AREZZO - Licio Gelli lived in an elegant villa on a Tuscan hill. It’s an idyllic setting surrounded by vineyards. The address is Via Santa Maria delle Grazie, reassuringly evocative of sanctity and beauty, and the large house, Villa Wanda, is named after his late wife. Inside, the sitting room spoke of  professional success -- the miller’s son from Pistoia who brokered million-dollar deals and controlled a secret state within the state.

         At one end of the room were two blue sofas, which Gelli seemed to favour for interviews, at the other pink armchairs. The long rectangular room could almost be mistaken for an annex of the Uffizi. There were ancient statues in marble and wood, old master paintings illuminated on the walls, and on the end wall a ceramic bas-relief representing ‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’. Beneath was a collection of knights in silver and ivory, the miniatures accompanied by cannons, catapults and other engines of war. It seemed appropriate  for a man who devoted his life to ideological conflict.         

The first time I visited Villa Wanda, in 1989, there were carabinieri on guard outside the gate. They would be a fixture for years -- testimony to the controversial nature of the villa’s owner, partly  for his protection and partly to ensure the terms of his house arrest were respected. A judge involved in the Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy trial, in which Gelli was a defendant, found it unsettling that carabiniere commanders  used the same officers for protecting him, the judge, as for watching over Gelli, the defendant, rotating the bodyguards between Arezzo and Milan. He saw it as a mind-game by the Milan division of the carabinieri, once notorious for its infiltration by  members of Gelli’s P2 Lodge.
         One inevitably approached the house with trepidation. The Venerable Master of the Propaganda Due Masonic Lodge was a living legend and a dark one. Pervasive political influence and suspected involvement in a slew of crimes – from coup plots to terrorist conspiracies and not a few murders – made Gelli’s reputation disconcerting.

         He received me in a cramped ground-floor office, dominated by  heavy furniture. He gave the impression of a mild-mannered provincial banker, with grey hair, a grey suit and a slightly bulbous nose in a placid-looking face. His discourse was bland, as he held forth on the responsibilities of the press in the persecution of innocent men. But he lived up to his reputation for Sibylline, mafia-style messages.         

The P2 Masonic Lodge, for which he was given organisational responsibility in 1971, was a regular lodge owing obedience to the Grand Orient of Italy, he explained. It had special rules of confidentiality because it contained important personalities and others whose ideology ostensibly precluded them from becoming masons. It was therefore inappropriate to divulge their identities or for them to meet all the other members of the lodge. ‘And anyway it was impossible, as there was nowhere large enough for 1,000 or 1,500 people to meet.’ Here was one of the cryptic messages. The official P2 membership list, seized in a police raid on Gelli’s home and office March 17, 1981, contained 962 names -- a powerful elite encompassing all walks of life, from the military to magistrates, press, police and politicians  including three cabinet ministers. Was Gelli suggesting that the names of some 500 members had not emerged? ‘I don’t know. There are those who speak of 1,000 members, others speak of 1,500, others of 2,000, some have even reached the figure of 3,000.’ His words would have been alarming for anyone whose name was on a full list not made public.
         Much P2 power came from the membership of  intelligence service heads. Access to sensitive secret service files placed an extraordinary instrument of blackmail in Gelli’s hands. He was initially coy about his relationship with the intelligence world. ‘If there was an officer who was a member of P2 I wasn’t in a position to know it, because I wouldn’t ask him whether he belonged to the secret services and if he did belong, he shouldn’t tell me, or what sort of secret services would they have been?’ But he then conceded: ‘I knew masses of them, what do you expect? I knew whether or not they belonged to the secret services.’
         I returned  four months later,  in the company of Charles Raw,who was researching his monumental book, The Money Changers. That was memorable for Gelli’s ability to deny flatly the financial evidence gathered by the Banco Ambrosiano liquidators. He denied ownership of a Swiss bank account opened on his behalf and, in Raw’s words, ‘the irrefutable evidence provided by the Swiss authorities’ that it had been fed with funds originating at the Banco Ambrosiano, run by his generous brother in P2 Roberto Calvi.
         Gelli amiably agreed to pose for photographs in the garden. As we took our leave he cordially invited us to return for a cup of coffee if we were ever down Arezzo way again. And he would, of course, do the same if he were ever in London. It was hard not to think of his P2 brother Michele Sindona, a mafia-linked financier who died after drinking poisoned coffee.
        Gelli was born in a mill on the outskirts of Pistoia April 21, 1919. He is said to have been expelled from school at age 13. By age 17 he was fighting  with Italian fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, having enrolled under the assumed name of Livio Gommina. His elder brother Raffaello was killed in that conflict, a traumatic experience that seems to have confirmed his lifelong aversion to communism.
         The other key ingredient in Gelli’s career was contact with international intelligence services. Gelli emerged unscathed from the Second World War, having used his position as a liaison officer between the Italian fascists and German occupying forces to save the lives of numerous partisans. This gave rise to suggestions that he had been a secret communist sympathiser and really worked for the Soviet KGB. There were more plausible stories that he had worked for the Counter Intelligence Corps of the US Fifth Army and plentiful evidence of a continuing relationship with US intelligence in subsequent years. His curriculum would not be complete without reference to the numerous indications of his longstanding links to Italy’s own military intelligence apparatus, where he exerted significant influence.

