Chapter 1- The United States and the Italian right-wing in historical

context

“Neo-fascists are a strong bulwark against communism. Since the United States does
not want Bolshevism to take hold in Italy, it should precisely for this reason open a
negotiation with the neo-fascists to support them. In return, the United States would
be able to control the political situation by leaning on the neo-fascists”. 1

Intro
This thesis’s subject has a well-defined temporal limitation, that is the five-year
period of the Nixon Administration. The first chapter goes back in time to the last
days of World War II to trace the origins of the relationship between the US and the
Italian right-wing during the Nixon years. The aim of this chapter is to provide a
contextualisation and historical background to this thesis. Placing the topic of this
thesis in a broader historical context will clarify what led to the destabilization of the
Italian politics and society between 1969 and 1974. In this regard, this chapter will
explain how the first contacts between the Italian right-wing and US intelligence
occurred and how they evolved before Nixon's arrival in the White House.
The intertwined relations between the United States and the Italian right-wing are
part of a context of violent internal political conflict in Italy that has its roots in the
civil war fought between Fascists and anti-Fascists from 1943 to 1945. The US
policymakers wished that the new Italian political class arose after the World War II
guaranteed the stability they deemed necessary in Italy. The problem arose from the
fact that the strongest and most numerous political groups that emerged from the war
of liberation against Nazi-fascism were the Communists. This reality was an
objective vulnus in the new geopolitical scenario that arose in the spring of 1945,
which saw Italy as a borderland in the division of the world decreed in Yalta.

1
Secret OSS report by General William Quinn, director of the Strategic Services Unit, 10 April 1946, National
Archives Records Administration, Record Group 226, Entry 108-A, Box 272
 The fact that the Communists and Socialists arrogated themselves the right to
build the new Italy, resurrected the red scare that had hung over between 1919 and
1922 facilitating the advent of fascism. Moreover, compared to twenty-five years
earlier, communism was no longer an internal business involving single countries, but
a global issue. The Soviet Union was, along with the United States, the great winner
of World War II, and both had found in the victorious outcome of the conflict their
affirmation as major imperial powers, with the firm intention of maintaining the
acquired status. The Italian Communists, for their part, after having emerged as a
party from a split from the Socialist Party in 1921, had begun to act immediately as
Soviet Union’s agents, receiving fundamental political and financial support at the
time of the civil war. Thanks to this support, the Italian Communists had established
themselves as the most important Italian political force at the end of World War II
and made no secret of being a fifth Soviet column in Italy.
From the American perspective it had become inevitable to seek in the
conservative front an ally of equal strength that would act as a counterweight to the
Communists. Among the institutional parties, this subject was identified in the
Christian Democrats. However, the new climate of the Cold War suggested the US
government that opposition to the Communists in sensitive countries such as Italy
should also be pursued through the use of covert operations. To carry out clandestine
actions against the Communists, the Office of Strategic Services deemed it would be
a good device to use the veterans of the Italian Social Republic. The Fascists, for their
part, far from resigning themselves to defeat, were animated by a revanchism that led
them to reject and fight the status quo that arose in Italy after the end of World War
II. Thus, two former enemies at war until a few months earlier spontaneously found
themselves on the same side of the barricade for almost the entire duration of the
Cold War. That was the premise to the events that took place in Italy in the 1960s and
the 1970s
First contacts
On 26 April 1945, the infantry marine division of the Italian Social Republic, Decima
Mas, formally surrendered to a delegation of the Corpo Volontari della Libertà, the
unified command structure of the Italian Resistance during the World War II. Right
after, the commander of the Decima Mas Junio Valerio Borghese took refuge in an
apartment, where he remained hidden until 9 May. On that date, the Office of
Strategic Service (OSS) officer James Jesus Angleton, who at that time was the X-2
Italian section head, joined him. Aware of being in a race against time to secure the
collaboration of a useful ally in the fight against the Communist enemy, Angleton
explained to Borghese that his capture by the left-wing partisans was imminent. The
only way he could escape a certain death sentence was to follow them to Rome.
Borghese agreed, and Angleton dressed him up in an American uniform and drove
him from Milan to Rome, offering him a fair trial, in return for his collaboration in
the fight against the Communists.2
Angleton's rescue of General Borghese fits into the historical context of the
nascent Cold War. The OSS’s aim was to delay the prosecution of Borghese by the
Italian justice, in order to make a serene and compliant evaluation of an ordinary
court possible. It was, therefore, necessary to keep Borghese in safe Allied hands
while waiting for the excitement aroused by the civil war to subside, so that a new
season-the fight against Communism-could be inaugurated. Hence Angleton's
recommendation to the US Army high commands to rely on Borghese, since his
military expertise would be of great interest for the purposes of naval espionage. 3
That was the first real step in the collaboration between the former Fascist
troopers and the US armed forces and intelligence. As Nicola Tranfaglia wrote, the
Cold War began in Italy at the same time as the fighting in World War II ceased on
2
Jack Green and Alessandro Massignani, The Black Prince and the Sea Devils: The Story of Valerio Borghese and the
Elite Units of the Decima Mas. (Boston, 2009), 183

3
Letter from Angleton to col. Nicols, 14 July 1945, National Archives Records Administration, Oss, Record Group
226, e. 108 A, Box 260
the Italian front. At that point, the OSS managed to persuade a large portion of the
Italian Social Republic's soldiers to go to the other side of the barricade and join
forces with the Americans to carry out covert actions against left-wing militants and
trade unionists.4
Soon after arriving in Rome, the British military police took Borghese into
custody, holding him until October 1945, when they handed him over to the Italian
authorities. On 15 October 1947, his trial for war crimes and Decima Mas
collaboration with the Nazi occupation began. On 17 February 1949, the court of
Rome sentenced Borghese to twelve years. At the same time, the court decreed his
release, as nine years were immediately pardoned by virtue of Borghese’s brave
actions during his previous service in the Italian Navy. 5 After returning to being a free
citizen, Borghese threw himself into the political activity by joining the Italian Social
Movement and becoming president of the party in 1951. Twenty years later, his
political activity turned into subversion against democracy.
Angleton was not the only American intelligence officer engaged in establishing
relationships with veterans of the Social Republic. Counterintelligence Corps agents
Leo Pagnota and Joseph Luongo were also very active in identifying former Fascists
with whom to form an allied anti-Communist front after the end of the war. Among
the personalities they contacted, there were two former soldiers of the Decima Mas,
Sergio Minetto and Lino Franco, with whom they created an information network in
the north-east of Italy called "Siegfried Group". Such groups, in the 1960s, recruited
the New Order’s militants to start the terrorist season with the Piazza Fontana
bombing.
Joseph Luongo also co-opted SS major Karl Haas, responsible along with Erich
Priebke for the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine on 24 March 1944. Haas himself said
that, after having fled to Austria at the end of the war to escape the Italian justice
system, the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) recruited him. After making him follow
a refresher course, in 1947 the CIC made Haas return clandestinely to Italy with the
4
Nicola Tranfaglia, Come nasce la Repubblica. La mafia, il Vaticano e il neofascismo nei documenti americani e
italiani 1943-1947 (Milan, 2004), 41-42
5
Richard Bosworth, The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (New York, 2009), 593
task of carrying out information activities on the Communist Party and of
coordinating with the nascent Italian Social Movement.6
Simultaneously, the Americans had also got in touch with Pino Romualdi, deputy
secretary of the Republican Fascist Party in the Italian Social Republic. In the frantic
hours between 25 and 26 April 1945, the Social Republic’s armed forces and
government authorities abandoned Milan starting to wander along Como Lake. In the
morning of 26 April 1945, Romualdi remained in the lake city along with five
thousand Fascist troopers at his command waiting for two emissaries from
Switzerland with whom to negotiate his surrender. They were the frigate commander
of the Italian Royal Navy Giovanni Dessì and Dr. Salvatore Guastoni, member of the
Information Service of the Italian Navy but direct employee of the OSS. The
surrender agreements were stipulated the same evening, and simultaneously both the
German SS and the Black Brigades (the most ideological armed body of the Italian
Social Republic) on the other, surrendered.7 Even if there is no evidence, the speed
and the contemporaneity of the events make it likely that the negotiations had already
been in an advanced stage for many months unbeknown to Mussolini and Hitler.
Certainly, it can not be a coincidence that both Pino Romualdi and the head of the SS
in Italy Karl Wolff received favorable treatment in the post-war period. Suffice it to
say that Wolff escaped the Nuremberg trial thanks to the interest of Allen Dulles,
who at the time was the head of the OSS in Europe. 8 It is easy to understand how, in a
new context that arose with the beginning of the Cold War, the usefulness of the
Nazi-Fascist’s military and intelligence expertise made their crimes condoned.
Romualdi was also the founder of the Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria, an anti-
Communist armed group formed by former soldiers of the Italian Social Republic
that enjoyed Us support. This example led Gianni Flamini to believe that the United
States used Italy as a clandestine laboratory for the experimentation and
implementation of subversive and terrorist techniques, to be replicated in other

