Vincenzo Vinciguerra

Vincenzo Vinciguerra is a former member of the neo-fascist "Avanguardia Nazionale" ("National Vanguard") and "Ordine Nuovo" ("New Order"). He is currently serving a life-sentence for the murder of three policemen by a car bomb in Peteano in 1972. The investigation in this previously unsolved affair by prosecutor Felice Casson led to the revelation of "Gladio" networks around Western Europe. [cite news | title = CIA Organized Secret Army in Western Europe | publisher = Washington Post | date = 1990-11-14]

The 1972 Peteano bombing

Following juridical investigations, it has been discovered that the C4 explosive (the most powerful explosive available at the time) used in the 1972 bombing came from a Gladio arms dump located beneath a cemetery near Verona, which existence was revealed to judges Felice Casson and Carlo Mastelloni by Giulio Andreotti, former Prime minister of Italy. Judge Casson's investigations revealed that Marco Morin, an explosives expert who worked for the Italian police and a member of "Ordine Nuovo" far-right group, had deliberately provided a fake expertise, claiming that the explosives used were the same that the Red Brigades used. However, Casson demonstrated that the explosives were in fact C4, which was used by NATO. A group of "Carabinieri" had accidentally discovered on February 24, 1972, an arms dump near Trieste, containing arms, munitions and C4 identical to the one used in Peteano the same year. According to historian Daniele Ganser,

"Casson's investigation revealed that the right-wing organization Ordine Nuovo had collaborated very closely with the Italian Military Secret Service, SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa). Together, they had engineerred the Peteano terror and then wrongly blamed the militant extreme Italian left, the Red Brigades. Judge Casson identified Ordine Nuovo member Vincenzo Vinciguerra as the man who had planted the Peteano bomb... He confessed and testified that he had been covererd by an entire network of sympathizers in Italy and abroad who had ensured that after the attack he could escape. 'A whole mechanism came into action', Vinciguerra recalled, 'that is, the Carabinieri, the Minister of the Interior, the customs services and the military and civilian intelligence services accepted the ideological reasoning behind the attack.'" [ Daniele Ganser, "NATO's Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe", Franck Cass, London, 2005, pp.3-4 ] cite news | title=Strage di Piazza Fontana spunta un agente USA | publisher=La Repubblica | date=February 11, 1998 | accessdate=2007-02-20 | url=http://www.repubblica.it/online/fatti/fontana/fontana/fontana.html (With original documents, including juridical sentences and the report of the Italian Commission on Terrorism) it icon ]

According to Vinciguerra, the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing was supposed to push then Interior Minister Mariano Rumor to declare a state of emergency cite news | title=Strage di Piazza Fontana spunta un agente USA | publisher=La Repubblica | date=February 11, 1998 | accessdate=2007-02-20 | url=http://www.repubblica.it/online/fatti/fontana/fontana/fontana.html (With original documents, including juridical sentences and the report of the Italian Commission on Terrorism) it icon ]

Testimony concerning the 1980 Bologna massacre

In 1984, questioned by judges about the 1980 Bologna station bomb Vinciguerra said: "With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages... [it] lies within the state itself...There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army...A secret organisation, a super-organisation with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them...A super-organisation which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on Nato's behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.cite news | title = Secret agents, freemasons, fascists . . . and a top-level campaign of political 'destabilisation' | publisher = The Guardian | date = 1990-12-05]

Vinciguerra explained how the Italian secret services had protected him, helping him flying away to Francoist Spain.

According to historian Daniele Ganser, Gladio stopped protecting Vinciguerra as soon as he started talking, which permitted his subsequent trial [ [http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection_gladio/Terrorism_Western_Europe.pdf] and [http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/news/media_desk.htm#Gladio] Research project directed by Daniele Ganser ] .

Vinciguerra's allegations concerning NATO

Vinciguerra also made this statement to "The Guardian" : "The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organised matrix... "Avanguardia Nazionale", like "Ordine Nuovo" (the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s), were being mobilised into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance."

Testimony concerning Chilean general Carlos Prats' 1974 assassination

Along with Stefano Delle Chiaie, Vinciguerra testified in Rome in December 1995 before judge Maria Servini de Cubria that Enrique Arancibia Clavel (a former Chilean secret police agent prosecuted for crimes against humanity in 2004 [ [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3596316.stm Vital rights ruling in Argentina] , "BBC", August 24, 2004 ] ) and US expatriate DINA agent Michael Townley were directly involved in Chilean General Carlos Prats' assassination in Buenos Aires (Argentina) [ [http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2000/05/22/mun6.html Arancibia, "clave" en la cooperación de las dictaduras] , "La Jornada", May 5, 2000 es icon ] .

References

See also

*Mariano Rumor (in an interview, Vincenzo Vinciguerra declared that he was asked to kill Mariano Rumor)
*strategy of tension

External links

*Daniele Ganser, "Terrorism in Western Europe: An Approach to NATO's Secret Stay-Behind Armies" in Winter/Spring 2005 "Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations" [http://diplomacy.shu.edu/journal/new/] .
* [http://digilander.libero.it/infoprc/peteano001.html Intervista a Vincenzo Vinciguerra, July 8, 2000, by Gigi Marcucci and Paola Minoliti]