The Black Cross

What happened to the Italian anarchists is worth examining.

By nessie

Part II. Read the first part.

In April 1969, in the small southern town of Battpalgia, Italy, rumors of an impending plant closure triggered a strike. In the course of confrontations between strikers and police, the police shot a 19-year-old worker to death. They also killed a young schoolteacher who had been watching from the window of her flat. The government attempted to lay the blame not on the police but on what they called a "preordained plan" implemented by "provocateurs alien to the city." The media immediately blamed Maoists and anarchists.

The Italian public is ever so much more politically sophisticated than Americans. Italians were not fooled. They were outraged. Their outrage forced the Italian parliament to propose a bill prohibiting police from carrying firearms while on public order duty. The bill was due to come up for debate on April 28 , 1969. But before it came up, the Fiat stand at the Milan trade fair was bombed. So was the Milan central rail station.

These bombings had been carefully planned in order to lay the blame at the foot of the Black Cross anarchists. Though there was no evidence whatsoever as to the identity of those who had placed the bombs, the police and the media claimed to know their political convictions. After a wave of anti-anarchist hysteria in the press, 15 anarchists were arrested, including Guiseppe Pinelli. Although he and five others were quickly released, more than five months passed before the 10 others were even questioned by the magistrate. Two years passed before they were finally acquitted on all charges.

From April 1969 onward, the press, television, and radio all began to talk of international anarchist plots to foment bloody revolution. This coordinated psy-war campaign was designed to instill fear and uncertainty in the public. The bombings continued. They grew more horrific.

In August 1969, 150 anarchists were arrested and brought in for questioning by teams of detectives under the command of a rising star in the firmament of Italian political police, Inspector Luigi Calabresi. Calabresi had undergone training at various police academies in the United States. He must have made valuable connections in political circles while he was here. When extreme right-wing U.S. General Edwin A. Walker traveled to Italy, Calabrisi accompanied him. Walker was a confidant of Barry Goldwater. Walker made headlines when he was forced from command because he had been indoctrinating his troops with John Birch Society propaganda. It was Calabrisi who introduced Walker to Italian secret service chief General Guiseppe de Lorenzo. People are known by the company they keep. Inspector Calabrisi kept company with some very bad people.

Among them, presumably, were the friends of the subject of Stewart Christie's book, Stefano Della Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist. Della Chiaie was the fascist terrorist eventually indicted for the bloody bombing of the Bologna railway station, which claimed 85 dead and more than 200 injured. Della Chiaie's name is inextricably linked to General de Lorenzo's attempted seizure of power in 1964, and to a long string of right-wing scandals and fascist outrages which plagued Italy for more than a decade. They include the abortive coup attempt by the "Black Prince" Valario Borghese in December 1970, the bombing of the Rome-Munich express in August 1974 which killed 12 and injured 48, and the murder of the magistrate investigating the bombing. Della Chiaie also is inextricably linked to the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan which killed 16 people, seriously injured 88 more, and directly led to the death of the anarchist Guiseppe Pinelli.

General de Lorenzo, as conspiracy buffs will recall, was the founder of La Rosa Dei Venti – Guinta Executiva Piscossa Sociale Italiana, which translates as Compass Rose – Executive Council of Italian Social Salvation. Compass Rose was a powerful and long secret organization with close ties to Italian intelligence, and through them, to NATO intelligence. In the mid 1960s, Lorenzo was one of the most powerful men in Italy. In 1956, he had been appointed head of Italy's secret service, SIFAR. In 1962 he was made commander of the carabinieri. He kept his job as head of SIFAR. The carabinieri is a militarized national police force that combines the central aspects of our own Federal Bureau of Investigation; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; state troopers; and local police.

According to Conflict Studies No. 8, November 1970:

Since the carabinieri have units down to the village level, the Commander-in-Chief is an unrivaled position to keep his finger on the pulse of what is going on. He would also be excellently placed to take some undemocratic initiative against the established system, were he so inclined.

Sound familiar? It should.

It gets worse. Behind Compass Rose, and pulling its strings, was an even more secret organization, the shadowy "Propaganda Due," also known as P-2, a nominally Masonic lodge. For decades P-2 virtually ran Italy from behind the scenes, while the front men in Rome traded cabinet posts back and forth dozens of times in what they laughably call "changes in government." For a while, with the help of U.S.-born gangster-priest Paul Marcinkus, P-2 ran the Vatican Bank. It was during this era that the Vatican Bank was caught red-handed laundering counterfeit paper for the Gambino crime family.

