Does the truth of the Moro case come from Syria?
What role did the Libyan secret services and a Palestinian fire group play in the Moro case? Franco Scalzo's article for Storia in Rete
In the weeks in which Aldo Moro was held prisoner by the Red Brigades (March 16-May 9, 1978) it is easy that in the darkest recesses of public opinion – not only that oriented to the left – a sort of unmentionable admiration for the BR. The "charm" of the terrorists lay in their "geometric power", in a country, like Italy, in which nothing worked and which was sinking into the most deplorable sloppiness. Furthermore, that " I am under full and uncontrolled dominion" , a phrase inserted by Moro in one of his letters from his captivity, considerably attenuated the pity towards a prisoner who seemed to have prostrated himself to his captors. In the notebook used to annotate, point by point, the letter sent to him by Moro, next to this sentence the then Minister of the Interior and future President of the Republic, Francesco Cossiga noted that it was " the warning that he may be forced to speak ». The then tenant of the Viminale and party companion of the DC leader in the hands of terrorists, on whom the Americans had forced cohabitation, in the control room, with Steve Pieczenik, a singular official of the US State Department, thus slipped out of a situation embarrassing with a circus spin. He slipped away so as not to have to admit, for example, that the journalist Mino Pecorelli, notoriously well informed and linked to the secret services, had already written in his magazine "OP" (i.e. "Osservatore Politico") about " technically Syrian territory", as a probable prison of the Christian Democrat president and that the reference to " full and uncontrolled dominion" could refer to a physical place, juridically detached from the surrounding environment, impervious to the Italian Authority. But, in addition to what was written by "OP" (in an issue that would "fly away" immediately after publication), there was also something else.
WHAT MORO WRITES IN THE LETTER TO THE GRANDSON LUCA
There is, for example, a letter written by Moro for his nephew Luca, discovered, among various other documents, in Milan, in the apartment in via Montenevoso 8, only much later. That letter, according to some witnesses, would have been held by the jailers because it contained coded information for the investigators; in fact there are recurring statements that seem to go in the same direction indicated by Pecorelli, for example the sentence « now the grandfather is a little far away, but not so much» or the other, which says: « …with the grandfather who is now a little 'out" . The concepts of "near" and "far" take on the atrocious fluidity of ambiguity in the mind of those who know they are in a foreign land but hear distinctly the screeching of the seagulls and the noise of the carriages, full of tourists, biting the paved. Because everything – with the sole exception of via Fani, the place of the kidnapping, which is on a completely different side – takes place in the virtual triangle – just a few hundred square meters – which includes some key places and situations:
1) the underpass of Largo Argentina where the first press release of the so-called BR was found;
2) via Caetani, where Moro's body will be abandoned;
3) the well-known Dutch seer Gerard Croiset had placed the "people's prison" inside the Jewish ghetto;
4) the indication, repeatedly repeated, in the form of a metaphor, by the usual Pecorelli, of the Syrian embassy which is still located a short distance away today, in Piazza dell'Ara Coeli;
5) the photo, taken from above, of the two investigating magistrates, Rosario Priore and Ferdinando Imposimato, who were inspecting the Ghetto, and sent to Priore, together with a greeting card, with the obvious purpose of blocking the investigation.
In the end, the collective perception of the facts of the "Caso Moro" is distorted almost more by the ideological readings and by the literary "temptations" of certain reconstructions than by the systematic misdirections operated by some organs of the State. The red Renault 4 with Moro's body was found there, in via Caetani on 9 May 1978, because it was the most convenient solution, and the red brigatists – practically "Sunday hikers" who had struggled with shooting – they would never have been able to carry out the masterpiece of via Fani: the kidnapping of Moro and the massacre of his escort carried out with the icy precision of a Swiss watch, that of a commando specialized in carrying out real actions of war in an urban context .
THE “REVELATIONS” OF PECORELLI
More than 44 years have passed since then, almost half a century, and I still can't explain how certain "revelations" of Pecorelli's were ignored: the anathema, for example, addressed to members of the Red Brigades who rejoiced from inside a cage, in the court of Turin, for the enterprise of their "comrades" in Rome, since – said the director of "OP" – the logo of the five-pointed star on a red background had served only as a cover for other actors. An operation – that of the kidnapping of Moro – which was the most sophisticated in the entire history of the industrialized West and which bore the trappings of Yalta.
