another 9 11 -- the killing of aldo moro

[geogeo]

Happened on a film called Piazza delle Cinque Lune, early 2000s, Italian, but Donald Sutherland as protagonist. Everyone is dubbed into English except Sutherland's voice. He is investigating the May 9, 1978 assassination of kidnapped Italian former prime minister, by 2nd Red Brigades (Gladio front) terrorist Moretti.

Moro was working out some sort of compromise with the communists.

He was killed by 11 bullets, apparently a big part of what was talked about.

The movie goes very into depth on CIA, NATO, Strategy of Tension, P2 Masonic Lodge. Sutherland sounds right now like he's a regular contributor to RI...

[smiths]

this incident and italian 20th century politics really fascinate me,

there is a reasonable degree of parallel with JFK in this,
the deep state declaring openly that politics is only pantomime and will be discontinued where it suits

Three decades after the murder of Aldo Moro, the magistrate who wrote the indictments for three Red Brigades trials has charged that the government willfully withheld evidence from both the judiciary and from a Parliamentary commission ...

In sworn testimony to the Parliamentary Commission, that bizarre story begins in a country house near Bologna, on April 2, 1978, a rainy Sunday. Moro had been in the Brigades' hands for seventeen days. As children played in the background, a dozen bored grown-ups -- mostly professors from the famous University of Bologna and their wives -- decided to while away the time by holding a séance with a Ouija Board ...

The august assembly in the Bologna country house, which included Romano Prodi (today, Italian Premier) and his wife Flavia, thus asked the spirits to reveal the address of the Red Brigades hideout in Rome. Lo and behold, the planchette spat forth a name, "Gradoli" and the numbers 6 and an 11.

The information obtained from the departed spirits about Moro's detention seemed important enough that Prodi passed along the information to those in charge of the investigation (although not to the judges, by the way).

This governmental inquiry and the crisis committee were controlled by Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga, subsequently president of Italy. Informed of the séance and its dramatic revelations, Cossiga leapt into action, sending hundreds of police and paramilitary into upon the dank medieval town of Gradoli North of Rome on April 5, thirty-one days before Moro was killed.. Scattering chickens and poking into every house, the police searched Iraq style, while all was filmed for state TV.

Alas, the spirits had sent hundreds of troops to the wrong Gradoli -- even though, as the ever more desperate Mrs. Moro suggested to Minister Cossiga, "Gradoli" may have been a street in Rome. No, Cossiga replied (so declared Mrs. Moro), there is no such road in the Yellow Pages.

But there was a Via Gradoli in Rome, a short street; and at number 96 was apartment number 11, as the Ouija Board had said. Living there under a fake name, traveling almost daily to another Brigades hideout to interrogate Moro, was the organization's top leader, Mario Moretti. If spotted, therefore, Moretti could have been tailed directly to Moro himself.

In fact, the police in Rome did know that a Via Gradoli existed. On March 28, two days after the kidnapping, a busybody living in that very building had spotted three suspicious-looking young people on the usually tranquil street who seemed to be keeping the building under surveillance (they were). Five policemen responded to the summons with signed orders from the judiciary to check every apartment, with no exceptions. When nobody answered their knock at apartment number 11, they ignored their orders and did not break down the door, explaining lamely afterward that everyone they had met told them all the residents were trustworthy folks ...

When the Parliamentary Commission turned its attention to this complicated affair, all participants in the séance save Prodi and his wife Flavia answered the summons, and all repeated the same, memorized story of the séance and the talking-spirits.

This obvious lie meant that all risked arrest for perjury, as I learned.
No one was arrested, however, perhaps because all those involved on both sides understood that the séance story was never meant to be believed.

An adviser to the crisis committee was the Harvard-trained psychiatrist Steven Pieczenik. Pieczenik specialized in hostage negotiations and was sent by the U.S. State Department to advise the Italian government during the kidnapping. Interviewed by RAI radio March 16, Pieczenik said that the United States had encouraged Italian decision-makers to abandon Moro, a decision he now regrets. In a rebuttal, Richard N. Gardner, who had been the U.S. ambassador at the time, scoffed that, "After one month I asked for him to go back to America. He is not a reliable man." Reliable or otherwise, Pieczenik served as deputy assistant secretary and/or Senior Policy Planner under four U.S. secretaries of state (he later went on to write psycho-political thrillers, including a number co-authored with Tom Clancy).

