"[4] Formed in 1970, the Red Brigades sought to create a revolutionary state through armed struggle, and to remove Italy from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The group was also influenced by volumes on the Tupamaros of Uruguay published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, which in the words of historian Paul Ginsborg became "a sort of do-it-yourself manual for the early Red Brigades".

Although Italy was not the sole country to experience years of terrorism,[9] the BR were the most powerful, largest, and longest-lived post-World War II left-wing terrorist group in Western Europe.

Workers' strikes shook factories, Pirelli and Siemens in particular, which led part of the labour movement to adopt "armed propaganda" as a method of struggle.

[15] In the beginning, the BR were mainly active in Reggio Emilia, in large factories in Milan (Pirelli, Sit-Siemens, and Magneti Marelli) and in Turin (Fiat).

In 1972, they carried out their first kidnapping, in which a factory foreman for Sit Siemens was held for around twenty minutes whilst pictures were taken of him wearing a placard declaring him to be a fascist.

[18] Initially, the BR focused on managerial staff and right-wing trade unionists from the country's largest firms, such as Alfa Romeo, Fiat, and Sit-Siemens.

They all followed a similar path in which the victim was subjected to a summary trial, held in captivity for a period between 20 minutes to 55 days, and then released unharmed.

[18] During this time, the BR's activities were denounced by far-left political groups, such as Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio, which were closer to the autonomist movement.

Those like Lotta Continua shared the need for armed self-defence against police and fascist violence but were critical of terrorist actions, which they saw as elitist and counterproductive, and condemned the BR as a catalyst rather than an answer to repression.

[4] Frequent allegations of links between the BR and the intelligence services of Communist states were made but never proven, and were always rejected by the militants in books and interviews.

The arrest was made possible by "Frate Mitra", alias Silvano Girotto, a former monk who had infiltrated the BR for the Italian security services.

Terrorist activities, especially against Carabinieri and magistrates, increased considerably in order to terrorize juries and cause mistrials in cases against imprisoned leaders of the organization.

Moro's body was left in the trunk of a car in Via Caetani, a site midway between the DC and PCI headquarters, as a last symbolic challenge to the police, who were keeping the entire nation, and Rome in particular, under strict surveillance.

[3] Italian police made a large number of arrests in 1980 when 12,000 far-left militants were detained while 300 fled to France and 200 to South America; a total of 600 people left Italy.

[24] Most leaders arrested including Faranda, Franceschini, Moretti, and Morucci either retracted their doctrine (as dissociati) or collaborated with investigators in the capture of other BR members (as collaboratori di giustizia), obtaining important reductions in prison sentences.

In revenge, the BR assassinated his brother Roberto in 1981, significantly damaging the standing of the group and lowering them in the public's eyes to little more than a supposedly radical Cosa Nostra.

On 17 December 1981, four members of the BR, posing as plumbers, invaded the Verona apartment of U.S. Army Brigadier General, James L. Dozier, then NATO deputy chief of staff at Southern European land forces.

[34] He was held for 42 days until 28 January 1982, when a team of NOCS (a special operations unit of the Italian police) successfully carried out his rescue from an apartment in Padua, without firing a shot, capturing the entire terrorist cell.

[37] Some of those associated with the Hyperion School, which included Corrado Simioni, Vanni Mulinaris, and Duccio Berio,[38] were accused by the Italian authorities of being the "masterminds" of the BR, although they were all cleared afterwards.

The Abbé had even observed eight days of a hunger strike from 26 May to 3 June 1984 in the Cathedral of Turin to protest the conditions suffered by "Brigadists" in Italian prisons and the imprisonment without trial of Mulinaris, who was recognized as innocent some time afterwards.

The same year, French President François Mitterrand guaranteed immunity from extradition to BR members living in France who had made a break from their past, were not sentenced for violent crimes and had started a new life.

On 3 March 2003, two followers, Mario Galesi and Nadia Desdemona Lioce, started a firefight with a police patrol on a train at Castiglion Fiorentino station, near Arezzo.

On 23 October 2003, Italian police arrested six members of the Red Brigades in early-dawn raids in Florence, Sardinia, Rome and Pisa in connection with the murder of Massimo D'Antona.

[citation needed] Several figures from the 1970s, including philosopher Antonio Negri who was wrongly accused of being the mastermind of the BR, have called for a new analysis of the events which happened during the Years of Lead in Italy.

On 1 October 2007, Cristoforo Piancone, who is serving a life sentence for six murders, managed to steal €170,000 from the bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena with an accomplice.

Romanian defector Ion Mihai Pacepa claimed that the Red Brigades' primary foreign support came from the Czechoslovak StB and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Yugoslav connection with underground leftist movements in Italy began in the mid-1960s with the intent of destabilizing NATO, and ties were allegedly established with the Red Brigades immediately following the group's founding in 1970.

The UDBA chief in charge of relations with the Red Brigades was, in Pacepa's account, Silvo Gorenc, a close associate of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia.

Gorenc was supposedly proud of Yugoslavia's close yet clandestine relationship with the Red Brigades, though he allegedly insisted the government could and would not attempt to influence the group to avoid executing Aldo Moro, despite Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu's pleas for Yugoslav intervention.