Numero Zero (15 page)

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 going slightly soft in the head, spending day after day in an armchair brooding over past glories, only able to see what was going on in the world through the television, black and white, while he thought back—his mind now clouding with age but roused by syphilis—to triumphant moments on the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, to summers when he harvested the corn bare-chested, smothered children with kisses while their aroused mothers slavered over his hands, or the afternoons in the Sala del Mappamondo, where his manservant, Navarra, would bring women in for him and, unbuttoning his fly in cavalry fashion, he would flip them over on his desk and,
wham
, inseminate them in seconds while they made simpering groans like bitches in heat, murmuring, ‘Oh, my Duce, my Duce' . . . And as he thought back, salivating, his cock now flaccid, someone was hammering away in his head about the idea of resurrection close at hand—like the joke about Hitler, who's also in Argentina, and the neo-Nazis want him to come back and conquer the world, and he hems and haws, since he too is getting old, and finally he says, ‘Okay, but this time as
baddies
, right?'

“Anyhow,” continued Braggadocio, “in 1970 everything seemed to suggest a military coup might work. The head of the Italian secret services was General Miceli, who was also a member of the P2 Masonic lodge and would later become a politician and member of the Neofascist Party—note that he was suspected and investigated for involvement in the Borghese affair, though he got through it unscathed and died peacefully two years ago. I've learned from a reliable source that Miceli, two years after the Borghese coup, still received eight hundred thousand dollars from the American embassy, no one knows why. Borghese could therefore rely on excellent support from the top, and on Gladio, on the Falangist veterans of the Spanish Civil War, on Masonic contacts, and it has been implied that the Mafia played a part—which, as you know, it always does. And in the shadows, the ubiquitous Licio Gelli stirring up the police and the top military command, which already swarmed with Freemasons. Just listen to the story of Licio Gelli, because it's central to my theory.

“So Gelli, he's never denied it, fought in the Spanish Civil War with Franco. And he was in the Italian Social Republic and worked as a liaison officer with the SS, but at the same time he had contacts with the partisans, and after the war he links up with the CIA. Someone like that could hardly fail to be mixed up with Gladio. But hear this: in July 1942, as an inspector of the National Fascist Party, he was given the task of transporting the treasury of King Peter II of Yugoslavia into Italy: sixty tons of gold ingots, two tons of old coinage, six million U.S. dollars, and two million pounds sterling that the Military Intelligence Service had requisitioned. The treasury was finally returned in 1947, twenty tons of ingots light, and it is rumored that Gelli had moved them to Argentina. Argentina, you understand? In Argentina, Gelli is on friendly terms with Perón, and not just with Perón but with generals such as Videla, and from Argentina he receives a diplomatic passport. Who else is mixed up with Argentina? His right-hand man, Umberto Ortolani, who is also the link between Gelli and Monsignor Marcinkus. And so? So everything points us to Argentina, where the Duce is living and preparing for his return, and there's obviously a need for money and good organization and local support. Which is why Gelli is essential to the Borghese plan.”

“It sounds convincing, doesn't it.”

“And it is. This doesn't alter the fact that Borghese was putting together a comic Brancaleone army, where alongside diehard Fascist granddads (Borghese himself was over sixty) were representatives of the state and even divisions of the Forestry Rangers—don't ask why the Forestry Rangers, perhaps with all the deforestation that had gone on after the war, they had nothing better to do. But this motley crew was capable of some nasty things. From later judicial proceedings it emerges that Licio Gelli's role was to capture the president of the republic, at that time Giuseppe Saragat. A ship owner from Civitavecchia had offered the use of his merchant ships to transport those captured by the conspirators to the Lipari Islands. You won't believe who else was involved in the operation. Otto Skorzeny, the man who had freed Mussolini from his brief imprisonment on the Gran Sasso mountain in 1943! He was still around, someone else who had survived the bloody postwar purges unscathed, with links to the CIA. He could ensure that the United States would not oppose the coup so long as a ‘moderate democratic' military regime took power. Just think of the hypocrisy there. But what the later investigations never brought to light was that Skorzeny had evidently remained in contact with Mussolini, who owed him a lot—perhaps he would take care of the Duce's return from exile to provide the heroic vision the conspirators needed. In short, the coup depended entirely on Mussolini's triumphal return.

“Just listen to this. The coup had been carefully planned since 1969, the year of the bombing in Piazza Fontana, which was arranged so all suspicion would fall on the Left and to psychologically prepare public opinion for a return to law and order. Borghese planned to occupy the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Defense, the state television studios, and the communication networks (radio and telephone), and to deport all parliamentary opponents. This isn't some fantasy on my part: a proclamation was later found that Borghese was going to read out on the radio, and which said more or less that the long-awaited time for political change had arrived, that the clique that had governed for twenty-five years had brought Italy to the brink of economic and moral disaster, and that the army and police supported the takeover of political power. Borghese would have ended by saying, ‘Italians, in delivering the glorious tricolor back into your hands, we urge you to cry out proudly our hymn of love,
Viva l'Italia
.' Language typical of Mussolini.”

On December 7 and 8, 1970, Braggadocio reminded me, several hundred conspirators assembled in Rome, arms and ammunition were distributed, two generals had taken up position at the Ministry of Defense, a group of armed Forestry Rangers were posted at the state television headquarters, and preparations were made in Milan for the occupation of the Sesto San Giovanni quarter, a traditional Communist stronghold.