In an interview in l'Unità March 17, Rosy Bindi, who is Prodi's Minister for the Family, said, "Moro's assassination still conditions Italian life. We have yet to compensate for the delay our country began to accumulate when we lost the architect of the project for a mature democracy, meaning alternating powers.... For thirty years we have been paying the consequences."

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16990

[MinM]

There was a clue tonight on Jeopardy about the Aldo Moro assassination...

"You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration . . . or you will pay dearly for it."
-- Sen. Henry Jackson to Italian FM Aldo Moro

Possibly, Consul. I wasn't thinking into it that deeply; I was thinking it was a mob hit.

No details yet. We'll see.

Maybe

The Red Brigade?

@THR: Kathryn Bigelow 'Devastated' Over Gandolfini's Death

Here's the most comprehensive 1999 article I've found
on the CIA-backed Operation Condor hemispheric assassination program.
You'll never think of Robert Redford as the innocent CIA agent in 'Three Days of the Condor' (1975) again...

Condor must be understood within the context of the global anticommunist
alliance led by the United States. We now know that top U.S. officials and
agencies, including the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and
the Defense Department, were fully aware of Condor's formation and its
operations from the time it was organized in 1975 (if not earlier). The U.S.
government considered the Latin American militaries to be allies in the Cold
War and worked closely with their intelligence organizations. U.S. executive
agencies at least condoned, and sometimes actively assisted, Condor
"countersubversive" operations. Although evidence is still fragmentary, it is
now possible to piece together information from numerous sources to understand
Operation Condor as a clandestine inter-American counterinsurgency system...

In recent years we have learned much about U.S. sponsorship of terrorism
during the Cold War, including assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and
campaigns of terror such as Operation Mongoose in Cuban territory...

The Army School of the Americas (SOA) and the Panama base of the U.S. Army
Southern Command served as a center for the continental anticommunist
alliance, and there are indications that the planning of covert operations
took place there. Certainly, many officers who designed and implemented
military terrorism in Latin America were graduates of the SOA. One military
graduate of the School said, "the school was always a front for other special
operations, covert operations." [29] Garzon has asked the United States for
any documentation linking the School with Condor...

Operation Condor must be understood within the broader context of the
Cold War and the security architecture shaped by the United States after World
War II. The Condor system takes on deeper meaning when viewed alongside the
European stay-behind projects discovered in 1990, part of a U.S.-led, covert
effort to set up authority structures parallel to (and often, opposed to)
elected governments and democratic institutions. [31] Like the stay-behind
armies, Condor was a clandestine component of a regional anticommunist front
and part of a covert strategy of the states involved, known only to select
officials. Operation Condor operated inside of, or parallel to, formal
military alliances such as the Rio Pact and the Conference of American Armies,
as the stay-behind programs operated secretly within NATO. (A NATO Experts
Working Group on Latin America kept close tabs on developments in Latin
America in the 1970s.) [32] Finally, there is evidence that the stay-behind
program in Italy, known as Operation Gla dio, was linked to Condor.

Comparing Condor to the European "Stay-Behind" Projects

After World War II, top U.S. national security strategists grew increasingly
alarmed by the advances of Communism in Eastern Europe and in the Far East.
U.S. national security specialists embarked on a secret, multibillion-dollar
project to develop global covert warfare [33] and propaganda machinery to wage
the Cold War against Communism. National Security Council Directive 10/2 of
June 1948 authorized a vast program of clandestine:

propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action including sabotage,
anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures...subversion against
hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements,
guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous
anti-Communist elements... [to be done so that] any U.S. government
responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if
uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility... (Church
Committee Report, Book IV, 1976:29-31, cited in Simpson, 1988: 102).

