September 28, 2025 • 25 mins
Opus Dei is a secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect. Gareth Gore uncovered how it pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of the world’s largest banks. His book is: Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
John and I are on break now who are on
a secret mission, and this before all new Mission Implausible
episodes come out this fall. But for now we'll bring
you one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon
be launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small. Could they be true?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Biggest financial stories.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
But incongruously, perhaps he's come out with this great book Opus,
The Cult of Dark Money, human trafficking, and right wing
conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
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 Day.
(01:54):
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 rabbit hole.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
Hey, guys, must little thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
Great. Yes, Opus, I think many of your listeners will
be surprised to hear that it isn't some kind of
medi 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 Jasimeria Escliva who he
was a bit of a lost priest. I think for
a number of years he considered just ditching the priesthood entirely.
(02:32):
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 who 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
(02:54):
everyone afterwards that basically God spoke to him and at
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 Opusto was born.
But very quickly it kind of evolved into something else.
So it started as basically a group that would just
(03:17):
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 overthrow
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.
(03:39):
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.
(04:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So how is it viewed within the Catholic Church.
Speaker 5 (04:13):
Now the Catholic which is a wide church, obviously that's
the liberal parts of the church. The most famous person
within that part, within the part of the church, of course,
is the Pelp. Pope Francis is considered a progressive, a
liberal Pulp. But you know that the church also has
a conservative wing and an art conservative wing, and Opus
(04:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I 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 Screeva 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
(05:11):
to conspiracy theories that he saw all around him.
Speaker 5 (05:14):
You're absolutely right, jere So Escrigart. After he had this
initial vision, this quite benign vision for just helping ordinary Catholics,
all of this crazy stuff was happening around him. There
were church burnings, that was fighting on the streets. He
came to the conclusion that this was all employed by
the Communists and the Jews and the Masons to take
(05:36):
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 op Stai. He
(05:56):
started to see opistae as almost like a militia to
fight back against these hidden forces.
Speaker 6 (06:03):
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
(06:24):
book is when you look at business activity that we
might call corruption, we might call 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
(06:47):
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
(07:08):
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 costs a bit to join the world.
(07:29):
It's a 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
(07:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Everyone's a Catholic.
Speaker 6 (08:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
It very quickly developed into a kind of controlling organization,
and I think that was for a number of reasons.
Screeve Art. He had all these grand ideas about he
wrote all of this stuff down in nineteen thirty one
nineteen thirty two, about infiltrating society and having his people
basically running the government and the judiciary and schools and
business and.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
The rest of it.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
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
(09:02):
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 it kind of dysfunctional controlling family
were every element of these people's existences was watched and controlled.
(09:22):
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.
(09:43):
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 entire time.
Speaker 7 (09:51):
You're describing just classic cult behavior. Yes, was it always
a cult or did it evolve into a cult?
Speaker 5 (09:58):
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 it from
that point he discovered that cult like recruitment to cult
(10:19):
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 cult like
(10:41):
recruitment and it was it was super successful in the
Franco years. And to come back to what we were
saying before, were 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
(11:03):
then ensure that he could use the money to expand
open Stay around the world.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Let's pause for a secret, We'll be right back. Could
you maybe go unto the Benko popular banking scandal that
Opuste was at the biolum up.
Speaker 6 (11:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
So, through the nineteen forties, spifi'd very quickly realized that
they needed money to expand. He had huge ambitions to
take opu Ste 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
(11:46):
state funds to help op Stay expand they began to
set up networks of businesses as well, so through Opuste'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
(12:08):
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
(12:30):
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 opah Stay and confessed that the owner
(12:53):
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 Opuste got this information and.
Speaker 6 (13:06):
Did he literally confess like they broke the seal of
the confessional or it's more.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
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 Opu's Day
member and basically was looking for a bit of kind
of Catholic guidance. And this the opposte member took this
information and passed it along to his fellow members, and
they then turned the information against the bank to oust
(13:35):
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, Opus Day was effectively
in control of one of Spain's largest banks and from
there the sky was the limit.
Speaker 7 (13:48):
Then what happened next with the bank fraud? Where did
the story go?
