A few days ago I was thinking this would have been an ideal place to hide Mussolini’s corpse after Leccisi had stolen it, but unfortunately I’m not writing a novel but reconstructing historical facts, and history tells us the remains of the Duce were placed somewhere else. Shame. That’s why recently I’ve been visiting this place a lot, for a story about last remains. It’s been giving me much food for thought. There are those who find inspiration looking, say, at the Dolomites or Lake Maggiore, but I find inspiration here.
I should have been the keeper of a morgue. Perhaps it’s the memory of my grandfather who died so horribly, may he rest in peace.”
“Why have you brought me here?”
“I need to talk, I’ve got to tell someone about these things seething inside me, or else I’ll go mad. It can turn your head being the only person to have found the truth. And there’s never anyone here, except for the occasional tourist, who doesn’t understand a damn thing. And at last I’ve reached stay-behind.”
“Stay what?”
“Remember I still had to work out what they did with the Duce, the living one—not to leave him rotting in Argentina or in the Vatican and ending up like his double. What do we do with the Duce?”
“What do we do with him?”
“Well, the Allies, or those among the Allies who wanted him alive, to be brought out at the right moment, to be used against a Communist revolution or a Soviet attack. During the Second World War, the British had coordinated the activities of the resistance movements in the countries occupied by the Axis powers through a network run by a branch of their intelligence services, the Special Operations Executive, which was disbanded at the end of the war.
But it was started up again in the early 1950s as the nucleus for a new organization that was to operate in various European countries to stop an invasion by the Red Army, or local Communists who might try to overthrow the state. The coordination was done by the supreme command of the Allied forces in Europe, and led to the creation of ‘stay-behind’ in Belgium, England, France, West Germany, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Norway.
A secret paramilitary structure. In Italy, its beginnings can be traced back to 1949; then, in 1959, the Italian secret services enter as part of a coordination and planning committee, and finally in 1964 the organization called Gladio was officially born, funded by the CIA. Gladio—the word ought to mean something to you, since gladius was a sword used by Roman legionaries, so using the word gladio evoked the imagery of fascism.
A name that would attract military veterans, adventurers, and nostalgics. The war was over, but many people had fond memories of heroic days, of attacks with a couple of bombs and a flower in their mouth (as the Fascist song went), of machine-gun fire.
They were ex-Fascists, or idealistic sixty-year-old Catholics terrified at the prospect of Cossacks arriving at Saint Peter’s and letting their horses drink from the holy-water stoups, but there were also fanatics loyal to the exiled monarchy. It’s even rumored that they included Edgardo Sogno, who, though once a partisan leader in Piedmont and a hero, was also a monarchist through and through, and therefore linked to the creed of a bygone world.
Recruits were sent to a training camp in Sardinia, where they learned (or were reminded) how to blow up bridges, operate machine guns, attack enemy squads at night with daggers between their teeth, carry out acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare—”
“But they would all have been retired colonels, ailing field marshals, rachitic bank clerks. I can’t see them clambering over piers and pylons like in The Bridge over the River Kwai.”
“Yes, but there were also young neofascists raring for a fight, and all kinds of angry types who had nothing to do with politics.”
“I seem to remember reading something about it a few years ago.”
“Certainly, Gladio remained top secret from the end of the war, the only people to know about it were the intelligence services and the highest military commanders, and it was communicated little by little only to prime ministers, ministers of defense, and presidents of the republic. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the whole thing lost all practical purpose, and perhaps cost too much.
It was President Cossiga who let the cat out of the bag in 1990, and then, the same year, Prime Minister Andreotti officially admitted that, all right, Gladio had existed, but there was no reason to fuss, its existence had been necessary, the story was now over, and the tittle-tattle was to stop. As it turned out, no one was overconcerned, the issue was almost forgotten.
Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland were the only countries to launch parliamentary inquiries, but George H. W. Bush refused to comment since he was in the midst of preparations for the Gulf War and didn’t want to unsettle the Atlantic Alliance. The entire affair was hushed up in all the countries that participated in the stay-behind operations, with only a few minor incidents. In France it had been known for some time that the infamous OAS had been created with members of the French stay-behind, but after a failed coup in Algiers, General de Gaulle had brought dissidents back under control.
In Germany, it was common knowledge that the Oktoberfest bomb in Munich in 1980 was made with explosives that came from a German stay-behind depot; in Greece, it was the stay-behind army, the Lochos Oreinon Katadromon, that kicked off the military coup, and in Portugal, a mysterious Aginter Press was behind the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane, leader of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique. In Spain, a year after the death of General Franco, two members of the Carlist Party were killed by far-right terrorists, and the following year, stay-behinds carried out a massacre in Madrid, in the office of a lawyer with links to the Communist Party.
In Switzerland, just two years ago, Colonel Alboth, a former local stay-behind commander, declares in a private letter to the Swiss defense department that he is prepared to reveal “the whole truth” and is then found dead at his home, stabbed with his own bayonet. In Turkey, the Grey Wolves, later involved in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, are linked to stay-behind. I could go on—and I’ve read you only a few of my notes—but as you see, this is small stuff, a killing here and a killing there, barely enough to reach the front page, and each time all is forgotten.
The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines—mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc.—so news drowns in a great sea of information.
I’m interested in what Gladio did in Italy from the 1960s until 1990. Must have been up to all kinds of tricks, would have been mixed up with the far-right terrorist movements, played a part in the bombing at Piazza Fontana in 1969, and from then on—the days of the student revolts of ’68 and the workers’ strikes that autumn—it dawned on someone that he could incite terrorist attacks and put the blame on the Left.
And it’s rumored that Licio Gelli’s notorious P2 Masonic lodge was also sticking its nose in. But why is an organization that should have been opposing the Soviets involving itself in terrorist attacks? And here I came across the whole story of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, and before that, all those rumors of military takeovers planned but never carried out.”
The so-called Borghese coup was a fairly grotesque story that someone, I think, turned into a satirical movie. Junio Valerio Borghese, also known as the Black Prince, had been a leader of the Decima Mas commando unit.
A man of some courage, it was said, a Fascist through and through, he had inevitably been part of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò, and it was never clear how, in 1945, while people were being shot at random, he managed to survive, and continued to preserve the aura of a thoroughbred fighter, beret at a rakish angle, machine gun slung across his shoulder, typical military garb with trousers gathered at the ankles, turtleneck sweater, though he had a face that no one would have looked at twice if they’d seen him walking in the street dressed as a bank clerk.
Now, in 1970, Borghese felt the moment for a military coup had come. Mussolini would have been approaching eighty-seven by then. They must have realized, Braggadocio thought, that if he was to be brought back from exile, it was better not to wait too much longer—after all, back in 1945 he was already looking worn.
“My heart sometimes goes out to that poor man,” said Braggadocio. “Imagine him still waiting patiently . . . assuming he was in Argentina, where even if he couldn’t eat the great beefsteaks because of his ulcer, he could at least look out over the boundless pampas (even so, what bliss—just think—for twenty-five years).
It would have been worse if he’d been shut up in the Vatican, with no more than an evening walk in a small garden, and vegetable broth served by a nun with hairs on her chin, and the idea of having lost not only Italy but his lover, unable to hug his children, and perhaps
