INCREASED REPRESSION, AS BR BEGIN POLITICAL KIDNAPPINGS
The period from end of 1971 to March of 1972 in Italy saw repression sharply increase, in a context of very violent mass confrontations between the revolutionary Left and the police. At first, the movement focus was to expose the role of the State and the fascists in the Piazza Fontana terrorist bombing of December 1969, and to free Valpreda, the anarchist comrade framed by the State. Through a carefully organized campaign of movement 'counter-information" the State was exposed, Valpreda's trial postponed, three of the Fascist ringleaders in the bombing were identified, and two of them, Ventura and Freda, were arrested.
The State's attempt to politically isolate the revolutionary Left by blaming it for the Piazza Fontana bombing ' and for the entire 1970-71 fascist terror campaign that followed ' failed. This left the State politically exposed. Imperialism was forced now to rely on cruder tactics. This physical repression came down particularly against the two main groups of the extra-parliamentary Left, Continuous Struggle and Workers' Power. On March 15, 1972, Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, leader of the GAP (Partisan Action Group), died via a bomb he was setting at the base of a high-voltage electric power pylon in the mountains near Milan. Speculation grew in the Left whether he had been assassinated, or somehow set up by the police...
The first BR political kidnapping took place in this tense atmosphere of growing polarization between the movement and the State. It was the first revolutionary kidnapping in Italian history. On March 3, 1972 three Brigadists kidnapped Idalgo Macchiarini as he left his office at the Sit-Siemens plant in Milan. He was put in a van, handcuffed, questioned as part of a political trial, and released 20 minutes later. Around his neck the BR left a sign that said:
RED ★ BRIGADES
BITE AND FLEE!
NOTHING WILL GO UNPUNISHED!
STRIKE ONE TO EDUCATE ONE HUNDRED!
ALL POWER TO THE ARMED PEOPLE!
Macchiarini was a fascist and one of the most hated bosses at Sit-Siemens, a personnel manager. The BR distributed a leaflet explaining their action and also a photo of Macchiarini while under interrogation in his temporary prison. The photo was captioned: "Milan, 3rd March, 1972, Macchiarini, Idalgo, Fascist manager of Siemens, tried by the BR. The proletarians have taken up arms, for the bosses it's the beginning of the end."
The next day while Macchiarini was denouncing the "brutality" of his BR captors, the BR returned his wrist watch to him in a letter to the newspaper Corriere della Sera in which they denied using violence against him except while he was struggling to resist capture.
The revisionist Italian Communist Party (PCI) daily, L'Unita next day published a short article condemning the BR with the headline: "Serious provocation at Sit-Siemens in Milan".
The mass of the workers at Sit-Siemens, on the other hand, approved of the BR action. In fact, only a few hours before the kidnapping a large group of Sit-Siemens workers had tried to storm Macchiarini's office. A month later on April 13 during another shop floor demonstration, the workers paid him another "unwanted visit". The various business and management groups in Milan, of course, registered their "moral" indignation against the kidnapping.
The revolutionary Left's reaction to the Macchiarini action was mixed. Workers' Vanguard ("Avanguardia Operaia"), a large Trotskyist group in the New Left, savagely attacked the BR as police agents. This was not totally unexpected. Workers' Vanguard had formed out of the student movement in 1969, with the goal of becoming the "Leninist" party. Its primary base was in the Milan worker-student C.U.B. movement, where it had already succeeded in winning over part of the Pirelli C.U.B. (or United Rank and File Committee) and splitting the assembly into two competing mass organizations. Workers' Vanguard had earlier disassociated itself sharply from other armed formations. When the October 22nd GAP group was arrested in the industrial port city of Genoa, the WV publicly labeled these comrades "Fascists". WV's violent political attack on the BR in their newspaper was headlined: "DIRECTED BY THE SECRET SERVICES..." Their criticism was:
"The kidnapping was unexpected (at Siemens there is no struggle in this period). The gesture is completely demonstrative and seems to have been done for publicity reasons... Around the neck of the kidnap victim a sign was hung with a message on it written in a style foreign to the workers' movement: 'Bite and run', 'Strike one to educate one hundred'. BUT ABOVE ALL THE KEY TO THE FELTRINELLI CASE MAKES ITS APPEARANCE: THE VAN!
"The public is being introduced to certain ideas: there are terrorists, they are Leftists and they use small vans for their crimes."
The first sentence of the Workers' Vanguard statement was of course false, since, as already mentioned, that same day there'd been a militant shop floor demonstration against Macchiarini. And while the two BR slogans were not familiar to the "Leninist" Workers' Vanguard, the first was used by Fidel and Che in the Cuban guerrilla struggle, and the second by V. I. Lenin himself (in his notes in 1905).
