I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
This is mission implausible.
I'm really pleased to have and more than a little curious to talk with our guests today. Gareth Gore. Gareth is a financial journalist with close to two decades of experience. He's reported from over twenty five countries and has covered some of the world's biggest financial stories. But incongruously per Cabs, he's come out with this great book Opus, The Cult of Dark Money, human trafficking, and right wing conspiracy inside
the Catholic Church. So today we're going to begin an episode talking maybe about a mixture of conspiracy and conspiracy theories involving one of the oldest and most mysterious organizations in history, the Catholic Church. But not the Catholic church like the one. I was an ultra boy at Saint Leo's, but one of its most secretive, lay fanatical fringe factions.
Opus stay. So Gareth, welcome, and maybe let's start out with you briefly telling us about Opus Day and see if you can do it without mentioning the Dan Brown book or the Tom Hanks movie Da Vinci Code, and then how you ended up going down this railmit. Hey, guys, must of.
All thank you for having me on.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Great, yes, opuse, I think many of your listeners will be surprised to hear that it isn't some kind of medieval organization. This group is less than one hundred years old. It was actually founded in nineteen twenty eight by a Spanish priest by the name of Josimeria Espliva, who it was a bit of a lost priest for I think for a number of years he considered just ditching the priesthood entirely. He was torn. He wanted to make money, he wanted to be a success, but he'd fallen into
the priesthood partly by accident. He applied for a bunch of jobs. He tried to become a civil servant to work for the government at one stage, but didn't get the job, so.
He was a bit of a lost soul.
But then one day, whilst on retreat in Madrid in October nineteen twenty eight, he had this vision. So he told everyone afterwards that basically God spoke to him and out the outline of vision for a new organization that would help ordinary Catholics to go a bit deeper, to be more serious about their faith, without the need to become priests or nuns. And that's basically how Opusta was born. But very quickly it kind of evolved into something else.
So it started out as basically a group that would just help you to become a better Catholic. But this was Spain in the late nineteen twenties early nineteen thirties. It was a country that was deeply divided on the brink of civil war. The workers were rising up. They over through the monarchy. They were demanding new rights for themselves and critically for Escrivaughn for Opah's day, they were turning the backs on the church and he was horrified
about this. So what he did was he took this vision and he transformed it into something else, and this is where the conspiracy comes in. So he secretly drew up documents for a brand new organization that would infiltrate every part of society and use its power there to reshape society, to unwind all of these progressive advances and to go back. So he drew a new vision for opu's day as a reactionary, secret, reactionary force in society, and that's what it continues to be today.
So how is it viewed within the Catholic Church?
Now, the Catholic Church is a wide church. Obviously that there's the liberal parts of the church. The most famous person within that, within the part of the church, of course is the Pelp Pop Francis is considered a progressive, a liberal Polpe. But you know that the church also has a conservative wing and an arch conservative wing, and Opus Stay.
Is very much part of that.
So I think the liberal progressive side of the church has always viewed Opa Stay with a certain amount of suspicion, but it's very much welcomed by the arch conservatives.
Forget this right, it was a conspiracy, a real conspiracy. They were trying to infiltrate these places. But it was also in response to a conspiracy theory Escreva right Winery standard. He thought the world was controlled by the Jews and the Freemasons, Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, the Democrats and Communists and Bolsheviks. So his conspiracy was reaction to conspiracy theories that he saw all around him.
You're absolutely right, Jerry, so Escriegart. After he had this initial vision, this quite benign vision for just helping ordinary Catholics, all of this crazy stuff was happening around and there were church burnings, that was fighting on the streets, he kent to the conclusion that this was all employed by the Communists and the Jews and the Masons to take over Spain, to rip up its Catholic past, and to
basically push forward this atheistic kind of society. He brought into all of these conspiracy theories that it was a yeah, it was a conspiracy to radically change Spanish society. And the way that he began to redevelop Opa stay. He started to see Opustae as almost like a militia to fight back against these hidden forces.
And that gives you a permission. We're seeing this around the world today. When you're in your mind fighting against this grand conspiracy that sort of can give you free change to do the very things that you claim the other side does. They're censoring us, so we're going to censor them. They're destroying us, so we're going to destroy. Something I was thinking about in the context of your book is when you look at business activity that we
might call corruption, we might whatever. If you look at the history of business activity, as a general rule, money was always controlled by secretive groups. It was very often family groups or culturally specific groups. And I think that's for sort of pragmatic reasons that before the development of modern commercial law, before the development of the modern corporation or the publicly held corporation, how would you spread money around the world, how would you come up with trade agreements?
