“LA tua compagna e morta” — your comrade is dead — said Fabio in wind-up mode. Fabio’s vinoteca doubles as a coffee shop until noon and is conveniently situated on the route of my morning passeggiata.

“Quale compagno?” I asked. “Barbara Balzerani,” he said knowing it would get a rise from me.

The novelist Barbara Balzerani died last week, March 4. In her younger years, she was head of the Rome column of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) and was in the team that, on March 16 1978, along with her then-partner Mario Morretti, kidnapped the Christian Democrat president Aldo Moro, killing five police and carabinieri bodyguards in the process.
 
The Moro affair is, to this day, the subject of much speculation as to the motives of the main actors, the shadowy forces behind each of the protagonists and the role of foreign and domestic intelligence services.

In dispute are the actions of the Italian deep state and the role of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the events which led to Moro’s execution by Moretti and his body being dumped symbolically in via Caetani, supposedly midway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the PCI.
 
“Everyone in Italy understands that the Americans were behind this,” Fabio said.
 
Balzerani joined the Red Brigades in 1975 from the fringes of the Italian ultra left in a now-defunct group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) whose theoretical inspiration was Antonio Negri.
 
The foundation of this ideological tendency — which popped up across a range of leftist organisations — lay in a mechanical conception of the role of the worker in a capitalist factory organisation in Italy at that historical moment.
 
One side of this rested on a dehumanised, decultured and alienated conception of the factory worker that alternated with a notion that the particularly exploitative conditions of the modern Fordist factory would be the basis of a spontaneous movement of worker resistance.
 
Negri later theorised this in terms which appealed to a Catholic sensibility as “the Italian Solidarnosc, an instrument against the alleged hegemony of the communists on the workers’ movement.”
 
Not surprisingly this approach was not welcomed by the Italian communists or the main trade union federation, the CGIL, closely associated with the party.
 
Apart from trade union activists in the better-organised workplaces who had little tolerance for the ultra left, an element of the party and trade union leadership were moving in a different direction identified with the then newly minted concept of “Eurocommunism.”
 
The PCI — based on its heroic partisan record and strong post-war implantation in a working class that was being reshaped by internal migration and extensive capital investment — was a vast social movement locked out of central government but with strong positions in regional, provincial and local government and of course, in the trade union movement.
 
It contested a Christian Democracy constituted as the governing authority closely integrated with the church, banks, big business and the state apparatus, with extensive regional links with organised crime and Italy’s vast machinery of coercion — the polizia nazionale, Carabinieri and an alphabet soup of intelligence organisations each connected to different ministries: the army, navy, airforce and law enforcement bodies.
 
The strong catholic social orientation of parts of Christian Democracy gave it a heterogeneous mass base, while the top echelons were closely integrated with the deep state, organised crime and the US intelligence and military.
 
Despite the post-war republican constitution, fascism was never rooted out of Italian politics and continued both as a parliamentary force and a murky network of armed nuclei, violent street squads and secret networks integrated with sectors of capital and the state apparatus.
 
A substantial tendency in the PCI posited a “historic compromise” with the social sectors linked to Christian Democracy as a mechanism to break out of its isolation from governing power.
 
The most influential figure in the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer, advocated a “terzo via” which can be distinguished from the “third way” of right-wing social democracy of the Blairite kind, but nevertheless entailed the party exercising pressure to limit wage militancy during Italy’s chronic bouts of inflation but most importantly rested on a political accommodation with the governing Christian Democracy.
 
As well as the US Britain actively interfered in domestic Italian politics as revealed by a 2008 la Repubblica expose of Foreign Office discussions, in 1976, of “a clean surgical coup” to remove the PCI from power.
 
The British ambassador Guy Millard reported:“[Berlinguer’s] entry into government would create a serious problem for Nato and the European Community and could turn out to be an event with catastrophic consequences.”
 
It was the PCI triumph in the 1976 general election when it won 34 per cent that convinced Moro of the necessity of denaturing the PCI as an oppositional force.
 
This “compromesso storico” was cast as a national reconciliation designed to break the institutional log jam but necessarily entailed a subordination of some immediate working-class interests to goals which were presented as national and democratic.
 
Berlinguer, a man of personal integrity, who to this day is regarded by sectors in the Partito Democratico as representative of its continuity with the PCI, still features in PD propaganda.
 
