Essential Bibliography of -Revival of Fascism:"The Unico"-

Seeing Michael Ledeen named, in La Repubblica’s Oct. 25-27 “Nigergate, the Grand Deception” series, as a conduit of the now notorious fake documents used in launching the Iraq War, comes as no surprise. To anyone familiar with the career of neo-conservative propagandist and off-and-on U.S. government official Ledeen, and his campaigning for war with Iraq and, next, Iran, it would have been a shock had he not surfaced in that connection—especially since the venue of the forged documentation on Saddam Hussein’s imagined search for yellowcake in Niger was Italy, Ledeen’s old stomping ground.

As “Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair” at the American Enterprise Institute, which is the neo-cons’ Temple of Doom in Washington, D.C., Ledeen is well known for promoting the permanent war/permanent revolution policies of the recent period’s “Cheney cabal.”¹ Earlier, over the past quarter century, Ledeen was a protagonist of some of the most spectacular intelligence episodes of that era, including the Iran-Contra international gun-and drug-running cartel, and cover-ups on behalf of the perpetrators of the terrorism and assassinations that rocked Italy during the Strategy of Tension in the 1970s, including the 1978 assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the 1980 Bologna train station massacre.

All too often, the activities of Ledeen and the Cheney cabal are portrayed to the gullible as merely the expression of one among several factions within the U.S. government, or the intelligence community, or the Establishment as a whole. They profile themselves as super-patriots, or hard-liners against terrorism. And, since Project Democracy got going in the 1980s,² Ledeen talks in terms of worldwide “democratic revolution,” language that likewise turns up in the scripts handed to George W. Bush to read.

But the writings and career of Michael Ledeen open the window onto what lies behind, and drives the Cheney clique. It is the Synarchy, exposed in the Children of Satan series of pamphlets, issued by the LaRouche in 2004 Presidential campaign committee last year.³It is a desire to eliminate mod ern nation-states, and any vestige of the real American System, from the face of the Earth, in favor of a financier-run, fascist world empire.

Its roots are in Venice, the Venice where the descendants and other heirs of ancient Rome’s selfdestroyed oligarchy set up their system of usury, manipulation, and betrayal, attempting to perpetuate their wealth and power.

Ledeen is famous for his 1972 book, Universal Fascism.4 By no means is he merely an academic who became enamored of an abstract notion, “universal fascism,” and then “went into the field,” so to speak, to implement it.

Most everything in Ledeen’s career and in his writings, from his early treatise on the Italian fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio to his ongoing conjured Ouija-board dialogues with deceased spy-master James Jesus Angleton, through which Ledeen presents his regime-change-for-Iran campaign and other schemes in The National Review Online, marks him as a classic operative of the Venetian type: a skinnier version of Parvus, a century later.5 An American patriotic intelligence officer in the first decades of our Republic—say, James Fenimore Cooper, whose 1831 novel The Bravo cut right to the heart of Venetian intelligence operations—would not have missed what we were dealing with in Ledeen. But the ability to discern a British or Venetian operation, alien to the heart and soul of the United States of America, was attenuated over time, as some of Britain’s imperial operations to take back its former colonies by subversion from within, succeeded, especially after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.⁶

By the middle of the 20th Century, a Synarchist banker, Allen Dulles, was able to incorporate defeated fascists into NATO and related American intelligence networks in the post-World War II period.⁷ And in the late 20th Century, Roy Godson could organize a project called “Intelligence Requirements for the ‘80s,” which launched an intensified campaign to revamp U.S. intelligence along the lines of imperial Venice. Michael Ledeen was a contributor to one of the books that came out of Godson’s circles, Hydra of Carnage, in which Prof. Adda Bozeman wrote,“Since the mind of Venice seems reincarnated in the minds of the editors of this volume, and since the position of Venice in the world environment from the Thirteenth to about the Seventeenth Century is not unlike that of the United States today, I do not hesitate to follow some Venetian guidelines.”⁸ These currents in American intelligence and national policy, which Ledeen distills in their relatively purest form, are a noxious import, alien to the founding principles of our Republic! We can look at them in more depth, through the writings of Michael Ledeen and “where he’s coming from”—Venice.

(i) Fascismo Universale

From his student days at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s, Ledeen was picked up and sponsored by Anglo-Venetian financier circles, some of the very men, or their next-generation heirs, who had launched World War I and organized the fascist regimes that followed. Prof. George Mosse, who mentored Ledeen at Wisconsin (but later maintained that his pupil had gone overboard in his embrace of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini), directed him to Italy in 1965, where he was adopted by two senior figures. One was Renzo De Felice, dean of postwar “universal fascism” studies, and the other was Count Vittorio Cini, former Minister of Communications in Mussolini’s wartime cabinet. The fabulously wealthy Cini, a top-ranking Venetian oligarch (founder of the Cini Foundation), had been an intimate, a self-described “fraternal friend,” of Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, head of the “Venetian group” in Italian politics and industry, who was Mussolini’s Finance Minister in 1925-27, and the real architect of the Mussolini regime.

To assist Ledeen in his studies of fascism, Cini and De Felice opened the doors for him to the freemasonic archives in Rome and Venice, archives that have a security-clearance system tighter than that of many governments. Under this patronage and out of these studies, Ledeen authored or co-authored articles and books that promoted a revival of fascism, but in a new, improved form. “It does not seem unreasonable to argue that fascism contained potentialities and that it might well have developed in another direction” (than Mussolini’s “foreign adventures” and alliance with Hitler), Ledeen wrote in Universal Fascism. That book was named after a tendency in 1920s fascist Italy called fascismo universale, whose adherents made certain criticisms of Mussolini. Giuseppe Bottai and other of the “young fascist intellectuals,”lionized by Ledeen in his book, had been sponsored by Count Cini, like Ledeen himself, only several decades earlier; the Cini Foundation’s own glowing biography of its founder tells how in the 1930s“Cini established contacts with various elements oriented towards ‘dissidence’ within Fascism.”

The new, universal fascism would return to its revolutionary roots, shorn of the limiting, nationalistic elements of the Mussolini, Hitler, or Franco regimes. The essence of fascism, the creation of an entirely new man in a crucible of endless war and revolution, had been “betrayed” by these nationalist fascisms, but what the movement should have become, could be seen in earlier experiments, such as the French Revolution’s Terror. In this argument, readers of Children of Satan will recognize the Synarchists’“Beast-man” project, rooted in the militarist Martinist freemasonic cult of the Jacobin Terror and Napoleon’s dictatorship.

In the introduction to Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice,⁹a joint composition, consisting of an interview of De Felice by Ledeen, Ledeen wrote, “Renzo De Felice has been called everything from‘soft on Mussolini’ to ‘depraved’ and has been accused of trying to ‘rehabilitate fascism.’. . . De Felice claims that the Fascist movement was linked to a Western radical tradition going back to the days of the Terror of the French Revolution. Fascism, he argues, Count Vittorio Cini, a Venetian oligarch and former minister in Mussolini’s Cabinet, opened the doors for Ledeen to the ultrasecret freemasonic archives in Rome and Venice. contains both a well defined theory of human progress and a conception of the popular will that ties it to the extremist Rousseauvian themes of the Terror and the ‘totalitarian democracy’ that it spawned.”

In The Illuminati and Revolutionary Mysticism, 17891900, De Felice had traced fascism to the freemasonic lodges that organized the Jacobins in the 1789 French Revolution. De Felice neglected to mention some essentials, such as British Lord Shelburne’s sponsorship of those Martinist lodges, which was aimed at preventing the American Revolution from spreading to France, our ally during the just-concluded Revolutionary War. But he captured other essentials, saying that fascism was, and is, a “revolutionary phenomenon,” aimed at overthrowing all nation-states. Therefore he called the fascist regimes of the mid-20th Century inter-war period a “betrayed revolution.” In the interview book with Ledeen, De Felice argued for permanent revolution: De Felice: “But all revolutions have been betrayed Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed.” Ledeen: “Just as the American Constitution betrayed the American Revolution.” De Felice: “Exactly.” De Felice trumpeted his support for the truly Satanic Martinist credo of endless violence and terror, the credo of the Beast-man:“I have always had a certain taste, a psychological and human interest in a particular kind of personality that is both cold-blooded and Luciferian. There is something in common between my Jacobins and a certain kind of Fascism” (from The Illuminati and Revolutionary Mysticism, 17891900).

De Felice thought that while, “Twenty or thirty years ago, fascism was too recent an experience, it was still too hot a subject, and an objective, scientific analysis was impossible,” now (in the 1970s) fascism could be appreciated as a “revolutionary phenomenon,” which, if returned to its roots, could usher in “a new phase in the history of civilization.” Elsewhere in the Fascism book, Ledeen expressed his fascination with “the act of destruction which would precede the flowering of the new fascist hegemony,” and would “sweep away the . . . dross of Western civilization, . . . the decadence of Western civilization in its nationalist and capitalist aspects, as well as in its most ancient and solemn one, Christianity.” De Felice and Ledeen both harped on the need to study the early, revolutionary days of fascism, in order to comprehend the true, universal fascist spirit.

In illustration, Ledeen wrote his 1975 book, D’Annunzio, the First Duce, a glorification of the first 20-Century experiment in fascist government, led by Italian poet and war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio, who took over the Adriatic Sea port city of Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) in 1919 and ruled it as a corporate state for a year and a half. Fiume served as a model and inspiration for Mussolini. Italian fascist trademarks like the raised-arm salute, black shirts and fezzes, and force-feeding of castor oil to torture or kill opponents, were pioneered in D’Annunzio’s Fiume.

The sponsors of D’Annunzio’s Fiume adventure, such as Volpi and his associates, subsequently created the Mussolini regime, beginning with Mussolini’s “march on Rome” in 1922. Ledeen glowed with enthusiasm for D’Annunzio’s attempt to create the “new man” of fascism, and for his Dionysian call to destroy the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of nation-states: “The revolt headed by D’Annunzio was directed against the old European order, and was actualized on behalf of the creativity and virility of youth, which was supposed to give birth to a new world, modeled on the image of its creators. The essence of such a revolution was liberation of the human personality, what can be called the ‘radicalization’ of the masses It was the ability of D’Annunzio to convince his own followers that they belonged to a spiritually ‘higher’ reign that made him such a powerful and important political phenomenon.” D’Annunzio argued that the spirit of this Nietzschean superman was the ancient god Dionysus, and that the purpose of a Dionysian, fascist world order was to destroy the image of Prometheus, which had animated mankind since before Classical Greece. Thus, to appreciate what Ledeen and the Cheney cabal intend for civilization today, we begin with the Fiume experiment. The road from Fiume, in turn, leads deep into the bowels of Venice, where the Anglo-Dutch model of imperial financier rule, born there in opposition to the 15th-Century Golden Renaissance, continued to flourish in the period of the fascism so admired by Ledeen.

(ii) Fiume: Dionysius vs. Prometheus

For an understanding of Fiume, we must raise the curtain on the stage where Synarchist financial and industrial circles operated in turn-of-the-century (19th to 20th) Europe. Walter Rathenau, chairman of Allgemeine Elektrizitaets Gesellschaft (AEG) and a business partner of Volpi, put it this way in 1909:“Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors among themselves.”¹⁰

The Synarchist syndicate included a group of Venetian financiers, centered around Count Piero Foscari, member of an old dogal family (one of those from which, in earlier times, Venice’s top oligarch, the Doge, used to be drawn). The Venetian group’s chief public figure was Giuseppe Volpi—finan- cier, industrial magnate and freemasonic leader.¹¹ By 1905, Volpi held a commanding position in Italy’s electricity industry, among many other endeavors. With financing from Giuseppe Toeplitz, head of the Venice branch of the Synarchist Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI), Volpi and his associate Dannie Heinemann attempted to create a worldwide electricity cartel. Heinemann controlled the most powerful South American electricity trust, as well as the famous Barcelona Traction, Light and Power (later taken over by Juan March, model for the“shepherd boy”assassin character in Robert Ludlum’s novel The Matarese Circle). Later, in 1922, Heinemann would be the single largest funder of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi’s fascist Pan-Europa Union at its founding. BCI itself had been created under agreements struck by Italian Prime Minister and freemasonic grandmaster Francesco Crispi with other of Europe’s most powerful banks. This Europe-widefinancier cartel sponsored freemasonic lodges all across the continent, and in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, following the tradition of financiersponsored freemasonry, established in 16th-Century Venice.

The official international head of freemasonry in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, until his death in 1910, was the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, who was also the chief architect of World War I. He oversaw a theosophical, Luciferian turn in established Masonry and related societies, typified by the 1884 founding of the Quatuor Coronati lodge, which sponsored the Satanist Aleister Crowley, and by the activities of Madame Blavatsky, Bertrand Russell, and H.G. Wells.

Volpi’s group, too, was directed by Edward VII, and was in the middle of all the freemasonic revolutions and assassinations in the Balkans and Istanbul, which were crucial in igniting World War I. Another top leader in Italian freemasonry was BCI’s Toeplitz, the major financier to back D’Annunzio’s Fiume project. Toeplitz’s son described his father’s bank:“By the time of World War I, Papa had brought the bank to a solid position in Italy, with the creation of a vast network of branches in the Balkans, Turkey, Egypt, France, London, South America and the U.S., and had put it on a level with the outstanding banks of the world.” From the turn of the century, BCI took control of most of the Italian electrical, steel, shipbuilding, and chemicals industries. Toeplitz hosted a famous salon in Venice, which was frequented by Contessa Anna Morosini, the “uncrowned Queen of Venice,” at whose palazzo the yacht of Kaiser Wilhelm II was often moored. Through Toeplitz, in particular, BCI was synonymous with Martinist freemasonry. (Later, after World War II, the infamous Propaganda Due, or P-2, lodge would be founded on its premises.)

Before converting to Catholicism, Toeplitz had been associated with the Donmeh cult, whose members were followers of Sabbatai Zvi, the Venetian Levant company’s Jewish agent in the Ottoman Empire, notorious as a “false messiah” at the time of his death in 1676. Zvi’s associates were given a choice: convert to Islam, or be put to the sword. Among those who converted, many took on “Turkish/Islamic”coloring on the outside, but remained “Jewish” on the inside. In reality they were neither Islamic nor Jewish, but constituted a gnostic cult that believed salvation could only be obtained through the most heinous of sins. The freemasonic Donmehs were at the core of the Young Turk movement, which seized power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908, and they were closely associated with D’Annunzio and his Fiume project.

As a freemason, a hero of World War I, and Gabriel D’Annunzio, glorified by Ledeen, led the first 20th-Century experiment in fascism, avowing that the purpose of a Dionysian, fascist world order was to a Classically trained, but Satanic poet, D’Annunzio was chosen by the Venetian group destroy the image of Prometheus. to lead the first fascist experiment after the war. He was a member of a Martinist Masonic lodge, with the pseudonym“Ariel”and the Masonic degree of Superiore Incognito (“Higher Unknown”).¹² The Martinist rites are founded upon “magic violence” and a belief in “progress” through torture, death, and destruction, as specified by the leading early 19th-Century Martinist, Count Joseph de Maistre, and otherwise exemplified by the Martinist-led French Terror and Napoleon. The titles of D’Annunzio’s works exude the Martinist death cult: Triumph of Death, Contemplation of Death, and The Innocent, which glorifies a man who kills his wife. D’Annunzio had received a Jesuit education, early on revealing the philosophical bent of his later years, according to a report from one of his priests: “When somebody speaks of God with him he goes mad He said that God created man to make him suffer.” Already as a young poet, he wrote that he aimed to exalt the senses of man, and to“destroy the ancient Classicism.” The cultural circles in which D’Annunzio travelled worshipped Nature, Love, Blood, and the Earth. The chief characters in his Nietzschean books were always modelled on himself. In a work called “Praise Be to the Heaven, to the Sea, to the Earth and to the Heroes,” D’Annunzio developed a theme that would run through all his efforts, namely that technology and progress are evil, while the ancient values associated with Zeus must be revived. In poetic form, he told of a young poet who goes to Greece to discover the “ancient values.” On a peak during a thunderstorm, he invokes Zeus, who tells him to be an apostle for the truth. Confused, the poet asks Zeus what he means. Zeus replies that he must celebrate the cult of Dionysus in all his poetry, and that only through the submission of man to Dionysus, will Zeus again become Lord of the Earth. This will mean the end of history, and, specifically, the obliteration of even the very notion of a Platonic “idea.” This was the D’Annunzio, whose takeover of Fiume in 1919-1920 Ledeen hailed as “in many ways a great success.”

(iii) Mussolini, Volpi, and Martinist Corporativism

Michael Ledeen’s books do not stress economics, opting rather for an emphasis on the “new,” the “heroic,” and the “virile” in the fascist political ideologies. Let it never be forgotten, however, that these agendas were attached to an underlying one, according to which corporativist social organization should serve the ultimate interests of an oligarchical bankers’ dictatorship. Working primarily through Volpi, the London-centered international Synarchist cartel financed Mussolini’s seizure of power, once again under the ideology of Martinism. As outlined by the late 19th-Century French Martinist Saint- Yves d’Alveydre, the organization of society must be corporativist, in order to prevent the relationship of employer and employee from being that of “oppressor and oppressed.” Saint Yves proposed to set up corporativist councils to represent the people and advise governments, as the kernel of Martinism. Under Volpi’s direction, from his position in the ruling Grand Council of Fascism, then as Finance Minister, and finally as head of the Fascist Confederation of Industrialists, this is precisely what Mussolini did. For good measure, he adopted the fasces, the Roman axe, as the symbol to signify his regime as a rebirth of the Roman Empire in the new, fascist form. Volpi, in a typical speech from 1937, when he was head of the Fascist Confederation of Industrialists, repeated the Martinist credo: “Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen: “. . .We must nevertheless refer briefly to the foundations on which our economic growth is based. Of these the most important is the corporative organization now universally recognized at the most characteristic achievement of the Fascist regime. “‘Corporatio’ is an old Latin word, but the Fascist ‘corporation’ is something radically different from that known to the ancients, which was a trade society formed for strengthening and protecting its members, quite regardless of any collective interest. The Fascist corporation is profoundly different, for it brings together all the factors engaged in production, conciliating class interests within each branch of industry and the interests of the several branches within the nation Thus, side by side with the activities assigned them by law, the corporations perform a most valuable work of persuasion and education among the producing classes, they create a moral atmosphere, and form and strengthen in each and all that corporative mentality which is essential to make regulations effective “The reform of the Chamber of Deputies and the formation of the Chamber of the Fasci and the Corporations, as approved by the Grand Fascist Council, will insert the corporations in the legislative machinery of the State, increasing their legislative powers and heightening their political and constitutional prestige.” The Fiume and Mussolini experiments give some sense of what Ledeen is promoting. Their sponsors also launched Europe into its bloodiest wars, World War I and World War II.

(iv) Volpi Helps Prepare World War I

In the first two decades of the 20th Century, the BCIcentered Venetian group around Volpi and Foscari was most active in the Balkan powder keg, which would detonate World War I. These Balkan-centered Venetian activities are usually left out of the history books, which is like omitting Michael Ledeen from the story of how the Cheney cabal unleashed its “permanent war” policy at the outset of the 21st Century. A vignette reported by the British Labour Party figure, C.H. Norman, testifies that the British, French, and Venetian freemasons’ agenda was world war. “Somewhere about the year 1906,”Norman wrote,“I was invited to attend a meeting of Englishmen for the purpose of discussing a proposal to form an English Lodge of the Grand Orient The Lodge was ‘to be engaged in propaganda on behalf of the Entente Cordiale.’. . . With this apparently innocent object I found myself in sympathy. But, nevertheless, I decided to discover whether it was all its benevolent programme intended. To my astonishment I found the Grand Orient was about to embark upon a vast political scheme in alliance with the Russian Okhrana, which could only be brought to fruition Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, head of the “Venetian group” in Italian politics and industry, was Mussolini’s Finance Minister. He emphasized that corporatist economic organization was “the most characteristic achievement of the Fascist regime.” by a terrible European War.”¹³ Giuseppe Volpi established his main base of operations in the Balkans in the tiny principality of Montenegro, which had for centuries had been a Venetian fiefdom on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. In the words of one of Volpi’s biographers, “...in a few years, from 1903 to 1909, he transformed Montenegro into a real Venetian colony, with all the characteristics of the epoch in which the procurators of the Republic used to recruit crews for the ships and groups for the garrisons on terra firma.”¹⁴ From Montenegro, Volpi oversaw the 1903 coup in Serbia, in which King Alexander and Queen Draga of the Obrenovic Dynasty were assassinated, and the pan-Slavist, anti-Austrian Karageorgovic Dynasty came to power. Volpi even went to work in the new Serbian regime, becoming Serbia’s vice-consul in Venice. With good reason, “Vienna followed the Venetian’s actions with suspicion.”¹⁵Aside from the 1908 Young Turks’coup, the 1903 coup in Serbia was the single most important event in the Balkans before World War I. It set the stage for the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the June 1914 assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The Serbian intelligence operative Col. Dragutin Dmitrievich-Apis was effectively Volpi’s agent in the 1903 assassination. In 1914, Apis coordinated the assassination at Sarajevo. The Young Turks’ coup was recounted in our recent arti- cle.¹⁶ Most important, in the present context, is that the core “Young Turks” came from the Venice-generated Donmeh cult, as did Volpi’s financial wizard, Toeplitz. This Donmeh lineage of the Young Turks was captured by one British intelligence operative, who complained, “Every time I go to meet with the Young Turks, I get fobbed off on an old Jew.” The “old Jew” was the business partner of a freemasonic coconspirator of both Volpi and Parvus, grain trader Emmanuel Carasso. Volpi himself was present at the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul, when the Young Turks’ coup took place, opening wide new avenues for his business and political intrigues in the Balkans. His representative in Istanbul, Bernardino Nogara, would later become the top controller of Vatican finances, in the wake of the 1929 Concordat between the Vatican and Mussolini; later, some of Nogara’s prote´ge´s were leading figures in the P-2 lodge. Volpi’s Montenegro operations gave him leverage into Russia. The Venetians owned Montenegro’s King Nicholas and debt-encumbered playboy Crown Prince Danilo, lock, stock and barrel, having extended numerous loans to them when their credit with other lenders was in ruins. King Nicholas was called “the father-in-law of Europe.” One of his daughters had married King Emmanuel III of Italy, while two others married Russian grand dukes. These were the “Montenegrin princesses,” who became notorious at the Russian court, for their role in the fall of the Tsar. As confidantes of Tsarina Alexandra, the Montenegrin princesses orchestrated an endless parade of freemasonic weirdoes, mystics, and holy rollers through the palace. Among the latter was the notorious Martinist leader and spiritist, Papus, whom the Montenegrins then supplanted with Rasputin. Montenegrin Princess Anas- tasia’s husband, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, was a leadingfigure in the“war party”within Russia: he promoted the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, okayed the Sarajevo assassination of 1914, commanded Russian forces during the first, disastrous year of World War I, and then went on to head the exile wing of the British/Soviet intelligence operation called the Trust, after the war and revolutions he had done so much to unleash. Another of Volpi’s interlocutors in Montenegro was General N.M. Potapov, the Russian military attache´ there in 190314. Potapov trained the Montenegrin Army, which had a role to play in the Balkan Wars, and then provided financing and training for the freemasonic assassins of Archduke Ferdinand. When World War I broke out, Potapov was promoted from the apparent backwater posting in Montenegro, to become Quartermaster of the Russian Army and then chief of Russian military intelligence. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he led purges of the Tsarist military apparatus, then became the first Soviet Red Army Chief of Staff, and military head of the Trust. Rounding out the Balkans picture, Volpi and the Vene- tian/Sicilian mafia that dominated Italian foreign policy fueled the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, which fed into the Balkan Wars the next year.

(v) Ledeen and SISMI

The faked “Niger yellowcake” documents came through SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, where Michael Ledeen’s ties go way back. World War II, the climax of London’s and the Volpi group’s war and fascism projects, had not even ended, when Allen and John Foster Dulles and their operatives in the U.S. intelligence and the military—people like Ledeen’s future se´ance interlocutor James Jesus Angleton—started to revive fascism, in its non-nationalist, “universal” form. Angleton inherited the contacts of his father, Hugh Angleton, a businessman based in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, and an intimate of the Mussolini regime. James Jesus Angleton was in charge of most U.S. intelligence operations in Italy, from the second half of World War II, through his sacking as CIA counterintelligence chief by Director of Central Intelligence William Colby in 1974. He was involved in the implantation of an extensive fascist network within in Italy’s military and intelligence organizations, an apparatus later subsumed into the P-2 freemasonic lodge, which was reinvigorated around 1970. These Angleton people, with backing from Synarchist networks inside NATO, were to be instrumental in launching the terrorism of the Strategy of Tension in Italy, from the late 1960s through 1980, and then in cover-ups to conceal its mechanisms.¹⁷ One of Angleton’s key operatives, already during World War II, was Valerio Borghese, the “Black Prince,” who was to lead a pro-fascist coup in 1970. Angleton reportedly travelled to Italy for the occasion. The biographers of Borghese describe his concept of universal fascism, entailing plans for a Europe free of nation-states, but unified under NATO or other pan-European bodies: “Fascism in the postwar era was different from its pre-war variety. Although it had splintered into many different factions, it had two powerful drives. One was that it was anti-communist. It was this element that made Borghese acceptable to the mainstream parties and national secret services. He was ultimately pro-NATO, as was the rest of this wing of fascism. The other one was the realization that in the postwar environment no single European nation could stand up to the two superpowers, and hence, that Europe would be a third force. That is, Europe would be ‘opposed to the twin imperialisms of international communism and international finance capitalism, both of which were perceived as being materialistic, exploitative, dehumanizing.’. . . It was from this faction, too, that many of the acts of terrorism of the‘Black International’sprung.”¹⁸(Emphasis in original.) Federico D’Amato, head of the secret UAR section of the Italian Interior Ministry, was another of Angleton’s recruits. He let Borghese’s men into Interior Ministry buildings to seize weapons, on the night of the 1970 coup attempt. It was into these Angleton networks, and not only into the boardroom/drawing room circuit of Count Cini, that Michael Ledeen stepped in 1965. Two decades later, Italian intelligence insiders would give testimony that points to Ledeen as the inheritor of Angleton’s machine.

D’Amato testified in 1986 that, as of 1980, he had already known Ledeen “for many years.” Available evidence shows Ledeen as highly active in Italy between the mid-1970s and at least 1982. Among his top contacts in that period, according to their own testimony, were D’Amato and businessman Francesco Pazienza, a P-2 member. According to many accounts, P-2 boss Licio Gelli was another. That was the time period that saw the kidnapping of Aldo Moro on March 16, 1978 (and his subsequent murder), just as his long-standing goal of a broad-based, stable government with the support of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was about to be achieved; the Aug. 2, 1980 “Bologna Massacre” train station bombing, in which 85 people died; the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981; and the demise of P-2 banker Roberto Calvi, who turned up dead, hanging from the Blackfriar Bridge in London on June 17, 1982, evidently the victim of attempts to cover up P-2’s financial activities. Again and again, Italian magistrates, and the witnesses testifying before them, mentioned Ledeen as on the scene to “spin” these events.

Pazienza testified to a hands-on role of Ledeen. The two had worked together since 1978. Magistrates who judged the Bologna train station bombing case, and the role therein of P-2 and its SISMI and other assets, found that Ledeen had first introduced Pazienza into SISMI, where he rose to a top leadership position. P-2, meanwhile, controlled much of SISMI itself, but also operated what Italian officials called a Supersismi, or sometimes “the parallel SISMI,” which went beyond the formal organs of the SISMI proper.

On trial in 1986-88 for spreading false versions to conceal the real authors of the Bologna massacre, Pazienza testified: “The Supersismi was not a structure, but a kind of organization. I was called to collaborate with SISMI in January 1980 I cannot name the names of my collaborators [in the Supersismi], but given that one name has already come out, I have no problem in saying that among them was Michael Ledeen, who was there even before I arrived, and continues to collaborate with the service—so much so, that I came to know with absolute certainty that, in 1985, he was receiving all the investigative-judicial material concerning the investigation for the attempt against the Pope.”19 The Italian investigations found that the cover-up of the Bologna massacre’s authorship was orchestrated through P-2 and its assets in SISMI (and elsewhere). P-2 boss Gelli and Ledeen’s agent Pazienza were both sentenced for their roles. Magistrates at the Bologna trial stated that “Pazienza’s position inside SISMI was of absolute prominence He was in charge of contact with agents. Among them was the American agent Michael Ledeen..”

(vi) The Temple Mount Plot

The ongoing plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque atop Haram Al Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem, if it came to fruition, would trigger religious warfare on an incalculable worldwide scale. The footprints of old Venice and its associated highest, Satanic levels of international freemasonry are all over the project. So it was fitting that a very close associate of Michael Ledeen, his wife, figured in this picture. EIR investigators of the Temple Mount plot discovered three principal protagonists in 1982-83, aside from the Christian and Jewish fundamentalist networks who hoped to trigger the Battle of Armageddon and usher in the Messianic age. The three were Edoardo Recanati, who was buying up land for the purpose of resettling Palestinian East Jerusalem with Jewish fundamentalists; Barbara Ledeen, working as an editor at the Biblical Archeology Review (BAR), who exclaimed about the plan to rebuild Solomon’s Temple (right where the mosque now stands), “That’s my baby!”; and Dr. Asher Kaufman of the elite Quatuor Coronati Lodge in London, the “research lodge” of world freemasonry. As the investigation unfolded, a source close to Recanati confirmed that Eduardo “was from an old Venetian banking family, but he doesn’t want to talk about it.” (Members of the Recanati family were leading freemasons in Volpi’s Salonica circles before World War I.) The physicist Kaufman, it emerged, had been sent to Jerusalem on behalf of Quatuor Coronati, by one of Quatuor Coronati’s top figures, Dr. T.E. Allibone, a senior figure in the Royal Society and one of Britain’s preeminent nuclear physicists, who served for 30 years as the“Lord of the Manor” of Britain’s top-secret Aldermaston nuclear-weapons lab. Soon after EIR blew the whistle on the plot, BAR fired Barbara Ledeen. Michael co-authored a New Republic article with her, to justify their involvement in the plot.20 In the mid-1990s, EIR received warnings of a reinvigorated plot to rebuild Solomon’s Temple. New investigations led to two men: Spencer “Spenny” Douglas David Compton, Seventh Marquess of Northampton and day-to-day head of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE, world freema- sonry’s “mother lodge”) on behalf of its Grand Master, the Royal Family’s Duke of Kent, and Prof. Giuliano di Bernardo, whom the UGLE and Northampton sponsored to found a new Italian grand lodge after the P-2 debacle. Di Bernardo, who socializes with Northampton on the canals of Venice, published his book Rebuilding the Temple (in Italian) in 1996. He has proclaimed that “the rebuilding of the Temple is at the center of our studies,” while his lodge has held freemasonic ceremonies in the Grotto of King Solomon, adjacent to the Temple Mount.21

(vii) Venice and the Neo-Cons

Adda Bozeman’s eagerness “to follow some Venetian guidelines,” quoted at the beginning of this article, dramatizes how alive the Venetian imperial tradition is in the minds of Michael Ledeen and his neo-con friends.

In her writings in favor of introducing Venetian methods into U.S. practice, Bozeman went on to advocate the use of “other agencies” than nationstates, because in a post nation-state era, these would be more relevant for effective intelligence warfare, just as they were for the Byzantine, Venetian, or other empires.

These “other agencies” were to include certain Shiite brotherhoods, religious cults of all kinds, and other formations typical of the “pre- The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest shrines. Michael Ledeen and Western culture of major sections of the his wife, Barbara, have been propagandists for the ongoing “Temple Mount” plot to blow world, particularly the Middle East and up the Dome of the Rock and trigger religious warfare throughout the Muslim world. Asia.” Ledeen agrees with her on those Venetian methods. There was a scandal in 1986, when William Phillips chose Ledeen to write a mani- festo-like article on “the meaning of National Interests” for Partisan Review. Even that publication’s communists- turned-right-wingers revolted against Ledeen’s naked arguments that democracy was passe´, that there was a need for “breaking the law from time to time,” and that changes were needed in the law that “prohibits American officials from working with murderers” and in the “executive order, dating from 1975, prohibiting any official of the American government to conduct, order, encourage, or facilitate assassinations.”Ledeen said that Congress could not be trusted on such matters, since Congressional oversight would inhibit “those few persons who are seeking to advance the national interest of the United States.”Thus Ledeen foreshadowed the Cheney cabal’s more recent attempt to twist Sen. John McCain’s arm to exempt the CIA from McCain’s amendment, drafted after Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to forbid the United States from conducting torture. Warned Ledeen,“One cannot conduct foreign policy with more than 500 secretaries of state.” Clearly an un-American system of rule by “those few persons,” closed oligarchical committees running policy in secret behind the scenes, like the Venetian Council of Ten, would suit Ledeen better.

(viii) Note

1. “Cheney Revives Parvus ‘Permanent War’ Madness,” EIR, Sept. 23, 2005.

2. Project Democracy: The ‘Parallel Government’ Behind The Iran-Contra

Affair (EIR Special Report: April 1987).

3. Issued in book form as Children of Satan (Lyndon LaRouche PAC: August 2004).

4. Michael Arthur Ledeen, Universal Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1972).

5. On Alexander Helphand (Parvus), see Note 1.

6. Lyndon LaRouche, “A Strategic View of European History Today: Globalization, the New Imperialism,” EIR, Oct. 28, 2005.

7. Allen Douglas, “Italy’s Black Prince: Terror War Against the Nation-State,” EIR, Feb. 4, 2005.

8. Adda Bozeman, “Political Warfare in Totalitarian and Traditional Societies: A Comparison,”in Uri Ra’anan, et al., Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism (Lexington Books, 1986).

9. Renzo De Felice and Michael Arthur Ledeen, Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1976).

10. The industrialist Rathenau, an architect of the April 10, 1922 Rapallo Treaty between Germany and Russia, was assassinated on July 24, 1922. The banking oligarchy feared the Rapallo Treaty for its potential to undercut their own Treaty of Versailles, which had set the stage for the looting of Germany, the emergence of fascist regimes in Europe, and, ultimately, World War II. Rathenau was in the middle of the Synarchy, but not “of it.” The Synarchy does not forgive those, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom they view as traitors to their class. See Lyndon LaRouche, “Remember Walter Rathenau,” EIR, June 17, 2005.

11. Allen and Rachel Douglas, The Roots of the Trust (unpublished research report, EIR: 1987).

12. Gastone Ventura, Tutti gli uomini del martinismo (All the Men of Martinism) (Edizioni Atenor, 1978).

13. M. Edith Durham, The Sarajevo Crime (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.: 1925).

14. Fabrizio Sarazani, L’Ultimo Doge: Vita di Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata (Milan: Edizioni del Borghese: 1972), p. 40.

15. Ibid.

16. See Note 1.

17. Claudio Celani, “Strategy of Tension: The Case of Italy,” in The Synarchist Resurgence Behind the Madrid Train Bombing of March 11, 2004 (LaRouche in 2004: June 2004), provides an overview of the terrorism and cover-ups in Italy’s Strategy of Tension.

18. Jack Greene and Alessandro Massignani, The Black Price and The Sea Devils: The Story of Valerio Borghese and the Elite Units of the Decima Mas (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press: 2004).

19. See Note 2.

20. Barbara and Michael Ledeen,“What Do Christian and Jewish Fundamentalists Have in Common? The Temple Mount plot,” The New Republic, June 18, 1984.

21. Who Is Sparking a Religious War In the Middle East? (EIR Special Report: December 2000).

BP*

Italy's Black Prince:

Terror War Against the Nation-State

by Allen Douglas,

published by Executive Intelligence Review

February 4, 2005.

.2 Italy's Black Prince:
Terror War Against the Nation-State

by Allen Douglas

The career of the Roman "Black Prince," Junio Valerio Borghese, gruesomely illustrates how virtually all modern "international terrorism" and all assassinations of heads of state and government such as President John F. Kennedy, former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, or the numerous attempts on France's President Charles de Gaulle, derive from the postwar Nazi International, sponsored by the Anglo-American-led Synarchy and its intelligence services.

To trace all the ramifications of that career, is to open a door onto the centuries-old highest level of the financial oligarchy—the Synarchy: the aristocratic families of the "black nobility," the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta, and the heirs of what Pope John Paul I called the "ancients" of Venice.

