In 1990, Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to reveal the existence of a vast underground paramilitary network that had been operating in Italy for decades under Nato command. This network, called Gladio, had been responsible for several terrorist attacks that had caused hundreds of civilian casualties, as well as two attempted coups (1964 and 1970).
These revelations, which implicated many European countries, including Britain, and the United States, led to a series of national investigations, and for months caused an international political storm which contended with the Gulf War for attention in the press. Yet today these revelations appear to have been erased from historical memory.
Undoubtedly, the political lessons that must be drawn from these events are the reason for their erasure. The events of Operation Gladio demonstrated how the imperialist bourgeoisie responds when it feels its rule is threatened – even if the opposition is playing by the rules of the bourgeoisie’s own institutions.
Roots of the operation
For most of the 20th century, communists in Italy enjoyed mass support, being recognised as the frontline of partisan resistance against fascism, and the Italian Communist party (PCI) grew to more than two million members (more than any other party in Europe for most of the postwar period), gaining upwards of 34 percent of the electoral vote at its peak and playing a key role in the social and cultural life of the working class.
Following the fall of fascism, the PCI could also count on the support of thousands of armed men and women, formerly members of the partisan resistance and also in the new republic’s police forces. While such a base could have been mobilised to advance the position of the working class, PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti chose to maintain the wartime line of a united front with bourgeois-democratic forces, which had been established as part of the struggle against fascism.
According to his line, which opportunistically turned the united front from an anti-fascist tactic into a general principle, the party should obtain power through bourgeois parliamentary means, and only then would its armed forces be mobilised defensively. For the bourgeoisie, however, even these terms were unacceptable.
This was the situation in which imperialism sought to mount an offensive leveraging the most reactionary forces of Italian society: fascism, the mafia, and the Church.
Following the 1943 Allied landing in Sicily during WW2, the USA had recruited the services of the mafia through Operation Underworld. In 1945, fascist commander Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, who had been captured by the partisans and was awaiting execution, was rescued by the CIA’s predecessor (the OSS) and acquitted of his war crimes.
Many such cases of collaboration would allow the USA to set up a network of fascist assets in the country to employ as anticommunist forces. Licio Gelli was another fascist blackshirt who escaped partisan justice thanks to US protection. He was later tasked by the CIA with heading the secret political wing of Gladio – a secret society known as Propaganda Due or P2, which was exposed in 1981 and had over 900 members who included high-ranking officers of the army, police and secret services, as well as industrialists, politicians and judges (one notorious member was former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi).
The elections of 1948, the first since the fall of fascism, saw the Popular Democratic Front (FDP) of the PCI run against the US-backed Christian Democrats (DCI). While the people were ostensibly given a choice between two coalitions, in practice it became clear that the choice was between continued bourgeois rule under the DCI or civil war, since the DCI leadership made it clear that the election would not be conceded to the PCI even if they polled the requisite proportion of votes.
Following 1990’s revelations, President Francesco Cossiga admitted that the DCI had set up its own paramilitary organisation which had been ready to spring into action in case of a communist victory, and that he himself had been “armed to the teeth”.
The DCI victory in this dubious election, characterised by tremendous US interference, was followed by a long series of protests, during which more than 60 workers, most of them communists, were murdered by the state. The PCI’s leader, Togliatti, survived an assassination attempt during this period, but while communist militants rose up, Togliatti called for calm.
Already in the 1950s, “Gladiators” (as the Gladio operatives were referred to internally) started to receive training in Britain and weapons from the USA. Plans were in place to initiate a conflict and even to invade the country should the communists win an election or be allowed to participate in any government. A Gladio base was set up in Sardinia where gladiators could receive British and US training.
As working-class organisation increased and the PCI continued to win greater support in the following elections, eventually threatening the DCI’s monopoly on cabinet positions in 1963, the ruling class relied on its Gladio assets to respond with ever greater violence, in both targeted and indiscriminate ways.
