Strategy of Tension:
The Case of Italy
PART 1
The day of the Madrid bombings, March 11, Lyndon LaRouche issued a statement discarding the idea that the terrorist attacks had been carried out either by the Basque terrorist group ETA or by "Islamic terrorism," and commented that the modality of the Madrid atrocity reminded him of the 1980 Bologna train station bombing and, in general, of the terrorist "strategy of tension" in Italy in the early seventies. In the following days, several experts interviewed by EIR, as well as some newspaper commentators, independently pointed to the same analogy.
The name "strategy of tension" indicates the period roughly from 1969 to 1974, when Italy was hit by a series of terrorist bombings, some of which caused large numbers of civilian deaths. The authors were right-wing extremists maneuvered by intelligence and military structures aiming at provoking a coup d'état, or an authoritarian shift, by inducing the population to believe that the bombs were part of a communist insurgency. The beginning of the strategy of tension is officially marked by the Dec. 12, 1969 bomb that exploded inside the Banca Nazionale dell' Agricoltura in Milan's Piazza Fontana, known as "the Piazza Fontana massacre," in which 16 people were killed and 58 wounded. The end of the strategy of tension, strictly considered, is marked by the bomb on the "Italicus" train (Aug. 4, 1974) in San Benedetto Val di Sambro, which killed 12 and wounded 105. During that period, there were at least four known coup d'état attempts, threats, or plots—one per year!
The largest terrorist massacre, however, was six years later, on Aug. 2, 1980, in Bologna, when a suitcase with over 40 pounds of explosives went off in the train station, killing 85 and wounding more than 200. The responsibility was officially claimed by a right-wing terrorist group called Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR). The Bologna bombing, from the standpoint of its timing and the strategy behind it, does not belong, strictly speaking, to the "strategy of tension"; it was not connected to a plan for a military coup, or a government policy change of some sort. However, the terrorist organizations involved were leftovers of the "strategy of tension" period. They had gone underground and reorganized themselves. As in the Piazza Fontana and other cases, a massive cover-up was carried out by certain synarchist networks inside intelligence and military forces.
Today, several judicial and parliamentary investigations have established that a red thread goes through the "strategy of tension," from Piazza Fontana, to the Italicus bombs, to the 1980 Bologna massacre. The most important ones are the official Bologna investigation, the most recent investigation on Piazza Fontana started by prosecutor Guido Salvini in 1992 in Milan, and the results of the Parliament Committee on the Failed Identification of the Authors of Terrorist Massacres ("Terrorism Committee"), which worked from 1994 to 2001.
The Bologna trial ended with the conviction of neo-fascists Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro as executors, and of freemasonic puppet-master Licio Gelli, his associate Francesco Pazienza, and several military intelligence officials for cover-up. The Milan trial produced a life sentence for three neo-fascists, Delfo Zorzi, Carlo Maria Maggi, and Carlo Rognoni, which was later overturned on appeal (as if it were a signal, the appeal result was announced the day after the Madrid bombings). The case is now going to the Supreme Court. The parliamentary committee under Chairman Giovanni Pellegrino has done a considerable amount of work, including input from the Bologna and the Milan investigations, in addition to the work of its own experts, taking testimony from important witnesses, etc.
All three bodies have converged in establishing, albeit with slight differentiations of political analysis, a quite truthful picture of the structure controlling and deploying terrorism in Italy, especially as concerns "black" (right-wing) terrorism. Pellegrino's committee has explored also the other side of the coin, the so-called "red" terrorism, coming to the conclusion that it has been run by the same structures. Remarkably, the committee included in its records a publication issued by the European Labor Party (Partito Operaio Europeo, POE), the LaRouche organization in Italy until 1983, as being on the mark on who killed Aldo Moro, already in September 1978.
The public resurfacing of synarchist puppet-master Licio Gelli last September; the upgrading of the international coordination of Falangist organizations including Italy's Forza Nuova, successor to the neo-fascist Third Position disbanded in the aftermath of the Bologna massacre; the deployment of Mussolini's granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, as a "brand name" in support of such networks; these and other signals had suggested a level of alert already before the Madrid bombs were set off. Already last August, Lyndon LaRouche had suggested keeping watch on the "friends of Mussolini's granddaughter," in view of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's prediction of new atrocities which would justify an expansion of the "war on terrorism."
The Madrid atrocity has now dramatically posed the question of a serious intelligence investigation of international terrorism, in order to respond in the adequate way. Terrorism does not pop up in the woods at night, like mushrooms, but it has a background and a history. Looking at the history of the "strategy of tension" will be useful for our readers, in order to draw the possible parallels and avoid giving naive support to the usual witchhunts, launched to cover up the real perpetrators.
Piazza Fontana
The technique adopted for the Madrid atrocity, by placing simultaneous bombs on trains, is not new. The 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre was preceded by a series of "demonstrative actions" started during the night of Aug. 8-9, with ten bombs placed on ten different trains. Eight of the bombs, low-potential devices, went off. Those bombs were actually placed by a neo-fascist organization called Ordine Nuovo, but investigators were led to believe that it was left-wing anarchists who did it. More such "demonstrative actions" followed until, on Dec. 12, there was a qualitative jump. A series of high-potential bombs went off—in Milan's Piazza Fontana, but also in Rome, where three bombs wounded 13 people. Luckily, another bomb in the center of Milan, at Piazza Scala, did not explode.
Immediately, prosecutors were led to look for the perpetrators in the leftist camp. Two known anarchists, Pietro Valpreda and Giuseppe Pinelli, were arrested. Pinelli died that same evening, by jumping out of the window of the police station where he was being interrogated. The official investigation of his death concluded that it was suicide. Valpreda was kept in jail for several years, until he was cleared of all accusations.
The anarchist connection was a cover-up, organized by the occult structure protecting the Ordine Nuovo right-wing terrorists. For instance, they had even arranged to have a "black" extremist, who looked like Valpreda, take a taxi after the bomb exploded, as if fleeing from the scene, in order to manipulate the taxi driver into testifying against Valpreda. The taxi driver, however, was never able to testify in a trial, along with eight other witnesses who died in circumstances that were never clarified.
The cover-up came mainly from the Interior Ministry, which is in command of the police, and precisely from an office called Ufficio Affari Riservati (UAR), a sort of domestic intelligence bureau, whose chief was Federico Umberto D'Amato. D'Amato, as Pellegrino explains, "was an old Anglo-American agent, whose career started soon after the Liberation [from Nazism/Fascism] under James Angleton, the head of the OSS." Thanks to Angleton's protecton, "D'Amato became superintendent of the Special Secretary of the Atlantic Pact, the most strategic office of our structures, as it is the connection between NATO and the U.S.A." At the end of the war, the UAR was stuffed with hundreds of former officials of Mussolini's Salò Republic, the rump Northern Italian State under virtual Nazi SS control, whose militia was derisively referred to as repubblichini by Italian partisans.
Milan prosecutor Guido Salvini had established that Delfo Zorzi, the neo-fascist who was first sentenced, and now acquitted, for having placed the Piazza Fontana bomb, had been recruited by D'Amato as late as 1968. Salvini has found out much more. A witness, Carlo Digilio, decided in 1992 to collaborate in the investigation, and revealed that he had worked as an infiltrator in Zorzi's group for U.S. military intelligence units within the NATO command in Verona. Digilio's superiors in such a U.S. structure knew about all terrorist actions the Zorzi group was planning to undertake, from the Aug. 8 to the Dec. 12 bombings. Digilio's superior, Capt. David Garrett of the U.S. Navy, claimed, however, that the deal was that all actions had to be "demonstrative." Garrett, Digilio reported, was in contact with Pino Rauti in Rome, the national leader of the neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo (ON), of which Zorzi was a member in the Veneto region.
The second participant in the Piazza Fontana action, Carlo Maria Maggi, was the leader of the Veneto ON cell. The third one, Giancarlo Rognoni, was a member of the Milan ON organization, who provided logistical support.
Already in 1971, two members of Ordine Nuovo, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, had been arrested in the Piazza Fontana investigations, as well as in relation to other minor terrorist actions. However, when the two Milan prosecutors, Gerardo D'Ambrosio and Emilio Alessandrini, were close to discovering the whole network, the investigation was "stolen" from them and moved to the southern Italian city of Catanzaro, where both Freda and Ventura were acquitted.
Today, Salvini's investigation has assembled several witnesses demonstrating that it was Freda who bought the timers used for building the bombs, and that it was Ventura who made them. But neither Freda nor Ventura can be tried, because they have been already acquitted once for the same crime.
The Coup Strategy
As we said, it has been established that the strategy of tension aimed at taking control over the government, in a semi-totalitarian way. The best formula, according to the plotters, would be a technocratic Cabinet supported by a public pronouncement of the Armed Forces, South American style; or, as an alternative, a straight military coup. The chances of success for a military coup in Italy have always been low, especially because of the presence of a large militant organization, the Communist Party, which was organized for partisan warfare. However, plans for a military coup were made and almost executed; if anything, they functioned as a threat, to achieve the desired political results. Consider that, in 1969, Italy was the only democratic country in Southern Europe, surrounded by dictatorships in Portugal, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Greece. A coup in Greece had just occurred, in 1967.
The plan in 1969, as reported by several witnesses, was to create widespread public tension and fear, which would lend support to the declaration of a state of emergency by Prime Minister Mariano Rumor, who would exclude the Socialists from the government and seek support from the MSI, the official neo-fascist party. However, Rumor did not deliver. He was prevented by Aldo Moro, who was then his Foreign Minister, and who faced State President Giuseppe Saragat, who was in favor of declaring the state of emergency, and finally prevailed. There was a long government crisis, and only three months later was Rumor able to put together another Cabinet.
This was not the first time Moro faced the threat of a coup. In 1964, when he, as Prime Minister, was negotiating his first government with Socialist participation, the threat was carried out by another State President, Antonio Segni. Segni, a right-wing Christian Democrat, was manipulated by an intelligence officer, Col. Renzo Rocca, head of the economic division of SIFAR, the military secret service. Rocca (who, after his stint at SIFAR went to work at the FIAT automaker in Turin) reported to Segni that the financial and economic establishment predicted a catastrophic economic crisis, if the Socialists were to join the government. In reality, a few large monopolies in the hands of the same families who had provided support to Mussolini's regime, feared that the new government would introduce decisive reforms to break their power in such fields as real estate, energy, finance, and economic planning. Segni, upon advice from Rocca, called the head of SIFAR, General De Lorenzo, and asked him to prepare a list of political leaders to be rounded up in case of serious insurgency or threat to the Constitution. De Lorenzo prepared a plan, which was called "Piano Solo."
Segni then manifested his intention to withdraw the government mandate from Prime Minister Moro, and to give it to a tecnocrat, Cesare Merzagora. In addition to this, Segni received help from the vice president of the European Commission, Marjolin, who publicly attacked Moro's government program in the name of the European Community. Marjolin, himself a French Socialist, had probably met Segni in Paris, where Segni had been shortly before commissioning the Piano Solo.
Moro and his allies took Segni's threats seriously, and decided that in order to avoid a constitutional crisis, the new government should drop the "dangerous" elements in its program. Thus, the center-left government, a project started by Moro in 1960 and supported by the Kennedy Administration, was born as a lame duck.
Preparing the Strategy of Tension
Probably, if Enrico Mattei, Italy's powerful economic leader, had been alive, things would have been different. But Mattei had died two year earlier, on Oct. 27, 1962, when a bomb placed in his plane exploded the moment the pilot pulled the landing gear, in proximity to the Milan Airport. Mattei, a former partisan commander, was the founder of Italy's oil concern ENI, a leader of post-war economic reconstruction, and a fighter for Italian independence, both in the energy sector and in foreign policy. Mattei had challenged the energy monopolies abroad and domestically, and had put them on the defensive. In 1960, he threw all his power and influence—and money—behind Moro's project. His assassination was a turning point in Italian history, the beginning of what then became the strategy of tension, and the successive phases of destabilization.
Mattei was killed at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, after an international media campaign which portrayed him as a friend of the Soviets, someone who was making economic deals with Moscow and who would not hesitate to bring Italy into the Communist camp. As documented in various EIR publications, Mattei had been targetted by the French terrorist organization OAS and by the same Colonel Rocca we have just met, who was briefing the CIA station chief in Rome, Thomas Karamessines, against Mattei. These are the networks which surface again a few years later, in the deployment of the strategy of tension.[1]
On May 3-5, 1965, three years after the death of Mattei, and one year after the "Piano Solo" crisis, a conference took place at the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome, organized by the Istituto Alberto Pollio, a think-tank headed by Gen. Giuseppe Aloja, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. The theme of the conference was "Revolutionary Warfare," and it is considered the planning session of what would become the strategy of tension. The participants discussed various aspects of the alleged Communist threat to Italy, conducted through irregular means, and possible ways to counter it using the same means: counterrevolutionary warfare. Among the speakers were Pino Rauti, founder of the neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo; Mario Merlino, a neo-fascist member of ON who pretended to be an "anarchist" during the Piazza Fontana investigations; fascist journalists Guido Giannettini, Enrico de Boccard, and Edgardo Beltrametti; military officials such as generals Alceste Nulli-Augusti and Adriano Giulio Cesare Magi Braschi[2]; Salvatore Alagna from the Court of Appeals in Milan; and Vittorio De Biase, from one of the most important economic monopolies, Edison. De Biase was the closest advisor to Edison Chairman Giorgio Valerio, an enemy of Mattei and Moro. Before, during, and after Fascism, Edison was the largest component of the energy cartel, together with SADE, led by Fascist minister Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata.
