strong that a cover up of the real cause of death was engineered by a Vatican clique convinced it was acting to protect the Church and her sacred teachings.

The facts surrounding the discovery of the Pope's death are bizarre to say the least. They prove that the Vatican did not, in the first instance, tell the truth and may not still be telling the truth. The first fact it attempted to hide was that Sister Vincenza found the Pope dead at about 5 a.m. when she brought him his thermos of coffee. She said he was sitting upright in bed, his lips twisted. She noticed that he was clutching a sheaf of papers. An unsettled dispute persists as to the nature of these papers, for they have disappeared. One explanation is that certain members of the Curia did not want the outside world to know that a power struggle was in progress inside the Vatican, engineered by a group that opposed Benelli's return to the centre of power. The papers allegedly detailed the changes that Luciani had intended to decree that same day. But according to Vatican news bulletins, he was holding a copy of The Imitation of Christ.

Rumours concerning the missing papers and other anomalies surrounding John Paul 1's death continued to surface during the next six years until finally, in June 1984 -- intending to dispense with the rumours once and for all -- an unsigned memorandum was prepared for a conference of bishops that brushed aside The Imitation of Christ story as a pure invention of the press!

This account was just as untrue as the first, produced in an attempt to rewrite history. The same memorandum suggested that the papers seen by Sister Vincenza were nothing more than the Pope's notes for his sermon at the Wednesday audience and the Angelus talk on the following Sunday. But the report neglected to mention that the original Vatican communique claimed the Pope had been found by Father John Magee, one of the two papal secretaries.

Sister Vincenza in fact had called Father Magee. His first reaction had been to summon Cardinal Villot from his apartment two floors below. Villot appeared in the papal bedroom a little after 5 a.m. and as camerlingo immediately took charge. According to others present, he did a quick tour of the room, stopping at the Pope's bedside table and at his desk. After his initial visit to the bedroom, a small bottle of Effortil, a liquid medicine used to alleviate low blood pressure, that John Paul kept on his bedside table, went missing. The sheaf of notes also disappeared. No autopsy was requested, and no forensic tests were undertaken.

The Vatican doctor, Renato Buzzonetti, arrived in the bedroom at 6 a.m. and made a brief examination of the body. Buzzonetti informed Villot that the cause of death was infarto miocardico acuto -- a massive heart attack -- and he estimated the time of death at about 11 p.m. on the previous evening. Without further ado, Villot called for the rapid embalming of the body.

Almost immediately the other secretary, Father Diego Lorenzi, who had been Luciani's aide in Venice, telephoned the Pope's personal physician, Antonio Da Ros, who had looked after Luciani for more than twenty years in Venice. 'He was shocked. Stunned. Unable to believe it ... he said he would come to Rome immediately,' Lorenzi reported. Da Ros had been in Rome two weeks before to examine his patient, and remarked, 'Non sta bene, ma benone' -- 'You're not well, but very well.' [3] But when Da Ros arrived later that same day, he was not allowed near the body.

Benelli was telephoned in Florence at about 6.30 a.m. Overcome with grief and openly crying, he immediately retired to his room and began to pray. When Benelli re-emerged at 9 a.m. to speak to the press, he said: 'The Church has lost the right man for the right moment. We are very distressed. We are left frightened. Man cannot explain such a thing.' [4]

Hardly had Benelli spoken than the Vatican information department began creating the legend of the Pope's ill health. But if the Pope's health was so frail, why were no medicines -- other than Effortil -- to be found in the papal apartments? And whatever happened to that missing bottle of Effortil? Why was Cardinal Villot never questioned about it? Also not to be forgotten, Edoardo Luciani, the dead pope's brother, was on record as stating that Albino had no history of heart trouble.

The controversy surrounding Papa Luciani's death hung over the pre-Conclave General Congregations. As camerlingo, Villot found himself under attack by the more progressive cardinals. He admitted that the Vatican Press Office had given misleading information. [5] The dissident cardinals wanted to know why no autopsy had been performed, nor an official death certificate issued, and they pushed for a collegial statement on the Pope's death. The Conservatives rejected the idea.

No more reactionary figure existed in the Roman Curia than Cardinal Silvio Oddi. He was Opus Dei's cardinal protector. The Italian authorities had demanded an autopsy, but Oddi claimed that he had already carried out an investigation for the College of Cardinals and found no evidence of foul play. Therefore he opposed an autopsy on grounds that it would create a precedent, [6] which was untrue. Papal autopsies had been carried out before. Indeed, Oddi was quoted as saying: 'The College of Cardinals will not examine the possibility of anIother1enquiry at all, and will not accept any supervision from anyone, and it will not even discuss the subject ... We know ... in all certainty that the death of John Paul I was due to the fact that his heart stopped beating from perfectly natural causes.' [7]

Then on 12 October 1978, as the second Conclave opened, Father Panciroli, the Vatican spokesman, announced that after all a death certificate had been signed by Professor Mario Fontana and Dr. Renato Buzzonetti. The 'certificate' was not, however, a public document. With good reason. It contained a mere five typewritten lines affirming in Italian that the Pope had died in the Apostolic Palace at 23:00 on 28 September 1978 by morte improvvisa -- da infarto miocardico acuto. [8] Such a document would not have passed muster in jurisdictions where developed notions of civil law existed.

In the second Conclave Siri and Benelli again started as frontrunners. In the opening ballots Benelli almost got the required two-thirds plus one. [9] Then Siri, at the urging of Baggio, Krol, Oddi and Palazzini, asked those who supported him to transfer their votes to Karol Wojtyla. He suggested that Wojtyla would make a 'good doctrinal pope'.

Speaking afterwards about what happened inside the Conclave, Cardinal Enrique y Tarancon expressed disgust for the politicking that surrounded the papal election, while Siri remarked, 'Secrecy can cover some very uncharitable actions."' [10] Siri never specified what those 'actions' might have been, but the election of the first non-Italian pope in 455 years meant that the Holy See embarked upon an apostolic programme that was radically different to the one that John Paul I had begun formulating.

Once elected, Wojtyla wanted to take the name of Stanislaus, after Cracow's first bishop and martyr. But Siri recommended that, to heal the Church's wounds, he should call himself John Paul II. Caracas lawyer Alberto Jaimes Berti, who had known Siri for more than twenty years, was in Rome for the papal inauguration. He said Siri was elated. 'He told me he had backed Wojtyla in the Conclave because he saw him as a providential figure sent to destroy Communism everywhere in the world. "We must help this Pope achieve his mission. He will need money, lots of money",' Berti quoted Siri as saying.

Berti at that time handled the Church finances in Venezuela. During his visit to Rome, he said Siri drew him aside and mentioned that the Church wanted to create a Latin American bank to promote trade with East Europe, Siri stressed that die' bank required a sound capital base and would have to operate with absolute confidentiality. [11]

According to Berti, there was no doubt that if John Paul I had remained alive the Banco Ambrosiano scandal would never have occurred, as Luciani would have uncovered the IOR's secret dealings and put an end to them. On the other hand, there would have been an IOR scandal involving not only Marcinkus, but Opus Dei, the Italian military intelligence agency, SISMI, and others. With Wojtyla as Pope, however, the problems at the IOR were glossed over. Marcinkus continued as the bank's chairman. Villot remained as Secretary of State. It was no secret that Villot was by then Opus Dei's man. And the bottle of Effortil? According to a conspiracy theory still talked about in Vatican corridors, it had been spiked by a clear and tasteless poison that produced the same effect as digitalis, the natural poison that was suspected of being administered to Father Giuliano Ferrari, who died of a massive heart attack only a few months before.

The other results of Papa Wojtyla's election were that Baggio continued as Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops and Poletti kept his job as Vicar of Rome. They were needed to insure the Founder's beatification and Opus Dei's elevation to Personal Prelature. And there was no papal audience for US Congressman James Scheuer, vice-chairman of the UN Population Fund, as Wojtyla, backed by Opus Dei, firmly opposed any change in the Vatican's policy on contraception. Indeed within the first year of his pontificate, Wojtyla used Opus Dei's leading theologian in Latin America, Monsignor Ibanez Langlois, to pressure Chilean dictator Pinochet into removing from the country $1 million worth of medical equipment supplied by the London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation for a female sterilization programme. Failure to heed the Pope's wishes, Pinochet was warned, would cause Chile to lose papal support in its Beagle Channel dispute with Argentina. Pinochet immediately complied. [12]

Under Luciani's successor, the same crowd continued to run the IOR and the bank has similarly denied its involvement in other financial scandals. There was no Curial shake-out, and the Jesuits came under increasing pressure to toe the Conservative line or face dissolution. Under John Paul II Opus Dei moved to suppress all dissident opinion on sexual morality. Moreover, with the encyclical Veritas Splendor Papa Wojtyla branded abortion, euthanasia, contraception and homosexuality as 'intrinsically evil'. These were all pet Opus Dei phobias. Indeed Opus Dei was accused of indirectly financing the anti-abortion commandos that in the 1990s were formed in France and the United States. [13]

Unaware of the power play in Rome, Roberto Calvi continued his South American travels, visiting Lima before flying to Washington for the annual general meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. While in Lima Calvi met the minister of the economy and the president of the Banco de la Nacion to discuss the possibility of opening a bank in Peru. To demonstrate the usefulness of such an institution, Calvi had Ambrosiano loan the Peruvian Central Reserve Bank, of which Opus Dei's Emilio Castanon was a director, the necessary funds to pay for a naval frigate ordered from an Italian shipyard. The licence for the new bank was delivered within the year.

John Paul II, meanwhile, made Cardinal Oddi prefect of the Congregation of Religious. The appointment was strategic because the Congregation of Religious was the ministry that held jurisdiction over secular institutes, and therefore Opus Dei. But perhaps more telling was the appointment of Pietro Palazzini as prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

John Paul II had been in office for less than a month when he sent Don Alvaro del Portillo a note of warm wishes on the occasion of the Work's Fiftieth Anniversary -- its first jubilee. The note was enclosed in a letter from Villot stating that 'His Holiness considers the transforming of Opus Dei into a Personal Prelature as a necessity that can no longer be delayed.' But in the midst of Don Alvaro's rush to have the concerned Congregations issue their nihil obstat, Cardinal Villot died, supposedly in his sleep (without disclosing what he had done with the bottle of Effortil), [14] Villot was replaced as Secretary of State by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli.

In utmost secrecy, Don Alvaro del Portillo forwarded to Cardinal Baggio, Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, a fifteen-page report on the advantages for the Church of making Opus Dei the first -- and only -- Personal Prelature, The document was a masterpiece of bureaucratic reasoning, finely constructed and disciplined in style, For once, it gave statistics, including Opus Dei's exact strength -- 72,375 members, married or celibate, men and women, representing 87 nationalities, of which about 2 per cent were priests, In addition, it pointed out that Opus Dei was already hierarchically structured as a floating diocese, with what amounted to its own Ordinary, presbyterium, territory and congregation.

Don Alvaro stressed that Opus Dei represented a new pastoral phenomenon in the life of the Church, 'uniquely comparable to the spiritual reality and apostolates of the faithful -- clergy and laity who belonged to the first Christian communities'.

The Transformation Memo devoted an entire section to underlining that 'substantially all of the constitutive elements of a Personal Prelature' already existed in Opus Dei's structure. Then came the clincher: 'The transformation of Opus Dei from Secular Institute to Personal Prelature ... offers the Holy See the possibility of more efficiently deploying a corps mobile of priests and lay persons (specially trained) capable of operating everywhere as a powerful spiritual and apostolic catalyst for Christian action, above all in social and professional domains where today it is often impossible to work decisively in apostolic terms with the means that are currently available to the Church.' [15]

The memo also unveiled some details of Opus Dei's auxiliary activities: 'Members of Opus Dei already work in the following professional enterprises ... 479 universities and institutes of higher learning on five continents; 604 newspapers, magazines and scientific publications; 52 radio and television stations; 38 news and publicity agencies; 12 film production and distribution companies, etc. Moreover, our members, aided by ordinary citizens, Catholic and non-Catholic, Christian and non-Christian, promote in 53 countries the apostolic activities Of an educational or social nature: through primary and secondary schools, technical institutes, youth clubs, trade schools, hotel schools, home economics schools, clinics and infirmaries, etc. (See Note 9).' [16]

Note 9 stated that the list was exclusive of the 'apostolate of penetration'. This apostolate was carried out by Opus Dei members within the framework of their normal professional activities by organizing specialized training courses, cultural exchanges, international congresses, conventions and seminars attended by leading economic figures, technicians, teachers and others. The apostolate of penetration specifically targeted countries 'governed by totalitarian regimes that are either atheist, anti-Christian or at least nationalistic in tendency, in which it is difficult or virtually impossible de jure o de facto to undertake a missionary or religious activity, and in the end [to establish] an organized presence or activity related to the Church as one of its institutions.'

_______________

Notes:

1. Clara Calvi's diaries, p. 29.

2. Yallop, Op. cit., pp. 302-303.

3. Ibid., p. 353.

4. Ibid., p. 320.

5. Peter Hebblethwaite, The Next Pope, Fount (HarperCollins), London 1995, p. 64.

6. Tommaso Ricci, 'Yallop Debunked', 30 Days, Rome, June 1988. Ricci was quoting Swiss journalist Victor Willi, who had just written a book titled Im Namen des Teufels? (In the Devil's Name?), refuting Yallop's thesis. The book was 'read and approved' by Joaquin Navarro-Valls, Willi told 30 Days. But Navarro-Valls denied to John Cornwell that Cardinal Oddi had any official standing as an investigator or spokesman for the Vatican concerning John Paul I's death [see A Thief in the Night, p. 291].

7. Yallop. Op. cit., p. 336.

8. A copy of the death certificate was later published by John Cornwell in the appendices to A Thief in the Night.

9. Jan Grootaers, De Vatican II a Jean-Paul II: Le grand tournant de l'Eglise catholique, Centurion, Paris 1981, pp. 124-133.

10. Hebblethwaite, The Next Pope, pp. 66-67.

11. Interview with Dr. Alberto Jaimes Berti, London, 24 February 1994.

12. Stephen D. Mumford, American Democracy & the Vatican: Population Growth & National Security, Humanist Press, Amherst, New York, 1984, pp. 196-197.

13. Reseau Voltaire, Notes d'information No. 15 of 10 April 1995 and No. 23 of 5 June 1995.

14. Cornwell relates in A Thief in the Night, page 87, that a confidential Vatican source told him Villar 'collapsed' outside the Vatican and was taken to the Gemelli Hospital. 'The Vatican people rushed round and snatched the body ... They pretended the corpse was still alive, took it back to the Vatican, and said he died holily in bed.'

15. Transformation of Opus Dei into a Personal Prelature; memorandum to the Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, Cardinal Sebastiana Baggio, 23 April 1979, paragraph 19.

16. Ibid., paragraph 20.

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23. Banco Occidental

I provided financing throughout Latin America for warships and other military equipment to be used to counter the subversive activities of well-organized Communist forces. Thanks to these operations, the Church today can boast a new authority in countries like Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Nicaragua ...

-- Roberto Calvi, 1982

JAVIER SAINZ MORENO, PROFESSOR OF LAW AT MADRID UNIVERSITY, is an acerbic critic of Opus Dei, having formed a very definite view of its modus operandi which to him seems more suited to an organization specializing in pilleria than a branch of the Catholic Church. He has strong opinions.

'Opus Dei distinguishes between its members and the rest of the world. The institution is not afraid to co-operate with people of dubious reputation, outright crooks or even Socialist politicians. But Opus Dei's hierarchy is careful to insure that these persons do not contaminate or come too close to the Work. Once they have been used, Opus Dei washes its hands of them, casts them adrift, abandons and despises them.

'What gives Opus Dei its importance is the influence it wields and also that it deploys its immense financial resources to spread its apostolate ... Opus Dei knows very well that money rules the world and that religious hegemony of a country or a continent is dependent upon obtaining financial hegemony ...

'By its audacity, Opus Dei dares to do what other religious orders would never dream of doing: it uses the same weapons as its enemies. For this it will hire people it considers unworthy of respect so that these people do its dirty work. This allows it to achieve its objectives without being directly involved. The end justifies the means. Afterwards Opus Dei pays these people off and forgets them in the same way that one disposes of a dirty handkerchief by throwing it into the dustbin.

