SOSSI ACTION
January 1974, there were widespread rumors of an impending military coup. Many left-wing trade unionists and parliament members chose to sleep away from home.
With inflation at 20% a year, the government announced a new round of price hikes on basic necessities. On February 27, 1974 the working class staged a massive general strike to protest the Center-Left government's austerity program. The next day the government fell as Cabinet Minister Ugo La Malfa, head of the small but influential conservative Republican party(1), resigned his post to protest the Socialists' and the unions' "economic adventurism".
The government's political crisis was compounded by revelations of wide-spread corruption inside the government. Bribes by the Italian oil and chemical industries had gone to all political parties, except the PCI. In addition, cases of corruption within the judiciary, and growing conflicts between the executive branch and the judiciary, came out into the open.
The right-wing Social-Democrats, who were the party most closely aligned with the interests of u.s. imperialism in Italy, called for a continued tough economic policy and an increased military commitment to NATO. In March 1974, Mariano Rumor, the Christian Democratic (DC) Premier who had led the previous Center-Left government, formed a new DC government, this time much closer to the political right-wing. The PCI (Italian Communist Party) put up only a feeble opposition to this new right-wing government in parliament.
The new Rumor DC government's first actions were to revive the tough austerity program of the previous government. More price rises in basic necessities were announced. On April 11 parliament approved government financing of the political parties, which gave the fascist MSI a subsidy of several billion lire a year (several million dollars). Parliament also approved a new law extending the limit of preventive detention(2) to 8 years. On April 18 Gianni Agnelli was elected the president of Confindustria (Italy's equivalent to the u.s. NAM, National Association of Manufacturers), which signaled the emergence of a FIAT-Montedison(3) bloc as the dominant group within the ruling class.
In the meantime the DC right-wing, led by its party secretary, Amintore Fanfani, was mobilizing all right-wing forces across the country to win the upcoming May referendum to scrap the divorce law passed by parliament in December 1970. The fascists and the Catholic Right hoped to use the "culture war" issue of the divorce law to consolidate a right-wing, law-and-order majority in the country. The PCI, busy trying to form an alliance with the Catholic church, did not want to put up a militant fight in support of the right of divorce, for fear of antagonizing the Vatican. In fact, in 1973 the PCI had gone so far as to publicly oppose the legalization of abortions!
The political events of 1974 were framed in the context of the national debate over the divorce referendum. This struggle paralyzed the Rumor government for three months, preoccupying both Left and Right. The referendum was at the same time a political football seized upon by the parliamentary parties, and a watershed issue in the modernization of Italian society.
Prior to 1970, there had been no divorce in Italy, save for those with enough money and influence to obtain a marriage annulment from the Vatican (i.e. a church pronouncement that the marriage had never existed). The old laws denied women not only divorce, but also separation – neither wife nor children were allowed to leave the husband's residence. These feudal-clerical laws openly put the authority of the State behind the oppression of women. At that time involuntary marriages were both legal and common in the countryside. A man desiring a young woman – often a 13 or 14 year old child – would simply kidnap and rape her, then declare that he wished to marry her. The "dishonored" young woman's father and priest would usually force marriage upon her. Nor was rape legally defined as a crime of violence against a woman under the old laws, but rather as a public disorder (like "drunk and disorderly" violations in the "u.s.a.").
The backwardness and injustice of the old legal code chaffed on even bourgeois women, and was seen by imperialism itself as a fetter on the social modernization of Italy. For that matter, many men who wanted to take new wives also welcomed divorce reform. For these reasons the Moderate wing of the Christian Democrats, the Republican party, the various Social- Democratic parties (PSI and PSU), and the PCI all supported the December 1970 law that legalized divorce (after 5-7 years of trial separation). In the first three years after passage there were 66,000 divorce decrees.
Opposition to the divorce law was whipped up by the right – the right-wing of the Christian Democrats, the fascists, and the Vatican. They believed that a nationwide campaign against the reform, culminating in a petition drive and then a popular referendum to overturn the new law, would re-establish reactionary ideology in Italian society, a grip which had been weakening since 1960. Divorce was linked in their propaganda to pornography, crime, breakup of the family, and the growing mood of "permissiveness" that they decried. The right believed that on this one issue – because of its appeal to both male chauvinism and loyalty to the church – they would command a majority of the voters. 500,000 signatures were needed, and the right brought in nearly triple that: 1.3 million in March 1974, to get the repeal referendum on the ballot.
The left broadly viewed this issue as a counter-attack. While the left parties all supported bourgeois equality for women (right to vote, own property, enter and leave a marriage), in no sense did that mean support of, or even understanding of, Women's Liberation. The referendum was a political football, in which the Left, which feared the repeal referendum succeeding, appealed to men to oppose it in order to block the Right. Questions of women's rights were generally secondary issues at best. Because a Right triumph was seen as a giant step towards fascism, much of the Left pushed for a united front to defend bourgeois democracy at the polls. There was in the Left parties a widespread belief, almost a hysteria, that most Italian voters would follow the Right and vote down divorce – with midnight police raids against radicals coming soon thereafter.
The hysteria to defend bourgeois democracy pulled much of the New Left in a conservative direction. A united front against the Right only meant channelling political energy into election campaigns and outright support for the Center-Left coalition schemes of former DC Premier Aldo Moro and PCI chief Berlinguer. The leadership of Continuous Struggle ("Lotta Continua") used the need for a united front against fascism as an excuse to support the PCI's election campaign and to oppose any armed struggle. Much of the New Left attacked the rise of the Red Brigades as a fascist conspiracy for scaring voters into supporting a law-and-order bloc, in the upcoming May elections. Turmoil and resistance to this new line began in the Continuous Struggle membership. In Continuous Struggle's local headquarters in the working class Sesto district of Milan, huge graffiti appeared on the wall inside – "No more phrase-mongering groups, let's arm the workers". Over the Continuous Struggle headquarters entrance someone had scrawled sarcastically: "Struggle used to be continuous!" There were many splits then, with new armed collectives and informal action groups being formed, as well as growth of the BR itself.
The Left considered itself, and so was, put off balance by this period. Even the BR spoke of "this gloomy atmosphere of the referendum" Their line was to oppose the movement's traditional type of anti-fascist united front, precisely because its only true end was loyalty to bourgeois democracy. They outlined an anti-fascist movement with revolutionary implications. It was true that the Red Brigades also posed the referendum primarily as a Left-Right test of strength and as a right-wing proto-fascist conspiracy. The issue itself, of divorce and women's rights in general, was largely overlooked. As we will later see, the struggle was not as either Left or Right parties thought.
The increasingly repressive political situation was the object of an analysis by the BR in a document published in April 1974 entitled: "Against Neogaullism, carry the attack to the heart of the State". The BR document analyzed the tactical strength of the revolutionary Left in the factories and their overall strategic weakness. The BR concluded that the ruling class had temporarily shelved its Center-Left alliance with the PCI and had opted for a more repressive strategy whose central pivot was the "Neo-Gaullist" institutional reform of the State to create a stronger executive and weaker parliament, similar to what De Gaulle had achieved in France in the late 1950's. The BR concluded that the movement needed a strategy that went beyond traditional militant anti-fascism. Instead the BR called for a strategy which focused on defeating the hard-line NeoGaullist faction within the State by playing on contradictions and divisions within the ruling class.
The partial text of the BR document is reprinted below.
AGAINST NEOGAULLISM
CARRY THE ATTACK TO THE HEART OF THE STATE
April 1974
Parallel with the deepening of their own governmental crisis, a counterrevolutionary process is inexorably unfolding in which the entire owning class is united in the attempt to destroy the movements of struggle and the autonomous and revolutionary levels of organization that they have produced.
Now, while in the factories workers autonomy is strong enough and organized enough to maintain a permanent state of insubordination, and even to conquer for itself a growing zone of power, but outside the factory it is still too weak to be able to offer resistance to the attacks of the counterrevolution.
For this reason the forces of counterrevolution tend to shift the principal contradiction outside the factories. They commit themselves now to decisive battles in order to isolate our struggle for power inside the factories, to be able to control it more easily and then destroy it...
A revolutionary initiative inevitably generates its organized antagonism: the counter-revolution.
Marx has already made clear that this is a scientific law which regulates class relations: warning that "the revolutionary progress did not make its way with tragi-comic immediate conquests, but on the contrary it causes an adversary to arise. Only by fighting against this adversary can the party of the insurrection reach the maturity of a true revolutionary party..."
Nevertheless the counterrevolution in this period does not follow a linear path. Within it are two clashing political lines whose opposition to each other is of a tactical nature. One is the putschist tendency, the other is the NeoGaullist-type "constitutional reform" tendency. Both play their own specific role within the strategic process of the counterrevolution.
The Putschist Line
...one consideration is fundamental: so long as there is room in Italy for counter- revolutionary solutions that maintain the appearances and the form of bourgeois democracy, even while trampling on its substance, these solutions will prevail over putschist ones...