Perpetuation of Power
Edison had about 300,000 shareholders, but it was controlled by a few economic-financial groups, representing the financier-rentier oligarchy: Bastogi, former railway company and now a financial holding, was the main shareholder, followed by Pirelli (Alberto Pirelli had been an enthusiastic minister of Mussolini's); the families Crespi (owners of the newspaper Corriere della Sera, and founders of the first Italian ecological association, Italia Nostra, in 1964) and Feltrinelli (Giangiacomo Feltrinelli founded the first left terrorist group, the GAP, in 1970); Assicurazioni Generali; and SADE.
Edison's main shareholder, Bastogi, was also present in the other energy concerns SADE (together with the Venetian aristocratic trio Volpi-Cini-Gaggia), Centrale, and SME. Bastogi was in turn owned in part by FIAT, Generali, Edison, Centrale, and Pirelli.
Bastogi was built as the center of financial power under Fascism, by Alberto Beneduce, the reorganizer of the bankrupted Italian banking system in 1933, architect of Il Duce's deflation policy, and creator of the large state conglomerate IRI.
Beneduce was a freemason and a "socialist" (as Il Duce himself also was formerly), so much that he named his three daughters "Idea Nuova Socialista," "Italia Libera," and "Vittoria Proletaria." Beneduce did not live long enough to see the fall of Fascism, but he ensured his succession by marrying his daughter Idea Nuova Socialista to a young promising talent named Enrico Cuccia, a protégé of Mussolini's first Finance Minister, Guido Jung.
Cuccia, who worked at Banca Commerciale Italiana under Beneduce's ally Raffaele Mattioli, in 1942 participated in the foundation of the Partito d'Azione, a party opposed to right-wing fascism, which, however goes back to the same roots of fascism, in Giuseppe Mazzini during the 19th Century. In the middle of the war, the Partito d'Azione sent Cuccia to negotiate a deal with U.S. representative George Kennan, in Portugal. Cuccia was introduced to Kennan by André Meyer, the synarchist banker head of Lazard Frères. The content of the deal has remained secret until today.
At the end of the war, the oligarchical control of the Italian economic system was in danger, because the large state-owned sector—including the banks, IRI (through which Beneduce controlled Bastogi), and the central bank itself (owned by the nationalized banks)—was now under the control of the new political parties, the Christian Democracy and its allies. Cuccia knew that the group around Mattei (whom he knew through Resistance networks) had a precise idea of the state role in the economy, to serve the Common Good instead of private interests.
But, maybe as a result of the deal struck through George Kennan, Cuccia was allowed to find a solution that would guarantee the interests of private monopolies in the new Italian state, through the invention of Mediobanca, an investment bank that was half public and half privately owned. Mediobanca was founded in 1946, and in 1955, Lazard and Lehman entered as foreign partners. Since the 1936 banking legislation enforced by Beneduce prohibited investment banking in Italy, Mediobanca was the first and only private investment bank, which dominated the scene from 1946 to 1995. Through Mediobanca, Cuccia was always able to provide fresh money (coming from the company's public shareholders) for the needs of his private shareholders, and for the other members of the "club." Among these, of course, was Edison's Giorgio Valerio, who sent his envoy to the Istituto Pollio meeting.
Arming the Foot-Soldiers
After the Istituto Pollio meeting, the marching orders were given to the "troops." In the same year, 1965, Pino Rauti and Guido Giannettini, two participants, published a pamphlet entitled Red Hands Over the Armed Forces, aimed at recruiting supporters to the project inside the military.
In 1966, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, the two Ordine Nuovo members who participated in the Piazza Fontana bombings, announced the formation of the Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato, a paramilitary organization composed of military and civilian personnel, overlapping with the secret but official NATO "stay-behind" organization called Gladio.
In Rome, another neo-fascist organization, Avanguardia Nazionale (AN), was active. Its leader, Stefano delle Chiaie, had been seen among the audience at the Istituto Pollio, but he always denied it. In the evening of Dec. 12, AN took care of the bombs in Rome, while Zorzi and the ON people, coordinated from Rome, placed their bombs in Piazza Fontana and Piazza Scala.
According to Salvini, the real "mind" behind the attacks was Guerin Serac, a former OAS member who was running the Aginter Press, a center of logistical support to neo-fascist groups throughout Europe. It was Serac who had developed the strategy of "creating false groups of the extreme left, and infiltrating existing ones, in order to place on them the responsibility for terrorist actions, provoking the intervention of the Armed Forces and excluding the Communist Party from any significant influence on Italian political life."
Serac, a "Catholic" fascist, had participated in the French colonial intervention in 1956 in Suez, in alliance with Britain and Israel, against Egyptian leader Nasser's decision to nationalize the canal. The allied colonial forces were humiliated by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who ordered them to cease the intervention and go home.
As we have seen, the strategy of blaming the "anarchists" for the Piazza Fontana bombs seemed to have successful, at the beginning. Military intelligence helped, by indicating Guerin Serac, but only to say that he was a "Marxist." But Aldo Moro, and his friend Luigi Gui, the Defense Minister, didn't believe it. Gui was receiving honest reports that it was the neo-fascists who were behind it. And Moro prevented Prime Minister Rumor from declaring the state of emergency.
The strategy of tension continued. On July 22, 1970, a bomb exploded on the train Freccia del Sud, in the Calabrian city of Gioia Tauro, killing 6 persons and wounding 136. In September, the MSI organized a popular uprising in Reggio Calabria. After several days of clashes with police, there were 3 dead, and 190 policemen and 37 civilians wounded.
The Borghese Coup Attempt
On the night of Dec. 7, Junio Valerio Borghese, the Fascist commander whom Angleton had saved from a partisan execution squad, occupied the Interior Ministry with a platoon of militias, in what seemed to be the beginning of a military coup. But at midnight, Borghese's troops left the ministry, after having loaded two trucks with weapons.
According to Pellegrino, Borghese's coup was "a very serious attempt." Sources from the neo-fascist camp say that the plan was to occupy the television station, the State Presidency, the Interior Ministry, and a few more strategic points, after which an anti-insurgency plan was to start, which was ready at the Carabinieri headquarters. The plan included the arrest of trade unionists, political and military leaders, and similar individuals. The plan would have allowed a military dictatorship.
Pellegrino thinks that possibly, "somebody in Italy claimed that they had support overseas. But, once informed of what was going on in Rome, the relevant people immediately blocked Borghese and his people." The seriousness of Borghese's attempt is indicated by the fact that the secret service sent an official report to the prosecutors in 1974, but many key names were not included: among them, Admiral Torrisi, General Miceli, Air Force officials Lovecchio and Casero, all members of the secret freemasonic Propaganda-2 Lodge, as well as the head of the P-2, puppet-master Licio Gelli.
Borghese succeeded in avoiding arrest by escaping to Franco's Spain. In the meantime, the Ordine Nuovo people had not forgiven Prime Minister Rumor for having "betrayed" the cause and not having declared the state of emergency. They prepared a punishment. Gianfranco Bertoli was sent to Israel for the relevant training. When he came back, he was re-tooled as an "anarchist," and, on May 17, 1973, he threw a hand grenade against a crowd coming out of the door of the Police Central Office in Milan. Four persons died, and 52 were wounded. The real target was Rumor, who was visiting the office and who mixed with the crowd, but Rumor was not even injured. For a long time, Bertoli's cover functioned; everybody believed that he was an anarchist.
`Rosa dei Venti'
In October 1973, another plot for a coup attempt was discovered. It was called "Rosa dei Venti" (Point of the Compass), and it was centered in Verona, with Maj. Amos Spiazzi as one of its leaders.[3] Spiazzi, however, as Salvini describes, reported to a higher official, Gen. Adriano Giulio Cesare Magi Braschi, one of the main participants in the Istituto Pollio meeting. Braschi, who must have walked with a constantly curved spine under the weight of his own name, was said to be "connected to OAS representatives such as Jacques Soustelle." Furthermore, he was active in a NATO structure, as reported in a secret service note of 1963, where his "capacity in the field of non-orthodox warfare" was praised, and his role in the "inter-allied cooperation in this particular branch" was emphasized.
One of Salvini's main witnesses, Carlo Digilio, reported about meetings in Verona with Spiazzi, Magi Braschi, and neo-fascist terrorists such as Carlo Maria Maggi and Carlo Fumagalli. Magi Braschi died in 1995. At the beginning of the eighties, he had become Italian leader of the World Anti-Communist League.
A fourth coup d'état was discovered in 1976 in Turin. It had been planned to be pulled off in August 1974. It was called the "White Coup," and its leader was Edgardo Sogno, a former monarchist resistance leader. The list of members of Sogno's plot overlaps with those of the Rosa dei Venti and even with the Borghese coup. Sogno was a member of the P-2, like many of his co-conspirators.
Such overlapping prompted Bologna prosecutor Franco Quadrini, who has reconstructed the history of right-wing terrorism, to state that "the subversive project, connected with the successive `Borghese,' `Rosa dei Venti,' `Sogno' [attempts], was in reality a single one, and, from time to time, commissioned to this or that participating network, specifically prepared."
The Final Phase
According to Pellegrino, 1974 was the end of a phase. Already after the Borghese attempt, it became clear that the strategy was not successful, because the population did not support a coup. Internationally, there were major changes. Portugal first, and Greece after that, got rid of their dictatorships. In the U.S.A., Henry Kissinger left the government. A new strategy was launched, centered around the P-2 freemasonic Lodge. Black terrorism was no longer useful, and what was left of it had to be eliminated, carefully making sure that investigators would not reach the higher level.
PART 2
With the exception of the 1980 Bologna train-station massacre, all major episodes of blind terrorism in Italy have remained legally unsolved, thanks to a systematic cover-up and sabotage of the investigations carried out by intelligence structures. That is why somebody like Stefano delle Chiaie, for instance, the leader of Avanguardia Nazionale and lieutenant of "Black Prince" Junio Valerio Borghese, can today walk free in Rome with no one allowed to call him a terrorist. That is why the 1994-2001 Parliament Investigating Commission was called "on the Failed Identification of the Authors of Terrorist Massacres". Recently, a new Milan trial on the 1969 Piazza Fontana bomb had changed this pattern, but the sentence, as we have said, was overturned on appeal.
Similarly, the two major terrorist actions of 1974, the Brescia "Piazza della Loggia" massacre and the Italicus train bombings, have been followed by a massive coverup and destruction of evidence, which led to definitive acquittals for the indicted. However, the coverup itself could be discovered and become the evidence for a judgment on those responsible for those events.
Massacre in Piazza della Loggia
On May 28, 1974, a bomb exploded in Piazza della Loggia, Brescia, during a trade union demonstration, causing 8 dead and 103 wounded. The bomb was claimed by Ordine Nero, a neofascist organization which, a few weeks earlier, had joined three other groups—SAM, Avanguardia Nazionale, and Movimento di Azione Rivoluzionaria (MAR)—in a common action paper. Written by MAR leader Carlo Fumagalli, it had announced "war on the State" through "attacks against the main railway lines".
On Aug. 4 of that year, a bomb exploded on the Rome-Munich Italicus train, at San Benedetto Val di Sambro, causing 12 dead and 105 casualties. The massacre could have been much larger if the bomb had exploded in a tunnel the train had just gone through. Like the Piazza della Loggia bomb, the Italicus action was claimed by Ordine Nero.
Investigators are today convinced that those two terrorist actions were no longer part of a coup plan, and that Fumagalli's people moved as a reaction against what they considered to be a "betrayal" by the military faction. According to Sen. Giovanni Pellegrino, chairman of the Parliament Investigating Commission, "at the beginning of the Seventies, the strategists of the Tension abandoned the military option. But their soldiers, the footsoldiers of the clandestine networks, keep waiting for a new call to arms and, while waiting, maintain their activities."
Thus the "strategists" were forced to eliminate those sections of the terrorist apparatus which had become "uncomfortable." Fumagalli was arrested on May 9, 1974 by a Carabinieri squad under captain Francesco Delfino. Fumagalli's people, then, placed the bomb in Brescia. "Today we know," Pellegrino says, "that the terrorist target was the Carabinieri, who usually, during a demonstration, would line up under the Portico of Piazza della Loggia." By chance, that day, the rain forced the demonstrators to change their route, passing through the place where the Carabinieri were supposed to stay and where the bomb went off. Less than two hours after the explosion, the police chief ordered the fire brigades to clean up the square with hydrants and hoses, destroying any evidence. Two days later, in a mountain region around the central Italian city of Rieti, the Carabinieri assaulted a paramilitary camp and killed, in a shootout, Giancarlo Esposti, a young right-wing extremist very close to the MAR. Esposti had called his father soon after Fumagalli's arrest on May 9, 1974 saying he was fleeing because the Carabinieri had betrayed them.
In Brescia, prosecutor Mario Arcai, investigating the May 28 massacre, found the name of his son in a list of neofascists suspected for the bombing. The list was provided by captain Delfino. This circumstance forced Arcai out of the investigation, in a move, as Arcai later denounced, to prevent his discovering the higher level behind Fumagalli's terrorist group. Nevertheless, Brescia prosecutors succeeded in nailing down some possible perpetrators of the massacre, among whom Ermanno Buzzi, a neofascist who was sentenced to life prison in 1979. Two years later, Buzzi was suddenly transferred in the Novara prison, where less than 36 hours later he was strangled by the former military leader of Ordine Nuovo, Pierluigi Concutelli, and his comrade Mario Tuti. Two more witnesses of the Brescia massacre died violently, and finally, in 1982, the Court of Appeal acquitted all culprits who were still alive. As for Fumagalli, nobody knows where he is today, nor whether he is still alive.
