The Body of Il Duce (21 page)

A few months later, after the ballot to establish the constituent assembly, in which the Christian Democrats received more votes than parties of the left, ex-partisans felt less than enthusiastic about how the vote had gone. The amnesty for Fascists promoted by Justice Minister Palmiro Togliatti, Communist Party secretary, was also a source of rancor. To make matters worse, the Fascists were back on the scene with stunts like the theft of Mussolini's remains. Perhaps it was no surprise that on the left, too, there was a desire for political action. So at the end of August 1946, a few dozen ex-partisans from Asti, in Piedmont, declared the “rebellion of Santa Libera,” after the village in the Langhe district where they barricaded themselves in. They called for the expulsion of Fascist functionaries from office and for Togliatti's amnesty to be overturned. The prestige of Cino Moscatelli, acting as mediator, was required to persuade the rebels to back down.

At this point, nobody still believed that Moscatelli had been Il Duce's executioner, yet a year and a half after his death only a handful Communist leaders knew Colonel Valerio's real identity. The habits of secrecy adopted during the underground years were not enough to explain why the party hid Walter Audisio from public view. Nor were reasons of security, especially considering that the party never assigned Audisio bodyguards, even after his name was revealed. There were other motives for the silence surrounding Colonel Valerio's identity, and these were ideological.

As far back as 1925–26, during the first wave of attempts on Mussolini's life, and especially in 1931–32, after a second, the Communists had condemned any focus on individual targets, preferring a broad battle against an entire class of enemies. In opposition to other Resistance forces, among them Emilio Lussu and leaders of Justice and Liberty, the Communists argued that killing Mussolini was the crudest of political expedients. After 1945, when Communist partisans formed Il Duce's execution squad, it no longer made any sense for the party to dismiss the “exemplary gesture” as futile. Nevertheless, the fact that Il Duce's execution had occurred not at the beginning but at the end of a movement of national insurrection made the Communists cautious regarding the presentation of Mussolini's death. The party's strategy under Togliatti was to legitimize itself as a democratic force, and that meant casting the Resistance as a war of the people rather than a revolt of a minority and the Liberation as a season of brotherhood, not of violence. The terrible tableau of two or three partisans shooting an old, unarmed man and his young lover did not fit easily into this frame.

In 1947, the unity of the Committee of National Liberation came to an end when the parties of the left were excluded from the government. Thus the first months of that year marked an important turning point in modern Italy's political history. At the same time, Italians learned something new about the death of Il Duce—hardly an insignificant coincidence. In March 1947, Italians discovered the name and the face of the man who had shot Mussolini. But Colonel Valerio's identity—that he was Walter Audisio, an accountant from Alessandria, a Communist militant since 1931, leader of the Garibaldi Brigades, secretary of the high command of the Liberty Volunteers Corps—was not revealed to the world by the Communists, those who had suffered the highest casualties in the fight against Fascism. Audisio's name was instead made public by a neo-Fascist publication in Milan, by his enemies rather than his comrades. Naturally they presented him not as a man carrying out justice but as an assassin. It was only later, making the best of a bad situation, that Communist leaders decided to treat Audisio as a political asset, taking him around Italy in triumph.

The propaganda battle surrounding Colonel Valerio's identity was part of a larger war that in Milan, at least, pitched indomitable veterans of the Republic of Salò against the most pugnacious ex-partisans. At the same time, this localized recrudescence of the civil war was set in the context of the early Cold War and the attendant conflict regarding Italian Communism. Thus, the skirmishes in the press over a crucial episode in Italy's past—Mussolini's execution—were a way of fighting a conflict in the present as well as one for the future. In this way, Mussolini's dead body continued to write history.

