# Propaganda Due (P2) was a secret, illegal Masonic lodge that operated as a hidden network of Italian power under Licio Gelli

**Verdict: Proven.** Not a rumor but a matter of official record. A 1981 police raid on Licio Gelli's villa near Arezzo turned up a membership list of roughly 962 names that read like a directory of the Italian establishment: ministers, the heads of all three intelligence services, generals, bankers, and editors. A parliamentary commission of inquiry chaired by Tina Anselmi concluded P2 was a secret and subversive organization, and in 1982 Italy passed a law dissolving it and banning clandestine associations. That P2 existed as an illegal hidden network is settled fact. The maximalist reading, that P2 secretly controlled the whole of Italy and masterminded every dark event of the era, runs well past what the record establishes.

Category: Secret Societies & Power · Era: 1970s–1980s · First circulated: The lodge operated clandestinely through the 1970s; its existence and membership became public in May 1981 after the March 1981 seizure of Gelli's rolls · Believed by: A mainstream, cross-partisan consensus rather than a fringe following: the core account rests on Italy's own courts and a parliamentary commission, and is treated as established history across the Italian political spectrum
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/propaganda-due-p2

## Summary
Propaganda Due, universally shortened to P2, began as a regular lodge under Italy's main Masonic body, the Grande Oriente d'Italia. Under the venerable master Licio Gelli, a former fascist with a talent for cultivating the powerful, it mutated in the 1970s into something the law did not allow: a covert lodge whose members were kept secret even from other Masons, binding together figures across the state and the private economy. In March 1981 magistrates investigating the fugitive financier Michele Sindona raided Gelli's Villa Wanda near Arezzo and seized a list of about 962 members. The roll named 44 members of parliament, three of them cabinet ministers, the chiefs of all three Italian secret services, roughly 200 senior military and police officers, bankers, industrialists, and newspaper editors, along with the Banco Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi and a not-yet-political Silvio Berlusconi. The disclosure brought down the Forlani government. A parliamentary commission of inquiry led by the Christian Democrat Tina Anselmi spent years on the affair and concluded that P2 was a secret and subversive organization; a 1982 law dissolved it and outlawed clandestine associations. This case file separates the documented record (the lodge, the seized list, its political programme, the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, the commission's verdict, and the ban) from the far larger claim that P2 was an all-controlling puppet-master behind Italian life. The first is substantiated. The second is not.

## The claim
That Propaganda Due was not an ordinary Masonic lodge but a clandestine, illegal power network: a secret organization run by Licio Gelli that enrolled ministers, spy chiefs, generals, judges, bankers, and journalists, kept its own membership hidden, pursued a written plan to reshape the Italian state along authoritarian lines, and was entangled with the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the death of Roberto Calvi, amounting in the strongest versions of the claim to a hidden second government steering the country from the shadows.

