Speaker 1: John and I are on break now who are on
Speaker 1: a secret mission, and this before all new Mission Implausible
Speaker 1: episodes come out this fall. But for now, we'll bring
Speaker 1: you one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon
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Speaker 2: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
Speaker 2: CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
Speaker 2: in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 3: And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and.
Speaker 1: In war zones.
Speaker 3: We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories large and small.
Speaker 4: Could they be true?
Speaker 3: Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2: This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 4: This is part two of our conversation with Gareth Gore.
Speaker 4: Gareth is a financial journalist who's written the book Opus,
Speaker 4: The Cult of Dark Money, human trafficking, and right wing
Speaker 4: conspiracy inside the Catholic Church. He's been telling us about
Speaker 4: the secretive Catholic sect known as Opus Day. I have
Speaker 4: a question, so we all are perceiving this as a
Speaker 4: somewhat cult like structure. I certainly felt it was a
Speaker 4: cult when I was there. But usually a cult is
Speaker 4: got one figurehead who's benefiting from it, or a family
Speaker 4: that's benefiting from it. These founders are long since deead.
Speaker 4: Who are the beneficiaries? Now, who's the head of this?
Speaker 4: I mean there is a head of Opus stay in
Speaker 4: Rome who runs the entire thing. But like many cults,
Speaker 4: there's a worship of the founder. So everything that the
Speaker 4: founder said and wrote down is now taken as gospel.
Speaker 4: But yes, I mean in effect Escrevard, this priest who's
Speaker 4: been dead since nineteen seventy five, in fact, he's still
Speaker 4: in charge. I mean, there are all kinds of horrendous
Speaker 4: and abusive practices that he wrote down, that he stipulated
Speaker 4: in his writings, and I think the modern organization realizes
Speaker 4: that many of these practices had no place in society
Speaker 4: and in fact are really damaging to the reputation of
Speaker 4: Opus's day globally. Because of this cold like worship of
Speaker 4: the founder, they're unable to question anything he said or did.
Speaker 4: And recently it was discovered that Olpus's day has allegedly
Speaker 4: been involved in the trafficking of young girls. From recruiting
Speaker 4: these girls in places like Argentina and Algeria, the Philippines
Speaker 4: and entrapping them in the organization as effectively unpaid servants
Speaker 4: for the elite and the organization and federal prosecutors in
Speaker 4: Argentina have recently formally accused the organization of engaging in
Speaker 4: human trafficking and serious labor abuses, and there's going to
Speaker 4: be trial this year or next with four OPS Day
Speaker 4: priests standing trial. I think the organization realizes that those
Speaker 4: practices have no place in today's society, but they're unable
Speaker 4: to stop doing it because that's what the founders said
Speaker 4: should be done. So to answer your question, he's dead,
Speaker 4: but Scrivarre is still in charge. His message of infiltrating
Speaker 4: society at the very top is what drives Opus Day
Speaker 4: still to this day.
Speaker 2: We've mentioned that Opus Day seems to have people in
Speaker 2: senior positions in Washington been the right wing in the
Speaker 2: Supreme Court and Leonard Leo and Bill Bara in this
Speaker 2: sort of thing. I think we're suggesting they may have
Speaker 2: some undue influence in right wing politics, but also in
Speaker 2: our politics. Evangelical Protestants seem to be unusually supportive of
Speaker 2: the right wing in the United States. It would seem
Speaker 2: that they would be natural not enemies, but competitors. Is
Speaker 2: there something about Opus day in that it's your private
Speaker 2: relationship with God or something that makes it similar to
Speaker 2: evangelical Protestantism, or what's the relationship there, if any.
Speaker 5: Just before I answered that, I think I should be
Speaker 5: clear as well that there's no implication in my book
Speaker 5: call in anything. I'm saying that this head of Opus,
Speaker 5: Dane Realm that he sat the issuing orders out to
Speaker 5: Learned Leo or the Supreme Court justices or whatever. That's
Speaker 5: not the way it works. It's not that kind of conspiracy.
Speaker 5: The conspiracy is simply to recruit from the elite of
Speaker 5: society and have the right people in positions of power
Speaker 5: so that we can push forward this reactionary agenda and
Speaker 5: rip up any kind of progressive advances. That's the conspiracy.
Speaker 5: These people not being told specifically what to do. You
Speaker 5: need to vote this way, or you need to push
Speaker 5: this It's about creating the right conditions. It's about creating
Speaker 5: a network and having the right people rise up and
Speaker 5: to help each other out to advance this cause. And now,
Speaker 5: to get back to your question, from time to time
Speaker 5: they get into bed with like minded groups and individuals
Speaker 5: who have nothing to do with Opus Day and who
Speaker 5: have nothing to do with even with the Catholic Church.
