25.08.2010

Malevolent conspirator

Toby Abse condemns the architect of the 'strategy of tension'

The death of Francesco Cossiga, president of Italy from 1985 to 1992, will come as a great relief to many of his surviving victims - not least the relatives of the 85 people who were murdered during his premiership by fascists apparently acting on the orders of Cossiga’s masonic friends. They died as a result of a bomb deliberately placed in a waiting room at Bologna railway station on August 2 1980.

A matter of days before Cossiga was taken into intensive care, this malevolent and unrepentant old conspirator callously exploited the 30th anniversary of the Bologna bombing to step up his nauseating campaign to establish the ‘innocence’ of the convicted fascist mass-murderers, Francesca Mambro and Giusva Fioravanti - whose establishment links have already ensured that they have served remarkably little time behind bars. He cynically sought, in stark contradiction to the overwhelming evidence that had emerged in court many years previously, to blame the bombing on Palestinians.

Cossiga was probably the most sinister figure ever to become president of the Italian republic, even if some might argue that Giulio Andreotti was a more sinister prime minister. Amongst the presidents, only Antonio Segni, a fellow Sardinian Christian Democrat and relative of Cossiga’s, who acted as his patron when the latter was first elected to parliament in 1958, came close.

If any one politician could be seen as the architect of the ‘strategy of tension’ - the manipulation of terrorist groups in the interest of the more authoritarian sections of the Italian establishment and their American patrons - it was Cossiga. Throughout his career, he was a man renowned for his links with the secret services - links which went right back to 1962, when Segni put him in charge of his dealings with De Lorenzo and the Italian secret service, then known as Sifar. Cossiga’s appointment as under-secretary for defence in 1966 - a post he continued to hold under successive administrations until 1970 - gave him official responsibility for the secret service. It was no accident that his reaction to the uncovering of the American-sponsored clandestine structure known as Gladio in 1990 was so extreme as to lead many, even amongst sections of the establishment that generally regarded him as a safe pair of hands, to question his sanity.

Whilst Cossiga accumulated contacts in the murky world of the secret services, both Italian and American, over a long period, he first achieved national fame - or perhaps one should say infamy - amongst the wider public as minister of the interior in 1977. He was an extremely enthusiastic exponent of a repressive response to the largely university-based movement of 1977, a response which, doubtless intentionally, strengthened the influence of the violent autonomist minority within the movement, and boosted terrorist recruitment in its aftermath. Cossiga must bear the moral responsibility for the fatal shooting by the police of two unarmed demonstrators in two separate incidents that year - Francesco Lorusso in Bologna and Giorgiana Masi in Rome. These events led him to be branded ‘minister for civil war’ by the movement. His name appeared on walls all over Italy spelt with a K and the letter S in Gothic script - an obvious allusion to Nazi Germany.

However, it was the events of 1978 rather than 1977 which were to sow doubts about his character amongst many with no particular sympathy for extreme-left slogan-painters, leading a wide range of ordinary people to come to see him as a pathological liar and a man of blood in the way Eleonora Moro did. The 54 days of the captivity of her husband, Aldo Moro (March-May 1978), were the key episode in the life of Francesco Cossiga. As minister of the interior he has to be held responsible for the death of the man who had trusted him enough to appoint him to this post in the first place, before Andreotti renewed the appointment, and whom he claimed - how sincerely we will never know - was one of his closest friends.

At the very least, Cossiga’s refusal to negotiate with the Red Brigades could be seen as making the captive’s death inevitable, given the apparent failure of the police, army, carabinieri and secret services to locate either the kidnappers or the so-called ‘people’s prison’ in which the victim was being held. Cossiga’s resignation in the immediate aftermath of Moro’s murder has always been presented by his many friends in the Italian political and journalistic establishment as an honest recognition of the breathtaking incompetence of all the varied forces under his overall command, as an acceptance of ministerial responsibility rare in Italian public life, and more reminiscent of the English model, of which Cossiga, with his ostentatious admiration for the British monarchy, claimed to be so fond.

