The Death of a Statesman:
Aldo Moro and the Unspoken Terrorism
Like the thrall of the Kennedy
assassination in America, the Aldo Moro story has haunted Italy for
decades. The differences between the two cases are fundamental, but
on March 16, 1978, Rome was Dallas. Moro was a vigorous 61 years old,
the most powerful political figure in Italy, when his car and escort
sped off that sunstruck morning in Rome into an urban guerrilla ambush.
Pulled from the carnage of his  five
bodyguards, he spent the next 54 days in a suspiciously elusive "people's
prison," later revealed as a tiny room in an apartment only a few miles
from where he lived and the seat of his governance. On the morning of
May 9, he was slain by his captors but by then he had already been pronounced
politically dead and buried by his own party and his own men - the power-brokers
of Rome. Few would argue otherwise today, but not then. In the Dallas
killing, conspiracy theories have remained unproved, but not in the
Moro case. From the moment the dead man was put to rest, an uneasy national
conscience began to ask: Why, alone among all the terrorist crimes in
Italy, was no effort made to rescue the prisoner either by force or
negotiation? Since the mid-1980s, powerful evidence of official misdoing
and coverup emerged.
1 Again, hardly anyone
would dispute this now; even fewer, I suspect, care to recall anything
more than the catchphrase, anni di piombo - or "Years of Lead."
Yet it is precisely that unspoken side of terrorism that holds lessons
for these times. Much of what was and remains unspoken may be gleaned
from this book excerpt — the first of a series: the introduction
to Days of Wrath: the Ordeal of Aldo
Moro, written in the year following the
Moro killing. Although, not a word has been changed, I've added updating
footnotes. — RK
 ldo
Moro was kidnapped in an urban guerrilla ambush on the morning of March
16, 1978 by the Red Brigades. He was murdered on the morning of May 9
as he looked into the eyes of two particularly cold-blooded killers of
the Red Brigades.2
In the intervening fifty-four days he was annihilated
by a community of men of power of which he was a member.
He was annihilated in the strictest sense of the word:
to remove the force of; to reduce to nothing - by a government of his
own creation, by the political party over which he presided, by the first
parliamentary majority in the Atlantic alliance hinged to Eurocommunist
power, by an aggregate of mass media looting truth in a news grey-out
and, finally, by an astonishingly uncritical consensus of world opinion
led to believe that some Great Principle of Democracy was the price of
the prisoner’s freedom.
The reasons for his annihilation were wholly impersonal.
To be sure, there were indications that he might be forced by his captors
to “talk.” Apart from the fear this generated among his fellow politicians
in a country harboring many potential scandals, the intelligence services
of this and other member nations of NATO were concerned about what the
five-time Prime Minister might reveal. But the custody of state and supra-national
secrets was only a small factor. The greatest threat posed by the capture
of the most powerful man in Italy was simply Moro’s will to survive.
The actual Deciders, including those publicly accused by
Mrs. Moro of having by acts of omission ratified her husband’s death sentence,
behaved certainly without malice, and in most cases went against the deepest
wishes of their hearts. The making of a non-person of Aldo Moro, his physical
and moral abandonment by society’s forced withdrawal of his integrity,
was determined by a curious conjunction of time and the vicissitudes of
power. From the moment the Red Brigades laid their hands upon his substance
as a human being, he began to be transformed into the statue that will
one day stand in some Roman piazza bearing his name.
Moro’s power, however formidable were the forces arrayed
against it, was not easily recalled. From his cell in an elusive, desolate
“people’s prison,” he waged a complex, highly articulate and ingenious
battle for his life. He succeeded in engaging not only the fullest energies
of his family and friends who did not conform to the way of the juggernaut
(notably the Pope, two ex-presidents of the republic, and the United Nations
Secretary-General), but also, as will be seen, a part of the Red Brigades
themselves.
He refused the stage-managed martyr’s role proffered by
his peers. There could be no glory in dying for the pastiche of special
interests that held sway in Rome. There was only the dignity of campaigning
well for life in his own intensely political style, and when he understood
that he had lost - in advance of those who were fighting on his side -
he damned his false mourners, absolved no one of responsibility, and said
a simple last farewell. He died an anti-hero, a hero of his time.
 his
is a report on his struggle and his death. It is a story - as much as
a series of blood-letting truths can resemble a story - of how a powerful
man and his family were locked together by a combination of circumstances
into direct conflict with a political force of his own making, and how
that man and his family responded. What began, in terms of a story, as
high melodrama - a startling coup de main on a sun-struck street in Rome
- was turned by the wrench of dramatic irony into a pure tragedy worthy
of a bardic pen.
