On May 9, 1978, Aldo Moro, a Christian Democracy (DC) statesman who advocated for a Historic Compromise with the Italian Communist Party, (PCI), was murdered after 55 days of captivity by the Red Brigades (BR), a far-left terrorist organization. Although the courts established that the BR had acted alone, conspiracy theories related to the Moro case persist, because of the fact that the assassination of Aldo Moro ended the possibility of communism co-governing one of the main economies of the West, something that neither Washington nor Moscow wanted. Most of the conspiracy theories allege additional involvement, ranging from the Italian government itself, its secret services being involved with the BR, the Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic lodge, the CIA, Henry Kissinger, Mossad, and the KGB.
Because there remains several unclear aspects and it is widely acknowledged, including by the judges themselves, that there were failures on the part of the police, conspiracy theories are widely popular despite five trials in Rome's Court of Assizes that ended with many life sentences and two parliamentary commissions, among others inquiries. Conspiracy theorists hold that Moro, a progressive who wanted the PCI to be part of government, was ultimately sacrificed due to Cold War politics, that both sides welcomed his kidnapping, and that, by refusing to negotiate, they led to his death. The judges investigating the Moro affair dismissed these conspiracy theories, arguing that there is no evidence to support those interpretations of the Moro murder case, and while acknowledging that Moro had powerful political enemies, they insisted that conspiracy theorists had made too many assumptions. At the same time the judicial truth has changed several times and the last parliamentary commission, that concluded its works in 2018, established that the sentences were based mainly on the confession of Valerio Moretti and that the elements in open contradiction with his version, i.e. where the cars were left after the kidnapping, were downplayed.
Twenty years after Moro's death, such conspiracy theories remained popular. Few Italians believed in the official version of the Moro affair, namely that only the Red Brigades bore responsibility for Moro's murder and that the Italian government did its best to save Moro. In August 2020, about sixty individuals from the world of historical research and political inquiry signed a document denouncing the growing weight that the conspiratorial view on the kidnapping and killing of Moro has in public discourse.
Alleged involvement of the P2, Gladio, and the Italian intelligence services
Several authorities have suggested that P2 was involved in the kidnapping of Moro, and that the actions of the P2 were already known before Moro's death, and before the public revelation of the P2's existence in March 1981. The name of Andreotti has been repeatedly associated with numerous members of the P2, notably with the Italian mafia banker Michele Sindona and its founder Licio Gelli, with whom he was well acquainted. The P2 was a secret Masonic lodge involved in numerous financial and political scandals in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s and that featured as its members entrepreneurs, journalists, numerous high exponents of right-wing parties, the Italian police and military forces. Among others, they included future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Carabinieri general Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa (who made an admission request whose result is unknown), Vito Miceli (chief of SIOS), Sindona, and Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia, the pretender to the throne of Italy. Many high-ranking secret services members were also members of the P2, as were members of the committee that had to coordinate the searches for Moro. Another theory supposes that the BR had been infiltrated by the CIA or by the Operation Gladio, a paramilitary clandestine network headed by NATO whose main task was to oppose Soviet influence in Western Europe, including the rise of the PCI and their road to government.
All documents related to the P2 were published on 7 May 1981. The P2 was dissolved in 1982, with a law that also made the establishment of secret lodges with similar purposes illegal in Italy. Gelli, who since 2005 was no longer put on house arrest, said that the P2 was acquitted in the three levels of trial of the charges of conspiracy against the state, and Italian Freemasons cite the Strasbourg Court, which in 2001 condemned the Italian government for having violated the right of association guaranteed by the Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights with a law that required some public officials to declare their membership of a lodge. Most historians agree that the role of this deviant Freemasonry has not been completely clarified.
During the days of Moro's imprisonment, journalist Carmine Pecorelli wrote in his magazine an article entitled "Vergogna, buffoni!" ("Shame on you, clowns!"). In it, he wrote that Andreotti had met dalla Chiesa, who told him that he knew the location where Moro was kept but did not obtain the authorization to proceed to free him due to, in Pecorelli's words, a certain "Christ's lodge in Paradise", which analysts immediately identified with the P2. The likely allusion to the P2 became clear after the discovery of a list of the lodge members on 17 March 1981. Members of the lodge occupied important institutional positions and included , who was director of SISMI (Italy's military intelligence agency); prefect , who was director of CESIS; general of SISDE; admiral Antonino Geraci, who was the commander of SIOS; Federico Umberto D'Amato, who was director of the ; generals and , who were respectively commander and chief-of-staff of the Guardia di Finanza; and the Carabinieri general , who was responsible for road blocks in the capital during the investigations of the Moro affair.
