Webster Griffin Tarpley is an author, journalist, lecturer, and critic of US foreign and domestic policy. As a journalist living in Europe in the 1980s, Tarpley wrote a study commissioned by a committee of the Italian Parliament on the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The study reported on the false flag nature of the assassination, orchestrated by the neofascist lodge Propaganda Due (P2) with the cooperation of senior members of Italian government secret services but blamed on the Red Brigades. [“Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro?” (Who Killed Aldo Moro?), a study commissioned by a member of the Italian government and published in Rome in 1978.]
On March 16th, 1978, the day when the Italian designated Premier Honorable Aldo Moro should have formed an Italian Government with the Christian Democratic Party, to which he belonged, for the first time in the history of Italy, and in the history of a Western NATO Country, allied together with the Italian Communist Party, his car and the cars of the escort agents were stopped by a commando action in the center of Rome, all the escort agents were killed in seconds by terrorist killers who wore official uniforms of Italian Air Force officers and Moro himself was kidnapped unharmed and transported to an undisclosed location.
Although the presence of a certain number of armed red brigadiers during the commando action has been proven, it seems that they only served to block the Moro and escort cars as they were not adequately trained in the use of weapons in a commando action, while the massacre of the escort agents and It happened by a single ”very efficient” killer who killed them all in seconds with a machine pistol.
Around the start of the 1970s, Italy entered a period of intense political violence marked by riots, bombings and assassinations, with the chaos blamed on both far-left and far-right organizations. After the ‘Years of Lead’ wound down towards the start of the 1990s, the revelations of a covert anti-Communist network, codenamed Operation Gladio, would lead to questions around its role in the turmoil.
In the decades since, two broad narratives have emerged. The first is that the Gladio members, which included CIA agents, powerful business interests and far-right activists, simply stockpiled arms in preparation for a potential Soviet takeover, and then quietly disbanded after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In stark contrast, the other explanation claims that the CIA directed every twist and turn of the Years of Lead, generally portraying the other players in the Gladio network as simply following their lead. In reality however, a closer inspection reveals that Gladio’s relationship to the Years of Lead was complex, with the CIA creating a monster they were eventually unable to control.
In late 1970, with the Italian public reeling from a sudden escalation of political violence, various far-right figures are believed to have begun moving towards an attempted overthrow of the embattled government. Supported by dissident members of the armed forces, the figurehead of this planned coup was fascist war hero Junio Valerio Borghese, but the true architect is understood to have been Licio Gelli, a financier who was later named as a key participant in Operation Gladio.
At the centre of the Golpe Borghese, like many events linked to Operation Gladio, was Propaganda Due, a Masonic lodge that had been largely inactive until Gelli was assigned its leadership in 1965. As secretary of P2, Gelli built the lodge into a quietly powerful entity, likely using its secrecy to further entrench his Gladio operations. Along with his contacts in business and the security services, Gelli would use the lodge to maintain links to extra-parliamentary extremists.
Most notably, Gelli was connected to Stefano Delle Chiaie, the leader of Avanguardia Nazionale (‘National Vanguard’). Linked to various incidents of far-right terrorism, including the Piazza Fontana bombing, DC had joined Borghese’s Fronte Nazionale (‘National Front’) in 1967. At the same time, DC is believed to have also been an asset of Italy’s SID intelligence agency, acting as a key link between the security services and neofascism.
During the lead-up to the Golpe Borghese, Delle Chiaie and his followers were inserting themselves into the civil unrest which swept the Reggio region in the late 1960s. Centered around the city of Calabria Reggio, the dispute began over the location of the regional capital, with the far-right taking a lead role in escalating the situation. By July 1970, the government had lost control of the city, with protesters assembling barricades and clashing with police. Later that month, a train derailment killed six people, with the authorities identifying sabotage as the cause.
