Ratlines : The Vatican, The Nazis & Western Intelligence
In one of the more shocking episodes of the Cold War tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals and their fascist allies were smuggled out of Europe and resettled around the world in places like Argentina, Canada, Australia and the United States. Others were resettled throughout the middle east a few ended up as far away as South East Asia. They were considered too valuable by western intelligence to face justice for their crimes. 27 Million people were killed in the Soviet Union alone, 4 million in Poland, I’ve written of the many uses these fascist exiles were put to in my previous articles. They were used as spies, propagandists and terrorists in the west’s secret war on the Soviet Bloc and even non-aligned countries like Yugoslavia. They went to work for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, universities, and think tanks and were even used to turn out the vote for the Republican Party in the US. The Ukrainian fascists formed a powerful lobby in the US, Canada and Australia. In Canada for example the Ukrainian Nazi exiles are so powerful that they have placed one of their own at the head of Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland. As the cold war neared it’s end these fascist movements in exile returned home seizing power with the help of Western Intelligence in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, in the 1990’s and Ukraine in 2004 and again in 2014. They also have a great deal of influence in the Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania where SS veterans hold yearly parades and are treated as heroes. Thus the fascist exiles have gone from a scandalous chapter in cold war history to the cause of a new cold war with Russia. They have played a vital role in the increasing danger of fascism worldwide.
Students of CIA or MI6 history won’t be surprised to see them conspiring with Nazis and Fascists. The CIA has been involved in countless fascist coups from Guatemala in 1954 to Ukraine in 2014. CIA architect Allen Dulles was notorious for his nazi business ties before and during the war. The ratlines were only one element of CIA involvement with the nazis which included, Operation Sunrise (Dulles separate peace with the SS near wars end,) the recruitment of Reinhard Gehlen and his Org of nazi war criminals, the phony denazification of West Germany, Operation Bloodstone (placing nazis in american universities and think tanks), Operation Paperclip (recruiting Nazi Scientists) , the Free Europe Committees, fascist stay behind networks like GLADIO, and more. The British did not even wait for World War 2 to end before siding with Greek Fascists in crushing the Greek Partisans who had single handedly defeated the Nazi occupation of their country. MI6 played a key role in using the fascist exiles to wage war on the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia between the disbanding of OSS in 1945 and the creation of the CIA in 1947. MI6 had worked with these same fascists before the war when the Ustashi and Stepan Bandera’s OUN Ukrainian fascists were both on their payroll. CIA architect Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster had like the british been in business with the fascists before during and after the war.
More shocking is the role of the Vatican in all this. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising given the history of the Church. During the Middle ages clergy often played the role of diplomats, spies and technocrats in royal courts as they were comparatively well educated and often of noble lineage. In Italy the Vatican held vast territories and became a state pursuing it’s own ruthless realpolitik waging wars for territory. Popes like the Borgias became notorious for their ruthlessness and corruption. The church also became a vast business enterprise holding valuable lands, manufacturing goods, and eventually making a fortune in the slave trade. They would play a key role in the conquest of the Americas and the genocide that followed and would compete with the protestant missionaries in the conquest of Asia and Africa. The chance to seize the vast assets the church accumulated over the centuries became a driving force behind the Reformation and the bloody wars of religion that lasted centuries. Then came the French Revolution and democracy became a major threat to the wealth of the church. Worse it unleashed revolutions across Europe including Italy and the church lost most of it’s territory. The Vatican became as obsessed with battling revolution as it had once been with battling heresy. Then came World War 1 and the Russian Revolution which threatened to spread across Europe. If the church was terrified of liberal democracy you can imagine it’s horror at the triumph of “godless Communism.” To sum things up the Vatican had millennia of experience in espionage, propaganda, diplomacy setting up NGOs as fronts and other instruments of soft power and had been fighting for centuries to preserve it’s power and it’s vast fortune. It isn’t my intent to single out the Catholic Church as one could also write a book on Orthodox or protestant ties to fascism. Less well known are the Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim ties to fascism. American evangelicals for example have long played an important role in international fascist networks like WACL.