If one took all this willingness to acknowledge acute personal failings at face value, one would wonder why somebody who had made a complete mess of the most serious challenge he had ever faced in the absolutely central role of interior minister, instead of retiring in disgrace from the political arena, was so rapidly regarded as fit not only to be prime minister in 1979-80, but, even more significantly, president of the republic in 1985-92. However, if one accepts, at least in broad outline, what the establishment apologist, Vladimiro Satta, so superciliously labels the conspiracy theory of the Moro affair, it all makes much more sense. If Moro’s death, far from being a regrettable consequence of the appalling incompetence of the security forces, and a cast-iron determination by sincere believers in parliamentary democracy never to negotiate with terrorists, was instead the desired outcome - whether from the very beginning because of Moro’s commitment to an ‘historic compromise’ with the communists, or from the moment that Moro started to reveal political scandals or state secrets to his captors - then a man who played the key role in bringing about such a gruesome outcome and covering up the state’s collusion with the Red Brigades was bound to be rewarded over the rest of his lifetime by those internal and external forces in Rome and Washington who had so unhesitatingly sought Moro’s death.

Given Cossiga’s long-standing links with both the Italian secret services and the Americans - of which the sinister role of the American psychiatrist and international relations expert, Steve Pieczenik, in privately advising him about the dangers posed by a living Moro is but one example - and his apparently closeness to the P2 masonic lodge led by Licio Gelli, whose members made up a remarkable high proportion of his advisors during the 54 days, the subsequent flowering of his career seems almost inevitable.

Again, without such suppositions, one would be at a loss as to why somebody whose relatively short premiership left yet another trail of innocent blood - two major incidents involving the large-scale loss of Italian civilian lives: namely the far from accidental Ustica plane crash of June 1980; and the Bologna bombing of August 1980 - seemed such an ideal candidate for further high office five years later. Moreover, Cossiga’s premiership exposed the obvious hypocrisy behind the sanctimonious talk of having no dealings with terrorists that had so marked his public discourse as interior minister during the Moro affair, since as premier Cossiga leaked the news of the imminent arrest of the terrorist son of his minister of labour, Claudio Donat Cattin, to the father, thus enabling the son, a prime murder suspect, to flee. The contrast between this illegal favour to the Donat Cattin family and Cossiga’s obstinate refusal to entertain any of the captive Moro’s proposals about an exchange of prisoners between the state and the Red Brigades should be self-evident.

Whilst the early years of Cossiga’s presidency were unremarkable, after 1990 his conduct became more and more erratic and autocratic. He followed the corrupt Socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi, along the path of systematic attacks on the magistrates, seeking to subordinate them to the executive power, which aroused a lot of controversy at the time, even if it has become quite normal in Italy during the era of current premier Silvio Berlusconi. Given that the main motivation of both Craxi and Berlusconi for such attacks on magistrates has been irritation with any legal limits on their own financial dealings, it is worth pointing out that Cossiga, unlike many Christian Democrat politicians, never had any great interest in financial malfeasance - his reason for heartily detesting magistrates was that some of the braver ones were willing to investigate aspects of the ‘strategy of tension’, not least Gladio.

His blatant attempt to abuse presidential powers, accompanied by flirtations with the neo-fascist MSI, and calls for a presidential, rather than parliamentary, republic, as well as his shameless defence of the illegal Gladio after its belated exposure, led to the beginning of an impeachment procedure, but, predictably, the Italian Communist Party - engaged in its own liquidation in 1989-91 - had no stomach to pursue this. In the end, Cossiga resigned a few months early, but subsequently received the customary position of senator for life, and the same respect given by mainstream politicians of all shades to any other retired president.

In latter years, Cossiga continued to exert a malevolent influence from the shadows. He played a key role in conspiring against the first Prodi government and installing Massimo D’Alema as premier in 1998 - Cossiga’s motive appears to have been Atlanticist: to exploit the willingness of the opportunist D’Alema to toe the aggressive Nato line about the Kosova war in contrast to Prodi’s more pacific inclinations.

Whilst Cossiga sometimes provided Berlusconi with assistance in close votes in the Senate, his main contribution to public life in his last years was to continue to uphold the unconvincing official version of the Moro affair, and to promote a variety of lies and obfuscations about Bologna and Ustica. As a loyal friend of the Italian secret services, neo-fascists and the Americans, he blamed the French for the Ustica plane crash. Even if, as seems most likely, the incident did involve somebody mistaking the Italian civilian plane for a Libyan one, rather than the placing of a bomb on the Italian jet, the French were not at the top of the list of Libyan president Muammar al-Gaddafi’s enemies in 1980.

The public grief of former members of the Red Brigades involved in Moro’s kidnapping and murder, like Gallinari and Morucci, over Cossiga’s death, reinforces the impression that he played a key role in ensuring that their prison terms were considerably reduced in return for their permanent silence about the murkier aspects of the Moro affair. There is every reason to assume that Cossiga’s secrets have died with him.