by Peter Robb
Pasolini followed this with a disarming admission. I know. But I don’t have the proof. I don’t even have clues. Instead he claimed the artist’s prerogative of an imaginative statement of political reality. The court room wasn’t the only place where truth was decided. The court room was often the last place to look for it. Pasolini went on:
I know because I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganized fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail.
Two months before his murder, Pasolini narrowed his aim. In the Corriere della Sera he demanded simply that the DC be put on trial for
unworthiness, contempt for citizens, manipulation of public money, intrigue with the oil companies, with industrialists, bankers, connivance with the mafia, high treason in favour of a foreign country, collaboration with the CIA, illicit use of organisms like the SID [secret services], responsibility in the massacres of Milan, Brescia, Bologna … destruction of Italy’s urban and rural environment … responsibility for the fearful, as they say, state of schools, hospitals and every basic public service …
By now his polemics had become a wild, desperate joke. Twenty years later it was hard to recall the mad daring of Pasolini’s provocation in the autumn of 1975, on the front page of Italy’s leading paper. The accuracy of it all, however, still quickened the pulse.
Let the image of Andreotti or Fanfani, Gava or Restivo, handcuffed between the carabinieri, be a metaphoric image. Let their trial be a metaphor. To make what I say comic as well as sublime … and above all much clearer.
A month before his murder he was writing another litany of things Italians want to know. Among others:
Italian citizens want to know why … the division between northern Italy and southern Italy has become even deeper, making southerners ever more second class citizens … Italians want to know how far the mafia has taken part in the decisions of the government in Rome or collaborated with it …
Pasolini had earlier that year described Moro as
the one … who seems the least implicated of all in the horrible things that have been organized in this country from 1969 until now, in the attempt, at least formally successful, to hold on to power.
Wading through the press clippings of the previous spring, Sciascia seized now on the way the other politicians started speaking of Moro, a few days after his kidnapping, first as a statesman, and then as a great statesman. Moro, said Sciascia, had never been a statesman, let alone a great one, the DC never having had any sense of the state. Moro was a first-rate politician who continued to be one during his imprisonment. The statesman-talk was a way of sharply distinguishing the earlier Moro from the author of the letters now arriving from the prison, which urgently argued for negotiating his release. The letters, said his old DC colleagues, were if not dictated by terrorists then written under pressure of physical or psychological torture. Moro had written first in the hope of being rescued, playing for time and probably trying to convey, in his habitually oblique and contorted language, useful information. At a certain point in his well fed isolation Moro must have realized the rescuers weren’t coming. No commando squad was going to kick down the door of the people’s prison. After twenty days, Moro had sent a vigorously argued letter to the DC leaders pointing out, truthfully, that he’d always been in favour of negotiating to save lives in cases like his own, and reminding the communists what they owed him. Unable to suppress their president’s letter, the DC leaders had issued a note saying it had been written under duress and could not morally be attributed to [Moro].
From there on Moro’s letters had become more personal, more desperate and more acutely argued. Sciascia described the sequence as a tragic breaking down. The mask, the character, gave way to the man, and the man to the creature, the bare forked animal, and it was when Moro shed his political mask, dropped his political voice and started to sound in his letters really and deeply human, that the DC, the communists and the Italian press repudiated him. One DC leader, challenged by Moro, had replied that he wasn’t going to debate with the BR. The communist Antonello Trombadori had cried in the corridors of the Italian parliament, Moro is dead! A famous conservative commentator had published a Requiem for Moro. All this was while Moro was alive and hoping to live. The culminating touch had been a public statement put out by a group describing themselves as friends of Moro, which had announced that the Moro who speaks from the ‘people’s prison’ is not the Moro we have known. The fifty-odd signatories had described themselves as old friends who’d shared with the earlier Moro a common cultural formation, Christian spirituality and political vision. The Moro who still hoped to negotiate his release was not the man we know, with his spiritual, political and judicial vision that inspired the contribution to the drawing up of the republic’s very constitution. The great statesman was dead, they were saying, dismissing the lucid and intelligent living writer of the letters being received as the voice of the Red Brigades.
