On March 4th, leading Italian daily La Repubblica published an astonishing interview with Roberto Jucci, veteran “general of top secret missions”, who over his lengthy career worked at the highest echelons of Rome’s security and intelligence apparatus, while enjoying an intensive “relationship of trust” with many of the country’s most powerful political figures and government agencies. Along the way, he exposed how US “centers of power”, in conjunction with notorious Masonic Lodge P2 (Proganda Due), were responsible for the murder of left-leaning statesman Aldo Moro.

On March 16th 1978, Moro was kidnapped by a unit of the Red Brigades, a leftist militant faction, while en route to a high-level meeting. There, he planned to give his blessing to a new coalition government, in which the dominant Christian Democrats would rely on Communist support for the very first time. The CIA had over the prior three decades interfered in all of Italy’s elections to prevent the latter party from taking power.

After 55 days in captivity, Moro’s kidnappers concluded authorities would neither negotiate with them, nor release any jailed Red Brigades members in return, and he was executed. His bullet-riddled corpse was left in the trunk of a Renault 4, near Rome’s River Tiber, for authorities to discover. Despite numerous trials, many facts of the highest-profile murder case in modern Italian history remain uncertain today. Suspicions have long abounded, widely, that his death one way or another resulted from Operation Gladio.

Gladio was a covert Cold War CIA, MI6 and NATO connivance, in which an underground shadow army of fascist paramilitaries wreaked havoc across Europe, carrying out false flag terror attacks, robberies, and assassinations to discredit the left, install right-wing governments, and justify vicious crackdowns on dissent. It was known as a “strategy of tension”. As Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a Gladio operative jailed for life in 1984 for a car bombing in Italy, which killed three police officers and injured two, explained:

“You were supposed to attack civilians, women, children, innocent people from outside the political arena. The reason was simple, force the public to turn to the state and ask for greater security…People would willingly trade their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains, or enter a bank. This was the political logic behind the bombings. They remain unpunished because the state cannot condemn itself.”

As we shall see, La Repubblica’s bombshell interview exposes how Moro’s kidnap and murder represented the monstrous zenith of Gladio’s “strategy of tension”. The details raise grave questions about the direct involvement of the CIA, and P2 - a “state within a state”, per Roberto Jucci - in the crime, and countless others during Rome’s bloodspattered “years of lead”.

‘Honest People’

Speaking candidly in the twilight of his years (at 98 years old, Jucci “maintains an iron memory: He remembers everything, every detail of the extraordinary career”), the general records how then-interior minister Francesco Cossiga, who set up a crisis committee to rescue Moro, placed him “in charge of the raiders” who would free the captive politician once his whereabouts were ascertained. “They had to operate with pinpoint precision, so as not to risk the hostage's life.”

Jucci, then a high-ranking official within now-defunct Servizio Informazioni Operative e Situazione, assembled a crack squad drawn from the ranks of Italy’s “legendary” Col Moschin paratrooper assault regiment. He equipped them with “sophisticated” British- and German-made weapons, and had the team “trained non-stop in a secret base” in Tuscany. As such, he was “not an actor, only an extra,” in the race to rescue Moro. Ominously, the general believes this may have been by design:

“The real goal was to get me out of the way…My biggest regret about the Moro case is that I didn’t understand I was being exploited…They had put me in a corner and sent me away from Rome so as not to see and not to operate.”

Jucci’s suspicions stem from “most of the leaders of [Italy’s] military institutions” hailing from P2. He describes the Masonic lodge as, “the expression of a power group from a foreign country,” that being the US: “American centers of power…operated through elements of P2.” 

Asked by La Repubblica if he was ever invited to join P2, Jucci responds, “No, never. The individual I always thought to be one of their recruiters, when he saw me he would turn the corner. They knew me well. To get into P2 you had to be a willing person and I don’t think I’ve ever been.” This, alongside his “filial affection for Moro,” who often “asked me for opinions,” surely explains why he was kept in Tuscany during the hunt.

Had he “been an actor” in Cossiga’s committee, Jucci “would have tailed” the individuals who delivered letters Moro wrote during captivity to his secretary “and other subjects,” attempted “to find support in Arab countries that might have found a useful channel for his release,” and “tried everything I could to save him.” While he “probably wouldn’t have succeeded”, he “would have tried anything” in any event. Asked why “tailings” weren’t ordered, the general’s answer is stark:

“[The committee] ...was advised by a man sent by the US and…composed largely of [P2]. All people who, in my opinion, wanted things to go in a different way from what all honest people were asking for. Moro had to be destroyed politically and physically: if he had survived, Italy’s politics would have developed differently…I believe Moro could have been freed if all the institutions had worked in this direction.”

As it was, the US opposed “the opening of a government, supported by Moro, made up of Communists and Christian Democrats.” So the much-beloved statesman had to die. Jucci contrasts the failure to find him with the kidnap of US General James Dozier, purportedly also by the Red Brigades, in December 1981. He was “located and freed in a blitz” in 42 days, by a joint US-Italian taskforce. “One of them, they wanted to set free; I have my doubts about the other,” Jucci laments. 

The general has no doubt that Cossiga’s determination to rescue Moro was deeply sincere. After he failed, he resigned his post as interior minister “and disappeared.” Jucci tracked him down “after a few days” to an apartment near Rome’s famous Piazza San Silvestro, where he spent his days ruminating alone, a non-commissioned Italian naval officer bringing him food. When he visited Cossiga:

“He looked at me mutely for many minutes. Then he would say, ‘maybe I could have done more.’ For him, it was an obsession, which I think marked his life.”

At the conclusion of the interview, Jucci acknowledges the “strong presence of US military intelligence” in Rome, which “sometimes operated in a very questionable way,” before cryptically noting “how there have been Italians who have operated according to…objectives, which perhaps should not have been done.” In this context, he tantalisingly cites Operation Gladio:

“It had to be done, but it had to be handled in a different way. In our plans, in the event of an invasion, it was planned that we would abandon part of the territory to position ourselves on more defensible lines. If someone has used Gladio for other purposes, it is their personal responsibility.”

Jucci refers to the official purpose of Gladio - a clandestine “stay behind” sabotage force, to be activated only in the event of the Soviet Union invading Western Europe. Yet, a June 1959 Italian military intelligence report unearthed by historian Daniele Ganser confirms guerrilla action against “domestic threats” - in other words, the political left - during peacetime, was hardwired into the cloak-and-dagger effort from its very inception.

Official investigations into Gladio have moreover revealed CIA- and MI6-provided explosives and weapons hidden throughout Italy, intended for “stay behind” use, were deployed in multiple mass-casualty terror attacks, including the 1980 bombing of Bologna Centrale railway station, which killed 85 people and wounded over 200. These probes were launched after then-Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted Gladio’s existence in October 1990. A European Parliament resolution the next month called for independent judicial and parliamentary investigations into Gladio in every European state.

Aside from initial inquiries in Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, nothing substantive materialised subsequently. In August 2021, it was announced that a trove of documents related to Gladio and P2 would be declassified, at long last. But nothing has been released since. In closing, Jucci tells La Repubblica he wasn’t consulted by any of the parliamentary committees investigating Moro’s death. “Perhaps I could have said something and contributed to the search for the truth,” he suggests, apparently unaware that “the state cannot condemn itself.”