The fascist Borghese founded Mussolini's elite naval warfare squadron, which he turned into a savage irregular warfare unit in northern Italy by the end of World War II. Picked up by Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and other anti-Franklin Delano Roosevelt operatives of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Borghese and his men would be involved in every major postwar coup attempt or terrorist outbreak in Italy until 1970, when he fled to Spain after the failed coup attempt most closely associated with his name.

From Italy, and then while in Spain, he maintained connections all over Europe and with the bloody Operation Condor torture-and-murder syndicate in Ibero-America. An examination of Borghese's career enables one to peer beneath the surface of terrorism and spectacular assassinations, into the netherworld whence these actions are launched: where international high finance; ancient aristocratic families; pro-fascist elements of the Curia of the Catholic Church; leading fascists of the Hitler-Mussolini era; and the Anglo-American intelligence services, in particular those of NATO, are all unified in a war against the modern nation-state.

The British and U.S. intelligence services' files on Borghese are still classified, as are the Borghese family archives in the Vatican after 1922, when Mussolini seized power. The present book is the first biography of Borghese in English. When correlated with other recent exposés of Gladio, the post-World War II NATO "stay-behind" network in Europe, and when all are situated within the work of Lyndon LaRouche and his associates on the Synarchy, it is a notable contribution to unmasking international terrorism, though the book's authors are perhaps not always aware of the full implications of what they present.[1]

Borghese belonged to a principal family of Rome's ostensibly Catholic "black nobility," many members of which claim descent from the elite of the Roman Empire. Numerous Popes and cardinals came from the Borghese and allied families, such as the Pallavicini, the Colonna, and the Orsini; these families maintained enormous power into the 20th Century, and still today, in the Curia, the administration of the Vatican.

Their faction within the Church helped construct the infamous "rat-line"—run, in part, through monasteries and convents—which spirited thousands of Fascists and Nazis out of Europe after the war, into Ibero-America, Asia, and the Middle East.

Whether the Borgheses indeed originated with the Roman Empire, as they claim, or only rose in the early 16th Century, as records suggest, they could boast of one Pope, Paul V (Camillo Borghese, reigned 1605-21), and several cardinals, while a Borghese prince married Napoleon's sister. They lost their fortune in the 19th Century, and thus the 20th Century saw Junio Valerio Borghese going to war.

In the first half of the book, naval warfare specialists Greene and Massignani recount the development of Italian naval irregular warfare on the eve of World War II, which involved light craft, frogmen, and sabotage. Borghese was an innovator in this field, beginning with his sabotage efforts for Franco during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. He founded Mussolini's naval special warfare unit, the Decima MAS, commonly known as the X MAS. (MAS was originally an acronym for Motoscafi Anti Sommergibili, anti-submarine motorboats, but soon became the generic term for any light craft.)

The X MAS was a kind of personal squadron of Italy's Venice-centered oligarchy, staffed by officers from leading noble families.

One of them was the nephew of Italy's royal House of Savoy, Prince Aimone of Savoy, the Duke of Aosta. The X MAS thus mirrored the oligarchical coloring of the OSS, where the leadership was so dominated by bluebloods, such as Wall Street's pro-fascist Allen Dulles, that it earned the sobriquet "Oh So Social." The two organizations were destined to collaborate closely.

Its aristocratic pedigree enabled the X MAS to operate as largely independent from Mussolini. As Greene and Massignani note, "Key personnel inside the X MAS were of noble stock, and this enabled them to win the support of top-level officers. It also made it possible for them to be in direct contact with the companies that supplied and developed craft, new weapons, and equipment for the flotilla."

Soon after taking power in mid-1943, the new royalist Italian government signed an armistice with the Allies. The royalists captured Mussolini in July, and held him in a remote prison in the Appenine Mountains. He was freed in a daring raid (so the story goes), led by Hitler's chief commando, Otto Skorzeny, who was later to become, like Borghese, a kingpin of postwar international terrorism.

The Nazis disbanded Italy's army and sank most of its navy, so that they could not be used against them, but some diehards, notably Borghese and his X MAS, chose to fight on for fascism. Many other Italians were organized by Italy's political parties, including the Communist Party, into partisan warfare bands, which fought both the Germans and Mussolini's 1943-45 Nazi-run rump Salò Republic in northern Italy.

Hitler's henchman for the German occupation of northern Italy, SS Gen. Karl Wolff (formerly Himmler's private secretary), ordered Borghese and his X MAS to move onto land, where they became infamous for anti-partisan warfare, including the systematic use of torture and the summary execution of Italian civilians as a "lesson" to the partisans. Greene and Massignani report that in the 600 days of the Salò Republic, the X MAS raised a force of 50,000 men, and that in the bloody civil war which followed the armistice, probably more Italians died than in the entire war before then.

The X MAS was nominally committed to the Salò Republic; however, it never swore allegiance to Salò, and never flew any flag but its own. Reports flooded back to Mussolini that Borghese was maintaining contact with all sides, so Il Duce had Borghese arrested in early 1944, though he soon released him.

Indeed, Borghese had either established contact or worked with: the SS security service (Sicherheitsdienst), with which he worked closely; the Abwehr (German army counterintelligence); the Italian royalist government; British Secret Intelligence Service; James Jesus Angleton, chief of the OSS counter-espionage branch in Italy; and Allen Dulles, OSS Berne, Switzerland station chief. He also met several times with SS General Wolff.

Wolff and Dulles plotted the Anglo-American redeployment of fascist operatives after the war, among them Borghese. Indeed, Wolff declared, "Where the person of Borghese and his Decima Mas is concerned, I have spoken several times . . . with a representative of Mr. Dulles." In late 1944, Rome's black aristocracy asked the Allied military governor in Italy, Vice Adm. Ellery Stone, to intervene in favor of the "terrible boy," Junio Valerio. A friend of the Borghese family and lover of a Roman baroness, Stone needed little convincing. As the partisans closed in on Borghese in May 1945, Stone instructed Angleton to warn him, which the latter did personally. On May 19, the Americans formally arrested Borghese, thus saving him from scheduled execution by a partisan firing squad.

(i) A Brief Hiatus

The Americans and the British showed a keen interest in the X MAS wartime activities, especially its Vega battalion, which had operated behind enemy lines. As one X MAS leader put it, foreshadowing Borghese's later deployment as part of Gladio, "For the Allies we were important because we had infiltrated the Communist bands, we knew their secrets and tactics and therefore developed the first anti-guerrilla procedures. . . . They wanted to know how we carried out the anti-communist war. . . . They wanted to exploit our knowledge." The Germans had also developed "stay-behind" units to function behind Allied lines in Italy, and the X MAS were almost certainly part of that operation as well. Several members of the X MAS were taken to the United States for debriefing.

Borghese's friends in high places ensured that the Allies would clear him of war crimes. The Italian government, however, demanded that the Allies hand him over for trial in Milan in late 1945. His friends again intervened, and his trial was transferred to Rome, where Dulles, Angleton, et al. had ensured that many of the old Fascist bureaucrats remained in office, and where the courts were much more conservative. After two years in prison, he was finally found guilty in early 1949 of collaborating with the Nazis (though not in war crimes) and sentenced to 12 years in prison. As one frustrated observer put it, "The crimes of Borghese's band were too obvious, and the verdict had to be life imprisonment. But the court, through a scandalous application of extenuating circumstances, pardons, and remissions, reduced the sentence." The judge then decided he had served enough time, and released him, an action that would have been politically impossible before Britain's Winston Churchill announced the beginning of the Cold War with his 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri.

Borghese's new career was about to begin.

(ii) A Universal Fascist

Shortly after his release from prison, Borghese became president of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) party, composed largely of former Fascists. The MSI was a mixture of "national" and "international" ("universal") fascists.

Borghese was committed to the latter outlook, which today is openly espoused by neo-con Michael Ledeen, himself a protégé of a Mussolini Cabinet minister, the Venetian oligarch Vittorio Cini.

Cini, in turn, was a key collaborator of the real architect of Mussolini's regime, its longtime Finance Minister, the Venetian Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata.

Greene and Massignani describe Borghese's universal fascism and its plans for a Europe free of nation-states, but "unified" under NATO: "Fascism in the postwar era was different from its pre-war variety. Although it had splintered into many different factions, it had two powerful drives. One was that it was anti-communist. It was this element that made Borghese acceptable to the mainstream parties and national secret services. He was ultimately pro-NATO, as was the rest of this wing of fascism. The other one was the realization that in the postwar environment no single European nation could stand up to the two superpowers, and hence, that Europe would be a third force. That is, Europe would be `opposed to the twin imperialisms of international communism and international finance capitalism, both of which were perceived as being materialistic, exploitative, dehumanizing' " (emphasis in original).

Borghese's "united Europe" was the scheme promoted, from the early 1920s on, by his fellow oligarch, the Venetian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, which became an explicit goal of the Synarchist International in the 1920s and 1930s.

Today, the seed crystal of that "united Europe" has become the Maastricht Treaty-generated European Union and its European Central Bank. The same vision of a united Europe had also inspired Hjalmar Schacht, the financial architect of Hitler's regime, though Schacht viewed Hitler's conquest of Europe as the pathway to achieve it.

It was also the vision for which the Synarchy deployed one of its most notorious agents of the 20th Century, Alexander Helphand Parvus. Parvus first financed the Bolshevik Revolution, and then, after it was victorious, became the most ferocious "anti-Bolshevik," proclaiming that only a "united Europe" could stop the communist menace.

Between the wars, this "united Europe" scheme was momentarily eclipsed by the "national fascisms" of Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, and Hitler, though all were installed by the same Europe-based, London-centered Synarchy. But, after the war, write Greene and Massignani, Borghese's universal fascism was the wave of the future, as well as the incubator of international terrorism. "In Italy, it was the Fascist faction that possessed the many international ties that stretched between Franco's Spain, South America, and South Africa. It was from this faction, too, that many of the acts of terrorism of the `Black International' sprung" (emphasis added).

(iii) NATO, Gladio, and International Terrorism

Postwar Italian politics may appear to be a wilderness of mirrors, with its rapid changes of government, multiple coup attempts, and spectacular outbreaks of terrorism. Going back to the Nazi occupation of northern Italy during World War II, however, to examine the various British, American, and Nazi actors and their respective ties to different Italian factions, the reality quickly becomes apparent: that the Anglo-American Synarchists merely replaced—and to a great extent subsumed—the Nazis and Mussolini's Fascists as the would-be fascist occupying power, locked in mortal struggle against those Italian patriots, both "conservatives" of the Christian Democracy and "leftists" of the Italian Communist Party, who wished to establish a sovereign Italy.

The battle for a sovereign Italy centered on economic policy. In 1950, forces around wartime partisan leader, later industrialist Enrico Mattei effected a radical shift within the ruling Christian Democracy, away from free-market policies toward a dirigistic program of rapid industrial growth.

With an extraordinary series of state-sponsored corporations, and projects such as the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Southern Italy Development Fund) based on the model of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority, Italy experienced an economic miracle, with annual growth of over 7% for almost a decade. A linchpin of this was the newly founded national oil company, ENI, which Mattei headed in a war for energy independence against the synarchists' Seven Sisters.

Enraged at Italy's developing sovereignty, the Anglo-Americans deployed terrorism and assassinations to stop it. Borghese's activities run like a black dye through all of this history, until he fled to Spain in 1970. Let us now examine the scene in which he was to be so prominent an actor.

Already during World War II, Allen Dulles and other Anglo-American Synarchists, who had sponsored both Mussolini and Hitler in the first place, were trying to negotiate a peace with the Nazis which would leave them in power, sans Hitler and a handful of others. This Nazi puppet-regime would then ally with the British and the United States to conquer the Soviet Union, establishing a Synarchist world empire. Dulles's negotiating partner SS General Wolff said that he wanted "to build a bridge to the West," which would entail handing northern Italy over to the Allied military forces, but with German troops remaining in place, as "part of the proposed police force of the Western powers against Russia."[2]

U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by contrast, wanted to crush the fascist regimes, and foresaw a postwar world in which the colonial empires of all the European powers, starting with the British, would be abolished, and the United States and the Soviet Union—wartime allies—would cooperate in a grand program of global economic growth, into which the rest of the world would be drawn as well.

Dulles and his fellow Synarchists did not achieve their full scheme, but they did establish NATO as an occupation authority for Europe, which prepared for war against the Soviet Union. Lord Bertrand Russell's early 1946 call for pre-emptive nuclear warfare against the Soviet Union is typical. In the name of "fighting communism," Europe would be kept under AngloAllen Dulles American domination through NATO, and any and all means would be authorized toward that goal. Upon FDR's death in April 1945, the Synarchist puppet President Harry S Truman adopted these "anti-communist" schemes, which led immediately to the Cold War.

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in 1949, a secret clause in its treaty specified that each nation that wished to join must first establish a "national security authority" to fight communism, including through the deployment of clandestine citizen cadres. This demand grew out of a secret committee set up by the British and the U.S. within the Atlantic Pact, the forerunner of NATO. Truman's National Security Council issued directives authorizing the Armed Forces to use military force against Communist Parties, which commanded strong popular support in several European countries as a result of the war, even if those parties gained participation in government through elections. For this purpose, NATO and the Anglo-American intelligence services set up "stay-behind" units in all European countries.

According to Italian Gen. Paolo Inzerilli, who commanded Italy's Gladio unit from 1974-86, the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) and its Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) were the "interface between NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and the Secret Services of the member states as far as the problems of non-orthodox warfare were concerned." The CPC, said Inzerilli, was dominated by an inner executive group of the United States, Britain, and France, while the ACC was essentially a technical committee to coordinate expertise in explosives, "repression," or related problems of clandestine warfare.

Italian Gen. Gerardo Serravalle testified that the members of the CPC were the officers responsible for the stay-behind apparatus in the various European countries, and that "At the stay-behind meetings representatives of the CIA were always present," as well as "members of the U.S. Forces Europe Command."

The mid-1970s U.S. Congressional investigative committee under Sen. Frank Church, which examined illicit actions by U.S. intelligence services and the military, found that the Pentagon had requested the CIA's covert branch, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), to take the point in establishing stay-behind armies in Europe. The early plans were focussed on the Soviet Union, as the Church report noted: "Until 1950 OPC's paramilitary activities (also referred to as preventive action) were limited to plans and preparations for stay-behind nets in the event of future war.

Requested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these projected OPC operations focussed on Western Europe and were designed to support NATO forces against Soviet attack." However, the Pentagon soon went much further. A Joint Chiefs of Staff directive of May 14, 1952 set up "Operation Demagnetize," in which the CIA and the military secret services were instructed to reduce the "magnetic attraction" of the large Communist Parties of Italy and France through all means, including "political, paramilitary and psychological operations." The directive stated, "The limitation of the strength of the Communists in Italy and France is a top priority objective. This objective has to be reached by the employment of all means. The Italian and French government may know nothing of the plan `Demagnetize,' for it is clear that the plan can interfere with their respective national sovereignty" (emphasis added).

Operationally, the stay-behind units were run by the military secret services of each NATO nation, as directed by the CPC/ACC. Some light was shed on Pentagon and NATO thinking of this time in a Pentagon field manual, found along with the lists of members of the elite Propaganda Due (P2) freemasonic lodge in P2 Grand Master Licio Gelli's villa in Arezzo, Tuscany in 1981. Although issued in 1970, Field Manual 30-31B (FM 30-31B) reflected earlier Pentagon and NATO planning. It emphasized that military and other secret service leaders in each country should be recruited as U.S. (or NATO) agents: "The success of internal stabilisation operations, which are promoted in the context of strategies for internal defence by the U.S. military secret service, depends to a large extent on the understanding between the U.S. personnel and the personnel of the host country. The recruitment of senior members of the secret service of the host country as long time agents is thus especially important."

This process began already in 1944-45, when the Anglo-American synarchists re-constructed Italy's military secret service and its military police, the Carabinieri.

Some of the key individuals whom they installed or sponsored later turned up as members of P2, from where they oversaw the terrorism and assassinations of the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as the cover-ups. Like Borghese, some of these leaders had been recruited by Angleton himself. One of them was Federico Umberto D'Amato, chief of the UAR, a secret section of the Interior Ministry which coordinated the terrorist actions under NATO direction, in conjunction with the military secret services.[3]

Furthermore, stated the FM 30-31B, "There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the U.S. secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness. Most often such situations come about when the revolutionaries temporarily renounce the use of force and thus hope to gain an advantage, as the leaders of the host country wrongly consider the situation to be secure. U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger." FM 30-31B was issued in 1970; coup attempts against the Italian government under precisely the circumstances it describes, were launched using Gladio personnel (including Borghese) that year, and three more times through 1974. The manual stressed, "These special operations must remain strictly secret. Only those persons who are acting against the revolutionary uprising shall know of the involvement of the U.S. Army in the internal affairs of an allied country. The fact, that the involvement of forces of the U.S. military goes deeper shall not become known under any circumstances."[4]

(iv) The British Role

As in virtually everything to do with imperial strategies, the relevant U.S. circles were being carefully guided by their senior partners, the British, under the old rubric, "British brains and American brawn." Gladio was modelled on the actions of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) behind enemy lines during World War II, which had been created by the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) in 1940 under orders from Churchill to "set Europe ablaze." In charge of the SOE was Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton, who said, "We have to organize movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, to the Chinese Guerrillas now operating against Japan, to the Spanish Irregulars who played a notable part in Wellington's campaign or—one might as well admit it—to the organizations which the Nazis themselves have developed so remarkably in almost every country in the world" (emphasis added).

The SOE was closed down at war's end and replaced by the Special Air Services (SAS), which helped Britain's foreign secret service, MI6, to train the stay-behind armies of Europe. Gladio specialist Daniele Ganser of the Center for Security Studies at Zurich Technical University observed, "Many within the stay-behind community regarded the British to be the best in the field of secret warfare, more experienced than the military officers of the U.S."

The British set up a base for training stay-behind units at Ft. Monckton outside Portsmouth, England, and another in Sardinia.

One of the stay-behind operatives trained at Ft. Monckton recalled, "We were made to do exercises, going out in the dead of night and pretending to blow up trains in the railway stations without the stationmaster or the porters seeing you. We crept about and pretended to lay charges on the right part of the railway engine with a view to blowing it up." In the Gladio-coordinated blind terror which ravaged Italy from 1969 through 1980, trains and railway stations were to be a favorite target, notably the 1974 bombing of the Rome-Munich Italicus Express, which killed 12 and injured 48, and the explosion in the Bologna rail station in August 1980, which killed 85 and seriously injured or maimed 200. Lyndon LaRouche first emphasized within hours of the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2001 which killed 200 and wounded thousands more, that they were not the work of "Islamic terrorists," but followed the pattern of the 1980 Bologna bombing.

Vincenzo Vinciguerra, an Italian neo-fascist terrorist who was jailed for life and who had been bitter about the secret service's "manipulation" of neo-fascist groups ever since 1945, explained how Gladio (and any sister organizations) worked: "You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened."

After Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti exposed the existence of Gladio in 1990, the BBC's "Newsedition" undertook its own examination of Gladio. It reported in April 1991, "Britain's role in setting up stay-behinds throughout Europe was absolutely fundamental."

More crucial than the stay-behinds, were the secretive bodies which coordinated them, such as P2. Here, too, the British led the way. Already in 1944-45, the British set up a proto-P2 masonic lodge composed of House of Savoy monarchists, aristocrats, and Mussolini loyalists. A Jan. 2, 1945 OSS report noted: "The lodge is under British authority and will request their political and economic aid, things which the members cannot get through their respective parties without exposing themselves to accusations of being paid by the British."

(v) NATO's Italian Theater

OSS official James Jesus Angleton saved Borghese in 1945, and then set up the clandestine structure in the Italian military and secret services, which produced the Italian section of Gladio. Angleton was a devout Anglophile and a pro-fascist, who had spent much of his boyhood in Italy, where his father, James Hugh Angleton, owned the Italian subsidiary of National Cash Register. The outspokenly pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini senior Angleton also headed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Italy, and had extensive contacts with Mussolini's intelligence services. Some accounts report that he was a business partner of Allen Dulles. Both he and his son were to work for the special counterespionage unit of OSS, X-2, which had been set up at the demand of the British. Though it was nominally an American organization, the headquarters of X-2 for all of Europe, and even most of the globe, was London. X-2 was trained and de facto run throughout the war by the British, as its operatives were dispatched across Europe. From late 1943 through the first half of 1944, Lt. Col. James Hugh Angleton was X-2's liaison to Marshal Pietro Badoglio and other leaders of the Italian army, and to the army's intelligence service, building upon his excellent contacts in pre-war Italy.

The junior Angleton landed in Italy as an X-2 operative in October 1944. Borghese was one of his informants/agents from shortly thereafter, until the Italian government demanded that the OSS turn him over for prosecution. The U.S. mandated that the "operational resources" of the Italian police and all of the military intelligence and secret services be put at the disposal of X-2, which was led by Angleton. This, naturally, set the pattern for decades to come. Bespeaking his patronage by Dulles and the British, young Angleton rose from chief of the X-2 unit in Rome, to chief of all OSS counterespionage in Italy. By age 28, he was chief of all secret activity, intelligence as well as counterintelligence, in Italy for the Strategic Services Unit, the short-lived successor to OSS, and predecessor to the operational section of the CIA, which was established in 1947. In this he was aided immensely by the fact that many patriotic OSS officers, such as Max Corvo, head of OSS operations in Italy from 1943-45 and later a friend of Lyndon LaRouche, had been purged by the Dulles faction the day after FDR's death.

Essential to Angleton's activities, to the establishment of the first stay-behind units in Italy, and to the organization of the Vatican-linked "rat-lines" which smuggled fascists out of Europe at war's end, was the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). The Rome-based SMOM was a nominally Catholic organization with membership drawn from the highest ranks of the European oligarchy, in particular Italy's black nobility. The SMOM awarded Angleton one of its highest decorations in 1946. A member of the "Black Prince's" family, S. Giacomo, Prince Borghese, had been a Bailiff Grand Cross of Honor of Devotion in the SMOM since 1932, while P2 founder Licio Gelli and several of his top members, including secret service heads, also belonged.

By 1949 Angleton was a special assistant to CIA chief Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, and by 1955, CIA chief Allen Dulles (1953-61) had appointed him to head the counterintelligence department of the CIA. He held that post until he was fired by CIA chief William Colby in 1974, after having done untold damage to U.S. intelligence capabilities.[5]

As Angleton rose in U.S. intelligence, maintaining his close ties to Italy, NATO was constructing the foundations of Gladio. Under NSC directives issued in 1949 and 1950, the CIA helped the Italian police set up secret units of counterinsurgency specialists, largely drawn from veterans of Mussolini's secret police. A new military intelligence agency, SIFAR, was organized under the direction of a covert American intelligence operative, Carmel Offie, nicknamed "the godfather." Simultaneously, Borghese was organizing paramilitary units for use against the PCI, in coordination with CIA operatives under the purview of Angleton (who was formally assigned to Italy by Allen Dulles when Dulles became CIA chief in 1953). On Dec. 2, 1951, Borghese was named honorary president of the MSI, and in a speech to the party's convention, proclaimed that the MSI could not be "conscientious objectors" if the Cold War turned hot, as he expected. That same month, two MSI members travelled to NATO headquarters in Paris to swear their organization's allegiance to NATO. By 1952, the NATO-directed "Operation Demagnetize" was in place, and SIFAR was directed to adopt political and psychological operations against the PCI, including the covert use of armed force, to diminish the PCI's influence in all fields. The U.S. poured a staggering $4 billion into "anti-communist" Italy between 1948 and 1953.

Borghese and his old X MAS cadre figured prominently in these plans. Indeed, some people in U.S. intelligence had briefly toyed with the idea of promoting Borghese as a new King of Italy, until an uproar from the House of Savoy and its supporters forced them to drop the idea. The royalists and the MSI were often allies, and Borghese's X MAS had sometimes worked with the royalist Osoppo brigade during 1943-45. Greene and Massignani observe that, "Interestingly enough, the core of the future Gladio stay-behind organization started with the Osoppo partisans." Since Borghese's X MAS was also a chief recruiting ground for the early Gladio units, the wartime collaboration clearly continued.

In 1953, Borghese led some 500 MSI volunteers, among others, to launch an uprising in the north Adriatic city of Trieste, a city which was claimed by both Italy and Yugoslavia. Under the slogan "To Trieste with Valerio Borghese," Borghese re-enacted the 1919 march on Fiume by the fascist (and Martinist freemason) Gabriele D'Annunzio, a precursor to Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome. The neo-fascists acted on behalf of the "Committee for the Defense of Italians of Trieste and Istria," whose weapons were delivered by the Italian secret services. The following year, Trieste was returned to Italy.

In 1955, Borghese became president of the union of former soldiers of the Salò Republic, a key recruiting ground for Gladio. He was later to become one of the leaders of the "Tricolor Committee for the Italianity of the Alto Adige." The Alto Adige, or South Tyrol, in Italy saw one of the earliest known uses of stay-behind units. Though Italian territory, the area was German-speaking, and a fruitful area for promoting ethnic conflict.

In 1956, NATO formally established Gladio. According to documents discovered in Italy in 1990, Gladio's forces there were divided into 40 main groups, 10 specialized in sabotage, 6 each in espionage, propaganda, evasion and escape tactics, and 12 in guerrilla activities. A special Gladio training camp was set up on Sardinia, off Italy's western coast, run by the Americans and the British.

That same year, 1956, U.S. Ambassador to Italy Clare Booth Luce—a Dame of Malta and the wife of Time and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce, a key sponsor of the fascist Congress for Cultural Freedom—"recommended" a fellow SMOM member, Gen. Giovanni De Lorenzo, as the new head of SIFAR. In 1962, the CIA helped install De Lorenzo as head of the Carabinieri, while he still maintained control over SIFAR. He began purging officers deemed not sufficiently "anti-communist," in either his eyes or or those of U.S. military attaché Vernon Walters.

CIA Rome station chief William Harvey, meanwhile, was recruiting "action teams" to throw bombs and attack leftists. These teams launched an attack on a peaceful demonstration in Rome in 1963, leaving 200 people injured and heavy damage to part of the city. The action was later linked to Gladio, in testimony by a general of the secret service.

In 1963, Borghese became president of the Banco di Credito Commerciale e Industriale, a very high-paying "ceremonial post" which was designed to build up his capabilities. The bank had been the very first one owned by the Sicilian financier Michele Sindona, a Fascist during World War II, who later laundered heroin funds for the Sicilian mafia, and then became a power in P2. Borghese's bank was involved with a "vast sector" of conservative economic interests, including the son of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, Franco's Spain, and reactionary circles in the Vatican and the Christian Democratic Party. Ultimately the bank collapsed, but Borghese got off almost scot-free. "What is significant," write Greene and Massignani, "is that Borghese clearly had many contacts on a national as well as an international scale. These connections extended to very high levels. It also appears that the financial wherewithal that he needed to survive may have come from such sources after the end of the war." The authors also note that his career closely parallels that of former SS commando Otto Skorzeny in Spain.

(vi) Series of Coups

From 1962 to 1964, the Synarchy initiated a phase change in international affairs with the Cuban Missiles Crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (and Enrico Mattei), the attempts on France's President Charles de Gaulle, and the launching of the war in Vietnam and the youth rock-drug-sex counterculture, among other things. Italy was not exempt.

As Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1964 was negotiating his first government with Socialist participation, the synarchists unleashed a coup threat under the name "Plan Solo." Its chief public figure was State President Antonio Segni, and Borghese was a protagonist.

The usual accounts of Gladio-related coup threats invariably emphasize Moro's "opening to the left" as the reason for them. However, there is another reason, internal to Italy itself (in addition to the global ramifications of a coup in Italy), but one which is entirely coherent with the Synarchy's attempt to stop Italy's economic development. This other dimension emerges clearly in the account of Plan Solo by EIR counterterrorism and Italian affairs expert Claudio Celani: "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 automaker FIAT in Turin [of the oligarchical Agnelli family—ed.]) reported to Segni that the financial and economic establishment predicted a catastrophic economic crisis, if the Socialists joined the government. In reality, a few large monopolies (in the hands of the same families who had supported Mussolini's regime) feared that the new government would introduce reforms to break their power in real estate, energy, finance, and economic planning."

Advised by Rocca, Segni called the head of SIFAR, Gen. Giovanni de Lorenzo, and asked him to prepare a list of political leaders to be rounded up in case of an insurgency. De Lorenzo prepared "Plan Solo," which included a list of 731 individuals to be interned at the Gladio camp in Sardinia. Greene and Massignani observe, "Supporting the Carabinieri were politically sanitized civilians largely made up of former Decima Mas, paratroopers, and soldiers and sailors of the RSI [Salò Republic]." "Borghese was De Lorenzo's friend" and was scheduled to personally participate in the coup, according to Remo Orlandini, a top Borghese collaborator and heir to a shipbuilding empire. The coup did not eventuate, leaving a very "angry Borghese."

In early May 1965, a meeting took place at the Parco Dei Principi Hotel in Rome, which Italian prosecutors consider the planning meeting for the 1969-74 "Strategy of Tension." It was sponsored by an institute run by the chief of the general staff of Italy's armed forces, on the theme of "Revolutionary Warfare." Participants plotted how the alleged threat by the PCI must be forestalled by "counterrevolutionary war." (The PCI's vote totals were generally rising through the second half of the 1960s.) Present were leaders of the fascist terror groups, Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) and Ordine Nuovo (ON), pro-fascist journalists, the military, and various secret services. One of the fascist journalists present was Guido Giannettini, also an operative of the Italian secret services, who four years earlier had taught a seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy on "The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup." Though Borghese himself was not present, his lieutenant Stefano Delle Chiaie, the nominal chief of AN, was. Delle Chiaie had probably been recruited by the UAR secret unit of Italy's Interior Ministry as early as 1960, and was to be Borghese's chief lieutenant in the 1970 coup plot.

During the 1960s through his coup attempt in 1970, Borghese either founded or was intimately involved in at least three fascist terror organizations: Delle Chiaie's AN; the ON; and the Fronte Nazionale (FN), which Borghese founded in 1968 for the sole purpose, according to a document of SID (as SIFAR was renamed after 1965), "to subvert the institutions of the state by means of a coup." Two of these were represented at the Parco Dei Principi meeting. All three were run by operatives of NATO or Italy's clandestine services, notably the UAR and SIFAR/SID. Borghese lieutenant Delle Chiaie was almost certainly a UAR agent, and "AN itself was suspected of being the creation of UAR." Greene and Massignani report that "many members of the FN, ON, and AN had been trained in disinformation and guerrilla warfare at the special [NATO] camp in Sardinia," while ON bomber Vincenzo Vinciguerra charged that the "right-wing movements such as AN or ON were not only connected with Italian and NATO secret services, but manned by them."

NATO interventions were not limited to Italy. In Greece in 1967, despite a wave of terror, the left-of-center Center Union under former Prime Minister George Papandreou was expected to return to power. On the night of April 20-21, 1967, the Greek military pulled a coup. It involved the Greek stay-behind army, LOK, and was based on the Prometheus plan, a NATO contingency plan for combatting a "communist insurgency." The coup was partially financed by P2's Michele Sindona, and, before long, Italians were being sent to Greece for paramilitary training.

By 1968, Gladio had stepped up its training at the NATO base in Sardinia. "Within a few years, 4,000 graduates had been placed in strategic posts. At least 139 arms caches, including some at Carabinieri barracks, were at their disposal," reported Arthur E. Rowse, who has examined Gladio's Italian operations in depth. Terrorism exploded in Italy, with 147 attacks in 1968, another 398 in 1969, and peaked at 2,498 in 1978. Borghese's efforts were a key part of this.

One of the first members of the FN, Borghese's project for a state "beyond the center, right and left," was P2 boss and Knight of Malta Licio Gelli. Like Borghese, Gelli had fought for Franco and Mussolini, and was recruited by SIFAR in the 1950s. Gelli was the "main intermediary" between the CIA and De Lorenzo.

In the FN, Borghese was known as "the Commander," and he established "action groups" all over the country. The FN (like the AN) had a two-part structure: "A" groups, which were the public side of FN, and clandestine "B" groups, whose existence was usually unknown even to the members of their respective A groups. The B groups were to be used in terrorism, in the "Strategy of Tension" aimed at producing a change in the Italian government, which exploded with the Piazza Fontana massacre on Dec. 12, 1969, in which 16 were killed and 58 wounded. Members of the Borghese-connected ON were arrested on suspicion of the crime, but cover-ups run by P2 and the secret services ensured their release.

The terror and coup attempts escalated after U.S. President Nixon took office in 1969. His National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger issued orders to Licio Gelli through Kissinger's deputy, Gen. Alexander Haig, and Gelli maintained many high-level contacts in the U.S. Republican Party. The synarchist Kissinger was bitterly opposed to a sovereign Italy. With the Socialist Party in the government at the time, the United States opened the financial spigots to "anti-communist" forces—including the neo-Fascist MSI—and poured in $10 million in 1970 alone. "The money funneled to [U.S. Ambassador Graham] Martin came through the Vatican banker [MSOffice1] and Borghese's friend and patron, Sindona," observe Greene and Massignani.

On June 1, 1970, Borghese appointed Delle Chiaie to head the "B" groups, and moved forward with plans for a coup. U.S. Ambassador Martin handled some of the funding, through his chief contact, Gen. Vito Miceli, who took over as head of the SID in October 1970. Before he became head of the SID, Miceli had met with Borghese several times at the home of Remo Orlandini, Borghese lieutenant and shipbuilding heir. Martin was no ordinary diplomatic appointee: The fiercely right-wing Colonel Martin had just come from the Embassy in Thailand, where he had strong-armed the Thai government into joining the United States in Vietnam, and he would leave Italy in 1973 to take up the post in Saigon. During 1970, Martin maintained multiple liaisons with Borghese, including through FN operative Pier Talenti, who owned a bus company that would be utilized in the coup attempt, and through probable CIA operative Hugh Fenwich, who was meeting with Orlandini.

Borghese set up the political and military headquarters for the coup in Rome, the military one at one of Orlandini's shipyards. On the night of Dec. 7, 1970, a group of 50 AN paramilitaries led by Delle Chiaie was let into the Interior Ministry's armory at the instruction of Angleton's old recruit, UAR head Federico D'Amato. According to newspaper accounts, Angleton himself arrived in Rome just before the coup attempt, and left just afterwards. Other troops moved into place in Rome, Milan, and elsewhere, and the mafia in Calabria was scheduled to don Carabinieri uniforms and play a role. Borghese prepared a statement to be read on TV to justify the coup, and he intended for Italian troops to be sent to Vietnam. At the last minute, he received a phone call and called off the coup.

Borghese fled to Franco's Spain, where his activities until his death in 1974 remain mysterious. It is known that he and Delle Chiaie met dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile on April 29, 1974. Also present was the head of Chilean police intelligence, Col. Jorge Carrasco, a protagonist in Operation Condor's tortures and murder. Borghese died in Spain in 1974. Delle Chiaie said that he was poisoned, apparently because investigations into the 1970 coup were under way in Italy. After Franco's death the following year, Delle Chiaie left for Chile, to play a key role in Operation Condor, then continued that work in Bolivia, in conjunction with the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie.

(vii) NATO's Assassination Bureau

The extent of terrorism, assassinations, and the re-shaping of Europe's political landscape through Gladio and related, NATO-directed units is stunning.

However, a vital caveat must be added here. The apparatus behind the "strategy of tension" terror that destabilized Europe over much of the Cold War era, was first and foremost a private synarchist apparatus embedded in the NATO and national secret service organizations, including "official" clandestine agencies like Gladio. These "parallel" networks, populated by veterans of the wartime Fascist and Nazi apparatus, and associated with secret societies like P-2, and fronts like Rosa dei Venti and Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato, at times had their agents posted in top positions in the "official" structures, creating the dangerously tempting but false appearance that the official agencies per se—including NATO—were directing the terror/destabilization programs.

Confusion on this point is both dangerous and understandable. When the P-2 membership list was revealed in the early 1980s, following the death of banker Roberto Calvi, it became clear that the secret lodge had penetrated virtually the entire security apparatus and political party structures of Italy and several other countries of Europe and Ibero-America.

The carnage carried out by this "parallel" apparatus was stunning. In Italy alone, the chief theater of Gladio warfare, there were 14,591 "acts of violence with a political motivation," according to Italian Sen. Giovanni Pellegrino, head of the Parliamentary Committee on the Failed Identification of the Authors of Terrorist Massacres ("Terrorism Committee," in operation 1994-2001, which looked into both Gladio and the P2 lodge). "It may be worth remembering that these `acts' have left behind 491 dead and 1,181 injured and maimed, figures of a war, with no parallel in any other European country."