6
Gianni Cipriani, Lo stato invisibile (Milan, 2002),434-436
7
Franco Morini, “Nome: Msi-Paternità: SIM”, Aurora, n. 44, (November-December 1997), 8-13
8
Elisabetta Ricciardi, Vita sotto le armi, vita clandestina. Cronaca e silenzio nei diari di un ufficiale (1940-1943)
(Florence, 2010), 77
countries such as Chile.9 Rornualdi drew up the programmatic manifesto of the Italian
anti-Bolshevik Front, composed entirely of clandestine neo-Fascist units, and
delivered it to Angleton. This message stated that neo-Fascists and Americans had to
unite for a common action against Communism, "hotbed of social infection for
Europe and the world."10
At this point, some clarifications may be useful. The interactions with the Social
Republic veterans were held by those OSS agents who reported directly to James
Jesus Angleton as head of counterespionage in Italy. It is obvious that Angleton did
not act of his own accord. Although no official documents were found, it appears
clear that he acted on input from Allen Dulles. One of the first Dulles’s statement
after taking office as head of the European branch of the OSS on 12 November 1942,
was "We're fighting the wrong enemy", in reference to the Nazi-Fascists. It is obvious
that the meaning of this statement reflected Dulles' belief that the Soviets posed a far
greater threat to the United States and the stability of the West Christians. 11 The
Nazis, as he explained, were pro-capitalist Aryan its resolute anti-capitalism, whereas
the true enemy was the godless Communism.12
However, immediately after the end of the war, Nazi-Fascism was definitively
buried without chance of resurrection, and the new threat was Communism. In the
years immediately following the end of World War II, the United States feared that
an electoral victory of the Socialists and Communists in Italy, and their seizure of
power, could have a domino effect on the rest of Western Europe. With tensions
between East and West already high, such a perspective was unacceptable in the
American political circles. James Jesus Angleton could easily use his position as
number one of the American secret services in Italy to pass the message that the ex-
Fascists were reliable and determined people in the fight against communism. Thus,

