Crossed Lives

1.

- “A year ago in a secluded beach villa on the outskirts of Dar-es-Salaam, a plastic charge exploded inside a French translation of a book on Marxist theory.” — David Martin, Guardian, Feb. 3, 1970

- “On December 12th, 1969, a bomb exploded in a bank in Milan’s city centre. The Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana was packed with clients, sixteen of whom were killed and over eighty injured. The same day, another three bombs blew up in Rome causing a number of injuries; a further device was found in a corridor in Milan’s Banca Commerciale and was destroyed by police.” — John Foote, History Today, 2000.

• 17 deaths, 89 wounded. “ Giovanni ARNOLDI, anni 42; Giulio CHINA, anni 57; Eugenio CORSINI; Pietro DENDENA, anni 45; Carlo GAIANI, anni 37; Calogero GALATIOTO, anni 37; Carlo GARAVAGLIA, anni 71; Paolo GERLI, anni 45; Luigi MELONI, anni 57; Vittorio MOCCHI; Gerolamo PAPETTI, anni 78; Mario PASI, anni 48; Carlo PEREGO, anni 74; Oreste SANGALLI, anni 49; Angelo SCAGLIA, anni 61; Carlo SILVA, anni 71; Attilio VALE’, anni 52.” Plus: Giuseppe PINELLI, anarchist, defenestrated, police headquarters, 15 December 1969.

- Pinelli leaped (according to police) or was thrown (according to the rest of the world) out of the window of commissioner Calabresi. Was Calabresi in the office at the time? The Italian courts have said no. The left — particularly the group called Lotta continua — said yes. Calabresi himself was murdered on via Cherubini in Milan on May 17, 1972 by Ovidio Bompressi (according to the courts) or he was murdered by someone else (according to those who doubt the testimony of Leonardo Marino, his accuser). The directors of Lotta continua were in on the assassination — according to Italian prosecutors — or were persecuted for their right to free speech — by their supporters.

- This is part of the story of M. This is part of the story of the ‘La strage di piazza Fontana’, a story with explosions on the one end and an unending legal labyrinth on the other, of false flags and delayed prosecutions, of men who were condemned as guilty by the court but not ever imprisoned, as the condemnations came too late, decades too late. It is the story of an assassin connector, code name “Charley”. For Charlemagne, as in the Waffen S.S. Charlemagne, the French fascist troop that fought with the Nazis on the Eastern front. M.’s death eliminated one possibility for the liberation of Mozambique. The massacre in Milan started a subwar that raged in Italy in the 1970s, the years of lead, and that is still waged at the bottom of a certain number of consciousnesses. One thinks of hidden hands, of occult influences, of unexplained homicides. “… there are two distinct kinds of small worlds: those with connectors and those without. Connectors… are a superconnected few that possess a disproportionate share of all the links in the network.”

- This will not be about the truth. This will be about approximations to some more shadowy essence. Every hidden bit seems to lead elsewhere, or to many elsewheres. The strange postwar fate of Nazi collaborators defies the narrative of the triumph of good over evil. In the postwar world, they are everywhere, used by everyone.

- This is the part of the story of M. The part of the story where M. ends, in pieces. M., whose scrawled trajectory in the twentieth century world up until the point that the Plekhanov translation exploded in his hands was an improbable combination of travel, suspect patrons, racial/racist barriers, odd bits and pieces of foreign policy, education and the internal buzz and boom of his soul. Like yours, like mine. It was at the time treated as a success story. M. meeting Kennedy. M. talking in London. Then, a tragic cutting down story, soon to be eclipsed by other assassinations — Amical Cabral, a friend, in 1973; François Tombalbaye, president of Chad, 1975; Anwar Sadat, 1981. The cold war: a constant mizzling of assassinations, aborted chances on every hotspot, and then some. Among the structures, in the wreckage, some get the axe through the cranium, the plastique attached to the undercarriage of the car. Some come out of the bank and get blown to bits. Why?

- I could write M.’s story as so much uplift, so much optimism. And who am I to mock the upbeat, the uplifting? Don’t I want it myself, in the evening good drinks, in the morning coffee, on the stray afternoon love. Even if my outline for this story adheres to a darker story line, even if, for dramatic purposes, I prefer to trace fault lines rather than agreed upon geopolitical boundaries. This is a two sided world, the dark and the light are indivisibly sided, subtraction never brings us to a final purity, a radiant zero, or a black hole. And all this dark, black, massed on the “evil” side. It is a language bug, on my tongue since long before Jimmy cracked corn. We jump a little forward, we rest a little. We jump backward. Somebody pulls strings. Somebody else cuts the strings.

