The Last Supper (22 page)

The PFLP was categorized as a terrorist organization by the US State Department, so it wasn’t a wise association for Billy Carter. His brother Jimmy’s popularity was already low, thanks to his botched handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. With the help of Michael Ledeen, the American historian and journalist, Pazienza was able to ensure that the story enjoyed huge play in the American media. Some of his information came from his friend Federico Umberto D’Amato, another P2 member who was responsible at the time for Italy’s border police. D’Amato had full details of Billy Carter’s stopover in Rome on his return from Tripoli, with six days of alcoholic
revelry at the Hilton Hotel paid for by a generous Libyan embassy. The story broke shortly before the presidential election, in October 1980, so the timing could hardly have been better.

Reagan’s gratitude became quickly apparent. The Reagan administration had no confidence in the outgoing ambassador to Italy, Richard Gardner, and promptly removed the Rome CIA station chief, Hugh Montgomery. In the diplomatic interregnum Pazienza and Ledeen handled relations between the Italian and American governments. Pazienza’s importance became visible when he organized a visit to Washington for the Christian Democrat leader, and Piccoli was grateful to Pazienza for ensuring that his scheduled meeting with Secretary of State Alexander Haig actually took place. Haig had been abruptly summoned to Camp David by the president but agreed to delay his departure after some string-pulling by Pazienza. The Haig connection was strong. Ledeen was a special adviser to the secretary of state and Pazienza had reportedly worked with Haig when the latter left the command of NATO forces in Europe to become head of the arms multinational United Technologies. Pazienza’s organizational
tour de force
found its way into the newspapers and made him seem just the kind of influence-broker Calvi was looking for.

Pazienza told the Milan court Calvi had contacted him through Piccoli because he too wanted help in establishing relations with the new American government. ‘The Banco Ambrosiano group had a representative office in Washington and everyone at that time, including Calvi, wanted relations with the new American administration,’ he said. His claim was confirmed by the testimony of Federico Umberto D’Amato, who told magistrates Pazienza had mediated in secret contacts between the Vatican and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and knew Marcinkus, Haig and Ledeen well. ‘Calvi believed that the solution to his problems could come from a grand-scale agreement to be made with the Americans; Pazienza’s
contacts could be useful to him,’
⁶
D’Amato said. Calvi may also have been attracted by the rumours that Pazienza had worked for the CIA as well as for SISMI. ‘Calvi struck me as a lost, disoriented individual. I never saw him smile, as if he was always on the edge of a catastrophe,’ D’Amato told magistrates on another occasion. ‘He had an extraordinary belief in mysterious things . . . Another of his obsessions was with the secret services. Once, for example, he said to me, knowing that I had good relations with the secret services and with the CIA: “Why don’t we go to Washington once and for all and talk to these people from the CIA?” I told him that the secret services, at least from what I knew and believed, didn’t intervene in financial matters.’
⁷
D’Amato, who had enjoyed excellent links to the Central Intelligence Agency since its founding after the Second World War, was being disingenuous at the very least.

Pazienza’s curriculum vitae provides numerous further reasons why Calvi might have been interested in employing him. He had trained as a doctor at Rome university, specializing in the effects of deep water on physiology, and had cultivated an interest in deep sea diving, which he combined with a career in marine engineering that took him to the four corners of the globe. In the early 1970s he worked with the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and negotiated oil contracts in Iran and Libya on behalf of Cousteau’s Cocean company. He later worked for the Italian engineering group Condotte d’Acqua, headed by alleged P2 member Loris Corbi, ultimately acquiring wide experience in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States.

This was the overt part of Pazienza’s career, documented in a c.v. that he prepared himself. The clandestine part, which would have been of even greater interest to Calvi, was documented by the Italian secret services. An undated report headed Highly Confidential declares: ‘His international credit cards are his relations with SDECE [French intelligence], CIA, the Saudi Arabian secret services, Vatican circles, international
freemasonry through the Grand Orient of Italy. His membership of the board of the Luxembourg company Sedebra links him to the Sindona–Calvi–IOR connection from 1977.’ The report goes on to enumerate other significant links: to Bob Armao, administrator of the deposed Shah of Iran’s fortune, to the Shah’s son [Ali Reza Pahlavi], and to the arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi. ‘He also carried out public relations tasks for the Saudi businessman [Akram] Ojjeh,’ the report averred. It referred to a ‘Sicilian Connection’ and Pazienza’s ‘links to the Italo-American mafia clans headed by the Gambino family’. The Gambinos were the crime family who allegedly conducted drug imports to the United States in the context of the Iran–Contra operation and who oversaw Sindona’s mysterious visit to Sicily in 1979.