'Thus Opus Dei will hire lawyers who counsel them how not to pay taxes -- and it's clear that afterwards Opus Dei will claim the money so gained serves to expand its religious works. It will hire architects to find ways of getting around zoning restrictions to obtain building permits -- of course the permits are for schools or old people's homes, therefore they serve the social good. It will engage women to create scandals and discredit politicians who oppose the Work. It is clear that because of their low morals, these politicians would succumb to temptation anyway. In short, it hires disreputable persons to carry out its dirty deeds.'

I thought about this for a long while before realizing that Roberto Calvi was one of those 'dirty handkerchiefs'. He had always maintained to his wife Clara that Opus Dei was deeply involved in his dealings with the Vatican. However, according to his wife, he could only recite the names of two persons within the Curia -- Cardinal Palazzini and Monsignor Hilary Franco -- as intercessors, but neither were, strictly speaking, members of Opus Dei. Of course Calvi was close to Marcinkus, but the Vatican banker was not an Opus Dei member either. He was, on the other hand, a slave for a red hat.

Although not devoutly religious, Roberto Calvi held the Church in esteem. Like Marcinkus, his weak point was his immense ambition. Within the context of the times I believe that Roberto Calvi was not a dishonest person, though his ambition left him open to manipulation. But Calvi had another problem. When he took over as chairman of Banco Amhrosiano he inherited a hidden partner, left behind by Canesi, the former chairman. The hidden partner was, or later became, the bank's largest shareholder, as crazy as that may seem, and whatever Calvi did, as hard as he might have tried -- and he did try -- he could not get rid of that shareholder.

The identity of the hidden shareholder has never been conclusively proven. The evidence indicates that it was the IOR, or a client of the IOR, but the Vatican bank claimed it was operating on behalf of Calvi, producing copies of suspect or at least 'parallel' letters as 'proof'. And so current wisdom holds that, for lack of better proof, Calvi must have been his own hidden partner. Moreover, the wisdom holds that to have amassed such a large shareholding in the bank, of which he was after all but an employee, he must have used the bank's own money. Therefore he was a crook as well.

The Calvi family has tried for more than a dozen years to convince the world that this was not the case. As a task, it has wholly defeated them. But nevertheless, in my inquiries I developed considerable sympathy for their cause. I might have formed a different view had the people Calvi said were his partners, and those who ran the Vatican bank, consistently told a straight story. But they never have. So it is worth going over the Calvi story as it helps establish the credibility of the very same people who have risen to power within the Vatican.

Calvi claimed it was 'the priests' who were sapping Banco Ambrosiano's capital to finance their covert dealings and he couldn't get them to honour their obligations. Now if that were true it was a very Mephistophelian plan on the part of the 'priests'. As the plan developed, Madrid became the clearing house for many of its operations, which meant that he and his Masonic friends, Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani, paid frequent visits there.

During the 1960s the Church decided to soften its stand on Freemasonry. The revised codex of canon law no longer mentioned it as a prohibited institution. Certain sections of the Church even came to view Freemasonry as a viable weapon against Marxism. Italy's Propagande Due (P2) Lodge, not a true lodge in the Masonic sense but a secret grouping of prominent persons useful to Freemasonry's anti-Marxist mission, was evidence of this, as many high-ranking prelates were included among its members. The Church 'invaded' the Freemasonry movement and was 'colonizing' it.

P2 was formed in the late 1960s, allegedly at the behest of Giordano Gamberini, a Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy and friend of Giulio Andreotti. But he was much closer to Francesco Cosentino, who also was well introduced in Vatican circles. Either Andreotti or Cosentino, or perhaps both, were said to have suggested the creation of a secret cell of trusted right-wing personalities in key national sectors, but especially banking, intelligence and the press, to guard against what they perceived as 'the creeping Marxist threat'.

The person Gamberini chose to develop the P2 Lodge was a small-time textile magnate from the Tuscan town of Arezzo, midway between Florence and Perugia, who after two years as a Freemason had risen to the Italian equivalent of Master Mason. His name, of course, was Licio Gelli. But the P2's top man, according to Calvi, was none other than Andreotti, followed in line of command by Cosentino and Ortolani.

Andreotti always denied Calvi's allegation. But the fact remains that Calvi feared Andreotti more than Gelli or Ortolani. As "for Cosentino, he died soon after the P2 hearings began. The truth of the matter, Javier Sainz said, is that the P2 Lodge was part of a secret right-wing network created with the Vatican's blessing as part of the Occident's bulwark against Marxism. The P1 Lodge was in France and the P3 Lodge was in Madrid. The P3 was headed by a former minister of justice, Pio Cabanillas Gallas.

The sense of all this was that Opus Dei's methodology consisted of using, if necessary, unclean hands to achieve certain of its secular aims and that Calvi, Gelli, Ortolani and the Propaganda network, having similar political aims, were appropriate assets to be exploited and then abandoned. As far as pouring resources into the battle against Marxist subversion in Latin America was concerned, Opus Dei allegedly decided that a secondary Spanish bank would make a good partner for Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano.

In the mid-1970s, Calvi started to show an interest in Banco Occidental of Madrid. Its shares were listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange. Ablock of 100,000 shares, representing 10 per cent of its capital, was held privately by a Swiss company, Zenith Finance S.A. Dr Arthur Wiederkehr was not on Zenith's board at the time but would become a director in 1980. Calvi acquired these shares for 80 million Swiss francs, ten times more than the going market price, which was an unusual thing for an astute banker to do. [1] He placed them in a company owned by United Trading.

Banco Occidental belonged to Gregorio de Diego, an enterprising freebooter originally from Salamanca. Diego represented everything that Opus Dei admired in the free enterprising ethic. He was clever, aggressively acquisitive and obviously someone gifted for attracting capital. He had made a fortune during World War II by going from village to village, buying rabbit pelts. He sold the pelts to Germany where they were used to line winter uniforms for the Wehrmacht. He also negotiated an important contract to supply German officers with leather boots. But the Germans were upset when they received twice the number of right-footed boots and no left-footed ones. The reason for their displeasure was that they had paid a substantial sum up front and were obliged to renegotiate the contract. Diego ended up selling them a matching number of left-footed boots at double the price. With the capital acquired from the sale of pelts and boots he managed to corner the market in Spanish wolfram, a strategic mineral of which the Germans were in short supply. After the war he found himself with a mountain of money on his hands while the rest of Spain was in the grips of a liquidity squeeze. In the 1960s he bought the Banco Peninsular, which he renamed Banco Occidental. Its headquarters in the Plaza de Espana had big stained glass windows like a church.

Diego died of a heart attack in the arms of his mistress. Though not a point in his favour, it could hardly be held against the son, also called Gregorio de Diego, who inherited the family empire. Although he had no banking experience Diego II became Occidental's managing director, appointing as chairman the Conde Tomas de Marsal, a Spanish grandee who, like Ortolani, was a secret knight of the papal household.

Under Conde de Marsal, Banco Occidental moved into the investment banking field, taking positions in industrial concerns, such as cement works which fitted well with Diego's property development activities. In the early 1970s, the bank opened a representative office in Rome, primarily for Tomas de Marsal's convenience as frequently he visited the Vatican.

In 1976, Banco Ambrosiano made a loan to Occidental which it used to purchase 1 per cent of Ambrosiano's stock. At the same time, Banco Ambrosiano increased its holding in Banco Occidental to 510,000 shares, for which it paid another 40 million Swiss francs (roughly $18 million), and Calvi went on Banco Occidental's board of directors. In addition to the Conde de Marsal, who insiders described as a religious fanatic, other directors included Pio Cabanillas, the Venerable P3 Master. Like his P2 counterpart, Cabanillas kept secret files on most of Spain's important people. And he was a friend of Luis Valls Taberner.

Diego surrounded himself with Opus Dei members. In this respect his bank was to all intents an Opus Dei bank. His aide-de-camp was supernumerary Eloy Ramirez, for many years the representative in Mexico for Banco Espanol de Credito (Banesto), Spain's largest commercial bank. Diego hired him for his Latin American contacts. He always accompanied Diego on foreign trips. When they arrived in a country for the first time, Ramirez would pay a visit to his brothers in the faith and they opened all the necessary doors. But the real eminence grise was Diego's brother-in-law, Fernando Perez Minguez, an art connoisseur and antiques dealer who kept an office in the bank although he was not officially on the payroll. Like the Ramirez couple, Fernando Perez and his wife were Opus Dei super-numeraries.

Banco Occidental concentrated on developing outlets in Latin America and Florida by acquiring participations in small commercial banks and buying hotels. Amember of Occidental's legal department also suspected that Calvi used Banco Occidental as the hinge for arms transactions with Latin American dictatorships. These transactions required Calvi's frequent presence in Madrid. But to stay overnight in the Spanish capital would have attracted attention, so United Trading purchased an executive jet to carry him to and from Madrid in the same day. Instructions were given to Occidental's staff never to mention the Learjet when talking on the telephone with the Ambrosiano offices in Milan, suggesting that the staff in Milan was not supposed to know of the aircraft's existence.

In Madrid, Calvi met frequently with Cabanillas to discuss the possibility of bidding for control of El Pais, because it was feared that Madrid's largest circulation newspaper was leaning too far to the left. The project fitted in well with Opus Dei's Apostolate of Public Opinion and also the P2 and/or Vatican plans to take control of Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper. Matias Cortes Domingues, a top Madrid lawyer who acted as Banco Occidental's independent counsel, was said to be advising Cabanillas on the takeover plans. Matias's brother, Antonio, also a lawyer, was an Opus Dei numerary.

Some years before, Umberto Ortolani had purchased Banco Financiero Sudamericano, a small Montevideo bank which he called Bafisud. Calvi and Diego began to use Bafisud for some of their South American ventures. In 1976 Ambrosiano Overseas acquired a 5 per cent interest in Ortolani's Bafisud, and Occidental's Cogebel acquired a matching 5 per cent. Ortolani and Diego became good friends. Diego described the Ortolani mansion in Montevideo as 'a museum containing half the Vatican art treasures'.

In 1977, Banco Occidental and Rumasa developed a relationship, engaging in a series of back-to-back deposits. That interlocking relationships existed between the three banking groups -- Ambrosiano, Occidental and Rumasa -- was demonstrated by a $25 million medium-term loan raised by Rumasa in the marketplace in October 1980. The loan was co-managed by Banca del Gottardo, Ambrosiano's Swiss affiliate, Banque de l'Union Europeenne, also partly owned by the Ambrosiano and closely connected with Opus Dei operations in France, and the First National Bank in Saint Louis, Missouri. This latter bank was linked with the Anheuser Busch brewing family, said to have close ties with Opus Dei in the United States.

By then the interest charges on United Trading's debt to Ambrosiano were running at about $50 million a year. As United Trading was domiciled offshore, it had to be fed with offshore money. But as the debt grew, Calvi had trouble finding a supply of offshore money to cover it. Italian banks required special authorization to export capital and to obtain it Calvi would have had to disclose to the banking authorities the existence of the United Trading network. That meant unveiling its covert operations in South America and elsewhere. He became a slave to the open United Trading position -- a classic example of the Brazilian economist's adage that if a client owes a bank $1 million and cannot repay, he has a problem, but if the client owes the bank $100 million and does not repay, then the bank has a problem. Calvi had a problem, and its name was United Trading.

Calvi's involvement with Banco Occidental was one indication of his dealings with persons and interests close to Opus Dei. But Opus Dei later denied that Calvi had any dealings with its members, either directly or indirectly. Another indication that he was plugged into an Opus Dei network came when Ambrosiano's offshore resources could no longer support the burden of United Trading's debt and a stopgap solution was found in a South American capital where a director of the central bank and several existing or future government ministers were Opus Dei members.

Calvi opened Banco Ambrosiano Andino in Lima in October 1979. The new bank had a capital of $12.5 million, mostly subscribed by Banco Ambrosiano Holding, Luxembourg, itself partly owned by the United Trading family. Banco Andino now became the innermost sanctuary of the United Trading network. By the end of the first month of operations, Andino's balance sheet totalled in excess of $435 million, virtually all of it in book-scrambling loans conceived to hide the real source and end-use of monies deployed by United Trading and its network of offshore companies.

Strangely Calvi believed that Opus Dei was his ally. A surer ally would have been Cardinal Egidio Vagnozzi, head of the Vatican's Prefecture for Economic Affairs. Vagnozzi was concerned that Opus Dei had proposed to Paul VI, behind his back, to take over the Vatican finances. Vagnozzi was opposed to according Opus Dei any greater influence in Vatican affairs than it already enjoyed. He also mistrusted Marcinkus and spoke to Cardinal Casaroli, the new secretary of state, about his fears. Casaroli, a master of ambivalence, gave him only a minimum of support. He backed Vagnozzi's proposal to call an extraordinary meeting of the 123 cardinals for Monday, 5 November 1979. Vagnozzi wanted to sound the alarm bells, as he maintained that the Vatican was nearing a state of financial collapse. The November 1979 gathering of cardinals was the last major meeting Vagnozzi presided over. He died shortly afterwards and an investigation file he had assembled on Marcinkus disappeared.

At about this time General Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI, Italy's military intelligence establishment, hired as his agency's Vatican and Palestinian specialist Francesco Pazienza. Born in 1946 at Taranto, southern Italy, into a staunchly Catholic family, Pazienza held a degree in 'deep-sea physiology'. Blessed with an idiomatic command of five languages, he knew a welter of international celebrities, including Aristotle Onassis, NATO commander-in-chief Alexander Haig, international swindler Robert Vesco, the PLO's Yasser Arafat and a range of Saudi princes. He also had excellent contacts in Latin America, particularly Argentina, where he claimed the nuncio, Archbishop Pio Laghi, was a close friend, as was the Vatican's permanent representative at the United Nations, Archbishop Giovanni Cheli.

Pazienza had been working for SISMI for almost two years when a new Italian crisis was detonated almost by accident by two Milan magistrates. In mid-March 1981, as part of their investigation into Sindona's criminal activities, the magistrates raided Gelli's home and office. Along with photocopies of various classified state documents, they found what appeared to be the membership list of a secret Masonic Lodge. Several cabinet ministers figured among the list's 962 names. The rest were high-ranking military and secret service officers, prominent industrialists, bankers, journalists, foreign political dignitaries, the pretender to the Italian throne and senior Vatican prelates. Gelli telephoned his office from South America while the raid was in progress and learned what was going on. But the rest of the world remained uninformed for several more months.

Pazienza's boss, Santovito, was one of the names on Gelli's P2 list. He was required to resign. Without Santovito's protection, Pazienza's career as a SISMI agent was at an end. After setting up his own security agency in Rome, he was contacted by Flaminio Piccoli, chairman of the Christian Democrat party. Piccoli, who was Andreotti's friend, suggested that Pazienza meet with Roberto Calvi, as the banker was concerned about the integrity of the people running the IOR. Pazienza proposed to procure for Calvi the missing file on Marcinkus assembled by the late Cardinal Vagnozzi.

Pazienza knew Senator Mario Tedeschi, who published a right-wing magazine called Il Borghese, which ran a column on Vatican affairs. Il Borghese received most of its Vatican gossip from a Roman blackmailer, Giorgio Di Nunzio. The same Di Nunzio knew that Vagnozzi had deposited the Marcinkus file with a Zurich lawyer, Dr Peter Duft, and claimed that for a lot of money he could get hold of it.

Calvi was becoming an increasingly important factor in the Italian power equation. His bank had assets of nearly $20,000 million and 38,000 shareholders. In spite of its liquidity problems, it remained profitable and was far from bankrupt. But Calvi was attempting to move the Ambrosiano away from its traditional power base -- the Catholic Right -- into more neutral waters. By the same measure, this would have resulted in diluting the holdings of his hidden partner, and because of this he was showing dangerous initiative. He had begun to do business with the Italian Socialist party. Helping the Socialists to broaden their financial base was not to the liking of Giulio Andreotti. He wanted Banco Ambrosiano brought back into the right-wing Catholic orbit. Paiienza was the person designated to assist in this undertaking.

