A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (24 page)

Six years after De Lorenzo’s averted coup came another. Its leader was Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, who had commanded a Fascist corps of saboteurs under Mussolini and, after the war, had founded the Fronte Nazionale, with which he hoped to return Italy to Fascism. He recruited his putschists from current and former military men, and on December 7, 1970, the anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, they struck. The signal Borghese passed to begin the coup was “Tora, Tora,” after the code name Japan’s Fascists used for their attack. In the first hours of the coup, fifty of Borghese’s men penetrated the Ministry of the Interior and stole hundreds of submachine guns while two hundred other troops, already armed, advanced on Rome. Other conspirators prepared to seize parts of other cities. But before the insurrection matured, Borghese received a call—from whom is still debated—telling him that the support of the Italian Army, which he had expected, had not materialized. He had little choice but to recall his men and quietly return the stolen weapons. For years it was rumored that the coup had been backed by the United States, but the principal source of the rumor was a co-conspirator of Borghese’s who was of doubtful reliability. Decades later, however, a more reliable conspirator stepped forward and said that before the coup he had asked a CIA officer for a guarantee that the United States would not oppose it. The CIA man supposedly spoke with his superiors and reported back to the conspirator that his government would support the coup so long as Giulio Andreotti, already a rajah of the Right, were installed as prime minister. Years later the United States released archived documents showing that the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Graham Martin, had indeed been told of Borghese’s coup months in advance. Martin in turn cabled Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, to ask if he should warn the Italian president or prime minister. What Rogers told Martin is not known, but there is no sign the Americans alerted the Italians. (If they had, it is unlikely the coup would have progressed as far as it did.)

One of Borghese’s co-conspirators was General Vito Miceli, who at the time ran SID (the successor to SIFAR) and thus Gladio. Not long after the aborted coup, Ambassador Martin gave Miceli $800,000 in cash, despite warnings from subordinates that Miceli was “linked to antidemocratic elements of the Right.” By some accounts, Miceli spent the American money “merely” on anti-Communist propaganda, but around the time he received the cash, he illegally created a secret intelligence organization whose funding has never been fully accounted for. The Super SID, as it came to be called, was patterned on the Gladio model—a force that was run by the uppermost officials of SID but hidden from the rest of the government. After the Super SID was exposed, Miceli was asked at an inquest whether it was he who had founded it.

“A Super SID on my orders?” he replied. “Of course! But I have not organized it myself to make a coup d’état. This was the United States and NATO who asked me to do it!”

Prince Borghese’s threat was followed by one from Count Edgardo Sogno. (Italy’s nobility tended to Neanderthalic politics.) In the early Cold War, Sogno had founded a group that ostensibly propagandized against Communism but in fact gathered dirt on labor organizers and other leftists, with funding from the auto giant FIAT. “When FIAT stopped financing us,” Sogno later said, “I decided to go to the United States and ask for help from my old friend Allen Dulles,” the director of the CIA. Dulles apparently gave Sogno the money he needed. As the years passed, the electoral gains of the Communist Party increasingly angered Sogno, and in the 1970s he became irretrievably outraged by suggestions from some Christian Democrats that for the stability of Italy the Communists should finally be given a piece of the government. Sogno began plotting a coup, and in the summer of 1974 he shared his plans with the CIA chief of station in Rome, Rocky Stone. “I told him,” Sogno later wrote, “that I was informing him as an ally in the struggle for the freedom of the West and asked him what the attitude of the American government would be. He answered what I already knew: the United States would have supported any initiative tending to keep the Communists out of government.” Sogno moved forward with his preparations, but before their culmination the Italian government discovered and quashed them. If the United States betrayed Sogno, he never suspected it.

THE YEARS
OF LEAD,
Italy’s grisly era of domestic terrorism, were inaugurated on December 12, 1969, by a bomb that destroyed seventeen people and disfigured eighty-six others at a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana. As with the bombing near Peteano, which followed three years later, police rushed to blame leftists, hundreds of whom were eventually arrested around the country and thousands of whom were harried. Newspapers followed the government’s lead with McCarthyite assaults in print, and the Left, which had been in a strong position after the global protests of 1968 (which had been particularly potent in Italy and had essentially continued through 1969) found itself suddenly on the defensive.