Eugenio Pacelli the future Pope Pius XII was papal nuncio in Munich when the revolutionaries briefly triumphed in Germany in 1919 and armed workers invaded his home before deciding to spare his life. If they could have seen into his future they would have shot him as he would spend his life battling communism and supporting fascism. Within a few days the revolutionaries were being massacred by Freikorps fascist death squads that would give birth to the Nazi Party. A couple years later Pacelli would meet with an obscure politician by the name of Adolf Hitler handing him a small fortune and giving his blessing to Hitler’s crusade against Communism. When Mussolini came to power in Italy the Vatican would negotiate a deal known as the Concordant making the Catholic Church the state religion, giving the Church tremendous influence over education, and allowing it to keep it’s vast fortune tax free. Soon the Vatican established a bank that was the perfect vehicle for all sorts of nefarious money laundering as it was the only bank in the world with diplomatic immunity. Many books have been written about the endless series of Vatican banking scandals which followed through the decades and Pope John Paul I would be murdered for attempting to investigate it. The Vatican set up charitable fronts which it would later use to fund fascists, smuggle war criminals and bribe politicians for the CIA. At the center of all this was Cardinal Montini the future Pope Paul VI who as Cardinal would be Pius XII’s right hand man in all the intrigues that followed as head of the IOR (The Institute of Religious Works) and as Secretary of State of the Vatican. Montini would also go to work for the notorious future head of CIA counter intelligence James Jesus Angleton as part of the Operation Sunrise negotiations with the SS a relationship that would continue long after the war. The relationship between the Church and Fascism was a little more complex then I’ll portray it here, allowing the Church to present an opposite narrative of resistance to Fascism. However the Church protested only when it’s own interests were threatened and there was a deafening silence about the atrocities the Nazis and their allies were inflicting on Europe. Some clergymen spoke out but the Vatican failed to follow their example. In contrast the church constantly attacked and vilified the communist countries. Worse in places like Croatia and Slovakia it was the clergy itself that were involved in carrying out war crimes. In Fascist Croatia clergy ran death camps and lead death squads murdering people with their own hands in gruesome competitive throat slitting competitions. Fascist Slovakia was ruled directly by the clergy in the form of Monsignor Tiso who was the dictator of the country.
While the Nazis were obsessed with race and Nazism also had a strong current within it seeking a sort of teutonic pagan “revival” (along with a Nazified protestant church) the Vatican had it’s own brand of catholic fascism which it backed in Spain, Hungary, Italy, Argentina, Croatia, Slovakia and even Ukraine. It was all part of a much grander Vatican scheme called the Intermarium that sought to create a catholic bloc of countries between Germany and the Soviet Union that they hoped would be united in a Pan-Danubian Confederation. Intermarium itself was a sort of proto-World Anti-Communist League (WACL) an alliance of Fascists throughout Europe. Interestingly the Vatican was not alone in this scheme the French, the Germans, the British, the Poles, the Hapsburgs, as well as Americans like Allen Dulles were all working together and occasionally competing for control of Intermarium. Unsurprisingly Intermarium has been resurrected today by NATO and the American empire as a plan to turn all the territories Gorbachev gave away in exchange for vague promises of peace into implacable enemies of Russia and it’s remaining allies in the region. A closely related scheme was the Promethean League another proto-WACL based in London, Paris and Poland aiming to unite soviet minorities against the USSR which is fascinating today because of the role it played in uniting Ukrainian fascists with Pan-Turkist fascists in the days before and during World War 2. During the war both groups would join the SS and be run by the same man Theodore Oberlander who would later be a key WACL figure as well as minister for the expellees. Expellees were ethnic Germans forced out of eastern europe (places like Sudatenland Czechoslovakia or Silesia Poland) because of their pro-nazi views and role in the Nazi conquest and occupation and yet continue to be funded by the German government to lobby for the return of their lost territories. The fact that a war criminal like Oberlander was not only perfectly safe in West Germany but given tremendous power reveals that the Ratlines were about far more then war criminals escaping justice. Oberlander was not alone Nazi Generals like Heusinger were still being promoted, Reinhard Gehlen ran a huge nazi intelligence service employing war criminals and he worked closely with Hans Globke who wrote the Nuremburg laws and was the power behind Konrad Adenauer. Thus Nazis weren’t merely being sent around the world to escape justice as their was little chance of them facing justice with the Americans and British turning a complete blind eye to their pasts. They were being planted around the world to wage war on the planet on behalf of western intelligence. The old ties between the pan-turkists and the OUN helps explain why the Ukrainian fascists went to Chechnya during the 1990’s fighting on the side of al Qaeda against Russia. In 2007 Ukrainian Nazi Right Sector founder Dimtry Yarosh held a conference of al Qaeda type groups in western Ukraine. It is revealing of the connections between the wars in Syria and Ukraine linked by threads of the secret history of international fascism threads that tie together through studying groups like Intermarium, the Promethean League, the Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League (APACL) and the Anti-Bolshevik-bloc of Nations (ABN) a key branch of the later World Anti-Communist League. And these are only a few of the many fascist groups who’s histories intertwine with the Vatican and western intelligence and which unfortunately continue to play a part in world events into our own times.