The NeoGaullist Plan of "Constitutional Reform"
The aggravation of the economic crisis, the inability to control potentially explosive social tensions and the pressing struggles of the Workers Movement... demonstrate ever more clearly that the unfolding government crisis cannot be resolved with simple changes of administration at the top.
Having discarded the hypothesis of the "historic compromise," the dominant groups of the bourgeoisie have but one choice left: "turn to the Right."
But the turn to the Right, this time, must provide the bourgeois guarantees of stability, organicity and credibility; it must confront all the problems of politics, economics, and security and public order at their root with precise constitutional changes, which can create a new base for the whole institutional system of our country.
This plan which Premier Leone explicitly talked about for the first time in his speech at the end of the year in 1973, aims at the transformation of the republic born out of the World War II Resistance movement into a presidential republic. The fundamental points of this project are: the strengthening of the executive branch by giving greater legislative and administrative powers to the head of state and the president of the council; the progressive emptying of the legislative power of parliament; the recourse to direct legislation through popular referendum; the revision of the electoral law from proportional party representation to majority rule.
But to carry out such an ambitious plan requires solidly united political leadership, and, above all, an iron control of the movements of the various existing political and social forces.
For this reason the NeoGaullist plan for constitutional reform must be an armed project, and each phase of its realization must proceed at the same rate hand in hand with a growing process of militarization of power.
NeoGaullism Is An Armed Plan
The principal objective of the NeoGaullist forces is necessarily the strengthening of their control over key points of the state apparatus.
The "separate bodies" of the state, which until now have operated independently and often in contradiction to each other, must now be brought under a new discipline...
Very revealing on this point is the process of reorganization which is unfolding within the judiciary. NeoGaullism is trying to achieve something that not even fascism was able to do: to build an exact identity between its power interests and the "law".
The Political Clash Over the Referendum
The NeoGaullist plan for "constitutional reform" finds in the carrying out of the referendum, besides the first step of its realization, an opportunity to unite all the forces of the Right around itself, from the MSI to the DC.
Thus the referendum is a fundamental step for this plan, a first proof of the overall political strength of this new power bloc.... The political strategy of the DC, in this phase is:
- to definitely invalidate the strategy of the center-left...
- to create a general climate of insecurity which permits the DC, at the head of the NeoGaullist forces, to present itself to the public as the only force capable of restoring political and economic order and tranquility in the country...
It is clear that if the DC were to win the referendum at the head of the NeoGaullist forces, the plan for "constitutional reform" would receive an enormous impetus. It would immediately become a "democratic" platform for "restoring" the state and re-establishing integral rule of the bourgeoisie.... Up to now the revolutionary movement has opposed the Counterrevolutionary process on the restricted terrain of militant anti-fascism.
But because the Counterrevolutionary initiative is now being personally led by a power bloc internal to the State, it is, above all, against these forces that we must unleash our hardest blows.
It is time to tear away the cobwebs of the past and go beyond the traditional formulations of militant anti-fascism. To strike at the fascists with every means and in every place is correct and necessary. But the principal contradiction today is that which opposes itself to the forces of the Counterrevolution.
Because while it is true that the crisis of the regime and the resultant birth of an organized and battle-hardened Counterrevolution were produced by years of hard popular and working class struggle, it is even more true that to win, the mass movement must now go beyond the spontaneous stage and organize itself on the strategic terrain of the struggle for power. And the Working Class will only conquer power through armed struggle.
* * * * * * *
On April 18, 1974, the same day that FIAT boss Agnelli was being installed as the head of Confindustria, the BR kidnapped the assistant Attorney General of Genoa, Mario Sossi. This action marked a major shift in BR strategy away from a narrow focus on factory struggle to a direct attack on the State. The BR had decided to target the judiciary, which was widely understood as corrupt and self-serving, because they saw it as the State's weakest link. By going on the offensive against the State the BR sought to regain the initiative for the revolutionary movement.
The Red Brigades' operation against prosecutor Mario Sossi was much more than a simple kidnapping. It was one of the most successful political-military campaigns ever waged on the terrain of urban guerrilla warfare.
In a 35-day campaign the BR maneuvered the imperialists around, exposing the vicious and immoral character of the State apparatus while making clumsy fools of the police man-hunt. Further, millions of people watched enthralled as the various factions within the State involuntarily carried their contradictions into public view – as State officials exposed, assaulted, and vilified each other. The moral contrast between capitalism and the revolution was seen by the masses. At the end the fascist prosecutor Sossi was voluntarily making propaganda for the revolutionary Left. It was a stunning campaign, that demonstrated the creative potential of urban guerrilla warfare to the masses.
In their paper on neo-Gaullism, the Red Brigades briefly explain the importance of this action to them:
Against every defensive and liquidationist tendency which uses the crisis as a pretext for renouncing the struggle and seeking a compromise, we, by striking at the figure of the assistant prosecutor Dr. Mario Sossi, wanted to strike a vital center of the Counterrevolutionary process. We have gone over to the attack right at this moment, in this gloomy atmosphere of the referendum, because we are convinced that the Working Class and the Revolutionary Movement are faced right now with a new phase of the class war. A phase in which we of the Red Brigades hold that:
- to the strategic encirclement of the workers struggles one answers by extending the revolutionary initiative to the vital centers of the state;
- this is not an optional choice but a choice which is also indispensable for maintaining the initiative in the factories;
- to the counterrevolutionary process which is a comprehensive social movement a strategic resistance movement must be counter-posed.
Sossi was a mediocre judge and a secondary figure in the State's power structure, who had achieved a certain amount of notoriety in the press by leading the judicial repression of the revolutionary Left. In the Italian system, judges are also prosecutors and administrators. He was a member of the fascist organization FUAN, and also the UMI, the most right-wing of all the judges' organizations. He had a macho personality. In 1972 he had boasted of being able to round up 5,000 Genoa Leftists in a few minutes, and he had bought a gun, saying he would shoot anyone who looked at him cross-eyed. Sossi had been the government prosecutor in the recently concluded trial of the October 22nd group. He had asked for stiff sentences against them, totaling several hundred years of prison and four life terms. Sossi had brought indictments against Dario Fo and Franca Rame(4), left-wing playwright-actor and actress, for their prison support work.
During the October 22nd trial, Sossi had tried to claim that the entire Left was involved in illegal activity and that October 22nd was only the tip of the iceberg. He had a very Puritanical personality and had prosecuted dozens of news-vendors for selling "obscene literature", The revolutionary Left had nicknamed him "Dr. Handcuffs". He was widely hated by the Genoa proletariat. There were rhymed wall slogans all over the city saying "Sossi, you fascist, you're first on our list", and so forth. One of Italy's most popular weekly magazines, Gente, called him the "most hated man in Italy".
Continuous Struggle ("Lotta Continua") which had loudly led the Left's propaganda campaign against Sossi, reacted to the BR action with hostility and panic. Continuous Struggle decided that the BR kidnapping of Sossi was a made-up police conspiracy intended to justify State repression of their organization. Manifesto reacted with big headlines calling the kidnappers fascist provocateurs who were trying to influence the outcome of the divorce referendum.
At 7:45 a.m. on April 19th 1974, the BR issued their first message in connection with the Sossi kidnapping:
MESSAGE #1
An armed unit of the Red Brigades has arrested the notorious Mario Sossi, assistant prosecutor for the Republic, and imprisoned him in a people's prison.
Mario Sossi was the leading pawn on the chess-board of the Counterrevolution, a fanatic prosecutor of the working class, of the student movement, of the small tradesmen, of the organizations of the Left in general and the revolutionary Left in particular.
Mario Sossi will be tried by a revolutionary tribunal.
Since his youth Sossi has put himself at the disposal of the fascists, appearing twice on the list of election candidates of the FUAN.
On becoming a judge, he immediately sided with the extreme rightwing tendency in the judiciary.
December 1969: Bombs in Piazza Fontana. Within the framework of imperialism's strategy of creating enough social disruption to justify a coup, Sossi, the anti-communist plays his part and orders a series of raids on the Genoese Left. Using the old fascist laws of the Rocco penal codes, he has the entire executive committee of the Communist Party of Italy (M-L), about twenty comrades, arrested on charges of "conspiracy against the state." Not satisfied he has books of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and even popular music records seized from the homes of comrades.
February 1970: the debate breaks out over the right to strike of public service employees. The Right wants their right to strike denied. Sossi.loses little time and charges the entire grievance committee of the psychiatric hospital workers of Quarto and Cogoleto with "collective desertion of their work places."
These are the months following the "hot autumn." A fearful bourgeoisie loudly demands an attack on the right to strike. And Sossi, the submissive servant, delivers! It would take up too much space to list all the investigations of workers, unionists and political vanguards that were carried out.
October 1970: the struggle of the student movement does not halt. The watchword of reaction is attack the students. Sossi has three students arrested on robbery charges for the crime of having let their friends eat free meals in a dormitory dining hall.
November 1971: It's the radical newspaper vendors turn. He has 9 of them arrested and has them railroaded on charges of "having displayed obscene publications." At the trial our moralizer declares: "We are not afraid of the mob and the unions. The movements of the mob do not scare us."