There were signs early on, however, that something was amiss in the haste to accuse the Left. To start with, only a few days after the bombing, the police’s leading suspect, an anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli, tumbled out a fourth-floor window at Milan’s police headquarters. The police said Pinelli leapt to his death when his alibi began to crumble under interrogation. It was an unconvincing explanation. It was the more so after investigating magistrates showed that Pinelli was not behind Piazza Fontana. Rightists were. Which rightists has never been irrefutably proven because for the next four decades police and intelligence officers covered up for them, and sympathetic judges dismissed cases against both them and their coverers on the thinnest of legal grounds. One of the first magistrates to expose pieces of the truth was Spataro’s mentor Emilio Alessandrini.

Terrorists of the Right followed Piazza Fontana with scores of lethal attacks that achieved their apotheosis in the slaughter of eighty-five and the mangling of two hundred others at Bologna’s main train station in 1980. It remains the deadliest attack by terrorists in Italian history. The Right’s assaults were part of a “strategy of tension” whose goal, as several terrorists eventually said, was “to destabilize in order to stabilize”—that is, to create such fear in Italians that they would call for or tolerate the re-imposition of Fascism. Short of that, Italians might at least call for or tolerate what might now be called the Cheney agenda: an erosion of civil liberties, a fettering of the legislature’s power to check the executive, and, as a kind of a garnish, largesse for corporations and attacks on the rights of workers. No single body coordinated the strategy of tension. Rather, a common tune circulated along the rightist underground and was picked up and passed along by groups large and small, much as would happen among Islamic terrorists twenty years later.

The Left, as noted, had its savages too. They had not been of much consequence before Piazza Fontana, but afterward their ranks swelled and they murdered scores of officials like Spataro’s mentors. The leftists did not see that their efforts to spark revolution only played into the strategy of tension. As the number of dead and dismembered grew, Italians, though not so terrorized as to call for Fascism’s return, punished the Left at the polls, particularly after the Red Brigades murdered former prime minister Moro in 1978. The prospects of the Communist Party became crepuscular, then went out altogether.

By the end of the Years of Lead in the late 1980s, political attacks had, by one count, killed 491 people and wounded 1,181. Perhaps three-fifths or two-thirds were the victims of rightists, the balance of leftists.

It was against this background that Magistrate Casson investigated the bombing at Peteano. In time, he found and convicted the bomber, who was a leader of a cell of the rightist Ordine Nuovo, New Order, named Vincenzo Vinciguerra. Vinciguerra’s family name means “a victor in war”; his redundant given name means “conqueror.” He explained to Casson that right-wing terrorists had not carried out the strategy of tension entirely autonomously. “There exists in Italy,” he said, “a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men in an anti-Soviet capacity—that is, to organize a resistance on Italian soil in case of a military invasion on the part of the Red Army. . . . [It is] comprised of soldiers and civilians entrusted with military and political tasks and possessing its own network of communications, arms, and explosives and men trained to use them.” The men of the secret force, Vinciguerra said, did not limit their work to preparing a defense against the Red Army. Instead, “in the absence of a Soviet military invasion, [they] took up the task, on NATO’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the Left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.” In short, Gladio, which Vinciguerra did not name (but which could have been no other), had played more than a passing role in the strategy of tension.

Casson subsequently discovered documents in military archives that proved Gladio’s existence, then he discovered that Gladiators were among the whitewashers of the Peteano bombing. He also discovered a list of probable Gladiators, some of whom were tied in varying degree to other rightist attacks. But he could not learn with certainty whether Gladiators carried out or gave direct support for the attacks, nor could he learn whether Gladio as an organization had sanctioned or supported them.