Along with Avanguardia Nazionale members, members of a local ‘Ndrangheta family were later accused of sabotaging the train, as part of a wider campaign of destabilization. Headed by the De Stefano brothers, the clan were known as modernizers within the ‘Ndrangheta, who were pushing for a more hierarchical structure that resembled the Sicilian Mafia. As it happened, the Mafia were also linked to various Gladio-related events throughout the Cold War, beginning with their links to American intelligence in World War Two. Since then, their staunch opposition to Communism had seen them rewarded with key positions in local government, allowing them to establish Sicily as a key node in the ‘French Connection’ heroin syndicate.
In September, five anarchists were killed in an apparent car crash near Rome. The group had previously been based in Reggio, where they claimed to have obtained evidence that the far-right had provoked the violent unrest. Naturally, questions were raised about the cause of the crash, with some pointing the finger at Borghese and his supporters. By now however, the public was more concerned with the wider insurrection, with the government eventually forced to deploy the army in early 1971.
It was in this context of chaos that the Golpe Borghese took shape, with the turmoil in the streets reflected in the halls of power. In August, center-left Prime Minister Mariano Rumor had resigned, with fellow Christian Democrat Emilio Colombo taking power instead. With the role of the Communists a key cause of the collapse of the Rumor cabinet, a December visit by Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito was selected as a pretext to gather hundreds of Avanguardia Nazionale members, supposedly to protest against the visit. In reality, the fascist militants were to complement sympathetic elements in the armed forces, who would seize power and detain socialist President Giuseppe Saragat, allowing for Borghese’s insertion as the new head of state.
Decades later, it was alleged that Borghese had recruited the De Stefano family to support his bid for power, having already formed close connections with the ‘Ndrine during the Reggio unrest. Along with them, Borghese is believed to have had similar discussions with members of the Mafia. According to the testimony of high-ranking Pentito witnesses, some were interested, particularly powerful Corleonsi boss Luciano Liggio. Overall however, it appears that Borghese’s request was voted down. Despite this, the theme of organized crime would arise again in the overlapping world of far-right politics and Operation Gladio.
On the 8th of December, Borghese’s supporters gathered to await the signal to overthrow the Italian Republic. It never came, with the coup’s figurehead calling things off at the last minute. Instead, Borghese fled to Spain, where he refused to make public the reason for his sudden change of heart. By 1974, he was dead, having suffered a pancreatic hemorrhage that some claimed was caused by poisoning.
At the time of Borghese’s death, the public had been made aware of his attempted coup through media reports and state investigations. Amongst the figures arrested was army general Amos Spiazzi, who was later sentenced to five years in prison, only for the decision to be overturned on appeal. Despite Spiazzi’s acquittal the investigations would lead to further questions about the links between the state and the far-right, eventually culminating in the Gladio revelations of the 1990s.
Like Borghese, Licio Gelli and Stefano Delle Chiaie also fled Italy after the failed coup. In their case, the two ended up settling in South America, with Gelli becoming close to the movement of former Argentine President Juan Perón, who was himself exiled in Spain. Having ruled Argentina for nearly a decade, Peron’s movement had been outlawed in 1955. Forced underground, the Peronistas had formed links with both the far-left and far-right, having already given refuge to escaped fascists after Word War Two.
In 1973, Perón suddenly re-emerged in Argentina, smuggled back into the country by Gelli. At the time, the South American nation had gone through its first election in ten years, which was won by left-wing Perónist Héctor José Cámpora. During a post-election rally to celebrate both Cámpora’s victory and Perón’s return, snipers fired on the left-wing sections of the crowd, killing thirteen and wounding hundreds. According to subsequent investigations in Spain, Delle Chiaie had been present at the massacre, which caused a lasting split in the movement and contributed to the outbreak of the Dirty War later in the 1970s.
Back in Italy, the Years of Lead continued to gain pace. In the anti-climactic aftermath of the Golpe Borghese, far-right activists would continue to perpetrate brazen acts of terrorism. Increasingly, they would target the representatives of the state, likely due to the realization that the status quo would not allow for the full restoration of fascist rule. With moderates blocking their agenda, it appears that they sought to force their hand with an intensification of the growing chaos.
