Conspiracy theories about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro
On May 9, 1978, Aldo Moro, a Christian Democracy (DC) statesman who advocated for a Historic Compromise with the Italian Communist Party, (PCI), was murdered after 55 days of captivity by the Red Brigades (BR), a far-left terrorist organization.
Conspiracy theorists hold that Moro, a progressive who wanted the PCI to be part of government, was ultimately sacrificed due to Cold War politics, that both sides welcomed his kidnapping, and that, by refusing to negotiate, they led to his death.
In August 2020, about sixty individuals from the world of historical research and political inquiry signed a document denouncing the growing weight that the conspiratorial view on the kidnapping and killing of Moro has in public discourse.
Among others, they included future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Carabinieri general Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa (who made an admission request whose result is unknown), Vito Miceli (chief of SIOS), Sindona, and Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia, the pretender to the throne of Italy.
[9] Another theory supposes that the BR had been infiltrated by the CIA or by the Operation Gladio, a paramilitary clandestine network headed by NATO whose main task was to oppose Soviet influence in Western Europe,[10] including the rise of the PCI and their road to government.
In it, he wrote that Andreotti had met dalla Chiesa, who told him that he knew the location where Moro was kept but did not obtain the authorization to proceed to free him due to, in Pecorelli's words, a certain "Christ's lodge in Paradise",[15] which analysts immediately identified with the P2.
[1][17] According to Vincenzo Cappelletti (a professor who took part in the crisis committees), Franco Ferracuti [it], who was later discovered to be a P2 member and declared that Moro was suffering of the Stockholm syndrome towards his kidnappers, was close to the lodge during the kidnapping days, having been introduced by Grassini.
[20] Another debated case was regarding the presence of Camillo Guglielmi [it], a colonel of SISMI's 7th Division that controlled Operation Gladio and who was nicknamed "Papà",[21] in via Stresa near the location of the ambush, and in those exact minutes when the BR kidnapped Moro.
[20] Investigations made by DIGOS discovered that several machines used by the terrorists to print their communications from one year before the kidnapping of Moro, which was financed by Mario Moretti, had been previously owned by the Italian state.
[34] In 2003, Philip Willan wrote for The Guardian: "Both Moscow and Washington opposed Moro's policy as dangerously destabilising for the postwar European order which the great powers sanction at the Yalta conference in 1945.
[43] During the 1983 trial against the BR, Moro's widow declared that her husband was unpopular in the United States due to the Historic Compromise, and that he had been repeatedly warned by American politicians to stop disrupting the political situation which had been established in the Yalta Conference, in reference to the possible executive role of the PCI.
He asserted that Gladio had manipulated Moretti as a way to take over the Red Brigades to effect a strategy of tension aimed at creating popular demand for a new, right-wing law-and-order regime.
[51][52] In the Italian RAI TV programme La notte della Repubblica, Moretti denied these accusations, saying that he had never seen an Israeli in his life and that it was wrong to think that the change of the BR's strategy depended from the arrest of some militants.
[57] In January 2008, La Repubblica published documents obtained from Britain's National Archives, in which Foreign Office planners wrote in May 1976 that "a clean surgical coup" to remove the PCI from power "would be attractive in many ways" but concluded that the idea was not realistic since it could lead to what they described as a "prolonged and bloody" resistance by communists in Italy and a potential civil war that could have included an intervention by the Soviet Union.
[37] Guy Millard, the British ambassador to Rome, wrote in a memo quoted by La Repubblica that "(Berlinguer's) entry into government would create a serious problem for Nato and the European Community and could turn out to be an event with catastrophic consequences".
Evidence of the Secret War for the Control of Oil and Italy), a 2011 book by Mario Cereghino and Giovanni Fasanella, who had access to declassified documents, showed that, apart from his accommodation to the PCI, Britain was also opposed to Moro for his pro-Arab policies.
[66] Before and after 1978, numerous apartments in the street had been used by Italian secret agents, including a Carabinieri Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza enrolled by SISMI who resided in the building facing that of Moretti and who was from the same birthplace.
Some thirty years after the events, Pieczenik declared in an interview that the decision to issue the false communication was taken during a meeting of the crisis committee, present at which were Francesco Cossiga, members of the Italian intelligence agencies, and Ferracuti.
[77] During an alleged séance in which they participated on 2 April 1978, after asking the soul of Giorgio La Pira about the location of Moro, a Ouija table they were using registered the words Viterbo, Bolsena, and Gradoli, three towns north of Rome.
[89] Pecorelli, who apparently had several informers in the Italian secret services,[93][94] spoke repeatedly about the kidnapping of Moro in his magazine Osservatorio politico, which he founded in 1968 to tell "the background of that system of power that was stuck in the ganglia of Italy with limited sovereignty".
Pieczenik explained the leak to Argentina with the presence in the committee of numerous members of the P2 lodge, which had strong ties with the South American country; Gelli, the P2's founder, had lived for a period there.
When a self-styled adviser from the Argentine embassy in Washington approached me proposing to work for the government of Buenos Aires and spoke to me in detail about some facts of the Moro case that had only been discussed in the Roman rooms of Cossiga.
[11]Due to this admission, which Peczenik reiterated in another 2013 interview that was acquired by the public's prosecution office,[128] Imposimato, one of the Moro case's judges, wrote an investigative book titled I 55 giorni che hanno cambiato l'Italia.
[134] Since some of the ammunition used for the assault had been treated with a special preserving paint, which was also found in some secret depots related to the Gladio undercover organization, it has been suggested that these would come from some Italian military or paramilitary corps.
Allegedly killed by the Red Brigades in 1979, although in circumstances never clear, Varisco had been at the helm of the investigation on the BR base in via Gradoli; he was also a friend of dalla Chiesa, who was also murdered for never completely understood reasons, as well as of Pecorelli.
[90] The confession of a mysterious terminally ill former BR member in Five Moons Square would have anticipated some events that occurred a few years after the release of the 2003 film, namely the 2009 discovery of a letter, which was brought to light by a former police inspector.
The letter, which was published by La Stampa in October 2009,[141][142][143] references the mysterious men on board a Honda motorbike, who were linked to the secret services,[144] and that allegedly shot against a witness to keep him away and protected the Red Brigades during and after the via Fani ambush.
The terrorists for the occasion had taken measures, such as cutting the tyres of the van of a florist who worked in via Fani, in order to remove a dangerous witness during the ambush, which can be explained only by their having precise knowledge of Moro's route that morning.
Rome's public prosecutor office had opened an investigation file relating to the statements of two bomb squad members, Vitantonio Raso and Giovanni Circhetta, who were never questioned and said that they arrived to the location two hours before the call from the Red Brigades.
[181] In August 2020, about sixty individuals from the world of historical research and political inquiry signed a document denouncing the growing weight that the conspiratorial view on the kidnapping and killing of the Moro has in public discourse.
