Propaganda Due

Foundation

With the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, the Grand Orient of Italy, the most important and numerous Masonic community in Italy, felt the need to safeguard the identity of its most prominent members, even within the organisation. For this reason, the membership of the latter did not appear on any official list, but was known only to the Grand Master, who recorded it as an initiation "by ear". It was not until 1877 that Giuseppe Mazzoni began to draw up a list called Propaganda Massonica, officially establishing the lodge in question and becoming its first venerable master.

Propaganda was founded in 1877, in Turin, as Propaganda Massonica. This lodge was frequented by politicians and government officials from across Italy who were unable to attend their own lodges and included prominent members of the Piedmont nobility. Since its foundation, the main feature of the lodge was to provide adequate cover and secrecy for the most important initiates, both inside and outside the Masonic organisation.

Adriano Lemmi (Grand Master from 1885 to 1895) was initiated into the Propaganda lodge in 1877 and helped to give it prestige by bringing together members of parliament, senators and bankers who, due to their positions, were forced to leave their local lodges and settle in Rome. During its history, the lodge included important Italian figures, such as the poet Giosuè Carducci, politicians Francesco Crispi and Arturo Labriola and journalist Gabriele Galantara.

Even after Lemmi's Grand Mastership, the lodge continued to be an important reference point in the organisation of the Masonic Grand Orient. Among its members, at the beginning of the 20th, century there were Giovanni Ameglio (1920), Mario Cevolotto, Eugenio Chiesa (1913), Alessandro Fortis (1909), Gabriele Galantara (1907), and Giorgio Pitacco (1909).

Propaganda Massonica was banned in 1925, alongside all other Masonic lodges and secret societies, by the Fascist regime. The Grand Master Domizio Torrigiani signed the decree dissolving all lodges. However, Italian Freemasonry was reconstituted in exile in Paris on 12 January 1930.

Following the end of World War II, Freemasonry became legal again and the lodge was reformed. The name was changed to Propaganda Due when the Grand Orient of Italy numbered its lodges. By the 1960s, the lodge was all but inactive, holding few meetings. This original lodge was only tangentially related to the one established by Licio Gelli in 1966, two years after becoming a Freemason. On the contrary, Giuliano Di Bernardo, former Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, affirmed that "the cards of the P2 affiliates bore the signature of the Grand Master, therefore they were all effective members of the Grand Orient of Italy."

Discovery

The activities of P2 were discovered by prosecutors while investigating banker Michele Sindona, the collapse of his bank and his ties to the Sicilian Mafia. In March 1981, police found a list of alleged members in Gelli's house in Arezzo. It contained 962 names, among which were important state officials, important politicians and a number of military officers, including the heads of the three Italian secret services. Future Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was on the list, although he had not yet entered politics at the time. Another famous member was Victor Emmanuel, the son of the last Italian king.

Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani (whose chef de cabinet was a P2 member as well) appointed a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, headed by the independent DC Tina Anselmi. In May 1981, Forlani was forced to resign due to the P2 scandal, causing the fall of the Italian government.

In January 1982, the P2 lodge was definitively disbanded by the Law 25 January 1982, no. 17. In July 1982, new documents were found hidden in the false bottom of a suitcase belonging to Gelli's daughter at Fiumicino airport in Rome. The documents were entitled Memorandum sulla situazione italiana ("Memorandum on the Italian Situation") and Piano di rinascita democratica ("Plan of Democratic Rebirth"), and are seen as the political programme of P2. According to these documents, the main enemies of Italy were the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the trade unions, particularly the Communist Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL). These had to be isolated and cooperation with the PCI, the second biggest party in Italy and one of the largest in Europe, which was proposed in the Historic Compromise by Aldo Moro, needed to be disrupted.

Gelli's goal was to form a new political and economic elite to lead Italy away from the danger of Communist rule. More controversially, it sought to do this by means of an authoritarian form of democracy. P2 advocated a programme of extensive political corruption: "political parties, newspapers and trade unions can be the objects of possible solicitations which could take the form of economic-financial manoeuvres. The availability of sums not exceeding 30 to 40 billion lire would seem sufficient to allow carefully chosen men, acting in good faith, to conquer key positions necessary for overall control."

