A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial

by Hendricks, Steve

  There is no reliable record of how much money the CIA funneled into the campaign or, for the most part, what it was spent on, although CIA-funded pamphlets that depicted Communist candidates as sexually depraved are known to have been distributed. The agency would later tell Congress it spent $1 million. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s then chief of station in Italy (later its megalomaniacal director of counterintelligence), once said the figure was $10 million, which would have gone far in poor Italy of the immediate postwar. Others have estimated $30 million, which today would be roughly equivalent to $300 million. Whatever the case, the Christian Democrats won the elections by a wide margin. The portion of the margin attributable to the CIA is unknowable, but the success helped resolve a debate then taking place in Congress and the White House about whether the CIA should be a mere collector of intelligence or a subverter as well. The advocates of subversion won, and over the next few decades, the CIA ran dozens of covert campaigns in other countries based on the Italian job.

  To undermine the Italian Communists for the longer term, the CIA turned after 1948 from ad hoc electioneering to systemic subversion of the Italian polity. The CIA gave money to anti-Communist labor unions and strike-breaking gangsters, founded publishing houses that excreted anti-Communist tracts and books, paid reporters to write and editors to approve anti-Communist articles, threatened other reporters and editors who would not be bought, and held membership drives and rallies for the Christian Democrats. The Soviet Union was doing some of the same for the Communists but, to judge from evidence revealed since the end of the Cold War, with fewer resources.

  The Italian Left grew anyway. In the elections of 1953 the Communists and Socialists won a combined thirty-five percent of the seats in Italy’s parliament, against the Christian Democrats’ forty percent. A rattled CIA responded with so vigorous a campaign of “political action” that William Colby, who ran the station in Rome (years before he ran the Phoenix program in Vietnam, then ran the entire CIA), could say twenty years later that the agency had yet to run a bigger campaign. But in the elections of 1958 the Communist–Socialist bloc again lost by only a few percent, and in 1963 the bloc finally won a narrow plurality. The Christian Democrats could maintain their power only by giving the Socialists a few shelves in the national cabinet, a development that, in the CIA’s view, portended the fall of Western Europe. Money continued to flow from Langley to Rome. The CIA would later claim that in the twenty years after the 1948 elections, it gave politicians of the Italian Right $65 million. That sum did not appear to include the money the CIA gave reporters, labor bosses, and the like. Victor Marchetti, a former senior CIA officer in Italy, estimated that a truer and more inclusive figure for the 1950s was $20 million to $30 million per year. Other students of the topic have concluded that every Christian Democrat who held a ministerial post between 1948 and 1968 took money from the CIA, although the money was apparently well-enough laundered that not all of the ministers knew its source. Italy was an extreme but not unique case. German chancellor Willy Brandt and French prime minister Guy Mollet were both beneficiaries of the CIA’s political fund.

  Concerned that these comparatively genteel efforts to influence Italy’s electorate might fail, the CIA, in or around 1951, created Gladio. The precise date, like many other details about Gladio, remains shrouded. Gladio had for a co-founder the Italian military secret service, the Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate, SIFAR, which was much the lesser partner. (SIFAR was a precursor of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa, SID, which was a precursor of SISMI.) Since the close of the Second World War, the CIA had exerted its considerable influence to ensure that SIFAR was run by ardent anti-Communists, including Fascists and members of a secret paramilitary wing of the Christian Democrats who were to have seized power if the Communists had won the elections of 1948. For years, whenever SIFAR gathered important intelligence, it sent it to “the boys at Via Veneto,” as the CIA officers at the U.S. embassy in Rome were known. The CIA and SIFAR hid Gladio’s birth from the rest of the Italian government. While some Italian prime ministers and presidents would be told of Gladio’s existence over the next four decades, many seem not to have been. Nor, as a body, was Parliament. Under Italy’s Constitution and laws, Gladio was as illegal as the Mafia.

  To man the army, SIFAR quietly recruited zealots from Italy’s military and police forces and trained them in guerrilla warfare and specialized arts like espionage, electronics, and propaganda. The trained men in turn kept an eye out for other zealots to recruit, some of whom were trained as well but others of whom were kept as untrained reserves available for muster by the regular Gladiators when the great clash with Communism came. Apparently Gladio grew briskly, because by the late 1950s or early 1960s the CIA and SIFAR built a training center for the army on the island of Sardinia. The site was chosen because it could be defended should Communists take mainland Italy and because its remoteness helped maintain Gladio’s secrecy. At about the time the center was built, the CIA and SIFAR began sharing the management of Gladio with NATO. Probably NATO helped pay for the training center, which was no rude camp. A runway was laid, a firing range cleared, a small harbor dug, underwater structures for training frogmen built, and buildings erected for training in explosives and house-to-house fighting. Trainees were flown to Sardinia in planes with blacked-out windows, then driven in blacked-out vans from the airfield to their barracks. In the early years, the trainees seem to have had little idea where they were.