Pazienza negotiated with Peter Duft, Vagnozzi's 'man of confidence' in Switzerland, for the purchase of the Marcinkus file for $1.5 million. The payment was made from a United Trading account, with one-quarter going to the lawyer and the rest to Di Nunzio's Swiss bank account, and Pazienza delivered the documents personally to Calvi. But the ways of the Lord are wondrous. In 1982, while on a visit to his Swiss account, Di Nunzio died of a sudden heart attack.

Calvi had been working for some months with Gelli and Ortolani on restructuring the Rizzoli publishing empire, which owned the Carriere della Sera. By the end of 1980, United Trading had paid out a total of $40.65 million to Ortolani accounts in Switzerland, apparently to engineer a Rizzoli takeover. [2] Calvi supposed that Ortolani was operating for the Vatican and that he had joined the Rizzoli board as the Vatican's representative. By March 1981, the United Trading payments to both Ortolani and Gelli had risen to $76 million. Calvi began pressing the IOR to reduce United Trading's open position. He mistrusted Gelli and Ortolani as much as he feared Andreotti and, believing the right-wing Catholic alliance that formed the bank's traditional power base was hampering the Ambrosiano's expansion, he began to search for new partners. Retribution was swift.

In the midst of the Rizzoli negotiations, magistrates in Milan withdrew Calvi's passport, pending charges for illegally exporting capital. Though he had strong suspicions, Calvi was never able to clearly identify who his enemies were. He suspected Andreotti. And increasingly he came to mistrust Gelli and Ortolani. But he was completely mystified by the opacity of the Vatican. He regarded Opus Dei and Cardinal Palazzini as allies. He looked upon Casaroli, concerning whose private life he claimed to hold some compromising documents, as an enemy, and Marcinkus, by his greed and incompetence, as dangerous.

In an attempt to find out more about the Vatican faction he thought was opposing him, Calvi asked Pazienza -- whom he had hired on a retainer of $500,000 -- to arrange a meeting with a member of the Casaroli clique. In the week before Easter 1981 Pazienza introduced Calvi to Casaroli's under-secretary, Archbishop Achille Silvestrini. Rather than informing Silvestrini of his dealings with the IOR, Calvi talked about the Rizzoli group, but Silvesttini remained non-committal. Calvi would have liked to have Ortolani's position in the Rizzoli operation clarified. Silvestrini gave nothing away, perhaps because he knew nothing.

The next phase of the $260-million Rizzoli deal took place at the end of April, with a $95-million transfer from Banco Ambrosiano Andino to the account of the Zirka Corporation, Monrovia, at Rothschild Bank in Zurich. This money was labelled as a loan to Bellatrix, a Panamanian company. Bellatrix was a child of United Trading. The $95 million for Bellatrix joined another $46.5 million that had been transferred to Rothschild Bank from Ambrosiano Services, Luxembourg, earlier that year, supposedly to purchase a block of 189,000 Rizzoli shares held at Rothschild-Bank, at a price twenty times over market value. To these transfers would be added another $8 million, bringing the total amount received by Bellatrix to around $150 million. But there were several anomalies here that only came to light following later investigations. First, although Bellatrix belonged to United Trading, it was Ortolani and Bruno Tassan Din, the Rizzoli managing director, who controlled its operations. Second, Rothschild Bank claimed it had no Bellatrix account on its books. Third, the name of Bellatrix did not appear on Rizzoli's share register.

Marcinkus, meanwhile, was gathering forces to defend himself against the Casaroli group. But as he was planning his counteroffensive disaster struck. 'Something happened that altered the balance of power inside the Vatican. On 13 May 1981, there was an assassination attempt against John Paul II in St Peter's Square. While the Pope was in hospital, Casaroli took charge at the Vatican. This was a serious blow for Marcinkus. Casaroli had every interest in seeing him destroyed,' Pazienza explained.

John Paul II spent four months recovering from the bullet wound. During that time Marcinkus's position was further shaken by a new disaster. On 20 May 1981, Italy's fiscal police, the Guardia di Finanza, arrested Calvi at his home in Milan for illegally exporting capital through Ambrosiano's offshore network. Operating in the international money markets was, after all, one of the functions of an international banker. But under existing law Italian bankers were restricted in their international operations; to expand their foreign business they had to be artful jugglers. Calvi, perhaps, was a little too artful. The high priest of Italian private banking spent the next two months in prison, treated no better than a common criminal, atoning for his eagerness to assist the Church in her clandestine financial dealings. [3]

Clara Calvi's shock over her husband's arrest was not to be described. Until then she had been convinced that Roberto lived a charmed existence. Naively, she believed that the family was protected from the Italian combinazione of graft and patronage that was dragging the country into a moral crisis. It was true that because of the wave of kidnappings in Italy their children were accompanied everywhere they went by personal bodyguards. That was simply a fact of life for wealthy Italians in the 1970s and 1980s. When Carlo Calvi was ordered to report to an army intelligence unit for his military service, he was driven to the barracks in an armour-plated limousine. Their country house at Drezzo, even though perched on a hilltop, was guarded night and day by a private security force. The amount of protection -- both political and physical -- depended on one's standing: the more prominent the family, the more protection required.

Then suddenly the protection ran out. Italy and Spain were the only western industrialized nations which still maintained foreign exchange controls. This was contrary to Common Market regulations and they would soon be repealed. But for the time being the export of capital remained a criminal offence. And yet, no Italian banker existed who at some point had not sidestepped those restrictions in order to operate competitively in the international marketplace. Calvi was no exception. But he was singled out. His trial was transformed into a media circus.

In Calvi's absence Pazienza took control. He arranged for Clara to plead her husband's case with Giulio Andreotti. The 'Great Intriguer' told her that Roberto had to step aside. He said he was proposing that the Bank of Italy appoint two 'friendly' commissioners -- the financier Orazio Bagnasco, Siri's friend from Genoa, and the president of the Banco Popolare di Novara, a small provincial bank owned by Bagnasco -- to take control of the Ambrosiano.

Clara Calvi interpreted Andreotti's reaction as placing him solidly in the Casaroli camp, now preparing its light cavalry for an attack on Marcinkus. But Curial undercurrents are so subtle that it is impossible for an outsider to obtain an accurate overview. Andreotti in fact adhered to what was known as the Rome party, a third force inside the Vatican comprised of arch-Conservatives, aligned doctrinally with Opus Dei and with the Pope. Marcinkus was still useful to them, but in the end he, too, would be eased aside and replaced by other hands.

After Calvi's arrest in May 1981, Banco Occidental found itself in a liquidity bind, and in early July 1981 it went to the wall with a $100 million hole in its accounts. Fraud was alleged. Banco de Espana took over the failed Banco Occidental, acquiring 51 per cent of its capital for a symbolic one peseta. Banco Ambrosiano Holding sold its Occidental shares to Banco Vizcaya, a Spanish regional bank generally considered to be within Opus Dei's orbit, for a mere $1 million, thereby incurring a $40 million loss. Banco de Espana then turned around and sold what remained of Occidental's banking business to the same Banco Vizcaya for a nominal price. The Occidental, relieved of its bad debts, thus was reconstituted within Banco Vizcaya, which soon merged with Banco Bilbao to supplant Banesto as Spain's largest commercial bank. By coincidence, Banco de Espana's governor at the time was Alvarez Rendueles, the young banker whom Ruiz-Mateos had refused to hire.

A few days before Banco de Espana's intervention, Diego II was advised by a high-ranking official at the central bank, also an Opus Dei member, that if he covered a part of Occidental's losses with a personal guarantee -- a guarantee that both knew was uncollectable -- he would be permitted to spin Occidental's hotel division off the bank's books into a separate corporation where it would be sheltered from bankruptcy.

Occidental's hotel division owned two prestige hotels in Spain, one in Budapest, about a dozen in the Dominican Republic, several in Portugal, one in Venezuela, the Occidental Plaza in Miami, the Fairmount in San Antonio, Texas, and the Grand Hotel in Atlanta. Forewarned that an arrest warrant was on its way, Diego fled to Atlanta, where he owned a palatial estate with a fleet of luxury cars, swimming pool, baseball diamond, tennis courts and stables for thirty horses. One year later, at fifty-five years of age, he suffered a massive heart attack, but was saved by emergency surgery. Occidental Hoteles S.A., run by his son Gregorio de Diego III, became one of Spain's largest hotel chains.

Ortolani's Bafisud did not long survive Occidental's demise. It became bankrupt and was taken over by the Central Bank of Uruguay. In May 1983 what remained of Bafisud's business was sold to a Dutch bank for one peso. The president of the Uruguayan central bank was Ramon Diaz, an Opus Dei member.

_______________

Notes:

1. Requisitoria of State Prosecutor Dr. Pierluigi Dell'Osso in the 1989 Banco Ambrosiano criminal proceedings, Milan, pp. 376 and 381.

2. Raw, Op. cit., p. 292.

3. At a meeting with the author on 2 December 1993, Carlo Calvi said, 'I am still convinced that my father's trial for currency violations was provoked by Licio Gelli to create a serious crisis inside the Vatican.'

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24. Blackfriars

Had my husband been able to complete his very delicate negotiations with Opus Dei, he would today be the most powerful man in Italy.

-- Clara Calvi

CONVINCED THAT MARCINKUS WAS WITHHOLDING INFORMATION from the Italian authorities which would have absolved Roberto, the Calvi family wanted to get a message to the Pope. After Clara Calvi's meeting with Andreotti, Pazienza flew to New York to confer with Carlo Calvi. The son was in charge of a Washington affiliate, Banco Ambrosiano Service Corporation, with offices in the Watergate complex. Pazienza arranged for Carlo to meet the head of the Vatican's diplomatic mission to the UN in New York, Archbishop Giovanni Cheli. Pazienza briefed Carlo first, alleging that Cheli was after Marcinkus's job. Therefore one might have thought that Cheli had an interest in insuring the message got through. [1]

Three of Pazienza's friends accompanied Carlo to his meeting: Father Lorenzo Zorza was Cheli's personal assistant; Alfonso Bove was a Brooklyn businessman; and Sebastiano Lustrisimi was a member of the Italian secret services based in New York. They waited in Cheli's front office at the UN headquarters while Carlo spoke to the Archbishop alone. Carlo thought him arrogant. After listening with evident impatience to Carlo's report on Banco Ambrosiano's dealings with the IOR, Cheli suggested that the 'proper channel' for transmitting such information to Rome would be through the apostolic delegation in Washington. He arranged a meeting for Carlo with the first secretary, Monsignor Eugenio Sbarbaro, and instructed Father Zorza to accompany him.

When Carlo met Sbarbaro, he seemed even less interested than Cheli. Without the IOR's co-operation Calvi was found guilty of exchange control violations, sentenced to four years in prison and fined $13.5 million, pending appeal. 'God's Banker' -- as the world press now dubbed him - was released on bail. But he was still without a passport. Moreover, it was of little comfort that during Calvi's sojourn in prison John Paul II had appointed a commission of fifteen cardinals to review the Vatican's finances. At the next board meeting his fellow directors greeted him with standing applause. He then went to Sardinia for a few weeks of rest.

A dozen years after the banker's death new elements continue to surface which contribute to the thesis that he was the victim of a conspiracy involving the Vatican bank and the Ambrosiano's hidden shareholder whose identity, for reasons that were increasingly obvious, the conspirators had wanted to protect. Among the new disclosures were the existence of a Venezuelan connection and the role played by the Italian secret services which knew what was happening step by step but never intervened.

Pazienza, himself appealing a heavy prison sentence for his role in Ambrosiano's subsequent bankruptcy, admitted to feeling used by the 'occult forces' muscling in on Banco Ambrosiano behind Calvi's back. This suggestion of conspiracy was likewise ignored by the magistrates, perhaps because Pazienza was quickly phased out of the picture after introducing Calvi to the man who became the conspiracy's on-the-ground co-ordinator. This was the Sardinian property developer Flavio Mario Carboni.

Clara Calvi liked this 'gentle, sweet-speaking man'. He was considerate, bringing them gifts of Sardinian goat cheese and olive oil. She did wonder, however, why he always wore loose-fitting jackets until one evening she noticed Carboni carried a revolver tucked into the small of his back.

Clara quickly forgot the incident. Over the next few weeks the Calvis went for cruises on Carboni's yacht. Other guests included Nestor Coli Blasini, the Venezuelan ambassador to the Holy See, and Venezuelan economist Carlo Binetti. A COPEI (Venezuelan Christian Democrat) politician, Coil had close Opus Dei connections, though the Calvis were unaware of this. He had reformed the national business management institute, exorcizing it of all leftist influence, and was a close friend of the COPEI minister of education, Enrique Peres Olivares, a high-ranking Opus Dei numerary. He kept a close eye on the vacationers and talked at length with Calvi. Carboni was accompanied by Manuela Kleinszig, his twenty-three- year-old Austrian girlfriend. He also had a wife and Roman mistress, neither of whom travelled with him.

In the midst of their holiday, Calvi flew to Rome for a meeting with Marcinkus. The night before, Carboni had come to dinner, and Calvi confided that he was having trouble with the 'priests'. At the Rome meeting Calvi wanted to convince Marcinkus to liquidate United Trading because it had got out of hand. [2]

That Calvi had to seek Marcinkus's authority to implement the winding up of United Trading was strong evidence that it did not then or ever belong to Ambrosiano. But the best he could do on this occasion was to persuade Marcinkus to issue two 'comfort letters', acknowledging that the United Trading family, including the parent, were 'directly or indirectly' controlled by the IOR. One letter was addressed to Banco Ambrosiano Andino S.A. in Lima; the other to Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial S.A. in Managua. Both were dated 1 September 1981.

To obtain these letters, Calvi apparently signed a counter-letter of indemnity, prepared on blank stationery, with a Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Limited heading typed in at the top. It was dated 26 August 1981, the date of his visit to Rome. No copy of it existed in the Ambrosiano files, nor among Calvi's personal papers. It stated that Ambrosiano Overseas held the IOR harmless for issuing the letters of comfort. It also stipulated that the United Trading family would conduct no further operations and its involvement with the IOR including a $200 million term deposit -- would be unwound by no later than 30 June 1982. In spite of this letter, the United Trading shares -- the litmus test of corporate ownership -- remained with the IOR in Rome. This was in itself a most telling fact.

The counter-letter's intent was to give the illusion that ultimate responsibility for the United Trading family belonged with Banco Ambrosiano Overseas in Nassau. This being the case, Calvi would have been a fool to sign it. Unless he was following orders. The Nassau bank, after all, was one-fifth owned by the IOR and the remainder by Banco Ambrosiano Holdings in Luxembourg which, as we have seen, was at one time 40-per cent owned by Lovelok, the hidden partner. So one could interpret the counter-letter as signifying that the IOR or its unnamed client -- the 'missing counterparty' -- was simply passing the United Trading position from one hand to the other. By the same measure, the IOR was better protecting itself from the risk of the United Trading network being identified with the Vatican if its existence was discovered by the Bank of Italy.

Another feature of the counter-letter was its insistence on repayment by Ambrosiano Overseas of the $200 million term deposit by the end of June 1982. The IOR has never been terribly explicit about this deposit -- one theory being that it was part of a back-to-back operation between the IOR and the Ambrosiano involving a Venezuelan development project with Neapolitan investors. The IOR told Calvi that only once this deposit was retired would 'the rest' -- i.e., the monies which the United Trading then owed the Ambrosiano group -- be unwound. [3]

When Calvi flew back to Sardinia the same evening he told Clara: 'The priests are going to make me pay for having brought up the name of the IOR. In fact, they are already making me pay.' [4]

With United Trading's usefulness drawing to a close, Marcinkus's importance began to wane. On 29 September 1981, John Paul II promoted him Archbishop and made him Governor of the Vatican City. He still retained his position as head of the IOR, but he spent an increasing amount of time seeking to improve the administration and revenues of the Vatican City state. If Calvi's hypothesis was right, Opus Dei was about to assume control of the Vatican bank. Six weeks later John Paul II informed Cardinal Baggio that he had decided to elevate Opus Dei to the status of Personal Prelature.

Among Calvi's alternatives for resolving the due-date gap, the two most realistic seemed the sale of 10 per cent of Banco Ambrosiano at an inflated price of $200 a share, or recapturing the $150 million transferred to Bellatrix at Rothschild Bank in Zurich. During the next months he worked on both, relying on Pazienza. Instead of finding a buyer for the Ambrosiano stock, Pazienza reinserted Flavio Carboni into the picture. Pazienza did this by convincing Calvi to approve a $3 million loan to Carboni's Sardinian development company, Prato Verde S.p.A., for which Pazienza received a $250,000 commission.

