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Title: Stefano Delle Chiaie Author: Stuart Christie Date: 1984 Language: en Topics: Italy, fascism, nazism, terrorism Source: Retrieved on 22nd September 2020 from https://libcom.org/history/stefano-delle-chiaie-portrait-black-terrorist-stuart-christie
The career of Stefano Delle Chiaie spans two continents and two decades.
The history of Delle Chiaie is the history of nazism in our world today.
Through it we see neofascist terrorist organisations in their true role:
agents of an inner, oligarchic power sphere which sets itself above all
law and morality.
On 2 August 1980 a bomb hidden in a suitcase exploded at Bologna railway
station in Italy, claiming the lives of 85 innocent people and injuring
over 200. The outrage at Bologna was just one more episode in what has
become known as the ‘Strategy of Tension’ — a campaign of terror,
infiltration, provocation murder (including that of anarchist Giuseppe
Pinelli) that stretches back to the beginning of the 1960s and has its
roots in the Cold War. But what exactly are the aims of this seemingly
senseless campaign, and who are the people behind it?
Of the five people named as suspects by the Italian judge investigating
the outrage at Bologna, one stands out from all the rest: Stefano Delle
Chiaie. Master organiser of neofascist terror, or someone who has been
deliberately set up as such by other more shadowy figures, the name of
Delle Chiaie is inextricably linked with just about every major
rightwing scandal and terrorist outrage to have rocked Italy during the
past two decades. The history of Delle Chiaie is the history of Nazism
in our world today. Through it we see neofascist terrorist organisations
in their true role: that of “plausibly deniable” agents of an inner
oligarchic power sphere which sets itself above all law and morality.
In 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily flying Mafia colours, and the
following year James Angleton headed the OSS special ops section in
Rome. In 1945 Angleton rescued Valerio Borghese (The Black Prince) from
the death sentence he was given by the Italian Resistance for war
crimes, and in 1948 he helped orchestrate the CIA’s successful
intervention in the Italian elections to keep the Communists from
winning. With this sort of legacy, it’s no wonder that black politics
has been dominant in Italy ever since.
Organised crime, corrupt Italian secret services, and unrepentant
fascists have been working together through powerful Masonic societies
such as Propaganda Due (P2 Lodge). In the 1960s some of them began a
campaign of terror and murder that was known as the Strategy of Tension.
A favourite tactic was to blame their acts on the Left so as to
legitimise more power for their friends on the Right. The most
outrageous crime was the Bologna railway station bombing in 1980 that
killed 85 innocent people; one of the five named as suspects by the
investigating judge was Stefano Delle Chiaie. This book examines what is
known and speculated about the career of Delle Chiaie, who also moved
among ex-Nazi and junta circles in Latin America, Spain, and Greece.
Princes should devolve all matters of responsibility upon others, take
upon themselves only those of grace.
(The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli)
I am against democracy; I am a fascist. Or rather a nazi-fascist. Men
like me work towards a coup d’Čtat in Italy, or a civil war situation.
(Guido Giannettini, Paris 1974)
Fascism is a populist, collectivist and statist movement opposed to
monopoly capitalism and communism. Although fascism recruits from all
social classes it attracts mainly the middle classes since it appears to
offer an alternative to bolshevism while permitting them to maintain
their interests by establishing themselves as the Third Force between
multinational and state capitalism.
Fascism feeds on dissatisfaction, rancour, exaggerated nationalism,
anticommunism and racial prejudice: all traits which flourish in times
of political and social insecurity.
Fascism has produced no rational system of ideas and has special appeal
to those who lack the critical ability to bring together all the
relevant facts and factors when assessing a situation and their own
emotions; people who either through habit or inertia have become totally
dependent on others for their opinions and who find uncritical obedience
to authority both comfortable and advantageous.
On 2 August 1980 a bomb hidden in a suitcase was exploded at Bologna
railway station in Italy. It was a Saturday and the first full day of
the national holiday and the station was crowded. The explosion claimed
the lives of 85 innocent victims and seriously injured over 200 more.
Over two years later the Bologna investigating magistrate, Aldo Gentile,
issued an international warrant for the arrest of five men wanted in
connection with the bombing. Gentile, who had led the investigation of
the bombing from the start, told reporters: The man who was carrying the
suitcase is among them. One of the wanted men was a French neofascist,
another a German. The other three were Italians, and the senior among
them was Stefano Delle Chiaie.
The name of this master organiser of neofascist terror is inextricably
linked with most of the extreme rightwing scandals and terrorist
outrages which have rocked Italy since the early sixties. These include
the attempted seizure of power by secret service chief General Guiseppe
de Lorenzo in 1964, the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in December 1969
which killed 16 people and seriously injured 88 more, and led directly
to the death of the anarchist Guiseppe Pinelli, the attempted seizure of
power by Prince Valerio Borghese in December 1970, the bombing of the
Rome-Munich express in August 1974 which killed 12 people and injured 48
others and the murder of the magistrate investigating the train bombing.
Outside Italy, Delle Chiaie and his accomplices have been responsible
for the murders of exiled political dissidents, the setting up of death
squads both in Europe and in Latin America and the provision of
mercenaries for rightwing plotters in Africa and Asia, while they have
been partners in crime to international drug dealers and kidnappers.
Delle Chiaie is also alleged to have acted as regulator for the sinister
P2 Masonic lodge in Italy with links with the Vatican and various Latin
American dictatorships.
The warrant was issued for Delle Chiaie’s arrest on information from the
testimony of a number of secret service agents and fascist pentiti or
supergrasses. This, together with other evidence accumulated over the
years by researchers into the far right, and a careful analysis of all
the interrelationships between Delle Chiaie and his associates, friends
and colleagues, leaves little doubt that Stefano Delle Chiaie, or Il
Caccola” as he is also known, is either the main coordinator of what has
come to be known in informed international political and journalistic
circles as the Black Orchestra,1 or has been deliberately set up as such
by other more shadowy figures.
Delle Chiaie was born at Apio in 1936 into a staunchly pro-fascist
household. A failed political science student turned insurance
underwriter, he began his active political career as secretary of the
local neofascist party, the MSI, in 1956.
Bored with the lack of action and contemptuous of the lack of radical
ideas among the more cautious elements of the old-guard fascists, Delle
Chiaie abandoned the MSI in 1958 and gave his allegiance to the newly
formed and more overtly Nazi and anti-semitic Ordine Nuovo under the
leadership of the journalist Pino Rauti. The motto of Ordine Nuovo was
also that of the Nazi SS: Our honour is our loyalty.
Known as Il Caccola (Roman slang; which translates as Shorty), Stefano
Delle Chiaie first appears to have been recruited into secret service
work as an auxiliary agent during the crisis period of the early summer
of 1960. Anti fascist riots in which 12 people were killed and many
hundreds injured took place in most industrial towns and cities
throughout Italy, which in turn led to the downfall of the government of
prime minister Tambroni, which had depended on the votes of the
far-right deputies to stay in office.
Il Caccola claims that in the early part of that summer of 1960 while
the tension was still mounting, he was approached, through an MSI
intermediary, by an official of the Interior Ministry to undertake
covert operations against anti-fascists and leftwing militants. It was
also around this time that Delle Chiaie decided to leave Ordine Nuovo
and set up his own neofascist organisation which eventually became known
as Avanguardia Nazionale, an organisation which was to be the breeding
ground and epicentre of neofascist terror for two decades.
What exact role Delle Chiaie and his circle of friends played in the
events of 1960 is not yet known, but whatever it was it was sufficiently
successful to convince factions within the Interior Ministry of the
usefulness of employing plausibly deniable fascist gangs as auxiliary
police and agents of the state during periods of crisis.
Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) soon came to be regarded as the cudgel of
black extremism. Although even at the height of its popularity” it
counted on fewer than 500 members, it was certainly the most tightly
organised and rigidly structured of Italian neofascist groups. Those who
crossed Delle Chiaie were soon to discover exactly how his “stringent
internal discipline” operated in practice.
One of the early members of AN was Antonino Aliotti. Aliotti had been
involved in many punitive expeditions organised by Delle Chiaie against
the left, including the vicious attack on the daughter of the Communist
Deputy, Pietro Ingrao, who had her finger hacked off with a knife. On
his return from military service, Aliotti underwent a crisis of
conscience and openly accused his old leader, Delle Chiaie, of being a
lackey of the Italian Interior Ministry and not a genuine fascist
revolutionary.
A few days later Aliotti received his first warning. His car was stopped
and searched by police who discovered explosives in the boot which
Aliotti swore had been planted. Acquitted on this charge for lack of
evidence, Aliotti again denounced Stefano Delle Chiaie, openly accusing
him of having arranged the clumsy police frame-up, and again threatened
to expose his links with the Interior Ministry. A few days later Aliotti
was found dead in his car again loaded with explosives. The police
concluded he had committed suicide, but the evening before his death
Aliotti had tried desperately to contact friends, all of whom were at
odds with Delle Chiaie. Although there was some evidence of a struggle
the matter was not followed up and the exact circumstances of the death
of Antonino Aliotti remain a mystery.
Avanguardia Nazionale had a steady income of 300,000 lire a month
guaranteed by Carlo Pesenti, a famous Lombard cement manufacturer and
insurance tycoon, while other industrialists and businessmen provided
additional funds.2 Within a few months AN had opened a number of
branches in Rome and other Italian cities and soon was second only in
importance to Ordine Nuovo among the flourishing extraparliamentary
neofascist groups of the early sixties. As with most fascist
organisations, its members were recruited primarily from the ranks of
the middle classes.
Delle Chiaie’s organisation was a success. Though it was officially at
odds with the respectable MSI, the relationship was, in fact, one of
mutual interdependence. For the 1962 local elections, Avanguardia
Nazionale was hired by MSI candidate Ernesto Brivio, a veteran of
Mussolini’s dreaded anti-partisan Brigate Nere and one-time confidant of
the Cuban ex-dictator Fulgencio Batista, to ensure security during his
election campaign. Avanguardia Nazionale’s support for MSI hardliners
under Giorgio Almirante gave the organisation access to considerable
funds. In return for this financial support, Delle Chiaie’s organisation
provided security for MSI candidates Pino Romualdi, Luigi
Turchi and Giulio Caradonna during the 1963 election campaign. Later in
1962 a scandal brought to light further links between the Delle Chiaie
organisation and the security services. During the visit to Rome for an
audience with the Pope of Moise Tshombe, the Congolese leader generally
regarded as the tool of reactionary western interests, demonstrations
were organised by leftist groups to protest against the visit and the
official recognition of the murderer of Patrice Lumumba, the man who had
led the Congo (Zaire)3 to independence. The head of the Rome Special
Squad, a police group similar to, but more volatile than, the British
Special Patrol Group, Inspector Santillo, used the Delle Chiaie
organisation to infiltrate and disrupt the leftist demonstration in the
Piazza Colonnaand even went so far as to provide Delle Chiaie’s men with
police issue truncheons. The fascists were recognised and the ensuing
scandal of such overt connivance between the police and rightists forced
the Interior Ministry to disband the Special Squad and transfer Santillo
from Rome Police HQ to the provincial city of Reggio Emilio.
From early 1964 onwards Stefano Delle Chiaie’s career became more
closely enmeshed with all the major conspiratorial events which occurred
subsequently. Early that year he began to concentrate on developing his
theoretical ideas on psychological warfare and on building up a national
and international clandestine neofascist infrastructure. “II Caccola”
also began to boast to friends of his increasingly close relationship
with officers of SIFAR, the then Italian military intelligence
organisation. He claimed to be privy to topsecret information concerning
something big in the pipeline, and that those close to him had to be
ready to act when the time came.
There is little doubt that the something big in the pipeline referred to
Plan Solo.
Frightened by the opening to the left under the Christian Democrat
premiership of Aldo Moro and the success at the polls of the communists
who gained 25% of the vote in the 1963 elections, the Italian right
began to make plans to pave the way for the installation of a government
of public safety consisting of rightwing Christian Democrats, top
managers and military men.
General Giovanni De Lorenzo, commander of the paramilitary carabinieri
and head of the Italian secret services, together with twenty other
senior army officers and allegedly with the knowledge and agreement of
President Antonio Segni, drew up a plan for a presidential-type coup
d’etat. Plan Solo was to have concluded with the assassination of the
premier, Aldo Moro. Executive authority was to have passed to the
rightwing Christian Democrat Cesare Merzagora.
The coup was called off at the final moment by a compromise between the
socialists and rightwing Christian Democrats. General De Lorenzo and his
colleagues were not ones to give in so easily, however, and although
their plans were thwarted on this occasion the plotters did not abandon
them.
organ or headquarters. It is a loosely structured international
friendship circle of neofascist and old guard Nazis with shared goals
whose coordinated activities over the past twenty years or so have led
directly to the deaths of perhaps hundreds of people in Europe and
certainly thousands in the third world countries of Latin America,
Africa and Asia. The shared goals are essentially those of Hitler’s
Third Reich: white supremacy, the defeat of all movements towards
democracy and equality, the destruction of Russian and Chinese-style
state communism.
industrial sources of funds is beyond the scope of this brief work, but
there seems to be a predominance of oil, rubber, motor and cement
interests: the road lobby. This fits with the recurrent choice of trains
and stations as targets (why not supermarkets, cinemas, airports,
etc.?), and with the general animosity of the European right against
railways as symbols of socialism and bastions of working class
solidarity and strength.
Delle Chiaie’s principal contact, and puppetmaster within the Italian
secret service during this period was Guido Giannettini, a rightwing
journalist of high standing in western intelligence circles.
In November 1961, Giannettini had been invited by General Pedro del
Valle, commander of the United States Central Naval Academy at
Annapolis, to conduct a three-day seminar on The Techniques and
Prospects of a Coup d’Etat in Europe. His audience included both
Pentagon and CIA representatives. This appears to have established
Giannettini as a respected figure among NATO spy chiefs.
At this time a principal concern in western strategic thinking was the
need to counter nascent national liberation movements in Africa and Asia
in such a way that while it might not be possible to prevent the
emergence into sovereign statehood of the old colonies and dependencies
it should be possible to keep them within the western “sphere of
influence” by securing the eclipse or demise of the more virulently
nationalist leaders and their replacement by “friends of the west,”
avowed champions of private enterprise and staunch anticommunists who
would take whatever steps were necessary within their countries to
prevent the colonialist interests being replaced by Russian and Chinese
ones.
The principal vehicle used to this end was a “plausibly deniable”
intelligence front, an international news agency based in Lisbon <fn>As
a centre for subversion and intrigue in Africa, Lisbon would have been a
natural choice. Portugal then still had a fascist government and vast
and wealthy territories in Africa which it had no plans to shed.</fn>
called Aginter Press.
Although the declared aims of this agency were “to focus the attention
of an anxious elite upon the perils of insidious subversion which slowly
infiltrates through everyday reports, to denounce its methods and the
mechanics of its manoeuvres” it was not until many years later,
following Portugal’s “Revolution of the Flowers” in May 1974, that the
revolutionary investigators from the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement
discovered the true function of Aginter Press.
Its founder and chief was an ex-French army officer and member of the
OAS, the pro-settler terrorist conspiracy within the French army in
Algeria (1961–62), also a veteran of the Korean war (1950–53) and the
Indochina war (1945–54) in which he had served as French liaison officer
with the newly formed CIA. His name was Captain Yves Guillou, but he was
better known by his adopted name of Yves Guerin-Serac.
Following the defeat of the OAS putsch in Algeria in 1962 Guerin-Serac
had deserted from his command of the 3^(rd) Commando of the 11^(th)
Demi-Brigade of Parachute Shock Troops and sought refuge in Lisbon with
his political mentor Pierre Lagaillarde, generally regarded as the
“father” of the OAS. He came, he later claimed, to Portugal to offer his
services to the last remaining colonial empire which could provide the
last bulwark against communism and atheism:
“The others have laid down their weapons, but not I. After the OAS I
fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its proper
dimensions which is to say, a planetary dimension.” (Paris Match,
November 1974.)
According to a report by the post-1974 Portuguese intelligence service,
SDCI, set up to replace the hated PIDE of the Salazar and Caetano
regimes, Aginter Press provided for:
them, the CIA, the West German BND or “Gehlen Organisation,” the Spanish
Direccion General de Seguridad, South Africa’s BOSS and, later, the
Greek KYP.
terrorists specialising in sabotage and assassination.
indoctrination operations in sub-Saharan Africa, South America and
Europe in conjunction with a number of sub-fascist regimes, well-known
rightwing figures and internationally active neofascist groups.
with a clandestine paramilitary wing called OACI, “Organisation Armee
contre le Communisme International. “
The OACI was set up by Guerin-Serac, Giannettini, and the escaped
wartime Nazi Otto Skorzeny, one of the principal guardians of the fund
set up at Himmler’s behest in 1944 to secure the survival of the Nazi
movement beyond its impending military defeat at the hands of the
allies. <fn>See Appendix A.</fn> We can return to Skorzeny later, but it
is worth remarking here that Giannettini would have been linked to
Guerin-Serac not only through their intelligence backgrounds but also
through the OAS exiles such as Jean Jacques Susini and Georges Bidault
who took up residence in Italy after the defeat of their putsch in 1962.
<fn>The planned invasion of France by the OAS was frustrated by native
and settler workers on Algerian airfields, who sabotaged the aircraft
which should have carried the OAS “Paras.”</fn> At this time Giannettini
became one of their main agents, liaising between them and the Italian
government in conjunction with their representative Philippe de Massey.
Giannettini’s efforts were recognised when in the same year, 1962, he
was invested by the OAS with the title “Captain of the Crusade.” <fn>The
occasion of the investiture was a field mass in Spain attended by the
leadership of the Falange Espanola, Spain’s only legal political party,
and representatives of the OAS.</fn>
Describing his organisation, Guerin-Serac wrote:
<blockquote>Our number consists of two types of men:
Algeria, and some who even enlisted with us after the battle for Korea.
the study of the techniques of Marxist subversion… Having formed study
groups, they have shared experiences in an attempt to dissect the
techniques of Marxist subversion and to lay the foundations of a
counter-technique. During this period we have systematically established
close contacts with like-minded groups emerging in Italy, Belgium,
Germany, Spain or Portugal, for the purpose of forming the kernel of a
truly Western league of Struggle against Marxism.
The role of the secret OACI was described as to be prepared to intervene
anywhere in the world to confront the gravest communist threats.
The catalyst for action seems to have been the preparations for the
“Tri-Continental” Congress scheduled for Havana from 3 to 10 January
1966.
Organised by the exiled Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka, this
congress, which was described as “the first solidarity conference of the
peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America,” and which had Soviet and
Chinese backing, threw right wing political circles and intelligence
services into a panic. The first theatre of operations for Aginter
agents was Africa. The Portuguese SDCI report states that the agency’s
“correspondents” began their operations there towards the end of 1965,
but goes into little detail. It merely notes that Aginter “dispatched
its operation chiefs
to the countries bordering Portuguese Africa… Their aim included the
liquidation of leaders of the liberation movements, infiltration, the
installation of informers and provocateurs, and the utilisation of false
liberation movements. “
It is no coincidence that this same period saw the beginning of a
campaign of murder and kidnapping of many leaders of the
anti-colonialist struggle, including Ben Barka, the organiser of the
“Tri-Continental,” who disappeared in Paris on 29 October 1965, the
murders of Portuguese opposition leader Humberto Delgado and later,
Amilcar Cabral, one of Africa’s foremost revolutionary figures
Apart from the actual physical elimination of suspected or openly
antiwestern political leaders and militants, Aginter press operations
were designed to manipulate popular feeling by means of the so-called
“Strategy of Tension.”
This appears to have been devised by an ill-assorted collection of
rightwing elements in international political, military and intelligence
circles in the early sixties, the idea being to bring about, apparently
because of labour and leftwing activity, such social disruption and
uncertainty that the populace would favour the installation of a
strong-arm government pledged to restore “order.”
Aginter agents would hardly have been true to their self-elected role of
“forming the kernel of a truly Western League of Struggle against
Marxism
prepared to intervene anywhere in the world” if they had confined their
attentions to Africa and Asia and not looked inside NATO itself at
Italy. Italy had and has a large and popular Communist Party (the PCI),
which is highly critical of Moscow (not to mention Peking) and well
entrenched in local government. The far right, on the other hand, is
historically the party (under Mussolini) of national humiliation and
defeat. The PCI is avowedly neutralist, and were it to gain power would
take Italy out of NATO, depriving the Western alliance of its
headquarters for Southern Land Forces at La Maddalena in Sardinia and
Southern Command HQ at Naples, the principle NATO naval base in the
Mediterranean and home of the US Sixth Fleet.
The Strategy of Tension itself was outlined in a document which came to
light in October 1974. Dated November 1969 it was one of a number of
dispatches sent to Lisbon by Aginter’s Italian correspondents. The
document is entitled Our Political Activity which it explains thus:
<blockquote>Our belief is that the first phase of political activity
ought to be to create the conditions favouring the installation of chaos
in all of the regime’s structures. This should necessarily begin with
the undermining of the state economy so as to arrive at confusion
throughout the whole legal apparatus. This leads on to a situation of
strong political tension, fear in the world of industry and hostility
towards the government and the political parties… In our view the first
move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state,
under the cover of communist and pro-Chinese activities. Moreover, we
have people who have infiltrated these groups and obviously we will have
to tailor our actions to the ethos of the milieu propaganda and action
of a sort which will seem to have emanated from our communist
adversaries and pressure brought to bear on people in whom power is
invested at every level. That will create a feeling of hostility towards
those who threaten the peace of each and every nation, and at the same
time we must raise up a defender of the citizenry [sic] against the
disintegration brought about by terrorism and subversion…</blockquote>
The report goes on to describe the political situation in Italy and the
emergence of the extraparliamentary left: “Outside the present
contingencies these people are possessed of a new enthusiasm and huge
impatience. This fact should be carefully considered. The introduction
of provocateur elements into the circles of the revolutionary left is
merely a reflection of the wish to push this unstable situation to
breaking point and create a climate of chaos…” The unknown author
concludes: “Pro-Chinese circles, characterised by their own impatience
and zeal, are right for infiltration… Our activity must be to destroy
the structure of the democratic State under the cover of communist and
pro-Chinese activities; we have already infiltrated some of our people
into these groups“ <fn>An Italian police report on Aginter Press
contained the following outline of the specialised training courses:
Instruction was divided under four headings: action, propaganda,
intelligence and security, with great emphasis being put on
psychological operations and the techniques of terrorism and sabotage.
The theory course was also outlined: “Subversion applies appropriate
methods to minds and wills in order to induce them to act regardless of
all logic and against all norms and laws, and thus conditions
individuals and enables one to do with them as one wishes. Terrorism:
terrorism breaks down resistance, obtains its submission and provokes a
breach between the populace and the authorities. Selective terrorism:
breaking down the political and administrative machinery by eliminating
its cadres. Blind terrorism: smashing the people’s trust by
disorganising the masses, the better to manipulate them.”</fn>
One of the key Aginter Press and OACI agents responsible for
coordinating this infiltration of the left was none other than Stefano
Delle Chiaie, long a “man of confidence” of the exiled OAS Italian
infrastructure and who carried an Aginter Press card in the name of
Giovanni Martelli. As already stated, it is not known precisely when
Stefano Delle Chiaie was first recruited as an agent of the Italian
secret service, but he was certainly working on behalf of the Interior
Ministry as far back as 1960 and he himself has implied knowledge of
and involvement with De Lorenzo’s “Plan Solo.” What is certain is that
in the spring of 1964 all members of Avanguardia Nazionale underwent
courses on the theory and practice of terrorism, psychological warfare
and the construction of explosive devices.
