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
Speaker 1: be launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
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 1: And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
Speaker 1: and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
Speaker 1: our adversaries.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories large and small. Could they be true?
Speaker 1: Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2: This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 3: I'm really pleased to have and more than a little
Speaker 3: curious to talk with our guests today. Gareth Gore Gareth
Speaker 3: is a financial journalist with close to two decades of experience.
Speaker 3: He's reported from over twenty five countries and has covered
Speaker 3: some of the world's.
Speaker 1: Biggest financial stories.
Speaker 4: But incongruously, perhaps he's come out with this great book Opus,
Speaker 4: The Cult of Dark Money, human trafficking, and right wing
Speaker 4: conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1: So today we're going to begin an episode talking maybe
Speaker 1: about a mixture of conspiracy and conspiracy theories involving one
Speaker 1: of the oldest and most mysterious organizations in history, the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church, but not the Catholic Church like the one
Speaker 1: I was an ultra boy at Saint Leo's, but one
Speaker 1: of its most secretive, lay fanatical fringe factions, Opus Day.
Speaker 1: So Gareth, welcome, and maybe let's start out with you
Speaker 1: briefly telling us about Opus Day and see if you
Speaker 1: can do it without mentioning the Dan Brown book or
Speaker 1: the Tom Hanks movie Da Vinci Code, and then how
Speaker 1: you ended up going down this rabbit hole.
Speaker 5: Hey, guys, must little thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1: It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 5: Great. Yes, Opus, I think many of your listeners will
Speaker 5: be surprised to hear that it isn't some kind of
Speaker 5: medi organization. This group is less than one hundred years old.
Speaker 5: It was actually founded in nineteen twenty eight by a
Speaker 5: Spanish priest by the name of Jasimeria Escliva who he
Speaker 5: was a bit of a lost priest. I think for
Speaker 5: a number of years he considered just ditching the priesthood entirely.
Speaker 5: He was torn. He wanted to make money, he wanted
Speaker 5: to be a success, but he'd fallen into the priesthood
Speaker 5: partly by accident. He applied for a bunch of jobs.
Speaker 5: He tried to become a civil servant who work for
Speaker 5: the government at one stage, but didn't get the job.
Speaker 5: So he was a bit of a lost soul. But
Speaker 5: then one day, whilst on retreat in Madrid in October
Speaker 5: nineteen twenty eight, he had this vision. So he told
Speaker 5: everyone afterwards that basically God spoke to him and at
Speaker 5: the outline of vision for a new organization that would
Speaker 5: help ordinary Catholics to go a bit deeper, to be
Speaker 5: more serious about their faith without the need to become
Speaker 5: priests or nuns. And that's basically how Opusto was born.
Speaker 5: But very quickly it kind of evolved into something else.
Speaker 5: So it started as basically a group that would just
Speaker 5: help you to become a better Catholic. But this was
Speaker 5: Spain in the late nineteen twenties early nineteen thirties. It
Speaker 5: was a country that was deeply divided, on the brink
Speaker 5: of civil war. The workers were rising up, they overthrow
Speaker 5: the monarchy. They were demanding new rights for themselves and
Speaker 5: critically for Escrivaughn. For Opah's day, they were turning the
Speaker 5: backs on the Church, and he was horrified about this.
Speaker 5: So what he did was he took this vision and
Speaker 5: he transformed it into something else. And this is where
Speaker 5: the conspiracy comes in. So he secretly drew up documents
Speaker 5: for a brand new organization that would infiltrate every part
Speaker 5: of society and use its power there to reshape society,
Speaker 5: to unwind all of these progressive advances and to go back.
Speaker 5: So he drew a new vision for Opu's day as
Speaker 5: a reactionary secret, reactionary force in society, and that's what
Speaker 5: it continues to be today.
Speaker 2: So how is it viewed within the Catholic Church.
Speaker 5: Now the Catholic which is a wide church, obviously that's
Speaker 5: the liberal parts of the church. The most famous person
Speaker 5: within that part, within the part of the church, of course,
Speaker 5: is the Pelp. Pope Francis is considered a progressive, a
Speaker 5: liberal Pulp. But you know that the church also has
Speaker 5: a conservative wing and an art conservative wing, and Opus
Speaker 5: Stay is very much part of that. So I think
Speaker 5: the liberal progressive side of the church has always viewed
Speaker 5: Opa Stay with a certain amount of suspicion, but it's
Speaker 5: very much welcomed by the arch conservatives.