Italy is a land of intrigues and conspiracies thus before getting lost in the web of intrigues surrounding the Vatican and having introduced two of our key players Eugenio Pacelli who had become Pope Pius XII after having negotiated the Vatican Concordant with Nazi Germany and Cardinal Montini the head of the Vatican bank and the Secretary of State lets turn to the end of World War 2 and the story of the ratlines themselves. A ratline is intelligence slang for an escape/smuggling route. It had a number of key points and routes. One key one was in Salzburg Austria where both the British and American forces would play a key role. Vienna and Trieste were also key hubs for the ratlines. First the British pretended not to notice the notorious wanted war criminals hiding out in their area like Ante Pavelic the dictator of Croatia during the war. The American CIC 430th division was stationed there supposedly it’s job was to hunt Nazi war criminals but thanks to the behind the scenes manipulation of Allen Dulles the mission changed to helping to smuggle Nazis or using them to do their dirty work. Future CIA director Allen Dulles was head of a proto-OPC known as either the WDD War Department Detachment or the DDU the Documents Disposal Unit (The OPC was a part of the State Department headed by Allen Dulles right hand man Frank Wisner that carried out the work that was too dirty for the new CIA.) I’ll pause for a moment to consider the implications for historians that veterans of the Document Disposal Unit would later control the CIA and men like Angleton would have decades to destroy and censor files in turn destroying or censoring the history of the world. Many journalists and historians foolishly wait till the CIA admits through declassified files what it has been up to before they are willing to believe what they already should have known. But many files have been destroyed, selectively edited, forged, or deliberately misfiled, and many more will never be released.
From Salzburg the war criminals would be smuggled into Italy often after staged escapes from displaced persons camps. Key ratline hubs in Italy included the Tyrol, Genoa, Milan and Rome each ratline hub was overseen by a churchman. In Rome they would come under the protection of Pro-Nazi Bishop Alois Hudal head of the Collegium Orientalis which trained priests to infiltrate the Soviet Union and spy for the Vatican and the Nazis. Now the International Red Cross enters the picture. The sinister role of the Red Cross reveals that the use of NGOs as intelligence fronts is nothing new. Allen Dulles was close to people like Francois Poncet President of the Red Cross who supplied blank Red Cross passports to Alois Hudal who gave them out to the Nazis with new fake names. During the war Poncet and many french conservatives had been informers for the Gestapo. Poncet would also be appointed high commisioner of Germany and Ambassador to Italy. The Vatican received permission to send clergy into displaced person’s camps and prisoner of war camps from Carmel Offie at the State Department and they smuggled in Red Cross passports with fake names to the prisoners during their visits. From Italy many resettled in Spain, Latin America or the Middle East especially in Argentina where Juan Peron had made deals with the Vatican and nazi underground to welcome them with open arms. The Ratlines to Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and other countries brought not just the Nazis themselves but often huge sums of gold, whole factories, valuable patents, looted art and a fortune in Nazi loot that was hidden oversees. Italy was a big beneficiary as whole factories were shipped from eastern europe to be rebuilt in Italy and West Germany. To help launder all the nazi loot back to his clients Allen Dulles had William Donovan and the MI6 liaison to the US during the war William Stephenson set up the World Commerce Corporation. Some of the infamous Nazi war criminals who escaped along the ratline included mobile gas van inventor Walter Rauff, The “Butcher of Lyons” Klaus Barbie and his friend SS Counterfeiter Federico Schwend, Adolf Eichmann, and Josef Mengele.
