Shadow Warrior (17 page)

The glamorous Mrs. Luce, “La Signora,” as she was subsequently dubbed by the press, hit the Italian political and social scene with primal force. Some commentators observed that Europe had not experienced an American envoy of her celebrity since Benjamin Franklin took Paris by storm. Because of her fame and the Luces' status within the Republican Party, she—unlike other ambassadors—enjoyed direct access to the White House. The new ambassador arrived in Rome just weeks before the 1953 Italian national election. Her selection had not been universally applauded. In the United States, some Protestant leaders had expressed fears that her fervent Catholicism would make her a tool of the Vatican. In Italy, one observer commented that Italian feminism had not matured sufficiently to accommodate her. Clare Luce was not deterred. Blonde, beautiful, elegant, bright, and majestically egotistical, she set about implementing the Eisenhower administration's policies with a vengeance.

The results of the 1953 election proved disappointing to Washington. The four-party coalition headed by the Christian Democrats failed to obtain an absolute majority. The Communist/Socialist tally held steady at around 35 percent. Only the Monarchists and Fascists gained any ground.
Such was the political situation when Bill Colby and his family arrived in Rome in the autumn of 1953.
⁵

In the midst of the poverty and hopelessness of southern Italy and the factionalism and cutthroat politics of the north, Rome stood as a shining jewel in the Italian commonwealth with its majestic monuments—the Coliseum and statue of Victor Immanuel II—its Renaissance art and architectural treasures, its fabulous restaurants and beautiful people. Indeed, by the early 1950s Rome had become a mecca for hedonists from around the world; funded by the super-rich and adorned by movie stars, the city's nightlife was incomparable. After the blandness and cold of Scandinavia, the Colbys—Bill, Barbara, John, Catherine, and Carl—found the Eternal City intoxicating.

Colby rented an apartment near the Coliseum. “On one side of us lived the grandson of Garibaldi,” Carl recalled, “and on the other an American race-car driver named Masten Gregory.”
⁶
Gregory boasted a beautiful wife, three daughters, and a trophy signifying his triumph at Le Mans. Behind the Colbys lived the Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who graciously made her pool available to the children. Barbara immediately enrolled in an Italian language class, the better to immerse herself in Rome's social life. After Bill was promoted in his Foreign Service capacity from special assistant to the ambassador to first secretary, barely an evening passed without him hosting or attending a banquet or reception.

Colby's position as second-ranking political officer in the embassy dovetailed perfectly with his CIA assignment. Working under Gerry Miller, he was to head up the political action side of the station, working as a coequal with the head of the regular intelligence operation. As Colby described it, his job “was to prevent Italy from being taken over by the Communists in the next—1958—elections and thus prevent the NATO military defenses from being circumvented politically by a subversive fifth column, the Partito Communista Italiano [PCI].”
⁷

The CIA estimated that by 1953 Moscow was pouring $50 million a year into Italy. Some of the aid was funneled through the party-owned import-export firms that had been set up to monopolize trade with various Eastern European companies. But much of the money was “black-bagged,” that is, delivered directly to the PCI by Soviet and East European embassies. Most of these funds were in the form of nontraceable US dollars.
The Red dollars went to support a kaleidoscope of front organizations, including groups for women, youth, labor, artists, farmers, and veterans. Each organization had a journal propagandizing on behalf of the communist way. Every region of the country boasted a party office with paid organizers and propagandists. The country was plastered with pro-PCI posters and its people deluged with leaflets, newspaper articles, and pamphlets. Colby was tasked with matching this effort, and he set about his work with relish.
⁸

The only apparatus in Italy that could match the PCI for money and organization was the Roman Catholic Church. From Italy to the United States to Vietnam, the church acted as the cutting edge of anticommunism. The Vatican saw Bolshevism, rooted as it was in atheism, as the greatest threat to Catholicism since the Protestant Reformation. There was more than ideology and spirituality at stake; the church had benefited for centuries from alliances with landed and financial elites, and the Vatican was one of the biggest landholding and richest entities in the world. Pope Pius XII made no bones about the Vatican's attitude toward the PCI: as of 1949, all Italian Communists were, by definition, excommunicated. Every parish and every priest in Italy was in service to the anticommunist cause. Catholic Action, the church's political wing, had 3 million members.
⁹

