Aldo Moro and the ‘Commie scare’

Aldo Moro and the ‘Commie scare’
Thirty years after his murder we may finally get to know the truth about Aldo Moro, says Robert Fox
Thirty years ago this Sunday, the Italian statesman Aldo Moro was seized by the Red Brigades and eight weeks later his body was dumped in downtown Rome. It was the most spectacular assassination by the Red Brigades and the most significant killing of a leader in Europe during the entire Cold War.

But was this just the notoriously incompetent Red Brigades acting alone? Or did they have professional help from outside, particularly from senior Nato allies worried that Italy was about to get a Communist government?

Rome has been rocked by a string of revelations that both America under Jimmy Carter and Britain under James Callaghan were worried about the rise of the Communists in Italy, and were prepared to do something about it. British Cabinet papers
released in January under the 30 year rule show that the Foreign Office discussed in May 1976 the possibility of backing a right-wing coup if the Communists won the upcoming general election.

Now Steve Pieczenick, a former crisis negotiator at the US State Department, has revealed in a new book just available in Rome that he was sent from Washington the day after Moro's kidnap on March 16, 1978 to help the Italian government 'manage' the crisis. His first act was to order the distribution of a fake bulletin from the Red Brigades saying that Aldo Moro (left) had been killed.

Pieczenick says this was to prepare the Italian public for Moro's death, and to warn the terrorists that the government would not negotiate to get him back. (Italian governments, it should be noted, had no reservation about bargaining with the terrorists over kidnappings on subsequent occasions.)

It is also known - and has never been denied - that three British 'counter-terrorism experts' were dispatched to Rome at this time; they are believed to have worked for the SAS and MI6.

It is now clear that the US and UK were anxious that Moro should not come back alive. It was a decade before the Berlin Wall came down and neither government wanted to see the Communists sharing power in a Nato-member country.

The Italian Communists, led by the brilliant and charismatic Sardinian aristocrat Enrico Berlinguer, had reaped large gains in the 1975 regional elections. Then, in the general election of 1976, they came within a couple of points of the ruling Christian Democrats.

Aldo Moro, leader of the Christian Democrats, recognised that his party was exhausted by 30 years of uninterrupted rule since the war. He decided his party could only continue to rule if they agreed a programme of reforms with Berlinguer, who at this stage agreed not to demand seats in cabinet.

Moro was on his way to parliament for the vote of confidence for this arrangement when he was grabbed by a five-man Red Brigades commando group, led by Prospero

Moro had been warned by Kissinger, allegedly, of the consequences if he brought the ‘Reds’ to powerGallinari, a notorious terrorist hitman.

The year before, Gallinari had been sprung from jail in Belluno where he was doing time for murdering a judge in Genoa. In a scene reminiscent of The Great Escape, Gallinari and his mates roared out of the main gate on motorbikes 'liberated' from the guards. It sounded suspiciously easy, little was done to find him, and he only surfaced again after the murder of Moro.

Moro had been warned, allegedly, of the dire consequences if he brought the 'Reds' to power by Henry Kissinger in his last days as US Secretary of State. With only one other person in the room, a bilingual diplomat interpreting for Moro who spoke no English, Kissinger said words to the effect 'we will fix you' if he pursued a pact with the Communists. (At the same time a US diplomat called Moro a 'schmuck' at a public dinner.)

And that is what seems to have happened: a prime covert operation to remove a democratically elected politician from power. Soon, under the 30 year disclosure rule, we should get the official Whitehall documents about Britain's role in the affair.

FIRST POSTED MARCH 14, 2008