## Origin and timeline
- 1877: A lodge named Propaganda is chartered in Turin under the Grande Oriente d'Italia, Italy's principal Masonic obedience. It caters discreetly to establishment figures who prefer not to attend an ordinary lodge in public. This is the distant institutional ancestor of the later P2.
- 1945: The lodge is reconstituted after the war as Raggruppamento Gelli - P2. Licio Gelli, a former Blackshirt who had fought for Franco in Spain and served the Italian Social Republic, is brought into Masonry and begins his rise inside it.
- 1970s: Gelli, now the lodge's venerable master, transforms P2 into a clandestine body. Members are recruited individually and kept secret even from the wider Grande Oriente, and the lodge draws in officials from across the military, intelligence, government, finance, and the press.
- 1976: The lodge's political programme, later titled the Piano di Rinascita Democratica (Plan for Democratic Rebirth), is drafted around this time. It sets out steps to bring parties, parliament, the press, unions, and the judiciary under quiet control, naming the Communist Party and the trade unions as the adversaries to be broken.
- 1981-03-17: Milanese magistrates investigating the banker Michele Sindona order a search of Gelli's Villa Wanda near Arezzo. In his safe they find a membership list of roughly 962 names, along with dossiers and documents.
- 1981-05: The list is made public. It names 44 parliamentarians including three cabinet ministers, the heads of all three intelligence services, about 200 senior officers of the armed forces and police, dozens of bankers and industrialists, and prominent editors. Within days the coalition government of Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani collapses.
- 1981-07: The Piano di Rinascita Democratica and an accompanying memorandum are recovered, reportedly hidden in a false bottom of a suitcase belonging to Gelli's daughter, giving investigators the lodge's stated aims in its own words.
- 1982-01-25: Parliament passes Law No. 17, which dissolves P2 and criminalizes secret associations that interfere with the workings of public institutions. It becomes known as the Anselmi Law. P2 is formally outlawed.
- 1982-06: Banco Ambrosiano collapses with some 1.4 billion dollars missing, and its chairman Roberto Calvi, a P2 member, is found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. The failure links the lodge scandal to one of the era's most notorious financial and criminal affairs.
- 1984-07: The parliamentary commission of inquiry chaired by Tina Anselmi delivers its final report. It authenticates the membership list with few exceptions and concludes that P2 was a secret, subversive organization that had penetrated the institutions of the state.
- 1992-2015: Gelli is convicted in 1992 of fraud in connection with the Banco Ambrosiano collapse and is separately convicted over the obstruction of the Bologna bombing investigation. He evades most of his sentences and dies at Villa Wanda in December 2015, aged 96, describing himself to the end as a fascist.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: P2 was a genuinely secret, illegal lodge, not merely a discreet but lawful Masonic body.
  Evidence: Established. Regular Masonry in Italy operates under published charters, and secret associations that shield their membership are incompatible with Article 18 of the Italian Constitution. P2 under Gelli kept its rolls hidden even from the Grande Oriente d'Italia, which suspended and then expelled the lodge. Parliament confirmed the point in law: the 1982 Anselmi Law dissolved P2 by name and made clandestine associations of this kind illegal. The secrecy is not an allegation; it is the reason the lodge was banned.
- Claim: The 1981 membership list really did reach into the commanding heights of the Italian state.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the seized document itself and by the parliamentary commission that authenticated it. The roll of roughly 962 names included 44 members of parliament, three of them serving ministers, the directors of the SISMI, SISDE, and CESIS intelligence bodies, around 200 senior military and police officers including a dozen Carabinieri generals, and a long list of bankers, industrialists, and editors. Roberto Calvi and a young Silvio Berlusconi were on it. The reach of the list is a matter of record, not inference.
- Claim: P2 had a written plan to reshape Italian democracy along authoritarian lines.
  Evidence: Documented. The Piano di Rinascita Democratica, recovered in 1981, laid out a programme to capture the levers of public opinion and government: consolidating the press and television, weakening the unions, disciplining the parties and the magistracy, and eventually rewriting parts of the constitution, with the Communist Party and organized labor cast as the enemy. The commission treated the plan as authentic and central. What the document proves is intent and design; it does not by itself prove that the plan was carried out to completion.
- Claim: P2 was tied to the Banco Ambrosiano collapse and the death of Roberto Calvi.
  Evidence: Proven in outline, unresolved in detail. Calvi was a P2 member, his bank failed in 1982 with roughly 1.4 billion dollars missing through offshore entities, and Gelli was later convicted of fraud connected to that collapse. The financial links between the lodge, the bank, and its money are firmly documented. The precise circumstances of Calvi's death, by contrast, were never conclusively settled: Italian courts came to treat it as a murder but acquitted everyone tried for it, a separate question this site rates on its own.
- Claim: An official Italian inquiry concluded that P2 was subversive, not just embarrassing.
  Evidence: Correct. The commission of inquiry chaired by Tina Anselmi, after years of hearings and document review, described P2 as a secret and subversive organization that had built a system of hidden influence across the institutions of the republic. This was the finding of a parliamentary body, not of a single journalist or prosecutor, which is what gives the core account its unusual solidity. The commission members did not all agree on how far the lodge's ambitions had been realized, and filed differing emphases.
- Claim: P2 secretly ran Italy and was the hidden hand behind the terrorism of the Years of Lead.
  Evidence: This is the maximalist claim, and it is where the evidence thins. That P2 was subversive, well connected, and dangerous is established; that it functioned as an omnipotent shadow government directing coups, bombings, and every scandal of the period is not. Gelli was convicted of obstructing the investigation into the 1980 Bologna station bombing, which is a serious documented fact, but that is a conviction for a cover-up, not proof that the lodge planned the attack. Courts and historians have tied P2 to specific abuses; they have not demonstrated the single all-controlling conspiracy that the popular version imagines.