There was a brief scandal in Italy after Alois Hudal’s ratline was exposed so the Vatican turned to father Krunoslav Draganovic a Croatian fascist as his replacement in running the Rome Ratline. Dragonovic was based in San Girolamo’s Croatian Institute which had trained Croatian clerics for centuries and was now guarded by armed Ustashi. During the war Draganovic had served as Ustashi emissary to the Vatican. The Dragonovic network carried around fascist war criminals in cars with Vatican diplomatic plates. Dragonovic had a network of Croatian priests to help run the ratlines and his ratlines carried 15 times as many war criminals as Hudal’s. Hudal had smuggled 1,000-2,000 fugitives mostly German nazis while the Draganovic ratlines smuggled at least 30,000 war criminals not just the Ustashi but the SS and the Ukrainian OUN/B, the Romanian Iron guards and anyone else the vatican and CIA wanted him to smuggle. He met regularly with both Cardinal Montini and Italian intelligence, and American intelligence which paid him $1,200 dollars a head to smuggle out nazis they thought would be useful in future operations. Draganovic’s friends in intelligence warned him in advance of any plans to arrest one of his nazi exiles so they could be moved to safety before any raid. Dragonovic was also a key Intermarium member who was known as the “Golden Priest” because he ended up in possession of much of the loot from the Ustashi’s murder spree in Yugoslavia during the war.
Long time readers will be familiar with the Ustashi; but since their crimes are still being covered up in order to legitimize the current fascist government of Croatia installed thanks to Germany, the US, NATO, and the lying corporate media. Croatia was the worst example of clerical fascism it had a special relationship with the Vatican going back to 700 AD. The Ustashi began in the 1920’s as a fascist terrorist group that conducted a wave of assassinations. Their most famous victim was King Alexander of Yugoslavia assassinated in Marseille France in 1934. The Ustashi took a secret oath in front of a knife a revolver and a crucifix. They were sponsored by fascist Italy the Vatican and British Intelligence. Then during the war the Nazis set up a Croatian Ustashi puppet Government under Ante Pavelic which broke away from the rest of Yugoslavia and was allied to muslim fascist Bosnians. Ante Pavelic was so extreme he once lectured Hitler on being too soft on the Jews and bragged about the speed his Ustashi had already eliminated them with. The Ustashi also hated Gypsies and above all the Orthodox Christian Serbs. Their goal for the Serbs was to convert a third, kill a third, and expel a third. Often those who converted were massacred anyway. At their death camp in Jacenovac the Ustashi burned victims alive or slit their throats. Once when Mussolini visited Pavelic he saw what he thought was a huge bowl of oysters only to discover they were 40 pounds of human eyes sent him in tribute by the Ustashi.
Yet despite all this Pope Pius XII gave Pavelic a personal audience. And the Croatian Church not only supported the Ustashi they joined them or lead them in their slaughters. Their crimes revealed yet another angle in the Vatican schemes which was not just motivated by anti-communism but by the desire to continue their war on the Orthodox Church after the schism of the 11th century. Popes Pius XI and Pius XII dreamed of forcibly converting the whole Orthodox world to catholicism. Earlier in Franco’s Spain their fascist ally had slaughtered protestants. In allying with fascists the church was reviving the old horrors of the crusades and the wars of religion. All while also cynically co-operating with protestant imperialists like the british who had denied catholics civil rights for centuries. The Vatican role in Croatia is one of the most shameful crimes of the 20th century. Sadly instead of apologizing in the 1990’s the church beatified Archbishop Stepinac a fervent Ustashi war criminal and he is on the fast track to sainthood.
Draganovic was involved in far more then smuggling out Ustashi. At wars end they had returned to their roots as a terrorist group now funded by the CIA in addition to the british. They were renamed the Krizari meaning the Crusaders and were waging a now forgotten covert war on Yugoslavia that lasted into the 1950’s. Their base was in Trieste. The Ustashi reign of terror would continue for decades as they assassinated Yugoslav government officials hijacked airliners, and acted as hitmen and bodyguards for Latin American dictators like Stroessner in Paraguay. Yet despite their ongoing crimes they were allowed safe refuge to operate out of Australia, Canada, and the US. They were key allies with the Ukrainian OUN/B and together they dominated the ABN (The Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations) a key component of WACL. Before being forced to retreat to Salzburg the OUN/B had battled Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia near the end of the war. By the start of the 1990’s the Ustashi had managed to return to power in Croatia under Franjo Tudjman thanks to the CIA and German intelligence. The media has maintained complete silence on this fact for decades while relentlessly demonizing the Serbs.