9
Ricciardi, Vita sotto le armi, vita clandestina. Cronaca e silenzio nei diari di un ufficiale (1940-1943), 189
10
Tranfaglia, Come nasce la Repubblica, 80-86
11
Lee Martin, The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spy-monsters to Today’s Neo Nazi Groups
and Right-Wing Extremists (New York, 2011), 18-19
12
Gabriiel Rockhill, “The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It”, (16 October 2020),
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/16/the-u-s-did-not-defeat-fascism-in-wwii-it-discretely-internationalized-it/,
the first brick for the construction of relations between the United States and the
Italian right was laid.
Not surprisingly, in the Italian context, the American officer reported to his
superiors that Borghese and his men were elements of great interest in their long-term
activities against communism.13 The Decima Mas commandos were reached and
arrested by the OSS and placed at the disposal of the Allied armies from 10 May
1945. At the time, the OSS reported that the former troopers of the Decima Mas
promoted a program that appealed to different sectors of Italian society.14 Such
activities were clearly aimed at preventing the Communists and the Socialists, in the
wake of the strength acquired in the 1943-1945 civil war, from governing Italy. To
achieve this goal, a serious event to the detriment of the leftist militants had to take
place. The aim was to provoke a reaction by the left-wing and a counter-reaction by
the military authorities, thus lighting the fire. A fact that occurred in Portella della
Ginestra, near Palermo, on 1 May 1947, when an attack on the crowd that gathered to
celebrate the May Day caused eleven dead and twenty-seven wounded. The
perpetrators of the massacre committed in Portella della Ginestra were members of
Salvatore Giuliano's mafia gang. However, the historian Giuseppe Casarrubea and the
former Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott highlighted the American and the Decima
Mas veterans’s responsibilities.
That day, about two thousand workers from the province of Palermo had gathered
in Portella della Ginestra not only to celebrate the Labor Day, but also to demonstrate
against landownership in favor of the occupation of uncultivated lands. It was also
the celebration of the recent victory of the People's Bloc, the alliance between
Socialists and Communists in the Sicilian regional elections, held on 20 April of that
year, in which it had prevailed with 32% of the votes. The secretary of the local
branch of the Socialist Party had been speaking for a few minutes when the shooting
13
AMDuemila, "Il filo nero dello stragismo, da Portella della Ginestra all'omicidio di Mattarella", (9 June 2018),
http://www.antimafiaduemila.com/home/primo- piano/70641- il - filo - nero - dello - stragismo - da - portella - della -
ginestra -all’omicidio - mattarella.html
14
OSS Note, Roundup of the Decima Mas clandestine movement in Bologna and Modena, 16 June 1945, National
Archives Records Administration, Record Group 225, Series 174, Box 36, Folder 253
began. The toll was eleven dead (eight adults and three children) and twenty-seven
wounded, some of whom later died.15
This event occurred with the involvement of the former Fascist soldiers of the
Social Republic and the OSS. A document that Casarrubea found in the US National
Archives describes the equipment supplied by the OSS agents. According to the
document, such equipment would cause a whistle lasting two and a half to three and a
half seconds, after which the device would explode like a large firecracker. 16 It was
exactly the kind of noise that the survivors of the massacre heard. 17 The point is, only
the American intelligence services had that kind of devices. The Decima Mas and
some Fascist clandestine groups were supplied with different explosives that, unlike
the "simulator", were lethal. Moreover, according to numerous reports from witnesses
and survivors, the attackers used grenade launcher that neither Salvatore Giuliano's
men nor any other criminal gang ever deployed. On the contrary, such military
equipment were supplied by the Decima Mas together with other weapons, such as
the 1891 muskets and the Breda Model 30 machine gun. 18 To complete these details,
Dale Scott revealed that the former OSS head William Donovan financed the Portella
della Ginestra massacre through his own firm, the World Commerce Corporation. 19
The subversive maneuvers that led to Portella della Ginestra can thus be
considered the beginning of a political and psychological operation that culminated in
the five-year period 1969-74, but that lasted throughout the Cold War. Since the
months preceding the massacre of Portella della Ginestra, Salvatore Giuliano had
frequent contacts with American emissaries, who would instruct him to carry out
attacks on the main exponents of the Communist Party in Sicily. In this regard,
Angleton recruited a dozen men among the ranks of the Decima Mas to land in
Palermo a few days before 1 May 1947.20 This was a plan that, however, did not yield
15
John Dickie, Cosa Nostra. A history of the Sicilian Mafia (London, 2004), 263-268
16
NARA, RG.226, series 210, box 171. The manual was distributed to OSS agents (title: Special weapons, devices,
equipment, February 1945, classified "confidential"), in Giuseppe Casarrubbea, Storia segreta della Sicilia. Dallo
sbarco alleato a Portella della Ginestra, (Milan, 2005), 271
17
Casarrubbea, Storia segreta della Sicilia, 270
18
Casarrubbea, Storia segreta della Sicilia, 258
19
Peter Dale Scott, “Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection”, (6 September 2008),
https://www.globalresearch.ca/deep-events-and-the-cia-s-global-drug-connection/10095
20
Casarrubbea, Storia segreta della Sicilia, 258
the desired results. Palmiro Togliatti and Pietro Nenni, intuiting the real matrix of the
massacre and the political aims that underpinned it, withheld their militants from
reacting to the provocation. In fact, a reaction from the Socialists and the
Communists would have been the trigger to carry out a reactionary coup. Therefore,
the organizers of the Portella della Ginestra attack, lacking the maximum objective,
had to settle for the minimum one, with the expulsion of the Communist and the
Socialist parties from the fourth government of Alcide De Gasperi that took office on
31 May of the same year. 21 The new government included for the first-time right-
wing ministers: Luigi Einaudi, from the Italian Liberal Party, at the Ministry of
Finance, and Randolfo Pacciardi as deputy Prime Ministers. The latter politician, who
was the head of the right-wing faction of the center-left Italian Republican Party, will
often appear in the course of this research, as he played a crucial role in plots that
took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, the covert operations in the context of the clandestine war on the Italian
left-wing were not over. Casarrubea found a British document dated 11 August 1947,
entitled “Italian far-right movement: American assistance, paragraph Visit of an
American representative”. According to this document, the former head of the Allied
Military Government of Occupied Territories, Colonel Charles Poletti, arrived in
Italy in June 1947 on a special mission on behalf of the American government.
During the mission, he promised he would supply weapons and financial support to
the anti-Communists, on condition that the far-right movements in Italy be placed
under a unified command.22
Casarrubea reconstructed the command chain made of US officers and the anti-
Communist armed groups created in 1946-47: at the top of the pyramid, the Allied
Military Government (in the persons of Colonel Charles Poletti, Brigadier Stanlake
Swinton Lee and the Belgian presbyter and OSS agent Felix Morlion), and at the
bottom the agents of the various American secret services - OSS, SSU, CIC - based in
21
Angelo La Bella and Rosa Mecarolo, Portella della Ginestra: il massacro che ha cambiato la storia d'Italia (Rome,
2003), 52
22
Giuseppe Casarrubea and Mario Cereghino, Stati Uniti eversione nera e guerra al comunismo in Italia (1943-1947),
(Palermo, 2007), 23
Via Sicilia 159 in Rome (in the persons of James Jesus Angleton, Philip Corso, Mike
Stern, ten. Huppert, Federico Umberto D 'Amato, just to mention a few, and which
will be mentioned again in the continuation of this thesis); reporting to this summit,
the Italian generals who created the Italian Liberation Army, the Italian Anti-
Bolshevik Front (formed by the Esercito Clandestino Anticomunista, the Fasci di
Azione Rivoluzionaria and the Squadre di Azione Mussolini) and Salvatore Giuliano’s
gang.23 From this sort of organizational chart, it is possible to deduce how the senior
US intelligence and military officers stationed in Italy created an anti-Communist
armed front under their command, made up of the staunchest opponents of the Italian
left-wing, without quibbling about ideological background and criminal record. Such
a pattern was re-proposed between the 1960s and the 1970s.
After reviewing these Italian, US and British intelligence reports, it is possible to
draw some conclusions. The popular following and the moral prestige that especially
the Communists had gained with the resistance against Nazi-fascism seemed too high
to reasonably hope that the elector’s votes would be sufficient to ward off the danger
of a red government. That is why a part of the American political and military
apparatus, identifiable mainly in the OSS, believed that it was worth making a "deal
with the devil". In other words, that it was necessary to enter into a collaboration
agreement with the old Nazi and Fascist enemies in order to “defend freedom”. This
pact was aimed at banning the Italian Communist Party through operations such as
the Sicilian massacres of the spring of 1947. That was thought up as the triggering of
a bomb that would have led to popular reaction and the consequent armed response
led by American intelligence, with neo-Fascist armed groups engaged as enforcers.
The reasons why this project (which probably would have led to a royalist coup) did
not go through are unknown. It is likely that, in the end, the American and Italian
perpetrators were satisfied with the ousting of the Socialists and Communists from
the De Gasperi’s government, and with the guarantee that they would never again be
part of it. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the cool head the
left-wing militants kept after Portella della Ginestra contributed to thwarting such
23
Casarrubbbea and Cereghino, Stati Uniti eversione nera e guerra al comunismo in Italia (1943-1947). 43-46
subversive plans. The fact remains that the massacre of 1 May 1947 represented a
model for the attacks carried out between 1969 and 1974.

Development of US interference
In 1948 the first democratic elections took place in Italy after the fall of fascism.
There are numerous historical works on American interference in these elections to
ensure the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Popular Front coalition made
up of Communists and Socialists.24 Likewise, many studies have highlighted how the
1948 Italian elections represented the first CIA's covert actions.25
The very origins of the CIA offer hints. The National Security Act enacted on 26
July 1947 established the CIA tasked function to perform such other functions and
duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC would from
time to time direct.26 Some scholars pointed out that the Act recognized an acceptance
of the necessity to engage in covert action. 27 Furthermore, the vagueness of this
statement gave carte blanche to the CIA to act in the ways it deemed most
appropriate.
The formalization of the CIA functions regarding covert operations occurred with
the directive of the National Security Council 10/2 of 18 June 1948. It determined
that, in the interests of world peace and US national security covert operations must

