16.05.2013
Giulio Andreotti: Corruption, murder and the thirst for power
Toby Abse reviews the life of the Italian prime minister with close Mafia connections: Giulio Andreotti, January 14 1919 - May 6 2013
This month has finally seen the death at the age of 94 of Giulio Andreotti, probably the most important figure in the entire history of Italian Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana - DC), as he played a much greater role in shaping the party’s character during the cold war era than his original patron, the party’s founder Alcide De Gasperi (1881-1954). Some have tried to portray Andreotti as a major statesman or at worst a “controversial politician”.1 It needs to be pointed out that in actual fact he was linked to the Mafia from the late 1950s until the late 1980s and the instigator of a number of political murders.
Andreotti’s longevity - both literal and political (he was a deputy in the lower house of parliament from 1946 until 1991 and a life senator from 1991 until 2013) demonstrates the truth of his most famous aphorism: “Power wears out those who don’t have it.” The man judged unfit for military service in 1940 outlived the vast majority of his healthier and more athletic male contemporaries.
By far the best description of him was given by Aldo Moro - another leading Christian Democrat and former premier - during his imprisonment by the Red Brigades in 1978: “a cold, inscrutable manipulator, without doubts, without hesitations, without a moment of human pity. This is Andreotti, whose orders all the others have obviously followed.” At that point, aware of his own inexorable fate, Moro saw Andreotti as bearing by far the heaviest responsibility for his own imminent death: “Andreotti has always been in power, his origins are somewhat to the right… Now he is following a hard line in relation to the Red Brigades, with the intention of sacrificing without scruple the person who was patron and organiser of the present government accords.”2
Whilst Moro may have been the first public figure with a close link to Andreotti to die a violent death, he was by no means the last - the journalist, Mino Pecorelli (1979); the police chief, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa (1982); the crooked financiers, sometimes known as ‘god’s bankers’, Roberto Calvi (1982) and Michele Sindona (1986); and Andreotti’s Sicilian political lieutenant, Salvo Lima (1992) being the most notorious. The most comprehensive list of possible victims is given in Paolo Sorrentino’s magnificent 2008 biopic Il divo, the screening of which Andreotti is said to have walked out of. Lima was killed by the Mafia as a warning to Andreotti, whom the now dominant Corleonese Mafia faction regarded as having betrayed them for failing to get the convictions of scores of major Mafia bosses overturned in 1992 in the way they had expected. However, the earlier deaths have often, rightly or wrongly, been laid at his door,3 even if he was only ever put on trial for one of them, the murder of Mino Pecorelli, for which he was convicted in November 2002, although that verdict was overturned in October 2003.
US link
Andreotti dominated the Italian political scene - demonstrated by his seven premierships, concentrated into three periods (1972-73, 1976-79 and 1989-92). However, whilst there can be little dispute that no major Italian politician of national, as opposed to purely regional Sicilian, standing has ever had such close and longstanding links with the Mafia, that connection - and the substantial Sicilian electoral base it gave to this most Roman of all Italian politicians - is not the only reason for his dominance. During the cold war, Andreotti was the key link man between the Italian political establishment and the Americans, especially the military and secret services. This linkage was built up during his extraordinarily long tenure, by Italian standards, as minister of defence in 1959-66 - a period marked by the De Lorenzo coup attempt of 1964.
Without American protection, his long immunity from serious judicial investigation is incomprehensible - his crimes were of a different order from the usual mundane corruption of most Italian politicians of the First Republic. It was clearly the decision of the Americans to throw him to the wolves in 1993 - whether because of his public revelations in 1990 of Nato’s long denied Operation Gladio, because of his pro-Arab stance as foreign minister in 1983-89 or simply because a disintegrating Christian Democracy was no longer of any practical use is unclear - that precipitated the spate of accusations by Mafia pentiti (supergrasses).
