Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Mussolini did not really cure himself from this illness, its aftereffects and its returns, until he was treated by the German doctor Hitler sent to tend to him in 1943. On first meeting him, Georg Zachariae describes him as being pale, grey-skinned and painfully thin, with sunken cheeks and jutting cheekbones:

  He had had a stomach ulcer twenty years before, and from 1940 onwards the disturbances had returned more strongly than ever, despite all the treatments he had undergone. He suffered bad stomach cramps, particularly two or three hours after meals and during the night – they felt as if someone was pressing a fist down on his stomach with all his force. The result was he could hardly sleep and became almost scared to go to bed at night. He also suffered from very bad constipation, which could only be treated with powerful laxatives.3

  Mussolini wasn’t squeamish in complaining to Petacci about the laxatives he had to take. Emptying his bowels had become one of his major preoccupations. He thought having to do so was humiliating, saying that he felt he was nothing more than a digestive tube. “He thinks about the laxative and its effects, with his usual air of amused disgust: ‘The good Lord ought to have made us differently, he shouldn’t have given us guts. He should have created us to live on air, or made us so that we just absorb the food we eat rather than having to get rid of it…’”4

  Boratto also had views on Mussolini’s relationship with food. “I think Mussolini’s illness stemmed from his irregular eating habits. Whenever we travelled in the car, he preferred to eat by buying a packed lunch in one of the railway stations, which he would eat as I drove.”5 In reality, Mussolini was paying the price for the Matteotti crisis with an acute psychosomatic reaction that exacerbated his ulcer, as he explained to Petacci: “Ulcers have psychological causes. I developed an ulcer after the Matteotti affair. It was a terrible period – accusations, suspicions, anxieties, conflicts, moments of outright tragedy. I couldn’t sleep at night, the work was so intense. I began to feel pain, and once the episode was over I continued to feel it. One evening I felt ill in bed and vomited blood, then it stopped. I got up to go to the bathroom and vomited up more blood. I fell unconscious to the floor and didn’t come round for twenty minutes.”6

  The murder of Matteotti was certainly not the first case where extreme violence had been used against an opposition leader. The Fascist squads had knifed and beaten many politicians, intellectuals, trade-unionists, journalists, even priests. The list of those who had been killed was long, and not one of them had caused Mussolini to lose any sleep. He’d always managed to come out on top, sometimes by playing down the political consequences and sometimes using them to his own advantage. What then was so different about the “Matteotti affair” that it had such an extreme psycho-physical effect on him? Matteotti’s murder was not like one of the by now normal attacks carried out by the squads, which frequently took place more or less on the spur of the moment. It had been carefully planned and had several serious consequences, both direct and indirect, among which was the complete cessation of Mussolini’s overtures to the left, leaving an unbridgeable divide between the Fascists and the opposition. The principal aim of the murder was to prevent the United Socialist leader from revealing publicly the secrets that lay behind the regime. Amerigo Dumini, a political killer who used to boast in public of the murders he’d committed, led the small group sent to carry out the assassination. He’d been born in St Louis in the United States and had lived for a certain time in Chicago, long enough to pick up some of the techniques used by the Italo-American Mafia gangs, such as the lightning kidnapping of a victim on the street by bundling him into a car. He had then served as an Ardito in Italy during the war, and at the end of it used his experience in the army to deal in the trafficking of decommissioned weaponry, in which job he made a lot of money for himself, for his protector Cesare Rossi, as well as for the Fascist squads and the Fascist press. This fact alone should dispel any lingering nostalgic view of the Fascist ceremonies in commemoration of war heroes, such as the cult that grew up round Margherita Sarfatti’s son, Roberto: behind the rituals and the pennants there were illegal business dealings. The state sold cars and other military equipment, still in very good condition, at discounted prices – or rather at rock-bottom prices – to cooperatives or war-veteran associations that had frequently been set up for the sole purpose of receiving the goods. Behind the veterans associations there were racketeers who appropriated the material and, after cleaning it up a bit, sold it on the market. Behind the racketeers – but not so far behind, since many of them intervened in person – were, often, the Fascists. “In this way Fascism continued to finance itself from the trade in decommissioned weaponry even during the early years of the regime. And it is our conviction that not only Fascism, but Mussolini personally, once he had taken power, did not hesitate to use the proceeds from several sales of war munitions in order to finance himself and his newspaper, especially during the period when Torre was acting as the provisional administrator for the state railways, in other words from early March 1923.”7

