ROME—When police recovered the body of Roberto Calvi from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge they found a variety of objects in his pockets. There were five bricks and stones, more than 7,000 pounds in foreign currencies, and the business card of a leading City of London lawyer. The latter was perhaps the most natural object to be carried by the chairman of a leading Italian bank, but closer examination of its significance leads us into an extraordinary labyrinth of Cold War intelligence connections.

            The business card belonged to Colin McFadyean, a senior partner at top City law firm Slaughter and May. The firm had close ties to Britain’s intelligence establishment dating back to World War II, when many partners worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine warfare unit specialising in sabotage. McFadyean himself had been recuited into wartime naval intelligence by Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

            McFadyean told City police he had never met Calvi and had never done any work for his Banco Ambrosiano, and British authorities minimised the connection. The existence of the card only became public in 1983, a year after Calvi’s death, and after two inquests had been held without casting much light on the circumstances of the banker’s demise.

            McFadyean was a director of 17 companies, some of them with a connection to the worlds of arms and intelligence. Artemis Fine Arts, for example, was used to launder money and reward people for services to the Western cause during the Cold War, or so I was told by a source who frequented this cloak-and-dagger world.

            One of McFadyean’s colleagues at Artemis was Viscount Arnold van Zeeland, a Belgian financier and art expert. His name meant nothing to me when I came across it in court documents from the Calvi murder trial. But thanks to information provided to me recently by a correspondent, Van Zeeland’s name has opened doors to interlocking chambers where it is likely that much high-level intrigue was conducted at the height of the Cold War.

            Van Zeeland’s father, Paul, it turned out, had been prime minister of Belgium. He had also been a founder member of the Bilderberg Group, a secretive forum in which the world’s social, political and economic elite meets to discuss global problems, and an object of enduring suspicion on the part of conspiracy theorists.

            The Bilderberg Group was the brain-child of Jozef Retinger, a supporter of the anti-Nazi resistance in Poland and a CIA-financed campaigner for the unification of Europe. In a brief essay about the origins of the group, Retinger explained that he and his friends had been concerned at a climate of growing distrust between Western Europe and the United States at the beginning of the 1950s. Informal meetings between eminent representatives of the two continents would serve to heal the breach.

            The West’s response to the challenge of communism was a key issue from the start. “The attitude towards Communism and the Soviet Union,” was the first topic discussed when the group met for the first time in Holland in May 1954. The European Defence Community and “Communist infiltration in various Western countries” were on the agenda at later meetings.

            Among the early members of the group were Sir Colin Gubbins, head of SOE at the end of the war, and Antoine Pinay, a right-wing French politician who was a tireless anti-communist schemer. Participants at later meetings included General Lyman Lemnitzer, the American military officer whose name is associated with Operation Northwoods, a plan to stage false flag terrorist attacks in the United States to justify a military invasion of Cuba, and Mario Pedini, an Italian MP who was a member of Licio Gelli’s anti-communist P2 masonic lodge. Roberto Calvi too was a -- possibly reluctant -- member of P2.

            The group, Retinger wrote, was to become a “factory of initiative”. It would not implement the ideas itself, however, preferring “that they should be passed on to some person or organisation who could further develop them”.

            One of the people who could provide a useful connection between the group’s ideas and those capable of translating them into action was Charles (C.D.) Jackson, who helped to set up the Bilderberg’s North American branch. Like Gubbins, Jackson had a background in clandestine warfare, having been responsible for General Eisenhower’s psychological warfare department in North Africa and then in London.

            After the war Jackson became vice-president of Time Inc., and president of the National Committee for a Free Europe, which was funded by the CIA and controlled Radio Free Europe. He also threw his weight behind another effective Cold War instrument, the Pro Deo Movement, founded by a remarkable Dominican priest from Belgium, Father Felix Morlion.

            Morlion’s propaganda and espionage empire was set up in Brussels before the war and went on to include the Pro Deo University in Rome, now known as LUISS. Funded by the CIA and by Fiat president Vittorio Valletta -- another Bilderberger – Morlion’s “journalistic” establishment provided US intelligence with information on the Vatican and from a worldwide network of correspondents.

            Fr Morlion cut his teeth in the espionage and propaganda business in pre-war Belgium, where his Catholic Press Centre campaigned against moral decadence in the cinema and communist infiltration of Belgian industry. He reportedly entered into contact with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) at this time. The British were keen on his anti-communism but even more interested in his contacts with Catholic dissidents in Nazi-ruled Germany.

            Morlion’s intelligence-gathering and anti-communist agitation continued during and after the war under American auspices. US spy chief Bill Donovan helped him escape from Belgium to Portugal in 1940 and then to greater safety in New York, ultimately financing his move to Italy in 1944.

            The Dominican priest’s anti-communist activities made him a natural ally for Licio Gelli and Roberto Calvi’s P2 organisation. In a self-praising book entitled “Licio Gelli, European Poet”, Gelli published a diploma, written in Latin, confirming his receipt of an honorary degree in “financial science” from the International Pro Deo University of New York in October 1995.

            The younger generation of Van Zeelands was also involved in anti-communist action. Arnold van Zeeland’s brother-in-law, Count Arnould de Briey, was reportedly involved in a military coup plot in Belgium in 1973. De Briey was allegedly a leading figure in the French-speaking faction of the plotters. The operation is said to have been called off at the last minute as a result of ethnic feuding between the French and Flemish-speaking components of the conspiracy.

            Three potential witnesses to the plot are believed to have been killed in the course of the “Brabant massacres”, a series of apparently random shootings in which 28 people were killed. The massacres, which took place in the first half of the 1980s, have sometimes been attributed to the Belgian version of Italy’s Gladio stay-behind network, in a Central European version of the “strategy of tension”.

            Both Calvi and McFadyean appear to have frequented circles and institutions that were involved in a secret battle against communism in the second half of the 20^th century. Institutions such as the Bilderberg Group may well have put conspirators in touch with one another, even if the subsequent action was pursued elsewhere, as Retinger seemed to suggest.

            Melanie McFadyean, the British lawyer’s journalist daughter, made contact on my behalf with some of her father’s intelligence friends as I was updating my book “The Vatican at War”. None of them wanted to talk, telling her it was “better to let sleeping dogs lie”. No one suggested, though, that the dog didn’t exist.