         Since his return to Italy in 1988 Gelli talked freely to the press. In recent years he became more relaxed. Certain Cold War secrets were no longer so sensitive and the Venerable Master of P2 seemed to feel he could indulge in bragging. This was the case when I visited him again in 2005, this time to be admitted to the drawing room/art gallery. He had initially been loth to receive me, as I was researching a book on the Calvi case and Gelli himself was a suspect in the banker’s murder.

   He was stooped but still mentally alert at age 86. He soon showed himself to be in expansive mood, tackling the Calvi story readily. ‘In the last contacts he had before fleeing Italy, he said that if the Vatican did not make up its mind to pay back the money it had received from his institution, he would make known events and facts that were so grave that the Holy See would simply have been forced to leave Italian territory,’ he told me. ‘He certainly had information. Calvi represented at that time a certain way of doing business in Italy, a financial sector that paid large sums to the political world.’         

Gelli was convinced Calvi had been ‘suicided’ but didn’t have any idea as to who might have been behind it. ‘I have always asked myself that. He didn’t have enemies. I think of the famous briefcase. He used to keep it close to his leg, always in contact.’
An  intelligence report written just two months after Calvi’s death – he was found hanging from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge June 18 1982 – points an accusing finger at Gelli. A source told the author of the report that Calvi had turned to the Vatican bank and then to political personalities for help in staving off the Banco Ambrosiano’s collapse, but his efforts were in vain. ‘He therefore resumed contacts with Gelli to resolve all outstanding financial disputes between the two and to find the best way of avoiding the imminent financial collapse,’ the report said. ‘He went to London to meet Gelli or his emissaries, taking with him highly blackmailing documents. Here he was killed and the documentation taken from him.’

         The extent and significance of Gelli’s international contacts emerges from the documents in his personal archive, donated to the Italian state in 2005.

         A master of disguise, one photo donated shows a bearded Gelli pushing a barrel-organ through the streets of Nice during a period on the run. He is modestly attired in dark trousers and a white tee-shirt, sports a neat beard and is accompanied by a cat.
        The archive contains historical documents signed by Napoleon, Garibaldi, Mussolini, Manzoni and Hitler. These and Gelli’s meticulously classified personal papers are kept in a secure room marked Sala G. Outside  is a consultation room, with masonic medals, trowels, gavels and aprons from the P2 collection of masonic paraphernalia on display in glass cabinets. Gelli’s books are held in a locked glass-fronted bookcase topped with an impressive array of literary prizes for his efforts as a writer and poet. 

A number of letters sent to Giulio Andreotti appeared to confirm a close personal relationship, widely surmised at since the moment when they appeared together in a photo wearing beaming smiles during a diplomatic visit to Argentina by Andreotti.  