The following is the sworn statement of a member of the Delle Chiaie
organisation to an Italian journalist:
<blockquote>Mario Merlino [leading AN member who later infiltrated a
Rome anarchist group in order to pin the blame for the bomb outrages of
December 1969 on the anarchist movement as part of the “Strategy of
Tension”] told me that he, Stefano Delle Chiaie, and two others were
approached by a carabinieri officer and an NCO, one Pizzichemi or was it
Pizzichemini
the name I cannot recall exactly… who suggested to them that they should
hide some explosives in some PCI branches which they (the police) would
then proceed to have searched. He (Merlino) added that they had also
suggested as ideal targets for attacks the Rome HQ of the Christian
Democrats, the Confindustria premises in the Piazza Venezia and the RAI
television studios.</blockquote>
The three AN members given the job of infiltrating and planting the
explosives in the PCI branches were recognised and chased, but the
bombings of the RAI studios and the Christian Democrat premises went
ahead. Within a few weeks all five of Delle Chiaie’s men were arrested
and subsequently sentenced for these attacks. When eventually released,
all five openly denounced their political master for having betrayed
them. No investigation was launched into Delle Chiaie’s obvious links
with these and other incidents which served only to further enhance “Il
Caccola’s” growing reputation as untouchable.
The provocations attempted against the left by the members of Delle
Chiaie’s organisation at this time were the beginnings of the
application of the Strategy of Tension in Italy. Meanwhile, following
the aborting of Plan Solo, the powerful men inside the Italian state
machine itself who ultimately controlled Delle Chiaie, led by General de
Lorenzo, built up an efficient military machine capable of seizing power
whenever the situation demanded.
De Lorenzo and his colleagues set about creating a secret and powerful
putschist organisation which became known as La Rosa Dei VentiGiunta
Executiva Riscossa Sociale Italiana (The Rose of the WindsExecutive
Council of Italian Social Salvation).
In the mid-sixties De Lorenzo was one of the most powerful men in Italy.
Appointed head of the Secret Services (SIFAR) in 1956 by President
Gronchi, he stayed on as head of SIFAR after he was made commander of
the carabinieri in 1962. The carabinieri are: “a military gendarmerie
operating on a national scale unlike the police who are organised on a
local basis in towns. Discipline is high, and extends into a
carabinero’s private life. He may not, for example, marry before a
certain age, and has to obtain his commanding officer’s permission. The
public, generally, has a high regard for the carabinieri.
Since the carabinieri have units down to the village level, the C-in-C
is in an unrivalled position to keep his finger on the pulse of what is
going on. He would also be excellently placed to take some undemocratic
initiative against the established system, were he so inclined.
Probably, for this reason, the C-in-C is chosen not from the
carabinieri’s own ranks, but from among army generals who hold the post
for a specified period of time.” (Source: Conflict Studies No. 8,
November 1970.)
The organisation aimed to ensure that the Italian officer corps
consisted solely of men loyal to La Rosa’s objectives, and to this end
General De Loronzo methodically set about purging the carabinieri and
secret services of all socialists and anti-fascists and replacing them
with his own “men of confidence.” He also began to build up the
carabinieri into a highly trained regular army unit, equipping them with
heavy weapons, armoured vehicles and a special parachute detachment. In
effect La Rosa controlled the state’s main instruments of control and
repression.
The army rank and file, being conscripts, were most certainly suspect to
the right and could not be relied upon. One of the functions of the
“Rose of the Winds” was to create a secret parallel army within the
other armed forces (other than the carabinieri) to ensure a quick
neutralising of “subversives.” Who counted as a “subversive” was to be
established by turning the secret services (SIFAR, later SID) into a
police corps almost exclusively concerned with compiling dossiers and
filing information on Italian citizens. In 1967 it was discovered that
SIFAR/SID had unlawfully built up dossiers on some 157,000 Italians.
Details of the “Rose of the Winds” conspiracy were uncovered in 1974.
One of the plotters, Roberto Cavallero, a senior rightwing trade
unionist, said of it:
<blockquote>“the organisation was set up in 1964 after the failure of De
Lorenzo’s ‘Plan Solo.’ Everything which has happened since, from the
Parco dei Principe congress <fn>See Appendix B.</fn> down to today has
been part and parcel of a single trend
. La Rosa is a secret organisation at the summit of which there are
eighty-seven senior officers representing every corps and all of the
security services. The group has a foothold in every part of the country
and operational nuclei of officers dispersed throughout every
detachment. There is also a group of officers in liaison with the
far-right organisations who are party to conspiracies.”</blockquote>
According to Robert Cavallero’s statement, La Rosa’s justification for
its decision to intervene in Italian political life was that: “a coup
d’etat along Chilean or Greek lines was not on in Italy where account
had to be taken, on the one hand, of the overall political situation
the nine million communist voters and on the other, of a certain moral
laxity which also infests the military and precludes an intervention of
that sort.”
Cavallero’s description of the method of setting the stage for a coup
was explicit: “We have opted for the strategy of tension for it is
necessary for us to create a desire for order in the man in the street…
The Organisation has a legitimate role: its role is to prevent our
institutions being placed in jeopardy. When trouble erupts in the
country rioting, trade union pressure, violence, etc. the Organisation
goes into action to conjure up the option of a return to order. When
these troubles do not erupt (of themselves), they are contrived by the
far right… directed and financed by members of the Organisation.” When
the later head of the Italian secret services, General Miceli,
ultimately admitted the existence of the “Rose of the Winds”
organisation to investigating magistrates, he stated: “A super-secret
SID, acting on orders from me? Fair enough, but I never set it up for
the purpose of mounting a coup d’etat; I did so at the request of the
Americans and NATO…”
“The Rose of the Winds” conspirators were convinced that the only way to
preclude a communist takeover was to create a powerful and all-pervasive
network of informers and spies which would enable the state to monitor
all popular movements, maintain a check on leading dissidents and, when
necessary, eliminate them. The organisation they set up, like its
predecessor, Mussolini’s OVRA (Opera Volontaria Repressione
Antifascismo), was intended to provide an effective instrument of
repression capable of both manipulating popular mass movements and
smashing them at birth. <fn>Plans for a proposed coup d’etat found in
October 1973 (for the beginning of 1974) consisted of: Phase 1: The
operation to be financed on the basis of support from extreme rightwing
industrialists, bank robberies and kidnappings. Phase 2: Application of
the Strategy of Tension and perpetration of outrages throughout the
peninsula to be attributed to both left and right with the object of
creating “psychosis” among the populace. Phase 3: An offensive against
leftist organisations, assassinations of leftist leaders. Phase 4:
Military intervention. Officers and putschist troops combine with far
right in neutralising “democratic officers. Phase 5: Execution of 1624
named individuals. Phase 6: Creation of a regime based on the principles
of Mussolini’s Salo Republic.</fn>
In late 1965, as Aginter Press in Lisbon was getting its international
campaign against nationalist movements into gear, Delle Chiaie’s
organisation embarked on a massive campaign of disruption and
provocation directed against the Italian Communist Party on the eve of
its national congress. It was a “black propaganda” campaign which bore
all the hallmarks of a security service-inspired “psy-ops” manoeuvre.
Overnight, thousands of forged PCI posters and leaflets covered the
walls and streets of Rome but, although a number of well known AN
activists, such as Delle Chiaie’s right-hand man Flavio Campo, were
arrested, no serious charges ensued.
This campaign was apparently financed by the extreme rightwing Roman
Catholic organisation Comitati Civici, an organisation which shared AN’s
advocacy of struggle against “neo-illuminism” and the “unholy alliance”
between Catholic modernism and creeping socialist reformism. Stories
abounded that a considerable part of the three million lire provided for
the campaign had gone into the pockets of the AN leadership. Certainly,
Delle Chiaie acquired a brand new wardrobe and a new Austin A40 to go
with his new upward mobility.
Unexpectedly, and for no apparent reason, Stefano Delle Chiaie dissolved
Avanguardia Nazionale in the early part of 1966. The dissolution of what
had apparently been a healthy and flourishing neofascist organisation
had nothing to do with internal squabbles or dissension; nor did it
signify a change of heart among the organisation’s leaders. It was, in
fact, for the purpose of infiltration in order to develop the “Strategy
of Tension” and to implement the long term plans of the “Rose of the
Winds.” Having apparently failed to penetrate the rigid structure of the
official Communist organisation the fascists turned their attention to
the more volatile marxist-leninist (“maoist”) groups and the anarchist
movement.
Hardline neofascists of long standing such as Flavio Campo and Serafino
Di Lula suddenly vanished from circulation. Other members of the Delle
Chiaie organisation reentered the fold of the parent MSI, many securing
key positions within the party. Cataldo Strippoli became its national
youth director while his brother Attlio became provincial secretary of
the party.
Stefano Delle Chiaie himself went underground to coordinate the whole
campaign. Accompanying him were his trusted associates Nerio Leonori and
Carmine Palladino (whose murder in 1982 Delle Chiaie is strongly
suspected of ordering to ensure he did not talk). The stratagem they
employed was generally the same: once they had infiltrated their target
organisations they played the role of informers and agents-provocateurs,
urging and organising bombings, outrages, provocations and contriving
confrontations with the police. Most were unaware they were working on
behalf of factions within the Italian secret services.
During this period of clandestinity, Delle Chiaie appears to have
travelled widely in Europe, Visiting Spain, France, Austria, Switzerland
and Germany where he was in contact with members of Franz Josef
Strauss’s Bavarian CSU.
According to a deposition made by AN member Mario Merlino it was during
this period that Delle Chiaie made contact with a mysterious Frenchman
referred to as “Jean” and whom he introduced to friends as a “military
instructor and explosives expert.” Merlino claims that in the company of
this Frenchman both he and Delle Chiaie planted a bomb in the South
Vietnamese embassy in Rome one night “in order to get the blame laid on
the left.” These tactics were to be employed with relentless regularity
as the Strategy of Tension built up momentum.
Although the identity of this Frenchman is not known with any certainty,
it is probable he was either an Aginter agent such as Jean-Marie Laurent
or Yves Guerin-Serac himself, who, according to SIFAR reports, was known
to have made numerous trips to Italy between 1966 and 1968.
On 21 April 1967 the forces of reaction received a major boost with the
CIA inspired military coup in Greece. Following a period of political
instability and acts of terrorism as prescribed by the Strategy of
Tension three hundred senior members of the elite US-trained and NATO
controlled “Mountain Assault Brigade” put into effect the NATO
contingency plan “Plan Prometheus” and toppled the democratically
elected government.
Among the very first official guests of the Greek Junta was Pino Rauti,
founder of Ordine Nuovo, one of the organisers of the Parco dei Principe
conference, agent of the Italian secret services and mentor and friend
of Stefano Delle Chiaie. As special envoy from the Roman rightwing daily
Il Tempo, Rauti was officially welcomed by General Patakos of the Junta,
but Rauti had other less obvious reasons for his visit than journalistic
inquiry. On a more discreet level he met with the new head of the Greek
military police, Dimitrios Ionnidis and Colonel Ioannis Ladas, secretary
general of the Ministry of Public Order and a died-in-the-wool fascist.
One of his principal contacts was his host, Kostas Plevris, an agent of
the Greek Central Intelligence Agency (KYP) attached to its Italian
desk. Plevris was also the founder and leader of the Greek neofascist
“4^(th) August Movement,” <fn>Founded August 1965 and named after the
date on which General Metaxas established his dictatorship in 1936.</fn>
the private secretary of Colonel Ioannis Ladas and teacher of sociology
in both the military academy and the police training school as well as
being adviser to the armed forces on anticommunism and psychological
warfare. This is a convenient theory of the “centre.” i.e., those with a
vested interest in the illusion of democratic parliamentary government
as the engine of social justice, since it diverts attention from their
own impotence to deal with any reactionary threat and also tends to
discredit those genuine revolutionary elements who rightly accuse the
parliamentarians of lulling the workers into class-collaborationist
reformism and dangerous quietism. The theory also suits the fascists, by
and large, as any mass following they enjoy depends on popular appeal;
if any radical successes can be claimed by them, so much the better!
Plevris was also a key figure in the “World Service” press agency, a
front organisation for the KYP, run by French journalist, infiltrator of
European Nazi groups, and possible intelligence agent Patrice Chairoff,
under the pseudonym of Dr. Siegfried Schoenenberg.
The next few months were busy ones for Rauti. Together with Stefano
Delle Chiaie he organised a series of semi-official trips to Greece of
parties of handpicked rightwing Greek students studying in Italy and
around fifty selected members of Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale.
Although officially described as cultural exchanges, the trips were
sponsored jointly by General Enza Viola of the Italian general staff and
the Greek secret service. The effect of these trips on those who took
part would appear to verge on the miraculous. Died-in-the-wool Italian
Nazis returned from the Colonels’ Greece “convinced” socialists,
communists, Maoists and anarchists. Serafino di Luia, one of the most
vicious of Delle Chiaie’s hatchet-men, returned to found “Lotta di
Popolo,” a group which eulogised Cuba, China, Arab nationalism and
European traditional fascism using the most outrageously
pseudorevolutionary vocabulary imaginable something which was seized on
immediately by the media as exemplary of the muddled ideology of the
student movement and established the “theory” of “opposing extremisms”:
that the “far left” and “far right” share common objectives and are
often controlled and funded by the same source.
Other Nazis, such as Giovanni Ventura and Franco Freda, whose names
would recur in the near future as central figures in the Piazza Fontana
outrage, returned to have the presses of their print shops machines
which had hitherto been confined to printing the works of Adolf Hitler
and Houston Stewart Chamberlain began to run off the writings of Che
Guevara and Peter Kropotkin.
After a long period of clandestine preparation, Delle Chiaie “came in
from the cold” and re-established Avanguardia Nazionale. Throughout the
early part of 1969 he is reported to have travelled extensively,
spending April and May in North Italy. This same period also saw an
increasing number of punitive attacks and terrorist outrages of dubious
and uncertain origin.
Avanguardia Nazionale was now fully armed and well financed, a pattern
which was being repeated all over Italy by small groups of the far
right. Neofascist offices and branches which had long since folded
suddenly reopened, attracting many new members. By the spring of 1969
the neofascist presence had made itself felt throughout Italy with the
streets of most Italian towns, cities and villages being plastered with
rightist posters and leaflets singing the praises of the new right.
Apart from the reemergence of the well-established organisations and
groups of the extreme right wing, refreshed and refortified, this
phenomenon was accompanied by a proliferation of new groups of the
neofascist extraparliamentary right.
One of the main sources of income which helped stimulate the
regeneration of Italian neofascism in the late sixties was an American
bank with close political, intelligence and Mafia ties: the Continental
Illinois National Bank and Trust Company based in Cicero, near Chicago.
It was this bank, together with the Vatican bank (or Institute for
Religious Works to give it its proper title) which provided the
financial backing for Michele Sindona’s ill-fated Banca Privata
Finanziaria; this was the bank centrally involved in the massive
transfer of Italian industrial holdings to the control of US
multinationals which later facilitated the massive movement of capital
from Italy and the subsequent loss of confidence in the currency that
was a major contributory factor in the buildup to what later became
known as the “Hot Autumn” of 1969.
The Continental Illinois is a bank with strong Italian connections and
is believed to be a conduit for Mafia money. Coincidentally, the head of
the Vatican bank, Archbishop Paul Marcincus, is a native of Cicero.
The President of Continental Illinois at the time was David Kennedy, a
man who later became Treasury Secretary in President Nixon’s first
cabinet. Another business partner of the Continental Illinois was Carlo
Pesenti, the Lombardian cement magnate and “guardian angel” of Stefano
Delle Chiaie. Equally of interest was the fact that one of the mainstays
of the Nixon election campaign and the later notorious Committee to
Re-elect the President (CREEP) in the 1972 campaign, was MSI Deputy
Luigi Turchi, another of Delle Chiaie’s patrons, whose introduction to
the White House was effected through the ubiquitous David Kennedy. Based
at the Republican Party HQ in Washington, Turchi travelled the length
and breadth of the United States addressing rallies, participating in
debates and giving media interviews all directed at capturing the
Italian vote in the United States. When Nixon was finally re-elected a
reception was given at the White House at which MSI Deputy Turchi was a
“guest of honour.” Michael Eisenhower III, the head of Nixon’s campaign
executive, said to assembled journalists that the President was greatly
indebted to the contribution made by the Italian deputy and that he was
confident “that the contact will continue in the days to come.”
According to La Strage di StatoControinchiesta (State MassacreCounter
Inquest) by Samona and Savelli (Rome 1970), the Italian version of
Himmler’s “Circle of Friends”, the financial backers of the revived
fortunes of the far right in Italy consisted of US interests whose funds
were funnelled through the Continental Illinois and Sindona channels the
main providers being the CIA, organised crime and multinationals;
Roberto Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano; Kostas Plevris, the Greek KYP agent
and head of the neofascist “4^(th) of August Movement”; the
Assolombardo-Montedison Corporation (paid through the then MSI secretary
Arturo Michelini) and the ENI-CEFIS Corporation (paid through MSI
senator Gastone Nencioni). In addition, substantial sums were received
from smaller industrialists, businessmen and “nostalgics”; Carlo Pesenti
(Italcementi), Giovanni Borghi (Ignis), Guido Bracco (owner of a
pharmaceutical firm), the Isolabella family and numerous other lawyers,
shopkeepers, big landowners and members of the Italian “noble” families.
With the reemergence of the neofascist groups, the Strategy of Tension
began to move into top gear. In the small southern town of Battipaglia
rumours began to spread early in April 1969 of the imminent closure of
the town’s main source of employment, a tobacco factory. Protest
meetings were held and the workers of Battipaglia called for a general
strike. During the confrontations between police and strikers a nineteen
year old worker was shot dead by police as was a young school teacher
who had been watching events from the window of her flat. The pace of
events began to quicken. On 17 April, Rome’s Il Tempo, the public
mouthpiece of the Strategists of Tension, said that: “Battipaglia saw
and tried out for the first time the tactics employed by the Vietcong in
Saigon” and that “the democratic state and the essence of the PCI are
incompatible” and invited the ruling Christian Democrats “to pay no heed
to the sensibilities of anyone, but to act effectively in defence,
including preventive action, of public order.”
The government attempted to lay the blame for the carnage and excuse the
behaviour and excesses of the police by referring explicitly to the
existence of a “preordained plan” implemented by “provocateurs alien to
the city” but the media, left to draw their own conclusions as to the
identity of these provocateurs, immediately laid the blame on Maoists
and anarchists. Not one of the national papers saw fit to mention the
story filed by the OP news agency the day before the clashes erupted
which reported that fifty known members of extremist neofascist
organisations, in particular Delle Chiaie’s organisation, Avanguardia
Nazionale, had concentrated in the town during the two days prior to the
proposed general strike, and which forecast that Battipaglia would be
the scene of “very serious upheavals.”
The sense of outrage provoked by the police action forced the Italian
parliament to propose a bill which would prohibit the carrying of
firearms by policemen on public order duty. The bill was due to be
debated on 28 April, but before it could come up the outrages started in
earnest bombs blasted the Fiat stand at the Milan trade fair and Milan
Central station.
In spite of the fact that there was no evidence as to the identity of
those who had placed the bombs, their political convictions were
apparently common knowledge both to the media and to the police:
following a hysterical antianarchist campaign in the national press, the
police officer in charge of the investigation, Inspector Luigi
Calabresi, and the examining magistrate, Antonio Amati, ordered the
arrest of fifteen anarchists including Giuseppe Pinelli, a Milan railway
worker and founder of the Italian Anarchist Black Cross.
Although Pinelli and five other anarchists were released, it was over
five months before the other main suspects were even questioned by the
magistrate and, ultimately, two years before they were finally acquitted
on all charges.
The Milan trade fair and railway station bombings had been carefully
prepared in order to lay the blame at the door of the anarchists. The
man apparently at the centre of these and certainly all the subsequent
terrorist outrages until the end of 1969 was Stefano Delle Chiaie.
Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura were the two neoNazi secret service
agents who had actually planted the bombs. Both men were closely linked
with Delle Chiaie, whose name recurs in almost every investigation into
subsequent outrages, although always indirectly.
From April onwards, events which are too numerous to record in detail
began to recur with interesting regularity. The press, television and
radio all began to talk of international anarchist plots to foment
bloody revolution. The fears and uncertainties instilled in the
population by this near hysterical campaign by the media in the buildup
to what they described as the approaching “Hot Autumn” served only the
interests of the Strategists of Tension and were intended to lead
inexorably to military intervention in Italian political life. In all,
1969 saw 149 bomb attacks throughout Italy, a substantial increase on
the fifty recorded over the previous four-year period.
2 June: Military parade in Rome. Rumours begin to circulate of a coup
d’etat.
6 July: President Saragat provokes a split within the Italian Socialist
Party, a split which is proved to have been financed by the CIA, which
encourages the employers to resist new wage demands being renegotiated
after three years. Rumours of a coup become more persistent.
24 July: Delle Chiaie’s men Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura organise
bomb attack on the Turin Palace of Justice.
8–9 August: Ten concerted bomb attacks on trains in North Italy, again
organised by Freda and Ventura, and again the Italian police and press
go to great lengths to implicate the anarchists, in particular Giuseppe
Pinelli. Once again Pinelli is taken in for questioning by Inspector
Calabresi who considers him the chief suspect or “likely candidate.”
13–14 September: In a blatant provocation, two neofascists vandalise the
HQ of the Socialist Party in Legano, leaving anarchist slogans and “Viva
Mao” daubed on the walls. The local MSI branch stresses the youths acted
in “a personal capacity.”
4 October: A time bomb is discovered near the door of a Trieste primary
school primed to explode at midday, the time the children would have
been leaving. Antonio Severi, another Delle Chiaie man, is arrested and
charged with attempted massacre following the incident.
19 November: A general strike is called over poor housing conditions. In
Milan, police attack a trade union rally outside the Liric Theatre. Two
police jeeps crash attempting to disperse a workers’ demonstration and a
policeman, Annarumma, is killed. Italian fascist and extreme rightwing
organisations organise a huge funeral procession for the dead policeman
and threaten heavy reprisals. President Giuseppe Saragat appears on
television and announces that all leftist demonstrations will be
severely repressed.
28 November: 100,000 metalworkers demonstrate in Rome, not only for
higher wages but also for improved housing. Throughout this period the
Milan Stock Exchange is characterised by instability and frequent stock
collapses. The stocks which suffer most are those of small investors
which are more sensitive to alarmism.
7–8 December: A powerful bomb blast destroys the entrance hall of the
Reggio Emilio police HQ, seriously injuring one police officer. The
culprits are arrested in Rome two weeks later. Both of them had been
members of Avanguardia Nazionale and had been among those selected by
Delle Chiaie to visit Greece. Again, at the time, blame for the outrage
is placed firmly on the anarchists.
11 December: The Swiss daily Journal de Geneve writes: “Highly irregular
market in Milan with 3,120,000 shares changing hands. The shares which
have hitherto stood up are now feeling the consequences.” The discomfort
and alarmism is added to by the massive movement of capital abroad, a
movement which receives a great deal of publicity in the national press.
The true provenance of the bombing campaign was exposed finally on 7
December 1969 when the London Observer published the text of a secret
communication from the Director General of the Greek Junta’s Foreign
Ministry to the Greek Ambassador in Rome.
The report, dated 15 May 1969, was accompanied by a covering letter
which stated:
<blockquote>“In this report you will find it noted that the situation in
Italy has much of interest to us and proves that events are moving in a
direction highly favourable to the national revolution.
His Excellency the Premier holds that the difficult exertions long
undertaken by the national Hellenic government in Italy are beginning to
bear fruit. The Premier has ordered me to convey to you his appreciation
of the work you have carried out in this country to which you have
seconded and also to ask you to persist with your activities, stepping
them up so as to make best use of the possibilities which seem,
according to the report, to be imminent. Finally, he has asked that I
convey to you his wish that henceforth you redouble your precautions and
that, in the event of any reversal you cease contact between you so that
no connection may be drawn between the activities of our Italian friends
and the Greek authorities
</blockquote>
The key paragraph came under the heading “Specific Action” in the secret
report: <blockquote>(a) The actions whose implementation was scheduled
for an earlier date has not been possible to effect before 20 April. The
adjustment to our plans was necessitated by the fact that a contretemps
made it hard to gain access to the Fiat Pavilion. The two actions have
had a notable impact.</blockquote>
At 4.37 p.m. on 12 December 1969 the day Greece was expelled from the
Council of Europe a powerful explosion ripped through the main hall of
the Banca de Agricultura in the Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing 16 people
and seriously injuring a further 88. Most Italian banks closed at 4:00
p.m., but because of its proximity to and close involvement with the
fruit and vegetable market this one remained open until 4:30 p.m. In the
course of the next hour a further three explosions occurred at banks and
prominent institutions in Rome including the Altare delle Patria.
