Italy Bracing for New Wave of Terrorism : Attacks, Holdups Point to a Revived Red Brigades

ROME — The murder of a leading air force general last week and a rash of armed robberies, two of them smoothly executed heists worth more than $5 million in all, have led Italian authorities to brace for a new and well-financed wave of terrorism by the long dormant Red Brigades.

Gen. Licio Giorgieri, Italy’s top military aerospace officer, was assassinated by two gunmen on a motorbike Friday night as he was being driven to his suburban Rome home. Responsibility for the killing was almost immediately claimed by a faction of the Red Brigades.

Authorities suspect that the radical leftist terrorists have revived themselves and reorganized in small, tightly disciplined groups that may be even more ruthless than their terrorist comrades in their heyday a decade ago.

May Fit Murder Pattern

The group also may have forged close ties with other European and perhaps Middle East terrorist groups, law enforcement officials say. There was speculation that the Giorgieri killing may fit into a pattern of murders by French and German terrorist groups of top defense and arms manufacturing officials last year.

Whatever the result of an urgent police investigation of the Giorgieri assassination, the sudden surge in terrorist incidents this year has aroused widespread fear that the country may again be pushed into repeated terrorist attacks that most Italians believed had been quelled five years ago.

During the worst days of domestic Italian terrorism, from 1969 to 1982, there were 14,255 terrorist attacks, more than three-quarters of them carried out by the Red Brigades. So far, 415 victims of domestic terrorism have died, at least 147 of them killed by members of the extreme left-wing band.

Public Complacency

But after the dramatic rescue of U.S. Army Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier from Red Brigades kidnapers in January, 1982, and the successful arrests and prosecution of hundreds of brigatisti in the years that followed, the terrorist band appeared to be mortally wounded. Police said only about 200 members remained at large, some of them in French and British hide-outs and the rest living underground in Italy.

The survivors added to the air of public complacency when they made a few inept attempts to refinance themselves by armed robbery, one against a Brink’s truck in which an attacker died, and another against a bank. It was widely agreed that after 1982, the terrorist band had lost its touch.

Recently, however, the Red Brigades appear to have returned with a vengeance and a renewed capacity for pulling off almost flawlessly organized commando-style attacks.

In an editorial before the Giorgieri killing, the respected Rome daily, Il Messaggero, took note of a recent sharp increase in both armed robberies and in the theft of nondescript, mid-priced cars and automobile license plates as ominous symptoms of more trouble to come.

Well-Planned Heist

“In the past, these were a phenomenon that occurred before (Red Brigades) terrorist attacks,” the newspaper said. It also noted that the incidents appear to be even more ruthless than terrorist acts in the past.

Last month, on St. Valentine’s Day, an extraordinarily well-coordinated armed band hijacked a postal van, gunned down two police escort officers and made off with more than 1.2 billion lira ($902,000).

Unlike the botched robbery attempts of a few years ago, the heist was meticulously planned and carried out with split-second timing. As the van moved during morning rush-hour through the residential Monteverde section of Rome, its path was abruptly blocked by a suddenly stalled car, forcing it to brake so quickly that its escorting police car smashed into it from behind. Within moments, five machine gun-wielding terrorists who had been waiting in ambush opened fire and killed the two escort officers in the police car.

Wore Disguises

As a woman terrorist opened the doors of the van, two ordinary cars, one of them equipped with a police siren, pulled alongside. Quickly the gang shifted bags of money from the van to the two cars, then raced away with the siren blaring to nearby San Camillo hospital where police found the escape cars four hours later. Inside were green paramedic suits that the gang had used for disguise, ski masks that all but two had used to cover their faces, surgeons’ gloves and an unused hand grenade.

The cars, like all that the police have traced to the Red Brigades past and present, were stolen and bore stolen license plates.

Police remain uncertain whether there were nine or 10 members of the attack group, but positively identified one of them as old-line Red Brigades member Gaetano Scarfo, according to Chief Francesco Sirleo, of the Rome anti-terrorist squad.

Within 90 minutes of the attack, the Red Brigades claimed responsibility for it in a telephone call to a newspaper office in Bologna. Three days later, in a courtroom where three old Red Brigades members were on trial, the defendants attempted to read a pamphlet again claiming responsibility for the incident. That same day, a similar pamphlet was received in the mail by another newspaper.

‘Not an Isolated Action’

The document and phone call suggested links between the new Brigades and international terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East, and boasted that the postal van robbers had taken care not to harm civilians. However, one woman in a nearby house had been wounded when one of the terrorists fired a machine-gun burst at the buildings overlooking the crime.