P-2's longtime grand master (cappo de tutti cappos) was a man named Licio Gelli. Gelli . Gelli, among other things, attended the inaugural ceremonies of presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and called himself a friend of George Herbert Walker Bush. In July 1981, Gelli's daughter was stopped at the Rome airport and documents were confiscated from a false bottom in her suitcase. One of these was a photocopy of Supplement B.

These are kind of people Guiseppe Pinelli was up against. Following his arrest on suspicion of involvement in the Milan trade fair and railway station bombings, Pinelli had devoted his time to the Black Cross, providing assistance for his comrades arrested on false charges. He also coordinated an international investigation into the activities of the various fascists and intelligence agencies who were actually responsible. Knowing full well that the police and the press were not going to find the real perps, Pinelli, in typical anarchist fashion, had set out to do it himself. DIY is the heart and core of anarchism.

When the Piazza Fontana bomb went off, Pinelli had been with his friends and neighbors in his regular bar. When he heard the news, he and another anarchist named Sergio Ardau went to the anarchist club at the Via Scaldasole. Inspector Calabrisi was already there. Pinelli and Ardau were invited to police headquarters for a "little chat."

Three days later, on Dec. 15, the last interrogation of Guiseppe Pinelli began at 7 p.m. At 10 p.m., Calabrisi called Pinelli's wife, Licia, on the phone and asked her to look for her husband's railway pass which recorded train journeys for which no fares needed to be paid. She found it and called them back. At 11:00 a policeman came to the Pinelli home to collect it. Another anarchist, named Pasquale Valituttu was sitting in the corridor near the room where Pinelli was being questioned. At 11:56 p.m. he heard what he described as "very strange noises" coming from the room. Two minutes later, at precisely 11:58, a call was logged requesting an ambulance be sent to police headquarters. At 11:57 p.m. journalist Aldo Palumbo left the pressroom at police HQ. He was walking through the central courtyard when Pinelli's body plummeted to the ground before his eyes. Palumbo claims the body appeared to be already lifeless. This was later backed up by the forensic evidence.

The most likely explanation for Pinelli's murder was that his investigation had been somewhat successful, and he knew too much. Calabrisi's goons apparently couldn't beat a confession to the Piazza Fontana bombing out of Pinelli. For one thing, he hadn't done it. But at some point in his interrogation he must have let slip some indication that he knew who did, or worse, that he knew who pulled their strings. At that point the cops had no choice but to bash in his skull, heave him out a window, and try to make it look like he had jumped. Whatever the reason, out he flew.

A number of anarchists were quickly charged with "illegal conspiracy to commit crime" and complicity in the Piazza Fontana massacre. But the people of Milan were not fooled. They knew the right wing was responsible for the massacre. The targets of the Piazza Fontana bombing, like the targets of all the Strategy of Tension bombings, were working people. Anarchists do not kill working people. Anarchists seldom kill at all. When they do kill, it is almost always in self defense. A large minority of anarchists are pacifists. Even the most violent anarchists almost always direct their anger at property and not people. It has been this way for more than half a century.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone like Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski called an anarchist. Kaczynski is no anarchist. If anything, he appears to be a victim of government mind-control dating back to his participation in LSD experiments at Harvard when he was an undergraduate. But don't take my word for it, read what the Atlantic Monthly has to say.

Terrorism and assassination were abandoned by anarchists many, many decades ago, when it became painfully obvious they were only making things worse. While this is common knowledge to the Italian working class, indeed to the rest of the world, it is not widely recognized by Americans. Americans have been so dumbed down by public schools and so brainwashed by the propaganda machine, that most of them will believe without question all sorts of lies about who anarchists are and what anarchists actually do. Were something similar to the Piazza Fontana bombing to happen in America today, it is highly unlikely that the public would react in anything like the manner that the people of Milan did. A case could be made that a Strategy of Tension is already being implemented here, and has a serious chance of success. Not so in Italy, not in 1969, and certainly not today. Italians are, to put it frankly, far more sophisticated about politics than we are. Americans are a clueless people. Our worst enemy is our own ignorance.

