This book is a work of fiction, but it is set against a background of real events. In the late 1960s, Britain and Italy both witnessed widespread industrial action, the springing up of terrorist groups, and plots against the governments of the day by senior members of their respective intelligence communities. The First of May group did machine-gun the American embassy in London in 1967, and carried out several other attacks and kidnappings until disbanding in the early 1970s, whereupon their mantle was taken up by the Angry Brigade and others. In Italy, several anarchist and Communist groups carried out attacks on civilians at this time, eventually flowering into the Red Brigades and other groups that terrorized the country for much of the ’70s and ’80s.
As with Free Agent, I was inspired by the investigative journalism of Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, particularly a chapter in their book Smear! Wilson and the Secret State in which they described attempts to organize a coup in the United Kingdom during this period as part of a longer-term ‘strategy of tension’ against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Arte come Terrore is fictional, inspired by Germano Celant’s essay Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia, published in the journal Flash Art in 1967, in which he wrote of a revolutionary existence that ‘becomes terror’ (‘Un esistere rivoluzionario che si fa Terrore’) – I took his metaphor literally and extended it. However, two explosions did take place in Milan in April 1969, and several anarchists were charged in relation to them. Some now believe that those and several subsequent attacks, such as the bombing in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in December 1969, which killed 16 people and injured 80, and the bombing of Bologna train station in August 1980, which killed 85 people and injured over 200, may not have been carried out by anarchists or left-wing terrorists, as originally thought, but by right-wing groups with connections to Italy’s secret services, NATO, the CIA, MI6 and others.
In 1990, two Italian judges discovered a document written by Italian military intelligence in 1959 that outlined the purpose and structure of a network known as Gladio. In a statement to Italy’s parliament on 24 October 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed that this had been part of a secret NATO operation, known under different names in other countries, which had been set up shortly after the Second World War as a contingency plan in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The plan had involved the creation of ‘stay-behind nets’: forces that could provide effective resistance to the Soviets, and which had access to hidden caches of arms, supplies and technical equipment in many countries.
The existence of British stay-behind networks and their offshoots had been publicized prior to Andreotti’s statement. In 1977, Chapman Pincher wrote in the Daily Express of the existence of the ‘Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee’, which he claimed contained an ‘underground resistance organization which could rapidly be expanded in the event of the Russian occupation of any part of NATO, including Britain’ and which had links to the Ministry of Defence and the SAS. And in 1983, Anthony Verrier stated in a footnote in his book Through The Looking Glass that ‘current NATO planning’ (his emphasis) gave the SAS a similar role to that previously held by SOE regarding stay-behind parties. Since 1990, little else has been revealed of Britain’s post-war networks, although an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London in 1995 noted that junior Royal Marine officers in Austria had been detached from their normal duties in the early ’50s in order to prepare supply caches and coordinate with local agents for stay-behind parties.
The CIA established the Turkish arm of the network in 1952, but I have speculated that the British had already done some work along these lines a year earlier. This is based in part on a paragraph in Kim Philby’s memoirs in which he stated that SIS’s Directorate of War Planning was busy setting up ‘centres of resistance’ and guerrilla bases in Turkey to counter a possible Soviet invasion while he was stationed there in the late ’40s: in other words, a stay-behind network. If Philby were telling the truth, one presumes he informed Moscow at the time, meaning that at least part of the stay-behind operation was compromised from the start. If he was lying, the Soviets nevertheless knew about such plans by 1968, when his memoirs were published.
Following Andreotti’s statement in the Italian parliament, many people questioned whether members of Gladio and the other stay-behind networks had turned from their original mission of protecting Western Europe from Soviet invasion to supporting, planning or executing terrorist attacks on civilians – attacks that were then blamed on Communists and others in order to unite public feeling against the Left and bolster the country’s security structures. Since 1990, a great deal of information has emerged to support this idea, but despite parliamentary inquiries, arrests, trials, acquittals and retrials in Italy, Turkey and elsewhere, it remains unproven. Until NATO declassifies all its files on these networks, the truth may never be known – and perhaps not even then.