The only clue the police had as to the identify of the bombers was an
unexploded bomb found at the bottom of a lift shaft in the La Scala
branch of the Commerce Bank, also in Milan, an hour after the first
terrible explosion. The bomb was contained in a black simulated leather
briefcase in which was a cassette tape recorder packed with explosives
and a German timing device which had malfunctioned. For some as yet
unexplained reason this unique piece of evidence was taken to the
courtyard of the bank where it had been found and, on the direct orders
of the Procurator General of the Republic himself, De Peppo, detonated
without any attempt at scientific examination being made, thus
destroying the one strong chance of uncovering the identity of the
perpetrators of the ghastly carnage.
As with previous outrages, the blame for the Piazza Fontana bombing was
immediately placed on the anarchists. Within minutes of news of the
explosion being broadcast, Judge Amati, the magistrate in charge of
investigating the 25 April and 8 August bombings, rang Milan police HQ
to be briefed on developments. He was told that it was uncertain at that
time whether or not the explosion had been caused by a faulty gas boiler
or a terrorist bomb. “My money is on the outrage” was Amati’s reply and
he immediately urged the police to direct their attention towards
investigating the anarchists. That same evening, the ubiquitous
Inspector Calabresi, the officer in charge of the investigation, told a
journalist from the Milan daily La Stampa that the culprits were being
sought among the extreme left and that in his opinion the anarchists
were responsible for all that day’s outrages because they had “all the
characteristics of the bombings of 25 April and the attacks on the ten
trains on the night of 8–9 August that year.” (1969)
One hundred and fifty anarchists were arrested over the next few days
and brought to the Milan Questura (police headquarters) for questioning
by teams of detectives under Calabresi. Calabresi was a rising star in
the firmament of the Italian political police. Not only had he undergone
training at various police academies in the United States, but he had
also accompanied extreme rightwing US General Edwin A. Walker, confidant
of Senator Barry Goldwater, on his trip to Italy, and in fact had
effected the introduction between Walker and General De Lorenzo, a
relationship which subsequently flourished.
Among the many anarchists arrested that night was Calabresi’s bęte
noire, railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli.
Born in the working-class Porta Ticinese district of Milan in 1928,
Giuseppe Pinelli had worked first as an errand boy, then as a
warehouseman. He was a voracious reader and every spare moment he filled
with reading to make good the gaps in the official education he had
received. In 1944–5 he took part in the Resistance as a partisan courier
in an anarchist group operating in Milan. Pinelli was one of the few
young activists to remain a convinced anarchist when the revolutionary
hopes and aspirations of the postwar era began to fade.
In 1954, he joined the railway as a fitter and the following year he
married Licia; the couple had two daughters.
In 1963 Pinelli joined the young anarchists of Giuventu Libertaria
(“Libertarian Youth”) who were breathing new life and inspiration into
the anarchist movement in Milan, but he also kept his links with the
“old guard” of a previous generation. As one of the sparse “middle
generation” of Italian anarchists (35 years old) he tried to ensure
friendly liaison between members of the older movement and the new
activists. In 1965 he was one of the founders of the “Sacco and
Vanzetti” circle at Viale Murillo 1, the anarchists’ first premises in
Milan for more than ten years. In 1968, following the break-up of the
Viale Murillo club, he helped found the Ponte della Ghisolfa circle at
Piazzale Lugano 31 and later, in 1969, to open the anarchist club
premises in the Via Scaldesole 5.
A dedicated militant, Pinelli played a key part in running the various
circles, groups, clubs, etc., and was an active member of the Bovisa
branch of the USI, the anarcho-syndicalist trades union. More
importantly, perhaps, Pinelli was the moving spirit behind the Milan
Branch of the Anarchist Black Cross, an international anarchist relief
organisation for prisoners and victims of repression. From May 1969
onwards, following his arrest on suspicion of involvement in the Milan
trade fair and railway station bombings, Pinelli devoted his time to the
Anarchist Black Cross, providing assistance for the comrades arrested on
false and fabricated charges and coordinating an international
investigation into the activities of the neofascists and various
intelligence agencies he knew to be responsible for the acts ascribed to
himself and his comrades.
Pinelli had been with friends and neighbours in his regular bar at the
time of the explosions and then gone on to the anarchist club at the Via
Scaldasole when he heard news of the explosions and where he met
Inspector Calabresi and Brigadier Vito Panessi who were searching the
premises. The only other person present was another anarchist, Sergio
Ardau. Both comrades were invited along to the Questura for a “little
chat.” This was approximately 6:30 p.m. Ardau was taken in the police
car and Pinelli followed on his motor scooter. <fn>See Appendix C.</fn>
Three days later on 15 December at 7:00 p.m. in the evening, the last
interrogation of Giuseppe Pinelli officially began. At 10:00 p.m.
Calabresi rang Licia, asking her to look for her husband’s rail pass
recording the train journeys for which no fares need be paid. A short
time later Licia Pinelli rang back to say she’d found it and at 11:00
p.m. a policeman called at the Pinelli home to collect it. At about
11:56 the anarchist Pasquale Valituttu was sitting in the corridor near
the room where Pinelli was being questioned when he suddenly heard “very
strange noises” coming from the room. Two minutes later, at 11:58
precisely, a call was logged requesting an ambulance at the Questura.
Meanwhile, at 11:57, the Unita (Communist Party) journalist Aldo Palumbo
left the press room and was walking through the central courtyard of the
Police HQ when Pinelli’s body plummeted to earth before his eyes.
Palumbo claims that when he saw the body fall he believed it to be
already lifeless testimony which was later to be backed up by
pathological evidence.
Although a number of anarchists were quickly charged with “illegal
conspiracy to commit crime” and complicity in the massacre, the plans
and hopes of Stefano Delle Chiaie and his shadowy manipulators, the real
conspirators responsible for the tragic events of 12 December in Piazza
Fontana, were foiled by the untimely death of Pinelli.
The number of people who took to the streets of Milan on 15 December to
pay silent homage to the victims of the previous Friday’s massacre made
it clear that the Italian working class had no intention of succumbing
to terror, nor had it been fooled as to the real authorship of the
massacre which lay in the hands of the right not the anarchists. On the
morning of 15 December an estimated crowd of around three hundred
thousand Milanese overflowed the city’s Piazza Duomo to confront the
challenge. Had people been confused and terrified and remained at home,
the rightwing gambit might well have paid dividends, but the common
sense response of the Milanese working class in coming out that morning
extinguished any hopes the putschists might have left. Italian writer
Camilla Cederna spoke of “that unforgettable day of pregnant gloom, of
low dark snow clouds at noon, where the people’s reply to the outrage
came unanimous and spontaneous and anti-fascist Milan seemed to take the
upper hand and the spirit of unity seemed to have been rediscovered and
concord re-established.”
It was a day which had echoes of 19 July 1936 when proletarian Barcelona
took to the streets to resist an earlier fascist machination. Five days
later, on 20 December and in spite of a climate of severe police
intimidation, a cortege of three thousand people with black flags
followed “Pino” Pinelli to his final resting place.
On 17 December the Italian secret service agent Stefano Serpieri,
another of those who had visited Greece on the Delle Chiaie officially
sponsored trip, submitted a signed report to his boss, General Federico
Quirazza, head of the counterintelligence bureau of the secret service,
naming Stefano Delle Chiaie and Mario Merlino as the material authors of
the outrage:
<blockquote>Mario Merlino was the author of the bombing at the [Rome]
Altare delle Patria [Tomb of the Unknown Soldier], and he had received
his instructions from the fascist leader Stefano Delle Chiaie who, in
turn, had received his from Yves Guerin Serac, director of the Aginter
Press agency in Lisbon, which also employs the services of one Robert
Leroy, a French citizen, in its activities.</blockquote>
Serpieri further specified that “Merlino and Delle Chiaie, passing
themselves off as anarchists, carried out bombings so that the blame for
them would fall on other movements… ” Robert Leroy was a veteran of the
French “Charlemagne” division of the Waffen SS and a serving NATO
intelligence officer (according to his Aginter dossier) with Reinhard
Gehlen’s BND. <fn>BND Bundesnachrichtendienst, the Federal German
intelligence service founded by Reinhard Gehlen, ex-head of the
Wehrmacht intelligence organisation “Fremde Heere 0^(st)” (“Foreign
Armies East”). At the end of World War II the Pentagon absorbed his
organisation in its entirety in the belief that Gehlerl had an efficient
intelligence network stretching right into the Kremlin itself. As early
as 1949 an informer in one of the emigre organisations used by Gehlen
reckoned that about ninety per cent of all intelligence reaching the
Americans was false. Walter Schellenberg, ex-head of Nazi foreign
intelligence, claimed to author William Stevenson that the Gehlen
organisation was primarily a channel of escape for war criminals and
that it was taking in US funds on a scale that for Europe at that time
was magnificent. False intelligence from the Gehlen org to the Americans
was a major factor in the rise of the Cold War. Soon after the formation
of NATO, which was an extension of the Bundeswehr and established West
Germany as the strongest military power in that organisation next to the
US, the BND became the unofficial NATO intelligence organisation. In
this capacity it maintained a resident officer in the capital of every
NATO country, allegedly to keep an eye on the host country’s contacts
with the Soviet Union.</fn> He apparently first came into contact with
Delle Chiaie at an Ordine Nuovo meeting in Milan in 1965 and the two
have remained friends ever since. Leroy says of his connections with
Stefano Delle Chiaie that he visited him several times in Rome and that
he “shared my views regarding the need to unite seemingly opposed
revolutionary elements, in the manner of the Argentine Peronist
Movement….”
The report by agent Serpieri was buried by Admiral Hencke, the head of
the Italian secret service (SID) at the time. Hencke later lied to the
magistrate investigating the links between the neofascists and the
secret service when he stated that the SID had not investigated the
outrages nor had it received any information on the subject. It was not
until much later that the full details began to emerge, including the
facts that Admiral Hencke personally controlled both Pino Rauti and
Giovanni Ventura (and perhaps even Delle Chiaie himself).
Slowly the investigation began to concentrate more and more on the
“anarchist” Mario Merlino, a recent “convert” to anarchism following his
trip to Greece and one of the founders of the Rome “22^(nd) March”
anarchist group along with the genuine anarchist Pietro Valpreda.
<fn>See Appendix D.</fn> It was Merlino, suspected of planting the Rome
bombs, who, when arrested and questioned on the night of Friday, 12
December, changed his role from that of provocateur to that of
“informer.” It was due primarily to his statement to the police that the
other five anarchists of the 22^(nd) March group, including Pietro
Valpreda, were charged, but his own alibi was not checked for over two
months. Merlino’s alibi witnesses as to his whereabouts on the afternoon
of 12 December were none other than the family of Leda Minetti Stefano
Delle Chiaie’s woman companion and Stefano Delle Chiaie himself.
On 24 February 1970, investigating magistrate Cudillo called Stefano
Delle Chiaie in for questioning for the first time and “Il Caccola”
confirmed Merlino’s alibi. Five months later, with growing
contradictions in Merlino’s statements and additional evidence pointing
the finger at the neofascists as perpetrators of the Milan outrage, the
magistrate again questioned Delle Chiaie concerning his alibi for
Merlino on that fateful afternoon. Two days later, on 27 July, the
magistrate issued a warrant for the arrest of Stefano Delle Chiaie on a
charge of-perjury. In the meantime Delle Chiaie had gone to ground.
In November the following year, indisputable evidence against the
neofascist and secret service authorship of the Piazza Fontana massacre
emerged. A builder repairing the roof of a house in Castel Franco Veneto
accidentally broke through a partition wall belonging to a socialist
town councillor, Giancarlo Marchesin, and uncovered a cache of weapons
and explosives in particular ammunition boxes with NATO initials
similar to those used as bomb containers in the December 1969 outrages.
Marchesin claimed the weapons had been stored there by Giovanni Ventura
a few days after the 12 December bombings. Before that they had been
stored in the house of one Ruggero Pan, who explained to the police that
after the train bombings of the summer of 1969, Ventura asked him to buy
some metal boxes of the German “Jewel” brand. He explained that the
wooden trunks used to contain the explosives did not have the same
explosive effect as the metal ones. Pan refused to comply with Ventura’s
request, but the following day he noticed a metal box at Ventura’s place
and realised someone else had obliged in his place. Pan forgot about the
incident until 13 December 1969 when the press and TV showed pictures of
one of the boxes used in the attacks on the banks. It was of the “Jewel”
brand, identical to the ones obtained by Freda and Ventura.
Investigating magistrates also discovered that the nerve-centre of the
conspiracy was in the hall of a Padua University institute made
available to them by the neofascist caretaker, Marco Pozzan, a close
associate of Franco Freda. After lengthy interrogation by the
magistrates in March 1972 Pozzan confessed that the overall plan had
been given the go-ahead during a meeting in Padua on the evening of 18
April 1969. According to Pozzan both Pino Rauti, the agent of the Greek
Junta in Italy, and Stefano Delle Chiaie participated in the meeting.
<fn>Stefano Delle Chiaie denies participating in this meeting and
alleges that Pozzan, whom he later safehoused in Madrid, told him that
Franco Freda ordered him and two others to make the allegations. In an
interview with Italian journalist Enzo Biagi in January 1983 Delle
Chiaie said: “I understood why (the allegations were made) during the
Catanzaro trial [the trial of those charged with the 12 December 1969
outrage], when Ventura too did his damndest to implicate me by claiming
that I had participated in that celebrated meeting in Padua, when I
never went to it at all Because it was Giannettini who participated in
the meeting, not I nor Pino Rauti…. In the end, as far as the Piazza
Fontana case was concerned, out went Pozzan, Giannettini and La Bruna
and in I came. Well, that strikes me as a second sort of outrage. It
strikes me that there is still this determination to save those truly
responsible for the Piazza Fontana butchery and to heap the vile
responsibility for it upon my shoulders and the shoulders of others who
had nothing to do with those outrages.”</fn>
Warrants for the arrest of Franco Freda, Giovanni Ventura <fn>During a
search carried out in one of the addresses used by Giovanni Ventura,
investigators discovered some confidential reports in a chest
“…referring to the American, Soviet, French, German and Romanian
intelligence services and their activities…” In his defence Ventura
explained to the magistrates that he was working for a mysterious
international intelligence agency.
Unlike Franco Freda, who openly admitted his neoNazi ideas, Ventura
insisted as passing himself off as a man of the left. He claims to have
infiltrated a fascist group led by Freda for the purpose of monitoring
its activities on behalf of this mysterious service which, he alleged,
was “…close to the Gaullist left and certain European leftist circles
advocating a third force against Soviet-American bi-polarity.” According
to Ventura his contacts were two journalists whom he eventually named as
Jean Parvulesco, a Romanian fascist living in exile in Paris where he
worked for the Spanish and French security services, and Guido
Giannettini.
Franco Freda was additionally charged with having purchased the
detonators used in the Milan bombing. He claims to have purchased them
on behalf of a non-existent Captain Hamid of the Algerian secret service
who wanted them for use in anti-lsrael action.</fn> and Pino Rauti were
issued and Marco Pozzan was released as a minor accessory and then
vanished.
On 3 March 1972, the last day of the abortive trial of the anarchist
Pietro Valpreda in connection with the Piazza Fontana bombings, Freda,
Ventura and Pino Rauti were arrested with seven other fascists. All were
charged with having organised the outrages of 25 April at the Milan
Trade Fair and Milan railway station as well as the train bombings of
August that same year. Three weeks later, on 21 March 1972, the 12
December 1969 outrages were added to the list of charges. On 13 July
1972 all the neofascist suspects were released on bail and both Freda
and Ventura were spirited out of Europe by SID captain Antonio La Bruna
who travelled to Spain where he made the necessary arrangements with
Stefano Delle Chiaie in Barcelona in November 1972.
For four and a half months the whereabouts of Delle Chiaie were to
remain a mystery, until the night of 7–8 December 1970, the anniversary
of the Japanese surprise attack on the United States fleet at Pearl
Harbour in 1941. Then the ‘Black Prince’ Junio Valerio Borghese,
ex-commander of Mussolini’s Decima MAS (Tenth Light Flotilla) and
responsible for a murderous anti-partisan campaign under Mussolini’s
Salo Republic, gave the order to proceed with the final stages of an
attempted coup codenamed “Tora, Tora” (the Japanese callsign).
At 11:15 that evening, Stefano Delle Chiaie, commanding 50 neonazis,
occupied the buildings of the Interior Ministry in Rome. They had gained
entrance that morning disguised as workmen and had lain low until
Borghese gave the final go-ahead for the coup. (This information comes
from a statement given by Delle Chiaie to Michael Vernon Townley, a
Chilean secret service agent, quoted in Assassination on Embassy Row by
John Dinges and Saul Landau, Writers and Readers, London 1980.)
However, at the very last moment the coup was called off. A few minutes
before 1.00 a.m. on the 8^(th), Borghese received a mysterious telephone
call. The identity of the caller is not known, but the name of General
Micelli, successor to Admiral Hencke as head of the secret service and
commander of the “Rose of the Winds” organisation, has been mentioned
repeatedly in this connection (see for example L’Orchestre Noir by
Frederic Laurent, Stock, Paris 1978). What was said during the short
conversation was also unknown but speculation has it that Miceli, who
was allegedly involved in the shady background of the plot, realised at
the last moment that Borghese and his men were being set up by other
more powerful factions among the plotters, and decided to warn his
friend and advise him to pull out. <fn>See appendix E.</fn>
Frustrated and angry at the decision to abandon the coup, Stefano Delle
Chiaie wanted to press on with it regardless, but his men had already
begun to desert him and make their escape from the buildings. In the
same deposition, Townley stated that Stefano Delle Chiaie had recounted
to him the events of that night when they waited for the uprising which
never took place. Delle Chiaie told him in conversation that when they
eventually left early in the morning the fascists took with them 180
machineguns from the armoury. He also boasted to Townley that since that
night he had become one of the top ten or fifteen most important leaders
of the rightwing terrorist offensive in Italy.
News of the Borghese coup attempt was hushed up by the Italian secret
service for almost three months but eventually an informer broke the
story to the press. Forewarned, as usual, both Borghese and Delle Chiaie
fled to Spain, then still firmly under fascist rule. They were quickly
followed there by more than 100 Italian neofascists implicated in the
terrorist outrages which they had attempted to blame on the anarchists
and which they hoped would have led them to power in a “New Order.” Some
of these Nazi terrorists escaped with the assistance of the Italian
security services who had used them for their own particular ends
possibly a presidential, Gaullist-type coup and now had to keep them
out of the way to ensure their own complicity remained hidden. The
secret service officer responsible for organising the escape networks
and liaison with the neofascists was the SID Captain Antonio La Bruna,
who later helped Freda and Ventura to escape and later still was exposed
as a member of ‘P2’masonic lodge.
Borghese and Delle Chiaie were welcomed to Spain by numerous friends of
the “Black Orchestra,” in particular Otto Skorzeny, the Duke of
Valencia, Jose Antonio Giron, a former Franco minister who provided them
with accommodation at his villa in Fuengirol, and Mariano Sanchez
Covisa, an influential Madrid businessman and father of the notorious
“Guerrillas of Christ the King,” the Spanish death squads.
Spain was to provide new opportunities for Stefano Delle Chiaie with his
special skills, his considerable influence over his friendship circle
and his small army of dedicated followers in both Italy and Spain. His
leadership qualities were immediately recognised by Skorzeny, who took
him under his wing as his protege. Skorzeny’s business operations also
provided useful cover for the real life’s work of Delle Chiaie, which
was now entering a new and more international phase.
The spirit of “contestation” which marked the late sixties and early
seventies throughout the western world inspired a resurgence in the
activities of the anti-Francoist movement in Spain. The terrorist
campaign initiated by the Basque separatist organisation ETA was a
particularly aggravating thorn in the flesh of the dictatorship.
Obsessed with the threat of communism and inspired by the ideas of SAS
founder David Stirling, Skorzeny had, since the early fifties, been
toying with the idea of setting up an “international directorship of
strategic assault personnel” whose terms of reference would enable it to
“straddle the watershed between the paramilitary operations carried out
by the troops in uniform and the political warfare which is conducted by
civilian agents.” (Letter from David Stirling to Charles Foley published
in the latter’s book on Skorzeny, Commando Extraordinary.)
The political turbulence and rapid polarisation of western society which
began in the mid-sixties in the wake of the third world liberation
movements and, in particular, the example of the Vietnam War, convinced
Skorzeny that the time was ripe to put his ideas into practice (Just as
Stirling was doing in Britain with his “Watchguard” organisation with
which he hoped to counter “communist-inspired” anti-government forces
and maintain the “status quo” for the West).[1]
With the tide of unrest growing in intensity month by month and the
increasing number of guerrilla actions against military and political
pillars of the Franco regime, both at home and abroad, Skorzeny was
given a free hand by the Spanish Interior Ministry to deal with the
thorny but delicate problem of neutralising the perceived enemies of
Francoism. In 1968 he began recruiting former Waffen-SS and OAS men for
this purpose. French Nazi party leader Francoise Dior signed up many
members of her organisation who were then taken to San Sebastian to be
interviewed by Skorzeny who informed them they would be called upon when
Franco died if the Army did not manage to take control. Other recruits
were found primarily among the ranks of former members of the OAS, the
later outlawed Service d’Action Civique (SAC), as well as South Tyrolean
and exiled Yugoslav fascists, anti-Castro Cubans and Portuguese exile
fascists.
The day-to-day running of the Paladin organisation, as it was named, was
entrusted by Skorzeny to an old colleague from the Third Reich, Dr.
Gerhardt Harmut von Schubert. Von Schubert, if that indeed was his real
name, was, like many other leading figures among the old guard of the
“Black Orchestra,” an ex-employee of Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry.
After the war he had been security adviser to the vicious Peron
dictatorship in Argentina, then after that a principal agent in
Skorzeny’s construction of the Gestapo-style Egyptian security services
under Neguib and Nasser.
The public face of the Paladin organisation was that of a legitimate
security consultancy but this was only to provide cover for its real
function of recruiting mercenaries and killers for dictators and failing
colonialist regimes. Its covert activities in France and Spain were
carried out under a variety of convenient names: “Spanish Basque
Battalions,” the “Guerrillas of Christ the King,” the “Apostolic
AntiCommunist Alliance,” etc.
The arrival of Delle Chiaie and his army of dedicated followers boosted
the ranks of Paladin and marked the beginning of a bloodthirsty and
ruthless campaign of murder and terror directed against exiled
dissidents and “enemies of the regime.”
Under cover of the confusing variety of names this neofascist sub-state
agency has organised and carried out well over a thousand punitive
attacks in Spain and the French border area, particularly around
Bayonne, killed around fifty people and seriously wounded many hundreds
more. Aldo Tisei, the neofascist “supergrass” who took over the military
organisation of the Delle Chiaie group in Italy following its leader’s
move to Spain, later informed investigating magistrates: “We eliminated
ETA members who had fled to Franceand did so on behalf of the Spanish
secret services.“[2] The murderer of the almost legendary anarchist
Laureano Cerrada Santos, Ramon Benicho Canuda, may also have been
working with the Paladin organisation. The frame-up of eleven anarchists
in France following the kidnapping of Spanish banker Balthazar Suarez in
May 1974 also appears to have involved at least one Paladin provocateur
by the name of Martinez.
Paladin did not work solely for the Francoist security agency: it
carried out contracts on behalf of numerous other sub-fascist regimes
and agencies as well. Supergrass Aldo Tisei elaborated: “We had solid
and highly effective links of a political as well as an operational
nature with some foreign secret services, among whom I may name, without
fear of contradiction, the Chilean DINA and the Spanish secret services
up to Franco’s death. They also supplied us with superb logistical
back-up and helped find us effective assistance in the event of our
going on the run. Obviously these services wanted favours in return. On
DINA’s behalf we carried out the attack on the chairman of the exiled
Chilean Christian Democrats, Bernardo Leighton and his wife. On behalf
of the Spanish we have, as I said, eliminated runaway ETA terrorists who
had fled from Spain.”
