ITALY: In Search of the Red Brigades

ďďITALY

The Moro kidnaping triggers a duel of nerves

At the corner of Via Stresa and Via Fani, obscure street names thateveryone in Italy knows today, a small, squat school bus braked slowlyto a stop, and a flock of teen-age schoolgirls solemnly disembarked.They were 14 pupils of the school of the Little Servants of the SacredHeart of Jesus, all in dark sweaters over blue smocks and whitecollars. Two of them walked over to a flower vendor’s panel truck nearby, bought a bouquet of pink carnations and rejoined the group, nowstanding’all in a row. They laid down their flowers, crossed themselvesand paused for a moment of silence.

Before them, on the pavement under a budding willow tree, was animpromptu folk memorial to the five bodyguards who had been murderedduring the kidnaping of Aldo Moro, leader of the ruling ChristianDemocratic Party and a former Premier. The memorial is now a symbol ofwhat the Italian press has come to call, among many other things, the”Strage di Gioveìi Nero”— the Massacre of Black Thursday. Severalhundred bouquets of flowers were piled neatly in front of a low cross.Pinned to the cross in a cellophane shield were five newspaper photosof the dead. Below them was a brief inscription: ”The neighborhooddraws close around the families of the five assassinated policemen andthe family of The Honorable Aldo Moro, in a commitment of human andcivil solidarity.” Tacked to a tree near by was a lurid, half-tornSunday magazine cover showing the bloodied, sheet-covered body of oneof the victims. Those scenes of tribute were enacted last week as Romewas virtually turned inside out in the hunt for Moro and the RedBrigades terrorists who had abducted him. Rome Bureau Chief JordanBonfante reports:

That baroque pavement memorial in the residential Trionfale district onthe northwest side of Rome is all that marks the site of the terroristkidnaping that has traumatized the country. The only real sign ofnormality was the flower vendor at his usual corner. Having been keptaway from the scene by the kidnapers, who slashed the tires of histruck beforehand, he was back selling flowers.

Around the corner from the ambush site, the occupants of threeblue-and-white police cars surveyed the passing traffic. Two blocksaway, in the opposite direction, uniformed border police, pressed intospecial service, manned a roadblock and checked every tenth car or so.They concentrated on large vehicles, whose drivers were made to showidentification while the trunk was searched. Every few hundred yardsmore police, more roadblocks, more searches extended the tight securityblanket over the entire Trionfale district.

“There is nothing more we can search around here,” said a youngmustachioed lieutenant, putting his drawn automatic pistol on safety togesticulate more freely. “It is an endurance test now—the winner willbe the one who lasts the longest. If they are hidden anywhere aroundhere, they are going to have to come out sooner or later.” Then, likeany soldier, he griped that the squad scheduled to relieve his men forthe next eight hours was late.

The inner core of the search for Moro and his captors covered a quadrantof more than 20 square miles. Working outward from the scene of theambush, police made from 2,000 to 3,000 searches, building to building,concentrating on garages and basements. The hunters were organized insquads of twelve, infantry-style, with flanking and rear guards.

Outside the city, at key junctions, was a second concentric ring ofroadblocks manned by police and thousands of soldiers called in fromaround the country. Some ten miles farther, the third and outermostring of roadblocks was set up. As drivers discovered to theirdiscomfort, police stopped cars and leveled their guns at them, whilesoldiers stood at the ready in the background, sometimes behindsandbags. Tens of thousands of vehicles have been checked. Hundreds ofsuspicious youths, in particular, have been pulled into local policestations for verification of identity. Suspects have been detained,questioned, released. Clues have gone cold.

Aside from the intensive man hunt, the uneasy country was all too awareof the duel of nerves being played out between the state and theterrorists in two vastly different trials. The first was the legaltrial, in a fortified barracks in Turin, of 15 Red Brigades memberscharged with previous counts of kidnaping, assassination and armedinsurrection. Though the trial has been repeatedly postponed as aresult of Red Brigades intimidation, authorities were more determinedthan ever that it must go on.

