Italy’s notorious communist terrorist group the Red Brigades has sent a string a letters with bullets threatening various public officials in Italy, according to the Italian press agency Adnkronos.
The public officials threatened, as of now, include former Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema,
former Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, Labor Minister Maurizio Sacconi, mayor of Rome Gianni Alemanno, and several others.
The threatening letters were “posted in the seaside town of Fiumicino near Rome and … mailed to Italy’s Adnkronos news agency in the capital on Tuesday,” Adnkronos reported.
The letter threatening former justice minister Mastella was sent to his home just two days after he was attacked by “a group of unemployed youths,” as described by Sify News.
The letter to Mastella, who currently leads the centrist Popular Party of the South and has political aspirations to run for mayor of Naples, read in part:
Remember the Red Brigades, we’ll finish you in Naples. But we won’t screw up next, also because we won’t rely on our bare hands. Do you see the bullet?
Don’t try to become mayor of Naples. Stay on your own turf. Easter’s not that far off, and you know what happens to lambs then!
Although the other letter, threatening the mayor of Rome and others, was signed by Informal Anarchist Federation — the same group which claimed responsibility for a package bomb placed in the Greek embassy that was defused by law enforcement authorities on December 27, 2010 — it was also signed “For Communism, the Red Brigades, and the Galesi Centre for an Anti-imperialist Armed Movement.”
In 2010, the Red Brigades sent similar letters with bullets to former Speaker of Parliament and anti-terrorism Judge Luciano Violante and his wife.
The Red Brigades group does not discriminate among their targets’ politics: Rome’s Mayor Gianni Alemanno belongs to The People of Freedom, a center-Right party, while Judge Violante is a member of the center-Left Democratic Party.
In addition to letters, the Red Brigades has sent threats through acts of vandalism. In Turin, AGI News reported that new graffiti appeared on January 10 “with with the Red Brigades’ logo, all addressed [to] FIAT’s CEO Sergio Marchionne, only a few days before the referendum on the Mirafiori plant.”
In a self-interview in the 1970s, Renato Curcio, the original founder of the Red Brigades, described the goal of the group: “Faced with working-class terror, the bourgeoisie by now has an obligatory course: to reestablish control by intensified repression and progressive militarization of the state.”
Curcio’s admission confirms what high-ranking KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn alleged in his book New Lies for Old (1984) when explaining why the Soviet Union sponsored terrorism:
The objective of violence is to create chaos and anarchy, to impose additional strains on ruling democratic parties, to eliminate their ablest leaders, to force them to resort to undemocratic measures, and to demonstrate to the public their inability to maintain law and order, leaving the field open to the legal communist party to present itself as the only effective alternative force.
Throughout the Cold War, the Red Brigades was responsible for a wide array of terrorist attacks in Italy, including the kidnapping and execution of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.
Renato Curcio, Red Brigades leader at the time, had connections with Czech intelligence — the StB, which was dominated by the Soviet KGB. Curcio also frequently traveled to Czechoslovakia.
Despite the purported “fall” of communism and “demise” of the Soviet Union, the Red Brigades maintains ideological solidarity with Russia. In a secret U.S. State Department cable dated January 26, 2009, then-U.S. Ambassador to Italy Ronald Spogli observed that although “Putin’s Russia bears little resemblance to Communist ideals, this fact has not deterred Italian communists and other radical left politicians from being openly pro-Russia on the basis of ideological solidarity.”
In a document posted on the Internet in 2002, the Red Brigades stated that the September 11 terrorist attacks demonstrated the “need for the forging of alliances between anti-imperialistic forces and revolutionary forces in the regions of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.”
The threat of communism is indicative in the current terror activities of the Red Brigades, which challenge the accepted mainstream perception that the Cold War is over. In a 2009 televised interview shortly before he died, high-ranking KGB/SVR defector Sergei Tretyakov commented: “Who told you that Cold War was ever over? It transforms — it’s like a virus.”
That virus continues to plague Italy as more and more of its public figures are threatened by the Red Brigades and other Italian communists.