24
Some of the most important works are as follows:
- Roberto Faenza and Marco Fini, Gli americani in Italia (Milan, 1976)
- Ronald Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943-1953: A study of Cold War Politics (Stanford,
1989)
- Timothy Smith, The United States, Italy and NATO, 1947-52 (London, 1991),
- James E. Miller, “Taking Off the Gloves: The United States and the Italian Elections of 1948, Diplomatic
History, Vol. 7, N. 1, (1983), 35-55
- Mario Del Pero, “Gli Stati Uniti e la "Guerra psicologica" in Italia (1948-56)”, Studi Storici, Year 39, N. 4,
(Oct-Dec. 1998), 953-988
- Silvio Pons, “Stalin, Togliatti, and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe”, Journal of Cold War Studies,
Volume 3, Number 2, (2002), 3-27
25
See: Mario Del Pero, “Cia e covert operation nella politica estera americana del secondo dopoguerra”, Italia
Contemporanea, 205, (1996), 691-712; James Callanan, Covert Action in the Cold War: US Policy, Intelligence and
CIA Operations, (London, 2020); Alessandro Brogi, Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States
and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill, 2011); Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of
Cold War: Waging Political Warfare 1945-1950, (Cambridge, 2016)
26
United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Book IV, Report N. 94-775 (Washington, 1976), 15.
27
M.E. Bowman. "Secrets in Plain View: Covert Action the US. Way", International Law Studies, Volume 72: Law of
Military Operations, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1470&context=ils, 1998
supplement the US Government overt foreign activities. A passage of this directive
claimed that the US Government would conduct or sponsor the covert operations
against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states. The
covert operations were planned and executed in a way that any US Government
responsibility for them would not be evident to unauthorized persons. If uncovered,
the US Government could plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.28
The National Security Council admitted in the early months of its existence that
the US Government would act in such a way that it would not be possible to detect its
support for friendly governments or groups. As regards the specific Italian case, this
is exactly what it attempted to do in the 1960s and 1970s. Through the cover of
"friendly groups" such as various right-wing organizations and the Christian
Democratic governments, the CIA effectively conducted covert operations against the
Communist Party and the extra-parliamentary left-wing.
It is, therefore, possible that by intervening in the 1948 elections, the CIA tested
itself to evaluate its own level of efficiency and validity. The success of this operation
encouraged the United States to repeat the experiment elsewhere in the world, and
established Italy's political role as a laboratory for the CIA's covert operations.
Having averted, at least temporarily, the risk that the Communists would come to
power, Italy could be admitted to the Western assembly officially born with the
creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. What should be pointed out are
some details regarding Italy’s admission, as they explain the subsequent thirty years
of Italian history and a significant part of the history of the Cold War as a whole.
With the armistice signed between Italy and the Anglo-American on 8 September
1943, and after King Vittorio Emanuele III and Piero Badoglio fled to Brindisi to
escape Nazi vengeance, the Italian state had collapsed. Italy had become a no-man's
land with no state authority, and the Italian secret services had effectively ceased all
activities. The OSS filled this void and acted as an intelligence service also on behalf
of what remained of the Italian state confined to southern Italy. In the years
28
National Security Council Directive 10/2 on Office of Special Projects, FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED
STATES, 1945–1950, EMERGENCE OF THE INTELLIGENCE ESTABLISHMENT, Washington, 18 June 1948,
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292
immediately following the end of World War II, the Americans prevented Italy from
having its own autonomous intelligence, preferring to use agents who did not come
from the partisan ranks as their informants. Only from 1947 did the General Staff of
the Italian Armed Forces resume using its information agency. Nevertheless, the
United States persisted in preventing the reconstruction of a genuine Italian secret
service, until the victory of the anti-Communist front in the 18 April 1948 elections. 29
After the consolidation of the Christian Democrat power, the United States
allowed Italy to set up its own intelligence system. On 30 March 1949, the Italian
defense minister Randolfo Pacciardi issued an internal circular ordering the creation
of SIFAR, the first real Italian intelligence in the democratic era. Three days earlier,
on 27 March 1949, the Italian parliament had voted in favor of Italy joining the North
Atlantic Treaty, signed on 4 April 1949. Exactly one month later, on 4 May 1949,
Italy became part of the Atlantic Alliance. However, there were some NATO
agreements which compelled the Italian secret services to pass news and receive
instructions from a special CIA center which depended directly on the presidency of
the United States.30 These agreements’ clauses are still covered by NATO secrets, so
it is not possible to know their details, nor what precise directives the CIA may have
given to Italian intelligence so that it acted alongside the far-right during the strategy
of tension.31
Furthermore, NATO assigned the Carabinieri the task of Atlantic security police. 32
This detail is important, because during the terrorist season, the Italian military police
was the armed force most colluded with the subversive right-wing, mainly in
sidetracking the inquiries on its terrorist attacks. 33 Given its subordination to NATO,
it can be deduced that the Italian military police acted in accordance with the Atlantic
directives. In retrospect, it is possible to state that these agreements were the ground

29
Giuseppe De Lutiis, Storia dei servizi segreti in Italia (Rome, 1984), 138
30
Massimo Caprara, “I sette diavoli custodi. La mappa dei servizi segreti in Italia”, Il Mondo, Anno XXVI, N. 25, (20
June 1974)
31
Gianni Flamini, Il partito del golpe. Le strategie della tensione e del terrore dal primo centrosinistra organico al
sequestro Moro, Volume I, (Ferrara, 1981), 9
32
VVAA, Le istituzioni militari e l’ordinamento costituzionale (Rome, 1974), p. 54
33
G. Schaerf et al. Vent’anni di violenza politica in Italia (Rome, 1988)
the collaboration between the Italian and American intelligence agencies, on the one
hand, and the Italian subversive right, on the other, was based on.
The Italian intelligence organization can be described as follows. The military
secret service, from 1949 to 1966 called Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate
(SIFAR), and that in 1966 changed its name into Servizio Informazioni Difesa (SID),
was closely linked and subordinated to the CIA and the NATO command in Verona. 34
The civil secret service was represented by the Ufficio Affari Riservati (in English:
Office for Reserved Affairs) of the Ministry of the Interior, founded in 1948 and
subordinated to the P2 Masonic lodge and the Atlantic Pact Security Office. The
Italian secret services, both military and civilian, never acted without American
approval. As former Minister of Defence and of Interior Affairs, Paolo Taviani, said,
the CIA and the US Embassy in Rome commanded and financed the Italian secret
services.35 This means that US political and military higher spheres approved the
involvement of Italian intelligence in terrorism acts that will be examined in the next
chapters. From this reorganization of the security systems, it can be deduced how, at
the onset of the Cold War, the United States made sure of being able to use the Italian
state apparatuses in the fight against the Communist Party.
With the reorganization of the Italian security services, the US Government was
able to influence more broadly Italy’s domestic affairs. The most authoritative
confirmation of American interference in Italian domestic affairs to undermine the
Communist Party came from William Colby’s autobiography Honorable men. My
life with the CIA. CIA’s director from 4 September 1973 to 30 January 1976 and
station chief in Rome from 1953 to 1958, Colby introduced the chapter "Covert
Politics in Italy" with the following quote: "My job, simply put, was to prevent Italy
from being taken over by the Communists, and thus prevent the NATO military
defences from being circumvented by a subversive fifth column, the Italian
Communist Party".36

34
Daniele Ganser, “The ghost of Machiavelli. An approach to operation Gladio and terrorism in Cold War Italy”,
Crime, Law and Social Change, Vol. 45, N.2, (March 2006), 111-154
35
William Scobie, “Stay Behind Units”, The Observer, (18 November 1990)
36
William Colby, Honorable men. My life with the CIA (London, 1978), 109
 This statement would be enough to clarify the American policy towards Italy (and,
perhaps, the entire American foreign policy) during the Cold War. In the following
pages, Colby clarified two aspects he deemed essential. The first is that the CIA
indeed interfered in Italy throughout the Cold War, and that interfering in the internal
affairs of sovereign countries is illegal and immoral, but that it was done for a good
purpose. In fact, it was a question of giving support to the democratic parties so that
they could face the subversive policy pursued by the Italian Communist Party with
Soviet support, and thus guarantee the security of the United States itself and its
Atlantic allies. In this regard, it is worth quoting an interesting passage: "This
framework cannot justify every act of political interference by CIA since 1947, but it
certainly does in the case of Italy in the 1950s".37
What makes this passage interesting is, above all, the temporal context of the
publication of Colby's autobiography. This book was published in 1978, when the
echo of the revelations that emerged from the Pike and Church committees’ work on
the CIA operations was still ringing loud. One gets the feeling that, not being able to
deny certain crimes the CIA committed over the years, and to justify them, Colby
wanted to shift the responsibility to others to defend what he alleged being the
goodness of his work. In other words, the feeling is that Colby wanted to carry out
both an act of personal self-defence and a political operation in support of the
worldwide CIA’s anti-Communist policy, pinning its excesses and deviations on a
few bad seeds. It can be deduced, following Colby's narration, that the CIA had
exercised "good" interference with Italy, driven by altruistic intentions towards the
Italian people, during the 1950s, and that such interference became “deleterious" in
the following years. For these reasons, his narration must be taken with due caution,
although it nonetheless deserves attention.
Another passage worthy of mentioning is the one in which Colby argued that the
operation's primary purpose was to provide support to the centrist parties, without
resorting to bribes and dirty tricks, since the CIA's stand was for a democratic Italy.
In support of this alleged good intention, Colby wrote: "What's more, the very
37
Colby, Honorable men, 114
deliberate and conscious policy was made both in Washington and in Rome that no
help of any kind go to the Neo-Fascists".38
What can be added to this last passage is that one of the discoveries by the Pike
Committee was the funding of the Neo-Fascists given in 1972 at the request of the
then US ambassador in Rome Graham Martin. It is, therefore, a further confirmation
of the political intent of Colby's autobiography, aimed at distinguishing the
responsibilities of single individuals belonging to the American intelligence and
diplomatic circles from the policy that the US Government pursued. A clear and
humanly understandable intent, that nevertheless confirms that various American
state apparatuses have resorted to dirty tricks and have compromised with subversive
anti-democratic groups, albeit for limited periods.

