Gladio: Paolo Emilio Taviani

[Jan Klimkowski]

Afore it disappears....

Paolo Emilio Taviani

A resistance hero and long-serving government minister, his posthumous political memoirs promise to reveal secrets of Italy's terrorist years

Philip Willan
The Guardian, Thursday 21 June 2001 01.51 BST

A wartime resistance leader, authority on Christopher Columbus and long-serving Christian Democrat minister, Paolo Emilio Taviani, who has died of a stroke aged 88, was among the founders of the Gladio stay-behind network and a privileged observer of Italy's tormented terrorist years. A book of his political memoirs, to be published posthumously, is expected to shed new light on the "strategy of tension", the manipulation of terrorism in order to keep the Italian Communist party from power.

Born in Genoa, Taviani took degrees in law, philosophy and social sciences before becoming a professor of the history of economic doctrines at his home university. He was a captain in the artillery during the second world war, was sent briefly into internal exile for his antifascist views and became a partisan leader in 1943. As a member of the National Liberation Committee for Liguria, he participated in the Genoa uprising against the Germans - one of the most effective partisan actions of the war in Italy. At the end of the Genoa revolt, in April 1945, an entire German army corps surrendered to his men. He was decorated for his services to the resistance by both the American and Soviet governments.

A member of the constituent assembly which framed Italy's post-war republican constitution, Taviani was one of the founders of the Christian Democrat party and was continuously in parliament from 1946 until his death. He served as secretary of the party in the late 1940s and began his government career as an under secretary at the foreign ministry under prime minister Alcide De Gasperi in 1951. He served spells as minister for foreign trade, at the finance ministry and the treasury, but he will be remembered as an expert on security matters who headed the defence and interior ministries during delicate passages of Italian political history.

While at the ministry of defence from 1953 to 1958, he oversaw the creation of Italy's secret Nato stay-behind network, intended to mount resistance operations in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion, but also suspected of meddling in domestic politics in an anti-communist capacity. Taviani was interior minister for seven years until 1968, a time of increasing social and political tensions, and again from 1972 to 1974, a period marked by right-wing terrorist atrocities and coup plots and by the first violent actions of the Red Brigades.

Taviani has been accused of colluding with rightwing extremists while he was minister of the interior, but he was also the man responsible for outlawing both the extremist Ordine Nuovo (New Order) and Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard) organisations. It was a measure he believed had cost him dearly, for he never held ministerial office again.

Staunchly anti-communist and pro-American, Taviani offered a glimpse of the political background to Italy's terrorist years in recent depositions before a parliamentary commission on terrorism, and to magistrates probing the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which killed 16 people as they queued in the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura.

Taviani told investigators that Italy's military intelligence service was on the point of sending a senior officer from Rome to Milan to try to head off the bombing. A short while later the same organisation sent a different officer from Padua in an effort to lay the blame for the atrocity, falsely, on leftwing anarchists, he revealed.

In an interview with the Genoa newspaper Il Secolo XIX last August, Taviani said he did not believe the US Central Intelligence Agency was involved in organising the Milan bomb. "It seems to me certain, however, that agents of the CIA were among those who supplied the materials and who muddied the waters of the investigation," he told the newspaper.

In a similarly candid vein, he admitted in a magazine interview last November that he contributed to a decision not to press charges against German soldiers responsible for the massacre of thousands of their erstwhile Italian allies on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the war. The choice was made for cold-war "reasons of state," he said.

Taviani indicated he would reveal sensitive secrets relating to the cold war in Italy in a book to be published after his death. In the light of his remarkable longevity, he decided to bring forward the publication, possibly of a somewhat "cleaned-up" version, and the book is expected to be in the shops by early next year. "I don't deny that as minister of the inte rior I sometimes had to violate the law," he reportedly confided to senator Giovanni Pellegrino, chairman of the parliamentary terrorism commission. "But, believe me, I always remained faithful to the constitution."

When away from the cares of state, Taviani devoted his time to the study of Christopher Columbus, becoming one of the world's leading authorities on the subject. He retraced the voyages of the Genoese navigator and wrote numerous books about his life and times. Last year Taviani, who was made a life senator in 1991, donated his collection of 2,500 volumes on Columbus to a council-owned library in his native Genoa.

He is survived by his wife Vittoria, five sons and two daughters; another son predeceased him.

Paolo Emilio Taviani, politician, born November 6 1912; died June 18 2001

[Peter Lemkin]

Good find....lets hope his posthumous papers have some details and name some names and operations! Funny how these fascists seem to live so long; and the good, they often die so young...at the hands of fascists just like him......