Along with the machinations on the extremes of right-wing politics, there would be a growth in militancy on the left. Emerging out of the student protest movement of the 1960s, small groups would, like their counterparts on the far-right, embrace armed struggle. As with the actions of the neofascist scene, some of the more infamous incidents of far-left terror would also leave questions about the hand of Operation Gladio.
Source: PlainSightProductions
La Repubblica’s bombshell interview with Roberto Jucci
On March 4th, 2024, leading Italian daily La Repubblica published an astonishing interview with Roberto Jucci, veteran “general of top secret missions”, who over his lengthy career worked at the highest echelons of Rome’s security and intelligence apparatus, while enjoying an intensive “relationship of trust” with many of the country’s most powerful political figures and government agencies. Along the way, he exposed how US “centers of power”, in conjunction with notorious Masonic Lodge P2 (Proganda Due), were responsible for the murder of left-leaning statesman Aldo Moro.
On March 16th 1978, Moro was kidnapped by a unit of the Red Brigades, a leftist militant faction, while en route to a high-level meeting. There, he planned to give his blessing to a new coalition government, in which the dominant Christian Democrats would rely on Communist support for the very first time. The CIA had over the prior three decades interfered in all of Italy’s elections to prevent the latter party from taking power.
After 55 days in captivity, Moro’s kidnappers concluded authorities would neither negotiate with them, nor release any jailed Red Brigades members in return, and he was executed. His bullet-riddled corpse was left in the trunk of a Renault 4, near Rome’s River Tiber, for authorities to discover. Despite numerous trials, many facts of the highest-profile murder case in modern Italian history remain uncertain today. Suspicions have long abounded, widely, that his death one way or another resulted from Operation Gladio.
Gladio was a covert Cold War CIA, MI6 and NATO connivance, in which an underground shadow army of fascist paramilitaries wreaked havoc across Europe, carrying out false flag terror attacks, robberies, and assassinations to discredit the left, install right-wing governments, and justify vicious crackdowns on dissent. It was known as a “strategy of tension”. As Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a Gladio operative jailed for life in 1984 for a car bombing in Italy, which killed three police officers and injured two, explained:
“You were supposed to attack civilians, women, children, innocent people from outside the political arena. The reason was simple, force the public to turn to the state and ask for greater security…People would willingly trade their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains, or enter a bank. This was the political logic behind the bombings. They remain unpunished because the state cannot condemn itself.”
As we shall see, La Repubblica’s bombshell interview exposes how Moro’s kidnap and murder represented the monstrous zenith of Gladio’s “strategy of tension”. The details raise grave questions about the direct involvement of the CIA, and P2 – a “state within a state”, per Roberto Jucci – in the crime, and countless others during Rome’s bloodspattered “years of lead”.
‘Honest People’
Speaking candidly in the twilight of his years (at 98 years old, Jucci “maintains an iron memory: He remembers everything, every detail of the extraordinary career”), the general records how then-interior minister Francesco Cossiga, who set up a crisis committee to rescue Moro, placed him “in charge of the raiders” who would free the captive politician once his whereabouts were ascertained. “They had to operate with pinpoint precision, so as not to risk the hostage’s life.”
Jucci, then a high-ranking official within now-defunct Servizio Informazioni Operative e Situazione, assembled a crack squad drawn from the ranks of Italy’s “legendary” Col Moschin paratrooper assault regiment. He equipped them with “sophisticated” British- and German-made weapons, and had the team “trained non-stop in a secret base” in Tuscany. As such, he was “not an actor, only an extra,” in the race to rescue Moro. Ominously, the general believes this may have been by design:
“The real goal was to get me out of the way…My biggest regret about the Moro case is that I didn’t understand I was being exploited…They had put me in a corner and sent me away from Rome so as not to see and not to operate.”
Jucci’s suspicions stem from “most of the leaders of [Italy’s] military institutions” hailing from P2. He describes the Masonic lodge as, “the expression of a power group from a foreign country,” that being the US: “American centers of power…operated through elements of P2.”