Colby reveled not only in Rome's culture but in its Catholicism. He remembered the thrill of “being at the center of world Catholicism, with the rich ritual of the Vatican and the earnest seminarians of every race and nation showing the depth of our religion over the centuries and its breadth over the continents.” From the outset, the CIA had been laden with Catholics. Their anticommunism was unquestioned and they were, as one observer put it, “good brawlers.” In 1944, Pius had decorated Wild Bill Donovan with the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Sylvester. Several future directors of the Agency would be Knights of Malta. Both Clare Luce and Barbara Colby belonged to Knights' women's affiliate, the Dames of Malta. Bill declined an offer to join the order—“I'm a little lower key,” he confessed—but he was more than happy to exploit his Catholicism in the performance of his duties to the nation.
¹⁰

Colby's mandate was to provide support—principally cash—to the centrist political parties in Italy. For this purpose he was provided with approximately $30 million a year. He and his associate, Tom McCoy, would deliver the funds directly to members of the Christian Democratic, Liberal,
and Republican Party hierarchies or shower money on newspapers and magazines friendly to them. The parties, in turn, used the money to finance leaflets, posters, congresses, and voter registration drives—the usual activities engaged in by political organizations. But this particular organ in the Wurlitzer family also attempted to mirror what the Soviets and PCI were doing by stimulating and supporting anticommunist front organizations within the powerful labor movement and various cultural organizations.

As Colby readily admitted in his memoir, interference by one country in the political affairs of another was clearly illegal; most nations, including the United States and Italy, had laws against it. Yet, given the massive Soviet effort in Italy, what choice did the United States have? Espionage was also illegal, but since the founding of the nation-state system, governments had justified it on the grounds of national survival. Was it not so with US political action and paramilitary operations? Still, Colby had to go to great lengths to cover his tracks. US interference in Italy's domestic politics, if made public, would leave nationalists no choice but to turn against America.
¹¹

As had been the case in Scandinavia, after initial contacts, regular CIA personnel did not rendezvous directly with Italian anticommunists except at the highest levels. The Agency dispatched “outside officers” who had no traceable connection to the CIA or to the American embassy. If they were apprehended, American authorities would be able to renounce them with “plausible deniability.” The handful of officers that Colby and McCoy ran found it easy to secure cover in
dolce vita
Italy. At any given time, some ten thousand American tourists, businesspeople, and officials of labor and cultural organizations could be found in Rome or the other major Italian cities. There were some sour notes coming out of the Italian Wurlitzer, however. One of Colby's outside agents was jailed for beating up his wife's lover, and another was discovered padding the books. The principal problem facing the station, according to Tom McCoy, was finding bags and car trunks large enough to hold the sheer bulk of lire involved in the payoffs.
¹²

Bill Colby loved fieldwork and found it hard to resist even as he moved up in the Agency hierarchy. His son John remembered that every Sunday, the family would attend Mass at one of the Catholic churches situated in the Plaza Del Populo. There were no pews in Roman churches then; congregations would stand until they received communion. John remembered that the women were always in the front ranks, with the men milling about
in the rear. After services, the males would move out into the plaza, don red scarves, and talk politics. John recalled his father saying that “the women were all Catholics and the men were all communists.” Bill would mix with the crowd, gauging its mood and gleaning bits of information. It seemed that here, as elsewhere, he found the enemy more interesting than the ally. It was from the communists that he would learn the means and methods to defeat the communists. As Colby proudly recalled in
Honorable Men
, the political action program he headed was the largest ever undertaken in the history of the CIA. But his was only part of a larger effort.
¹³