Tisei also went into some detail about the role of Delle Chiaie in the
“Black Orchestra”: “This [international planning and coordination] is an
area personally looked after by Stefano Delle Chiaie and if he were to
succeed in his plans it would spell a lot of danger for the institutions
[sic]. For in that case, the armed groups of the far right would derive
massive advantages.”
1974 saw the restructuring of the Italian extraparliamentary right with
the establishment of much closer international links with other
neofascist movements and even more sinister umbrella organisations such
as the World Anti Communist League.
The offensive was not long in coming. On 28 May a bomb exploded at an
anti-fascist rally in Brescia, killing 8 and injuring 102 people. A
communique was received shortly after claiming responsibility for the
outrage on behalf of a hitherto unknown group using the name “Ordine
Nero.” ON was, in fact, just one of many names to be used by the now
amalgamated “Ordine-Nuovo” and “Avanguardia Nazionale.”
A few months later, on 4 August, another bomb exploded aboard the
Rome-Munich “Italicus” express train near Bologna, killing 12 people and
injuring 48. The date chosen for this outrage would appear not to have
been random. Italian police investigating the murder of a Greek student
in Rome the following February uncovered evidence that the “Italicus”
bombing involved both Italian and Greek fascists. Kostas Plevris’s
“4^(th) August Movement,” outlawed after the overthrow of the Junta in
July 1974, had reorganised as a clandestine terrorist organisation under
the name of the Greek equivalent of the Italian “Ordine Nuovo,” both
meaning “New Order.” Two years of investigation eventually led to
charges being preferred against another hardline element in the Delle
Chiaie network Mario Tutti, founder of the pro-Ghadaffi “Italian-Libyan
Friendship Society.”
Lotta Continua, the Italian leftwing paper, later published a story in
which it claimed that a gang of rightwing policemen, the so-called
“Black Dragons,” had been involved along with Tutti in the “Italicus”
and other train bombings. The same article disclosed that a member of
the “Black Dragons,” police officer Bruno Cresca, then in prison on
charges of robbery, had been involved in the rocket attack on a Pan
American plane at Rome’s Fiumicino airport on 17 December 1973 in which
32 people had burned to death. The attack was claimed by a hitherto
unknown “Palestinian People Organisation.” Lotta Continua also published
a duty roster and photograph proving Cresca had been on duty at
Fiumicino on the day of the attack, although officially assigned to
other duties a month before. The paper also quoted a witness who claimed
to have seen the terrorists slip through a side door, ushered by a
policeman in uniform, thereby evading the searches which would have led
to the discovery of their weapons. Finally, Lotta Continua published a
handwritten facsimile of a police interrogation of Cresca following the
discovery of some 30 million lire on his person. Although incomplete,
Cresca’s answers appear to indicate that the money had been given to him
in September 1974 in payment for work done in Rome the previous year.
Does this refer to the Fiumicino attack?
Stefano Delle Chiaie continued to use Spain as his base while he
travelled regularly between Madrid and Rome for nearly six years. After
the death of his protector Skorzeny and General Franco in 1975,
following hard on the collapse of the Portuguese and Greek dictatorships
the previous year, it became increasingly obvious it was time to move on
to more secure surroundings. The crunch came following a police raid in
February 1977 on a clandestine arms factory in the Calle Pelaio in
Madrid, owned by another of Delle Chiaie’s Spanish godfathers: Mariano
Sanchez Covisa, leader of the “Guerrillas of Christ the King.” Nine of
Delle Chiaie’s closest associates among the Italian exiled neofascists
were arrested in connection with this discovery, but forewarned (or
lucky!), both Delle Chiaie and his friend Yves Guerin-Serac (who had
been in Spain organising the counter-revolutionary “Portuguese
Liberation Army” on behalf of General Spinola to overthrow the
progressive Armed Forces Movement) managed to elude their would-be
captors and once again disappeared from view.
After the arms factory raid, the Spanish Ministry of the Interior issued
an interesting statement regarding information uncovered as a result of
the raid that the US-made Ingram M10 machinegun used in the killing in
1976 of the examining magistrate investigating the Italicus train
bombing, Vittorio Occorsio, “was modified and perfected by the engineer
Eliodoro Pomar in the Calle Pelaio factory.” What the statement did not
say was that the machinegun had been given to Stefano Delle Chiaie by
agents of the Guardia Civil “for services rendered.”
“Supergrass” Aldo Tisei, the organisational head of the neofascist
terrorist infrastructure in Italy following the flight abroad of the
original leaders of the various terrorist groups, and one of the two men
charged with the murder of Occorsio, has subsequently revealed the close
interdependence between organised crime and the security services. Tisei
revealed the real reason for the murder of Occorsio: “Occorsio was the
first magistrate to realise that behind our political movement, Ordine
Nuovo, stood a terrorist organisation with links to other foreign
organisations with anti-democratic objectives.” It now appears that
Occorsio had uncovered links with the Masonic lodge P2;[3] from these
links and from those with organised crime, the neofascists derived
political protection and all the skills of the underworld necessary to
pursue their activities. Also after the Madrid arms factory raid,
further investigations by the Spanish police led to the discovery of
fascist leader Elio Massagrande’s bank deposit box which was found to
contain large sums of foreign currency and three gold bars from the 1976
25-million-dollar Nice bank robbery carried out by Albert Spaggiari and
Italian and Spanish fascist terrorists, all contract employees of the
Paladin organisation. Elio Massagrande and another fascist, Gaetano
Orlando, managed to escape to Paraguay where, after international
protest, they were both arrested in December 1977, but released again in
a matter of days on the direct orders of President Stroessner.
Aldo Tisei has further alleged that the Delle Chiaie organisation also
operated as an espionage agency for an unnamed Libyan diplomat who also
allegedly ran a huge heroin smuggling operation. In return for money and
drugs the neofascists’ task was to supply the diplomat with secret
information on weapons and warfare systems being manufactured and
developed by the Selenia and Contraves companies, the two leading
Italian firms in the sector. One Delle Chiaie agent, Antonio Leandri,
worked at Contraves but he was murdered before he could be questioned by
police.
The identity of the Libyan diplomat is unknown, but Rome investigating
magistrate Ferdinando Imposimato has written: “Many facts and
discoveries prove the close links, going back to the early seventies,
between the Libyan government and leading exponents of fascist
subversion operating in Italy.” It is no accident that one of the
leading members of the Delle Chiaie network, Claudio Mutti, was for a
long time the chairman of the Italia-Libia Association. Also, Mario
Tutti, the neofascist killer charged with the “Italicus” express
bombing, is known to have cashed a cheque from the Libyan Embassy in
Rome while on the run in 1975.
In 1978 Ordine Nuovo, reconstituted in 1974 as a merger between Ordine
Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale which led to the formation of the
terrorist organisation Nuclei Armata Rivoluzionaria (NAR; “Armed
Revolutionary Groups”), issued clandestine “Order Papers” to members.
These papers make it clear that the new organisational network was now
international in scope and that the operational bases had been moved
outside Italy. They instructed cells to use different names for each
attack. One went so far as to say: “After murder comes indiscriminate
terrorism.”
Stefano Delle Chiaie’s first known visit to Latin America was to Chile
with Prince Valerio Borghese late in 1973 after the CIA-backed coup
which ousted and killed President Salvador Allende. The buildup to the
Chilean coup bore numerous similarities to the events which unsettled
Italy from early 1969 onwards. The two fascists’ trip to Chile was
ostensibly on behalf of a Madrid agency, Enesia, to establish friendly
relations and encourage trade with the new regime, but in fact to
discuss the setting up of an international hit squad to kill the enemies
of the Junta and to neutralise all overseas opposition.
This proposal for a transnational terror network later to become known
as “Operation Condor” was discussed and agreed with the Chilean Head of
Station of the American CIA, Raymond Warren, responsible for running
psychological warfare and paramilitary operations networks for
eliminating anti-Junta dissidents in other Latin American countries and
in Europe.
The first contract fulfilled was the murder in September 1974 of General
Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires. The murder was carried out by
the neofascist terrorist group Patria y Libertad, a network of rightwing
criminals trained in Bolivia and at a school of the United States
International Police Academy.
In September 1975 Delle Chiaie travelled to Rome on a false passport
where he met Michael Townley, a US-born agent of the Chilean secret
service, the DINA, Townley’s wife, Mariana Ines Callejas, also a DINA
agent, and Virgilio Paz, an anti-Castro Cuban terrorist leader.
According to a statement made by Townley to the FBI, following his
successful extradition to the United States from Chile on charges of
having murdered exiled Chilean leader Orlando Letelier, all three met
with Delle Chiaie and his associates to discuss the proposed
assassination of Bernardo Leighton.
Within a matter of days the assassination plan was finalised. Virgilio
Paz and Delle Chiaie between them prepared a scenario intended to
confuse the subsequent police investigation and lead it away from both
DINA and the Italians.
The attempt on Bernardo Leighton’s life took place in Rome on 6 October
1975, but it was unsuccessful and the would-be assassins succeeded only
in wounding their target. The attempt was later described to Aldo Tisei
by the would-be assassin himself, Pierluigi Concutelli: “Pierluigi
described the operation to me down to the finest detail. He fired at
Leighton’s head, heard the wife scream, whirled around and wounded her
in the throat. He was on the point of giving both the coup de grace but
relented, convinced their deaths were imminent.” Concutelli described it
as “the only cock-up in my life.”
A few days later, on 13 October, the false trail was laid when the
Miami-based Cuban exile paper Diario de las Americas published a
communique from an organisation calling itself Cero which claimed
responsibility for the shooting. In November a further communique from
Cero was received by the Miami office of the AP agency providing details
of the shooting. The communique claimed responsibility for the
assassination of the Cuban exile leader Rolando Masferrer on 31 October
for being “a divisive influence on the Cuban exile movement”; it added:
“Mr. Bernardo Leighton was shot through the back of the head in Rome. A
9mm Beretta pistol was used. We are informing you of this to contradict
reports in the media and to identify them fully.”
Townley later stated to the FBI that the information used in the Cero
communique had been channelled by Delle Chiaie to DINA in Chile and from
there to Virgilio Paz in Miami. Although annoyed at the failure of the
assassination attempt, DINA paid out l00 million lire to Delle Chiaie
which, according to pentito Aldo Tisei, he pocketed himself.
Another diplomatic murder linked with the Delle Chiaie organisation,
under contract from Paladin, by now based in Zurich following exposure
of its activities by the Parisian daily Liberation, was the murder of
General Joaquin Zenteno Anaya. Anaya was the American-trained Ranger
Commander responsible for the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia in
October 1967, and in May 1976 was the Bolivian ambassador in Paris.
Although the assassination was claimed by the hitherto unknown “Che
Guevara Brigade,” it has been suggested (Nouvel Observateur, Paris, June
1976) that it was planned by a Bolivian intelligence officer known as
Saavedra with Delle Chiaie in the Hotel Consulado in Madrid. (Anaya’s
politics were opposed to the then president, General Banzer. He was a
supporter of ex-president Torres who was murdered shortly afterwards in
Argentina.)
It would appear, then, that when Delle Chiaie and Guérin-Serac made
their escape from Madrid in 1977 they found refuge and a new base for
their activities in South America where they already had many friends
and protectors.
The original network of pro-Nazi circles in Latin America maintained by
Skorzeny, Luftwaffe hero Hans Ulrich Rudel, ex-Goebbels man Johannes von
Leers and Klaus Barbie had been built on in the late sixties by the
fresh blood of Aginter Press organiser Yves Guerin-Serac and his network
of OAS exiles.
Many of the methods and techniques which are now the hallmark of Latin
American death squads originated in the theory and practices in Algeria
of the French “5^(th) Bureau of the General Staff” (psychological
operations) under Colonel Lacheroy and were honed to cruel perfection by
the OAS under the direction of Colonel Jean Gardes: beheading,
degenitalising and other forms of mutilation of suspects and the
dynamiting of their corpses and leaving the remains in some public
place. Guérin-Serac’s mentors in Lisbon and Madrid, Susini and
Lagaillarde, were both proteges of the infamous 5^(th) Bureau set up in
1957 during the Algerian War. In the late sixties, when Aginter Press
spread its attention from Africa to Latin America, it is estimated that
about 60 per cent of Aginter personnel were recruited from the ranks of
the OAS, while the remainder were recruited from neoNazi organisations
in Western Europe such as the Frankfurt based Kampfbund Deutscher
Soldateni1 run by another ex-Goebbels man and partner of “von Schubert”
in Paladin, Dr. Eberhardt Taubert, otherwise known as “the man in the
white Porsche.“[4]
A 1968 prospectus sent by Guerin-Serac to the head of Guatemala’s secret
police tendering for a “security contract” makes chilling reading in the
light of subsequent events. It proposed: “a programme of action against
Castroite subversion in Latin America” and the “placement in Guatemala
of a team of specialists in subversive and revolutionary struggle, or
perfectly trained politicomilitary cadres to serve as technical advisers
in the elaboration of political and military action schemes to be
pursued in the struggle… This action by specialists would be placed
under the ultimate authority of local political leaders and perfectly
coordinated with them.
Apart from setting up a headquarters study office charged with making a
special study of subversion and familiarising officers with new combat
methods of guerrilla warfare, infiltration, psychological warfare and
the setting up of a ‘special missions’ centre… indeed it would be a good
idea as well to extend the antiguerrilla action to adjacent nations,
Nicaragua and El Salvador, for the antiguerrilla struggle.”
In June 1971, the New York Times reported that at least 2,000 people had
been murdered in Guatemala between May 1968 and November 1970. An
Amnesty International report estimated that upwards of 30,000 people
were murdered in the decade beginning 1966, the vast majority of them
between 1968 and 1971 following the assassination of US ambassador
Gordon Mein. The terror campaign, modelled on the South Vietnamese
“Phoenix” programme, in which an estimated 40,000 Viet Cong suspects
were murdered, was masterminded and overseen by Mein’s successor,
Nathaniel West, a senior staff member of the US National Security
Council (West was afterwards appointed US ambassador to Chile in
November 1971, shortly after President Allende nationalised the copper
mines) and was carried out by agencies such as the “plausibly deniable”
Aginter Press. According to Patrice Chairoff, missions carried out by
Aginter Press and similar front agencies in Latin America enabled, by
1977, around 560 European neofascists to receive in-depth training and
experience in psychological warfare and terrorism.
Shortly before exiled Argentinian dictator Juan Peron’s plane touched
down at Ezeiza airport on his return from exile to power on 20 June
1973, death squads of the “Triple A” (Argentine AntiCommunist Alliance)
organised by Peronist Interior Minister Juan Lopez Rega (later
identified as a member of Lodge P2) opened fire with machineguns and
threw hand grenades into the waiting crowds, massacring 300 bystanders
because they were Peronist leftwingers.
According to an investigation carried out by the newspaper of the
leftist Montoneros, El Descamisado, those responsible for the massacre
included members of several international neofascist groups, including
Francoise Chiappe, formerly of the Milice, the wartime Vichy-French
anti-Resistance Squads, a veteran of the OAS Delta Commandos, and
heavily implicated in the international drug trade.
When in May 1974 investigators from the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement
raided the Lisbon HQ of Aginter Press and its political wing, “Order and
Tradition,” they discovered Yves Guerin-Serac’s last-known forwarding
address: Apartado 1682, E1 Salvador.
Stefano Delle Chiaie’s main base in Latin America appears to have been
Buenos Aires, but he is known to have travelled extensively throughout
Latin America in the company of one or two trusted companions. According
to DINA sources quoted by American authors John Dinges and Saul Landau
in their book Death on Embassy Row, Stefano Delle Chiaie, using the
nom-de-guerre Alfredo di Stefano (a.k.a. “Topogigio”), together with two
Italian companions “Luigi” (or “Gigi”) and “Maurizio” (possibly Maurizio
Giorgi, a go-between for Delle Chiaie and Italian secret service officer
Antonio La Bruna), were provided with an office by DINA from which they
operated a front news agency in Santiago which specialised in
channelling pro-government articles to the Western media. The office
consisted of a large apartment equipped as an office with a telex
machine for their dispatches. As with Aginter Press, the news agency
also appears to have provided cover for covert activities.
The three Italians are known to have established contacts in Bolivia,
Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as in
their base country, Argentina. In Buenos Aires they are known to have
been in contact with DINA agent Michael Townley’s Milicia group, closely
allied to Lopez Rega’s Triple A, which specialised in reprinting Nazi
tracts in Spanish and promoting anti-semitic literature as well as
providing auxiliaries for the security services of Latin American
dictatorships). It was the Milicia which assisted Townley in
assassinating Chilean exiles such as General Carlos Prats.
Although Delle Chiaie’s exact activities and movements from 1977 until
1980 are a matter for conjecture (he seems to be able to go wherever he
wants, whenever he wants), what is certain is that this period saw a
cementing of the relationship between the neofascists and organised
crime, the Mafia. In Italy, 1976 had witnessed an increase in the number
of criminal kidnappings and there was growing evidence that the
neofascists, particularly those linked with the Delle Chiaie network
such as Pierluigi Concutelli, were deeply involved with the activities
of the so-called “Kidnap Anonymous” organisation. It was also known that
for some considerable time the Mafia organisations which ran the
narcotics trade in the “heroin triangle” (Ostia-Acilia-Casal Palocca)
had been using the neofascists as heavies to distribute drugs and to
intimidate addicts and “neutralise” investigators.
It is not known whether Delle Chiaie attended the 12^(th) Congress of
the South Korean-based World AntiCommunist League3 hosted by President
Stroessner in Asuncion, Paraguay, in 1979. But the 400 delegates from 80
countries certainly included Delle Chiaie’s close comrade from Spain,
Elio Massagrande. The main subject for discussion on the agenda was how
to galvanise support for rightwing regimes in the vanguard of the
struggle against communism.
Another more important meeting in which Delle Chiaie certainly was
involved was the secret conference of Latin American security and
intelligence services held in Bogota, Colombia, in November 1979. It was
at this conference that Argentinian General Roberto Eduardo Viola, later
to become President of Argentina, laid the foundations for the
Argentinian sponsored coup which blocked the accession of the newly
elected President of Bolivia, Dr. Siles Zuazo, in July 1980 (Edward S.
Herman, The Real Terror NetworkTerrorism in Fact and Propaganda, South
End Press, Boston, 1982).
If Delle Chiaie’s precise movements are unknown to us, his activities
are far from being obscure. He was travelling backwards and forwards
between Argentina and Bolivia for some years and was directly involved
in the destabilisation campaign preceding the bloody coup which
overthrew Bolivia’s democratically elected President Dr. Siles Zuazo on
17 July 1980.
One of the Delle Chiaie organisers in Latin America, West German Joachim
Fiebelkorn (born 1947), a Paladin and Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten
veteran, as well as a Frankfurt pimp, who had worked with Delle Chiaie
in Bolivia, stated later to the West German police that Delle Chiaie was
the number one international middleman between the Sicilian Mafia and
the Latin American cocaine producers. Based in a police barracks next to
the West German Embassy in the capital, La Paz, the Delle Chiaie men,
Los Novios de la Muerte “The Fiancés of Death” as they called
themselves, were contracted as security guards and enforcers for the
multinational drug empire of Roberto Suarez, described as the “King of
Coca,” overseeing the production, transportation, distribution and
marketing of cocaine.
It was Roberto Suarez who put up the money and placed his neofascist
paramilitary organisation at the disposal of General Luis Garcia Meza in
his preparations for the 1980 coup which installed both Meza and his
Interior Minister, the notorious Colonel Luis Arce Gomez. Arce Gomez, a
close relation of Roberto Suarez, and known as “the Idi Amin of the
Andes,” was described by the US ambassador to Bolivia and by the US Drug
Enforcement Agency as “one of the biggest cocaine dealers in the
country” after Suarez, of course. Another US Drug Enforcement Agency
official claimed that “for the first time ever the drugs mafia has
evidently bought itself a government.” (Bolivia: Cocaine: the military
connection, Latin America Regional Reports Andean Group, 29 August 1980,
quoted in Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network.)
The amount of money involved in this lucrative trade can be gauged by
Arce Gomez’s own estimate in a statement to Latin America Weekly Report
(13 February 1981): “Coca can produce for us 1,200 million dollars.” But
this was a vast understatement. The astronomical profits being made can
be better judged by the fact that Roberto Suarez, in an attempt to
obtain the release of his son, held in the United States on serious drug
charges, offered to pay off Bolivia’s entire foreign debts of $3,800m.
(The son has since been released on bail and is now back in Bolivia.)
Concerning the 1980 coup in Bolivia, Venezuelan journalist Ted Cordova
Laire wrote in El Nacional: “… all sectors agree unanimously that
Argentinian, Italian, German and South American elements all
participated in the coup effected by Garcia Meza and Colonel Arce Gomez.
Many of the junta’s prisoners were interrogated by Argentinians.” The
same writer also affirmed that the destabilisation campaign was begun
during the regime of Argentina’s Jorge Videla, another Lodge P2 Mason,
and that General Galtieri himself went to La Paz to prepare the campaign
and sent at least seventy Argentinian police and security specialists
who operated under cover of the newly established OPSIC the Oficina de
Operaciones Psicologicas (Office of Psychological Operations) chillingly
reminiscent of the French 5^(th) Bureau which spawned the likes of
Jean-Jacques Susini, Pierre Lagaillarde and Guerin-Serac: Writer Ed
Berman puts the figure at 200 military and intelligence personnel. Los
Angeles Times journalist Ray Bonner quoted one US military adviser in
Bolivia: “The Argentinian military did everything but tell General
Garcia Meza the day to pull it off.” (Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1981,
quoted in Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network).
The ostensible head of the new Bolivian regime, General Garcia Meza,
charged his Interior Minister Arce Gomez with the job of setting up a
personal bodyguard to protect him on his trips around the country. This
force was recruited from the neofascists who had helped him to power.
This parallel security force was trained and overseen by William Adgar
Moffett III, a CIA paramilitary officer who had previously helped refine
the methods used by Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s dreaded
murder organisation, the Ton Ton Macoutes. Within days of Arce Gomez’s
statement on taking office that “All those who violate the Law of
National Security will have to walk around with their last will and
testament under their arm,” the death squads had begun their campaign of
bloody repression. Student meetings were broken up and activists and
academics were beaten up and murdered; the headquarters of the main
Bolivian trade union, the Central Obrero Boliviano, were gutted and
militants tortured and murdered. One of the worst incidents was the
carnage which took place at Caracol, a small tin-mining community near
Oruro where only a few survivors lived to tell of the atrocities
committed by the “Fiancés of Death.” (“El Novio de la Muerte “Fiancé of
Death” is a marching song of the Spanish Foreign Legion.) To avoid
attracting attention to themselves, the “Fiancés of Death” would drive
into villages or working class areas in ambulances with red crosses
marked prominently on the vehicles and carry off their victims, most of
whom were never seen again. Other leading members of the “Fiancés of
Death” were Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” ex-Waffen SS officer
Haus Stellfield who died shortly after the coup from injecting an
overdose of cocaine, ex-Waffen SS Herbert Kopplin, Franz Josef Boefle,
Hans Juergen, Kay Gwinner, Wolfgang Walterkirche, the Rhodesian Manfred
Kuhlman, Heinz Lauer, Hans Landowski, Carsten Vollner, Joachim
Fiebelkorn.
Apart from these mainly German and Austrian Nazis there were also at
least two Frenchmen, Oliver Danet and Napoleon Leclerc, the OAS man
exiled from Marseilles at the end of the “French Connection.” Italian
neofascist and P2 supergrass Elio Cioloni, involved later in the Bologna
bombing investigations, described this motley collection in an interview
published in the Italian weekly Panorama:
Fiebelkorn [boss of the Bavarian operation] arrived in Santa Cruz and,
little by little, built up this group of German mercenaries. First there
was the middle-weight boxer “Icke” alias Herbert Kapplin, 52 year old
Berliner and veteran of the SS armoured division of General Steiner. He
was a POW in Russia until 1952, expert at stripping every sort of
weapon. The most likable character was Hans Juergen, formerly a railway
electrician, an alcoholic who died of overdrinking. The most experienced
driver was Manfred Kuhlmann, a little hothead forever in a fury with Kay
Gwinner, a Chilean German in exile since Allende’s day. There was also
the Frenchman Jean Leclerc. His real name was Napoleon Leclerc. In
Algeria, with the Legion, he had carried out a lot of torture: he always
strutted about in military uniform with grenades dangling at his belt.