He died while speaking at a mass 1984 rally in Padua and his funeral, followed by a million people, led to the highest-ever communist vote in Italian politics.
 
But before this, by 1980, the PCI was progressively excluded from the governing consensus amid declining electoral support that had among its origins a growing rift with young workers and students, sharp disagreements among party members and the growth of competing ideological tendencies associated with influential leaders.
 
A large and confusing ultra left had become a more active factor in working-class and national politics with a strong tendency to make the PCI and the trade union federation under its influence an object of its attacks including physical violence against party and CGIL militants.
 
This, and the compromises on economic questions — which made little sense to workers suffering the deepening economic problems faced by most advanced capitalist economies in the late 1970s — and sharpening divisions in the world communist movement, resulted in a loss of momentum.
 
Moro proved less than straightforward with the PCI, and the government, from which the PCI kept some distance, became increasingly composed of right-wing Christian Democrats brought in by Moro to maintain party unity while the Socialist Party was led by the corrupt Craxi who eventually made the decisive break with the PCI.
 
In as far as he was keen to bring the PCI into the governing consensus, Moro was opposed by the most right-wing, criminally corrupt elements most tied to the security state and Nato.

The US intelligence and military were closely involved with Gladio a secret Nato-wide formation of security, intelligence and military elements nominally constituted to fight the communists in the event of a Red Army advance in Europe, but in practice a focus for subversion, assassination and disruption of the working-class movement in close collaboration with far-right and criminal groups.
 
Moro’s kidnapping and execution activated all these tendencies to produce a crisis. He was travelling from his home to parliament in preparation for a vote of confidence in a new government that had the support if not the participation of the PCI.
 
In protest, a general strike took place, and the law enforcement apparatus went into overdrive with house searches and roadblocks. Millions joined demonstrations, the pope even offered to substitute himself for Moro.
 
In a demonstration of its marginalisation, the Red Brigades abandoned any practical notion of “armed propaganda,” and rather than demanding material changes of benefit to the workers, merely bid for the release of their imprisoned members.
 
In his perceptive essay, The Moro Affair writer Leonardo Sciascia contrasted the failure of the security apparatus to analyse Moro’s series of 86 letters from captivity and instead focused on the communiques of the Brigate Rosse. These he described as “miserably petrified, made of slogans, revolutionary cliches and gleanings from sociological and guerilla textbooks.”
 
In the state apparatus and the government, those elements who wanted to negotiate with the kidnappers were opposed by the supporters of “linea della fermezza” — this “line of firmness” was supported by the PCI, while Craxi, as ever the opportunist, played games.
 
In the mass of contradictory accounts, conspiracy theories and incompatible confessions, a certain consensus has emerged, supported by a letter written by the imprisoned Moro, that Cossiga, the interior minister who later admitted his role in setting up Gladio, was complicit.
 
A year after Moro’s killing the journalist Carmine Pecorelli — who traded on his contacts with the secret state and wrote about Gladio — was shot dead, it seems by far-right elements connected to the deep state and the notorious masonic lodge Propaganda Due.
 
Former prime minister Giulio Andreotti was found not guilty of complicity in the murder, the verdict was appealed he was convicted and then exonerated on appeal.
 
Highly recommended is Channel Four’s Walter Presents crime series Exterior Night, a six-parter that looks at the role of each of the major protagonists.
 
But speculation continues. In as far as his account can be trusted, the US State Department figure at the centre of events, one Steve Pieczenik, Henry Kissinger’s deputy assistant secretary of state, can have the last word: “I soon understood the true intentions of the actors in the game: the [Italian] right wanted the death of Moro, the Red Brigades wanted him alive, while the Communist Party, due to its hardline political position, was not going to negotiate. Francesco Cossiga, from his side, wanted him alive and well, but numerous forces in the country had radically different programmes …

“We had to pay attention to both the left and the right: it was necessary to avoid that the communists entered the government and, at the same time, suppress any harmful capability of the reactionary and anti-democratic right forces.

“At the same time, it was desirable that Moro’s family did not start a parallel negotiation, averting the risk that he could be released too soon. But I recognised that, pushing my strategy to its extreme consequences, I perhaps would have to sacrifice the hostage for the stability of Italy.”

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.