-M., in his books on the revolution in Mozambique begins with a story. M. is in a camp with his freedom fighters. He puts a bandage on the foot of one of them, and has him change into civilian clothes. The soldier goes in this disguise to the nearest garrison town, to the hospital. Of course, being black, he has to wait, he has to be initiated by the bureaucracy through petty humiliations before he gets his treatment. So, in order to register, he goes to the administration building. He talks with a villager who tells him that the Portuguese soldiers are quartered in the top floor of the administration building — and overflow into a few other houses nearby. The supposedly wounded man makes a tour of the building, he sees the trucks with troops pull out, learns that the troops wile away the ennui of garrison life by going out hunting. He comes back to M.’s camp with this news. M.’s soldiers now know when and where to attack.

A common tale of military tactics. The guerilla’s advantage, in the colonies, is to look like the colonized. To be taken for a nobody, a run of the mill idiot, an administrative problem, another tiresome field hand. It is a biblical tale. M., who was educated by missionaries and even did a bit of preaching himself when he was young — in South Africa, at the church camp in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin where he met his wife, Janet, a white woman — didn’t have to go to Mao for his tactics, when he could go to Numbers. In Numbers, Moses sends out twelve spies into the Canaan. They go up and down the land. The come back to the Jews’ camp at Kedosh. Ten of them report that Canaan is a land of giants, and that the Jews will never conquer them. Two of the spies are confident that the Promised Land can be taken. Then the Lord voted: he sent a disease that killed the cowardly spies and spared the courageous ones. Or so it says in Numbers. M. might wonder whether Moses helped that disease along. It is a tale for a Mozambican night, out in the bush, assessing chances to push the Portuguese out of the colony they rule with an iron hand. But how much to push them? Independence, for M., didn’t mean the exodus of the Portuguese managerial class, but a change in their allegiance to a new state, something that on paper seems easy enough to envision. The idea on paper failed to take into account the sheer weight of Portuguese racism, of European settler arrogance, of the backing of apartheid states and the backing of those apartheid states by the major power: the United States. Later, in Joshua, as the Jews again send spies into Canaan, preparing their attack, one of the Canaanites says: “I know that the Lord has given you the land, that the terror of the Lord has fallen upon us.” The revolution against the colonizing power succeeds when the terror of the Lord falls upon them. It is a delicate matter to arrive at that point. Scare the Canaanites too much, and bloody hell will result. The Jews, of course, had the backing of the Lord of Hosts.

• M. was not only a revolutionary, but a professor in anthropology at Syracuse University. B.A. from Oberlin college, M.A. and Ph.D, Northwestern University (under Melville Herskovits), and according to some sources, a visiting scholar at Harvard. He’d read the Bible, he’d read Marx. Also, as a student in Chicago, he’d worked in a cement factory to pay the bills. Chicago, a city where the racials lines were raw, where the white riot of American apartheid was giving back territory inch by inch. He knew that drill, from Africa. He’d joined the Ki-Kappa-Delta fraternity. He wanted and got the whole American college experience. The experience of being the only black student in so many college classes, where the well fed looks of white faces fell upon him.

2.

- In Vevey, Switzerland, a former boxer and general jack of all trades comes back from a trip to the Soviet Union, where he was the trainer for an amateur match between the Swiss and the Soviets. It was sponsored by a friendship society, in 1959. The boxer was treated well, the fans in Moscow were adoring, Communism, it turns out, is excellent for boxers and their managers. At this point in time, he was touting himself as a manager. So he joins the tiny Swiss communist party. But that is not satisfactory. Memories fade. This young man likes to ride sensation and, to the extent it is possible in Vevey, celebrity. He feels hemmed in. He wants, he thinks, to belong to a party more dedicated to the world revolution, or at least one where he can use his bouncer’s instinct for troublemakers and regulars. After visiting Albania in 1963, he has a revelation. The East is Red! The boxing manager founds the ‘Organisation des Communistes de Suisse — OCS, which takes a Maoist orientation. Then he founds the Parti Populaire Suisse in 1967. It receives some funds from the Chinese embassy in Switzerland. The PPS is fun, he is always kick out members and denouncing them in the party literature. He does a good line in denunciation. Sometimes, he kicks people out for hell of it. The counterfeit bourgeois faux revolutionaries, the hyenas, the jackals, the stabbers in the back. Lickspittles, capitalist roaders. The party newspaper is called L’étincelle — the Spark. In hommage to Lenin’s paper, Iskra, founded in 1900.