It was generally you did it with your family. There's a lot of family business throughout history. Or you did it with members of your insular group, you know. I mean this is part of the reason Jews in the Middle Ages or in the Middle East, as well as Lebanese today, or ethnic Chinese throughout Southeast Asia. I mean
you can point to a lot of these groups. And so, in a weird way, I was reading Opus day as a just an example of solving a problem, which is when you have this group that's spread around the world that specifically it hosts a bit to join the world. Little scary. You're giving up some credibility, but you're gaining
credibility with a little with a group. It's almost inevitable in my mind, that's going to lead you to financial transactions because if I'm whatever, I'm in Detroit and I want to do business with someone in Madrid, and I can be like, oh, we're in the same in group. It's very costly to betray someone within your same in group. So I trust you, you trust me, we can start doing deals that just saying I'm going to do deals with Catholics in a country like Spain or that's not
very meaningful. Everyone's a Catholic. I guess I'm forced to ask a question and not just give a filibuster. Was it was it designed to do that or was that just a result like they found themselves, Hey, we're an insular group that has this ability to be harnessed for financial gain, let's go ahead and do that.
It very quickly developed into a kind of controlling organization, and I think that was for a number of reasons, Screevaw. He had all of these grand ideas about he wrote all of this stuff down in my teen thirty one nineteen thirty two about infiltrating society and having his people basically running the government and the judiciary and schools and business and the rest of it. But the fact was he had no faults. For about the first five or six years after coming up with this idea of Elpus Day,
he failed to recruit almost anyone. He had about fifteen to twenty young boys who had recruited, and so he then began to realize that his efforts to recruit and attract people to help us Day it just wasn't working. So he came up with this entirely new system, this very controlling system, where he basically groomed people to join, and so it very quickly became not just a family, but a kind of a dysfunctional, controlling family were every
element of these people's existences was watched and controlled. So yes, you had this closed network. And by the way, many of the people when they joined, were forced to leave the blood family behind and the friend network behind the lives became Opus Day and just help us day. But he then kind of layered on top of that the system of watching each other and of controlling every movement. So it's the Mafia times ten. Because you have no freedom to even go and have a drink in the
local bar or whatever. You're being watched the entire time.
You're describing just classic cult behavior. Yes, was it always a cult or did it evolve into a cult?
I think initially he started off by genuinely trying to talk people into joining of their own free will, But I think it very quickly evolved, I think within five six years. And as I said before, he basically recruited no one in the first few years, and from that point he discovered that cult like recruitment and cult like kind of retention was the way forward. It became it was a very successful way to grab people and to
retain them. Then you had this kind of hiatus of the Spanish Civil War, which meant that the people he recruited were either killed or left or were dispersed around Spain. But then once Franco won the civil war, he then fell back on this playbook of cold bike recruitment and it was super successful in the Franco years and to come back to what we were saying before about the money.
He then found ways of of basically pilfering from the state, of positioning opu Stay within the state apparatus to get control over state funds for education and research, and of using that network to then ensure that he could use the money to expand op Stay around the world.
Let's pause for a second, we'll be right back. Could you maybe go unto the Benko popular banking scandal that Opuste was at the batum Ut.
Yeah, So, through the nineteen forties, spefi'd very quickly realized that they needed money to He had huge ambitions to take Opa Stay not just all across Spain but around
the world, and he needed money to do that. So initially, as I was just saying, he managed to get make rolls into the Franco regime and managed to siphon off state funds to help open Stay expand they began to set up networks of businesses as well, so through Opus Stay's connections with the regime, and so they set up businesses to benefit from those relationships with the Franco regime. But I think at one stage in the early fifties they realized that to get control of the bank would
take things to an entirely different level. Being dependent on the Franco regime to win contracts or whatever or just get state money was very restrictive because those taps could be turned off very quickly. But if you had control of the bank, you had control over the savings of potentially millions of Spaniards who put their money into the bank, and you could use that money to lend to your various initiatives around the world. And we've seen many banks
infiltrated and used in this way over the years. And the way they took control of their first bank was quite interesting. They got winds of scandal. It's a big Spanish bank. Ironically, one of the big bosses at the bank, who was a devout Catholic and fan of Opus Day, he turned to Opus Stay and confessed that the owner of the bank had been doing all these dodgy deals in France and if the Franco regime got wind of it, the bank was going to be punished and potentially people
who go to prison. So opus Stey got this information and.
