RED BRIGADES Red Brigades The Story of Italian Terrorism Robert C. Meade, Jr. Foreword by Richard N. Gardner Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-20306-2 ISBN 978-1-349-20304-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20304-8 ©Robert C. Meade, Jr., 1990 Foreword© Richard N. Gardner, 1990 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-49931-3 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, Sl Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-03593-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meade, Robert C., 1949- The Red Brigades: the story of Italian terrorism/Robert C. Meade, Jr. P· em. Bibliography: P. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-03593-8 1. Brigate rosse-History. 2. Terrorism-Italy-History. I. Title. HV6433.18M4 1990 364.1'0945-dc20 89-34719 CIP For my parents and Mary Jo 'Intolerance contradicts the reason for being of the democratic state. Violence is the precise antithesis of it. Intolerance and violence, the reasoning of partisanship as against the objectivity of the law, appear as grave signs of a crisis of the State that must be overcome and overcome rapidly. Intolerance is inconceivable when all is dialogue in our society. Violence is inadmissable and absurd when what is involved is not struggling against the exercise of arbitrary power, but contesting the difficult creation of the free consciences of all the citizens, the order that has been created by liberty and that is open to all the evolutions that liberty, without any limit, makes possible.' - Aldo Moro (1976) 'This disorganized and discordant Italy is, however, infinitely more rich and alive than the more or less well ordered Italy of the past. But this is only a small consolation. Because also in growing and from growing one can die.' - Aldo Moro (1974) Contents Foreword by Richard N. Gardner ix Acknowledgements XV Preface xvii Abbreviations xxiv 1 II Sessantotto 1 2 Progress and its Discontents 16 3 A Little Private War of Our Own 31 4 Getting to Know the General 55 5 Slouching Towards Disaster 69 6 The Movement of 1977 82 7 The Spring Campaign 98 8 The Justice of the People 122 9 The Politics of Life and Death 146 10 The Emergency, Phase One 174 11 The Program of Annihilation: 1978-80 183 12 Evanescence 199 13 The Emergency, Phase Two 208 14 Connections 219 15 We Are All Dissociati 232 16 Conclusion 242 vii viii Contents Notes 254 References 274 Index 294 Foreword It is unfortunate but true that Italy does not receive outside its borders the attention its achievements in the years since 1945 ought to have won for it. I do not speak here so much of official attention; the foreign ministries and embassies of Italy's allies have been, and continue to be, very active in the official interchange that is diplomacy. I refer, rather, to a cultural fact, to the disparity between Italy's importance and its recent accomplishments, on the one hand, and, on the other, the attitudes toward it as a political, social and economic force in the contemporary period that are noticeable among the press and the public of Italy's allies. In the United States, for instance, the political, social and economic realities of Italian life are consistently accorded far less coverage from the media than are those of Italy's neighbors. This situation matters. One would not wish to push the analogy too far, but it is fair to say that relations between nations resemble those between individuals. It is enough to sustain a solid acquaint­ anceship that an individual deal with another with politeness, respect and the observance of formal proprieties. But true friendship demands more - interest in, concern for, sympathy for the difficulties of the other's life, appreciation for the other's successes, a desire continuously to seek ways to improve and deepen the relationship. More can and should be done among the public and press of Italy's friends than has been done to learn about and understand the story of Italy's life as a nation over recent decades. The story that has thus gone incompletely reported and under­ stood is, viewed as a whole, one of truly stunning success. At the end of World War II, Italy was a country in defeat and in ruins, with a doubtful political future, still largely agricultural and suffer­ ing considerable poverty and deprivation. Today Italy is one of the economic powers of the world and one of its leading democracies, and its people are, on the whole, prosperous and comfortable. This success, however, has not been achieved smoothly or without cost. There have been many ups and downs and many grave and persistent problems. The worst time of all for Italy was the period commonly known as 'the years of lead'. It is also important for ix X Foreword Italy's friends to understand its problems and none more so than this most serious one. In his book about this period and one of its protagonists, Robert Meade helps to fill this gap. This well­ researched and well-written book provides an interesting and dramatic portrait of a truly terrible time, when an advanced Western society, afflicted by an array of economic, political and social problems, was besieged by groups of radicals determined to overturn that society through the use of systematic violence. This is a study of what can be seen as a great historical incongruity or irony - the extremist activity of anti-democratic, revolutionary zealots violently laboring to destroy a democratic state. This story is important, too, and worth being told for another reason. It is no revelation to say that our era has been a time of terrorism. In many places around the globe, on so many tragic occasions, airplanes have been highjacked and sabotaged, states­ men kidnapped and assassinated, ordinary citizens held hostage and murdered. The threat is so serious and has so often been realized that it has become part of the general public conscious­ ness. As Robert Meade points out, the Red Brigades have been one of the most significant terrorist groups. They and some other groups like them for many years subjected the Italian people to a reign of terror, committing thousands of acts of brutality in order to establish what these radicals apparently believed would be a society free of injustice and exploitation. The differences between the means employed and the ends purportedly sought could not have been greater. Thus, as an instance of terrorism in practice, and of the effort to control and defeat terrorism, the history of the Red Brigades here recounted is one that ought to receive the serious attention of a public rightly alarmed about the terrorist menace. When I arrived in Rome in 1977 to begin what would prove to be four busy years as the United States Ambassador to Italy, the situation in which the country found itself was very grave. The crisis was, as Robert Meade explains, a multifaceted one, a com­ bination of economic, political, social and public security difficul­ ties that had been some time in the making. Economically, Italy suffered in the 1970s from, among other things, serious inflation, low growth, capital shortages necessitating heavy borrowing abroad, and unemployment, especially for young people. On the political front, the arrangements that had sustained center-left governments for some years appeared to many no longer to Foreword xi function and the governmental coalitions of the first half of the 1970s were widely perceived to be less stable and effective than the seriousness of the circumstances required. Then, in 1975 and 1976, the Communist Party registered unpre­ cedented successes at the polls, and it appeared possible that the Communists were on the verge of becoming the first party of Italy. For many of Italy's friends, the advance of the Communists created unprecedented worry about the political and economic future of the country, while the prospect of Communist participation in an Italian cabinet raised concern about the consequences for the Western alliance. Inside Italy, there was social unrest throughout the decade among factory workers, among the employed and unemployed of the urban centers and among young people in the schools, universities and working-class districts of Rome and other cities and even of the provinces. The unrest had been percolating and erupting for many years and, in 1977, there occurred another eruption, this time a quite serious one. As Robert Meade makes plain, the discontent was not simply a severe form of labor­ management discord or an exaggerated form of the normal desire of young people to rebel. The source of great anxiety for the authorities and for Italy's friends was that, among workers and young people, extreme left-wing philosophies seemed to be driv­ ing the unrest and there was much enthusiasm for the goal of revolution. More particularly, a serious public security problem had developed by 1977. Mass demonstrations occurred, followed often by serious violence practiced by advocates of revolution. There were confrontations between the far left and the far right. Secret organizations on the far right engaged in terrorism against average citizens selected at random, as in the bombing of trains. And a growing number of left-wing terrorist groups practiced systematic violence on behalf of the revolution. The most active, most characteristic of these groups, the leaders in this national turmoil, were the Red Brigades. From a dramatic perspective the great Italian crisis reached its apogee in the spring of 1978, with the kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, and his subsequent ordeal.