  In this context it’s also worth recalling that Mussolini’s first aeroplane was decommissioned after the war. So Dumini was a trafficker, and behind Dumini there was Rossi, and behind Rossi there was Mussolini, who took good care however not to become too involved in the grey area where politics and illicit business dealings meet and merge. On the other hand, all the people who were moving the money around and distributing it in cash payments – the racketeers, the traffickers, the more or less concealed financiers – wished to be sure that it ended up in the right hands so they obtained the results they wanted. One person alone could provide the guarantee that behind him lay the guiding will and desires of the man at the top; his presence and his name were enough: Arnaldo Mussolini. As Mauro Canali writes in his study of the Matteotti affair, it is hard to find evidence of the business dealings for which Mussolini’s brother was acting as a frontman, but “the inclusion of his name on the management board of several businesses shows how willing he was to exploit his family connections”.8

  When the Fascists came to power, their finances took on another dimension. The thought of being in charge of the nation’s entire economy had not entered the heads of Mussolini and the men around him. On his return from a visit abroad, which he had taken in Belgium, London and finally Paris, Matteotti had plunged into the study of the complex political and economic background to Italian oil production, and while engaged on this had realized that it would be possible to deal Fascism a mortal blow. Industrial production – in particular car production – was growing rapidly in Italy. In 1922, the year of the March on Rome, Italy had a requirement of 716,000 tonnes of oil, but only produced 10,000. The rest – and it was easy to predict that demand would go on increasing – was supplied by two oil companies, behind which lay the real giants of the oil-production industry: Standard Oil in New Jersey, which controlled eighty per cent of the Italian market, and the Dutch-English company Royal Dutch-Shell, which controlled the remaining twenty per cent. Through a new company, the Anglo-Persian, which had acquired the rights to the oil extracted in Iran, the Royal Dutch-Shell was able to make some advantageous offers to the Italian government, thereby threatening to reduce the American share of the market. As the overall picture gradually grew clearer, Matteotti was able to fit in significant pieces in the jigsaw of complex relations, such as the appointment of Orso Mario Corbino to the post of Minister for the National Economy. The appointment was a clear demonstration of the power of the international oil industry. Corbino had voted against Mussolini’s first government but that was now irrelevant. He had ties to American interests: his first act was to scupper the proposal to create an oil company that would function in the international market to defend Italy’s real interests. The objective was to keep Italy dependent on external suppliers of oil – in other words, to maintain the profitability of the century’s most important business. The threat from Anglo-Persian was countered by a small American company that presented itself as “in
dependent”: Sinclair Oil, created from the merger of several individual producers. In signing a contract with this company, it was easy for Mussolini, his minister for the economy and the Fascist gerarchi to declare its independence, but the reality was that major American capital lay behind it, since Standard Oil was using the smaller company as a front to protect its own business interests. “Sinclair Oil’s request for concessions for exploratory drilling in Sicily and in Emilia was part of a larger, more complex plan of Standard Oil’s to maintain its monopoly of the Italian market, threatened by the arrival of Anglo-Persian. To be more precise, it is highly probable that Sinclair Oil was operating in Italy as a front for Standard Oil, as the higher Fascist echelons and Mussolini himself clearly knew.”9