According to Vincenzo Cappelletti (a professor who took part in the crisis committees), , who was later discovered to be a P2 member and declared that Moro was suffering of the Stockholm syndrome towards his kidnappers, was close to the lodge during the kidnapping days, having been introduced by Grassini.Commissione parlamentare d'inchiesta sul terrorismo in Italia e sulle cause della mancata individuazione dei responsabili delle stragi, 63the session (in Italian). Interview of Vincenzo Cappelletti. 23 February 2000. Retrieved 8 September 2023. Gelli declared that the presence of numerous P2 members in the committees was casual, since numerous personalities were members at the time, and this was simply a statistic reflected by the composition of the committees. According to Gelli, some members of the committees did not know that some of their colleagues were also part of the P2.
On 16 March 1978, the day of Moro's kidnapping, the most important members of the P2 met in the Hotel Excelsior in Rome, which was a few hundred meters from the U.S. Embassy in Rome. While exiting the hotel, Gelli declared "the most difficult part is done". It was supposed that his words referred to the abduction of Moro. Another debated case was regarding the presence of , a colonel of SISMI's 7th Division that controlled Operation Gladio and who was nicknamed "Papà", in via Stresa near the location of the ambush, and in those exact minutes when the BR kidnapped Moro. His presence was kept secret and was only disclosed in 1990 during the investigation of the Italian Parliament's commission on state massacres (the stragi di Stato as part of the strategy of tension in Italy). Guglielmi admitted that he was in via Stresa but only because he had been invited to lunch by a colleague. According to several sources, the colleague confirmed that Guglielmi came to his house but had not been invited. Furthermore, Italians normally have lunch at around 12:30 and Guglielmi's presence at around 09:00 would not be justified. Other sources list Guglielmi as a true member of Gladio; he always firmly denied this accusation. His direct superior, the general Pietro Musumeci, was a member of the P2 and was condemned for sidetracking the investigations on the 1980 Bologna station bombing.
The discovery of the BR refuge in via Gradoli saw the participation of members of both P2 and the police forces of Italy. , an informer of SISDE, had communicated that she had heard Morse code messages coming from the flat next to her. It turned out that those noises interpreted as Morse were in fact coming from the electric typewriter used by the terrorists to type their demand letters. She informed the police commissar , who was enlisted in the P2. When police agents went to the flat and knocked on the door, they did not attempt to enter it and left the place. SISDE had been also informed that a lock-up garage in via Gradoli had an antenna, allegedly used by the terrorist to communicate with the area of . Grassini, the head of SISDE and member of the P2, did not take any investigative measures.
Investigations made by DIGOS discovered that several machines used by the terrorists to print their communications from one year before the kidnapping of Moro, which was financed by Mario Moretti, had been previously owned by the Italian state. These included a printer owned by the . Despite its relatively young age and its high value, it had been sold out as scrap. A photocopier was previously owned by the Italy's Ministry of Transportation, and was acquired in 1969 and later sold to , a member of the BR.
The apartment in via Gradoli, which had been rented by Moretti under the pseudonym of Mario Borghi since 1978, and its building housed several apartments owned by SISDE men and one inhabited by a police confidant. During the days of the kidnapping, the palace was inspected by Carabinieri under the colonel , with the exclusion of Moretti's apartment; the official justification was that the Carabinieri were not authorized to enter the apartments if no one was inside. , the owner of the apartment, was later discovered to be a friend of , whose father was named in the Mitrokhin list of the KGB. Valerio Morucci and Adriana Faranda were eventually arrested in her flat. Pecorelli wrote a postcard to Moretti in 1977 from Ascoli Piceno (Moretti was born in the province of Ascoli), addressing it to one "Borghi at via Gradoli", with the message "Greetings, brrrr".
In June 2008, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, best known as "Carlos the Jackal", spoke in an interview released to the Italian press agency ANSA declaring that several men of the SISMI, led by the colonel (who was considered near to Moro), negotiated at the airport in Beirut for his liberation during the night of 8 to 9 May 1978; the agreement would have endorsed the liberation of several imprisoned members of the BR to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the territory of an Arabic country. According to Ramírez Sánchez, the agreement, which found the opposition of the SISMI leading figures, failed because news about it leaked to other Western secret services who, in turn, informed SISMI. Moro was killed the following day. Ramírez Sánchez stated that the officers involved in the attempt were all expelled from the services, being forced to resign or to go into compulsory retirement on a pension.
Involvement of foreign powers
Into the 21st century, the Moro affair continued to be a focus of Italian politics. In 2003, Philip Willan wrote for The Guardian: "Both Moscow and Washington opposed Moro's policy as dangerously destabilising for the postwar European order which the great powers sanction at the Yalta conference in 1945. Suspicion continues to this day that the CIA or KGB, possibly both, may have played a role in his violent removal from the political scene. At the very least, they did nothing to secure his release."