A Sinister Web

Submitted by Anon on 8 May, 2005 - 5:23

A SINISTER WEB

A Right-Wing Conspiracy in Italy 33 Years Ago?

by Alfred Consiglio

It was the kind of news the Italians call a bombshell. Settegiorni magazine reported on 16 April, 1972 that the Defence Ministry had been obliged to dismiss the command of the 3rd Army, stationed on the Eastern border. The formal grounds were “economic and organizational considerations”. Actually, it had come to light that there existed in the 3rd Army “right-wing elements attempting to form an activist nucleus for further action” with a view to “putting democracy in the freezer”.

At first it had seemed, the Settegiorni wrote, that the officers involved were of relatively junior, not even colonel rank. But further investigation had led to different and more disquieting conclusions. Otherwise things would hardly have gone to the length of dismissal of the entire 3rd Army command. The case of the 3rd Army may have been one of the signs of the political malaise in the armed forces, which had manifested itself in the fact of admirals and generals running on the fascist ticket in the parliamentary elections.

The report in a magazine connected with Left Catholic quarters was taken up by other publications. As May 7, the day of the elections, approached, the atmosphere in the country grew ever more tense, dramatic, charged with conflict. Fact after fact confirmed the existence of a big conspiracy of the reactionary forces, which the Communists had warned of time and again. The object was to provoke a vicious anti-labour campaign, dismantle the democratic liberties the people won in the course of the Resistance, break the workers and stop the class struggle of the working masses. The fact that former Armed Forces Chief of Staff General De Lorenzo and former NATO naval commander in Southern Europe, Admiral Birindelli, were running for parliament on the fascist ticket, and the fact that the 3rd Army command had to be dismissed shed some additional light on this conspiracy. But that was not all.

Among the significant things to bear in mind were:
• the death or murder of the millionaire publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, whose body was found in the Segrate suburb of Milan beside a power pylon which he allegedly tried to blow up;
• the arrest of the fascist Rauti-Freda-Ventura group, charged with subversive activity, with possession of explosives and arms, and with organizing the explosion at the Agricultural Bank in Milan and other terrorist acts;
• a body of evidence proving a link-up between Right and Left extremist groups, which had even led to the appearance of the new term ‘nazi-maoism’.

All these things had an important bearing on the pre-electoral situation and appeared closely, even if not openly, interconnected.

How did Feltrinelli met his death? Many believe it was while attempting unskillfully to lay an explosion charge under the power pylon. Others think that he was killed or wounded elsewhere and his body then brought to Segrate, where an accidental explosion was simulated.

Objectively speaking, any version is possible. Feltrinelli was a man with a complicated and confused record. A multimillionaire who inherited a fortune from his father, an industrial boss of the fascist days, he played at revolution for a long time, putting up Communist posters as a youth. Later he organized a sensational ‘business’ operation, publishing a ‘best-seller’ which the reactionaries seized on and used against the Communists. This ‘operation’ brought him enormous profits, a scandalous notoriety and a final break with the Communists.

Afterwards there was a lot more connections with extremists in Latin America and West Germany, publication of books about organizing urban guerillas and about how to produce home-made bombs, participation in various ultra-left groups which began to mushroom in Italy after 1968. At the first reports that the police, investigating the Milan bank explosion, proposed to question him, he fled the country and formally lived outside for more than two years, renting a castle in Carinthia, Austria, though known to be continually making trips home to his wife.

The most interesting part, however, came to light during the investigation of Feltrinelli’s death. Strange as it may seem at first sight, intimates of this ‘revolutionary’ had contacts, directly or indirectly, through relatives or friends, with Right extremists groups. In Italy at that time it was getting harder and harder to distinguish where the groups calling themselves ‘Left’ or ‘avant-garde’ end and those gravitating towards fascism as their ideological and political credo begin. More than that, events proved that most of the groups styling themselves ‘truly revolutionary’ literally teemed with fascist agents and police informers, who made their way in to discredit the name of Communists and Socialists.