Besides NATO's Gladio base in Sardinia, logistical support for Gladio in Italy and France was run out of a NATO front in dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal, Aginter Press, which also ran the stay-behind units there. It was headed by a former member of the anti-de Gaulle, pro-fascist Secret Army Organization (OAS), Yves Guerin Serac, who moved to Portugal after de Gaulle surrendered Algeria. Said Guerin Serac, belying the goals of his synarchist masters, "After the OAS I fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its proper dimensions—which is to say, a planetary dimension." He outlined his plan to "defeat communism," using NATO-organized "communist terrorism" as the excuse:

"In the first phase of our political activity we must create chaos in all structures of the regime. Two forms of terrorism can provoke such a situation: The blind terrorism (committing massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims), and the selective terrorism (eliminate chosen persons). This destruction of the state must be carried out as much as possible under the cover of `communist activities.' After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the juridical power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a solution, and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus. . . . Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being represented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation. It is obvious that we will need considerable financial resources to carry out such operations."

Aginter Press's representative in Italy, according to the ON's Vincenzo Vinciguerra, was Stefano Delle Chiaie. Delle Chiaie "allegedly carried out well over a thousand bloodthirsty attacks, including an estimated 50 murders in Spain," according to Daniele Ganser.

In assassinations within Portugal or its colonies, Aginter Press worked with the Portuguese secret service, PIDE. According to Portuguese journalists, it was involved in the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane, president of the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo) in 1969, and of Amilcar Cabral, national liberation leader in Guinea-Bissau in 1973. And, according to the most recent revelations from former Italian Sen. Sergio Flamigni, the "parallel" apparatus coordinated the kidnap and assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro through its Red Brigades unit on March 16, 1978, the day on which a PCI-supported DC government under Giulio Andreotti was finally going to be sworn in.

Were the Synarchist networks infiltrated into the NATO and Gladio structures involved in other assassinations of heads of state or government, as well?

The Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was coordinated by the Rome and New Orleans-headquartered Permindex corporation, which French intelligence, SDECE, discovered had also put up $200,000 for an attempt on de Gaulle. Even a cursory examination of the hard-core fascist outlook and connections of most of the Permindex/CMC personnel, their numerous ties to high-level Anglo-American intelligence, along with their financial connections, leaves no doubt that Permindex and its Rome-based arm, Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), were part of the parallel NATO/Gladio structure.

Permindex was registered in Berne, Switzerland, Dulles's old stomping grounds. It was chaired by a high-ranking veteran of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the OSS, the Canada-based lawyer and financier, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, the majority shareholder in Permindex (who also owned 50% of CMC). Its board was a mélange of devout "anti-communists," aristocrats, and fascists of various intelligence pedigrees. These included Count Guitierez di Spadafora, former undersecretary of agriculture to Mussolini, secretary of a British-sponsored Sicilian separatist movement, and in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, the master financier of the postwar Nazi International; Carlo d'Amelio, a Rome attorney who oversaw the financial holdings of the House of Savoy, and, according to some accounts, also of the Pallavicini family, and was the founding president of the CMC; Giuseppe Zigiotti, head of the Fascist National Association for Militia Arms; several other wartime fascists; and former OSS London and SOE veteran Col. Clay Shaw, the operations officer for the assassination.

Permindex was chaired by Canada's Bloomfield, while its international arm, CMC, was based in Rome, and Clay Shaw's firm in New Orleans, International Trade Mart, was a subsidiary of Permindex/CMC. According to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), OSS veteran Shaw worked for the CIA, as well. There was ample evidence of Shaw's involvement in the assassination, for which he was indicted by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Notably, one of the names found in Shaw's personal phone book was that of Princess Marcella Borghese, a member of the Black Prince's family. And one of the lower-level figures in the ambit of the plot, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby (who assassinated patsy Lee Harvey Oswald), charged repeatedly in letters from jail, that "the Nazis and the Fascists were behind the Kennedy murder." According to the highly credible Torbitt manuscript, "Ruby was much more knowledgeable about the conspiracy than most."

Huge financial resources flowed through Permindex/CMC for no commercial purpose. Some of these funds, at least, were provided through banks which had earlier financed the Nazis, including one intimately associated with Allen Dulles from the time of his 1930s work with Nazi cartels, through to his 1953-61 stint as CIA chief. Some hints of where the money was going could be found in French and Italian press reports that CMC official Ferenc Nagy, the fiercely anti-communist former Prime Minister of Hungary, was financing Jacques Soustelle and the OAS, along with other European fascist movements; or in New Orleans District Attorney Garrison's observation about "Shaw's secret life as an Agency [CIA] man trying to bring Fascism back to Italy."[6]

NATO units were also involved in at least some of the numerous assassination attempts on France's President Charles de Gaulle in 1962-63, which was no doubt a factor in de Gaulle's withdrawing France from NATO's military command in 1966. France, after all, had been a key target of NATO's "Operation Demagnetize" in the 1950s, and the "anti-communist," bitterly anti-de Gaulle OAS operatives like Guerin Serac, were natural partners of NATO. Adm. Pierre Lacoste, director of the France's military secret service DGSE (1982-85), admitted after Andreotti had exposed Gladio's existence in 1990, that some "terrorist actions" against de Gaulle and his plans to liberate Algeria were carried out by groups involving "a limited number of people" from the French Gladio organization!

A five-year investigation by France's SDECE intelligence agency of a 1962 assassination plot against de Gaulle found that the assassination had been planned in the Brussels headquarters of NATO by a specific group of British and French generals, who employed former fascists for the planned wetwork.

And then, there is the case of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who was assassinated on Feb. 28, 1986 in Stockholm. While there is no hard proof that parallel Gladio networks were involved, it has been suspected by Swedish investigative journalists. On April 28, 1992, Sweden's top daily, Dagens Nyheter, carried the headline: "A Top-Secret Intelligence Network Within NATO Is Behind the Death of Olof Palme." Journalist Goran Beckerus charged that the operative branch of NATO's Allied Clandestine Committee, known by its initials SOPS, oversaw the assassination under the code name "Operation Tree."

(viii) The Aristocracy and the Knights of Malta

In order to discover the real authors of international terrorism, we must move into territory at which Greene and Massignani only hint.

Time and again, Italian investigators of Gladio and P2 have suggested that the evidence before them was only the superficial tracings of a far-reaching, well-established power structure's activity. For instance, Senator Pellegrino, head of the Italian Parliament's "Terrorism Committee," is convinced that P2 Grand Master Gelli was the front man for hidden circles of far greater power; that if P2 were a "port," then Gelli, who has recently resurfaced to brag that he is "running the country," would be merely the "Port Authority." Who, or what, constitutes this greater power? From outside the country, it is the Anglo-American synarchists. But Gladio and the embedded "parallel Gladio" could not possibly function within Italy only by recruiting leaders of secret services; its protection had to involve some of the most powerful forces inside Italy itself.

Greene and Massignani note that the X MAS—which became a key component of Gladio—counted among its leadership a number of Italy's top aristocrats, though they name only two: the "Black Prince" himself, and the claimant to the throne of Italy, Prince Aimone, Duke of Aosta. In fact, the Duke was favored by many of Rome's black nobility over Victor Emmanuel III, who reigned from 1900-45, and who therefore was King during the era of Mussolini, who was nominally the King's prime minister. The recognized leader of Italy's black nobility, Princess Elvina Pallavicini, once proclaimed, "The Duke of Aosta would have been much better, but now we are stuck with Victor Emmanuel." How many other aristocrats among the X MAS leadership also became key figures, like Borghese, in NATO's Gladio organization?

It is certain, that aristocrats played vital roles in one of the "parallel" Gladio's most infamous operations, the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro. Looked at more carefully, that is no real surprise: Members of the most powerful international organization of the world's aristocracy, the SMOM, played essential roles in the establishment of the Vatican/British intelligence/CIA "rat-lines" and other crucial "anti-communist" activities at the end of World War II. Allen Dulles and James Angleton were SMOM members. Numerous SMOM members were also prominent in the P2 lodge; however, of the two organizations, the SMOM is incomparably the more senior and powerful; in fact, from available evidence, P2 is more appropriately thought of as an "operational" spin-off of the SMOM. Let us briefly look at the role of these aristocrats in the Moro assassination, and then in more detail at the SMOM itself.

The Gladio structure was named after the short Roman sword, gladio. When Aldo Moro was killed on May 9, 1978, ostensibly by the Red Brigades, he was dumped outside a Roman stadium where gladiators used to fight to the death. The symbolic connection was clear, as emphasized by investigative journalist and sometime mouthpiece for elements within the SID, Mino Pecorelli. The Red Brigades leader in charge of the operation was Mario Moretti. Former Senator Flamigni has documented in a recent book, that Moretti was a protégé almost from childhood of an important aristocratic family, the Casati Stampa. The Marchesa Annamaria Casati Stampa kept several neo-Fascist youth as lovers, one of whom was probably Moretti, whose high school education she paid for. Under Gladio direction, the neo-Fascist Moretti later turned into a "leftist" and headed the Red Brigades.[7] Connections to Fascism ran deep in the Casati Stampa family: her husband's uncle, Alessandro, had been a minister in Mussolini's first government, and then, when Mussolini was dumped, became a minister in the first royalist government.

The closest friend of the Casati Stampa family was Liberal Party Sen. Giorgio Bergamasco. Bergamasco, in turn, was one of the founders of the Committee of Democratic Resistance, led by Piedmontese aristocrat Count Edgardo Sogno Rata del Vallino. Sogno had fought for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and then for Mussolini, and in 1943 went over to the British SOE. He was also on the payroll of Allen Dulles for years for 10 million liras a month, and his Committee became another nucleus of the extended Gladio organization. Sogno led an attempted coup in 1974, which was foiled by Defense Minister Giulio Andreotti. Flamigni demonstrated in his book how the hardline Moretti-led faction of the Red Brigades was in reality run by Sogno's NATO-controlled organization.

Shortly after Moro's assassination, LaRouche's associates in Italy published a pamphlet, "Who Killed Aldo Moro?" which drew attention to the oligarchical Caetani family in Rome, near whose palace Moro's body had been found. Later investigations by others charged that the actual head of Gladio was the English aristocrat Hubert Howard, a British intelligence official in World War II and for decades afterwards, who had married Princess Lelia Caetani, daughter of Roffredo Caetani, 17th Duke of Sermoneta. Howard and his wife lived in the Caetani palace, as did one Igor Markevich, a double or triple agent of Western, Israeli, and Soviet intelligence services. He and Howard were leaders of high-level "esoteric" masonry, and, according to some accounts, had led the "negotiations" with the Red Brigades for the freedom of Moro—a convenient cover for constant liaison. British intelligence veteran Howard was also named by some as the secret head of Gladio. The account is credible. Howard was a member of one of the most powerful families in Britain, the Dukes of Norfolk, and the Catholic Howards had had intimate connections with the Italian aristocracy, particularly of Venice, since at least the 18th Century. His mother, for instance, was a member of the powerful Giustiniani family of Venice and Genoa, which claimed descent from Emperor Justinian. One Howard had been the Cardinal-Bishop of Frascati outside Rome in the 19th Century, a post held a couple of centuries earlier by a Caetani. Although long a power in the Church—Benedetto Caetani was crowned Pope Boniface VIII at the end of the 13th Century—the Caetani were part of the nominally "enlightened" wing of Italy's aristocracy by the 20th Century, and still wielded great influence under Mussolini and afterwards.

No account of the Italian aristocracy's role in promoting fascism and terrorism can omit the role of Princess Elvina Pallavicini. As head of the integrist international association of Catholic nobility, "Noblesse et Tradition," Pallavicini was a chief sponsor, both in Rome and worldwide, of the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was excommunicated by Pope John Paul II in 1988. Until her recent death, the Princess was also a chief sponsor of neo-Fascist groups in Italy, including setting the stage for the emergence of former porn star Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of Il Duce, as the candidate for an electoral coalition of neo-Fascist parties.

(ix) The Sovereign Military Order of Malta

Wherever one turns in investigating P2, Gladio, the "black aristocracy," international terrorism, or the Nazi International, one encounters the SMOM—the Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta, known as "the Knights of St. John" or the "Knights of Malta."

They were omnipresent in the establishment of the financial and human infrastructure of modern international terrorism already during World War II, and immediately thereafter. SMOM member Baron Luigi Parilli, an industrialist with high-level connections into both Hitler's SS and SD in Italy, and to Mussolini's intelligence services, was the main liaison between SS Gen. Karl Wolff and Allen Dulles in Berne. SMOM bestowed one of its highest awards, Gran Croce Al Merito Con Placca, on U.S. Ambassador to Italy Ellery Stone, who had saved Borghese, and who became a postwar vice-president of the ITT corporation, which helped organize the Sept. 11, 1973 overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende and the installation of dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The SMOM awarded its Croce Al Merito Seconda Classe to Italy's OSS chief James Jesus Angleton in 1946, around the same time it honored his boss, Allen Dulles. The following year, it bestowed the Gran Croce al Merito con Placca upon Hitler's Eastern Front intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, one of only four recipients of this award at the time. Gehlen's brother was the secretary to Thun Hohenstein, one of the five-member ruling Sovereign Council of the order. As head of the Institute for Associated Emigrations, Hohenstein printed some 2,000 passports, which were used to relocate leading Nazis to safe hiding places around the world.

Other leading Knights included CIA chiefs Allen Dulles, John McCone, and William Casey. Nazi International figure Otto Skorzeny was a Knight, as was businessman J. Peter Grace, who used the SMOM's diplomatic immunity as a cover for Iran-Contra activities.

Numerous leaders of Italy's military intelligence organization were members of both SMOM and P2, including Gen. Giuseppe Santovito (former head of SISMI, which replaced SID after 1977), Adm. Giovanni Torrisi, Chief of the General Staff of the Army, and Gen. Giovanni Allavena, head of SIFAR. Another key P2 member who was a Knight was Count Umberto Ortolani, a member of the SMOM's ruling inner council, and a veteran of Mussolini's counterespionage service. Some say he was the real brains behind P2, and he did sponsor the entrance of P2 boss Licio Gelli into the SMOM. Ortolani was a financier who, among other things, owned the second-largest bank in Uruguay, where he commanded enormous influence; the fascist Gelli had been in exile in Ibero-America until higher powers brought him back to Italy in the early 1960s to set up what became the P2 lodge.

As with any organization, not all of its members are guilty, and sometimes not even witting of the organization's crimes. In this case, however, given the nature of the beast, that would be relatively rare. Besides the repeated surfacing of SMOM members in terrorist-related activities near the end of World War II, one of their more recent operations illustrates the organization's essential nature.

In 1978, following hard upon the assassinations of Dresdner Bank head Jürgen Ponto, German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, and Aldo Moro, the Knights of Malta were caught red-handed coordinating an assassination operation against Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. LaRouche was the intellectual author of the Bremen summit of that year, where French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and British Prime Minister James Callaghan (the last under duress) signed the Bremen Communiqué, which announced the formation of the European Monetary System. The EMS, in the words of one West German official, was intended to be "the seed crystal of a new world monetary system." Bremen struck horror into the hearts of the world's oligarchy. Said one senior officer of the Banque Bruxelles-Lambert, owned by the Belgian Rothschilds, "It is recognized that it was LaRouche's program that went through at Bremen. If it goes through now, certain important financial centers are going to lose their power. A lot of people are not going to like that." The director of a Knights-run institute in Belgium was more succinct: "LaRouche is the first enemy of the London group." In New York, Knight Henry S. Bloch, director of Warburg, Pincus investment bank, whose hands investigators discovered to be holding many of the strings of the plot, proclaimed LaRouche to be "very dangerous," and pointedly compared him to Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965.

In their investigations of the SMOM, LaRouche's associates "discovered to their surprise that the mere mention of its name inspires awe and terror in the minds of highly placed government officials, central bankers, senior military and business leaders, and senior diplomatic and intelligence executives," as recorded in a pamphlet issued by the LaRouche organization at the time, "The `Black International' Terrorist Assassination Plot to Kill Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr." The pamphlet further reported, "The power that the Order concentrates is primarily financial, through direct control of most of the Western world's leading investment houses" and far, far more. The pamphlet also noted, "A second source of power is an absolutely unmatched intelligence capability." Which is to say, the SMOM is a leading organizational arm of the Synarchy, bringing together the world's leading aristocrats, financiers, and particularly military and intelligence officials. Its members yearn for the ultramontane world which existed before the rise of sovereign nation-states during the Renaissance, which meant a loss of power and privilege of their families. To them, that vanished world is as if yesterday. Indeed, it has by no means entirely disappeared, but lives on, centered—like the Knights themselves—on the Venetian-descended "independent central banks" of virtually every nation in the world, as LaRouche has emphasized.

The Knights of St. John were founded in the late 11th Century, and rose to prominence in the First Crusade of 1095. In 1120, Pope Urban II officially recognized them as a military religious order, and for centuries they remained one of the most powerful military forces in Christendom, first from their headquarters on the island of Rhodes, and then on Malta, from which they were finally driven by Napoleon in the late 18th Century. The Knights were recognized as a sovereign state by a Hapsburg Emperor in the 16th Century. They remain a sovereign state, run from their headquarters at 68 Via Condotti in Rome. They maintain their own fleet of aircraft, have diplomatic relations with 92 nations as well as the United Nations and the Holy See, and enjoy diplomatic immunity. The order is entirely Roman Catholic, and its higher ranks must document an aristocratic lineage and coat-of-arms of at least three centuries. The Grand Master of the order is both a secular prince, and a cardinal of the Church. Reflecting its history, its membership is still heavily comprised of individuals with a military or intelligence background. Pope Pius XII ordered an investigation of this nominally Catholic organization in the 1950s. The Papal Commission charged, among other things, that the Order should not have the sovereignty of a state, and ordered modifications of the SMOM "to bring them into conformity with decisions of the Holy See." However, Pius XII died before the Order could be fully reined in.

In addition to the Roman Catholic SMOM, there are four Protestant orders of the Knights, all founded within the last 150 years or so, and all run by ruling houses of Europe. The Roman Catholic and Protestant orders effectively merged on Nov. 26, 1963, four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Sovereign Head of the British Knights is Queen Elizabeth, while the Netherlands Knights were headed until his death by the former SS official, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, consort of Queen Juliana.

In 1927, the Rome-based SMOM authorized the establishment of an American chapter, whose members did not have to prove their aristocratic lineage. Its Treasurer and lay controller was John J. Raskob, the bitterly anti-FDR head of the Democratic National Committee, who in 1934 helped finance a coup attempt against Roosevelt. Its Grand Protector and Spiritual Advisor was Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, one of whose closest Cold War associates was Time/Life publisher and Congress for Cultural Freedom co-founder Henry Luce.

Another Knight, who played a profound role in Italy's postwar financial, economic and political history was Prince Massimo Spada, the leading lay financier of the Vatican's Institute for Religious Works, commonly called the "Vatican Bank." Spada gave the mafia-connected heroin launderer and later P2 financier Michele Sindona his entrée into the Vatican's finances, which, given the tax-sheltered, sovereign status of the Church within Italy (as negotiated in the 1929 Concordat between Mussolini and the Holy See), was invaluable for running all kinds of dirty operations.

However, in examining the Vatican, one must always be careful to ask, "Whose Vatican? That of all the modern popes? Or that of the black aristocracy?" And to really unravel that question, insofar as it intersects Ortolani, Gelli, Calvi, Spada, and their "Vatican-connected" associates, and the deeper, "permanent" infrastructure of terror in Italy, one must delve deeply into history, particularly that of Venice, to understand the enormous power still wielded by those whom Pope John Paul I, called "the ancients," during the time he was Patriarch of Venice. After all, as LaRouche has stressed, those "ancients" of Venice have given us the modern Anglo-Dutch parliamentary system, with its privately controlled central banks, and the Synarchy's present drive for world rule. Under Anglo-American direction, those Venetian "ancients" also brought Mussolini to power in the first place, and then organized the financial world of the Vatican, into which Ortolani, Gelli, Calvi et al. were inserted.

(x) The Legacy of History: The Venetian Factor

In 1582, the 40 or so families which controlled the vast fortunes and far-flung intelligence capabilities of Venice, split into two factions: the nuovi (the "new" houses, or families) and the vecchi (the "old" houses). On the surface, the appellations seemed to refer to those families ennobled since the serrata, the closing of the Grand Council in 1297, who were called the nuovi; whereas those who had already held titles of nobility, were the vecchi. In fact, the upheaval was the result of the establishment of sovereign nation-states for the first time in history, as a consequence of the Renaissance. The city-state of Venice, never more than 200,000 people, could not stand against the new powers that were coming into being, founded to promote the Common Good of their citizenry; the sheer numbers, the science and technology, the military power, were too much for even the powerful and devious masters of La Serenissima (as Venice is famously called).

The nuovi realized that, notwithstanding the bloody religious warfare which Venice had unleashed in Europe following the failure of the League of Cambrai to defeat Venice in 1511, its days were ultimately numbered. They took several strategic actions. First, under the leadership of Paolo Sarpi, they created the philosophy of empiricism, as a sense-certainty-based fraud whose purpose was to destroy the creative method of Platonic hypothesizing. Second, also under Sarpi's leadership, they launched a fierce war against the Vatican, posing as the bastion of "enlightened" Europe against obscurantist Rome. Third, they brought the newly emerging Protestant powers England and Holland (whose rise came largely thanks to Venice itself), into what had always been the cornerstone of Venice's fortunes—its trade with the East Indies. The Venetians founded the British East India Company in 1600 (from a merger of the England-based Venice Company and the Turkey Company) and the Dutch East India Company in 1602, and the wealth derived from this trade helped create or enrich a number of great aristocratic families in both countries, along the Venetian model. And, as LaRouche has often emphasized, the British East India Company became the foremost power in the world in 1763, in the wake of the British-rigged Seven Years' War among contending European powers, in the classic Venetian "divide and conquer" method. Fourth, they moved much of their fortunes (and even some of their families) north, first into Holland, and then into England, where they created what would be known in the 18th Century as "the Venetian Party." As part of this, they established the famous Wisselbank (Exchange Bank) of Amsterdam in 1609—the most powerful bank in the world—modelled upon their own private, patrician-controlled banks, followed by the Bank of England in 1694, both serving as the models upon which all central banks have been established since then.

In part because of these redeployments, Venice's financial power remained huge well into the 18th Century, as did its legendary spy system, brilliantly chronicled by Friedrich Schiller in his novella Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer), and American intelligence operative James Fenimore Cooper in his novel The Bravo.[8] Barings Bank in England, the bank of the British East India Company, for instance, was the vehicle for Venetian funds in Britain, and was at the center of the "Venetian Party," together with the Bank of England.

Napoleon Bonaparte had been partially sponsored and funded by Venetian and Genoese families: The Genoese Princess Pallavicini of that era famously punned that her family owned "la buona parte"—"the best part"—of him. His Corsican family had been retainers for the Genoese and Venetian nobility for centuries; and, as noted above, his favorite sister married a Borghese. When Napoleon's ravages had ended, Count Giovanni Capodistria, a Venetian nobleman acting as a government minister of Russia, almost single-handledly wrote the essential documents issued by the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, which established the ultra-reactionary Holy Alliance. Capodistria also pulled together the modern nation of Switzerland, in part as a repository for Venetian family funds (fondi), which were also used to found several insurance companies in the late 18th Century. These later included the Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà (RAS) and the Assicurazioni Generali di Venezia e Trieste.[9]

At the turn of the 20th Century, the "ancients" of Venice, although diminished, still commanded important financial and intelligence power, both on their own behalf, but also because they deployed as part of the British- (and subsequently Anglo-American-) dominated world which their ancestors had created. In the wake of the split/redeployments of 1582, they cloned themselves and their institutions and methods to dominate northern Protestant, often freemasonic Europe, while they still maintained their power in their historic seats of control in the formerly Hapsburg-ruled southern, more Catholic portions of Europe, in particular in Italy and Spain, and in the Church at Rome. They played a crucial role in organizing the Balkan Wars which laid the immediate basis for World War I, for which Britain's King Edward VII had schemed for decades. In the early 20th Century, a group of Venetian financier patricians, led by Count Piero Foscari of an ancient family of Venetian Doges, established a number of companies and banks. Chief among the latter, was the Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI), and in particular its Venice branch.[10]

Though Foscari was the undisputed leader of this Venetian group, its most active public figure was Giuseppe Volpi, later known as Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, after his early-1920s rule of Italian-occupied Libya on behalf of Mussolini. Acting as the point-man for an international financial syndicate including the Bank of England, the Mellons, and the House of Morgan, Volpi organized Mussolini's rise to power, precisely as Schacht did later for those same forces in installing Hitler in Germany. Volpi was Mussolini's Finance Minister from 1925 to July 1928, following which he became a member of the Grand Council of Fascism, and, in 1934, chairman of the Industrialists Association. He designed Mussolini's economic doctrine of corporatism along the model originally laid down by Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), the founder of the Synarchy of Empire movement, and the inspiration for the Martinist freemasonic lodges through which the modern Synarchy was organized. Nominally a tripartite pact among corporations, the state, and labor, it was basically rule by corporations, i.e., private financiers.

In 1929, Volpi oversaw the famous Concordat between Italy and the Vatican, in which, among other things, Italy recognized the Vatican as a sovereign state, and paid financial compensation for the Papal States in central Italy which it had taken over in the second half of the 19th Century. The compensation was 1,550 billion liras, a sizeable sum at the time. One Bernardino Nogara was chosen, seemingly "out of the blue," to manage this fortune. The prominent American diplomat George Kennan wrote in his Memoirs: 1925-1950 about the extraordinary power commanded by Nogara: "A so-called `mystery man,' an Italian banker by the name of Bernardino Nogara, had been granted sole control by the papacy over the entire fortune of $92.1 million the church had received from the Lateran treaty. . . . No Vatican official, not even the Pope himself was allowed veto power over Nogara's decision. Nor would the banker permit any religious or doctrinal policies of the church to stand in his way. . . . Never before in modern Church history had anyone been granted such sweeping authority by the church, not even popes themselves, with all their supposed infallibility, let alone a layman, and non-Catholic (Jewish), as in Nogara's case." His impact on the Church may also be judged by the epitaph delivered upon his death in 1958 by the head of the SMOM in America, New York's Cardinal Spellman: "Next to Jesus Christ, the greatest thing to happen to the Catholic Church is Bernardino Nogara."

Whether or not he was Jewish, the "mystery man" was no mystery at all. Nogara had been managing director for a Venetian firm run by Foscari, Volpi, et al. in the Ottoman Empire already back in 1901. Reflecting his Venetian ties, Nogara became Italy's representative on the Ottoman Debt Council, a sort of IMF for the Ottoman Empire, whose purpose was to bleed it and carve it up. The British sponsored freemasonic lodges in Salonika, from which the "Young Turks" were organized to oust the Sultan. The freemason Volpi was intimately involved in the coup, as, undoubtedly, was Nogara. Nogara was the head of the BCI branch in Istanbul, and was Volpi's chief intelligence agent in the Ottoman Empire until that empire disappeared in the World War I which Volpi and his friends had done so much to help organize, through the masonic lodges and through Venice's ancient financial and familial ties in the Balkans.

After Nogara had been chosen Delegate of the Special Administration (later known as the Administration of the Holy See Patrimony) to oversee the investment of the wealth flowing from the Concordat, he became vice president of the BCI, upon whose postwar premises the P2 lodge would be founded. Nogara established intimate financial relations with the cream of the Synarchy, including the Paris and London Rothschilds, Crédit Suisse, Hambros Bank in London, J.P. Morgan Bank, and the Bankers Trust Company in New York, and the Paris-centered Banque de Paris et des Pay Bas (Paribas), a stronghold of the Synarchy in France in the interwar and postwar years. He also promoted a cadre of uomini di fiducia, "men of confidence," Vatican lay Catholic or even non-Catholic financiers, who would oversee the enormous new Vatican holdings. Nogara bought large or controlling interests in dozens of major banks, utilities, insurance companies, and industrial corporations, even as he reorganized previous Vatican holdings, such as the "Catholic banks" which were generally Catholic-owned, and which did business with the Church and its officials, as opposed to the "secular" banks.

The most important of these "men of confidence" was Prince Massimo Spada (a Vatican title), who had been inducted as a Knight of Malta in 1944. Spada either chaired or sat on the board of an astounding array of the holdings Nogara purchased. Noting only a few of the more important (and their capital), as of the late 1960s, these included: He was vice-president of the Banco di Roma (one of Italy's largest banks, historically associated with Rome's black nobility), and sat on the board of its Swiss subsidiary; Italy's biggest domestic gas company, Società Italiana per il Gas (37,412 million liras); president of the Trieste-based Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà insurance company (4.320 billion liras); vice president and managing director of the L'Assicuratrice Italiana; vice president of both the Unione Subalpina di Assicurazioni and of the Lavoro e Sicurtà (750 million liras); Shell Italiana, the Italian subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell (129 billion liras invested in Italy); vice president of the Istituto Bancario Italiano (10 billion liras) and the Credito Commerciale di Cremona (2 billion liras); board member of the Banca Privata Finanzaria; board member of the huge financial holding companies, Società Meridionale Finanziaria (122 billion liras) and the Istituto Centrale Finanziario (150 million liras); vice president of the Finanzaria Industriale e Commerciale; president of the Banca Cattolica del Veneto (3 billion liras); board of directors of FINSIDER, a state-controlled holding company (195 billion liras), which is part of IRI, the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, formed during the Fascist regime, which constituted the country's largest cartel and controlled the biggest shipyards; the Italia shipping line; Alitalia airlines; Alfa Romeo; and the entire telephone system. FINSIDER produced at the time over 90% of Italy's steel and was the backbone of IRI. Spada was also a board member or executive of dozens more banks, insurance, and industrial companies. In 1963 he was appointed Privy Chamberlain of Sword and Cape, one of the highest of all Vatican titles, one also held by his brother Filippo.[11]

With all of this enormous power, and despite his leading position in the Catholic Church, Spada sponsored the rise of Michele Sindona as one of the Vatican's "men of confidence." His choice was most peculiar, not only because Sindona had been a Fascist during the war, but because during that time he had made connections (through American OSS-connected mobster Vito Genovese) to the Inzerillo and Gambino crime families, for whom he laundered heroin money.

Reviewing the picture sketched above, we thus find that an intricate financial web originally woven by Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata and his Venetian aristocratic friends and associates such as Bernardino Nogara, had grown by 1960 to include Michele Sindona, who financed one of Gladio's most important assets, the "Black Prince" Borghese. Sindona also "was one of the channels, perhaps one of the most important, to back up" the attempted coups of 1970-74, as Greene and Massignani put it. Sindona later sponsored the rise of Banco Ambrosiano's Roberto Calvi, the P2 financier who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982, in a ritualistic masonic murder. And, when the P2 financial scandals exploded, one of those arrested as a key figure in them, was Massimo Spada, the protégé of Volpi's friend Nogara.

The membership of the ostensibly Catholic—and therefore ostensibly anti-freemasonic—Rome-centered SMOM overlapped with the freemasonic, presumably "anti-clerical" P2 lodge; they were the "twins" of Italy's Venice-centered oligarchy.

The privately run international monetary system is now collapsing, and the desperate financial oligarchy is trying to consolidate a new, worldwide fascism, driven by new waves of terror, such as 9/11 and the March 11, 2004 train bombings in Madrid. In this context, much of the superstructure of Gladio is finally being exposed by those opposed to this new fascism. Those exposés are essential. But, we must go still deeper, to lift the veil from "the ancients," and through them from the Synarchy to which they have given birth, of which they remain a crucial component.

Note:

[1] The material in this review which directly concerns Borghese is almost entirely drawn from Greene and Massignani. Additional material on Gladio can be found in Daniele Ganser's book, NATO's Secret Armies (London, 2005), "Secret Warfare: Gladio," Arthur E. Rowse's "Gladio: The Secret U.S. War to Subvert Italian Democracy," and work by LaRouche and his associates. The latter includes "Strategy of Tension: The Case of Italy," an indispensable four-part series by Claudio Celani, first published in EIR, and "Terror's Legacy: Schacht, Skorzeny, Allen Dulles" by Michael Liebig. These two articles were republished, together with overviews by LaRouche, and numerous other studies, in the Special Report, The Synarchist Resurgence Behind the Madrid Train Bombing of March 11, 2004, issued by the LaRouche in 2004 campaign committee.

[2] Charles Higham, American Swastika (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1985), p. 198.

[3] Sen. Giovanni Pellegrino, who chaired the 1994-2001 Italian parliamentary committee investigating both the Gladio-orchestrated terrorism, and how Italy's secret services covered them up, said that D'Amato "was an old Anglo-American agent, whose career started soon after the Liberation under James Angleton." Under Angleton's protection, said Pellegrino, "D'Amato became superintendent of the Special Secretary of the Atlantic Pact, the most strategic officer of our apparatus, as it is the connection between NATO and the U.S.A." From its founding at the end of the war, the UAR was filled with hundreds of former officials of Mussolini's Salò Republic. D'Amato headed it from 1968-74, the period of NATO's "Strategy of Tension."

[4] Since no English original of FM 30-31B was ever found, but only Italian translations of parts of it (during the raid on Gelli's villa), some investigators query whether such a Pentagon manual ever existed. However, the Italian passages are entirely coherent with other Pentagon documents of the same general era, such as the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff's infamous Operation Northwoods plan, which called for unleashing terrorism against the domestic United States, among other clandestine provocations.

[5] Angleton and his associates in the OSS/CIA had a lifelong fascination with the Trust, the joint Anglo-American/Soviet intelligence operation which featured the use of double and triple agents. These were actually used by the Synarchists to manipulate both the Western powers and the Soviets against the nation-state, toward a kind of global condominium. It is not accidental that the "legendary" CIA counterintelligence chief Angleton somehow missed noticing that his mentor and his decades-long close friend Kim Philby was a "Soviet" (read: Trust) agent. Keeping up his part in the charade, Philby announced from Moscow that he had "enjoyed playing Angleton and Dulles." Angleton and Dulles maintained deep contacts with the "internationalist" wing of the Soviet intelligence establishment, just as they did with the "universal fascists" like Borghese. The shared goal was the destruction of nation-states in favor of world imperial rule. Many of Angleton's "fascist" assets in the postwar era turned out to be Soviet assets, as well.

[6] When the CMC first started up in Rome, its chief public figure, the pro-fascist former Prime Minister of Hungary, Ferenc Nagy, announced that it had major financial backing, including from J. Henry Schroder Bank and the Seligman Bank in Basel. The Seligman Bank was a large stockholder of the CMC, and its principal, Hans Seligman, sat on the boards of both the CMC and Permindex. With J. Henry Schroder, Nagy had spilled the beans on a most sensitive institution, and the bank was quick to deny his claim. J. Henry Schroder Bank had been intimately involved in the Dulles/Nazi financial deals from the 1930s, and, as CIA chief, Dulles maintained $50 million in "contingency funds" at Schroder under his sole control. See William F. Wertz, Jr., "The Plot Against FDR: A Model for Bush's Pinochet Plan Today," EIR, Jan. 21, 2005.

For further details on Permindex/CMC, including its finances, see a January 1970 manuscript by William Torbitt; New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's book, On the Trail of the Assassins; and the account in the 1992 edition of the book, Dope, Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy, by the authors of Executive Intelligence Review. EIR maintained a close relationship with Garrison until his death in 1992. The Italian left-wing daily Paese Sera also ran a series on CMC/Permindex in March 1967, exposing it as a shell for huge sums of money that had nothing to do with "commerce," naming some of its elite banking connections, and profiling its board members as Anglo-American intelligence-connected ex-Fascists and fanatical right-wingers. Earlier scandals regarding CMC/Permindex had caused an uproar in Parliament and elsewhere, which forced CMC/Permindex to leave Rome for Johannesburg in 1962, the year before the entity orchestrated the Kennedy assassination. Garrison observed that the Italian government had expelled CMC/Permindex for "subversive intelligence activity."

[7] The role of NATO in running the Red Brigades is documented by Claudio Celani in "The Sphinx and the Gladiators: How the Head of the Red Brigades was an Agent of NATO-Controlled Fascist Circles," EIR, Jan. 21, 2005, based in large measure on a recent book by former Sen. Sergio Flamigni, La Sfinge delle Brigate Rosse (The Sphinx of the Red Brigades).