The death of Guiseppe Pinelli backfired on the Strategists of Tension (for more on the Strategy of Tension, see here)and foiled at least some of their plans. Their hopes to confuse and intimidate the working people of Italy were dashed when 300,000 Milanese overflowed the Piazza Doumo to pay silent homage to the victims of the Piazza Fontana massacre. They came to show that they would not be intimidated by terror and that they knew where the real blame lay. Five days later, in spite of a climate of severe police intimidation, 3,000 people with black flags accompanied Pinelli to his final resting place.

On Dec. 17, an Italian secret service agent named Stefano Serpieri submitted a signed report to his boss, General Frederico Quirazza, head of the counterintelligence bureau of the secret service. In his report he said Stefano Delle Chiaie and another fascist, Mario Merlino, were responsible for the massacre. Merlino, the report stated, took his orders from Delle Chiaie, who in turn took orders from Yves Guerin-Serac, director of the Aginter Press agency in Lisbon. Aginter also employed, the report continued, Robert Leroy, a French citizen. Leroy was a veteran of the French "Charlemagne" division of the Waffen-SS and was (according to his Aginter dossier) a NATO intelligence officer with Reinhard Gehlen. Leroy and Delle Chiaie had met in Milan in 1965 and remained friends.

Merlino and Delle Chiaie, "passing themselves off as anarchists, carried out bombings so that the blame for them would fall on other movements ..." The report was buried by Admiral Henke, the head of the Italian secret service at the time. Henke later lied to the magistrate investigating the links between the fascists and the secret service when he stated that the secret service had not investigated the outrages nor had it received any information on the subject.

It was not until much later that details began to emerge. In November of the following year, a builder repairing the roof of a house accidentally broke through a partition wall belonging to a socialist town council member and discovered a cache of weapons and explosives. One thing led to another and the truth began, slowly, to come out. For the whole story, I highly recommend that you track down a copy of Christie's book, Stefano Della Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist. If you happen to be in San Francisco, you can find it at Bound Together Anarchist Collective Book Store at 1369 Haight St. Or you can order it over the Internet from AK Press (tk http://www.akpress.org for $8.95. It's a thoroughly fascinating book, worth every penny.

Delle Chiaie's trail led to a shadowy mercenary army run by Hitler's favorite commando, Otto Skorzeny, and later to Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon," and through him to the cocaine cartels of Latin America, and through them, to the Central Intelligence Agency. It's an excellent book, every bit as good as Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Kevin Coogan's riveting biography of another of the bad guys' well-connected underground heroes.

While you're at it, you can acquire a comprehensive overview of what is often called the "neofascist" movement, by reading a book by SFBG.com columnist, Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists. It, too, is an excellent book. Lee is a consummate historian. He will, among other things, disabuse you totally of the notion that there is anything "neo" about the fascist movement today.

Many changes have occurred since WWII came to an end, but there has been no break in the continuity of the fascist movement. Fascism is a dynamic, evolving philosophy. It's one reason they are so dangerous. They know how to adapt. Lee follows the careers of enough of the individuals involved to make this more than abundantly clear. Not only is there an unbroken chain of fascist organizers and organizations, but they are steadily growing in power and influence. Its financial power alone makes the Fascist International a major player on the world stage today. Not only is the fascist menace growing, its perpetrators are learning as they go. Above all else, they have learned the art of disguise, or "Tarnung" as it's called. Today they wear white shirts, that's all. Don't let it fool you.

The fascists have undoubtedly learned from the initial shortcomings of the Strategy of Tension. They have presumably refined their infiltration techniques and trained more sophisticated agents provocateurs. It would be foolish not to assume that they also have learned that if they want to pass themselves off as anarchists then they must try to act like anarchists. This means they must refrain as much as possible from killing people, especially from killing working people. Only by restricting their violence to inanimate objects can any agent provocateur ever hope to be mistaken for a real anarchist today. Fortunately for them, this is quite easy to do.

Which brings us back to the ELF (Earth Liberation Front). What exactly have their serial arson attacks actually accomplished? Two things stand out. They have put some fat insurance settlements into the pockets of a bunch of capitalists and they have created an excuse in the public's mind for even greater surveillance, harassment, and repression – and not just of anarchists. We must ask ourselves, as the Romans used to, "Cui bono?" Who benefits from these actions?

Hint: It's not the environment and it's certainly not the anarchists.

The nessie files runs alternate Mondays.

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