The earliest uses of targeted U.S. covert operations were in the Greek civil
war and in the Italian elections of 1948, in which the Communist Party (PCI)
stood poised to gala power. Respected domestically for its central role in the
Italian antifascist resistance, the PCI was subject to a covert U.S. campaign
of political manipulation, paramilitary action, and propaganda to undermine
its popularity. The Italian operation, which was considered successful, set a
precedent for CIA covert operations and dirty methods that became standard
practice. [34]

Throughout Europe, U.S. and British officials, operating within NATO, set up
secret stay-behind armies to prepare for a Communist invasion -- and prevent
Communist electoral victories. These paramilitary forces incorporated fascists
and former Nazis (Searchlight, 1991). One NATO source told Searchlight (a
British nongovernmental organization) that the two-pronged strategy of
Britain's Stay Behind was "to destabilize any left-leaning government, even a
Social Democratic one, and in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack to function as
a guerrilla army using classical guerrilla tactics" (Ibid.). [35] The U.S.
pushed for a secret clause in the North Atlantic Treaty requiring the secret
services of all joining nations to establish their own branches of the secret
army -- and to oppose Communist influence, even if the population voted for
Communist candidates in free elections (Simpson, 1988: 100-102; Willan, 1991:
27; Rowse, 1994). The covert project (known as Gladio in Italy, Operation Stay
Behind in the U.K., and S heepskin in Greece, among other names) encompassed
all of Europe and Scandinavia, including neutral countries. Agents set up
hundreds of arms caches all across Europe; one was at the U.S. Army's Camp
Derby (Lauria, 1991: 15; Willan, 1991: 170).

Charles deGaulle pulled France out of NATO partially due to the secret
protocol, which he considered a violation of sovereignty, and he regarded the
secret network to be a danger to his government (Willan, 1991: 27; Kwitney,
1992). Discovery of the covert project in 1990 caused a political firestorm in
Europe. In that year, the European Parliament passed a strongly worded
denunciation of the clandestine organization, its antidemocratic implications,
and the terrorist acts associated with it. [36]

Italian investigators discovered connections between the secret Gladio plans
and well-known terrorist acts, attempted military coups, and the undermining
of democratic institutions in the 1970s and 1980s. Later, investigators linked
Gladio with terrorist attacks officially attributed to left-wing guerrillas,
such as the Red Brigades' 1978 assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo
Moro, who was moving to include the Communist Party in a coalition government.
(In 1974, Henry Kissinger and a U.S. intelligence official had warned Moro
against a rapprochement with the Communists, in a meeting that greatly upset
Moro...

Yeah, for Ledeen to throw out the Aldo Moro reference unprompted on his own accord seems like more than a threat. It reeks of foreknowledge of something wicked this way comes.

Disturbing, yes. Is he foreshadowing, threatening, waging psywar? Is he recommending it to his spook friends? Does he think it's a joke, all the more so for the impunity with which he can say it? Was he drunk when he posted? I can think of a lot of contexts where someone would be rounded up for talking like this about the incumbent president.

[JackRiddler]

"You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration . . . or you will pay dearly for it."
-- Sen. Henry Jackson to Italian FM Aldo Moro

Don't know why I suspected an inaccuracy, it's not like Jackson would not have said it, but it does not seem he did. Attributed to an unnamed U.S. intel official, as later related by Moro's wife to an Italian tribunal. But of course it can be interpreted as not a threat (as in, you will pay a political price from your own voters, etc.)

Follow it around the web to see it go from Moro's wife's recollection to a direct quote from Kissinger, etc:

Can't see Ganser's citation but he's presumably reliable:
https://books.google.com/books?id=n0uRA ... 22&f=false

Here it's brought in connection with Jackson and Kissinger:

https://books.google.com/books?id=oKqmW ... on&f=false

Here it's straight up attributed to Kissinger:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/operation- ... 56?print=1

Etc:

https://www.google.com/search?num=20&sa ... Mjh8rb-0bw

[identity]

"You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration . . . or you will pay dearly for it."
-- Sen. Henry Jackson to Italian FM Aldo Moro

Don't know why I suspected an inaccuracy, it's not like Jackson would not have said it, but it does not seem he did. Attributed to an unnamed U.S. intel official, as later related by Moro's wife to an Italian tribunal. But of course it can be interpreted as not a threat (as in, you will pay a political price from your own voters, etc.)