Moro had then realized his party had condemned him to death. I wouldn’t have believed it possible, he had written. The closing words of a long letter in which he foresaw his death and his funeral were a portent, or a curse:
This bloodbath will not go well … neither for Andreotti, nor for the DC, nor for the country: each will bear his responsibility.
I do not want, I repeat, men of power around me. I want those who have really loved me to be near me … If all this has been decided, let God’s will be done. But let none of those responsible hide behind a pretended duty. Things will be made clear, they will soon be clear.
Sciascia ended with a paragraph from a story by the Argentinian metaphysical writer Jorge Luis Borges. A narrator describes a mystery story whose plot he’s forgotten. He remembers though that a final paragraph contains a sentence which makes the reader realize that the story’s solution to the mystery is wrong. The unquiet reader re-reads the pertinent chapters and finds another solution, the true one. Sciascia was implying Moro had left an oblique message about the state’s complicity in terrorism in one of his last letters. But the lines from Borges also bore on Sciascia’s belief that Moro was loyal to the end to his DC and never revealed compromising secrets to his captors. Maybe ‘findings’ will come to light, Sciascia wrote, but it will be too late not to suspect an expert set-up … Years after Sciascia wrote this, ‘findings’ did come to light. And though Sciascia had reason to be sceptical of anything emerging from the riven, nightmare world of the Italian secret services, the discovery of these ‘findings’ had consequences that were powerful reasons for believing the ‘findings’ to be authentic. In his terrible abandonment Moro had revealed more than Sciascia imagined. The unquiet reader has to go back now and reread some more chapters of The True History of Italy. On an essential matter of fact, Sciascia got it wrong.
* * *
THE FINDINGS made their first appearance less than five months after Moro’s body had been dumped in the boot of the red or purple Renault 4. On the first of October 1978 a group of the antiterrorist carabinieri who were working under general Dalla Chiesa raided an apartment in via Monte Nevoso in Milan. They surprized nine members of the Red Brigades at work typing out documents of Moro’s. There were unsent letters, various notes and his lengthy replies to BR interrogators on Italian politics.
The documents had hardly been discovered before they vanished. The originals disappeared at any rate, and questions about them were being asked within days. The journalist Giorgio Bocca wrote in La Repubblica five days later that political and military figures had gone through the Moro papers before they reached the magistrates. The BR members who were arrested themselves insisted that a part of the material disappeared on its way to the judiciary. A radically incomplete forty-nine page version was later released to the press. It contained a series of charges against the DC and especially Andreotti. Moro accused Andreotti over
his relations with the mafia banker Sindona; over the Italcasse financial scandal which involved both Andreotti and elements of Cosa Nostra; and over the state’s complicity in the 1969 terrorist bombing of a bank in piazza Fontana in Milan, which had killed sixteen people.
None of it was really new, and the edited version of the Moro papers added little to what was already known, though there was some piquancy in the accusations’ now coming from inside the DC. Later that October a curious piece on the Moro papers appeared in a little-known magazine called Osservatorio Politico, and known as OP. This paper was a one-man outfit in the person of Mino Pecorelli, who had come to journalism from the very murky background of the Italian secret services. OP was a kind of newsletter that presented insider knowledge in an oblique and intimidatory way, and its purposes were often closer to blackmail than information. It was assumed that Pecorelli was still at least close to his previous employers.
OP’s article contained some very brief extracts from the Moro papers that weren’t in the version given to the press. The accompanying text remarked Giulio Andreotti is a very lucky man, but his path has been smoothed by a series of only partly fortuitous circumstances … The article was a warning that Pecorelli knew what was in the complete original. Apart from this dangled bait, it was twelve years before the contents of the unmutilated Moro papers became known to more than three or four people. In October 1990 some workmen doing alterations to the same Milan apartment where the earlier papers had been seized in 1978 found a copy of a more complete set of documents hidden behind a plaster wall panel. Whether or not these Moro papers were the same as those found in 1978, which seemed to have disappeared without trace, this new version contained a great deal more than had been let out before. Moro here revealed that a secret and illegal anticommunist military network set up in Italy at the end of the war and linked to NATO was still in existence. He confirmed that the DC was financed in part by the CIA, something the left had been saying for years. He spoke about the state’s involvement in the right-wing terrorist strategy of tension in the seventies, and on many other matters. These parts had clearly been censored in 1978 as state secrets.