Speaker 1: I forget this right. It was a conspiracy, a real conspiracy.
Speaker 1: They were trying to infiltrate these places. But it was
Speaker 1: also in response to a conspiracy theory Screeva right Winery standard.
Speaker 1: He thought the world was controlled by the Jews and
Speaker 1: the Freemasons, Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, the
Speaker 1: Democrats and Communists and Bolsheviks. So his conspiracy was reaction
Speaker 1: to conspiracy theories that he saw all around him.
Speaker 5: You're absolutely right, jere So Escrigart. After he had this
Speaker 5: initial vision, this quite benign vision for just helping ordinary Catholics,
Speaker 5: all of this crazy stuff was happening around him. There
Speaker 5: were church burnings, that was fighting on the streets. He
Speaker 5: came to the conclusion that this was all employed by
Speaker 5: the Communists and the Jews and the Masons to take
Speaker 5: over Spain, to rip up its Catholic past, and to
Speaker 5: basically push forward this atheistic kind of society. He brought
Speaker 5: into all of these conspiracy theories that it was a yeah,
Speaker 5: it was a conspiracy to radically change Spanish society, and
Speaker 5: the way that he began to redevelop op Stai. He
Speaker 5: started to see opistae as almost like a militia to
Speaker 5: fight back against these hidden forces.
Speaker 6: And that gives you a permission. We're seeing this around
Speaker 6: the world today. When you're in your mind fighting against
Speaker 6: this grand conspiracy, that sort of can give you free
Speaker 6: change to do the very things that you claim the
Speaker 6: other side does. They're censoring us, so we're going to
Speaker 6: censor them. They're destroying us, so we're going to destroy.
Speaker 6: Something I was thinking about in the context of your
Speaker 6: book is when you look at business activity that we
Speaker 6: might call corruption, we might call whatever. If you look
Speaker 6: at the history of business activity as a general rule,
Speaker 6: money was always controlled by secretive groups. It was very
Speaker 6: often family groups or culturally specific groups. And I think
Speaker 6: that's for sort of pragmatic reasons that before the development
Speaker 6: of modern commercial law, before the development of the modern
Speaker 6: corporation or the publicly held corporation, how would you spread
Speaker 6: money around the world, how would you come up with
Speaker 6: trade agreements? It was generally you did it with your family.
Speaker 6: There's a lot of family business throughout history, or you
Speaker 6: did it with members of your insular group, you know.
Speaker 6: I mean this is part of the reason Jews in
Speaker 6: the Middle Ages or in the Middle East, as well
Speaker 6: as Lebanese today or ethnic Chinese throughout Southeast Asia. I mean,
Speaker 6: you can point to a lot of these groups. And
Speaker 6: so in a weird way, I was reading Opus Day
Speaker 6: as a just an example of solving a problem, which
Speaker 6: is when you have this group that's spread around the
Speaker 6: world that specifically it costs a bit to join the world.
Speaker 6: It's a little scary you're giving up some credibility, but
Speaker 6: you're gaining credibility with a little with a group. It's
Speaker 6: almost inevitable in my mind, that's going to lead you
Speaker 6: to financial transactions because if I'm whatever, I'm in Detroit
Speaker 6: and I want to do business with someone in Madrid,
Speaker 6: and I can be like, oh, we're in the same
Speaker 6: in group. It's very costly to betray someone within your
Speaker 6: same in group. So I trust you, you trust me,
Speaker 6: we can start doing deals that just saying I'm going
Speaker 6: to do deals with Catholics in a country like Spain
Speaker 6: or that's not very meaningful.
Speaker 2: Everyone's a Catholic.
Speaker 6: I guess I'm forced to ask a question and not
Speaker 6: just give a filibuster. Was it was it designed to
Speaker 6: do that? Or was that just a result like they
Speaker 6: found themselves. Hey, we're an insular group that has this
Speaker 6: ability to be harnessed for financial gain, Let's go ahead
Speaker 6: and do that.
Speaker 5: It very quickly developed into a kind of controlling organization,
Speaker 5: and I think that was for a number of reasons.
Speaker 5: Screeve Art. He had all these grand ideas about he
Speaker 5: wrote all of this stuff down in nineteen thirty one
Speaker 5: nineteen thirty two, about infiltrating society and having his people
Speaker 5: basically running the government and the judiciary and schools and
Speaker 5: business and.