When Calvi realized that Pazienza was not seriously interested in finding a buyer for the Ambrosiano stock he opened negotiations with Carlo De Benedetti, the man who saved Olivetti from bankruptcy. De Benedetti agreed to buy 1 million Ambrosiano shares equivalent to 2 per cent of the bank's capital -- at $43 each and join the board of directors as deputy chairman. For Calvi, this represented a beginning. It wasn't the moon, but it was nonetheless positively viewed in the marketplace.

The next day Calvi travelled to Rome for an important meeting. At least that is what he told Clara. But he neglected to mention to her -- or anyone else -- with whom he was meeting. Could it have been with Opus Dei's Grand Exchequer? Clara had no way of knowing. The same day, however, La Repubblica broke the news of De Benedetti's entry into the Ambrosiano.

Calvi was furious. De Benedetti's association with the Ambrosiano was supposed to have remained for the moment confidential. Calvi waited two days before informing De Benedetti that the Repubblica interview had met with a 'negative' reaction in Rome. But it is difficult to imagine why a man of De Benedetti's calibre becoming deputy chairman might have been dimly viewed. Perhaps it was because De Benedetti, indisputably an asset for the bank, was Jewish, and the people who Calvi saw in Rome did not want a Jew in a position of authority inside a Catholic bank that was handling covert financial operations for the Vatican.

De Benedetti put back his shares and left. His seat on the Ambrosiano board was filled by Orazio Bagnasco, who seven months before had been proposed by Andreotti as Calvi's replacement. Bagnasco had made a fortune selling shares in property-based mutual funds, prompting Clara Calvi to call him 'the door-to-door financier.' [5] Bagnasco had with a friend purchased in the market 2 per cent of Ambrosiano's stock and demanded to be admitted to the board. The conclusion was hard to dispel that Bagnasco was the Roman party's replacement for De Benedetti.

Calvi was now desperate. He thought he had found an ally in De Benedetti, only to have him replaced by a man of lesser stature whom he mistrusted. This led him to play his last remaining card, sending Pazienza to Zurich to trace the Bellatrix monies. Pazienza referred to the Bellatrix assignment as 'Operation Vino Veronese', because one of the companies through which $14 million of the missing Bellatrix money had transited, Recioto S.A., bore a name similar to an Italian wine called Richiotta, from the region of Verona.

Operation Vino Veronese ran into a blank wall, or rather it ran into Jurg Heer, a man of one thousand secrets. He was Rothschild Bank's credit director. After speaking with him, Pazienza concluded that the $150 million had completely volatilized. 'I drew a big zero,' he reported. 'This guy [Heer] was real spooky.' Calvi was not impressed; Operation Vino Veronese was Pazienza's last assignment. This left the field free for Flavio Carboni, who now became Calvi's closest confidant.

Earlier that month Calvi had asked Carboni to transmit a message to his contacts at the Vatican that unless the 'priests' faced up to their obligations, both Banco Ambrosiano and the IOR would go down the tubes. Carboni took this message to Cardinal Palazzini. This might have seemed strange, as Palazzini had nothing to do with finance. But Carboni knew that Palazzini was Opus Dei's staunchest supporter in the Curia and that Calvi's problems lay with Opus Dei, not Marcinkus. From the point forward, ,the Vatican and Opus Dei deny the description of events put forward by either Carboni or the Calvi family.

Carboni arranged for Calvi to meet Palazzini. Afterwards, Calvi told his wife that he was accorded a secret audience with John Paul II, who asked him to help straighten out the situation at the IOR. The Pope, said Calvi, assured him that if successful the rewards would be great. [6] Heartened, Calvi began planning a restructuring of the Banco Ambrosiano group, while drafting a proposal for overhauling the IOR which he believed Opus Dei would present to the Pope. [7]

Palazzini got back in touch with Carboni in March 1982 and told him that the IOR was 'impenetrable'. He suggested that Calvi see Monsignor Hilary Franco, who knew Marcinkus better since they both lived in the same Villa Stritch residence. A quick glance in the Annuario Pontificio indicated that Franco -- incardinated in the archdiocese of New York -- was a research assistant with the Congregation of the Clergy. The Annuario Pontificio did not disclose that Franco was also Palazzini's personal secretary.

Like Marcinkus, Hilary Franco aspired to a grand career in the Curia. He had recently been named an Honorary Prelate of the Papal Household. Such recognition raised him to a Grade 1 Minor Official (Step 2) in the Vatican's arcane bureaucratic machinery. According to Carboni, Hilary Franco agreed to act as Calvi's intermediary with the IOR and Opus Dei.

At the end of April 1982, Roberto Rosone, Ambrosiano's deputy chairman, was shot in the legs by a man riding pillion on a motor scooter. A security guard fired two shots that hit the fleeing gunman in the head. He toppled into the roadway, dead as a doornail, but the driver got away unscathed. The assassin turned out to be Danilo Abbruciati, a member of a Roman underworld association known as the Banda della Magliana. He had disappeared some months before, having decided to run the Banda della Magliana's money laundering operations from London. But why was Rosone on an underworld hit list? Pazienza claimed a police report alleged that Rosone was laundering money for the underworld. This was never substantiated and Rosone strongly denied it. Within days, however, it was rumoured that Calvi had put out the contract on Rosone's life because he believed his deputy chairman was plotting behind his back. But Calvi was terribly shocked by the attack which he took as a warning for himself. It left him brooding and sleepless.

Two weeks later, Calvi wrote to Hilary Franco, requesting an urgent meeting to discuss ways of raising $250 to $300 miIlion for the Ambrosiano. In this letter the chairman of a $20,000 million bank literally grovelled before the Grade 1 Minor Official (Step 2) of the Vatican, and he would only have done so if he believed there was some overriding reason, such as Franco's proximity to Opus Dei and to the Pope.

The wildest stories circulated about this prelate. Clara Calvi was told that he was the Pope's confessor. [8] Carboni's assistant, Emilio Pellicani, thought Franco had an office at the Opus Dei headquarters. Carboni claimed that Franco had excellent White House contacts. [9] He also maintained good relations with South Africa and its client state, the black homeland of Bophuthatswana, where he was said to be interested in investing Vatican funds in a gambling casino and race track. Franco's other South African interest was reported to be Cape Town's President Hotel, at which was held the annual Miss Seapoint beauty contest. [10]

Franco informed Carboni that Opus Dei was willing to front a loan for the Ambrosiano group so that it could repay the $200 million to the IOR on deadline. 'Monsignor Franco knows everything; he knows that I asked him whether Calvi could obtain from Opus Dei a $200-million loan ... and he assured me that these matters would be resolved, and that in a month or a month and a half everything would be all right,' Carboni told the Milan magistrates two years later. [11]

In spite of Calvi's grovelling, the tone of the 12 May 1982 letter to Franco, thanking him for his 'valued intervention with the Vatican authorities', was relatively up-beat because the banker at last believed a solution was in sight. He told Clara and his daughter that Opus Dei had presented to the Pope a new plan whose centrepiece was Opus Dei's assuming control of the IOR, and that if accepted it would create 'a completely new balance of power within the Vatican.' [12]

After talking with the Calvi family I am convinced that the banker sincerely believed he was dealing with representatives of Opus Dei. Of course it is possible that he was being purposely misled. But his trips to Madrid and his restructuring plan for Ambrosiano which involved Carlo Pesenti, an Ambrosiano board member known to be close to the Vatican and also to members of Opus Dei, were not figments of Calvi's imagination. They really existed. Moreover he was led to think that if he resigned from the Ambrosiano he would be named a financial adviser to the Vatican.

But Calvi's optimism was short-lived. On his next visit to the IOR on Thursday, 20 May 1982, Marcinkus refused to see him. Instead, Calvi met his assistant, Dr. Luigi Mennini. The encounter was glacial. Marcinkus wanted Calvi to appear before the commission of cardinals that was looking into the Vatican's finances. The commission, according to a Calvi memorandum later recovered from his briefcase, wanted to know why the Milan banker had used United Trading monies without prior approval to support the Ambrosiano stock. [13]

That the cardinals were aware of United Trading's existence is of itself revelatory. In any event, Calvi suspected that Marcinkus was preparing a criminal complaint against him just as his appeal of the currency violations conviction was due to be heard. This caused Calvi to lose his cool. He shouted at Mennini, 'Be careful! If it comes out that you gave money to Solidarnosc, there won't be one stone of the Vatican left standing on another.'

The details of this meeting, denied by the Vatican, came to light because Carboni secretly recorded his conversations with Calvi who told him about it when they met at Drezzo that weekend. Calvi by then had sent Clara to Washington to be with their son Carlo as he claimed her life was in danger in Milan. Anna had refused to accompany her mother because she was about to sit for her final exams at the University of Milan.

At the end of May, Calvi wrote to Cardinal Palazzini, pleading with him 'to intervene once again with those who, like yourself, have the best interests of the Church at heart.' After claiming to possess evidence that Casaroli and Silvestrini had taken bribes from Sindona, he asked Palazzini to arrange another audience with the Pope, so that he could explain the problem 'in its entirety, above all to prevent the projects of the enemies of the Church ... from succeeding'.

On the first weekend of June, Calvi returned with Anna to Drezzo. Having heard nothing from either Palazzini or Hilary Franco, he drafted a last letter to the Pope in which he accused the IOR bankers of negligence and misdealing. In part the letter stated:

The policy of always working from the shadows, the absurd negligence, the obstinate intransigence and the other incredible attitudes of some senior Vatican officials make me certain that Your Holiness has been little or not at all informed about the nature during these long years of my group's relations with the Vatican ...

At the specific request of your authorized representatives I have provided financing for many countries and politico-religious organizations in the East as in the West. It was I who, at the request of the Vatican authorities, co-ordinated throughout South and Central America the creation of numerous banking entities with the aim, in addition to everything else, of containing the penetration and extension of Marxist ideologies.

After all of this, I am the one who has been betrayed and abandoned by those same authorities to whom I always paid maximum respect and obedience.

Before closing, Calvi said he wanted to turn over to the Pope 'a number of important documents that are in my possession, and to explain to you in plain language how these dealings, about which you certainly are not informed, happened and could happen again'.

By this time Licio Gelli had returned clandestinely to Europe. He was sighted at the beginning of May by an Italian secret service agent dining in a Geneva restaurant with Hans Albert Kunz, a business associate of Carboni. Soon after, the still powerful Venerable Master of the dismantled P2 Lodge contacted Calvi to demand money. The pressure never stopped. Seeing her father distraught, Anna asked him to explain what was really happening. Calvi told her that to deal with the IOR problems 'we have drafted and put forward a plan which provides for the direct intervention of Opus Dei,' and that Opus Dei 'was due to supply an enormous sum ... to cover the IOR's open position at Banco Ambrosiano.'

As Ambrosiano's restructuring plan progressed, Calvi had told his wife, 'If Andreotti does not throw a spoke in the wheels in the next couple of weeks, all will be well.' Two days later, he again told Clara: 'What Andreotti had to say to me today gave me no pleasure at all.' Then he claimed that Andreotti was threatening to kill him. 'We lived in a perpetual climate of terror and subject to constant presages of death,' she said. One of his last comments was, 'If they kill me, the Pope will have to resign.' [14]

On 7 June 1982, Calvi informed the Banco Ambrosiano board for the first time that $1,300 million was at risk in his dealings with the IOR. The next day Calvi removed from the bank two cartons of documents which he regarded as essential in proving that he had been misled by the 'priests' sending them to an unknown destination, possibly Drezzo.

Calvi flew to Rome on Wednesday evening, 9 June 1982. His chauffeur in Rome, Tito Tesauri, picked him up at the airport and noted that his black briefcase, bulging with documents, was heavier than usual. Calvi spent the night at his flat in the old part of the city. Next morning over the phone he told Mennini that he declined to meet the commission of cardinals because the documents he needed to explain his dealings with the IOR were stored abroad and without a passport he was unable to retrieve them. He nevertheless agreed to meet Mennini on the following morning.

Sometime during his Thursday round of meetings, Calvi was shown a copy of a forged warrant for his arrest. The idea for the false warrant, according to a Guardia di Finanza undercover agent, came from Licio Gelli. The agent, codenamed 'Podgora', claimed that Gelli was waiting in London under an assumed name. Italian magistrates, as Calvi had already learned, have sweeping powers of detention. Believing the warrant to be authentic, he had every reason to be concerned. He disappeared that night.

According to Carboni, Calvi moved to the apartment of Emilio Pellicani in Rome's Magliana suburb. Pellicani was Carboni's batman. Tito Tesauri went to pick up Calvi early next morning Friday, 11 June 1982 -- and drive him to his meeting at the IOR. The chauffeur found Calvi's flat empty, the bed ruffled but unslept in, and a note in the kitchen written by his boss in a trembling hand: 'I have returned earlier than expected.' [15]

At 1.30 p.m., Calvi called Mennini to apologize for missing that morning's appointment, but promised to meet him the following week. Then, accompanied by Pellicani, Calvi supposedly took an Alitalia flight from Rome to Venice, and was driven by Pellicani from Venice to Trieste, where he was entrusted to Silvano Vittor, a petty smuggler whose mistress, Michaela, was Manuela Kleinszig's twin sister. Vittor would arrange for Calvi's clandestine passage into Austria during the night. But the only problem with this version of events is that Tina Anselmi, head of the P2 parliamentary commission, as well as several other persons well known to Calvi, were on the same flight and none noted the banker's presence aboard the aircraft. So it is possible that he arrived in Trieste by other means.

In fact the mayor of Drezzo, Leandro Balzaretti, claimed that Calvi and Carboni arrived in Drezzo by car late Thursday night. Balzaretti, an insurance agent, knew Calvi well. The Calvi family originally came from nearby Como, and the two spoke the Como dialect together. Had Calvi returned to Drezzo to pick up the two cartons of documents deposited there earlier in the week?

'Calvi called me from his house and said he wanted to pass by the office at midday to discuss insurance for a small bank he had bought in the south. He said he was leaving afterwards for Rome and would not be back in Drezzo until the twenty-sixth. I waited, but at noon he called on the car telephone to say he couldn't make it. I never heard from him again,' Balzaretti said when we met at his home in Drezzo. [16]

Como is 530 kilometres from Trieste. Travelling by car, the journey could easily be made in six hours. Calvi and Pellicani arrived at the Hotel Excelsior in Trieste in the early evening. Calvi was alleged to have only his bulging briefcase with him. But if he had come from Drezzo he almost certainly had the two cartons of documents as well.

Calvi initially had planned to go to Zurich, where Anna was waiting for him, as he wanted to make inquiries about the missing $150 million at the Rothschild Bank. But the conspirators did not want Calvi in Zurich. They wanted him in London. Calvi's hilltop property at Drezzo was within 50 metres of the Swiss frontier and after picking up documents and money, he could have walked out of the front gate, crossed a dirt track and made his way down the wooded north slope of the hill to the Swiss village of Pedrinate, on the outskirts of Chiasso. Or indeed he could have gone by road because the customs post on the Italian side of the border at Pedrinate was unguarded and to cross into Switzerland all he needed, as an Italian citizen, was an 10 card which he carried with him. But Carboni evidently convinced him to drive with Pellicani to Trieste while Carboni went back to Rome aboard his private Cessna. By the time they arrived at their respective destinations the cat was out of the bag. Rome's chief prosecutor, Dr Domenico Sica, had been informed that the banker was missing. Sica immediately raised the alarm.

Vittor arranged for a Yugoslav associate to drive Calvi during the night to the home of the Kleinszig sisters at Klagenfurt, Austria. Vittor explained that he would use another route to smuggle Calvi's briefcase and, one assumes, the two boxes of documents over the border, joining up with the banker in Klagenfurt to await Carboni's arrival. Calvi spent the day in Klagenfurt nervously waiting for the Triestine smuggler to arrive with his bulging briefcase and boxes of documents.

