Italy, 1976: The 'British government contemplated supporting an anti-communist coup'

Sporchi trucchi

The CIA's anti-communist scheming in postwar Italy is well-documented, but the plot thickens with new revelations about British involvement

The revelation that the British government contemplated supporting an anti-communist coup in Italy in 1976 is not as surprising as might at first seem. It confirms a long British tradition of marching in lockstep with the global policies of the United States, even when those policies were morally ambiguous or misguided.

The political conditions of cold-war Italy that emerge from the declassified Foreign Office documents published by the Rome daily La Repubblica on Sunday would appear to justify the prevailing sense of strategic panic. The Italian Communist party (PCI) was threatening to achieve power through the ballot box, held back only by the fragile bulwark of a corrupt and effete Christian Democrat party (DC).

Communist participation in the government of a key Nato ally, as proposed two years later by DC leader Aldo Moro, could have momentous consequences. "The presence of communist ministers in the Italian government would pose an immediate security problem for the Alliance," Britain's ambassador to Nato, John Killick, warned London. The security of nuclear bases in Italy could be at risk, military secrets were likely to leak to Moscow, and the US Sixth Fleet's land base in Naples would no longer be secure.

It was not, then, surprising that a Foreign Office planning document, drawn up on May 6 1976, should consider "Action in support of a coup d'etat or other subversive action." British opinion was by no means monolithic on the subject. The country was, after all, under the Labour government of James Callaghan. Though apparently attractive, the idea of a surgical military coup was "unrealistic" for the Foreign Office planners, and an authoritarian government was considered just as unpalatable as a government comprising communists.

Britain's ambassador to Rome, Sir Guy Millard, wisely concluded there was not much his country could do, lamenting the fact that the fate of the country was in the undependable hands of the DC. But British planners ran through the whole gamut of options, including "Subversive or military intervention against the PCI". The latter included financial support for "democratic forces" and the encouragement of a coup. Callaghan was acutely aware of the sensitivity of the subject, highlighting the "grave harm" that would be caused if the documents became public, revealing Britain's "interference in the internal affairs of a European ally".

All this was at a time when Italy was wracked by industrial unrest, terrorist bombings and authentic coup plots enjoying varying degrees of support from the US government. 1976 saw the arrest on coup-plotting charges of Edgardo Sogno, a former resistance fighter turned anti-communist partisan who had also served as a diplomat in Washington. Sogno claimed in a memoir that his coup project had been given a green light by the Rome CIA station chief, who assured him of US support for "any initiative designed to keep the communists out of government".

In 1990, Sogno told the magazine Panorama that he had made a personal commitment to shoot anyone who was prepared to form a government with members of the PCI. The admission, and the anti-communist planning outlined in the Foreign Office documents, provide an interesting backdrop to the fate of Aldo Moro. The moderate DC leader was kidnapped by the Marxist revolutionaries of the Red Brigades on the day he was due to present a new government - enjoying for the first time the external support of the PCI - for a confidence vote in parliament. He was shot dead after 55 days in captivity, on May 9 1978.

The maverick journalist Mino Pecorelli, who had close ties to the Italian intelligence services and the anti-communist P2 masonic lodge, described the kidnap operation as bearing "the hallmark of a lucid superpower". Moro had to be removed because his "historic compromise" with the PCI was disturbing the post-war balance of power, he claimed. Like the FCO planners, Pecorelli saw the development as potentially destabilising for Moscow as well as for the west, its eastern bloc hegemony threatened by the model of Enrico Berlinguer's democratic "Eurocommunism".

Much plotting evidently went on to underpin Italy's dramatic "years of lead" and much more of it has yet to emerge.

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By Philip Whilan

14 Jan 2008