The years of lead and state secrets. A book about the country’s bloodiest decade

Between 1970 and 1980, Italy experienced the bloodiest decade of the Cold War. A time span that begins with the birth of Red Brigades and it comes to the crime of Aldo Moro. Now a book reconstructs those years of lead, as they were called, and it is called The Masquerade. They wrote it Maurizio Fiorentini, head of a Roman collective of Autonomia Operaia, e Roberto Valtolina, writer and researcher. Published by Frascati & Serradifalco Editori, a publishing house whose founders include the Sicilians Giovanni Serradifalco and Carmelo Frascati, it is in bookstores with a preface by Ferruccio Pinotti.

The exhibition unfolds backwards, from the post-Moro era to the incubation of red terrorism. Event by event, character by character: investigators, suspects, apparatus, magistrates, politicians, militants, movements, victims, spies. Without shortcuts, logical leaps, discounts or even conspiracy theories. A plot in which facts dominate, set in a context of clash between the blocs of the Cold War. The audience of morologists and the young generations can access a text whose center of gravity is finally based on the experiences of those who – like Fiorentini – personally went through those events.
“Yalta is a dirty war which by no means ended on 9 November 1989, but which continues today, from Ukraine to Palestine, passing through the rumors about Ustica which have touched Bettino Craxi”, explain Valtolina and Fiorentini.

Bettino Craxi, the latter figure, who together with that of Aldo Moro and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, innervates the plot of the book. Napolitano was the first communist leader to arrive in the USA in the midst of the Moro kidnapping. He died on September 22nd. Precisely thirty years ago, Craxi addressed him and another top state personality. The story was hot. Crax’s correspondence ended up forgotten: now the book brings out that burning raw nerve: the relationships between the East, a branch of the Italian left and terrorism.

The second protagonist of the work, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, editor and founder of the publishing house of the same name, creates an ideological chain that leads the Red Brigades to carry out Operation Fritz; the third, Aldo Moro, victim of the balance of Yalta and of the so-called “firmness”, was kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades themselves. His captors kept, in the hideout on Via Gradoli, the badge of the Navy of a foreign country. This is the most sensational of the unpublished stories revealed by The Masquerade, ignored by the leaders of the Secret Services of the time, by Interpol, by the Rome Police Headquarters, by five trials and two Moro Commissions, and not even by the three parliamentary commissions on Terrorism, P2 and Mitrokhin.

Many protagonists of that season, some of whom “lived” in the apartment in via Gradoli, are still alive. They could tell what they know but it will be difficult for them to do so.