P2's influence

P2 was implicated in numerous Italian scandals and mysteries. Opinions about the importance and reach of the P2 differ. Some see P2 as a reactionary, shadow government ready to preempt a takeover of power in case of an electoral victory of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Among them, there were Massimo D'Alema, President of the Bicameral Commission that aimed to reform the Italian constitution, and the former Italian President Sandro Pertini. Others think it was nothing more than a sordid association of people eager to improve their careers by making powerful and important connections (e.g. the master Indro Montanelli).

Kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro

According to the Italian magistrate Gherardo Colombo, Propaganda Due had a role in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro because he opened the door to the PCI and Francesco Cossiga was powerless.

Italicus Express bombing

P2 was also heavily involved in the Italicus Express bombing (1974). One of the magistrates of the Arezzo Public Prosecutor's Office investigating the massacre, Mario Marsili, was Licio Gelli's son-in-law and, at the time the lists were found (1980), he was found to be a "dormant" member of the P2 lodge (card n°. 506). The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry declared:

[...] the Italicus massacre can be attributed to a neo-Fascist or neo-Nazi terrorist organisation operating in Tuscany; that the P2 Masonic lodge instigated the attacks and financed extra-parliamentary right-wing groups in Tuscany; that the P2 Masonic lodge is therefore seriously involved in the Italicus massacre and can even be held responsible in historical and political terms, if not in legal terms, as an essential economic, organisational and moral backdrop.

Corriere della Sera takeover

In 1977, P2 took control of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, a leading paper in Italy. At the time, the paper had encountered financial trouble and was unable to raise bank loans because its then editor, Piero Ottone, was considered hostile to the ruling Christian Democrats. Corriere's owners, the publishing house Rizzoli, struck a deal with Gelli, who provided the money with funds from the Vatican Bank directed by archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Ottone was fired and the paper's editorial line shifted to the right.

The paper published a long interview with Gelli in 1980. The interview was carried out by the television talk show host Maurizio Costanzo, who would also be exposed as a member of P2. Gelli said he was in favour of rewriting the Italian constitution towards a Gaullist presidential system. When asked what he always wanted to be, he replied: "A puppet master".

Bologna massacre

P2 members Gelli and the head of the secret service Pietro Musumeci were condemned for attempting to mislead the police investigation of the Bologna massacre on 2 August 1980, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 200. 2020s investigations, and following prosecutions from the Bologna Corte d'Assise, declared Licio Gelli, along with other P2 members, as the mastermind behind the massacre (the deadliest terroristic attack in Italy after the Second World War).

Banco Ambrosiano scandal

P2 became the target of considerable attention in the wake of the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano (one of Milan's principal banks, owned in part by the Vatican Bank), and the suspicious 1982 death of its president Roberto Calvi in London, initially ruled a suicide but later prosecuted as a murder. It was suspected by investigative journalists that some of the plundered funds went to P2 or to its members.

IRI slush funds

P2 was also involved in the Institute for the Industrial Reconstruction's slush funds, about which, during the 9th legislature, it was instituted a parliamentary commission of inquiry.

Protezione account

One of the documents found in 1981 was about a numbered bank account, the so-called "Protezione account", at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Lugano (Switzerland). It detailed the payment of US$7 million by the president of ENI, Florio Fiorini, through Roberto Calvi to the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) leader Claudio Martelli on behalf of Bettino Craxi, the socialist Prime Minister from 1983 to 1987.

The full extent of the payment became clear only twelve years later, in 1993, during the mani pulite (Italian for "clean hands") investigations into political corruption. The money was allegedly a kickback on a loan which the Socialist leaders had organised to help bail out the ailing. Rumours that the Minister of Justice, Martelli, was connected with the account had been circulating since investigations began into the P2 plot. He always flatly denied them. Learning that formal investigations were opened, he resigned as minister.

Murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Italian filmmaker and left-wing public intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally murdered in 1975. Speculation that Pasolini's murder was connected to P2 emerged in the 1990s, after his writings were revealed to have linked the P2 member Eugenio Cefis with violent crimes. As of 2023, a plea to reopen the case was filed based on DNA analysis and links the murder to the Banda della Magliana, a criminal organisation with close ties to far-right terrorism, as the probable culprits. Banda della Magliana has long been suggested to be linked to Gelli and P2, although concrete links have never been proven.

Criminal organization

Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry

After the discovery of the lists, Arnaldo Forlani appointed a committee of three wise men (Vezio Crisafulli, Lionello Levi Sandri and Aldo Mazzini Sandulli) to provide cognitive and critical elements on the activities of P2. At the end of 1981, at the behest of the President of the Chamber of Deputies Nilde Iotti, a parliamentary commission of inquiry was set up, led by the Christian Democrat deputy Tina Anselmi. The commission carried out a long analysis to shed light on the Loggia, considered a point of reference in Italy for American secret service circles intending to keep Italian political life under control to the point, if necessary, of promoting specific constitutional reforms or organising a coup d'état. The commission – which concluded its work in 1984 – produced six reports.

The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, headed by Anselmi, concluded that the P2 lodge was a secret criminal organization. Allegations of surreptitious international relationships, mainly with Argentina (Gelli repeatedly suggested that he was a close friend of Juan Perón) and with some people suspected of affiliation with the US Central Intelligence Agency, were also partly confirmed. Soon a political debate overtook the legal level of the analysis. The majority report said that P2 action resulted in "the pollution of the public life of a nation. It aimed to alter, often in decisive fashion, the correct functioning of the institutions of the country, according to a project which ... intended to undermine our democracy." A minority report by Massimo Teodori concluded that P2 was not just an abnormal outgrowth from an essentially healthy system, as upheld by the majority report, but an inherent part of the system itself.

The P2 was also investigated by the Commission for Mass Murders for alleged involvement in some massacres, but this led to nothing relevant. The members of P2 and Gelli were fully acquitted of the charges of "conspiracy against the State" by the Court of Assizes and the Court of Assizes of Appeal in Rome between 1994 and 1996.

New Italian law prohibiting "secret lodges"

Even though outlawed by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1925, Masonic institutions have been tolerated in Italy since the end of World War II and have been quite open about their activities and membership. A special law was issued that prohibited secret lodges, i.e. those whose locations and dates of meeting are secret, like Gelli's pseudo-Masonic association. The Grande Oriente d'Italia, after taking disciplinary action against members with P2 connections, distanced itself from Gelli's lodge. Other laws introduced a prohibition on membership in allegedly secret organizations for some categories of state officials (especially military officers). These laws were questioned by a case from the European Court of Human Rights in 2013. Following an action brought by a serving British naval officer, the European Court has established as precedent the illegality of any member nation attempting to ban Masonic membership for military officers, as a breach of their human rights.

Licio Gelli's 1981 list

On 17 March 1981, a list composed by Licio Gelli was found in his country house (Villa Wanda). The list was a combination of P2 members and the contents of Gelli's Rolodex. Many on the list were apparently never asked if they wanted to join P2, and it is unknown to what extent the list includes members who were formally initiated into the lodge. Since 1981, some of those on the list have demonstrated their distance from P2 to the satisfaction of the Italian legal system.

On 21 May 1981, the Italian government released the list. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry headed by Tina Anselmi considered the list reliable and genuine. It decided to publish the list in its concluding report, Relazione della Commissione parlamentare d'inchiesta sulla Loggia massonica P2.