I have no such pen, but I was drawn into taking a more
than passing interest in these events by the repeated observation that
the aspects of the case referred to above were being overlooked. Moreover,
after it was all over, the world applauded a hitherto untried strategy
of confrontation with political terrorism, which had in fact been totally
misunderstood. When the Washington Post, for example, wrote while
commending the new strategy that Moro’s kidnappers deliberately forced
him “deeper and deeper into psychological breakdown, advertising the stages
of their progress by publishing his increasingly distraught and desperate
letters” it revealed how remote it was from what had happened in Rome,
as well as how successfully Rome had covered up. A grave injustice was
being compounded into an historical error, and a dangerous precedent had
been set on an international scale.
I was in Rome for all Aldo Moro’s fifty-four days. Not
that I necessarily believe that those who are present and involved in
events are better placed than others to judge. On the contrary, the opposite
is closer to the truth, which is why the administration of justice and
the writing of history, for instance, are the natural dominions of disinterested
parties only. Indeed, my only claim to objectivity is the alien eye through
which I followed the case at close hand. Normally, the only events I “cover”
are those that happened long ago or have never happened at all. On the
day Aldo Moro was kidnapped, although I like everyone else in Rome became
aware of the news almost instantly in multiple, tangible ways, I was on
my way to a quiet corner of the city to work on a story that took place
in Rome four hundred years ago. I was in a different time frame, and after
being momentarily shaken by the present, I was more content than ever
to return there. In the years I had lived in Italy, I had had only two
relatively close encounters with Moro, neither of which had altered my
prejudice that he was precisely as he had been portrayed with devastating
wit by the great Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté in a film called Todo
Modo. In that film, the Moro character, the symbol of a decadent
Christian Democracy, is eliminated in the end by his party’s corrupters,
the CIA. Had I not been lost in the days of the Counter-Reformation, I
might have wondered how much truth there was in what many Romans were
saying, that Todo Modo had been prophecy in the can.
For I, like the distinguished author of the novel on which
the film was based, Leonardo Sciascia, was yet to discover who Aldo Moro
really was.
For a time, it was only on my brief but daily trips to
the frantic present that I noticed something amiss in Rome, but when Aldo
Moro’s letters began to arrive from the people’s prison, I knew by the
response of the men of power that a wicked fear had grabbed the Italian
boot, and someone was bound to fall.
Little happens in Italy that is not linked to the aims
of one or another political party, and here was a situation, I was perhaps
last to realize, where the principal aims of all the main parties coincided.
This was especially true for the super-parties - the ruling Christian
Democrats and the most powerful Communist party in the West.
On the day Moro was kidnapped a new government was to be
empowered, and the parliamentary majority on which it was to be based
was the broadest in the history of postwar Italy. It included, after thirty
years of ostracism, the Communists, who by a few percentage points had
been second only to the Christian Democrats at the polls. Their entry
into the majority on 16 March was the result of delicate statecraft which
Moro himself had contrived. Thus he had become the target of the Red Brigades,
who had timed his capture to his twenty-minute drive to Parliament to
give his blessing to the new government’s accession.
The Communists, who had gained access to state power on
promises of defending democracy, now sought with frenzy to disassociate
themselves from the Communism of the Red Brigades. They rushed forward
to proclaim themselves the staunchest protectors of the state, its institutions
and law and order. The Christian Democrats, whatever their individual
sentiments towards their captured leader, could do no less; and so the
race to the hard line was on. Indeed, this heartless, intractable stance
that was to dominate all the events leading (inexorably, one sees now)
to Moro’s slaying emerged almost at once. Backed internationally, especially
by the United States and West Germany (for reasons, I was later to discover,
that had little to do with Italy and the case in question), it left no
room for flexibility. From the beginning, one was either a hawk or a dupe
of the Red Brigades. All criticism of the official line was trampled down,
and the biggest critic of all, Aldo Moro, was said to be pathologically
mad.