The clash between the two most active militant groups in the province—adherents of
Lotta fascista,
familiar to us through the activities of Domenico Leccisi, and Volante Rosso, a band of Communist ex-partisans based in one of the party's clubs—began in 1946 and was by no means confined to warring over the memory of Piazzale Loreto. On October 9 that year, the neo-Fascists threw a bomb at a Communist Party club in the Porta Genova neighborhood, killing a five-year-old child. Then, on January 17, 1947, the Communists shot two neo-Fascist activists, one from the Democratic Fascist Party and another from the Mussolini Action Squad. While the bullets were flying, the Milanese neo-Fascist paper
Il Meridiano d'Italia
, which under editor Franco De Agazio took a critical approach to the Resistance, decided to reconstruct the precise movements of the Communist partisans at Dongo following their capture of Mussolini. In the course of its breathless account, the paper revealed documents that made it possible to name Walter Audisio. On March 3, Audisio gave an interview to a Swiss radio station in which he admitted to having shot Mussolini. Eleven days later followers of Volante Rosso killed De Agazio, firing four bullets at close range.

De Agazio was an unusual Fascist journalist in that his political roots lay in Italian liberalism. His paper's representation of the Resistance as caricature cost him his life. But in effect, the articles published in
Il Meridiano d'Italia
were the first of thousands on the “mysteries of Dongo” that the popular press turned out over the next fifty years. Somewhere between detective mysteries and bodice rippers, they offered a mixture of hasty executions and private vendettas, hidden treasure and lusty passions. “In America they would have made a couple of movies by now” about Il Duce's end, one weekly observed of
Il Meridiano d'Italia
's scandalizing.
2
The approach was quickly picked up by the establishment press. What could be more interesting than to populate the scene where Mussolini and Claretta were shot with attractive partisan women and undercover Communist agents?

Before De Agazio died, he did more than launch the “mysteries of Dongo” scandal sheet formula; he was enlisted by Giorgio Almirante, leader of the Italian Social Movement, to work with the cardinal of Turin to form anti-Communist squads in the Piedmont region. Meanwhile, the cardinal of Milan was meeting with another neo-Fascist, General Leone Zingales, who had been chosen by the military to investigate possible crimes by partisan forces at Lake Como after the Liberation.

These clandestine encounters organized by neo-Fascists and the Vatican did not escape the notice of U.S. intelligence, which was convinced that Yugoslav spies had a role in De Agazio's death. In the Cold War climate, U.S. agents in Italy wanted to exploit the murder of the neo-Fascist journalist to gather American support for the Italian Christian Democrats and other parties of the center right. Thus, in the weeks following De Agazio's assassination, Communist leaders had more urgent things to worry about than the public identification of Walter Audisio. They were facing a combined front of Christian Democrats, the Vatican, and the Truman administration in its efforts to eliminate the Communist Party altogether. Still, the labored way the Communist executive dealt with the revelation of Audisio's identity seems to reflect more than just the leaders' preoccupation.

For weeks after
Il Meridiano d'Italia
published its revelation, the Communists downplayed the matter, criticizing the “yellow press” and insisting that Il Duce's execution was a routine affair ordered by the Committee of National Liberation. Some two weeks later party secretary Togliatti was still telling an Italian news agency that Mussolini's execution had been “one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest contribution that the movement of national liberation made to the nation.”
3
It was not until March 21, eighteen days after Audisio himself acknowledged his role in the execution, that Togliatti officially confirmed that Colonel Valerio and Audisio were indeed one and the same. At the end of March, Audisio was formally presented at a Communist Party rally in Rome. The Communists reluctantly unveiled their role in Mussolini's execution, and only because it had already been revealed in the neo-Fascist press. Accordingly, the party also decided, reluctantly, to display the body—very much alive—of the man who had executed Il Duce.

*   *   *

THE WARY UNMASKING
of Colonel Valerio revealed the Communists' great caution about taking responsibility for the most radical aspect of the Resistance struggle, the tragic exit from twenty years of Fascism. At the same time, the party's secretiveness underscored a determination to portray the Resistance as a people's uprising. Two weeks after Audisio confirmed his identity on Swiss radio, Communist leader Luigi Longo still maintained that “it is best … that comrade Valerio remain simply comrade Valerio, the representative of justice for all the people.”
4
Even after the party acknowledged Audisio's role, it still sought to play it down.
L'Unità
presented him as an ordinary person, not a figure of history, sketching his working-class childhood, his studies at a technical school, his military service, marriage, work as an accountant, and sentence to internal exile for anti-Fascist activity. There were countless young people who would “recognize in Walter Audisio's life the traces of their own,” wrote
l'Unità
.
5
Even as the party launched a campaign to award Colonel Valerio a gold medal for bravery in action, the party press was depicting him as just an average Italian.