The Ukrainian OUN followed a similar story. They had also begun as a fascist terrorist group that conducted a wave of assassinations. During the Russian civil war during and after WWI Ukrainian fascists lead by Symon Petilura had lead genocidal massacres of jews. Today he is honored as a hero in post Maidan Ukraine. After his defeat the Ukrainian fascists organized the OUN to continue the war underground backed by british and German intelligence. The OUN would split into two branches the OUN/M or Melnyk faction and the more notorious OUN/B the Bandera faction. They conducted a campaign of terror and assassination in Ukraine and Poland. Bandera was on the MI6 payroll prior to the war. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union they followed the German army briefly declaring an independent Ukraine with Yaroslav Stetsko as prime minister they launched a genocidal massacre in western Ukraine slaughtering jews and loyal soviets. Hitler objected to the idea of independent Ukraine since he wanted to turn the whole Soviet Union into a german colony with the whole populace slaughtered or enslaved. Bandera and Stetsko were sent to a comfortable prison but the OUN/B itself continued to work for the Nazis becoming auxiliary police and carrying out the dirty work of the holocaust before forming their own Waffen SS division the Gallician SS. They were notorious for their atrocities one of their favorite methods of killing involved sawing people in half or hacking them to pieces with axes. Like the Ustashi they were so brutal that they even shocked the Nazis. And although they like to pose as brave nationalists the OUN helped the Germans round up Ukrainians to serve as slaves in German factories. As the Nazis began to loose the war against the Soviets they were forced to abandon their earlier arrogant attitude and rely more and more on the OUN and to endorse the idea of an “independent” Ukraine. In 1944 the Ukrainians and representatives of the rest of the Nazis fascist allies joined together to form the ABN and set up governments in exile for all the territories the soviets had liberated. It was a scheme Allen Dulles would co-opt after the war setting up the Free Europe committees with America’s corporate and media elite. MI6 would later reform the ABN in London. The SS Gallicia division was encircled and crushed at the battle of Brody by the red armies 1st Ukrainian front at the Battle of Brody July 22 1944. The surviving Ukrainian SS veterans and a wave of new recruits were reformed into the Ukrainian 1st army. At the same time with Bandera’s help Gehlen was running a stay behind Guerrilla war in Ukraine using the OUN. As the war ended this covert war on the Soviet Union would continue until 1953 claiming thousands of lives run by MI6 and later the CIA.
The story of the Ukrainian ratline is one of the more outrageous chapters of this sordid saga. They had formed an important part of Vatican schemes to gain control of the east. The heartland of Ukrainian fascism was Gallicia which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire a close vatican ally (and after WW1 was part of Poland another vatican ally) and they had set up a Uniate church there which used Orthodox ritual but was loyal to the Vatican. During the war they had schemed to unite the pro-nazi Ukrainian orthodox church with the Uniates but the scheme was foiled by the soviet military intelligence the GRU who as we shall see had managed to infiltrate many moles into the vatican’s fascist network. In any case at wars end the Vatican came to the defense of the “catholic army of Ukraine” as it had for the Nazis and Ustashi. Strangely their chief patron was the Ukrainian American Bishop Bucko who mounted a huge campaign to prevent them being sent back to the Soviet Union to face war crimes trials for their many crimes including the murder of 800,000 jews in Ukraine, their involvement in the crushing of the Warsaw uprising and general mass murder of poles, and even their involvement in fighting the western allies at Monte Casino or murders Partisans in France and Yugoslavia. Bucko enlisted the aid of a key ally of the Ratlines in the US and a major cold warrior in his own right Cardinal Spellman of New York. Spellman would play a key role in selecting Diem to rule Vietnam and also would lead the yearly “Captive Nations” day ceremony a parade of fascist exiled war criminals presented to the gullible american public as freedom fighters. MI6 had also renewed it’s ties to Bandera and the OUN/B while the Americans had recruited their own faction of Ukrainian fascists thanks to Klaus Barbie under Mykola Lebed. Instead of being smuggled into Latin America the British decided to evacuate the entire Ukrainian Army from Italy back to Britain itself. It caused only a minor scandal back in Britain and eventually most of them would be sent to Canada which would be a key sponsor of the ABN.