Vittor only appeared around midnight with the briefcase, but the two boxes of documents are never again mentioned. The delay in Vittor's arrival meant that he had unrestricted possession of the briefcase and perhaps the boxes for twenty-four hours, giving him ample time to photocopy the contents. One can only surmise that, among other items, the briefcase and boxes contained the missing accounting for United Trading, perhaps also the books of the defunct Lovelok and Radowal, and the Vagnozzi file on Marcinkus. The accounting items would certainly have provided evidence as to the real ownership of the Lovelok-Radowal-United Trading complex and therefore might have vindicated Calvi in the event of litigation.

Calvi remained intent on meeting Anna in Zurich. After Carboni arrived with Calvi's two suitcases -- packed in Drezzo the previous weekend and handed to Carboni in Milan before Calvi left for Rome -- it was decided that Vittor would drive him to Bregenz, on the Austrian border with Switzerland, while Carboni, Manuela and her sister Michaela flew to Zurich to judge whether a Swiss border crossing on a forged passport that Carboni had procured for him might be attempted. In fact Carboni met in Zurich with two other conspirators, Swiss businessman Hans Kunz and Roman restaurateur Ernesto Diotallevi, an associate of the late Danilo Abbruciati. Six weeks previously, Carboni had paid Diotallevi, a member of the Banda della Magliana, $530,000 for purposes unknown and in Zurich he promised to pay Diotallevi's mother-in-law a further large sum.

From Zurich, Carboni phoned Pellicani in Rome and asked him to check flight schedules from London to Caracas. He and Kunz then drove to Bregenz, arriving about 9 p.m., where they had a long meeting with Calvi. Only their version of what transpired exists, but it was clearly more tense than either Carboni or Kunz were prepared to admit. Carboni pressured Calvi to come up with $200 million so that the money could be transferred to Caracas before the end of the month.

According to Carboni, during the meeting Calvi told them he had been asked 'on behalf of Opus Dei and other religious orders in South America to form by September 1982 a banking institution to finance trade between Latin America and eastern bloc countries'. [17] Caracas was foreseen as the bank's headquarters. Carboni then claimed that Calvi put forward a plan for raising $350 million within the next few days. Calvi said he had $150 million in a strongbox at the Banque Lambert in Geneva, another $50 million at a bank in the United States, and he believed he could obtain $150 million from a contact in London. Carboni added that after raising the necessary cash Calvi proposed to fly to Caracas.

Had Carboni let slip something that he should never have mentioned? To cover up this gaff, Carboni claimed that he and Venezuelan economist Carlo Binetti were planning to go to Caracas and Calvi, with nothing better to do, proposed to join them there. In any event, this was the first mention of a Caracas connection and suddenly it loomed large in Calvi's plans for the few days that remained to him.

Carboni proposed that Calvi fly directly to London on a private charter (private flights are subject to less stringent immigration controls) while he went to Geneva to recover the $150 million from the Banque Lambert strongbox. He knew by then that Calvi had several bunches of strongbox keys in his briefcase and supposed one was for 'San Patricio's well', as he now called the Lambert cache. He also proposed that Kunz fly to the US and pick up the $50 million. [18] This would leave Calvi free to deal with his London contact.

Calvi must have realized by then with whom he was dealing. Apparently he had no intention of turning over the Banque Lambert strongbox key to Carboni, believing perhaps that it was the last insurance policy he possessed. He claimed instead that his wife's power-of-attorney was needed to gain access to the strongbox. Carboni was not pleased. He had an apparent fixation on a sum of $200 million and, it seems, an urgent need to be in Caracas before the end of the month. Calvi assured Carboni he could handle everything from London. He may have mentioned that Baron Lambert, owner of the Banque Lambert, had a top-drawer solicitor who could manage to have the contents of the Geneva strongbox delivered to London. He asked that Kunz arrange for the rental in London of a luxury town house or apartment so that he could discreetly meet his third source of funds, the supposed high-level contact.

Carboni and Kunz returned to Zurich. Next morning Kunz arranged for a taxi jet to pick up two 'directors of Fiat' at Innsbruck airport and fly them to Gatwick. In the confusion at Gatwick, they missed the driver of a hired car sent to collect them and took a taxi to Chelsea Cloisters, a residential hotel in Sloane Avenue, where Kunz's London solicitor had made a reservation under the name of 'Vittor plus one'. Calvi was not pleased with the eighth-floor convenience flat that he was required to share with his minder, and complained bitterly. But the banker was no longer the master of his movements. Vittor told him nothing could be done until Carboni arrived in London the following afternoon.

Next morning, Calvi contacted Alberto Jaimes Berti, Cardinal Siri's friend. Since May 1980 Berti had lived mainly in London where he owned an apartment in Hans Place, behind Harrods. Calvi had first met the Caracas lawyer in 1975 or 1976 at a reception at the Grand Hotel in Rome for the Venezuelan president, Carlos Andres Perez.

Berti agreed to see Calvi at the beginning of the afternoon, and when he arrived at the Chelsea Cloisters, Calvi was waiting for him in the lobby, dressed in a dark suit and tie, his moustache well trimmed. They sat down in one corner and Calvi removed from his briefcase a notebook which he consulted once at the beginning of their half-hour discussion. Calvi apparently knew that Berti was the custodian of a sealed envelope containing the shares of a Panamanian company that held $2,200 million belonging to as many as ,ix principals who he suspected included the IOR, the Spanish branch of Opus Dei, Ruiz-Mateos's Rumasa, Banco Ambrosiano and, perhaps, the Camorra. When last in Rome, Berti had spoken to Donato De Bonis, the IOR's priest secretary, who advised him that he could openly discuss the matter with Calvi, reinforcing his impression that the IOR and Ambrosiano were no strangers to the transaction.

At one point Berti surmised that the money was intended to capitalize the Latin American trade bank that both he and Calvi had been told about, though by different sources. In the interim, the money was invested in blue chip bonds in New York. Calvi asked if the portfolio could be used to guarantee a loan. Berti thought this possible, but for technical reasons it would require several days to arrange. Calvi seemed relieved and observed, 'So the matter is resolved'. He told Berti he would be back in touch.

While waiting for Carboni to arrive, Calvi telephoned Clara. She said he sounded elated. 'Something mad is about to happen. It's marvellous. It could change our lives,' he told her. He also asked Vittor to get him a British Airways flight schedule.

Accompanied by the Kleinszig sisters, Carboni booked into the Park Lane Hilton that same afternoon and called Calvi shortly after 6.15 p.m. They met at about 8 p.m. and spent the next two hours walking in Hyde Park. Again, only Carboni's version exists of what transpired, but Calvi returned to the Chelsea Cloisters a shaken man. At 7.30 a.m. next morning he called Anna in Zurich. He said she was no longer safe in Zurich and must leave immediately for Washington. Anna later testified that her father sounded very nervous 'and he said terrible things would happen if I didn't leave'.

Carboni did not attempt to contact Calvi at all on the following day -- Thursday -- until late in the evening -- around 11 p.m. He claimed that Calvi refused to see him. Instead Vittor came down to the lobby and together they went for a drink to a nearby pub, The Queen's Arms, where the Kleinszig sisters were waiting. When Vittor returned to the Chelsea Cloisters at about 1 a.m. he had no key and had to be let into flat 881 by the night manager. The TV set was on, but there was no Calvi. Undisturbed, Calvi's supposed bodyguard turned in for the night.

By the sworn affidavit of another eighth-floor resident, who was only questioned about these events seven years later, it was clear that both Vittor and Carboni were lying. Cecil Coomber, a South African artist then in his early seventies, was a resident in flat 834, down the corridor from the one occupied by Calvi and Vittor. At about 10 p.m. that evening, Coomber and a companion decided to go out for dinner. Waiting at the lift were three men. The two younger ones spoke in Italian, while the third -- whom Coomber identified as Calvi -- looked apprehensive and remained silent. All five took the lift to the ground floor. As Coomber crossed the lobby to the front entrance, he saw the three turn towards a service entrance at the rear of the building, where another resident had noticed a black car with driver parked. Coomber's sideways glance made him: the last person to see Roberto Calvi alive. The banker carried no briefcase; he was wearing a necktie, and he still had a moustache.

Calvi's body was found hanging from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge early next morning. He was wearing a two-piece light grey suit but no necktie. And no moustache. Only his feet were in the water. The River Police were called and removed the body, conveying it by launch to the Waterloo Police Pier. The policemen found four large stones in the victim's pockets and a brick inserted so roughly inside the six-button trouser fly that it had ripped off a button. The autopsy performed that afternoon found the victim had died about 2 a.m. of asphyxia due to hanging. No body injuries were noted.

The corpse carried a forged Italian passport in the name of Gian Roberto Calvini, a wallet with £7,000 in various currencies, two watches, four pairs of spectacles, but no keys. In one pocket was a slip of paper with the handwritten address of the Chelsea Cloisters, the business card of Colin McFadyean and a page torn from an address book on which appeared the telephone numbers of Monsignor Hilary Franco.

Detective Inspector John White of the City of London Police was called to the Snow Hill Police Station around 7 p.m. that evening: A telex had come in from Interpol announcing the arrival in London of Rome prosecutor Domenico Sica, accompanied by three Italian police officers. As the reserve inspector on duty that night, White was delegated to meet the Italians at Heathrow at 3.30 a.m. and he drove them directly to the morgue. Dr Sica identified the body as Calvi. The Italian magistrate needed no convincing that he was dealing with a homicide. Immediately back in Rome, he issued an international warrant for the missing Carboni.

Unknown to White, Calvi's travelling companions had already skipped the country or were preparing to do so. Acting on the scrap of paper found in Calvi's pocket he went to the Chelsea Cloisters on the Saturday morning to inquire if Calvi had been registered there. He drew a blank. Because Calvi's death was regarded as a suicide, no scientific examination was made of the scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge.

Clara Calvi learned of her husband's death on the Friday morning. Her brother, Luciano Canetti, called after hearing a newsflash on Italian radio that the missing banker had been found dead in London. The shock was devastating. She collapsed. A doctor was called. The family did not know what would happen next.

'After the sharp, wounding pain of the first days when we sought refuge in the Watergate under the protection of armed guards, our spirit remained strong. We were guided by a constant faith in him and a determination to use the judicial systems as diverse as Italy and England to uncover the truth. It was our duty, no matter the cost or risk, because we knew that suicide was out of the question,' Carlo Calvi later explained.

_______________

Notes:

1. Giovanni Cheli was one of 26 persons to testify at Escriva de Balaguer's beatification hearings in Rome. He therefore knew the Founder extremely well and worked closely with the Prelature. After leaving his post at the United Nations, he became one of the powerhouses in the Roman Curia, serving as co-president of the council of advisers to the papal household and president of the pontifical council dealing with migrations, was a member of the 'Cor Unum' and inter-religious affairs pontifical councils and the pontifical commission for Latin America.

2. Carboni statement to Examining Magistrate Matteo Mazziotti and Prosecutor Renata Bricchetti at Parma Court House, 15 February 1984, p. 3.

3. Flavio Carboni deposition before Mazziotti and Bricchetti. Parma, 16 February 1984 (p. 14 of English translation).

4. Clara Calvi diaries, p. 61.

5. Ibid., p. 46.

6. Ibid., p. 69.

7. Clara Calvi deposition before Examining Magistrate Bruno Sidari and Public Prosecutor Pierluigi Dell'Ossa, 24 October 1982, p. 86.

8. Clara Calvi diaries, p. 69.

9. Pellicani testimony before the Chamber of Deputies P2 Commission, 24 February 1983. Vol. ClV, Doc. XXIII, No. 2, Ter 9, pp. 344-345 and 643.

10. 'Sierra Leone/South Africa: The Strange Story of LIAT', Africa Confidential, London, 24J une 1987, Vol. 28, No. 13.

11. Statement of Flavio Carboni to Examining Magistrate Mazziotti and Prosecutor Bricchetti, Parma Court House, 16 February 1984 (p. 14 of English translation).

12. Testimony of Anna Calvi to the Milan Magistrate Bruno Siclari and Prosecutor Pierluigi Dell'Ossa, 22-23 October 1982, EM3 f4, pp. 265 ss.

13. The undated, unheaded document refers to 'these companies' and the reproach was made by Marcinkus before the Commission of Cardinals. 'These companies' can only refer to the United Trading complex. [Source: Tribunale di Roma, Sentenza nella causa di primo grade n. 168/92 contro Carboni e altri, 23 March 1993, pp. 102-104.]

14. Testimony of Clara Calvi, 19-26 October 1982. p. 88.

15. Statement of Tiro Tesauri to the Direzione Centrale della Polizia Criminale. Rome, 3 December 1991.

16. Interview with Leandro Balzaretti, 10 February 1994.

17. Carboni deposition taken by Milan Examining Magistrate Mazziotti and Prosecutor Dell'Ossa at Parma Prison on 7 April 1984.

18. Details of this plan and Calvi's intended travel to Caracas are given by Carboni in his deposition taken by Mazziotti and Dell'Ossa at Parma Prison on 7 April 1984, on pp. 12 and 16 of the English translation.

[admin]

25. 'With Very Great Hope'

It is only by Beelzebub, prince of the demons, that this man casts out demons.

-- Matthew 12:24

THAT THE 'NEW BALANCE OF POWER WITHIN THE VATICAN' DID come to pass -- as Calvi had predicted it would -- was confirmed by events in Rome during the next three years. A resuscitated Ambrosiano was placed under new ownership, as Andreotti had wanted. The United Trading family descended into a corporate hell, never to be heard from again. The IOR was bailed out of trouble, with persons close to Opus Dei assuming control over it and the papal purse strings.

But as these events unfolded it became more than ever apparent that Calvi, even in death, held the key to a bundle of secrets that remained a threat to the new power group at the Vatican. Possession of those secrets and their selective destruction had to be assured at any cost. The secrets were of course contained in Calvi's bulging black briefcase and missing cardboard boxes, and provided the only evidence linking the dead banker to those associated with the Vatican's new power group.

For information about what happened to the briefcase we have to rely on an Italian secret service report. [1] It disclosed that on the same day that Calvi's body was discovered a courier had flown on a private jet from Geneva to Gatwick where Carboni handed him a part of the briefcase's contents. These were flown back to Geneva and taken to a secluded lakeside villa where Gelli and Ortolani were waiting to examine them. The briefcase itself -- with the remainder of the documents and the several bunches of keys -- was flown by another private jet on Sunday from Edinburgh to Klagenfurt where the next day it was deposited in a strongbox at the Karmoner Savings Bank. [2]

On the Monday some of the conspirators gathered in Zurich to compare their alibis, and to consult by telephone with a lawyer in Rome, Wilfredo Vitalone, brother of Andreotti's closest confidant, Senator Claudio Vitalone. They decided that Vittor would give himself up to the authorities in Trieste, while Carboni went into hiding. Financially, at least, Carboni could afford to take some time off. Between January and May 1982 Calvi had authorized a series of payments to Swiss accounts under the Sardinian businessman's control totalling £16.3 million. This was not bad income for a man who the previous October had bounced cheques in the amount of £352,000. [3]

On 2 July 1982 the three commissioners appointed by the Bank of Italy to take control of Banco Ambrosiano met Marcinkus at the IOR offices in Rome. Marcinkus maintained that the IOR was not bound by the two comfort letters it had issued under the date of 1 September 1981 and therefore the Vatican bank would not pay the $1,300 million (£730 million) the commissioners insisted it owed the Ambrosiano. On 13 July 1982, Cardinal Casaroli tried to calm international criticism of the Vatican's lack of financial scruples by appointing a committee of 'three wise men' to unravel the true nature of the IOR dealings with Banco Ambrosiano: Philippe de Week, former chairman of Union Bank of Switzerland who was involved in the 'sniffing aircraft' scandal, Joseph Brennan, chairman of Emigrant Savings Bank of New York, and Carlo Cerutti, a senior executive of STET, the Italian state-owned telecommunications company.

Meanwhile Carboni was arrested near Lugano. His briefcase contained a stack of documents relating to various aspects of Calvi's disappearance and the co-ordinated alibis of the key co-conspirators for the period around the time of the banker's death. The same day in Milan subpoenas were issued for Marcinkus, Mennini and de Strobel. Fearing arrest, Marcinkus moved into the Governor's Palace inside the Vatican City. On 5 August 1982, John Paul II approved raising Opus Dei to a Personal Pre1ature, though the decision was not announced for another two and a half weeks due to strong dissent within the Curia. The dissent showed that four years into John Paul II's papacy resistance to the clique that had worked for his election remained significant and a period of further consolidation was needed.