Speaker 2: The rest of it.
Speaker 5: But the fact was he had no faults. For about
Speaker 5: the first five or six years after coming up with
Speaker 5: this idea of elpus Day, he failed to recruit almost anyone.
Speaker 5: He had about fifteen to twenty young boys who had recruited,
Speaker 5: and so he then began to realize that his efforts
Speaker 5: to recruit and attract people to help us Day it
Speaker 5: just wasn't working. So he came up with this entirely
Speaker 5: new system, this very controlling system where he basically groomed
Speaker 5: people to join, and so it very quickly became not
Speaker 5: just a family, but it kind of dysfunctional controlling family
Speaker 5: were every element of these people's existences was watched and controlled.
Speaker 5: So yes, you had this closed network. And by the way,
Speaker 5: many of the people when they joined, were forced to
Speaker 5: leave the blood family behind and the friend network behind
Speaker 5: the lives became opus day and just help us day.
Speaker 5: But he then kind of layered on top of that
Speaker 5: the system of watching each other and of controlling every movement.
Speaker 5: So it's the Mafia times ten. Because you have no
Speaker 5: freedom to even go and have a drink in the
Speaker 5: local bar or whatever. You're being watched entire time.
Speaker 7: You're describing just classic cult behavior. Yes, was it always
Speaker 7: a cult or did it evolve into a cult?
Speaker 5: I think initially he started off by genuinely trying to
Speaker 5: talk people into joining of their own free will, But
Speaker 5: I think it very quickly evolved, I think within five
Speaker 5: six years. And as I said before, he basically recruited
Speaker 5: no one in the first few years, and it from
Speaker 5: that point he discovered that cult like recruitment to cult
Speaker 5: like kind of retention was the way forward. It became
Speaker 5: it was a very successful way to grab people and
Speaker 5: to retain them. Then you had this kind of hiatus
Speaker 5: of the Spanish Civil War, which meant that the people
Speaker 5: he recruited were either killed or left or were dispersed
Speaker 5: around Spain. But then once Franco won the civil war,
Speaker 5: he then fell back on this playbook of cult like
Speaker 5: recruitment and it was it was super successful in the
Speaker 5: Franco years. And to come back to what we were
Speaker 5: saying before, were the money. He then found ways of
Speaker 5: of basically pilfering from the state, of positioning opu Stay
Speaker 5: within the state apparatus to get control over state funds
Speaker 5: for education and research, and of using that network to
Speaker 5: then ensure that he could use the money to expand
Speaker 5: open Stay around the world.
Speaker 1: Let's pause for a secret, We'll be right back. Could
Speaker 1: you maybe go unto the Benko popular banking scandal that
Speaker 1: Opuste was at the biolum up.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, through the nineteen forties, spifi'd very quickly realized that
Speaker 5: they needed money to expand. He had huge ambitions to
Speaker 5: take opu Ste not just all across Spain but around
Speaker 5: the world, and he needed money to do that. So initially,
Speaker 5: as I was just saying, he managed to get make
Speaker 5: rolls into the Franco regime and managed to siphon off
Speaker 5: state funds to help op Stay expand they began to
Speaker 5: set up networks of businesses as well, so through Opuste's
Speaker 5: connections with the regime, and so they set up businesses
Speaker 5: to benefit from those relationships with the Franco regime. But
Speaker 5: I think at one stage in the early fifties they
Speaker 5: realized that to get control of the bank would take
Speaker 5: things to an entirely different level. Being dependent on the
Speaker 5: Franco regime to win contracts or whatever or just get
Speaker 5: state money was very restrictive because those taps could be
Speaker 5: turned off very quickly. But if you had control of
Speaker 5: the bank, you had control over the savings of potentially
Speaker 5: millions of Spaniards who put their money into the bank,
Speaker 5: and you could use that money to lend to your
Speaker 5: various initiatives around the world. And we've seen many banks
Speaker 5: infiltrated and used in this way over the years, and
Speaker 5: the way they took control of their first bank was
Speaker 5: quite interesting. They got winds of scandal. It's a big
Speaker 5: Spanish bank. Ironically, one of the big bosses at the bank,
Speaker 5: who was a devout Catholic and fan of Opus day,
Speaker 5: he turned to opah Stay and confessed that the owner
Speaker 5: of the bank had been doing all these dodgy deals
Speaker 5: in France and if the Franco regime got wind of it,
Speaker 5: the bank was going to be punished and potentially people
Speaker 5: who go to prison. So Opuste got this information and.