One of the stranger chapters of the ratline story involves the Israelis. Still under British rule at the time and with an intelligence service that operated both in the west and in the Soviet Bloc they were well aware of the ratlines. However instead of exposing this massive criminal conspiracy they blackmailed their way into it. Soon Zionist settlers were traveling along the ratlines to sneak into Israel and weapons and money were being smuggled along with them. It quickly involved into a full blown alliance of sorts between Israel and the Nazi underground. Soon Mossad spies were being trained by the Gehlen Network and Gehlen always allowed the Israelis to operate with impunity in West Germany. In return Israel agreed not to expose or interfere with the nazi underground. It made similar deals with Italy and the Vatican. James Angleton at CIA would control both the Israel and the Vatican desks and had also been blackmailed into becoming a Mossad mole. The creation of the State of Israel would have been impossible without this strategy of blackmail. In the US they blackmailed Nelson Rockefeller over his business dealings with the Nazis during the war and in exchange for their silence he agreed to lobby Latin American countries to vote to create Israel in the UN. In addition to his powerful business interests there Rockefeller had basically been given control over all US Intelligence operations in Latin America during the war and he managed to get Israel the votes they needed. By the 1970’s the Neo-Cons would join the American Security Council a close WACL ally which had started as a private intelligence firm with an anti-semitic blacklist of suspected communists becoming the leading lobbyist for the military industrial complex. Israel had forged close ties with key WACL members like Taiwan, Guatemala and Argentina and was busy selling weapons to fascists around the globe.
The west had used the ratlines to loot eastern europe, send spies around the world, wage covert wars in Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. It put fascists to work writing propaganda and intelligence reports and built them vast radio networks Radio Europe and Radio Liberty to bombard the world with propaganda and attempt to destabilize the Soviet Union and it’s allies. Vast sums of Nazi loot were being laundered through banks. The CIA and OPC put their Vatican allies to work rigging the 1948 Italian elections. On the surface it seemed a tremendous success. However from an intelligence standpoint it would soon be revealed to be an enormous disaster. The soviets were masters at planting moles and by using fascist exiles the west had played into their hands.
The American’s allies the British were thoroughly infiltrated with Soviet Moles like Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt. The most famous mole was Kim Philby working for the KGB , but also included a whole spy ring running through both MI5 and MI6. Kim Philby was put in charge of many of these fascist networks and anti-soviet operations and so the Soviets were well aware of all the details of the covert war being waged against them. If that wasn’t bad enough the Soviets were masters at creating fake opposition groups the most famous of which is the Polish WIN who the west airdropped a fortune in supplies to only to discover that WIN was actually controlled by the soviets. However long before WIN the GRU had managed to infiltrate the white Russian fascist Emigres in the wake of World War 1. Britain’s super spy Ukrainian Sidney Reilly fell victim to the Trust an anti-soviet network that was actually controlled by Soviet intelligence which tricked Reilly into entering the Soviet Union so he could be arrested and executed for his earlier counter revolutionary coup plots, invasions and assassinations.