- L’étincelle founded in 1967. By 1968 the Party had focused on the number one enemy: the Jews. Who had even corrupted Red China: “Lin Piao stands in the pay of the Jews, and Mao, who was a true genius, is today only a simple victim. His age keeps him from seeing clearly.” Still, the Chinese embassy in Berne met with the PPS people. One of them received and directed funds from the Chinese to some far right organizations in Italy. Code name Charley.

- The PPS has another, stranger source of funding for an ostensibly far left group: the PIDE, the Portuguese intelligence agency. Which, under the Salazarist regime, has connections with all far right organizations in Europe, and, in Africa, is the force behind Portugal’s struggle with the anti-colonialist movement. For instance, in Mozambique.

3.

- M. found himself in demand in the early sixties. Africa was a continent that Americans wanted to know about: Americans in the State Department, in the Pentagon, and in the CIA. Americans in the movement, African-Americans who saw a mirror image of the U.S. Civil Rights movement in the de-colonialist revolutions in Africa. Sun Ra saw the connection. Later, towards the end of the decade, Fred Hampton saw the connection. Henry Dumas saw the connection. The ark of bones. “… the international rise of Black liberation and movements”, Amira Baraka said.

- The success of the Algerian revolution had shaken things up, the dice were rattling in the cup. The success of Kenyatta in Kenya, the success of Nyerere in Tanzania, these were events to reckon with, these were territories with potentially vast natural resources, this was a human story in the newspapers, countries were appearing on the map with harbors where a hostile naval force could set up base if it wasn’t countered, and there was a lot of interest, among diverse groups. M., being an African expert, was approached by the U.N. Would he help? M. joined the United Nations Trusteeship Council. He went back and forth from Africa to the United States. He avoided the Portuguese colonies. In 1964, he joined the struggle against the Portuguese, setting up in Dar-es-Salaam.

- “M. is probably in trouble. His often lofty and almost patrician manner has lost him support of some younger and more radical members of the party.” — U.S. state department memo, 1968. Quoted by J.A. Marcum, Conceiving Mozambique.

‘It is not rare in Dar es Salaam for example to see a freedom fIghter locked in heavy drinking bouts with strange faces of white men’, it continued, warning that ‘our brothers should be extra careful about such guises which the agents of the enemy may employ, through drinks, diplomatic parties or cheap bribes.’ The target was clearly the Ms.” Quotation from the Tanzanian paper, The Nationalist, in George Roberts, “The assassination of M: FRELIMO, Tanzania, and the politics of exile in Dar es Salaam”, 2017.

4.

- A random walk through some Cold War assassinations:

- Oviedo Barbery, Bolivia, 1951. National Revolutionary Movement leader run down by a truck and shot in Santa Cruz by two men. In 1952, American businessman Robert Charles Stevens of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, owner of a Bolivian alcohol plant and some farmland, was accused of aiding and abetting the assassination.

- Félix-Roland Moumié, Geneva, November 3, 1960. Cameroon revolutionary leader, poisoned with thalium put in a glass of Pernod in a restaurant. The assassin’s name was William Bechtel. “He introduced himself as a journalist close to the anticolonialist community and had already approached the independentist leader some months before in Ghana.” There’s a paper trail connecting Bechtel to the SDECE, the French intelligence. Bechtel got old, but was barely on the run at all, when in 1976 he was extradited from Belgium to Switzerland. There, the courts made much of the difficulty of connecting Bechtel to the murder. In 1980, the Swiss court dropped the case. Le Monde headlined: “The presumed assassin of Cameron’s former leader Felix Moumié benefits from the dismissal of the case.”

- Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, January 17, 1961. He was executed by a firing squad. The operation was directed by Belgian mercenary Julien Gat, backed by the CIA.

- Grigoris Lambrakis “Uncomfirmed reports received from Salonika said one of the deputies, Mr. Grigoris Lambrakis, was in critical condition tonight. Mr. Lambrakis, a deputy of the pro-Communist united Democratic Left party (EDA), was hit by a motor-cycle when he left a mass “peace supporters” rally last night. — Guardian, 24 May, 1963.