On 6 August 1982, the Bank of Italy placed Banco Ambrosiano in liquidation. Nuovo Banco Ambrosiano, formed by seven leading Italian commercial banks, immediately took over the operations of old Banco Ambrosiano, paying £252 million for Ambrosiano's remaining £1,460 million in deposits and its domestic network of one hundred branches. The foreign network, which contained most of the liabilities, was severed from the parent and therefore was not included in the buy-out operation. Its various components went into liquidation under separate procedures in the jurisdictions concerned. The new Ambrosiano opened its doors for business on the following Monday as if nothing had happened.

On 23 August 1982, the Vatican spokesman, Father Romeo Panciroli, announced that Opus Dei would be transformed into a Personal Prelature. Panciroli added, however, that publication of the relevant document -- entitled With Very Great Hope -- had been postponed for 'technical reasons'. Vatican sources claimed that foremost among the 'technical reasons' was Cardinal Giovanni Benelli's continued and determined opposition.

With Carboni in custody, dissension broke out among the conspirators just as the Calvi family was moving to have the suicide verdict handed down by the first London inquest quashed. The verdict had been based on the coroner's contention that the body bore no signs of violence, when in fact there were marks to the face consistent with thumb scratches made as the noose was slipped rapidly over the banker's head from behind. One of the hitherto unnamed conspirators was pressing for a larger payoff. But before appropriate measures were taken, Gelli decided it was time to come in from the cold. On 13 September 1982, he attempted to withdraw, £30 million from his account with the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva: hardly an inconspicuous operation. The bank manager politely asked his client to wait while the withdrawal was processed and called the police. Gelli was arrested on an Italian warrant.

Sergio Vaccari andLicio Gelli were said to know each other. Gelli was an ardent collector, and Vaccari had excellent contacts in the London antiques trade. Originally from Milan, he spoke four languages and was described by his former landlord as an elitist with an enormous hatred of humanity. 'He would murder for a price and that was known in the underworld. You see, he found an ecstasy in violence. He loved other people's fear,' claimed Bill Hopkins. He was so frightened of Vaccari that in the spring of 1982 he asked the 'antiques' dealer to move out. Vaccari agreed, provided Hopkins found him something of equal standing in the same neighbourhood. Hopkins did, at 68 Holland Park. When he moved out, Vaccari left behind a file of Calvi press clippings. Thinking nothing of it, Hopkins tossed it out. Then a few weeks later Vaccari returned to ask Hopkins for details about renting a convenience flat at the Chelsea Cloisters, where Hopkins knew the management.

According to 'Podgora', Vaccari was the point-man. He conveyed Calvi from the Chelsea Cloisters to the final rendezvous with his killers. But Vaccari thought his work deserved a better price. In early September 1982 he flew to Rome for a few days. When he returned, according to Hopkins, he was in 'a sunny mood'. He told his cleaning lady to take a few days off. When she returned to clean the apartment on the morning of 15 September 1982 -- two days after Gelli's arrest in Geneva -- she found her employer half sprawled across a white leather sofa in a pool of blood. He had been stabbed eighteen times about the face and chest. The Metropolitan police, when they arrived, assumed that Vaccari had known his killers. The curtains were drawn. Three half-filled whisky glasses and a box of 'After Eight' chocolates were on the coffee table. An open briefcase which contained an Italian Masonic document was on one of the two matching armchairs. There were traces of drugs and electronic weighing scales in the kitchen. His antique desk had been rifled and two drawers spilled open.

One of Vaccari's neighbours reported seeing two men leave building at about the presumed time of the murder and believed they were speaking Italian. Among the suspects questioned by the police was Giuseppe 'Pippo' Bellinghieri. The thirty-six-year-old Bellinghieri admitted knowing Vaccari and having visited the Holland Park apartment several times. But Bellinghieri claimed to have been on a pilgrimage to Poland when Vaccari was murdered. The investigation was closed and the crime remains unsolved.

With Gelli and Carboni in prison, Vaccari out of the way, and a suicide verdict on Calvi that the City of London Police seemed determined to uphold, the conspirators were secure. One of the conspiracy's essential features had been to paint Roberto Calvi's reputation as black as possible. It was said that he had embezzled money, accepted undisclosed commissions, consorted with crooks and kept a high-class mistress in Rome -- in other words that he was a man of no morals. Suddenly Opus Dei and the Vatican entered the fray, also implying that Calvi was a liar and a cheat. How could anyone believe such a man? His reputation was thoroughly sullied, in spite of the family's efforts to vindicate him. By association, his family also became tainted. It was suggested, for example, that their only interest in having the suicide verdict overturned was to collect the £1.75 million in insurance money due on the banker's death.

While the campaign to slander Calvi continued, the Vatican's 'three wise men' delivered a preliminary report. By their own admission it 'did not have a conclusive character' because they had not been given full access to the relevant documents. Consequently, they recommended a joint investigation by the Vatican and Italian governments, to be conducted 'on the basis of the documents in the possession of the two parties, in order subsequently to draw from them consequences that seem legitimate.' [4]

This started a new flood of rumours that so alarmed the Vatican it felt compelled to publish an editorial in the 8 October 1982 issue of l'Osservatore Romano, denying that Opus Dei or any of its members had dealings of any sort with Calvi or Banco Ambrosiano. Then on 17 October 1982 l'Osservatore Romano published a denial that the IOR had received any funds from the Ambrosiano. This was repeated In its weekly English language edition of 28 October 1982.

I.O.R. -- AMBROSIANO

Recently a Rome daily newspaper published some conclusions ... concerning the relations between the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) and the Ambrosiano group. It presented them inexactly as the 'results arrived at by the international committee of experts instituted by the Vatican to determine the actual participation of the IOR in the activities of the Banco Ambrosiano of Roberto Calvi'.

These are, in fact, the conclusions of a long and accurate study carried out by the IOR and its legal advisers on the basis of the documentation in the possession of the same Institute and summarized with reference to contrary statements made publicly and authoritatively.

Since great publicity was given to the conclusions and they were the subject of numerous comments, our paper also deems it opportune to publish their exact text:

1. The Institute for the Works of Religion did not receive any funds either from the Ambrosiano group or from Roberto Calvi, and therefore is not bound to restore anything.

2. The foreign companies which are in debt to the Ambrosiano group were never managed by the IOR, which had no knowledge of the operations carried out by those companies.

3. All the payments made by the Ambrosiano group to the aforesaid companies were made at a time prior to the so-called letters of patronage.

4. These letters, because of their date of issue, did not exercise any influence on the payments in question.

5. Should eventual verification be required, all this will be proved.

These assertions were misleading. To maintain that 'the IOR did not receive any funds from the Ambrosiano group ... and therefore is not bound to restore anything' was untrue. At that very moment the IOR was in the process of repaying £60 million in lira deposits to the Ambrosiano group. But the statement insisted that the conclusions were based on 'a long and accurate study carried out by the IOR and its legal advisers on the basis of documentation in the possession of the Institute'. Very well, but what study? Why was it never made public or, for that matter, made known to the three wise men?

The study was anything but accurate. It would have been interesting, therefore, to have seen the documentation that the experts relied upon in making their conclusion. Were they forged documents? Based on the fact that in another nineteen months the Vatican would own up to a 'moral responsibility in the affair', the question of forgery became relevant. The other relevant question remained who, really, was running the IOR?

One can only wonder, therefore, which legal advisers conducted the investigation and whether they were members of Opus Dei. Moreover, the language seemed to have an all too familiar ring to it. Certainly Cardinal Benelli, who had at least some of the facts at hand, should have known the statement to be false. But for the moment the energies of the Roman Curia were focused on preparing for the triennial plenary session of the College of Cardinals that was scheduled to open towards the end of November.

On Friday, 22 October 1982, Opus Dei's most implacable opponent in the College of Cardinals, Archbishop Benelli of Florence, suffered a massive heart attack -- infarto miocardico acuto, the medical bulletin said. But the sixty-two-year-old Benelli -- a hearty, good-living Tuscan -- had been in robust health, claimed his personal secretary. He worked long hours and rarely slept more than four hours a night. The first signs of heart trouble began only two days before and he died on 26 October 1982. His passing was said to have been a miracle as important for Opus Dei as the unexplained cure of Sister Concepcion which had paved the way for the Founder's beatification. Benelli had been preparing to oppose Opus Dei's becoming a Personal Prelature at the meeting of cardinals.

Four days before the convocation opened, Opus' Dei's regional vicar for Italy, Don Mario Lantini, wrote a one-page letter to Clara Calvi and her son Carlo to complain about their declarations to the press. The tone of the letter was obsequious. Other than its posturing, one wonders why a doctor of theology and philosophy such as Lantini would have bothered. The obvious answer must be that by insisting the banker had been murdered, the Calvis were embarrassing more than a few people. After offering his 'Christian condolences', Lantini referred to three recent articles in the Wall Street Journal, La Stampa and l'Espresso in which the Calvis affirmed that Roberto Calvi had been in contact with Opus Dei before his death. Lantini continued:

In my capacity as counsellor of Opus Dei for Italy I should like to confirm what has already been communicated and published in all the press, namely that no one representing Opus Dei has ever held any connection or contact, either directly or indirectly, with Roberto Calvi or with the IOR over share transactions with the Ambrosiano or in any other operation (or planned operation) of an economic/financial character of any kind or relevance.

Given this absolute distancing of Opus Dei -- and in order that full light may be brought to bear on this aspect -- the necessity becomes apparent of knowing to which elements you are referring when you speak of Opus Dei. The intention, among other things, is to provide evidence of who could have wrongly used the name of Opus Dei or attempted to attribute false intentions to it.

I would therefore ask you, Signora and Signore Calvi, to be so kind as to furnish me in particular with indications of people, facts and circumstances and to specify any other material which would serve to clear up the facts you have referred to in the interviews quoted.

Lantini gloated over the fact that he was never graced with a reply and Opus Dei brushed off the widow Calvi's statements as 'emotional speculation'. But what she said was only a factual rendering of what her husband had told her. She never claimed anything more than that. Moreover, Don Mario Lantini's letter was contentious. Clara Calvi had at all times been clear about her source and had given testimony about it under oath on several occasions. Don Lantini knew this, so why did he bother to trouble her? The fact that she never replied was therefore neither surprising, nor material. But the real point was that Don Lantini's letter might have been more appropriately addressed to the persons who had led Roberto Calvi to believe he was talking -- directly or indirectly -- to Opus Dei.

With Benelli's death, the last opposition to Opus Dei's elevation to 'floating diocese' status evaporated in the College of Cardinals and three days after the meeting closed Cardinal Casaroli and Cardinal Baggio issued on behalf of John Paul II the Papal hull, With Very Great Hope, including the Apostolic Constitution known as Ut sit, which transformed Opus Dei into a Personal Prelature,

The Pope declared:

With very great hope, the Church directs its attention and maternal care to Opus Dei, which -- by divine inspiration -- the Servant of God Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer founded in Madrid on 2 October 1928, so that it may always be an apt and effective instrument of the salvific mission which the Church carries out for the life of the world,

So now it was official. According to this declaration the Pope agreed that Opus Dei was not Escriva de Balaguer's invention, but God's, Escriva de Balaguer had only been the messenger, But just as significant, Ut sit legalized Opus Dei's status under canon law as a state within a Church.

Not only did With Very Great Hope and the Apostolic Constitution Ut sit make Don Alvaro del Portillo the 'little pope' of Villa Tevere, it confirmed that he reported to no-one save the Big Pope across the Tiber, though as far as the Big Pope was concerned he was rather more dependent on Opus Dei than met the eye. Should for any reason the Prelate of Opus Dei not wish to take orders from the Pontiff of Rome, he would then be responsible only to God, But if the Pontiff chose not to listen to the Prelate he risked finding his finances reduced by a significant amount.

The confirmation contained in With Very Great Hope that Opus Dei was founded 'by divine inspiration' bestowed upon the Prelature justification for its supreme arrogance as it placed the Work above all other institutions of the Church, being that it was the only one -- aside from the Church herself -- that claimed to be founded by God and not by man. This was exploited as a divine licence permitting Opus Dei to practise a modus operandi that in certain matters placed it close to the outer fringe of social custom and legality.

The official ceremony raising Opus Dei to the Church's only Personal Prelature took place in mid-March 1983 in Sant' Eugenio. Dramatic though it was, crowning a half-century of hope and planning, the ceremony was overshadowed by an unsettling event. Two weeks before, the Rumasa group was expropriated by Spain's newly elected Socialist government and placed in liquidation.

_______________

Notes:

1. Message No. 22582/1X/04 di prot, Re: Roberto Calvi to the Ministero dell'Interno (UCIGOS) and Comando Generlte Arma CC., 2° Rep. S.A. - Uff. Operazioni.

2. Mario Almerighi, Ordinanza de rinvio a giudizio nel procedimento penale contro Flavio Carboni e altri, Rome, pp. 93-94n.

3. Convicted on the cheque-bouncing charges by the Criminal Court in Rome on 24 October 1986, Carboni was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment.

4. Raw, Op. cit., p. 13.

[admin]

26. Paraparal

Faithful, docile. We want this to be our disposition and we will tell Jesus, using the words of the Father: 'Yes, Lord ... I will be faithful, and I will let the hands of my Superiors mould me so as to have this distinctive supernatural polish of our family.'

-- Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, 'In the Hands of the Potter', Cronica X, 1958

JOSE MARlA RUIZ-MATEOS HAD NOT ONLY TRUSTED LUIS VALLS LIKE A brother but he considered him one of the Work's leading strategists. But for two persons who shared similar views, their lifestyles were vastly different. Ruiz-Mateos was outgoing, while Valls was reflective, almost monkish. Ruiz-Mateos was accessible to his staff, and enjoyed talking with them; Valls secreted himself away on the top-f1oor-but-one of Banco Popular Espanol's new Presidencia in Madrid's Edificio Beatriz. Banco Popular's name appeared nowhere on the building's exterior, nor was it displayed in the entrance lobby. The topmost floor was reserved for Luis Valls's penthouse and roof garden. Even though an inscribed numerary, for many years he had refused to live in an Opus Dei residence.

Valls could never understand why Ruiz-Mateos insisted on displaying his octagonal bee emblem on all of Rumasa's four hundred enterprises. In this Valls was not alone. Alvaro del Portillo, when he came to Madrid, inevitably complained to Ruiz-Mateos, 'I see too many bees. Seriously, why do we have to see this little bee everywhere?' It was another way of saying that Ruiz-Mateos, for an Opus Dei person, was too up-front, too image-conscious, and that he didn't 'let the Lord shine through'.

This was a curious reflection from the prelate general of an organization that had the reputation of being madly narcissistic and extravagant in feathering its corporate nests, whether in Rome, Madrid or the high Andes. By the 1980s, Opus Dei in Spain had an annual budget of £6 million. Modest though this might seem, it only covered the operating costs of the regional vicariat and the nine provincial delegations. In reality, through its corporate network and full-time fund raisers, Spanish Opus Dei reportedly takes in on average £160 million a year. [1] This represents twice the annual budget of the Catholic Church in Spain. But what does the Obra, which claims to be a purely 'religious organization with no material assets', do with all this undeclared money? That is what the Spanish Socialist Party wanted to know.

For some time it had been apparent that Spain's next general elections, scheduled for October 1982, were likely to bring in the first Socialist government since the Civil War. Some Socialists blamed Opus Dei for fomenting an attempted coup d'etat that had occurred on 23 February 1981, delaying the party's return to power, and expected Felipe Gonzalez, the Socialist leader, to take retaliatory action. Luis Valls, for his part, feared the Socialists would seek to nationalize the banking sector. He made himself the unofficial spokesman of Spain's privately owned commercial banks in defending the right of free enterprise.