Speaker 5: At one stage in the late two thousands, the kind
Speaker 5: of senior Upper Stay members in the US obsessed with
Speaker 5: the idea of stopping same sex marriage from going into law,
Speaker 5: and so OPA Stay basically teamed up with the Mormon
Speaker 5: Church to push to get the called Proposition eight onto
Speaker 5: the ballot in California, which was a major step to
Speaker 5: slowing down the ratification of same sex marriage. Ultimately, they failed,
Speaker 5: and people in the US can now have same sex unions.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean, you know, that's one example of
Speaker 5: them teeming up with like minded groups which fall outside
Speaker 5: of the natural comfort zone.
Speaker 3: Good did you grow up in the Catholic Church.
Speaker 4: I did.
Speaker 3: I'm just wondering if you did.
Speaker 5: No, I didn't. I was raised, as I guess, a
Speaker 5: Cultural Church of England member. I went to a church
Speaker 5: and England school. We said the Lord's Prayer every morning,
Speaker 5: and we prayed and we sang hymns. But I don't
Speaker 5: think I really believed in of it.
Speaker 3: I did grow up Caretholic, not that oh PA state
Speaker 3: the Dominicans, but within the Catholic Church are the elements
Speaker 3: of the Catholic Church. We like to talk about this day, right,
Speaker 3: and we snicker about them.
Speaker 5: So this again goes back to the cult like worship
Speaker 5: of the founder. So the founder, I think was a
Speaker 5: bit of an unstable individual, as many of these cult
Speaker 5: leaders are. His father had fallen into bankruptcy, if the
Speaker 5: family had fallen on hard times, his father had died,
Speaker 5: and he is the eldest son. It was all on
Speaker 5: his shoulders to lift family back to the buddh all
Speaker 5: days and being rich and wealthy again. And so I
Speaker 5: think he was carrying around quite a little burden and
Speaker 5: he was struggling. But his way he over ate, the
Speaker 5: way that he dealt with the things a lot of
Speaker 5: his problems was to basically punish himself, to punish his body.
Speaker 5: And this is something that people self mutilation is not
Speaker 5: that far from self flagellation, which is what's happening here.
Speaker 5: I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, and but my interpretation
Speaker 5: is that this is the way that he dealt with
Speaker 5: his problems. So he would do it into two ways.
Speaker 5: And you mentioned one of them, the scyllis, which is
Speaker 5: basically like a barbed wire. Often usually you were around
Speaker 5: around the thigh, but couldn't be used to You can
Speaker 5: wear it around other parts of the body as well,
Speaker 5: and it's made up of these kind of like claws
Speaker 5: which dig into the skin. The idea is that it's
Speaker 5: meant to be very uncomfortable. It's that breaks the skin maybe,
Speaker 5: but it's just it makes it uncomfortable to sit or
Speaker 5: to do anything, and it's meant to remind you of
Speaker 5: the suffering of Christ. So that the Founder was a
Speaker 5: big wearer of the scillys. He would wear at four
Speaker 5: hours on end, sometimes around his thigh, often around his waist,
Speaker 5: which kind of goes back to his discomfort around his
Speaker 5: weight and his issues around weight. But he also used
Speaker 5: to use this other thing called the discipline, which is
Speaker 5: a whip. Now, a normal discipline would be made of
Speaker 5: kind of cord or rope, and maybe you'd have kind
Speaker 5: of three lashes and you'd take off your shirt and
Speaker 5: you would hit yourself over the back. And again the
Speaker 5: idea is that it's to remind you of the suffering
Speaker 5: of Christ. But for it's the Founder of OBErs Day,
Speaker 5: that wasn't enough. He pimped up his discipline so he
Speaker 5: would add razor blades to the rope so that when
Speaker 5: he whipped himself he would cut into his back, and
Speaker 5: those around him were worried about his psychological state. His
Speaker 5: mother and his priest even begged him to stop doing this.