Follow it around the web to see it go from Moro's wife's recollection to a direct quote from Kissinger, etc:

Can't see Ganser's citation but he's presumably reliable:

Ganser's citation:

88 Quoted in Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 220.

The quote is from Eleonora Moro in Philip P. Willan's Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (2002)

Philip Willan - Puppetmasters p.220.png

[semper occultus]

....worth remembering that JFK gave his blessing to a similar Opening to the Left in 1963 involving bringing the PSI - Italian Socialist Party - into coalition with the Christian Democrats after their attempt to govern with the support of the MSI - the remnants of Mussolini's party...had provoked widespread opposition.....


Finally, during a trip to Italy in the summer of 1963, Kennedy indirectly expressed his own support for an opening to the left in a long conversation with Nenni during a reception in the Quirinale gardens.

http://www.academia.edu/15412128/THe_United_States_Italy_and_the_opening_to_the_left


...probably just a co-incidence that after playing around in Angleton's back-yard JFK meets his fate in November of the same year - with a few ranking members of La Cosa Nostra along for the ride by many accounts....






The first issue that needs to be clarified is the nature of the Kennedy administration’s internal debate on its policy toward Italy.

Although some analysts have argued that the debate focused on the opportunity to “lift the American veto” of the Italian government’s inclination to pursue an “opening to the left,” the clash of opinions really centered on the wisdom of openly encouraging the center-left and covertly supporting Nenni in his fight inside the PSI to overcome the pro-Communist factions of the party.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Komer, Averell Harriman, and other senior officials in the new administration believed that without a clear-cut signal from the United States Italian politicians would never dare implement an opening to the left.

They also believed that Nenni was engaged in an all-out struggle for the control of his party, and that this struggle was the central issue of Italian politics, with the capacity to shape future political arrangements for many years. In their view, the United States must not stay on the sidelines and watch Nenni lose a fight that could determine the future of Italian democracy. It was important, they believed,not only that the U.S. embassy in Rome warmly express its support for an opening to the left (this aspect of the story is mentioned by all existing accounts) but also that the Kennedy administration consider the most appropriate channels to provide the beleaguered Nenni with material support (an aspect of the story that is crucial but usually neglected or only obliquely mentioned).

The notion of providing overt support for an opening to the left was opposed by many diplomats and State Department officials, who for one reason or another believed that Nenni could not yet be trusted to become a member of a government in the Western bloc.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

On the 40th anniversary of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, I wanted to share this portion of a book I'm currently reading, Gladio, NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis by Richard Cottrell. I don't have an online link, so I'm just typing this up from portions of pages 68-71, 73-76:

To mention the name of Aldo Moro to most Italians is to awaken a pain at the heart of a nation. Did the man who dominated Italian politics for twenty years really perish at the hands of a fanatical cell of Left-wing extremists calling themselves the Brigate Rosse? Within the unfinished work known as Italy, broadly 30 per cent or so consider themselves on the modern liberal centre-Left, and they continue to doubt the official account.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When [Giulio] Andreotti confessed to the existence of Gladio, perhaps the disturbed spirit of the murdered former premier Aldo Moro flickered in his mind, like the visions that tormented Shakespeare's Richard III the night before his final battle on the field of Bosworth. The similarities between these ruthless social climbers, Andreotti and the Last Plantagenet, are eerily compelling, not least their common habit of eliminating obstructions. When Moro was violently abducted on 16th March 1978, the communists were a shadow force in the background of Andreotti's administration, voting obediently to keep it alive, in the hope of further preferment. But the Divine Julius did not intend to stare at communist faces sitting around his own cabinet table. The multi-layered case of Moro is complicated by the convenient elimination of important witnesses close to the event, who might have told important stories. Signposts are always paramount in the Italian drama; thus Moro was seized on his way to parliament on the 16th of March, one day after the formal Ides of March - the 15th - when Julius Caesar was cut down on the steps of the Senate. Held incommunicado for fifty-five days, the wretched captive was permitted in this bleak teatro nero to send almost one hundred letters to his family and politicians, which magnetised the massive sense of national crisis in every Italian mind. Posed images before the Red Brigades banner which dominated newspaper front pages and TV newscasts for nearly two months conveyed a plain message: this is what you can expect from trading with double-crossing communists. In March 2008, Francesco Cossiga, who had been President (and thus reigning Gladio commander) during the Moro drama 30 years before, made two striking admissions. First, he falsely authorised a public announcement that Brigate Rosse had killed Moro, when the ruling Christian Democrat hierarchy knew perfectly well that the president of their party was still alive. Secondly, that Moro was sacrificed for the sake of the 'stability of the state.' It was tantamount to admitting that the state sentenced Moro to death.
----------------------------------
The crisis cabinet was chaired by the ever-mercurial Cossiga - a brawler rather than quiet and patient deliberator - whose tendency to shoot from the hip could nonetheless prove useful in generating diversions. Cossiga, as chief lieutenant of Andreotti, had no intention of securing the release of Moro. The 'shrewd political project worked out by Moro' was intended to perish with its author. The catalyst in dispatching [Steve] Pieczenik was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's Polish-born National Security Advisor. Coming as he did from a country which had suffered the brunt of Soviet aggression, Brzezinski viewed the Moro project of soft accommodation with the communists with great disdain. Pieczenik has offered conflicting accounts of his own role. He knew from long experience that if the intention really was to secure Moro's freedom, the political price would be relatively modest. Publicly, this was supposed to be the release of an incarcerated minor female brigadier, Paola Besuschio, confined in jail since 1975. Quite why the Brigate Rosse should be tempted by such a trifling morsel, supposedly having such an important bargaining chip in their possession, is inexplicable. Pieczenik insisted that he gave up on the case because the emergency committee was 'riddled with informers,' and by the end amounted to just Cossiga and himself staring at each other. So he raised his hands in exasperation, boarded a plane and went home. But in 2006, he gave an interview to French TV in a different light. Subsequently expanded in a book called We Killed Aldo Moro (2008), Pieczenik said that ultimately Moro was abandoned to his fate because he was giving his captors vital secrets of the state, in particular the hints of a 'NATO guerrilla army.' Of course the implication is that Moro believed himself to be a captive of a force other than the Red Brigades.

The food chain of this nugget is interesting. The Gladio units and their significance were of course known to Brzezinski and President Carter, between them representing the largest shareholder in NATO. It is unlikely that Pieczenik, confidant of presidents, flew to Rome in complete ignorance of Gladio. The begging question is this: if Moro was being indiscreet about Gladio, how did the council of Christian Democrat elders, stiff and dumb as Easter Island statues, actually know unless they had an inside track to the captive? Pieczenik then wrote: 'We had to sacrifice Aldo Moro to maintain the stability of Italy.' This was the identical refrain of Andreotti and Cossiga. It meant Moro's fate turned solely on keeping communists out of government in Rome - Carter's chief objective and that of every president before and since. If freed, Moro might start his bothersome campaign all over again. In 1997, when Senator Giovanni Pellegrino convened his parliamentary committee of inquiry into the anni di piombo, he summoned Pieczenik as a star witness. Pieczenik first agreed and then begged off, under pressure from the State Department and probably the CIA. There were bound to be many difficult questions. In his 2008 book, Pieczenik let slip an important clue, that in the fourth week of Moro's captivity the 'US had to instrumentalise the Red Brigades.' It could be taken to mean goading them to action, or having Moro killed (as we see in a moment), with the blame then thrown upon the Brigades. But the book implied that the ultimate decision on Moro's fate was made as much in Washington as Rome.

The ruling political centre of gravity lay with the anti-Communist Right, the state intelligence services, the Mafia, big business and the Catholic Church, precisely the coalition mirrored by Licio Gelli's P2 secret government. The 61-year-old former premier was snatched on Rome's Via Mario Fani by a swarm of machine gunners, while on his way to parliament to commit the ultimate heresy - to bless an historic accommodation with the communists. Five of his guards were killed. In such a context, the petty demands of the Brigate Rosse were insubstantial and incredible. It followed that everything that transfixed Italians saw on their television sets was a manufactured illusion. Giuseppe De Lutiis' excellent book, Il Golpe di Via Fani (Coup d'état on Via Fani), set out the case that the state, and not Marxist revolutionaries, had the most to gain from Moro's early departure from the scene. He constructed his case around the many 'disturbing inconsistencies' that he found with the official account.