Birth of the extra parliamentarian right-wing: New Order and National

Vanguard
The most important Italian far-right group in the post-war was New Order. Its genesis
traces back to 1 January 1948, when two Italian Social Republic veterans, Enzo Erra
and Pino Rauti, founded the magazine La Sfida, official journal of the Italian Social
Movement’s youth organization. One of the collaborators of the magazine, the
esotericist Massimo Scaligero, introduced the work and thought of Julius Evola to the
young editors. Evola's vision of the world, and his influence in the history of post
fascism, has already been mentioned in the introduction. Suffice it to say that Evola,
who became a collaborator of the same magazine starting from 1949, propagated his
ideas based on the rejection of modernity and progress and on the total aversion of
the democracy’s principles.
Evola's thought is based on the concept of tradition, depicted as adherence to a
warrior and rigid lifestyle, made up of self-discipline, hardness, sacrifice,
spiritualism, heroism, hierarchy and hatred towards all that is material, economic and
bourgeois. Rauti himself said to journalist Nicola Rao that Evola convinced them that
38
Colby, Honorable men, 115
Fascism was a cosmic event that was part of a historical continuity. Regimes go out
of fashion like clothes, but the conception of the world they convey remains the
same. These concepts had provided the young Fascist veterans, left disoriented after
the collapse of Fascism, a reason to keep living and continuing their political battle 39
The debate on Evola's moral responsibilities in right-wing terrorism is still open.
However, there is no doubt that these theses constituted a first brick in the
construction of the far-right ideology in the post-war period. Evola suggested that an
internal current within the Italian Social Movement, that would embody his thought
and influence the political action of the Italian right-wing, had to be created. This
faction, in Evola's mind, should have been a right-wing elite that used the party for
tactical and contingent purposes in order to create and train forces ready to intervene
in the event of a war against Communism.40 The disciples Enzo Erra and Pino Rauti
implemented Evola’s teachings. At the Italian Social Movement congress, held in
Viareggio from 9 to 11 January 1954, they created the New Order faction, with the
intention of translating the Evola’s ideas on a political level.
At the following congress of the Italian Social Movement, held in Milan from 24
to 26 November 1956, two factions faced each other: the conservative and pro-
Atlantic one, represented by Arturo Michelini, and the social-revolutionary one, anti-
American and anti-Soviet, represented by Giorgio Almirante. When the votes for the
seats in the central committee of the party were counted, Michelini's line-up prevailed
over Almirante’s. This outcome sanctioned the victory of the conservative faction
and the definitive transformation of the Italian Social Movement into a right-wing
party.41 In controversy with the alleged irregularities in the vote, the New Order and
the internal left-wing factions quit the Italian Social Movement. Afterwards, on 14
January 1957, Pino Rauti, along with other militants such as Paolo Signorelli and
Stefano Delle Chiaie (among the main characters of the 1969-74 terrorist season),

39
Nicola Rao, La Fiamma e la Celtica. Sessant’anni di neofascismo, da Salò ai centri sociali di destra (Milan, 2006),
52-53
40
Interview by Evola to Gianfranco De Turris, in L’Italiano, n. 11, (November 1971),
https://www.rigenerazionevola.it/intervista-a-julius-evola/
41
Rao, La Fiamma e la Celtica, 80-81
founded the Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo as a think tank far from any political and
electoral competition.42
After this digression on New Order’s origin, it is now time to analyse its relations
with the Italian and foreign security apparatuses. Aldo Giannuli, while postponing the
start of the relationships with the Italian and foreign secret services for a few years,
agrees that New Order soon began to act as an instrument in the hands of superior
forces. According to Giannuli, after three years of economic hardship and
irrelevance, New Order found a way to gain relevance in October 1959 by
participating in the neo-Nazi international network New European Order conference
held in Milan. On this occasion, the New Order leaders were able to establish
relations with other European far-right movements and to have the first connections
with foreign secret services, in the specific case the Egypt’s. Egyptian president
Gamal Abd-Al Nasser, indeed, had delegated his country's intelligence management
to former German army officers who fled to Egypt after World War II. The
ideological affinity with the Nazi officers recycled as Egyptian intelligence agents,
and Nasser's sympathies for New Order anti-Semitism, ensured that the far-right
group obtained funding for the sum of one million Lire at the time. Thanks to this
funding, New Order was able to start promoting its activities.
The second intelligence service New Order established relations with was the
Spanish one. Relations began in January 1962 with a letter that an officer serving at
the Zaragoza military academy sent to Pino Rauti. The Spanish officer requested
information about the activities in Italy of Spanish and Portuguese exiles against the
regimes led by Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar in exchange for a large loan. It
was from this moment that New Order turned itself into a dynamic movement, that
military and intelligence officers regularly invited to conferences and international
meetings abroad.43
Another interesting point is that relating to an ideological change in New Order.
Until the early 1960s, New Order followed a pro-European orientation, that yearned
42
Antonio Carioti, Gli orfani di Salò (Milan, 2008), 251
43
Aldo Giannuli, Storia di Ordine Nuovo (Sesto San Giovanni, Milan, 2017), 11-18
for the creation of a single huge European nation that would oppose both the United
States and the Soviet Union. In 1960, after the occurrence in Italy of a left-wing
uprising against the Fernando Tambroni’s government supported by the Italian Social
Movement, New Order felt the need to create a united front with America against the
common enemy.
Furthermore, at the international level, the process of decolonization of European
possessions in Africa had reached a climax. The anger at the loss of the European
primacy went along with the fear that the Communists might settle in the new
African states, and that the Soviet Union could become their guide and protector. In
the wake of these upheavals, the idea that the opposition between the West and
Communism was a clash between incompatible models of civilization, began to
spread in the far-right groups. It followed that the Communist parties in Western
countries were a foreign matter to surgically eradicate. The result of this new
approach was the switch from longing for a united Europe, based on the Fascist third
way perspective, to the defence of the West as a whole, therefore including the
United States. Inevitably, in order to defend the West, it was necessary to make a
common front with those conservative political circles that were ideologically
different from the historical Fascism and the neo-Fascism’s doctrine that arose after
1945. In this perspective, the far-right groups, starting with New Order, have ended
up accepting American hegemony and inserting themselves into secret NATO
bodies.44
Meanwhile, New Order adopted the terroristic ideology with the article by one of
the leading exponents, Clemente Graziani, entitled "The Revolutionary War" and
published on the think tank’s official journal in April 1963. In this article, Graziani
wrote that for the total conquest of the masses, the revolutionary war’s doctrine
provided for recourse to ruthless and indiscriminate forms of terrorism. It was a
matter, the article continued, of conditioning the crowds by acting on the main innate
reflex of fear. Terrorist activity of this type tends to exasperate the adversary to force
him into retaliatory actions that alienate the favour of the population. In what is
44
Giannuli, Storia di Ordine Nuovo, 81-88
perhaps the most interesting passage, Graziani wrote that, with these methods, the
French far-right terrorist group OAS managed to block the entire Islamic population
in its neighbourhoods in Algeria, and that it lacked the CIA’s support to achieve full
success. From this, Graziani concluded, “we understand that revolutionary action is
doomed to defeat if it is not inserted in a favourable situation in the international
politics.”45 It is evident that this article, in addition to being the manifesto of New
Order’s terrorist ideology, also reminded the need to insert in favourable international
circumstances and to gain American support with a view to war against the common
enemy.
New Order moved soon from theory to practice. Former general Vittorio Emanuele
Borsi of Parma said that in the mid 1960s, while he was chief of staff of the Italian
Third Army Corp, SIFAR informed him that New Order was preparing guerrilla
training plans in cooperation with NATO security services. General Borsi of Parma
described New Order as a typically American organization, with armaments and
radio equipment supplied by the NATO command in Verona and trained by US
instructors.46
From the subsequent investigations, the first judicial case involving New Order
also emerged. In May 1966, the Verona police arrested New Order militants Elio
Massagrande and Roberto Besutti for possession of weapons and explosives. During
interrogation at the police headquarters, Besutti revealed that the weapons and
explosives were supplied to New Order by Theodore Richards, a US army officer
serving at the NATO base in Verona. As the CIC agent Carlo Digilio revealed,
Theodore Richards escaped prosecution by bribing some magistrates.47
In the same years, the rapprochement between New Order and the American
Embassy’s staff in Rome also took place. According to the Italian intelligence, the
first contacts date back to the end of 1967, when Pino Rauti approached the press