Coup Plotters' `Breakaway Ally'
Even if some sections of the "Strategists of the Tension" still believed in the feasibility of a coup d'état, after the Brescia massacre such plans suffered a definitive setback. On July 17, 1974, Defense minister Giulio Andreotti announced the replacement of a dozen high military officials, in the Army and the Navy, to prevent a coup planned for Aug. 10. Andreotti put the entire Armed Forces on alert and strengthened security around the Presidential Palace. This is the famous "white coup" organized by Edgardo Sogno we have seen earlier. Andreotti had already replaced the head of the SID military intelligence service, Vito Miceli, with Admiral Casardi. Miceli was arrested in October by prosecutor Tamburino in Verona, who was investigating the Rosa dei Venti network, and incriminated also for the 1970 Borghese coup attempt. That same year, Commander Borghese himself died—through a "corrected" cup of coffee, according to his lieutenant Stefano delle Chiaie. In this context, the Italicus bomb, Aug. 4, would fit in the "breakaway ally" pattern. Both the Bologna trial (which incorporated the Italicus one) and the Parliament Investigating Commission on the secret P2 Lodge, have come to the conclusion that "the Italicus action can be traced back to a terrorist organization, of neofascist or neonazi character, operating in Tuscany." The first trial ended with an acquittal against three such neofascists, Mario Tuti, Luciano Franci and Piero Malentacchi. The appeal court then overturned the acquittal, sentencing the three to life in prison (Mario Tuti, we have seen, "executed" his comrade Buzzi in the Novara prison). However, the appeal sentence was invalidated by the Corte di Cassazione and the new appeal trial ended with a final acquittal.
Indicating that the neofascists had been "dumped" by their puppetmasters, the day before the bomb, MSI leader Giorgio Almirante in Rome leaked to the head of the newly formed police Antiterrorism Unit, Emilio Santillo, that he had been informed—by a source in the neofascist camp— that a terror attack on a train had been planned for the following day. However, Almirante gave—apparently due to a misunderstanding—the wrong time: the train would leave from the Rome Tiburtina station at 5.30 instead of 17.30. Similarly, Adm. Gino Birindelli, a former NATO commander and a participant in the 1971 Borghese coup attempt, as well as a member of Almirante's party, had delivered more detailed information to the Carabinieri head in Firenze, Gen. Luigi Bittoni, about the coming train bomb attack. Birindelli communicated the names of three neofascists in Arezzo, among whom Franci, who would be planning such an action. Bittoni informed the Carabinieri head in Arezzo, Col. Domenico Tuminello, who apparently did nothing.
After the explosion, when the Bologna prosecutors were looking for Augusto Cauchi, the head of the Arezzo neofascist cell, Cauchi was protected by the head of SID section in Florence, Federigo Mannucci Benincasa, who did not deliver information on Cauchi's whereabouts to the investigators. Later, in 1982, Mannucci Benincasa admitted that Cauchi was an SID collaborator.
The P2 Masonic Lodge vs. Moro
Seven years after the Brescia and Italicus bombings, a police unit, sent by Milan prosecutors Colombo and Turone, to a villa in Castiglion Fibocchi, near Arezzo, discovered the common house of all cover-ups, from the 1989 Piazza Fontana, to the Brescia and Italicus bombings, including the 1980 Bologna train-station massacre. In the residence of Arezzo businessman Licio Gelli, the police found the list of members of a secret freemasonic lodge, called Propaganda Due (P2), of which Gelli was the Grand Master.
Among the 953 names found, were: Carabinieri captain Francesco Delfino, the man whom we have seen in action in the Brescia case; Admiral Birindelli, General Bittoni and Colonel Luminello, who moved (or did not move) in the Italicus case; Federico Umberto d'Amato, the powerful head of the Ufficio Affari Riservati (Office of Secret Affairs) of the Interior Ministry, whence the first coverup of the Piazza Fontana bombing came; former SID head General Miceli, the man who covered up the Borghese coup attempt; Gen. Gianadelio Maletti and Captain LaBruna, two military intelligence officers who provided protection to neofascist terrorists in the aftermath of the Piazza Fontana massacre; also participants to the 1965 Istituto Pollio meeting, such as Filippo de Jorio, and to the Borghese coup attempt, such as businessman Remo Orlandini and Air Force Gen. Duilio Fanali; as well as Col. Amos Spiazzi of the Rosa dei Venti, and "white coup" organizer Edgardo Sogno.
The most important part of the list, however, included all the leaders of the Armed Forces, of the secret services, of several police branches; politicians and businessmen. The list was so hot that the two prosecutors informed the government before making it public. When the government finally decided to publish the list, public reaction was so big that Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani had to resign; his Cabinet chief was on that list too.
The P2, according to the Parliament Investigating Committee, was an association of "mutual help," in which every member swore to "help, comfort, and defend" his "brothers even at cost of his life." The aim was to promote each member to positions of power in the society. The Parliament considered the P2 a subversive conspiracy. This does not mean, however, that all members of the P2 were plotters. Many politicians, public officials and military figures joined the pro-Atlanticist P2 because this allowed them to have a "cosmic" sort of clearance with Anglo-American institutions. Others, like current Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, said they joined in order to "conduct business." One thing is clear: only part of the full P2 membership was discovered, as the numbers on member cards go well beyond the 953 found in Castiglion Fibocchi. As to the role of Gelli, Pellegrino is convinced that he was not the real head of the P2, but that if P2 were a "port," Gelli would be the Port Authority.
At the beginning, the P2 itself was used as a vehicle in the coup strategy. In 1971, in fact, Gelli sent a letter to all military members of the P2, inviting them to consider the possibility of installing a military government. In 1973, there was a meeting in Gelli's Villa Wanda in Arezzo, of all main participants in such a project. Later on, the strategy changed, as the P2 was upgraded. But from the beginning, there was deep hostility and hatred against Christian Democratic (CD) leader Aldo Moro and his policy.
The failure of the first phase of the Strategy of Tension was due to a simple fact: the open association of the project with forces too much identified with Mussolini's fascism, made it impossible to reach a broad consensus in support of an authoritarian shift. Too vivid was the memory among the Italians, of the suffering under the fascist dictatorship and in the war, into which the dictator had pulled the nation. Thus the secret Masonic lodge was formed to recruit the national anti-communist elite to a project which was presented as "pro-American" and clean of the old fascist face (which in reality was only hidden). Right-wing terrorism, put under control, was still a capability, to be run through members of the Lodge.
Licio Gelli, who was picked for the new strategy, had joined Freemasonry already in 1965—i.e., in the year of the Istituto Pollio meeting—but only in 1971 did he start to recruit to the Propaganda Due Lodge, when he was appointed its organizing secretary. The lodge was already a special one, dedicated to public figures who would not like publicity, and therefore were initiated directly by the Grand Master, without the public ceremony in front of the "brothers." But when Gelli started to stuff the P2 Lodge with military officers, Grand Orient leader Salvini became afraid and moved to publically expose Gelli. On July 10, 1971, Salvini accused Gelli of "organizing a coup d'état." A large opposition against Gelli grew inside Freemasonry. In 1973, the so-called "democratic Masons" planted a very strong denunciation of Gelli in the magazine Panorama. In December 1974, 600 Gran Maestri, gathered in Naples, and demanded from Salvini the ousting of Gelli. Salvini formalized the request in an act of dissolution of the P2, but before he could get that through, Gelli organized a Grand Lodge meeting and won the vote, by blackmailing Salvini with a dossier on Salvini's financial misdealings. As a result, instead of being expelled, Gelli was appointed Grand Master of the P2 Lodge. His enemies, the "democratic masons," were expelled from the Grand Orient.
Moro's `Parallel Convergences'
On July 26, 1976, in order to stop public attention on the P2, Salvini officially dissolved it. In reality, from that moment on, the P2 became secret and totally autonomous, an instrument in the hands of "puppetmaster" Gelli's strategy to stop Aldo Moro's policy.
In 1976, the strong electoral gains of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which was now only a couple of percentage points behind the Christian Democracy (DC), forced a shift in the political picture in favor of Aldo Moro's strategy. Moro had understood that the solution to Italy's vulnerability to external interference in its own sovreignty lay in transforming the PCI into a fully pro-West and democratic party. If that occurred, there could be no obstacles to a normal change in political power, like in other western democracies, and no pretext for subjecting Italy to Anglo-American imperial politics under the pretext of anti-communism.
Moro developed therefore the strategy of "parallel convergences," or the possibility of associating the PCI with government responsibilities, along with the DC, in a "national solidarity" cabinet. In 1974, after the failure of the Popular Front government in Chile and the Pinochet coup, PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer had already proposed a similar strategy of alliance with the DC, calling it "historical compromise." In 1976, then, Berlinguer broke with Moscow by publically stating that the PCI would respect Italy's membership in NATO.
Moro's included aim was to defeat the right-wing forces in his own DC, those responsible for having blocked the reformist potential of the center-left governments which he had promoted since 1962. In a May 1973 interview with the weekly Tempo, Moro had stated: "The real Right wing is always dangerous, due to its reactionary force, for the threat it inevitably represents against the democratic order. Its influence is far greater than what it might seem from the consistency of the political and parliamentary front which refers to it. These are not words, but fundamental political data."
This past September 2003, puppetmaster Licio Gelli "resurfaced" in an interview in which he bluntly confessed his hostility against Moro, and recounted an episode in which the two had a confrontation (see Part 1). Moro was not impressed by Gelli; however, he was shocked when the same hostility was expressed by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. During a visit to the United States in 1974, Moro was brutally told by Kissinger that he should abandon his policy of dialogue with the PCI. Moro's wife Eleonora, who testified in front of the Parliament Investigating Commission, reported Kissinger's words as follows: "You must stop pursuing your political plan, of bringing all political forces in your country to collaborate directly. Now, either you stop doing such things, or you will pay for that. It is up to you how to interpret this."
Moro was so shocked that he got physically ill. Upon his return to Italy, he seriously considered the idea of withdrawing from politics. The fact that he did not do so, but pushed his strategy ahead, knowing that his life was at stake, adds real greatness to his political figure. "Don't you think I know," he said to one of his university pupils, "that I can end up like Kennedy?"
The Career of a Synarchist
Licio Gelli started his political career as a fascist under Mussolini, participating in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the coup plotters who overthrew the republican government. After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, Gelli adhered to the "Repubblica Sociale," the northern Italian rump state nominally led by Mussolini but totally in the hands of the Nazi SS. In Pistoia, he became an official with the local SS, at the same time developing contacts with Resistance circles. According to the Parliamentary Investigation of the P2, "Gelli, shortly before the end of WWII, had no problems in developing contacts of collabration and understanding with the party which inevitably was appearing as the winner. While still wearing a German uniform, or better, by using it as an asset . . . he led a difficult game, in constant and dubious balance between the two parts."
After the war, Gelli started an official activity as a textile businessman in Arezzo, owner of the renowned Lebole firm. Unofficially, he kept playing his double game. An Italian secret service (SID) report dated September 1950, said that a source in the American Embassy characterized Gelli as an agent of an Eastern European secret service. That document, in the eyes of the Pellegrino Committee, marked the beginning of Gelli's service under Anglo-American and Italian intelligence structures. The evidence on his past as a communist agent, in the hands of his controllers, ensured Gelli's loyalty—and his protection—from now on.
Thus, Italian prosecutors investigating terrorist cases encountered Gelli's name more than once, but when they requested information from the secret services, they were told the lie that there was no file on him. For instance, on July 4, 1977, SID head Admiral Casardi answered a formal request from Bologna prosecutors investigating the Italicus massacre: "SID does not have particular information on the P2 Lodge. . . . There is no information on Licio Gelli as concerns his membership in the P2, beyond what the press has reported." Anti-terrorism chief Emilio Santillo, a man who made a serious effort to discover the truth about the P2, got the same "rubber wall" treatment from the secret service, and had to refer to the documents by the "democratic masons" in order to fill out his reports to investigators.
The first secret service report acknowledging the existence of the P2 was written in 1978, by the new military intelligence body, SISMI, under the direction of P2 member General Santovito. The report was an attack—not against the P2, but against an "anti-Masonic plot" allegedly carried out by some political forces: Nothing on Gelli or his connections to right-wing terrorism.
In 1981, when a Guardia di Finanza (GdF, an Army corps in charge of financial police duties) unit led by Col. Vincenzo Bianchi first searched Gelli's Villa Wanda, and put their hands on the P2 membership list, Bianchi received a phone call from Gen. Orazio Giannini, national head of the GdF, who told him to be careful, because the list contained the names of "all the top leaders of the Corps." Of course, including Giannini himself.
The Left-Right Red Brigades
In the early morning of March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro left his house in Via della Camilluccia, in Rome, to reach the Parliament. That day, his years-long efforts to build a "national solidarity" cabinet—i.e., a center-left government supported also by the PCI—were going to be finally rewarded. The Parliament was expected to vote confidence to such a cabinet, led by Giulio Andreotti.
Moro never reached Parliament. In Via Fani, the two-car convoy in which Moro and his escort were riding was blocked by a terrorist commando. Under massive fire, all members of Moro's escort died and Moro himself was pulled out of the car and carried away. Soon after, the so-called Red Brigades claimed responsibility for the operation, sending a Polaroid picture of Moro prisoner, sitting with a Red Brigades symbol on the background. The kidnapping of Aldo Moro had a bloody conclusion after 55 days, on May 9, when his corpse was found in the trunk of a red Renault 4, in the central Via Caetani in Rome.
The Red Brigades were born as a leftist terrorist group, out of the violent sections of the 1968 student upsurge. A crucial moment for this development is the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre, which was used to manipulate such radical left-wing fringes into a violent reaction. However, from the beginning, the Red Brigades included elements belonging to what Brescia prosecutor Giovanni Arcai has characterized as a "technostructure" controlling both right-wing and left-wing extremism. Interestingly, Arcai's enemy, P2 member Captain Delfino (today a general), fully agreed with him on this.