Coups, bombings and the assassination of Aldo Moro
In 1963, the DCI had to concede cabinet positions to the reformist socialist party (PSI) and the PCI for the first time in the republic’s history. Worried that DCI leader Aldo Moro was making too many concessions to the reformist PSI, a section of the bourgeoisie organised a coup known as ‘Piano Solo’, with the collaboration of the CIA, the head of the paramilitary police De Lorenzo, and the Italian secret services, which were tasked with directing Gladio operations under Colonel Renzo Rocca.
The first phase of the coup involved the false flag bombings of DCI offices, which were blamed on communist groups. The second phase, in June 1964, started under the guise of a military parade. Following the parade, the troops remained in Rome under a false pretext of ‘logistical issues’, in preparation for carrying out the coup. Following a meeting between Aldo Moro and coup plotter General De Lorenzo, the government announced the PSI’s intention to renege on many of its reformist demands. This genuflection to the ruling class by the social-democratic PSI was sufficient to defuse the situation and abort the coup.
As the class struggle intensified in the late 1960s, successful mass strikes enabled the Italian working class to force several concessions on the state, including legal protection from dismissal due to political reasons (such as union activity) and protection from workplace surveillance. At the same time, Gladio operators carried out several terrorist actions.
One of these was the massacre at the Piazza Fontana (1969), an indiscriminate bombing which hit agricultural workers at the National Bank of Agriculture. The action was initially blamed on anarchist groups, but although the fascist perpetrators were later exposed, none would ever be punished. As Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of the responsible fascist organisation Ordine Nuovo (New Order), later testified:
“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security.
“This was precisely the role of the right in Italy. It placed itself at the service of the state, which created a strategy aptly called the ‘Strategy of Tension’, in so far as they had to get ordinary people to accept that at any moment over a period of 30 years, from 1960 to the mid-eighties, a state of emergency could be declared.
“So, people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains or enter a bank. This is the political logic behind all the bombings. They remain unpunished because the state cannot condemn itself.” [1]
In declassified P2 documents, Renzo Rocca also claimed: “An efficient and global anticommunist action … requires the creation of activist groups, youth groups, gangs that can use all methods, including unorthodox ones such as intimidation, threats, blackmail, street fights, assault, sabotage and terrorism.” [2]
On the political front, the ruling class also tasked former fascist and CIA asset Junio Valerio Borghese with leading another coup operation in December 1970. Under the codename Tora Tora, several armed groups gathered in Rome and Milan, the plan being that they would occupy government buildings, arrest political figures and suppress resistance in working-class areas.
But the coup was aborted at the last moment under mysterious circumstances. CIA asset and mafia man Tommaso Buscetta later speculated that the coup had been halted because of the presence of Soviet ships in the Mediterranean. In fact, during the investigations into the Gladio massacre at Piazza Fontana, it emerged that the coup had been aborted on orders of the USA.
The complicity of the P2 secret society and of major mafia groups was also uncovered during the investigations. Of the more than 100 conspirators, all were eventually acquitted, while coup leader Borghese was able to flee to Spain, demonstrating again the complicity of all bourgeois state institutions.
Following the 1976 elections, the PCI and DCI were neck and neck, obtaining around 34 percent and 38 percent of the vote respectively. Unable to legitimately sideline the PCI at this point, DCI leader Aldo Moro became open to the PCI’s revisionist theory of what it called the ‘Historic Compromise’ (Compromesso Storico).
This theory, authored by PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer, maintained that the Chilean experience of Marxist leader Salvador Allende, who had been killed in a coup following his electoral victory, demonstrated the necessity for communists to prevent a bourgeois “centre” and “right” alliance by “collaborating with forces of Catholic or other democratic persuasion”. [3]
In other words, the PCI intended to court the “moderate” wing of the bourgeoisie to prevent it from siding with fascist coup plotters (little did he know, every chief of government had been secretly made aware of Gladio, later even Bettino Craxi of the supposedly ‘left’ PSI!)
For this purpose, the party officially broke ties with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), ushering in the bankrupt and treacherous tendency of Eurocommunism.
Despite the weakness of such an anti-Marxist position, the US administration was still insisting to Moro that no opening toward the PCI would be tolerated. Nonetheless, Moro chose to defy US directives and include the PCI in his government. On 16 March 1978, however, Moro was kidnapped and murdered after 55 days of captivity by the communist urban guerrilla group known as the Red Brigades (BRs).
