Italian probe could mean new woes for Oliver North by Leonardo Servadio and Mark Burdman D

Italian probe could mean new woes for
Oliver North

 by Leonardo Servadio and Mark Burdman

Developments in Italy during the week of July 23
have raised new questions about the potential involvement
of the Iran-Contra mob around Lt. Col. Oliver North, in
both the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof
Palme and the ensuing coverup. What is emerging in Italy
points to that side of the North crowd's misdeeds which
has never been brought before an American court and
investigated by any U.S. commission.
   The tumult in Italy was already brewing since early
June, but it became a controversy of international
proportions, when the magazine {Panorama} revealed on July
23, that President Francesco Cossiga had sent a letter to
Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on July 5, after having reviewed
the content of interviews conducted by Italian state
television TG1 journalist Ennio Remondino with former CIA
agents Richard Brenneke and Ibrahim Razin. Cossiga wrote
that statements contained in the broadcasts were so serious
that the government was obliged to look into them
immediately, and ``if the government were to think that the
information had any basis, I think that it should inform
the judiciary authority and the Parliamentary Commission
on Massacres and, at the level of the bilateral relations,
the relevant authorities in the U.S.A. and in Sweden.''
Otherwise, wrote Cossiga, the journalists who published
the information without previously thoroughly checking its
validity, should be punished in a most rigorous way.
   In late June-early July, the interviews with Brenneke
and Razin were broadcast in four parts by TG1. The most
explosive element of what they said, was that three days
before Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated,
Licio Gelli, Grand Master of the Propaganda 2 (P-2)
Freemasonic lodge, had sent a telegram to Republican Party
representative Philip Guarino, an intimate of George Bush,
announcing that ``the Swedish tree will be felled.'' In his
sequence, Razin claimed that the text of the telegram
exists in the archives of the National Security Agency,
and that the FBI has opened an investigation into this.
Razin added that he knew of the existence of
such a telegram from a high representative of the American
mafia, and that Palme was assassinated because he knew
about the illegal weapons trade in connection with the
Iran-Iraq war. As Brenneke put it, Palme had become a ``fly
in the ointment'' for those responsible for the dirty
doings.
   Brenneke, in one of his TV sequences, asserted that the
P-2 lodge was involved in such a trade. According to
Razin, the arms trade was an integral part of agreements
reached at the time of the 1980 election campaign between
representatives of the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan
and George Bush, and Iranian representatives: The Iranians
would guarantee not to release the American hostages
before the election was over, so that President Carter
would not get the benefit. In exchange, the Republicans
allegedly promised to send weapons to Iran after winning
the elections. Brenneke said that Gelli was present at the
October 1980 meeting in Paris where U.S. and Iranian
representatives discussed the whole operation. He also
asserted that George Bush, then candidate for the U.S.
vice presidency, took part in October 1980 arms-to-Iran
discussions in Paris, although not necessarily in the same
discussions as Gelli.
   Speaking about the CIA-Propaganda-2 contacts,
Brenneke said in the interview: ``We used the assistance
of these people to let money and drugs go in and out of
the U.S.A., and to let drugs and money go in and out of
Italy. We used them to create situations favorable to the
explosion of terrorism in Italy and other European
countries at the beginning of the 1970s.'' Brenneke added
that the CIA had financed P-2 to the tune of $1-10 million
a month, conduited through foreign-based corporations.
    If what Brenneke said is found to be true, it would
prove that the CIA, the P-2, and the KGB were working
together to run weapons, dope, and destabilizations
internationally, given that the KGB involvement in such
activities has been amply proven. It would be proven that
Palme was killed by the same crowd that ran the
Iran-Contra operation and that slandered Lyndon
LaRouche's political associates as a coverup for their own
dirty dealings. In statements issued July 24 and 25,
Virginia 10th District congressional candidate LaRouche
identified that this crowd is best known as ``Project
Democracy,'' a sub-unit of the U.S. government's National
Endowment for Democracy that works closely with the
Anti-Defamation League, NBC News, and elements of the U.S.
Department of Justice, and FBI, in the operation to have
LaRouche and several associates framed up and imprisoned.
This Project Democracy apparatus works with powerful
forces in Israel and Great Britain.
   The Brenneke and Razin statements are not by
themselves what is causing tremors internationally, but
rather the fact that the President of Italy has urgently
demanded that the government clear up the truth of the
Palme-Propaganda-2-CIA matter, of the contention that the
CIA financed terrorism in Italy, and the matter of U.S.
President Bush's name having been raised. Once the fact of
Cossiga's letter was made public, the shock effects went
way beyond Italy. Many of the newspapers that had jumped
on the ``LaRouche behind killing of Palme'' disinformation
in the March 1986 period--such as the {Wiesbadener Kurier}
in West Germany and the {Times} in Britain--were now
publishing prominent stories featuring in the headlines,
the mooted CIA-Propaganda-2 connection to the murder of
Palme. On July 24, almost all of the nationally read
newspapers in West Germany, and much of the major regional
press, were highlighting the story, and it was also
getting wide coverage in Sweden and other countries in
Europe.
   CIA officials have meanwhile furiously denied all the
allegations, and have claimed that Brenneke was never in
the CIA's employ. But as the Italian daily {Il Giorno} of
July 24 underlined, the CIA usually refrains from taking
an official position in such circumstances. If they do so
now, there must be something really big afoot.