Asked by La Repubblica if he was ever invited to join P2, Jucci responds, “No, never. The individual I always thought to be one of their recruiters, when he saw me he would turn the corner. They knew me well. To get into P2 you had to be a willing person and I don’t think I’ve ever been.” This, alongside his “filial affection for Moro,” who often “asked me for opinions,” surely explains why he was kept in Tuscany during the hunt.
Had he “been an actor” in Cossiga’s committee, Jucci “would have tailed” the individuals who delivered letters Moro wrote during captivity to his secretary “and other subjects,” attempted “to find support in Arab countries that might have found a useful channel for his release,” and “tried everything I could to save him.” While he “probably wouldn’t have succeeded”, he “would have tried anything” in any event. Asked why “tailings” weren’t ordered, the general’s answer is stark:
“[The committee] …was advised by a man sent by the US and…composed largely of [P2]. All people who, in my opinion, wanted things to go in a different way from what all honest people were asking for. Moro had to be destroyed politically and physically: if he had survived, Italy’s politics would have developed differently…I believe Moro could have been freed if all the institutions had worked in this direction.”
As it was, the US opposed “the opening of a government, supported by Moro, made up of Communists and Christian Democrats.” So the much-beloved statesman had to die. Jucci contrasts the failure to find him with the kidnap of US General James Dozier, purportedly also by the Red Brigades, in December 1981. He was “located and freed in a blitz” in 42 days, by a joint US-Italian taskforce. “One of them, they wanted to set free; I have my doubts about the other,” Jucci laments.
The general has no doubt that Cossiga’s determination to rescue Moro was deeply sincere. After he failed, he resigned his post as interior minister “and disappeared.” Jucci tracked him down “after a few days” to an apartment near Rome’s famous Piazza San Silvestro, where he spent his days ruminating alone, a non-commissioned Italian naval officer bringing him food. When he visited Cossiga:
“He looked at me mutely for many minutes. Then he would say, ‘maybe I could have done more.’ For him, it was an obsession, which I think marked his life.”
At the conclusion of the interview, Jucci acknowledges the “strong presence of US military intelligence” in Rome, which “sometimes operated in a very questionable way,” before cryptically noting “how there have been Italians who have operated according to…objectives, which perhaps should not have been done.” In this context, he tantalizingly cites Operation Gladio:
“It had to be done, but it had to be handled in a different way. In our plans, in the event of an invasion, it was planned that we would abandon part of the territory to position ourselves on more defensible lines. If someone has used Gladio for other purposes, it is their personal responsibility.”
Jucci refers to the official purpose of Gladio – a clandestine “stay behind” sabotage force, to be activated only in the event of the Soviet Union invading Western Europe. Yet, a June 1959 Italian military intelligence report unearthed by historian Daniele Ganser confirms guerrilla action against “domestic threats” – in other words, the political left – during peacetime, was hardwired into the cloak-and-dagger effort from its very inception.
Official investigations into Gladio have moreover revealed CIA- and MI6-provided explosives and weapons hidden throughout Italy, intended for “stay behind” use, were deployed in multiple mass-casualty terror attacks, including the 1980 bombing of Bologna Centrale railway station, which killed 85 people and wounded over 200. These probes were launched after then-Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted Gladio’s existence in October 1990. A European Parliament resolution the next month called for independent judicial and parliamentary investigations into Gladio in every European state.
Aside from initial inquiries in Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, nothing substantive materialized subsequently. In August 2021, it was announced that a trove of documents related to Gladio and P2 would be declassified, at long last. But nothing has been released since. In closing, Jucci tells La Repubblica he wasn’t consulted by any of the parliamentary committees investigating Moro’s death. “Perhaps I could have said something and contributed to the search for the truth,” he suggests, apparently unaware that “the state cannot condemn itself.”
Source: Almayadeen.net
See Also:
The Weird Kidnapping Case and Murder of Italian Premier Aldo Moro