Senator Pellegrino identified such a structure in Hyperion, officially a language school based in Paris, founded by Vanni Molinaris, Corrado Simioni, and Duccio Berio, three participants in the 1969 founding of the Red Brigades. Those three formed, with Mario Moretti, a superclandestine group, called the Superclan. While Moretti stayed in Italy, and eventually became the military leader of the Red Brigades, the other three moved to Paris in 1974, where they founded Hyperion. Hyperion was highly protected: when Padua prosecutor Guido Calogero, in 1979, secretly went to Paris to investigate it, the number two of D'Amato at the Ufficio Affari Riservati, Silvano Russomanno, leaked the information to the press, and suddenly all doors for Calogero in Paris were closed. "Figures like Abbé Pierre, one of the animators of Hyperion, "Pellegrino remarked, "surely have international connections which guarantee him great protection."
According to Sergio Flamigni—a former senator who has worked on the Parliamentary Commissions on the Moro case and on the P2, and who has published several books on the Moro case—despite the fact that the Italian terrorists were wanted in Italy for "membership in a clandestine group aiming at subverting, through armed struggle, the institutions of the State, . . . the Superclan leaders received a green light from the French secret service to open the `language school'; they enjoyed also the support of Dominican father Felix Morlion, founder of the Pro Deo intelligence service and financed by the American secret services."
Recently declassified OSS reports describe Morlion in 1945 as leader of a faction in the Vatican pushing for an authoritarian, Spanish Falange-like solution for postwar Italy. Morlion was supported by anti-Roosevelt U.S. factions, while his opponent in the Vatican, Monsignor Giambattista Montini (later Pope Paul VI), in agreement with Roosevelt, wanted a democratic regime in which the party of the Christian Democracy, of which he was the spiritual father, played a central role. Eventually, Montini prevailed.
Morlion kept influencing right-wing policies in Italy, through the Pro Deo University which he founded with U.S. money. In 1991, he was exposed by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti as the recruiter of Turkish terrorist Ali Agca in the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
Italy's most distinguished investigators, like prosecutors Rosario Priore or Ferdinando Imposimato, agree that the protection ensured by Francois Mitterrand's French government and security agencies, to Italian terrorist fugitives, has hindered discovering the full truth about terrorism.
And yet, in 1974, the Carabinieri under Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa succeeded in almost decapitating the Red Brigades. Thanks to the infiltration of Silvano Girotto, a former priest who had guerrilla experience in Latin America, Dalla Chiesa's men organized a trap to capture the leadership group of Mario Moretti, Renato Curcio, and Alberto Franceschini. At the last moment, Moretti was alerted and escaped the trap. However, he did not warn Curcio and Franceschini, who were captured. The leak came from inside the Dalla Chiesa Carabinieri unit. From that moment on, there was a qualitative change in the Red Brigades, which became a highly professional group from the standpoint of military capabilities. The new leader Moretti, according to Pellegrino, was probably "the contact man with something that was above or beyond the Red Brigades." Moretti "used to travel often to France, without anybody realizing it," reported general Dalla Chiesa to the Parliament Committee.
Why Moro Was Not Found
Twenty-six years after Moro's assassination and after four trials, the full truth has not yet come out. In the meantime, the Red Brigades terrorists have been captured, sentenced and today are all free. EIR has reported the many questions still unanswered in the Moro case. We focus here on the main elements which are central to the purpose of our reconstruction of the Strategy of Tension.
One and a half months before Moro's kidnapping, the central anti-terrorism office of the police was dissolved. The decision was taken by Police Minister Francesco Cossiga, a personal friend of Licio Gelli, after a reform of the secret services which replaced the old SID with two agencies: SISMI (military intelligence) and SISDE (civilian intelligence), coordinated by a body under the Prime Minister, CESIS. The anti-terrorism personnel, under police chief De Francesco, was not integrated in any of the new agencies, but simply disbanded. Thus, when the Red Brigades took action on March 16, Italian anti-terrorism forces were simply blind.
Immediately after Moro's kidnapping, Cossiga established a "technical-operational committee" to coordinate police action and to issue strategic guidelines aimed at finding Moro's prison and liberating him. Almost all members of the committee were members of the P2 Lodge: Adm. Giovanni Torrisi, head of General Staff of the Defense; Gen. Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI; Gen. Giulio Grassini, head of SISDE; Walter Pelosi, head of CESIS; Gen. Raffaele Lo Giudice, head of the Guardia di Finanza; Gen. Donato Lo Prete, chief of General Staff of the Guardia di Finanza.
Cossiga then established another committee, called "Committee I" (Intelligence) formed by the heads of SISMI, SISDE, CESIS and Armed Forces Intelligence (SIOS)—all P2 members. A third body, the "Experts Committee," included various professors, among whom Steve Pieznick, sent by the U.S. State Department, and Franco Ferracuti, a criminologist and P2 member who imposed the line that Moro, whatever he would say from his prison, had to be considered mad, a victim of the "Stockholm syndrome."
During Moro's captivity, Cossiga enforced a spectacular deployment of police and army forces in the streets of Rome, but in reality nothing serious was done to find the prison. One case is most striking: Two times the police received indications concerning a flat in Via Gradoli, where Red Brigadist Mario Moretti lived—once from the flat's neighbors; the second time in an obscure circumstance involving current EU chairman Romano Prodi. The first time, a policeman was sent to speak to the neighbors, but the flat was not searched. The second time, Prodi went personally to Cossiga to report that, during a séance with friends, the name "Gradoli" had come out. Cossiga, of course, knew that Prodi and his friends, professors at Bologna University, had probably received information from radical circles close to the Red Brigades, and that the séance story was a trick to cover the source.
Immediately, Cossiga sent hundreds of policemen—not to via Gradoli, but to a village outside Rome called Gradoli. A mistake? Not quite. Sen. Sergio Flamigni found out, years later, that SISMI owned a few flats in via Gradoli, including in the same building where the suspicious flat was. But the spectacular police deployment the other Gradoli, broadcast by radio and television, sent a warning to the terrorists to leave the Via Gradoli. On April 18, finally police entered the flat, and discovered that this, indeed, had been Moretti's hideout; they did so, because somebody who had the flat keys, had made sure that, by leaving the water open in the bathroom, a real flood would force the neighbors to call the fire brigades.
The Trail to Palazzo Caetani
While Cossiga's structures did nothing serious to find Moro, the political forces let themselves be captured by a division between those who proposed to negotiate with the Red Brigades to obtain Moro's liberation ("partito della trattativa"), and those who insisted that this would have meant the capitulation of the State to terrorism ("partito della fermezza"). The Red Brigades demanded the liberation of all of their comrades in jail, a demand which could never be met and this strengthened the position of the hard-liners. However, three years later, when a Christian Democratic politician was kidnapped in Naples, the same hardliners did not hesitate to open negotiations and obtain his release.
Moro's real prison has never been found. In September 1978, the Partito Operaio Europeo, associated with Lyndon LaRouche, published a report entitled Who Killed Aldo Moro? which for the first time established that the Red Brigades were the instrument of oligarchical forces who controlled both "left" and "right" terrorism, and which historically considered themselves as the enemies of the nation-state. The dossier also suggested that Moro's prison was to be looked for, close to where his corpse was found, that is in via Caetani, and possibly in Palazzo Caetani.
Recent findings of the Parliamentary Committee chaired by Senator Pellegrino have confirmed such suggestions in an astonishing way. The Committee has found out that, shortly after Moro had been kidnapped, SISMI briefly investigated a certain "Igor Caetani," a member of the oligarchical Caetani family. The real name of Igor Caetani was Igor Markevich, a Russian-born conductor who had married a Caetani princess. Markevich was suspected of being an intermediary between the Red Brigades and political factions who were ready to break the "fermezza" line and negotiate a deal to obtain Moro's freedom.
Why Markevich? Digging into his past, Committee experts have found that he was probably a double or triple intelligence agent, working for Anglo-American, Israeli, and possibly Russian intelligence circles. More important than Markevich was another inhabitant of Palazzo Caetani, Hubert Howard, who had also married a Caetani princess. Both Markevich and Howard were members of esoteric freemasonic circles. Howard had been a high British intelligence officer during the war, and had kept that function throughout the following decades. Some suspect that Howard was the real head of the secret NATO "stay-behind" network, called Gladio. According to some reconstructions, the order to kill Moro was not given by Moretti's people, but came from above and possibly through Howard.
PART 3
Enter Gladio
During his captivity, former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was "interrogated" by the Red Brigades, who aimed at achieving a confession of Christian Democratic party (DC) involvement in "capitalist corruption" and "imperialist exploitation." Tapes of the interrogations were made, and the Red Brigades announced that they would publish the interrogations, to advance the cause of the "anti-imperialist struggle." But they didn't. Today, the tapes have not yet been found.
Moro wrote also a "memorandum," which partially surfaced only after the terrorists had been arrested, and only in photocopied or typewritten form. Moro's handwritten originals have never been found. Similarly, the originals of the many letters he wrote to his party colleagues and his family were never found. According to one interpretation, this is because Moro had started to reveal the existence of the NATO secret "stay behind" organization, called Gladio.
Parts of the memorandum, in a typewritten version, were found in October 1978, when the newly appointed special anti-terrorism Carabinieri team under Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa[4] discovered a Red Brigades hideout in Milan. (In that apartment, on the via Montenevoso, Dalla Chiesa's men found also 15 letters written by Moro, other than those which the terrorists had delivered to politicians and to members of Moro's family during Moro's captivity.[5]) However, the larger bulk of the memorandum was found much later in the same apartment, in 1990, in a badly concealed hole in the wall, discovered by carpenters who were renovating the premises. This time, 53 photocopied pages of Moro's original handwritten memo, plus 114 pages of letters and last wills, never delivered, were found, together with weapons, ammunition, and a bag full of money.
The via Montenevoso papers constitute one of the many unsolved mysteries of the Moro case. It is evident that the papers were brought into the apartment, both in 1978 and in 1990, from the outside, and surely not by the Red Brigades terrorists. In fact, in 1978, Dalla Chiesa's men searched the flat for three hours, before the prosecutor could get there, and in the absence of the residents (the terrorists), who strangely enough renounced their right to be present at the search. Once the magistrate came, the apartment was turned upside down, so that it would have been impossible not to find the hole, covered by a thin wooden panel, nailed to the wall under the window.
All this adds a further element to the picture of a structure, external to the Red Brigades, which ran the Moro operation, which took possession of Moro's papers—and still has them.
Only in the papers which this entity decided to release in 1990, can Moro's mention of a secret NATO structure be found. In 1990, however, the Berlin Wall had come down, and the existence of Gladio had already been made known by Giulio Andreotti, who was then Prime Minister. Had this revelation come out in 1978, the impact would have been devastating.
It is clear that the same network which already in 1978 had Moro's papers in its possession, decided to release those found in the Montenevoso apartment. This network is still today in possession of the original papers, including those contained in a bag that Moro always carried with him, which, according to Moro's secretary Sereno Freato, pertained to evidence that shortly before Moro's kidnapping, the U.S. State Department under Henry Kissinger had tried to eliminate Moro politically, through the Lockheed scandal.[6]
The involvement of the Gladio organization in Moro's kidnapping, however, had already come out at an early stage. The day of the kidnapping, March 16, 1978, at 9 a.m., a member of the Gladio military structure, Col. Camillo Guglielmi of the SISMI military secret service, was on the via Fani, and therefore he was present at the shootout and kidnapping. Guglielmi's presence was later revealed by another member of Gladio, and was not denied by Guglielmi himself; he simply justified it by saying that he had been invited for lunch by a colleague living nearby—at 9 a.m. The same source reported that Guglielmi was part of a group inside SISMI, called "Ufficio R," under two members of the Propaganda-2 freemasonic lodge, Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte, who, two years later, in 1980, were caught in a cover-up of the Bologna train station bombing. Musumeci and Belmonte, as we shall see, were sentenced by the Bologna court, together with P2 puppet-master Licio Gelli.
`The External Entity'
The involvement of an external entity above the Red Brigades had been exposed already in 1978 by a journalist with ties to intelligence circles, Mino Pecorelli, whose destiny is intertwined with that of General Dalla Chiesa. Pecorelli ran a magazine called Osservatorio Politico, which, on March 28, 1978, wrote: "Let us prepare for the worst. The authors of the via Fani massacre and of Aldo Moro's kidnapping are professionals, trained in top-level war schools." On May 2, Pecorelli wrote: "The directing brain which organized Moro's capture has nothing to do with the traditional Red Brigades. The via Fani commando expresses in an unusual, but effective way, the new Italian political strategy." Pecorelli wrote that both in Washington and in Moscow, certain forces wanted to prevent the association of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) with the government: "Once again, the logic of Yalta has passed over the heads of minor powers. It is Yalta which decided via Fani."
Pecorelli had revealed the existence of a plan to kidnap Moro already ten years earlier, on Nov. 19, 1967, in an article in the magazine Il Nuovo Mondo d'Oggi, of which he was the editor. Under the title "I Should Kill Aldo Moro," Pecorelli reported that in 1964, at the time of Moro's first government with the Socialist Party (PSI), a certain political-economic group had assigned Lt. Col. Roberto Potestà the task of preparing a ranger commando to eliminate Moro's bodyguards, kidnap Moro to a secret place, kill him, and blame the assassination on left-wing elements. The similarity of that plan with what actually occurred in 1978 is striking.
Over the following years, Pecorelli repeatedly sent signals that Moro was targeted for assassination. In September 1975, he wrote: "A member of the delegation accompanying President Ford on a visit to Rome told us: `I see black. There is a Jacqueline in the future of your country.' " And on March 15, 1978, on the eve of the via Fani events, Pecorelli wrote: "On the Ides of March 1978, the Andreotti government is going to be sworn in before State President Giovanni Leone. Should we expect a Brutus?"