These tactics were no invention of the moment. They were mapped out as far back as 1968, when a group of fascist extremists headed by Pino Rauti, editor of the Rome Il Tempo, went to Greece. It was there, at conclaves with the ‘practitioners’ and ‘theoreticians’ of the Athens coup, that the tactics were devised of infiltrating ultra-left groups and staging acts of provocation that were to induce in Italy a tense political atmosphere reminiscent of civil war.

Fascists who had wormed their way into the confidence of extra-parliamentary movements urged striking workers to wage ‘total’ war on the employers, smash machinery, beat up managerial personnel, and blow up filling stations. And all the time generous contributions were pouring in to fascist funds from one of Italy’s biggest capitalists, Attilio Monti, owner of huge oil refineries and many influential newspapers.

On the night of 18 April 1969m a fascist extremist conference was held in Padua, presided over by Rauti and Franco Freda, who set up as the ‘ideologist of the new Right’. At this conference, many Italian commentators believed, was specifically worked out the fascist line incorporating “Greek experience’: a link-up with the ‘ultra-Left’ in order to use them for their own ends, and the organization of widespread terrorism throughout the country.

These decisions did not remain on paper. The Communist Party journal Rinascita published long lists of fascist outrages of the past years. Rauti, Freda and Giovanni Ventura, in whose bookshop representatives of the two extreme trends used to meet, were arrested. To these men, and particularly to Rauti, National Council member of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, whose leader Almirante tried hard to disown his party’s extremist trends and preserve a semblance of legality, led the threads of bloody crimes: the Milan bank explosion, in which 16 people were killed, the explosion in the Fiat pavilion at the Milan Fair, the explosion on trains coming down from the Northern border. All this took place back in 1969, but then the outlines of reaction’s elaborate, long-term conspiracy emerged into clear view.

The arrest of Rauti brought to light the highly suspicious contacts which a possibly unsuspecting Feltrinelli had with the Genoa “October 22” gang of the fascist Diego Vandelli. This gang, which called itself the “Red Brigade”, attempted to organize underground transmitters and so on. Half of it consisted of underworld types, agents provocateurs and fascists, with whom Rauti’s group was connected.

Digging about in this ‘nazi-maoist’ dung heap, the papers came upon another interesting little point. It was not only ideology and politics, it emerged, that Rauti busied himself with in Genoa. By way of that city, Italy’s principal port, went most of the smuggling of arms, drugs and other profitable items. Rauti was one of the chiefs of the Mondial Export-Import firm, owned by some big-time fascists. What sort of business did this firm engaged into? Mondial Export-Import sold hundreds of millions of lire worth of arms to Rhodesia, South Africa and the Portuguese colonialists.

One is led to ask: But what about the government, didn’t it knew about any of it before? Why had the ‘unholy Rauti trio’ only been taken out of circulation then? Why did the authorities attempted, using press, radio and TV, to fasten the responsibility for many terrorist acts upon the Left? The Communists said this about it: “The government is not only failing in its duty of waging a relentless struggle against fascism but maintaining an attitude of tolerance carried to the point of complicity with the subversive extreme Right.”

To equate the policy of the Italian Communists with that of groups which had embraced extremism or terrorism was vulgar falsification, stressed the Communist Party. Such ideas and methods had nothing in common with the organized labour movement. On the contrary, they had always been opposed by the Communists, by the labour movement, by the trade unions. And it was the fact that the chief target of the ‘Left’ extremists’ attacks was the Communists, not the employers and the capitalist system, that gave them common ground with the fascists.

More evidence kept appearing in the press, sometimes cutting across that which went before. But while details changed, the basic fact remained unaltered, as the Communist Party pointed out: “The conspiracy of the extreme Right has not been broken. Attempts continue and will continue to conceal the true facts, which are, however, emerging and which may reveal still greater and more serious complicity. Anti-democratic provocations continue and will

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