Italian Fascists Spearheaded
Cold War Anti-Communist Terrorism

“The Years of Lead”: horrific massacres were carried out at Piazza Fontana in Milan (1969, above left), Piazza della Loggia in Brescia (1974, above right) and Bologna Central Station (1980, below right), and in several other cities. Many were linked to Ordine Nuovo, founded and still guided by Pino Rauti of the MSI, and almost all were in collaboration with U.S. and Italian spy agencies that promoted a “strategy of tension” to keep the Communist Party out of government. (Photo (left): Ufficio Stampa Rai; (right) Archivio Silvano Cinelli)

This article is translated from L'internazionalista No. 8, May 2025.

xxx.
(Photo: Italy Defense Ministry)

Giorgia Meloni never renounced the fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), instead saying that fascism has been “consigned to history.” After becoming prime minister in 2022 she defended the MSI as “a party of the democratic right” and the MSI founder/leader Giorgio Almirante as a “great patriot.” This is beyond absurd. One of the MSI’s cofounders, Pino Rauti, in 1952 published a book titled La democrazia: Ecco il nemico! (Democracy: That’s the Enemy). Rauti was also a founder of the first postwar fascist paramilitary group, the F.A.R. (Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria) that in 1946 bombed offices of the Communist and Socialist parties.

In 1953, Rauti formed the Ordine Nuovo (O.N.) group in the MSI under the tutelage of former Nazi SS intelligence agent and fascist ideologue Julius Evola. In 1957, Rauti and his O.N. split from the MSI. In 1965, Rauti participated in a meeting of “Operation Gladio,” organized by the Italian military high command, bringing together fascists, top-level state officials and leading businessmen. Gladio, whose existence was revealed by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1990, was the Italian branch of NATO “stay-behind” secret armies to wage underground war should Communists come to power in Western Europe, particularly in Italy. But it was more than that.

In reality, as Judge Guido Salvini exposed in his decade-long investigation into the 1970s “years of lead,” right-wing terrorist groups (Ordine Nuovo, Avanguardia Nazionale) that carried out massacres (Piazza Fontana, Italicus, Bologna, Brescia, etc.)¹ in a “strategy of tension” were Gladio’s foot soldiers, run by the CIA.² A 2001 report by the Democratic Left Party (PDS) in the parliamentary commission of inquiry into right-wing massacres (the Commissione Stragi), cited Interior Ministry reports that Pino Rauti, now back in the MSI, “remained in close contact with the Venice Ordine Novo members” involved in the Piazza Fontana massacre.

The 2001 Commissione Stragi report also cited statements by those Ordine Novo terrorists (themselves informants of both Italian and U.S. military intelligence services) that Rauti “had operational connections” with the military high command, and that “Pino Rauti was in contact with the CIA apparatus.” Moreover, Rauti for years received regular payments from the press attaché of the U.S. embassy, which by 1970 amounted to 200,000 liras a month (roughly 3,200 € or US$3,500 today). As the commission report put it, Rauti, “one of the prominent members of the subversive right, was literally ‘in the pay of’ the U.S. embassy in Rome.”³

Left: Junio Valerio Borghese, known as “the Black Prince,” when he attempted a coup d'etat in 1970. Center: Borghese in 1945 together with Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, then defense minister of the “Salò Republic.” Right: Vito Miceli, head of the SID (military intelligence service) later to become a parliamentary deputy of the fascist MSI.
(Photo: A3)

Pino Rauti was one of the heroes of the MSI’s Azione Studentesca (A.S.) when Giorgia Meloni headed it in 1996, as he is today for the reborn A.S. as the student group of Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. At Rauti’s funeral in 2012, hundreds raised their arms in fascist salutes. Meloni was there, as was Rauti’s daughter, Isabella, who was elected to the Senate in 2018, where she is the deputy leader of the Fd’I fraction. She is also president of the Pino Rauti Studies Center, which in 2020 held an exhibition of 50 Years of Press and Propaganda of the Italian Right, 1945-1995 – i.e., of the MSI – stressing the continuity of the “anti-communist right” up to today.

But it was not just Rauti, the MSI itself was deeply involved in the machinations of the U.S./NATO imperialists’ anti-Soviet Cold War. While the MSI was electorally marginalized, behind the scenes it was well-connected with top levels of the Italian military and intelligence services, as well as coup plotters and fascist terrorists. According to the 1976 Report of the House Select Committee on Intelligence into covert actions by U.S. spy agencies, the CIA spent $75 million off-the-books on Italian elections from 1948 to 1974, including “a donation of $800,000 in 1972 for political forces of the Italian neo-fascist movement.” The money went to General Vito Micelli, the head of the SID (military intelligence) who passed it on to the MSI.

Meloni’s idol Giorgio Almirante was also up to his neck in the clandestine goings-on at the top levels of the Italian state. Early on in the “years of lead,” in 1970, the MSI founding leader met with the Junio Valerio Borghese (who had been president of the MSI in the early 1950s) as the latter was plotting a coup d’état. As the head of the MSI parliamentary fraction at the time revealed 50 years later, Almirante told the putschist “Black Prince” Borghese that in “military matters, we will be the ones to follow your directions.”⁴ In 1976, General Micelli was elected to parliament for the fascist MSI after having been investigated about a military secret society. 

In 1975, Almirante travelled to Washington to meet with members of the U.S. National Security Council. He also received financing from Licio Gelli, the “venerable master” of the CIA-linked Masonic Lodge P2, which was responsible for the Italicus train massacre and the bombing of the Bologna central station. He, too, was a former camerata from the puppet Salò Republic, when Almirante was the chief administrator of the culture ministry (and ordered antifascist partisans to “be shot in the back”) while Gelli was the liaison with top Nazis. Several MSI legislators were also members of the P2 secret lodge.

Not by any stretch of the imagination was the MSI anything resembling a “democratic” right wing, as claimed by Italian premier Meloni. The post-World War II fascist party and its leaders (Almirante, Rauti and the rest) was a vipers nest of former Mussolini officials, Nazi puppets, perennial coup mongers plotting to overthrow parliamentary rule, and a seedbed of mass murderers who always stayed in touch with their mother party. This is the sinister outfit whose heritage is proudly claimed by the Fratelli d’Italia, now at the helm of Italy’s fascist-led hard-right government. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Return to THE INTERNATIONALIST GROUP Home Page