COMMUNISTS: Tito & the Executioner

The fight between Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito and the Cominform had settled the Trieste issue: Tito will not get the Italian port, now under international control.

Pro-Cominform Communists in Trieste had split the Communist Party there in half and, with Moscow’s blessing, launched a purge, of pro-Tito Slavs. Last week Communist and non-Communist Italians in Trieste went on an anti-Slav rampage, removing Slav names from streets, trams, crossroad signs.

In Trieste the Cominform had publicly pointed a pistol at Tito, and cocked it with a click the world could hear. The man with the gun was thickset, rasp-voiced Vittorio Vidali, Cominform boss in Trieste. He had spent a quarter century in the Communist underground. Wherever he went, murder followed.

Many Names. Vidali was born near Trieste, about 50 years ago. After Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922 Vidali got away to Moscow, for three years of study. In 1926, as Emilio Sormenti, he turned up in the U.S. and in 1927 fled to avoid deportation. Ten years later, in the Spanish civil war, he was Carlos Contreras, commissar of the Fifth Loyalist Regiment. After Spain he was based in Mexico.

During his Mexican years, Vidali-Contreras had an outspoken enemy in the U.S., goateed Carlo Tresca, a fearless tyranny-hater and an exiled Italian anarcho-socialist. Tresca’s Italian-language weekly, Il Martello (The Hammer), publicly accused Vidali-Contreras of many acts of terrorism, and the following specific crimes: 1) the assassination in Barcelona of Camillo Berneri, Italian anarchist, during the Spanish civil war; 2) the murder in Mexico of Tiña Modotti, Vidali’s Communist mistress.

The Fight to the End. Had he lived, Carlo Tresca could have wielded great anti-Communist influence in postwar Italy. But on the night of Jan. 11, 1943, as he stepped from an office building into the wartime brownout of New York streets, a gunman killed him. Two days before, Tresca had told his friends: “Vidali is in town. That means there is a job to be done. I smell the stink of death.” Police sought Vidali-Contreras for questioning, but could not find him.

In January 1947 Vidali-Contreras left Mexico for Russia, and a few weeks later turned up in Trieste. Until the Cominform attack on Tito, he was a loyal Tito man. But last week, to a meeting of Trieste pro-Cominform Communists he announced: The fight [against Tito] will be continued to the end.” Another Trieste Communist official put it more bluntly: “This means that anyone among us, if he has the chance, should remove Tito.”

If the wind was from the West, where Vidali was, Tito, like Tresca, might be able to “smell the stink of death.”