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According to secret reports from the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), written just after World War II and since declassified, Draganovic and his collaborators at San Girolamo provided money, food, housing, and forged Red Cross passports for a number of Ustasha war criminals seeking to escape justice.

Through an underground railroad of sympathetic priests, known as the ratline, the Ustashas could move from Trieste, to Rome, to Genoa, and on to neutral countries--primarily Argentina--where they could live out their days unpunished and unnoticed.

Along the ratline, virtually the entire Ustasha leadership went free. All these people were escaping--and this at a time when just getting a meal in Rome was a major accomplishment, recalls William Gowen, a CIC officer in Rome after the war.

The copies of memos filed by Gowen and other members of the counterintelligence corps, now stored in U.S. Army archives at Fort Belvoir, Va., contain a wealth of detail on suspicious comings and goings at San Girolamo. The dispatches leave little doubt that the ancient walled compound at Via Tomacelli 132 was more than an ordinary monastery.

"San Girolamo is honeycombed with cells of Ustasha operatives," Gowen wrote on Feb. 12, 1947. "In order to enter this monastery, one must submit to a personal search for weapons and identification. . . . The whole area is guarded by armed Ustasha youths in civilian clothes, and the Ustasha salute is exchanged constantly."

From a source inside the compound, Gowen even managed to obtain Draganovic's secret files, which, Gowen reported on Sept. 5, 1947, "indicate clearly [Draganovic's] involvement in aiding and abetting the Ustasha to escape into South America."



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It is absurd to believe that 300,000 fugitive Nazis escaped to South America on the few U-Boats remaining at the end of the war, or that they all made their own travel arrangements...

The truth is much more ordinary, almost mundane. It is all the more shocking as a result. For whatever success ODESSA achieved, they were mere amateurs at Nazi-smuggling when compared with the Vatican. [Croat priest Krunoslav] Draganovic's Ratline was truly professional, ensuring that many guilty war criminals reached safe havens. Often they did not end up in the remote jungles of South America, but settled instead in Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States.

Most of the mass murderers were in fact not even German. At the end of World War II, there were tens of thousands of Central and East European Nazi collaborators who were just as guilty as their German sponsors... These were the people of most concern to Father Krunoslav Draganovic, Secretary of the Croatian Institute of San Girolamo in Rome. Draganovic was known for his deep sympathy for the Croatian Ustashi, even those who had committed war crimes.

Many innocent Croatians had been cynically returned by the British to certain death at the hands of Tito's Communist government in May 1945. But many horrendously guilty war criminals escaped... The Ustashi were the first to be protected by Draganovic... Draganovic was in Rome since August 1943, negotiating for Pavelic... Pavelic's plan for smuggling network were already well advanced.


--Mark Aarons and John Loftus "Unholy Trinity," St. Martin's Press, Edition 1992, pp 88-89, Chapter 5, titled "Ratline"




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While it may be true that individual Catholics risked their lives to save the Jews from Nazi annihilation, the Church as an entity did not. Roman Catholic intelligence operations assisted thousands of Nazi war criminals such as Adolph Eichmann, Franz Stangl (the commandant of Treblinka), Walter Rauf (the inventor of he "mobile" gas chamber), Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyons" ) and Ante Pavelic (the bloody dictator of Croatia) to escape from justice.

Pope Pius XII personally authorized the smuggling of Nazi war criminals and it was directed by his political advisor Giovanni Montini (later known as Pope Paul VI).




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After the war, Gelli became involved in the Vatican Ratline working with a Croatian priest named Krujoslav Dragonovic, and it is believed that Gelli was instrumental in smuggling out Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, whose flight to the west was paid for by funds from the US Counterintelligence Corps. It is also believed that Gelli was a key member of what was known as Operation Gladio.

This was a secret operation run by the CIA and NATO that established so-called stay behind networks all over Europe. The idea was that in the event of a Soviet land invasion, if the nuclear option was not be used on the continent, these networks which would have hidden stashes of military equipment and money, would operate as fifth columns behind the Russian lines until the Americans rode to the rescue.

Somewhere around 15,000 operatives are recruited by Operation Gladio, but In fact, most of the stay behind network was really a bureaucratic farce, and in some cases the assets most likely served the interests of fascist groups, particularly in Italy. And there is another story about Liccio Gelli, and this suggests that Gelli was even spying for the Russians in exchange for their protection in him not being prosecuted as a war criminal Juan Peron.

Anyway, after the war Gelli is linked to all of these different groups, he even befriends the Argentinean General Juan Peron and becomes an arms broker. When Peron returns to Argentina after the political turmoil there and becomes President of the country in 1973 -- something he did with the financial and political backing of Gelli and his contacts -- Gelli was the official guest of honor at the inauguration; and Giulio Andreotti, the Italian Prime Minister who was there at the ceremony, said that he actually say Juan Peron kneel at the feet of Liccio Gelli and kiss his ring.

Gelli established a branch of P-2 in Argentina, and like the lodge in Italy, it included some of the most powerful functionaries there. After Perons death in 1974, Gelli and Jose Lopez Rega, a death squad leader and Minister of Social Welfare, fly to Libya and broker a arms-for-machinery trading deal between Libya, Italy and Argentina.

Incidentally, it was Liccio Gelli who basically obtained the materiel for the modern Argentinean military, including the Exocet missiles that he bought from the French that were used in the Falklands war. And during this period, he is also funneling information to the SID, the Italian Army Intelligence. service.

Gelli is intimately involved in the Calvi story, and there is a quote attributed to him that I think it is fitting; Liccio Gelli The doors to all bank vaults open to the right...





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