[8] The extraordinary financial power which Venice still commanded in the 18th Century was documented by the Venetian nobleman Carlo Antonio Marin, historian of Venice Frederick Lane, and others. Its European-wide cultural warfare and espionage system was also still highly effective, as evidenced in the international campaign of the Paris-based Venetian Abbot Antonio Conti to attempt to destroy the reputation of the great scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. An agent of Venice's ruling Council of Ten, Count Cagliostro (Joseph Balsamo) organized the 1785 "Affair of the Queen's Necklace," the scandal which, as Napoleon observed, was the opening act of the French Revolution, an event financed and run out of Britain. Still another notorious Venetian spy of the same era was Casanova, who reported directly to the inner Three of the hooded, black-robed Council of Ten. The scarlet-robed chief of the Three was known as the Inquisitor, and in Venice it was understood that "The Ten will send you to the torture chamber, but the Three will send you to your grave."

Schiller chose to set his masterful portrayal of the methods of the Venetian intelligence service, as well as its Europe-wide reach, in the 18th Century; he clearly was not writing of a merely "historical" matter, nor was the patriotic American intelligence agent James Fenimore Cooper, in his portrait written several decades later, though Cooper set his tale centuries earlier. During the American Revolution, Venice put its still-considerable fleet at the service of the British.

[9] One of the notable financiers of Borghese in-law Napoleon was the Venetian Salomon Morpurgo, who later founded the Assicurazioni Generali di Venezia e Trieste (General Insurance Company of Venice and Trieste). Generali has been ruled ever since by a kind of central committee of Europe's financier and aristocratic oligarchy. On the board of Generali and its sister insurance company, Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà (RAS), over recent decades, one finds such names as Giustiniani, Orsini, Luzzatto (an old Venetian family), Rothschild, the Duke of Alba (whose ancestor laid waste to the Netherlands for Philip II of Spain), and Doria (Genoese financiers of the Hapsburgs). The president of the RAS at one point was Sindona's sponsor, Prince Massimo Spada, while Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata chaired the Generali from 1938-43. Had the 1964 coup been successful, the plotters planned to install Cesare Merzagora, chairman of Generali from 1968-79. Generali's chairman today is Antoine Bernheim, a senior partner of Lazard Frères, and member of one of the four families which control Lazard, a mainstay of the international Synarchy. Bernheim's daughter married Prince Orsini.

Generali and RAS are merely two important strands of a much larger web of families and finance, but they illustrate the directions in which one must look to discover the "port" behind the "Port Authority" guarded by P2 boss Licio Gelli, as Senator Pellegrino insightfully put it.

[10] The activities of Foscari, Volpi, et al. as the product of centuries-long Venetian operations in the Ottoman Empire, are elaborated in The Roots of the Trust, by Allen and Rachel Douglas (unpublished ms., 688 pages, 1997).

[11] The partial list of Spada's corporate offices is taken from Conrado Pallenberg, The Vatican Finances, (London: Peter Owen, 1971).

ST*

“Strategy of Tension:

The Case of Italy”

by Claudio Celani - April 30, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review

(www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3117tension_italy.html)

.3 Strategy of Tension:
The Case of Italy

by Claudio Celani

This piece originally appeared as a four-part series in the March 26, April 2, April 9, and April 30, 2004 issues of Executive Intelligence Review magazine.

The day of the Madrid train bombings, March 11, Lyndon LaRouche issued a statement rejecting 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, Italy train station bombing and, in general, of the terrorist "strategy of tension" in Italy in the 1970s. 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 manipulated 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 bombing of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan's Piazza Fontana, "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 containing over 40 pounds of explosives went off inside 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, Armed Revolutionary Nuclei). 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 which 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 findings of the Parliamentary Committee on the Failed Identification of the Authors of Terrorist Massacres ("Terrorism Committee"), which operated from 1994 to 2001.

The Bologna trial ended with the conviction of neo-fascists Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro as the perpetrators, and of freemasonic puppet-master Licio Gelli, his associate Francesco Pazienza, and several military intelligence officials for obstructing the investigation. The Milan trial produced life sentences for three neo-fascists, Delfo Zorzi, Carlo Maria Maggi, and Carlo Rognoni, later overturned on appeal—as if it were a signal, that appeal result was announced March 12, 2004, 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 also explored the other side of the coin, the so-called "red" terrorism, and come to the conclusion that both were run by the same structures. Remarkably, the committee included in its records a September 1978 report ("Who Killed Aldo Moro?") published by Italian associates of Lyndon LaRouche in the Italian chapter of the European Labor Party, which operated in Italy through 1983. The committee identified the report has having been on the mark concerning the kidnapping and murder of leading Italian politician Aldo Moro as early as September 1978, four months after Moro's murder.

The public resurfacing of synarchist puppet-master Licio Gelli in September 2003 (see the next article); 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 Benito Mussolini's granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, as a "brand name" in support of such networks; these and other signals had suggested a level of alert well before the Madrid bombs went off. Already, in August 2003, Lyndon LaRouche had suggested keeping watch on the "friends of Mussolini's granddaughter," after U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney predicted that new atrocities 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 overnight, like mushrooms in the woods; it has a background and a history. Looking at the history of the "strategy of tension" in Italy will be useful for our readers, in order to draw the possible parallels and avoid naively giving support to the usual witchhunts, launched to cover for the real perpetrators.

(i) Piazza Fontana: Model for Madrid

The technique adopted for the Madrid atrocity, of placing bombs on several trains simultaneously, is not new. The 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre was preceded by a series of "demonstrative actions" starting during the night of Aug. 8-9, 1969, 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 and 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 concluded that his death was a suicide. Valpreda was kept in prison for several years, before being cleared of all charges.

The anarchist connection was a cover-up, organized by the hidden structure protecting the Ordine Nuovo right-wing terrorists. For instance, they had even arranged to have a "black" (fascist) 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, did not live to testify at trial; he and eight other witnesses died under circumstances that were never clarified.

The cover-up came mainly from the Interior Ministry, which is in command of the police, and specifically 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," a leader of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. wartime predecessor of the CIA). Thanks to Angleton's protection, "D'Amato became superintendent of the Special Secretary of the Atlantic Pact, the most strategic office of our apparatus, 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 Nazi SS control, whose militia was derisively referred to as repubblichini by Italian anti-fascist partisans.

Milan prosecutor Guido Salvini had established that Delfo Zorzi, the neo-fascist whose conviction for having placed the Piazza Fontana bomb was recently overturned, had been recruited by D'Amato as late as 1968. Salvini has found out much more. One witness, Carlo Digilio, decided in 1992 to collaborate with 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 that U.S. operation knew about every terrorist action the Zorzi group was planning to undertake, from the Aug. 8, 1969 bombings to those the following December. Digilio's superior, U.S. Navy Captain David Garrett, 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.

In 1971, two members of Ordine Nuovo, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, were arrested in the Piazza Fontana investigations, as well as in connection with other minor terrorist actions. However, when the two Milan prosecutors, Gerardo D'Ambrosio and Emilio Alessandrini, came close to uncovering the whole network, the investigation was "stolen" from them, and moved to the southern city of Catanzaro, where both Freda and Ventura were acquitted.

Today, Salvini's investigation has assembled several witnesses who make clear 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 for this, because they have been already tried once for this crime, and acquitted.

(ii) The Coup Strategy

It has been established that the strategy of tension aimed at taking control of 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 were been small, 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, helping to force the desired political results. Consider that, in 1969, democratic Italy was surrounded by dictatorships in Portugal, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Greece, where a coup 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 Christian Democratic 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 fellow Christian Democrat Aldo Moro, then Foreign Minister; Moro confronted State President Giuseppe Saragat, who was in favor of declaring the state of emergency, and finally prevailed. There was a long government crisis, and it was three months before Rumor was able to put together another Cabinet.

This was not the first time Moro faced the threat of a coup. In 1964, when, as Prime Minister, he 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 automaker FIAT in Turin) reported to Segni that the financial and economic establishment predicted a catastrophic economic crisis, if the Socialists joined the government. In reality, a few large monopolies (in the hands of the same families who had supported Mussolini's regime) feared that the new government would introduce reforms to break their power in real estate, energy, finance, and economic planning. Segni, on advice from Rocca, called the head of SIFAR, Gen. Giovanni 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 called "Piano Solo."

Segni then manifested his intention to withdraw the government mandate from Prime Minister Moro, and to give it to a technocrat, Cesare Merzagora. In addition to this, Segni received help from the vice president of the European Commission, Robert Marjolin, who publicly attacked Moro's government program in the name of the European Community. Marjolin, 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 stillborn.

(iii) The Mattei Factor

Probably, if Enrico Mattei, Italy's powerful economic leader, had been alive, things would have been different. But Mattei had been killed on Oct. 27, 1962, when a bomb aboard his plane exploded as the pilot lowered the landing gear, on approach to the Milan Airport. Mattei, a former wartime commander of the anti-fascist Italian partisans, was the founder of Italy's state oil concern ENI, a leader of postwar economic reconstruction, and a fighter for Italian independence, both in energy 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 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 right-wing terrorist organization OAS (Organization Armée Secrete) and by the same Colonel Rocca we 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 threat to Italy allegedly posed by the Communists, operating through "irregular-warfare" means, and possible ways to counter that threat using the same means: counterrevolutionary warfare. Among the speakers were Pino Rauti, founder of the neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo; Mario Merlino, a 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 Gens. 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 Finance Minister Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata.

(iv) 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, formerly a 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 Crespi family (owners of the newspaper Corriere della Sera, and founders of the first Italian ecologist association, Italia Nostra, in 1964) and Feltrinelli family (Giangiacomo Feltrinelli founded the first left terrorist group, the GAP, in 1970); the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali; and SADE.

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 part-owned 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 once had been), so much so that he named his three daughters "Idea Nuova Socialista," "Italia Libera," and "Vittoria Proletaria." Beneduce did not live to see the fall of Fascism, but he ensured his succession by marrying his daughter Idea Nuova Socialista to a promising young 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, shares the same 19th-century roots as fascism, in the ideology of Giuseppe Mazzini. In the middle of World War II, 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 remains secret to this day.

At the end of the war, the oligarchical control of the Italian economic system was threatened, 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 new political parties, the Christian Democracy (DC) and its allies. Cuccia knew that the group around Mattei (whom he knew through Resistance networks) had a precise idea of the state's role in the national economy, and how that could be designed to serve the Common Good instead of private interests.

But, perhaps as a result of the deal struck through George Kennan, Cuccia was allowed to find a solution that would safeguard 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 De Biase to the Istituto Pollio meeting.

(v) 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 of the meeting, 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 (Nuclei in Defense of the State), 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 in the audience at the Istituto Pollio, but he always denied having been there. In the evening of Dec. 12, AN took care of the bombs in Rome, while Zorzi and the ON people, directed from Rome, placed their bombs in Milan's Piazza Fontana and Piazza Scala.

According to Milan Prosecutor Salvini, the real "brains" behind the attacks was Guérin-Sérac, a former member of the French OAS who was running the Aginter Press, a center of logistical support to neo-fascist groups throughout Europe. It was Guérin-Sérac 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."

Guérin-Sérac, a "Catholic" fascist, had participated in the French colonialist intervention in 1956 in Suez, in alliance with Britain and Israel, against Egyptian President Nasser's decision to nationalize the Canal. The allied colonialist 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 bombing seemed successful, at first. Military intelligence helped, by indicating Guérin-Sérac, 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 the neo-fascists 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 six people and wounding 136. In September, the MSI organized a popular uprising in Reggio Calabria. After several days of clashes with police, three were dead, and 190 policemen and 37 civilians were wounded.

(vi) The Borghese Coup Attempt

On the night of Dec. 7, 1970, Junio Valerio Borghese, the Fascist commander whom Angleton had saved from a partisan execution squad, occupied the Interior Ministry with a platoon of militiamen, 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 Presidency, the Interior Ministry, and a few other strategic points, after which a counterinsurgency operation that had been planned out at Carabinieri headquarters, was to start. The plan included the arrest of trade unionists, political and military leaders, and similar individuals; and 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, Adm. Giovanni Torrisi, Gen. Vito Miceli, Air Force officials Lovecchio and Casero, all members of the secret freemasonic Propaganda-2 (Propaganda Due, P-2) Lodge, as well as the head of P-2, puppet-master Licio Gelli.

Borghese succeeded in avoiding arrest by escaping to Spain. In the meantime, the Ordine Nuovo people had not forgiven Prime Minister Rumor for having "betrayed" the cause by not declaring a state of emergency. They prepared a punishment. Their agent 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 into a crowd coming out of the Police Central Office in Milan. Four people 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 worked; everybody believed that he was an anarchist.

(vii) 'Rosa dei Venti'

In October 1973, another coup plot was discovered: "Rosa dei Venti" (Points of the Compass), 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. Magi Braschi was said to be "connected to OAS representatives such as Jacques Soustelle." Furthermore, he was active in a NATO apparatus, as reported in a Secret Service note of 1963 which praised his "capacity in the field of unorthodox warfare" and emphasized his role in the "inter-allied cooperation in this particular branch."

One of Salvini's main witnesses, Carlo Digilio, reported on meetings in Verona with Spiazzi, Magi Braschi, and neo-fascist terrorists such as Carlo Maria Maggi and Carlo Fumagalli. At the beginning of the 1980s, Magi Braschi had become Italian leader of the World Anti-Communist League; he died in 1995.

A fourth coup d'état was discovered in 1976 in Turin. It had been planned for 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 overlaps 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."

According to Pellegrino, 1974 was the end of a phase. Already, after the Borghese attempt, it had become clear that the strategy was not successful, because the population did not support a coup. Internationally, there were major changes. First Portugal, and then Greece, got rid of their dictatorships. In the U.S.A., Henry Kissinger left the government in 1977. 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.

(viii) Licio Gelli's P-2 Lodge

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 freely 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 bombing seemed to change this pattern, but the conviction 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 cover-up and the destruction of evidence, which led to acquittals for those indicted. However, the cover-up itself could be uncovered and become the basis for a conviction of those responsible.

(ix) START - 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 foot soldiers 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.

(x) 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 neo-Nazi 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 Court of Cassations and the new appeal trial ended with a final acquittal.

Indicating that the neofascists had been "dumped" by their puppet-masters, 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 Florence, 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.

(xi) 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 cover-up of the Piazza Fontana bombing came; former SID head Gen. Vito 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 publicly 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 Grand Masters, 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 misdoings. 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.

(xii) 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 "puppet-master" 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 sovereignty 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 publicly 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, puppet-master 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 EIR, March 26, 2004). 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?"

(xiii) 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 collaboration 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.

(xiv) 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 foundation meeting of the Red Brigades. Those three formed, together with Mario Moretti, a super-clandestine 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 Hyperion, 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 Mehmet 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.

(xv) 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 Pieczenik, 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.

(xvi) 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

(xvii) 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.

(xviii) '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 no

GNO*

Le Intersezioni della struttura di Ordine Nuovo con gli apparati militari interessati alla Guerra non Ortodossa.

Fonte: http://www.strano.net/stragi/tstragi/salvini/salvin43.htm

.4 Le Intersezioni della struttura di Ordine Nuovo con gli apparati militari interessati alla Guerra non Ortodossa.

(i) IL RUOLO DEL GENERALE ADRIANO GIULIO CESARE MAGI BRASCHI

Al fine di mettere a fuoco in via conclusiva le intersezioni tra la strategia degli attentati e delle stragi e le strutture finalizzate a mutamenti illegali del quadro istituzionale nell’Italia degli anni ‘60/’70, appare necessario, terminata la fase espositiva delle più dirette emergenze processuali relative ai vari episodi criminosi, esaminare le intersezioni fra la struttura occulta di Ordine Nuovo e gli apparati militari attivi in quel periodo nel campo della guerra non ortodossa e della guerra psicologica contro il pericolo sovversivo.

Infatti, a dispetto dei proclami di guerra nazional/rivoluzionaria presenti nei testi di Ordine Nuovo e nelle prese di posizione dei suoi principali esponenti, che avrebbero comportato, come ha sempre sottolineato Vincenzo VINCIGUERRA, un coerente rifiuto dei due blocchi militari (quello comunista, ovviamente, e quello nato anche dall’ "occupazione" del nostro Paese da parte delle forze anglo/americane) e un rifiuto del mondo conservatore e borghese secondo gli ideali più puri dei combattenti della R.S.I., sembra ormai certo che l’organizzazione di RAUTI, MACERATINI, MAGGI e SIGNORELLI, solo per citare gli ideologi più noti, non abbia affatto disdegnato il contatto e l’alleanza con gli apparati istituzionali e con il mondo militare ufficiale, attestato su posizioni di difesa ad oltranza della scelta di campo atlantica e contrario a qualsiasi forma di "scivolamento", anche timido, del Paese a sinistra.

Figura centrale di tale intersezione, oltre all’intera vicenda dell’arruolamento degli ordinovisti nei NUCLEI DI DIFESA DELLO STATO già trattata nella prima sentenza/ordinanza, è quella di un generale, sconosciuto all’opinione pubblica e ai mass-media, e cioè il generale Adriano Giulio Cesare MAGI BRASCHI, uno dei massimi esperti e propagandisti, per oltre 40 anni, delle tecniche della guerra non ortodossa.

La figura del generale MAGI BRASCHI è emersa per la prima volta da alcuni interrogatori di Ettore MALCANGI, l’esponente della destra milanese latitante per lungo tempo a Villa d’Adda con Carlo DIGILIO, decisosi, con la sua testimonianza e nei limiti delle sue conoscenze, a far chiarezza su alcuni aspetti equivoci dell’ambiente politico in cui aveva a lungo militato.

Ettore MALCANGI ha riferito che Carlo DIGILIO, durante il periodo della comune latitanza, gli aveva confidato di aver avuto rapporti con ambienti della C.I.A. e che aveva conosciuto un importante generale, in qualche modo legato alla N.A.T.O. di Verona, il cui cognome, secondo il ricordo di MALCANGI, era FRASCA o BRASCA o BRASCHI (int. MALCANGI, 2.10.1995, f.3, e annotazione del R.O.S. sulle strutture di intelligence, 8.5.1996, vol.23, fasc.9, f.115).

Con questo generale, Carlo DIGILIO aveva partecipato ad una riunione che si era svolta intorno al 1973, probabilmente al Centro CARLOMAGNO di Verona, cui erano presenti esponenti di tutte le componenti dell’area di destra e di estrema destra: il dr. MAGGI per Ordine Nuovo, Giuliano BOVOLATO per le S.A.M. di Milano, Carlo FUMAGALLI per il M.A.R. e il colonnello SPIAZZI per i NUCLEI DI DIFESA DELLO STATO.

Tale riunione serviva per mettere a punto una strategia comune di mutamento istituzionale (int. citato, f.4, e int. 17.10.1995, ff.2-3).

La figura di tale generale è comparsa poco dopo nelle deposizioni di Roberto CAVALLARO, uomo di fiducia del colonnello SPIAZZI negli anni ‘70 e principale testimone nell’inchiesta sulla ROSA DEI VENTI, rese a personale del R.O.S. in data 23.1.1996 e 26.2.1996.

Roberto CAVALLARO aveva sentito parlare del generale BRASCHI dal colonnello SPIAZZI e da altri militari aderenti alla ROSA DEI VENTI.

Si trattava di un alto ufficiale dell’Esercito Italiano legato, fra l’altro, ad esponenti dell’O.A.S. come Jacques SOUSTELLE e soprannominato "FORTEBRACCIO", con un richiamo significativo al famoso capitano di ventura, o "FORTE BRASCHI", con un richiamo alla località, appunto Forte Braschi a Roma, ove hanno sempre avuto sede i servizi di sicurezza militari (dep. CAVALLARO, 23.1.1996, ff.1-2).

Del generale BRASCHI parlavano anche l’ing. PIAGGIO e l’avv. DE MARCHI, e cioè i finanziatori liguri del movimento golpista coinvolti nell’indagine sulla ROSA DEI VENTI (dep. citata, f.2).

Ma soprattutto Roberto CAVALLARO aveva avuto anche un contatto personale con MAGI BRASCHI ed è stato quindi in grado di riconoscere il generale in fotografia (dep. 16.2.1996, f.2).

Roberto CAVALLARO ha infatti rivelato una circostanza che non aveva mai rivelato prima e cioè che alla ristrettissima riunione tenuta in una villa del vicentino nella disponibilità del finanziere Michele SINDONA (riunione di cui CAVALLARO aveva parlato in un memoriale consegnato nel 1976 al G.I. di Padova, dr. Tamburrino) era presente, oltre a SINDONA, all’on. Giulio ANDREOTTI, a tre alti ufficiali della Marina e dell’Aeronautica (persone già citate nel memoriale) e allo stesso CAVALLARO, anche il generale BRASCHI all’epoca colonnello.

Anche tale riunione serviva per mettere a punto un piano di mutamento istituzionale e CAVALLARO ricordava che il colonnello BRASCHI non condivideva affatto l’apporto finanziario dato al piano da Michele SINDONA in quanto, ad avviso dell’ufficiale, il finanziere intendeva utilizzare tale causa politica per i suoi interessi personali, commerciali e finanziari (dep. 16.2.1996, f.2).

Il colonnello BRASCHI intendeva invece salvaguardare la centralità politica di quanto si stava preparando (dep. citata, f.2).

Martino SICILIANO è stato dal canto suo in grado di ricollegare direttamente il generale MAGI BRASCHI al gruppo veneto di Ordine Nuovo.

Egli, infatti, aveva sentito parlare da MAGGI, MOLIN e ZORZI di un alto ufficiale soprannominato appunto FORTE BRASCHI, che costoro contattavano a Roma e da cui andavano regolarmente in un periodo collocabile fra il 1966 e il 1968 (int. 11.5.1996, ff.1-2).

Molto probabilmente il primo elemento di contatto con il generale MAGI BRASCHI era stato Paolo MOLIN il quale poco prima, e cioè nel maggio 1965, aveva partecipato , a Roma, al Convegno dell’ISTITUTO POLLIO sulla guerra controrivoluzionaria (int. SICILIANO, citato, f.2), convegno cui il generale MAGI BRASCHI era stato presente con una relazione, ed infatti MOLIN aveva successivamente diffuso a Venezia diverse copie del volume "La Guerra Rivoluzionaria" che raccoglieva gli atti e gli interventi di tale convegno (int. citato, f.2).

Il generale MAGI BRASCHI è stato identificato nell’omonimo ufficiale dell’Esercito (deceduto recentemente, il 22.5.1995) a lungo distaccato presso il SIFAR, impiegato nel SIOS ESERCITO, oggetto di molte benemerenze fra cui la Croce di Ferro tedesca, che aveva legato la sua brillante carriera alla specializzazione nello studio della guerra psicologica e non ortodossa, tanto da diventare, all’inizio degli anni ‘60, responsabile del "NUCLEO GUERRA NON ORTODOSSA" del SIFAR (cfr. annotazione del R.O.S. in data 8.5.1996, vol.23, fasc.9, ff.116-117).

Il generale Adriano MAGI BRASCHI aveva tenuto una relazione al Convegno dell’Istituto Pollio, peraltro sotto le mentite spoglie di un avvocato e professore universitario al fine di non far emergere in modo troppo diretto l’intervento e l’interesse dei più alti gradi militari per la strategia delineata nel Convegno stesso.

Sempre in relazione al ricco curriculum militare del generale MAGI BRASCHI, da un altro documento, fornito dal S.I.S.Mi. e contenuto nel fascicolo personale dell’ufficiale, risulta che il 23.7.1963 la Direzione del SIFAR aveva rappresentato allo Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito l’impossibilità di privarsi in breve tempo dell’ufficiale, al fine di fargli completare il periodo di comando nell’Esercito, in ragione del contributo che stava dando al Servizio con la sua "provata specializzazione e capacità nel campo della guerra non ortodossa" e soprattutto in relazione alla ".....Cooperazione Interalleata in questo particolare ramo...." che stava acquisendo sempre maggiore importanza ed ingresso (cfr. annotazione del R.O.S. 26.6.1997, vol.23, fasc.9-bis, f.21).

Tale accenno richiama il probabile inserimento ad alto livello in ambito N.A.T.O. del generale MAGI BRASCHI, ricordato da Ettore MALCANGI.

Carlo DIGILIO ha avuto molte titubanze prima di parlare della figura del generale MAGI BRASCHI e dei suoi contatti con il dr. MAGGI, esitazioni che testimoniano indirettamente la caratura dell’ufficiale.

Solo a partire dalla primavera del 1996 DIGILIO si è risolto a fornire via via i decisivi elementi di comprensione di cui, tuttavia, non si può non sottolineare la probabile incompletezza e la necessità che nelle fasi ulteriori del procedimento tali aspetti siano ancora approfonditi.

In sintesi Carlo DIGILIO ha riferito che:

- Il generale MAGI BRASCHI era considerato nell’ambiente di Ordine Nuovo un ufficiale di grande prestigio, era in contatto con il dr. MAGGI e con gli ordinovisti veronesi che lo ritenevano l’elemento essenziale di collegamento con l’ambiente militare nella prospettiva del colpo di Stato (int. 24.2.1996, ff.3-4).

Secondo il dr. MAGGI, il generale MAGI BRASCHI era l’ufficiale che, al momento necessario, doveva coordinare l’appoggio dei civili ai militari, un vero e proprio deus ex machina che avrebbe avuto l’ultima parola al momento dell’intervento dei militari (int.12.6.1996, ff.1-2).

- Era soprannominato FORTEBRACCIO (int.12.6.1996, f.1) e Carlo DIGILIO lo aveva conosciuto personalmente in occasione di un incontro a Verona, in un locale pubblico, finalizzato a rinsaldare il raccordo fra civili e militari (int.5.5.1996, f.6).

A tale incontro erano presenti il dr. MAGGI, Marcello SOFFIATI e Giulio MALPEZZI, ordinovista di Bolzano.

Dopo l’incontro, il generale MAGI BRASCHI si era avviato a piedi verso il Comando FTASE di Verona, struttura cui probabilmente faceva riferimento (int.5.5.1996, f.6).

Il generale aveva partecipato ad altre riunioni a Verona, presso il Centro CARLOMAGNO, e a Rovigo, presente Marcello SOFFIATI il quale, in tali occasioni, rappresentava anche Sergio MINETTO quando questi non poteva essere presente (int.15.5.1996, f.2).

- Il dr. MAGGI e Paolo MOLIN avevano partecipato al Convegno dell’Istituto Pollio in cui il generale MAGI BRASCHI era stato relatore e da tale convegno era originata la strategia che aveva portato alla formazione dei NUCLEI DI DIFESA DELLO STATO in cui erano inseriti molti ordinovisti (int.12.6.1996, f.2; 19.12.1997, f.3).

- Carlo DIGILIO ha infine riconosciuto il generale MAGI BRASCHI in una fotografia acquisita dall’Ufficio durante la perquisizione effettuata nell’abitazione di quest’ultimo (int.12.6.1996, f.2).

In data 23.5.1996, infatti, è stata operata una perquisizione su disposizione di questo Ufficio nella villa di Bracciano ove tuttora vive la vedova del generale, Signora Emilia Caleca (cfr. vol.23, fasc.2, ff.3 e ss.).

Nella biblioteca del generale era ancora presente un’amplissima documentazione in tema di contro-insorgenza e guerra non ortodossa di provenienza sia italiana sia statunitense o di altri Paesi occidentali nonché carteggi e corrispondenza con la W.A.C.L. (la Lega Anticomunista Mondiale) della cui sezione italiana il generale MAGI BRASCHI era divenuto dirigente all’inizio degli anni ‘80 succedendo a Edgardo BELTRAMETTI (cfr. nota del R.O.S. in data 22.5.1996, vol.23, fasc.2, f.34).

Tale documentazione è stata sottoposta al perito dr. Aldo Giannuli per una integrazione della perizia principale specificamente finalizzata ad analizzare il ruolo svolto dall’Ufficiale all’interno delle strutture italiane di guerra non ortodossa.

La relazione integrativa è stata depositata in data 12.9.1997 (cfr. vol.22, fasc.1) e dalla ricca analisi effettuata dal perito risulta confermato che il generale MAGI BRASCHI era il miglior specialista dell’Esercito Italiano in tema di contro-insorgenza e l’Ufficiale, cui era affidata in materia, tramite la partecipazione a corsi e convegni, una sorta di delega alla rappresentanza esterna e quasi alla "propaganda" dell’argomento, ruolo questo che ben entra in sintonia con quanto riferito da Carlo DIGILIO e dagli altri testimoni (cfr. relazione del dr. Giannuli, pagg.52-53).

Dall’analisi della documentazione presente nell’archivio del generale MAGI BRASCHI risulta anche che questi era stato personalmente l’autore, nel 1963/1964, dei due manualetti del SIFAR sulla guerra non ortodossa intitolati "La Parata" e "La Risposta" (cfr. relazione citata, pagg.33-34) e soprattutto che la sua partecipazione al Convegno dell’Istituto POLLIO del maggio 1965 non era stata un’iniziativa "privata" dell’Ufficiale, ma egli vi aveva presenziato per esplicito incarico del Capo di Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito, generale ALOJA, cosicché può affermarsi che le nostre più alte strutture militari avevano partecipato direttamente all’organizzazione del Convegno cui erano presenti coloro che negli anni successivi sarebbero divenuti i principali protagonisti, sul piano operativo, della strategia della tensione (cfr. relazione citata, pagg.39-40).

In un appunto rinvenuto nella villa del generale MAGI BRASCHI, datato 6.5.1965 e cioè il giorno successivo alla conclusione del Convegno, l’Ufficiale relaziona al Capo di Stato Maggiore, con toni esultanti, sullo svolgimento dei lavori sottolineando che "come disposto da V.E., nei giorni 3/4/5 maggio sono intervenuto al Convegno" i cui lavori hanno posto l’accento "sulla necessità di un’azione che fronteggi efficacemente nel nostro Paese gli sviluppi della guerra rivoluzionaria, sull’opportunità di una stretta collaborazione fra civili e militari" (cfr. relazione citata. pag.39).

Meritano, allora, di essere richiamati i passi salienti della relazione tenuta dal generale MAGI BRASCHI nella giornata conclusiva del Convegno, in cui egli esprime senza mezzi termini quali siano le esigenze imposte dalle nuove forme di lotta contro il pericolo della "guerra rivoluzionaria" comunista che stava serpeggiando silenziosamente nel Paese e penetrando nei nuclei vitali della società:

"....Determinante è l’azione militare, lo si sa, l’han detto tutti.
E’ l’azione militare.
Ma non è soltanto dei militari. E’ stato detto da BELTRAMETTI.
La guerra non è più soltanto militare.
E’ "anche" militare, in ultima analisi; ma è economica, è sociale, è religiosa, è ideologica.
Se la prima guerra mondiale vide gli Stati Maggiori combinati, cioè dalla prima guerra mondiale si ricavò la necessità di avere Comandi composti dalle tre Armi, vale a dire gli Stati Maggiori che ragionassero in funzione tridimensionale; se dalla seconda guerra mondiale sono usciti gli Stati Maggiori integrati, cioè gli Stati Maggiori che comprendono personale di più nazioni: questa guerra vuole gli Stati Maggiori allargati, gli Stati Maggiori che comprendano civili e militari contemporaneamente".

Le parole del generale MAGI BRASCHI sulla necessità di affrontare e sconfiggere il nemico costituendo "Stati Maggiori allargati" sembrano preannunziare direttamente la formazione dei NUCLEI DI DIFESA DELLO STATO.

Ma soprattutto, per quanto concerne i profili di responsabilità dei soggetti coinvolti in questa istruttoria e nelle indagini collegate e l’interpretazione dei loro comportamenti, gli stretti rapporti fra il dr. Carlo Maria MAGGI e un personaggio del livello del generale MAGI BRASCHI consentono di affermare che la struttura occulta di Ordine Nuovo non era l’espressione di quattro fanatici eversori, ma che, almeno tendenzialmente, tale struttura avesse dei sicuri punti di riferimento militari e istituzionali in grado, al momento giusto, di sfruttare gli effetti di paura e disorientamento che gli attentati dovevano suscitare

(ii) LA STRUTTURA DI SICUREZZA E INFORMATIVA DI VERONA E I SUOI RAPPORTI CON ORDINE NUOVO

LA STRUTTURA INFORMATIVA AMERICANA NEL RACCONTO DI CARLO DIGILIO

LE PRIME DICHIARAZIONI

La maggiore novità di questa istruttoria è certamente il fatto che per la prima volta in un ambito strettamente processuale e con elementi di prova via via più solidi è emerso, all’interno degli avvenimenti noti come strategia della tensione, il quadro quasi intero di una rete informativa statunitense, un’ipotesi che in passato era confinata solo a qualche frammento processuale che non era stato possibile sviluppare per mancanza di testimoni diretti o era stata espressione di ricostruzioni politiche, soprattutto della c.d. controinformazione, che si basavano su deduzioni e analisi politico/internazionali più che su dati di fatto.

Gli elementi raccolti, comprese le dichiarazioni dei testimoni di supporto e i riscontri documentali trovati presso i Comandi dei Carabinieri o della Guardia di Finanza o forniti dal S.I.S.Mi., sono stati esposti in modo analitico e ragionato in due ampie annotazioni approntate dal Reparto Eversione del R.O.S. Carabinieri e dedicate appunto al coinvolgimento di strutture di intelligence straniere nella "strategia della tensione" (cfr. annotazioni in data 8.5.1996 e 26.6.1997, vol.23, fasc.9 e 9-bis).

A tali annotazioni (inviate anche alla Commissione Parlamentare sulle stragi per il loro eventuale utilizzo nella redazione della relazione finale) può quindi farsi riferimento per l’illustrazione di tutti gli elementi di riscontro che, per la loro ampiezza, appesantirebbero eccessivamente il presente provvedimento.

In questa sede saranno illustrati solo i personaggi e gli elementi essenziali, tenendo presente che il venire alla luce di tale struttura informativa non costituisce una semplice ricerca storica, ma, per le circostanze narrate da Carlo DIGILIO, un risultato processuale importante e di diretto utilizzo in quanto i componenti di tale rete hanno svolto un’attività non solo di osservazione, ma anche di consulenza tecnica, e quindi propulsiva, in quasi tutti gli attentati dal 1969 in poi, dagli attentati ai treni all’attentato all’Ufficio Istruzione di Milano, sino agli eventi più gravi e cioè la strage di Piazza Fontana, la strage dinanzi alla Questura di Milano e verosimilmente la strage di Piazza della Loggia a Brescia.

La struttura di cui faceva parte Carlo DIGILIO, certamente operante sin dal primo dopoguerra, faceva capo alla Base FTASE di Verona (sita in Via Roma, nel centro della città) con diramazioni in tutto il Triveneto.

Tale struttura era probabilmente un servizio di sicurezza prettamente militare (con sede, appunto, nelle Basi e non nelle Ambasciate), probabile prosecuzione e sviluppo del C.I.C. (Counter Intelligence Corp) dell’Esercito Americano, operante in Italia già durante la risalita lungo la Penisola delle forze anglo-americane e incaricato in tale frangente soprattutto di individuare e neutralizzare gli agenti nemici attivi nelle zone già liberate dagli Alleati.

L’organizzazione delineata da Carlo DIGILIO, tralasciando i personaggi di minore interesse, si compone come segue

- lo stesso Carlo DIGILIO, con il ruolo di agente informatore che aveva ereditato dal padre, Michelangelo DIGILIO, ufficiale della Guardia di Finanza;

- Marcello SOFFIATI, agente operativo che aveva ereditato i contatti con gli americani dal padre, Bruno SOFFIATI, "recuperato" nel dopoguerra dopo aver fatto parte, a Verona, di una rete informativa vicina alla GESTAPO tedesca;

- Sergio MINETTO, superiore di Carlo DIGILIO nel settore informativo;

- Giovanni BANDOLI, superiore di Marcello SOFFIATI nel settore operativo;

- il prof. Lino FRANCO, fiduciario a Vittorio Veneto dove disponeva anche di una sua rete, il gruppo SIGFRIED, formato da ex-repubblichini;

- il prof. Pietro GUNNELLA di Verona, elemento di collegamento con il colonnello Amos SPIAZZI e quindi con l’area dei Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato;

- il capitano Teddy RICHARDS e il capitano David CARRET, ufficiali americani superiori, in tempi diversi, di MINETTO e di BANDOLI;

- Robert Edward JONES e John Louis HALL, operanti a Trieste e in passato in contatto con Giovanni BANDOLI;

- Benito ROSSI, fiduciario informativo di Sergio MINETTO per il Trentino-Alto Adige;

- Joseph LUONGO e Leo Joseph PAGNOTTA, già in forza al C.I.C., operanti sin dal primo dopoguerra come reclutatori dell’intera rete informativa e, fra l’altro, di ex ufficiali nazisti come il maggiore Karl HASS, condannato per la strage delle Fosse Ardeatine.