- Humberto Delgado, the “fearless General,”, Villanueva del Fresno, February 13 1965. After losing an election to the Salazarists through fraud in 1958, General Delgado sought to overthrow the regime through dissatisfied elements in the military from his exile in Spain. The Portuguese secret service, the PIDE, ambushed and killed him on the border between Portugal and Spain.

- General Rene Barrientos Ortuño, President of Bolivia, helicopter crash, April, 1969. Under Barrientos, Che Guevara was hunted down, killed, and dismembered, his hacked off hands sent to Buenos Aires for final identification. The inquiry into the Barrientos helicopter crash ruled it an accident, although the cause of the malfunction could not be determined. Other versions in other heads may apply, but they have run down now, most of them, those heads. Two years later, on April 1 1971, in Hamburg, Germany, Colonel Roberto Quintanilla Pereira, a Bolivian diplomat who had played a leading role in the inquest, was visited by a young woman who was apparently asking for a visa. In his office, she took a pistol from her purse and “fired on the consul at close range, hitting him three times in the chest.” She then fled the scene. “The entry holes formed a regular triangle. Was it an accident? Or was it a V for Victory?” The “revolver used had been purchased by the Italian Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Who died in an apparent accident as he was attempting to blow up an electrical power pole on March 14, 1972. “Italy’s Quixote of Terrorism”, the NYT called him.

Quntanilla, Quintanilla had ordered the hacking off of Che’s hands. Quintanilla’s ashes were carried back to Bolivia by Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie’s son, who had taken on the post of Bolivian consul, succeeding Quintanilla. The woman who shot Quintanilla, Monica Ertl, was the daughter of Leni Riefenstahl’s chief cameraman and lover, Hans Ertl. Ertl had exiled himself in Bolivia after the war. He may have been a member of the Nazi anthropology unit, the Ahnenerbe group. He did claim to have found the remains of a lost civilization in Bolivia. Monica Ertl became estranged from her father after she divorced her husband and started working as a community activist in Santiago, Chile. She joined the group, “Ejército de Liberación Nacionala”, which was close to Che. The ELN was officially for armed combat, and officially unable to engage in it, due to the severely limited scale of the group. Ertl, who called herself Imilla, was the comrade and lover of the leader of the ELN, Inti Peredo. Peredo was killed in a shootout in La Paz, September 9, 1969. ‘The pregant Monika Erlt, who was near her delivery date, was wounded severely in the left arm. Comrades brought her to the Italian embassy. The people in the embassy secured her medical help. She lost her child, but she didn’t, in the end, have to have her left arm amputated.” (Knigge, 2010). Quintanilla is featured in two photographs: one shows Che Guevara’s corpse (from 1967); one shows Inti Peredo’s corpse, in a wooden casket. In the latter, Quintanilla is the gentleman with the moustache and the cigarette, presiding with an implacable expression over the scene. These pictures signed his death warrant.

- The price put on Monica Ertl’s head was five times that of Che’s — a kind of honor in its way. Her last action was an attempt to kidnap Klaus Barbie. She failed. Instead, she was ambushed and killed in La Paz on May 13, 1973. Or was she captured, tortured and killed?

- “Costa Gavras wanted to film her life with Romy Schneider in the leading role, but it remained simply a plan.”

5.

“The P.I.D.E. and the minister of Defense had need at that time of an intelligence network that could function in African countries that hosted the liberation movements of the Portuguese colonies. It was difficult for Portuguese agencies to get around in these countries. The P.I.D.E thought that agents of another nationality with an adequate cover could operate without a problem.”

Intelligence is a need. A need is an appetite. It comes from the stomach, the sexual organs. It is hooked to the superior faculties at the base of the brain. Inferior races differ in the quality and quantity of their appetite. This is the reason, Charley taught, that the worldwide Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy is so difficult to eradicate. His recruits, at the Kriegschule, VI Abteilung, under Otto Skorzeny: their young, haggard faces, wrapped up in the bloodshedding mystique, staring at him, writing letters home to Papa about the defense of Europe and the need for new culottes. Chickens to the slaughter. For the Jew, for the inferior Negro, for the Slav, intelligence is not the glorious achievement that it is for the Aryan, the European, the purification of the accidents and dross to get at the pure white essence of the divine. It is a low base gnawing thing, an activity done in the dark, in corners. With their paws and pincers. Charley taught that base methods must be resorted to in the interim to achieve knightly ends. Poison must be distributed to insects.