For the purposes of this novel I have presumed that NATO’s post-war stay-behind networks were subverted for false-flag terrorist operations, and have used some established facts in the hope of creating plausible fiction. My main sources were Philip Willan’s Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy and Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies. I am especially grateful to Philip Willan for his comments on an early draft of the novel.
In Chapter XXIII, Paul Dark reads the Italian military intelligence document discovered in 1990, and the figures mentioned there are taken from it. The ‘strategy document’ he reads earlier is my own invention. Right-wing establishment figures in both Britain and Italy were plotting against their governments during this period and, according to Daniele Ganser, an SIS agent betrayed the stay-behind networks to the KGB in Sweden in 1968. Italian Gladio members were trained by British special forces instructors in England, but their main training facility was a secret military base at Poglina in Sardinia, near Capo Marrargiu. In two separate right-wing coup attempts in Italy, in 1964 and 1970, there were plans to detain left-wing leaders, journalists and activists at this same base. The area between Capo Marrargiu and Alghero is known as The Griffons’ Coast, as it is home to the griffon vultures that Paul and Sarah encounter in Chapter XVII. Part of the area is now a reserve for this species.
In Chapter IX, Paul Dark discovers that his handlers in Moscow were initially unsure of the validity of the information he had given them. This is partly based on accounts of Moscow’s scepticism towards Kim Philby and other members of the Cambridge Ring during the Second World War. Genrikh Borovik in The Philby Files and Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev in The Crown Jewels quote declassified Soviet intelligence files expressing these suspicions, including several reports concluding that Philby and the other members of the ring must have been discovered by British intelligence and were unwittingly passing on disinformation. The spies were not fully cleared of suspicion by Moscow until 1944.
The frontispiece quote is taken from a memorandum prepared by George Kennan that set out the case for the United States’ use of ‘organized political warfare’, and is quoted courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration (RG 273, Records of the National Security Council, NSC 10/2. Top Secret). The United States’ post-war influence on Italy and fear of the Communist party coming to power in that country is widely documented, and it is clear from former CIA chief William Colby’s memoirs and other sources that the Americans were instrumental in setting up and running several post-war stay-behind networks, including in Italy.
It is thought that most of the superpowers investigated the use of biological weapons during the Cold War, often developing research carried out in the Second World War. In 1942, British military scientists detonated anthrax bombs on the Scottish island Gruinard: it was not decontaminated until 1990. As far as we know, Britain never ‘weaponized’ Lassa Fever, although the United States and the Soviet Union both suspected the other of trying to do so. In the 1970s, American scientists investigating the disease in Liberia encountered Soviet researchers looking for Lassa antibodies, reagents and samples. The darkened room in Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna is inspired by a description of a work in that gallery in Kate Simon’s Rome: Places and Pleasures, and on the earlier work of Lucio Fontana.
The ball at the top of St Peter’s Basilica is no longer open to the public, but it was in 1969, and was large enough to accommodate sixteen stout-hearted tourists. The Chapel of the Shroud in Turin is still under renovation following the fire in 1997. From April 2010, visitors will be able to see it for the first time since its controversial restoration in 2002.
I would also like to thank the Confraternity of the Holy Shroud and the Museo della Sindone in Turin; the staff of the bookshops Ardengo, Tara and Open Door in Rome; Caroline Brick at the London Transport Museum; Isobel Lee, Enrico Morriello, Sandra Cavallo, Francesca Rossi, Isabel de Vasconcellos, Sebastiano Mattei, Craig Arthur, Clare Nicholls, Evelyn Depoortere, Carla Buckley, Grant McKenzie, Helmut Schierer, Sharon and Luke Peppard, Nick Catford, Roger Whiffin, Blaine Bachman, Graham Belton, Ajay Chowdhury, Rob Ward, Phil Anderson, Phil Hatfield, Steven Savile and Tom Pendergrass for their comments, expertise and suggestions; my agent, Antony Topping, for his skilful shepherding of me to this point; my editors, Mike Jones at Simon & Schuster and Kathryn Court at Viking for their faith in Paul Dark; my parents and parents-in-law; my daughters, Astrid and Rebecca; and my wife, Johanna.