             - Some signals to Washington -
   In Italy itself, the two Italian magistrates who are
investigating the P-2 affair, Francesco Monastero and
Elisabetta Cesqui, want to hear testimony from Brenneke
and Razin. According to Italian press reports, the two
magistrates also want to investigate corporations based in
Belgium, Switzerland, and the U.S. that Brenneke said
the CIA had used as a channel to finance the P-2 lodge. In
the hands of the magistrates are documents which Brenneke
gave to journalist Remondino, which are said to include
evidence of the connections between the CIA and the lodge.
   Meanwhile, P-2 Grand Master Gelli is so distraught,
that he has instructed his lawyer to sue Italian state
television for billions of liras.
   But as seen from Italy, these investigations and
legal fights are only part of a broader picture, in which
many dark truths are coming to the light of day. Beyond
this, they indicate a significant strategic re-thinking
going on from inside Italy.
   In the days in which the interviews with Razin and
Brenneke were broadcast, the Italian press was full of
articles concerning the proofs, which are starting to come
out in the open, regarding the ties beween Eastern secret
services and the international terrorism that was
unleashed against all the Western European countries, but
in particular against Italy and Germany, during the 1970s.
It had just come out that the renowned terrorist ``Carlos''
was protected by East bloc secret services.
   ``We want to understand if the terrorists, with the
help of the 007s from the East, wanted to stop the
process of change in the Communist Party,'' said Christian
Democratic Secretary Arnaldo Forlani, while in Hungary at
the end of June. Forlani was referring to the
assassination of his party's chairman Aldo Moro,
perpetrated by the Red Brigades in June 1978, three months
after he was kidnaped. Moro had been working to bring the
Italian Communist Party out of Moscow's political control,
and for bringing Italy out of the political control of the
two superpowers. What might unite the cases of Moro and
Palme is that, in different ways, they both were an
obstacle to the superpowers' global power-sharing plans.
   In this context, the fact that the interviews of
Brenneke and Razin came out just as all the media were
starting to expose the connections of terrorism with the
KGB and the Eastern intelligence services, led some
people, especially from Italy's Socialist and Liberal
parties, to say that the interviews conducted by Remondino
were a smokescreen raised by the Communists in order to
divert attention from the Communist role in
protecting and steering international terrorism.
   In reality, if what Brenneke and Razin stated in
their interviews proves true, the picture that would
emerge would not necessarily contradict the information
concerning the Communist connections to terrorism: rather,
it might complete them and provide a wider and more
precise picture, bringing to the light a dark world where
Eastern and Western secret operations were run for
maintaining the status quo against political forces
striving for national emancipation. Were this the case, it
would be quite coherent that revelations such as those of
Razin and Brenneke come up at a time when the
``equilibrium of Yalta'' is being shaken.
   President Cossiga's letter to Prime Minister Andreotti
was written July 5: right after the brodcasts, and just as
Andreotti was about to leave for the London NATO summit.
In the days before that summit, there were some
provocative signs that the Italian political elite had
decided to open up a new era in its relations with the
U.S. In June 27 testimony before an Italian parliamentary
commission investigating the circumstances of the
shooting down of an Italian airliner over Ustica 10 years ago,
Adm. Fulvio Martini, the head of Italian military
intelligence, was asked about Libya's role in that affair.
In response, he noted that Libya's relations with many
countries operated in a ``gray zone.'' For example, he
pointed out, the presidential campaign of George Bush
received money from Libya indirectly, through royalties
paid by Qaddafi into Texas oil companies which supported
Bush. Martini's charge of a Bush-Qaddafi link made
headlines at the time. He could not have said it, without
agreement from senior figures in the Italian political
establishment.
   This was a foretaste of the issues that erupted at
the Houston Group of Seven summit on July 9-11. There, it became
obvious that significant tensions have emerged between
continental Europe and the Anglo-American world, with talk
of trade war on everyone's lips. No doubt, the whole skein
of Martini's statements, the TG1 interviews, and the
Cossiga letter, side by side with the expose@aas of East bloc
sponsorship of terrorism, reflects the potential for Italy
to shift into a new European orientation in the period
ahead. That Italy holds the presidency of the European
Community until the end of this year, makes this entire