Did he literally confess like they broke the seal of the Confessional or it's more.
I don't think it was in confession, but it was in one of these sessions that they call spiritual guidance, So that this guy had gone to an Opus Stay member and basically was looking for a bit of kind
of Catholic guidance. And this the O Stay member, took this information and passed it along to his members, and they then turned the information against the bank to oust the owner of the bank, and they, you know, over a number of years, they gradually took control until by the end of the nineteen fifties, Opustey was effectively in control of one of Spain's largest banks. And from there the sky was the limit.
Then what happened next with the bank fraud? Where did the story go?
So, after taking control of this Spanish bank in the late nineteen fifties, Opustay very quickly began to rewire and renetwork the bank to ensure that it could benefit from the bank financially, but also to ensure that its own network around the globe would benefit directly from the bank as well. And so Bank of Popular this Spanish bank very quickly became away not just of extracting money to help to finance the expansion of Opus Day, but also became a way of it became a network for moving
money around the world. During the Franco years, there were huge restrictions on transferring cash out of Spain to other and so they developed this network, initially through Switzerland and Andorra, but then through other kind of tax havens in Panama, Tinstein, Kurasau to traffic huge amounts of money, and over the course of the next kind of forty to fifty years,
the bank became a cash machine for Opus Day. They extracted hundreds of millions of dollars probably more like billions of dollars from the bank to finance the expansion of Opuste around the world.
And for a number of reasons.
In the early twenty tens, the bank fell into all kinds of trouble. Now, some of it was I guess related to these outflows to OPA Stay and Opustey's semi control of the bank, but some of it was also related to what was happening to other banks around the world. They'd overinvested in the real estate market and had failed to get on top of their problems quickly enough, and the bank fell into a huge amount of trouble. And yes,
in twenty seventeen, the bank collapsed. But the collapse of the bank was terrible for the bank's other shoholders and terrible for the bank's bondholders and predators, but was great for me because it meant that Opus Stay no longer had control over these archives, and this nauzy journalist from the UK was able to get in and pieced together this crazy story.
It seems that Opus Day got it pushed forward when Paul the second gave credibility the group and shared their conservative view. But what is it about the tenets of the Opus Day that appeal to average personnel? How is it different than regular Cathalyicism in that sense?
So I think there were two things. I think on the face of it, Opus Stay is very good at presenting itself as a serious organization dedicated to helping ordinary Catholics to go a step further in their faith and to really offer themselves up to God. And the way that they kind of reel people in is by telling them, look, you, as a doctor or a politician or a journalist or whatever, you can serve God by simply striving for perfection and everything you do, and that's your way of serving well,
you don't need to become a priest orundne. You can achieve sanhood here on earth by just striving for perfections if you're a if you're a hot shot lawyer or a Republican congressman or whatever. That's the idea is quite appealing. But I think there's also another element to it. And I think this is very much true in places like Spain where Opus Day is strongest, but I think it's
becoming increasingly true in the US as well. I think by joining Opus Day as a member, or just by entering into the elpus Day network, it opens a lot of doors. I think it's useful to think of Opusta as a network. By being part of the network, you're part of this kind of like minded group, these kind of like minded conservatives, like minded professionals. Because Opus Day very specifically recruits from the elite of society. They're not interested in the kind of the working classes in the
middle classes. They specifically go after because they want to influence society. But by getting membership into this network, that opens up business opportunities and networking opportunities, professional advancement. And I would argue that these days to get ahead in place like Washington, d C. It helps to be Catholic and it helps to be part of this help US Day network.
Just hold on for a short break.
We'll be right back. Okay. So you've got a screenvar who founds it and he's a big fan of Hitler, by the way, Mussolini. Today we've got Opus Stay, hugely influential, all out of portion towood size inside the US. So the US, you've got former head of the FBI, Louis Free. You've got people in the Supreme Court with close connections with Bilgar. Our heritage foundation is run by a guy with close relationship with Opus stain Scalia.
In the op ste.
Scalia, I don't believe he was a member, but he will certainly within the next He was a regular with.
The Circle execut right, yeah, yes. And Amy Colmbero and she's not in Opa Stay, but she was in a similar type of thing. So where is Opus Day now inside of the US? Right, and talking about real conspiracies, what is Opus Stay's role inside of the US now?
