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At his trial, Vinciguerra was to add, “With the massacre of Peteano and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages. [This structure] lies within the state itself. There exists in Italy 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.”
On October 24, 1990, Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti astonished the political establishment when he finally confirmed the existence of Gladio, in testimony to an Italian senate subcommittee. Andreotti had been forced into making this admission by the discoveries of Felice Casson in the archives of the state’s secret services. Gladio was, Andreotti said, a “structure of information, response, and safeguard.” Some 622 civilians belonged to Gladio units in Italy. He denied that the organization had any involvement in terrorist activities, but confirmed that 127 separate arms caches used by Gladio had been dismantled. It was from one such cache that the explosives that killed the three Carabinieri officers in Peteano had originated.
According to Giulio Andreotti, all incoming Italian prime ministers were informed about Gladio. This was challenged by the former socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi, who said he only knew about the secret organization when shown a letter about it that bore his own signature. Aldo Moro, the former prime minister who was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades, was closer to the political establishment of the time than Craxi, and doubtless knew of its existence. According to one of his kidnappers, Alberto Franceschini, Moro had helped set up the Gladio structure in the first place. However, Moro’s keenness to embrace a reformed Communist Party in a coalition known as “the historic compromise” (compromesso storico) offended many on the right, and has proved the basis for frequent conspiracy theories surrounding his kidnap and assassination.
Some of those with possible answers did not, however, survive to give them to subsequent parliamentary inquiries. The Carabinieri general Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who led the anti-terrorist campaign in the 1970s and captured two key members of the Red Brigades, was assassinated in Palermo in 1982, along with his wife, on the orders of the Mafia boss Salvatore Rina.
Among the cases Dalla Chiesa was investigating at the time was the murder of the journalist Mauro De Mauro. According to a Mafia informant, De Mauro was killed because he had learned about the planned 1970 coup d’état known as the Golpe Borghese, involving the right-wing “Black Prince,” Junio Valerio Borghese. The plot involved the occupation of the Quirinale Palace and Ministry of the Interior by army dissidents, with the support of Mafia backers. Borghese was an aristocrat and fascist soldier who had been rescued from partisans at the end of the war by the U.S. agent James Angleton, later a long-serving chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff. Known to many as the “mother” of the modern CIA, Angleton grew up in Rome, where his family owned a business, and returned to the city on one of his first CIA postings. Borghese fled Italy after the collapse of the plot attempt. In spite of several years of trials, no one was convicted of any crime over this very real attempt to overthrow a democratically elected European government.
A second journalist to suffer from the fallout of the “Years of Lead” was Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli, a specialist writer with extensive contacts inside the secret-service community. Pecorelli had written an article warning that Alberto Dalla Chiesa was in danger of assassination four years before the Carabinieri general was murdered. Pecorelli published a number of private documents relating to the Moro case, drawing a connection between the death of the former prime minister and Gladio. He had also linked Giulio Andreotti himself to the Mafia.
In March 1979, Pecorelli was murdered in the Prati district of Rome. The distinctive ammunition that killed him proved to be easily traceable. The journalist was assassinated by the Banda della Magliana, a group involved with all three arms of the Italian organized crime community, the Cosa Nostra, Camorra, and ’Ndrangheta, as well as a number of Fascist groups and the notorious P2 Masonic Lodge. The four bullets that killed Mino Pecorelli came from a cache of arms hidden in the basement of the Italian Health Ministry in Rome. The Mafia informant, Tommaso Buscetta, who grew up in Palermo and was later associated with the New York Gambino crime family in the United States, testified in Palermo in 1993 that Pecorelli was killed as a favor to Giulio Andreotti, on the orders of two Mafia cousins, Nino and Ignazio Salvo, who were the links between organized crime and Andreotti’s Christian Democratic Party.
Buscetta was one of the first and most important Mafia members to break the code of omertà. His testimony, to two judges who would later be murdered by the Mafia, resulted in the imprisonment of almost 350 gang members. It also served to increase the pressure on Giulio Andreotti.
The former prime minister denied ever having met the Salvo cousins. However, two photographs showing him with Nino Salvo were found in the archives of Letizia Battaglia, the legendary Sicilian photographer who has spent a career documenting the lives and deaths of the Mafia and their victims.
In 1995, five years after he first confirmed the existence of Gladio, the man who was a giant of postwar Italian politics was charged with ordering Pecorelli’s assassination out of fear that the journalist was about to reveal damning information confirming his connections to organized crime. Andreotti was acquitted in 1999 but found guilty on appeal in 2003. At the age of eighty-three he was sentenced to twenty-four years in jail. He was then immediately released pending a further appeal, and one year later was acquitted of all charges.
After Andreotti finally confirmed the existence of Gladio, the European Parliament drafted a resolution criticizing the fact that “these organizations operated and continue to operate completely outside the law since they are not subject to any parliamentary control.” It went on to call for “a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of those clandestine organizations.” Since that call was issued in 1990, only Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland have carried out parliamentary investigations.
Apart from the Quirinale Palace and the Ministry of the Interior, most of the government buildings featured in this book are imaginary. The Quirinale is open to the public once a week, on most Sunday mornings. The visit includes the Salone dei Corazzieri and is one of the great sights of Rome — a free one too.
The real-life tomb of the Blue Demon lies close to the Etruscan necropolis site on the outskirts of Tarquinia, and was discovered in 1995. At the time of writing, it is one of the few tombs on the site that is closed to the general public.
About the Author
DAVID HEWSON is the author of eleven novels. Formerly a weekly columnist for The Sunday Times, he lives in Kent, England, where he is at work on his next crime novel, The Fallen Angel.
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