Speaker 6: Did he literally confess like they broke the seal of
Speaker 6: the confessional or it's more.
Speaker 5: I don't think it was in confession, but it was
Speaker 5: in one of these sessions that they call spiritual guidance,
Speaker 5: So that this guy had gone to an Opu's Day
Speaker 5: member and basically was looking for a bit of kind
Speaker 5: of Catholic guidance. And this the opposte member took this
Speaker 5: information and passed it along to his fellow members, and
Speaker 5: they then turned the information against the bank to oust
Speaker 5: the owner of the bank, and they, you know, over
Speaker 5: a number of years they gradually took control until by
Speaker 5: the end of the nineteen fifties, Opus Day was effectively
Speaker 5: in control of one of Spain's largest banks and from
Speaker 5: there the sky was the limit.
Speaker 7: Then what happened next with the bank fraud? Where did
Speaker 7: the story go?
Speaker 5: So after taking control of this Spanish bank in the
Speaker 5: late nineteen fifties, Opus Day very quickly began to rewire
Speaker 5: and renetwork the bank to ensure that it could benefit
Speaker 5: from the bank financially, but also to ensure that its
Speaker 5: own network around the globe would benefit directly from the
Speaker 5: bank as well. And so Bank of Popular, this Spanish
Speaker 5: bank very quickly became away not just of extracting my
Speaker 5: need to help to finance the expansion of olper stay,
Speaker 5: but also became a way of it became a network
Speaker 5: for moving money around the world. During the Franco years,
Speaker 5: there were huge restrictions on transferring cash out of Spain
Speaker 5: to other countries, and so they developed this network, initially
Speaker 5: through Switzerland and Andorra, but then through other kind of
Speaker 5: tax havens in Panama, Tinstein, Kurasau to traffic huge amounts
Speaker 5: of money. And over the course of the next kind
Speaker 5: of forty to fifty years, the bank became a cash
Speaker 5: machine for Opus Day. They extracted hundreds of millions of
Speaker 5: dollars probably more like billions of dollars from the bank
Speaker 5: to finance the expansion of Opas day around the world,
Speaker 5: and for a number of reasons in the early twenty tens,
Speaker 5: the bank fell into all kinds of trouble. Now, some
Speaker 5: of it was I guess related to these outflows to
Speaker 5: Opa Stay and Opustay's semi control of the bank. But
Speaker 5: some of it was also related to what was happening
Speaker 5: to other banks around the world. They'd overinvested in the
Speaker 5: real estate market and had failed to get on top
Speaker 5: of their problems quickly enough, and the bank fell into
Speaker 5: a huge amount of trouble. And yes, in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 5: the bank collapsed. But the collapse of the bank was
Speaker 5: terrible for the bank's other shareholders and terrible for the
Speaker 5: bank's bondholders and creditors, but was great for me because
Speaker 5: it meant that Opus Stay no longer had control over
Speaker 5: these archives, and this nauzy journalist from the UK was
Speaker 5: able to get in and pieced together this crazy story.
Speaker 2: It seems that Opus Day got it pushed forward when
Speaker 2: Pop Paul the second gave credibility of the group and
Speaker 2: shared their conservative view. But what is it about the
Speaker 2: tenets of the Opus Day that appeal to average personnel?
Speaker 2: How is it different than regular catalysism in that sense?
Speaker 2: So I think there were two things. I think, on
Speaker 2: the face of it, Opus Stay is very good at
Speaker 2: presenting itself as a serious organization dedicated to helping ordinary
Speaker 2: Catholic to go a step further in their faith and
Speaker 2: to really offer themselves up to God. And the way
Speaker 2: that they kind of reel people in is by telling them, look, you,
Speaker 2: as a doctor or a politician or a journalist or whatever,
Speaker 2: you can serve God by simply striving for perfection and
Speaker 2: everything you do, and that's your way of serving God.