The list contains 962 names (including Gelli's). It has been claimed that at least 1,000 names may still be secret, as the membership numbers begin with number 1,600, which suggests that the complete list has not yet been found. The list included all of the heads of the secret services, 195 officers of the different military and security forces (12 generals of the Carabinieri, five of the financial police Guardia di Finanza, 22 of the army, four of the air force, and eight admirals), as well as 44 members of parliament, three ministers and a secretary of a political party, leading magistrates, a few prefects and heads of police, bankers and businessmen, civil servants, journalists and broadcasters. Included were a top official of the Banco di Roma, Italy's third-largest bank at the time, and a former director-general of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), the country's largest bank. The political deputies on the list spanned most of the political spectrum, including the socialist PSI and PSDI, the centrist DC, PRI and PLI as well as the far-right MSI; the communist PCI was the only major political force not represented on the list.

After the list was discovered, the Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani waited until 21 May 1981, before making public the list of P2 members, which included the names of two ministers then in office (the socialist Enrico Manca, and the Christian Democrat Franco Foschi) and five undersecretaries (Costantino Belluscio of the PSDI, Pasquale Bandiera of the PRI, Francesco Fossa of the PSI, Rolando Picchioni of the DC and Anselmo Martoni of the PSDI, the latter however mentioned as "asleep", i.e. resigned).

Notable people on Gelli's list

Notable individuals include:

General Aldo Alasia (Argentina).

Federico Carlos Barttfeld (Argentina), ambassador of Argentina to Yugoslavia (1991–1995) and China (1998–2001), and later under-secretary of state in Néstor Kirchner's government, relieved of his functions in 2003 following allegations of involvement in the Dirty War.

Silvio Berlusconi, businessman, future founder of the Forza Italia political party and Prime Minister of Italy, who explicitly confirmed his membership. According to Gelli, Berlusconi was "the only charismatic figure who can truly lead" Italy.

General Luis Betti (Argentina), Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1973–1974).

Admiral Gino Birindelli, Commander in Chief Naval Fleet in the Italian Navy from 1969, and a member of the Chamber of Deputies for the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) in 1972–1976.

Brunetto Bucciarelli-Ducci, former president of the Chamber of Deputies (1963–1968) and judge.

Roberto Calvi, known as "God's banker", chairman of Banco Ambrosiano from 1975, was allegedly killed by the Mafia in London in 1982.

Vincenzo Carollo, politician of the Christian Democratic Party (DC), President of Sicily 1967–1969 and member of the Senate of the Republic 1972–1987.

Fabrizio Cicchitto, member of the Italian Socialist Party, who later joined Berlusconi's centre-right party Forza Italia.

Maurizio Costanzo, popular television talk show host of Mediaset programmes in Berlusconi's commercial television network.

Relationships with the regular Freemasonry

According to Giuliano Di Bernardo, former Venerable Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, "until its dissolution in 1982 due to the Anselmi-Spadolini law, [P2] was a regular lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy, as attested by extensive documentation that passed between the grand masters Gamberini, Salvini and Battelli on the one hand and Licio Gelli on the other."

Expulsion

The Grand Orient of Italy officially expelled Gelli and the P2 lodge in 1976. In 1974, it was proposed that P2 be erased from the list of lodges by the Grand Orient of Italy, and the motion carried overwhelmingly. The following year a warrant was issued by the Grand Master for a new P2 lodge. It seems the Grand Orient in 1976 had only suspended the lodge, and not actually expelled it, on Gelli's request. Gelli was found to be active in the Grand Orient's national affairs two years later, financing the election of a new Grand Master. In 1981, a Masonic tribunal decided that the 1974 vote did mean the lodge had factually ceased to exist and that Gelli's lodge had therefore been masonically and politically illegal since that time.

Consequences and judicial investigations

P2 was dissolved by law, but its system of political, financial and criminal relations may have survived [...] As for Dr Berlusconi, his current interventionism is symptomatic of the reaction of a part of the old regime which, having accumulated wealth and power in the eighties, intends to continue to influence political life in the nineties as well.

The Court of Cassation decided that the Gelli case was the responsibility of the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office, from which he was accused only of fraudulent activity and false pretences. In May 1983, the case against the P2 leaders was closed. Later, Judge Gherardo Colombo declared that if the investigation had remained in Milan, "Bribesville" would have erupted a decade earlier, given the amount of information in Gelli's papers.