Speaker 5 (13:51):
So after taking control of this Spanish bank in the
late nineteen fifties, Opus Day 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 my
(14:15):
need to help to finance the expansion of olper stay,
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 countries, and so they developed this network, initially
through Switzerland and Andorra, but then through other kind of
(14:35):
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 Opas day around the world,
(14:58):
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 Opustay'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
(15:21):
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 shareholders and terrible for the
bank's bondholders and creditors, 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
(15:43):
able to get in and pieced together this crazy story.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
It seems that Opus Day got it pushed forward when
Pop Paul the second gave credibility of 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 catalysism in that sense?
So I think there were two things. I think, on
the face of it, Opus Stay is very good at
(16:07):
presenting itself as a serious organization dedicated to helping ordinary
Catholic 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
(16:30):
everything you do, and that's your way of serving God.
You don't need to become a priest or done. You
can achieve sanhood here on earth by just striving for
perfection 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
(16:53):
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 Olpusta as a network.
(17:14):
By being by the network, you're part of this kind
of like minded group, these kind of like minded conservatives,
like minded professionals. Because opstay very specifically recruits from the
elite of society. They're not interested in the kind of
the working classes or the middle classes they specifically go
after because they want to influence society. But by getting
(17:35):
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 LP Er Stay network. Just hold on for
(17:55):
a short break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Okay. So you've got a screenviar who founds it, and
he's a big fear of Hitler, by the way, Mussolini.
Today we've got OPA Stay hugely influential, all out of
worshiped with size and the US. So the US, you've
got former head of the FBI, Louis Three. You've got
people in the Supreme Court with close connections with bar Our.
(18:25):
Heritage Foundation is run by a guy with close relationship
with Opus stain Scalia in the ot Scalia.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
I don't believe he was a member, but he will
sent me within the next he was a regular within.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
The circle executive right, yeah, yes, And Amy Colinbero 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, Opus Stay
(18:59):
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. Obyste entered the US in the late
(19:21):
nineteen forties, and initially it's set up in Chicago, a
very Catholic city. It then soon expanded 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
(19:42):
to be in Washington. In the fifties, it tried to
set up an Olble's Daye 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 Obboste officially
has about three thousand members in the US, and as
(20:02):
a Catholic organization, you would have expected that membership to
be concentrated in Catholic cities like Chicago and Boston, New York,
even Miami these days with the large Hispanic population there, but.
Speaker 5 (20:16):
That's not true. The largest OPA stay 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. It's very
much gone after targeting the Washington d C. Political and
judicial elite. It's got two schools, two open stay schools
(20:39):
in Washington, which kind of servered a double purpose. One is,
and this has always been an open stay 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
(21:01):
get them to entice them into the schools, get them
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. It's a way of
drawing them into the system. I mean, many of Washington's
great and good send the kids to the boys' school
which is called the Heights and this girls school called
Oak Crest. And maybe this is a good moment to
(21:23):
bring in Johnson, your producer, which when we were setting
up the interview, he reveals me that he'd actually attended
the Heights School, the Upper Stay School 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.
Speaker 7 (21:40):
I actually think that you're attributing more legitimacy to the
school then I think it deserves as a school.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
So I was there for.
Speaker 7 (21:48):
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.
(22:09):
There is two Jews in 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,
(22:29):
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.
(22:50):
The Opusta is his members like Leonard Leo Right from
the Federal Society and responsible for putting three or four Supreme.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
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 Standing is
head of the FBI, was in Opus day and he
(23:19):
was close to Robert Hanson and protected him in a
lot of ways. And Hanson and I think we need
to as former CIA officers, we need to get into this.
And I want to talk to John Cipher about this
a little bit. Hanson apparently in the early eighties actually
confessed to a Catholic priest associd with Opus Day and said,
(23:41):
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
(24:04):
quite how Opus Day is an organization fits in, but
people certainly do. And John, I 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
Stay and seeing a dominant at the same time.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
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
(24:40):
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 retally free. He was also part of that same church.