Last week, hundreds of similar Red Brigades documents were found at the entrances to several Rome factories, asserting that “this is not an isolated action but an offensive which connects to other actions of European combatant organizations for a united international front against NATO imperialism and imperialism of the United States.”

Early this month, another gang, still not clearly identified but also suspected to be Brigades terrorists, pulled off a six-billion-lira ($4,614,000) robbery in Salerno.

“The Salerno robbery was by no means the first to cause concern among the anti-terrorist forces who have been observing this phenomenon with growing alarm,” the Turin newspaper La Stampa commented.

Jump in Robberies

The newspaper reported that robberies in Italy were up 41.4% in the first two months of this year and that armed robberies last year jumped by 66% over the year before, arousing strong suspicions that at least some of them were carried out by terrorists to pay for future activities.

As a follow-up, the Ministry of Interior asked Rome Police Chief Vincenzo Parisi to have all recent armed robbery cases re-examined for possible links to the Red Brigades. Parisi is a former head of SISDE, the military wing of the Italian secret service, and an expert on Middle East terrorism. He is one of a handful of specialists recently reassigned to senior anti-terrorist posts to bolster Italian defenses against both domestic and international terrorism. Other reassigned senior specialists are Umberto Improta, who masterminded the rescue of Gen. Dozier, and Ansoino Andreassi, a former chief of Interpol.

A number of veteran Italian magistrates who have spent much of the last two decades prosecuting domestic and international terrorists have said that they take the possibility of renewed activity by the Red Brigades very seriously.

More Victims Feared

“They said too soon that the state of emergency was over,” said Genoese magistrate Luigi Carli, who prosecuted the hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro last year after previously handling all of Genoa’s Red Brigades investigations. “They put a tombstone on terrorism too soon. Certainly the Red Brigades have reorganized themselves.”

Carli said he doubts that the revivified Brigades will succeed in their goal of sparking political turmoil through terrorism because public sympathy for left-wing violence, such as it was, has virtually disappeared since the 1970s.

“But assuredly they are dangerous on an activist level,” he said. “Leaving aside ideology and political theory, all that’s left is pure terrorism. I fear that we will have to account for more victims.”

Rome Judge Domenico Sica, another veteran in the fight against terrorism, pointed to the pamphlets that followed the bloody postal van robbery as evidence that the new Red Brigades were carefully organized.

‘Has to Be Taken Seriously’

“They are certainly dangerous,” he said. “If an organization succeeds in overcoming a series of crises such as those they have gone through in the last few years, it has to be taken seriously.”

Judge Sica also said he believes people had too quickly concluded that Italy’s time of domestic terrorism was over.

“Terrorism doesn’t move with our times,” he said. “A terrorist said it to me recently in jail. For us, six months of inactivity might be important. For them, it isn’t. Their measure of time is ideological.”

How many still-active Red Brigades terrorists are at large is not known, but Rome anti-terrorist police chief Sirleo said there may be 40 to 50 in Rome and about 200 nationwide.

International Contacts

“The Red Brigades still have working structures,” said Judge Rosario Priore, another veteran prosecutor of domestic and Middle East terrorists. “Apart from the 10 involved in the Valentine’s Day robbery, we judge there are about 40 to 50 others.”

He also expressed alarm over the Red Brigades’ international contacts, noting that “there are scores of Italian terrorists, both right and left wing, who live in France and England, (and) Italy has not been able to extradite any of them.”

“The document they issued after the last robbery talked of making a united front with various Middle East movements,” Priore added. “If this were to happen, it would cause a very serious threat.”

Another prosecutor of terrorists, Judge Giancarlo Caselli, said that one of the most worrisome aspects of the resurgence of the Brigades is that they appear even more prone to senseless violence than their predecessors.

‘Strong Dose of Criminality’

“The first difference is their ferocity, even if it is difficult to make up a scale of intolerance in terrorist actions. The Red Brigades always carried out robberies, but they theorized that they couldn’t always claim responsibility because the proletariat was not yet mature enough to understand that guerrilla fighters needed to finance themselves. They had to do the robberies but not talk about them.

“Today the principles obviously have changed inside the organization. Terrorist actions have always been accompanied by a strong dose of criminality, which now seems to have become almost exclusive. Rob and kill to demonstrate your own existence.”

Even a former terrorist who was one of the founders of the Red Brigades finds the heartlessness of the new terrorists to be beyond his understanding. Recently freed after disowning terrorism after 12 years in prison, Alberto Franceschini, one of the founders of the Red Brigades, told the popular magazine Panorama that he was appalled to learn of the murders of two police officers by the postal van robbers.

“I was struck by the ferocity in their lucid choice to kill for money,” he said. “This shows only cynicism and calculation. It’s a very modern type of terrorism, American-style and extremely inhuman.”