Red Brigades

The Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse in Italian, often abbreviated as BR) were a terrorist group located in Italy and active during the "Years of Lead". Formed in 1970, the Marxist-Leninist Red Brigades sought to create a revolutionary state through armed struggle and to separate Italy from the Western Alliance (NATO). In 1978, the second groups of the BR, headed by Mario Moretti, kidnapped the former Christian Democrat Prime Minister Aldo Moro and murdered him three months later. The BR barely survived the end of the Cold War following a split in 1984 and the arrest or exile of the majority of its members. In the first ten years of the group's existence, the Red Brigades were credited with 14,000 acts of violence, most of which against defenseless people on the street. In the 1980's, the group was disbanded by Italian investigators, thanks to the fact that most leaders under arrest helped lead to the capture of the other members. A majority of such leaders took advantage of a law that gave credits for retracting the doctrine and contributing to the capture of members on the loose.

1970 foundation: the first BR generation

The Red Brigades were founded in August 1970 in Pecorile by Renato Curcio, a student at the University of Trento, his girlfriend Margherita Cagol (Mara Cagol), and Alberto Franceschini. In the beginning the Red Brigades were mainly active in Reggio Emilia, and later in Milan and Turin, where they supported labor unions. Members sabotaged factory equipment and broke into factory offices and trade union headquarters. In 1972, they carried out their first kidnapping: a factory foreman who was held for some time but later released .

During this time the Red Brigades' tactics and agenda split from other extreme left political groups, such as Lotta Continua or Potere Operaio (which were closer to the Autonomist movement). The Red Brigades now became far more violent and organized than their contemporaries. In June 1974, the Red Brigades made its first lethal attack, against two members of the Italian neo-fascist party, Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). After this it abandoned its political activities among workers.

On the other hand, the 1972 Peteano attack, killing three policemen by a car-bomb, was blamed for a long time on the BR, but it was later found that neo-fascist activist Vincenzo Vinciguerra was the true culprit. After this bombing, Vincigerra escaped to Franquist Spain where he continued to organize terrorist attacks, in the frame of the strategy of tension ..

1974 arrest of BR founders and Corrado Simioni's "superclan"

In September 1974, Red Brigades founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini were arrested by General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. They were released under the 1987 law on "dissociation". According to Franceschini, the death of editor Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, on March 15th, 1972, left them like "orphans”, and sparked the more violent nature of the BRs' acts after 1972 . Franceschini also admitted the Red Brigades' involvement in the bombing of the US Embassy in Athens Greece, which Corrado Simioni allegedly organized. According to Franceschini, Simioni also set up a secret group inside the Red Brigades, a sort of "superclan". Franceschini alleged that Simioni was working on behalf of NATO in a false flag operation, citing Simioni's insistent proposal to assassinate Junio Valerio Borghese in November 1970 or another unattended request to murder two NATO agents . However, Corrado Simioni was innocented by Italian justice for any alleged relations with the BR (before Franceschini's publication of his autobiography). Mario Moretti then took the head of the BR, and organized Aldo Moro's March 1978 kidnap. Moretti was suspected of being a spy by both Franceschini and Curcio .

Expansion and radicalization of the BR

After 1974, the Red Brigades expanded into Rome, Genoa, and Venice, and began to kidnap prominent individuals. Its 1975 manifesto stated that its goal was a "concentrated strike against the heart of the State, because the state is an imperialist collection of multinational corporations". It switched its attacks against police, security forces and the Italian ruling party, Democrazia Cristiana.

In 1976, the Italian police arrested a number of its members and killed one. That following April, the Red Brigades announced that they had set up a Communist Combatant Party to "guide the working class." Terrorist activities, especially against Carabinieri and magistrates, increased considerably to pressure juries to dismiss cases against the imprisoned leaders of the organization. Membership switched from workers to the dominance of students.

Aldo Moro's Murder, 1978

File:Moro br 1.jpg

Moro, photographed during his detention by the Red Brigades

Main article: Aldo Moro

In 1978, the Second BR, headed by Mario Moretti, kidnapped and murdered Christian Democrat Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was trying to conclude an Historic Compromise ("compromesso storico") between Italian Communist Party and Democrazia Cristiana. A team of Red Brigades members, using stolen Alitalia plane company uniforms, ambushed Moro, killed five of Moro’s bodyguards and took him captive. After holding Moro for 56 days, they placed him in a car and told him to cover himself with a blanket. Mario Moretti then shot him ten times in the chest. Moro's body was left in the trunk of a car in Via Caetani, a site midway between the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party headquarters, as a last symbolic challenge to the police, who were keeping the entire nation, and Rome in particular, under strict surveillance. Moretti wrote in Brigate Rosse: una storia italiana that the murder of Moro was the ultimate expression of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary action. Original founder Alberto Franceschini wrote that those imprisoned members did not understand why Moro had been chosen as a target.