As for the reference to Feltrinelli and the van: since at that time there was wide speculation in the Left that the secret services had murdered Feltrinelli, Workers' Vanguard was attempting to imply that the use of a van by the BR in the action was somehow connected to the use of a 'van by the secret police in their supposed murder plot against Feltrinelli; therefore, the BR were run by police agents.(1) This strange logic revealed much more about Workers' Vanguard than it did about the BR.
In contrast, Continuous Struggle's reaction to the kidnapping represented a 180' change from their earlier strong condemnation of the Pirelli truck fire-bombings. The day after the action the Milan executive committee of Continuous Struggle issued a communique in full solidarity with the BR:.
"Idalgo Macchiarini was captured Friday afternoon, tried and punished. During the morning a demonstration inside the factory had tried to reach his office to make him feel the weight of their strength and their class hatred. We hold that this action is coherent with the generalized will of the masses to also carry out the class struggle on the terrain of violence and illegality.'.
On March 9, 1972, while the Left in Italy was still debating the Macchiarini action, the New Popular Resistance (NRP) in France, the armed wing of Gauche Proletarienne (Proletarian Left), kidnapped a Renault manager, Robert Nogrette. Nogrette had fired many militant Renault workers and had organized a hit squad which assassinated Pierre Overnay, a Renault worker.
Continuous Struggle also enthusiastically supported the Nogrette kidnapping. In a daily news bulletin entitled The Valpreda Trial (dated March 10, 1972), distributed by their militants, a huge, half-page high headline read: "THE KIDNAPPING OF SIT-SIEMENS AND RENAULT MANAGERS: REVOLUTIONARY JUSTICE BEGINS TO INSTILL FEAR ' LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY JUSTICE." In the article Continuous Struggle states: "The trial and punishment of the bosses is the constant practice of the workers' struggle and an important moment of opposition to the capitalist hierarchies inside and outside the factory. It is the essential condition for the defense of the conquests of the working class."
Continuous Struggle was to pay heavily for taking these positions. In Milan the police issued eleven arrest warrants against the Milan leadership, some of whom were top national leaders of the organization.
Just as heavy State repression was coming down against Continuous Struggle and Workers' Power (who not only supported armed struggle but were the strongest groups in the New Left), the Workers' Vanguard group opened up a sharp attack on them and withdrew from the movement united front against repression. This united front, the Committee of Struggle Against the State Massacre, had been set up to expose the State's complicity in the Fascist bombing of Piazza Fontana in 1969.
After Feltrinelli's death in the accidental explosion, the bourgeoisie used his death to mount a heavy campaign to isolate and crush Workers' Power which had whole-heartedly supported the BR's Macchiarini action. While much of the extra-parliamentary Left was disoriented by this campaign, Workers' Power attempted to fight back. They published an article revealing Feltrinelli's membership in GAP and defended him as a fallen comrade. The rest of the movement was taken aback by their boldness. An ex-Workers' Power member was implicated in the busted Feltrinelli operation and two current WP leaders were implicated as well. The bourgeois press launched a campaign claiming Workers' Power and GAP and 'the Red Brigades were one organization, with Workers' Power being the above ground arm. Rumors spread that the WP was about to be outlawed. Continuous Struggle attempted to rally the movement in defense of Workers' Power but the base of the extra-parliamentary Left failed to respond. Most of the movement ran for cover, some individuals even turning into police informers.
Workers' Vanguard ("Avanguardia Operaia") chose this moment to attack WP ' accusing the organization of an 'insane analysis of the Italian situation and the tasks of the movement that leads it to treat as comrades". It was also at that point that Workers' Vanguard chose to leave the movement's anti-repression united front. The anti- repression committee, for its part, charged Workers' Vanguard with opportunistically trying to save itself from State repression by distancing itself from the most persecuted Left organizations, thereby abandoning the anti-repression struggle and objectively aiding the State. The united front was breaking up. Earlier the Manifesto group, made up of "Maoist" intellectuals expelled from the PCI in 1969, had left the united front. Manifesto, which wanted to look "respectable" and run candidates in the May 1972 elections, had refused to comment on the Macchiarini action.
With the surfacing of these divisions and weaknesses in the movement, the well-known fascist prosecutor Dr. Mario Sossi (his position corresponded to that of assistant attorney general in the u.s.) boasted to the press that his forces had readied themselves to arrest 5,000 revolutionary Leftists in a few minutes. Sossi had taken charge of the arrest and prosecution of the Genoa October 22nd Collective.