Right from the beginning, from the thirties onwards, Opusta has always aspired, has always conspired. She might say to infiltrate the upper echelons of society, because Esprievar realized from very early on that the way you push your reactionary agenda is by infiltrating the institutions that are in charge of shaping societies. Opusta entered the US in the late nineteen forties and initially it's set up in Chicago, a very
Catholic city. It then soon ext and to Boston, but before long in area, in the early nineteen fifties, it was turning its attention to Washington because it realized that if it wanted to shape US society, then it had to be in Washington. In the fifties, it tried to set up an Opus Day University in Washington, d c.
But that idea completely failed. But ever since then it's poured resources into the city and I think one for me, one kind of very interesting statistic is this OBUs Day officially has about three thousand members in the US, and as a Catholic organization, you would have expected that membership to be concentrated in Catholic cities like Chicago, Boston, New York, even Miami these days with the large Hispanic population there.
But that's not true, the largest Opus day community in the US is in the Washington, d C. Area, and that kind of tells you all you need to know about where it's targeted its recruitment over the years, very much gone after targeting the Washington DC political and judicial elite. It's got two schools, two open stay schools in Washington, which kind of servered a double purpose. One is, and
this has always been an open staate strategy. They've gone after the top students because that's a way of recruiting tomorrow's elite into the system from an early age, and
it's really indoctrinating them from an early age. But two, by setting up these very good schools, it's a way of attracting the great and the good of Washington to get them to entice them into the schools, get them to send their kids there, and then you invite them to the kind of extracurricular meetings where you know, you get to know the parents as well, and it's a
way of drawing them into the system. I mean, many of Washington's great and good send their kids to the boys' school which is called The Heights, and there's a girls school called Oak Crest, And maybe this is a good moment to bring in Johnson, your producer, which when we were setting up the interview, he reveals to me that he'd actually tended the Height School, the Upistaate School and
just outside of Washington. So maybe I don't know if you want to talk about your observations and how they tally with what I or not.
I actually think that you're attributing more legitimacy to the school, then I think it deserves as a school.
So I was there for.
One grade, one year, eighth grade in the early eighties, and I'm Jewish, So why on earth did they accept a Jew? I think they had the misconception that maybe my family had some more influence, which we didn't, and also a fear that if they rejected me or they kicked me out, that that would somehow boomerang on them. There was two Jews and two Protestants in the school, and a few black kids, so we were the outsiders. It was a year of absolutely stagnant education for me.
There was the education was just of the ne year of educating the kids. I didn't realize it at the time, but only in hindsight how many of the kids were kids of people of influence in journalism and politics and money. But it was also it was a very abusive environment physically and emotionally, and almost all the kids that were in there with me hated it, couldn't wait to get out. The Opus Stay is his members like Leonard Leo right from the Federal Society and responsible for putting three or
four Supreme Court justices in. Then we've got the head of the Heritage Foundation, right, that's the authors of Project twenty twenty five. We've got people like Newt Gingrich, right, it was the father of the American Current, right, And so we've got all these tentacles going in and Louis Free. My understanding is head of the FBI was in Opus Stay and he was close to Robert Hanson and protected him in a lot of ways.
And Hanson and I think we need to as former CIA offices, we need to get into this. And I want to talk to John Cipher about this a little bit. He handsent apparently in the early eighties actually confessed to a Catholic priest assocaid with Opus Day and said, I'm spying for the Russians, and they've given me diamonds and they've given me a huge amount of money, and the priest, this Opus Day priest, told him give the money that the Russians, this KGB bun it, give it to Opus
Day and don't tell anybody about this. And I'm not sure that's really the right thing to do. So for me, that's espionage, that's conspiracy. I'm not sure quite how Opus Day is an organization fits in, but people certainly do. And johnah was going to ask you, you've worked on the Hanson case, what was the sense of his mental makeup that he was both in Opus Day and seeing a dominance at the same time.
I don't think he was a conservative Catholic. It was when he got married. His wife was a very strong Catholic and he almost went overboard in that. And I don't know if it gave him a place to be in a place to think that he was part of the elite or something. But he was always an outsider, even in that sense. And yeah, he spied for the Russians from the late seventies when he was in New York and didn't have much money, all the way up to so until he was arrested in two thousand and one.
And that's true. He did confess to a priest in the church and was told to give money to but you know, obviously a very very troubled person. And what's interesting is, yeah, his boss when he was at the FBI for part of the time he was at the FBI, was really free. He was also part of that same church.
We're going to stop here today and we'll continue our conversation with Gareth Gore next week when we'll get into Opah Stay's political ambitions here in the US and around the world until next week on Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible. It is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
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