After Moro's death, on Oct. 17, 1978, Pecorelli wrote: "The police minister knew everything, even where [Moro] was kept, in the Ghetto area. Why did he not say anything? He could not make any decision, because he would have to ask the higher-ups. This raises the question: How high? Maybe up to the Lodge of Christ in Paradise?" The reference is obviously to a freemasonic lodge, even in the name Christ (Rome's Piazza del Gesù was the address of the central office of freemasonry).
Minister Francesco Cossiga, Pecorelli wrote, had been informed by a Carabinieri general that Moro's prison had been located, and he needed the OK for a raid. Cossiga said that he had to consult on that, and ultimately denied the request, on the pretext that he did not want to risk Moro's life during the raid. "The name of the general is Amen," wrote Pecorelli, meaning obviously Dalla Chiesa, whose name in Italian means "from the Church."
On Jan. 16, 1979, Pecorelli announced more revelations on the Moro case, but he was never able to publish them, because he was shot two months later.
The Restoration
Legend has it that with the assassination of Aldo Moro, the Red Brigades failed to achieve their goal, which was to build a "revolutionary" consensus around them. The truth is that the stringpullers behind the Red Brigades did reach their aim, which was to finish off Moro and his policy, once and forever.
The policy of national unity laboriously built by Moro started to crumble already on the day of his kidnapping, and after the momentum supplied by the hard line against terrorism, it quickly collapsed in the following 12 months. Moro was the only figure who could keep the Christian Democratic party together in a dialogue with the Communist Party, guaranteeing no compromise on principles; at the same time, Moro was the only figure whom the PCI leaders fully trusted, in a collaboration in which the PCI had to make considerable concessions, without apparent advantages. Without Moro, the right wing in the DC considerably raised the difficulty for the PCI, in a context stressed by austerity measures imposed on Italy by the International Monetary Fund. This strengthened the extremist, Jacobin faction in the PCI, which had always been against collaboration with the DC, so that in January 1979, when Parliament was called upon to vote on Italy's entrance into the European Monetary System, the PCI voted against it, and left the majority coalition, thus marking the end of the period of "national solidarity." The Andreotti government resigned on Jan. 31, 1979.
This opened the way to a "Restoration" government, preceded by very turbulent months. Initially, attempts to form a new government with a different majority failed, so that State President Pertini was forced to call for early elections. In order to influence the election result, the synarchists deployed left-wing and right-wing terrorism, in a bloody escalation. Already on Jan. 24, the Red Brigades had assassinated trade unionist Guido Rossa, a PCI member; on Jan. 29, another terrorist commando had killed Milan prosecutor Emilio Alessandrini, a veteran of the investigations into the neo-fascist networks involved in the Piazza Fontana massacre of 1969. Until June 3, the election date, such acts of terrorism escalated. This destabilization phase saw not only "red" terrorists in action, but also a reorganized neo-fascist network.[7]
The election results showed the effects of the terrorist campaign: Frightened voters abandoned the PCI, which dropped from 34.4% to 30%. The DC and PSI confirmed their 1976 percentiles, and minor centrist parties slightly increased their votes, so that on paper, a tiny center-left majority was again possible. However, three attempts to form a government failed before, on Aug. 2, with a real coup de theatre, none other than Francesco Cossiga was appointed. Cossiga had resigned, in recognition of his responsibility for his failure as police minister during Moro's kidnapping. Now, it was as if Cossiga was rewarded, by entrusting him with the leadership of a government supported by forces hostile to Moro's policy. Cossiga convinced the Socialists not to vote against his government, which lasted eight months. It was replaced, on April 5, by a second Cossiga Cabinet, this time with the Socialists on board, who were rewarded with nine ministerial posts.
In the meantime, on Feb. 15-20, 1980, at the national congress of the DC, the anti-Moro faction formalized the end of the Moro policy, by voting up a preamble to the party program, establishing that the Christian Democracy excluded any possibility of future collaboration with the PCI. This was exactly what Henry Kissinger had demanded from Moro in 1976. The author of the preamble was Carlo Donat Cattin, who became deputy secretary general. Donat Cattin, a former trade unionist, had a deep, dark secret: His son Marco was a member of the Red Brigades. This means that Donat Cattin was susceptible to blackmail, including through his secretary Ilio Giasolli, a member of the P2.[8]
With the establishment of Cossiga's government, his friend Licio Gelli's secret network, the P2, was at the height of its power. P2 members were still in command of both secret services, SISDE and SISMI, as well as of the state coordination body, CESIS; Federico Umberto D'Amato, P2 member and an old buddy of James Jesus Angleton—formerly CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence—was still at his place in the Interior Ministry; in Cossiga's first Cabinet, two ministers and three deputy ministers were P2 members. In Cossiga's second Cabinet, the P2 presence increased to three ministers and five deputy ministers. Cossiga also promoted P2 members Gen. Orazio Giannini as head of the Guardia di Finanza (financial police) and Adm. Giovanni Torrisi as head of the General Staff of Defense. The larger P2 network, as far as it is publicly known, was impressive. Gelli's secret organization included the following numbers of high military officers: Army 50; Navy 29; Carabinieri 32; Air Force 9; Guardia di Finanza 37. Furthermore, it included: 22 police officials; 14 judges and prosecutors; 9 diplomats; 53 ministry officials; 49 bankers and bank officials; 83 industrialists; 124 professionals; 8 managers of state holdings; 12 corporate managers; 59 members of Parliament and party officials; 4 media publishers; 8 newspaper editors; 22 journalists; 3 writers; and 10 officials of public television RAI.
Cossiga himself later claimed in an interview that he first met P2 head Gelli in this period. Whether this is true or just a cover for an older relationship, Cossiga and Gelli claim mutual friendship to this day.
The `Plan for Democratic Rebirth'
The P2 strategy unfolded according to two documents which were drafted between Autumn 1975 and Winter 1976: the "Memorandum on the Italian Political Situation" and the "Plan for Democratic Rebirth." The "Memorandum" expresses pessimism on the capacity of the Christian Democratic party to keep functioning as a "dam" against Communism. "At this point," says the Memorandum, "the solution of a `militarocracy,' the Italian way, could not appear as unthinkable as an alternative to the Communist regime."
The "Rebirth" plan was a plan of action to infiltrate, control, and corrupt all state institutions. It envisions the opportunity of collecting and allocating 30-40 billion lire (about 150 million euro) to control newspapers, political parties, and trade unions; selected politicians are indicated as candidates to be supported in gaining positions of power in their parties; P2 journalists should be infiltrated into all dailies and the national television; "RAI should be dissolved in the name of freedom of information." In particular, a reform of the DC was discussed, thinking that 10 billion lire would be enough to "buy" the party.
The "primary objective and indispensable precondition of the operation" of the plan, "is the establishment of a club (of a Rotary-like nature for the diversity of its components) where the best level of industry and financial sector leaders, members of the liberal professions, public officials and magistrates, as well as very few, selected politicians are represented . . . men who would constitute a real committee of trustees respecting those politicians who will take on the honor of implementing the plan." The plan indicated also a series of electoral, judicial, and constitutional reforms to be implemented, in order to make the country more "governable." In particular, the whole political landscape was to be changed: Traditional parties should disappear and be replaced by "two political movements, one of a liberal-labor inspiration and one of liberal-moderate, or conservative inspiration," to be achieved through "successively being dismantled and then rebuilt, several times."
The substance of Gelli's plan was to subordinate national political life to an oligarchy with no formal political accountability, represented by the secret P2 lodge. Here, and not in state institutions, decisions would be taken. This would not mean that Gelli could pull a string and everything would move into place. But once the power of such a system was established, Italy could be steered in the direction wanted by the P2's Anglo-American controllers. The P2's main instrument to condition Italian political life was the strategy of tension; sometimes, to remind its own members who was boss. This was sometimes necessary when international conditions changed, and new policies were in place.
Reorganization of Neo-Fascist Terrorism
At the end of the 1970s, after the historical leaders of Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale had either been arrested or escaped abroad, the figure of Paolo Signorelli emerged as the chief neo-fascist ideologue. Signorelli is described by Bologna prosecutors as the immediate superior of Giancarlo Rognoni, one of the three neo-fascists sentenced and then acquitted for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. At the same time, Signorelli was described as an intimate of Licio Gelli by neo-fascist witnesses.
A Rome prosecutor who was investigating the reorganization of right-wing terrorist networks, Vittorio Occorsio, and who was state attorney at the trial against Ordine Nuovo, was killed on July 10, 1976. His work was continued by Mario Amato from late 1977 to the Spring of 1980. Amato came across a Secret Service dossier revealing the reorganization of Ordine Nuovo. Those members of ON who had not fled to Spain had gone underground, and had begun to adopt the tactics and rhetoric of left-wing terrorists. Even more startling, they made attempts to link up with leftist groups, in a common effort to destroy the state.
Amato also found evidence of Signorelli's involvement in reorganizing the movement. The group now had a semi-legal wing called the Third Position, and a terrorist wing called, among other things, Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR). In 1979, Amato twice had Signorelli arrested in connection with terrorist attacks in Rome, but Signorelli was released both times after questioning.
Amato's main obstacle in the investigation was his superior, the head prosecutor of the Rome judiciary, Giovanni De Matteo, a member of P2. All dossiers on right-wing terrorism landed on his desk, but died there.
Then, in Spring 1980, Amato had a breakthrough: A neo-fascist named Massimi, who was in jail for several crimes, told Amato that he had been present at a meeting at Signorelli's home on Dec. 9, 1979, when the murder of a suspected traitor was planned. Besides Signorelli and five other fascists, Prof. Aldo Semerari of Rome University, a noted criminal psychologist who was a close friend of De Matteo, was present. Semerari was also a P2 member.
Not knowing the secret connections between Semerari and De Matteo, Amato presented his information to De Matteo, urgently pleading that it should be forwarded to the proper authorities. But after De Matteo had been sitting on the dossier for a week, Amato learned indirectly that its content had been leaked to Signorelli and Semerari. Amato filed a complaint to the Superior Council of the Judiciary, without, however, revealing one of the things Massimi had revealed: that Amato himself was next on the fascist hit list. Ten days after his appearance before the Council, on June 23, 1980, Amato was shot in the head while waiting at a bus stop. He had neither security nor an armored car, despite the fact that he had repeatedly asked for protection.
Amato's work, however, was crucial for the Bologna prosecutors, who had the task of investigating those responsible for the bomb that exploded on Aug. 2, 1980, in the Bologna train station.
The Bologna Train Station Massacre
On Aug. 2, 1980, at 10:25 a.m., a powerful bomb exploded in the Bologna train station, killing 85 and injuring more than 200. Twenty-four years later, the court handed down a life-long prison sentence for three neo-fascists, Sergio Picciafuoco, Valerio Fioravanti, and Francesca Mambro, and minor sentences for Licio Gelli, Francesco Pazienza, and SISMI officials Gen. Giuseppe Musumeci and Col. Pietro Belmonte, for being involved in the cover-up.
However, the question as to why that massacre was perpetrated has not yet found a satisfactory answer—at least if one does not accept the explanation that it was done by a neo-fascist cell gone crazy. From the standpoint of the "strategy of tension," the purpose of such a large terrorist attack should have been to produce a situation similar to the state of emergency which the Rumor government was supposed to declare after the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. Also, this time there was no urgency of shifting an undesired government policy, as such a shift had already occurred. It is not excluded, however, that for the P2 synarchist controllers, even a government considered an asset should be appropriately "conditioned." But why an unprecedented massacre, the largest so far, in Bologna, the stronghold of local PCI power?
The international picture was less "stabilized" than the domestic one. With the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the West had lost an important ally in the Persian Gulf, and Islamic fundamentalism was on the march. In the Mediterranean, Libya was in a confrontation with the U.S. Administration. Some, including ministers of the Cossiga government itself, have posited a connection between the Bologna bombing and another episode, the explosion of a civilian airplane of Itavia Airlines, over Ustica Island, near Sicily, which had occurred a few weeks earlier, on June 27. In that incident, 81 people lost their lives. Many years later, prosecutor Rosario Priore established that the Itavia DC-9 was hit by a rocket during an air battle involving American, French, Italian, and Libyan aircraft. Most probably, the rocket was shot by U.S. jets against a Libyan MiG which, in order to escape radar detection, was flying in the DC-9's shadow. It was believed that Libyan leader Colonel Qaddafi was on the Libyan jet, coming from Yugoslavia. The Itavia jet had taken off from Bologna.
However, the connection between Ustica and the Bologna massacre has not been demonstrated. What has been demonstrated, is the massive cover-up in both cases. The investigations of the Ustica incident have been hindered by cover-ups involving the highest Air Force authorities, and the elimination of countless witnesses in mysterious circumstances; among these were pilots Ivo Nutarelli and Ivo Naldini, who died in the Ramstein, Germany, air show on Aug. 28, 1988, in a dramatic midair collision which caused 70 civilian deaths and injured 400.
The Bologna case has seen a cover-up involving the P2 and SISMI officials, who succeeded in slowing down investigations, and forcing prosecutor Aldo Gentile to recuse himself. Paradoxically, those carrying out the cover-ups were nailed with sound juridical evidence, stronger than the circumstantial evidence used, for instance, to sentence Mambro and Fioravanti.
A few days after the massacre, on Aug. 5, the magazine L'Espresso published an interview with Col. Amos Spiazzi, the leader of the Rosa dei Venti conspiracy (see Part 1), who revealed that, as a SISMI agent, he had discovered that the neo-fascists were preparing a major terrorist action. The interview, it was announced, had been given before the Bologna massacre. Spiazzi then dropped a nickname, "Ciccio," as his source from neo-fascist circles.
