The British role in the assassinations of Enrico Mattei and Aldo Moro was exposed on yesterday’s investigative TV program “Report” on Italy’s national Raitre channel. Author Paolo Mondani covered declassified British archive papers, and interviewed author Giovanni Fasanella. He and co-author Mario José Cereghino had found these papers and published them in his books, exposing how a British government “special committee” plotted a military coup in Italy in 1976, in order to stop Moro’s independence policy. They dropped that plan because of U.S. opposition, only to opt for “a different subversive action,” which ultimately contemplated the physical elimination of Moro in 1978.
As for Mattei: British archive papers show that, in 1962, a few months before he was assassinated via the sabotage of his plane, Mattei was described as “danger number one” for British Empire interests in Southwest Asia, and the decision was solicited to transfer the “Mattei dossier” to the intelligence services.
Back to the Moro case: A series of new, unpublished elements were reported. This included, remarkably, the testimony of Claudio Signorile, who was deputy secretary-general of the Italian Socialist Party when Moro was kidnapped on March 16, 1978 and killed in May, and who undertook an effort, through secret negotiations with the Red Brigades terrorists, for Moro’s release. Rome at that time was crowded with British intelligence agents, reported Signorile, adding that a witness had told him that the Red Brigades had regular contact with British agents. U.K. intelligence had agents in all political parties, Signorile told “Report” interviewer Mondani. (It is possible that Signorile’s source is Franco Piperno, a leader of the Autonomia Operaia group, close to the Red Brigades terrorists. Piperno was Signorile’s contact man during the attempted negotiations with the Red Brigades.)
That points to the existence of a puppet-master behind the Red Brigades and their “enemies” in the Italian institutions. An entity external to the Red Brigades decided that Moro had to be killed, because he was revealing NATO secrets, including the existence of “Operation Gladio,” to his Red Brigades interrogators. (NB: This puts Gladio in the right perspective with respect to the Moro case. Moro was not “killed by Gladio” as conspiracy theorists say, but because he had exposed its existence, among other things.)