He never paid his bills and saw communists everywhere. It Fiebelkorn’s
best friend was 65 year old Hans Stellfield, a Gestapo veteran who fled
lo South America at the end of the war. A military instructor, potter,
dealer in exotic animals and drugs, he was also a bodyguard and smuggled
arms from the USA… Our nine-man group was in direct touch with the Nazi
HQ in La Paz run by Klaus Barbie… From the second half of 1978 onwards
we had but one aim … to get ourselves organised so as to display our
power.
Following the success of the coup the US Drug Enforcement Agency
estimated that the drug traffickers who had put up the 70 million
dollars to put Garcia Meza into power increased the annual production at
their refineries from 2,000 million dollars to over 7,000 million.
When the US authorities started to exert pressure on the Bolivian
government to crack down on the production of cocaine, it simply
provided Arce Gomez with an opportunity to corner the market for himself
and Suarez. Having recruited the “Fiancés of Death” into the Bolivian
National Drug Control Agency, Arce Gomez then provided them with a list
of more than a hundred of the smaller independent drug producers to be
dealt with. Leading units of the Bolivian army, the Nazis raided the
“illegal” drug factories of the smaller producers, smashed up the
equipment, impounded their stocks of cocaine and forced many of them to
hand over their houses, luxury flats, aeroplanes, boats, and whatever
money they had. Those who resisted were tortured and killed as examples
to the others.
The story of Pierluigi Pagliai, a long-term confidant of Delle Chiaie,
illustrates the activities of the neofascist network in Bolivia.
Pagliai, born 1954, the son of a rich Milanese family and a stalwart of
Italian neofascism in the early seventies, had gone on the run to
Argentina six years previously when he had been named and, briefly,
arrested in connection with the 1974 Brescia anti-fascist rally bombing
mentioned earlier. In Argentina he had been recruited into that
country’s “special services,” along with Delle Chiaie.
Known variously as “Carlos,” Mario Bonomi and Bruno Costas, Pagliai was
an accredited “coordinator” of the Bolivian National Drug Control Agency
a misnomer if there ever was one under Colonel Renan Reque. Colonel
Reque claims that Pagliai came to him with a Bolivian birth certificate
and identity card in the company of an official of Department II of
Bolivian Military Intelligence who “insisted” he should be accredited to
the agency. According to the statement of supergrass Ciolini, who was
also an agent of the Bolivian Interior Ministry, Pagliai had been
described in CIA documents as a “young terrorist torture freak.” The CIA
blamed him directly for many of the violations of human rights
perpetrated under the regime of General Meza. Pagliai’s name has also
been linked with a number of murders, including that of an expoliceman,
Jose Abraham Batista, who was gunned down, for an unknown motive, in the
Avenida Uruguay in the narco-fasicst capital of Santa Cruz de la Sierra,
as well as the torture and murder on 17 July 1980 of Marcelo Quiroga
Santa Cruz, the secretary-general of the Bolivian Socialist Party.
Talstrasse 6, D-6 Frankfurt am Main. Founded by Karl Heinz
Keuken,Wolfram Langer, Erwin Schonbrun and Dr. Eberhardt Taubert. The
organisation which has a membership of around 1500 of whom two-thirds
are under the age of thirty, publishes the monthly Unser Kampf (“Our
Struggle”) which is wholly controlled by Nazis. Many members of the
Paladin Group were recruited from the ranks of the KDS, as were many of
the mercenaries who fought in Rhodesia (39 in June, 21 in July and 34 in
September 1976). The Rhodesian mercenaries were recruited and trained by
Taubert’s colleague Major Nicholas Lamprecht.
1931two years before Hitler came to power. Promoted to Sturmfuhrer in
legal department during Goebbels’ gauleitership of Berlin, he later
followed Goebbels to the Ministry of Propaganda where he was assigned
the department handling “the struggle against alien ideologies,
religious meddling and bolshevism at home and abroad.” Dr. Taubert later
took charge of “active anti-Jewish propaganda” and was subsequently
assigned the “anti-Komintern” bureau which specialised in anticommunist
and anti-Soviet propaganda. In 1938 Taubert was appointed Judge with the
“Court of Peoples’Justice.” He was later made ministerial adviser to
Goebbels and headed a 450-strong team of Nazi propaganda specialists in
the occupied territories. After the war Taubert went to South Africa and
Iran before returning to Germany in 1950, when he was recruited into the
special services section of the Gehlen organisation (BND). He was also
appointed chairman of the CIA backed “National Association for Peace and
Freedom”. Under cover of the All-German Ministry, Taubert was an adviser
to Franz Josef Strauss, Minister of Defence, and to NATO on “problems of
psychological warfare.” For over twenty years Taubert was the main
source of finance to the neoNazi and extreme right groups in Europe,
acting as a conduit for money from businesses and foundations such as
the Staats und Wirtschaftspolitischen Gesellschaft e.v. in Cologne and
Pelugan AG of Frankenthal (in 1977 this company was run by former consul
Dr. Fritz Ries, one of the many straw men through whom funds are
channelled to Franz Josef Strauss). According to journalist Patrice
Chairoff, Taubert was also one of the “respected correspondents” of the
Greek KYP through his “World Service” “press agency.’ Until his death in
1976, Taubert was considered .
internationally active extreme right wing organisations and pressure
groups. Although founded in Seoul, South Korea, in 1966, the initial
foundations were laid in Mexico in 1958 during the “World AntiCommunist
Congress for Freedom and Liberation.” The WACL is based on Goebbels’
“Anti-Komintern” and is the main conduit for funds for extreme right
wing organisations throughout the world. One of the first operations
financed by the WACL shortly after its founding in November 1966 was to
finance the propaganda and intelligence gathering press agency “Aginter
Press.”
On Saturday, 2 August 1980, the first full day of the Italian national
holiday, a massive explosion ripped through the waiting room at Bologna
railway station, killing 85 people and seriously injuring and maiming a
further 200.
Although the people of Italy knew instinctively this was a neofascist
provocation, the police could come up with no real leads and seven days
after the outrage the investigation had come to a dead end.
The first clue came when a prisoner claimed to have overheard the
massacre being planned by his cellmates. Arrest warrants were issued for
a number of neofascists but nothing substantial came from this and other
leads. Indeed, by December 1980 there were still only three suspects and
the evidence against them hinged solely on the statement of a fellow
neofascist informer, Piergiorgio Farina. This evidence proved
circumstantial and on 30 April 1981 the investigating magistrate ordered
the release of Francisco Furlotti, the man named by Farina as having
been the key planner of the outrage. The other two suspects were also
released at the end of 1981, again due to insufficient evidence a
decision which shocked most of Italy, not only the relatives of the dead
and injured.
The investigation was not, however, at a dead end. By mid-April 1982
news of four arrests on charges of illegal association and membership of
an armed gang Leda Minetti, Adriano Tilgher, Maurizio Giorgi and Carmine
Palladino for the first time pointed the finger directly at Stefano
Delle Chiaie.
In May 1981 the investigation into the Bologna massacre was overshadowed
by another scandal which exposed the formalised corruption of the
Italian ruling class. It also proved to be inextricably linked with the
Bologna enquiry. During a police raid on the Arezzo villa of Licio
Gelli, a respected businessman and honourary Argentinian consul, in
connection with the investigation into Michele Sindona, the Vatican’s
financial front man and embezzler of 45 million dollars from his
Franklin National Bank, police discovered a list of 953 prominent public
figures who were members of a Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due or “P2,”
based in Rome’s Hotel Excelsior under the worshipful mastership of
Gelli.
Further investigations revealed that Gelli was a wanted wartime fascist
and had used P2 to establish a conspiratorial network which covered
every key sector of the Italian establishment and whose membership
included cabinet ministers, newspaper publishers, the heads of
television and radio stations, and the heads of the secret services and
armed forces. Lodge P2 was in effect the continuation and political
extension, in Italy and in Latin America, of the Rose of the Winds
organisation whose existence had been exposed in 1974.[5] The scandal
which followed the disclosure of the existence and membership of Lodge
P2 brought down the government of Orlando Forlani, but only two members
of P2 were ever questioned about any criminal offence Licio Gelli and a
secret service officer who faced charges concerning the passing of
classified information. Captain Antonio La Bruna, Stefano Delle Chiaie’s
secret service shadow, was the officer questioned as to his membership
of P2.
The full implications of this elaborate secret Masonic network are still
unknown, but subsequent revelations by members and events have cast some
light on its founding aims. Licio Gelli, who had fled to Argentina where
he had lived for many years after the war and where he had many
protectors, was arrested in Switzerland in September 1982. Carrying a
false passport, he was arrested while attempting to withdraw 120 million
dollars from the private account of Roberto Calvi, a member of both P2
and City of London Lodge 901, President of the Banco Ambrosiano, another
Vatican conduit. In a statement by fellow P2 brother Michele Sindona to
Jeremy Paxman of the BBC “Panorama” programme from a US prison where he
is serving 25 years for fraud, the money being raised by both Calvi and
Gelli, with the help of the Vatican bank, was to be used to finance
extreme rightwing military regimes in Latin America. These regimes
relied heavily on the support of Lodge P2, which saw its main function
as coordinating the international activities and attitudes of rightwing
“anticommunism” and which was undoubtedly one of the most effective
clandestine power structures forming links between the far right in
Europe and in Latin America.
Further information as to the insidious nature of Lodge P2 came to light
with the arrest in Switzerland of Elio Ciolini, a P2 “brother,” alleged
secret service agent and card-carrying officer of the Bolivian Interior
Ministry. Ciolini had been jailed in Switzerland on charges of
swindling, kidnapping and making death threats against a woman by the
name of Renata Ball. In the autumn of 1981, from his prison cell in
Geneva, Ciolini wrote to Aldo Gentile, the magistrate investigating the
Bologna railway massacre, claiming he had inside knowledge and was
prepared to make a statement. The magistrate eventually travelled to
Switzerland and began taking Ciolini’s deposition in mid March 1982.
Ciolini made some remarkable allegations when he began to outline his
explanation of the mechanics and reason for the outrage.
According to the informer, a huge fraud had been planned in Italy
involving the massive ENI industrial group (a parastatal corporation
which controlled most of Italy’s oil, natural gas and chemical industry
and which also subsidised the neofascist MSI) and a sum of 50 billion
lire. Plans for this massive swindle were, according to Ciolini,
discussed at a “special” meeting of Lodge P2 on 11 April 1980 in Monte
Carlo. It was decided that Gelli should commission Stefano Delle Chiaie
to organise an action of such spectacular dimensions that governmental
and public attention would be diverted away from the financial coup.
According to Ciolini, Delle Chiaie and Gelli met at the Sheraton Hotel
in Buenos Aires to finalise their plans.
Whether or not Ciolini’s allegations were true (and there is
considerable doubt about some of them) he was released shortly after
giving his statement to the Bologna magistrate. His bail was, according
to a letter sent to the chairman of the parliamentary inquiry into the
activities of Lodge P2, put up by the carabinieri or another secret
service agency. On his release, Ciolini went to see the Bologna
magistrates claiming he was passing through on his way to check in at
the “HQ of his service” (carabinieri counterintelligence) and made a
further deposition concerning drug and arms smuggling rings centred
around Lodge P2. He also went into great detail about the organisation
of the Delle Chiaie network abroad, particularly in Latin America.
As a result of this latest deposition by Ciolini, the investigating
magistrate issued the warrants for the arrest of Leda Minetti, Carmine
Palladino, Adriano Tilgher and Maurizio Giorgi. Events began to move
quickly. Carmille Palladino, a dedicated disciple and confidant of
Stefano Delle Chiaie, a long-time friend who had acted as a go-between
for the fascist leader and his organisation in Europe, was coldbloodedly
strangled in prison on 12 August 1982 by another member of the Delle
Chiaie group, Pierluigi Concutelli,2 the neofascist and would-be
assassin of Bernardo Leighton, who was serving a life sentence for the
murder of the magistrate Vittorio Occorsio. Concutelli, who immediately
admitted responsibility for the murder, claimed he had strangled
Palladino because he had been directly responsible for the arrest and
death of Giorgio Vale, another member of the Delle Chiaie network. What
is more likely is that Concutelli had been ordered to kill Palladino who
was seen as the weak link in the chain and who could easily incriminate
all the other members of the “Black Orchestra,” particularly his boss,
Delle Chiaie himself. Fear of being indicted on a charge of massacre
could move him to tell all he knew of the organisation’s involvement in
a series of compromising events dating back to the attempted coup of
General De Lorenzo and the fascist inspired revolt which rocked Reggio
Calabria in 1970.
Coincidentally, shortly before his murder Carmine Palladino had been the
subject of a series of discussions between the magistrate investigating
the Bologna massacre, Aldo Gentile, and journalist Roberto Chiori.
Before Delle Chiaie’s name had been openly linked with the Bologna
massacre, Chiori had turned his attentions to locating the whereabouts
of the “historic” leader of Italian neofascism, Stefano Delle Chiaie.
The first person the journalist went to was the terrorist leader’s
companion, Leda Minetti. A few days after he made his initial contact
with Minetti, Chiori was told to “prepare for a long journey.”
He was then introduced to the person who would escort him to meet Delle
Chiaie: Carmine Palladino. It was not until the two men boarded a plane
for Brussels that Chiori knew where he was going. From Brussels they
took a train to Paris where they booked into a hotel in Montmartre to
await the contact. During this journey Chiori felt he had got to know
Palladino fairly well and formed a favourable impression of him.
Palladino told the journalist that he first got to know Delle Chiaie
when he was a member of the “Quadraro” gang in the Rome suburb where
Delle Chiaie was the fascist boss. He swore to Chiori that he had “never
gone over the top” and added that he had now lost all his original
idealism and enthusiasm for the cause, nor did he believe in violence.
This loss of enthusiasm was probably also transparent to Delle Chiaie
himself and may well have been a factor in the decision to eliminate his
old friend and comrade. Palladino was, however, totally under the
charismatic spell of “Il Caccola,” as Chiori was to observe later. He
was clearly proud of his personal relationship with Delle Chiaie about
whom he spoke with great reverence, a man for whom he would clearly have
sacrificed much with no hesitation. The call eventually came from Delle
Chiaie’s hideout and a meeting was arranged. The Nazi leader was
comfortably ensconced in a luxury suite in one of the new hotels in the
fashionable Etoile district of Paris. Delle Chiaie was accompanied
everywhere by a bodyguard supplied by his Paris network. Chiori’s
interview with Delle Chiaie lasted six hours, during which time Carmine
Palladino was present at all times. The relationship between them, as
observed by the journalist, appeared to be that of general and adjutant.
At one point, while sorting through letters and documents brought by
Palladino, Delle Chiaie became furious with an item referring to a
police search of an insurance agency run by another of Delle Chiaie’s
close lieutenants, Adriano Tilgher.
Apparently, the information obtained by the police during this search
led to the arrest of numerous members of Terza Posizione, a neofascist
terrorist organisation under Delle Chiaie’s aegis. During the interview
Chiori noted that Delle Chiaie ended up claiming a “paternity of sorts”
of the NAR.
The sequence of events leading up to the Bologna massacre on 2 August
1980, according to the testimony of penitent fascist “supergrasses” such
as Elio Ciolini and Aldo Tisei, appears to be as follows:
Paris: early summer 1980. Delle Chiaie arrived in Paris from Bolivia
where he met, among others, Carmine Palladino, Alessandro Alibrandi
(later safehoused in England by the League of Saint George) and Giuseppe
Dimitri. Delle Chiaie also admits to having been in Cannes during the
summer of 1980 on a “working holiday,” travelling on a Venezuelan
passport.
Diksmuide, Belgium: June. International neofascist rally hosted by
Flemish Militant Order (VMO), attended by neofascists from Italy,
France, Spain, the United States and Britain. According to the British
anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, a secret meeting was held in Bruges
to discuss clandestine activities such as the exchange of personnel to
effect jobs in each other’s countries and the establishing of an escape
network and the setting up of a network of “safehouses” for neofascists
on the run. The British neofascist organisation, the League of Saint
George, undertook to provide cover for wanted neofascists.
Rome, 26 June. Pierluigi Pagliai and Maurizio Giorgi arrived on a flight
from Buenos Aires where they meet up with three other mercenaries in a
hotel: Frenchman Olivier Danet and two West Germans, Joachim Fiebelkom
and Karl Heinz Hoffman, leader of the West German terrorist group which
bore his name.
Abruzzi, Italy: mid-July. Campo Hobbit, third camp of its kind, inspired
by the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, attracted over two thousand
neofascists including many subsequently implicated in the Bologna
massacre. Inspector Paul Durand, a French security policeman and founder
member of the French neofascist FANE (allegedly set up with assistance
from Delle Chiaie) visited Bologna “on holiday” with another Delle
Chiaie associate, Marco Affatigato, and a group of other unidentified
neofascists shortly before the bombing. It would appear Durand was being
set up by the Italians. In Bologna Durand met Francisco Donini, founder
of the Italian National Socialist Union and the Fiume Liberation
organisation, who arranged for him to meet other extreme rightwingers,
including Franco Freda’s lawyer. In a statement to French police
investigators, Durand has since voiced his doubts: “What still surprises
me is that Donini wanted me to check into a hotel right opposite the
Bologna railway station. But he knew it was too expensive for me…”
Durand then travelled on to Perugia for a meeting with Hugo Cesarini of
the National Labour Party, then to Rome for further meetings with MSI
members, then on to Campo Hobbit for the fascist “festivities.” Also
present at the Campo Hobbit celebrations were Augusto Cauchi, Mario
Tutti, Luciano Franci and Pierre Malentocchi all members of the Delle
Chiaie network and the latter three accused of involvement in the 1974
Italicus train bombing.
Following the carnage of the Bologna railway station and the subsequent
investigation into the extreme right, neofascist terrorists in Italy
went underground. According to informer Walter Sordi,[6] who spent two
years as a fugitive in France, the first to get out were Stefano
Procopio, Fabrizio de Iori, Alessandro Alibrandi and Sordi himself.
These made their getaway on the now well-organised escape lines by plane
from Rome to Athens on false passports, by ship from Athens to Cyprus
and then the final journey to Beirut where they were assured of a warm
welcome. As soon as the four neofascists landed in Lebanon they were
escorted to a Christian Falangist military training camp where,
according to Sordi: “They made us an allowance of 300,000 lire monthly,
enough to live on. They taught us how to use heavy arms, bazookas,
machineguns and we learned how to put bombs together and how explosives
should be handled.” In return for this hospitality and training the
fascists were occasionally asked along to take part in attacks on
military bases of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Sordi’s
statement concerning the Christian Falangist backing for the Italian
neofascists was supported later when a PLO guerrilla group captured some
Germans returning from the Maronite Christian part of Beirut. Held and
questioned, the Germans admitted having spent some time in the Falangist
training camp at Akura: “We also met about a dozen Italians there,” they
claimed.
In August 1981, a year after the Bologna bombing, Searchlight magazine
announced that Italian neofascists wanted for questioning in connection
with the massacre had all been found safehouses and cover in Britain.
The British end of the new ODESSA escape network was apparently proposed
and organised by Steven Brady of the League of Saint George during the
previous year’s Diksmuide rally. After leaving Beirut, Alibrandi had
travelled to London where he was seen by Searchlight’s informer at a
League of Saint George social at the Oak Tree public house in Acton,
London. Throughout the evening Alibrandi and other Italians were in the
company of both Steven Brady and Mike Griffin, membership secretary of
the League of Saint George. The following month a further seven Italians
were arrested in London in connection with the Bologna massacre.
Although the few who were employed were in poorly paid catering jobs,
they were found to be in possession of substantial sums of money; one
had Ł2,000. However, the extradition request was turned down by London
magistrates because of the “poor quality of the evidence put forward by
the Italian authorities” and all were allowed to remain in Britain.
British police apparently believed that up to 23 other wanted neofascist
fugitives were also hiding in Britain.[7]
Some time in 1981 Alessandro Alibrandi returned secretly to Italy where
he was shot dead in a gun battle with police that December.
On Friday, 10 September 1982 the Bologna investigating magistrate, Aldo
Gentile, issued an international warrant for the arrest of five men
alleged to be perpetrators of the outrage two years previously. He told
reporters: “The man who was carrying the suitcase containing the
explosives is among them.”
The five were:
Olivier Danet 28 year old French mercenary with extreme rightwing
connections, involved in arms and drug smuggling and a member of the
Bolivian “Fiancés of Death”; alleged to be the man who prepared the
Bologna station bomb.
Joachim Fiebelkorn the German mercenary and “Fiancé of Death.”
Maurizio Giorgi
Pierluzgi Pagliai
Stefano Delle Chiaie
Of the five only Giorgi was already in custody on other charges. Danet
was arrested by French police shortly afterwards. Fiebelkorn gave
himself up to West German police in Frankfurt on the Monday after the
arrest warrant was issued and was released on bail within 40 hours.
While he was in custody Fiebelkorn made a lengthy statement concerning
his work for Delle Chiaie as a “security adviser” in Bolivia. (This was
the statement naming Stefano Delle Chiaie as the main conduit between
the Latin American drug producers and the Sicilian mafia.)
Exactly one month after the warrant was issued, on 10 October, the
military dictatorship of General Luis Garcia Meza was obliged to hand
over power to the civilian government of Dr Siles Zuazo. The junta
strong man, Interior Minister Colonel Luis Arce Gomez, aware that the
days of his power were rapidly coming to an end, had already arranged to
have himself accredited as military attaché to the Bolivian Embassy in
Buenos Aires and on 4 October, one week before the elections, he crossed
the frontier with a convoy of five cars and an immense personal fortune.
Both Arce Gomez and Garcia Meza were later (unsurprisingly) given
political asylum in Argentina, the country which had originally helped
them attain power, and permitted to travel in cars without number plates
and with their own armed bodyguards.
The Italian authorities had been waiting for this moment. Italian secret
service agents had apparently been hot on the trail of Delle Chiaie in
Bolivia and Argentina for some months previously and when the news came
of the election of the new president of Bolivia they moved immediately
to spring the trap.
At 20.00 hours GMT on Saturday, 9 October 1982, an Alitalia DC 10,
chartered under mysterious circumstances, left Rome’s Fiumicino airport
bound for La Paz. On board were twelve Italian secret service officers
and antiterrorist policemen.
With the full cooperation of the newly elected Bolivian government the
Italians organised an operation for the arrest of Delle Chiaie and
Pagliai which bore little similarity to the capture by Israeli agents of
Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires twenty years previously. Whereas Eichmann
was snatched from under the noses of his Argentinian hosts and bundled
aboard an El Al plane, for the attempted capture of Pagliai special
squads of Bolivian security forces surrounded Pagliai’s house in the
garrison town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the drug capital of Latin
America and the bastion of the leading rightwing party of Bolivia, the
Falange Socialista Boliviana, the inner core of Bolivian reaction.
Pagliai was found to be not at home, however, and so the security forces
awaited his return from the Puerta Banegas province where he was
reported to have been with a group of hunters. At midday on Sunday, 10
October, Pagliai, the young terrorist torture freak, drove into the
Plaza Nuestra Seńora de Fatima, and the police moved in to surround his
jeep. In the gunfight which ensued Pagliai received a bullet in his neck
which lodged in his spinal cord. Pagliai was unfortunate. He had been
making preparations to follow Garcia Meza and Arce Gomez from Bolivia
and return to his home base in Argentina, with his Argentinian wife and
their child.
According to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, he had the previous
week transferred 15 million dollars to his bank account in Argentina. He
was operated on at Santa Cruz and taken to La Paz on the Alitalia DC 10,
and then, after the granting of extradition, to Rome where he arrived on
13 October in a coma. He recovered consciousness but remained paralysed
in all four limbs, eventually dying in a Rome hospital 24 days after his
forced repatriation. It is not known what if anything he said of Delle
Chiaie.
