Giovanni Malagodi

Giovanni Malagodi  link (Politician)
Born	12 October 1904 London, UK
Died	17 April 1991 Rome, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Alma mater	University of Rome
Parents	Olindo Malagodi
Interests	Golpe Bianco
Party	Italian Liberal Party
Italian liberal politician and supporter of European unity under American guiding hand. Attended the first Bilderberg and 8 others.

Giovanni Francesco Malagodi was an Italian liberal politician. As secretary of the balancing Italian Liberal Party, he kept the Italian left out of government, a task started by the CIA in the 1948 election.

He was the third and sixth President of the Liberal International. He attended the first Bilderberg in 1954 and 8 others.

Background

Born in London, he was the son of journalist and politician Olindo Malagodi.

Career

Starting from the 1930s, he held directive positions in the Banca Commerciale Italiana, including in Germany before the war for some time. He worked as general manager of an affiliated bank in Paris and in Buenos Aires between 1936 and 1947. He came back to Italy in the summer of 1947.

He was named as Italian representative of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) from 1947 until 1953.

He was also used to advise on the economic side of NATO, and was with President de Gasperi and Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza on a visit to Washington.

In 1953 Malagodi entered the Italian Liberal Party and was appointed as the party's national secretary the following year. During his tenure, the PLI established strong ties with Confindustria, the country's leading association of industrialists. He also opposed attempts by the Christian Democrats to form a centre-left alliance with the Italian Socialist Party in government; this, in 1955, caused the secession of the PLI's left wing, which went on to form the Radical Party.

In 1957 he visited CIA director Allen Dulles during a trip to the United States.

Politically speaking, he was personally very strongly in favor of European unification, and a joint army, a common currency, and that the common currency meant a common government.

Now, you see, the uncertainty to which Stikker referred in the Americans, was an uncertainty about the pace of unification, about the ultimate goal of political unification, and also probably about the best way in which to prod the Europeans, the leading Europeans. One theory was that you should prod them very hard, and the other was that you should not prod them too hard in order not to put up psychological resistances. I always believed both theories were true; that the matter was to find a reasonable middle way. This was easier at the beginning when Europe was so poor and so weak that the authority of the American Government offering aid, not only money, but psychological aid and political aid, was very great. Gradually, as the situation in Europe grew better, there was a revival, in a certain sense, of independence — of a national independence in Europe — and therefore the influence of the United States became more difficult to exert. Fundamentally, everybody always knew that without the United States we could neither carry on nor unify.

Under Malagodi, in 1963 the PLI scored a record 7% in that year's general election.

With the formation of centre-left governments in the 1960s, the PLI was marginalized in the Italian political world, and suffered a decline that was not halted by the party's participation in the second Giulio Andreotti cabinet of 1972–1973. Malagodi was chosen as Minister of the Treasury in that government, launching a series of measures that favoured younger and more politically-aligned bureaucrats, such as the so-called pensioni d'oro ("Golden pensions").

In 1972 Malagodi resigned as secretary of the PLI, assuming the party's presidency that same year. He abandoned this latter position in 1976 after coming into conflict with Valerio Zanone, the new leader of the PLI, who was more oriented towards a collaboration with centre-left parties. Malagodi was the president of the Italian Senate from 22 April to 1 July 1987, succeeding Amintore Fanfani.

He died in Rome in April 1991.

Connections to 1974 Sogno coup

Malagodi is mentioned in David Teacher's Rogue Agents:

However, it is the Italian connections of the AESP that are the most fascinating. The former high-ranking P2 member Giancarlo Elia Valori attended both the Charlemagne Grand Dinner and the AESP Chapter Assembly; he would become a member of the AESP's organising core, the Permanent Delegation, the following year...

Valori and Lombardo already provided the AESP with high-level contacts to P2 and the group involved in the 1974 Sogno coup. A new face at the February gathering strengthened the Academy's links to Italian politics and to the Sogno coup: former Minister Giovanni Malagodi, a participant with Pinay at the Bilderbergers' inaugural conference in May 1954; Malagodi later attended the Bilderberg conferences in 1957 (again with Pinay), in 1958 and in 1965.

Both President of the Liberal International and President of the Italian Liberal Party PLI, Malagodi was an influential member of the PLI's Sogno faction in 1974 when Sogno, a future member of P2, was insisting that a coup of "liberal" inspiration was necessary to save Italy from Communism. The "liberal coup" that Sogno proposed was scheduled for August 1974 and included the capture of the Presidential Palace, the dissolution of Parliament and the nomination of a government of technocrats, but the plan was aborted shortly beforehand.

Despite the failure of their plan, the Sogno fraction continued to insist that the rise of Communism threatened the very basis of the Italian State. One month after the planned Sogno coup, in September 1974, Malagodi participated in the 7^th Study Conference of the PLI's youth group along with fellow Bilderberger and PLI Senator Manlio Brosio, from 1964 to 1971 the Secretary-General of NATO who had previously served in de Gasperi's first post-war coalition as Defence Minister responsible for the re-organisation of the Italian intelligence community and the establishment of SIFAR. At the September 1974 conference, Brosio declared that only communism - and not fascism - presented an immediate danger to stability in Italy. The judicial inquiry into the Sogno coup was blocked in November 1974 by the death of the main witness, secret service Colonel Giuseppe Condo. Condo, aged 42, died of a "heart attack" a week before magistrates were due to question him. Sogno and one of his coconspirators were arrested on charges of attempting a coup d'état in 1976, but this second inquiry failed to get to the bottom of the coup plans because of the State secrecy imposed on documents showing foreign support for Sogno's plans.