Prince Turkul was the GRU master spy among the Russian emigres in his long career he managed to con the French, the British, the Japanese, the Germans, the Ukrainians, the Vatican and the CIA and eventually came to be based in Rome. He had ties to all the white Russian fascists as well as to the Serb fascist Chetniks. He lead the NTS the Russian fascist party when the Nazis built a traitorous Russian army under General Vlasov they had NTS act as political officers thus the GRU knew everything the Germans were up too. Turkul helped save the Soviet Union by spreading divisions among Germany’s fascist allies and sabotaging german efforts at establishing a separate peace with the west. Not only was Turkul a master spy he was a master of manipulating intelligence and played a major role in insuring Germany’s defeat. He supplied them intelligence via the Max network who were posing as jewish fascists with access to intelligence from the soviet high command the Stavka. The information was accurate since it was being leaked by the GRU but at key moments before decisive battles like Stalingrad or Kursk the information proved misleading and the Germans would suffer a major defeat. The Soviet spy Turkul would save countless American and British lives at Normandy by tricking the germans into moving their forces from France to the Balkans to stave off a Soviet invasion that never came. In Warsaw Turkul’s NTS were caught broadcasting intelligence to the Red Army. Yet the Germans continued to place great faith in Prince Turkul and he worked first for Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr and then for Reinhard Gehlen’s RSHA operating out of Gehlen’s headquarters with access to all the top German Intelligence. After the war with the danger of the Holocaust passed the Max network switched their loyalty to Israel from the Soviets. They were recruited by the CIA along with Prince Turkul. In order to keep Israel silent about it’s soviet moles the soviet bloc was blackmailed into sending arms to Israel from Czechoslovakia. As for Prince Turkul his final accomplishment was in helping to prematurely spark the Hungarian counter-revolution at a time when the west was already preoccupied with the Suez crisis allowing the counter revolutionaries to be crushed with the unexpected side effect of driving Allen Dulles right hand man Frank Wisner insane. The notoriously paranoid Angleton also began to go even crazier when he discovered that his good friend Kim Philby had been a soviet mole all along. The Soviets had also managed to plant a mole in the heart of the Gehlen Org Heinz Felfe who was head of Counter-Intelligence and West Germany’s NATO liason. Unsurprisingly the west’s covert war on the Soviet Bloc was a disaster with 95% of those attempting to infiltrate the soviet bloc captured or killed.
Unfortunately the west would have the last laugh as thanks to the folly and incompetence of Gorbachev they were finally able to achieve their dreams of the rollback of Communism with the Vatican playing a key role by funneling money to Solidarity in Poland. Western intelligence had bought many traitors within the Soviet Union and they used them to destroy the Soviet Union and install Yeltsin. The Vatican continues to wage covert war on socialist countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela despite the leftist rhetoric of the new Pope or the friendly relations the two countries have tried to forge with the church. The ratline was only the first in a long series of events linking fascists, the Vatican and the CIA that would plague Italy for decades stolen elections, corruption, Assassinations, P-2, Gladio false flag terror bombings and kidnappings, failed coups, the STIBAM arms and drug smuggling ring, ever mutating neo-fascism, and the Vatican banking scandals. Steve Bannon was recently exposed running an international fascist network out of a monastery in Italy dedicated to helping the far right win elections in Europe.
Almost 75 years later the after-effects of the ratline continues into our own time. Fascists openly rule in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and Croatia. Their popularity is on the rise across europe. In Bolivia Klaus Barbie would help launch the infamous “cocaine coup” fueling the rise of the Medellin Cartel in Colombia. This would fuel Reagan’s phony war on drugs and the mass incarceration that would decimate minorities. In Chile Nazi exiles would torture and murder Chileans after the CIA installed the dictator Pinochet. It was only one example of the Nazis role as advisers to the Condor Network that would leave tens of thousands tortured and disapeared. Facebook has put a Ukrainian fascist in charge of censoring the news. Fascism is on the rise around the world from India to Brazil to America. Fascist terrorists have been massacring people around the world in mass shootings. American neo-nazis are training with Ukrainian fascist death squads who are being trained by NATO and the american military. In Ukraine the blood bath continues the world remains silent as Ukraine shells the Donbass murdering civilians blowing up homes, schools, and hospitals. In Ukraine itself fascist death squads will torture or assassinate anyone daring to criticize the war or often anyone who refuses to pay them extortion as they operate as gangsters. And of course everywhere around the world there is the CIA and MI6 spreading death, destruction and lies. The Vatican, the Nazis and the CIA; the same players endlessly playing the same games forever.
Sources
My main source was the excellent Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks by Mark Aarons and John Loftus which provides a highly detailed account of the ratlines despite the authors anti-Soviet bias.
I also recommend The Secret War Against the Jews by John Loftus and Mark Aarons which discusses Israel’s role in the ratlines among many other subjects.
I highly recommend the classic God and the Fascists: The Vatican Alliance with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic by Karlheinz Deschner which discusses the Vatican role in bringing fascism to power.
An interview with John Loftus on Unholy Trinity
A classic Issue of Covert Action Information Bulletin on the Vatican the Nazis and the CIA
Dave Emory and Nip Tuck on the endless series of Italian scandals
An Interesting article on Intermarium although I disagree with some of the conclusions
The Red Cross in Haiti another disgraceful scandal