45
Clemente Graziani, “La guerra rivoluzionaria”, Ordine Nuovo, Year IX, (April 1963), 73-80
46
Testimony by General Vittorio Emanuele Borsi at the Assizes Court in Venice, 30 December 1997, in Sentence -
order of the Civil and Criminal Court, Criminal Instruction Office of Venice on Argo 16, Legal Procedure n. 318/87A
47
Civil and Criminal Court of Milan, Hearing Office section 20, Sentence-Order of the investigating judge Guido
Salvini in the criminal proceeding on the Piazza Fontana massacre, N.9/92 General Register of Investigating Judge, 3
February 1998
officer of the US Embassy asking for financial support for the organisation's
magazine. The request was accepted, and the US Embassy began to pay 200,000 Lire
monthly check.48 These, essentially, were the first steps that New Order took, before
marking the Italian history in the second half of the twentieth century.
As for National Vanguard, it has a simpler, but no less important history. Its
founder, Stefano Delle Chiaie, had left the Italian Social Movement in 1956 by
joining the Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo. Soon after, he left New Order too, in
controversy with Pino Rauti's decision not to engage in politics and to limit the
group’s action only to intellectual activity. On 25 April 1960, deliberately on the
anniversary of the liberation from Nazi-Fascism, Delle Chiaie founded National
Vanguard. It became immediately infamous due to its marked propensity for
aggression against left-wing militants and intellectuals, as often happened with the
film director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. Another feature of this organization was
the absolute impunity it enjoyed, despite the considerable number of episodes of
violence its militants. The most tragic was the killing at the La Sapienza University in
Rome of the leftist student Paolo Rossi on 27 April 1966, whose perpetrators were
never brought to justice.
A significant example of friendly relations between the National Vanguard and the
law enforcement occurred in Rome on 10 December 1964, during the visit of the
Katanga’s separatist leader and puppet of the Western powers and CIA, Moise
Ciombé. That day, National-Vanguard militants joint the police in repressing protests
against Ciombé's visit. Several witnesses reported that National Vanguard’s militants
were equipped with the same sticks as the police to attack the demonstrators. 49
Since the 1960s, this kind of events has raised the suspicion, even among the
various right-wing movements, that National Vanguard had a privileged relationship
with the police and the interior ministry. There have been several confirmations in
this regard over the years. Questioned by the investigating judge Carlo Mastelloni on
15 May 1997, the former official of the Reserved Affairs Office Guglielmo Carlucci
48
Note by source “Mortilla”, 12 November 1970, in Gianni Flamini Lo stato invisibile Storia dello spionaggio in Italia
dal dopoguerra ad oggi (Milan, 2002), 392
49
Gianni Cipriani and Antonio Cipriani, Sovranità limitata. Storia dell’eversione Atlantica (Rome, 1991), 48
said that he witnessed meetings between his head, Federico Umberto D'Amato, and
Stefano Delle Chiaie. Judge Carlo Mastelloni summarized the deposition in these
terms: "Dr. Carlucci recalled that Delle Chiaie used to meet Dr. D'Amato both when
the official was deputy director and in the subsequent times in which he had assumed
the position of director".50
As the following chapters will show, National Vanguard played an important role
in the 1960s and 1970s terrorist attack and in the attempted Borghese coup. Delle
Chiaie, on his part, became one of the most famous right-wing extremists in the
world, courted and well paid by the Spanish and Latin American military regimes
eager to use his services in the war against Communism.51

Rise of the centre-left governments and opposition

In 1963, the centre-left governments’ season in Italy began. The first steps were
taken on November 1961, when the Christian Democratic party’s secretary Aldo
Moro publicly expressed himself in favour of the formation of a government with the
Socialist Party’s support. Arthur Schlesinger, John Fitzgerald Kennedy's adviser,
shared Moro’s stance, being convinced of the need to support, even financially, that
wing of the Italian Socialist Party that yearned for a loosening of ties with the
Communist Party. Initially, Schlesinger's intentions found obstacles within the
American Embassy in Italy and the State Department, still largely composed of
conservative officials. Nevertheless, in the Italian political elections held on 28 April
1963, the Italian Socialist Democratic Party and the Italian Socialist Party increased
their parliamentary representations respectively by eleven and three seats in the
Chamber of Deputies and by nine seats in the Senate. These results, combined with
the simultaneous replacement of officials at the State Department and the American
Embassy in Italy, removed all restrictions on Kennedy's freedom of action. The
meeting between Kennedy and Pietro Nenni, on the occasion of the US President’s
50
Criminal Court, Criminal Investigation Office of Venice, Sentence-order issued by investigative judge Carlo
MASTELLONI on Argo 16, Investigating Judge, details of act n. 318/87A Investigating Judge, 23 November 1998
51
See: Stuart Christie, Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, (London, 1984), 33-45
official visit to Italy on 1 July 1963, was the public confirmation of the US
Government position in favour of the establishment of a centre-left government. 52
A few days prior to his assassination, Kennedy communicated to the US Embassy
to Rome that the formation of a government including the Socialists had to be a top
priority.53 According to Leopoldo Nuti, the Kennedy Administration was convinced
that a centre-left government was the only solution that could guarantee
parliamentary stability and compete effectively with the propaganda of the Italian
Communist Party.54 Furthermore, the Kennedy Administration intended to pursue the
path of a progressive anti-Communism, different from the purely conservative type of
the previous decade. This kind of anti-Communist left-wing was aimed at promoting
economic development and democratization in order to increasingly reduce the room
for manoeuvre for the communists.55 Thus, on 5 December 1963, Aldo Moro formed
the first centre-left government in Italy.
A brief reflection is required to better understand why the formation of the centre-
left coalition in Italy has an important place in the Cold War history. The US
administrations that followed one another from 1945 to 1989 took various stands on
this issue. The Republicans Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon sharply opposed
the centre-left governments, as they believed that they would act as trojans horse for
the coming to power of the communists. The Democrats John Fitzgerald Kennedy
and Lyndon Johnson, on the contrary, encouraged the distribution of ministerial posts
to the Socialists. Especially the Kennedy Administration thought that encouraging a
transformation of the Socialist Party into a governmental political force would drain
the popular supports from the Communist Party. Somehow, it was the aversion to the
Communist party that, in 1963, laid the basis for the birth of the centre-left
government.