August 1972: on August 6 the newspapers leak the news of the imminent granting of provisional liberty to the partisan commander, Giovambattista Lazagna, jailed as a provocation to the Left after the Feltrinelli case. Sossi is on vacation, but is immediately called back to work by "someone" from SID who, basing himself on the infamous "testimony" of the provocateur Pisetta, asks Sossi to issue a new warrant for Lazagna's arrest.
November 1972-March 1973: Major trial of the revolutionary group "October 22nd." At the conclusion of our interrogation we will present our own version of the behind the scene events, political intrigues, and the various complicities of persons involved in this trial. For now it is sufficient for us to emphasize that Sossi, in harmony with all the forces of the Counterrevolution, focuses on the central question which is to be the purpose of the trial: it is not a matter of specific crimes, but the judgment and condemnation of the "crime" par excellence: having revolted arms in hand against the law and order of the bourgeoisie. We are facing trial by government!
March 1974: the comrades of October 22 yell: "Sossi, fascist, you're the first on our list" during their appeal trial.
He brings charges against all of them. But it does no good: all the walls in Genoa are covered with Red slogans which repeat the same idea. The revolutionary Left today has said: Enough!
Comrades, the basic contradiction today is between the working class and the revolutionary movement on the one hand and the dark forces of the Counterrevolution on the other. These forces conspire after the trial of the referendum, to carry out an institutional change, that is, a NeoGaullist-style "constitutional reform." And NeoGaullism is an armed plan against the workers struggle.
No compromise is possible with the executioners of liberty.
And whoever proposes and seeks compromise cannot speak in the name of the entire workers movement.
Comrades, we are entering a new phase of the class war, a phase in which the main task of the revolutionary forces is to break the encirclement of the workers struggles, spreading the resistance and the armed initiative to the vital centers of the State.
The working class will only seize power through the armed struggle!
Against NeoGaullism carry the attack to the heart of the State!
Turn the government crisis into armed struggle for communism!
Organize proletarian power!
April 1974
We warn policemen, carabinieri and various cops that their behavior may aggravate the situation of the prisoner.
At this point the right began a deliberate series of provocations. The pro-fascist newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo and the weekly Il Mondo circulated rumors that the entire extra-parliamentary Left was about to be outlawed. On April 21st, the fascists bombed the railroad tracks as the Bologna-Florence express train was about to arrive from Turin. Automatic track switches stopped the train before it could be derailed, avoiding a major bloodbath. The bourgeois press, including the Corriere della Sera, tried to link the Sossi action and the train bombing together as part of a general fascist strategy to destabilize the country.
* * * * * * *
On April 23 ‘the BR in its second message denounced phony BR leaflets reprinted by the press to supposedly "prove" the BR's fascist origins. The BR announced that only BR releases typed on the same machine used to type Message #1 should be considered genuine. The BR also reprinted a personal request by Sossi asking the police and the judiciary to stop looking for him. At first Sossi's request was ignored by Coco, a top-level Italian prosecutor for Genoa. Later chief prosecutor Grisolia announced that the judiciary police(5) were suspending their investigation of the kidnapping. The regular police continued their search however and a sharp public polemic developed between the judiciary and the police over whether or not to suspend the search.
Soon the debate spread to the rest of the political establishment and the country as a whole. Even the famed movie directors Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini jumped into the controversy. Both strongly supported the police continuing to search for Sossi. The police accused the judiciary of being too soft on the 4 BR members they had recently released, and the judiciary accused the police of failing to do their job by not presenting solid evidence to build a case against them. The open split between the judiciary and the police alarmed the bourgeois press which began to openly admit that the BR were achieving their political objective of paralyzing the State.
At this point the GAP issued a statement urging the BR to execute Sossi unless the State released Mario Rossi, one of the October 22nd defendants:
Genoa GAP Message to BR During Sossi Action
Comrades of the BR, oppressors and executioners do not need trials, their very foul existence in the service of Power dictates one sentence only...the immediate suppression of those who suppress us day by day. Mario Sossi does not need a trial... But in the prisons of the state… there are still locked up those who, for having rebelled against the exploitation of the bosses have been condemned to years and years of prison... We refer above all to our comrades of October 22 GAP. We must tear them from jail, return them to their work as fighters in the class struggle, we must therefore demand their liberation.
For this...we ask you that the only slogan be: ROSSI(6) OUT OR DEATH TO SOSSI.
On April 26 the BR issued its 3rd message, in direct response to the GAP message:
SOSSI MESSAGE #3
April 26, 1974
So far in the course of the interrogations 3 points have been explored with the prisoner Sossi:
1) Complicity and agreements between the police (Catalano and Nicoliello) and the Gadolla family;
2) Complicity and agreements between one section of the judiciary (Francesco Coco with his faithful servant Paulo Francesco Castellano), the police and the Gadolla family;
3) The contacts that took place between Sossi and two high army officials of Genoa SID.
The interrogations continue.
Those who have confused Mario Sossi's message, which he spontaneously wrote himself, with the position of our organization, have shown little ability to understand the heart of the political problem: the question of political prisoners.
Sossi is a political prisoner of the proletariat. As such any optimism whatsoever as to his gratuitous liberation is absolutely unjustified. In these last years many are the comrades who, breaking with the paralyzing pacifist Strategy of revisionism, have taken up arms once again to fight the bourgeois order and its laws. Fight for communism. Some have fallen or are now locked up in the public and inhumane jails of the state. They have been made to appear as criminals. An example of this is the government trial of the communist comrades of the October 22 group.
All these comrades are political prisoners. An irrevocable point of the political program of the BR is the liberation of all comrades who are political prisoners.
The BR interrogation of Sossi took place for two hours each day during his captivity and focused on his leading role in the trial of the October 22nd comrades. From excerpts of his interrogation, it appears that Sossi completely broke down under the BR questioning and collaborated with his captors, admitting that he had been part of an elaborate government infiltration and set-up of the October 22nd group.
On April 28, a massive search for the BR and Sossi began again. Il Messagero, one of Italy's leading dailies, admitted however that without any real leads the police were acting totally at random.
RAI-TV, the government-run radio-TV station and the press attempted to tie "Lotta Continua" and the Red Brigades together using some leaflets written by a Lotta Continua collective named October. The media deliberately confused October with the armed collective October 22nd, and therefore tied it in with the BR. The October collective had demanded the release of an anarchist comrade who was in jail. The press immediately began to speculate that this was actually an indirect BR demand through Lotta Continua for an exchange of Sossi for this comrade. Later this same anarchist comrade exposed the media's game and issued a statement declaring that his release would come as a result of legal proof available that he was the victim of a fascist frame-up.
A new polemic now broke out over whether or not to agree to an eventual BR request for a prisoner exchange. On April 28th, the day the search resumed General Della Chiesa, commander of the carabinieri brigade in Turin, held a meeting with the carabinieri in Genoa without, however, bothering to inform the chief prosecutor for Genoa. The next day 4,000 carabinieri staged a military dragnet of Genoa, raiding 50 homes, again without informing the chief prosecutor of their plans.
The April 29, 1974 issue of the leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera, ruefully observed, "Ten days since the kidnapping of Sossi the BR seem to be winning all along the line. They are winning materially because the judge is still in their hands. They are winning politically because they are sowing disorder in the structure of the State."
On April 30, 1974 a second message from Sossi was delivered to the Corriere della Sera, which reprinted it in their May 1st edition. Without specifically naming names, Sossi in effect demanded that Coco, his boss, admit publicly Coco's own responsibility in the frame-up of October 22nd. He concluded with a warning that the search for him could endanger him. Sossi's wife, Grazia, gave an interview afterward clearing up any doubts about what Sossi was asking for: "My husband is a simple substitute. He proposes legal provisions that others have the power to decide." Tension at the palace of justice in Genoa mounted. The pressure on hardliners within the State, like Coco, to save Sossi by making some kind of deal with the BR, was growing. After Sossi's second message, the police and the judicial hardliners canceled their daily press conference and decided on a press white-out on all information about the Sossi case. Nevertheless the Sossi kidnapping continued to dominate the news in Italy.
On May 2nd, the police, carabinieri and judiciary took another hit. Armed BR units simultaneously raided the Christian Democratic party Sturzo Center in Turin, and the Sogno Democratic Resistance Committee in Milan. A few days later the BR issued a leaflet explaining their choice of targets:
BR Message Explaining Action May 2, 1974 Against Centro Sturzo in Turin and Committee of Democratic Resistance in Milan
Comrades, in the current struggle the State is progressively taking over those provocative, terroristic repressive tasks which in the past have been carried out by the official and the clandestine Right. It is indispensable to go on the attack against those forces and persons who advance this policy from within the State apparatus (as well as from within the political parties and the economic world). Today it is indispensable to single out, know and attack these enemies, so as to unmask them before the eyes of all proletarians. We must organize and arm ourselves today for this purpose.
We comrades of the Red Brigades, have sought to give a concrete example of the path to be followed by striking the Committee of Democratic Resistance (CRD) which currently is the most active center of USA imperialism in Italy and the Sturzo centers of the Christian Democracy, which are tied to the CRD but which "specialize" as a bridge to the MSI (the fascist party – ed.).