Of Delle Chiaie, the main target of the international manhunt, there was
no sign. Once again he had lived up to his name of untouchable. It is
entirely within the bounds of probability that he was forewarned of the
search for him by wellwishers in the Italian, American or Argentinian
secret services and so made good his escape. It is also entirely within
his character that he should have allowed Pagliai to walk into the trap
or indeed have sent him into it to save his own skin. As usual with
Delle Chiaie, there are a number of contradictory reports as to the
manner of his escape. Some say he escaped from Santa Cruz to Argentina
on 10 October with other members of the Bolivian military regime.
According to a report in the Venezuelan daily El Nacional Delle Chiaie
escaped using the name Alfredo Modugno, an assumed name by which he had
been registered as a participant at the first Ibero-American Congress of
Democratic Journalists scheduled to start the very day the military
regime fell. Other reports have Delle Chiaie escaping across the
Peruvian border near Puno on 11 October under the name Mario Esposito
and accompanied by three bodyguards.
On 22 December 1982 Delle Chiaie issued a press statement, from hiding,
to the Italian ANSA news agency announcing a warning to the new
government of Bolivia and the world. He stated that there was already
being created a Civil Military Junta to take full advantage of the sharp
contradictions among the components of the democratic process begun the
previous 10 October and to capture power.
According to the La Paz daily, Meridiano, which carried the story, this
is the first time the Black Pimpernel (their description) had been heard
of since the failure of the security operation to catch him over two
months earlier. The paper goes on to say there is no reason to
disbelieve in the existence of this clandestine junta.
The fascist terrorist who until recently lived in Bolivia states that
the subversive international has ample possibilities because the
revolutionary movement is now connected with many political sectors,
including those with differential doctrinarial aspirations [presumably
this is an attempt to raise the spectre of so-called opposing extremisms
again].
why do the Americans, French and Israelis search for him and his
comrades hiding in Bolivia? To understand this, he says, one has to talk
about what we were doing in Bolivia. In 1980 Bolivian comrades asked us
to give direct support to the revolution which would bring the military
to power. It was in this way that Vanguardia Nazionale’ took part, as it
had in Costa Rica, Spain, Angola, Portugal, Chile, El Salvador and
Argentina.
We were not present in a mercenary role but rather as political
militants who knew how to win esteem and respect. Our activities
unleashed a series of international manoeuvres aimed at thwarting this
process of winning influence which confirmed the value and worth
(pragmatic) of our ideas and our political projects.
According to Delle Chiaie, the Americans are looking for him because he
and his comrades opposed the pressures of the USA (the American
ambassador behaved as though Bolivia was a province of his Empire) to
destroy the cocoa plantations.
The French, went on Delle Chiaie, were after him for another reason. We
tore up a pre-contract signed between France and Bolivia in 1979 for the
exploration and exploitation of uranium resources. The contract had a
clause which was too advantageous to France.
As for the persecution by the Israelis, Delle Chiaie explained: We are
constantly working to explain to the Bolivians the methods and
objectives of international Zionism.
Remembering that the government of Hernan Siles Zuazo decreed his
expulsion, he said: There are some sectors who want to capture me,
preferably dead. With me, it won’t be an easy job. They look for us, but
we are on the look out for them.
Speaking of the present situation: The government is in the hands of
minor marxist elements the economic difficulties and the social conflict
are assuming proportions which have no precedent now a clandestine civil
military junta has been organised which hopes to rebuild on such sharp
contradictions, a power which represents the real interests of the
Bolivian people.
Wherever Delle Chiaie is hiding Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile,
Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia, or Peru he will certainly
reemerge at some time in the future to serve the interests of a power
elite capable of any act no matter how horrific in the pursuit of its
global objectives of subverting all forms of political dissent and all
genuine movements for social progress.
The final word on Delle Chiaie in this present work lies with the
repentant ex-head of the neofascist terrorist infrastructure, Aldo
Tisei: Delle Chiaie may be the shadowy figure of rightwing subversion.
He is one of that breed of individuals who purport to be steadfast
revolutionaries but in fact have three or four different faces. In the
history of terrorism one finds people who assume their full share of
responsibility and sign their statements and these are dubbed rogues.
And there are others who have for years and do still strive to assume a
pure status that they have never enjoyed. By now their role is clear:
theirs is the role of prize spies.
Shortly after being condemned to death for war crimes in 1946, the Nazi
philosopher Alfred Rosenberg declared: Within fifteen years we will
begin to be talked about again, and within twenty years Nazism will
again be a force. Rosenberg’s prophecy did come true, but not in quite
the way he imagined it. The history of neofascism over the past twenty
years, as seen through the story of Stefano Delle Chiaie and his
colleagues of the Black Orchestra, gives us a clear indication of their
true role: agents of an inner, oligarchic power sphere which sets itself
above all law and morality.
The account of Stefano Delle Chiaie’s involvement in the events
described in the previous pages has been drawn from a wide variety of
sources, some honest and some highly suspect. Stefano Delle Chiaie
himself vehemently denies all the allegations made against him
concerning the Piazza Fontana, Italicus and Bologna bombings, the
various coup d’etat attempts or any connection with the Italian secret
service, the SID. When interviewed by Italian journalist Enzo Biagi in
January 1983 on the edge of the Amazonian rain forest Stefano Delle
Chiaie recounted the conversation between him and Captain Antonio La
Bruna when discussing the SIDs plan to spring Freda and Ventura from
prison and, with Delle Chiaie’s assistance, safehouse them in Spain
before finding them haven in Latin America:
La Bruna then began to describe the situation in Italy, adding that it
was the time to strike back and that we were indispensable to that
operation. He said one thing that stuck in my mind. He said: Some SID
people are convinced that you have connections with the Interior
Ministry, while others are not. I said to him, How come? Because, he
answered, you have never contacted us. My answer to that was that I held
that the national revolutionary movement was not a prize to be disputed
between the Interior Ministry and the SID.
That’s the only contact I have had with the SID and it was severed
immediately, so much so that La Bruna has been one of my fiercest
accusers. And, of course, this shows that I had had no contacts with the
SID, as had Giannettini for example.
Whether or not Stefano Delle Chiaie was directly responsible for the
outrages and terrorist activities ascribed to him is a matter for
conjecture. However, there are sufficient attendant circumstances and
statements to directly and inferentially place Delle Chiaie as a key
figure in the events described in previous pages, though the extent to
which he was or is a willing or unwitting agent of others may never be
known. But there are more important considerations.
Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause
more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real
fear. They only intimidate the weak: they exasperate the best forces and
temper the resolution of the strongest.
— Victor Serge, What Everyone Should Know About State Oppression
The aim of this study in black terrorism has not been to establish the
guilt of Stefano Delle Chiaie or present him as an evil genius
controlling a vast international network of thugs and terrorists. Nor
yet is it an exposé of the nonsensical but sinister selectivity of the
Western media in presenting the quantitatively and qualitatively lesser
Marxist and nationalist terrorist groups as the agents of soviet
destabilisation cumulatively eroding the foundations of democracy.
The primary aim has been to underline the real dangers of fascism in the
hope that useful lessons can be drawn from the experiences of the past
twenty years:
forces which are the real backbone of any violent reactionary movement.
These forces can be identified within certain sectors of the economic,
political, military and religious bureaucracies and organised crime.
provide the basis for a scenario in which the neofascists and other
reactionary elements can be called on to play what they see as their
assigned historic role.
national socialism must turn to other methods. In a recent article in
his occasional publication Gothic Ripples, British fascist strategist
Colin Jordan says: For us the days of the political party’ as a
primitive means of political action are now finished and gone forever.
This political isolation, and their obsessive anticommunism which
extends inevitably against all dissent and all rival political
standpoints, together with their predisposition to violence and covert
action, places them in a position whereby they can easily be
manipulated, however unwittingly, by external interests.
internationally are such that the fascists and organised crime are in
effect assets of clandestine state agencies who, in the intelligence
parlance, are both plausibly deniable and can, in the same parlance,
respond to a crisis without transgressions of administrative
jurisdictions in order to neutralise troublesome dissidents (or even,
indeed, political opponents seemingly more powerful than themselves,
e.g., J. F. Kennedy) or safeguard and enhance the investment climate.
extraparliamentary left, in particular the anarchist groups, was
ultimately unsuccessful (inasmuch as it was eventually exposed), it did
underline that the anarchists, because of their negative symbolic value
and a confusing variety of tendencies, were considered easy prey for
short-term manipulation. However, anarchist structures tend to reveal
their infiltrators rapidly, as they are thin or transparent. More
structured movements may conceal traitors indefinitely. The more rigid
the structure the easier it is to remain undetected, as one simply
carries out orders!
and tension has counter-revolutionary aims which depend upon producing
certain conditions (i.e., political and economic destabilisation) that
does not necessarily make those conditions counter-revolutionary. We
must be careful to distinguish between real provocation and genuine
resistance and avoid fuelling the arguments of those who criticise and
oppose all resistance on the grounds that it causes repression. As
Victor Serge noted in What Everyone Should Know About State Repression:
The intrigues of power elites only reveal their corruption and
contribute in no small measure to their eventual downfall. Provocation
acquires growing importance in proportion as the regimes it serves go
into decline and enter onto the slippery slope to oblivion it is the
curse of decomposing regimes.
friends and comrades. Suspicion and mistrust among us can only be
reduced and isolated by more reliance not just on tighter, but also on
more tested local affinity groups who are united by shared activity and
working together, rather than mere adherence to a common programme or
platform.
massacres such as the Piazza Fontana or Bologna railway station, it is
imperative that we are able to recognise and counter the intrigues and
manoeuvres of covert political elites in their attempts to quash
political dissent and, ultimately, impose totalitarian methods of social
control. We hope the present work goes some way towards furthering our
understanding of the methods of the modern-day Dr Caligari and the
nature of the zombie in his cabinet.
against whom the fascist terror is ultimately aimed and from the working
class that the only final resistance can come. Given the contradictory
trends towards greater and greater state power on the one hand and
greater and greater demands for the democratisation of everyday social
life on the other, it is inevitable that the strong-arm tactics of the
state should be carried out by plausibly deniable agents apparently (by
their antiparliamentary stance) unconnected with the moderate
centre/consensus, since any clear connection would destroy the
democratic façade of the state and the semi-benign image of the economic
institutions it serves. Since society continues to rest on wage slavery,
which ultimately denies the vast majority of its members any say in
their own destiny, individual or collective, things cannot be otherwise.
Close links between German industry and commerce and the Nazi party go
back to 11 December 1931 when Walter Funk, later wartime president of
the Reichsbank (German central bank) approached Baron Kurt von Schroeder
to arrange for Hitler to meet potential supporters among German
industrialists. Wilhelm Keppler, a small businessman, was given the job
of calling together a group of capitalists who could advise Hitler on
what to offer the industrialists in order to win their support. This
became known as the Keppler Kreis (Keppler Circle), which later
developed into the Reichsfuhrer SS Circle of Friends supervised by the
SS and Gestapo boss Heinrich HimmIer.
Twenty days after the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life by von
Stauffenberg on 20 July 1944, a meeting was held in great secrecy at the
Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. Present were sixty-seven members of
the Circle of Friends representing the most powerful industrial,
political and commercial interests of the Nazi power structure. The
meeting was the culmination of a years planning by Martin Bormann
following the crushing of the German armies at Stalingrad. (The
Strasbourg conference was documented in great detail and its files were
discovered later by United States army counterintelligence.) The
conference chairman, Dr Scheid, declared: Germany has already lost the
battle for France. Henceforth German industry must prepare itself for
the economic campaign which will follow the end of the war. All
industrialists must strengthen their contacts and companies abroad, each
on his own account and without drawing attention to himself. And that is
not all. We must be ready to finance the Nazi party which is going to be
driven underground for some time.
After a lengthy discussion the conference agreed on a plan providing for
the transfer to neutral or non-belligerent nations of a significant
portion of the funds of the major companies of the Third Reich. It is
estimated that at their disposal the Circle of Friends has some $800
million. It was also estimated, in 1973, that of the world’s total known
gold reserves of 75,000 tons, some 93 tons were still in Nazi hands.
In 1946 the US Treasury Department published their report on the outcome
of this conference: German industrialists and Nazi leaders transferred
part of their wealth abroad. Straw men in their service set up companies
and opened secret bank accounts.
750 companies were set up in this way throughout the world by Germans
using Nazi funds: 112 in Spain, 58 in Portugal, 35 in Turkey, 98 in
Argentina, 214 in Switzerland and 253 in various other countries. An
inventory discovered in 1945 among papers belonging to RHSA VI (Nazi
foreign intelligence) showed cash paid out to leading Nazi agents
including an amount of five million gold reichsmarks charged against
Cash Office and signed for by Otto Skorzeny.
By early 1965 the leaders of the Rose of the Winds organisation began to
prepare the ground for their long-term plans. For three days in May that
year, the third to the fifth, the Parco dei Principe Hotel in Rome was
the venue for an anticommunist conference on the theme of Revolutionary
Warfare Instrument of World Expansion which was to prove the pivotal
point which led inexorably to the tragic events of subsequent years.
Discreetly financed by the counterintelligence bureau of the Italian
secret service, the conference was organised under the aegis of the
Alberto Polli Institute for Military and Historical Studies, a rightwing
think tank. The papers submitted at the conference were published a few
months later by the extreme rightwing publishing house Giovanni Volpe.
The three-day event was chaired jointly by a general commanding the
parachute regiment and the president of the Milan court of appeal; its
ideological stars were a group of extreme rightwing journalists.
Although all of them were to play a crucial part in subsequent events,
one is of particular interest in the context of this story Guido
Giannettini.
The proposals outlined by the neofascist journalists at the Parco dei
Principe conference were directed at: preparing a military instrument
capable of facing up to the techniques and expansion of revolutionary
warfare an instrument encompassing the setting up of standing defence
groups capable of resisting clandestine penetration by revolutionary
warfare and which will give battle without hesitation and with all
necessary energy and ruthlessness, even in the least orthodox of
circumstances. The defence groups were, of course, to be drawn only from
known and trusted anticommunists.
So impressed were the Italian general staff with the ideas proposed by
the Parco dei Principe team that they promptly commissioned them to
compile a report outlining communist infiltration and subversion of the
armed forces. Ten thousand copies of this report were printed, but at
the last moment it was realised its publication might have precisely the
opposite effect to that desired and all copies were hurriedly recalled.
The document was eventually published under the pseudonym Flavio
Messeler ten years later by the Rome publishing house Savelli with the
title Red Hands on the Armed Forces. Interestingly enough a similar
confidential study entitled Communist Propaganda in the Armed Forces was
published by the Greek army general staff in September 1967 in
justification for the coup the previous April.
Effectively, the Parco dei Principe conference established the
credentials of the neofascists and the extreme right as experts in the
theory and practice of counter-revolution. All of the Parco dei Principe
team were recruited into the Italian secret service, directly
responsible to its new head, Admiral Hencke, and established as men of
confidence and key advisers within the Italian military infrastructure.
They were now in a position both to manipulate state policy and to be
manipulated!
Since 1962 (when the McConnell plan was formulated with its league table
in which NATO countries are ranked according to the strategic
significance of their geographic location), Civil Emergency Planning
(CEP) had been topmost in the minds of NATO planners. Following the
success, in 1965, of the Parco dei Principe conference, NATO ministers
approved a secret report on Civil Emergency Planning. Under the terms of
this secret NATO agreement, all of the countries of the Alliance were to
establish an organisation composed of trustworthy and able individuals
endowed with the necessary means and capable of intervening effectively
in case of an invasion. In Germany, Belgium and Britain these
organisations were set up within the framework of the regular and
reserve forces. In Italy this auxiliary force was made up of specialists
recruited because of their anticommunist reliability. The function of
these forces was to establish secret bases, arms dumps and equipment
caches and to go into action within the framework of the current NATO
survival plan in the event of external socialist aggression or internal
political upheavals. In the Italian context it was this NATO report
which led directly to the recruitment of fascist terrorists who could
act with impunity and under official cover as part of a legitimate
military back-up force. In May 1976 the Rome weekly L’Europeo
(circulation over 100,000) revealed the existence of a special training
camp (weapons, explosives, psychological warfare) established,
presumably by the Italian General Staff, at Alghero in western Sardinia
in 1968, where training was given to members of the Delle Chiaie
organisation. La Maddalena, northern Sardinia, is also the HQ of NATO
Southern Land Forces.
In the British context it is interesting to note that the details of the
existence of this Third Force type of organisation Civil Assistance
Unison only emerged in the early seventies following the miners strike
of 1974, under the command of General Sir Walter Walker, ex-Commander in
Chief of NATO Forces, North Europe. Although both the Home Office and
the Ministry of Defence instructed members of the forces and civil
servants not to join such groups in 1974, Walker claimed that although
these directives made things awkward he still had an extensive
intelligence network and he had been assured by retired and serving
members of the security services and Special Branch that his
organisation would have their fullest support if the chips were down.
Walker claimed his organisation could call on 100,000 volunteers. In
1976 General Walker stated that Unison could call a national conference
of at least 5,000 delegates. Another semi-secret Third Force
organisation in Britain is the paramilitary Legion of Frontiersmen of
the Commonwealth (address: Records Officer, 284, Broadway, Bexleyheath,
Kent, tel: 01-303-6288). Founded in 1904 by Captain Roger Pocock, it was
officially recognised as an auxiliary branch of British Military
Intelligence in 1906. Frontiersmen have fought in a number of wars,
transporting themselves to the front line under their own steam.
The first British casualties of the Second World War were Frontiersmen
who had attached themselves to the Belgian Army. Training is similar to
that of the Territorials and duties include guards of honour on civic
occasions, mounted escorts and aid to the civil power duties. Among the
mainly inoffensive aims of the LFC is the following: In times of war and
national emergency, to seek to aid the armed forces of the Crown in all
possible ways and in particular by encouraging members of the Command
and others to enlist in the armed or supporting forces. The Legion is
not a part of the Ministry of Defence but it is approved by them. The
President (two years ago anyway) is General Sir Rodney Moore, ex-Defence
Services Secretary at the Ministry of Defence and, since 1975, Chief
Steward of Hampton Court Palace. Less savoury members include John
Kingsley Read, John Tyndalls successor as chairman of the National
Front, a sergeant in the Blackburn branch of the LFC who used it as a
recruiting ground for the NF.
Another similar semi-official organisation is a covert group within the
government-funded Reserve Forces Association (RFA) called the Resistance
and Psychological Operations Committee (RPOC). The RFA is the
representative body of British military reservists and the British
component of the NATO-supported Confederation Inter Allies des Officiers
de Reserve (CIOR). The RFA was formed in 1970 and is also, formally,
independent of the Ministry of Defence, but its 214 individual and 90
corporate members represent all the reserve units of the armed forces
and the government, according to Chapman Pincher (Daily Express, 18 July
1977), treats it as the spokesman for Britain’s reserve forces.
According to Pincher, the RPOC has been preparing the nucleus of an
underground resistance organisation since 1971. Close links have
allegedly been formed with similar units in several European countries
which are actively recruiting anticommunist resistance fighters. They
are also said to have established an intelligence network which NATO
chiefs regard as being of great value.
The importance given to these reservist organisations is reflected in
the recognition and support given to both RFA and CIOR at both national
and NATO levels. CIOR was given formal recognition by the NATO Military
Committee in 1977 and steps were being taken (in 1977) to involve CIOR
in NATO military activities.
More recently Admiral Lord Hill Norton, former Chief of the Defence
Staff and Chairman of the Military Committee of NATO (19747), General
Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, former C-in-C NATO for Northern Europe, Air
Marshall Sir Frederick Sowrey, the UK Representative on the Permanent
Military Deputies Group CENTO, 1977–9, together with assorted groups of
rightwing financiers and semi-psychopaths such as Sir David Wills, have
launched a campaign to create a similar auxiliary defence force. Called
Defence Begins at Home, the campaign hopes to build up a force of
700,000 reservists capable of crushing subversion from within.
In order that the responsibility for the Piazza Fontana bombing be seen
to be the work of anarchists, suitable and likely candidates had to be
available in Milan. It would appear from the harassment directed against
Pinelli and his friends since 25 April that he and the Anarchist Black
Cross had been agreed on by the various parties to the conspiracy. So
far as the security services and fascists were concerned, implicating
the ABC as the political and organisational inspiration for the bombings
would represent a much more convincing and plausible scapegoat than the
teenagers of the Rome 22 March Group. In addition, it would permit them
to implicate a man considered by the authorities of prime importance in
the Italian left, the marxist publisher Giacomo Feltrinelli, who, in the
eyes of the right, represented the main danger to the Italian status
quo. By showing Feltrinelli to be a murderer as opposed to a highly
considered leftist publisher, they would not only rid themselves of a
dangerous and troublesome enemy, but would also deliver a severe blow to
the Italian left.
It was Feltrinelli who had supplied an alibi for his two anarchist
friends, Giovanni and Eliane Corradini, who had been arrested in
connection with the 25 April bombing. The rightwing and centre press had
also named Feltrinelli as the main financier of the anarchist groups and
the instigator of the bombing campaign.[8] Pinelli, in turn, was a close
friend of the Corradini’s, who were also active in the Anarchist Black
Cross, and in Calabresi’s eyes Pino was the man to tie the whole
anarchist conspiracy together. If he could be induced to make the
necessary statements the success of the whole operation would be
assured, as Pinelli himself was in no way suspect as a man who had long
repudiated political violence.
As Pinelli was a highly esteemed comrade any statement made by him
concerning anarchist involvement in the outrage would be the ideal
finishing touch to the whole manoeuvre.
The provocateurs had done their work well. They were well aware that
discussions had taken place between Pinelli and the other comrades at
the Ponte della Ghisolfa concerning methods of resisting what they
believed to be an imminent rightist coup in which they would be number
one targets. These discussions, which necessarily involved preparations
for clandestine activity, could easily be presented in a damning light.
The provocateurs and infiltrators had successfully penetrated the group
and were stoking the fires and pushing the debate to extremes, urging
the need to move from theory and the preparation of contingency plans to
practice. In the meantime, terrorist actions had been carried out
intended to prepare public opinion against the anarchists.
Giuseppe Pinelli was to provide the finishing touch. The interrogation
followed the normal pattern of intimidation: erosion of his physical and
mental resistance, and the threat of being named as one of the
perpetrators of the massacre. Pinelli did not break and the
interrogations moved on to the third degree. It would appear that during
this more violent final phase of Pinelli’s interrogation the anarchist
realised the full ramifications of the entire plot, and that,
intuitively, he understood they were trying to draw him into a trap. The
names and circumstances mentioned by the police would have made Pinelli
realise that at least one provocateur had infiltrated the group and he
would have quickly divined the connections between this man, Antonio
Sottosanti, alias Nino the fascist a man very similar in appearance to
Pietro Valpreda and his interrogators. Faced with the knowledge that
Pinelli was fully cognisant of their involvement to the plot, the
policemen present who were so involved could hardly afford to let him be
released. One of the many blows was crucial and left Pinelli slumped in
his chair, unconscious or dead.
With Pinelli not only unwilling to play their game but now fully aware
of the extent to which at least some of his captors were involved in the
conspiracy in which he was being cast in a central role, the only
alternative scenario was for the honourable anarchist to appear to take
his own life when it became clear to him his ideals had been betrayed.
According to the statements made by the five police officers present
Calabresi, Panessa, Mucilli, Mainardi and carabinieri lieutenant Sabino
Logrono Pinelli’s final words as he threw himself out of the window were
“This is the end (of anarchism)”. So far as the authorities were
concerned Pinelli’s suicide was therefore an act of self-incrimination.
Police Inspector Luigi Calabresi was himself murdered on 17 May 1972.
The killer, covering his face with a newspaper, approached his intended
victim at about 9.15 a.m. shortly after he left his home in Milan’s Via
Cherubini and fired three shots into Calabresi as he was about to get
into his car. Patrice Chairoff (see text) claims Calabresi’s murder had
nothing to do with his involvement in the death of Pinelli. Chairoff
believes that Calabresi was killed because of his investigations into
Mondialexport, an import-export agency which served as a cover for a
section of the West German intelligence service BND known as BND II.