On April 25, 1972 GAP announced they were abandoning their "foco" strategy and declared their political unity with the BR. After expressing their belief that "the guerrilla foco can achieve nothing against the armed power of the bourgeoisie and imperialism" they concluded: "It seems to us that this rectification eliminates most of the tactical differences that divided us from the Red Brigades."
Meanwhile the State opened up a drive to find GAP and BR safehouses and attempted to infiltrate the Brigades. Marco Pisetta, a lumpenproletarian and sometime police informer on the fringes of the movement was picked up during a raid on one of these safehouses. Pisetta signed a melodramatic false confession written for him by SID (the Italian military intelligence service) agents. This confession was later leaked to the right-wing magazine I1 Borghese in January 1973. The SID confession linked the entire extra-parliamentary Left to the BR, claiming the Brigades were only 'the tip of the iceberg of a gigantic armed Left. Pisetta knew little and was only a minor propaganda gain for the State. He was one of only two successful infiltrators or informers against the BR in the early years.
Although the BR were repeatedly accused by the PCI, Manifesto, and many others in the movement of being a den of police spies, actually the early BR were almost impossible to penetrate. Even the PCI had to openly admit this in a 1974 magazine article.
In fact, the BR's ability to resist infiltration was much better than that of the rest of the legal Left including the PCI itself. In 1970 the PCI found out that it had two CIA agents, Stendardi and Ottavicino, on their own Central Committee. It was only with the outside help of the KGB that they were discovered, after hundreds of revolutionaries in Brazil, Portugal, Greece and Spain had been arrested because of them. These two maneuvered themselves into the position of running much of the Italian Communist Party's solidarity work with underground revolutionaries in Latin America and the Mediterranean. Information about those underground movements went straight to the CIA, who usually arranged for the local police to move on it. Hundreds of militants were killed because of this penetration.
The BR's views on the problem of infiltration were outlined in a May 1974 interview in L'Espresso: "The basic criterion for protecting oneself from infiltration is the level of political consciousness and militant practice. No criterion however is infallible."
After the raid on the Via Boiardo safehouse on May 2, 1972 the BR decided to go completely underground. Due to their tight organization BR emerged from the first wave of repression against them "only slightly grazed" as they themselves put it. Up to the May 2nd raid BR had continued to be involved in semi-clandestine work. In an internal document captured by police later, BR described their situation: "The question of clandestinity was only posed in its real terms after May 2, 1972. Up to then, enmeshed as we were in a situation of semi-legality, it was only seen in its tactical and defensive aspects rather than its strategic importance."
For six months from May to November of 1972 the BR quietly built a logistical infrastructure, doing expropriations without using their name. An internal document on expropriations, written after 1972, shows their basic analysis of this area of activity.
EXCERPT FROM BR INTERNAL DOCUMENT ON THE QUESTION OF EXPROPRIATION
...expropriation must not be considered simply for self-financing purposes, but must be considered one of the basic aspects of the struggle for the construction of proletarian power and as one of the required paths which the growth of the revolutionary movement must travel. Until now, for tactical reasons we preferred to avoid making expropriations the object of armed propaganda on a mass level, to avoid, as much as possible, giving the State the opportunity for repression and a political attack which, given our actual conditions of weakness, would have been difficult to ward off. Now, judging that in any case the State will be the one to take the initiative on this terrain (attempting to criminalize the movement they will race to paint us as a gang of armed robbers) it is necessary to reconsider the situation...
While we are of the opinion that it would be in our interest to "expose ourselves" under conditions of a better rooting of the BR in the mass movement, being forced to, we will have to take a position on this question. We hold that it is intellectualistic and politically infantile to hope to achieve a political victory on the terrain of expropriations simply by publishing a document that explains what we think on this question. To hold a dialectical position which has force in the movement, an expropriation action is necessary which has an unmistakable political meaning such as to constitute a general reference point. Only this way an eventual document would be effective on a mass level and not only for groups on the Left...
Everything depends on seeing whether we have enough organizational strength for an expropriation of this type, but if we do not try and we do not construct it we will not have it.(2)
They also performed social investigation in the factories where the mass struggle was taking place, deepening roots all the while. They accumulated a large body of information to be used later in a qualitative organizational leap: the Fall 1972 BR campaign against "FIAT FASCISM".
FOOTNOTES
(1) Later the GAP and the BR revealed that Feltrinelli's death was due to the careless use of cheap watches as timers, and that he was killed while attempting a bombing action as part of a GAP unit. Their van was a GAP vehicle, one of many.
(2) Panorama, June 29, 1975.
