Costa 08 - City of Fear (50 page)

“Marco was the only man alive who had the guts to stand up to these crooks. If some of us had shared his courage, perhaps he’d still be alive today. And your mother. Maybe this place”—she gestured toward the honey-colored house—“would feel like a home instead of a tomb.”

“That’s enough!”

His anger left her red-faced. “How many people know what you just heard, do you think? How many dare we trust?”

The thought hadn’t occurred to him. “I’ve no idea. There must be some kind of specialist group.…”

She laughed at him. “Where? To do what? Are you hearing what I’m telling you? Twenty years ago, when these people raised Ugo Campagnolo out of the gutter and put him into power, they were the conspiracy. Today the conspiracy is
us
. A handful of people who hardly dare pass the time of day with a stranger. Why do you think I told you so little in San Giovanni? I didn’t know for one second whether one of you would run back to Palombo and tell him every word.” She threw the envelope on the table. “Well, I know now. We have a meeting this afternoon. If you want to come, bring a suitcase and some things. I don’t know when you’ll see this place again. But”—she nodded at the house—“if you want to stay here and watch the grass grow, then good day. You’re no use to us.”

There was so much to take in and, staring into her big, friendly face, so little time to think.

Costa found himself wondering what his father would have done in
such circumstances, and knew the answer immediately, almost as if he’d heard the old man’s cracked, gravelly voice in his ear once more.

He picked up the envelope and tore it to shreds. The Englishwoman watched him, expressionless.

“I have one more favor to ask,” Elizabeth Murray said. “Dario’s in my car. He doesn’t know whether you want to see him or not. This has been eating at him for years, Nic. Talk to him. The last week … Ranieri’s death—this has all taken its toll on the man. He needs you.”

DARIO SORDI EMERGED FROM THE CAR AT THE GATE WITH the tall figure of Leo Falcone by his side. The old man waved at the police inspector to stay back as he began to walk slowly toward the house.

The two men—young and old—met halfway, next to the bench seat they’d installed when Marco Costa’s illness made it difficult for him to walk. Sordi looked grateful for the chance to sit. He seemed so much more frail than a week before. It was the first time Costa had ever seen doubt, and perhaps a little fear, in his eyes, and he felt guilty for being in some way responsible for the change.

“I’m sorry. I am so very sorry,” Sordi said in a faltering voice, one that betrayed his age. “I apologize that I lacked the courage to tell you to your face. Forgive me.…”

“Dario, there’s nothing to forgive.”

“I wish I could believe that. I’ve always tried to think the best of people, Nic. I hoped, I believed for a while, that Campagnolo and the men behind him would be satisfied with what they had. It is a nation, after all. Few own such a jewel as Italy. Few get it handed to them by the weakness and petty divisions of their opponents.” He shook his head, as if fighting to clear his thoughts. “But I was a fool. There’s no compromise to be made with thieves. For an atheist, your father had an extraordinary knowledge of religion, you know. He quoted Augustine at me on this subject once, and I never forgot what he said about”—his
mouth became narrow, almost cruel—“kleptocracies:
‘If justice is taken away, then what are states but gangs of robbers? And what are gangs of robbers themselves but little states?’”

Sordi looked him in the eye.

“This is not ordinary politics. Far from it. This is criminality posing as democracy. The men behind the Blue Demon are quietly seizing every institution, carving up the proceeds between them, hoping to make sure this nation will remain theirs for generations. My God … I was born into a nightmare like that. I don’t wish to die in one.” His voice broke, his hand shook as he pointed at the house in the field behind them.

“I wish I could have saved your father and mother,” Dario Sordi whispered. “And poor Ranieri. I wish so much …”

Costa reached out and embraced him, holding his stiff, bony body firmly, in a way he never could with his own father. Sordi’s chin, bristly and dry, brushed against his cheek. Then the old man pulled back and gazed away for a moment, ashamed of his tears.

“No one could save my father, Dario. He lived as he wanted to. That was who he was. We all knew that. None of us could have changed him one iota. Perhaps now …”

He stopped himself. There was a stray thought rising in his head—that perhaps Marco Costa’s spirit did live on somewhere.

There was a sound. Elizabeth Murray was walking up the drive, looking like a mountain shepherdess who’d lost her way.

Then he heard something from the road. Two more cars were moving slowly toward them. He could see Gianni Peroni at the wheel of the first, with Teresa Lupo by his side and Silvio Di Capua in the back. Rosa Prabakaran, her face pretty and serious, was driving the second. In the passenger seat next to her was the magistrate Giulia Amato.

Peroni drew up by the gate and winked at him. “Hop in,” the big cop told him.

“Goodbye, Dario. Take care,” Costa said quickly, and strode to Peroni’s vehicle. He opened the door for Elizabeth Murray, helping her onto the seat, passing over her crook, before returning to climb in the other side.

They set off to the south, away from Rome. He reminded himself that, for the last few days, he’d been fantasizing about a journey such as this. Down the Via Appia Antica, to an unknown destination, a different Italy, a land he knew only by reputation, not experience.

