The Portrait

Who was Francesco Pazienza, invisible puppeteer of the First Republic

The former Sismi agent, weaver of secrets between Freemasonry, services and black finance, has died at the age of 79. From the P2 to the Bologna massacre, from the Banco Ambrosiano to the Cirillo case, the story of the shadow that crossed Italy

by Angelica Migliorisi

22 June 2025

4' min read

Key points

The Shadow Architect
The bomb, the cover-up, the conviction
The Cirillo Affair: Dealing with the Camorra
The Fall of the Ambrosian
The ghost of the assassination attempt on the Pope
The network: Freemasonry, Vatican, CIA
Prison, silence and redemption

4' min read

He was everywhere and nowhere. He talked to cardinals, camorrists, generals, bankers and terrorists. With the death of Francesco Pazienza, the voice of the man who knew too much goes out. And who, for decades, made the Italian Republic his personal playground. He passed away on 22 June, at the age of 79, at the hospital of Sarzana, in the Val di Magra, in the province of La Spezia. He spent his last years retired in a villa by the sea in Lerici, in the Golfo dei Poeti, where he was a volunteer in public assistance. An apparently peaceful end for a man who had lived through - and partly built - the darkest pages of Italian history.

The Shadow Architect

Born in 1946 in Monteparano, in the province of Taranto, Pazienza graduated in medicine at the Sapienza University, but never practised. In the 1970s he was already in Paris and then New York, where he built a dense network of financial and diplomatic contacts. He is brilliant, manipulative and ambitious. He sensed that real power does not come through elections, but through the confidential corridors of the secret services and Vatican banks.

In 1979 he was enrolled at Sismi, the Italian military secret service. His contact was General Giuseppe Santovito, a P2 man. Pazienza became the operational brain of what the magistrates would define as a 'parallel structure' within the services: the so-called 'Super-SISMI'. Not official, not transparent, but very powerful.

The bomb, the cover-up, the conviction

The summer of 1980 marks a turning point. On 2 August the bomb exploded at Bologna station: 85 people died. Italy is shocked. While the investigations turn towards neo-fascist subversion, Pazienza, together with Generals Musumeci and Belmonte, orchestrates a clamorous deception: he has an explosive suitcase placed on a train bound for Taranto to feed the false trail of Palestinian terrorists.

The trick does not hold. Pazienza will be definitively condemned in 1995. But he will never repent. To those who asked him about the operation he replied sarcastically: 'We just wanted to give the magistrates another hypothesis'.

The Cirillo Affair: Dealing with the Camorra

Shortly afterwards, in 1981, another mystery: Ciro Cirillo, a Campania alderman of the Christian Democrats, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades. Unlike the Moro case, the State chose to negotiate. Pazienza moves in silence: he comes into contact with the Camorra of Raffaele Cutolo and manages a negotiation involving money and criminal mediation.

Cirillo is freed. Pazienza recounts, years later: "I saved a life. Not like those who said no to Moro". But behind the operation there are suspicions of a turnover of billions of lire. There is talk of a billion and a half paid in black, never traced. Some say that a part ended up in his hands.

The Fall of the Ambrosian

The biggest blow came in 1982: the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano. Roberto Calvi, the 'banker of God', is found hanged in London. The bank is collapsing, the money has disappeared. Pazienza, who acted as an intermediary between Calvi, the P2 lodge and the Vatican, flees to the United States.

When he was arrested in New York in 1985, with false passports and compromising papers, he had the truth about one of the biggest financial scandals in Republican history in his pocket. He was extradited in 1986 and convicted in 1993 of fraudulent bankruptcy and conspiracy. In the minutes he recounts that part of the Ambrosiano funds were used to finance Solidarnosc, the IRA, the Contras and anti-Sandinista groups in Latin America. The CIA, according to him, knew everything. The Holy See also. One of the judges at the trial will say: "We had never seen such an organised criminal mind".

The ghost of the assassination attempt on the Pope

The mystery is in his DNA. Ali Ağca, the bomber of John Paul II, tells of being interrogated by an Italian official in prison. He describes him, identifies him: Francesco Pazienza. He denies it. But the suspicion remains. It is not the only case.

In the labyrinth of the Orlandi case, his name appears in several investigations as an intermediary figure between the services and the Vatican. No definitive proof, but his relations with religious circles and international intelligence make him a figure constantly in the background of the great Italian unspoken.

The Network: Freemasonry, Vatican, CIA

Pazienza was never formally enrolled in the P2 lodge, but for Licio Gelli was "more useful than many brothers". He frequented Roberto Calvi and Flavio Carboni. He has relations with Paul Marcinkus, the powerful monsignor who headed the IOR, the Vatican bank. He is in contact with CIA circles, the French DGSE and Mossad. He has even approached the network of the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

He built a personal intelligence system, supported by deviant services and financed by numbered accounts. It is said that he had a network of informants on all continents and that when he spoke to American or Israeli agents, he did so 'as an equal'.

Jail, silence and redemption

After years of imprisonment - between Rebibbia, Sulmona and Parma - from 2007 onwards he is committed to social services. He retired to Lerici, where he became a volunteer. He works as an ambulance driver, takes part in rescue missions during the L'Aquila earthquake, helps out in marine helicopters. The man who had dealt with Cutolo, 'o Professor', now devoted himself to the disabled.

But he has never asked for forgiveness. He has written books - 'The Disobedient', 'Pazienza's Version' - in which he vindicates his choices. "I was not a deviant agent. I just operated in a country that did not want to see". In a 2018 interview he said: "I never betrayed. I did what I had to do. And I also paid for those who were never touched".

His legacy is all in the folds of the judicial papers, in the depredations, in the slush funds, in the murdered dead that still have no truth. But also - and above all - in the way the State has accepted for years to live with men like him.