Philip P. Willan

Book review By Peter Drew

Terrorism is today the pretext for many of the less acceptable activities carried out by western states, from the suspension of civil liberties and the creation of police checkpoints in city streets, to threats and acts of war against foreign governments said to sponsor it. Any publication which produces this enormous weight of genuine evidence showing that terrorism can be created by one of those western states in order to provide such a pretext must therefore be considered political dynamite.
Philip Willan's masterpiece examines in commendably and necessarily minute detail the years of violence in Italy, which have recently been forced to undergo radical reappraisal in that country. The twists and turns are torturous enough to fill 358 pages, but the basic idea is that terrorism in the two decades since since 1969 was controlled by the state in a 'strategy of tension' to scare voters away from 'extremist' parties, primarily communists, who came close to achieving power. The'puppetmasters' of the book's title are quickly revealed to be the Americans, determined to keep pro-US, pro-NATO elements at the helm of the Italian State.

STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE

Willan leaves nothing to be merely assumed by the reader and even spells out the background to Italy's strategic importance for the USA's military interests. "Until 1988 the country did not posses an aircraft carrier. This was not because of its studiedly unaggressive foreign policy stance but because of geographic position, jutting into Mediterranean, enables it to project air power throughout Mediterranean basin." He writes: De Gaule's move away from Atlantic alliance in 1966 led to Italy replacing France as regional centre of operations for Americans. The importance of Italian naval bases was increased by Don Mintoff coming to power in Malta in 1971 and closing its ports to Western warships.

Willan later takes a further step back from the smallprint to assess the broad postwar picture. "The Yalta Agreement in 1945 had laid the basis for the division of Europe into two geopolitical blocks. Whether the maintenance of these blocks depended more on the agreement or on the realities of military power is open to argument. Many Italian commentators attribute the tacit understanding between superpowers that each should have a free hand in their own sphere of influence to what they call 'the logic of Yalta'. Just as, according to this interpretation, the Americans were unable to intervene when russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakiaor Hungary, so it was unthinkable that a Communist Party could be allowed to come to power in a country of the capitalist West. It followed then that the Soviet Union would have accepted that outright communist rule in Italy was out of the question and that, if necessary, American tanks would move to prevent it."

STRATEGY OF TENSION

He details how it was at a "secret level of intelligence cooperation between Italy and the United States" that the strategy of tension was carried out and discovers clues all along the way to confirm this thesis, including internal CIA memoranda. Willan concludes: "There can be little doubts that much of the responsibility for what happen as a result of the strategy of tension rests with the United States. Since the end of the Second World War the United States has exercised great and only gradually diminishing, influence over the Italian secret services, it is unthinkable that those secret services could have been involved in major abuses and in collusion with terrorism for more than a decade without the approval of the NATO security establishment."

The most significant reality to emerge from Willan's research for readers in what was once called Free Europe, is that the Americanization of their homelands is notjust a question of American fads, fashion and subcultures eating away existing identities. THERE IS VERY CLEARLY A CONCRETE US-RUN 'SYSTEM', OR SECRET GOVERNMENT, HOLDING POWER ABOVE THE LEVEL OF ALL THE SELF-IMPORTANTLY 'SOVEREIGN' NATIONAL STATES.

Speculation about whether P2 leader Licio Gelli played a leading part in the terrorist campaign or whether Red Brigades' leader Mario Moretti or the ideologue Professor Toni Negri were in fact long term intelligence agents, make for fascinating reading.

But for anyone in Britain the details fade into irrelevance next to the chilling certainty that this could happen here too, in a state in which secret American control must surely be greater than everywhere else in Europe. Maybe opposition to the system has never reached the point where any sort of dramatic intervention was needed. But we can rest assured that if it did, the necessary action would be taken. With the evidence to support this notion now freely available, it is a shocking symptom of submission that the Italian experience has apparently failed to have any impact on the British public's imagination. Reflecting our population's increasing self-identification with the USA, everyone still seems a lot more interested in the never-ending American domestic controversy over who killed their President Kennedy in 1963.

(From the periodical "Perspectives" NR 3, 1993, edited by the Transeuropa Collective, BM-6682, London WC1N.)