The Public Prosecutor's Office of Rome began proceedings against Licio Gelli and about twenty other people, accused of political conspiracy, criminal association and other crimes. After an investigation that lasted almost ten years, in October 1991, the investigating judge at the Criminal Court of Rome requested that they be sent for trial. The trial lasted a year and a half and with the sentence on 16 April 1994, filed the following 26 July, the Court pronounced a sentence of acquittal of all the accused of the crime of attacking the Constitution through political conspiracy because the fact did not exist. The appeal was rejected, and on 27 March 1996, the Court of Appeal confirmed the sentence. Although subsequent judicial inquiries have (not without receiving criticism from many quarters) partly denied the conclusions of the commission of inquiry, tending to reduce the influence of the lodge, the discovery of the P2 case made people in Italy aware of the existence, in other systems and in other countries, of lobbying, i.e. the exertion of political pressure on those in positions of power to influence the choices made in the running of the nation in a direction favourable to the lobbyists.

In 1987, Licio Gelli was sentenced to 8 years in prison by the Court of Assizes of Florence for having financed members of the Tuscan extreme right, involved in the attacks on the Florence-Bologna railway line. Two years later, on appeal, the judges declared that they did not have to proceed against the accused because, at the time of his extradition from Switzerland, political offences had been excluded. The Supreme Court ordered a new trial, stating that Gelli should have been fully acquitted. On 9 October 1991, the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Florence acquitted him with a broad formulation.

Subversive programme "Plan of Democratic Rebirth"

It was immediately realised that the seized documents testified to the existence of an organisation that aimed to take possession of the organs of state power in Italy: the Plan for Democratic Rebirth (Piano di Rinascita Democratica), a document halfway between a manifesto and a feasibility study that was seized a few months later from Gelli's daughter, contained a sort of roadmap for the penetration of the lodge's members into key sectors of the State, indications for the start of selected proselytising and, appropriately, also a budget estimate of the costs for the acquisition of the vital functions of power: "The availability of funds not exceeding 30 or 40 billion seems sufficient to allow well-selected men of good faith to conquer the key positions necessary for their control."

The primary objectives were the reorganisation of the State under the banner of anti-communist and anti-socialist authoritarianism, accompanied by a selective and class-based approach to social structures. Among the main points of the plan was the simplification of the political panorama with the presence of two large macro-parties, bringing the magistracy under the control of the executive power, separating the careers of magistrates, overcoming the bicameral system and reducing the number of parliamentarians, abolishing the provinces, breaking the unity of the trade unions and reforming the labour market, control over the mass media, transforming the universities in Italy into foundations under private law, abolishing the legal validity of academic qualifications and adopting a repressive policy against petty crime and political opponents.

The people to be "recruited" into the parties would in exchange have to obtain "predominance" (textual) over their own organisations (in the plan it states "for the PSI, for example, Mancini, Mariani and Craxi; for the PRI: Visentini and Bandiera; for the PSDI: Orlandi and Amidei; for the DC: Andreotti, Piccoli, Forlani, Gullotti and Bisaglia; for the PLI: Cottone and Quilleri; for the Destra Nazionale (possibly): Covelli"), while the "recruited" journalists were supposed to "sympathise" with the men recommended by the Masonic lodge. Some of the politicians mentioned went on to play leading roles in their parties and in the government, but these personalities were considered "to be recruited". However, it has never been clearly established whether Gelli contacted them to pursue the aims of P2.

Urgent changes

the public liability (for negligence) of magistrates of civil and penal law;

the regulations for career access (preliminary psycho-aptitude tests).