  The powers behind the large oil-industry companies, described by Enrico Mattei in 1945 as the “seven sisters”, which operated like transnational governments, were preparing for war among themselves: what was at stake was the control of the rapidly growing Italian market. The top-secret American plan was detailed and bold: Italy must not become a producer of oil, and Sinclair Oil had to reach an agreement with the Fascists whatever it cost. The regime was ready to sign a contract with Sinclair Oil which granted the company exclusive rights to the exploration of vast parts of Italian territory, in effect handing it a stranglehold over the industry – a curious policy for a government which vaunted its nationalist credentials. It was obvious that Sinclair wouldn’t find a drop of oil. To win a space in the markets Sinclair paid large bribes to politicians; in the United States an inquiry had been carried out into sums it had paid out during the Coolidge presidency. The American press was on to the affair, and articles appearing there started to raise concerns in Italy over the agreement which was near to being signed. At this point the new Italian ambassador to Washington stepped in; this was the prince Gelasio Caetani, a mining engineer who was still relatively young; he had two degrees from Columbia University and had worked for many years for the Guggenheim family, who were shareholders in Sinclair Oil. He gave his reassurances that the agreement with Sinclair Oil could go ahead. Mauro Canali comments:

  It is curious that the head of the Italian government was so keen to sign an agreement with Sinclair Oil as to neglect some of the basic rules of political prudence. It might be supposed that there were external pressures on him, but if so it is not clear who was in a position to exert such pressure on the Fascist leader to sign an agreement about which in private he expressed serious misgivings, to the point that he refused to meet a representative from Sinclair. The only power at that time which could bring pressure to bear successfully on Mussolini was the monarchy, but it seems improbable that members of the court circle or even of the royal family itself would risk bringing such pressure on a head of government who was still an unknown quantity and who was also notoriously quick to take offence.10

  Matteotti was venturing into unknown territory, bringing to light the illicit business deals which lay behind the regime, the gerarchi’s corruption, the source of the hidden funds which had suddenly financed the Fascist press. The United Socialist leader had discovered the way to bring Mussolini down, and in making his denunciation he would also transform the opposition to the regime, which was increasingly trapped in a sterile political antagonism based on the defence of abstract moral principles. But what Matteotti had discovered made him an enemy not only of Mussolini, but also of the large oil companies. He probably realized this, but decided to go ahead all the same. On the morning he was kidnapped, Matteotti was not due to deliver the usual outspoken criticisms of Fascism for which he had become famous among the opposition ranks. His attack was going to be a new one. Peter Tompkins – the Europe correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, NBC and CBS, and a former secret-service agent who was sent to Rome during the final months of the Fascist regime in order to work with the Resistance – was convinced of this too. Tompkins was not a professional historian, but his investigations are characteristic of the solid intelligence training he had received. According to Tompkins’s reconstruction of the events that surrounded the murder of Matteotti, Sinclair Oil had paid bribes to various powerful figures in the regime, from Gabriello Carnazza, the minister for Public Works, and Orso Mario Corbino, the minister for the Economy, to the men who acted as intermediaries between the company and Mussolini, such as Cesare Rossi. In Tompkins’s view, their aim was twofold: to maintain the American hold on Italy’s demand for oil and to prevent the discovery of oil in Emilia, Sicily and the Italian colony of Libya, and the risk of an upset in the Italian market and the emergence of autonomous oil production. It is true that any hypothetical identification and exploitation of the Libyan oil fields lay a long way in the future, but oil companies are used to taking the long view and ensuring their interests are protected over the long term.

  An Italian geologist and geographer, Ardito Desio, had discovered oil in Libya, although he had not guessed at the extraordinary quantities that lay beneath the soil of the Italian colony. In 1938 he brought a bottle of crude oil that he had managed to extract himself back with him to Italy, still preserved by his daughter today in memory of an opportunity which was lost by her father and the whole country. In his reconstruction Tompkins discovered that all the gerarchi to whom bribes had been paid were members of the Piazza del Gesù Lodge, the branch which had split away in 1908 and so was no longer “obedient” to the English Lodge. It was men belonging to the English Lodge “The Lion and the Unicorn” who defended the interests of the Royal Dutch-Shell company, and it was probably these same men who gave Matteotti, during his visit to London, the documents revealing the secret dealings which would enable him to launch his attack on the regime. Tompkins is also convinced that the Italian royal family, the other power in the country’s diarchy, was directly involved in the affair, an argument which has been sustained principally by Matteotti’s son, Matteo, who was only three years old at the time his father was murdered and who later fought with the Partisans and became a deputy in the first post-war parliament in the newly founded Republic. If true, the involvement would explain the King’s subsequent actions. Emilio De Bono, one of the four leaders of the March on Rome, a monarchist and at the time of the Matteotti affair the director of the department for Public Security, may have informed Victor Emmanuel of the documents in Matteotti’s possession. Tompkins acknowledged that this hypothesis had been made first by Giancarlo Fusco, a journalist who worked for the newspaper Stampa sera, who had based it on a remark made by the Duke Aimone of Savoy-Aosta in a interview which Fusco published only in 1978, many years after the Duke’s death.

