Israel’s Mossad ‘in contact from very beginning’ with assassins of ex-Italian PM: Reporter

A veteran investigative journalist has exposed the role of Israel’s Mossad spy agency in the 1978 abduction and murder of Italy’s then pro-Palestinian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, a far-left terrorist organization.

Speaking to the independent news website The Grayzone, Eric Salerno cited remarks by Red Brigades member Alberto Franceschini, who said the Mossad had been “in contact from the very beginning” with the terror group.

According to Franceschini, such interactions were “very normal in the way the Mossad acted with all kinds of, let’s call them subversive organizations, all over Europe.”

Franceschini also revealed the Tel Aviv regime had “offered weapons and assistance” to the Red Brigade seeking to “destabilize Italy.”

On March 16, 1978, Moro was kidnapped in the Italian capital of Rome by the Red Brigades in an operation which left all but one of his bodyguards dead. 

He was killed after almost two months in captivity, during which government officials refused any negotiation with his kidnappers.

In his interview, Salerno referred to well-placed sources who blamed Mossad for Moro’s killing.

In July 1998, Giuseppe De Gori, a lawyer who represented Moro’s Christian Democrat party in trials related to the case, said Mossad “had always controlled” the Red Brigades, without formally infiltrating the terrorist outfit.

Testifying to a parliamentary commission on terrorism, he hinted the group’s decision to kill Moro after nearly two months of captivity resulted from indirect Israeli intervention.

Israel “hated” the “anti-Zionist” Moro, and began taking advantage of its ability to “smuggle” information to the Red Brigades in a bid to influence the group’s actions, he added.

The lawyer also noted that a Mossad colonel had offered the Red Brigades “weapons and whatever they wanted as long as they pursued a different policy.” 

In 2002, the lawyer told author Philip Willan that Mossad made Moro’s execution a fait accompli by fabricating a letter from the Red Brigades to Italian authorities in mid-April 1978 claiming that the statesman was already dead, De Gori said.

“After that… Moro could no longer be saved.”

In May 2007, Giovanni Galloni, former vice president of the Italian judiciary’s High Council, signaled that Moro’s killers were hired by Washington and/or Tel Aviv.

He revealed that “a few months before his capture,” Moro confided to him that he was “worried” the US and Israeli “secret services had infiltrated the Red Brigades.”

He further said that “not all participants” in the prime minister’s abduction had been members of the Red Brigades as the assassins displayed a high level of shooting expertise.

Additionally, former magistrate Luigi Carli said in a testimony to an Italian parliamentary committee in June 2017 that the Red Brigades had been “co-financed” by Mossad. 

He cited several former Red Brigades collaborators as saying that any efforts which ended up “weakening, or helping to weaken, Italy’s internal situation” would “enhance Israel’s prestige and authority” in the Mediterranean.

‘Italian-Israeli collaboration predates latter’s 1948 creation’

In his book Mossad Base Italy, published in 2010, Salerno illustrated how the secret Israeli-Italian alliance predated the May 1948 creation of the occupying regime, with Rome providing covert support to Zionist militias like the Haganah.

He said every Italian administration since World War II has secretly aided the Mossad while Tel Aviv entrusted Italian intelligence with conducting “extremely classified missions” on its behalf.

“Israeli espionage agents confirm that Italy’s intelligence services are among the friendliest in the world toward their Israeli counterparts,” read a review of the book by Haaretz intelligence correspondent Yossi Melman.

‘Today’s Italy has little trace of pro-Palestine tendencies’

Also in his interview with The Grayzone, Salerno said the Italian government is now “a continuation, even an extension, of the old fascist regime.”

Today, he emphasized, there is little trace of any pro-Arab tendencies in mainstream Italian politics, and the US and Israel no longer have any need to destabilize the country which has a weak economy.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has little sympathy for the Palestinians and little intention of recognizing a Palestinian state, even after it was revealed in November 2024 that the Mossad had been employing a private Italian intelligence firm to target her and cabinet ministers, according to the journalist.

“I think that basically, the government that we have here in Italy at the moment is a government that would like to criticize many things that are happening,” but “it can’t criticize Israel too much.”

Several injured in Italy as police confront pro-Palestine protesters

Around 10 people were injured during a pro-Palestine demonstration in Italy after police tried to stop protesters with water cannon and tear gas.

Regarding recent mass protests across Italy in support of the Gaza Strip amid a genocidal Israeli war, Salerno said, “What is happening today in Palestine in Gaza is something exceptional.”

However, people and the governments of Italy have “never done very much to really help the Palestinians” as “nothing has been taught or spoken about” in the European country about the plight of Palestinians for many years, he pointed out.

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