Philip Willan
Constable, London, 1991, £20.00
Hats off. A British journalist, living in Italy, Willan has produced that synthesis of the Italian material on the “strategy of tension’ and related parapolitical activity which people like me, without Italian or access to the Italian press, have been waiting for. This is one of those books that has been waiting to be written.
For 40 years Italy’s political system has been subverted by US-funded parapolitics, demonstrating the universal application of the late Ralph J. Gleason’s First Law of American Politics After Watergate: no matter how paranoid you are, what they’re actually doing is worse than you could possibly imagine. In Italy’s case, not only was it worse, it is also infinitely more complicated. Trying to recount the highlights of this, Willan has produced a book which is practically falling over itself to tell ever more astounding (and dreadful) tales of plots, “red’ and “black’ terror run by spooks, bombings, coup plans, assassinations and all the other goodies the Americans bought with the 100 million dollars or so they have spent there since the war.
On second reading two things emerged from the welter of new names. First, various participants in the plots refer repeatedly not to the United States or its agencies, but to NATO. NATO is dominated by the USA, of course, but still is not quite merely the USA. “Look at the NATO dimension’ is one of the messages of the Gladio network story — which is a chapter in this book.(1) What do we know of NATO intelligence-gathering and covert operations? Is there “NATO Intelligence’ somewhere? (Brian Crozier — writing as “John Rossiter’ — has NATO intelligence in his novel The Andropov Deception.) If so, where? How organised? How managed?
Second, if James Angleton’s famous expression “the wilderness of mirrors’ applies anywhere, it is in Italy, where he played a major role in establishing the covert American role in Italian politics just after the war. The USA destroyed Italian democracy in order to save it (from the Italian Communist Party). As the major media celebrate the “triumph of the West’, Willan’s book shows that the USA’s only commitment is to US capital. Though a commonplace for those on the left, the forceful way this message comes across in Willan’s book may explain why it has had such a thin reception in this country.
For the most part Willan is careful not to overwork his evidence and is openly speculative in places; and while experts on Italian parapolitics will quarrel with bits of this, for the non-specialist reader this is unreservedly recommended.
RR
(1) “Look at NATO’ is also the message from the Andrew Hale 1988 “faction’ No, Peace for the Wicked. Hale was a journalist in Italy and came across what appeared to be evidence in 1972 that Roberto Calvi and the assistant British Military Attache in Rome — presumably an MI6 officer under cover — were funnelling money to the Italian far right. No, Peace for the Wicked is £4.50 from Hale at 31 Ada Road, Canterbury, CT1 3TS. Be warned, however, that apart from that snippet the book is not very interesting.