For some reason, Colby was not selected to head the huge stay-behind, paramilitary operation the CIA ran in Italy. Though covert operations were the former Jedburgh's proven area of expertise, Gerry Miller decided to run “Project Gladio” himself (the name was an allusion to the short sword that was ubiquitous in the Roman legions of old). Like the stay-behind nets in Scandinavia, Gladio originated with the so-called “secret anti-Communist NATO protocols” that committed alliance members and their security services to preventing a communist seizure of power within their own borders and those of their allies “by any means.” Compared to Colby's Scandinavian nets, Gladio was far more extensive and more ideologically conservative. Miller's agents found willing operatives among former followers of Benito Mussolini and among archconservative Catholics. By 1958, Gladio comprised hundreds of cells operating throughout the country and dozens of strategically located arms caches, including both small arms and heavy weapons. The Italian stay-behind operation was hardly unique. In West Germany, the CIA built its espionage and stay-behind operations around former Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen. The Italian network would remain active for the rest of the Cold War and would be linked to a series of rightwing terrorist attacks in the 1970s.
¹⁴

Colby made no mention of Gladio in his memoir, but he did state that “a very deliberate and conscious policy was made both in Washington and in Rome that no help of any kind go to the Neo-Fascists or Monarchists.” He was speaking of political action, his operation, but even in this he was being disingenuous. Colby's job was to control matters so that Washington would not have to choose between a centrist government and a regime of neo-fascists. But if push came to shove, there was no doubt as to the choice the Eisenhower administration would make. NSC 5411/2, the Eisenhower administration's primary policy document on postwar Italy, declared that
“an extreme rightist government,” though “almost certainly authoritarian, probably ultra-nationalist,” would be “far less dangerous than a Communist regime.” Moreover, Clare Boothe Luce, who oversaw every aspect of the Agency's activities in Italy, was not nearly as fastidious as Colby. And it was her approach, not Colby's, that would dominate the Eisenhower administration's foreign policy.
¹⁵

In 1954, Eisenhower had convened a panel chaired by General James Doolittle to report on the state of American intelligence. Its conclusion for the CIA was unequivocal: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” In the looming contest between Sino-Soviet communism and the free world, there could be no rules. If the West was to prevail, it would have to discard notions of “fair play” and Judeo-Christian ethics. “We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us,” declared the report. But Colby continued to believe that ends did not always justify means. From 1954 until 1956, he and Clare Luce would clash repeatedly over whether the United States should support an opening to the left or the right as part of the effort to shore up the Italian political center. At the same time, rumor had it, the ambassador and the spy found each other personally congenial enough to conduct an affair.
¹⁶

The failure of the Christian Democrats to gain a clear majority in the 1953 elections had marked the end of De Gasperi's political career. His successors as prime minister, Guiseppe Pella and Mario Scelba, were forced to turn either to the right—to the neo-fascists and monarchists—or to the left—the socialists (PSI)—in order to fashion and sustain a parliamentary majority. At this point, the United States faced a crucial choice in its Italian policy. In Rome, the debate played out chiefly between Colby and Luce. Colby later recalled that every Tuesday, the ambassador presided over a brainstorming session in her ornate office in the embassy, the former residence of Queen Mother Margherita of Savoy. The setting, Colby later recalled, “wonderfully and somewhat theatrically set off [Luce's] blond hair, the pastel colors she favored in her clothing and her regal bearing.” One journalist referred to her as “that poised, coiffed, Rhinemaiden of conservatives.”
¹⁷
She and Colby butted heads initially over tactics. He, on the one
hand, had been pressing for yearly budgets of US aid for Italy's noncommunist parties in order to enable them to build strong, durable infrastructures. She, on the other, wanted to hold the CIA money hostage in order to compel America's erstwhile allies to toe the anticommunist line. She had been annoyed, for example, when the Christian Democrats refused to support national legislation outlawing the PCI in the wake of the 1953 elections. She increasingly perceived Pella and Scelba as prevaricators who, while appeasing the communists, continually badgered the United States for more handouts.