Speaker 5: The walls would be spattered with blood after he'd had
Speaker 5: these sessions, but Escrevar made it compulsory for the numery members,
Speaker 5: the celibate members of Opus Day, the kind of the
Speaker 5: elite members of OPA's day, to continue this practice. So
Speaker 5: many of the teachers were at the school in the
Speaker 5: Heights where John attended. Many of those teachers would have
Speaker 5: been numery members celibate members of Opus Day, and they
Speaker 5: are still to this day expected to do those two
Speaker 5: forms of corporal multification. So then they're expected to wor
Speaker 5: the sybis for two hours a day, you're in the afternoons,
Speaker 5: and they're expected to whip themselves using the discipline, presumably
Speaker 5: without the razor blades, for a period, usually on a
Speaker 5: Saturday afternoon. That's still ongoing to this day. And those
Speaker 5: are the kind of the elite members, the normal members,
Speaker 5: the supernomeries, the people that live out in the innormal
Speaker 5: homes with kids or whatever. They've been couraged to do.
Speaker 5: These things too, but there's not the same level of
Speaker 5: expectation or control to ensure they do it. But yeah,
Speaker 5: this is very much still alive and well within the organization.
Speaker 4: Going to the conspiracy aspect of this show, the word
Speaker 4: that is most commonly associated with Opus Day is secretive.
Speaker 4: Why be secretive? Why not be open about what you
Speaker 4: believe and what you're trying to accomplish in this world
Speaker 4: like other organizations are.
Speaker 5: Again, it always comes back to the founder. He was
Speaker 5: a conspiracy theorist himself. He realized that he was building
Speaker 5: this army and he saw it as an army. He
Speaker 5: described it in his writings as an army. He knew
Speaker 5: he was building this secret army in a hostile environment,
Speaker 5: so it made sense to him to keep it flanderstin. Yeah,
Speaker 5: like he specifically told his members to not disclose their
Speaker 5: membership to anyone else, to even their their friends or family.
Speaker 5: He was obsessed with the idea of we need to
Speaker 5: keep this below the radar because there are enemies of
Speaker 5: Christ add and as well as infiltrating the upper echelons
Speaker 5: of society, he also tasked his followers with and I
Speaker 5: guess u cia guys will enjoy this but he tasked
Speaker 5: them specifically with collecting information on the enemies of Christ.
Speaker 5: He saw this as a battle and the open stain membership.
Speaker 5: It was a gorilla army that would infiltrate society and
Speaker 5: use their positions there to one push through the agenda,
Speaker 5: but two also to collect information on the enemies out
Speaker 5: there and people that might be that might stop them
Speaker 5: from pushing through this throat. Yes, these documents were written
Speaker 5: in the nineteen thirties. These documents are held up as
Speaker 5: like tablets that Nausi's brought down from the mountain. This
Speaker 5: is still the way the organization thinks about itself and
Speaker 5: about its membership today in the twenty first century.
Speaker 2: Just hold on for a short break can be read back.
Speaker 3: So Gith, no discussion of Opustay is complete without at
Speaker 3: least touching on Reverend John McCluskey, right. He was the
Speaker 3: American sort of patron of Opus day, bringing it into
Speaker 3: the US, building it up. Charismitic guy. He converted New
Speaker 3: Gingrich and Larry Kudlow and Senator Sam brown Beck and
Speaker 3: a number of other people. A huge money raiser, and
Speaker 3: in the end he ended up with charges of sexual exploitation.
Speaker 3: I think a payout of a million dollars was made
Speaker 3: to a number of young women. I wonder if you
Speaker 3: could bring us through some of the charges of sexual assault,
Speaker 3: but of the charges against against McCluskey and OPUS Day
Speaker 3: in general, you're absolutely.
Speaker 5: Watch and describing as sexual assault.
Speaker 3: So yes, in.