So had a lot of material that concerned Andreotti alone. Andreotti, the newly-found papers said, had lately won a power struggle for control of the secret services and so was privy to all state secrets. Moro described Andreotti as vastly powerful both inside and out of Italy, and went on to make a solemn denunciation of the man the law had given so much power. He described Andreotti as cold, impenetrable, devoid of human feelings … given over to the conquest of power in order to do evil, as he has always done in life. A very dangerous man, Moro warned, to have in charge. In a striking phrase, Moro evoked an Andreotti livid, absent, closed in his dream of glory.
Unlike the earlier published version, these Moro papers contained information about Andreotti’s dealings with Sindona and a fairly detailed account of Andreotti’s part in the Italcasse scandal. This was a complex and deeply compromising matter. Andreotti had used loans from the Italcasse bank, which was owned by the Italian government and controlled by the DC, to help business friends of his who were in trouble. The transactions involved money launderers working for the Cosa Nostra boss Pippo Calò, the one who’d argued against rescuing Moro. The publication of what Moro knew about this would likely have destroyed Andreotti’s political career. Somebody had got hold of the signed cheques that proved Andreotti’s involvement with mafia interests. The damage done to Andreotti when these raw facts were known would be compounded by questions they’d now raise about why Andreotti had refused to negotiate for Moro’s release. And the compounded damage would be compounded still further by the discovery that prime minister Andreotti had suppressed those parts of the Moro papers that told the story. And a flameout was the last thing prime minister Andreotti had in mind in 1978.
In October 1978, the OP article on the Moro papers had come at a time of frantic activity in some quarters. At two o’clock in the morning Franco Evangelisti, the deputy minister who was Andreotti’s factotum, had an unexpected home visit from general Dalla Chiesa, who asked him to read a typescript of about fifty pages. The general said it came from Moro and that he was going to give it to Andreotti the next day. Evangelisti said he never found out later whether he did or not. The mother of Dalla Chiesa’s wife also said she remembered her daughter telling her about the Moro papers at this time. She told her mother Andreotti had asked the general for them. She said Dalla Chiesa had given a part to the magistrates, a part but not all to Andreotti and that he’d kept a photocopy of the papers for himself. Andreotti’s memory of this period was quite different, and minimal. He said he knew nothing of Dalla Chiesa’s night call on his assistant, that he’d merely run a distracted prime ministerial eye over the Moro documents when they were passed to him. He added that before he was charged in 1993 he’d refused to read the Moro papers, because he didn’t want to trouble the memory he had of his murdered colleague.
People who worked closely with Dalla Chiesa and Pecorelli remembered that the general of the antiterrorist force and the muckraking journalist met quite often over the six months from September 1978. This improbable couple, the model of military rectitude and the sleazebag journo with the dubious past, seem to have had one thing only in common. They were the only two, apart from Andreotti and maybe the ineffable Licio Gelli and one or two of Gelli’s people in the secret services, who knew what was in the Moro papers. Pino Arlacchi, an informed writer on the mafia and in 1995 deputy head of the parliamentary antimafia commission, gave an interesting take on Pecorelli at this time. Pecorelli had lately broken with Licio Gelli and the secret right-wing P2 lodge, and as Pecorelli and Dalla Chiesa got to know each other, they became allies, helping and protecting each other in their search, drawn together by a shared sense of acute danger.