About the government

the "law on the Presidency of the Council and on Ministries" (Italian Constitution, art. 95) to determine responsibilities and the (reduced) number of ministers, with the elimination, or almost, of undersecretaries;

administrative reform (in relation to articles 28, 97 and 98 of the Constitution) based on the theory of the non-administrative public act, on the clear separation of political responsibility from administrative responsibility (which becomes personal, through the institution of the Ministry's Secretary General) and on the substitution of the principle of refusal by silence with that of consent by silence;

Economic and social measures

elimination of midweek public holidays and related long weekends (except for 2 June, Christmas, New Year and 15 August) to be awarded in the form of a lump sum of 7 additional days to the annual holiday entitlement;

reduction of tax rates on company funds allocated to reserves, amortisation, investments and guarantees, to encourage self-financing and reward the reinvestment of profit;

granting of heavy tax relief to foreign capital investment to facilitate the repatriation of capital from abroad;

Reform of the labour market;

transforming universities in Italy into foundations under private law.

TV and press

immediate establishment of an agency to coordinate the local press (to be acquired with subsequent operations over time) and cable TV to be set up in a chain so as to control the media and public opinion in the country.

the multiplication of radio and TV networks in the name of antenna freedom (art. 21 of the Constitution), and the suppression of RAI. These broadcasters and newspapers were to be coordinated by ANSA.

Trade unions

bring the union back to its "natural function" of "interlocutor of the productive phenomenon instead of the illegitimately assumed interlocutor in view of company and government policy decisions" the union must not get involved in politics. With this in mind, it is necessary to "limit the right to strike to economic causes and in any case ensure freedom of work";

provide for the "restoration of individual freedom in factories and companies in general to allow the election of factory councils with effective guarantees of voting secrecy".

The first objective is linked to the issue of the insufficient definition of clear boundaries and the overlapping of powers, which weaken the State. For example:

The shift of the centres of real power from Parliament to the unions and from the Government to multinational employers, with the corresponding instruments of financial action.

The two objectives are achieved with two hypotheses:

urging the break-up of CISL and UIL and subsequent union with the autonomous unions;

control of internal currents: "acquire with financial instruments of equal entity the most available among the current confederals in order to overturn the balance of power within the current trimurti." Article 17 of the Workers' Statute prohibited the financing of fake unions. The last resort was "a sensational phenomenon such as the creation of a real union that would wave the flag of freedom of labour and economic protection of workers".

Medium and long-term measures

Judicial system:

unity of the Public Prosecutor with the other magistrates (in the current legal system, however, the Public Prosecutor is distinct from the Judges, in accordance with the Constitution – articles 107 and 112);

reform of the High Council of the Judiciary, which must be accountable to the Italian Parliament (constitutional amendment);

reform of the judicial system to re-establish selection criteria based on merit for the promotion of magistrates, impose age limits for prosecuting functions, separate the careers of prosecutors and judges, and reduce the praetorian function to an ordinary judge (in the current legal system, however, the Public Prosecutor is distinct from the Judges, in accordance with the Constitution – articles 107 and 112);

reform of the High Council of the Judiciary, which must be accountable to the Italian Parliament (constitutional amendment);

reform of the judicial system to re-establish selection criteria based on merit for the promotion of magistrates, impose age limits for prosecuting functions, separate the careers of prosecutors and judges, and reduce the praetorian function to that of judge to that of judge.

Government body:

amendment of the Constitution to establish that the prime minister is elected by the Chamber at the beginning of each legislature and can only be overthrown through the election of his successor;

Parliament body:

new electoral laws, for the Chamber of Deputies, of a mixed type (both single-member and proportional) reducing the number of deputies to 450 and, for the Senate, of 2nd degree representation, regional, of economic, social and cultural interests, reducing the number of senators to 250 and increasing from 5 to 25 the number of senators for life appointed by the president, with an increase in the relative categories (former parliamentarians, former magistrates, former public officials and entrepreneurs, former military personnel, etc.);

Implementation

Although the P2 lodge was formally dissolved, many of its former members (some of whose names were not included in the published lists) continued for decades to operate and hold prominent roles in politics, the judiciary, the economy, banking systems, among others, and in cooperation with Roman Catholic bishops and high prelates who were operating in Italy in the same years. Excommunicated priest Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre suggested the existence of a Masonic Lodge in the Vatican with close relationships to other regular Masonic obediences.

The progressive implementation of the Plan of Democratic Rebirth has been detailed by some Italian media.