The BRs thought that by cornering the DCI they would be able to explode the contradictions between the proletarian base of the PCI and its opportunist leadership. However, the PCI stood firmly with the DCI and the state in refusing any engagement to rescue Moro. Near the time of his execution, Moro, who understood that the state institutions had no intention of organising his release, demanded that nobody from his own party, the DCI, should be allowed to attend his funeral.
A 1995 official report claimed that the Red Brigades had been made instrumental in a wider political scheme. In 1979, Carmine Pecorelli, an investigative journalist and P2 member, was assassinated by the mafia for his work, which indicated state complicity in the Moro affair (DCI leader Andreotti was later tried and condemned for ordering the assassination, only to be acquitted in 2003).
To this day, the full picture of Moro’s case remains obscured. Nonetheless, it is revealing to compare Moro’s case with the BRs’ kidnapping of US Nato officer James L Dozier in 1981. In Dozier’s case, the state mobilised all forces, and even conducted a barbaric torture campaign against imprisoned brigaders, in order to secure the captive’s release.
State terrorism continued, often with unclear motives, reaching its apex with 1980’s Bologna train station massacre. Targeting people in the economy-class waiting room, a group of fascists planted a bomb that killed more than 80 people. P2 chief Licio Gelli was charged with attempting to derail investigations, while the two fascists incarcerated for the crime, Francesca Mambro and Valerio Fioravanti, were released in 2004 and 2008. While admitting to other murders, they continue to disclaim any involvement in the Bologna massacre.
The revisionism of the PCI eventually bore its bitter fruits. Party membership had been in slow and steady decline ever since the CPSU’s 20th party congress of 1956, in which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s legacy. It grew in the decade following the successful struggles of the late 1960s, but again went into decline starting from the late 1970s.
At that time, the increased pace of capital export, which transferred an ever-increasing proportion of production abroad, was leading to a steady disempowerment of the proletariat in all the western imperialist countries. Through the Eurocommunist 1980s the PCI haemorrhaged support – and finally liquidated itself with the fall of the USSR in 1991.
Following these events, the strategy of tension and state terrorism also came to an end.
How the knot unravelled
From the 1960s onwards, Nato officials began cultivating relationships with fascist terrorist organisations such as Ordine Nuovo (ON), among others. At this time, a split had already formed within the fascist camp between so-called ‘fascists’ and ‘neofascists’. The former accused the latter of betraying fascism by becoming agents of Nato and the bourgeois-liberal regime.
These fascists, unlike the ‘neofascists’, expressed a strictly bourgeois-nationalist position and viewed the postwar liberal regime as an enemy (in spite of both fascist and liberal states being forms of bourgeois rule). As a result, they also occasionally entered into armed conflict with state forces. To this group belonged Valerio Fioravanti, his wife Francesca Mambro, and Vincenzo Vinciguerra.
In 1972, Vinciguerra planted a bomb in the northeastern town of Peteano (very close to the Slovenian border) that killed three police officers – an action which he viewed as being part of a struggle against the state and a rupture with the neofascist movement which was “directed by state and international powers”. This action was covered up by an ON agent operating within the police forces and repurposed as a false flag.
For ten years it was officially attributed to a militant communist group, until investigative judge Felice Casson, reviewing the case, discovered its irregularities and ordered the arrest of Vinciguerra.
Vinciguerra’s disillusion with ON’s ‘neofascism’ motivated him to reveal what he knew about the Gladio operation, the organised nature of political violence and terrorism, and the deep and insoluble links between fascist organisations and the Italian state apparatus. His declarations stand out because they were not produced in exchange for a reduced sentence but rather out of political conviction.
It was Judge Casson’s work which ultimately ended up implicating Prime Minister Andreotti himself. Andreotti’s revelations also introduced an official narrative, according to which this secret network existed in order “to be activated in case of Soviet aggression”. In fact, the organised Italian working class was the target of the operation, which was not dormant but extremely active, and the Italian ruling class and its US imperialist overlords was ready to describe any and every advance by workers as “Soviet intervention”.
