this time; they are believed to have worked for the SAS and MI6.

It is now clear that the US and UK were anxious that Moro should not come back alive. It was a decade before the Berlin Wall came down and neither government wanted to see the Communists sharing power in a Nato-member country.

The Italian Communists, led by the brilliant and charismatic Sardinian aristocrat Enrico Berlinguer, had reaped large gains in the 1975 regional elections. Then, in the general election of 1976, they came within a couple of points of the ruling Christian Democrats.

Aldo Moro, leader of the Christian Democrats, recognised that his party was exhausted by 30 years of uninterrupted rule since the war. He decided his party could only continue to rule if they agreed a programme of reforms with Berlinguer, who at this stage agreed not to demand seats in cabinet.

Moro was on his way to parliament for the vote of confidence for this arrangement when he was grabbed by a five-man Red Brigades commando group, led by Prospero

Gallinari, a notorious terrorist hitman.

The year before, Gallinari had been sprung from jail in Belluno where he was doing time for murdering a judge in Genoa. In a scene reminiscent of The Great Escape, Gallinari and his mates roared out of the main gate on motorbikes 'liberated' from the guards. It sounded suspiciously easy, little was done to find him, and he only surfaced again after the murder of Moro.

Moro had been warned, allegedly, of the dire consequences if he brought the 'Reds' to power by Henry Kissinger in his last days as US Secretary of State. With only one other person in the room, a bilingual diplomat interpreting for Moro who spoke no English, Kissinger said words to the effect 'we will fix you' if he pursued a pact with the Communists. (At the same time a US diplomat called Moro a 'schmuck' at a public dinner.)

And that is what seems to have happened: a prime covert operation to remove a democratically elected politician from power. Soon, under the 30 year disclosure rule, we should get the official Whitehall documents about Britain's role in the affair.