"Ciccio" was Francesco Mangiameli, a member of the Third Position and at the same time, a participant in several terrorist actions with NAR leader Valerio Fioravanti. Spiazzi's interview is today interpreted as a successful effort to set Mangiameli up for assassination, in order to eliminate evidence of connections between the terrorists and intelligence circles.
Right on schedule, on Sept. 9, 1980, Mangiameli was assassinated by a commando led by Valerio Fioravanti. Mangiameli's comrades in Palermo issued a leaflet accusing Fioravanti of the assassination and of the Bologna terror action. Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello, the two other leaders of Third Position, knew they were next on Fioravanti's hit list, and hastily escaped abroad, finding refuge in London.
When in 1981, police arrested Fioravanti, Mambro, and Sergio Picciafuoco, their alibis for Aug. 2, 1980 collapsed. Picciafuoco's presence on the premises of the Bologna train station when the bomb exploded, could be proven, because he was even medicated for a light injury.
Prosecutors established that the weeks immediately preceding the Bologna massacre, had been spent together by Picciafuoco, Fioravanti, and Mangiameli, hosted by Mangiameli in Sicily. Furthermore, Fioravanti and Mambro supplied contradictory alibis, and were additionally contradicted by witnesses.
However, while prosecutors were moving after the NAR and Third Position neo-fascists, the P2-controlled SISMI structure tried to lead them in the wrong direction. On Sept. 1, 1980, the Repubblica press agency in Rome published an article criticizing the direction of the Bologna investigations. On Sept. 15, the magazine Panorama repeated the same critiques and suggested that an international connection be investigated. Both articles had been organized by Francesco Pazienza, who had become the real head of SISMI. According to Italian prosecutors, Francesco Pazienza, a businessman who had collaborated with French intelligence circles in the past, at the end of the 1970s was promoted by U.S. circles as the man who should replace Gelli as the head of the P2. Pazienza, by his own admission, reported to Michael Ledeen at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. Simultaneously, Licio Gelli, in person, intervened in the weeks immediately preceding the Bologna massacre, with a SISDE official in Bologna "suggesting" to him that the international connection, and not the domestic neo-fascist one, was the right one.
The P2 strategy was sophisticated, because the international connection contained elements of truth; for instance, SISDE head Giulio Grassini, a P2 member, wrote a report on Oct. 2, indicating that the Italian terrorists had trained in Lebanon, together with German neo-Nazi groups, whose leader was Karl-Heinz Hoffmann. This report was credible, because eight weeks after the Bologna bombing, on Sept. 26, a member of Hoffmann's group had blown himself up at the Oktoberfest in Munich, killing 12 others and wounding 215. A week later in Paris, a bomb in front of a synagogue had killed 4 persons and wounded 13. The action was claimed by the European National Fascists.
In this way, the idea that the Bologna massacre was part of a European-wide offensive of right-wing terrorism, "Euro-fascism," was credible. The alleged source for the Lebanese connection, however, Palestinian leader Abu Ayad, was contradicted by the spokesman of the Falange. But the SISMI insisted on the connection, and on Jan. 23, 1981, supplied another report which identified the leader of the Italian neo-fascist group which had trained in Lebanon. Prosecutor Aldo Gentile travelled twice to Lebanon, without achieving any results, because his information was too vague.
It was not until 1985 that Colonel Giovannone, the head of the SISMI station in Lebanon, admitted that SISMI was perfectly aware that allegations of a "Lebanese connection" were inconsistent.
The P2 Tries To Set LaRouche Up
In November 1981, when the Lebanese connection had evaporated, the P2 started another cover-up. A neo-fascist arrested in Switzerland for common crimes, Elio Ciolini, demanded to be extradited to Italy, because he had information on the Bologna massacre. Initially, Ciolini reported to a Carabinieri official about an international terrorist cell, headed by Stefano delle Chiaie, responsible for several terrorist atrocities such as Piazza Fontana, Italicus, and Bologna, under the supervision of a secret freemasonic lodge, based in Montecarlo. Members of the Montecarlo Lodge were Licio Gelli, banker Roberto Calvi, Giulio Andreotti, but also FIAT owner Gianni Agnelli and Henry Kissinger.
The "Montecarlo connection" kept prosecutors busy until 1984, yielding only a loss of time and of image for the investigation.
Again, prosecutors were confronted with a mixture of true and false information. Ciolini had worked with delle Chiaie in Argentina, and his statements on delle Chiaie's presence in Italy and France in June-July 1980 could be confirmed. But ultimately, it was discovered that Ciolini's story had been prepared for him by a SISMI official!
Gen. Nino Lugaresi, who was appointed head of SISMI after P2 was discovered, declared in 1985: "Ciolini is one of the most brilliant members of Gelli's staff . . . for the most part Ciolini's entire activity seemed to me a successful cover-up activity, implemented to paralyze the investigations on the Bologna massacre." And Lugaresi added: "Only the existence of some sort of connection between the authors of the massacre and the authors of the cover-up can explain such a behavior."
Ciolini tried again, in 1990, to construct another false connection. This time, before prosecutor Grassi, he claimed that the mastermind of the Bologna massacre was "American neo-fascist Lyndon LaRoche [sic]," and that he learned about this during a stay at the Harriman Foundation, in the United States. This time, prosecutor Grassi did not bother to check Ciolini's statements, and incriminated him right away.
This attempt, however, coinciding with the legal setup by a Virginia court against LaRouche and his associates in the United States,[9] indicates that Ciolini—and his P2 controllers—are connected to the synarchist networks recently identified by LaRouche.
PART 4
The synarchist strategy of tension ripped Italy apart beginning in the 1960s, as neo-Nazi, banking, and terror networks joined forces to destabilize the nation. Part 3, in EIR of April 9, 2004, unravelled the threads of cover-up that followed the terror bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980, which killed 85 people and injured more than 200. We showed that interlinked personnel of the Propaganda-2 (P2) freemasonic organization and the SISMI military intelligence services covered up the tracks of the terrorists over many years.
Operation `Terror on Trains'
Gen. Pietro Musumeci, a veteran P2 member who was head of the Control and Security Office and of the General Secretariat of SISMI, decided to carry out personally the most blatant cover-up action. A bag containing the same kind of explosive used in Bologna was placed on a train, in order to be discovered on Jan. 13, 1981. Inside the bag were also two guns, ammunition, newspapers, and plane tickets, all pointing to French terrorist Raphael Lagrange and German terrorist Dimitris Martin, whose presence had been previously signalled by anonymous sources to SISMI itself.
After the bag was found, SISMI head Gen. Giuseppe Santovito wrote a report saying that the explosive was destined for delivery to two other French terrorists, who would have placed it on Italian trains and blamed the action on Italian neofascists. SISMI kept feeding false information on the new connection to Bologna prosecutors, but after the P2's membership was made public, in May 1981, Santovito and Musumeci's game was over.
In 1985, the truth came out: SISMI officials Musumeci and Col. Pietro Belmonte had themselves put the bag on the Taranto-Milan train; the scheme had been planned by P2 leader Francesco Pazienza and Santovito.
P2 and `Billygate'
In the Summer of 1980, the P2 intervened in the U.S. Presidential elections in favor of the Bush-Reagan ticket. This was the famous "Billygate" scandal involving Jimmy Carter's brother Billy and his connections to Libya's dictator Qaddafi. Since Carter's defeat was virtually certain, the "Billygate" affair must be read as part of the faction fights in the Reagan-Bush camp in order to ensure control over the incoming Presidency.
The scandal was organized by American "universal fascist" Michael Ledeen and Francesco Pazienza, in collaboration with P2 member Federico Umberto D'Amato. According to Italian prosecutors, Pazienza, a businessman with a past collaboration with French intelligence, at the end of the '70s was promoted by U.S. circles as the man who should replace Licio Gelli as the head of the P2. At the time of Billygate, Pazienza was officially an advisor to SISMI's General Santovito, himself a P2 member; but by some accounts, Santovito took orders from Pazienza. According to Pazienza's version, at meetings in the men's room of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Washington's Georgetown University, Ledeen told him he should collect evidence on rumors that Billy Carter was spending some "quality time" in Libya, a country considered almost at war with the United States. This idea came from publisher Arnaud de Borchgrave, Ledeen said. Pazienza reports how he and D'Amato, using SISMI channels in Libya, put together the story that Billy had participated in the celebrations of Libya's revolution, at a hotel where Palestinian extremist George Habbash was hosted too. The photos of Billy Carter having a nice time in Libya made the front pages of U.S. and world media.
Commenting on the episode, judges of the Rome court that sentenced Pazienza in 1985 wrote: "The happy result of the operation in support of Reagan brought the hoped-for advantages and credited Pazienza among the leadership of the winning party [the Republicans], so that Pazienza, together with Ledeen, in the transition period and during the diplomatic crisis provoked by the near-paralysis of the American Embassy in Rome, without an ambassador, took over the functions of liaison between the new American administration and Italian political personalities, as stated by Pazienza and confirmed by Federico Umberto d'Amato."
Both Pazienza and Gelli were invited to the inauguration of the Reagan-Bush Administration. Eventually, Pazienza organized meetings between Italian politicians and U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
Attempt on the Pope and Murder of Calvi
In the 1980-82 period, while Pazienza "conquered a dominant position" in SISMI, two more dramatic events centered around Italy shocked the world: the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981 and the ritual execution of P2 banker Roberto Calvi on June 17, 1982.
The two events are connected as part of a larger operation, to undermine the Vatican crusade against both Communism and Western free-market policies, announced by Pope John Paul II already in his speech before the United Nations shortly after his election. Pazienza was locked in an internal power struggle in the Vatican, involving a powerful group of American bishops controlling Vatican finances, to which also Roberto Calvi, head of the largest Italian private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, was connected. Ledeen, together with Theodore Shackley, was pulling the strings of the Iran-Contra operation, the forerunner of the "Clash of Civilizations" policy whose next stage was the creation of the Osama bin Laden phenomenon.
Soon after the attempted assassination of the Pope, a massive cover-up was launched with the creation of the "Bulgarian connection." Prosecutor Rosario Priore, in his 1998 sentence, demonstrated that the cover-up had been organized by U.S.-centered intelligence circles.[10] The attack against the Pope had been preceded by the discovery of the P2 membership list. Pazienza, in the meantime, had become an ally of the Vatican faction around Msgr. Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican bank Istituto Opere di Religione (IOR). Pazienza had also become a "special adviser" to P2 member Roberto Calvi, whose Banco Ambrosiano had been part of a scheme, together with Marcinkus' IOR, to channel money to certain factions of the Polish trade union Solidarnosc, the center of the anti-communist revolution in Poland. Ambrosiano had also financed the P2-controlled faction in the Argentinian military junta. Calvi's bank was also used to finance Italian political parties, especially the Socialist Party, which seemed to best fit the role assigned according to Gelli's "Plan for Democratic Rebirth" (see Part 3).
Eventually, in the aftermath of the crackdown against the P2 Lodge, Ambrosiano's unbalanced accounts exploded in a bankruptcy crisis. Calvi, who apparently was becoming the scapegoat, was induced to travel to London in search of a solution to his problems. The man who convinced him to make the trip was Flavio Carboni, a Sardinian "businessman" introduced (or better, assigned) to Calvi by his controller Pazienza. Calvi and Carboni travelled to London on June 16, 1982. On June 17, Calvi's corpse was found hanging under Blackfriars' Bridge, with bricks in the pockets of his suit. The Scotland Yard investigation quickly concluded that it was "suicide."
Neofascists Made in London
Twenty-one years after Calvi's death, his family succeeded in having the case reopened, and a new autopsy concluded that Calvi had been killed. Furthermore, as a result of cooperation between Italian and British police, a witness has declared that Carboni's alibi for June 16-17, 1982 in London, was false.
In an interview, Calvi's son Guido has hinted at participation of Italian neofascists in the assassination of his father. He pointed to "those neofascists who got rich in London" in the years following Calvi's death.
Guido Calvi's description fits Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello, the two leaders of the Terza Posizione (Third Position) whom we left (in Part 3) after they had fled Italy in the aftermath of the 1980 Bologna massacre. Haunted by both their former comrades and an arrest warrant, the two found refuge in London, where Margaret Thatcher's government systematically rejected numerous Italian extradition requests. In London, Fiore and Morsello set up shop as an accommodation and job-search agency for Italian and Spanish students, called "Meeting Point," at which the two allegedly made millions.
However, the British magazine Searchlight exposed the two men in June 1989 as British intelligence (MI6) agents. The same allegations were contained in a 1991 report by the European Parliament Committee on Racism and Xenophobia. And, on Dec. 1, 1999, Italian antiterrorism chief Ansoino Andreassi stated in front of a Parliamentary committee that at minimum, Fiore and Morsello have been "protected" by MI6.[11]
This is apparently enough, as established recently by a Naples court in a slander trial, to justify calling Fiore a "British intelligence agent" (Morsello in the meantime died).[12]
Fiore and Morsello put their money into two funds—the St. George Educational Trust and the St. Michael the Archangel Trust—through which they financed various activities, including providing lawyers for neofascist defendants Franco Freda and Cesaro Ferri in a terrorism trial in Italy, and the new Italian party founded and run from London, Forza Nuova.
Fiore, Lefebvre, and the `Black Nobility'
Forza Nuova reflects a transformation undergone by Fiore during his London years, away from the "secular" character typical of previous neofascist grouplets, including Fiore's own Third Position, into a Christian fundamentalist, Falangist profile. Not accidentally, the name Forza Nuova is mutated from the Spanish "Fuerza Nueva" party led by former Franco official Blas Piñar, with whom Fiore's party cultivates close ties.
