Thursday, March 13, 2008

Knight of Malta News in March 2008

From http://z13.invisionfree.com/THE_UNHIVED_MIND/index.php?showtopic=26007&st=255


 


user posted image
"Uncle Festing"







QUOTE
THE 79TH GRAND MASTER OF THE ORDER OF MALTA
 
Rome, 11 March 2008 Fra' Matthew Festing, 58, an Englishman, becomes the 79th Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, elected this morning by the Council Complete of State (the Order’s electoral body). In accepting the role, the new Grand Master swore his Oath before the Cardinal Patronus of the Order, Cardinal Pio Laghi, and the electoral body. He succeeds Fra’ Andrew Bertie, 78th Grand Master (1988-2008), who died on 7 February.

The new Grand Master affirms his resolve to continue the great work carried out by his predecessor. Fra’ Matthew comes with a wide range of experience in Order affairs. He has been the Grand Prior of England since the Priory’s re-establishment in 1993, restored after an abeyance of 450 years. In this capacity, he has led missions of humanitarian aid to Kosovo, Serbia and Croatia after the recent disturbances in those countries, and with a large delegation from Britain he attends the Order’s annual pilgrimage to Lourdes with handicapped pilgrims.

Educated at Ampleforth and St.John’s College Cambridge, where he read history, Fra' Matthew, an art expert, has for most of his professional life worked at an international art auction house. As a child he lived in Egypt and Singapore, where his father, Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had earlier postings. His mother was a member of the recusant Riddells of Swinburne Castle who suffered for their faith in penal times. He is also descended from Sir Adrian Fortescue, a knight of Malta, who was martyred in 1539.

Fra' Matthew served in the Grenadier Guards and holds the rank of colonel in the Territorial Army. He was appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) by the Queen and has served as her Deputy Lieutenant in the county of Northumberland for a number of years.

In 1977 Fra' Matthew became a member of the Order of Malta, taking solemn religious vows in 1991.

As well as his passion for the decorative arts and for history, for which his encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the Order is legendary, as is his very British sense of humour, Fra' Matthew spends any free time possible in his beloved Northumberland countryside.


 


 

 

_________________

 







QUOTE (ephilution @ Feb 11 2008, 10:57 PM)
General Giovanni De Lorenzo - Head of SIFAR/SID (Italian Secret Service); Head o/t Carabinieri (Italian Paramilitary Police)
user posted imageuser posted image







QUOTE
THE SECRET NATO COVER

@TEMP = The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provided international cover for Washington's postwar
operations in Italy.
A secret clause in the initial NATO agreement in 1949 required that before a nation could join, it
must have already established a national security authority to fight communism through clandestine citizen cadres.

This Stay Behind clause grew out of a secret committee set up at U.S. insistence in the Atlantic Pact, the forerunner of
NATO. Each NATO member was also required to send delegates to semiannual meetings on the subject. *4

U.S. authority for such moves flowed in a steady stream of presidential directives transmitted through the National
Security Council (NSC).
In December 1950, the council gave the armed forces carte blanche to use appropriate military
force
even if the communists merely gain participation in government by legal means or threaten to achieve control...or the government ceases to evidence a determination to oppose communist internal or external threats. *5

The CIA helped the Italian police set up secret squadrons staffed in many cases with veterans of Mussolini's secret
police. *6 The squadrons were trained for intensive espionage and counter-espionage, against communists and other
perceived enemies of the status quo.
The plan to use exceptional means was patterned after the highly militarized
French intelligence service, the Suret Nationale, which was reportedly so tough on communists that many fled to other
countries. *7


The newly organized intelligence agency, SIFAR, began operations in September 1949, under the supervision of an undercover American, Carmel Offie, nicknamed godfather by the Italians. *8 Interior Minister Mario Scelba headed
the operation. At the same time, Scelba was directing a brutal repression, murdering hundreds of workers and peasants
who sought improved conditions after the war. *9


OPERATION DEMAGNETIZE

With the Italian secret service under control, the Americans then expanded it under the name Operation Demagnetize
and tied it to an existing network of cadre in northern Italy. In 1951, the Italian secret service formally agreed to set up
a clandestine organization within the military to coordinate with the northern cadres.
In 1952, SIFAR received secret
orders from Washington to adopt a series of political, paramilitary and psychological operations destined to diminish the
power of the Italian Communist Party, its material resources, and its influence on government.
This priority objective
must be attained by all means. 10