“Then, all of a sudden, what happens? While the plan seemed to be proceeding smoothly, and we might say the conspirators had Rome within their grasp, Borghese announced that the operation had been called off. Later it was implied that forces loyal to the state were opposed to the conspiracy, but then why not arrest Borghese the day before, rather than wait for uniformed lumberjacks to make their way to Rome? In any event, the whole business is more or less hushed up, those behind the coup slip discreetly away, Borghese takes refuge in Spain, a few idiots get themselves arrested, all of them ‘detained' in private clinics, and some visited by General Miceli in their new quarters and promised protection in exchange for silence. Parliamentary inquiries are hardly mentioned by the press, in fact the public is fed vague news about it only three months later. I'm not interested in what actually happened, what I want to know is why a coup so carefully prepared was called off in a matter of a few hours, transforming an extremely serious business into a farce. Why?”

“You tell me.”

“I think I'm the only person to have asked the question and certainly the only one to have worked out the answer, which is as plain as day: that very night, news arrives that Mussolini, who is now in Italy ready to resurface,
has suddenly died
—which, at his age, and having been shuttled around, is hardly improbable. The coup is called off because its charismatic symbol is gone, and this time for real, twenty-five years after his supposed death.”

Braggadocio's eyes gleamed, appearing to illuminate the lines of skulls that surrounded us, his hands shook, his lips were covered with whitish saliva. He grasped me by the shoulders: “You understand, Colonna, this is my reconstruction of the facts!”

“But if I remember correctly, there was also a trial—”

“A charade, with Andreotti, the then prime minister, helping to cover it all up, and those who ended in jail were minor players. The point is, everything we heard was false or distorted, and for twenty years we've been living a lie. I've always said: never believe what they tell you . . .”

“And your story ends there . . .”

“Eh, no, this is the beginning of another one, and perhaps I only became interested through what happened next, which was the direct consequence of Mussolini's death. Without the figure of the Duce, Gladio could no longer hope to seize power, and meanwhile the prospect of Soviet invasion seemed increasingly remote, since there was now a gradual move toward détente. But Gladio was not disbanded. On the contrary, it became truly active from then on.”

“And how was that?”

“Well, since it's no longer a question of establishing a new power by overthrowing the government, Gladio joins up with all the hidden forces trying to destabilize Italy in an effort to prevent the rise of the Left and to prepare the way for new forms of repression, to be carried out in full accordance with the law. Before the Borghese plot, you realize, don't you, that there were very few bomb attacks like Piazza Fontana? Only then do the Red Brigades get going. And the bombings start in the years immediately following, one after another: 1973, a bomb at the police headquarters in Milan; 1974, a massacre in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia; that same year, a high-explosive bomb goes off on the train from Rome to Munich, with twelve dead and forty-eight injured. But remember, Aldo Moro, foreign minister at the time and soon to be prime minister, was to have been on board, but had missed the train because some ministry officials had made him get off at the last moment to sign some urgent documents. Ten years later, another bomb on the Naples–Milan express. Not to mention the killing of Moro in 1978, and we still don't know what really happened. As if that weren't enough, in that same year, a month after his election, the new pope, John Paul I, died mysteriously. Heart attack or stroke, they said, but why did the pope's personal effects disappear: his glasses, his slippers, his notes, and the bottle of Effortil he apparently had to take for low blood pressure? Why did these things disappear into thin air? Perhaps because it wasn't credible that someone with hypotension would have a stroke? Why was Cardinal Villot the first important person to enter the room immediately after? It's obvious, you'll say—he was the Vatican secretary of state. But a book by a certain David Yallop exposes a number of facts: the pope is rumored to have been interested in the existence of an ecclesiastical-Masonic cabal that included Cardinal Villot, Monsignor Agostino Casaroli, deputy director of the
Osservatore Romano
newspaper and director of Vatican Radio, and of course the ever-present Monsignor Marcinkus, who ruled the roost at the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, better known as the Vatican Bank, and who was later discovered to have been involved in tax evasion and money laundering, and who covered up other dark dealings by such characters as Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona—both of whom, surprise surprise, would come to a sticky end over the next few years, one hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London, the other poisoned in prison. A copy of the weekly magazine
Il Mondo
was found on the pope's desk, open to a report on the operations of the Vatican Bank. Yallop suspects six people of the murder: Villot, Cardinal John Cody of Chicago, Marcinkus, Sindona, Calvi, and once again Licio Gelli, the venerable master of the P2 Masonic lodge. You'll tell me this has nothing to do with Gladio, but by sheer coincidence, many of these characters play some part in the other conspiracies, and the Vatican was involved in rescuing and sheltering Mussolini. Perhaps this was what the pope had discovered, though several years had passed since the death of the real Duce, and he wanted to get rid of the gang that had been preparing to overthrow the state since the end of the Second World War. And I should add that with Pope John Paul I dead, the business must have ended up in the hands of John Paul II, shot three years later by the Turkish Grey Wolves, the same Grey Wolves, as I've said, who were a part of the Turkish stay-behind . . . The pope then grants a pardon, his contrite attacker repents in prison, but all in all, the pontiff is frightened off and no longer gets involved in that business, not least because he has no overwhelming interest in Italy and seems preoccupied with fighting Protestant sects in the Third World. And so they leave him be. Aren't all these coincidences proof enough?”