This "conversion" must be attributed to the influence of the Catholic schismatic movement called "The Society of Pius X," founded by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre. Society members often appear at Forza Nuova's public events in Italy, while a member of the Society, Father Michael Crowdy, is a trustee of Fiore's St. George Trust, based in London.
Marcel Lefebvre was a reactionary French bishop, supporter of the terrorist Secret Army Organization (OAS), and among the leaders of a movement called "Cité Catholique," which pursues "the installation of the Reign of God in the world against modern naturalism, which constitutes the triumph of Satan."[13]
The Lefebvrists are the spearhead of the anti-ecumenical, oligarchical faction in the Catholic Church, run by what is known as the "Black Nobility," the aristocracy historically connected with the temporal power of the Church. This faction is allied to the Carlist element of the international synarchist conspiracy. The movement was formed officially in defense of the Tridentine Mass rite, codified at the 1570 Council of Trent, but eliminated by Vatican Council II. In reality, it was a general reaction against the new ecumenical, anti-oligarchical thrust emerging from the Council. Those layers were also embittered by Pope Paul VI's decision to eliminate the aristocrats' privileges in the Vatican Curia, and in the Church in general.
In 1976, in a real declaration of war, the Black Nobility mobilized Lefebvre who, in open defiance of Vatican orders, celebrated a demonstrative Latin mass before a pro-feudalist, aristocratic audience in Paris. One year later, the same challenge was repeated in Rome, when Princess Elvina Pallavicini, the recognized leader of the Black Nobility, invited Lefebvre to celebrate a Latin Mass in her famous Palazzo Rospigliosi in Rome. In 1978, Lefebvre celebrated another mass in Paris, this time in front of the representatives of all the fascist parties of Europe ("Euroright") and the official head of the Carlist movement, Henry IV of Parma-Bourbon. Lefebvre was finally excommunicated by Pope John Paul II, in 1988. After Lefebvre's death, negotiations started between his followers and the Vatican, which have not yet concluded.
Lefebvre's Italian sponsor, Princess Pallavicini, born in 1914, has also recently emerged as the leader of the "pre-emptive warfare" faction in Rome, when she organized a meeting in support of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's policies. On Feb. 12, 2003, she invited U.S. Ambassador to Italy Mel Sembler, U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson, and State Department policy planner Andrew Erdmann to address an audience of Italian government members, Church officials, politicians, international diplomats and, of course, aristocrats.
Thus, while the peripheral, expendable elements of the international synarchist conspiracy, such as Forza Nuova and its Falangist allies, profile themselves as anti-war, anti-imperialist champions, their connections demonstrate that this is just a countergang posture, useful as a cover for terrorist operations, in the same way that bin Laden's al-Qaeda was used for 9/11.
Forza Nuova's Operations Today
When Fiore and Morsello were released from prison in 1997, the two were allowed to return to Italy. At their arrival at the Rome airport, they were greeted by a group including current governor of the Lazio region Francesco Storace, Sen. Enzo Fragalà, both of the Alleanza Nazionale party, and lawyer Giuseppe Taormina, a former deputy minister in Silvio Berlusconi's government. Fiore started to expand his party base, recruiting especially among radical soccer clubs. Forza Nuova rapidly took over right-wing clubs, like Lazio F.C., but also such traditionally left-wing clubs as Roma A.C., applying tactics learned in Britain. Today, Forza Nuova controls most of Italy's hooligan clubs, through front organizations. Another old acquaintance of the strategy of tension years, Prof. Paolo Signorelli (the neofascist whom prosecutor Amato in Rome was investigating, before being killed), is playing a major role in both indoctrinating the hooligans against the "new enemy," the police, as well as running a sort of legal assistance organization for those hooligans who end up in prison.
At the same time, Forza Nuova launched an alliance with radical factions in the separatist Lega Nord (Northern League), represented by former neofascists. This is the case of Sen. Mario Borghezio from Turin, who regularly intervenes at Forza Nuova rallies and congresses on his preferred theme, anti-immigrant demagogy.
Another input into Forza Nuova is represented by the nationwide organization Alleanza Cattolica, which supplies cadres also to Alleanza Nazionale. Alleanza Cattolica (AC) is considered by many as the Italian version of the Tradition, Family, and Property organization in Brazil, whose "counterrevolutionary" ideology it faithfully replicates. AC was founded by Giovanni Cantoni, a former follower of fascist Franco Freda, the man involved, but acquitted, in the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre. Cantoni's brother Pietro was ordained by the Lefebvrians in France. Two AC "intellectuals," Agostino Sanfratello and Piero Vassallo, have been leaders and candidates for Forza Nuova. Vassallo became, in 1975, secretary general of the International Philip II Association, in the name of the "most Catholic emperor of the Counter-reformation Age." Sanfratello specializes in anti-Islamic propaganda.
Two other members of AC, Benedetto Tusa and Mauro Ronco, are currently defense attorney for Giancarlo Rognoni and Carlo Maria Maggi, two neofascists who, together with Delfo Zorzi, were been first sentenced and then acquitted on appeal, in March 2004, for the Piazza Fontana massacre. AC's top man in the government is Alfredo Mantovano, a deputy justice minister and in former national coordinator of Alleanza Nazionale.
The most peculiar member of AC, however, is Massimo Introvigne, a "former" Lefebvrist who runs a think-tank on cults, called CESNUR in Turin. Introvigne, who is also chairman of the Italian office of the International Transylvanian Society of Dracula, and cultivates strange relationships with members of Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templis Orientis (OTO), a Satanist cult.
Typical of countergangs, Forza Nuova has also developed a Delphic operation against the LaRouche movement, adopting a parody of elements from LaRouche's program in order to discredit them. Thus, they have incorporated into their program a certain Prof. Giacinto Auriti, a teacher at Teramo University, who polemicizes against the central banking system, as a private system under which the state creates debt instead of credit. Auriti, however, pushes a feudal alternative: the creation of "municipal currencies" instead of a central banking system.
Similarly, when the LaRouche movement launched a successful parliamentary initiative in support of Argentina, in 2002, which brought about a parliamentary resolution calling for a "new world financial architecture," Fiore's movement launched a countergang operation in support of Argentina. In December 2002, Forza Nuova invited to Italy a delegation of the Argentinian Popular Reconstruction Party, led by its secretary general, Gustavo Breide Obeid. The PPR is part of the Argentinian synarchist network which, through Fernando Quijano, tried to "kidnap" LaRouche's organization in Ibero-America.
A Parallel Organization
On April 14, 2004, prosecutors in Bari arrested 15 members of Forza Nuova—virtually the entire local chapter—on the allegation of having formed two parallel organizations: the one, legal, with a Christian fundamentalist ideology, participating in elections, etc.; the other one, practicing violence against political enemies, minorities, etc., in continuity with neofascist organizations of the past.
This is the first time that a legal charge has been made against Forza Nuova as a whole, and it could have implications at the national level. In the past, FN members had been protagonists of violent episodes, sometimes spectacular ones, but in no case was FN as a party involved.
For instance, on Dec. 22, 1999, a right-wing radical named Andrea Insabato was severely injured while trying to place a bomb in the central office of the Rome leftist daily Il Manifesto. Insabato, a psychologically unstable figure, had been a member of Fiore's Third Position, until it was disbanded (and Insabato spent three years in jail) in the aftermath of the 1980 Bologna massacre. Eventually, Insabato held one of the Forza Nuova accounts where Fiore sent money from London. Recently, however, Insabato left Forza Nuova and founded his own group, called Christian Rebirth. Although Insabato still attended FN meetings, he was no longer a card-carrying member, so Fiore could dissociate from him. This did not prevent Fiore's brother from initially taking up Insabato's legal defense.
In 2002, Insabato was sentenced to 12 years in prison, which was reduced on appeal to six years and eight months. Judge Renato Pugliese, in the first sentencing, wrote that Insabato's action reminded him of "the years of the strategy of tension." The judgment also pointed to the fact that Insabato necessarily had accomplices, who are, however, unknown.
In another episode in January 2003, fifteen members of Forza Nuova, including the leader of the Veneto regional chapter, Paolo Caratossidis, were arrested in Verona, Padua, and Treviso. The group had made headlines a few days earlier, on Jan. 10, by intervening in the studio of a local television station, Telenuovo, during a live talk show, and assaulting a radical Islamic leader and his secretary. (Thanks to the episode, the victim, a lunatic named Adel Smith, gained unexpected notoriety for himself and his radical views, which helped feed anti-Islamic hysteria in the Italian media.)
Gelli Gives the Signal
In Autumn 2003, Forza Nuova was finally called upon to play a role in a new phase of the synarchist strategy. The signal was given by P2 puppet-master Licio Gelli himself, now 84 years old and a free man, after serving the (minor) sentence for his role in the cover-up of the Bologna bombing. On Sept. 28, he gave an interview to the daily La Repubblica, in which he made it known that he is fully active, just like in the "good old days," and he delivered a series of messages to leading Italian politicians. Above all, Gelli rejoiced because, he said, society is being transformed according to his plans. "Justice, television, public security: I wrote everything 30 years ago," Gelli said, referring to his "Plan for Democratic Rebirth" (see Part 3). Gelli also claimed that none of the old P2 members had "repented," and said that he "would have done nothing" to save Aldo Moro from the Red Brigades.
He praised Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (a P2 member), and especially his recent choice for "cleaning up" his party, Forza Italia, Fabrizio Cicchitto (also a P2 member). Gelli also praised the national coordinator of Forza Italia, Sandro Bondi, a former communist. He then boasted that he has given money to all political forces, even to some communists, and mentioned two politicians: Lega Nord leader Umberto Bossi and Alleanza Nazionale leader and current deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini. However, "Fini was a well-promising guy. But in the last couple of years he sort of faded away."
That was the signal. In Gelli's eyes, Gianfranco Fini had gone too far in breaking with his own fascist roots. In 1993, Fini had successfully transformed the traditional fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), into the Alleanza Nazionale; this was necessary to win over part of the conservative vote which had belonged to the Christian Democratic party[14]; step by step, Fini had moved to cut Alleanza Nazionale's fascist roots, taking more and more "moderate" positions on current issues. He had even outflanked his allies on the immigration issue, calling for voting rights for immigrants.
But if all this could be swallowed by the old MSI base for the sake of power, Fini's trip to Israel was the drop that tipped the glass. On Sept. 23-25, this former admirer of Benito Mussolini visited Israel upon invitation from the Sharon government. With a Jewish skullcap on his head, Fini first praised Sharon's separation wall, and then pronounced solemnly that Mussolini's racial laws were "the ultimate evil."
One Mussolini Out, Another Mussolini In
Fini's "break" with Mussolini provoked reactions at home. Princess Elvina Pallavicini told Lazio governor Storace, her asset, "We must do something." Storace's group, which includes Agriculture Minister Gianni Alemanno, did not go so far as to split from the party, but they organized an internal opposition.
However, a window was now open for the creation of a new party to fill the vacuum left by the break with Mussolini's fascism. Why not a party led by a new Mussolini? The granddaughter of Il Duce, Alessandra Mussolini, had already gained notoriety when she decided to market her name in politics—in Alleanza Nazionale, of course. The daughter of Mussolini's son Romano, a jazz musician, and of Sophia Loren's sister Maria Scicolone, Alessandra had initially tried a modest career as a porno actress. When she ran as a candidate for office in 1994, in Naples, her family name captured the nostalgic vote in the traditional MSI stronghold. As a regular host on television talk shows, Mussolini gained notoriety more with her temperament than with her political positions.
It was now decided that Mussolini should leave Fini's party. She did it in a theatrical way ("You will all end up being circumcised," she told Fini and her old comrades), and became the candidate for an electoral coalition of neofascist parties, including Forza Nuova, Fronte Nazionale, and Movimento Sociale-Fiamma Tricolore, a splinter party from the old MSI. Naturally, Fiore's Forza Nuova playes a central role, not only because of its financial means, in the new "black thing," as Italians nicknamed it.
Higher Level of the Synarchist Project
But people like Fiore and Mussolini herself, despite the significance of her name, represent just the lower, expendable level of the synarchist operation. We have to go to the higher level to meet the people who deploy them in the interest of the banking and oligarchical synarchist elite. Several sources have indicated that the decision to launch the operation with Mussolini's granddaughter and Roberto Fiore was taken by a sinister figure who has played a major role behind the scenes of Italian politics in the last decade, Marcello Dell'Utri. A Sicilian, he is not only a family friend of the Mussolinis (more precisely, of Alessandra's mother, Maria Scicolone), but through his twin brother, Alberto, also connected to a powerful faction in the synarchist financial elite. Alberto married Maria Pia La Malfa, member of a political dynasty whose founder, Ugo La Malfa, was among the founders of the Partito d'Azione, together with Enrico Cuccia and others, in the offices of the Banca Commerciale Italiana in 1942 in Milan (see Part 1). Maria Pia La Malfa Dell'Utri pulls the strings of various political operations behind the scenes, being an important organizer of several aristocratic salons.[15]
Marcello Dell'Utri became, in 1973, current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's personal adviser, when Berlusconi was a real estate developer; and became manager of Publitalia in 1979, when Berlusconi moved into the television business. In 1994, it was Dell'Utri, together with a few other close advisers and friends, who convinced Berlusconi to form his own party, in order to fill the vacuum left by the destruction of the government parties by the synarchist "Clean Hands" operation. He and his pupil Gianfranco Micciché (they are both from Palermo), faked candidate lists in order to overcome Berlusconi's last-minute indecision and show him that he had vast support in the country. Overnight, Publitalia's national cadre, from a pool of salesmen, was transformed into a network of political activists.
Since Forza Italia offered asylum to old Christian Democrats, socialists, social democrats, liberals, and so on, for a number of years the party has been the battleground of two opposite tendencies: the one aiming at evolving into a sort of new Christian Democracy, the other looking at the neo-conservative model in the United States. Recently, the balance has tilted in favor of the latter tendency.