[Pecorelli] ended up taking seriously what was initially his ‘cover’ as a journalist. Before that, his magazine had simply been a weapon used by a faction of the secret services, but after May 1978 its financiers had increasingly lost control of their mouthpiece. OP’s exposés of the regime’s misdeeds and its attacks on very powerful figures continued …
A third person was present at one of the secret night-time meetings of Dalla Chiesa and Pecorelli in the last days of 1978 or the first of 1979, inside the general’s white Alfa Romeo. A little further on in The True History, on page 554, in the prosecutors’ sixth volume, I found the testimony of Angelo Incandela. He was a senior prison officer who was a close and trusted ally of Dalla Chiesa’s. It was Incandela who convinced the BR’s Patrizio Peci to collaborate with Dalla Chiesa, and this was the state’s breakthrough against left-wing terrrorism. In the prison at Cuneo where Incandela was working, there were a number of brigatisti and mafiosi of note among the prisoners. Dalla Chiesa was hunting for a packet of documents on Andreotti that he believed had been smuggled into the prison, and Pecorelli, whom Incandela only identified later from a photograph, was there to explain how and where the packet of documents, rolled up and tightly bound in plastic tape like a salame, had arrived. Incandela recalled
Three days later the general … repeated that I absolutely had to find those papers from the Moro kidnapping …
General Dalla Chiesa was very anxious to have information about the Hon. Andreotti.
Often over the years he asked me insistently to pass on information learnt from the inmates about the Hon. Andreotti.
He was utterly convinced that the Hon. Andreotti was an extremely dangerous person …
In Milan once he said to me, to get me to make a secret report on what he thought I knew about Andreotti, But don’t you understand that this is the only way I and you and others like us can hope to save our lives?
The papers had reached the prison. Incandela found the packet and handed it unopened to Dalla Chiesa. This meeting had a sequel in the summer of 1981, another secret meeting between Dalla Chiesa and Incandela, in which the general tried very hard to get the officer to hide a big env
elope containing a document, about forty pages Incandela thought, behind a lavatory cistern off the prisoners’ recreation room. The envelope would then be discovered during a prison search. Incandela angered Dalla Chiesa by refusing, but only because there was no way he could hide the envelope unseen by the guards. His tone changed suddenly and he stared into my eyes, Incandela remembered. Are you an officer with balls? Dalla Chiesa had said. We’re writing history … For the Fatherland, men who’ve got balls sometimes have to take risks.
One of the men of honour imprisoned at Cuneo then was Tommaso Buscetta. As a senior mafioso Buscetta expected privileges in jail, and when he failed to get them he told Incandela one day, You know that in Rome we can count even on Andreotti? We could have saved Moro, only they didn’t want it. Cosa Nostra had ordered Buscetta to make contact with the BR in prison during the first weeks of Moro’s imprisonment. This was when Cosa Nostra still thought saving Moro would be a favour to the friends in the DC. When they realized the real favour would be to let Moro die, Buscetta’s orders were countermanded.
Dalla Chiesa’s idea of the envelope behind the lavatory cistern, which seems to have been an attempt to get the Moro papers back into circulation without the general’s being linked to their reappearance, showed that Dalla Chiesa, even in the middle of the war against terrorism, still had the Moro documents very much on his mind nearly three years after they were first found. Pecorelli’s interest in what the Moro papers revealed didn’t last as long as the general’s, but it was very intense while it did. It’s a bombshell! Italcasse isn’t over it’s hardly started—who took the cheques will come out in the new year, he jotted among his notes. He’d discovered Cosa Nostra’s involvement in Andreotti’s Italcasse loans to Andreotti’s business friends.
At the end of January 1979, Pecorelli was invited to a dinner. The dinner was held in the restaurant of the Famija Piemonteisa club in Rome and it was organized and attended by the club’s director, Walter Bonino. This dinner takes a lot of space in The True History of Italy, which gives much attention, for instance, to the seating arrangement, which was intimate enough for two of the diners not to be able to carry on a private conversation unheard by the others. The True History also gives the information that at the end of the meal the diners moved to an adjoining room where coffee was sipped. It doesn’t tell the reader what was eaten. Was it something typical from Piedmont, in keeping with the club’s name, a truffle dish maybe? The fragrant white Alba truffles would have been barely out of season. Served alla piemontese they would have been thinly sliced and placed in a covered pan in alternating layers with equally thin slices of parmesan cheese and a hint of salt, pepper and olive oil. They cook in ten minutes. Or given the very hardbitten and experienced old capital hands who were gathered there that evening, something more characteristically Roman like fingerburning barbecued ribs of baby lamb? Either dish would’ve been apt, though it was too early in the year for one of that spring’s tender suckling lambs. Maybe none of the diners remembered what they ate on what sounds like a far from convivial occasion.