I look over this material, I read and re-read: this is what I get. What if this “Charley” was a ghost, a cutout, an intelligent agency’s device? What if Charley never served under Sturmbannfuhrer Alain Guignot de Sallebert, either in the Franzözische Flakbatterie in Munich or in the Second Batallion of the SS Sturmbrigade? Why does Charley’s real name not appear in Forbes’ classic account, For Europe, or in the heated Naziporn histories of Jean Mabire? Or was he rolled over too soon, in that very full time, to earn an honored or shameful spot? Allotted to Otto Skorzeny’s Werwolf schools, which at the end of the war, as the Soviets moved in, were set up to train saboteurs, using the manual (Werwolf: Winken für Jagdeinheiten) and “drill, athletics, speed marching”.

- “Each recruit was deprived of his ID papers, not only to prevent identification by the Allies in case of capture, but also to deprive him or her of individuality, and thus to accentuate total surrender to the aims of the organization.” (Alexander Perry Biddiscombe, 1998)

- Deprived of his ID papers — this was Charley’s career. After his condemnation and imprisonment in France, which lasted for an awful long time by the standards of that period, came unlikely employments: a salesman of Catholic devotional material — brevaries and missals; the director of a post card factory. All the while, according to Charley, he was working for NATO, undercover, or as an informer, to be less dramatic about it. Or was it as a provocateur? The man who suggests the more radical action? What undercover agency was in control when he joined an obscure Swiss Maoist party, was received at the Chinese embassy, and sent back his memos to Aginter Press, which was subcontracting for the Portuguese intelligence? Charley, we are told in those works that notice him, was the “right arm of Guérin-Sérac” — the phrase occurs in judge Guido Salvini’s response to the commission set up to investigate the Milan massacre; it reoccurs in Pauline Picco’s Liaisons dangereuses: Les extrêmes droites en France et en Italie (1960–1984); while in the most informative book about the Cold War neo-fascist network, L’orchestre noir, every extreme-right potentate has a right arm except for Guérin-Sérac, which gives Charley an opening for the position. A right arm; a vigilante eye; a good ear. “Total surrender to the aims of the organization.”

- Body parts. The watchful eye, the strong right arm, the leg man, the finger. “Certain aspects of this history remain impossible to write: the successive judicial inquiries of the stagi have been made the object of willful and systematic disorientation by many sectors of the Italian state, which has fed the conspiracy theories.”

6.

From the literature discovered in the raid on Aginter Press HQ, Lisbon, Portugal, April 25, 1974: “History of the cover:

a. Whatever the identity, the history of the cover must be plausible and logical and out not to comport with indications of subversive activity.

b. The history of the cover must be based on the facts of the real life of the agent or of the persona adopted, don’t speak of places or of things known, don’t cite references to knowledge that one does not possess (general or theoretical).

c. Make the history concord with the identity papers, which can support a granular examination (date and place of birth).

d. Note that the police are principally interested in the recent past thus the history invented with care is meant to cover this period (learn by heart the dates and places).

e. To be too specific can become implausible. Be a little vague sometimes in the less important parts and those about the distant past. Remain natural.”

- One of the quintessential Cold War novels: Pale Fire. The (im)providential conjunction of an assassin, Gradus and his victim — except that, with Nabokovian wit, the wrong victim is killed, John Shade, instead of Gradus’s target, Shade’s neighbor, the rightful king of Zembla.

- “The assassins were two former Czarist officers, Pierre Sphableski-Bokr and Serge Taboritzki. It seems that the assassins took their places in the second row, underneath the stage from which Miliukov was speaking. After he finished, Taboritzki rose suddenly, stepped forward, and fired three shots in the direction of the head of the Kadets, crying: you scoundrel, I have come to avenge the family of the Czars! Three shots resounded. Miliukov, instinctively, threw himself down. At that moment professor Nabokov, editor of the Berlin Russian language periodical, Roul, threw himself in front of his friend. The other officer had hoisted himself onto the stage and shot a stream of five bullets into Nabokov, who fell, instantly killed.” Such was the account of the death of Vladimir Nabokov’s father in the Journal, a Paris newspaper, 30 March 1921. A combination of the wrong victim and subdeb murderers, caricatures of brutality, farceurs who should have been shooting popguns. It is the gun, the stream of five bullets, that turns the caricature into the dirtiest kind of fate. Art can only parry, only back away and parry, from a distance made of sorrow, impotence, and guilt.