It was doubtful that the defendants, who have been in jail for more thantwo years, had anything to do with planning Moro’s kidnaping. But theymade the most of it, shouting to the courtroom, “Moro is in the handsof the proletariat, and he will be tried. Long live the Red Brigades!”The defendants refused to cooperate with their court-appointed counsel,but Judge Guido Barbaro rejected a request that the prisoners beallowed to represent themselves. Having resolved the legal ruckus, thecourt ordered the trial to resume again this week.

The other trial, presumably being conducted in a deep hideout somewherein Rome, was the “People’s Tribunal” of Moro. This, according to a RedBrigades message that was left atop an automatic photo booth in thecenter of the city along with a picture showing Moro in captivity, wasthe terrorists’ way of dealing with the man whom they accused of”criminal counterrevolution.” Other public officials who have beensimilarly kidnaped in the past have also been subjected to these”trials,” which consisted largely of forcing the victims to endureendless Marxist diatribes before they were released.

For all its intensity, the search for Moro yielded precious few leads.Items:> The police found five automobiles used by the terrorists. Two carshad been left at the scene. A Fiat 132 that carried Moro away was foundthe same day half a mile away, and two more getaway cars turned up onthe same quiet, narrow street. Investigators theorize that the vehicleswere planted there as decoys designed to lead police to concentratetheir search in the wrong neighborhood.

>Witnesses provided good descriptions of four of the twelve terrorists. One was a youthful man with bushy, modish hair and a mustache; two others, clean-shaven, were described as older and heavier. The fourth was a slim young woman with long brown hair and glasses.

> The sale of three airline caps worn bythe terrorists was traced to a Rome uniform shop. The buyer could havebeen the same woman.

The vast dragnet had at least one salutary effect: the capital’snormally thriving crime rate was down 30%; there were simply too manycops on the streets. The police presence was also meant to prevent anyfollow-up terrorist attack, although that deterrent failed to stop RedBrigades gunmen in Turin from shooting and wounding Giovanni Picco, 46,the former Christian Democratic mayor.

Italian authorities, meanwhile, were being aided by a team ofspecialists from the West German Federal Criminal Bureau and by twoagents of Britain’s Special Air Service, famed for its undercovercounterterrorist operations in Northern Ireland. Investigatorssuspected that the meticulously planned Moro abduction may not havebeen entirely made-in-Italy. Some believed that a precision team ofhighly trained foreign terrorists, probably West German, may havecommitted the attack itself and then turned Moro over to indigenous RedBrigades. The technical planning and organization of the kidnaping wasmore proficient than anything the Red Brigades had previouslyundertaken. Police experts estimated that the operation must haverequired a minimum of 30 people to organize transportation to safehouses, telephone contacts, surveillance of Moro and even of theflorist.

Members of the West German terrorist group, the Red Army Faction, werenatural suspects because the Moro incident was strikingly similar, bothin its cold-blooded sophistication and its implementation, to theabduction last September of West German Industrialist Hanns-MartinSchleyer. One witness thought she heard a kidnaper speak in German ,”Achtung! Achtung!” Another bystander was waved off by a terroristwho spoke with what sounded like heavily accented Italian.An additional element was the chilling professional precision exhibitedby one of the killers. One bodyguard had managed to get out of the carand fire three shots at the terrorists—yet one of the killers was coolenough to take two to three seconds for careful aim before shooting thebodyguard in the center of his forehead.

At midweek, a special seven-hour Cabinet meeting drew up a set of stiffnew antiterrorist measures, including life imprisonment for murdercommitted in the course of a kidnaping. The Cabinet also gave policewider power in interrogation and arrests, and relaxed restrictions onpolice wiretappings and searches. Suspects could be detained for 24hours just for verification of their identity, and police could carryout preliminary interrogations without the presence of an attorney.

The action did not daunt Moro’s captors, who last Saturday night issued”Communiqué No. 2″ almost simultaneously in Rome, Milan, Turin andGenoa. The 1,700-word message, a rambling revolutionary harangue aboutthe “menace of imperialist terrorism,” made no demand for an exchangeof prisoners. It did claim that Moro was being “interrogated” andwarned that he would be given “proletarian justice.” The police saidthey had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the ominous communiqué.-