The bipartisan matrix of the crime – associated with the strategic interests of the USA and the USSR which would have been equally threatened by the realization of the "historic compromise" (i.e. the involvement of the Communist Party in the government of the country) – makes the hypothesis plausible that while at the Viminale Pieczenik was vigilant to prevent anyone actually going to Moro's rescue, the task of kidnapping the DC president and eliminating his escort had been outsourced to a fire team of foreign specialists. A scenario, this, which rewards both the fact that the BR involvement was "certified" only by the cloth with the star that appears in the two snapshots of the prisoner (a little thing, a close relative of Nothing), and, above all, by the painstaking care with which was "cleaned up" – immediately – the stage in via Fani. For example, with the seizure of the photos taken immediately after the event from the two photojournalists Gherardo Nucci (from the Asca agency) and Ianni (from Ansa). But also with the pitiful boastfulness reserved for two of the witnesses of the kidnapping, one of whom claimed to have heard the assassins while, in their excitement, they were exchanging orders in a language that was neither English, nor Italian, nor German. And the other witness said he noticed the "olive complexion" of those who had participated in the ambush.
I waited for years to pass to hunt down, in newspaper libraries and private collections, the copy of "OP" which contained Pecorelli's reference to the «technically Syrian territory». I ruled out that, seeing the character, the journalist had thrown it out there, without knowledge of the facts. But it was a waste of time: I never found that copy again. On the other hand, however, I was authorized to consult the papers concerning the Moro case that the Prime Minister, during the Renzi government, had transferred to the Central State Archives. A sea of documents in which I lowered myself with all my diving equipment intercepting, among other things, one in particular. A document entitled "Syrian reference" and which not only "rehabilitated" Pecorelli from the suspicion of having gambled but offered me a series of useful elements for identifying elements of the "Saeqa", the offshoot of the Organization for Liberation of Palestine (PLO) which took orders from Damascus, the fire group that had operated in via Fani. But there's more. Because following this direction of investigation I have included, among the eventualities worthy of consideration, also the one that someone had attempted, in that spring of '78, to force the wall of silence that had surrounded Aldo Moro. This is demonstrated by the story of the man who tried several times, incognito and unheard, to notify Ansa and the Vatican, by means of a telex, of the identity of the kidnappers and the place where Moro was held prisoner. The conjunction of this and other files has given me a cross-section, which I describe briefly.
The commando, having finished the work in via Fani, disappeared in the direction of the Aurelia and headed towards a pre-established point on the coast (hence, the detail of the sand found in the cuff of Moro's trousers) where he should have arrived with a fast dinghy another group with the task of moving the DC president to a ship that was cruising in the center of the Tyrrhenian Sea (a circumstance which, among other things, had been reported in "Giorni – Vie Nuove", a magazine linked to the PCI, by the journalist Guido Cappato, who had learned it from an agent of the Israeli internal secret service, the Shin Bet, met in Switzerland).
THE ROLE OF THE ISRAELI SERVICES
It is very probable that the interference of the Israeli services, although it promised to be rather harmless, had induced the organizers of the kidnapping to fall back on the "disposal" of the prisoner in a friendly embassy. Thus, while the fire group returning from via Fani could have regularly boarded an airliner to return to their home in Lebanon, Moro's jailers, with a "U" turn, resumed the road to Rome. An anonymous telephone call, collected by the General Command of the Carabinieri, at 21.45 on 17 March 1978, warned that between 3 and 4 am, followed by a blue Fiat, it would pass along the Lungotevere degli Inventori – coming from the coastal area – a “lobster” colored Renault 4, registered in Rome, with Aldo Moro inside.