- M. was a fixture at conferences, where in polished, masculine-cued tones speakers read from papers and made remarks about other papers while the academic audience with a smattering of the press looked on in various states of concentration or boredom. The lights were dimmed, politenesses were exchanged, disagreements bloomed in an appropriately sheathed language. The occasional Young Turk to break the atmosphere of decorum with a frankness, letting it all hang out, rapping to the audience on an existential level, laying it straight, shocking statement after shocking statement.

- M. did not ever play the role of that Turk, for there was no yield, no point there, no forward. The point for him was the presentation of a patient man, a pragmatist, with right on his side, and he could yield the hothead position, the romantic radical position, to others. Still: if the Americans could not come up with guns and funding, he’d go to the Soviets, or the Chinese.

- January 24, 1968. The Chicago Tribune journalist, Robert Cross, goes to hear a Symposium at Northwestern University on violence. M. is on the panel with two others: Charles Hamilton — co-author of a book with Stokely Carmichael on Black Power, and Stanley Milgram (“a City College of New York psychologist who discovered recently that, when ordered under laboratory conditions, people will continue giving huge electric shocks to other people, even when the other people are screaming with pain”). Milgram, according to Cross, went out taking an informal survey on the Northwestern campus about violence, asking the question: “…what would they think if the United States announced that, as a matter of poicy, it wou ld begin committing atrocities in Viet Nam. “Well, if the government is going to do that, they must know what they’re doing,” Milgram said a co-ed had replied.

- Mohammed Speaks also reported on the conference: Negro Professor Says City Violence ‘Healthy Outlet’ for Ghetto Blacks. M. said “he found it surprising that ‘thousands of people hate the Dow Chemical Corporation. So much that they are willing to go to jail but I have not heard of the slightest effort by these people to blow up the chemical works.”

Milgram made another remark: “much of the violence in the United States is caused by law enforcement agencies. … I recall during the Newark riots of last summer that the newspaper headlines would say ’40 Dead in Newark Violence’. But reading the fine print I found that 38 of these deaths were carried out not by Negroes but by the agent of social control — in other words, the police.’

- May 23, 1968. The killing of Henry Dumas. “Peter Bienkowski, according to his statement published in the Amsterdam News, observed Henry in a dangerous confrontation with another man, whose race and identity were never determined, on the subway platform at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. According to the officer, Henry was belligerent, and he assaulted the officer when he tried to intervene. In response, the officer fired his weapon and brought an end to a life filled with both promise and frustration.” Jeffrey Leak, Visible Man: the Life of Henry Dumas.

7.

- “Red Brigades (BR) terrorist group 473–77; financing of, 477; kidnapping of Aldo Moro,475; tactics of, 474–475.” From Index, Tony Judt, Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945.

Mentions of Gehlen — 0; mentions of Aginter Press — O; mentions of PIDE- O; mentions of Ordine Nuoavo, Piazza Fontana, massacre of, Brescia, massacre of — O. Summing up of the neo-fascist network noir in Italy: “The conspiratorial, anti-republican Right re-surfaced in these years (and perpetrated the single worst crime of the age, the bombing of Bologna’s railway station in 1980, killing 85 and wounding two hundred)”.

- Assassins of a certain kind tend to disappear — from the court docket, from the interest of the police, from the newspapers stories, from the histories. The Bechtels, the Aginter agents, Stefano Delle Chiaie, Ordine Nuovo — these have accrued a subliterature that makes no mark on the larger histories of the Cold War. The catalog of political violence in Italy from 1969–1988, compiled by researchers at the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts in Venti Anni di Violenzi Politica in Italia is contained in four thick volumes. There is an equilibrium between the extreme right and extreme left, even though the right indulges in more spectacular bouts of bloodshedding. There is a disequilibrium in who is punished. Leftists get the longer sentences, get their convictions confirmed all the way up the ladder of the courts. Rightists are not found, or if arrested are released for lack of evidence, or if brought to trial and convicted see their convictions overturned by the higher courts.