Altri soggetti risultano essere comparsi solo occasionalmente sulla scena di Verona, come il colonnello Frederik TEPASKY, di stanza nella ex Germania Federale e presente, di tanto in tanto, nella zona veronese con funzione di supervisore della struttura (int. DIGILIO, 31.1.1996, f.3, e anche dep. CAVALLARO al R.O.S., 16.2.1996, f.1).

Anche in merito ai componenti e al funzionamento della struttura americana, le dichiarazioni di Carlo DIGILIO presentano quel carattere di frammentarietà e progressività tipica della scelta del collaboratore che non ha ritenuto, sino ad un certo punto dell’istruttoria, che sussistessero le condizioni per rivelare circostanze così gravi e uniche nel panorama dell’eversione.

L’unica possibilità di illustrare le sue dichiarazioni consiste quindi nel riportarne i passi salienti in successione cronologica, lasciando ai capitoli successivi i riscontri relativi ai singoli personaggi e alla singole circostanze.

Inizialmente, Carlo DIGILIO ha rivelato il ruolo di agente della struttura limitatamente a Marcello SOFFIATI, spiegando che questi dipendeva dal Comando FTASE ed era incaricato di tenere i rapporti con gli ustascia croati, anche recandosi presso la loro base di Valencia, in Spagna, e di acquisire notizie sugli esuli cileni in Italia e in genere sulle formazioni di estrema sinistra (int.30.10.1993 e 29.1.1994, f.1).

Solo successivamente Carlo DIGILIO ha ammesso di avere lavorato anche lui per la struttura atlantica (il Comando FTASE di Verona è il Comando delle Forze della N.A.T.O. per tutto il Sud-Europa) e di essere stato inviato, tramite il prof. Lino FRANCO di Vittorio Veneto, un ex-repubblichino e fiduciario della struttura, a controllare per la prima volta l’arsenale di armi ed esplosivi che VENTURA e ZORZI detenevano presso il casolare di Paese, riferendo poi al suo superiore gli esiti della missione (int. 19.2.1994, ff.2-4, e 5.3.1994, ff.1-2).

Carlo DIGILIO ha così spiegato le ragioni per cui, ereditato il compito dal padre Michelangelo, deceduto nel 1966, aveva iniziato a divenire a sua volta un informatore, ruolo ricoperto quantomeno sino al 1978:

"Mio padre del resto, nella sua qualità di tenente della Guardia di Finanza, nel periodo della Liberazione, rientrando dalla Grecia, aveva collaborato con formazioni di partigiani "bianchi" ed era un componente del direttivo composto da sei persone del Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale di Venezia.
Essendo militare il suo nominativo era rimasto sempre riservato e anche dopo la guerra si è cercato di fare in modo che rimanesse tale.
Mio padre aveva partecipato alla liberazione di Venezia e al disarmo e alla cattura della guarnigione tedesca a Venezia.
Inoltre, oltre a tale attività di partigiano, durante e dopo la guerra era stato informatore dell’O.S.S., che erano i servizi di sicurezza militari americani, con il nome in codice di "ERODOTO".
Mio padre aveva i suoi referenti a Verona presso la base della F.T.A.S.E.
Alla sua morte, per le ragioni che ho già accennato, mi fu chiesto se anch’io intendevo collaborare come aveva fatto lui.
Ovviamente non era un’attività a tempo pieno, ma ciò comportava singole attività di informazione.
Le persone a cui ho fatto riferimento per tale lavoro sono state diverse e presentate in tempi successivi.
La cosa ovviamente rivestiva carattere di assoluta riservatezza.
Si trattava comunque di americani i quali usavano anche, per facilitare i collegamenti, dei loro connazionali di origine italiana.
Non avevo un nome in codice particolare.
Facevo riferimento, se necessario, al nome in codice di mio padre.
Fu quindi in tale veste che io fui chiamato a Verona per assumere l’incarico di recarmi a Vittorio Veneto dal prof. FRANCO che cercava una persona non conosciuta nell’ambiente della destra e che fosse esperto in armi.
Sono questi, quindi, i motivi per cui io sono entrato in contatto e ho frequentato persone come VENTURA o persone di Ordine Nuovo di Venezia..... Al prof. FRANCO relazionai tutto, compreso il progetto di attentato di cui VENTURA mi aveva parlato.
In merito, il prof. FRANCO annotò tutto e ricevette da me il percussore.
In tutto ci vedemmo tre o quattro volte sempre in relazione alla vicenda del casolare e all’attività di VENTURA". (DIGILIO, int. 5.3.1994, f.3).

In un successivo interrogatorio DIGILIO ha spiegato meglio i suoi compiti e parlato del tentativo di recupero della notevole quantità di esplosivo rubato a Boscochiesanuova che si era temuto potesse essere utilizzato per attentati contro basi americane:

"Come ho già detto io svolsi attività di informazione facendo riferimento al comando F.T.A.S.E. di Verona a partire dal 1967 e sino al 1978.
La struttura informativa che operava all'interno di questo Comando era una struttura informativa della C.I.A. interessata ovviamente ad avere il maggior numero di dati sulla situazione italiana e ad effettuare una sorta di controllo sull'area del triveneto che era una di quelle di maggiore interesse.
Prima di iniziare questa attività avevo conosciuto occasionalmente MARCELLO SOFFIATI al Lido di Venezia in un contesto del tutto normale e lo rividi casualmente a Verona proprio nei medesimi uffici cui io stesso facevo riferimento.
Si trattava di una palazzina all'interno del Comando di Verona, però a se stante ed indipendente.
In sostanza Soffiati faceva il mio medesimo lavoro, pur riferendosi a BANDOLI e cioè a persona diversa a quella cui facevo riferimento io.
Soffiati aveva avuto uno o più nomi in codice, ma in questo momento proprio non li ricordo e li comunicherò all'Ufficio se riuscirò a farmeli venire in mente.
La struttura comportava l'impegno sia di militari americani in servizio presso la Base sia di altri americani che si trattenevano in Italia per qualche tempo, incaricati di specifici servizio di informazione, sia di cittadini italiani che costituivano in sostanza una rete di informazione sul territorio.
Non erano tutte persone di destra, c'erano anche persone che potevano essere di orientamento democristiano o liberale purché tutte sicuramente anticomuniste.
Ho difficoltà ad indicare altri italiani perché, pur non essendone certo, posso ritenere che qualcuno di essi sia ancora in servizio presso tale struttura e quando io mi dimisi formalmente, nel 1978, ebbi la consegna di mantenere il silenzio sulla rete di informazione di cui ero a conoscenza.
Posso comunque dire che la rete era formata da diverse sezioni, ognuna delle quali riferentesi ad un determinato ambiente in cui raccogliere informazioni come ad esempio il mondo industriale, l'estrema destra, l'estrema sinistra e così via.
Fra le persone incaricate di specifiche missioni di informazione ricordo un latino-americano che era venuto in Italia per qualche tempo per acquisire notizie sugli esuli cileni rifugiatisi dopo il golpe contro il governo Allende e che erano in contatto con l'estrema sinistra locale.
Io non ho avuto rapporti diretti con questa persona che era invece uno dei referenti di Soffiati nell'ambito della raccolta di informazioni sugli esuli sud-americani di cui avevo già accennato.
Io, nel corso degli anni, ho avuto quattro referenti americani che si sono succeduti e due di questi erano di origine italiana.
Nel corso della mia attività ho eseguito una dozzina di incarichi di informazione in diversi settori, non necessariamente sul mondo di estrema destra.
D'altronde non erano necessariamente raccolte di informazioni a sfondo direttamente politico perché nel corso della mia attività sono stato incaricato anche di eseguire la ricerca di materiale radioattivo trafugato.
Ho già fatto cenno all'attività di informazione e di ricerca sui 10 quintali di esplosivo trafugati dal capannone di una ditta che effettuava lavori di sbancamento a Boscochiesanuova.
In merito posso precisare che l'interesse a questo trafugamento era soprattutto legato al fatto che il furto fosse avvenuto non distante dalla Base di Verona in quanto Boscochiesanuova si trova a una dozzina di chilometri da Verona e quindi l'acquisizione di informazioni su tale furto, che risultò poi essere avvenuto a scopo sostanzialmente di lucro, era di interesse in relazione alla sicurezza della Base.
Avevo una ricompensa in contanti a scadenze non fisse che mi consentiva di vivere unitamente all'attività di contabile che svolgevo in varie ditte" (DIGILIO, int. 6.4.1994, f.2)

Carlo DIGILIO si era poi recato una seconda volta al casolare di Paese insieme al prof. Lino FRANCO e in tale occasione erano stati provati per la prima volta gli inneschi formati da un orologio, una resistenza e un fiammifero (int.10.10.1994, ff.2-4).

Erano certamente in preparazione i primi attentati della campagna iniziata nella primavera del 1969 e il prof. Lino FRANCO aveva spiegato a ZORZI e VENTURA che, per agire in condizioni di massima sicurezza, era necessario usare fiammiferi antivento e non fiammiferi comuni (int. citato, f.3).

Nell’interrogatorio in data 12.11.1994, Carlo DIGILIO ha finalmente rivelato chi fosse il suo superiore, e cioè Sergio MINETTO, che lo aveva inviato dal prof. Lino FRANCO e con il quale era rimasto in contatto sino al 1985, momento della sua fuga a Santo Domingo.

"A questo punto, al fine di completare il quadro di quella che fu la mia attività presso Ventura e di controlli che mi furono affidati, posso meglio specificare come e da chi ebbi l'incarico di recarmi dal prof. Franco a Vittorio Veneto.
Io fui chiamato a Verona da un ufficiale della CIA, che ovviamente anche Soffiati conosceva bene, il quale affidò a me l'incarico di andare dal prof. Franco e non da Soffiati in quanto quest'ultimo era troppo conosciuto come estremista di destra e ciò avrebbe creato problemi con VENTURA, infatti Franco intendeva mandare da Ventura non un personaggio noto, ma una persona che potesse sembrare un collezionista o un esperto di armi.
Io potevo giocare questa parte mentre Soffiati no o perlomeno c'erano dei rischi.
L'agente della CIA di Verona che mi mandò da Franco dovrebbe avere attualmente circa 70 anni, è un italiano di origine veronese ed era stato un alto ufficiale della X MAS del Principe Borghese e suo uomo di fiducia.
In quegli anni si muoveva nel Veneto presentandosi come commerciante e riparatore di frigoriferi e teneva i contatti grazie a questa attività di copertura con esponenti del Fronte Nazionale nelle varie città.
Uno dei punti di incontro, a Venezia, era il ristorante La Rivetta, vicinissimo a Piazza San Marco.
Il suo Ufficio si occupava quindi di attività operative che erano sia controlli su addestramenti fatti da italiani sia controlli come quello che io feci sul gruppo di Ventura sia i contatti con gli esponenti del Fronte Nazionale nel quadro della preparazione del golpe.
Una delle esercitazione a cui questo agente sovraintese avvenne a Fortezza ed anche Soffiati, del resto, si era occupato degli addestramenti in Alto Adige in funzione difensiva nel periodo in cui era in corso l'offensiva del terrorismo altoatesino.
Quindi questi corsi erano in pratica di addestramento alla controguerriglia per elementi italiani.
Non mi risulta che questo agente fosse mai stato inquisito per i fatti del golpe Borghese o in altri processi simili.
Quando mi trovai in difficoltà, temendo nel 1982 un secondo arresto dopo il mio primo arresto e la successiva scarcerazione, io che mi trovavo a Verona a casa di Soffiati in Via Stella, lo chiamai e lo feci venire in quell'appartamento.
Del resto tale appartamento era in sostanza di copertura perché serviva per i contatti con i vari informatori evitando che costoro dovessero recarsi presso il Comando se non per cose importantissime.
Io chiesi aiuto all'agente e questi mi diede alcuni consigli, anche se io poi mi allontanai autonomamente accompagnato dal colonnello SPIAZZI e poi da MALCANGI come ho già ampiamente narrato in relazione alle varie fasi della mia fuga.
Alla fine del 1984, prima di andare a Santo Domingo, nella medesima occasione in cui mi recai a Verona per sapere dal colonnello Spiazzi come andava la vendita della mia pistola, utilizzai questo viaggio anche per incontrare l'agente in un bar tenendo a distanza Malcangi che mi aveva accompagnato e che avevo fatto sostare in un altro bar.
Chiesi aiuto all'agente spiegandogli che ero in forte difficoltà e che ero ormai deciso a lasciare l'Italia.
Egli mi consentì di utilizzare a Santo Domingo il suo nome come presentazione in caso di necessità.
Lo vidi così per l'ultima volta in quell'occasione.
Effettivamente io utilizzai questa possibilità proprio pochi mesi prima del mio arresto a Santo Domingo. Mi presentai al Consolato americano, entrai in contatto con un ufficiale facendo il nome dell'agente e questi fece un controllo per verificare che il nome corrispondesse ad un loro uomo in Italia. Tornai qualche giorno dopo, mi disse che andava tutto bene, che l'agente era ancora in Italia, e mi chiese di cosa avessi bisogno. Io gli dissi che ero in forte difficoltà e che avevo bisogno di un lavoro nel medesimo settore informativo che era stato in passato il mio.
Mi disse che sarebbe stato possibile utilizzarmi nel campo dell'organizzazione e riordino dei fuorusciti cubani a Santo Domingo da inviare dove essi avevano la loro sede principale a Miami, in un campo di raccolta. Precisamente questo campo si trova vicino a Miami, nella località HEALIAH. Io dovevo in sostanza occuparmi di un primo vaglio dei soggetti e del loro avviamento negli Stati Uniti.
Non ebbi tempo di iniziare questo lavoro poiché nel giro di poche settimane fui arrestato a Santo Domingo a seguito delle indagini della Polizia italiana". (DIGILIO, int. 12.11.1994, f.3).

Si noti che il nome di Sergio MINETTO non è ancora esplicitato nel verbale, ma è stato fatto per la prima volta da Carlo DIGILIO al personale della Digos di Venezia che lo stava riaccompagnando nel luogo di detenzione dopo l’interrogatorio (cfr. relazione della Digos di Venezia in data 15.11.1994, vol.4, fasc.2, f.84).

Qui si fermano le prime dichiarazioni di Carlo DIGILIO, rese sino al 12.11.1994, in merito alla struttura informativa americana, che tratteggiano un quadro di grande novità, ma certamente ancora incompleto.

La possibilità di acquisire nuovi particolari si interromperà sino all’autunno del 1995, anche in ragione del grave incidente che colpirà la salute di Carlo DIGILIO.

Solo a partire da tale momento riprenderanno, pur fra molte comprensibili difficoltà (è dell’ottobre 1995 l’avvio dell’operazione CECCHETTI), gli interrogatori e il quadro storico e processuale andrà completandosi.

(iii) IL RUOLO DELL’ON. MARIANO RUMOR E IL COLLEGAMENTO FRA GLI ATTENTATI DEL 12.12.1969 E LA STRAGE DI VIA FATEBENEFRATELLI

Il racconto di Carlo DIGILIO ha fatto emergere un filo di collegamento, che sinora non era stato individuato, fra gli attentati del 12.12.1969 e la strage del 17.5.1973, filo che passa attraverso la figura e il ruolo dell’on. Mariano RUMOR, Presidente del Consiglio nel dicembre 1969 e vero e diretto obiettivo della bomba "ananas" lanciata da Gianfranco BERTOLI dinanzi alla Questura di Milano.

In merito alla figura dell’on. RUMOR così si è espresso sinteticamente Carlo DIGILIO descrivendo i motivi di astio che l’ambiente di Ordine Nuovo coltivava contro la sua persona:

"L'Ufficio chiede a DIGILIO se possa meglio specificare quali fossero le ragioni di astio da parte dell'ambiente di Ordine Nuovo nei confronti dell'on. Mariano RUMOR accennate nell'interrogatorio in data 12.10.1996, f.4, in relazione al progetto di spingere BERTOLI ad attentare contro la vita dello stesso RUMOR.
Questo è un argomento molto importante e posso meglio spiegare i motivi di quella che secondo Ordine Nuovo, tramite uno strumento come Gianfranco BERTOLI, doveva essere una vera e propria vendetta e punizione nei confronti dell'on. RUMOR.
Questi era odiato poiché i dirigenti di Ordine Nuovo ritenevano che l'on. RUMOR (NB: Rumor era di Vicenza), Presidente del Consiglio nel dicembre 1969, avesse fatto il "vile" in quanto, venendo meno alle promesse fatte, non aveva attivato un certo meccanismo dopo gli attentati decretando lo "stato di emergenza" e mettendo in moto i militari che avrebbero saputo che sbocco dare alla crisi.
Questa delusione mi fu espressa da SOFFIATI e da MAGGI negli incontri di cui ho già riferito, che avvennero dopo gli attentati del 12 dicembre, e cioè quello con MAGGI pochi giorni dopo la strage e la cena con MAGGI e SOFFIATI che avvenne allo Scalinetto nei giorni di Natale del 1969.
In particolare MAGGI era deluso e disse che di fronte alla reazione dell'opinione pubblica vi era stata una "ritirata" di RUMOR che aveva impedito un'immediata presa di posizione dei militari.
Disse proprio "presa di posizione" e non "presa di potere" nel senso che sarebbe stato un primo intervento che avrebbe dato inizio ad un maggior controllo dei militari sulla vita del Paese senza un vero e proprio colpo di Stato.
Ciò avrebbe permesso comunque l'uscita allo scoperto dei NUCLEI DI DIFESA DELLO STATO con funzione di appoggio e di propaganda in favore dei militari.
In seguito il capitano CARRET mi confermò che quello era stato il progetto, ben visto anche dagli americani, e che era fallito per i tentennamenti di alcuni democristiani come RUMOR.
Mi spiegò anche che nei giorni successivi alla strage le navi militari sia italiane sia americane avevano avuto l'ordine di uscire dai porti perché, in caso di manifestazioni o scontri diffusi, ancorate nei porti potevano essere più facilmente colpite.
Anche con Sergio MINETTO, a casa di Bruno SOFFIATI, vi furono da parte di quest'ultimo commenti simili prima ancora dei colloqui che ebbi con CARRET". (DIGILIO, int.21.2.1997, f.1)

Ciò non significa certamente che l’on. Mariano RUMOR fosse organizzatore o mandante di stragi come qualche giornalista, dopo l’audizione di questo giudice dinanzi alla Commissione Parlamentare sulle stragi e il terrorismo, ha titolato, suscitando il comprensibile sdegno di alcuni ex-esponenti della Democrazia Cristiana.

Significa piuttosto che il Presidente del Consiglio dell’epoca e una parte della D.C., ed anche e soprattutto il P.S.D.I., erano visti come il terminale che doveva concretizzare con le sue decisioni i frutti di una strategia politico/eversiva che, partendo da soggetti operativi come MAGGI, ZORZI e FREDA, attraverso mediazioni, probabilmente anche militari, che forse non saranno mai note, era in grado di indirizzare le scelte ai massimi vertici istituzionali.

Il racconto di Carlo DIGILIO non è isolato nel quadro della ricostruzione della strategia politica di Ordine Nuovo, discussa molto probabilmente a livello dei vertici romani dell’organizzazione.

Vincenzo VINCIGUERRA aveva parlato, sin dagli interrogatori resi subito dopo l’assunzione di responsabilità dell’attentato di Peteano e quindi in un’ottica di denunzia delle collusioni della destra apparentemente "rivoluzionaria" con apparati e strategie statali, della sospetta insistenza con cui il dr. MAGGI e Delfo ZORZI, più volte fra il 1971 e il 1972, gli avevano proposto di eliminare l’on. RUMOR, piano per la cui esecuzione era stata scelta la residenza dell’on. RUMOR nei pressi di Vicenza e in ordine alla quale "non vi sarebbero stati problemi con la scorta", prospettandosi così complicità inaccettabili per il "puro" VINCIGUERRA (int. al G.I. di Venezia, 14.8.1984, vol.12, fasc.7, ff.136-138).

Anche Martino SICILIANO aveva appreso da Delfo ZORZI la stessa spiegazione in merito alle ragioni dell’astio contro l’on. RUMOR:

"In relazione agli avvenimenti che ci interessavano Delfo ZORZI, all'inizio del 1970, mi parlò della figura dell'on. Mariano RUMOR spiegandomi che da lui l'ambiente di destra si era aspettato che, nella sua qualità di Presidente del Consiglio, subito dopo i fatti del 12.12.1969 portasse avanti la scelta di far proclamare lo Stato di Emergenza.
Sempre secondo ZORZI, già prima dei fatti del dicembre vi erano stati contatti fra alti esponenti di Ordine Nuovo a Roma e ambienti istituzionali, soprattutto democristiani, per giungere ad una soluzione di quel tipo in caso di attentati gravi.
Tale soluzione sembrava sicura, ma dopo gli attentati del 12 dicembre l'on. RUMOR aveva disatteso queste nostre aspettative e non si era sentito di portare avanti questa scelta.
Per questo l'on. RUMOR, agli occhi degli alti dirigenti di Ordine Nuovo fra i quali ZORZI mi indicò MAGGI e SIGNORELLI, era visto come un traditore e quindi andava prima o poi punito". (SICILIANO, int. 24.6.1997, f.4).

Tale complessiva ricostruzione trova corrispondenza in un documento molto particolare e precisamente un volumetto, riguardante gli attentati del 12.12.1969 e soprattutto quanto sarebbe avvenuto, sul piano politico/istituzionale, dopo gli attentati stessi, quasi sconosciuto anche agli studiosi del settore e mai preso in considerazione ed analizzato durante le precedenti istruttorie.

Si tratta del breve saggio politico-giudiziario "Il Segreto della Repubblica", edito nel 1978 dalle sconosciute Edizioni FLAN e firmato da tale Walter RUBINI.

In realtà Walter RUBINI, come non è stato difficile accertare, è lo pseudonimo di Fulvio BELLINI e il libro è stato praticamente stampato in proprio avendo in precedenza le Edizioni FLAN stampato solo un altro volume scritto dallo stesso autore.

Fulvio BELLINI è un ormai anziano studioso e polemista residente a Milano, militante sino all’immediato dopoguerra del P.C.I. e in seguito, per un periodo, legatosi a Giorgio PISANO’ insieme al quale aveva collaborato a varie pubblicazioni di polemica politico/giudiziaria.

Le informazioni cui ha sovente potuto accedere Fulvio BELLINI non devono essere certamente di seconda mano se egli per primo, nel 1963, ha potuto prospettare (prima con una serie di articoli sul periodico "Il Secolo XX" e poi con un libro, il primo, appunto, pubblicato dalle Edizioni FLAN), con significative argomentazioni sia sul fatto sia sul movente, la morte di Enrico MATTEI, a bordo dell’aereo su cui viaggiava, come atto di sabotaggio attuato, forse, da elementi dell’O.A.S. al servizio di interessi politico-economici stranieri (cfr. atti trasmessi dal P.M. di Pavia, dr. Vincenzo Calia, vol.20, fasc.10, ff.21 e ss. e 43 e ss.).

Chiave di volta della ricostruzione operata nel volume pubblicato nel 1978 (che comunque non contiene, in merito all’esecuzione degli attentati, nulla che non fosse già noto alle indagini) è il compromesso, appunto "Il Segreto della Repubblica", che sarebbe stato raggiunto il 15.12.1969, subito dopo il solenne funerale delle vittime della strage di Piazza Fontana, fra due ampie aree politiche, una autoritaria e quasi filo-golpista e una più cauta e non disponibile a ridurre gli spazi di democrazia, compromesso che comportava che il Presidente del Consiglio, on. Mariano RUMOR, non si adoperasse per la dichiarazione dello stato di emergenza e non decidesse di sciogliere le Camere e che tuttavia in cambio, quale condizione posta dalla componente autoritaria, si desse via libera alla prosecuzione della pista anarchica voluta dal Ministero dell’Interno e si rinunziasse ad approfondire la "pista nera" che il nucleo di p.g. dei Carabinieri di Roma aveva cominciato a battere con successo.

Gli antecedenti sul piano politico e i passaggi di tale situazione di compromesso, esposti nel volume, sono stati sintetizzati dall’Ufficio nella parte introduttiva alla testimonianza cui è stato chiamato Fulvio BELLINI in data 2.4.1997 dinanzi a questo Giudice Istruttore e al Pubblico Ministero:

"....l'Ufficio richiama l'attenzione del dr. Bellini sui seguenti passaggi della sua ricostruzione:

- scissione del P.S.I. e formazione del P.S.U. nel luglio 1969, presuntivamente appoggiata e finanziata da ambienti americani, e ruolo di tale Partito nei successivi eventi di spinta verso soluzioni autoritarie, noti come "strategia della tensione" conseguenti agli attentati;
- prevista disponibilità, all'interno della medesima strategia (di cui braccio operativo sarebbero stati Ordine Nuovo e Avanguardia Nazionale), del Presidente del Consiglio, on. Mariano Rumor, a decretare lo stato di emergenza e a sciogliere le Camere nella prospettiva della formazione di un governo di centro-destra con l'esclusione del P.S.I.;
- fallimento di tale strategia a seguito dei dubbi e dei tentennamenti a mettere in opera tali scelte da parte dell'on. Rumor, in particolare dopo i funerali delle vittime della strage del 12.12.1969, e conseguente venir meno dell'obiettivo politico degli attentati;
- formazione comunque di un accordo a livello dei più alti vertici politici, compreso l'on. Moro allora Ministro degli Esteri, affinché non fosse sviluppata la pista riguardante l'Aginter Press e Avanguardia Nazionale, delineata nell'appunto del S.I.D. del 16.12.1969 e inizialmente sviluppata da alcune indagini del Nucleo di p.g. dei Carabinieri di Roma (in particolare nei confronti di Delle Chiaie) e di conseguenza avesse sviluppo a livello di indagine di p.g. solo la c.d. pista rossa o anarchica avviata in particolare dal Ministero dell'Interno".

La testimonianza di Fulvio BELLINI si è sviluppata, nei suoi passaggi più importanti, nel modo che segue:

"....posso innanzitutto confermare che la parte centrale e significativa del volume stesso è la ricostruzione di quanto avvenne a livello politico nel periodo immediatamente precedente e successivo agli attentati del 12 dicembre 1969 e di come le indagini presero in sostanza l'indirizzo che era più consono alle scelte politiche prevalenti in quei momenti.
Faccio ancora presente che pur avendo scritto il libro tra l'inverno 1977 e la primavera 1978, tanto che era praticamente già scritto quando fu rapito l'on. Moro, avevo già raccolto le informazioni utili sulla parte centrale dello stesso sin dall'inizio del 1970.
Quando avvennero gli attentati, a livello di intuizione politico-storica e pur senza avere inizialmente alcun dato diretto, mi ero subito formato la convinzione che VALPREDA fosse un capro espiatorio e che gli anarchici fossero vittime di un meccanismo ben più grande e articolato.
Dico questo non per scelta politica, ma perché proprio sul piano storico e di ricerca avevo compreso che alle spalle di questi attentati doveva esserci un piano finalizzato a cambiare gli equilibri politici del momento.
La mia fonte su quello che avvenne negli ambienti politici dopo gli attentati che ho riportato nei capitolo VI e VII del libro fu, a partire dal gennaio 1970, un conoscente inglese che frequentava gli ambienti giornalistici e diceva di essere il corrispondente in Italia dell'Agenzia Reuter e che conobbi al Circolo della Stampa, abituale punto di ritrovo di giornalisti, esponenti politici e personaggi vari.
Sono tuttavia certo che, così come altri soggetti che si qualificavano come giornalisti, egli in realtà fosse un agente dell'Intelligence Service inglese.
Questo signore aveva all'epoca circa 50 anni ed aveva un aspetto tipicamente inglese e non si è mai presentato con nome e cognome, cosa che del resto io non gli ho mai chiesto e che non è mia abitudine fare.
Ho continuato a vederlo normalmente fino al 1975/1976 mentre in seguito gli incontri si sono un po' rarefatti quantomeno fino al 1987.
Ripeto che la mia esperienza sin dai tempi della guerra, sia con agenti dell'O.S.S. paracadutati in Italia sia con agenti inglesi mi faceva ben comprendere con quale tipo di persona stessi parlando.
Anche per la mia simpatia nei confronti di questi ultimi, cioè gli inglesi, dopo la guerra rifiutai la Bronze Star americana.
Io e l'inglese parlammo per la prima volta credo all'inizio del gennaio 1970, comunque poche settimane dopo i fatti.
Egli mi fornì in sostanza tutte le informazioni che io ho riportato nei due capitoli centrali del libro e cioè che vi era stato un grosso scontro istituzionale in sostanza fra l'area che aveva fatto capo a Saragat, definibile come Partito americano, e l'area che aveva fatto capo a Moro, scontro che aveva avuto il suo epilogo qualche giorno prima di Natale.
In sostanza aveva vinto questa seconda linea che aveva dalla sua parte la possibilità di mettere sul tavolo i primi risultati delle indagini delegate dal Ministro della Difesa GUI, molto vicino a Moro, al controspionaggio militare e ai Carabinieri e che stavano portando alla evidenziazione della responsabilità di gruppi di estrema destra.
Per questa ragione non era stato decretato lo stato di emergenza e non erano state sciolte le Camere, come soprattutto i settori del rinato P.S.U. volevano, anche se l'accordo si era comunque concluso lasciando da parte i risultati delle prime indagini sulla destra e lasciando così che si sviluppasse la c.d. pista rossa.
Sempre il giornalista inglese mi disse che l'on. Rumor, che inizialmente faceva parte dell'area del Partito americano, fortemente colpito dalla grande mobilitazione popolare che vi era stata per i funerali delle vittime del 12 dicembre 1969, era stato colto da dubbi e si era alleato con l'on. Moro non consentendo così che avvenisse una svolta autoritaria e soprattutto non consentendo che fossero sciolte le Camere.
L'inglese mi mostrò anche una copia dell'articolo dell'Observer del 14.12.1969 che ho citato all'inizio del capitolo VI e che indicava già a grandi linee questo tipo di strategia.
Io non conoscevo questo articolo poiché non leggevo l'Observer, ma comunque mi resi conto che già dal 14 dicembre quel giornale aveva compreso e sintetizzato la dinamica degli avvenimenti che l'inglese mi aveva ricostruito.
Con riferimento a questo articolo, l'inglese mi disse che in realtà non era un semplice commento giornalistico, ma una sorta di presa di posizione ufficiale ben comprensibile negli ambienti politico-diplomatici, che intendeva disapprovare la possibile destabilizzazione del nostro Paese a seguito di un eventuale scioglimento delle Camere.
Ciò era stato ben compreso ed era per queste ragioni che Saragat, stizzito, aveva indotto il Governo ad una protesta diplomatica.
Comunque da tale messaggio del giornale inglese, l'ala facente capo a Moro e a una forte parte della D.C. aveva capito che non era isolata.
Io, ovviamente, sino a quel momento non sapevo nulla del fatto che fosse stata iniziata, anche se subito interrotta, un'indagine da parte del controspionaggio militare che aveva intrapreso una strada ben diversa da quella che portava agli anarchici del gruppo Valpreda.
Nel corso di questo o di un secondo incontro, l'inglese mi fece vedere dei suoi appunti, di cui presi nota, che riguardavano proprio gli avvenimenti e soprattutto le indagini successivi al 12 dicembre così come li ho riportati nel libro.
Ricordo che l'inglese mi citò il fatto dell'immediato ritorno di Moro da Bruxelles e il fatto che subito GUI lo informò dei primi esiti delle indagini del servizio informazioni militare sviluppatesi poi con gli interrogatori di DELLE CHIAIE da parte dei Carabinieri.
Io misi da parte gli appunti che avevo potuto ricavare dai colloqui con l'inglese e iniziai a svilupparli, sino a scrivere il libro, solo nel momento in cui, intorno al 1973, le indagini sulla pista nera condotte prima a Treviso e poi a Milano e l'evidenziazione del ruolo di personaggi come GIANNETTINI mi diedero la certezza che si era trattato di informazioni esatte e di prima mano.
Le notizie politiche che l'inglese mi ha fornito si sono sempre rivelate esatte anticipando sovente lo sviluppo di grossi avvenimenti politici nel nostro Paese e risultando certo qualcosa di ben diverso dalla normale attività giornalistica.
Io non gli ho mai chiesto, dopo l'inizio della nostra conoscenza in cui mi disse che era della Reuter, per chi effettivamente lavorasse". (dep. Fulvio BELLINI, 2.4.1997).

In sostanza Fulvio BELLINI, anche nella sua testimonianza, ha confermato che sarebbero stati i dubbi e poi il cambiamento di campo dell’on. Mariano RUMOR nel dicembre 1969 a determinare il fallimento della strategia politico-istituzionale, gradita agli americani e alle aree politiche italiane ad essi vicine, che sarebbe stato l’obiettivo della campagna di attentati.

Fulvio BELLINI avrebbe ricevuto tali informazioni, sin dall’inizio del 1970, da un giornalista inglese, in realtà corrispondente dei servizi informativi di tale Paese, di cui si è ben guardato di consentire l’identificazione, anche se il rapporto con lo stesso sarebbe durato, e proficuamente, per molti anni.

Tale linea di acquisizione di notizie sembra verosimile tenendo presente, ad esempio, che nei giorni immediatamente successivi al 12 dicembre 1969 la stampa britannica più autorevole (dal TIMES all’OBSERVER) e portatrice del punto di vista del Governo non aveva avuto dubbi nell’indicare come "nera" la matrice della strage e nel ritenerla connessa ad un progetto di svolta autoritaria, mostrando di disporre di informazioni non di seconda mano (cfr. perizia del dr. Aldo Giannuli, f.142).

Sembra però difficile che le informazioni raccolte da Fulvio BELLINI si limitino a quelle raccolte nel 1970 dall’agente inglese e non siano state arricchite, in seguito, da altri dati di conferma anche in considerazione del fatto che il volume è stato scritto solo molti anni dopo, secondo l’autore fra l’inverno 1977 e la primavera 1978, e comunque pubblicato alla fine del 1978.

Non sembra un caso che nella nota aggiunta alla prefazione (pag.9), scritta certamente quando il testo era già stato scritto, Fulvio BELLINI sottolinei che la pubblicazione del c.d. memoriale Moro (quello rinvenuto in Via Montenevoso, a Milano, il 1°.10.1978) evidenzi "una impressionante analogia fra gli argomenti toccati dallo scomparso statista e quelli trattati nel "Segreto della Repubblica".

A questo punto, tenendo presente che secondo il volume, scritto nel periodo corrispondente al rapimento dello statista, l’on. Aldo MORO (all’epoca Ministro degli Esteri) sarebbe stato uno dei principali artefici del "compromesso" del dicembre 1969 che aveva comunque arginato la linea oltranzista appoggiata dai filo-americani del P.S.D.I., compromesso che era stato possibile grazie al mutamento di campo dell’on. RUMOR (pagg.85-87), è possibile azzardare un’ipotesi.

Non è infatti escluso che Fulvio BELLINI, grazie ai poliedrici contatti di cui godeva sia a destra sia a sinistra (egli, nella testimonianza, si è in sostanza qualificato come un comunista amico dei fascisti e viceversa, mostrando stima nei confronti di entrambi i "rivoluzionari" Mussolini e Lenin), abbia potuto ricevere confidenze o anticipazioni in merito ai temi e alle linee di interpretazione toccate dall’on. MORO durante la sua prigionia, e in particolare quelle relative alla strage di Piazza Fontana e alla strategia della tensione, ricevendo da ciò conferma dei primi elementi raccolti nel 1970.

L’esame del "memoriale MORO" e in particolare del secondo testo rinvenuto nel 1990 in Via Montenevoso in una intercapedine (ammesso che anche tale testo sia completo) sembra avvalorare tale prospettazione e anche la ricostruzione di collaboratori di giustizia secondo cui la strage di Via Fatebenefratelli non sarebbe stato un episodio secondario e l’obiettivo sarebbe stato direttamente l’on. Mariano RUMOR, e non genericamente le personalità presenti, da punire per il "tradimento" del dicembre 1969.