52
Leo Wollemborg, Stars, stripes and tricolor. The United States and Italy, 1946-1989 (New York, 1990), 164.
53
Wollemborg, Stars, stripes and tricolor, 176
54
Leopoldo Nuti, Gli Stati Uniti e l'apertura a sinistra: importanza e limiti della presenza americana in Italia, (Bari,
199), 609
55
Alberto Giovagnoli and Sergio Pons, L’Italia Repubblicana nella crisi degli anni Settanta. Vol.1, Tra guerra fredda e
distensione (Florence, 2003), p.31
 Nevertheless, a certain alarmism had already began to spread among sectors of the
American state apparatuses. Ever since the first steps towards the establishment of the
centre-left coalition, there was a considerable rift between the liberal and the
conservative US branches about the stance to have. An example of the conservative
sectors’ attitude against the centre-left government project was the meeting that took
place at the US Embassy in Rome in late November 1961. This meeting was attended
by Ambassador George Frederick Reinhardt, the CIA station chief in Italy Thomas
Karamessines and the military attaché at the American Embassy Colonel Vernon
Walters, future deputy director of the CIA from 2 May 1972 to 2 July 1976. Walters
forcefully advocated the use of US troops to prevent the Socialist Party from entering
the government coalition. Karamessines, more realistically, argued that the process of
bringing the socialists closer to the government was irreversible, but that it could be
counterbalanced by strengthening those in Italy who opposed it. Ambassador
Reinhardt agreed with Karamessines, and the possibility of US intervention just
before or after the consummation of an "opening to the left" was excluded.56
The idea Karamessenis exposed began to take shape during a meeting between
Vernon Walters and the head of SIFAR, General Giovanni De Lorenzo in the autumn
of 1962, shortly before the latter took office as Chief of Staff of the Carabinieri.
During the meeting, De Lorenzo and Walters finalized the details of a secret plan that
SIFAR and the CIA had agreed upon following the local elections held on 10 and 11
June 1962. Alarmed by the Communist’s electoral growth, the Italian and American
secret services signed the memorandum. The salient points were as follows:

1. Planning diversified actions for any emergency situations.

2. Intensifying funding for forces opposing the centre-left.

56
Robert Leonardi and Alan Platt, “American Foreign Policy and the Postwar Italian Left”, Political Science Quarterly,
Vol. 93, No. 2 (Summer, 1978), 197-215
3. Supporting the Christian Democrats hostile to the opening to the left, starting from
the newly elected President of the Republic Antonio Segni, who was clearly against
to the Socialists entry into government.57

Giovanni De Lorenzo was the right man to implement this plan, because he had
already been one of the Americans' protégés for some time. He had, in fact, been
appointed head of SIFAR by pressure from the CIA official Carmel Offie on the then
defence minister Paolo Emilio Taviani on 27 December 1955. 58 During his tenure as
head of the military secret services, De Lorenzo carried out the largest cataloguing
work ever in the history of Italy, managing to create dossiers on 157,000 citizens.59
The plan that Walters and De Lorenzo devised took a concrete shape in 1963,
when the new CIA chief station in Rome, William Harvey, coordinated together with
Colonel Renzo Rocca a series of attacks against the headquarters of the Christian
Democrats. The attackers were right-wing extremists and veterans of the Decima
Mas in the guise of left-wing militants, and the purpose was to sabotage the project of
forming centre-left governments and lead the public opinion to demand emergency
measures. Roberto Faenza found in the American archives a list of far-right-
paramilitary groups that have carried out similar actions and that have participated in
other anti-Communist operations in Italy.60 The presence of such a list, including the
names of these groups’ members and the description of their activities, in the US
archives, proves that some CIA’s sectors carried out covert operations jointly with the
Italian right-wing.
A further confirmation of the US determination to stop the advance of the
Communist Party came in 1990 during the turmoil caused by the discovery of Gladio.
The Italian weekly Panorama revealed the content of the memorandum NSC 6014/1,
"US Policy Towards Italy”, drawn up on 19 January 1961. It stated that if the
Communists took power even legally by winning fair democratic elections, the

57
Faenza, Il Malaffare, 315
58
De Lutiis, Storia dei servizi segreti in Italia, 61
59
Lino Jannuzzi. "1964 Segni e de Lorenzo tentarono il colpo di stato", L’Espresso, N. 4, Year XIII, (29 January 1967)
60
Faenza, Il Malaffare, 369
United States had to take every possible and appropriate action to assist any Italian
group that sought to prevent, or overthrow, Communist rule. 61 Needless to say that
“any Italian group” were New Order and National Vanguard.
The intensity of the struggle against the Communists soon reached unimaginable
levels. During an interrogation given to the Milan court on 7 March 2000, at the third
trial for the Piazza Fontana massacre, the former interior minister Paolo Taviani said
what follows. On 23 February 1964, the President of the Republic Antonio Segni,
commenting on the progressive strengthening of the Communist Party, confided to
Taviani his fear that the Italian political situation would force him to give it the task
of forming a new government. During the same deposition, Taviani added that, in the
same period, parliamentarians from various parties expressed their concerns to the
CIA station agents in Rome about the risk that the centre-left government could pave
the way to the Communist Party.62 Thus, they implicitly appealed to an American
intervention so that this experiment ceased.
At the same time, General De Lorenzo prepared the so-called Piano Solo, a name
that was devised to indicate that it would be carried out by the Carabinieri alone (the
English translation of the Italian word "solo"). It was a special emergency plan,
approved by President Segni and scheduled for the summer of 1964, to protect public
order. This plan consisted in the arrest and deportation to the Gladio base in Campo
Marragiu of approximately a thousand of leftist politicians and intellectuals,
including the deputy Prime Minister and head of the Socialist Party Pietro Nenni. The
Piano Solo had some similarities with the Walters-De Lorenzo agreement. Moreover,
the US were aware of the Piano Solo preparation, as proved by an air gram sent by
the embassy in Rome to the State Department on 26 June 1964. This document reads
that the Italian economic and political situation was serious and whatever left-centre
formula was adopted, it would inevitably fail. The only solution, the document
continues, was to overthrow the current coalition government. General Giovanni De
Lorenzo represented the only force around whom the Italian security forces could
61
Pino Buongiorno, “Se vince il PCI”, in Panorama, Year XXVIII, N.1286, (9 December 1990)
62
Procura della Repubblica di Milano, N. 1152/2000 Prot. Ord, Historical Archives of the Italian Senate, Archival
Collection Mariano Rumor, Serial Number II, Box 180
rally, and for this reason he organized mobile task force battalions ready to take
action in the event of a political emergency. The document concluded by saying that
a centrist government would be instituted and leftist reaction on the piazza would be
met with a show of force.63
It is interesting to report a conversation that General De Lorenzo had at the
American Embassy with military attachés on 26 May 1964, in the weeks his alleged
coup project was supposed to take place. During the conversation, De Lorenzo said
that the Italian top security and military officers would very much prefer to see
organized a strong rightist political party that they would support and obtain political
and ideological orientation from. The problem, De Lorenzo said, was that the Italian
right-wing was in disarray. The Monarchists were all but finished because they
lacked political vision and realism. The Neo-Fascists leaders were hopelessly
divided, and still pretended to live in the Fascist Era, that the great majority of the
Italians abhorred. There was no future for them in Italy, De Lorenzo added, and both
should dissolve themselves as soon as possible. What the country's military leaders
wished was the emergence of a new party, with the Italian Liberal Party as the
nucleus, that would embrace all the right-wing forces, including moderate elements
of the Social Movement and the Monarchist Party. Such a party would be fully
supported by the security and military establishments either indirectly in elections or
directly, should the security of the state be threatened through Communist
subversion.
Another point General De Lorenzo treated concerned the Italian Communist Party.
According to his own words, there was general agreement at the top levels of the
military establishments that the most efficient way to eliminate the internal
Communist threat would be for the party to take the fatal step of staging an open
revolt. The revolt would be so ruthlessly suppressed that the Italian Communist Party
would be eliminated for good. Nonetheless, De Lorenzo added, the Communists were