Speaker 8 (24:55):
We're going to stop here today and we'll continue our
conversation with Gareth Gore next week when we'll get into
OPU Stay's political ambitions here in the US and around
the world until next week on Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible
was produced by I'm Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and
(25:18):
Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 7 (25:19):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 8 (25:22):
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
John and I are on break now who are on
a secret mission, and this before all new Mission Implausible
episodes come out this fall. But for now we'll bring
you one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon
be launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small. Could they be true?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Biggest financial stories.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
But incongruously, perhaps he's come out with this great book Opus,
The Cult of Dark Money, human trafficking, and right wing
conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
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 Day.
(01:54):
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 rabbit hole.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
Hey, guys, must little thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
Great. Yes, Opus, I think many of your listeners will
be surprised to hear that it isn't some kind of
medi 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 Jasimeria Escliva who he
was a bit of a lost priest. I think for
a number of years he considered just ditching the priesthood entirely.
(02:32):
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 who 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
(02:54):
everyone afterwards that basically God spoke to him and at
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 Opusto was born.
But very quickly it kind of evolved into something else.
So it started as basically a group that would just
(03:17):
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 overthrow
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.
(03:39):
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.
(04:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So how is it viewed within the Catholic Church.
Speaker 5 (04:13):
Now the Catholic which is a wide church, obviously that's
the liberal parts of the church. The most famous person
within that part, within the part of the church, of course,
is the Pelp. Pope Francis is considered a progressive, a
liberal Pulp. But you know that the church also has
a conservative wing and an art conservative wing, and Opus
(04:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I 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 Screeva 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
(05:11):
to conspiracy theories that he saw all around him.
Speaker 5 (05:14):
You're absolutely right, jere So Escrigart. After he had this
initial vision, this quite benign vision for just helping ordinary Catholics,
all of this crazy stuff was happening around him. There
were church burnings, that was fighting on the streets. He
came to the conclusion that this was all employed by
the Communists and the Jews and the Masons to take
(05:36):
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 op Stai. He
(05:56):
started to see opistae as almost like a militia to
fight back against these hidden forces.
Speaker 6 (06:03):
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
(06:24):
book is when you look at business activity that we
might call corruption, we might call 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
(06:47):
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
(07:08):
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 costs a bit to join the world.
(07:29):
It's a 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
(07:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Everyone's a Catholic.
Speaker 6 (08:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
It very quickly developed into a kind of controlling organization,
and I think that was for a number of reasons.
Screeve Art. He had all these grand ideas about he
wrote all of this stuff down in nineteen thirty one
nineteen thirty two, about infiltrating society and having his people
basically running the government and the judiciary and schools and
business and.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
The rest of it.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
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
(09:02):
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 it kind of dysfunctional controlling family
were every element of these people's existences was watched and controlled.
(09:22):
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.
(09:43):
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 entire time.
Speaker 7 (09:51):
You're describing just classic cult behavior. Yes, was it always
a cult or did it evolve into a cult?
Speaker 5 (09:58):
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 it from
that point he discovered that cult like recruitment to cult
(10:19):
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 cult like
(10:41):
recruitment and it was it was super successful in the
Franco years. And to come back to what we were
saying before, were 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
(11:03):
then ensure that he could use the money to expand
open Stay around the world.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Let's pause for a secret, We'll be right back. Could
you maybe go unto the Benko popular banking scandal that
Opuste was at the biolum up.
Speaker 6 (11:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
So, through the nineteen forties, spifi'd very quickly realized that
they needed money to expand. He had huge ambitions to
take opu Ste 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
(11:46):
state funds to help op Stay expand they began to
set up networks of businesses as well, so through Opuste'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
(12:08):
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
(12:30):
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 opah Stay and confessed that the owner
(12:53):
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 Opuste got this information and.
Speaker 6 (13:06):
Did he literally confess like they broke the seal of
the confessional or it's more.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
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 Opu's Day
member and basically was looking for a bit of kind
of Catholic guidance. And this the opposte member took this
information and passed it along to his fellow members, and
they then turned the information against the bank to oust
(13:35):
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, Opus Day was effectively
in control of one of Spain's largest banks and from
there the sky was the limit.
Speaker 7 (13:48):
Then what happened next with the bank fraud? Where did
the story go?