In fact, the description fit Walter Audisio rather well. Corpulent, jovial, good at telling jokes, he had what one journalist describes as “more the air of a traveling salesman than of a partisan hero.”
6
For this reason, the young women at the Communist Party headquarters thought he was less interesting than the elegant, discreet Aldo Lampredi. Unlike Lampredi, Audisio did not have the rock-hard faith of the model Communist. He also had a black mark on his record, the letter he had written abjuring his anti-Fascist past to gain release from internal exile in 1939, although this was unknown to the great majority of Communist militants. Still, in a period when faith in the Resistance seemed to be giving way to “desistance” (a word coined by the anti-Fascist Piero Calamandrei to describe the changing climate in 1947), the Communist rank and file wanted nothing more than a comrade to venerate as the living incarnation of the partisan creed. What better symbol of the Resistance ethos than Il Duce's executioner?

L'Unità
opened its pages to Colonel Valerio—for the first time as Walter Audisio—so he could tell the story of his fateful mission. Not surprisingly, the ex-partisan took advantage of his monopoly on information to give a rather black-and-white version of events. He painted the scene as a one-on-one contest between himself and Il Duce. Faced with the Resistance in person, he said, Mussolini showed himself to be “less than an average man,” his eyes wide with fear, his mouth half open, his arms hanging limp: cowardice personified.

On March 30, 1947, when Walter Audisio was presented to the public at the Basilica di Massenzio in Rome, forty thousand people showed up for the rally. So large was the crowd that it made the Palm Sunday faithful at St. Peter's look like a handful. As preparations for the rally were in progress, the Vatican was in fact calling Colonel Valerio to the attention of Western diplomats and secret service organizations. On the eve of the rally, the Vatican secretary of state, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI), alerted the American embassy, which in turn alerted the State Department, that the Communist Party had give out Carabinieri uniforms to special gangs of provocateurs who were supposed to mingle with the crowd. When Audisio appeared, he would be shot, while the false Carabinieri would fire into the gathering, inciting panic. Afterward, according to Vatican officials, the Communist press would accuse neo-Fascists and the Carabinieri of killing Audisio.

Although the information sounded “somewhat doubtful” to the Americans, the embassy duly told Washington that word had been passed on to the British secret service and the counterintelligence corps. On April 1, however, U.S. ambassador James C. Dunn telegraphed the State Department in Washington to say that the rally had taken place without incident.
7
Nonetheless, Dunn aired the suspicion that a Communist plot lay behind the De Agazio murder and Audisio's unveiling, cleverly manipulated by the Soviet Union.

Within just a few months of the rally, Audisio became a charismatic figure to Communist followers—even a mythic character. There was an especially memorable event on September 7, 1947, in Modena, when Communists came together for the annual Festa dell'Unità. It was celebrated in the way these things were done in the years just after the war: whole families came loaded down with their lunch preparations—men, women, and children with only a few lire in their pockets but enough to buy flags sporting the hammer and sickle. People streamed into town from the countryside to see the allegorical floats, the sack races, and the bookstands, and the chance to see the party leaders up close—Palmiro Togliatti, Luigi Longo, Pietro Secchia, Cino Moscatelli, Giancarlo Pajetta. According to the press, however, it was Walter Audisio who got the most enthusiastic reception. “Va-le-rio, Va-le-rio, Va-le-rio,” the crowd chanted, as if at a football stadium.

When Longo began to hand out gold medals, the crowd would not quiet down until Audisio received one. “Valerio, there's still a lot of work to do,” yelled one man. A tiny woman with a red flag pinned in her gray hair managed to climb up on the stage and grab Audisio's hand. She would never again wash the hand that had touched Colonel Valerio, she declared as she came down, not even if she lived a hundred years. It is hard not to compare these moments to the clichéd vignettes of Mussolini's rule, to Il Duce embracing workers and the lucky ones pledging not to wash their faces for a month. The Communists appeared to feel the same excitement from contact with Il Duce's executioner as the Fascist loyal got in the presence of the dictator.