  The CIA supplied the Gladiators with an arsenal, which was scattered about the country in caches that were to be opened when the war came. Most of the caches, like the one found near Peteano, were buried under fields or churchyards or mountainsides, but others were more brazenly stored in police barracks. Some may have held gold, whose worth, unlike the lira, was assured over time. When Gladio was exposed in 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti said there had been 139 caches, a number that might have been true or might have been gross understatement. Even 139, with dozens or scores of weapons per cache, suggested a sizeable army. Estimates vary widely, but regular Gladiators over the four decades of the army’s existence numbered at least several hundred, more probably several thousand, and possibly ten thousand. Irregular recruits were probably several thousand more. After Gladio’s exposure, a few Italian generals and prime ministers who had been complicit in Gladio’s operation said the army was to have been used only against Communists who invaded or mounted an insurrection, not against Communists the electorate might empower by vote. It was a highly improbable claim.

  A PROBLEM with preparing men to seize a country is that they may grow dissatisfied when not allowed to do so. If they have been encouraged in the belief that the enemy is not merely objectionable but diabolic, they may become more dissatisfied still. This may help explain how Italy came to be threatened with a coup d’état after the Socialists and Communists won their narrow plurality in 1963. A year and a half before the election, some senior CIA and military officers at the U.S. embassy argued that if the Socialists won a share of the government, the United States should encourage its proxies to intervene militarily. Their argument did not carry, and the Socialists were given their small share of the cabinet without violence. But the governing coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists was shaky and soon collapsed. As negotiations got underway between the two parties for a new government, the head of the Carabinieri, General Giovanni de Lorenzo, publicly rattled his saber (and his armored brigade) and privately, it seems, threatened a coup. De Lorenzo took a dim view of Socialists, and his rattles were understood as a suggestion that the Socialists should have a diminished role, or none at all, in the new government. De Lorenzo had until recently been the longtime director of SIFAR and thus Gladio, a post in which he had been installed largely because the United States thought him more unyieldingly anti-Communist than other candidates and demanded he be put there. After he moved to the Carabinieri, he maintained influence over SIFAR and Gladio through men he had appointed during his t
enure. The blueprint for his coup called for seven or eight hundred opposition leaders to be arrested and flown to the Gladio base on Sardinia for internment. It is conceivable that De Lorenzo would have planned a concentration camp at a base funded by the CIA and NATO without first getting their approval, but just. As it happened, the coup was not needed. The Socialists concluded from De Lorenzo’s threat that they would be annihilated if they did not restrict their ambitions, and they quickly accepted a minimal role in the new government and muted their calls for leftward change. The government listed rightward and stayed in that position for quite some time.

  A few years after his gambit, De Lorenzo was discovered to have illegally compiled dossiers on tens of thousands of innocent Italians. His particular focus was the sexual and financial peccadilloes of the elite, although he was not averse to gathering whatever else might be used for blackmail. The file on former and future prime minister Amintore Fanfani ran to four fat volumes. When the dossiers were exposed, De Lorenzo said the United States and NATO had suggested he create them, a claim that has never been proven nor disproven.

  Six years after De Lorenzo’s averted coup came another. Its leader was Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, who had commanded a Fascist corps of saboteurs under Mussolini and, after the war, had founded the Fronte Nazionale, with which he hoped to return Italy to Fascism. He recruited his putschists from current and former military men, and on December 7, 1970, the anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, they struck. The signal Borghese passed to begin the coup was “Tora, Tora,” after the code name Japan’s Fascists used for their attack. In the first hours of the coup, fifty of Borghese’s men penetrated the Ministry of the Interior and stole hundreds of submachine guns while two hundred other troops, already armed, advanced on Rome. Other conspirators prepared to seize parts of other cities. But before the insurrection matured, Borghese received a call—from whom is still debated—telling him that the support of the Italian Army, which he had expected, had not materialized. He had little choice but to recall his men and quietly return the stolen weapons. For years it was rumored that the coup had been backed by the United States, but the principal source of the rumor was a co-conspirator of Borghese’s who was of doubtful reliability. Decades later, however, a more reliable conspirator stepped forward and said that before the coup he had asked a CIA officer for a guarantee that the United States would not oppose it. The CIA man supposedly spoke with his superiors and reported back to the conspirator that his government would support the coup so long as Giulio Andreotti, already a rajah of the Right, were installed as prime minister. Years later the United States released archived documents showing that the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Graham Martin, had indeed been told of Borghese’s coup months in advance. Martin in turn cabled Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, to ask if he should warn the Italian president or prime minister. What Rogers told Martin is not known, but there is no sign the Americans alerted the Italians. (If they had, it is unlikely the coup would have progressed as far as it did.)

  One of Borghese’s co-conspirators was General Vito Miceli, who at the time ran SID (the successor to SIFAR) and thus Gladio. Not long after the aborted coup, Ambassador Martin gave Miceli $800,000 in cash, despite warnings from subordinates that Miceli was “linked to antidemocratic elements of the Right.” By some accounts, Miceli spent the American money “merely” on anti-Communist propaganda, but around the time he received the cash, he illegally created a secret intelligence organization whose funding has never been fully accounted for. The Super SID, as it came to be called, was patterned on the Gladio model—a force that was run by the uppermost officials of SID but hidden from the rest of the government. After the Super SID was exposed, Miceli was asked at an inquest whether it was he who had founded it.

