Dr. Frank Bruno Gigliotti (Oct. 15, 1896 San Bernardo [Catanzaro, Calabria], Italy – Sep. 20, 1975 Lemon Grove, Cal., USA)
By Terry Melanson (Oct. 30, 2015)
If you have studied the history of deep state intrigue, Gladio and stay-behind networks during the cold war, occasionally you may have come across a fleeting mention of someone named Frank Gigliotti. In Philip Willan’s Puppetmasters, for example, Gigliotti is described as a “former OSS and then CIA agent” who played a key role in the US negations to return control to the Grand Orient masons their former headquarters in Palazzo Giustiniani, Rome (57). “Frank Gigliotti of the US Masonic Lodge,” Daniele Ganser asserts in NATO’s Secret Armies, “personally recruited Gelli and instructed him to set up an anti-Communist parallel government in Italy in close cooperation with the CIA station in Rome” (73). In Willan’s book as well, Gigliotti is mentioned in a paragraph that begins with Gelli’s initiation into grand orient masonry.
Gelli, of course, refers to Licio Gelli, the Venerable Master of the Propaganda Due (P2) secret masonic lodge which recruited members with senior positions in the intelligence apparatus, the military, judiciary, parliament, media, banking and high finance. P2 operated like a state within a state, and Gelli as a self-proclaimed puppet master. The discovery, in 1981, of an official list of nearly a thousand members, including “four cabinet ministers, three under-secretaries and thirty-eight parliamentarians,” precipitated a collapse of the government (Willan 2002: 49). In subsequent government inquiries, Gelli and P2 were linked to the downfall of Banco Ambrosiano; Operation Gladio and the Strategy of Tension; the Bologna massacre; far-right/fascist groups such as Ordine Nuovo and Stefano Delle Chiaie’s Italian Social Movement; the Borghese coup; the Rosa dei Venti (Compass Rose) conspiracy; kidnapping, murder and assassination.
The parliamentary commission of inquiry investigating P2 specifically mentions Frank Gigliotti, his OSS/CIA/US Scottish Rite/Grand Orient ties, and draws attention to the conspicuous appearance of Licio Gelli once Gigliotti leaves the scene.
This seemingly obscure mason from the US was meddling in grand orient masonic affairs, on behalf of his masonic brethren as well as the US government, and was linked to the rise of Gelli and his ascendancy to the leadership of P2. Who was this man? What was the trajectory of his career?