This link with the Americans may, at least in part, explain Andreotti’s role in the Moro affair, which, even allowing for some rivalry between the two Christian Democrat leaders, seemed an odd way to return the favour that Moro had showed in engineering Andreotti’s return to the premiership in 1976. It is now quite clear that, whether or not the Americans had any role in Moro’s initial kidnapping, they decided relatively early in his captivity that Moro had to die - as the relatively recent interview given by Steve Pieczenik, the former deputy secretary of state in the US government, has confirmed.4 Moro had on an official visit to Washington in September 1974 been given a stern warning by Henry Kissinger about his willingness to compromise with the Partito Comunista Italiano, which Moro’s widow always believed to constitute a direct threat to his life. As she explained to an Italian Senate Commission many years ago, “It’s one of the few occasions when my husband told me exactly what had been said to him, without telling me the name of the person concerned. I will try and repeat it now: You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration. Either you give this up or you will pay dearly for it.”5
Whilst the death of Moro may have been decided in Washington, some subsequent killings seem to fit into a pattern of more personal and purely Italian vendettas. Pecorelli seems to have been making various damaging, if often coded accusations, including about both the Moro affair, against Andreotti - accusations which could have had grave effects on the politician’s career. Nonetheless, even in this instance there may have been some American complicity. In one of his last articles, published on January 16 1979, Pecorelli had written: “… we will talk about Steve R Pieczenik … who participated for three weeks in the interior ministry’s expert meetings, then returned to America before Moro was killed, and reported to Congress that the measures taken by Cossiga on the Moro affair were the best possible in the circumstances.”6
Pecorelli was shot in the mouth, the Mafia’s classical way of punishing those who break its code of silence. But, regardless of who actually fired the fatal shot, the motivation was clearly political - it was obviously some sort of contract killing, not an internal Mafia matter. He was a little known and rather shady and ambiguous figure, as much of a blackmailer as a genuine investigative journalist, and his often coded articles were for the obscure, small-circulation periodical, Osservatorio Politico, so his murder was not a major news item at a time when terrorist killings still dominated the headlines.
The death of the carabinieri general, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, was a rather more dramatic public event. In 1982 the government appointed him prefect of Palermo to deal with the ‘second Mafia war’. Just before taking up the post, Dalla Chiesa had a meeting with Andreotti, at which the general indicated he would take action against any Sicilian Christian Democrat politicians linked with the Mafia. Dalla Chiesa’s diary indicated Andreotti got very angry on this occasion, but Andreotti always denied the meeting had ever occurred. In a note dated April 2 1982 to the then prime minister, Giovanni Spadolini, Dalla Chiesa wrote that the Sicilian current linked to Andreotti was the most infiltrated by the Mafia of all the DC factions on the island.
By September of that year Dalla Chiesa had been ambushed in his car in the centre of Palermo and shot dead, together with his wife. On the face of it, it looked as if the Sicilian Mafia had decided that the tough policeman, already very famous for his ruthless and effective crackdown on the Red Brigades, was taking his new job far too seriously and had to be eliminated before he weakened their hold on the island. Andreotti’s involvement could be explained as a product of his need to protect his Sicilian political associates, who were closely intertwined with the mobsters. This is more or less what was alleged by Dalla Chiesa’s son, Nando, in his book about his father’s killing.7
However, there is an alternative explanation - in which the Mafia play a less central role, even if they would doubtless have found the elimination of somebody they would in any event have regarded as an over-zealous policeman a rather congenial task. This second explanation hinges on Dalla Chiesa’s knowledge of the murkier aspects of the Moro affair. According to Mino Pecorelli’s sister, Dalla Chiesa met Pecorelli, who was a fellow member of a masonic lodge, a few days before the latter was assassinated and in the course of this meeting Pecorelli gave Dalla Chiesa several documents containing serious accusations against Andreotti. Moreover, on his death bed in 1993, Andreotti’s longstanding political collaborator, Franco Evangelisti, described to a journalist an alleged secret meeting between Andreotti and Dalla Chiesa, during which the latter had shown Andreotti Moro’s complete statement to the Red Brigades, containing ‘dangerous revelations’ about Andreotti.
The key point here is that the more complete version of Moro’s memorial and prison letters were only ‘found’ and published in 1990 - having, according to the unbelievable official version, somehow escaped detection in a thorough police search of the very same Milanese apartment in 1978 - long after Dalla Chiesa’s death in 1982. So this account suggests that Dalla Chiesa, far from being a police investigator of unimpeachable integrity, had, for a period at least, colluded with Andreotti in the cover-up of the Moro affair, something which he might have been able to use against Andreotti, had he lived.
Bankers’ demise
If the Pecorelli murder for which Andreotti was tried and the Dalla Chiesa murder of which he was accused, either implicitly or explicitly, by a variety of authors are the most spectacular deaths associated with him in the years after Aldo Moro’s untimely end, the murder/suicide of the two crooked bankers, Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona, are also worthy of some attention.