- And then there is the strategy of tension, the false flags. The trail that leads to the left, to anarchists, to extraparliamentary activists, etc., is seized on by an Italian police force, secret service, and judiciary long sympathetic to the far right. Aginter Press had a line in printing fake anarchist, ultra left posters, and putting them up near planned “actions”. A false flag can be a whole party, ostensibly devoted to Maoist communism, and really devoted to handing out journalist cards to neo-fascist provocateurs, which they used to penetrate anti-colonialist paramilitaries in Africa and extra-parliamentary leftist groups in Europe. Cover under cover. Money comes in from the Chinese, the Soviets, the CIA, and from businessmen. Often, the players and the financiers have histories of extreme-right sympathy going back to the interwar period.

- Charley was an atypical assassin: he did not leave a paper trail concerning his thoughts. An old cagoulard, he claimed in his interview with Laurent. Did he attend the Parco di Principi conference of 1965, sponsored by military institute supported by the Italian Military Secret Service (SIFAR) and featuring lectures and talks by many of the extreme right’s future activists and strategists? Did he recognize that the theory being promoted was a descendent of the Cagoulard approach to the Popular Front in 1938? The great crime that horrifies the nation. The trail laid down that implicates anarchists, the extra parliamentary left, the communists. The need for repressive laws, a state of emergency. Did Charley know the legendary Cagoulard killer, Filliol, hiding in Italy under the cover name A.C. Rossi?

- “He lived near Milan, with a new partner, very sparsely, as a professor of French, then as a small businesmman. He collected stamps and vacationed on the Adriatic.

Still, he kept very quiet relations with the veterans of the LVF (Legion of French volunteers against Bolshevism). ». Post cards and stamps — these are truly hobbies of a bourgeois innocence that no neighbor need worry about.

- Charley was probably there. Reporting for Le Reporter, his employer at the time.

- Leopoldo Sciascia wrote a short novel, I pugnalatori, about a historical event. On the night of October 1, 1862, in Palermo, in thirteen different places in the city, identical stabbing attacks were made on various random citizens. One of the attackers was captured, and from his confession the police were able to unfold the plan behind these attacks. The plan was to destabilize the current order in Sicily, which had been enfolded into the United kingdom of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel II. But which side of that instability was intended by the shadowy figures who had hired the stabbers — the pugnalatori?

- Charley was present at the meeting of the Clandestine Revolutionary Front (Maoist) in Torino in 1967. He was also present at the convention of the Nuovo ordine europeo in March, 1967, in Abbiategrasso, a convention of unrepentant fascists. Coincidentally, players in both the bombing in Milan and the bombing in Brescia (1974, 8 dead) were also present at the latter meeting.

- Possibly. Curiously. Curiously, after the Portuguese carnation revolution, one leftist party — a Maoist one — led attacks on the Portuguese communists and leftist parties. A bomb exploded at the Cuban embassy, killing two. One recalls the far right use of small Maoist parties in Switzerland and Italy. Possibly. Curiously. This Maoist party was well financed, through a lawyer who met with disaffected militaries after the Revolution, who were planning a coup. Connections, of course, to the American ambassador, Frank Carlucci — a Kissinger associate. Under Carter, second in command at the CIA. Under Reagan, Secretary of Defense, 1987–1989. We know more about what the Stasi was doing in the 70s and 80s than we know about what the CIA was doing in Europe. The lack of curiosity is funny. Archives in the U.S. have been selectively opened, if opened at all. Curiously, members of the Ordine Nuove party show up at anarchist meetings in the late sixties in Italy. They proclaim, loudly, that the government must be violently overthrown. Bombs go off in Rome. Possibly, something is going on? Curiously, journalist cards from L’etincelle turn up among the papers of many neo-fascists. Meetings are held in Greece — the Greece that saw a democratic government recently overturned by a military junta. The editor and head of the Parti Populaire Suisse gives an interview to one of the leading extreme-right magazines in Europe. A magazine with an anti-semitic agenda, exuding a nostalgia for the fallen Third Reich. Probably. Curiously, journalists from a leftist Swiss newspaper with a circulation of less than ten thousand turn up in Africa. In Brazzaville. In Angola. In Dar-es-Salaam. Financed and accredited by the Chinese government.

- Of Charley, the last trace seems to be his interview in 1976 with a French journalist. Vincenzo Vinciguerra, the perpetrator of the massacre of Peteano (3 carabinieri dead by car bomb) testified to the Piazza Fontana massacre inquiry conducted by Judge Guido Salvini in 1991 that Charley died in 1982. Where, when, how? The Salvini inquiry discusses, as well, a rumored connection between Charley and an unnamed “great fire” in Brussels in 1967. The most famous “great fire” in Brussels, May 22, 1967, was the burning down of the Innovation Department store. 251 deaths. Cause of fire unknown. Recent researchers claim gas accumulated in the space above the ceiling in the children’s department. Others have pointed out that a ‘Maoist’ Belgian group was picketing the store at this time, protesting against a display of American goods. And specifically clothes. And the children’s department had a display of American clothes. Coincidences between Maoist groups and stressful incidents — bombings, shootings — can be seen all through the decade after 1967. In October, 1967, Charley attended a “riunioni di un gruppo filo-cinese, denominato FRONTE RIVOLUZIONARIO CLANDESTINO” in Turin. He also kept his contacts in Nato, in the German BND, and the Portuguese PIDE, well apprised. Charley was seen with An alphabet soup, a poisoned broth. He kept to a busy schedule in that year.

- Charley was in, Charley was out, Charley is probably dead. We can imagine him getting the flight to Nairobi on an East African Airline from Rome in 1969. He’d made this trip before, visited African leftist leaders who thought they were talking to a committed Maoist, visited PIDE contacts, visited Jorge Jardim (the confident of Salazar, the mastermind of white power in Austral Africa) stayed in the big house outside of Beira. Did he go riding horses with Jardem’s beautiful blonde daughter? Did Jardim, amidst the thick smoke of cigars in the study, confide various dicta from his old friend, Salazar, now in his senescence? His ticket is bought, his expenses paid by L’etincelle, although of course the money is only going through that paper. Charley’s own money — ah, there’s a subject of biographical mystery! Did he keep his main account in the Banco Atlántico, favored by the Opus Dei and many eminent members of the anti-communist mafia, or did he have gold hidden in a Swiss bank, or was he an ambidextrous, even polydextrous horder of treasures in many banks, in tax free havens?

- Charley was in, he was out, he was connected. Draw the lines between the dots, make the distance between the dots degrees of separation. Count up the casualties weighing on each degree. Send in the FOIA request, get a response that the file is missing, or get a digital text so full of redacted passages it could be an art work. Look in the archives in Paris, in Munich. Those who were in the game, those who were in the know, they are dying out, dying in their country houses, dying in country, dying in the villes, hundreds of klicks away from any respectable airport. His boss at Aginter, Guerin-Serac, who taught his “adepts” the technique of wiring a book with plastique, was last seen in the late 90s in Spain. This was after, according to rumor, he had worked under contract for D’Aubusson in El Salvador, training death squads. There were the guys who, when the heat was on, fled to Chili, and ran out their string with Pinochet. There were the mercs who died in Katanga. Charley worked with them. Maybe Charley fingered them to this or that agency. Just so they could keep tabs.

- In 1969, Nixon signalled a policy change towards Africa. No more Kennedy-type coddling of the blacks. The alliance with white Africa — South Africa, Rhodesia, the Portuguese colonies — was drawn tighter.

- “The whites are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them. There is no hope for the blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence, which will only lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists.” NSSM study, 1969. Quoted in No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950–2000.

- Among the notes found in the Aginterpress archive, one was from Charley: « Intox [ … ] Simangocl Mond. Simango cl dos Santos. »

- Charley’s job was not to wire the bomb. Charley’s job was to wire the factional splits that would lead to the bomb. Charley’s job was to spread rumors about what was being discussed at the bar over the gin and tonics in the New Africa Hotel. It was to emphasize the air conditioning in M.’s bungalow in Oyster Bay, that cozy section of Dar-es-Salaam. It was to interview the honchos in FRELIMO and emphasize this or that slight, this or that ideological deviation. Play both sides, use the Maoist connection as credentials to talk to dissident FRELIMO players who suspected M.’s connection to the CIA, use the connection to P.I.D.E. to clear the channel so that the bomb could be made and delivered. Charley was out of Dar es Salaam by the time the bomb went off on 3 February 1969, in the home of M.’s friend, in M.’s hand. Charley was out of Italy when the Milan bomb went off in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura on December 12, 1969. Charley’s year of miracles.