Infatti nella parte del "memoriale MORO" dedicata alle riflessioni del "prigioniero" sulla strage di Piazza Fontana (si veda un estratto, vol.20, fasc.10, ff.14 e ss.), oltre ad accennare a "responsabilità che si collocano fuori dall’Italia" e al fatto che nella strategia della tensione doveva presumersi che "Paesi associati a vario titolo alla nostra politica e quindi interessati ad un certo indirizzo si fossero in qualche modo impegnati attraverso i loro servizi di informazione" (evidente richiamo, questo, agli Stati Uniti d’America e ai Paesi del Patto Atlantico), vi è una serie di riferimenti, ben 4 in poche pagine, all’on. RUMOR.

Leggendo con attenzione il testo si può notare che tutti i riferimenti all’on. RUMOR contengono, dopo la citazione del nome dell’esponente democristiano, un insistente riferimento al fatto che "egli stesso" sarebbe stato "destinatario dell’attentato BERTOLI" (o oggetto di attacco del BERTOLI o di un attentato, e così via), riferimenti pleonastici dopo la prima citazione, tenendo presente il fatto che l’avvenimento di Via Fatebenefratelli era ampiamente noto.

Perchè, allora, citare 4 volte l’attentato di Gianfranco BERTOLI (strage, per così dire, "minore" rispetto ad altre) nei passi relativi alla strage di Piazza Fontana e al ruolo dell’on. RUMOR?

Si ha la sensazione che l’on. MORO, in parte in ragione del suo stile e in parte della situazione di prigionia in cui si trovava, abbia voluto inviare un messaggio criptico che comunque imponeva lo stesso collegamento fra i due episodi, quello del 1969 e quello del 1973, emerso nella presente istruttoria.

In uno dei passaggi, l’on. RUMOR è anche definito "uomo intelligente ma incostante e di scarsa attitudine realizzativa", definizione che sembra richiamare il comportamento incerto di RUMOR sino all’ultimo momento di quel dicembre 1969 messo in luce tanto dalle dichiarazioni di collaboratori di giustizia quanto dal saggio polemico di Fulvio BELLINI.

Se a ciò si aggiunge il riferimento inequivoco contenuto nel memoriale (in un altro passo, oltre a quelli citati, si legge: "...la presenza straniera, a mio avviso, c’era"), l’insieme delle risultanze della presente istruttoria ne risulta notevolmente rafforzata e, in prospettiva, la strada dell’approfondimento di tali collegamenti (e in primo luogo delle "fonti" di Fulvio BELLINI) potrebbe ancora essere utilmente percorsa.

Indice e sommario articoli: http://www.strano.net/stragi/tstragi/salvini/

PB*

The Story Behind

Parmalat's Bankruptcy

source:http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3102parmalat_invest.html
This article appears in the January 16, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

.5 The Story Behind
Parmalat's Bankruptcy

by Claudio Celani

The bankruptcy of the giant food company Parmalat, warned Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti on Dec. 22, runs the risk of leading to "general corporate insolvency" in Italy, if there is a run on corporate bonds. Throughout Europe, financial operators are nervous about the enormous sums of fraudulent financial paper that went up in smoke—and about where the trail of criminal investigation will lead. A senior European financial source, for example, told EIR that Parmalat's collapse throws a spotlight on the huge volume of dirty deals that are being run by top international banks through offshore centers such as the Cayman Islands. These deals are often used to finance political, illegal, or high-risk speculative efforts, he said, and the Parmalat scandal could expose this entire dirty sub-structure of the global financial system, with unforeseeable financial as well as political consequences.

Parmalat is the largest Italian food company and the fourth largest in Europe, controlling 50% of the Italian market in milk and milk-derivative products. Suddenly, it was discovered that its claimed liquidity of 4 billion euro did not exist, and that EU 8 million in bonds of investors' money had evaporated as well. Parmalat is the largest bankruptcy in European history, representing 1.5% of Italian GNP—proportionally larger than the combined ratio of the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies to the U.S. GNP.

Behind Parmalat's facade as a productive agro-industrial company with 34,000 employees, hides a giant financial speculative scheme to lure investors' money and syphon it off through a network of 260 international offshore speculative entities, where the money disappeared. It has been reported that at the receiver-end of that scheme, the Cayman Islands-based offshore entity called Bonlat had invested $6.9 billion in interest swaps, the highest-risk derivatives operations. So far, through this scheme, at least EU 8 billion have disappeared, but the figure is provisory.

It is now being discovered that over the years, Parmalat had become a tool of the banks, which had invented, built up, and managed the speculative scheme. Which banks? The list currently investigated by prosecutors in Parma and Milan reads like the Burke's Peerage of the international financial system: Bank of America, Citicorp, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Banco Santander, ABN; it goes on with all the largest Italian banks: Capitalia (Rome), S. Paolo-IMI (Turin), Intesa-BCI (Milan), Unicredito (Genoa-Milan), Monte dei Paschi (Siena), to name just a few.

(i) How It Developed

The story began in 1997, when Parmalat decided to become a "global player" and started a campaign of international acquisitions, especially in North and South America, financed through debt. Soon, Parmalat became the third largest cookie-maker in the United States. But such acquisitions, instead of bringing in profits, started, no later than 2001, to bring in red figures. Losing money on its productive activities, the company shifted more and more to the high-flying world of derivatives and other speculative enterprises.

Parmalat's founder and now former CEO Calisto Tanzi engaged the firm in several exotic enterprises, such as a tourism agency called Parmatour, and the purchase of the local soccer club Parma. Huge sums were poured into these two enterprises, which have been a loss from the very beginning. It has been reported that Parmatour, now closed, has a loss of at least EU 2 billion, an incredibly high figure for a tourist agency.

The losses of the Parma soccer club are not yet fully known. Here, Parma insiders are pointing at what they call the "Medellín Cartel" connection—i.e., the purchase of overpriced Colombian soccer players, and other extravagances. While accumulating losses, and with debts to the banks, Parmalat started to built a network of offshore mail-box companies, which were used to conceal losses, through a mirror-game which made them appear as assets or liquidity, while the company started to issue bonds in order to collect money. The security for such bonds was provided by the alleged liquidity represented by the offshore schemes.

The largest bond placers have been Bank of America, Citicorp, and J.P. Morgan. These banks, like their European and Italian partners, rated Parmalat bonds as sound financial paper, when they knew, or should have known, that they were worth nothing. While Bank of America has participated as a partner in some of Parmalat's acquisitions, Citicorp is alleged to have built up the fraudulent accounting system.

What strikes one is not only the dimension of the scheme, but the arrogance of its authors. For instance, one of the offshore mail-box firms used to channel the liquidity coming from the bond sales was called Buconero, which means "black hole"! Appropriately, the first class-action suit in the United States on the Parmalat case, filed by the South Alaskan Miners' Pension Fund, is against Parmalat, its auditors, Bank of America, and Citicorp—and focusses on Buconero. "The Parmalat fraud has been mainly implemented in New York, with the active role of the Zini legal firm and of Citibank," said San Diego lawyer Darren Robbins, a partner in the firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, which is leading the class-action suit. "We believe that Citigroup, by creating instruments like the sadly famous 'Buconero,' has played a fundamental role in helping Parmalat to fake their balance sheets and hide their real financial situation."

The New York-based Zini lawfirm named by Robbins, has played a role which seems to have come out of the movie The Godfather. Through Zini, firms owned by Parmalat have been sold to certain American citizens with Italian surnames, only to be purchased again by Parmalat later. The whole operation was fake: The money for the sale in the first place came from other entities owned by Parmalat, and it served only to create "liquidity" in the books. Thanks to that liquidity, Parmalat could keep issuing bonds. Mafia? Former CEO Tanzi declared to prosecutors in Parma that the fraudulent bonds system "was fully the banks' idea." Parmalat's former financial manager, Fausto Tonna, counterfeited Parmalat's balance sheets in order to provide security for the bonds, but "it was the banks which proposed it to Tonna," Tanzi declared.

Tanzi's version has been so far confirmed by Luciano Spilingardi, head of Cassa di Risparmio di Parma and member of the Parmalat board. Bond issues were ordered by the banks, Spilingardi said to prosecutors, according to leaks published in the daily La Repubblica. "I remember," Spilingardi says, "that one of the last issues, of 150 million euros, was presented to the board meeting as an explicit request by a foreign bank, which was ready to subscribe the entire bond. If I remember correctly, it was Deutsche Bank." Spilingardi says that he expressed "perplexity" about the proposal, because a previous bond issue of EU 600 million had failed, in the Spring of 2003, causing a 10% fall of Parmalat stocks in one day. But the request was accepted, and the last Parmalat bond, issued in Summer 2003, made its way to the Cayman Islands black hole. At the moment of Parmalat's default, in December 2003, the financial manager of Parmalat was no longer Tonna, who had left after the failed bond issue in the Spring. He has been replaced by Alberto Ferraris, who comes from ... Citibank. In June 2003, before the last bond issue "ordered" by Deutsche Bank, Parmalat's board gained a new member: Luca Sala, a top manager coming from ... Bank of America.

The Parmalat crisis finally broke out on Dec. 8, when the company Parmalat defaulted on a EU 150 million bond. The management claims that this was because a customer, a speculative fund named Epicurum, did not pay its bills. Allegedly, Parmalat has won a derivatives contract with Epicurum, betting against the dollar. But it was soon discovered that Epicurum is owned by firms whose address is the same as some of Parmalat's own offshore entities. In other words, Epicurum is owned by Parmalat.

On Dec. 9, as rumors spread that Parmalat's claimed liquidity was not there, Standard & Poor's finally downgraded Parmalat bonds to junk status, and in the next few days, Parmalat stocks fell 40%. On Dec. 12, the Parmalat management somehow found the money to pay the bond, but on Dec. 19 came the end: Bank of America announced that an account with allegedly $3.9 billion in liquidity, claimed by Parmalat at BoA, did not exist. In one shot, the bankruptcy was revealed, and Parmalat stocks fell an additional 66%. Later, Tonna would confess that he had faked BoA documents, using a scanner, scissors, and glue, to "invent" such a $3.9 billion account, a version which is still the official one.

(ii) 'Systemic Risk'

On Dec. 22, the Italian government rushed through emergency legislation aimed at allowing quick bankruptcy procedures for Parmalat, in order to protect its industrial activity, payrolls, vendors, etc., from creditors' claims. The government appointed Enrico Bondi to present a reorganization plan by Jan. 20. So far, so good. But Bondi, who had already replaced Tanzi a few days before, has two loyalties: he was appointed by the government, but he is also a man trusted by the banks, including for his reorganization of the Ferruzzi-Montedison group, which was eventually sold to the Agnelli group. Fears are that Bondi will obey the banks, which want to chop up Parmalat and sell it in pieces—the plan feared by the trade unions and, at least publicly, by the government itself.

That same day, Paolo Raimondi, head of the Italian LaRouche movement, issued a statement in which he said that the Parmalat bankruptcy, like the Cirio, Enron, and LTCM cases, "are not isolated cases in an otherwise functioning system. Instead, they are the most evident manifestation of the bankruptcy of the entire financial system." After pointing to the role of derivative speculation in the Parmalat case, Raimondi stressed that Citigroup and Bank of America, Parmalat's main financial partners, are "the number two and three among banks involved in derivatives operations."

Because it is not just a firm at stake but the whole system, "the solution must be a global one," Raimondi said, pointing to Lyndon LaRouche's proposal for a world financial reorganization called a New Bretton Woods. "The Italian Parliament has already discussed, in the past, a series of motions on the New Bretton Woods, which were introduced on different occasions by Senators Pedrizzi and Peterlini, and by Representative Brugger, and received support from a hundred members of Parliament, from all parties." Raimondi also called the recent statement by "a high moral authority, such as Milan Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, who, presented with the New Bretton Woods proposal, said that the Italian government not only can, but must, promote it." Over Christmas, this statement was circulated in Italy, and distributed in Parma by LaRouche Youth Movement organizers.

The Italian government is aware of the systemic dimensions of the crisis, at least as concerns the Italian bond market, as Minister Tremonti's Dec. 22 statement about "general corporate insolvency" shows. "Do you have any idea," said Tremonti to his colleagues, "of what would happen if the market demanded liquidation of money invested in corporate bonds? Therefore, we must quickly review current legislation protecting investors."

Tremonti referred to 100,000 Italian owners of Parmalat bonds, mostly families which have been advised by their banks to buy paper which is now worth nothing. This is the third large insolvency hitting Italian investors in one year: The first, the Argentinian insolvency, wiped out EU 12 billion euro in bonds owned by 450,000 Italians; then, the bankruptcy of Cirio, another food company, meant a default on EU 1.2 billion in bonds owned by 40,000 families. Panic is already spreading, and a run on the Italian bond market is on the horizon. Bank stocks have plunged, with Capitalia, the main Italian creditor of Parmalat, having lost 40% since Dec. 4.

The red thread of this catastrophe is represented by the role of the banks. Italian banks, not unlike their international colleagues, have lured unaware customers into high-risk investments—workers, pensioners, and professionals who, in most cases, did not know where their money was invested, or who were fraudulently told that it was "safely" invested.

In the Argentinian bonds case, consumer organizations have filed a legal action against the banks, because they failed to inform customers, as prescribed by law, that the investment was a high-risk one. In the Cirio case, it came out that on the eve of the company's insolvency, creditor banks rushed to dump their Cirio bonds, by selling them to their customers! And Italian newspapers are now publishing letters by owners of Parmalat bonds, telling how they were still being sold such bonds by their banks on Dec. 11, two days after the first Parmalat default, and after Standard & Poor's had downgraded them to "junk" status!

The role of the banks, and of their putative supervisor, the Bank of Italy, has been the issue of an all-out war between Tremonti and BoI Governor Antonio Fazio, since the Cirio default. Things have now escalated, as the failure of BoI supervision in the Parmalat case is dramatically evident. Beyond the power struggles which are also involved, the real issue is, who controls the Bank of Italy. The fact is that the central bank, which is supposed to exercise control over the banking system, is itself controlled by the banks, which are its shareholders!

The Italian central banking system is not dissimilar to the U.S. Federal Reserve or other central banking systems. Under the Bretton Woods system of regulations, however, it was partially under government control. This changed first in 1979, when deregulation freed the central bank from the obligation to buy government debt, and finally after 1992, when the largest shareholders of the Bank of Italy were privatized. These are Banca Commerciale (now Intesa-BCI), Credito Italiano (now Unicredito), IMI (now S.Paolo-IMI), and Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. The reader will recognize the names of some among Parmalat's main creditors and bond-placers. These are the controllers of the Bank of Italy, which the BoI is supposed to control.

In the past months, Tremonti has led an unsuccessful battle to change this, by attempting to introduce local government representatives onto the boards of the Banking Foundations, which control Italian banks. Through that move, Tremonti hoped also to gain a handle on banking decisions to finance, for instance, infrastructure investments. He lost that battle, due to the staunch opposition of the Bank of Italy.

But now the issue is again on the table, and decisions are expected to be taken after a parliamentary committee, set up after the Parmalat case broke, has investigated the current state of relations between the banking system and the corporate world. On Jan. 8, a government initiative is expected on a new control authority, which is supposed to assume the supervisory powers which the Bank of Italy had, but never implemented.

.6 CAM*, Cini alliata Matarazzo

CAM*

Cini,Alliata, Matarazzo

.7 Vittorio Cini

(i) Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera.

Vittorio Cini, Conte di Monselice (Ferrara, 20 febbraio 1885 - Venezia, 18 settembre 1977) era un finanziere al quale era attribuito uno dei patrimoni italiani più cospicui dei suoi anni. Ereditò dal padre alcune cave di trachite nel Veneto ed alcuni terreni nel Ferrarese. Studiò economia e commercio in Svizzera, in Italia fu il primo a intraprendere importanti opere di bonifica (Pineta di Destra e Giussago) per strappare le terre all'erosione del mare. Compì lavori di canalizzazione e progettò una rete per la navigazione interna della Valle Padana.Partecipò alla prima guerra mondiale, poi si dedicò a valorizzare la sua città d'adozione, Venezia, che volle non fosse più considerata unicamente un grande museo, ma anche un centro di nuovo benessere: fu così che gettò le basi per la costruzione del porto industriale di Marghera.Gli venne affidata, più tardi, la gestione delle acciaierie ILVA, in pessime condizioni economiche: gli bastarono pochi mesi per risanarle.Dal 1936 al 1943 fu Comissario Generale dell'Esposizione Universale di Roma. Ministro delle Comunicazioni nel febbraio 1943 (ultimo gabinetto Mussolini), lasciò la carica per profonde divergenze con il capo del governo. Dopo l'8 settembre venne catturato dai tedeschi ed internato a Dachau, da dove il figlio Giorgio (che aveva ricavato del denaro vendendo tutti i gioielli della madre, l'attrice Lyda Borelli) riuscì a farlo evadere corrompendo i guardiani delle SS. Nel 1949 il figlio morì in un incidente di volo e Vittorio Cini dedicò da allora la sua vita a opere di filantropia. Acquistò un'intera isola, quella di San Giorgio, davanti alla riva di Piazza San Marco, e istituì la Fondazione Cini, centro d'arte e di cultura, sede di istituti di preparazione professionale e di addestramento dei giovani alla vita sul mare.

Estratto da "http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorio_Cini"

(ii) Riportiamo qualche informazione di Cini da altra fonte:

Fonte: Ledeen’s Beloved «Universal Fascism»: Venetian War Against the Nation-State

Count Vittorio Cini, a Venetian oligarch and former minister in Mussolini’s Cabinet, opened the doors for Ledeen to the ultrasecret freemasonic archives in Rome and Venice

“Fascismo universale

From his student days at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s, Ledeen was picked up and sponsored by Anglo-Venetian financier circles, some of the very men, or their next-generation heirs, who had launched World War I and organized the fascist regimes that followed. Prof. George Mosse, who mentored Ledeen at Wisconsin (but later maintained that his pupil had gone overboard in his embrace of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini), directed him to Italy in 1965, where he was adopted by two senior figures. One was Renzo De Felice, dean of postwar “universal fascism”studies, and the other was Count Vittorio Cini, former Minister of Communications in Mussolini’s wartime cabinet. The fabulously wealthy Cini, a top-ranking Venetian oligarch (founder of the Cini Foundation), had been an intimate, a self-described “fraternal friend,” of Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, head of the “Venetian group” in Italian politics and industry, who was Mussolini’s Finance Minister in 1925-27, and the real architect of the Mussolini regime. To assist Ledeen in his studies of fascism, Cini and De Felice opened the doors for him to the freemasonic archives in Rome and Venice, archives that have a security-clearance system tighter than that of many governments.

Under this patronage and out of these studies, Ledeen authored or co-authored articles and books that promoted a revival of fascism, but in a new, improved form. “It does not seem unreasonable to argue that fascism contained potentialities and that it might well have developed in another direction” (than Mussolini’s “foreign adventures” and alliance with Hitler), Ledeen wrote in Universal Fascism. That book was named after a tendency in 1920s fascist Italy called fascismo universale, whose adherents made certain criticisms of Mussolini. Giuseppe Bottai and other of the “young fascist intellectuals,” lionized by Ledeen in his book, had been sponsored by Count Cini, like Ledeen himself, only several decades earlier; the Cini Foundation’s own glowing biography of its founder tellshow in the 1930s “Cini established contacts with various elements oriented towards ‘dissidence’ within Fascism.” “

.8 Fondazione Giorgio Cini-Venezia

Gran parte di queste informazioni sono tratte dal sito ufficiale della Fondazione.

La fondazione Giorgio Cini è stata costituita in memoria dell’unico figlio maschio di Cini morto in un incidente aereo.

La Fondazione ha un impatto enorme sulla vita culturale Veneta, per mostrare questo riportiamo storia della fondazione, l’elenco dei membri legati alla famiglia Cini, altri centri legati o gestiti dalla fondazione, il direttivo della fondazione, gli amici della fondazione e Casa Cini di Ferrara.

(A) Fondazione

The Giorgio Cini Foundation is a non-profit cultural institution based in Venice, Italy. It was constituted by Count Vittorio Cini, in memory of his son Giorgio, with the aim of restoring the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore (devastated after 100 years of military occupation) and of creating an international cultural centre that would re-integrate the Island into the life of Venice.

The creation of the Foundation was one of the most considerable private initiatives of the 20th century. The importance of this undertaking was borne out by the initial investment committed to rehabilitate the Island and by the many events the Foundation has promoted or hosted since. It is further substanstiated by the cultural patrimony conserved on the Island and, since 1984, at the Gallery of Palazzo Cini at San Vio.

Alongside the Foundation's commitment to its own research and the conferences and seminars growing out of this work, the Island welcomes events sponsored by distinguished cultural and scientific organisations. It has even been the site of major international summits (inprimis the G7 in 1980 and 1987).

The role of the Giorgio Cini Foundation is attested by the many highly esteemed intellectuals, artists, politicians and economists who have been involved in its programme, and by the recollections of scholars and guests who have spent time on the Island.

The original site of Giorgio Cini Foundation : HTTP://www.cini.it

(B) Membri legati alla famiglia

Alcuni membri sono i discendenti di Vittorio Cini e degli Alliata come si può vedere da un estratto dei membri del direttivo. I legami di parentela sono direttamente visibili nello diagramma riportato a pagina 77

MEMBRI DI NOMINA DELL'UFFICIO DESIGNATO DEL FONDATORE :

- ALLIATA DI MONTEREALE Principe Giovanni ( Comitato direttivo).

INVITATI PERMANENTI:

- ALLIATA DI MONTEREALE Principe Dott. Fabrizio

- GUGLIELMI di VULCI CINI Marchesa Ylda

(C) ALTRI CENTRI

(i) INTERNI ALLA FONDAZIONE GIORGIO CINI

FONDO RESPIGHI

La moglie Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo ha donato, nel 1967, alla Fondazione Giorgio Cini la biblioteca e lo studio del grande compositore Ottorino Respighi, nonché i diritti sulle esecuzioni delle sue opere. Il Fondo organizza corsi di alto perfezionamento pianistico e concerti.

CULTURA POPOLARE VENETA

Iniziativa voluta e finanziata dalla Regione del Veneto, con specifica legge, per offrire un riferimento editoriale sistematico e unitario alla variegata realtà regionale di documentazioni, studi, linee di ricerca, in collaborazione con la Fondazione Cini, presso cui hanno anche sede il Comitato Scientifico ed il coordinamento editoriale.

FONDAZIONE SCUOLA DI SAN GIORGIO

Costituita nel 1997, per iniziativa delle Fondazioni Giorgio Cini e Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, la "Scuola di San Giorgio" si prefigge come obiettivo principale l'organizzazione di seminari e corsi di formazione intesi alla ricerca ed allo sviluppo delle tecnologie più avanzate per la restituzione dei beni culturali anche tramite la realizzazione di laboratori altamente specializzati.

ACCADEMIA MUSICALE DI SAN GIORGIO

Nel 1994 il maestro Rony Rogoff costituisce un complesso cameristico di giovani strumentisti italiani che avevano seguito i suoi corsi. Dall'aprile 1999, la Fondazione Cini sostiene l'attività - in collaborazione con la Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Verona - e ospita la sede del complesso, che assume la denominazione "Accademia Musicale di San Giorgio".

TEATRO VERDE

Tra le maggiori nuove opere della Fondazione Cini, edificato a partire dal 1952 (l'inaugurazione è del luglio 1954) su progetto degli architetti Luigi Vietti ed Angelo Scattolin, il «Teatro Verde», circondato dal ricostituito parco, fonde la solennità della architettura teatrale classica antica e la grazia preromantica di quella agreste.

PISCINA "CLEMENTE GANDINI"

Piscina coperta di dimensioni regolamentari, costruita nel 1961 come nuovo impianto per i centri formativi della Fondazione, è stata successivamente gestita in accordo con società sportive e istituzioni cittadine.

È in programma il suo importante restauro.

CENTRO DI CULTURA E CIVILTÁ

Uno dei tre centri originari della Fondazione Giorgio Cini, con personalità giuridica autonoma, cui, sino al 1985, facevano capo gli Istituti riuniti nella Scuola di San Giorgio per lo studio della Civiltà veneziana. Attualmente le iniziative sono soprattutto a carattere editoriale e si riferiscono alle pubblicazioni degli Istituti.

(ii) IN COLLABORAZIONE CON ALTRE ISTITUZIONI CULTURALI

FONDAZIONE CENTRO MUSICALE MALIPIERO

La Fondazione, che ha sede nella Casa di Malipiero ad Asolo, ha finalità di ricerca e di promozione dell'opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero e fu costituita nel 1986 da: Comune di Venezia, Gran Teatro La Fenice, Teatro Comunale di Treviso, Fondazione Giorgio Cini (depositaria di importanti archivi del maestro), Fondazione Levi, Comune di Asolo, Provincia di Treviso, Conservatorio "Benedetto Marcello" di Venezia.

ASSOCIAZIONE RICHARD WAGNER DI VENEZIA

Costituita per onorare la memoria del grande compositore morto a Venezia il 13 febbraio 1883, l'Associazione ha come soci fondatori il Comune di Venezia, il Gran Teatro La Fenice, la Fondazione Giorgio Cini, la Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, l'Ateneo Veneto, il Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, l'Associazione Culturale Italo-Tedesca, l'Associazione Amici della Fenice. Ne è presidente Giuseppe Pugliese.

SCUOLA PER LIBRAI "UMBERTO E ELISABETTA MAURI"

La Scuola nacque nel 1983 - unica in Italia e seconda in Europa dopo quella di Francoforte - in un momento di difficoltà per molti librai e intendeva accrescerne la professionalità e le capacità di gestione. Valentino Bompiani, subito eletto Presidente, ne parlò al professor Vittore Branca, allora Segretario Generale della Fondazione Cini, individuata come luogo ideale per ospitare i corsi di perfezionamento.

ARCHIVIO LUIGI NONO

L'Archivio Luigi Nono s'è costituito nel 1993, per generosa iniziativa della moglie Nuria Schönberg e conserva la quasi totalità del lascito di Nono, così come si presentava alla sua morte, nel maggio 1990. Si tratta di un luogo d'incontro, di ricerca, di studio sulla musica contemporanea, sulla complessità delle esperienze di frontiera del compositore veneziano.

(iii) CONVENZIONI

UNIVERSITA' DI VENEZIA

LA BIENNALE

TEATRO LA FENICE

REGIONE DEL VENETO

ACCADEMIA DEI LINCEI

(iv) ISTITUZIONI PRESENTI SULL'ISOLA DI SAN GIORGIO MAGGIORE

Palazzo Cini-Toscani-Ferraresi Mostre d’Arte

(D) Ecco la nuova Fondazione Cini, sotto la direzione di Giovanni Bazoli

Fonte: http://www.aidanews.it/articoli.asp?IDArticolo=2729

Download ottobre 2007. Articolo del 2003.

Due vicepresidenti:

Ignazio Musu, vice presidente rettore della Venice International University, professore di economia politica a Ca' Foscari e consigliere comunale della Margherita.

Giorgio Orsoni, altro vice presidente, avvocato amministrativista e professore di diritto a Ca' Foscari, è fra l'altro Procuratore di San Marco e Presidente di Save Engineering, con in curriculum la presidenza dell'Unione triveneta dei consigli dell'Ordine degli avvocati e dell'Ordine degli avvocati di Venezia, oltre che la rappresentanza del Veneto in seno al Consiglio nazionale forense.

Il nuovo Comitato Direttivo è composto, oltre che dal Presidente, Giovanni Bazoli e dai due Vice, da Giovanni Alliata di Montereale, da Enrico Chiari, da Giorgio Guglielmi di Vulcie dal nuovo componente Arnaldo Borghesi, che ha preso il testimone dall'assesore Marino Cortese, che resta in Consiglio Generale.

Ed ecco il nuovo Consiglio Generale, che resterà in carica per il triennio 2003-2005. Nominati dal Patriarca di Venezia, Monsignor Angelo Scola: Giovanni Alliata di Montereale, Giovanni Bazoli, l'Amb. Jacques Blot, Vittore Branca, Giovanni Pietro Castellani, Marino Cortese, Alfonso Desiata, Vittorio Gregotti, Giorgio Guglielmi di Vulci, Giorgio Orsoni, Corrado Passera, Francesco Sapio, Carlo Alberto Tesserin, Tiziano Treu, Francesco Valcanover e Renzo Zorzi. Cooptati dal Consiglio Generale: Paolo Biasi, Arnaldo Borghesi, Angelo Rampinelli, Domenico Siniscalco e Giorgio Vittadini. Rappresentanti delle istituzioni educative, sociali, culturali e artistiche nel territorio di San Giorgio: Roberto Cecchi, Enrico Chiari, Antonio Fanna, Enrico Filippi, Giancarlo Ligabue, Ignazio Musu, Giancarlo Tomasin.

In qualità di Revisori dei Conti sono stati confermati Giorgio Brunetti, Marino Grimani e Sergio Zambardi.

Dei nuovi consiglieri, Domenico Siniscalco, 48 anni, ordinario di Economia Politica all'Università di Torino e membro della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Stoccolma e del Royal Institute of International Affairs di Londra, è Direttore Generale del Tesoro.

Tiziano Treu, vicentino, 63 anni, ordinario di Diritto del Lavoro, è stato Ministro del Lavoro e della Previdenza Sociale nei governi Dini e Prodi e Ministro dei Trasporti e della Navigazione nel governo D'Alema. E' Senatore della Repubblica.

Carlo Alberto Tesserin, nato a Chioggia nel 1938, maestro del Lavoro e dirigente d'azienda, è Consigliere Regionale del Veneto e Presidente della Prima Commissione Affari Istituzionali della Regione.

Giorgio Vittadini infine, nato a Milano nel 1957, è Ordinario di Statistica Metodologica all'Università di Milano - Bicocca. Si occupa di organizzazioni non profit, sussidiarietà, federalismo, temi su cui ha scritto numerosi libri, ed è fondatore e presidente della Compagnia delle Opere.

I nostri più sinceri auguri al prof. Tiziano Treu che lo stimiamo anche come uomo politico.

(E) Gli amici della Fondazione Cini

Banca Intesa

Fondazione Cariplo

Alitalia

Autostrada Serenissima

Banco Popolare di Verona e Novara

Cerved Business Information

Fondazione Prada

Gruppo Caltagirone

Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso

Lazard & Co.

S.Pellegrino

…

Gli Amici di San Giorgio sono un gruppo ristretto e solidale di venticinque Istituzioni e Aziende, rappresentate dai loro vertici, che offrono il proprio sostegno alle attività culturali della Fondazione. Gli Amici di San Giorgio si riconoscono nei valori di rigoroso impegno di pensiero, di ricerca della verità e di fraterno incontro fra popoli e civiltà, propri della Fondazione Gli Amici di San Giorgio si riuniscono almeno una volta all'anno, in occasione della presentazione dei programmi della Fondazione. Gli Amici di San Giorgio hanno facoltà d'uso dei luoghi della Fondazione, per tre giorni l'anno, per iniziative consone al decoro e al prestigio dell'Istituzione. Gli Amici di San Giorgio ricevono tutte le pubblicazioni della Fondazione e sono invitati in forma privilegiata a tutte le manifestazioni della stessa. Gli Amici di San Giorgio vedranno rappresentati i marchi delle proprie Istituzioni e Aziende nelle principali attività di comunicazione istituzionale della Fondazione. I nuovi membri fra gli Amici di San Giorgio sono accettati a insindacabile giudizio del Comitato Direttivo della Fondazione, sentiti i membri effettivi in forma consultiva. Gli Amici di San Giorgio si impegnano a versare una quota di euro 100.000 (centomila) alla Fondazione Giorio Cini per il biennio 2003/2004, come erogazione liberale.

(F) Casa Giorgio Cini a Ferrara

La memoria di Giorgio, figlio di Vittorio Cini morto in un incidente aereo, fu onorata dal padre non solo con l’istituzione della Fondazione Cini , fu onorata anche a Ferrara con l'Istituto di cultura che prende il nome di «Casa Giorgio Cini»

La memoria di Giorgio fu onorata anche a Ferrara: nel 1950 il conte Vittorio donò alla Provincia Romana della Compagnia di Gesù la casa di origini trecentesche che Luigi Cini, di antica e nobile famiglia toscana trasferitasi nel XVII secolo nella città estense, acquistò nel 1922.
L'Istituto di cultura che prese il nome di «Casa Giorgio Cini», sorse allo scopo di "accogliere giovani residenti a Ferrara, già avviati agli studi medi e universitari, affinché fiancheggiando i naturali compiti delle rispettive famiglie, sia dato ad essi, assieme a un conveniente sollievo ricreativo, il miglior impulso a una preparazione culturale e ad una piena formazione educativa e morale". Per garantire la continuità degli ideali che ispirarono la donazione del conte, nel 1984, quando i Gesuiti dovettero lasciare Ferrara e la Casa passò alla Curia Arcivescovile della diocesi, si costituì per iniziativa di alcuni cittadini l'Associazione «Amici di Casa Cini», che affiancò, con il sostegno anche economico, la Direzione dell'Istituto nella realizzazione di iniziative culturali e di promozione umana e sociale.

.9 Principe Giovanni Alliata di Montereale

Fonte:http://www.archivio900.it/indicenomi/default.asp?id=1361.

Nasce a Rio de Janeiro nel 1921ed ereditera' in maniera poco chiara una fortuna in proprieta' di ogni tipo in Brasile.
Il principe Alliata di Montereale, Gran Maestro della potente loggia massonica degli Alam, leader del partito monarchico, e' uno dei mandante della strage di Portella delle Ginestre, come afferma Gaspare Pisciotta, poco prima di essere assassinato in carcere. Nel 1946 spendeva 2 milioni di allora al mese per sostenere ogni tipo di attivita' separatista in Sicilia.
Ha dilapidato un patrimonio in una vita piena di donne e tavoli da gioco oltre che di massoneria. Di disponibilita' finanziarie comunque ne ha sempre avute.
Diverra' anche Gran Maestro dell'osservanza massonica di Piazza del Gesu'. Sara' anche a capo di una loggia massonica coperta attraverso la quale intratteneva ambigui rapporti con uomini d'affari in Sudamerica.
Sara' il finanziatore del giornale "Il popolo di Roma" del Fronte Nazionale Monarchico.
Nel 1970 una "soffiata" gli permette di sfuggire alla cattura ordinata dalla Procura della Repubblica di Roma nell'ambito dell'inchiesta sul fallito golpe del principe Junio Valerio Borghese e di rifugiarsi all'estero. Secondo i giudici Alliata avrebbe partecipato alla stesura del progetto politico-militare ed avrebbe richiesto collaborazione ai boss di Cosa Nostra, che tramite Luciano Liggio, pero' rifiuteranno. Verra' poi prosciolto e tornera' tranquillamente in Italia.
Compare poi fra i destinatari di un avviso di garanzia inviato dalla magistratura di Padova che indaga sull'attivita' del gruppo neofascista la Rosa dei Venti.
La procura di Palmi emette un ordine di cattura contro di lui l'11 Maggio 1994 per "associazione a delinquere e associazione segreta per aver fatto parte di un gruppo massonico occulto con finalita' di interferenza sull'esercizio delle funzioni di organi costituzionali, di amministrazioni pubbliche, di enti pubblici e di servizi pubblici essenziali e per impedire ed ostacolare il libero esercizio del diritto di voto". Il 20 Giugno 1994 muore a Roma, mentre e' agli arresti domiciliari.

Fine Fonte:http://www.archivio900.it/indicenomi/default.asp?id=1361.

GIOVANNI ALLIATA DI MONREALE. Nella primavera del 1960 la massoneria ottiene il riconoscimento di quella Usa accentuando la componente anticomunista con la riunificazione col gruppo reazionario capitanato dal siciliano Giovanni Alliata di Monreale, massone, che più avanti entrerà nella P2 e mafioso implicato nella strage di Portella delle ginestre come mandante. Alliata di Monreale inizia anche un'opera di avvicinamento col gruppo di fascisti presenti nella massoneria: fra questi, Elio Sciubba, funzionario del ministero del Tesoro

.10 Collegamento tra Alliata e Cini

Diagramma C.A.M.

Il collegamento tra la famiglia Cini e Alliata di Montereale avviene con il matrimonio di Yana Cini, figlia di Vittorio Cini e Lyda Borrelli, con Fabrizio Alliata figlio di Giovanni Alliata(1) e Olga Matarazzo[1].