Speaker 2: You don't need to become a priest or done. You
Speaker 2: can achieve sanhood here on earth by just striving for
Speaker 2: perfection if you're a hot shot lawyer or a Republican
Speaker 2: congressman or whatever. That's the idea is quite appealing, But
Speaker 2: I think there's also another element to it, And I
Speaker 2: think this is very much true in places like Spain
Speaker 2: where Opus Day is strongest, but I think it's becoming
Speaker 2: increasingly true in the US as well. I think by
Speaker 2: joining Opus Day as a member, or just by entering
Speaker 2: into the elpus Day network, it opens a lot of doors.
Speaker 2: I think it's useful to think of Olpusta as a network.
Speaker 2: By being by the network, you're part of this kind
Speaker 2: of like minded group, these kind of like minded conservatives,
Speaker 2: like minded professionals. Because opstay very specifically recruits from the
Speaker 2: elite of society. They're not interested in the kind of
Speaker 2: the working classes or the middle classes they specifically go
Speaker 2: after because they want to influence society. But by getting
Speaker 2: membership into this network, that opens up business opportunities and
Speaker 2: networking opportunities, professional advancement. And I would argue that these days,
Speaker 2: to get ahead in place like Washington, d C. It
Speaker 2: helps to be Catholic and it helps to be part
Speaker 2: of this LP Er Stay network. Just hold on for
Speaker 2: a short break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Okay. So you've got a screenviar who founds it, and
Speaker 1: he's a big fear of Hitler, by the way, Mussolini.
Speaker 1: Today we've got OPA Stay hugely influential, all out of
Speaker 1: worshiped with size and the US. So the US, you've
Speaker 1: got former head of the FBI, Louis Three. You've got
Speaker 1: people in the Supreme Court with close connections with bar Our.
Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation is run by a guy with close relationship
Speaker 1: with Opus stain Scalia in the ot Scalia.
Speaker 5: I don't believe he was a member, but he will
Speaker 5: sent me within the next he was a regular within.
Speaker 1: The circle executive right, yeah, yes, And Amy Colinbero and
Speaker 1: she's not in OPA Stay, but she was in a
Speaker 1: similar type of thing. So where is Opus day now
Speaker 1: inside of the US, right, and talking about real conspiracies,
Speaker 1: what is Opus Stay's role inside of the US now?
Speaker 1: Right from the beginning, from the thirties onwards, Opus Stay
Speaker 1: has always aspired, has always conspired, she might say, to
Speaker 1: infiltrate the upper echelons of society, because Esprievar realized from
Speaker 1: very early on that the way you push your reactionary
Speaker 1: agenda is by infiltrating the institutions that are in charge
Speaker 1: of shaping societies. Obyste entered the US in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen forties, and initially it's set up in Chicago, a
Speaker 1: very Catholic city. It then soon expanded to Boston, but
Speaker 1: before long in area, in the early nineteen fifties, it
Speaker 1: was turning its attention to Washington because it realized that
Speaker 1: if it wanted to shape US society, then it had
Speaker 1: to be in Washington. In the fifties, it tried to
Speaker 1: set up an Olble's Daye University in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: But that idea completely failed. But ever since then it's
Speaker 1: poured resources into the city. And I think one for me,
Speaker 1: one kind of very interesting statistic is this Obboste officially
Speaker 1: has about three thousand members in the US, and as
Speaker 1: a Catholic organization, you would have expected that membership to
Speaker 1: be concentrated in Catholic cities like Chicago and Boston, New York,
Speaker 1: even Miami these days with the large Hispanic population there, but.
Speaker 5: That's not true. The largest OPA stay community in the
Speaker 5: US is in the Washington, D C. Area, and that
Speaker 5: kind of tells you all you need to know about
Speaker 5: where it's targeted its recruitment over the years. It's very
Speaker 5: much gone after targeting the Washington d C. Political and
Speaker 5: judicial elite. It's got two schools, two open stay schools
Speaker 5: in Washington, which kind of servered a double purpose. One is,
Speaker 5: and this has always been an open stay strategy. They've
Speaker 5: gone after the top students because that's a way of
Speaker 5: recruiting tomorrow's elite into the system from an early age
Speaker 5: and it's really indoctrinating them from an early age. But two,
Speaker 5: by setting up these very good schools, it's a way
Speaker 5: of attracting the great and the good of Washington to
Speaker 5: get them to entice them into the schools, get them
Speaker 5: send their kids there, and then you invite them to
Speaker 5: the kind of extracurricular meetings where you know, you get
Speaker 5: to know the parents as well. It's a way of
Speaker 5: drawing them into the system. I mean, many of Washington's
Speaker 5: great and good send the kids to the boys' school
Speaker 5: which is called the Heights and this girls school called
Speaker 5: Oak Crest. And maybe this is a good moment to
Speaker 5: bring in Johnson, your producer, which when we were setting
Speaker 5: up the interview, he reveals me that he'd actually attended
Speaker 5: the Heights School, the Upper Stay School just outside of Washington.