Before it reached the terminus in via Caetani, to open up like a wedding favor and show the world its terrible contents, a red Renault 4, whose license plate began with "N", was in fact registered, on 5 May, as a suspect car on a Carabinieri handbook but it is not possible to say whether it was a coincidence or not, since instead of the license plate number a theory of dots appears and there is no way even to know if this way of doing was part of the customs of the office or if the omission was made after the terrible "surprise" of via Caetani. It is probable, however, that in spite of all the rumors that, inspired by other rumors, have intertwined around via Gradoli and via Montalcini (where Moro's two alleged prisons would have been during the kidnapping), in a circular dynamic like that of the Ouroboros (the symbol depicting the snake biting its tail), Moro's imprisonment followed quite different paths. The first days were spent by the DC leader in a secret shelter on the Roman coast (according to the confidential source conventionally called "Olmo"). Perhaps it was a couple of weeks, as could be deduced from the cryptographic analysis performed by the carabinieri on the letters written by the prisoner to the secretary of his party, Benigno Zaccagnini, with possible various "encrypted" references to a proximity to the sea. But the rest of Moro's imprisonment was spent in the center of Rome having to take for granted, however, that the red Renault with his body traveled only a very short distance before being parked in via Caetani on the morning of 9 May 1978. This is a fact confirmed by the experts, Valerio Giacomini and Gianni Lombardi, who had carried out the botanical and petrographic survey on the car tyres. An expert report which, however, encountered the rock-solid ostracism of other experts – a kilometric list – to whom the conclusions of Giacomini and Lombardi ruined the "narrative" based on via Montalcini, several kilometers away from the point where Moro's body had been found . A hole here (via Gradoli), and a hole there (via Montalcini), as prey do to escape the attack of predators. This is what is taught to the "barbefinte" on the first day of school.
DID A SUPERIOR ORDER DIVERT THE MORO CASE?
The sensation, sifting through the enormous amount of documents available in the Central State Archives, is that our Services, at the time, had been obliged by a superior order (how much "superior" one can only guess) to look without getting in the way. It makes him suspect, for example, that colonel of SISMI, the military secret service of the time, – a certain Guglielmi – who, coincidentally, walked by via Fani on 16 March 1978 because he had to go to lunch with a friend (too eager , at 9 o'clock?), and this also justifies the content of a note (reproduced on the cover of my book "Ecce Moro", Settimo Sigillo editore, published in 2014 but condemned to be out of sight almost immediately) in which an officer of the disconsolately turns to General Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI from 1978 to 1981, to tell him: « Your Excellency, for the news. It does not seem that, so far, the right track has been found in relation to the Moro case…».
The scenario of the international conspiracy, which should not, for all its complexity, remain limited to the hegemonic role of the USA and the USSR or to the subordinate role of the Saiqa, emerges in all its overflowing evidence in all the documents in which information and entries concerning the Gaddafi's Libya. Noteworthy, for example, is the note from SISMI in which it is written: «On March 20, SISDE (the civil secret service of the time, NDR) sent a copy of the message according to which a DESSAULT MYSTERE FALCON 20 device, marked in Libya with the initials 5A – DAG, indicated by various sources as supporting terrorist commandos and which should have landed at the Geneva-Cointrin airport on 15 March 1978, coming from Libya itself, had abruptly changed its flight plan and landed instead in Rome -Fiumicino, from where it then departed at 10.05 on the following 16 March, with destination Paris-Orly». The continuation of the dispatch reads: «use of civil aviation-type uniforms by a well-known commando could be connected with the presence of said stop plane in Rome Fiumicino». The aircraft, normally used by the Libyan leadership to guarantee support for its agents engaged in " international level" acts of terrorism, stopped at night in a decentralized stand at Fiumicino airport and three people got off (one of whom will be identified late for Abdessalam Jalloud, the right arm of the Libyan rais, placed at the top of Libyan intelligence) who unexpectedly lost track of themselves to reappear and re-embark the next morning, after the via Fani massacre.
Obviously, in the minutes of four judicial trials and of two parliamentary commissions, there is not even a shadow of the episode, in full compliance with a recommendation made "urbi et orbi", in 1988, by Admiral Fulvio Martini, head of SISMI, which noted that the reasons why some aspects of that tragedy " could have disturbed international relations with the countries concerned" had not disappeared. An example of what a state that counts for nothing is, the equivalent of a colony.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/caso-moro-siria/ on Fri, 06 Jan 2023 06:59:00 +0000.