Strategy of Tension: The Case of Italy

Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) (http://www.larouchepub.com/)
Fuente:Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) (www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3117tension_italy.html)
This article appears in the April 30, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

The Trail to Palazzo Caetani
While Cossiga's structures did nothing serious to find Moro, the political forces let themselves be captured by a division between those who proposed to negotiate with the Red Brigades to obtain Moro's liberation ("partito della trattativa"), and those who insisted that this would have meant the capitulation of the State to terrorism ("partito della fermezza"). The Red Brigades demanded the liberation of all of their comrades in jail, a demand which could never be met and this strengthened the position of the hard-liners. However, three years later, when a Christian Democratic politician was kidnapped in Naples, the same hardliners did not hesitate to open negotiations and obtain his release.

Moro's real prison has never been found. In September 1978, the Partito Operaio Europeo, associated with Lyndon LaRouche, published a report entitled Who Killed Aldo Moro? which for the first time established that the Red Brigades were the instrument of oligarchical forces who controlled both "left" and "right" terrorism, and which historically considered themselves as the enemies of the nation-state. The dossier also suggested that Moro's prison was to be looked for, close to where his corpse was found, that is in via Caetani, and possibly in Palazzo Caetani.

Recent findings of the Parliamentary Committee chaired by Senator Pellegrino have confirmed such suggestions in an astonishing way. The Committee has found out that, shortly after Moro had been kidnapped, SISMI briefly investigated a certain "Igor Caetani," a member of the oligarchical Caetani family. The real name of Igor Caetani was Igor Markevich, a Russian-born conductor who had married a Caetani princess. Markevich was suspected of being an intermediary between the Red Brigades and political factions who were ready to break the "fermezza" line and negotiate a deal to obtain Moro's freedom.

Why Markevich? Digging into his past, Committee experts have found that he was probably a double or triple intelligence agent, working for Anglo-American, Israeli, and possibly Russian intelligence circles. More important than Markevich was another inhabitant of Palazzo Caetani, Hubert Howard, who had also married a Caetani princess. Both Markevich and Howard were members of esoteric freemasonic circles. Howard had been a high British intelligence officer during the war, and had kept that function throughout the following decades. Some suspect that Howard was the real head of the secret NATO "stay-behind" network, called Gladio. According to some reconstructions, the order to kill Moro was not given by Moretti's people, but came from above and possibly through Howard.

PART 3

Enter Gladio
During his captivity, former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was "interrogated" by the Red Brigades, who aimed at achieving a confession of Christian Democratic party (DC) involvement in "capitalist corruption" and "imperialist exploitation." Tapes of the interrogations were made, and the Red Brigades announced that they would publish the interrogations, to advance the cause of the "anti-imperialist struggle." But they didn't. Today, the tapes have not yet been found.

Moro wrote also a "memorandum," which partially surfaced only after the terrorists had been arrested, and only in photocopied or typewritten form. Moro's handwritten originals have never been found. Similarly, the originals of the many letters he wrote to his party colleagues and his family were never found. According to one interpretation, this is because Moro had started to reveal the existence of the NATO secret "stay behind" organization, called Gladio.

Parts of the memorandum, in a typewritten version, were found in October 1978, when the newly appointed special anti-terrorism Carabinieri team under Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa[4] discovered a Red Brigades hideout in Milan. (In that apartment, on the via Montenevoso, Dalla Chiesa's men found also 15 letters written by Moro, other than those which the terrorists had delivered to politicians and to members of Moro's family during Moro's captivity.)[5] However, the larger bulk of the memorandum was found much later in the same apartment, in 1990, in a badly concealed hole in the wall, discovered by carpenters who were renovating the premises. This time, 53 photocopied pages of Moro's original handwritten memo, plus 114 pages of letters and last wills, never delivered, were found, together with weapons, ammunition, and a bag full of money.

The via Montenevoso papers constitute one of the many unsolved mysteries of the Moro case. It is evident that the papers were brought into the apartment, both in 1978 and in 1990, from the outside, and surely not by the Red Brigades terrorists. In fact, in 1978, Dalla Chiesa's men searched the flat for three hours, before the prosecutor could get there, and in the absence of the residents (the terrorists), who strangely enough renounced their right to be present at the search. Once the magistrate came, the apartment was turned upside down, so that it would have been impossible not to find the hole, covered by a thin wooden panel, nailed to the wall under the window.

All this adds a further element to the picture of a structure, external to the Red Brigades, which ran the Moro operation, which took possession of Moro's papers—and still has them.

Only in the papers which this entity decided to release in 1990, can Moro's mention of a secret NATO structure be found. In 1990, however, the Berlin Wall had come down, and the existence of Gladio had already been made known by Giulio Andreotti, who was then Prime Minister. Had this revelation come out in 1978, the impact would have been devastating.

It is clear that the same network which already in 1978 had Moro's papers in its possession, decided to release those found in the Montenevoso apartment. This network is still today in possession of the original papers, including those contained in a bag that Moro always carried with him, which, according to Moro's secretary Sereno Freato, pertained to evidence that shortly before Moro's kidnapping, the U.S. State Department under Henry Kissinger had tried to eliminate Moro politically, through the Lockheed scandal.[6]

The involvement of the Gladio organization in Moro's kidnapping, however, had already come out at an early stage. The day of the kidnapping, March 16, 1978, at 9 a.m., a member of the Gladio military structure, Col. Camillo Guglielmi of the SISMI military secret service, was on the via Fani, and therefore he was present at the shootout and kidnapping. Guglielmi's presence was later revealed by another member of Gladio, and was not denied by Guglielmi himself; he simply justified it by saying that he had been invited for lunch by a colleague living nearby—at 9 a.m. The same source reported that Guglielmi was part of a group inside SISMI, called "Ufficio R," under two members of the Propaganda-2 freemasonic lodge, Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte, who, two years later, in 1980, were caught in a cover-up of the Bologna train station bombing. Musumeci and Belmonte, as we shall see, were sentenced by the Bologna court, together with P2 puppet-master Licio Gelli.

'The External Entity'
The involvement of an external entity above the Red Brigades had been exposed already in 1978 by a journalist with ties to intelligence circles, Mino Pecorelli, whose destiny is intertwined with that of General Dalla Chiesa. Pecorelli ran a magazine called Osservatorio Politico, which, on March 28, 1978, wrote: "Let us prepare for the worst. The authors of the via Fani massacre and of Aldo Moro's kidnapping are professionals, trained in top-level war schools." On May 2, Pecorelli wrote: "The directing brain which organized Moro's capture has no