Dell'Utri, in particular, has moved to undermine the influence of current Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti, author of the "European Action Plan" for infrastructure development, which last year was adopted by the European Union. Dell'Utri had conspired with Fini and other coalition partners to convince Berlusconi to establish an Office of Economic Planning, which Tremonti has characterized as an "anti-Economic Ministry."
More importantly, Dell'Utri has recently started a project, together with Cicchitto and Bondi (the two praised by Gelli) in order to transform the current "liberal" ideology of the government coalition, into an outright fascist-synarchist one.
In order to do so, Dell'Utri has set up a web of magazines and newspapers, each one fitting the profile of single components of the Forza Italia party, whose evolution will ultimately converge in the synarchist result. The command center of this "black orchestra" is a weekly cultural magazine, Il Domenicale, run directly by Dell'Utri, through a young journalist named Angelo Crespi. Main players in the orchestra are another weekly run by Cicchitto, Icocervo, and the daily newspaper Il Foglio, run by a former communist, Giuliano Ferrara. A fourth major player is the "cadre school" department of Forza Italia, run by a priest named Gianni Baget Bozzo, a member of the close circle where the birth of Forza Italia was decided.
A visit to the Internet sites of these entities shows evidence of their interplay. The division of roles is as follows:
- Il Domenicale proclaims as its mission, to unite all "liberalisms" under a common roof. Liberalisms belong to two traditions, according to the magazine: "the Thomistic-Aristotelian one" (its own), "and the others." The "Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition" is identified with the counterrevolution; its champions, Joseph de Maistre, Donoso Cortés, Nietzsche, et al., are subjects of regular coverage in the magazine, which also runs revisionist articles on the American Civil War. Frequent guests include Massimo Introvigne, the "anti-cult" specialist of Alleanza Cattolica; and Marco Respinti, of the cultural section of Il Secolo, the organ of the Alleanza Nazionale party.
- L'Icocervo is more "moderate." Its editor, Cicchitto, writes that they consider themselves "liberals" with moderation (in America, one might say, "compassionate conservatives"), and for instance, in economic policy, this sometimes means opposition to privatization, in favor of a certain role of the state. L'Icocervo is published by a publishing house run by the spokesman for—Gladio (see Part 3). Francesco Gironda, an expert in psychological warfare, became national spokesman of the "Gladiatori" in 1991, after Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti revealed the existence of Gladio, the post-World War II secret stay-behind network. Gironda has since then organized legal assistance, press campaigns, etc. for them, supported by former State President Francesco Cossiga. Gironda's publishing house, Bietti, specializes in revisionist books on Italian political history, including terrorism. Our reconstruction of the "strategy of tension" would plainly be considered by them as "communist propaganda."
- Il Foglio, run by Ferrara, is a daily paper with a political profile. Ferrara published an autobiography in 1993, in which he reported how, after a career in the Communist Party in Turin, he became a follower of fascist philosopher Leo Strauss (father of the Bush Administration neo-cons), travelling to Germany in order to study him better. He also revealed that for several years, in the '80s, he worked as a paid informant for the CIA, delivering information on Italian politicians. Ferrara was the government spokesman for a few months in the first Berlusconi government, a role which he performed catastrophically.
- Gianni Baget Bozzo has modelled his cadre school department in Forza Italia after British and American liberalism, both "classical" a là Adam Smith and "neo" a là Leo Strauss. At the 2004 party convention celebrating the first decade, Baget Bozzo stated that Berlusconi has been sent by "the Holy Spirit." This statement prompted the Bishop of Genoa, Bozzo's superior, to censor him.
Left, Right . . . Fascist!
As Gelli's Plan for a Democratic Rebirth, which envisioned a process of "decompositions and recompositions" of existing political parties, is proceeding, Dell'Utri's black orchestra has started playing the suitable symphony. If, in a first phase, "leftist" synarchists take over the left, and "rightist" synarchists takeover the right, in a second phase, left and right have to be reunited.
Thus, a most interesting debate has been started by Il Foglio, then picked up by Il Domenicale at another level, to demonstrate that today's leading leftist intellectuals are, in reality, fascists, and that there is nothing wrong with that, but, if that is the case, one should go back to the original.
The leftist intellectual targetted was Alessandro Galante Garrone, a leading historian of the French jacobin movement who died last year. Garrone, a professor at Turin University, was the leading personality in a political association called Libertà e Giustizia (Liberty and Justice), gathering the remnants of old members of the Action Party, together with the new generations of jacobins produced by Garrone and his co-thinkers, like Norberto Bobbio, at Turin University. Liberty and Justice, in reality, is a front for financier Carlo De Benedetti. It pushes a continuation of the "Clean Hands" campaign and runs several figures of the so-called "anti-global" galaxy.
Dell'Utri's people have pulled out an article written in 1940 by Galante Garrone, in the magazine Racist Laws, in which Garrone, as a young Fascist judge, argued on the issue whether it was the public administration or the court that was entitled to judge the application of Mussolini's racial laws. Garrone argued in favor of the court, stating that the judge must ascertain when an Italian citizen is a Jew and must therefore be subject to racial laws.
Like Garrone, many other "leftist" intellectuals in the post-war period are in reality "kangaroos," who jumped to the other side at the fall of Fascism, writes Il Domenicale. It is now time "to look at the past without fear or shame, thinking about the hypothesis of reconstructing a national identity that goes beyond divisions."
More explicit was author Angelo D'Orsi, who wrote the book in which the information on Garrone is contained. In an interview with Il Foglio, he said that on the cultural level, "the demarcation line between fascism and anti-fascism was impracticable. Men of culture felt themselves to be protagonists of a movement, the creation of the new Italy. . . . Fascism created qualified intellectual work." Divisions came later, at the political level, and mainly because the Fascist political cadre were "uncultivated, vulgar, savage."
Conclusion
Here ends our reconstruction of the networks which have destabilized Italy in the years of the Strategy of Tension, up to the current day. By no means is it complete or perfect. We hope, however, that it gives the reader, especially the younger ones who were born after those turbulent years, an active and not academic knowledge of that historical phase, in order to draw the lessons for changing the present and the future.
Bibliography
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[1] Members of the OAS founded the organization Aginterpress in Portugal, which worked as a logistical support center for the Italian neo-fascists; Colonel Rocca financed, through SIFAR, the Istituto Pollio plotters; and Karamessines was the sponsor of Theodor Shackley, the U.S. intelligence official associated with P-2 puppet-master Licio Gelli.
[2] Magi Braschi was head of the Non-Orthodox Warfare office of the Italian secret service SIFAR, and member of a NATO structure. He emerges from the Salvini investigation as the leader of the military faction ready to move publicly in the aftermath of the Piazza Fontana bombing.
[3] Spiazzi played a major role in the aftermath of the 1980 Bologna train station bombing, when, in an interview, he revealed the name of a neo-fascist informant, thus targetting him for assassination. The victim, Francesco Mangiameli, was the treasurer of Roberto Fiore's Third Position group. The "liquidation" of Mangiameli, and not the successive warrant issued by Bologna prosecutors, was the reason for Fiore's escape from Italy, to find refuge in London.
[4] Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, on Aug 30, 1978, was appointed Italian anti-terrorism czar with the power of coordinating all police bodies. Dalla Chiesa, who had already performed well in capturing the first-generation Red Brigades' leaders in 1974 (except for Mario Moretti), was himself a member of the P2. Testifying before the Parliamentary Investigating Committee on the P2, he justified his membership by saying that he had joined it in order to investigate it. Dalla Chiesa captured all Red Brigaders involved in the Moro operation, and became the repository of many secrets involving both infiltration of the terrorist group and the whereabouts of Moro's papers. He was killed on Sept. 3, 1982, in Palermo, by a Mafia commando. A few hours after his death, investigators found Dalla Chiesa's safe open and empty.
[5] Moro wrote those letters under pressure, as the terrorists pursued their strategy of dismantling the political unity he had so arduously built. However, Moro was well aware of that purpose, and he would have never written them, had he not thought he could somehow control the process. Moro's letters were addressed to Interior Minister Cossiga, party secretary Zaccagnini, and others, including his friend Pope Paul VI, to convince them to "negotiate" for his liberation. The "Experts Committee" established by Cossiga, under P2 member Franco Ferracuti, imposed the line that Moro's personality had been annihilated by the "Stockholm syndrome," and therefore his letters should be simply disregarded. Moro's letters to his family found in 1990 demonstrate that Ferracuti's analysis was wrong.
[6] The U.S. Lockheed corporation had bribed Italian officials to get the Italian military to buy Starfighter and C-130 aircraft. While allegations against a former Defense Minister, Tanassi, proved to be true, those against Tanassi's predecessor Gui, a Moro ally, were false. In addition, the allegation that Moro, under the nickname "Antelope Cobbler," was the mastermind of the bribes, in order to finance his political faction, proved to be false. Those allegations had originated in the office of Henry Kissinger's assistant at the State Department, Loewenstein, as papers contained in Moro's bag documented.
[7] On Feb. 16, two terrorist commandos killed two people in Milan. On Feb. 26, in Turin, in a shootout with police, two terrorists died. On March 9, in Palermo, the Mafia killed local DC leader Michele Reina. On March 13, in Bergamo, terrorists killed Carabinieri agent Giuseppe Guerrieri. The next day, they "legged" (shot in the legs) an official of automaker FIAT, Giuliano Farina. Also in Turin, on March 19, terrorists killed a passer-by in a failed attack against a police car. On March 20, journalist Mino Pecorelli was assassinated (see above). On April 1, in Thiene (Vicenza), three terrorists died in the premature explosion of a bomb during the preparation of an attack. On April 19, in Milan, terrorists killed police agent Andrea Compagna, while in Rome a neo-fascist assassinated a communist student, Ciro Principessa. On May 3, in Rome, a Red Brigades commando assaulted the office of the local DC chapter, killing two policemen.
[8] Donat Cattin's son Marco was the head of the Prima Linea commando (a group allied to the Red Brigades), which had assassinated prosecutor Emilio Alessandrini one year earlier in Milan. Alessandrini had shortly before been assigned to follow up an Esposto, a paper of denunciation, presented by the European Labor Party (POE, the LaRouche organization in Italy), exposing sociologist Francesco Alberoni as the intellectual father of the founding nucleus of the Red Brigades, at the University of Trento. In a meeting with this author, Alessandrini explained that he found the Esposto's arguments politically convincing, but that he would need juridical evidence in order to move on the charges.
[9] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The Night They Came To Kill Me," EIR, March 12, 2004. See also Railroad! U.S.A. vs. Lyndon LaRouche, et al. (Commission to Investigate Human Rights Violations: Washington, D.C., 1989).
[10] Claudio Celani, "Pope's Trip: Again, Full of Surprises," EIR, June 7, 2002.
[11] The following exchange took place between Committee member Bielli and Andreassi:
Andreassi: On their possible—as the media wrote—suspect contiguity with, at least, the British secret services (it has been said that they can be informants of those secret services), we did not find out much. They will never tell us, especially if it is the secret service. Sure, we tried all ways with the British police to have them extradited, but we did not succeed.
Bielli: Protected—have they been protected?
Andreassi: De facto, they have not been extradited.
Bielli: In exchange for what?
Andreassi: I am not able to tell you.
[12] The Naples sentence is the more important, as it was issued by judge Giovanni Fragola Rabuano, apparently sympathetic to the defendants. The court, in fact, condemned in 2003 a left-wing journalist who wrote in the magazine La Voce della Campania, that Fiore had been trained in Lebanon before going to London, and had escaped with Third Position's cash. In the same sentence, however, the court established that "it is not a crime to call Fiore a British intelligence agent."
[13] Indeed, already at the 1965 Istituto Pollio meeting in Rome, which marks the beginning of the strategy of tension, some participants, such as Alfredo Cattabiani and Enrico de Boccard, called for imitating the "counterrevolutionary experience of French Catholics," taking Lefebvre's Cité Catholique as a model.
[14] In 1992-93, according to the P2 script of the "Plan for Democratic Rebirth," the Italian political system entered a new phase; so far, Gelli's plans had proceeded along the lines of the first phase: infiltration and corruption of political parties; now the time was ripe to pull the plug, and destroy the system, in order to start the second phase, in which traditional parties should disappear and be replaced by "two political movements, one of liberal-laborist inspiration and one of liberal-moderate, or conservative inspiration," to be achieved through "successive decompositions and recompositions."
The new phase started with a political coup called "Clean Hands." A prosecution team under the control of the jacobin Francesco Saverio Borrelli, supported by State President Cossiga, put hundreds of political leaders under a trial-by-media "anti-corruption" process. Borrelli's team's action was dictated by a jacobin club called Società Civile, sponsored by the financial-media group headed by synarchist banker Carlo De Benedetti. As a result, all anti-communist political parties were dissolved. The vacuum was filled by the "post-fascist" Alleanza Nazionale, the separatist Lega Nord, and the newly formed Forza Italia, led by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. The leading prosecutor in the "Clean Hands" pool under Borrelli's general prosecution office, Antonio Di Pietro, eventually founded his own political party. One of Di Pietro's collaborators in the "anti-corruption" investigation, police officer Mauro Floriani, married Il Duce's granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini. About Di Pietro, Michael Ledeen recently told a source: "We used him and, afterwards, threw him away like a paper towel."
[15] Both Marcello and Maria Pia Dell'Utri are involved in a current trial in Palermo, where Marcello is accused of "external participation in a Mafia association." The chief prosecutor has insisted that Dell'Utri has been involved in a Mafia operation in which Prime Minister Berlusconi would be the "victim" and Dell'Utri the "accomplice."