Aldo Moro's assassination began an all-out assault against the Brigades by the Italian law enforcement and security forces. The murder of a popular political figure also drew condemnation from Italian left-wing radicals and even the imprisoned ex-leaders of the Brigades. The Brigades lost most of their (small) social following. Italian police made a large number of arrests in 1980: 12,000 far-left activists were detained(many of which disappeared), while 300 exiled themselves in France and 200 others in South America, on a total of 600 people who escaped away. Most leaders arrested (including, e.g., Faranda, Franceschini, Moretti, Morucci) collaborated with investigators in the capture of other BR members, and retracted their doctrine in exchange for years of prison credits, according to the pentito judicial strategy .

Aldo Moro's assassination continues to haunt today's Italy, and remains a significant event of the Cold War.

The BR in the 1980s

After the Abbé Pierre's January 2007 death, Italian magistrate Carlo Mastelloni recalled in the Corriere della Sera that the Abbé Pierre had "spontaneously testified" in the 1980s in favor of the group of Italians refugees in Paris revolving around the Hyperion language school, directed by Vanni Mulinaris. Simone de Beauvoir had also written a letter to him, which has been kept in juridical archives . The Hyperion School (which included Corrado Simioni, Vanni Mulinaris and Duccio Beriowas ) was accused by the Italian justice of being the "masterminds" of the BR, before all members being innocented.

After Vanni Mulinari's travel to Udine and subsequent arrest by the Italian justice, the Abbé Pierre went to talk in 1983 with Italian President Sandro Pertini to plead the cause of Vanni Mulinaris, imprisoned on a charge of assisting the BR, and even observed eight days of hunger strike from May 26, 1984 to June 3 in the Cathedral of Turin to protest against the detention conditions of "Brigadists" in Italian prisons and the imprisonment without trial of Vanni Mulinaris, who was recognized innocent some time afterwards, which was according to the Abbé a "violation of human rights" . Magistrate Mastelloni recalled that a niece of the Abbé was secretary at Hyperion and married to one of the Italians then wanted by the Italian justice. Italian press agency ANSA evoqued after the Abbé Pierre's death his intervention in 2005 in favor of one of his physicians, Michele d'Auria, former member of Prima Linea far-left group, accused of having participated in hold-ups in 1990 and who had exiled himself to France, as many others activists during the "years of lead," where he had joined the Emmaus companions La Repubblica specified that Italian justice has recognized the innocence of all people close to the Hyperion School .

Others opponents of Italian anti-terrorism legislation and repression against the globality of the left-wing movement under the pretext of counter-terrorism included French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze.

Red Brigades-PCC and Red Brigades-UCC 1984 split

In 1984, the Red Brigades had split into two factions: the majority faction of the Communist Combatant Party (Red Brigades-PCC) and the minority of the Union of Combatant Communists (Red Brigades-UCC). The same year, four imprisoned leaders, Curcio, Moretti, Ianelli and Bertolucci, rejected the armed struggle as pointless.

Also in 1984, the Red Brigades claimed responsibility for the murder of Leamon Hunt, US chief of the Sinai Multinational Force and Observer Group.

Exile in France

In 1985 some Italian members living in France returned to Italy. The same year, French president François Mitterrand guaranteed amnesty to BR members in exile who had made a break with their past and started a new life, and refused to extradite them to Italy. The Abbé Pierre allegedly convinced him to take this decision, according to the Corriere della Sera .

In 2002, Paris extradited Paolo Persichetti, an ex-member of the Red Brigades who had turned to teaching sociology at university, breaking for the first time with Mitterrand's word. However, in 1998, Bordeaux's appeal court had judged that Sergio Tornaghi could not be extradited to Italy, on the grounds that Italian procedure would not let him be judged again, after a trial during his absence (European Court of Human Rights uphold such a right to a new judgment). These extraditions in the 2000s overreached the sole case of the BR, with other, leftist activists exiled in France being researched by Italian justice. These have included the Adriano Sofri case, Antonio Negri's willfull return to Italy and surrender to the justice, etc.