Ostensibly dealing in bulk foodstuffs, Mondialexport, under the control
of SS veteran Gerhardt Mertens, an associate of Otto Skorzeny, was in
fact an important international arms smuggling operation and a source of
laundered funds for clandestine BND II operations in Italy and
elsewhere.
Calabresi’s murderers, all identified, were known neofascists and
contract agents of the Paladin organisation (see text) and BND II:
Gianni Nardi son of a billionaire industrialist previously implicated in
the murder of a Milan fireman in 1967.
Bruno Stefano prominent member of Delle Chiaie’s AN organisation.
Gudrun Keiss a girlfriend of Bruno Stefano and former star of
Scandinavian pornographic films. Chairoff states she has worked for West
German intelligence since December 1970. Believed to have driven the
getaway car following the murder.
Jean Vincent Martini Avanguardia Nazionale activist from South Tyrol,
recruiting agent for Angolan mercenaries and main Paladin agent in
Belgium. Identified as one of Paladin’s killers in Paladin’s anti-ETA
contract.
According to Chairoff, BND II is in fact the West German section of the
secret intelligence organisation within NATO, the Italian section of
which was the Rose of the Winds. In 1977 the BND II was allegedly
controlled from the main espionage centre at 33 Heilmannstrasse,
D-Pullach bei Munchen, by one Dieter Blotz (a.k.a. Jan Helmers). In Rome
the parallel BND operated (1977) under the cover of another
export-import agency in the Via G. C-boni, an address which also
provided cover for the Paladin group, Aginter Press and World Service
(Chairoff, as has been mentioned, actually ran the Athens-based World
Service under the noms-de-guerre of Dr Siegfried Schoenenberg and N.
Kalchi).
The BND II case officers in Rome in 1977 were, according to Chairoff:
Herbert Schlesinger responsible for the control and coordination of
neoNazi and fascist activities, overseeing existing groups and, when
necessary, creating new groups to meet the requirements of the moment.
Penkowski a former lieutenant in German military intelligence (MAD
Militarischen Abschirmdienst, based at Bruhlerstrasse 300, MAD Cologne).
Penkowski allegedly controls infiltrated cells of the Red Brigades, the
NAP, the Proletari dei Quartieri, the Gioventu Proletaria and the New
Partisans. (It is interesting to speculate that the order for the murder
of Aldo Moro, which served primarily the interests of the extreme right
in Italy, may well have emanated from this source. The rightists behind
the 1964 Plan Solo plot had planned a similar end for Moro.) The Roman
station chief of this section of the BND responsible for the above-named
officers was, again according to Chairoff, one Erik Mullinken who
reported direct to the Bavarian spy centre.
On his return from Athens in 1968 Merlino formed the XXII March Group,
after the Nanterre group of libertarians that sparked the May events in
France that year. The pseudo-libertarian group, which appeared in public
some days later at a demonstration outside the French Embassy in Rome
under a black banner (with the Roman numerals). As the demonstration was
dispersed the XXII March group burned two cars with petrol bombs and the
following day Il Tempo talked about preordained plans, urban guerrilla
tactics and blind violence with which thugs manipulated by the PCI
damaged and set fire to the vehicles of private citizens.
However, it had been recognised as a provocation by the left, who had
noted the presence of Stefano Delle Chiaie, Serafino di Luia and other
well known Italian fascists. A month after its inception, the XXII March
Group was abandoned and with it, presumably, any attempt at a
Paris-style provocation.
Merlino then made overtures to the Maoist Avanguardia Proletaria to whom
he boasted of having contacts with the publishers of L’Etincelle
(Aginter), but the Marxist-Leninists were not falling for it. He next
tried again with the Maoist Partita Comunista d’ltalia (Linea Rossa)
where no one knew him, but he came undone when his name appeared in the
papers in connection with a fascist attack on the PCI HQ in Rome. In the
autumn and winter of 1968 he reemerged at the Faculty of Education in
Rome where he was involved in various provocations.
In May 1969 Merlino approached a member of the Maoist Unione del
Comunisti Italiani (which he tried to infiltrate), asking him a favour.
It was shortly after the bombing of the Palace of Justice in Rome and he
said he was afraid his place would be searched and he needed to hide
some compromising material. Would the comrade hold on to it for a bit
until the heat died down? The Unione man said he would and Merlino
handed over the fuse wire and detonators. Two days later the police
raided his house, but the wise comrade had had the good sense to get rid
of it the day it was given to him. That finished Merlino so far as the
Marxist-Leninist left was concerned.
In September 1969 the only sector in which he was not compromised was
that of the anarchists. He passed himself off as a victim of police
harassment to a young anarchist and thereby sought an introduction to
the Bakunin Group in Rome.
When Merlino arrived at the Bakunin Group, the membership was already
split into two factions. The majority, who were under criticism from the
younger members such as Pietro Valpreda and Emilio Bagnoli, were
confronted with charges of being bureaucrats, elitists and unable to
adapt to the new perspectives opened up by the student and workers
struggles.
Merlino quickly sided with the enragé faction and his presence was an
important factor in the worsening relations between the two groups and
the decision to form a new one. He even offered to raise the necessary
funds, 150,000 lire, allegedly emanating from some unnamed Catholic
group. In late October 1969 the differences were so great that the
Bakunin Group split, with Merlino’s faction taking the name 22^(nd)
March Group (with arabic numerals this time), again in an attempt to
capitalise on the publicity surrounding the name of the 1968 Nanterre
student group. With him went Valpreda, Bagnoli and about seventeen other
youngsters. Most of these were genuine, but there were at least two
state agents (police and security service) among them as well.
(Source: Confession/Statement given by Merlino to police following his
arrest on Friday 12 December 1969.)
There is little doubt that there was a more shadowy group of plotters
behind Borghese and Delle Chiaie, a group which includes important
factions within the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties,
the military and, ultimately, NATO and the Americans. The influential
Rome weekly L’Espresso (circulation over 300,000) noted that the head of
CIA counterintelligence, the rabid rightwinger James Jesus Angleton, the
American agent who saved Prince Borghese’s life in 1945 by providing him
with a US military uniform and escorting him to Rome, arrived for a
private visit to Italy a few weeks before the attempted coup and
returned shortly after it had been aborted.
The Milan weekly Panorama (6 November 1975) reported: To further the
implementation of the coup, Borghese’s National Front had long since
established liaisons with the USA in the person of President Nixon, as
well as with members of NATO units stationed at Malta. Before the coup
proceeded, a telephone call was made from Rome; it was to have reached
the American President in the USA by way of Naples and Malta. For
reasons as yet unclear the call got no further than Malta. Off that
island, four NATO ships of the US Sixth Fleet were standing by, ready to
weigh anchor at the first command in order to carry out a mission of
approach and possible support of the putschists action-manoeuvres very
similar to those carried out by the US navy off Santiago, Chile on 11
September 1971. According to the later claims of Remo Orlandini, a key
figure in the conspiracy, President Nixon had followed all the
preparations leading up to the coup through two CIA agents involved in
the plot a man named Fenwich, an American engineer with the Selenia
company, and an Italo-American by the name of Talenti. Orlandini claims
to have heard several telephone conversations in which Fenwich
personally briefed the White House on the conspirators plans. These
claims are confirmed in an SID memorandum sent to judge Filipo Fiore and
public prosecutor Claudio Vitalone.
Neither Fenwich nor Talenti ever answered the magistrate’s summons and
it has been impossible to pinpoint their identities. However, during the
1968 US election campaign an Italian American called Pier Talenti,
resident in the US since the war, had been one of Nixon’s press
attachés. In 1972 the same Talenti established an Italian Committee to
Re-elect the President (CREEP) which had the job of raising funds among
Italian industrialists (in contravention of US legislation).
According to the January 1976 report of the Pike Committee of the US
House of Representatives on the CIA and the FBI, one of the primary
functions of the CIA from its inception was to disrupt democracy in
allied or subject countries. From 1948 to 1968 the CIA and related
organisations expended over 65 million dollars in Italy alone to ensure
the failure of communist electoral efforts.
Italy is of immense strategic importance to NATO Southern Command. Even
without Greek or Turkish bases the US Sixth Fleet and other NATO naval
forces could still fulfil their function in the eastern Mediterranean.
However, if Italy were to leave the alliance then it is highly probable
that NATO Southern Command based in Naples on the Italian mainland and
La Maddalena in Sardinia would have to withdraw from the Mediterranean
altogether.
In June 1969 Enrico Berlinguer, then Deputy Secretary of the Italian
Communist Party (PCI), made a speech outlining his party’s attitude to
NATO:
We are struggling so that Italy should not take part in any military or
potential bloc, for its exit from NATO and the removal of NATO bases in
Italy. We are fighting for a state of neutrality and for the
transformation of the Mediterranean into a sea of peace.
The continuing weakness of the Italian economy and its governments,
combined with a strong indigenous labour movement and the increasing
likelihood of PCI involvement in government, provide both NATO and the
Americans with a strong motive for neutralising any shift to the left in
Italian politics. In the view of the NATO planners, the entry of the PCI
into government as urged by Aldo Moro would have far-reaching
repercussions and seriously upset the balance of East-West relations.
For the right, the prospect of communist involvement in government would
mean the end of NATO.
Noam Chomsky has written on the subject of US destabilisation at length
and with some insight:
These activities are not sporadic or out of control’, but are
systematic, relatively independent of political changes, and in general
organised at the highest levels of state. According to the Pike
Committee. All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being
out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the
President and the Assistant to the President for National Security
Affairs.’ The great majority’ of its covert action projects were
proposed by parties outside the CIA, that is by the civilian agencies
that used the CIA, in effect, as a secret army of the Presidency.
These programmes formed a part of the successful US governmental effort,
abetted by the US labour bureaucracy, to split and weaken the European
labour movement and in general to restore European capitalism and ensure
US dominance of most of the industrial world. The Pike Committee gives
this quantitative estimate: From 1965 to date, 32 per cent of Forty
Committee approved covert action projects were for providing some form
of financial election support to foreign parties and individuals.’ The
Forty Committee is the review and approval mechanism for covert action’
directly controlled by the President. These efforts to subvert democracy
constitute the largest covert action category of the CIA and are
directed primarily against the Third World.
Indirectly, then, the Pike Committee report also leads to some
interesting speculations with regard to US government policy. … Some of
the CIA activities are remarkable in their cynicism. To cite one case,
the CIA supported the rebellion of the Kurds in Iran while the US acted
to prevent a political settlement that might have prepared a degree of
Kurdish autonomy. Kissinger, Nixon and the Shah also insisted on a no
win policy so that the revolt would persist, undermining both Iran and
the Kurdish movement. With a shift in international politics, the Kurds
were sold out. The US then refused even humanitarian assistance to its
former allies and they were crushed by force. The reason was explained
to the Pike Committee Staff by a high government official: covert action
should not be confused with missionary work.
(The Secret Terror Organisation of the US Government, in Noam Chomsky,
Radical Priorities, Black Rose Books, Montreal, Canada, 1982.)
It would appear likely that Prince Borghese and his fellow plotters were
being set, up as victims of a CIA/NATO stratagem similar to that
employed against the Kurds and other manipulated minorities.
Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975) was one of the first members of the Austrian
Nazi party in 1935 and a leading member of the Vienna Gymnastic Club, a
Nazi front organisation which played a prominent role in the Anschluss.
At the outbreak of war in 1939 Skorzeny was running his own engineering
firm when he volunteered for the Luftwaffe but was rejected on the
grounds of his age. He then joined the Das Reich Division of the Waffen
SS as a technical expert. In 1943 he was given command of the newly
formed Oranienberg Special Purposes Regiment. Skorzeny was offered the
new SS unit because of his close relationship with the Austrian SS
police leader and later SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had
succeeded Reinhardt Heydrich as head of the Reich security office, the
RHSA, following Heydrich’s assassination by Czech resistance fighters in
May 1942.
On 12 September 1943 Skorzeny’s special forces effected the release of
Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop hotel in the Gran Sasso where he was
being held prisoner by the new Italian government. Although Skorzeny
planned the escape operation, his insistence on accompanying the raiding
party under the command of Lieutenant Von Bernlepsch placed the whole
mission in jeopardy; his size and weight almost prevented the light
aircraft from taking off.
In July 1944 Martin Bormann, Hitler’s Deputy, personally handed Skorzeny
an order signed by Hitler calling upon all personnel, military and civil
to assist Skorzeny in any way, stating that he had been charged directly
with secret and personal orders of the utmost importance. During the
confusion following the 20 July plot against Hitler, Skorzeny became the
effective C-in-C of all German Home Forces for 24 hours and played a
crucial role in ensuring the failure of the plot. It has been alleged
that it was Skorzeny himself who ordered the summary executions of
Colonel Ludwig Beck, Claus von Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Merz von
Quirnheim and Werner von Haeften, the leaders of the plot. Skorzeny
denied these charges, but it is also worth noting that until his death
he also denied playing any part in the activities of the Nazi party
until late 1939 and then to have had as little as possible to do with
the party during the war itself; after the defeat of the Third Reich he
continually denied any involvement whatsoever with the postwar Nazi and
neofascist movements denials which are at odds with the known facts.
In November 1944 Skorzeny was appointed head of the sabotage section of
Dept. VI of the Reich Security Office and began training foreign
intelligence agents and terrorists to continue the war behind the allied
lines. These agents were mostly recruited from French, Italian, Belgian
and Spanish fascist and extreme rightwing organisations such as the
Milice and the Mouvement Sociale Revolutionnaire. Skorzeny’s final task
of the war, he claimed, was to create the nucleus of a corps to defend
Hitler’s alpine redoubt at the Eagle’s Nest in the Alto Adige on the
Austro-Hungarian border. In fact his task was to coordinate the escape
and evasion networks of leading Nazis. The stories of a fortified zone
in the Austrian Alps were part of a disinformation exercise connived at
by US intelligence chief Allan Dulles and elements of the Nazi party and
Wehrmacht to provide the latter with an orderly breathing space to
ensure the German political and social infrastructure remained intact as
a cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism. SS Major-General Prince
Maximilian von Hohenlohe who had been in contact with Dulles on
Himmler’s orders since mid-1943 reported: Dulles does not reject the
basic idea and deeds of National Socialism but he deplored its excesses.
(Hohenlohe was later appointed to a top job in the Gehlen organisation
and made an adviser to the US State Department.)
On 16 April 1945 Otto Skorzeny and Karl Radl, his adjutant, surrendered,
in uniform, to a US command post where he was charged with having
contravened the Geneva Convention (by having fought in enemy uniform
during the Battle of the Bulge, November 1944). Interrogated personally
by OSS General William Donovan and apparently recruited by him into US
intelligence Skorzeny was eventually acquitted in 1947 on the strength
of evidence given on his behalf by British military intelligence officer
Captain Yeo-Thomas. Skorzeny then applied for denazification, but there
were too many intelligence reports pertaining to him; one French
intelligence officer described him as an unregenerate bastard.
In 1948 Skorzeny managed to escape from the allied denazification camp
at Oberursal. He was assisted in his escape by the Nazi evasion networks
he had been responsible for organising during the final stages of the
war and with the connivance of the US Army’s 66^(th) counterintelligence
corps.
Skorzeny was recruited into Reinhardt Gehlen’s intelligence
organisation, a creation of the newly formed CIA under Allan Dulles and
Richard Helms, the then CIA Station Chief in Germany. He travelled
extensively throughout Europe and Latin America on intelligence business
for both Gehlen and the CIA. In 1950 he established his home base in
Madrid where, under cover of an engineering and export-import business,
he handled the financial affairs of the Circle of Friends (having
reclaimed Nazi party funds from Eva Peron), coordinated the Nazi escape
and evasion networks and built up an international intelligence
gathering and mercenary recruitment agency. Skorzeny was also appointed
security adviser to various rightwing governments in Latin America as
well as Spain where he was employed in an advisory capacity by the
Interior Ministry to assist the notorious Brigada Politico Social.
In 1953 Skorzeny was invited by CIA chief Allan Dulles, through his
father-in-law Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s ex-financial consultant and
president of the Reichsbank, to help reorganise the security services of
the new Republic of Egypt under General Neguib and, later, Colonel
Nasser. Skorzeny’s salary in this undertaking was subsidised by the CIA.
It was because of his involvement with the events leading up to the Suez
Crisis in 1956 that Skorzeny was refused entry into Britain, in spite of
a strong intervention on his behalf by at least one senior SAS officer.
Canadian journalist Omar Anderson wrote the following in an article in
the Montreal Star in 1960:
Otto Skorzeny has been a leading figure in Bonn’s negotiations for
Bundeswehr bases in Spain
Aggrieved German diplomats in Madrid have complained to the Foreign
Office here that Skorzeny enjoys something akin to celebrity status with
the Spanish government.
Skorzeny himself credits his Madrid-acquired influence to my friends
from Nuremberg, a reference to Skorzeny’s incarceration as a witness for
the Nuremberg war crimes proceedings against German commercial trusts.
On 31 August 1960, speaking at the Delkey Literary, Historical Debating
Society at the Cliff Castle Hotel in the Republic of Ireland where he
had bought a house the previous year, Skorzeny commented on the question
of inferior races: There should not be talk of inferior or superior
races. It is clear, however, that some races are without proof of
culture.
In 1964, following the escape of a major Nazi war criminal, Zech
Nenntwichs, new stories began to circulate concerning Skorzeny’s
involvement in various Nazi escape and evasion networks such as Die
Spinne and ODESSA.
In 1969 Skorzeny was appointed security adviser to the Colombian
Ministry of the Interior. The request for his assistance was channelled
through the German ambassador in Bogota, Ernst Ludwig von Ror. In 1972
the Bolivian businessman and security adviser Klaus Altmann, otherwise
known as Klaus Barbie, named Otto Skorzeny as the chief of the Die
Spinne network which Barbie claimed commanded the loyalty of 100,000
fascist sympathisers in 22 countries and which was funded by Nazi
investments controlled by Skorzeny. (Altmann, or Barbie, was the
Bolivian agent for an export-import agency registered in Augsburg and
was also the manager of the landlocked Bolivian navy, Transmaritima
Boliviana, registered in Panama and Hamburg, a company which was
entirely run by German businessmen.) Also in 1972, Otto Skorzeny met
various South African generals. One of his close friends and colleagues
in South Africa was Lieutenant-General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellethin,
ex-Chief of Staff of 4 Panzer Army, a director of Trek Airways, an
airline which specialises in police and security charter operations in
South Africa. Later investigations into the Rose of the Winds conspiracy
in Italy confirmed that in the summer of 1973 Skorzeny had attended a
meeting of the conspirators in the home of the fascist doctor Gian Paolo
Porta Cassucia. In September 1973 the Dublin Evening Express announced
that Skorzeny was seriously ill in Spain with cancer of the nervous
system. This report was taken up by the Washington Post, which
identified him as being a major arms broker for Portugal and an agent of
the massive Interarms company based in Virginia. Skorzeny, the paper
alleged, had been trafficking in arms for many years to many sub-Saharan
African countries. On 6 July 1975 Skorzeny died in Madrid to be followed
on 21 November by Franco.
Freemasonry is, perhaps, the most large-scale political organisation of
the middle-class in every Western nation. The Grand Orient of Italy, a
particularly powerful institution, is no exception. One important
difference between the Grand Orient of Italy and the Grand Lodge of
England the mother lodge is the existence in Italy of covered or
secret lodges whose membership is unknown even to the council members of
the Grand Orient, the ultimate masonic authority in Italy. The purpose
of these secret lodges is to bring together into a single discreet body
brothers who hold high public and private office and who wish to remain
unknown to other (lesser) brethren while at the same time strengthening
and extending a covert decision-making network within the organs of
traditional power.
There are two secret lodges under the Grand Orient of Italy P1 and P2
(P standing for Propaganda) both of which are hotbeds of corruption and
reaction. P1 of lesser importance both generally and in the present
context came under the direct control of Lino Salvini, a doctor who was
elected Grand Master of Italy’s masons in 1970. He immediately used his
influence to involve the Masonic movement in a series of political and
financial intrigues, including moves to sabotage the amalgamation of
Italy’s three main trade unions, which eventually led to an
investigation of his activities by the Grand Lodge of New York (the
world’s most powerful lodge with 400,000 registered members) and the
breaking off of relations with the Grand Orient of Italy by the Grand
Lodges of Michigan, Texas and Indiana. Salvini’s manoeuvres against the
Italian trade union movement had the financial backing of Fiat and
Confindustria (the Italian employers’ organisation) to the tune of 80 to
90 million lire a year.
By far the most important of the two secret lodges was that controlled
by Licio Gelli, an old-guard fascist from the Mussolini era who fled to
Argentina following disclosures that he had been involved in the torture
and murder of Italian partisans. Gelli was intimately involved with the
regime of the Argentinian dictator Juan Peron (1947–54) and remained in
Argentina for twenty years before returning to Italy with the position
of honourary Argentine consul. (Witnesses claim to have seen Peron kneel
at Gelli’s feet for reasons upon which one can only speculate.)
Initiated into masonry in 1964, Gelli became organising secretary for
Lodge P2 and immediately set about restructuring it. Until Gelli came
along P2 had been a lodge in decline; its membership consisted of
middle-rank civil servants, junior officers and small businessmen.
Within two years, through his vast international network of political,
military and business contacts, particularly strong among the power
elites of the Latin dictatorships, Gelli had more than doubled the
lodge’s membership to 573, the majority from among the upper echelons of
Italian and Argentinian public and private life. Jealous of the growing
power of P2, which had acquired a reputation for complete discretion and
obsessive anticommunism (with a membership which rocketed following the
discovery and investigation into the Rose of the Winds conspiracy in
1974/5) the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, Lino Salvini,
attempted to depose Gelli and replace him with a more compliant brother.
He wrote an abrupt letter of dismissal to Gelli which concluded: I find
you sympathetic, but I am discharging you. Salvini had sadly
underestimated the power of his rival. Gelli made it quite clear to
Salvini that unless he withdrew the dismissal notice he would have him
in prison within half an hour. The threat was taken seriously. Not only
was Gelli reinstated immediately, he was raised to the grade of
Worshipful Master.
During the fraud investigation into Michele Sindona’s Banca Privata
Italiana, a conduit for mafia, Vatican, fascist and secret service
money, police searching Gelli’s villa discovered a list of 953 members
of P2. The coded list included three cabinet ministers, thirty generals,
eight admirals, including the head of the armed forces, the heads of two
intelligence services as well as the civilian collator of intelligence,
43 MPs, police chiefs of Italy’s four main cities, the mayors of Brescia
and Pavia and the editor of the influential Milan daily Corriere della
Sera. Further investigation revealed a more detailed coded register
indicating a membership of 2,400 brothers all powerful men in their own
spheres contending to mould events to suit the national interest as
perceived by the selfseeking power elite.
Solemn ex-communication by the Catholic Church for baptised believers
who became freemasons has been revoked for some years now. Although the
anathema still survives in canon law this too is undergoing revision,
and the document from the Congregation for Doctrine and the Faith,
together with a series of official pronouncements, have more or less
cemented the peace between the Vatican and freemasonry.
Stefano Delle Chiaie’s alleged CIA contacts:
William Jones no details (could be William Charles Jones III, executive
director Bureau of Intelligence Research, director Office Intelligence
Liaison 7/73).
Ernesto M. Lancina no details.
Richard H. Courtenaye b Calif 3/27/23. U Calif (Los Angeles) BA 44,
Harvard U MPA 56. US Army 4346 capt overseas. GOVT EXPER chief broadcast
dept War Dept 46–47. STATE Dept 0–6 6/47. Barcelona cons off 11/47.
Mexico DF pub off asst 9/48. Quito econ off 11/50, 0–5 6/51. Kobe
cons-econ off 9/53. Dept. det adv econ study Harvard U 9/55, 0–4 2/57.