  Aimone had told a small group of officials in 1942 that the real reason Matteotti had been killed was because he was carrying important documents proving that the King, Victor Emmanuel III, had become a large shareholder in the Sinclair Oil Company in 1921, without having to pay a single lira for the shares. In exchange, the King agreed to keep the huge deposits of oil which it was thought existed in Libya “covered” – in other words, unexplored and unexploited. […] But the real plot was devised by Standard Oil using its dependent company Sinclair Oil to obtain an exclusive ten-year contract, renewable for fifty more years, to search for oil in Italy. The contract was signed by Mussolini and Victor Emmanuel III but repudiated by Mussolini when an article by Matteotti was published in the English magazine English Life a month after his murder, revealing the plot.11

  At the end of the Second World War, the Duke Aimone of Savoy-Aosta (the father of the present Duke Amedeo) was trapped by a British secret-service agent posing as a journalist into making some indiscreet revelations; for this his family sent him away into a kind of exile or “internment” in Argentina. He died in obscure circumstances shortly afterwards. In the second trial for the murder of Matteotti, which took place in 1946, the Socialist prosecuting lawyer Giuseppe Paparazzo declared that the man who carried out the killing, Amerigo Dumini, first buried the documents that Matteotti was carrying with him under a tree and later sent them to an American l
awyer, Martin J. Arnold, in San Antonio, Texas. Among the documents Dumini sent to Arnold was also his own memorandum on the affair that he wrote in 1933. Thanks to an agreement between William J. Donovan, head of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, a team of FBI agents photographed the Dumini dossier in the offices of Arnold & Robertson in San Antonio and had them classified as secret. The lawyers would have been in the right to refuse the agents permission to see the files, but got round the breach in professional ethics by leaving the room for a while, during which the dossier was left unattended. After Arnold had died, Tompkins contacted his widow, who remembered the so-called “Italian file”, but couldn’t find it any more among the other papers belonging to her husband which had been stored in the garage. Tompkins was certain that the file contained not only Dumini’s 1933 memorandum, in which the main responsibility for Matteotti’s killing was laid at the door of Arnaldo Mussolini, but also proof of the King’s involvement. Tompkins died before he could go to Texas to initiate a personal search for the missing file.

  Mussolini found himself in the position of an actor having to perform from a script he was not familiar with and in which he had difficulty identifying who the other characters were. Too much was at stake: the hidden manoeuvres of the giant oil companies were beyond his power to control. He saw that he was being increasingly indicated as the person responsible for ordering Matteotti’s murder, realized that a solution was beyond even his gifts for political escapology, but in the effort to find a way out fell seriously ill. Once the men in the Fascist Cheka unit had been identified, the investigating magistrates started to trace the close links some of them had with Cesare Rossi, the head of the government’s press office, and the Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Aldo Finzi. Both, as close associates of Mussolini, could lead the investigators’ trail nearer to him; Mussolini immediately jettisoned them. On 14th June he sacked both Rossi and Finzi – the former was given no right of appeal, but Finzi was asked to go as a scapegoat with the possibility held out of an eventual reinstatement. He also dismissed Caetani as the Italian ambassador in Washington (Caetani was the only one Mussolini re-employed, many years later, as the head of a new Italian oil company, AGIP). Rossi reacted by accusing Mussolini of losing control of the situation. He might escape being identified as the person who ordered Matteotti’s killing, but he nevertheless was morally responsible for creating and fomenting the climate of intolerance and violence in which the murder had taken place. In particular, certain remarks Mussolini had let fall, such as “that man shouldn’t be allowed to walk free”, had easily been interpreted by others as giving a tacit green light to the assassins.