Operation Demagnetize marked the institutional hardening of Gladio. A State Department historian characterized it as
the strategy of stabilization, *11 although it could be more accurately described as one of destabilization.
From the
start, the offensive was secretly directed and funded by the U.S. government.
In 1956, the arrangement was formalized in a written agreement, using the name Gladio for the first time. According to 1956 documents uncovered in Italy in 1990, Gladio was divided into independent cells coordinated from a CIA camp in Sardinia. These special forces included 40 main groups. Ten specialized in sabotage, six each in espionage, propaganda, evasion and escape tactics, and 12 in guerrilla activities. Another division handled the training of agents and commandos. These special forces had access to underground arms caches, which included hand guns, grenades, high-tech explosives, daggers, 60-millimeter mortars, 57-millimeter machine guns and precision rifles. *12

In 1956, Gen. Giovanni De Lorenzo was named to head SIFAR on the recommendation of U.S. Ambassador Claire
Boothe Luce
, the avidly anticommunist wife of the publisher of Time magazine.
*13 A key player in Gladio was now in place. In 1962, the CIA helped place De Lorenzo at the head of the national police (carabinieri), while he retained
effective control of the secret service.


The general brought with him 17 lieutenants to begin purging insufficiently right-wing officers. It was the first step to a
right-wing coup attempt, with U.S. military attaché Vernon Walters in the vanguard. In a memo to De Lorenzo the same
year, Walters suggested types of intervention aimed at provoking a national crisis, including blocking a center-left
coalition, creating schisms among the socialists, and funding forces favorable to the status quo.14

Meanwhile, according to CIA files found in Rome in 1984, CIA station chief William Harvey began to recruit action
teams based on a list of 2,000 men capable of throwing bombs, conducting attacks, and accompanying these actions with
indispensable propaganda. 15 These teams had a chance to practice their skills in 1963 as part of an anti-union
offensive. U.S.-trained gladiators dressed as police and civilians attacked construction workers peacefully demonstrating
in Rome, leaving some 200 wounded and a large section of the city in shambles. The link to Gladio was made in later
testimony by a former general in the secret service.16

SIFAR Lt. Col. Renzo Rocca was also training a civil militia composed of ex-soldiers, parachutists and members of
Junio Valerio Black Prince Borghese's paramilitary organization, Decima MAS (Tenth Torpedo Boat Squadron), for the
pending coup
.17 President Antonio Segni reportedly knew of the plan, which was to conclude with the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, under fire for not being tough enough with the communists.18

The long-planned takeover, known later as Plan Solo, fizzled in March 1964, when the key carabinieri involved
remained in their barracks. As a subsequent inquiry moved to question Rocca about the coup attempt, he apparently
killed himself, possibly to fulfill Gladio's oath of silence. After officials determined that state secrets were involved,
three hamstrung inquiries failed to determine the guilty parties.19


THE STRATEGY OF TENSION

Despite the failure of Plan Solo, the CIA and the Italian right had largely succeeded in creating the clandestine
structures envisioned in Operation Demagnetize. Now the plotters turned their attention to a renewed offensive against
the left.

To win intellectual support, the secret services set up a conference in Rome at the luxurious Parco dei Principi hotel in
May 1965, for a study of revolutionary war. The choice of words was inadvertently revealing, since the conveners and
invited participants were planning a real revolution, not just warning of an imaginary communist takeover. The
meeting was essentially a reunion of fascists, right-wing journalists, and military personnel.
The strategy of tension
that emerged was designed to disrupt normality with terror attacks in order to create chaos and provoke a frightened
public into accepting still more authoritarian government. *20


Several graduates of this exercise had long records of anticommunist actions and would later be implicated in some of
Italy's worst massacres. One was journalist and secret agent Guido Giannettini. Four years earlier, he had conducted a
seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy on The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d'Etat in Europe. Another was notorious
fascist Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had reportedly been recruited as a secret agent in 1960. He had organized his own
armed band known as Avanguardia Nationale (AN), whose members had begun training in terror tactics in preparation
for Plan Solo. *21

General De Lorenzo, whose SIFAR had now become SID, soon enlisted these and other confidants in a new Gladio
project. They planned to create a secret parallel force alongside sensitive government offices to neutralize subversive
elements not yet purified. Known as the Parallel SID, its tentacles reached into nearly every key institution of the
Italian state.
Gen.Vito Miceli, who later headed SID, said he set up the separate structure at the request of the
Americans and NATO.
22


FRATERNAL BONDS

Two ancient, mysterious, international fraternities kept the loosely-linked Gladio programs from flying apart.
The
Knights of Malta played a formative role after the war (see box), but the order of Freemasonry and its most notorious lodge in Italy, known as Propaganda Due (pronounced doo-ay ), or P-2, was far more influential.
In the late 1960s, its Most Venerable Master was Licio Gelli, a Knight of Malta who fought for Franco with Mussolini's Black Shirts. At the end of World War II, Gelli faced execution by Italian partisans for his Nazi collaboration, but escaped by joining the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. *23 In the 1950s, he was recruited by SIFAR.