Madrid 0–5 econ off 7/56, 0–4 2/58. Dept intell rsch spec 1/59, chief
Middle Am br Off Resch-Anls for Am Reps 7/59, chief Inter-Am Pol Div
5-9/61, 12/61, dir Off Resch-Anls for Am Reps 10-12/61, 0–3 4/62. Quebec
prin off 7/62 cons gen 9/62. Windsor 6/64. Tijuana cons off 8/68. Dept
det Off Econ Opportunity 3/7 1. Tangier prin off 6/73. Langs Fr. Soan.
(w — Norma Drew).
Richard Jerome Scott b Ind 12/18/30. Un Notre Dame BA 58. US Army 5254
overseas. PRIV EXPER writer publ co 4558, STATE dept R-8 3158, 0–8 7158,
intell resch spec 10/58. Panama cons and pol off 4/60, 0–7 2/61.
Valencia cons off (Gen) 10/62. Vancouver visa off 1/65, 0–6 5/65, 0–5
4/67, FSO gen 7/67. Dept int rel off 7/68, pol-mil aff off 5/70. Bangkok
7/71. Lang. Span. (w Dorothy Shefano).
Charles Willard Brown b Calif 9/6/1919. Am U BS 56. USCG, 4245. PRIV
EXPER 3740, 46. GOVT EXPER 4042, with city state govts 495 1. STATE Dept
GS-9 investigator (Los Angeles) 2/51, GS-1 1 spec agt 2/54, GS-12
investigator 11/55. Bonn R-5 reg admin spec 5/56, 0–5 6/56, 0–5 2/57.
Dept pers off 1/59, det pub admin studies admin off 5/66, asst exec dir
Bu African Aff 2168, dir Allowances Staff 3170, 0–2 5172, Nairobi admin
off 2174 (w Georgette Townsend), Foreign Service Classification List,
November 1977FSO 2 Step 6 5/72.
Moffett, William Adgar III b Calif 11127/39. U Va BA 62. United States
Marine Corps 6265 maj overseas. PRIV EXPER mgmt trainee distribtrans
corp 6567. GOVT EXPER programme analyst Dept of Army 6773. STATE
Port-au-Prince R-7 econ-commercial officer 1/73 (w Anne Dekle). Source:
Patrice Chairoff.
Q. Captain, you’re always at the centre of the most unedifying polemics.
How come? A few weeks ago the fugitive fascist Stefano Delle Chiaie
said, in the course of an interview with Enzo Biagi, that La Bruna,
which is to say, yourself, had something to do with the Piazza Fontana
bombs.
A. The usual old refrain. It has even been reported that let’s say that
mission is what earned me my captains stars. But I have a cast-iron
alibi. For years I have said nothing. Now let me speak out. From
September 1969 to early March 1970 I was involved in another, highly
delicate mission. That, too, even now is shrouded in the confidentiality
which must attend our work as special agents. I am fed up. I ask those
in a position to do so (i.e., my superiors) to release me from my burden
of silence.
Q. The man in the street knows nothing of your affairs. Let me ask you,
to begin with, how on earth you, a servant of the State, ever came to
hobnob with this Delle Chiaie character, an extreme rightwing fanatic
who has been wanted for years.
A. I ran across him in Barcelona, on exactly 30 November to 2 December
1972. The meeting was the idea of a journalist introduced to me by
General Gianadelio Maletti, my direct superior. I and the journalist
were to co-operate in ascertaining certain facts regarding the
son-in-law of the oil magnate Attilio Monti. But at the last moment it
fell through. However, he did put me in touch with Delle Chiaie.
Q. What did you talk about?
A. He told me of the movement which he led. When he had finished, I told
him that I would be reporting back to my superiors and, on the specific
instructions of Maletti, spoke this phrase to him: Rest assured that
whatever may happen, the general will not lift a finger against you. Now
they accuse me of having invited him to co-operate with the SID, I do
not see why, if it was true, I should conceal the fact since I was only
carrying out orders received from above. Anyway I never did issue that
invitation.
Q. How come you did not arrest him? He was and is one of the heads of
the black international. He is wanted for nearly all of the fascist
outrages which have swamped the streets of Italy in blood over the past
14 years.
A. Your question is badly framed. You ought to have asked me how come
they never instructed me to arrest him. Anyway, I don’t know the answer
to that. If it was up to anyone to tip off the Spanish police as to
where Delle Chiaie was hiding out it was them
the people in Rome. The fact remains that in his interview with Biagi,
this gentleman stated that every so often he still goes home to Italy.
Which means that he feels safe and well protected.
Q. A loyal executor of orders, then. Could it be, La Bruna, that like
the Germans of the Nuremberg trial, you always hide behind the formula I
was only carrying out orders.?
A. Yes, and I will demonstrate it. If you will permit, though, I should
like to open with a premise. What was the SID? An agency which had at
its head General Vito Micelli to begin with and Admiral Mario Casardi
thereafter. They had the oversight of five departments
D office which handled internal security; R office dealing with
intelligence from abroad; S office which gleaned from the official
sources and the press
the USI office was given over to industrial security and then there was
the Logistics Office. Yours truly was attached to D office under General
Maletti. We in turn were subdivided into three sections
counterespionage, military police and (once again) internal security. I
was in command of the NOD, an operational squad comprising four men in
all. It goes without saying that I could carry out only those actions
determined by my superiors.
Q. NOD has been named as a sort of private gang, a SID within the SID, a
cancer that had grown up inside the secret services, a deranged monster.
A. Balls. All complete balls. I have never worked off my own bat. It was
Maletti who gave the orders on every occasion. Even later on when we
wound up on trial. During the Piazza Fontana massacre proceedings I did
no more than obey. And I have proof of what I say. I have scrupulously
preserved the memoranda which the general wrote me indicating which
answers I should give to the judges. I placed my trust in him because he
was au fait with the whole episode in all of its complexity and did not
know only the odd detail as I did.
Q. Answer this question please. Is it or is it not true that in the
1970s you helped smuggle out of Italy certain Palestinian terrorists
held in prison for some very serious outrages?
A. Strictly speaking, it was not I who rescued them from prison. But it
is true, I was assigned the task of escorting them abroad. Orders from
above. The person who passed them to me had, in turn, received them from
those involved in political activity, from parliamentarians and
ministers.
Q. But is it normal practice of the secret services to set free those
bandits which the police and carabinieri go to such trouble to
apprehend?
A. In certain instances its the opportune thing to do. In the supreme
interests of the nation. The same sort of thing goes on pretty well
everywhere. There are those like me, who do the dirty work and handle
things to do with foreign policy which cannot be done openly and which
are off limits as far as ministers are concerned.
Q. Just one point. What did Italy get in return that time?
A. I don’t know. But in those years nothing happened to us. There were
no attacks and no other terrorist acts of an international nature.
Q. In short, the PLO kept quiet. Let’s turn now from red terrorism to
the black kind you covered up for, and helped smuggle abroad Guido
Giannettini and Marco Pozzan, neofascists involved in the inquiry into
the poor people killed that tragic 12 December in 1969 in the Piazza
Fontana.
A. I wasn’t really able to help anybody. That was demonstrated at the
Catanzaro trial. I shall never tire of reiterating it: I was an
operative, a subordinate and it has never been the case that a
subordinate is able to procure phoney documents and safe conducts for
his pals. Giannettini left under his own steam, using his own passport
and with a plane ticket acquired from some travel agency or other. Sure,
Maletti knew all about it, but he didn’t tell me to stop him. And let’s
move on to Pozzan. Yes, my men escorted him to the frontier. But to
leave the country he used a passport. He used one supplied by D office.
Q. In whose interests was it that these gentlemen should be smuggled
out?
A. You shouldn’t be asking me that.
Q. Fair enough, but we will ask you how come your name features on the
list of P2 members.
A. I joined the P2 because I was invited to join by Colonel Antonio
Viezzer, the head of Maletti’s secretariat. I consulted Maletti and he
answered with a phrase that dispelled any doubts I had: The carabinieri
must have eyes and ears everywhere. So I went to see Licio Gelli at the
Excelsior Hotel in Rome. I was escorted by Viezzer, though he denies it.
Q. None of you secret agents were absent from the P2. When did you
discover that the delightful company included so many, so very, very
many of your superiors?
A. Whenever the membership lists were made public. Doubtless I had had
the odd suspicion. I escorted Maletti and his wife too many times to
Castiglion Fibocchi, to Gelli’s firm. They would buy clothes and replace
their wardrobes, all at knock-down prices I suppose.
Q. And did the Worshipful Master ever do you any favours?
A. No, unfortunately not. I did ask a favour of him when I came out of
prison and was suspended from the service. I wanted him to help me find
a job and rebuild my life. But all he could offer me was a chance to go
to South America. I turned this down because I definitely did not want
anyone saying Captain La Bruna runs away.
Q. Let us change scene. And talk about petroleum. For Italians, that
means Libya. Is it true that you kept a watchful eye out for Colonel
Ghedaffi?
A. Not I, the State. The SID did do the odd service for Ghedaffi
for instance, the so-called Hilton Operation. The Italian secret
services blew a coup attempt devised by mercenaries who were aiming to
free opponents of the Libyan regime and seize Tripoli.
Q. How did you disentangle yourselves from your triple games? If it came
to your attention that your Libyan or Palestinian friends were preparing
for attacks on your Israeli allies (or vice versa) what was your next
move?
A. In our trade one has to be really subtle. Strategic choices are a
matter for the experts, thus, a matter for the politicians and not for
military men. The last word always belongs to the entourage of some
minister. It all depends on what suits the country at any given moment.
Q. Another twist, another story. Unlike Maletti, you and Micelli have
been named as friends of the far right. Is it coincidence that today
Micelli sits in Parliament on the benches of Giorgio Almirante’s MSI?
A. Whereas I sit on the accused bench. I’ve done my time and still I
face another accusation, of misrepresentation in the matter of Pozzan’s
passport and also in connection with the P2 episode. To tell the truth,
the idea of Maletti’s passing himself off as a democrat is one I have
always found risible. If he is, if he really is one how come he did not
stay here to await the findings of the magistrature? How come he
decamped to South Africa, leaving me in the shit?
Q. Odd. Maletti accuses La Bruna of all manner. of nefarious deeds and
decamps, La Bruna stands his ground and defends himself by pointing the
finger at Maletti. But hadn’t you been such pals once upon a time?
A. There is no friendship between superior and subordinate. There are
too many things which divide them-ambition, career, etc. The subordinate
is dispatched into danger but by the time he realises he has been used
it is too late. I was a pal of Maletti’s. Only many years later did I
learn that he, instead, had dropped me in it time and again, drafting
the worst sort of reports about me and about my work. Who can say? Maybe
his aim was to offload on to me the blame for his guilty conscience.
Q. What else did Maletti do to you?
A. He accused me of having supplied to the journalist Mino Pecorelli the
dossiers which he had built up at the end of 1975 on the petroleum
scandal which later set the Italy of the powerful atrembling. The
dossier contained virtually the whole story of the immense fraud
favoured by high-ranking officers of the Guardia di Finanza. But I was
not the one who passed them to Pecorelli. The file was in Maletti’s
office safe for safekeeping. And he was the one to place it in the
records shortly before he was removed from his post. I have no idea who
it was who sold it to him. All I know is that after he made it public,
Pecorelli was killed. And Maletti cut the cord.
Q. Weren’t there a little too many deaths in all of these stories? Apart
from the attentats and the Pecorelli business, I can think of generals
killed in traffic accidents that were never accounted for, or who
committed suicide without any motives.
A. You have said it. Let me tell you that, when I was in the service, my
own car was interfered with on two occasions. It is a miracle that I am
still alive.
Q. All things considered, La Bruna, would you be a secret agent if you
had it to do all over again?
A. Yes. Despite the problems and the misadventures I would do it all
again. Yes. Because its something that gets into the blood. The SID was
not all that much worse than other agencies. Even todays reformed
agencies have their problems.
La Bruna is right. Times change but the stories are much the same.
Micelli and Maletti (P2 members) were succeeded by General Guiseppe
Santovito (himself also a registered P2 member). Then he was wanted and
today magistrates in Trento would like to question him regarding certain
arms trafficking. The interview is over. The man with the pomaded hair
puts some heaps of papers into order. From these papers he will one day
construct a book on his Italy, the Italy of mysteries.
Stefano Jesurum and Gian Palo Rossetti (helped by Mario Biasciucci)
Oggi no. 20, 18 May 1983
In the lead-up to the interview, there is a quote from the Francoist spy
Luis Manuel Gonzales Mata: Agents, when they have no further information
to report, invent some; when there are no more outrages to be prevented,
they provoke some; when there is no longer any extremist organisation to
infiltrate, they set some up. At the foot of a photo of La Bruna and
Maletti in court in Catanzaro in 1981, La Bruna is quoted as saying:
Even in the courtroom I always obeyed the orders from my immediate
superior Maletti. I gave the testimony he wanted me to give.
Bruno Bruni 42 42 180
Boffi Gianni 38 80 01
Bologna Adriano 37 04 47 Giovane Halia (MSI), son of an exprefect who
belonged to Junio Valerio Borgheses Fronte Nazionale.
Biagioni Lamberto 30 75 411 National leader of the MSI (196467); Giovane
Europa (neonazis); Lotta del Popolo (69). Connected with Julius Evola.
In 64 did not go on summer holidays because Taradonna had told him that
something big was in the pipeline.
Alfredo (Sandro Maluzzi) 47 56 38
Bruno Brandi 80 16 31
Bedetti Paolo 49 59 401
Angelo 34 96 463
Stefano Bertini 84 55 201 MSI. Ordine Nuovo. Visited Greece with
Merlino.
Bartuli Mario 59 65 69
Antonio 57 28 28
Alfredo 76 45 81
Luciano Bergamini (Verona) 045/43142
De Giorgi Dario 75 36 37
Colantoni Peppe 21 14 59
Andrea Cimino 51 31 810
Coltellaci Sergio 30 70 969 MSI: Avanguardia Nazionale (one of its
founders). Son of a one-time fascist gerarca (hierarch). Close friend of
Stefano Delle Chiaie: he has even had Delle Chiaie as his guest in his
Pescasseroli villa.
Leopoldo De Medici 87 92 49 Giovane Italia (MSI): Ordine Nuovo; Lotta
del
Popolo (69).
Tito Conforti 51 24 154
Donato Pilolli 83 80 421 MSI: Ordine Nuovo.
Pierluigi Casarelli 49 55 064
Antonio Cangiano 59 43 65
Cacace Mario 43 38 33 Avanguardia Nazionale.
Giancarlo Cartocci 49 57 80 Ordine Nuovo: Movimento Studentesco in
Giurisprudenza (Nazi-Maoists); Avanguardia Nazionale. In Greece with
Merlino. Distributor among Rome’s fascists of the Soccorso Tricolore
funds promoted by Il Borghese.
Stefano Delle Chiaie 72 65 21
Pierfranco Di Giovanni 77 64 87 MSI: Avanguardia Nazionale. Took part in
the clashes which led to the death of Paulo Rossi.
Flavio Campo (illegible) Avanguardia Nazionale (one of the founders).
Parachutist, ex-boxer, one of the most notorious fascist goons in Rome
and at the time a clerk with the Interior Ministry.
Loris Facchinetti 72 26 77 President of Europa Civiltŕ.
Pierluigi Fioretti 80 41 19 Giovane Italia (MSI).
Noel Salvin 56 42 03
Marco Gaspare 32 04 46 Giovane Italia; infiltrator of the student
movement;
Giovane Italia.
Grasso Antonio 30 36 56 Well-known goon, nicknamed IlBalilla.
Saverio Ghiacci 53 67 63 One of the founders of Avanguardia Nazionale
and loyal henchman of Stefano Delle Chiaie. Noted fascist goon. Very
active in the clashes in which Paolo Rossi was killed (one photograph
shows him beating
Rossi with a violent punch). Many times questioned by police concerning
dynamite attacks. Visited Greece with Merlino.
Franco Gelli 75 76 61
B. Giorgi 76 … 55 Member of the GAN in Reggio Emilia.
Alfredo Govoni 73 32 13
S Gujos 35 63 341
Domenico Gramozio 85 86 51 Roman Youth Secretary of the MSI. Close
friend of Giulio Caradonna. Noted goon.
Maurizio Giorgi 43 93 430 MSI: Avanguardia Nazionale (one of the
founders). Present at the fighting in which Paulo Rossi was killed.
Antonio Jezzi 34 92 045 Avanguardia Nazionale; faithful advocate of
Stefano Delle Chiaie.
Franco Jappelli 53 44 243 MSI youth leader.
Franco Morganti 48 48 61
Mauroenrico Enrico 74 43 83 Avanguardia Nazionale.
Alfredo Moriconi 68 92 80
Leonardo Molinari 84 47 302
Francesco Manemi 73 07 96
Sandro Meluzzi 47 96 70
Marco Marchetti 55 74 305 Ordine Nuovo: infiltrator of the student
movement; Avanguardia Nazionale. In Greece with Merlino.
Sandro Malagola 42 06 88 MSI youth leader.
Luciano Lago 59 45 37
Bepi Morbiato 52 60 636 Avanguardia Nazionale.
Antonio Moretti 77 70 41
Ignio Macro 76 17 827 Avanguardia Nazionale.
Giovanni Nota 76 15 342
Roberto Pascucci 83 10 618
Enzo Palasso 85 66 06
Bruno Pera 62 24 610 MSI (close to Giulio Caradonna); Lotta di Popolo.
Guido Pagua 31 5 6 32 Avanguardia Nazionale. In March 197 <fn>libcom
note: Full date missing</fn> he seriously injured a girl student with a
brick at Rome University.
Guglielmo Quagliarotti 51 27 940 Avanguardia Nazionale.
Alberto Questa 42 44 896 — Avanguardia Nazionale. Involved in the
clashes during which Paolo Rossi was killed.
Roberto Pallotto 75 88 589 Avanguardia Nazionale member; very loyal to
Delle Chiaie. Often arrested on suspicion of dynamite attacks.
Mimmo Pilolli 83 16 403 MSI (national leadership); Ordine Nuovo;
infiltrated the PC d’I (linea rossa) in 1968; Avanguardia Nazionale.
Sandro Pisano 65 67 923 Ordine Nuovo. The person to whom Merlino
(according to a statement he made to the police) used to pass
information for transmission to Junio Valerio Borghese.
Chicco Pamphili 46 15 52
AttilioPasqualini 42 47 017 MSI youthleader.
Maurizio Piccetta 73 12 426
Francesco Pugliese 32 74 924
Luigi Presenti 42 89 59
Ernesto Roli 42 61 583 MSI youth leader.
Cesare Perri 42 43 247 Avanguardia Nazionale (a founder). Loyal to
Stefano
Delle Chiaie; Ordine Nuovo. In Greece with Merlino.
Teodoro Silos-Calo 53 64 76 MSI youth leader.
Adriano Romualdi 34 86 35 MSI national leader. Son of MSI
parliamentarian Pino Romualdi
Angelino Rossi 29 16 14 Noted fascist thug. Brother of Alberto, alias Il
Bava, Rossi, head of the MSIs Volontari Nazionali. The pair trained at a
paramilitary camp in Prenestino with Caradonnas squads.
Franco Spallone 62 26 596 MSI youth leader.
Franco Tarantelli 47 26 26 — MSI national leader.
Adriano Tilgher 89 27 481 Avanguardia Nazionale. Theoretician of
neonazism.
Massimiliano von Stein 31 57 43
Fascism Today A World Survey, Angelo Dei Boca and Mario Giovana,
Pantheon Books, New York, 1969
The Great Heroin Coup, Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism,
Henrik Kruger, South End Press, Boston, 1980
L’Orchestre Noir, Frederic Laurent, Stock, Paris, 1978
Dossier NeoNazi, Patrice Chairoff, Editions Ramsay, Paris, 1977
La Strage Di Stato Controinchiesta, Supplemento a Controborghese,
Edizioni Samona e Savelli, Rome, 1970
1969–1972 Dalla Strage Alle Elezione, Fotostoria, Milan, 1972
The Death of French Algeria: Wolves in the City, Paul Henissart,
Hart-Davis, London, 1970
Greece Under Military Rule, (ed.) Clogg and Yannopoulos, Secker &
Warburg, 1972
Skorzeny: Hitler’s Commando, Glenn B. Infield, St Martins Press, New
York, 1981
The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda, Edward S.
Herman, South End Press, Boston, 1982
Assassination on Embassy Row, John Dinges and Saul Landau, Writers and
Readers, London, 1981
Radical Priorities, Noam Chomsky (ed. C.P. Otero), Black Rose, Montreal,
1981
Histoire de lOAS, Jean-Jacques Susini, La Table Ronde, Paris, 1963
Les Combats, Joseph Ortiz, Editions de la PensČe Moderne, Paris, 1964
Histoire de l’Organisation de l’Armče Sčcrčte, Morland, Barange,
Martinez,
Juillard, Paris, 1964
Italy Since 1945, Elizabeth Wiskemann, Macmillan, London, 1971
Labyrinth, Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Penguin, London, 1983
The Belarus Secret, John Loftus, Penguin, London, 1983
[1] See Appendix F.
[2] Delle Chiaie made at least three trips to Greece during the course
of 1971 accompanied by Yves Guerin-Serac, Guido Giannettini and a number
of others, including Bruno Stefano and Gianni Nardi, both later
implicated in the Calabrese murder. The purpose of these trips was to
attend courses in urban guerrilla and psychological warfare organised by
the KYP/CIA front organisation “World Service.”
[3] In relation to the murder of Occorsio it is interesting to note that
the murderers, Concutelli and Tisei, were safehoused in an apartment
rented to them by a Rome businessman, Pietro Citti, a friend and
confidant of Flavio Carboni, the Italian financier and Lodge P2 member
later involved in the last, tragic flight of Roberto Calvi of the Banco
Ambrosiano to London. Calvi’s last night alive was spent in the London
home of another freemason and relative of Carboni, Michael Morris.
Pietro Citti, the Carboni front man, had close ties with Delle Chiaie to
whom he had leased his apartment at Via Sartorio 5 in Rome for a
hideout. It was from this hideout that the murder of Occorsio was
planned and effected, with Stefano Delle Chiaie’s Ingram MAC10
machinegun. Pietro Citti also appears to have been a link man between
Carboni, acting on behalf of Lodge P2, and Delle Chiaie, whom he visited
on occasion in Madrid.
[4] See Appendix G.
[5] Pierluigi Concutelli, the top assassin for the Delle Chiaie network,
and Mario Tuti (in whose “honour” the Bologna railway massacre was
claimed) had both previously carried out another prison murder. The
earlier victim was Ermano Buzzi, a forty year old fascist arrested in
1979 for his alleged part in the 1974 Brescia bombing. Buzzi, who was
awaiting trial in the top security wing of Novara prison, was the third
prisoner to be murdered in Novara in the space of one month.
[6] On the “new ODESSA,” Sordi has madc statements concerning the
existence of a possibly Paris-based clandestine clearing house for
wanted fascists which also acts as a mercenary recruitment agencyechoes
of the Paladin organisation. Sordi has told Italian magistrates of the
case of one fascist, Carlo de Cilla wanted for a robbery attributed to
the NAR, who was recruited through this agency to fight fo~ the Afghan
Liberation army.
[7] The importance of Britain as a refuge for the Italian neoNazi right
is underlined by the continuing attempts by Giovanni Ventura, the
Italian secret service agent most directly implicated in the 1969 Piazza
Fontana bombing, to obtain political asylum in this country on his
release from custody in Argentina. Another member of the Delle Chiaie
network, Luciano Petrone, was arrested on an international warrant in
London on 24 January 1983. Petrone was held on an extradition request
from the Italian police who wanted to question him in connection with
the murder of two policemen in Rome in June 1982. Spanish police also
wanted to question him in regard to a bank robbery in Marbella which
netted an estimated Ł10 million from safe-deposit boxes. Among those
attending the Petroni extradition hearings as observers were three of
the young Italian neofascists previously held on extradition warrants in
connection with terrorist charges in Italy.
[8] Giacomo Feltrinelli was killed in a bomb explosion in Northern Italy
in 1972. He was supposed by the police to have been leader of the Armed
Partisan Groups (GAP), and to have been attempting to blow up an
electricity pylon at the time of his death.