As the legal battle intensified in the early 1990s, it dawned on Andreotti that his masters might be preparing to sacrifice him as a scapegoat so as to put an end to the growing scandal. To protect himself, he started pulling the rug from under other state officials involved, as well as from under the US and other European governments. It was revealed that caches of weapons had been distributed around the country by the CIA for use by ideologically selected gladiators. Moreover, leaders of all the Nato countries were aware of and had participated in Gladio meetings.
Eventually, even the European parliament was forced to acknowledge the existence of Gladio, its links with European secret services, Nato and the USA, as well as with their weapons stores. In 1990, a resolution called for parliamentary inquiries in every member state, as well as for legal prosecutions and the dismantling of all Gladio networks. Unsurprisingly, none of those demands were acted on.
A profound political lesson
Operation Gladio clearly demonstrates the unbreakable link between bourgeois rule and bourgeois institutions, which the ruling class is willing to protect through the most heinous crimes. It also exposes the revisionist fairy tales about ‘parliamentary roads to socialism’ as hopelessly naive and recklessly idealistic.
While the Italian communist party busied itself with class reconciliation, the bourgeois state was carrying out terrorist actions to avoid even mildly social-democratic reforms. While revisionism wished to brush aside class antagonism, the ruling class never questioned for a moment its need to crush the organised working class by any means necessary.
By promoting the idea that the bourgeois parliament could offer the workers a path to socialism, the PCI not only misdirected the energies of its members and the wider movement, it also conceded a central ideological argument of the bourgeoisie – ie, that the formal democracy which had been restored after the war was good enough for all classes. In the context of widespread working-class militance, it is not difficult to understand that the renegacy of the PCI leadership contributed to the spontaneous formation of communist urban guerrilla groups such as the Red Brigades, which in the end were hopelessly ill-equipped to engage in a protracted confrontation with the state.
The Gladio events also exposed the intimate relationship between the state, fascist organisations and the mafia. The latter were instruments employed in the class struggle, at times unknowingly but often with explicit complicity. They could be relied on to carry out operations that the official state forces could not afford to take on themselves without damaging their legitimacy, such as violent attacks on workers and demonstrators, and even terrorism.
Such activity required an unshakeable ideological attachment to the ruling class and utter contempt for the proletariat (ie, anticommunism). For this reason, a two-layer system arose within Italian state institutions, one of which was covert and operated on an anticommunist basis and one which openly but blindly sought to uphold bourgeois notions of legality and democracy that were in fact no longer tenable even for the bourgeoisie itself.
It was the contradictions within the bourgeois system itself that ultimately led fascist assets like Vinciguerra to turn on the state. The ruling class purported to represent the interests of ‘the nation’, but in fact acted as a willing assistant to a stronger foreign bourgeoisie in order to keep its seat at the table of global finance capital and its role in the imperialist chain. This alienated the petty-bourgeois elements in the fascist movement who adhered to a purely idealistic nationalism very much akin to the ‘Little Englanders’ who imagine there is some way back to the ‘glory days’ of the British empire.
For the Italian masses, these events exposed the crookedness of state institutions and the vacuity of their democracy. Notions like ‘Stragismo di stato’ (doctrine of state massacres) gained currency and are engraved in the people’s understanding of Italian history. The leadership role of the CIA in supervising Operation Gladio exposed the limited nature of Italian sovereignty since the second world war, and of western European countries more broadly.
If we are to honour the workers who lost their lives during those decades, and if we are to avoid a repetition of the terrible calamities bought on our movement through revisionist treachery, we must remember and spread awareness of the memory of this history and its profound lessons.
Notes
[1] Allan Francovich, interview with Vinciguerra for BBC2 Timewatch, 1992.
[2] Report on the massacre of Piazza della Loggia file n. 1962-2-21-32: “Aspetti dell’azione anticomunista in Italia e suggerimenti per attuare una politica anticomunista”.
[3] Enrico Berlinguer, Riflessioni sull’Italia dopo i fatti del Cile, published in Rinascita, 12 October 1973