After some years of self-imposed exile in Argentine fascist circles,24 he saw his calling in Italy as a Mason. Quickly
rising to its top post, he began fraternizing in 1969 with Gen. Alexander Haig, then assistant to Henry Kissinger,
President Nixon's national security chief. Gelli became the main intermediary between the CIA and SID's De Lorenzo, also a Mason and Knight. Gelli's first order from the White House was reportedly to recruit 400 more top Italian and NATO officials.25

To help ferret out dissidents, Gelli and De Lorenzo began compiling personal dossiers on thousands of people, including
legislators and clerics. *26 Within a few years, scandal erupted when an inquiry found 157,000 such files in SID, all
available to the Ministers of Defense and Interior. *27 Parliament ordered 34,000 files burned, but by then the CIA had
obtained duplicates for its archives. *28





This was only a giant psychological divertion.

This is the Sun Tzu Low Intensity NOT CONVENTIONAL coupe of Carabineers. Just when they were suspected to make the coupe, they were upgraded and updated, thanks to de Lorenzo. First they fitted in the head of people the threat of conventional coupe, for yers and years, and to make more credible the fable they did many bloody massacres. Now that the danger of a conventional coupe is disappeared, NOW STARTS THE REAL COUPE.

Sun Tzu pretends: first to conquer the headquarter, and then to destroy the army, exactly at the opposite of a conventional a la von Clausewitz attack, where first you destroy the army and then conquer the headquarter. I am not telling crap, just what the 'propaganda' experts of Gladio knew and know well, and everyday apply in the Italian political life (and also in the 'alternative' information system...).

Keep in mind that the friend de Lorenzo, so a FASCIST one, after the fall of Mussolini goverment in 8th September 1943 (another day of virgin Mary), he JOINED THE PARTISAN ANTIFASCIST GUERRILLA, first on the Alps, then in Rome (near his master General Superior).

Best regards from a North Adriatic, Anti-catholic and Anti-islamic isolationist

avles

[B][/B]

 

___________________

 


THE NEW BEAST ENEMY!
-
THE 79TH GRAND MASTER OF THE ORDER OF MALTA

user posted image

Rome, 11 March 2008

Fra' Matthew Festing, 58, an Englishman, becomes the 79th Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, elected this morning by the Council Complete of State (the Order’s electoral body). In accepting the role, the new Grand Master swore his Oath before the Cardinal Patronus of the Order, Cardinal Pio Laghi, and the electoral body. He succeeds Fra’ Andrew Bertie, 78th Grand Master (1988-2008), who died on 7 February.

The new Grand Master affirms his resolve to continue the great work carried out by his predecessor. Fra’ Matthew comes with a wide range of experience in Order affairs. He has been the Grand Prior of England since the Priory’s re-establishment in 1993, restored after an abeyance of 450 years. In this capacity, he has led missions of humanitarian aid to Kosovo, Serbia and Croatia after the recent disturbances in those countries, and with a large delegation from Britain he attends the Order’s annual pilgrimage to Lourdes with handicapped pilgrims.

Educated at Ampleforth and St.John’s College Cambridge, where he read history, Fra' Matthew, an art expert, has for most of his professional life worked at an international art auction house. As a child he lived in Egypt and Singapore, where his father, Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had earlier postings. His mother was a member of the recusant Riddells of Swinburne Castle who suffered for their faith in penal times. He is also descended from Sir Adrian Fortescue, a knight of Malta, who was martyred in 1539.

Fra' Matthew served in the Grenadier Guards and holds the rank of colonel in the Territorial Army. He was appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) by the Queen and has served as her Deputy Lieutenant in the county of Northumberland for a number of years.

In 1977 Fra' Matthew became a member of the Order of Malta, taking solemn religious vows in 1991.

As well as his passion for the decorative arts and for history, for which his encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the Order is legendary, as is his very British sense of humour, Fra' Matthew spends any free time possible in his beloved Northumberland countryside.


-Craig Oxley

 

 

____________

 

Morocco Mole:
Northumberland countryside. hmm always wanted to go hunting there, wink.gif

 

No comments: