Operation Gladio

by Paul L. Williams

  THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

  In 1984, after twelve years of intense investigation, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a leader of ON, was taken into custody and questioned about the Peteano incident. After confessing in court that he had planted the car bomb, Vinciguerra said:

  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;…[it] 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 against a Russian army…. A secret organization, a super-organization with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them…. A super-organization which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, 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.24

  Following his conviction and sentence to life in prison, Vinciguerra, in an interview with the Guardian, said, “The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix. The Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo, were being mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organizations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance.”25

  THE BRESCIA BLAST

  Despite the setbacks, including the discovery of the arms dump, the attacks continued. On May 28, 1974, a bomb exploded within a garbage container that had been placed in the midst of Piazza della Loggia in Brescia. The incident took place during a demonstration against the Movimento d'Azione Rivoluzionaria (MAR), yet another neo-fascist group.

  Three weeks before the bombing, Carlo Fumagalli, a CIA operative and the founder of MAR, had been arrested for starting a fire at the Pirelli-Bicocca tarpaulin depot. The damage was estimated at a thousand million lire at the time and a thirty-year old worker lost his life in the blaze. Years later, Gaetano Orlando, a MAR spokesman, admitted, “The MAR group's plan was that the attack should be put down to the Red Brigades which were on the rise at the time.”26 Brescia, where the bombing took place, was the town in which Fumagalli and the MAR had established their headquarters.

  The Brescia blast killed eight people and wounded one hundred more. The attack, it was later learned, had been led by Pino Rauti, the founder of ON, who had been receiving regular paychecks from the US Embassy in Rome.27 An hour and a half after the bombing the local police chief ordered firemen to hose down the square. This order caused, in the words of examining magistrate Domenico Vino, “the possible loss of vital evidence and arous[ed] alarming questions as to the haste of the operation.”28

  Following the attack, a series of anonymous callers to the police and the press attempted to implicate Lotta Continua (“Continuous Struggle”), a militant Communist organization, in the incident. Members of the group were rounded up and placed in custody only to be acquitted due to lack of evidence.29

  TERROR ON A TRAIN

  On August 4, 1974, another major terrorist incident occurred when a bomb exploded on the Italicus Rome-Munich Express, as the train pulled out of a tunnel near the village of San Benedetto Val di Sambro. Twelve people were killed and 105 injured. This attack represented a reaction to the May 12 vote that abolished Italy's arcane divorce laws. The outcome represented a sharp rebuke to the Vatican and the Christian Democratic Party. Following the election, Gelli funneled black funds to Augusto Cauchi, who had commandeered the bombing.30 When the police traced the evidence to Cauchi, he fled, with Gelli's assistance, to Argentina. Sixteen years after the incident, Mario Tuti and Luciano Franci—two members of Cauchi's criminal clan—received life sentences for their part in the train attack.31

  THE MASTER PLAN

  In 1976, Gelli and other P2 officials drafted documents outlining their plans for the “Democratic Rebirth” of Italy. The plans called for the infiltration and control of all state institutions, all opposition groups (including the Italian Communist Party), the trade unions, the leading daily newspapers, and the national television stations. The drafters of the plan believed that this takeover could be accomplished by the expenditure of 40 billion lire (approximately $250 million) in black funds. The overall objective was “the establishment of a club where the best level of industry and financial sector leaders, members of the liberal professions, public officials and magistrates, as well as very few, selected politicians are represented…men who would constitute a real committee of trustees respecting those politicians who will take on the honor of implementing the plan.”32 The club would implement a series of electoral, judicial, and constitutional reforms in order to make the country more “governable.” National political life would be subordinated to an oligarchy with no formal political accountability, represented by the secret P2 lodge. Here, and not in state institutions, decisions would be made. Gelli and his Masonic brothers could pull a string and everything would fall into place. Once this system was established, Italy could be steered in the direction determined by P2's American controllers.

  The plans, as outlined in the P2 documents “Memorandum sulla Situazione Italiana” (“Memorandum on the Italian Situation”) and “Piano di Rinascita Democratica” (“Plan of Democratic Rebirth”), were found by the Italian police at the Fiumicino airport in Rome. They had been concealed within the false bottom of a suitcase belonging to Gelli's daughter.33 Also in the suitcase was a top secret US military dossier entitled “Stability Operations—Intelligence—Special Fields,” that had been published under the authority of General William Westmoreland, the US Army's chief of staff. The dossier informed intelligence operatives of appropriate means of response to Communist insurgencies.34

  THE MORO KIDNAPPING

  On March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, Italy's prime minister, was kidnapped while on his way to parliament for the opening of debate on the newly formed government of national unity—a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats. The incident occurred when a white Fiat with diplomatic plates pulled in front of his black limousine, forcing the driver to slam on the brakes. Two men from the Fiat and four other assassins who had been waiting on the sidewalk in Alitalia pilot uniforms, opened fire on Moro's bodyguards, killing all five of them.

  Moro's policy of working with and bringing the Communists into the government was denounced both by the USSR and the United States. But no one had been more outraged at the Italian prime minister's attempt at rapprochement than US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. In 1974, when Moro paid a visit to the United States, Kissinger warned him: “You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration, or you will pay dearly for it.”35 Kissinger's threat had such a profound effect upon Moro that the prime minister became physically ill and contemplated retirement from government.36

  The military secret service and acting prime minister Giulio Andreotti immediately blamed the left-wing terrorist organization Red Brigades for the kidnapping and proceeded to crack down on the left. Seventy-two thousand roadblocks were erected and 37,000 houses were searched. More than six million people were questioned in less than two months. While Moro was held captive, his wife Eleonora spent the days in agony together with her closest family and friends, even asking Pope Paul VI for help.37

  THE CRISIS COMMITTEE

  Steve Pieczenik, a former US State Department hostage negotiator and international crisis manager, claimed that he played a “critical role” in Moro's fate. He had been sent to Italy on the day of the kidnapping by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Presi
dent Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, who viewed Moro's project of accommodation with the Communists with great disdain.38 In Rome, Pieczenik worked with a crisis committee, headed by Francesco Cossiga, Italy's interior minister. Cossiga, who became Italy's prime minister in 1979 and president in 1985, had strong ties to Gelli and Gladio.39 Indeed, all of the officials who served on the crisis committee were members of P2—including Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, head of General Staff of the Defense; General Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI; Walter Pelosi, head of CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies); General Raffaele Giudice, head of the Guardia di Finanza; and General Donato Lo Prete, chief of General Staff of the Guardia di Finanza.40 Giulio Grassini, the head of the newly appointed Anti-Terrorism Inspectorate, was also a member of the lodge. Throughout the investigation, Grassini remained in constant contact not only with the committee but also Gelli.41

  On May 9, 1978, the committee forged a memo, attributed to the Red Brigades, stating that Moro was dead.42 Pieczenik said that the memo, which was leaked to the press, served a dual purpose: to prepare the Italian public for the worst and to let the Red Brigades know that the state would not negotiate for Moro and considered him already dead. “The decision was made in the fourth week of the kidnapping, when Moro's letters became desperate and he was about to reveal state secrets,” Pieczenik later testified. “It was an extremely difficult decision, but the one who made it in the end was interior minister Francesco Cossiga, and, apparently, also prime minister Giulio Andreotti.”43 When pressed about the committee's action, Pieczenik added: “We had to sacrifice Aldo Moro to maintain the stability of Italy.”44

  A STONE IN THE MOUTH

  In a cryptic article, appearing in a May 1978 issue of Osservatore Politico, investigative journalist Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli drew a connection between the death of Moro and Gladio. Moro's body, he noted, had been left in the trunk of a car parked next to an ancient Roman amphitheater where runaway slaves and prisoners fought to the death in gladiatorial combat. “Who knows what there was in the destiny of Moro that his death should be discovered next to that wall?” Pecorelli wrote. “The blood of yesterday and the blood of today.”45

  In another article, Pecorelli wrote that Moro's kidnapping had been carried out by a “lucid superpower” and was inspired by the “logic of Yalta.” He described the crime as “one of the biggest political operations carried out in recent decades in an industrialized country integrated into the Western system.”46 In one of his last articles, published on January 16, 1979, Pecorelli had written, “We will talk about Steve R. Pieczenik, who participated for three weeks in the interior ministry's expert meetings, then returned to America before Moro was killed, and reported to Congress that the measures taken by Cossiga on the Moro affair were the best possible in the circumstances.”47

  Several months after making these claims, Pecorelli was gunned down near his office on Via Orazio in Rome. The barrel of a gun had been shoved down his throat and the trigger pulled twice. As a classic gesture of the Mafia's practice of sasso in bocca (stone in the mouth), police officers discovered a stone within Picorelli's mouth as an announcement that the journalist never again would divulge a secret.48

  THE HYPERION LANGUAGE SCHOOL

  The fact that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by the CIA and the Italian secret services remains no longer contested. The purpose of the strategy of tension was to encourage violence from the radical left in order to convince the Italian people of the need to repress the rise of communism. The Brigades were a perfect foil. With unflinching radicalism, they considered the Italian Communist Party (PCI) too moderate and Moro's opening too compromising.

  Thanks to the infiltration, which occurred in 1973, the Brigades began to work closely with the Hyperion Language School in Paris, with most brigadiers unaware that it had been founded by the CIA. Hyperion opened an office in Italy shortly before the kidnapping and closed it a few months later. An Italian police report singles out Hyperion as “the most important CIA office in Europe.”49 Founded by Corrado Simioni, a CIA operative who worked with Radio Free Europe; Duccio Berio, an informant to the P2-controlled Italian military intelligence; and Mario Moretti, the CIA operative who was later convicted of killing Aldo Moro, the “school” acted as an intermediary for meetings between Italian and foreign terrorist groups, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Red Army Faction of Germany, and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (the Basque revolutionary army).50

  THE RED BRIGADE MYSTERY

  In 1974, four years before the kidnapping, Red Brigade founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini had been arrested in Rome. Franceschini immediately accused Mario Moretti of turning them in, stating that Moretti and Giovanni Senzani, another leading Red Brigade member, were, in fact, CIA spies.51 “From a military point of view,” Franceschini told an Italian parliamentary commission, “those of you who know the people who were supposed to have carried out the [Moro] operation will be perfectly aware that they were not capable of it.”

  Franceschini's testimony is supported by the several facts: (1) the gunmen who mowed down Moro's bodyguards were highly trained assassins with skills that far exceed those of known brigadiers; (2) the assassins were obliged to wear Alitalia uniforms in order to identify each other; (3) Moro had been held captive in an apartment complex owned by SISMI, Italy's military agency; and (4) the bullets that riddled Moro's body were treated with a special preserving paint that characterized the ammunition found in the Gladio arms dumps.52

  In 1981, Moretti was arrested, apparently by accident, and eventually confessed to the kidnapping. He received six life sentences for the murder but never cooperated with investigators. Cossiga, when he became president of Italy in 1985, pressed for a pardon. Moretti was paroled after fifteen years and presently resides in Milan.53 His early pardon by the Italian court has never been explained.

  VATICAN PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

  Fr. Felix Morlion, a Belgian priest, was affiliated with the Hyperion Language School and served to establish a branch of the “school” in Rome.54 During World War II, he had worked closely with Wild Bill Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services by creating Pro Deo a Catholic intelligence agency. When the Nazis seized control of Western Europe, Donovan relocated Morlion and his agency from Lisbon to New York.55 In 1945, the priest relocated to Rome, where he became the private emissary of Pope Pius XII and four of the pope's successors. Throughout the 1960s, he remained a pivotal US intelligence agent, as witnessed by his key role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.56 At JFK's urging, the Dominican priest had attended a strategic meeting in Andover, Massachusetts, where he established a communication channel between Moscow and Washington, mediated by Pope John XXIII, through whom messages were passed that brought an end to the threat of a nuclear war. In 1966, Morlion established, with funding from the CIA, the Pro Deo University which became Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (the International University of Social Studies). As president of the new university, Morlion became a force in the formation of the right-wing policies of the Italian government. He also reportedly began recruiting of terrorists and assassins, including Moretti and Mehmet Ali Ağca (who attempted the hit on John Paul II).57

  Questions about Morlion's involvement in the Moro matter first arose from the discovery of photos, taken by Pecorelli, of the prominent priest in the company of leading Italian military intelligence officials at the time of the kidnapping. Such questions became more pressing when the Rome office of the Hyperion School, which Morlion helped to establish, opened shortly before the Moro kidnapping, only to close the following autumn.58 Even more puzzling is the fact that the Pro Deo founder received prominent mention in the secret files of Licio Gelli (which were seized by the Italian police in 1982).59

  Fr. Antonio Mennini, a Vatican official, served as the intermediary between Moro and his family during the time of the captivity. How Fr. Mennini came to serve in this capacity raises questions about the extent of the Vatic
an's involvement in the crime. Fr. Mennini, who claimed to have heard Moro's last confession, was the son of Luigi Mennini, who served under the direct supervision of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Why would the brigadiers—avowed atheists—employ the services of a priest? And why would they seek the service of the son of a high ranking IOR official? Were Luigi or Antonio somehow in league with the kidnappers? Fr. Mennini, following Moro's death, rose through the ranks of Holy Mother Church and presently serves as the papal nuncio to Great Britain. And the Vatican, to this day, continues to shield Moro's confessor from ever having to testify in state hearings concerning the Prime Minister's abduction and death.60

  THE BOLOGNA BOMBING

  Gladio's role in the strategy of tension might have gone undetected save for the massacre in Bologna. At 10:25 a.m. on August 2, 1980, a time bomb within an unattended suitcase exploded in the crowded, air-conditioned waiting room of the Central Station in Bologna, destroying most of the main building. Eighty-four people were killed in the bombing and more than two hundred wounded, making it the most savage attack to take place on Italian soil since World War II.61