Police dragnets of Communist working class neighborhoods continued. One of these neighborhoods, Sestri Ponente, was raided by 200 police after a fascist journalist told police he had deciphered a secret coded message in Sossi's second message. After 15 days the police search for the BR was going nowhere fast. The press now publicly admitted that the police were chasing their tails. The revisionist Italian Communist Party daily, Paese Sera, began to publicly speculate that maybe the State really wanted Sossi dead. The bourgeois press was now repeatedly referring to the presence of lawyers and doctors inside the BR, and an attempt was made to incriminate Red Aid lawyers and PCI doctors and members of parliament as BR members or sympathizers.
At this point, the judicial authorities transferred the handling of the investigation from the Genoa prosecutor's office to the Turin prosecutor's office, The head prosecutor in Turin was Reviglio della Vemeria, an old, long-time fascist and hard line judge.
Meanwhile the BR, as they had done during the Amerio kidnapping in December 1973, flooded the country with leaflets. More BR broadcasts were made on loudspeakers in front of factories. Once more revealing their total impotence, the police issued a reward of 20 million lire ($25,000) for the capture of the BR. Rumors were also circulated, then denied, then recirculated and once more denied, that 50 arrest warrants were about to be issued for alleged members of the BR.
On May 5, BR Message #4 was released. The BR demanded the exchange of Sossi for 8 October 22nd prisoners:
BR MESSAGE #4
SOSSI ACTION
1) The interrogation of the prisoner Mario Sossi is over. We have heard his version of the facts, his self defense, his self criticism. Now it is time for some decisions.
2) Briefly there are three main points:
- He has admitted that the trial of the October 22 group was the poisonous fruit of a series of counter-revolutionary machinations, aimed at liquidating the armed struggle in our country at birth. These machinations were planned and put into effect by the police (Catalano-Nicoliello), by the investigative nucleus of the Carabinieri (Pensa), by the commanders of the SID (Dallaglio, Saracino) and covered by a section of the judiciary (Coco-Castellano).
- He has admitted to having relied on a cowardly method to implicate many comrades of October 22 without any evidence. The construction of his sand castle of accusations rested not on proof, but on hearsay gathered from petty artisans of provocation. (Mezzani, LaValle, Astara, Vandelli, Rinaldi) and on those with weak characters who were cynically blackmailed (Sanguineti).
- After having reconstructed for us their machinations, methods of operation, techniques and purposes of infiltration, and having recognized his own specific responsibilities in the government trial against October 22, Mario Sossi pointed the finger at the one who, protected by the great shadow of power, guided him in this miserable adventure: Francesco Coco, Procuratore Generale for the Republic.
3) The bourgeoisie, after having launched a repressive offensive without precedents, and without results, against our organization and against the people, is forced to admit now that they have lost the game both politically as well as militarily. Their reliance on offers of cash rewards is an almost ridiculous anachronism which reveals the total defeat of the most able men the police forces have available. And honestly, we find it hard to understand how anyone after having acted as a police informer can reasonable expect to enjoy this dirty money.
4) Mario Sossi is a political prisoner. As such he has been treated without violence or sadism. The principles of the Geneva Convention have been respected, as he asked. The interrogation was freely undergone by him and for this reason was carried out.
5) With regard to the people, to the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Left, and to the revolutionary Left he has stained himself with serious crimes, which he has admitted to. For these crimes a punishment of 4 life sentences and several hundred years of jail, which is what he has asked for the communist comrades of October 22, would not be enough.
6) Nevertheless we are leaving a way out for those who have power and care about his freedom: an exchange of political prisoners. For Mario Sossi we want freedom for: Mario Rossi, Giuseppe Battaglia, Augusto Viel, Rinaldo Fiorani, Silvio Malagoli, Cesare Maino, Gino Piccardo, Aldo De Scisciolo. Nothing must be hidden from the people. Thus there will be no secret negotiations.
7) Here is the method of exchange. The 8 comrades must be freed together in one of the following countries: Cuba, North Korea, Algeria. They must be accompanied by people they trust. Mario Rossi must confirm their liberation once accomplished. Within 24 hours after confirmation of the liberation of the 8 comrades – 24 hours which must consist of a genuine general truce – the liberation of Mario Sossi will also take place.
This is our word.
8) We will only guarantee the safety of the prisoner until we receive an answer. In a war one must know how to lose some battles. And you have lost this battle. Accepting this fact can help avoid that which no one wants but which no one can exclude as possible.
The general reaction of the bourgeois press was to denounce the BR demand as a direct challenge to the State. The split between hard-liners and soft-liners in the judiciary continued with Genoa Chief Prosecutor Grisola favoring negotiations to save Sossi, while Coco, the chief government prosecutor, and Taviani, the minister of the Interior (in charge of the police) were opposed. Most of the leadership of the Italian political establishment opposed negotiations with the BR. The PCI's L'Unita called the BR demand "...one more criminal episode of the fascist strategy of tension..."
At this point, Sossi's family entered the fray, mounting a campaign to pressure the State to negotiate with the BR. The State refused to negotiate however, and the only concrete result the Sossi family obtained was an increase in the reward being offered.
On May 7th, Il Messagero published an article citing a number of recent precedents for the State "making concessions to terrorists". On the same day Genoa's three main union federations – CGIL, CISL, and UIL (the Communist, Catholic, and right-wing Social—Democratic unions respectively) – issued a call for a political general strike on May 10th to show worker opposition to negotiations with the BR. Colato, an assistant prosecutor, was one of the few judiciary members to argue that it was legally permissible to release the October 22nd prisoners. Meanwhile, the assistant prosecutor of Genoa, Marvulli, ordered a series of raids in Milan without notifying the local Milan police. The offices of the important extra-parliamentary Left magazine, Contro-Informazione, were among the places raided.
On May 8th, two messages from Sossi were reprinted in Il Messagero. One was to the press, the other to his wife. Sossi called on the State not to abandon him, and not to make him pay for other people's mistakes. He urged the press to support his wife's campaign calling for an exchange of prisoners to save Sossi's life.
A complex legal and propagandistic battle now ensued between Sossi's wife and the divided State apparatus over whether or not to meet the BR demand for an exchange. Out of self-interest, some elements in the judiciary were now definitely moving toward the position of calling for independent judicial action to free Sossi.
UMI, the right-wing judges' organization, took a hard line against releasing the October 22nd prisoners while more liberal Genoese judges called for an exchange. Their group, Magistratura Democratica (Democratic Judiciary), issued a document criticizing the legal thesis of opposing all concessions out of a need to defend the prestige of the State.
$360,000 was collected and offered to the BR as ransom for Sossi's life. The BR refused to even consider the offer.
The neighborhood in Turin where Amerio had been held was subjected to a police dragnet on the theory that Sossi might be found there. Grazia Sossi, despairing of any help from the government, attempted to make direct contact with the BR. In Genoa, a silent march took place, comprised of many distinct political elements, to "save" Sossi's life. The main point of agreement of the marchers was a criticism of the State's "passivity".
On May 9th, BR Message #5 was issued:
BR MESSAGE #5
SOSSI ACTION
We don't negotiate with criminals!
1. Why does Cabinet Minister Taviani want to turn Mario Sossi into a "dead hero"? Taviani is not a "strongman." He is a man who trembles, a man who is afraid. Behind his defense of the bourgeois-democratic State are not so much moral and political motives, but low motives of common criminality.
It is shameful for the "democratic institutions" that this is so; but it is even more shameful that so-called forces of the Left are silent like mafia gangs and gather around him. And now we will tell you why.
2. All the clandestine arms traffic in Genoa (and not only Genoa, because there are solid contacts with Milan also) is controlled, directed and supplied by Doctor Umberto Catalano. By means of this network which includes a series of Genoese arms dealers, such as the Diana company of Traverso Renzo and the fascist Lantieri, both of whom are agents and confidantes of the political police, common criminals are supplied and infiltration of revolutionary groups is attempted. It is also through this network that the attempt was made to entrap the comrades of October 22.
This traffic in guns permits Dr. Catalano and a series of lower ranking officials of the political police to make a nice living. The perfectly efficient "MAB" machine guns are supplied to the market directly from the Genoa police headquarters. There exists a legal case regarding this matter which up to now has been obstructed by the highest quarters of the judiciary (Coco and Castellano).
This fact is known to Cabinet Minister Taviani, who provides a very authoritative cover for this criminal activity of the Genoa political police. Now it is clear why in the much-publicized "operations to maintain public order" so many arms caches are found. It is also understandable why Taviani today would prefer to make a "dead hero" of Sossi; if necessary we will furnish detailed documentation about this lurid affair. For this reason we answer the minister of police: we don't deal with criminals!
3. Now is the time when everyone must accept their responsibilities. It is up to the judiciary to concede provisional liberty to the 8 comrades of October 22. In the current situation the Genoa Court of Appeals must decide. In a "state of right" founded on the separation of powers, the government cannot intervene even minimally. It is up to the judiciary to decide whether or not to make itself an accomplice of the criminal will of the Minister of the Interior.
We repeat: We want freedom for Mario Rossi, Giuseppe Battaglia, Augusto Viel, Rinaldo Fiorani, Silvio Malagoli, Cesare Maino, Gino Piccardo, Aldo De Scisciola.
4. Under fascism the communist comrades were also branded as delinquents, criminals and bandits. The working class of Genoa must strike not alongside Taviani but for the liberation of the 8 Comrades of October 22! For Communism.
Of all the BR messages during the Sossi operation, Message #5 probably had the greatest political impact. Sossi had talked. What State secrets had he revealed? A cold fear gripped the judges and cops of Genoa. The May 11, 1974 issue of the Corriere della Sera quoted Judge Castellano, one of the judges fingered by Sossi, as saying: "I'm full of bitterness, I can't grasp what is going on, I can't take it any more! I come to the office now only to show that I'm not afraid." The Corriere concluded: "In truth, Sossi is not the only prisoner of the BR."
A few weeks later the BR sent a summary of Sossi's interrogation to the magazine L'Espresso.
BR SUMMARY OF FACTS REGARDING POLICE INVOLVEMENT IN ARMS TRAFFIC IN GENOA WHICH CAME OUT IN SOSSI INTERROGATION
In April of '72 Angelo Costa, chief of the Mobile Unit of Genoa police, finds a chest full of arms in a storehouse belonging to an employee of the "Diana" company of Lantieri, located along the Polcevera embankment. Checking the registration on the arms, he discovers that these were the same guns that were declared to have been lost in the flood of October-November 1970 from the "Diana" armory in Via Canevari. A search of the armory is made, and upon checking registration records, it is discovered that numerous cases of guns have disappeared (Note: the job of checking gun registration records belongs to the police). This case is assigned to Sossi. Sossi charges the two owners of the armory: Traverso Renzo and Lantieri Giuseppe (also owners of another armory in Via Donghi) with simulation of a crime and arms traffic. Investigating more deeply he discovers that the clerk in the armory, Alessi Ferdinando, 30 years old, is a friend of Carlo Piccardo, the brother of Gino Piccardo of the October 22 organization. In a search of the house belonging to Gino Piccardo, Scisciolo and Maino in connection with the investigation of October 22 several pistols and a machine gun were found which had been supplied by Aléssi Ferdinando.
Another defendant in the arms traffic case is Bonafini Walter, 52 years old of Milan, whose job it was to sell arms in Milan. At this point Traverso's defense lawyer Silvio Romanelli interviews and tells Sossi: "Be careful because there are much higher authorities involved in this case than my defendant, you'd better cover everything up."
Sossi then interrogates Traverso in prison, who declares: "I once gave Catalano, the chief of the political police, a pistol in exchange for 4 MAB machine guns." This is an oral declaration. Catalano is called. Interrogated about these facts he denies everything, his face reddening. When he is shown Traverso's statements, he admits having made the exchange, but adds that the 4 machine guns were broken. (This is an oral statement by Catalano.)
Several days later a certain Profumo, a nightclub owner from Nervi, shows up and says he bought the pistol and gave it to Catalano. He tells a confusing, incredible story. Requestioned, Catalano admits that the two owners of the armory are trusted confidantes, that he was not the only one to have contacts with them (other lower ranking officials of the political police were in contact with them) and the arms traffic permitted him to infiltrate the Left. For this reason the whole matter had to be covered up.
At this point, Sossi turns the whole case over to the examining magistrate Castellano so that he will be in charge of the investigation. After several days Castellano releases all the defendants on provisional liberty. Sossi finds out that during that same time Catalano had gone to talk to Castellano. Sossi then goes to Castellano telling him that the matter is too serious to be covered up. Castellano answers him saying that if this episode were to become known before the trial of the October 22 group, it might destroy the whole investigation of October 22.
The Court of Assizes trial takes place and the matter is hushed up. Once the appeal process is also completed Sossi returns to the attack. First he talks about it with Lieutenant Colonel Franciosa (chief of the judicial police of the Carabinieri – ed.), then with the assistant district attorney, Meloni, then with the police prefect. The police prefect says he'll see what can be done and talks to Taviani about it. But the matter remains obstructed.
BR Message #5 no longer made any reference to demands for safe passage of October 22nd prisoners to Cuba, Algeria, or North Korea, as #4 had. The PCI called the reference to the three Socialist countries a provocation. Later on when Fidel Castro refused to cooperate with the BR and offer the prisoners asylum in Cuba, the bourgeois press crowed: "... not even Castro wants these common criminals". But within some quarters of the Italian revolutionary Left the feeling was that, far from viewing the BR and October 22nd as "petty-bourgeois adventurists", "provocateurs", or "criminals", all things he himself had been called by the Cuban Communist party in the 1950's, Castro was really acting under pressure from the Soviet Union.
The BR later carried out a self-criticism which led them to "rediscuss the problem of the liberation of political prisoners" and to study other options which later were used to liberate Curcio from Casale prison. In an alleged internal BR document, captured by police in the Robbiano di Mediglia BR safe house in the Fall of 1974, the BR stated:
EXCERPT FROM ALLEGED BR INTERNAL DOCUMENT CAPTURED AT ROBBIANO DI MEDIGLIA DISCUSSING CUBA'S REFUSAL TO GRANT POLITICAL ASYLUM TO THE OCTOBER 22 COMRADES
The refusal of Cuba to grant political asylum to the 8 must be interpreted as a general refusal of the entire social-imperialist area and of the non-aligned countries to accept the development of an armed revolutionary process in Europe which threatens the balance of power between the two great power blocs, the USA and the USSR. The PCI, national expression of the social-imperialist strategy, has as a result assumed an active role of total opposition to the success of negotiations with Cuba. The isolation we have experienced on an international level, for which there are no short-term solutions, is of a strategic character and must be carefully analyzed. To a certain degree in fact our experience is similar to that of the Palestinian fedayeen in the Mideast... The comrades are now engaged in re-discussing the problem of the liberation of political prisoners keeping this experience in mind.
On May 10th the BR released a message from Sossi to his wife announcing his resignation from the right-wing judges association (UMI), because it had opposed his release in an exchange. On the same day, reformist unions struck against the BR. The strike's main slogan: "oppose BR blackmail". The unions which pushed the strike showed their character again when they sent their thugs around Genoa, to remove pro-BR slogans, plastered on walls throughout the city. Union leaders claimed the strike was a success, but the class knew better: worker turnout was actually quite light. Continuous Struggle (Lotta Continua) judged the general strike a failure. They pointed out it only gave the right-wing Christian Democratic elements a chance to speak in the factories, and push for the defense of the State, two days before the divorce referendum. We can see how for the social-democrats in the Italian Left, events were to be seen through the prism of the referendum, and for the class-conscious and revolutionary left, through BR's very different political conversation.
The right-wing magazine Tempo (Time) gloated how the PCI, for the first time, had called for a political strike using the same slogans as the Right: for a strong state and law-and-order. And how it had abandoned its "knee-jerk worship of anti-fascist resistance traditions"!
Grazia Sossi, Mario's wife, sent the unions a letter of "thanks", upbraiding them: "Your struggle for democracy and justice is also mine... It is not democratic to cover up obscure plots and obscure interests of a small minority with the name of the people and with political ideals."
The sharpest reply to the anti-BR strike came from Workers' Autonomy comrades in the big Ansaldo shipyards in Genoa, from Rosso (Red) magazine. At Ansaldo (a big Genoese shipbuilding, steel and finance conglomerate organized during World War I), a group called The Autonomous Communist Workers' Group – Ansaldo Meccanica, Porto Italcantieri issued a leaflet denouncing the PCI and the strike:
LEAFLET OF MAY 9, 1974 WRITTEN BY THE AUTONOMOUS COMMUNIST WORKERS GROUP OF L'ANSALDO MECCANICA PORTO ITALCANTIERI SHIPYARD
NO SOLIDARITY
This morning's strike (by the PCI – ed.) was called to defend the so-called "democratic institutions" of the state. But what was not mentioned was that this state and these "democratic institutions" are the ones that permit the exploitation, the misery and the oppression of the many by the few; which starve us with low wages and continual price increases; which permit fascist plots and give protection to fascist criminals; which cause our deaths on the job. Let the bosses carry out these acts of solidarity, we have nothing in common with them. So don't ask the working class to make a sacrifice it does not feel (and which was not even asked of us for the massacre of the workers in Chile or for the assassination of Comrade Pinelli)... Strikes have never scared any of us workers but we consider this strike to be counter-productive and damaging.
Rosso magazine, published by comrades in the Workers' Autonomy movement, ran an editorial along similar lines.
EDITORIAL ON THE ANTI-BR STRIKE BY THE NEWSPAPER ROSSO #11, JUNE 1974
The PCI strike has not convinced the Genoese workers. Neither for the death of Pinelli nor for that of the Spanish anarchist Puig, who was garrotted by Franco... was the Genoese working class called out in struggle (and they certainly would have answered the call). But it was the eve of the referendum, the eve of a showdown which the PCI had not wanted, an event which risked ending up as a contemptuous kick to the "historic compromise"... For that reason it was immediately necessary to offer a show of strength which demonstrated the full capacity of the PCI's control over the working class to the point of reducing it to a pitiful slave to the bourgeois-democratic state.
* * * * * * *
Meanwhile three different political lines had emerged within the judiciary:
1. A "no concessions" hard line pushed by UMI,
2. A softer pro-negotiations line of progressive judges represented by Democratic Judiciary which also wanted to investigate the BR charges of police and judicial irregularities,
3. Sossi's friends who only wanted to see Sossi freed and didn't want to deal with any other issues. The latter two groups of judges came to an agreement and issued a document signed "Ligurian Judges"(7) calling for whatever initiatives were necessary to free Sossi.
That was a major crack in the State structure. The BR had forced the State to recognize its revolutionary political power.
On May 10, 1974 a prison revolt in Alessandria prison was crushed by General Della Chiesa's carabinieri troops on orders from the fascist chief prosecutor of Turin, Reviglio della Veneria. Seven people were killed in the State's prison assault, five of them police hostages caught in the crossfire. Posing in front of the corpses for the press, prosecutor Della Veneria commented with self-satisfaction that: "We could not allow the State to be trampled on. It was a marvelous action conducted in a majestic fashion." Later when the minister of justice Zagari, a PSI Social—Democrat, promised a "serious and rigorous investigation" of the circumstances of the massacre, he allowed the same fascist Della Veneria to take charge of the investigation!
The massacre took place two days before the big referendum vote. It had been organized by interior minister Taviani, carabinieri General Della Chiesa, and prosecutor Della Veneria, with intention to show that the State would not be pressured into negotiations with the BR, and that it now considered Sossi a sacrificial lamb (after all, it had just gunned down five of its own men). The day after the massacre, interior minister Taviani announced to prime minister Rumor that there would be negotiations "especially in light of the Alessandrian prison revolt". Finally, on May 12, 1974, the two days of divorce referendum voting began.
At this point both the Turin and Genoa assistant prosecutors, Caccia and Marvulli, asked all citizens receiving a BR message to immediately turn it over to the police. The ostensible purpose was to allow the police to check the documents for possible fingerprints, but of course the real purpose was to muzzle the press. Many journalists made an official protest to the government that this was a violation of freedom of the press and that a government attempt to impose press silence on the Sossi case might endanger Sossi's life, since the BR were demanding no secret negotiations.
On the evening of May 13, the results of the referendum were made public. It was defeated. The vote was 3 to 2 in favor of legal divorce in Italy, against repealing the divorce law. It was a big defeat for Fanfani, the Christian Democratic right-wing, the Vatican, and the fascist MSI party. Genoa and Alessandra voted heavily against repeal: 72% and 70% NO. The South, where the right-wing has always had more electoral strength, also heavily voted NO.
In one stroke, hysteria over a threatening right-wing victory had disappeared. Millions of women had overwhelmingly voted to preserve their right of divorce (Italian women comprise a majority of the actual voters), in all regions and across all party lines. The spontaneous mass movement to vote down the referendum was a major victory for women's rights. What both the Right and the Left had overlooked, in their posing the divorce issue as a test of strength, was that the masses of Italian women would throw the whole matter into the trash bin.
The other thing that had been overlooked is that the big bourgeoisie primarily were allied with the Left on this issue against the Right bloc of fascists, and Vatican-DC right-wing. A modern capitalist society needed not only to obscure the State's role in oppressing women, but could not tolerate an archaic legal code designed around religious doctrine rather than the capitalist market. The secularization of Italian capitalism was long overdue. Indeed, La Stampa, Italy's second-largest newspaper (owned by the FIAT interests), rejoiced in a banner headline over the vote: "ITALY IS A MODERN COUNTRY".
In terms of the Sossi kidnapping, some who had previously been convinced by the Left parties that it'd all been some fascist maneuver to influence the referendum vote, and who thought Sossi would be killed after the ballots had been counted, had to face the reality that BR were not just "provocateurs".
On May 14, Sossi, who now feared for the loss of his life, (not at BR hands, but at those of the carabinieri) sent a long message to President of the Republic Leone, urging him to make sure that the State fulfilled its responsibility to protect its loyal servants. Leone washed his hands of Sossi's appeal. He said: "The dignity of the State and the government's institutions must be safeguarded so that the citizens do not lose faith in the government." Grazia Sossi's reaction was: "I have been abandoned by everyone. The State has condemned my husband to death."
The defense lawyers of the October 22nd prisoners were now split as to whether they should support the initiative of the Democratic Judiciary judges, to legally exchange Sossi for the October 22nd prisoners. October 22nd member Augusto Viel's lawyer proposed that all the October 22nd prisoners should meet, renounce their desire for liberation and call on the BR to free Sossi, in return for a promise by the judiciary for a fair review of their trial.
On May 16, 1974, L'Espresso published an interview with the BR which explained their objectives and reasons for kidnapping Sossi. The interview also detailed the BR's analysis of the extra—parliamentary Left, and the current political situation, as they saw it:
BR INTERVIEWED IN L'ESPRESSO
MAY 16, 1974
Q.: Why did you single out Sossi from among all the representatives of the counterrevolution?
A.: For these reasons:
1. Because the tactics and the counter-moves of anti-guerrilla warfare were used for the first time against the October 22 group. These operational methods of the State were of particular interest to us. As a "man of power" Sossi knew about them. Therefore he could tell us about them. And he did tell us.
2. Because Sossi is a judge and the judiciary right now is the weakest link, even if the most active, in the chain of power.
3. Because Sossi is a target of the proletariat's hate, because it was he who "fabricated" the proof and the charges against the communist comrades of the October 22 group, and because he has been a fanatic prosecutor of the revolutionary Left throughout his brief career.
Q.: When did you decide the kidnapping? Was the operation prepared over a long period of time?
A.: We worked for a year on this action. We waited however for the results of the appeal process before carrying it out, because within the Left there were some who still believed it was possible to do something legally. It didn't turn out that way. The judges did not even take into consideration the thesis of unpremeditated homicide; they did not want to go into the question of Gadolla. That is, they did their part in the first important government show-trial. Rossi and comrades were convicted for political reasons. The sentence was a deliberate response to the need of the State to discourage and terrorize whoever might have the heart to take the path of armed struggle. It was necessary to reverse the trend and we have done this.
Q.: Why did you decide to act now? Only for technical reasons or specifically because of the referendum? Or like the Tupamaros do you believe that the best time to attack is when the credibility of the institutions has fallen to its lowest point?
A.: Obviously an action like the arrest of Sossi, with all its consequences, cannot be decided on the basis of an exclusively technical criterion. We decided to intervene now because at this moment the maneuvers for a second republic are being prepared. And because today it is indispensable to carry the attack to the State to break the encirclement of the workers struggle. We have come to the conclusion that a plan is being prepared for the overturning of the republican institutions; a plan which, while maintaining the appearances of bourgeois democracy, aims at creating a NeoGaullist fascism in the period after the referendum. Our raids on the headquarters of the Sturzo Center in Turin and the CRD (Democratic Resistance Committee) center in Milan must also be seen in this light. The basic objective of those headquarters was to begin a complete rebuilding of those right-wing forces, persons and organizations which in this moment are "clandestinely" creating the foundations of a second republic. Now, however, this plan requires a fundamental condition for its achievement: a strong concentration of all powers, beginning with political power. For the "party of the second republic" the referendum was to be an opportunity to test their ability to control and manipulate the opposition forces, and to assess their degree of subordination and acceptance. And this is the way it was. With the Sossi action however, our organization refused the "tactical" choice of the "compromise" adopted by the parties of the constitutional Left. We attempted to block the complete resolution of contradictions which had opened up within the government as a result of the repression of the workers struggles of these last years. If, as we maintain, the government crisis is above all a crisis of the bourgeoisie's hegemony over the proletariat, the task of the revolutionary forces must be to deepen this crisis and carry it to its furthest point, while at the same time building the political-military tools needed for a revolutionary outcome.
Q.: How did the trial unfold?
A.: We questioned the prisoner Sossi about the actions he took and the political significance of each. It was not so much a matter of a police-style interrogation, but of understanding how the men most exposed to power think and what agents those men least exposed to power use. Sossi is a good "technician," but he doesn't have a lot of political autonomy. He is an excellent tool for dirty maneuvers. With the interrogations we were able to reconstruct facts, persons and methods of the forces of the Counterrevolution.
Q.: Will you make the interrogation public?
A.: From time to time we will make information known which serves the struggle we are waging. In addition we will publish the names of the infiltrators and informers in the groups of the Genoese extra-parliamentary Left. Assuming these groups are interested!
Q.: Will there be a sentence? On the basis of what criteria will you decide what to do with Sossi and what will you demand in exchange?
A.: A sentence against Sossi presupposes another one against the powers that guided him, and in turn another one against the State. We have therefore asked the State to exchange the comrades of the October 22 group for the political prisoner Sossi. We will not accept counter-proposals. We will refuse any offer of a money ransom. The life of a man cannot be bought.
Q.: Did you expect such a violent condemnation from the major groups of extra-parliamentary Left (Manifesto, Lotta Continua, etc.)? How do you explain this?
A.: In '71, responding to another interview, we said: "We are not interested in developing a sterile ideological polemic. Our attitude toward the extra-parliamentary groups is above all determined by their position on armed struggle. In reality despite the way they define themselves politically, a strong neo-pacifist current exists within these groups with which we have nothing in common and which, in fact, we hold will at the opportune moment constitute a strong obstacle to armed organization of the proletariat. While on the other hand, another grouping of militants will accept this perspective of armed struggles with them the discussion is open." Today we can add that to the degree to which their role as forces subordinate to the parties of "compromise" has become more marked and obvious, the contradictions inside their groups have become more violent. The Sossi case has brought the depth of these contradictions out into the open.
Q.: Don't you pose for yourself the problem, as the Tupamaros did, of maintaining good relations with the other revolutionary organizations?
A.: Good relations with the other revolutionary organizations presupposes "other revolutionary organizations." Obviously this is not the case with the major groups of the extra-parliamentary Left. There is an area of genuinely revolutionary forces, wholly internal to the big factories, with which we have established a political exchange with rich potential.
Q.: Do you believe that armed struggle in an advanced capitalist country like Italy, with the strongest reformist "communist" party in Western Europe, really has a chance of developing and succeeding? Why?
A.: The armed struggle today is a demand born in the big urban factories. It is a political necessity for those working class vanguards who have rejected reformism as a plan for stabilizing the system. It is these vanguards whose struggles have broken up the command structure of the bosses on the shop floor, have destroyed the mechanisms of bourgeois terror and hegemony, and thus have triggered and sharpened the crisis of the regime. Furthermore we are heading for a radicalization of the political and social struggle, and we believe that with the progress of this struggle the Left will inevitably undergo a process of polarization in which the decisive criterion will be the position on armed struggle. The PCI or at least its communist soul will also be caught up in this process.
Q.: Do you believe, at any rate that the armed action of a small vanguard group separated from the masses is useful?
A.: The armed action of a small group separated from the masses has no hope of success. The action of an armed vanguard even though very small is another matter. The BR are not a group. Our armed initiative is the fruit of ongoing work within the most advanced stratum of workers autonomy in all the largest factories of the North. Work that was begun 4 years ago at Pirelli. Work that was not very noisy but certainly decisive in the process of formation of a genuinely revolutionary vanguard.
Q.: Do you think you can build an alternative to the existing unions?
A.: It is not a matter of building an alternative to the union administration, but of building a different strategic political framework within which to orient the union struggle.
Q.: What kind of clandestine factory organization do you seek?
A.: Our militants in the factories work to help the growth of workers autonomy at all levels. We are convinced that this growth is heading in the direction of the building of organs of workers power.
Q.: How do you answer those (and this is almost everyone) who on the basis of the reasoning "who benefits from these actions?" maintains that you are provocateurs because you objectively play the Right's game?
A.: This criticism has been made of us simultaneously by the government, the opposition, the Right and the Left – almost everybody in other words! In general those who make these charges from the Left use the following reasoning: "You always intervene close to the time of major political events, therefore..." But can the timeliness of our intervention be the object of serious criticism? Certainly not. An untimely intervention would only be a mistaken intervention. In reality we are scolded for the fact that the armed initiative introduces an unforeseen variable into the institutionalized political game. To say that this plays into the hands of the Right is a completely undialectical statement. Those who play into the hands of the Right, and do so completely, are those who refuse to see that a Counterrevolutionary process is taking place; who pose only defensive tasks for themselves and who have given up trying to build an effective resistance movement with which to oppose the Counterrevolution.
Q.: How do you answer those who while accepting your political placement on the Left maintain, however, that there is no possibility for the development of your revolutionary plan?
A.: We have made a bet with history and we have not won it yet; this is true. But our experience of these last two years makes short shrift of pessimism. It is above all the experience of working class struggles: just remember Mirafiori, the blockade of March-April '73, the "red handkerchiefs" in the last contract fight. It is these struggles, and the vanguard stratum they have given expression to, which are the basis of current revolutionary possibilities in our country.
Q.: What measures do you take to protect yourselves from infiltration of your group by provocateurs?
A.: The basic criterion is the level of political consciousness and practical militancy that the comrades who approach us have shown in the mass struggles. All our militants have worked in the mass movement for a long time. The social composition of our organization is precise: almost all our cadres are workers. No criterion is infallible, however, thus not even this one. But provocateurs and informers should know that it is not easy to escape our justice...
Q.: It is often said that our ideological matrix is Marxist-Leninist, Catholic and workerist: do you recognize yourselves in this mixture?
A.: Our ideological mold is communist. Our reference points are Marxism-Leninism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the ongoing experiences of metropolitan guerrilla movements.
Q.: Is it true that your political-organizational model is the Tupamaro movement?
A.: No, that is not exact. No experience is repeatable and Italy is not Uruguay. However, from the experience of the Tupamaros we have kept in mind important principles of organization such as the organization by columns and compartmentalization.
Q.: Can you outline your model of organization?
A.: Our point of view is that the armed struggle in Italy must be carried on by an organization which is the direct expression of the class movement. The people are the origin of everything thus it is necessary to unite them, mobilize them and arm them. The development of a first phase of guerrilla war in the big European industrial metropoli seems possible to us, looking at the experience and true limits of the first German, French and Italian armed groups. There are two conditions: the growth of real moments of working class power in the biggest factories, in most important working class centers and in the poor working class neighborhoods where revolts and exploitation are mainly concentrated; the construction of a "regular strategic force" trained to deal with all the tasks which present themselves at different levels of the struggle from the point of view of the armed struggle. (8)
The only revolutionary Left group to give a serious political response to the BR interview was the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Group (Gruppo Comunista Revolutionaria). An article by Livio Maitan, a leading Italian Trotskyist theoretician, in their magazine Red Flag rejected the BR's analysis about "Fascist Neo-gaullism". Maitan argued that there was still space for a successful legal struggle by the working class in Italy: that the May 12 referendum had proven this.
Certain formulations about the growth of proletarian power in the factory, he continued, re-echoed certain ideas advanced by the Argentine revolutionary guerrilla organization, the ERP: "we are not confronting a militarist or focoist conception in its purest state, a la Debray in '67, for example", but this did not change the fact that the analysis was too general. In particular, some BR statements in his view seemed to imply "a gradualist conception: as if an alternative armed power could be built bit by bit beginning with some factory or some neighborhood.... The problem of the arming of the proletariat on a mass level cannot be posed other than in a revolutionary situation of dual power." Finally Red Flag concludes "in the context of a general crisis of the system, it is not at all excluded that small groups of militants carrying out armed actions will have some success... but, revolutionaries must have an overall strategic design, outline an overall alternative", which according to Red Flag the BR don't seem to have.
On May 18, BR Message #6 was released. For the first time, the BR explicitly speak of a death sentence for Sossi. The text of Message #6 is reprinted below:
BR MESSAGE #6
SOSSI ACTION
1). Mario Sossi has been our prisoner for one month. We have been staring you in the face for one month. No mask can hide your inhuman, fascist face. We have taken one of yours and you have abandoned him. He has admitted carrying on damaging intrigues and machinations against the communist comrades of October 22 and you have answered that he is a psychologically weak-minded person. He has denounced government personalities and charged them with responsibility for certain actions and you have called for censorship of the press and RAI Television just like the worst fascist regimes. Your slow-wittedness is repulsive and your cowardice does not even permit us to respect you as enemies. But above all you have demonstrated something else: that you respond to only one law, that of force. It is with that coin that we intend to pay you.
2). We have precise proof and photocopies of investigative documents regarding the already mentioned arms smuggling. Mario Sossi has provided ample testimony on all this. In addition he has written and signed a precise and documented accusation against those who today have abandoned him to his fate. We do not believe in your laws and we leave it to the "democrats" to have illusions about your justice. But for us, what he has written is like a big mirror in which well-known and not so well-known faces appear, faces we do not intend to forget. This battle is about to end, but not the war. Soon their turn will come.
3). Some of the lawyers for the October 22 comrades are creating all kinds of obstacles to their liberation.(9) We will not tolerate this behavior because among other things these people have sold out the comrades to the various police forces. If you want us to be more precise and explicit we can be!
4). To the law of force we answer with reason and force. Those who calculated that we would not fight it out to the end were wrong. We take full responsibility before the revolutionary movement in stating that, if within 48 hours – beginning from 12 midnight Saturday, May 18 – the 8 comrades of October 22 are not liberated according to the procedures of our message #4, Mario Sossi will be executed. He will be executed for the crimes for which he has taken personal responsibility.
5). We reaffirm that, no matter how this battle ends, the liberation of all comrade political prisoners is an irrevocable point in the political program of our organization.(9)
In the diary he kept during his imprisonment, Sossi bitterly noted:
EXCERPT FROM SOSSI'S DIARY
Dr. Coco, why don't you take my place? Is or is not the Procurator of the Republic(10), according to judicial law, responsible for all the actions (without distinction) of his assistants? Why have you refused to say so? Come on, Umberto Catalano, you are a man with guts, a man of honor. There's room for you too! Taviani, I believe in your "democratic and anti-fascist" toughness; we must not yield! Well then come take my place, or at least come keep me company. I await you! I should like to talk to you about some little details that maybe you already know about... but I could refresh your memory, yes?
...Opportunists, exploiters, accomplices, pimps and cowards live a comfortable life. No one kidnaps them. To top things off, some of these people are brazen enough to recite the miserable comedy of the "intransigent citizen"! I want to submit to a disciplinary proceeding: this way everyone will have to listen. It will be talked about in court, it will be discussed in parliament; and maybe finally some light will be shed on dark episodes of clientelism, provocation, corruption and irresponsibility. And then, willing or not, each one will have to admit their own responsibilities!
I have been used by the political powers through the organs of the police and through the same judicial apparatus which is, in reality, "led by the hand" by the political powers. Now in my moment of need, these powers, of which the leadership of the judiciary and the executive are a core element, toss me away like an old shoe, and try to undermine me. As in so many well known cases, they are exclusively preoccupied with defending their positions of prestige reached at the price of enormous sacrifice (by others!!!)...
Whatever happens, there is someone who in any case morally has already killed me. I do not intend to be a hero to please those who today cynically and in contradiction of themselves, wish only my death, my insanity or an endless imprisonment! Let them use their own skins for a "heroic" gesture, then I will also be willing to be a "hero."...
P.E.T. (Paolo Emilio Taviano, Minister of Interior – ed.): "Please, sit down, make yourself comfortable!" M.S. (Mario Sossi – ed.): "Please, your excellence, you first!" If you think that dying is a good thing, then please, you go to your death...THOUGHTS. A selection of high powered psychiatrists and psychologists guided by the ineffable P.E.T. has issued the verdict that if I'm not crazy, I'm close to it; I'm crazy enough to falsify the meaning of the words I will speak if I get out of here... If my life is saved, I will owe it to the enemy who captured me; not to my erstwhile (I hope) assassins!...
Meanwhile, more rumors and more denials were being circulated that the October 22nd prisoners and their lawyers were still not prepared to accept provisional liberty by judicial decree. Some newspapers raise the question: can a lawyer oppose his clients wishes and refuse to ask for provisional liberty? In fact, it was a false issue, because according to Italian law, a judge did not need a lawyer's formal request to grant provisional liberty to a prisoner. Finally Grazia Sossi's lawyer rendered the whole question moot by asking for the release of the October 22nd prisoners himself.
On May 20 after more legal maneuvers, two judges and six jurors in a sitting of the Genoa Court of Appeals conceded provisional liberty to the 8 October 22nd prisoners, as well as legal rights to get passports so they could legally leave the country on the condition of Sossi's release. This was recognized by all as a major political victory for the Red Brigades.
The almost universal reaction of bourgeois press, politicians and government leaders was condemnation of the judges' action. Only Pietro Nenni, the aged retired leader of the Social Democratic PSI and Italian Communist Party central committee member Terracini supported the judges' action on "humanitarian" grounds. Zagari, the PSI minister of justice, opposed the exchange and other government leaders stated they would not let any action be taken that would weaken the State. The PCI also took the same hard line as the government. Coco, the Genoa chief attorney, stated that though he disagreed with the judges' decision he was legally bound to uphold it, though he added he would try to legally challenge it.
On May 21 the BR issued Message #7, which included a brief note from Sossi, to show he was in good health:
BR MESSAGE #7
We are asked to guarantee the safety and the liberation of the prisoner MARIO SOSSI. Our answer is that his safety and liberation will be guaranteed above all by the execution of the decree of provisional liberty, as well as the fact that the 8 comrades of October 22 will find asylum in the Cuban embassy in the Vatican. This is being demanded in order to guarantee their safety given the position that the Italian government has taken. We reconfirm that within 24 hours of the liberation of the comrades according to the procedures already indicated, the prisoner Mario Sossi will definitely be freed. This is our word.(11)
Coco was now the key to the whole exchange, and he began to stall on the release of the prisoners. Not able to challenge the legality of the judges' grant of provisional liberty, Coco tried to maneuver and play a delaying game, setting impossible conditions for the execution of the exchange. First you give us Sossi alive and in good health, then we'll release the prisoners. It was becoming clear to the BR that Coco had no intention of making the exchange, that he was really stalling for time, hoping that the Court of Appeals decision could somehow be invalidated and that the BR would either have to kill Sossi, or release him without winning any concessions from the State.
On May 23, 1974, after having held him in a people's prison for 35 days, the BR released Sossi.
In a BR internal document said to have been captured by police in the Robbiano di Mediglia safe house. The BR analyzed the State's strategy and explained their decision to release Sossi:
EXCERPT FROM BR DOCUMENT
The "Coco plan" was to stall us until the provisional liberty decree could be invalidated by the Court of Cassation. This was the meaning of his statement "We'll free those of October 22 only when Dr. Sossi is freed." In this situation the choices were obligatory: either free Sossi and force Coco to eat his promises thus showing that the law is purely a tool of the State, or hold Sossi prisoner, with the prospect of having to free him or execute him a few days later without any political gain... A decision to execute Sossi after the concession of provisional liberty would have been a mistake, because it would have helped to resolve the contradictions immediately along hard, rightwing lines, and it would have permitted a political realignment within the State capable of realizing such a rightwing front.
Taviani, in agreement with top levels of the Genoese judiciary and police was creating a situation which would close off every way out and force us to execute Sossi. Such a development would have permitted him to attack and isolate those forces open to a soft line and to negotiations – to unleash a campaign which by portraying us as pure criminals and assassins, aimed at the widest possible political isolation of us, to bury forever the scandals that the Sossi affair had brought to light (arms smuggling, the Gadolla arrest, the October 22 trial, black falcons, infiltration, etc.) Once the impossibility of an international resolution of the action was established, and having judged that executing Sossi in this period would have no doubt helped to resolve all contradictions in a rightward direction, the only responsible political choice left was to free him. A choice which ultimately would have increased the long-term political effects of the action. A choice which in addition, would have shown in a striking way how the law is a class reality: an instrument for the defense of the interests of the dominant class.(12)
After making him sit on a bench in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Milan, the BR put a train ticket for Genoa in his pocket and gave him a message to be made public. The message, #8, explained why they had released Sossi and briefly summed up the results of the struggle. The text is printed below:
BR MESSAGE #8
WHY WE ARE RELEASING MARIO SOSSI
First: the Genoa Assizes Court of Appeals has conceded provisional liberty to the 8 Communist comrades of October 22, conditional on guarantees of safety and freedom of the prisoner; these guarantees have been deliberately ignored by Coco, Taviani's and the government's faithful servant. Coco in this way would like to force us into a protracted arm wrestling match so that he can invalidate the clear political meaning of Assizes Court of Appeals decree. We do not intend to provide him with an excuse to play this game. By freeing Sossi we confront Coco and those who cover for him with a clear responsibility: either free the comrades immediately or ignore their own laws.
Second: In each battle it is necessary "to fight to the end." Fighting to the end at this moment means to develop to the maximum the contradictions which in these 35 days have surfaced within the State and between its various organs, and not to provide any pretexts for their resolution. This battle has made us learn how to know our enemy better: his tactical strength and his strategic weakness: his democratic mask and his bloody, fascist face. This battle has reconfirmed the fact that all contradictions in society are resolved only on the basis of precise relations of force. Now more than ever therefore the strategic character of our choice becomes clear: the working class will take power only through armed struggle. We reconfirm that the liberation of all comrade political prisoners is an irrevocable point in our political program.(13)
FOOTNOTES
(1) The Republican party generally follows the conservative line of FIAT corporation's Gianni Agnelli on economic and foreign policy matters. Most of Italy's long string of DC governments have had to include the Republicans in their cabinets, to insure themselves a voting majority in parliament. - Giornale d'Italia, May 13, 1974
(2) In Italy under an old fascist law, the police can hold someone for years without charging them with a crime. - Ibid.
(3) Montedison is a multinational corporation and the leading Italian Electrical industry company. - Il Messaggero, April 20, 1974
(4) Both were very active with "Red Aid", the main movement legal support. - Il Tempo, April 28, 1974
(5) In Italy the judiciary can co-opt police officers making them investigative agents of the court. - Contro-Informazione, #3/4, July 15, 1974
(6) One of the October 22 defendants. - Il Tempo, May 6, 1974
(7) Genoa is in the Ligurian region. - Paese Sera, May 10, 1974
(8) L'Espresso #20, 1974
(9) Paese Sera, May 19, 1974
(10) In the Italian judicial system a Procurator of the Republic is a high-level prosecutor or district attorney, with power similar to that of an attorney general of a U.S. State. - From Government Prosecutor Bruno Caccia's Bill of Indictment.
(11) Il Tempo, May 22, 1974
(12) Bruno Caccia, op. cit.
(13) Il Giornale d'Italia, May 24-25, 1974