The Socialist threat could not have come at a worse time. Anticipating the Holy See's acceptance of the Portillo Option, Opus Dei's need for funds at this stage was immense. Spain, as usual, led the way when it came to raising cash for God's little needs. Ruiz-Mateos suspected that Gregorio Lopez Bravo, who after serving as Spain's foreign minister became deputy chairman of Banesto, the country's largest commercial bank, was given the task of covering the Portillo Option. But because of Opus Dei's insistence on discretion, even though they were the best of friends Lopez Bravo would never have admitted it. Nevertheless, in June 1980 he formed the Instituto de Educacion e Investigacion (IEI), with himself as chairman and Enrique Sendagorta Aramburu, another supernumerary, as deputy chairman. Sendagorta served on the board of Banco Vizcaya, and was deputy chairman of Induban, Vizcaya's investment banking arm. He personally contributed more than £1 million to the cause. Ruiz-Mateos was 'indexed' for a special payment to IEI of 1,500 million pesetas (£7.9 million). He was told that the money was for the University of Navarra but he suspected it was really to help underwrite Opus Dei's takeover of the IOR.



Unable to meet this indexation at one go -- it was over and above Rumasa's quarterly decimus transfers -- Ruiz-Mateos proposed to pay the full amount over five years in annual instalments of 300 million pesetas (£1.6 million) each, plus 10 per cent annual interest on the outstanding balance. To do this he issued five promissory notes to an intermediary, Hispano Alemana de Construcciones S.A., so that the notes could be discounted. The notes were issued on 9 December 1980, payable by the Banco Industrial del Sur in favour of Hispano Alemana on the same date each year. The first year's draft carried interest of 150 million pesetas (£789,000), giving it a total face value of 450 million pesetas (£2.4 million). In addition, Ruiz-Mateos furnished the Opus Dei directors with a written undertaking to renew this arrangement every five years for seventy-five years. The contract stipulated that the payments to Hispano Alemana were for IEI's account.

After Rumasa's takeover of Banco Atlantico, the Rumasa banks -- all twenty of them -- collectively moved into the prestige group of the top eight commercial banks in Spain, directly behind Luis Valls's Banco Popular Espanol. There was a fear among establishment bankers that Ruiz-Mateos had discovered some sort of new formula and if allowed to continue unchecked he would transform Rumasa into Spain's number one bank. The Banco de Espana reacted by pressuring Rumasa to open its books for inspection.

Ruiz-Mateos concluded that the most influential person in Spain's financial establishment was Luis Valls. He had noted that a majority of the central bank's directorate and board of governors were 'Vallses' -- people who owed their allegiance to the chairman of Banco Popular Espanol -- including the governor, Jose Ramon Alvarez Rendueles, and his deputy, Mariano Rubio, who was responsible for insuring that Rumasa complied with the central bank's executive order. But Ruiz-Mateos was only too aware that if he opened Rumasa's books to Banco de Espana's inspection, the undeclared transfers to Opus Dei would be uncovered, causing both the Work and Rumasa a lot of problems. On the other hand, if he refused he risked provoking Rumasa's expropriation. He therefore decided to broach the matter with Valls.

Ruiz-Mateos claimed that Luis Valls assured him the Banco de Espana problem 'could be solved with money, by paying money'. [2] Ruiz-Mateos said that Valls instructed him to hire a political payoff specialist, Antonio Navalon Sanchez, and for legal work to retain the services of Matias Cortes Domingues. 'Both are people who enjoy my entire confidence,' Valls said.

'How much cash is needed?' Ruiz-Mateos asked.

'One thousand million pesetas [£5.3 millionI for now,' Valls allegedly replied. [3]

Matias Cortes was Spain's leading criminal lawyer. Among his clients were Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa of the Central African mock empire, the local representative of Rothschild Bank, a couple of Spain's leading publishers and Manuel de la Concha, president of the Madrid Stock Exchange who later, along with Mariano Rubio, went to prison for corruption. Cortes exuded influence; the king's private telephone number was in his agenda and he dined with cabinet ministers and dukes. He owned a public relations agency and an Italian restaurant, and did business with Dr Arthur Wiederkehr's convenience company factory. Although on close terms with Valls, on one occasion he noted under a reference to Opus Dei's senior banker and another person identified only as Pedro the comment 'soberbio, obsceno y chuleta de barrio' (arrogant, obscene and a neighbourhood hood). [4]

In March 1982 Ruiz-Mateos hired Navalon as a consultant. Ruiz-Mateos said he paid Naval6n, who had previously worked as political bagman for Valls, a monthly retainer of £31,560 without ever asking for a receipt. Cortes, Naval6n and Valls were friends of Pio Cabanillas, the ubiquitous notary public and justice minister in the transitionary government that brought democracy to Spain. Cortes was experienced in the school of hard-knocks lawyering. As Banesto's outside counsel, he had helped negotiate the 1978 takeover of Banca Coca. Ignacio Coca, who had risen to prominence under Franco, sold the bank for a substantial cash payment and 7 per cent of Banesto's share capital. Only afterwards did the Banesto board discover that Coca had over-valued the assets, using the crude device of fictitious property and securities holdings. Cortes asked Coca to make good the missing 8,000 million pesetas (£42 million). Coca committed suicide.

The Socialists obtained an absolute majority in the October 1982 elections. With Gonzalez in the prime minister's office, Ruiz-Mateos asked Luis Valls what was going to happen. He said Valls told him to give Naval6n another 1,000 million pesetas, presumably for central bank officials or members of the new Socialist government. The money was handed over by Ruiz-Mateos's personal secretary, either in cash or bearer cheques. Adelighted Naval6n called the bribe money his 'candies'. [5]

A few months later, Opus Dei sent two emissaries to question Ruiz-Mateos about who in Rumasa knew of the transfers to Switzerland. He told them the transfers were handled by the head of his banking division, Carlos Quintas. That seemed to satisfy them but, reflecting on this later, Ruiz-Mateos concluded that, knowing what was about to happen, the emissaries wanted to make sure Quintas had cleansed the books of all Opus Dei-linked transfers. Also in early 1983 his two supposed friends, Banco Popular director Rafael Termes and Paco Curt Martinez, put back their shares in Ruiz-Mateos y Cia, a Rumasa subsidiary, to Ruiz-Mateos who, unsuspecting, bought both of them out according to a generous book-value formula. Reflecting on these events long afterwards, it seemed to Ruiz-Mateos that he was the only person in Madrid who didn't know that the government was going to seize Rumasa, apparently with Luis Valls manipulating the levers from behind the scenes.

Ruiz-Mateos came away from a meeting with Cortes and Naval6n on the morning of Wednesday, 23 February 1983, confident that a solution to Rumasa's problems was about to be found. But in the late afternoon Cortes met Petra Mateos, chef de cabinet of Miguel Boyer Salvador, the Socialist super-minister of economy and finance, who reported back to her boss that Rumasa definitely refused to comply. Boyer immediately gave orders for a para-military force to invest the Rumasa buildings in Madrid. The date was significant, being the second anniversary of the aborted coup d'etat that Ruiz-Mateos suspected had been financed by Valls. Ruiz-Mateos was at home when the expropriation was announced in a TV newsflash that evening and until then had no inkling that Rumasa's fate had been sealed.

'I learned of Rumasa's expropriation at the same time as the Spanish people -- at home, watching television. For days I had received no word from Valls. Some weeks before he had mysteriously called to tell me that Rumasa's expropriation was one of the alternatives under consideration by the Socialists, but not to worry as Rome was not lost, and for this reason I still trusted him,' Ruiz-Mateos later wrote to Don Alvaro del Portillo. [6]

All of Navalon's candies had come to nothing. Miguel Boyer explained to the nation that Rumasa had refused to submit to a government audit. Boyer said he feared that, having over-extended itself, the Ruiz-Mateos empire was about to collapse. While a privately owned holding company, he pointed out that Rumasa controlled many publicly traded banks and corporations. If suddenly the empire collapsed he feared it would provoke a national crisis. This danger justified his intervention.

A dejected Ruiz-Mateos asked Luis Valls, 'What do I do now?'

'You keep your mouth shut and get out of the country,' he said Valls advised him. 'We'll help you, but you must do what Matias Cortes tells you.'

And so, in a move reminiscent of Calvi's flight from Italy, Ruiz-Mateos disappeared from sight. He arrived in London accompanied by his private secretary Pepe Diaz, banking director Carlos Quintas and a bevy of private bodyguards. He was exhausted and depressed. He was told on no account to disclose his membership in the Work. To insure his obedience, he was assigned a new spiritual director, Frank 'Kiko' Mitjans, a Catalan for whom he never felt much warmth, and a permanent minder, Benedict Whyte, who Ruiz-Mateos described as 'a very gentle but obedient person'.

Ruiz-Mateos's whereabouts remained a mystery to the Spanish press, fuelling all sorts of rumours concerning his dishonesty and criminal responsibility in provoking the Rumasa crisis. He felt isolated, but his faith remained strong. He attended Mass daily at Saint Mary's Church in Codogan Street, Belgravia, around the corner from Sloane Street. He always arrived in a black limousine, preceded by an identical vehicle containing his bodyguards. He sat at the back of the church. When he wished to celebrate the marriage of his eldest daughter, the pastor of Saint Mary's was asked to turn over the church to Opus Dei for the occasion.

As the weeks passed, Ruiz-Mateos became convinced that Valls had betrayed him to save Banco Popular Espanol from nationalization. The authorities and press painted him more 'of a scoundrel each day. Boyer claimed there was a $2,000 million hole at Rumasa. According to Ruiz-Mateos's reckoning, the group should have shown a net worth of $3,300 million. From London he instructed one of his lawyers, Opus Dei supernumerary Crispin de Vicente, to sue the government, seeking the return of his assets. The government retaliated by charging Ruiz-Mateos with fraud, keeping false books and illegally exporting capital. A warrant was issued for his arrest.

Investigators found copies of Rumasa promissory notes for £9.3 million (interest included) in favour of IEI. Lopez Bravo confirmed that the IEI -- which he said provided financial assistance to students and researchers - had received 870 million pesetas (£4.6 million) from Ruiz-Mateos but denied that the institute transferred the money to Opus Dei, which, had it been destined for the IOR, was of course correct. Opus Dei also denied that it had ever received monies from Ruiz-Mateos. [7]

'I am not a member of Opus Dei, though I sympathize with its objectives,' Ruiz-Mateos told Stephen Aris of the London Sunday Times. [8] A week later he told The Financial Times banking correspondent, 'I never met Calvi, but some people say I will end up like Calvi.' [9]

His declarations brought two Opus Dei supernumeraries to London to counsel him to remain silent. One of them, Luis Coronel de Palma, governor of the Banco de Espana from 1970 to 1976, hinted that the expropriation had been a deal to save Banco Popular Espanol from nationalization. Coronel was followed by Lopez Bravo. As a friend, Lopez Bravo was upset. He had already warned Ruiz-Mateos in an elliptical manner not to trust Valls. Opus Dei members are forbidden to speak badly of another member. This time Lopez Bravo, who was beginning to have his own doubts about certain Opusian ethics, assured Ruiz-Mateos, 'Luis Valls owes you an explanation.'

Over the next four months Luis Valls called twice. 'He told me that if I remained patient the future would be fascinating. He also said that we would meet soon with our brothers in a country yet to be determined to talk over everything ...' Then, after a visit from Navalon, Valls came to London to meet with his unhappy friend.

'You betrayed me,' Ruiz-Mateos told him.

'What are you talking about?' Valls replied.

Valls avoided any kind of explanation. At that point Ruiz-Mateos decided there were two Obras: Opus Dei, spiritually spotless, as originally intended by the Founder, and Opus Homini, the Obra that some men made of it. He decided to sever all ties with Opus Homini. He fired Matias Cortes, refused to have anything more to do with his London 'minder', Ben Whyte, and stopped giving his confidences to Kiko Mitjans. Opus Dei sent his former spiritual director of fifteen years, Boro Nacher, to London to try to reason with him. But Ruiz-Mateos refused to see him, suspecting Nacher of knowing all along that Valls and the Madrid directors were plotting to sacrifice Rumasa to the Socialists.

Ruiz-Mateos claimed he had never heard mention of the Caracas lawyer Alberto Jaimes Berti or the Paraparal property venture. If both he and Berti were telling the truth, then Opus Dei had been operating behind his back well before the expropriation, running money through Rumasa's banking sector without his knowledge or consent. According to Berti, the agent for this operation was Ruiz-Mateos's brother-in-law, Luis Baron Mora-Figueroa.

Ruiz-Mateos described his brother-in-law as '100-per cent Opus Dei. He is a wonderful man, but a fanatic of Opus Dei. To talk with him today is like talking to a brick wall.' Luis Baron likewise denied that he ever met Berti, and Ruiz-Mateos doubted that his brother-in-law had travelled to Caracas in 1980 on an investment mission.

Until the early 1980s, in addition to handling the Church finances in Venezuela, Berti acted as legal council to the Apostolic Nunciature in Caracas. He had set up a clerical pension fund through a company he founded under the name of Inpreclero and, at Archbishop Benelli's behest, he used another company -- Inecclesia -- for anonymously investing Church money in American blue chip securities or specially designated projects. Although managing director of both companies, they were controlled by the Venezuelan Conference of Bishops through its finance committee. Inecclesia had audited assets of $1,400 million.

Now Berti is the first to admit that he was never a great admirer of Escriva de Balaguer or the organization he founded. As counsel to the Apostolic Nunciature Berti had been called upon over the years to carry out some disagreeable tasks that were a source of embarrassment to the Prelature. The first occurred in 1970 when the nuncio in Caracas received a complaint from the parents of two teenaged boys in the diocese of Margarita, a group of islands off the Venezuelan coast. The parents were threatening criminal action against the local bishop for molesting their sons and the nuncio feared a scandal. He asked Berti to intervene. The Bishop of Margarita was Francisco de Guruceaga, Opus Dei's first vocation in Venezuela.

Berti flew to La Asuncion on the Isla de Margarita and through the help of a woman prosecutor in the sexual offences department got hold of and shredded the Guruceaga file. He then negotiated a $160,000 payment for the parents. The nuncio sent Guruceaga to London on an extended sabbatical, where he lived a secular existence for the next three years, travelling extensively.

In 1973 the new nuncio, Monsignor Antonio del Giudice, gave Guruceaga another chance and appointed him Bishop of La Guaira, a small diocese and port city in the federal district of Caracas. According to Berti, Guruceaga considered himself a mercantile prelate, licensed to make money for God's work. One of Guruceaga's deals had been the 1975 sale for $2.5 million of a tract of land belonging to the diocese of La Guaira. The money disappeared. Del Giudice's successor asked Berti to investigate. Berti said he gathered the documentary evidence and the nuncio sent his report to the secretary of state, Cardinal Villot, in Rome. Nothing more was heard of the affair.

At Benelli's request, Inecclesia also helped people connected with the Church to invest monies anonymously on the American stock markets. For Berti to handle the operation, however, the client needed to supply him with several letters of introduction from important ecclesiastic authorities or organizations like the Knights of Malta. He would tell the client to transfer the money to an Inecclesia account in Panama City. The money would then be assigned to a shell company in whose name the US securities were purchased. Once the money was fully invested, Berti furnished the client with the bearer share certificate of the Panamanian company.

This was the procedure used when Berti said he was contacted at the end of 1980 by Luis Baron Mora-Figueroa, chairman of Banco del Norte, one of the twenty banks belonging to the Rumasa group, and also a member of Rumasa's board of directors. He said Luis Baron presented him with several letters of recommendation from the Vatican and other Church authorities, including Villot's successor as secretary of state, Cardinal Casaroli, and the IOR's prelate-secretary Donato de Bonis. Luis Baron told Berti that he represented a syndicate of investors involved in a long-term project. At first Berti thought the project might have been the Latin American trade bank that Cardinal Siri had mentioned. Only later, when plans for the bank were shelved, did Berti suspect that the project was Paraparal, Venezuela's largest property development venture.

Paraparal was a planned 14,000-home residential city, on the shores of the Lago de Valencia, launched in 1976 by developer, Giuseppe Milone, who had arrived from Naples the year before. The cost of bringing Paraparal onto the market was estimated at around $2,000 million. Berti was Milone's Caracas attorney. As Berti pointed out, there were not a great many investors around with $2,000 million lying idle. The Church was one; the Mafia (or Naples's crime syndicate -- the Camorra) another. As for the former, Berti, a manager of Church money, was certainly qualified to give an opinion.