63
Intelligence Information Cable, “Views of Senior Italian on the Present Political Situation”, 26 June 1964, FRUS,
1964–1968, VOLUME XII, WESTERN EUROPE, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v12/d99,
fully aware of the consequences of an open rebellion, and they were accordingly
banking on assuming power through parliamentary procedures.64
The impression is that, in De Lorenzo's intentions, the plan mainly consisted in
frightening the Italian left-wing politicians and making them understand the
consequences if the Communists had gone too far and crossed the drawn line. That
was, to quote Pietro Nenni, a "sabre-rattling". Enough for Aldo Moro's second centre-
left government to be formed on 17 July 1964, again with Socialist ministers, with a
social reforms program, compared to the first government, considerably resized. A
sign that the message was well received.
To complete this brief mention of the Piano Solo, it should be remembered that, in
the 1968 general elections, Giovanni De Lorenzo was elected deputy of the
Democratic Party of Monarchical Unity. In 1971 he joined the Italian Social
Movement, being re-elected with the neo-Fascists in the 1972 elections. De Lorenzo's
political career exemplifies the compromise that the Italian Social Movement had
with sectors of the armed forces inclined to take action against the Communists, with
the US blessing. Such an example was not isolated, as the continuation of this
research will show.
In the climate of opposition to the centre-left government, the first turning point of
what went down in history as the strategy of tension occurred. That was the
Conference on the Revolutionary War, organized in Rome from 3 to 5 May 1965 by
the Alberto Pollio Institute of Military Studies with the SIFAR funding. This institute
was founded by Enrico de Boccard, an Italian Social Republic veteran and journalist
of the newspaper Lo Specchio, directed by CIA agent Nelson Page, with the help of
General Egidio Viggiani, head of SIFAR. The conference had as its main theme the
revolutionary war, a doctrine that in those years was circulating above all in military
circles, and its aim was to coordinate and give a greater vigour to the opposition
against the possible Communist advance in Italy. The founding assumption of the
conference was that a third world war, against a sneaky and envious enemy such as

64
Dispacth from the US Embassy in Italy “Lt. Gen. De Lorenzo’s Comments on Security and Political Subjects”, 26
May 1964, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 59, Central Files 1964-66, POL 12 IT. Secret
international Communism, was already underway. It should also be added that in
1972, during a search of a safe belonging to the neo-fascist Giovanni Ventura
(acknowledged as one the culprits of the Piazza Fontana massacre), the investigators
found a document from the Italian military intelligence which defined the Pollio
Institute as a "cover for CIA activities in Italy". 65 It is therefore presumable that the
Conference on the Revolutionary War was an operation that some sectors of the CIA
inspired to give a qualitative leap to the opposition to the Italian Communist Party.
The attendants of the conference were personalities linked to the anti-Communist
world, especially high-ranking military officers, Italian Social Movement and Italian
Social Democratic Party MPs, journalists, and a group of National Vanguard
militants. The most famous participants were Pino Rauti, General Adriano Magi-
Braschi and the professor and former Waffen SS trooper Pio Filippani Ronconi.
Ronconi theorized the creation of structures in concentric circles with increasingly
secret and clandestine levels, with the function of defence and counterattack from the
Communist offensive. Two of these structures were to act within the legal framework
in defense of the state. The third was to operate in complete anonymity with the tasks
of counter-terror and possible breaking of the points of precarious balance, in order to
determine a different constellation of forces in power. These nuclei could be
composed in part of the youngsters who were wasting their energies and their time in
noble demonstrations that fail to shake the indifference of the masses in the face of
the deterioration of the national situation". Above these structures, in Ronconi's mind,
a council in charge of coordinating all the activities had to be established. 66
For his part, Magi-Braschi argued that what was underway against Communism
was not only a military war, but also an economic, social, religious, ideological one.
Making a comparison with the two world wars, he explained that from the World
War I the need to have commands composed of all the armed forces arose, and the

65
CIVIL AND CRIMINAL COURT OF MILAN Investigation Office section 20^, N.2643/84A Public Prosecutor
General Register, Sentence-Ordinance on the bombing of Milan, 18 March 1995
66
Pio Filippani Ronconi, Ipotesi per una contro rivoluzione, in La guerra rivoluzionaria - Atti del Primo Convegno
organizzato dall'Istituto Pollio,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160420160302/http://www.stragi.it/la_guerra_rivoluzionaria/05.htm#Ipotesi%20per
%20una%20contro%20rivoluzione
World War II generated the General Staffs made up of personnel from several
nations. The war against Communism, on the contrary, required a General Staff that
included civilians and military at the same time. It is easy to understand how, by the
term "civilians", Magi-Braschi meant far-right militants.67
These and other interventions prove right those who maintain that, with the
conference on the revolutionary war, the ideological, programmatic and
organizational foundations of the strategy of tension were laid. It can be added that
one of the first effects was the creation of the Nuclei per la Difesa dello Stato at the
disposal of the Italian Staff of the Armed Forces. Adriano Magi-Braschi oversaw its
implementation, inserting the militants of New Order into the mixed civilians and
military body of the State Defense Units, obtaining the explicit support of the
American military leaders.68 Basically, the Nuclei per la Difesa dello Stato was a
structure conceived as a secret organization, directly connected to the Italian military
secret service and fully inserted in the NATO security system. Its task was to create
the conditions for a coup d'état to take place through terrorist attacks. The first act of
the Nuclei per la Difesa of the State, in July 1966, was the sending of about two
thousand letters to Italian Army’s officers, urging them to join to the political project
to "strike out the Communist infection".69
It is interesting to report the opinion that Vincenzo Vinciguerra expressed on this
matter. In a document drawn up in the summer of 1995, the former New Order
militant wrote that the Nuclei per la Difesa dello Stato could be classified within the
special anti-Communist operations conceived within the framework of Stay-Behind.
In support of his thesis, Vinciguerra argued that there were “gladiators” at the top of
the thirty-six legions into which the Nuclei per la Difesa dello Stato were divided,
with the dual function of guardians and controllers.70

67
. Adriano Magi-Braschi, Spoliticizzare la guerra, in La guerra rivoluzionaria
68
De Lutiis, Storia dei servizi segreti in Italia., p. 75
69
See a sample on the webpage of judge Guido Salvini: https://guidosalvini.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Volantino-
Nuclei-per-la-difesa-dello-Stato-inviato-agli-uffciali.pdf
70
Vincenzo Vinciguerra, “Autopsia di una sentenza”, in Paolo Cucchiarelli and Aldo Giannuli, Lo stato parallelo.
L'Italia oscura nei documenti e nelle relazioni della Commissione stragi (Rome, 1997), 117-122
 Another immediate outcome of the conference on the revolutionary war was the so-
called "Chinese poster operation", a disinformation campaign promoted by the
Reserved Affairs Office of the Italian Interior Ministry and carried out by National
Vanguard militants. It consisted of posting posters signed by a non-existent pro-
Chinese Marxist-Leninist movement, praising Stalin and polemical towards the
alleged revisionism of the Communist Party on the walls of Rome, Milan, Florence,
Livorno, Venice and Padua, between January and February 1966. The purpose of the
operation was to encourage dissidence within the Italian Communist Party and the
birth of far-left extra-parliamentary movements, in order to push it to radicalize its
positions and frighten public opinion in the face of the existence of such extremist
groups. As Vincenzo Vinciguerra said, that was the concrete launch of the strategy of
tension.71 Thus, it can be said that, with the 3-5 May 1965 conference, the die was
cast. The first twenty years after the World War II had laid the basis for the terrorist
and coup season in Italy. At the end of 1960s, it was time, for the anti-Communists,
to spring into action.

71
Vincenzo Vinciguerra interrogated by the investigating judge Guido Salvini in the Opera penitentiary on 30 May
1992, reported in the sentence-order of the judge Carlo Mastelloni on Argo 16, 2680.