It seemed he was going there.

THE EVENTS AND CHARACTERS PORTRAYED HERE ARE ENTIRELY fictional. However, Operation Gladio and its networks of clandestine undercover partisans were very real and operated for two decades or more with the secret support of successive Western governments fearful of a Soviet domino effect in Europe after the Second World War.

The CIA’s founder, Allen Dulles, was instrumental in the formation of Gladio, and it was his organization that paid for most of its operations in both NATO and neutral countries. Their existence was nothing more than a rumor until the 1980s, when the Italian judge Felice Casson discovered archive documents that clearly showed that some elements in the intelligence community had links with right-wing terrorist groups.

Gladio’s initial brief was to provide the basis for a network of partisan opposition in the event of a Soviet takeover. Power usually devolved to those involved in the covert movements, men who, in the case of Italy, tended to be recruited from within the ranks of former fascists and the criminal classes and were often left to devise their own strategies of action.

Casson told a BBC documentary the aim was “to create tension within the country to promote conservative, reactionary social and political tendencies. While this strategy was being implemented, it was necessary to protect those behind it because evidence implicating them was being discovered. Witnesses withheld information to cover right-wing extremists.”

A 1972 attack in Peteano, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, was a rare visible example of Gladio’s apparent links to terrorism in Italy. Three members of the Carabinieri died in a car bomb, which, for years, was blamed on the Italian left-wing terrorist group the Red Brigades. When Casson reopened the case, he discovered that the explosives used came from a secret Gladio arms cache. Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a former member of the neo-Fascist groups Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo, received a life sentence for the attack and went on to speak openly about connections between terrorism and the secret services. He claimed that he had been able to escape and hide after the outrage because of support among the Italian security community for his anti-communist stance.

Vinciguerra recalled, “A whole mechanism came into action … the Carabinieri, the Minister of the Interior, the customs services, and the military and civilian intelligence services accepted the ideological reasoning behind the attack.”

He was later to tell the Swiss historian Daniele Ganser, author of
Nato’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe
, “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic which remains behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”

At his trial, Vinciguerra was to add, “With the massacre of Peteano and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages. [This structure] lies within the state itself. There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity, that is, to organize a resistance on Italian soil.”

On October 24, 1990, Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti astonished the political establishment when he finally confirmed the existence of Gladio, in testimony to an Italian senate subcommittee. Andreotti had been forced into making this admission by the discoveries of Felice Casson in the archives of the state’s secret services. Gladio
was, Andreotti said, a “structure of information, response, and safeguard.” Some 622 civilians belonged to Gladio units in Italy. He denied that the organization had any involvement in terrorist activities, but confirmed that 127 separate arms caches used by Gladio had been dismantled. It was from one such cache that the explosives that killed the three Carabinieri officers in Peteano had originated.

According to Giulio Andreotti, all incoming Italian prime ministers were informed about Gladio. This was challenged by the former socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi, who said he only knew about the secret organization when shown a letter about it that bore his own signature. Aldo Moro, the former prime minister who was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades, was closer to the political establishment of the time than Craxi, and doubtless knew of its existence. According to one of his kidnappers, Alberto Franceschini, Moro had helped set up the Gladio structure in the first place. However, Moro’s keenness to embrace a reformed Communist Party in a coalition known as “the historic compromise”
(compromesso storico)
offended many on the right, and has proved the basis for frequent conspiracy theories surrounding his kidnap and assassination.

Some of those with possible answers did not, however, survive to give them to subsequent parliamentary inquiries. The Carabinieri general Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who led the anti-terrorist campaign in the 1970s and captured two key members of the Red Brigades, was assassinated in Palermo in 1982, along with his wife, on the orders of the Mafia boss Salvatore Rina.

Among the cases Dalla Chiesa was investigating at the time was the murder of the journalist Mauro De Mauro. According to a Mafia informant, De Mauro was killed because he had learned about the planned 1970 coup d’état known as the Golpe Borghese, involving the right-wing “Black Prince,” Junio Valerio Borghese. The plot involved the occupation of the Quirinale Palace and Ministry of the Interior by army dissidents, with the support of Mafia backers. Borghese was an aristocrat and fascist soldier who had been rescued from partisans at the end of the war by the U.S. agent James Angleton, later a long-serving chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff. Known to many as the “mother” of the modern CIA, Angleton grew up in Rome, where his
family owned a business, and returned to the city on one of his first CIA postings. Borghese fled Italy after the collapse of the plot attempt. In spite of several years of trials, no one was convicted of any crime over this very real attempt to overthrow a democratically elected European government.

A second journalist to suffer from the fallout of the “Years of Lead” was Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli, a specialist writer with extensive contacts inside the secret-service community. Pecorelli had written an article warning that Alberto Dalla Chiesa was in danger of assassination four years before the Carabinieri general was murdered. Pecorelli published a number of private documents relating to the Moro case, drawing a connection between the death of the former prime minister and Gladio. He had also linked Giulio Andreotti himself to the Mafia.