The location where the members of the Brigades claimed to have held Moro prisoner is in a quarter of Rome [Magliana] that, at the time, was under the absolute control of a criminal gang with ties to the Mafia. The prosecutor's office ran into insurmountable difficulties trying to investigate Swiss bank accounts linked to one of the Brigades' commanders. The autopsy on Moro's corpse showed a muscle tone in the legs and a level of personal hygiene incompatible with a 55-day detention in a cellar like that described by the terrorists.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whatever the means used to kill him, and precisely where, Moro's bullet-riddled body was bundled into the trunk of a red Renault 4 fourgon, then motored undetected on the morning of 9th May 1978 to the heart of the locked-down capital, close to the River Tiber and the respective headquarters of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and the DC (Christian Democrats, Democrazia Cristiana). The politically loaded signposts - the red delivery van, the location between the two rival political camps - spelt the message of a marriage postponed. Permanently. The subsequent post-mortem undermined the already confused picture of where Moro had been held. It seemed from the autopsy that his corpse had been transported a curiously short distance, little more than a kilometre. (A calculation helped by measuring the loss of blood and the degree to which rigor mortis had set in). Moro had also been in contact with asbestos, from the traces which clung to his clothing. This is rather difficult to square with the captors' inference that he was confined in a cave. He was unlikely to attract asbestos in any of the apartments where he was held. The explanation may well be, as I have suggested, that he was finally taken to an execution site with vault-like qualities. For example, some kind of store (containing building materials for example) where asbestos might be found would supply an explanation. Stacks of building materials would also conveniently absorb the Skorpion-fired cartridges. It is evident that Moro was passed around like a parcel between different confinements, probably at least three, on of which, as we see in a moment, had exceptionally interesting associations. But for his last moments, I conclude that this exceptionally brave man was the live target in a shooting gallery. The nation went into mourning. But on the political scene, Moro was still very much alive.

The spotlight now falls upon a man who hovered for years in the dangerous everglades between State secrets, terrorism and organized crime, until his luck ran out. Antonio 'Toni' Chichiarelli appears to have modeled himself on the central figure of Marcello Rubini in Federico Fellini's iconic La Dolce Vita, the social-climbing journalist who becomes friend and confidant of the rich, famous and powerful. 'Toni' greeted the daylight as an impresario of the art world, a dealer in expensive pictures. These accomplishments concealed the darker side of his life. He was also a master forger and art smuggler whose services were widely sought around the world. He moved freely in the underworld inhabited by the rich neo-fascists of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR), linked to the Bologna station atrocity of August 1980 and the bombing of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan in 1969.

Both organizations moved in the same orbit as the Banda della Magliana (for whom the ubiquitous 'Toni' acted as official forger). Chichiarelli had many connections that were certain to land him in serious trouble. This guardian of a thousand secrets typified the subliminal knots tying together the Italian underworld elite composed of Licio Gelli's P2 lodge, intelligence circles, the Christian Democrat oligarchy, criminal gangs and the Vatican. He knew of the ultra-secret accords that connected Mario Moretti, de facto leader of the Brigate Rosse at the time of the Moro tragedy, to the Italian state. Among his closest friends he counted the French gangster Albert Bergamelli, who ran the vast dope-smuggling racket in the port of Marseilles for the CIA; and Aldo Semerari, the strange psychiatrist run wild who was the Mob aristocracy's favorite shrink. His couch was their comforting retreat in coping with the tumultuous conflicts in the underworld of organized crime. This was a dangerous world where an excess of knowledge slips into risky compromise. Semarari was beheaded (the code for silencing tongues) by the Camorra in Naples on 1st April 1981 (April Fool's Day) shortly after he made a panic phone call to SISMI director General Giuseppe Santovito pleading that his life was in danger.