It ought to be stressed that both had very strong Vatican connections and that by the 1970s Andreotti, who attended mass without fail at 6am every morning and cultivated each successive pope with boundless devotion was the DC politician with the closest direct links to the Vatican hierarchy. Despite this religiosity, Andreotti’s claim that “I must say, I met Mother Teresa much more often than I met Sindona or Calvi” has as much credibility as his claim never to have met the notorious Salvo cousins - a pair of Mafiosi who for many years had the contract for state tax collection in Sicily and with whom Andreotti appeared in a number of photographs, doubtless by pure chance.
Roberto Calvi’s death under Blackfriars Bridge still remains a mystery - in part because of the apparent incompetence of the City of London police, who instantly assumed that the banker had hanged himself and failed to notice the bricks in his pockets or marks around his neck consistent with strangulation.8 Sindona, who in 1984 had been arrested, brought back to Italy from the USA and sentenced to life imprisonment for fraudulent bankruptcy and the assassination of lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli, was killed by a poisoned cup of coffee in Voghera prison in March 1986. Journalist and university professor Sergio Turone has suggested that Andreotti had a role in providing the poisoned sugar that caused Sindona’s death, after convincing the banker that it would cause him only to faint, and this would help him to be returned to the US. According to Turone, Andreotti feared Sindona would reveal dangerous details about his past life, because Sindona’s criminal conviction had shown him that Andreotti had stopped supporting him.
It is worth noting that Ambrosoli’s son, the unsuccessful centre-left candidate for the Lombard regional presidency this February, walked out of a sitting of the regional council when it decided upon a few minutes’ silence in Andreotti’s honour last week. The implication being that he held Andreotti responsible for his father’s murder, whether because of Andreotti’s friendship with Sindona or more directly is not clear. Ambrosoli senior had been shot dead by three Mafia hit men commissioned by Sindona, but shortly before Ambrosoli’s death he received a threatening phone call invoking Andreotti’s name, which he taped; conveniently the American Mafioso at the end of the line fell to his death whilst trying to escape from a New York jail in 1984.
As stated above, in one of the often bizarre verdicts of the Cassazione (supreme court), Andreotti’s conviction for the murder of Pecorelli was overturned in 2003. However, contrary to what his apologists and many confused and ignorant journalists have claimed, Andreotti was not formally acquitted of Mafia involvement in another court hearing in 2003. Indeed the court verdict established that Andreotti had had strong ties to the Mafia until 1980 and had used them to further his political career to such an extent as to be considered part of the Mafia itself - in fact he had had “friendly and even direct ties” with Mafia boss Stefano Bontade. However, the statute of limitations applied to an offence committed more than 20 years earlier, so that no legal punishment could be imposed.
Whilst it may perhaps be true that there was some conflict between Andreotti and the Mafia over a failed attempt on his part to save Piersanti Mattarella, a reformist DC president of the Sicilian region, from assassination, Andreotti did not break off relations with the Mafia for about another decade, perhaps not until early 1992 - although some have suggested that the break may have come slightly earlier, as European Union, and particularly German, pressure on the Italian government to do something about the Mafia had started to mount.
Although Andreotti was involved in various corruption scandals - probably to pay for factional intrigues and to buy support - he seems to have been primarily interested in power, not money, and does not seem to have indulged in the luxurious lifestyle associated with so many Italian politicians of both left and right. However, whilst he lacked the ostentatious vulgarity associated with Berlusconi, no-one should forget his vile crimes - let alone indulge in nauseating apologetics of the kind that marked Donald Sassoon’s eulogy in The Guardian.
Notes
1. See Donald Sassoon’s obituary in The Guardian (May 6) for an attempt to whitewash him.
2. Translations taken from P Willan Puppetmasters: the political use of terrorism in Italy New York 2002, p276. Whilst it could be argued that not every assertion is reliably sourced, it should be far more widely read than it has been.
3. As Andreotti famously remarked, “Aside from the Punic Wars, for which I was too young, I have been blamed for everything else.”
4. Pieczenik’s interview was part of a French documentary film, which became the basis of the book by Emmanuel Amara, Abbiamo ucciso Aldo Moro (Rome 2008). Pieczenik has given mutually contradictory accounts of his own role in the Moro affair to various journalists over the years and been unwilling to appear before any Italian parliamentary or judicial investigation. He has also made bizarre assertions about Osama bin Laden and other matters unrelated to the Moro affair, so doubtless some will argue he is an unreliable witness. But what he told Amara is more detailed and plausible than any other version he has ever provided.
5. Translation taken from Willan op cit p220.
7. N Dalla Chiesa Delitto imperfetto Milan 1984.
8. For further details about the case, see P Willan The last supper: the Mafia, the masons and the killing of Roberto Calvi London 2007.