Another undated secret service report refers to the public relations work done for Ojjeh in Europe and the United States and suggests that the construction contracts in the Shah’s Iran obtained for Condotte d’Acqua by Pazienza were the result of high-level introductions procured by the Saudi businessman. The report referred to Pazienza’s close ties to Monsignor Marcinkus, saying the IOR chief had been responsible for introducing Pazienza to Calvi. Yet another report, drawn up for SISMI on 22 February 1982, alleged that Pazienza was involved in exporting arms from Europe to Oman, ‘for the probable subsequent transfer to Iraq’, via West German companies and a Yugoslav arms company with alleged links to Kashoggi. These were the kind of secret operations likely to impress Calvi: a potential source of rapid enrichment and an indication of ties to the world of secret power to which he aspired and which he admired so much.

Francesco Pazienza began working for Calvi in March 1981. It would be the beginning of a busy time for Calvi and his world. On 17 March police raided Gelli’s home and office in Tuscany, setting off a political scandal that would rock Italy and deprive Calvi of his politico-masonic protection.
On 10 May Calvi was arrested for currency violations, introducing him to the traumatic experience of prison and creating the first doubts about the creditworthiness of his bank, doubts that would make it more difficult for the Ambrosiano to raise funds on the international money market from then on. Three days later a Muslim extremist shot the pope, an event that would incapacitate John Paul for weeks and undermine the position of Archbishop Marcinkus within the Vatican, which depended on the constant contact and support of the pontiff. Pazienza stuck close to Calvi’s family while the patriarch was in prison, giving them moral support and assisting them in their contacts with possible political patrons. Psychological pressure on the family increased on 9 July, when Calvi attempted suicide in prison. When he was released two weeks later, Pazienza arranged for a holiday in Sardinia, where Calvi and his wife could recuperate from the accumulated stress. There Calvi would be introduced for the first time to Flavio Carboni, whom Pazienza said he had met by chance in a policeman’s office at about the time he began work for Calvi.

By his own account, Pazienza worked for Calvi on some of his most delicate projects. In his autobiography Pazienza describes how the Banco Ambrosiano funnelled money to the anti-communist trade union Solidarity in Poland, a cause close to the hearts of Pope John Paul and President Ronald Reagan. Solidarity’s success in undermining Polish communism would create the first real breach in the monolithic power of the Eastern Bloc, a trickle through the dyke that would soon be transformed into an unstoppable flood. Reagan’s Roman Catholic CIA director, William Casey, who saw fighting communism as something of a religious mission, coordinated American and Vatican efforts to support Solidarity to ensure that neither organization trod on the other’s toes in the dark of clandestine operations. ‘The money flowed towards Warsaw via the IOR and, more concretely, via the financial institution that served as the secular ally
par excellence
of
the Vatican bank and Marcinkus: the Banco Ambrosiano,’ Pazienza wrote. He had received confirmation of these flows from French intelligence in January 1981, he said. According to this account, Calvi had been the protagonist and Pazienza the passive observer.
⁸

Pazienza changed his story significantly when called to give evidence at the Calvi murder trial in April 2006. Now he claimed he had personally been involved in smuggling gold ingots to Gdansk in the false bottom of a Lada jeep. The entrepreneur appeared in court wearing brown corduroy slacks and a blue pullover with holes at the elbow. He had been accompanied by prison guards from Livorno jail, where he was serving a prison sentence for his role in the fraudulent collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, a far cry now from the days when he travelled by private jet or Rolls-Royce and owned luxury yachts. He had organized the shipment of a $4 million consignment to Solidarity in March 1982, he said, revealing his own direct involvement for the first time. ‘I dealt with it on Calvi’s behalf and with Marcinkus’s approval. Calvi told me to speak to Marcinkus, and the operation got under way,’ he told the court. Pazienza had discussed the gold consignment with Marcinkus during a meeting at the archbishop’s residence, Villa Stritch. The organizers used a jeep with Polish number plates, he said, and the gold was delivered in small ingots that could then be melted down for further distribution at Solidarity-controlled factories.
⁹

Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano was involved in other sensitive financial operations with the IOR, including the payment of ransoms for kidnap victims. When the son of Francesco De Martino, a former secretary of the Socialist party and a candidate at the time for the Italian presidency, was kidnapped in April 1977, the Banco Ambrosiano was one of the institutions to rally round. Licio Gelli has described how Calvi apologized to him for arriving late for a dinner engagement: he had been delayed by the process of counting and delivering a billion
lire needed for the ransom of De Martino’s son. ‘Smiling, he explained the nature of the delay: when the work had been completed they had noticed that the banknotes were in bags bearing the letters IOR,’ Gelli explained in a memorandum sent to the parliamentary P2 Commission. ‘He had therefore given orders for the containers to be replaced, but he was satisfied that he had contributed to saving a human life.’

Francesco Pazienza was personally involved in the negotiations for the release of another kidnap hostage: a Christian Democrat councillor responsible for public works in the Naples area. Pazienza was asked to intervene by his political patron Flaminio Piccoli after Ciro Cirillo was seized by the Red Brigades in April 1981. The solution, he realized immediately, was to contact the Camorra, the criminal organization that controlled the territory where the kidnap had taken place. Exploiting the contacts of a builder friend, Alvaro Giardili – whose business card would be found in Roberto Calvi’s pocket under Blackfriars Bridge – Pazienza got in touch with Vincenzo Casillo, the top lieutenant of imprisoned Camorra boss Raffaele Cutolo. After a memorable lunch with a dozen of Casillo’s soldiers, heavily armed and dripping with jewellery, Pazienza got to meet Casillo himself. Known as ‘
O Nirone
’ (The Black One) for his dark complexion, Casillo got straight down to business and within days was able to deliver the goods: councillor Cirillo’s safe deliverance from captivity. It was an important meeting for Pazienza, as Casillo would later be accused of strangling Calvi and of having done so on his, Pazienza’s, orders. ‘He was tall, thin, with incredibly long bony hands. Unlike his aides he was dressed in sober fashion, with a pale blue shirt and khaki trousers,’ Pazienza recalled in his memoir. Unlike his aides, Pazienza observed with relief, he eschewed gold chains, rings and bracelets, as well as the long nails on the little finger that were worn as a sign of criminal affiliation – a kind of visible masonic handshake for
Camorristi.
¹⁰

A Camorra
pentito,
Enrico Madonna, told magistrates that Casillo had admitted to him that he had personally participated in Calvi’s murder. ‘He didn’t give me any details on the murder, or its motives, but he said that if he hadn’t killed him, other people with whom he was connected would have done so,’ Madonna claimed. He deduced that the other people Casillo was referring to were ‘the secret services and people connected to the Banco Ambrosiano, like Pazienza’.
¹¹

Pazienza and Casillo’s negotiations for the release of the kidnapped councillor were brought to a satisfactory, if disreputable, conclusion. The Italian authorities agreed to pay the Red Brigades a ransom of £850,000 and a reward of more than £1 million went to the Camorra for its mediation efforts. The deal included the promise of earthquake reconstruction contracts for Camorra-controlled firms – and an offer by the Camorra to assassinate policemen and magistrates on behalf of the Red Brigades. It was the kind of problem-solving at which Pazienza excelled, but where it was impossible to achieve results without getting one’s hands dirty. The Banco Ambrosiano is believed to have contributed to the ransom, though Pazienza does not say as much in his autobiography. He does however mention another contributor to the ransom pot: Enrico Nicoletti, the treasurer of the Magliana Band. The Rome underworld gang that would play an important role in Calvi’s flight from Italy had contributed hundreds of millions of lire for the redemption of the Christian Democrat councillor. Flavio Carboni was one who said that the Banco Ambrosiano had contributed directly to the ransom. He told magistrates Calvi had confided to him that he had entrusted Pazienza with ‘a huge sum’ for the purpose.