At the peak of the Moro crisis, Chichiarelli personally circulated the famous forged 'seventh directive' of the Brigate Rosse. purportedly ordering the leadership to liquidate Moro. This was an essential element of the plan to affix the responsibility for the kidnapping and murder on the Brigate. 'Toni' knew perfectly well that Moro's kidnappers were the Banda, assisted with back-up from the Calabrian criminal clan known as the 'Ndrangheta. In this contorted environment, where the real and unreal bumped shoulders, there now appeared a Carabinieri secret service agent called Antonio Labruna. He devoted his professional life to disinfecting the Carabinieri SID special investigations unit to frustrate neo-fascist infiltrators. He suddenly received a strange tip-off from a Vatican informant at the height of the crisis that Moro was being held at number 96, Via Gradoli, an apartment block in a well-to-do central district of the capital. It transpired that this building with its 26 apartments was owned by the state secret services. In the circumstances an especially interesting tenant was none other than Mario Moretti, reigning commandant of the Brigate Rosse, the man who was ultimately convicted for the killing of Moro. Co-incidence leans rather heavily. It is clearly of more than passing interest that the leader of Italy's notorious political bandits rented his flat in a block used by the secret services, at the peak of a state emergency attributed to Moretti himself. Moreover, there are strong claims that Moro actually was held in this same block at one point during captivity. The evidence accumulates that Moretti (the so-called second stage commander following the elimination of the original leadership) was 'steering' the Brigate into performing deeds favourable to the political machinations of the state, according to the classic precepts set out by the French terrorist mastermind, Yves Guerin-Serac.
---------------------------------------------------------
Magliana had one other significant advantage. It was scarcely a kilometre - 'the short distance' - from the location where Moro's body was found. The famous 'crisis resolution committee' also included SISMI director General Giuseppe Santovito, another close acolyte of Licio Gelli and a member of P2. Santovito's fingerprints were found on many events during the years of lead, and the Moro affair was no exception. He was cynically nominated by Francesco Cossiga to represent the secret services on the crisis committee, and seems to have come to this task with curious diffidence, as though the outcome scarcely mattered. He mentioned almost in passing that Francesco Fonti, a prominent functionary (and future pentito) of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, informed him where Moro was held and by whom. Fonti named the Banda della Magliana. They had kidnapped Moro and were holding him awaiting further orders. Fonti said that he knew this because of the intimate fraternity between the 'Ndrangheta and the Banda. Santovito casually took the information to the crisis committee, where he was told to keep it to himself because 'the politicians had changed their minds.' It was a classic example of capolavoro, the Italian expression for a masterpiece of sublime deception.

This is from Chapter Two. So far, I've only read up to Chapter Three. When I finish, I'll be sure to post a book review in that forum.

[Sounder]

The evidence accumulates that Moretti (the so-called second stage commander following the elimination of the original leadership) was 'steering' the Brigate into performing deeds favourable to the political machinations of the state, according to the classic precepts set out by the French terrorist mastermind, Yves Guerin-Serac.

So where do terrorists get their support from? Same as it ever was.

And why, dear Lord, do they do it, despite the high price often paid.

The nihilistic lifestyle does have its attractions, one must suppose.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The evidence accumulates that Moretti (the so-called second stage commander following the elimination of the original leadership) was 'steering' the Brigate into performing deeds favourable to the political machinations of the state, according to the classic precepts set out by the French terrorist mastermind, Yves Guerin-Serac.

So where do terrorists get their support from? Same as it ever was.

And why, dear Lord, do they do it, despite the high price often paid.

The nihilistic lifestyle does have its attractions, one must suppose.

Why indeed. What a pathetic scary situation, just trying to put myself in the shoes of the first stage leadership: you really believe in your cause, you really believe in your tactics - illegal though they may be - then this cat with connections comes along and takes it to the next level. An ultimately suicidal level.

Now say they found out where Moretti got his real support. (Shouldn't be too difficult just walking around his neighborhood!) What do they do? Who do they turn to, to rectify the situation? They're already outcast and bandits. Now they're compromised outcasts and bandits - because they're owned and controlled by the very forces they declared war against. Those same forces control the media outlets that would ordinarily be used to get their message out.

At that point, there's nowhere to turn. Your movement is toast.

