The Vatican at War: From Blackfriars Bridge to Buenos Aires by Philip Willan

Author:Philip Willan [Willan, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781491707944
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2017-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE BRITISH CONNECTIONS

Some possible British connections to the Calvi murder emerge from a number of sources, not all of them as reliable as one might desire. There are corroborating circumstances however that justify paying them careful attention. The possible involvement of British intelligence in the case may go some way to explain the lackadaisical nature of the original UK investigations. Paying undue attention to leads that might implicate the secret services, one police officer explained, could lead to the loss of one’s security clearance: the kiss of death for a career in the police.

Angelo Izzo is perhaps the most off-putting source it is possible to imagine, though he faces stiff competition from the gallery of rogues who have reconstructed the Calvi story as we know it to date. Izzo was one of the ‘monsters of Circeo’, three rightwing extremists who raped and murdered a young woman in an orgy of gratuitous violence at a holiday home near the beach resort of San Felice Circeo in 1975. Thirty years later he took advantage of temporary release from prison to rape and murder a 14-year-old girl and her mother, the family of an organized crime boss from Puglia with whom he had made friends in prison. Izzo became an important witness in numerous terrorism trials after receiving confidences in prison from fellow rightwingers and then relaying the information to the authorities. But the genuineness of his cooperation was thrown into doubt when he failed to return from a temporary furlough from prison in 1993 and his role as a pentito has now come to be viewed with deep suspicion. He does however appear to have had access to influential figures on the far right and to sensitive information they were prepared to share with him because of his reputation for ideological soundness and, perhaps, his pathological brutality.

Izzo’s evidence about the Calvi case deserves careful consideration because of his direct knowledge of the links between rightwing extremism and the Magliana Band in Rome and his contacts with rightwing terrorists on the run in London—some of the suspected players in Calvi’s murder. In a statement made to Milan magistrates on 17 December 1993, following his recapture, Izzo spoke of his acquaintance with Loris Facchinetti, a senior rightwinger and freemason who was allegedly involved in Cold War operations behind the Iron Curtain on behalf of Western secret services. Facchinetti had helped Josef Stalin’s daughter to escape to the West and had been involved in the funding of the Afghan resistance with money supplied by masonic interests in Central and South America, Izzo claimed.

In his lengthy statement to Judge Guido Salvini, Izzo made a number of surprising claims that appeared to imply detailed knowledge of some of the most secret aspects of the Ambrosiano affair. Some of the information made him seem particularly knowledgeable, but there was one small drawback: it had already been published in books. Izzo’s overall conclusions, however, had not, and they were illuminating.

Izzo had spent time in prison with another rightwing

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