Speaker 5 (13:51):
So after taking control of this Spanish bank in the
late nineteen fifties, Opus Day 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 my
(14:15):
need to help to finance the expansion of olper stay,
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 countries, and so they developed this network, initially
through Switzerland and Andorra, but then through other kind of
(14:35):
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 Opas day around the world,
(14:58):
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 Opustay'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
(15:21):
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 shareholders and terrible for the
bank's bondholders and creditors, 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
(15:43):
able to get in and pieced together this crazy story.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
It seems that Opus Day got it pushed forward when
Pop Paul the second gave credibility of 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 catalysism in that sense?
So I think there were two things. I think, on
the face of it, Opus Stay is very good at
(16:07):
presenting itself as a serious organization dedicated to helping ordinary
Catholic 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
(16:30):
everything you do, and that's your way of serving God.
You don't need to become a priest or done. You
can achieve sanhood here on earth by just striving for
perfection 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
(16:53):
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 Olpusta as a network.
(17:14):
By being by the network, you're part of this kind
of like minded group, these kind of like minded conservatives,
like minded professionals. Because opstay very specifically recruits from the
elite of society. They're not interested in the kind of
the working classes or the middle classes they specifically go
after because they want to influence society. But by getting
(17:35):
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 LP Er Stay network. Just hold on for
(17:55):
a short break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Okay. So you've got a screenviar who founds it, and
he's a big fear of Hitler, by the way, Mussolini.
Today we've got OPA Stay hugely influential, all out of
worshiped with size and the US. So the US, you've
got former head of the FBI, Louis Three. You've got
people in the Supreme Court with close connections with bar Our.
(18:25):
Heritage Foundation is run by a guy with close relationship
with Opus stain Scalia in the ot Scalia.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
I don't believe he was a member, but he will
sent me within the next he was a regular within.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
The circle executive right, yeah, yes, And Amy Colinbero 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, Opus Stay
(18:59):
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. Obyste entered the US in the late
(19:21):
nineteen forties, and initially it's set up in Chicago, a
very Catholic city. It then soon expanded 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
(19:42):
to be in Washington. In the fifties, it tried to
set up an Olble's Daye 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 Obboste officially
has about three thousand members in the US, and as
(20:02):
a Catholic organization, you would have expected that membership to
be concentrated in Catholic cities like Chicago and Boston, New York,
even Miami these days with the large Hispanic population there, but.
Speaker 5 (20:16):
That's not true. The largest OPA stay 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. It's very
much gone after targeting the Washington d C. Political and
judicial elite. It's got two schools, two open stay schools
(20:39):
in Washington, which kind of servered a double purpose. One is,
and this has always been an open stay 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
(21:01):
get them to entice them into the schools, get them
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. It's a way of
drawing them into the system. I mean, many of Washington's
great and good send the kids to the boys' school
which is called the Heights and this girls school called
Oak Crest. And maybe this is a good moment to
(21:23):
bring in Johnson, your producer, which when we were setting
up the interview, he reveals me that he'd actually attended
the Heights School, the Upper Stay School 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.
Speaker 7 (21:40):
I actually think that you're attributing more legitimacy to the
school then I think it deserves as a school.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
So I was there for.
Speaker 7 (21:48):
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.
(22:09):
There is two Jews in 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,
(22:29):
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.
(22:50):
The Opusta is his members like Leonard Leo Right from
the Federal Society and responsible for putting three or four Supreme.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
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 Standing is
head of the FBI, was in Opus day and he
(23:19):
was close to Robert Hanson and protected him in a
lot of ways. And Hanson and I think we need
to as former CIA officers, we need to get into this.
And I want to talk to John Cipher about this
a little bit. Hanson apparently in the early eighties actually
confessed to a Catholic priest associd with Opus Day and said,
(23:41):
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
(24:04):
quite how Opus Day is an organization fits in, but
people certainly do. And John, I 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
Stay and seeing a dominant at the same time.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
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
(24:40):
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 retally free. He was also part of that same church.
Speaker 8 (24:55):
We're going to stop here today and we'll continue our
conversation with Gareth Gore next week when we'll get into
OPU Stay's political ambitions here in the US and around
the world until next week on Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible
was produced by I'm Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and
(25:18):
Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 7 (25:19):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 8 (25:22):
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!