Riportiamo questo schema per chiarezza, ad esempio di Principi Alliata con il nome di Giovanni ve ne sono stati tanti. Siccome uno di questi è indicato in maniera poco idilliaca in varie fonti non vorremmo fosse confuso con altri suoi parenti. Tal principe, citato alla pagina precedente è in figura 1.1 quello nato dal matrimonio tra Olga Matarazzo e Giovanni Alliata di Trapani.

In particolare è importante non confondersi con uno dei membri attuali direttivi della Fondazione Cini di Venezia, sempre Principe Giovanni Alliata.

Le famiglie Cini, Alliata, Matarazzo hanno mantenuto la loro potenza, oltre in Italia particolarmente nei paese del Sudamerica come Brasile e Argentina.

"Alliata di Montereale - Cini - Materazzo" Chart

Filomena Sansivieri+Francesco Matarazzo

1.Prince
Giovanni Alliata
Trapani-Italy 13 August 1877
20 Jan 1938 Rio de Janeiro

Olga Matarazzo
Sao Paulo 1 Jul 1894
22 Nov 1996, Rome

Vittorio Cini
Ferrara 20 feb 1885
Venice 18 sep 1977

Lyda Borrelli
Genoa 22 Mar 1884
2 Jun 1959

.	Children of Giovanni
	1.1Prince Giovanni Alliata 26 Aug 1921 Rio de Janeiro 20 June 1996 Rome	1.2 Princess Anna Maria Alliata 22 Nov 1923	1.3 Prince Fabrizio Alliata 8 Jul 1926 Copenhagen

	Children
	Yana Cini Montereale 8 Jan 1924 Venice 5 Apr 89 Rome

Children of Prince Fabrizio and Yana Cini
1.3.1Prince Giovanni (29 Mar 1954) married Michela Vanon	1.3.2Prince Vittorio (10 Apr 1956) married Dialta Lensi Orlandi	1.3.3 Domizia Maria (8 sep 1958)	1.3.4Prince Giorgio (17 May 1960) married Giorgina Pontoriero	1.3.5Prince Paolo (3 Feb 1964) married Iona Mercedes Padilla

.11 La famiglia Matarazzo

source: http://www.gruppomatarazzo.it/storia.php
La Famiglia Matarazzo si distinse all’inizio del XX secolo nel mondo dell’imprenditoria internazionale, grazie a Francesco Matarazzo (1854-1937), diventato in Brasile Conte Francisco Matarazzo, proprietario di un impero industriale senza precedenti e fondatore di una dinastia che ancora oggi ha rappresentanti al governo. Francesco Matarazzo, primo di nove fratelli, apparteneva ad una famiglia benestante di Castellabate di Stabbia, perse il padre molto presto, e nel 1880 si imbarcò su un piroscafo alla volta del Brasile in cerca di fortuna. A differenza della maggior parte degli immigrati italiani dell’epoca Francesco aveva un grado d’istruzione superiore. A quell’epoca, il grasso suino era una merce molto richiesta, e Matarazzo se ne porta dietro un carico per cominciare la sua avventura brasiliana con un capitale iniziale. Ma era destino che la sua traiettoria cominciasse dal nulla: il carico di grasso, dopo aver attraversato felicemente l’Atlantico, affonda assieme a due bauli di vestiti, nel tragitto dal piroscafo al molo del porto di Santos.
Così il giovane Francesco, quando arrivò al porto di Santos nel 1881, all'età di 27 anni, dovette cominciare dal nulla, appena pochi soldi e i vestiti che aveva addosso.Si recò immediatamente a Sorocaba, all'interno dello Stato di São Paulo, dove iniziò a lavorare come bracciante nelle piantagioni dell’interno e appena riescì a raggruppare un certo gruzzolo aprì un emporio che vendeva grasso suino e altri articoli di prima necessità per i fattori italiani delle grandi fazendas locali, dai coltelli alle zappe, dai cappelli ai cerchioni per le ruote delle carrette. Guadagnò abbastanza per cominciare a barattare le proprie merci per farina, e con la farina cominciò a produrre spaghetti e maccheroni.
Con il capitale montò un allevamento di maiali per ottenere il grasso, e allo stesso tempo fondò il primo "mulino moderno" del Brasile, come annunciò un giornale del 1891, e la prima fabbrica di pasta.
A partire dal momento in cui si stabilì a São Paulo, Francesco Matarazzo avviò una serie di imprese che si moltiplicarono rapidamente e che coprivano svariate aree di interesse, molte delle quali notevolmente all'avanguardia per quell'epoca La spinta che movimentò lo sviluppo delle varie imprese Matarazzo nasceva dall’idea di Francesco non appoggiarsi a nessun fornitore, e di creare così fabbriche per la produzione di materie prime di cui aveva bisogno. Nel 1900 inaugurò un'industria per la macinatura del grano, un'attività industriale ancora sconosciuta nel paese. Il Mulino Moderno Matarazzo, invece degli scomodi barilotti di legno nei quali era venduta la farina sino allora, adottò i pratici sacchi di cotone che avevano fatto la loro apparizione in Europa nel decennio precedente, e il successo fu immediato. Gli ordini cominciarono a fioccare da tutto lo stato, e persino dagli stati brasiliani limitrofi.
Il nome Matarazzo iniziò a diventare famoso. Per insaccare la farina, comprò piantagioni di cotone e costruì una fabbrica di iuta, che prima doveva importare dall’Inghilterra. La fabbrica di iuta si trasformò presto in un impianto di filati di cotone, e Matarazzo entrò nel settore dell’abbigliamento.
Nulla era sprecato nel sistema industriale eretto dal dinamico imprenditore salernitano: dalle piantagioni di cotone i semi furono inviati a Sorocaba per l'estrazione di olio dal cotone, e nacque la prima fabbrica del genere a São Paulo, e con tale olio Matarazzo si inventò di fare prima il sapone, e poi prodotti per la pelle.
Il complesso industriale che creò in pochi anni Francesco Matarazzo copriva il settore alimentare, quello tessile, quello chimico e metallurgico, e quello petrolifero.
Le attività comprendevano anche il settore finanziario: nel 1900 prese parte alla fondazione della Banca Commerciale Italiana di San Paolo; alcuni anni dopo fu azionista, membro fondatore e primo presidente della Banca Italiana del Brasile; a partire dal 1911 diventò il rappresentante locale del Banco di Napoli, detentore del monopolio delle spedizioni di denaro verso l'Italia, effettuate dagli italiani che lavoravano all'estero.
Tutto questo prima della creazione della Casa Bancária Matarazzo
Amico di Guglielmo Marconi e di molti personaggi di spicco dell’alta società italiana, venne insignito del titolo di Conte dal re Vittorio Emanuele III per le sue attività filantropiche e beneficienti tanto in Brasile come a Salerno, dove finanzia la costruzione di un ospedale intitolato proprio al re d’Italia, e dove visse per tutta la durata della Prima Guerra Mondiale. Nel 1930 il giornale ‘Diario de São Paulo’ può scrivere: "E’ sorto un nuovo Stato brasiliano. E’ lo Stato Matarazzo, che copre tutta la geografia economica del Brasile: se lo stato di San Paolo ha un prodotto interno lordo annuo di 400 mila ‘Contos de Rei’, e lo stato di Rio de Janeiro di 270 mila ‘Contos’, le Industrias Reunidas Matarazzo S.A. incassano all’anno 350 mila ‘Contos’. Si può quindi affermare che il conte Matarazzo rappresenta dal punto di vista economico e finanziario il secondo Stato brasiliano".
Il Conte Francesco Matarazzo morì nel 1937, lasciando ai suoi eredi e successori un titolo nobiliare, che i pronipoti usano ancora oggi, e il più importante gruppo industriale dell’America Latina, definito all’epoca dall’Enciclopedia Britannica tra i primi sei gruppi industriali più importanti al mondo.
Francesco Matarazzo può essere considerato il più grande imprenditore del Brasile e uno dei più grandi capitalisti del mondo. I risultati, all’apice del successo, del suo impero industriale, che per tre decenni fu il maggiore dell’America Latina, sono sbalorditivi: più di 200 aziende, società di navigazione, banche, immensi possedimenti terrieni, filiali in molte parti del mondo, 30.000 dipendenti e un patrimonio che alla sua morte ammontava a oltre 20 miliardi di dollari. Oggi sui resti del parco industriale Matarazzo a San Paolo, sorge un centro commerciale che porta, in loro onore, il nome della grande dinastia
Erede e Presidente di questo grande gruppo industriale è stato il “Cavaliere del lavoro Ermelino Matarazzo di Licosa”, nonno di Livia Matarazzo di Licosa, fondatrice del Gruppo Matarazzo in Italia.
Ermelino Matarazzo, nato a Napoli il 15 giugno 1918, fu l’industriale che importò la Coca Cola in Italia, nonché l’inventore della famosa bibita Fanta, prodotta per la prima volta nella sua fabbrica SNIBEG S.P.A. di Napoli, da una formula da lui studiata insieme ad un’amica, una contessa siciliana proprietaria di agrumeti. Ci piace ricordare la figura di Ermelino Matarazzo di Licosa per gli ideali che hanno sempre guidato la sua vita: “Amore per la famiglia, amore per il lavoro”.
Era un uomo di uno spiccato carisma e di una brillante intelligenza, con la particolare inclinazione all’ascolto: ascolto nei confronti dei bisogni e dell’inventiva dei propri dipendenti e ascolto nei confronti del prossimo da qualsiasi parte venisse.
“Sono sempre stato convinto di volere e dovere vivere con il frutto del mio lavoro e non con le sopravvenienze (tali le ho sempre considerate, e meno male, visto che si sono completamente dissipate)di beni, sussidi, appannaggi pervenuti da assi ereditari, tanto notevoli nella mia famiglia paterna.
Preoccupato di non essere infettato dal morbo del successo, ho cercato di non perdere mai la mia identità, senza ambire ad un’alta posizione sociale o a un potere economico in termini di idolatria. Ho cercato di esercitare con umiltà e riconoscenza al Signore i privilegi che sempre più potevo acquisire.
Più che essere ‘qualcuno’, ho cercato di essere me stesso rispettando i principi etici, morali, legali, di Gentiluomo, di buon Figlio, Marito, Padre, Nonno.
Potenziare posti di lavoro sarebbe il mio testamento più felice”.

“Il potere di un uomo non è dato dalla classe sociale a cui appartiene, ma dalla stima che lo circonda”.

Ermelino Matarazzo di Licosa

.12 Appunti sull’attività politica dei fascisti italiani in Argentina dopo il 1945

di Federica Bertagna∗

Historiapolitica.com

Appunti sull’attività politica dei fascisti italiani in Argentina dopo il 1945

di Federica Bertagna∗

1. Nel novembre del 1950 in un articolo sul “Momento” di Roma intitolato “Alziamo il sipario sui gerarchi e i camerati della Internazionale nera”, è nominato tra gli altri Tullio Abelli, ex redattore del quotidiano del Movimento sociale italiano1 “Ordine sociale”2. Vi si legge che nel 1948 “il giornalista torinese e dirigente del Msi decise di accompagnare un gruppo di emigranti italiani nella Terra del Fuoco” e che a Buenos Aires “divenne amico intimo dei gerarchi rifugiatisi in quelle località”3.

In una nota al ministero dell’Interno del febbraio 1950, la questura di Torino aveva fornito i dettagli sui suoi trascorsi e movimenti: Abelli, che aveva aderito alla Rsi e combattuto nella X Mas, “dopo la liberazione fondò insieme con altri ex-fascisti, i cosiddetti ‘Fasci di azione rivoluzionaria’4, organizzazione clandestina tendente a ricostruire il disciolto partito fascista […] con passaporto rilasciatogli da questo ufficio si recò in Argentina quale corrispondente del giornale ‘Ordine sociale’”.

Ma il soggiorno era in realtà, secondo la polizia, una missione politica coperta: il giornalista “si recò nell’America del Sud anche e soprattutto per incarico dell’Ufficio Esteri, esistente in seno alla segreteria centrale del Msi”. Abelli era membro infatti del comitato centrale eletto dal primo congresso nazionale del Msi, nel 19485, e successivi rapporti lo nominano come uomo del partito in Sudamerica. Dopo un breve passaggio in Italia di ritorno da Buenos Aires, dal ’50 risultava trasferito in Brasile dove “esplicherebbe attività a favore del Msi”6.

Nel 1952 tra i dirigenti missini il solo Francesco Di Giglio, direttore del foglio neofascista “Risorgimento” di Buenos Aires, era residente all’estero. Dunque o Abelli era rientrato definitivamente in patria7, o continuava a fare la spola con compiti organizzativi, vivendo oltreoceano per brevi periodi, come induce a pensare la nota dei delegati al congresso del Msi di quello stesso anno: “Abelli porta il saluto delle collettività italiane dell’America Latina. Gli italiani all’estero credono in noi e ci sono vicini. Legge quindi il testo del telegramma inviato dal Congresso a Peròn”8. Un appunto del gabinetto del ministero dell’Interno, riferiva che nella circostanza erano rappresentati “i gruppi del Msi all’estero con le delegazioni di 14 città capitali: Istanbul, Buenos Aires, San Paolo del Brasile, Asunción, Madrid [...]”9.

2. A quel punto erano dunque stabiliti in forma organica i rapporti tra il partito della destra fascista in Italia e un’America latina concepita da subito come una risorsa in virtù certo della presenza in Brasile e in Argentina di folte collettività di connazionali ma anche di interlocutori sul piano politico nell’establishment di governo, in particolare al Plata. A gettare un ponte tra i due lati dell’oceano avevano provveduto i fuoriusciti fascisti, come scriveva la stampa italiana, che si occupò con insistenza nell’immediato dopoguerra della presunta “Internazionale nera”.

Nelle inchieste essa era presentata come una organizzazione che ruotava attorno ad alcuni dei gerarchi ricercati dalla giustizia rifugiatisi all’estero: un nome ricorrente era quello dell’ultimo segretario del Pnf, Carlo Scorza, che si era reso irreperibile sfuggendo all’arresto nel luglio del 1943 ma solo al principio del 1949 aveva in realtà cominciato a risiedere a Buenos Aires, dedicandosi ad attività in campo pubblicistico10. I giornali si spingevano finanche ad ipotizzare che il neofascismo italiano fosse l’emanazione di una centrale in Sudamerica. In corrispondenza con la serie di arresti a Roma che nel giugno del 1947 colpì il più importante dei gruppi illegali formati nel dopoguerra, i Far, sulla “Repubblica d’Italia” per esempio si leggeva: “in Argentina, dove come tutti sanno si sono rifugiate turbe di ex gerarchi, si è costituito un Governo Provvisorio Fascista clandestino, a cui farebbero in ultima analisi capo, da un punto di vista politico, organizzativo e finanziario, l’organizzazione dei Far e anche il Msi”11.

I cronisti indulgevano sovente a palesi e fantasiose esagerazioni; però è indubbio che si instaurarono rapporti tra i fascisti in patria e quelli “sudamericani” e che costoro, oltre a partire portandosi appresso ideali mai rinnegati, impiantarono all’estero cellule attive offrendo supporto logistico ai militanti inviati fin dal 1947 in America latina dalla neonata formazione della destra con mandato di sondare il terreno e organizzare sedi (era probabilmente il compito affidato ad Abelli). Gli esuli, che spesse volte non avevano più fatto politica in Italia dopo la conclusione della guerra, o a causa di condanne che li avevano privati dei diritti civili o perché costretti alla clandestinità, una volta sistemati a destinazione trovarono del resto un ambiente ideale per riprendere l’attività.

Da subito il Msi guardò a Perón come ad un possibile alleato o quantomeno ad un interlocutore sul piano politico. L’atto di nascita ufficiale della formazione neofascista risale al febbraio 1947 (la fondazione in clandestinità è precedente di qualche mese) e coincide con un congresso nel corso del quale i delegati dimostrarono grande interesse per la repubblica sudamericana12, arrivando a prospettare un asse con il capo del governo argentino e auspicando suoi passi ufficiali per esempio per risolvere con la restituzione di Trieste all’Italia la questione del confine orientale, uno dei punti cardine del programma del partito. Con una forzatura si potrebbe quasi prendere a prestito e applicare al Msi la formula della “doppia lealtà” impiegata per descrivere l’atteggiamento ambivalente dei due maggiori partiti dell’arco costituzionale, Dc e Pci: i missini avevano come riferimento esterno il paese che ambiva a creare una “terza posizione” tra i due blocchi guidati da Usa e Urss e un movimento, il peronista poi denominato “giustizialista”, che aveva costruito le sue fortune presentandosi come ideologia di mezzo tra comunismo e capitalismo.

Un veicolo fondamentale furono come detto i fuoriusciti: a parte la suggestione, l’immagine di un pellegrinaggio alla Casa Rosada con cui qualcuno ha rappresentato la loro intesa con il presidente esprime bene lo spirito con il quale i fascisti sbarcavano nell’Argentina peronista13. Dopo un’inchiesta del quotidiano “Paese Sera”14 sui finanziamenti al Msi, la questura di Roma l’11 ottobre 1950 dava per certo che i rapporti tra il neofascismo italiano e gli esuli fossero resi agevoli dalla benevolenza di cui questi ultimi godevano presso i governi e le classi dirigenti dei paesi ospiti:

Sono […] notorie le relazioni fra i dirigenti del Msi e gli ex gerarchi fascisti residenti nei paesi dell’America Latina, che hanno ivi incontrato il favore delle autorità governative locali, di enti, organizzazioni, istituti e privati e svolgono solidale attività per i loro “camerati” d’Italia e d’America15.

Quando in seguito all’apertura a Napoli degli sportelli del Banco de Italia y Rio de la Plata vennero svolte indagini su un flusso di denaro per il Msi, nell’aprile del 1952 il ministero degli Interni escluse che fosse utilizzato questo canale: “non sono finora emersi elementi atti a suffragare i sospetti segnalati sull’attività della Banca de Italia y Rio de La Plata e cioè che sarebbero cointeressati nella gestione anche vecchi gerarchi fascisti e che attraverso l’attività del banco possa trovarsi il modo di finanziare il Msi con fondi provenienti dall’Argentina”16.

Ma forse non c’era reale necessità di servirsi dei conti bancari perché si faceva ricorso a corrieri: quanti si erano rifugiati oltreoceano tornavano in Italia in viaggio o per motivi di lavoro, se non erano ricercati o avevano smesso di esserlo; e uomini organici o collegati al partito, come s’è visto nel caso di Abelli, si muovevano in direzione opposta. Il ministero degli Interni, dopo una segnalazione giunta dal console a Valparaíso, Aurelio Natoli, nel 1947 investigò anche sul trasporto di documenti verso il Cile e di “somme di denaro per sovvenzionare il movimento neofascista” verso l’Italia ad opera di presunti emissari che lavoravano a bordo delle navi: la prefettura di Genova escluse però il coinvolgimento dei due principali indiziati, Raffaele Montuoro e Pietro Pistelli, entrambi ex iscritti al Pnf che non avevano ricoperto cariche durante il ventennio17.

Nel 1949, stando a quanto riportò la stampa, durante i lavori del congresso del Msi, fu letto in apertura un messaggio augurale del movimento peronista e un fascista argentino salì sul palco rassicurando la platea con le parole “Abbiate fede, camerati. Risorgerete”, sicché Giorgio Almirante, dopo aver comunicato che i soldi occorrenti per l’organizzazione dell’assise congressuale erano arrivati da Buenos Aires, fu sommerso dalle grida di “Viva Perón” dei delegati. La pronta rettifica − “Mi avete frainteso! Li hanno mandati i nostri camerati costretti a risiedere in Argentina”18 − confermava il filo diretto con gli esuli. Tre anni più tardi, i finanziamenti li portò di persona uno dei più noti, Tullio Tamburini, secondo un appunto anonimo inviato al ministero dell’Interno da Milano il 16 luglio 1952:

nei locali ambienti neofascisti corre voce che il noto Tamburini, ex capo della polizia della sedicente repubblica sociale sarebbe giunto recentemente a Roma proveniente dall’Argentina. Secondo tale voce il Tamburini verrebbe quanto prima in questa città ove si tratterrebbe alcuni giorni per prendere contatti con i locali esponenti del Msi. La sua venuta in Italia viene messa anche in relazione all’imminenza del Congresso Nazionale del Msi in quanto lo si dice latore di una forte somma, avuta dagli ex gerarchi esuli in Argentina, da consegnare agli attuali dirigenti del Movimento Sociale per affrontare le spese di organizzazione19.

Non bisogna tuttavia immaginare che all’innegabile stabilizzarsi nel tempo di simili canali di collegamento tra Europa e Sudamerica corrispondesse l’“internazionale fascista” dipinta dai giornali, cioè una struttura compatta: l’organizzazione, se di organizzazione si può parlare, sembra in realtà abbastanza disarticolata se solo si osserva da vicino, passando dalle fonti di polizia a quelle interne, il microcosmo dei nostalgici in Argentina. Esso appare frastagliato e percorso da divisioni e non tutto schierato e disposto a sostenere i camerati in patria. Personalismi e ambizioni di leadership ne intaccavano provocavano vere rotture, come accadeva anche in Italia, dove le relazioni tra le componenti interne ed esterne al Msi spesso non erano idilliache, talvolta proprio a causa di vicende che avevano a che fare con gli esuli e in particolare con la questione materiale della spartizione dei fondi raccolti oltreoceano, come capitò tra il Movimento sociale e l’associazione neofascista Movimento italiano femminile dopo una colletta organizzata dal “Risorgimento”, il foglio fascista porteño di Francesco Di Giglio, episodio su cui torneremo tra breve.

Mentre nei loro rapporti a Roma i diplomatici insistevano in questa fase soprattutto sulla contrapposizione frontale tra il campo dei fascisti e quello degli antifascisti militanti, causa della disunione della collettività, Carlo Sforza, prossimo ministro degli Affari Esteri e primo inviato della Repubblica italiana nella regione, fu tra i primi a intuire questo elemento. Nella relazione stesa dopo il viaggio che l’aveva portato nell’estate del 1946 tra l’altro in Argentina, egli notò infatti che il nucleo di estremisti neofascisti era isolato dai moderati della sua stessa parte e che anzi, paradossalmente, con la loro azione i “repubblichini (o neofascisti che siano, non aventi niente in comune con i vecchi ingenui fascisti)” favorivano la riconciliazione tra gli antifascisti e i “fascisti di buona fede”20. Queste analisi, per quanto schematiche, coglievano un aspetto non secondario: la distanza tra i fascisti coloniali e i loro camerati provenienti dall’Italia che avevano aderito a Salò. Da un lato essa era simile a quella che si dà ogniqualvolta un nuovo strato migratorio si aggiunge ad un gruppo amalgamato di persone residenti all’estero da tanto tempo; e che dopo il 1945 si produsse infatti tra gli italiani stabilitisi in Argentina da vent’anni o arrivati addirittura prima della Grande guerra e i cosiddetti “ingegnieri” dell’ondata postbellica, perché gli antichi immigrati conservavano una acuta nostalgia per un’Italia che immaginavano però identica alla patria conosciuta nel momento in cui erano partiti o addirittura al paese raccontato loro dai genitori, ignorando quanto radicalmente si fosse nel frattempo trasformata e con essa i connazionali.

Dall’altro tra i fascisti c’era la complicazione rappresentata dal diverso tipo di militanza: i repubblichini avevano infatti alle spalle un’esperienza di guerra e di guerra civile e con il loro oltranzismo creavano in pratica gli stessi problemi che dopo il primo conflitto mondiale erano sorti all’arrivo oltreoceano degli ex combattenti e degli squadristi, osteggiati non solo dagli antifascisti ma anche spesso dai maggiorenti delle comunità italiane, che solo più tardi avrebbero aderito e sostenuto entusiasticamente il regime mussoliniano21. Inoltre c’erano differenze importanti sotto il profilo ideologico, come ha osservato il giornalista e pubblicista Pablo Giussani, che era figlio di padre italiano e da adolescente, alla fine degli anni trenta, aveva frequentato con assiduità gli ambienti dell’élite fascista di Buenos Aires, sviluppando tra l’altro una vera e propria infatuazione per la liturgia e i rituali del regime, in verità non così usuale all’estero22:

Los jercarcas […] llegaron a la Argentina como exponentes de un fascismo algo distinto del que recordaban los residentes de sus contactos de preguerra con la Italia de Mussolini. Como encarnaciones del “espiritu de Salò”, eran hombres cuyo fascismo, en contraste con el de 1939 o 1940, incluía un feroz rancor por la traición de los Saboya, de la aristocrazia nobiliaria y económica de Italia que abrazaba ahora a los invasores anglosajones con el mismo fervor con que, un cuarto de siglo antes, habían encontrado en los camisas negras una tabla de salvación23.