  “A Super SID on my orders?” he replied. “Of course! But I have not organized it myself to make a coup d’état. This was the United States and NATO who asked me to do it!”

  Prince Borghese’s threat was followed by one from Count Edgardo Sogno. (Italy’s nobility tended to Neanderthalic politics.) In the early Cold War, Sogno had founded a group that ostensibly propagandized against Communism but in fact gathered dirt on labor organizers and other leftists, with funding from the auto giant FIAT. “When FIAT stopped financing us,” Sogno later said, “I decided to go to the United States and ask for help from my old friend Allen Dulles,” the director of the CIA. Dulles apparently gave Sogno the money he needed. As the years passed, the electoral gains of the Communist Party increasingly angered Sogno, and in the 1970s he became irretrievably outraged by suggestions from some Christian Democrats that for the stability of Italy the Communists should finally be given a piece of the government. Sogno began plotting a coup, and in the summer of 1974 he shared his plans with the CIA chief of station in Rome, Rocky Stone. “I told him,” Sogno later wrote, “that I was informing him as an ally in the struggle for the freedom of the West and asked him what the attitude of the American government would be. He answered what I already knew: the United States would have supported any initiative tending to keep the Communists out of government.” Sogno moved forward with his preparations, but before their culmination the Italian government discovered and quashed them. If the United States betrayed Sogno, he never suspected it.

  THE YEARS OF LEAD, Italy’s grisly era of domestic terrorism, were inaugurated on December 12, 1969, by a bomb that destroyed seventeen people and disfigured eighty-six others at a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana. As with the bombing near Peteano, which followed three years later, police rushed to blame leftists, hundreds of whom were eventually arrested around the country and thousands of whom were harried. Newspapers followed the government’s lead with McCarthyite assaults in print, and the Left, which had been in a strong position after the global protests of 1968 (which had been particularly potent in Italy and had essentially continued through 1969) found itself suddenly on the defensive.

  There were signs early on, however, that something was amiss in the haste to accuse the Left. To start with, only a few days after the bombing, the police’s leading suspect, an anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli, tumbled out a fourth-floor window at Milan’s police headquarters. The police said Pinelli leapt to his death when his alibi began to crumble under interrogation. It was an unconvincing explanation. It was the more so after investigating magistrates showed that Pinelli was not behind Piazza Fontana. Rightists were. Which rightists has never been irrefutably proven because for the next four decades police and intelligence officers covered up for them, and sympathetic judges dismissed cases against both them and their coverers on the thinnest of legal grounds. One of the first magistrates to expose pieces of the truth was Spataro’s mentor Emilio Alessandrini.

  Terrorists of the Right followed Piazza Fontana with scores of lethal attacks that achieved their apotheosis in the slaughter of eighty-five and the mangling of two hundred others at Bologna’s main train station in 1980. It remains the deadliest attack by terrorists in Italian history. The Right’s assaults were part of a “strategy of tension” whose goal, as several terrorists eventually said, was “to destabilize in order to stabilize”—that is, to create such fear in Italians that they would call for or tolerate the re-imposition of Fascism. Short of that, Italians might at least call for or tolerate what might now be called the Cheney agenda: an erosion of civil liberties, a fettering of the legislature’s power to check the executive, and, as a kind of a garnish, largesse for corporations and attacks on the rights of workers. No single body coordinated the strategy of tension. Rather, a common tune circulated along the rightist underground and was picked up and passed along by groups large and small, much as would happen among Islamic terrorists twenty years later.

  The Left, as noted, had its savages too. They had not been of much consequence before Piazza Fontana, but afterward their ranks swelled and they murdered scores of officials like Spataro’s mentors. The leftists did not see that their efforts to spark revolution only played into
the strategy of tension. As the number of dead and dismembered grew, Italians, though not so terrorized as to call for Fascism’s return, punished the Left at the polls, particularly after the Red Brigades murdered former prime minister Moro in 1978. The prospects of the Communist Party became crepuscular, then went out altogether.

  By the end of the Years of Lead in the late 1980s, political attacks had, by one count, killed 491 people and wounded 1,181. Perhaps three-fifths or two-thirds were the victims of rightists, the balance of leftists.

  It was against this background that Magistrate Casson investigated the bombing at Peteano. In time, he found and convicted the bomber, who was a leader of a cell of the rightist Ordine Nuovo, New Order, named Vincenzo Vinciguerra. Vinciguerra’s family name means “a victor in war”; his redundant given name means “conqueror.” He explained to Casson that rightwing terrorists had not carried out the strategy of tension entirely autonomously. “There exists in Italy,” he said, “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 in case of a military invasion on the part of the Red Army… . [It is] comprised of soldiers and civilians entrusted with military and political tasks and possessing its own network of communications, arms, and explosives and men trained to use them.” The men of the secret force, Vinciguerra said, did not limit their work to preparing a defense against the Red Army. Instead, “in the absence of a Soviet military invasion, [they] 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.” In short, Gladio, which Vinciguerra did not name (but which could have been no other), had played more than a passing role in the strategy of tension.