After Casson exposed Gladio in 1990, the man who ran it from 1971 to 1974, General Gerardo Serravalle, said that during his tenure the CIA’s Rocky Stone told him the United States did not much care whether the Gladiators could fight a stay-behind war against an invading Red Army. The United States was far more interested in “the subject of internal control—that is, our level of readiness to counter street disturbances, handling nationwide strikes, and above all any eventual rise of the Communist Party. Mr. Stone stated quite clearly that the financial support of the CIA was wholly dependent on our willingness to put into action, to program and plan these other—how shall we call them?—internal measures.” Serravalle did not specify what, if anything, Gladio did to counter “any eventual rise of the Communist Party”—whether, say, Gladio merely drilled in riot control or, say again, gave aid to the strategists of tension. (Other Gladiators and Gladio documents suggested that Gladio had been tasked as early as the 1950s with combating internal rather than external threats.) Serravalle also said that on taking command of Gladio, he discovered it was full of hotheads who wanted to attack the Left and that he was so appalled by the discovery (evidently he thought he would be running a kind of anti-Communist Junior League) that he ordered Gladio’s arms caches dug up and flown to the Gladio base in Sardinia. Since he seems to have had them dug up only after the cache near Peteano was found, the truth may be that he feared other caches would be unearthed and Gladio with them. He may also have feared that explosives from the cache near Peteano had been used in the bombing and that other caches might be put to similar use.

In 1998, several years after Serravalle offered his revelations, a terrorist from New Order named Carlo Digilio said that he and others in his Venetian cell regularly discussed their plans for the strategy of tension with a certain U.S. Navy captain. Digilio and his cellmates assumed the captain was either a CIA or military intelligence officer, but they had no evidence of either possibility. Digilio said he told the captain in advance of a plan that he had heard, at second or third hand, to bomb Piazza Fontana, but although the captain seemed concerned, he did nothing Digilio could see to deter the bombing. After the attack, Digilio told the captain what he knew of how it had been carried out, and again the American seemed to do nothing with the information. A magistrate thought enough of Digilio’s claims to ask a judge to indict the mysterious captain, which would have allowed the magistrate to put questions to the U.S. government, but since it was impossible to prove even the captain’s existence, the judge declined to indict.

In 2000 came another testifier. Paolo Emilio Taviani, minister of defense in the 1950s and of the interior in the 1960s and 1970s, said that senior officers of SID had not only been aware of the plot to bomb Piazza Fontana but had even been on the verge of stopping it. However, they decided not to, and later they tried to protect the bombers by framing leftists in Padua with the attack. Taviani said he did not believe, as some did, that the CIA had organized the bombing. But he added, “It seems to me certain, however, that agents of the CIA were among those who supplied the materials and who muddied the waters of the investigation.” He offered no proof.

Taviani’s testimony was followed by that of General Giandelio Maletti, who ran SID’s counterintelligence section in the early 1970s. Maletti said that the materials for several rightist bombs, probably including the bomb at Piazza Fontana, had been brought to Italy from military bases in Germany, and he thought it likely the CIA had been the courier. He did not elaborate why he thought so. He also said that the CIA routinely worked with right-wing groups it knew to be violent, because “the CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left . . .”

Other witnesses of lesser rank and varying reliability also came forward. Some claimed that U.S. intelligence officers were told in advance of a bombing in Brescia in 1974 that killed eight and wounded nearly a hundred, and others claimed that the makings of the bomb at Bologna’s railway station in 1980 came from a Gladio arsenal. Some of the claimants might merely have been trying to share the blame for their sins with the CIA.

After Gladio’s exposure in 1990, Prime Minister Andreotti admitted that the army had existed but said it had long ago been disbanded. When documents emerged that proved his claim untrue, he owned up to the army’s continued existence but shrewdly deflected attention from himself by saying NATO was running Gladios all over Europe. A NATO spokesman said in reply, “An organization of this kind does not and never has existed within the framework of the NATO military structure.” The next day, however, NATO said its spokesman had erred, then refused to say more. NATO’s supreme power, the United States, said nothing. Investigators were not long in learning that NATO had run, and was still running, Gladios all over the continent—in Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. The CIA seems to have had a hand in setting up some of the secret armies, but the details are far from clear. The revelations were a great scandal in Europe, and the Gladios were supposedly shut down. In the United States that begat them, the story was hardly a blip.