Speaker 5: The early two thousands, he groped one of the women
Speaker 5: who came to him for the spirituals and olpusta member
Speaker 5: in fact, and she reported the issue to OPU Stay
Speaker 5: and they did nothing, and she threatened to sue. And
Speaker 5: when she threatened to sue, Opus Stay decided to smuggle
Speaker 5: this guy out of the country. They basically sent him
Speaker 5: off to England to live in the OLPAH Stay Center
Speaker 5: in London where he couldn't be served with papers or
Speaker 5: arrested or whatever. And there was a good reason for that,
Speaker 5: and that was because mc mccoskey had become the face
Speaker 5: of OLPUS Day in Washington, d C. And as you say,
Speaker 5: he'd recruited vast numbers of the Conservative Republican elite to
Speaker 5: OPA Stay. He'd enticed all of these people into the
Speaker 5: OLPAH Stay network. People looked up to him. He was
Speaker 5: frequently on places like meet the press. He was the
Speaker 5: kind of the go to guy in central Washington. He
Speaker 5: was confessor to all of these powerful people. The last
Speaker 5: thing Olpasta needed was for him to be embroiled in
Speaker 5: this sex gangle, and so they shipped him off to England. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: they agreed pay off with this woman, I guess got
Speaker 5: her to sign a non disclosure agreement. They paid her
Speaker 5: almost a million dollars. The whole story went away, although
Speaker 5: it was part of the agreement. He was no longer
Speaker 5: allowed to be back in DC, so he went off
Speaker 5: initially to Chicago, but then they shipped him out to
Speaker 5: Silicon Valley to recruit out there in Silicon Valley. And
Speaker 5: this whole thing went away until a few years later
Speaker 5: and the woman she'd understood as part of the agreement
Speaker 5: with elpus Day that he would no longer be allowed
Speaker 5: to go out and preach and he wouldn't be allowed
Speaker 5: to be alone with women, And she discovered that he
Speaker 5: was being allowed to carry he was carrying on doing
Speaker 5: that in his ministry, and so she decided to basically
Speaker 5: go public and to expose what had happened. So, yeah,
Speaker 5: are there influential people in other places around the world. Oh, absolutely, absolutely,
Speaker 5: almost every word that elpas Day operates, it's managed to penetrate,
Speaker 5: to a greater or lesser extent, the kind of elite
Speaker 5: of society. Going back to the sixties and seventies. There
Speaker 5: are all kinds of rumors that they were involved in
Speaker 5: the WHO in seventy five in Chile. They were kind
Speaker 5: of part of the efforts to destabilize the Allende government
Speaker 5: in the early seventies. There these days in places like Poland, Spain,
Speaker 5: of course, they're extremely influential Hungary. I understand that they've
Speaker 5: got pretty big influence there as well. Any places like
Speaker 5: the Philippines, I think they over the years have really
Speaker 5: managed again to penetrate the kind of the Filipino political elite.
Speaker 5: One thing listeners should realize is that this is not
Speaker 5: no ordinary organization. If you're interested in joining up, as
Speaker 5: Dave you think, you know, if you think it's a
Speaker 5: great organization you want to sign up, you can't just
Speaker 5: go on to the website and punching your details and
Speaker 5: get a membership card posted through the post. It's not
Speaker 5: possible to request membership. You have to be invited in
Speaker 5: so they decide who they want to be part of
Speaker 5: the organization and they go after them, they caught them,
Speaker 5: they groomed them, and they pushed them into membership. And
Speaker 5: again that tells you what you need to know. This
Speaker 5: is it's not a club that's open to anyone. It's
Speaker 5: a club specifically for targeted individuals who are in a
Speaker 5: position to shape society.
Speaker 2: Guys, you're a financial investigator and journalists, you talk about
Speaker 2: others either conspiracy or conspiracy theories in the financial industry.
Speaker 5: As you guys will now, behind every kind of conspiracy,
Speaker 5: you need money. And so banks throughout their history have
Speaker 5: been at the forefront of making stuff happen around the world.
Speaker 5: Whenever there's a coop or destabilization efforts or whatever they
Speaker 5: might be around the world, the money's going to come
Speaker 5: from somewhere. I mean, we were just talking before we
Speaker 5: started recording about whole BCCI scandal the late eighties, knowing
Speaker 5: nineties what people discovered that this bank had been used
Speaker 5: to funnel money to the Taliban, to pakistanis into all
Speaker 5: over the place. There's a great book called Billion Dollar Whale,
Speaker 5: which is about a huge scandal in Malaysia where billions
Speaker 5: were siphoned by this guy and some of the money
Speaker 5: was used to finance the film The Wolf of Wall
Speaker 5: for Ball three.
Speaker 3: So opusta a it he has goals? What are its
Speaker 3: goals through the US? Because you know, we see Project
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five which has a huge amount of influence
Speaker 3: of opus Sta people leading it and guiding it forward.
Speaker 3: So what would a future US look like if opus
Speaker 3: Stay gets its way.
Speaker 5: I don't think Opista has any specific goals. Its goals
Speaker 5: kind of shift and change according to whatever's happening. So
Speaker 5: in the early nineteen thirties in Spain, for example, I
Speaker 5: guess the goal would have been the elimination of the
Speaker 5: Communists and the Masons and the Jews, and the kind
Speaker 5: of the re establishment of the church's proper place in society.
Speaker 4: Nick Church great again, but also make.