Per chiarire questo punto e capire se vi siano effettivamente stati un dibattito e un confronto sul piano delle idee dovremmo disporre di fonti andate quasi completamente perdute e in primis delle raccolte dei diversi giornali neofascisti che si pubblicavano nella capitale argentina. Che le cose stessero in termini così netti pare nondimeno poco probabile, tenuto conto che lo “spirito di Salò”, sia pure, come sempre all’estero, semplificato e declinato soprattutto come fedeltà al duce, albergava anche tra i fascisti d’Argentina, a partire dai vertici, ovvero da quel Vittorio Valdani che dal 1925 ne era il capo indiscusso24. Non mancavano anelli di raccordo perché si stabilisse una sintonia e un’unità d’azione tra i vecchi e almeno una parte dei repubblichini, alcuni dei quali del resto riconobbero di aver trovato a Buenos Aires un habitat ideale proprio grazie all’accoglienza dei notabili locali. Un caso emblematico è quello del citato Carlo Scorza, squadrista e ras di Lucca nonché ultimo segretario del Pnf e capo provincia in diverse città durante la Rsi, il quale, giunto nella capitale argentina dopo una lunga serie di peripezie, dapprima si affidò ad alcuni connazionali25, quindi nel maggio del 1949 fu presentato proprio a Valdani. Cominciò un sodalizio sostanziato dai finanziamenti erogati a favore delle attività in campo editoriale dell’ex gerarca, di cui la biografia di Valdani che questi scrisse nel 1955 fu una sorta di suggello. In essa Scorza celebrò sia il capitano d’impresa capace di costruire un impero industriale, sia l’italiano all’estero animato da un sentimento di “devozione religiosa e tetragona alla patria che lo indusse ad affrontare senza la minima esitazione tremende responsabilità sino al punto da mettere in gioco tutto il suo lavoro, le sue fortune e la sua stessa esistenza”26. Dove era chiara l’allusione alle scelte giudicate disinteressate e coraggiose di Valdani, che si iscrisse al Pnf nel momento della sua crisi peggiore, dopo l’assassinio Matteotti, rifondando il fascio di Buenos Aires, ma poi soprattutto abbracciò nel 1943 la causa della Repubblica di Salò, rimanendone il rappresentante al Plata, nonostante il mancato riconoscimento argentino e nonostante gli alleati lo avessero incluso nella “lista nera” degli industriali sottoposti a boicottaggio, costringendolo a rinunciare alle cariche nei consigli di amministrazione delle sue aziende. In considerazione di questo schierarsi a fianco di Mussolini nei momenti più difficili, era facile prevedere che Valdani diventasse dopo il 1945 il punto di riferimento degli esuli in arrivo dall’Italia e che fosse pronto ad appoggiare loro iniziative, come sarà proprio per la rivista politico-culturale di Scorza, “Dinámica social”. Più che causa di dissidi in realtà, secondo quanto ha osservato ancora Giussani, la differente prospettiva dei camerati sbarcati nel dopoguerra fu all’origine di dinamiche interessanti nel rapporto dei fascisti con il peronismo: furono proprio costoro, che “inauguraban su vida de exiliados en el país con visitas de agradecimiento, curiosidad o camaradería a Perón”27 a far da tramite nell’avvicinamento progressivo al capo del governo dell’élite dei nostalgici locali, che lo avevano guardato con diffidenza da principio per il suo scontro con l’Unión Industrial Argentina, di cui molti di essi, giunti ai vertici della vita economica del paese, erano membri. Il quadro dei rapporti interni nel gruppo in Argentina era complesso; difficilmente lo si può riassumere in una formula. Alcuni dei fuoriusciti accusavano per esempio di crescente disimpegno sì la vecchia guardia dei notabili ma insieme i camerati con cui condividevano la sorte dell’esilio. Le critiche nei confronti di quanti una volta al sicuro all’estero avevano rinunciato alla militanza rimbalzavano anche dall’Italia, dove ci si rammaricava dello scarso apporto e dell’incapacità degli ultimi arrivati di smuovere e mobilitare la colonia. 3. Sono rivelatori a tale proposito i carteggi del Movimento italiano femminile (Mif), un’organizzazione neofascista fondata nel 1946 da Maria Pignatelli per soccorrere i fascisti in carcere o alle prese con i processi28. Il Mif per svolgere la sua opera cercò subito interlocutori sia nei settori “rimasti italiani” delle comunità sudamericane sia tra i fascisti espatriati, che in alcuni casi aveva del resto assistito prima della partenza. La fonte ci offre peraltro una inquadratura un po’ laterale sugli scambi tra i due lati dell’oceano: non vi si fa riferimento ad un’azione politica in senso stretto, visto che l’associazione della Pignatelli era interessata pressoché esclusivamente ad aiutare e liberare i “perseguitati” in prigione. Peraltro è probabile che un numero non piccolo di nostalgici fuori d’Italia scegliesse di mantenere soltanto in questa forma i legami con la madrepatria e partecipasse ad iniziative occasionali di raccolta fondi senza avere contatti e svolgere attività nelle sezioni estere del Msi; ma servirebbe il riscontro delle carte del partito relative alle connessioni con l’estero per fare luce su ciò. Poco dopo la fondazione del Mif, tra la fine del 1946 e l’inizio del 1947, quando trovare fondi in Italia era ancora problematico a causa del clima segnato dalla guerra civile, la Pignatelli aveva ottenuto l’importante contributo dal Brasile della famiglia Matarazzo di San Paolo, ma presto dovette fare i conti con il progressivo spegnersi degli entusiasmi che avevano circondato la sua opera a favore dei detenuti. Nell’aprile del 1948, esasperata per la carenza di risorse, la segretaria inviò una lettera ad un presunto ingegner “Franchi” (così la firma in calce ma si trattava evidentemente di uno pseudonimo dietro cui si celava un ex collaboratore dell’associazione giunto in Argentina alla fine del 1947: per i toni deferenti nei confronti della principessa, improbabile sia da identificare con l’ex segretario del Pnf Francesco Giunta29, del quale nell’archivio del movimento si conserva una missiva del 1949 siglata con le iniziali30), esortandolo senza mezzi termini a smuovere i camerati a Buenos Aires. Prese inoltre a pretesto l’atteggiamento tenuto durante un viaggio in Italia dall’ex ministro dell’Agricoltura della Rsi, Edoardo Moroni, che lavorando per il governo argentino a Buenos Aires sarebbe stato nella condizione ideale per servire la causa, per biasimare in generale la condotta dei gerarchi espatriati: “Moroni è venuto via, senza farsi vivo con noi, nemmeno con Monsignore [sc. Silverio Mattei, assistente ecclesiastico del Mif] e ne siamo indignati. Aveva il dovere di aiutare, invece sono di un egoismo crasso”. Nella replica il 6 luglio del 1948, “Franchi” fece presente le difficoltà che lui e la responsabile del Mif nella capitale argentina, Emma Castronovo, avevano dovuto fronteggiare per “la scarsa sensibilità alle sofferenze altrui, che caratterizza molti nostri…ex camerati” e si sfogò a sua volta: Basterebbe che ogni fortunato “ex” che è riuscito a mettere in salvo se stesso e la famiglia, con relative dotazioni mobiliari e liquide, contribuisse con l’equivalente mensile di quanto spendono nelle colazioni che sogliono offrire ai loro conoscenti, per dare a Voi i mezzi per fare del Bene […] anche quello che Voi mi scrivete circa quanto avviene in Italia in certi settori a noi vicini, mi conferma nell’opinione che soltanto l’idea vivrà ancora ma che gli “uomini” che ne furono gli esponenti sarà bene che spariscano per sempre dalla futura storia d’Italia se i loro sentimenti più evidenti sono soltanto l’ambizione personale e il meschino interesse particolare!31 In parte la mancanza di risultati dipendeva dalla incompatibilità e incomunicabilità con i maggiorenti locali: “Franchi” ammetteva di non aver neppure tentato di raggiungere “le persone più influenti del campo industriale e finanziario italiano, che potrebbero senza dubbio dar molto, ma che io non mi sento di avvicinare, perché mi sento troppo lontano dai loro sentimenti e dal loro…passato”. Piero Parini segnalava analoghi problemi, che lo spingevano ad isolarsi: Non ho rapporti con l’ambiente. Le mie impressioni generali sull’ambiente non sono favorevoli per ragioni di varia indole e perché temo che si stiano ripetendo alcuni degli errori che tanto ci hanno nuociuto in passato. Si tratta come le ripeto di impressioni personali ed è per questo che ho scarsi rapporti con quell’ambiente32. Entrambi riconoscevano di non poter dedicare le necessarie energie al Mif anche perché pressati da urgenze di lavoro, per quanto l’ex capo provincia di Milano si dicesse soddisfatto dei risultati ottenuti con la sua impresa metallurgica. Una missiva successiva di “Franchi” apriva invece squarci su una condizione di precarietà economica che spiega perché molti non dessero da oltreoceano alcun contributo: se le possibilità di affermazione e rapido avanzamento professionale che offriva l’Argentina all’epoca rafforzavano la tendenza di ognuno a rinchiudersi nel proprio particolare, nel suo caso non era il disinteresse ma la necessità di guadagnarsi da vivere che lo costringeva a confinare nei ritagli di tempo la propaganda a favore dell’associazione: Si sono aggiunte poi alle difficoltà di carattere ambientale, quelle personali derivanti dall’impossibilità di assentarmi dal lavoro, che mi assorbe per l’intera giornata e col quale devo procurarmi i mezzi necessari per tirare avanti alla meglio, in questo primo periodo di ambientamento, nel tentativo di aprirmi una strada con le mie modeste forze, senza ricorrere ad alcuno, perché qua ognuno pensa ai casi suoi33. Nel luglio del 1949, dopo che la Pignatelli gli aveva chiesto di raccogliere fondi per curare uno dei figli di Mussolini (“Avvertite Vittorio che Romano è da me con la madre; è molto grave con i due polmoni presi”)34, ribadendo che era imperdonabile che chi come lui conosceva direttamente il Mif per avervi collaborato passasse il mare “dimenticando tutto”, Francesco Giunta analizzò in termini non diversi da quelli di Franchi e Parini la situazione a Buenos Aires e la sua personale, aggiungendo anche alcune significative informazioni sull’esistenza (o sulla sopravvivenza) di associazioni fasciste nella capitale, che a quanto pare versavano a quella data in condizioni non floride ma rimanevano attive: Le molte collette fatte finora per gli uni e per gli altri fanno finito per scocciare la gente e coloro fra i nostri che hanno larghi mezzi non si occupano più di nulla, da quando la cara patria è diventata una ciabatta rotta: solo la massa dei piccoli e degli umili è compatta, arrabbiata e irreducibile [sic] e sono molti e sono tanti ma non hanno mezzi se non per tenere in piedi le loro organizzazioni, che sono in fondo quelle di prima senza, naturalmente, gli aiuti che avevano una volta…Io sono ancora “fra color che sono sospesi” perché Cencelli35 non viene più e da me solo non me la sento di prendere iniziative agricole a grande raggio, comunque pri[ma] di ripassare l’oceano è bene pensarci due volte36. Vari biglietti di ringraziamento della Pignatelli a sconosciuti italiani d’Argentina confermavano che a mandare contributi erano più spesso connazionali di modeste possibilità o comunque che non facevano parte dell’establishment della colonia, anche se occasionali donazioni arrivarono altresì da nomi noti, come l’ex capo della polizia Tullio Tamburini, che nel novembre del 1947 inviò attraverso tale Pierluigi Sirtori37 del denaro per Romano Giovanni, detenuto nel carcere di San Vittore38; o come la moglie di Vittorio Valdani, Lina, che versò direttamente al Mif. La scarsa generosità del notabilato emerse nel corso della campagna per una raccolta di denaro a favore dell’assistenza ai camerati in Italia, promossa nell’estate del 1947 da Francesco Di Giglio attraverso il suo giornale, “Il Risorgimento”: la somma fu messa assieme grazie alla generosità di simpatizzanti senza grandi mezzi; poco venne in proporzione dagli altri, come il direttore del foglio porteño aveva previsto e anticipato alla principessa, per non alimentare speranze eccessive sull’esito della campagna: “Non ci facciamo troppe illusioni, perché l’amor di Patria qui è sentito più che altro dai modesti, dagli umili. Gli emigranti arricchiti hanno, nel 99% dei casi, il cuore duro e l’anima arida. Ma siamo certi che qualcosa faremo, qualche dolore leniremo”. Le modalità di spartizione del denaro posero termine alla collaborazione tra i due. La segretaria del Mif infatti protestò ripetutamente (minaccerà ad un certo punto di rivolgersi agli avvocati), perché convinta che la sottoscrizione sarebbe stata destinata al completo agli aiuti ai detenuti per suo tramite: era lo stesso conflitto d’interessi che in Italia l’aveva più volte portata a scontrarsi con i camerati del Movimento sociale, di fronte al quale rivendicava la separazione totale tra le funzioni del partito e quelle del movimento, convinta della maggiore urgenza, se non rilievo, delle seconde. Alla fine con Di Giglio dovette accontentarsi della metà dei contributi raccolti, che fu consegnata tra l’altro solo nel giugno del 1948: l’11 Renato Romanini ringraziò l’armatore Achille Lauro, che dopo aver ricevuto il versamento (oltre mezzo milione di lire, cifra non proprio modesta all’epoca) aveva messo a disposizione l’agenzia marittima a Buenos Aires per il trasferimento in Italia. Di Giglio fece presente che al principio era al contrario previsto di assegnare tutto al Movimento sociale: e non per scopi politici o per finanziare giornali, come la Pignatelli aveva sostenuto, insinuando che i soldi fossero stati usati per sistemare i conti del periodico “Ordine sociale”, ma per la sezione del partito deputata all’assistenza. In ogni caso la penuria di fondi a Buenos Aires era grave come quella che affliggeva l’associazione: una parte della somma era stata momentaneamente dirottata per tenere in vita “Il Risorgimento”, che rischiava di dover sospendere le pubblicazioni perché “la tipografia non voleva sentir ragioni né si trovò un italiano disposto ad avallare un credito”: se fanno qualche versamento per quell’iniziativa [sc. l’assistenza in Italia] i nostri bravi connazionali − così poco malleabili sul terreno economico − non cavano di tasca nemmeno un centesimo per il giornale che vive anche della solidarietà dei connazionali […] a San Paolo (Brasile) il rappresentante del Risorgimento cerca di fare qualcosa: ma anche lì son duri e tutto un conte Matarazzo, ricco sfondato, se l’è cavata con la vergognosa somma di cinquemila lire. Spero di poter fare qualcosa di meglio in Cile dove c’è una piccola ma ottima Collettività in occasione di un mio prossimo viaggio colà […] Ho parlato qui con il Centro Femenino de Asistencia: nulla da fare, per la solita malattia dell’esibizionismo e del cannibalismo che tanto caratterizza noi italiani39. Neppure i fascisti “coloniali” di Buenos Aires erano dunque immuni dalla classica e universalmente deprecata piaga che affliggeva le collettività all’estero, la tendenza a frazionarsi: il “Centro Feminino de Asistencia” nominato da Di Giglio aveva preferito contattare autonomamente la Pignatelli mettendosi a disposizione per l’invio di pacchi piuttosto che lavorare assieme ai camerati di lì. L’organizzazione degli aiuti alla madre patria era da sempre uno dei momenti in cui si acutizzavano tensioni e sorgevano antagonismi e divisioni nelle colonie, poiché per un verso la direzione dei comitati costituiva un’importante vetrina e trampolino per ottenere il riconoscimento dei connazionali e delle stesse rappresentanze diplomatiche italiane, per l’altro la gestione dei fondi, quasi mai trasparente, attirava critiche e sospetti di abusi. Nella fattispecie le evidenti smagliature anche nei rapporti tra vicini continentali revocavano in dubbio l’esistenza della famigerata “internazionale nera”: i fascisti d’Argentina tentarono senza successo di rivolgersi ad altri nuclei per tenere in piedi le loro iniziative politiche e pubblicistiche perché gli stessi camerati che dai paesi sudamericani facevano arrivare i finanziamenti in Italia erano poco propensi a supportare compagni di fede oltreoceano. Dinamiche piuttosto scontate e non dissimili da quelle che avevano diviso (e continuavano a dividere) il fronte degli antifascisti, spesso incapaci di superare attriti politici e ideologici e gelosie personali e timorosi di perdere la propria autonomia appoggiando le attività dei connazionali residenti in altri stati40. Alcuni episodi nel corso della campagna promossa da Di Giglio mostrarono che quando si trattava di flussi di denaro non funzionava una rete fascista ma piuttosto una serie di canali indipendenti che allacciavano le periferie al centro, mentre c’era una certa circolazione delle informazioni attraverso la stampa etnica; e singoli membri delle comunità italiane del Cono Sur (Argentina e Cile) e nelle due maggiori città della regione, Buenos Aires e San Paolo, erano in collegamento. Alcuni componenti della stessa famiglia Matarazzo che il direttore del “Risorgimento” additava come esempio dello scandaloso disinteresse dei notabili in Sudamerica in più occasioni spedirono autonomamente somme al Mif, con cui dialogavano tramite Andrea Ippolito, esule fascista in Brasile che aveva sposato una delle figlie della casata di imprenditori: un promemoria della Pignatelli del gennaio del 1947 segnala l’intenzione di affidare a lui il comitato dell’associazione a San Paolo. La lettera per Ippolito fu passata alla cognata Dora Matarazzo, in quel momento in viaggio in Italia, attraverso una conoscente, come era prassi per la principessa, che per ragioni di sicurezza in quei mesi non utilizzava per la corrispondenza più delicata il servizio postale41. Anche il professor Francisco Borrelli, rappresentante nella capitale paulista della casa editrice nazionale portoghese, si indirizzò direttamente alla Pignatelli. Nel febbraio del 1948, in un italiano che qua e là tradiva la lunga permanenza all’estero, le spiegò di aver organizzato una sottoscrizione tra i connazionali dopo aver letto l’appello per la “Crociata di solidarietà italiana per l’aiuto ai fratelli che soffrono” pubblicato sul “Risorgimento” in Argentina e di essere pronto a trasferire al Mif il ricavato, frutto di una decina di elargizioni, per mezzo di un suo parente in Italia. Invitato ad occuparsi con continuità dell’associazione, Borrelli tornava a farsi vivo in luglio: scriveva questa volta di aver fatto ricorso per raggiungere più persone “all’ausilio di un settimanale italiano, ‘Tribuna Italiana’”, il foglio creato alcuni mesi prima a San Paolo da un altro fascista fuoriuscito, il trevigiano Piero Pedrazza, e di aver ottenuto buoni risultati. La seconda serie di sottoscrittori comprendeva in effetti una cinquantina di nominativi, tra cui un medico brasiliano e una coppia di italiani residenti a Buenos Aires42. 4. Dal fatto che il Msi e, nonostante le continue lamentele della Pignatelli, anche il Mif poterono valersi per anni dell’apporto del Sudamerica per i finanziamenti ed avere loro uomini in Argentina si potrebbe dedurre che partito e movimento godessero di un seguito locale cioè che da un lato avessero ereditato i consensi di chi aveva creduto in Mussolini; dall’altro avessero raccolto adesioni tra i nuovi arrivati nelle collettività. Due decenni prima della fondazione nel 1971 dei “Comitati tricolori italiani nel mondo”43, che marcherà una svolta portando ad una forte intensificazione della sua attività tra gli emigrati, in particolare tra quelli residenti in Europa (comune peraltro in quegli anni a tutte le forze politiche), il Movimento sociale aveva sezioni in Sudamerica: oltre a Di Giglio, che come detto presenziò ad alcuni dei primi congressi in qualità di rappresentante nella capitale argentina del Msi44, in Argentina era all’opera come delegato per la città di Córdoba uno degli esuli, Davide Fossa; mentre in Cile, a Valparaíso, c’era un gruppo di fascisti raccolto attorno a Rodolfo Carnio Perich e al suo giornale, “Le campane di San Giusto”. Ma non sappiamo quanti fossero gli iscritti che facevano politica fuori dai momenti di mobilitazione classici (le collette e le petizioni); né se, come aveva segnalato il console Natoli riferendosi a Valparaíso, quella fascista fosse nel dopoguerra l’unica compagine che si richiamava ad un partito italiano. Nella primavera del 1955 “La Tribuna italiana”, il citato periodico neofascista di San Paolo, commenta la presunta intenzione del governo Scelba di concedere il voto agli italiani all’estero per “ottenere voti anticomunisti”. Il giornale, ironizzando sull’iniziativa di un presidente del Consiglio che “considera retoricume tutto ciò che esalta e commuove lo spirito dell’italiano all’estero” ma poi pensa di usare gli emigrati per frenare l’avanzata delle sinistre, sottolinea che i connazionali in Brasile sono in ogni caso pronti a rispondere all’appello e che non ci sono dubbi sull’esito della consultazione elettorale: Lista patriottica “in testa alla quale siano idealmente ravvisabili i nomi di Mussolini e Graziani”, 75%; lista democristiana, 15%; lista partitini 8%; e lista socialcomunista 2%. L’articolo viene immediatamente ripreso in Argentina dal “Risorgimento” di Di Giglio, che si associa agli auspici dei camerati paulisti, mentre il “Corriere degli italiani”, che era stato fondato nel 1949 dall’antifascista Ettore Rossi come settimanale e dopo essere diventato nel 1954 quotidiano era ormai il foglio più autorevole e diffuso della collettività della capitale, assume una posizione critica: una chiamata alle urne dei connazionali all’estero oltre a presentare una serie di difficoltà tecniche, li avrebbe riportati al clima avvelenato di dieci o vent’anni innanzi. Inoltre, una campagna elettorale con “articoli accesi, discorsi roventi, adunanze manifestazioni, accuse controaccuse, calunnie e querele” rischiava di urtare la sensibilità delle autorità locali “dando loro l’idea di un fenomeno del tutto inesistente e cioè una specie di Stato nello stato”45. Dopo che della “vecchia questione del voto agli italiani all’estero”, come poteva definirla già allora il quotidiano romano “Il Messaggero” (nella penisola se ne discuteva dal lontano 1908…) chiosando il dibattito sviluppatosi oltreoceano e associandosi ai rilievi di Rossi, si era occupata nel 1947 l’Assemblea Costituente, in quello stesso 1955 − e la coincidenza dei tempi non è evidentemente casuale − un senatore del Msi, Lando Ferretti, presentò una proposta di legge in materia, la prima delle quaranta esaminate dai due rami del Parlamento fino all’approvazione definitiva della normativa nel 200146. A un decennio dalla conclusione della guerra, dunque, i missini, al pari dei loro camerati in Brasile e Argentina, erano convinti di avere raggiunto (o mantenuto) il consenso della maggioranza dei connazionali nelle due principali colonie sudamericane e di avere pronto un serbatoio potenziale di suffragi da far fruttare in patria. Al contrario i democratici come Rossi, in passato uno dei leader del fronte antifascista al Plata, dipingevano una situazione ormai completamente normalizzata descrivendo una comunità ben inserita nella società ospite e, se non indifferente, lontana dalle contese politiche “nazionali”47. Probabile fosse questa la lettura più vicina al vero. Nel marzo del 1955 il console generale a Buenos Aires, nel rapporto annuale relativo all’attività degli uffici nell’anno precedente, tornava a ribadire lo spreco di risorse rappresentato dall’invio delle schede elettorali oltreoceano da parte dei comuni italiani48: a fronte delle poche decine di interessati che avevano richiesto l’iscrizione nelle liste, i costi di spedizione erano esorbitanti e un impiegato era distaccato in pianta stabile al “reparto elettorale” e sottratto a compiti più utili. Se fosse passato, aggiungeva il funzionario, “il progetto recentemente ventilato da qualche giornale locale − ma avversato da altri − e già dibattuto anche in Patria di far affluire alle urne i voti degli italiani all’estero”, sarebbe diventato impossibile gestire le pratiche con lo scarso organico a disposizione49. Il problema si sarebbe in effetti posto, ma solo cinquant’anni più tardi, quando in occasione delle elezioni politiche del 2006 gli italiani all’estero per la prima volta sarebbero stati chiamati ad eleggere loro rappresentanti nei due rami del Parlamento italiano. L’alto e per alcuni paesi sorprendente tasso di partecipazione al voto ha confermato una volta di più quanto siano complessi i percorsi dell’identità etnica in emigrazione50. Ma questa, come si dice, è un’altra storia.

Note:

∗ Università degli Studi di Verona, Italia. El texto sintetiza algunas

secciones del libro “La patria di reserva. L’emigrazione fascista in

Argentina” (Donzelli Edizione, Roma, 2006), cuya traducción será publicada

en 2007 por Siglo XXI de Argentina.

1 Nel Movimento sociale italiano (Msi), fondato nel dicembre del 1946, si raccolsero reduci e nostalgici del fascismo mussoliniano: per quasi cinquant’anni, dalle elezioni del 18 aprile 1948 fino alla sua trasformazione in Alleanza Nazionale (1995), il Msi rappresentò l’estrema destra nel Parlamento italiano.

2 Il quotidiano “Ordine sociale”, diretto da Mirko Giobbe, uscì a Roma come organo ufficiale del Msi dal marzo all’agosto del 1948. Tra i collaboratori figuravano, oltre a Giorgio Almirante, Pino Romualdi e Augusto De Marsanich. Sul foglio, nazionalista, antiamericano e schierato sulle posizioni dei “socializzatori”, si veda la scheda di U. Di Meglio, Il ruolo della stampa nella nascita del Msi, “Rivista di studi corporativi”, 11, 5-6, 1981, p. 234.

3 Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Acs), Ministero dell’Interno (Mi), Pubblica Sicurezza (Ps), 1950, b. 29, fasc. neofascismo 1949-1950. Qui anche le citazioni di seguito nel testo.

4 Sui Far si veda la ricostruzione di uno dei fondatori: M. Tedeschi, Fascisti dopo Mussolini. Le organizzazioni clandestine neofasciste 1944-1947, Settimo Sigillo, Roma, 1996 (1a 1950). Più in generale sul neofascismo dopo l’ 8 settembre 1943 cfr. G. Parlato, Fascisti senza Mussolini. Le origini del neofascismo in Italia, 1943-1948, il Mulino,

Bologna, 2006.

5 Acs, Mi, Gabinetto (Gab), Partiti politici 1944-1966, b. 87, fasc. 195/P/96/4.

6 Acs, Mi, Gab, Partiti politici 1944-1966, b. 89, fasc. 195/P/98.

7 Acs, Mi, Ps, 1952, b. 29, fasc. neofascismo 1949-1950.

8 Acs, Mi, Gab, Partiti politici 19441966,

b. 87, fasc.195/P/96/3.

9 Acs, Mi, Gab, Partiti politici 1944-1966, b. 87, fasc. 195/P/96/3.

10 La notizia fu riferita da Arpesani: cfr. Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (Asmae), Affari politici (Ap) 1946-1950, b. 8,fasc. 3.

11 Il ritaglio dell’articolo della “Repubblica d’Italia”, che è del 22 giugno 1947 ed è firmato dalla sigla “Gust”, si trova in Acs, Mi, Ps, 1947-1948, b. 66, carte sparse.

12 Acs, Mi, Gab, Partiti politici 1944-1966, b. 89, fasc. 195/P/99.

13 Cfr. P. Giussani, Montoneros. La soberbia armada, Tiempo de ideas, Buenos Aires, 1992 (1a 1984), p. 115.

14 Cfr. “Paese Sera”, 10 settembre 1950.

15 Acs, Mi, Ps, 1950, b. 29, fasc. Movimento sociale italiano II.

16 Acs, Mi, Ps, 1950, b. 29 bis, fasc. Napoli Msi. Il Banco de Italia y Rio de La Plata era controllato da Vittorio Cini e attraverso la holding Fabril Financiera gestiva partecipazioni azionarie in diversi settori industriali. Uno degli uomini forti del cosiddetto “Gruppo Fabril”, che riuniva imprese con un totale di 12000 dipendenti nel 1948, era Vittorio Valdani. Cfr. C. Lussana,1946: la prima frontiera. Dalla corrispondenza argentina di Agostino Rocca, Fondazione Dalmine, Dalmine, 1999, pp. 81-82.

17 Acs, Mi, Ps, 1947-1948, b. 59, fasc. neofascismo all’estero.

18 F. Bertagna, Fascisti e collaborazionisti verso l’America (1945-1948), in P. Bevilacqua, A. De Clementi, E. Franzina (a cura di), Storia dell’emigrazione italiana, I, Partenze, Donzelli, Roma, 2001, p. 353.

19 Acs, Mi, Gab, Partiti politici 1944-1966, b. 87, fasc. 2, sf. 195/P/93.

20 La relazione di Sforza a De Gasperi, del 9 ottobre 1946, è citata in L. Incisa di Camerana, L’Argentina, gli italiani, l’Italia. Un altro destino, Spai, Tavernerio, 1998, p. 535.

21 Cfr. su questo punto le osservazioni di É. Vial, I Fasci in Francia, in E. Franzina e M. Sanfilippo (a cura di), Il fascismo e gli emigrati. La parabola dei Fasci italiani all’estero (1920-1943), Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2003, pp. 27-42.

22 Cfr. E. Franzina e M. Sanfilippo, Introduzione a Franzina e Sanfilippo, Il fascismo e gli emigrati cit., p. XIII.

23 Giussani, Montoneros. La soberbia armada cit., pp. 115-116.

24 Vittorio Valdani (1870-1964), ingegnere milanese, lavorò in campo minerario negli Stati Uniti e in Russia prima di essere assunto come segretario particolare di Pirelli nel 1899. Nel 1908 prese a dirigere per conto della casa madre milanese lo stabilimento della Compañia General de Fósforos in Argentina; successivamente avviò in proprio importanti attività nei settori del tessile e della produzione di carta. Durante la prima guerra mondiale guidò il comitato per i prestiti di guerra all’Italia; nel 1925 rifondò il fascio di Buenos Aires e dal 1930 finanziò “Il Mattino d’Italia”. Nel dopoguerra si impegnò per la riconciliazione tra fascisti e antifascisti nella collettività, accogliendo le proposte in tal senso della controparte e in particolare di Dionisio Petriella. Cfr. D. Petriella e S. Sosa Miatello, Diccionario Biográfico Italo-Argentino, Asociación Dante Alighieri, Buenos Aires, 1976, ad vocem.

25 Scorza ricordava “primi ed indimenticabili per la fraterna premura che si presero di me” Valentino Dal Vera di Conegliano Veneto, Alberto Toso di Torino, Luigi Minieri di Napoli. Cfr. Scorza, Vittorio Valdani: Un Uomo, Editorial de autores, Buenos Aires, 1955, p. 12.

26 Cfr. Scorza, Vittorio Valdani cit.

27 Giussani, Montoneros. La soberbia armada cit., p. 115.

28 L’archivio del Mif è depositato presso l’Archivio di stato di Cosenza. L’inventario del fondo, ricchissimo (la documentazione è raccolta in 87 buste), è stato pubblicato in R. Guarasci, La lampada e il fascio. Archivio e storia di un movimento neofascista: il “Movimento italianofemminile”, Laruffa, Reggio Calabria, 1987.

29 Francesco Giunta, capo dello squadrismo triestino, segretario del Pnf nel 1923-1924, era stato governatore della Dalmazia a partire dal febbraio del 1943: il suo nome figurava nella lista degli italiani reclamati dalla Jugoslavia per essere processati nel dopoguerra e mai consegnati. Incarcerato in patria, in seguito alla promulgazione dell’amnistia fu trasferito a Procida nel timore che i detenuti comuni potessero costituire una minaccia per la sua incolumità (cfr. P. G. Murgia, Il vento del nord. Storia e cronaca del fascismo dopo la Resistenza (1945-1950), Sugarco, Milano, 1975, p.196).

30 La corrispondenza per “Franchi” viene indirizzata a Mazzoli Evelina a Buenos Aires. In un appunto della Pignatelli in calce ad una missiva si legge “fare pratica intestata Ing. Franchi”. Cfr. Archivio di Stato di Cosenza (Asc), Movimento italiano femminile (Mif), b. 37, fasc. 6. Qui anche le citazioni successive.

31 Asc, Mif, b. 37, fasc. 6.

32 Ibidem.

33 Ibidem.

34 Ibidem.

35 Con ogni probabilità si tratta del conte Valentino Orsolini Cencelli, che era stato nel 1947 sul punto di partire per l’Argentina, come si ricava da una lettera che gli inviò il 10 maggio la segretaria del Mif, invitandolo ad aiutare una volta a destinazione: “sono sicura che non ci negherete il vostro concorso poiché le pene passate sono certamente incancellabili e che quando sarete lontano dalla Patria non dimenticherete chi è rimasto a soffrire per essa e con essa”. Un messaggio successivo di Valerio Pignatelli lo esortava a mobilitare i suoi “feudi”, Littoria e la provincia di Rieti (entrambe le missive sono in Asc, Mif, b. 37, fasc. 6).

36 Ibidem.

37 “Camillo Sirtori” era lo pseudonimo utilizzato da Carlo Scorza durante il primo periodo in Argentina: potrebbe essere solo una coincidenza;improbabile che Scorza, all’epoca latitante, si sentisse tanto tranquillo da risiedere sia pur sotto falso nome in un albergo della capitale.

38 Asc, Mif, b. 36, fasc. 18.

39 Asc, Mif, b. 37, fasc. 5.

40 Si veda per esempio l’interessante comunicazione dell’ambasciata italiana in Cile sul congresso dell’“Italia Libera” a Buenos Aires del 1948, in cui era emerso che i militanti dei diversi paesi sudamericani, oltre a non gradire affatto i supervisori con “patente democratica” che arrivavano a dettar legge dagli Stati Uniti, come Luigi Antonini, erano in generale poco propensi a creare un “movimento unitario”. Il diplomatico notava giustamente che un’organizzazione panamericana “presupporrebbe una omogeneità ed uniformità tra le collettività italiane delle Repubbliche latino-americane e quella degli Stati Uniti che di fatto non esiste” (Asmae, Ap 1946-1950, Argentina, b. 2, fasc. 28). La dimensione in cui i vari gruppi politici degli italiani all’estero si muovono nel secondo dopoguerra diviene progressivamente “nazionale”, ma nel senso di limitata al paese in cui essi vivono.

41 Asc, Mif, b. 37, fasc. 10, sf. 2.

42 Asc, Mif, b. 37, fasc. 10, sf. 1.

43 Qualche notizia in G. Baiocchi, Scheda sui fascisti nell’emigrazione europea, in Emigrazione. Cento anni 26 milioni, “Il Ponte”, 30, 11-12, 1974, pp. 1596-1600; e F. Bertagna, Note sulla Federazione mondiale della stampa italiana all’estero dai prodromi al Congresso costituente (1956-1971), “Archivio storico dell’emigrazione italiana”, 1, 1, 2005, pp. 15-38.

44 Cfr. la relazione del console Natoli da Valparaíso, in Asmae, Ap 1946-1950, Argentina, b. 6, fasc. 4.

45 Gli articoli furono citati in Italia in un articolo di Mario Diaz Ferrari pubblicato sul “Messaggero” l’8 aprile del 1955.

46 Cfr. M. Colucci, Il voto degli italiani all’estero, in P. Bevilacqua, A. De Clementi, E. Franzina (a cura di), Storia dell’emigrazione italiana, II,Arrivi, Donzelli, Roma, 2002, pp. 597-609.

47 Sulla scarsa propensione degli italiani all’estero all’attività politica diretta nel secondo dopoguerra si veda Colucci, Il voto degli italiani

all’estero cit., pp. 604-606.

48 Nella relazione precedente il console si era spinto sino a proporre che fosse trasmessa alle Prefetture la richiesta di sospendere l’invio dei certificati elettorali all’estero “limitatamente ai paesi transoceanici”. Cfr. il “Rapporto consolare” relativo al 1953, in Asmae, Ap 1950-1957, b. 1571, fasc. Rapporti politici con l’Italia, p. 15.

49 Cfr. Asmae, Ap 1950-1957, b. 1620, fasc. Argentina-Italia.

50 Per una prima analisi del voto cfr. Il voto italiano all’estero: dossier, “Archivio storico dell’emigrazione italiana”, 3, 1, 2007, pp. 163-204; in particolare per l’Argentina cfr. M. A. Bernardotti, La “sorpresa” del Sudamerica e il voto in Argentina, ibidem, pp. 193-204.

BAL*

Giuseppe Balsamo Conte di Cagliostro

.13 Giuseppe Balsamo Conte di Cagliostro

Giuseppe Balsamo detto Conte di Cagliostro è definito in maniera diversa a seconda delle fonti, ne presentiamo qualcuna:

(A) Balsamo Tratto da BP* The Black Prince

In BP*, nella parte “The Legacy of History: The Venetian Factor ” nota 8, si legge che Balsamo era un agente spia di Venezia:

“The extraordinary financial power which Venice still commanded in the 18th Century was documented by the Venetian nobleman Carlo Antonio Marin, historian of Venice Frederick Lane, and others. Its European-wide cultural warfare and espionage system was also still highly effective, as evidenced in the international campaign of the Paris-based Venetian Abbot Antonio Conti to attempt to destroy the reputation of the great scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

An agent of Venice's ruling Council of Ten, Count Cagliostro (Joseph Balsamo) organized the 1785 "Affair of the Queen's Necklace," the scandal which, as Napoleon observed, was the opening act of the French Revolution, an event financed and run out of Britain.

Still another notorious Venetian spy of the same era was Casanova, who reported directly to the inner Three of the hooded, black-robed Council of Ten. The scarlet-robed chief of the Three was known as the Inquisitor, and in Venice it was understood that "The Ten will send you to the torture chamber, but the Three will send you to your grave."

(B) Balsamo Tratto dal sito ufficiale del comune di San Leo (PU)

Il sito ufficiale del comune di San Leo riporta una visione di Giuseppe Balsamo alquanto sdolcinata il linea con la tendenza attuale che riporta Cagliostro come una vittima della cultura del tempo. Riportiamo comunque alcune parti del testo che riteniamo significative. Il sito originale riporta molte informazioni e immagini.

Giuseppe Balsamo nacque a Palermo il 2 giugno 1743, dal mercante Pietro Balsamo e da Felicita Bracconieri. Risale al 1771 il primo viaggio a Londra della giovane coppia. Ritornò a Londra nel 1776, presentandosi come conte Alessandro di Cagliostro. Durante questo soggiorno, insieme alla moglie, divenuta la celestiale Serafina, viene ammesso alla loggia massonica "La Speranza". La massoneria gli offrì ottime opportunità per soddisfare ogni ambizione sopita. Grazie alle vie da essa indicate e alle cognizioni acquisite, egli poté riscuotere successi appaganti moralmente ed economicamente che lo portarono, dal 1777 al 1780, ad attraversare l’Europa centro-settentrionale, dall’Aia a Berlino, dalla Curlandia a Pietroburgo e alla Polonia.

Il nuovo rito egiziano di cui Cagliostro era Gran Cofto, aveva affascinato nobili ed intellettuali con le sue iniziazioni e pratiche rituali che prevedevano la rigenerazione del corpo e dell’anima. Grande risalto ebbe, inoltre, la figura di Serafina, presidentessa di una loggia che ammetteva anche le donne, con il titolo di regina di Saba. Alla corte di Varsavia, nel maggio del 1780, ricevette un’accoglienza trionfale tributata dal sovrano in persona: la sua fama di alchimista e guaritore aveva raggiunto le vette più alte!

Considerevole diffusione ebbero in quegli anni l’elixir di lunga vita, il vino egiziano e le cosiddette polveri rinfrescanti con i quali Cagliostro compì alcune portentose guarigioni curando, spesso senza alcun compenso, i numerosi ammalati che, nel 1781, gremivano la residenza di Strasburgo.

Il comportamento filantropico, la conoscenza di alcuni elementi del magnetismo animale e dei segreti alchemici, la capacità di infondere fiducia e, al tempo stesso, di turbare l’interlocutore, penetrarlo con la profondità dello sguardo, da tutti ritenuto quasi soprannaturale: queste le componenti che contribuirono a rafforzare il fascino personale e l’alone di leggenda e di mistero che accompagnarono Cagliostro fin dalle prime apparizioni. Poliedrico e versatile, conquistò la stima e l’ammirazione del filosofo Lavater e del gran elemosiniere del re di Francia, il cardinale di Rohan, entrambi in quegli anni a Strasburgo. Tuttavia, Cagliostro raggiunse l’apice del successo a Lione, dove giunse dopo una breve sosta a Napoli e dopo aver risieduto più di un anno a Bordeaux con sua moglie.

A Lione, infatti, egli consolidò il rito egiziano, istituendo la "madre loggia", la Sagesse triomphante, per la quale ottenne una fiabesca sede e la partecipazione di importanti personalità. Quasi nello stesso momento giunse l’invito al convegno dei Philalèthes, la prestigiosa società che intendeva appurare le antiche origini della massoneria. A Cagliostro non restava che dedicarsi anima e corpo a questo nuovo incarico, parallelamente alla sua attività taumaturgica ed esoterica, ma il coinvolgimento nell’affaire du collier de la reine lo rese protagonista suo malgrado, insieme a Rohan e alla contessa Jeanne Valois de la Motte, del più celebre ed intricato scandalo dell’epoca, il complotto che diffamò la regina Maria Antonietta e aprì la strada alla rivoluzione francese.

Tra il 1786 e il 1788 la coppia fece vari viaggi: Aix in Savoia, Torino, Genova, Rovereto. In queste città Cagliostro continuò a svolgere l’attività di taumaturgo e ad istaurare logge massoniche. Giunto a Trento nel 1788, fu accolto con benevolenza dal vescovo Pietro Virgilio Thun che lo aiutò ad ottenere i visti necessari per rientrare a Roma: pur di assecondare i desideri di Serafina, era disposto a stabilirsi in una città ostile agli esponenti della massoneria, considerati faziosi e reazionari.

Cagliostro tentò di costituire anche a Roma una loggia di rito egiziano, invitando il 16 settembre 1789 a Villa Malta prelati e patrizi romani. Le adesioni furono soltanto due: quella del marchese Vivaldi e quella del frate cappuccino Francesco Giuseppe da San Maurizio, che fu nominato segretario.

Dalla abbondante quanto inattendibile letteratura sulla vita di Cagliostro, abbiamo appreso che il suo primo maestro in campo medico e alchemico fu Altotas, un personaggio alquanto oscuro di dubbia provenienza che morì a Malta nel 1767. Sembra che costui fosse esperto di medicina popolare e dell’arte di tingere e trattare i metalli.

L’insegnamento che Cagliostro ne ricavò fu certamente legato alla semplice empiria: agli inizi della sua carriera, quando ancora si faceva chiamare Giuseppe Balsamo, l’alchimia fu un mero espediente che gli consentì di fare soldi con la vendita di alcuni "segreti".

Dopo il 1772, quando, in seguito all’adesione alla massoneria, egli aveva assunto il nome di Alessandro conte di Cagliostro, incontrò il monaco benedettino Dom Antoine Pernety, uomo di vasta erudizione che era stato chiamato alla corte di Federico II di Prussia, dove aveva conosciuto importanti uomini di cultura che lo avevano iniziato alle scienze ermetiche. Sembra che Pernety abbia poi fondato un proprio rito del quale prese parte lo stesso Cagliostro, suo convinto sostenitore.

Proprio da questa eccellente frequentazione, Cagliostro apprese che non era possibile interpretare l’alchimia come una prassi fondata su storte ed alambicchi, ma che invece bisognava intenderla come una scienza ermeneutica che ricerca il segreto della pietra filosofale, con l’ausilio di antiche scritture egiziane e greche. Di conseguenza, egli si appropriò della funzione di custode degli arcani della natura, celati negli antichi caratteri geroglifici. Infatti, secondo quanto tramandato da Ermete Trismegisto, solo pochi aderenti alla filosofia alchemica potevano essere considerati dagli antichi saggi egizi veramente meritevoli di partecipare alla conoscenza più profonda, opportunamente velata da enigmi e linguaggi di difficile interpretazione. Solo chi possiede il più autentico spirito alchemico sarà in grado di comprendere la verità nascosta in fatti apparentemente bizzarri, inverosimili, talvolta addirittura antitetici e fantastici e di impiegarla per scopi benefici. Cagliostro, aderendo a questi concetti, incarnò agli occhi del suo secolo la figura che compendiava in sé l’antica saggezza dell’ermeneuta e l’abilità pratica dell’empirista.

(C) Balsamo - Tratto da Wikipedia

Fonte: Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_Memphis-Misraim

premessa

Among the Masonic Rites, Memphis-Misraim has occupied a particular position since its origin. It is considered[attribution needed] to be among the Egyptian rites that drank from the source of the ancient initiatic traditions of the Mediterranean basin: Pythagoreans, Alexandrian hermetic authors, neo-Platonics, the Sabbeans of Harrân, and others. It is said that it was necessary to wait until the 18th century to find any traces in Europe, but evidence seems to show that this is when these rites originated, and with most rites, it therefore has a constructed history. These two would associate and then merge under the influence of General Garibaldi in 1881.

Balsamo

From as early as 1738, one can find traces of this Rite filled with alchemical, occult and Egyptian references, with a structure of 90 degrees. Joseph Balsamo, called Cagliostro, a key character of his time, gave the Rite the impulse necessary for its development. Very close to the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta, Manuel Pinto de Fonseca,[citation needed] Cagliostro founded the Rite of High Egyptian Masonry in 1784. He received, between 1767 and 1775, from Sir Knight Luigi d’Aquino, the brother of the national Grand Master of Neapolitan Masonry, the Arcana Arcanorum, which are three very high hermetic degrees. In 1788, he introduced them into the Rite of Misraïm and gave a patent to this Rite.

It developed quickly in Milan, Genoa and Naples.

.14 La Santa

Fonte: Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera.

Estratto da "http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_%28%27Ndrangheta%29"

La Santa è un organizzazione malavitosa, secondo le confessioni dei pentiti, nata a metà degli anni '70 in seno alla 'Ndrangheta. Chi fa parte di questa associazione viene chiamato santista, ed è uno degli ultimi gradi della gerarchia calabrese. I Santisti potevano essere massimo 33, ma col tempo nè furono accettate anche di più. Chi appartiene alla Santa può avere contatti con persone non affiliate e che hanno prestato giuramento ad altri corpi come: carabinieri, politici, magistratura e soprattutto con la massoneria. La Santa inoltre possiede regole diverse da quella consuete alla 'Ndrangheta.

I protettori della Santa e dei santisti sono: Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi e Giuseppe La Marmora.

Storia

Secondo le confessioni dei pentiti, nacque a metà degli anni '70 con l'esigenza di dover conferire con uomini non appartenenti alla 'Ndrangheta per poter meglio gestire gli affari illeciti e avere accesso al potere. Per arrivare ai livelli alti del potere bisognava avere come tramite gli appartenenti alla massoneria che spesso non erano affidabili. Il pentito Gaetano Costa afferma che fu Don Mommo Piromalli a introdurre la regola che chi fosse santista potesse avere contatti anche con la massoneria. Si ebbero però da subito disaccordi, soprattutto da Don Antonio Macrì e Don Mico Tripodo, soprattutto per il fatto che potesse tradire la propria 'ndrina per salvare l'organizzazione santista. Il pentito Lauro però affermò che lo stesso Macrì fosse un massone. All'inizio l'associazione poteva essere composta solo da 33 elementi, ma per le richieste pressanti di molti 'ndranghetisti il numero fu incrementato fino a far creare, per i troppi appartenenti, un grado superiore il Vangelo, di cui ne parla anche Pino Scriva.

Nel 1992 grazie all'operazione Olimpia si ebbero maggiori informazioni, si scoprirono le persone che fecero accedere i santisti nella massoneria calabrese: il notaio Pietro Marrapodi, il capo-loggia Cosimo Zaccone...

[1] Olga è una figlia del Conte Francesco Matarazzo che morì nel 1937, lasciando ai suoi eredi e successori un titolo nobiliare, che i pronipoti usano ancora oggi, e il più importante gruppo industriale dell’America Latina, definito all’epoca dall’Enciclopedia Britannica tra i primi sei gruppi industriali più importanti al mondo.