[American Dream]

Made me think of this:

We thought we could change something
We helped them win
We changed the slogans
We get hunted again
When you're the fighter
You're the politicians tool
When you're the fighter
You're everybody's fool

-Bruce Cockburn - Guerilla Betrayed (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZqZ1RC-4LI

What a pathetic scary situation, just trying to put myself in the shoes of the first stage leadership: you really believe in your cause, you really believe in your tactics - illegal though they may be - then this cat with connections comes along and takes it to the next level. An ultimately suicidal level.

Now say they found out where Moretti got his real support. (Shouldn't be too difficult just walking around his neighborhood!) What do they do? Who do they turn to, to rectify the situation? They're already outcast and bandits. Now they're compromised outcasts and bandits - because they're owned and controlled by the very forces they declared war against. Those same forces control the media outlets that would ordinarily be used to get their message out.

At that point, there's nowhere to turn. Your movement is toast.

[Sounder]

Sounder » Sat Mar 17, 2018 6:06 am wrote:

The evidence accumulates that Moretti (the so-called second stage commander following the elimination of the original leadership) was 'steering' the Brigate into performing deeds favourable to the political machinations of the state, according to the classic precepts set out by the French terrorist mastermind, Yves Guerin-Serac.



So where do terrorists get their support from? Same as it ever was.

And why, dear Lord, do they do it, despite the high price often paid.

The nihilistic lifestyle does have its attractions, one must suppose.

SRP wrote...
Why indeed. What a pathetic scary situation, just trying to put myself in the shoes of the first stage leadership: you really believe in your cause, you really believe in your tactics - illegal though they may be - then this cat with connections comes along and takes it to the next level. An ultimately suicidal level.

There is a vid of an interview with a woman who was banned from entry to Britain and Tommy Johnson, I think his name is; where he recounts his interactions with the govt., who try to pinch him in absurd ways to try to 'turn' him. One passing reflection was Tommy saying; they do this to the Muslims too.

Now say they found out where Moretti got his real support. (Shouldn't be too difficult just walking around his neighborhood!) What do they do? Who do they turn to, to rectify the situation? They're already outcast and bandits. Now they're compromised outcasts and bandits - because they're owned and controlled by the very forces they declared war against. Those same forces control the media outlets that would ordinarily be used to get their message out.

At that point, there's nowhere to turn. Your movement is toast.

But what I do not understand is how can the membership not see that what they propose to do can only help the right, and worse yet, the imperial powers?

Or to transfer to present day, how can people not recognize that unrestrained immigration can only increase support for the right-wing?

[DrEvil]

^^Off topic, but wut?! First off, no one is talking about unrestrained immigration, and second, it's perfectly possible to be for immigration and recognize that it increases support for the right wing. It's pretty damn obvious actually, and most people know it.

[Sounder]

Drop the word 'unrestrained' to make your point? And normal levels of immigration do not increase the right-wing, but unrestrained immigration certainly does.

We all support immigration and to try to bad jacket me this way is all to typical.

Pretty damn obvious there is a difference between immigration and unrestrained immigration.

[norton ash]

http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/vi ... ontext=nle

In 1978 Aldo Moro, who had been Prime Minister of Italy
and was the leader of the largest opposition party in that
country, was kidnapped after all of his bodyguards were shot
dead. Members of the Italian security forces suggested to the
General in charge that they torture one of the suspects they
had in custody, knowing that this suspect probably knew
where the terrorists were holding Moro. The General replied
‘Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive
the introduction of torture.’

-- General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who led the campaign of the Carabinieri national police against the Red Brigades and who captured their top leadership in 1974.

The introduction of torture has made America sick and is a threat to its survival.

Gina Haspel should be arrested – not put in charge of the CIA

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ent-warren

[DrEvil]

Drop the word 'unrestrained' to make your point? And normal levels of immigration do not increase the right-wing, but unrestrained immigration certainly does.

We all support immigration and to try to bad jacket me this way is all to typical.

Pretty damn obvious there is a difference between immigration and unrestrained immigration.

The only thing I took issue with was your claim that no one recognizes that unrestrained immigration leads to more right wing sentiment. Your opinions on immigration in general are none of my concern, and I honestly couldn't care less.