 Other documents in Gelli’s collection offer a fascinating glimpse of how the Venerabile’s power network actually operated in practice. The Arezzo mattress manufacturer sometimes describes himself as an unlicensed private banker. In 1998 police found 150 kilos of gold concealed in giant flowerpots under Gelli’s roses and geraniums, giving some indication of his success in the financial sphere. Roberto Calvi explained his decision to join P2 in 1975 as a quest for political protection. A document found in the banker’s briefcase after his death said Gelli ‘had convinced me that all political and financial power really depended on him and that no deal of any importance could go ahead without his consent’.
At around the time that Calvi joined the lodge, P2’s theoretical approach to the assumption and exercise of political power was being developed in a paradoxically named ‘Plan for Democratic Revival’. Corruption rather than military force was the recommended method for taking control of the Italian state. A sum of around 30 or 40 billion Lire [£20-26 million] was considered sufficient for the purpose, ‘enough for well-chosen men of good faith’ to win control of key positions in political parties, the press and trade unions. As far as the press was concerned, a couple of campaigning news magazines were to be bought, as well as individual journalists, two or three per publication, who would be given the task of ‘supporting’ selected politicians. In practice, Calvi’s money would come in handy when P2 bought control of the Corriere della Sera, the country’s most influential newspaper.
How P2 power could be exercised in reality is graphically illustrated in documents relating to Gelli’s organisation of a visit to Italy by the head of the Argentine navy in 1977. Admiral Emilio Massera was  a member of the Argentine branch of P2. His visit to inspect and order Italian weapons systems was organised by Gelli wearing one of his many official hats, that of economic counsellor at the Argentine embassy in Rome.  Massera was scheduled to meet five leading bankers at Rome’s Grand Hotel. Of the five names on the list for the meeting, four – including that of Roberto Calvi – also appeared on Gelli’s P2 membership list. An hour later, in the same hotel, there was to be a meeting with Italy’s treasury minister; Gaetano Stammati was yet another P2 brother. 

Just how useful the network could be was illustrated in a letter from Gelli to Federico Barttfeld, the Argentine ambassador to Italy, another member of the P2 family. Gelli explained that the group of journalists who would interview Massera during his visit would be selected individuals from major Italian news organisations and questions would all be vetted in advance.

 The questions would actually be drawn up by the Argentine delegation, passed to the editors of Italian newspapers – ‘naturally friends’ – who would in turn pass them on ‘to the journalists, of proven faith, chosen to conduct this interview.’ To smooth the political waters before Massera’s controversial visit, the admiral had agreed that the junta would release a number of leftwing suspects of Italian origin who had ended up in the far from tender hands of the military dictatorship. P2 power brokers were therefore able to take life-and-death decisions concerning the fate of Argentine dissidents, organise the meetings between a visiting P2 dignitary and P2 members of the Italian business and financial worlds, and then control the way the news of the visit was reported in the Italian press. 

One of the most curious items in the Gelli archive in Pistoia is a painting of the Venerable Master in the red and white garb of a cardinal. Gelli was tasked with negotiating an improvement in relations with the Catholic Church early on in his masonic career and he appears to have been well connected in the Vatican over many years. There have been repeated rumours of the existence of a Vatican Lodge, possibly coinciding with P2; this despite a papal ban on Catholics becoming freemasons, which was not rescinded until 1983. An unpublished first draft of his memoirLa Verita [The Truth] describes how Gelli insinuated his way into the Vatican by offering a specially made mattress to the Holy Father, a ploy that gained him a series of private audiences both with Pope Pius XII and Paul VI. 

Gelli was rewarded by being named first a Commander and then a Grand Officer of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. 

As I left, I was weighed down by Gelli’s parting gifts. Strangest was a videotape of the film Piazza delle Cinque Lune. The film tells the story of the kidnap murder of Aldo Moro, complete with a sinister conspiratorial figure from the secret services who is clearly modelled on Licio. That did not deter the director, Renzo Martinelli, from presenting Gelli with a batch of complimentary tapes, one of which the recipient was now passing on to me. It somehow summed up Gelli’s ambiguous position in Italian society: respected elder statesman and faithful servant of the enduring (inner) Italian state, or terrorist conspirator and murderer on behalf of a secret supranational power. In the prevailing uncertainty everyone remains free to make their choice, and to make him a polite homage of the books and films that accuse him. He did seem to be venerable after all.