Giorgio Bocca, an independently minded Italian journalist,
painted this picture shortly after Moro’s death:
On March 16, the facade [of a free press] came down and
one could see how the transmission of information really worked. The
political parties, the owners or the patrons of the newspapers and television
made the decisions and the editors carried them out. Hypocrisy, lies,
exaggerations, and outright inventions, which a few days earlier would
have been considered unacceptable, were sent to the composing room and
printed without the slightest protest. The dissidents, rather than be
marginalized, fell into line; the columnists, rather than be censored,
censored themselves. The majority view, everyone knew, was inspired
by the interests of the two great parties of power: the Christian Democrats
and the Communists . . . the general tenor was, “He who is not with
us is either a scoundrel or a friend of the enemy.
had personally witnessed this sort of thing in other countries, in India
and Bangladesh, in Eastern Europe, and in my own country during the Vietnam
war and in the ‘fifties, but Italy after Mussolini had lost its taste
for intolerance. As this was the first time such a reaction had been engendered
by modern political terrorism, from which no country appears to be immune,
it seemed worthy of attention. Foreigners, I think, tend to hone the sense
that sniffs out freedom in trouble.
Early in April, I put my rummaging of the sixteenth century
away and began to watch the events in Rome more carefully than before.
It was, however, quite difficult to learn anything that was not in the
newspapers and, like the atmosphere, the newspapers were exactly as Bocca
described them. Nevertheless, there was an information underground of
sorts. It had its origins in the Moro family’s need to communicate what
the mass media refused to convey. The more the affair hurtled towards
its climax, the more elaborate and accessible was the counter-news. I
will speak of all this in its proper place, but it was not until the terrible
end, or weeks later, when tensions even for those who truly grieved began
to subside, that I was able to really begin the work of sorting fact from
fancy.
My task was made easier by a number of factors. The first
was the onset of contrition. Many people were suddenly taken with sorrow
for having sowed the hard line to reap nothing, and some, although far
from all, were now quite willing to talk. In the same vein the press,
among other amends, assigned some of its best investigative reporters
to retrace the fifty-four days in an unjaundiced way.
Second was the slight shift in the political balance of
power caused by local elections in May. This brought about some in-fighting
in the capital which would have been of little interest to outsiders had
not its internal logic forced the steady leakage of almost all the known
secret documents in the Moro case. .
Finally, I was in a somewhat privileged position. Over
the years I had developed my own sources of information in Rome, which
is nothing unusual for a person of my profession, except that many of
these sources had been and still were in touch with the protagonists in
the Moro case. A small number had themselves been protagonists. As a result,
I was favored with much unpublished material and was able to make contact
with circles still completely closed, particularly the Moro family and
the Red Brigades.
This is not to say, however, that the reader has in his
or her hands anything resembling a definitive work on the case of Aldo
Moro. Unfortunately, that book will be a long time coming. Many circles
or inner circles remain more than closed; they are sealed from justice
and shame. What has been attempted here is an initial effort to straighten
the doctored record of events that weighed so heavily in those days and
seems now more than ever in need of review. This hardly ensures that I
have managed to entirely avoid adding new error to old, but my work is
based exclusively on all that is known and what I have come to know in
the course of my research. I have given no space to my imagination nor
credit to anybody’s fiction.
Even so I, too, am obliged to keep certain confidences.
The Moro case is hot. His killers are at large. The fortunes of men and
women are still in play. Wounds of mind, body and soul have yet to heal.
Blood matters of life or death are real in the most literal sense. Let
the reader be assured, however, that nothing of what I am not at liberty
to disclose would alter the substance of this report. For reasons of prudence,
requests for anonymity and, above all, due respect for the Moro family’s
self-imposed reserve, I ask the reader’s indulgence wherever I fail to
satisfy a natural curiosity about certain intimate details. As for my
sources, I have, in the customary fashion, and within the limits cited,
indicated the origins of everything that follows.
It is a narrative of the world’s second experience with
a universal Confusion of Tongues.
R.K.
Rome, March 16, 1979
1
Infiltration of the highest levels of government
by a secret organization known as P-2, with an intent to overthrow Italian
democracy, has been established beyond doubt. Moro’s political agenda
was anathema to P-2 and it was in a position to do something about it
when he was kidnapped. The long work of the parliamentary commission investigating
the case disclosed that P-2 members directly responsible for the search
operations during Moro's captivity included the Chiefs of Staff of the
Army and the Navy, the heads of the intelligence services, the head of
the war room, high police officials conducting the field investigations,
and the Interior Minister's closest civilian advisers. The evidence further
suggests that they succeeded in locating the Rome apartment where Moro
was being held prisoner, but did nothing about it, and may even have shielded
it from local police dragnet operations.
2
It was not until 1994 that the actual killer, one
man alone, confessed. See related Time Capsule, "The Man Who Killed
Aldo Moro."
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