New assassinations by new BR generation

In the mid-eighties, arrests increased in Italy. In February 1986, the Red Brigades-PCC killed the ex-mayor of Florence Lando Conti and tried to kill Prime Minister's advisor Bettino Craxi. In March 1987, Red Brigades-UCC killed General Licio Giorgieri in Rome. On April 16 1988, in Forlì, Red Brigades-PCC killed Italian senator Roberto Ruffilli, an advisor of Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco de Mita. After that the group activities all but ended after massive arrests of its leadership, while the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 put an official end to the Cold War. With limited resources and followers to carry out major terrorist acts, the group is mostly inoperative.

The most recent known actions of the Red Brigades-PCC (as of February 2004) are the 1999 murder of Massimo D'Antona, an advisor to the cabinet of near-left Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema. In March 20, 2002 the same gun that was used to kill D'Antona was used to kill professor Marco Biagi, an economic advisor to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Red Brigades-PCC again claimed responsibility. On 3 March 2003 two followers, Mario Galesi and Nadia Desdemona Lioce, started a firefight with a police patrol on a train at Castiglion Fiorentino station, near Arezzo. Galesi and Emanuele Petri (one of the policemen) were killed, Lioce was arrested. In October 23 2003, Italian police arrested six members of the Red Brigades in early-dawn raids in Florence, Sardinia, Rome and Pisa in connection with the murder of Massimo D'Antona. On June 1st, 2005, four members of the Red Brigades-PCC were condemned to life-sentence in Bologna for the murder of Marco Biagi: Nadia Desdemona Lioce, Roberto Morandi, Marco Mezzasalma and Diana Blefari Melazi.

Legacy of the "years of lead"

Several figures from the 1970s, including philosopher Antonio Negri who was wrongly accused of being the "mastermind" of the BR, have called for a new, honest analysis of the events which happened during the "years of lead" in Italy. Negri voluntarilly returned to Italy in 1997, from his 14 years of exile in France, and was henceforth imprisoned several times, in the hope that this act would raise awareness of the situation of hundreds of exiles and prisoners (including Adriano Sofri from Lotta continua) involved in radical left political activities in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. Negri was freed in the spring of 2003, having served his full sentence of 17 years. "I am taking up my political work again starting from the ground up, from prison," said Negri, who wrote The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics and Empire in his captivity time. "With my return, I would like to give a push to the generation that was marginalized by the anti-terrorist laws of the 1970s so that they will leave their internal or foreign exile and again take part in public and democratic life."

On the other hand, BR founder Alberto Franceschini declared after his release from an 18-year prison term that "The BR continue to exist because we never proceeded to their funeral," calling for truth from every involved parties in order to be able to turn the page .

Allegations concerning exterior support

Some right-wing authors, such as Ion Pacepa, former official of the Romanian Securitate, have alleged that the BR received support from the Czechoslovakian StB and the Palestine Liberation Organization. They claim that Soviet and Czechoslovakia small arms and explosives came from the Middle East via heroine traffickers along well established smuggling routes. Furthermore, they allege that logistic support and training was cared out directly by the Czechoslovakian StB both in Prague and at remote PLO training camps in North Africa and Syria.

These allegations however have never been proven by the Italian justice, and remains controversial. Others claims that the BR, in particular the internal "supergang" during the time of Mario Moretti's leadership, were infiltrated by the CIA or/and by Eastern Bloc services. None of these allegations have currently found conclusive evidences, and remain pure speculation.

Trivia

Singer Joe Strummer of British punk band, The Clash, attracted some controversy after wearing a Brigate Rosse T-shirt to a 1978 Rock Against Racism event.

Bibliography

• Giovanni Fasanella and Alberto Franceschini (with a postface from judge Rosario Priore, who investigated on Aldo Moro's death), Che cosa sono le BR [2] ( "BRIGADES ROUGES. L'Histoire secrète des Red Brigades racontée par leur fondateur, Alberto Franceschini. Entretien avec Giovanni Fasanella." Editions Panama, 2005 a review by Le Monde and another review by L'Humanite
• A Giovanni Fasanella's bibliography
• Ganser, Daniele: NATO's Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. (London: Frank Cass, 2005). ISBN 0-7146-8500-3.
• Terrorist Group Profiles, Dudley Knox Library, Naval Postgraduate School.

See also

• Black Brigades
• Gladio in Italy
• CIA and NATO "stay-behind" Operation Gladio
• False flag and strategy of tension
• Aldo Moro's 1978 assassination

External links

• Interview with Alberto Franceschini
• Strike One to Educate One Hundred: the rise of the Red Brigades in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s - this page includes links to several scanned-in chapters of the book "Strike One to Educate One Hundred", a sympathetic appraisal of the Red Brigades. Lots of political context about both Italy and the Italian revolutionary left.