Luis Baron knew the precise distribution of liquidities inside the Rumasa group. His Banco del Norte assembled and collated the financial data required by the Banco de Espana for Rumasa's banking division, and it also prepared the regular reports sent to the monetary authorities detailing the group's foreign exchange positions. [10] Berti claimed that Luis Baron entrusted to Inecclesia's safekeeping $2,000 million, later increased by another $200 million. Berti said he followed the normal procedure. The money was transferred in several instalments to a Panamanian shell company and sent for investment to designated brokers in New York. The money in fact came in with some delay, requiring adjustments in the investment schedules. During this time Berti went to Rome on business and met the IOR's de Bonis. Berti claimed he discovered that de Bonis knew all about the Baron transaction. His familiarity with it convinced Berti that the IOR was also involved. Moreover, according to Berti, de Bonis mentioned that Roberto Calvi was another insider with full knowledge of the operation. [11] This made sense as Berti had noted that some of the monies received in Panama came through the Ambrosiano network.

At about this time, a palace revolution occurred within the Conference of Venezuelan Bishops. Francisco de Guruceaga took over the Conference's finance committee and immediately brought Inpreclero and Inecclesia under his control. Berti drew his mandate from a six-member board of directors -- of which he was one of the three lay members. Guruceaga bypassed the directors and in February 1983 appointed himself president of both companies in a procedure that Berti considered illegal. Berti refused to hand over the books. In retaliation Guruceaga accused him of embezzling up to $50 million from the clerical pension fund.

Assuming control of the two companies was consistent with Opus Dei's policy of monopolizing management of the Church's finances wherever and however it could. Opus Dei, for example, was said to have done the same under Pinochet, with its members taking over the Chilean Church's finances. [12] But it was their tactics that shocked Berti: 'Opus Dei was unscrupulous and immoral in their campaign to remove me. They tried to destroy me. For eight months they used the radio, TV and newspapers in a well orchestrated campaign of lies and hate that was impossible to counter.'

During his fray with Opus Dei, Berti uncovered what he considered was further evidence that the $2,200 million was destined for the Paraparal project. He knew that in 1981 the project faced one of its innumerable liquidity crises and risked going under. At the time Milone had been desperate to raise another $200 million. It was then, Berti said, that Calvi was asked to invest in Paraparal. But the Ambrosiano had treasury problems of its own, thanks to its United Trading exposure. Nevertheless Calvi agreed but as a show of good faith he requested that the syndicate make a compensatory deposit of $200 million with the Ambrosiano network. This was apparently done through the IOR, but Berti concluded that Calvi did not complete his side of the bargain because he said the banker called him in Caracas and asked him to get Milone to stop pressuring him for money.

Because of the Ambrosiano's deepening problems, Calvi was unable either to put up the $200 million or reimburse the 'compensatory' deposit. As a result, the Paraparal operation risked going under and other monies had to be found. This explained for Berti the delay in receiving the last slice of the $2,200 million, with one of Milone's backers stepping in to save the project from going under. If true, this would have made a marked man out of Calvi. While this description of events made sense, Berti's reasoning was based on deduction rather than hard facts, until one day he had to go to Rome to settle legal matters with Milone, and was threatened by a 'Mr. Tortola', who identified himself as a Camorra associate. Tortola told him: 'We reached Calvi in London and we can reach you any place you go.' [13]

Berti supposed an entry in Rumasa's books related to the Baron operation. But when Rumasa was expropriated, to prevent the government liquidators from tracing it, ownership of the Paraparal development was transferred to a new company called Cali S.A. Formed in Panama on the same day as Rumasa's nationalization, it acquired the litigation rights of a plaintiff who had brought an action against Paraparal. Cali won the case, placing the Paraparal development company in default, thereby enabling it to assume ownership. 'This was a very unusual form of sale,' Berti observed wryly. That it was, and very clean, too, as nothing linked Cali to the original investment syndicate.

Berti's story was based on a mixture of conjecture and insider knowledge. The Vatican and Opus Dei had also consistently denied involvement in Calvi's 'misdealings'. But towards the end of 1983, the Vatican realized it was going to be taken to court by the creditors of Banco Ambrosiano. This prodded the Vatican to take its first hesitant steps towards a settlement. In January 1984 the Vatican indicated through a Rome lawyer that it would consider making a $250 million (£140.3 million) payment to settle the Ambrosiano affair. But the IOR did not have such a sum available. Some thought was given to raising a commercial loan for up to $90 million (£50.5 million). Then at the end of January, Marcinkus claimed, the IOR arranged 'other financing'. [14]

The source of the 'other financing' has never been disclosed. But on 25 May 1984 the IOR agreed to pay $244 million (£137 million) in settlement of all claims against it. When this amount was added to the time deposits and other assets it had forfeited, and the $99 million (£55.6 million) in lira deposits that it repaid, the IOR's total loss in the Ambrosiano fiasco amounted to $510 million (£286.3 million). [15] The settlement, in effect, left the IOR bankrupt. Marcinkus protested. 'It didn't kind of clear us out completely; we had to kind of lower our capital level,' he said. [16] But the IOR had no capital level, in that it had no share capital per se. It may have had reserves, and it had deposits. The IOR was kept in being, therefore, by the loyalty of its depositors. The largest depositor was Opus Dei.

There was a 'codicil' to the settlement whereby the IOR agreed to hand over to the creditors an assortment of bearer shares belonging to the United Trading family of companies -- those mentioned in the comfort letters. These included the entire share capital of the parent United Trading itself, and also 53,300 shares, representing 23 per cent of the share capital, of Banco Ambrosiano Holding, Luxembourg.

On the earthquake scale of financial disasters, by the payment to the Ambrosiano creditors, 1984 was definitely a volcanic nine for the Vatican. Where the money came from to cover this enormous hole was disclosed in the fuzziest of terms to the cardinals in a meeting that took place nine months later. They were informed that the IOR's $244 million payment 'was covered entirely by the [IOR] itself, without contributions from the Holy See and without drawing on the funds entrusted to the administration of the Institute.'

Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos was still denying any connection with the Prelature. But he was beginning to come out of a long decompression period with the certainty that he had been betrayed. Shortly after he fired his UK solicitor, the British Home Office refused to renew his residence permit, obliging him to leave the country. He was eventually arrested on a Spanish warrant in Frankfurt and held for three months before being freed on £2.7 million bail. He applied for political asylum, which was refused, and spent the next year and a half fighting extradition.

In the midst of the extradition proceedings, on 31 May 1985 Ruiz-Mateos composed a 45-page hand-written letter to Don Alvaro del Portillo that was frank, touching, full of hurt, but without bitterness, as a son unburdening his soul to a father, hoping for understanding, guidance, and some form of human warmth. It began:

I assure you, Father, that all the facts I tell you are true, and God knows it. My only aim is to inform you of what happened and, if convenient, to receive your advice. Everything has been taken from me. They didn't value anything. I have been dishonoured, discredited in my work and thrown out of Spain. I have been persecuted and slandered. I went to gaol and was separated from my family. Is there anything left? ...

I beg of you, Father, to put yourself in my situation and try to understand me. I'm sure you will feel compassion ... and that if only you understand what I am suffering it would help so much to alleviate the pain ...

He recited the parade of senior Opus Dei members who had come to see him in London and, later, while in prison in Frankfurt. They asked him to remain silent, but, he reflected, 'who really benefits if I keep silent ... ? You can be assured, Father, that at no time did I wish to involve the institution and I believe that I have demonstrated that heroically ...' But how was he rewarded for his silence? He claimed that the regional vicar for Germany had warned him, 'You could die tomorrow of a heart attack ...' The letter continued:

[M]y personal entourage is intimately linked to the Work: wife, children, brothers, brother-in-law and even my lawyer [Crispin de Vicente]. How many times I cried before them about my situation, only to receive a sepulchral silence and I noted that all of them looked at me with reserve, and finally I understood that they did not understand ...

He then cited a letter he had received from Luis Valls, denying any involvement in his problems with the Banco de Espana. 'If someone deceived you, it was not me,' Valls claimed.

To insure that his letter got into the hands of the prelate general, Ruiz-Mateos had his eldest son, Zoilo, deliver it in person to the Villa Tevere. Ruiz-Mateos never received a reply. But one day Amadeo de Fuenmayor came from Rome to see him.

'How is your soul?' Fuenmayor asked. 'Have you been following the norms?' Ruiz-Mateos brushed off the question and wanted to know what had happened to his letter.

What letter?' Don Amadeo replied. 'Do you know that you could die tonight? Have a heart attack? Or die of cancer?'

In November 1985, the German authorities agreed to Ruiz-Mateos's extradition and he was flown to Madrid by military jet. He spent the next seven weeks in a maximum security wing of Alcala-Meco Prison, which gave him more time to reflect. He appeared at a remand hearing early in the New Year and escaped custody by donning a false moustache, wig and trenchcoat in the courthouse toilets, only to reappear a few days later at a well-publicized press conference to complain about the conditions of his detention. Thereafter, the red-faced authorities agreed to place him under house arrest.

By then he did not see why, on top of everything else, he should be charged with illegal export of capital when those who pressed him into doing it were not accused with him. And so he informed the Madrid magistrates that three national directors of Opus Dei -- Alejandro Cantero, Juan Francisco Montuenga and Salvador Nacher -- not only pressured him into making enormous contributions to Opus Dei but also had him transfer abroad the money for them. He said that he had diverted to Opus Dei abroad almost £40 million out of Rumasa's Cash flow. His allegations were promptly denied by Opus Dei's national headquarters, though it was now admitted that Ruiz-Mateos had been an Obra member after all.

In May 1986 the directorate of Opus Dei in Spain issued an ultimatum to Ruiz-Mateos, threatening to expel him if he did not withdraw his accusations against the three directors. But rather than back down, Ruiz-Mateos produced fifteen photocopies of trans: actions involving Rumasa transfers through Nordfinanz Bank, Zurich, for a 'River Invest' account at Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva. While the state prosecutor's office puzzled over what to do next -- the state prosecutor, Francisco Jimenez Lablanca, was an Opus Dei member -- Opus Dei had the aplomb to deny that it was in any way connected with Ruiz-Mateos's business activities, and in fact countered the bad publicity with an eight-page interview with Tomas Gutierrez Calzada, the regional vicar for Spain, in Epoca. The interview was headed 'The Enemies of Liberty Are Attacking Us'. 'Liberty' in this Opusian usage was interchangeable with 'Church'. The 'enemies' of the Church, it turned out from the next line, was Ruiz-Mateos, because he was 'threatening us with public scandal.' [17]

Realizing he was now well outside of the road, Ruiz-Mateos began to fear for his life. [18] 'Not only am I aware that something could happen to me, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. Many Spaniards have died mysteriously for much less and history is plagued with crimes committed in the name of God,' he said in a 1986 interview. [19] Three months previously Michele Sindona had died in a Milan prison after drinking a poisoned cup of coffee, and the incident, like Calvi's murder, was fresh in his mind.

He was freed from house arrest after a first fraud charge was dropped for lack of evidence. But by then his Rumasa empire had been liquidated. The state patrimony office sold Banco Atlantico to an Arab group at a fire-sale price, prompting a Barcelona newspaper to claim the winding up of Rumasa had cost the Spanish taxpayer more than twice the £1,000 million that the public prosecutor alleged Ruiz-Mateos had defrauded from the state. Other charges were still pending.

By this point one had the impression that Felipe Gonzalez would have been happy to see the Rumasa affair buried and forgotten. But Ruiz-Mateos was not going to let that happen. His counter-action against the government claimed £842 million in damages. He put across key points in his case by calling press conferences in front of government buildings and turning up dressed like a pirate or Superman. It was the only way, he said, to keep his case in the public eye.

In June 1989 he obtained temporary immunity from prosecution by being elected to the European parliament. Before he could celebrate his victory, however, he was rushed to hospital and had one metre of his intestines removed as a result of a mesenteric thrombosis. This type of thrombosis, usually fatal, can only result from a vascular obstruction, eating a venomous fish, a spider bite or poison. Ruiz-Mateos went to the Mayo Clinic for post-operatory convalescence. The doctors there considered it likely that he had been poisoned. On the basis of their report, back in Madrid he brought an attempted murder charge against persons unknown.

Spain's Constitutional Court was asked to rule on the legality of the Rumasa expropriation law. It has eleven judges and a president, whose vote counts double. After lengthy consideration, six of the judges voted against the law's legitimacy; five were in favour. The president, Manuel Garcia-Pelayo, then approaching 80 years of age, decided -- after receiving a call from Felipe Gonzalez -- to vote with the minority. Two years later Garda-Pelayo retired to Venezuela. Before dying of a stroke, he stated that in rendering the Rumasa judgement the integrity of the Constitutional Court had been debased.

Ruiz-Mateos appealed the ruling to the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg which upheld his claim that the Spanish government had acted unconstitutionally and failed thereafter to accord him a fair trial. But the Strasbourg court said it was not competent to rule on his claim for compensation.

Twelve years after Rumasa's expropriation, Ruiz-Mateos still had not been given his day in court -- a 'day' that some experts feared might last for several years and would be exceedingly embarrassing for Opus Dei. When asked who was responsible for his downfall, he replied, 'I think the same people who organized the coup d'etat also organized the expropriation of Rumasa.'

But who were these 'same people'? I asked.

'Los "Vallses",' he replied. [20]

_______________

Notes:

1. Santiago Aroca, 'The Godfather of Opus and its Strawmen', Tiempo 217, 7 July 1986. (Exchange rate of 190 pesetas to £1.)

2. Ruiz-Mateos Open Letter to Luis Valls Taberner, February 1995.

3. Unpublished memorandum of 2 February 1994 in the files of Kroll Associates, London, and Ruiz-Mateos Open Letter to Luis Valls, February 1995. Luis Valls disputes Ruiz-Marcos's version of the expropriation scenario. While he acknowledges meeting Ruiz-Mateos on many occasions, and notably during 'six or seven lunches', he said the only time they ever discussed Rumasa's problems was in early 1982 at a reception given by King Juan Carlos for Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He said Ruiz-Mateos asked him for the name of a good lawyer as he was unhappy with how his solicitors were handling the Banco de Espana probe. Valls gave him one name -- Matias Cortes -- and thought the matter closed.

4. Note in Macias Cortes's agenda for 5 August 1983.

5. 'The Rumasa Affair Soils the Vatican and Opus', Tiempo, Madrid, 1 August 1983.

6. Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos letter to Don Alvaro del Portillo, 31 May 1985.

7. 'Rumasa -- Search and Destroy', The Economist, 16 April 1983

8. Stephen Aris, 'How Marcos Rose and Fell: the End of a Reign in Spain', The Sunday Times, 24 April 1983.

9. 'This is only the start of a very long film', The Financial Times, London, 30 April 1983.

10. WW Finance Memorandum on The Rumasa Group, Geneva 1979, p. 12.

11. Monsignor Donato de Bonis has denied knowing Alberto Jaimes Berti or being in any way aware of the 'Baron' operation.

12. 'Chile's monetarist model starts to come apart'. Latin America Economic Report, 14 January 1977.

13. Memo to the Files of Kroll Associates, London, by Jeffrey Katz, 16 November 1993.

14. Raw, Op. cit., p. 37.

15. Ibid., p. 16.

16. John Cornwell, Op. cit., p. 132.

17. Epoca, Madrid, 11 August 1986.

18. 'Opus Dei in plot to kill me', The Sunday Press, Dublin, 25 May 1986.

19. Phil Davison, 'A brush with death for "Superman",' The Independent, London, 1 June 1993.

20. After Ruiz-Mateos published an open letter to Luis Valls in February 1995, the banker sent the following note to leading Spanish newspaper and magazine publishers:

Ruiz-Mateos has been lying for five years. He has now forged something for the first time: a letter and a signature. Now he is no longer in disguise. Besides, he has started off on a new stage of informative terrorism. Never up to date have his suits and reports succeeded. His accusations are but plain lies. Yet he keeps on playing this game since he is aware that the defendant cannot materially prove he is not guilty. Thanks to such a divertimento, the man in the street becomes confused with [the] accusations on the one part, and the defendant's pleas of not guilty on the other. Ruiz-Mateos is just trying to arouse doubt. Could you make your editors keep a close eye so that they may not be caught unawares by those inventions that the overactive and wicked minds of Ruis-Mateos and his cronies work up?