Speaker 5: So maybe I don't know if you want to talk
Speaker 5: about your observations and how they tally with what I
Speaker 5: or not.
Speaker 7: I actually think that you're attributing more legitimacy to the
Speaker 7: school then I think it deserves as a school.
Speaker 1: So I was there for.
Speaker 7: One grade, one year, eighth grade in the early eighties,
Speaker 7: and I'm Jewish, So why on earth did they accept
Speaker 7: a Jew. I think they had the misconception that maybe
Speaker 7: my family had some more influence, which we didn't, and
Speaker 7: also a fear that if they rejected me or they
Speaker 7: kicked me out, that that would somehow boomerang on them.
Speaker 7: There is two Jews in two Protestants in the school
Speaker 7: and a few black kids, so we were the outsiders.
Speaker 7: It was a year of absolutely stagnant education. For me,
Speaker 7: there was the education was just of the ne year
Speaker 7: of educating the kids. I didn't realize it at the time,
Speaker 7: but only in hindsight how many of the kids were
Speaker 7: kids of people of influence in journalism and politics and money.
Speaker 7: But it was also it was a very abusive environment
Speaker 7: physically and emotionally, and almost all the kids that were
Speaker 7: in there with me hated it, couldn't wait to get out.
Speaker 7: The Opusta is his members like Leonard Leo Right from
Speaker 7: the Federal Society and responsible for putting three or four Supreme.
Speaker 1: Court justices in. Then we've got the head of the
Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation, right, that's the authors of Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: We've got people like Newt Gingrich right, it was the
Speaker 1: father of the American current right. And so we've got
Speaker 1: all these tentacles going in. And Louis free Standing is
Speaker 1: head of the FBI, was in Opus day and he
Speaker 1: was close to Robert Hanson and protected him in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. And Hanson and I think we need
Speaker 1: to as former CIA officers, we need to get into this.
Speaker 1: And I want to talk to John Cipher about this
Speaker 1: a little bit. Hanson apparently in the early eighties actually
Speaker 1: confessed to a Catholic priest associd with Opus Day and said,
Speaker 1: I'm spying for the Russians and they've given me diamonds
Speaker 1: and they've given me a huge amount of money. And
Speaker 1: the priest, this Opus Day priest, told him give the
Speaker 1: money that the Russians, this KGB bun it, give it
Speaker 1: to Opus Day and don't tell anybody about this. And
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that's really the right thing to do.
Speaker 1: So for me, that's espionage, that's conspiracy. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: quite how Opus Day is an organization fits in, but
Speaker 1: people certainly do. And John, I was going to ask you,
Speaker 1: you've worked on the Hanson case, what was the sense
Speaker 1: of his mental makeup that he was both in Opus
Speaker 1: Stay and seeing a dominant at the same time.
Speaker 2: I don't think he was a conservative Catholic. It was
Speaker 2: when he got married. His wife was a very strong
Speaker 2: Catholic and he almost went overboard in that. And I
Speaker 2: don't know if it gave him a place to be
Speaker 2: in a place to think that he was part of
Speaker 2: the elite or something. But he was always an outsider
Speaker 2: even in that sense. And yeah, he spied for the
Speaker 2: Russians from the late seventies when he was in New
Speaker 2: York and didn't have much money all the way up
Speaker 2: to so until he was arrested in two thousand and one.
Speaker 2: And that's true. He did confess to a priest in
Speaker 2: the church and was told to give money to but
Speaker 2: you know, obviously a very very troubled person. And what's
Speaker 2: interesting is, yeah, his boss when he was at the FBI,
Speaker 2: for part of the time he was at the FBI,
Speaker 2: was retally free. He was also part of that same church.
Speaker 8: We're going to stop here today and we'll continue our
Speaker 8: conversation with Gareth Gore next week when we'll get into
Speaker 8: OPU Stay's political ambitions here in the US and around
Speaker 8: the world until next week on Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible
Speaker 8: was produced by I'm Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and
Speaker 8: Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 7: The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 8: Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
Speaker 8: Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.