Yallop, David A In god's name, an investigation into the murder of pope John Paul I

Bantam Books, New York. 1984, xi, 339p., photo sections, clothbacked boards in dj. Bookclub edition with the dot and no price on the jacket; somewhat handled, jacket has tears and soiling. After serving as pope just one month, JP the 1st died of heart trouble. But he had no heart trouble. His medical history is gone into thoroughly, also that of his predicessor Paul VI. JP's problem was that he planned "changes that would affect the doctrine, finances and hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church." P2 and Banco Ambrosiano were also likely to have been affected, find pix and theories. // In addition to Vatican sources (these approached him) Yallop had a brilliant principal investigator, Philip Willan. Willan is not mentioned in the text except for a photo credit.A few years later Willan published "The Puppet Masters" a very important study of US military and intelligence manipulation of postwar Italian politics and especially the creation of the "left-wing" terror tactics of 1970s Italy.

Amazon Reviews of Puppetmasters↓

Reviewer: Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium)

Philip Willan analyzes remarkably and profoundly the violent activities of left- and right-wing terrorist groups in Italy in the 2nd half of the 20th century.

He unveils a monster conspiracy between the Italian secret services, the CIA, the FBI, NATO (Gladio netword), the Mafia, the Catholic Church, conservative Italian politicians and freemasonry against the left.

They created a strategy of tension designed to prevent the Italian communist party from taking power or to become a government partner (Italy was a key NATO member).

One of the main means in this strategy was the infiltration of extreme left-wing movements. After the leaders of the Red Brigades were put in prison, the movement became totally controlled by governmental intelligence services. Bombings with indiscriminate killings of innocent civilian were blamed on the left in order to discredit left-wing parties, create fear among the population and concomitantly support the right-wing parties.

The most blatant sign of the collusion of the different players involved was the kidnapping and the murder of the Italian politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. Also Moro tried to forge a center-left government with the communists.

A key player in the strategy of fear was the infamous freemason lodge P2 and its venerable Master Licio Gelli, who attended as an honorary guest the inaugural ceremonies of the presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan. He was also implicated in the Lockheed bribery scandal.

The author states that American lodges were set up for every NATO base.

The main culprits in the deadly strategy were the Italian secret services. But, as the author rightly states, `they needed the endorsement of NATO and NATO's most powerful member. He stresses the 'ignoble' role of the US government: `the responsibility of what happened as a result of the strategy of tension rests with the US.'

Ultimately, this book shows the limited sovereignty of a NATO member State, which in fact was run by its secret services. The US even concocted to install a `Greek colonels regime' in Italy.

This depressing story of (in)discrimate killings and a vast number of mysterious deaths is extremely revealing for the kind of democracy we live in: `if you don't vote as we like, you will pay the price.'

This book is a must read for all supporters of real democracy.

Reviewer: "william_martin" (Reston, VA United States)

Begin with Puppetmasters if you suspect that al Qaeda must have had help to accomplish the Sept. 11 attacks and seek examples of how U.S. intelligence agencies have manipulated terrorists.

Throughout the 70's and halfway into the 80's, the United States and right-wing factions within Italy conducted a war of terror in the name of Communism that was designed to arouse public sentiment against the Italian Communist Party. Willan documents that they did it, and how. In doing so, Puppetmasters, which was first published in 1991, reveals to the contemporary reader the ease with which the same tactics could have been used in September 2001 in order to mobilize political support for a weak U.S. president, a right-wing social agenda, and military adventures into far away lands.

The Italian experience with terrorism was astonishingly similar to what we have experienced since Sept. 11. Authorities on the peninsula found themselves blocked and hindered in their efforts to stop terrorism and then to convict terrorists once apprehended. Similarly, the failure to apprehend any accomplices to the Sept. 11 terrorists, the lack of progress on finding those who mailed anthrax letters to congress and the media, and the persistent failure to catch a sniper who terrorized the nation's political capital at the height of the 2002 congressional elections, all raise suspicions that we're not getting to the truth about the War on Terrorism. Puppetmasters may present part of the answer.

Although it details the "years of lead" during which Italy suffered through thousands of terror attacks, the book clearly has important lessons for today. It is an excellent starting point for those wishing to understand how al Qaeda could be receiving assistance from those in government to accomplish their far-flung plots.

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