Aldo Moro and the ‘Commie scare’

Thirty years ago this Sunday, the Italian statesman Aldo Moro was seized by the Red Brigades and eight weeks later his body was dumped in downtown Rome. It was the most spectacular assassination by the Red Brigades and the most significant killing of a leader in Europe during the entire Cold War.

But was this just the notoriously incompetent Red Brigades acting alone? Or did they have professional help from outside, particularly from senior Nato allies worried that Italy was about to get a Communist government?

Rome has been rocked by a string of revelations that both America under Jimmy Carter and Britain under James Callaghan were worried about the rise of the Communists in Italy, and were prepared to do something about it. British Cabinet papers

released in January under the 30 year rule show that the Foreign Office discussed in May 1976 the possibility of backing a right-wing coup if the Communists won the upcoming general election.

Now Steve Pieczenick, a former crisis negotiator at the US State Department, has revealed in a new book just available in Rome that he was sent from Washington the day after Moro's kidnap on March 16, 1978 to help the Italian government 'manage' the crisis. His first act was to order the distribution of a fake bulletin from the Red Brigades saying that Aldo Moro (left) had been killed.

Pieczenick says this was to prepare the Italian public for Moro's death, and to warn the terrorists that the government would not negotiate to get him back. (Italian governments, it should be noted, had no reservation about bargaining with the terrorists over kidnappings on subsequent occasions.)

It is also known - and has never been denied - that three British 'counter-terrorism experts' were dispatched to Rome at