Speaker 5: Conservative reading of the Catholic faith great again. So I
Speaker 5: think these days, obviously there's the kind of hot button
Speaker 5: issues like abortion and same sex marriage and contraception and
Speaker 5: all that kind of thing. But I think really the
Speaker 5: goal for opus day is to have is what we
Speaker 5: were saying Earlieres, is to have the right hinder people,
Speaker 5: our kind of people in positions of power making the
Speaker 5: right decisions, the right moral Catholic decisions about these things,
Speaker 5: and so there's no kind of policy agenda. It's about
Speaker 5: creating the right conditions. It's about creating this network and
Speaker 5: feeding this network with conservative Catholic doctrine, and then having
Speaker 5: those people go out and make the right decisions for
Speaker 5: themselves based on the reading of the Bible. I think
Speaker 5: that's the goal. Yeah, I think it's in a good
Speaker 5: position to do that following the last election, as you
Speaker 5: were saying. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation,
Speaker 5: the Architective Project twenty twenty five, this blueprint for a
Speaker 5: second Trump administration. He's a regular at the OLPA Stay
Speaker 5: Center in Central Washington. He gets his spiritual guidance from
Speaker 5: an open state priest, and you can be rest assured
Speaker 5: that OPU Stay's pretty happy with most of the agenda
Speaker 5: that he's going to be pushing. In the last Trump administration,
Speaker 5: I think there were five members of the cabinets who
Speaker 5: were closely allied to OPA Stay. I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 5: to see a similar number, if not more, in the second.
Speaker 5: In the second administration, you might assume, Okay, they don't
Speaker 5: really believe in these particular policies.
Speaker 4: They're all in it for power. Half of the people
Speaker 4: believe it, and half of the people are seeing it
Speaker 4: as a train that can ride to power. But my
Speaker 4: impression of the people that I was surrounded with was no,
Speaker 4: they're doing this because they're true believers and they specifically
Speaker 4: see the world as either good or evil.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 5: I think if you listen to some of the speeches
Speaker 5: given given by people like Leonard Leo and by Kevin Roberts,
Speaker 5: it's very clear that they see this as as a war.
Speaker 5: It's us versus them. It's not just a cultural war.
Speaker 5: I mean they they see this as a religious war.
Speaker 5: It's a war against atheism, it's a war against progressivism.
Speaker 5: They truly believe they're on the right side of history
Speaker 5: and that they're following the teachings of Christ. I think
Speaker 5: the Pope might have something to say about it.
Speaker 4: I think there are wide.
Speaker 5: Sections of the Catholic Church, including some of its most
Speaker 5: senior people, who recognize that OPUS Stay is a problem,
Speaker 5: and that many of the practices in OPA Stay, things
Speaker 5: like human trafficking, the targeting and grooming of children, the
Speaker 5: way that it controls and manipulates its members, that these
Speaker 5: are horrendous abuses that need that have no place inside
Speaker 5: the church. So I've got great feedback from sections of
Speaker 5: the church. Opus Day Opusta's reaction has been really interesting.
Speaker 5: It's decided to normally, when in this day and age,
Speaker 5: or maybe in B nine, maybe these days this doesn't happen,
Speaker 5: but certainly in recent history, whenever an organization was presented
Speaker 5: with horrendous scandal or abuse, the reaction is, oh, my goodness,
Speaker 5: this is terrible. We're going to launch a huge investigation.
Speaker 5: We're going to get to the bottom of this. We're
Speaker 5: going to ensure that this is all sorted at, and
Speaker 5: we're gonna absolutely going to get We'll get to the
Speaker 5: bottom of this. Opus Day's reaction to my book and
Speaker 5: to the allegations I make in my book has been
Speaker 5: to stick the finger and fingers in their ears and
Speaker 5: go la la.
Speaker 3: La la, la, la, la la lao.
Speaker 5: They just don't want to engage with the book in
Speaker 5: any way. They have monted this disinformation campaign. They've tried
Speaker 5: to smear me and say basically, I'm a liar. I've
Speaker 5: tricked them into all of these kind of things, all
Speaker 5: completely false. They've created this kind of alternative narrative that
Speaker 5: the book is all about this one Spanish guy and
Speaker 5: it's I'm besmirching his character and it's an assault on
Speaker 5: this poor guy that's not true. This is then exposed
Speaker 5: a about topper s Day. You know, they basically don't
Speaker 5: want to engage with the book because to engage with
Speaker 5: the book would involve them having to answer pretty serious
Speaker 5: questions and would involve them having to admit to decades
Speaker 5: of use and manipulation, and would involve them having to
Speaker 5: admit that many of these practices are ongoing today as well.
Speaker 5: Thank you guys having me on.
Speaker 3: It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 4: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher,
Speaker 4: and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Speaker 4: Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
Speaker 4: for iHeart Podcasts.