Apart from the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro in
1978, the worst incident in Italy's Years of Lead was the Bologna Bombing in
1980. It was a wake-up for some as the perpetrators seemed to be not the
Leftist Red Brigades but Right-wing fascist groups.
While some tried to spin the bombing as an operation
conducted by the Left and some still attempt to pin it on the Palestinians, the
truth is the Right was hitting Bologna and if anyone knows anything about
Italian politics Bologna has long been the centre of the Left and in particular
the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It didn't make sense that the Red Brigades
would bomb their own centre of support.
Slowly a new picture began to emerge and as time has passed
it has become clear that Right wing forces were not only behind the Bologna
Bombing, they were also behind a lot of the activity and terrorism of those
years. Clearly the Right and the state-intelligence services had infiltrated Leftist
paramilitary groups such as the Brigades and in some cases were manipulating
them. Such a realisation changes everything and re-shapes one's understanding
of NATO and the Cold War.
Further investigations cast doubt on the official narrative
regarding the Moro kidnapping and assassination. The investigative trails kept
leading back to the CIA-connected security services and in terms of cui bono, it didn't make sense for the
Brigades to go after him. Moro was determined to bring the PCI into government
and his death ended that process allowing the Centre-Right factions within the
Christian Democracy Party (DC) to retain control. The party which dominated
Italian politics during the Cold War was essentially a creation and tool of the
United States. The party with the help of the CIA and the Roman Catholic Church
was able to score its huge electoral win in 1948 and it would continue to
dominate until its dissolution in 1994. During that time of slate-cleaning and
chapter-closing, the agenda was re-imagined and reincarnated in the Forza
Italia Party of Sylvio Berlusconi.
Moro represented a threat to the dominance of the DC and the NATO
agenda. He was hated by the Atlantic order and by some accounts even threatened
by Henry Kissinger.
If the Brigades had really killed Moro, why all the
obfuscation and obstruction on the part of the state security services? The
murder of Carmine Pecorelli a journalist deeply connected to the intelligence
services came at a convenient moment. He was in the process of unveiling the
state's role in the Moro affair and the charges went all the way to the top...
to Christian Democratic prime minister Giulio Andreotti who (though eventually
convicted) managed to avoid jail time.*
By the time the Years of Lead came to end in the late 1980's,
there was a cloud of confusion over the events that had taken place. The
country had been terrorised and yet it wasn't clear who was at fault. Was it
the Left, the Right, both or was there something else, a mysterious cloud that
hovered over Italy and some of the other members of NATO? The terrorism which
gripped Europe throughout the 1970s and 1980s in many cases pointed back to
elements within NATO itself, a point both Pecorelli and Moro tried to make.
Eventually in the 1990's, the GLADIO story began to emerge
but during the victory lap of the post Cold War, the era in which American
unipolarity was at its height and the European project was in full swing and
thus forward looking... the story was largely buried. The implications
represented an existential threat to the system and had the potential to
shatter the entire Western order. The idea that US-led NATO forces would be
employed to terrorise the citizenry of ally-states in order to manipulate their
politics and militarise their societies would be viewed as nothing less than an
evil betrayal. The American post-WWII narrative would be revealed as a great
swindle and so the story was further confused and obfuscated. The Soviets were
famous for sending in the tanks and were excoriated for it but if it became
commonly known what NATO did when one of its satellites threatened dissent...
there would be at the very least, moral equivalence. Both sides would be viewed
as evil, a point some groups had been trying to make all along. The Soviet tool
was blunt and played badly in front of the cameras. NATO on the other hand wielded
a rapier and through the manipulative means of terrorism, corruption and assassination
was able to control its sphere. Both sides had their successes and failures.
Here we are thirty years after the Cold War and forty years
after the greatest tragedies of the leaden years and still there are many unanswered
questions, mysteries that will certainly persist until all these men are long
in their graves. It is a story every bit as complex and incredible as the
events surrounding Dallas in November 1963. But it's also a living story as the
same system is still at work though it operates in a different form. And the
European theatre is only part of the story.
---
*Don Lucchesi a character in The Godfather III is said to be
patterned on Andreotti, however I've always thought P2 leader Licio Gelli was a
more likely candidate.
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