## Why people believe it
- Because the foundation is not speculation but official record. A membership list was seized by magistrates, a parliamentary commission authenticated it, and parliament passed a law to dissolve the lodge. When the core of a conspiracy story is confirmed by the state's own institutions, every darker embellishment inherits an air of credibility it has not necessarily earned.
- The membership genuinely was extraordinary. Spy chiefs, generals, ministers, and bankers really were on one secret list answering, at least nominally, to one man in a Tuscan villa. A network that real and that senior makes it easy to believe there was nothing it could not reach.
- The lodge's own written plan reads like a blueprint for capturing a democracy. Because the Piano di Rinascita Democratica exists and says what it says, readers reasonably ask how much of it came true, and the gap between a stated ambition and a proven outcome is where a maximalist theory takes root.
- The surrounding events were lurid and partly unsolved. A collapsed bank, a banker hanged under a London bridge, the terror of the Years of Lead, and a fugitive fascist grandmaster fleeing across continents form a backdrop so dark that a single hidden hand behind all of it feels like the natural, tidy explanation.
- Gelli largely escaped punishment. He fled, broke out of a Swiss prison, and died in comfort having served little real time, which invites the suspicion that he was protected, and protection by unseen powers is exactly what the theory predicts.

## Open questions
- How far the Piano di Rinascita Democratica was actually implemented, as opposed to merely written, remains debated. The document is authentic and its aims are plain, but tracing which of its goals were achieved, by P2 as such rather than by the ordinary drift of Italian politics, is a genuinely hard historical question that the commission itself did not answer with a single verdict.
- The lodge's precise role, if any, in the terrorism of the Years of Lead is not settled. Gelli's conviction for obstructing the Bologna bombing inquiry is documented, but a direct, proven chain of command from P2 to the planning of specific mass-casualty attacks has never been established, and honest accounts distinguish a cover-up from authorship.
- How complete the seized membership list was is itself uncertain. Investigators found roughly 962 names in one safe, and it has never been conclusively determined whether that roll was exhaustive, whether more senior names were withheld or destroyed, or how many affiliates were never written down at all.
- The full extent of P2's foreign and intelligence entanglements is only partly mapped. Connections have been alleged to Cold War intelligence networks and to figures across South America, where Gelli had deep ties, but the documentary record supporting the widest versions of those links is fragmentary rather than conclusive.

## Sources
- Propaganda Due, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due
- Licio Gelli, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licio_Gelli
- Official Report Verifies Role Of Italy's 'Secret Government', The Washington Post (1984): https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/07/07/official-report-verifies-role-of-italys-secret-government/c530b0ba-4e4c-4958-88a8-f2303874a148/
- Murky masonic leader Licio Gelli dies, SWI swissinfo.ch (2015): https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-bank-accounts_murky-masonic-leader-licio-gelli-dies/41844126
- Licio Gelli, 96; Italian financier and colorful leader of political-industrial cabal, The Boston Globe (2015): https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/12/23/licio-gelli-italian-financier-and-cabal-leader/aCIZTb2IcLyTLZxio9g7ZO/story.html
- Italy's shadowy masonic leader dies aged 96, The Local (Italy) (2015): https://www.thelocal.it/20151216/controversial-p2-masonic-leader-dies-in-italy
- Piano di rinascita democratica, Wikipedia (Italian): https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_di_rinascita_democratica
- Banco Ambrosiano, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banco_Ambrosiano

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/propaganda-due-p2