seems rather unlikely that the firms would engage so extravagantly in this unusual sideline with complete spontaneity.8

Much of the money given by the CIA to Italian political parties since World War II, said a former high-level US official, ended up in villas, in vacation homes and in Swiss bank accounts for the politicians themselves. 9

A more direct American intervention into the 1976 elections was in the form of propaganda. Inasmuch as political advertising is not allowed on Italian television, the US Ambassador to Switzerland, Nathaniel Davis, arranged for the purchase of large blocks of time on Monte Carlo TV to present a daily news commentary by the editorial staff of the Milan newspaper Il Giornale Nuovo, which was closely associated with the CIA. It was this newspaper that, in May 1981, set in motion chat particular piece of international disinformation known as The KGB Plot to Kill the Pope .

Another Italian newspaper, the Daily American of Rome, for decades the countrys leading English-language paper, was for a long period in the 1950s to the 70s partly owned and/or managed by the CIA. We had at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at auy given time, the CIA admitted in 1977, referring to papers owned outright or heavily subsidized, or infiltrated sufficiently to have stories printed which were useful to the Agency or suppress those it found detrimental.10

Ambassador Davis also arranged for news items which had been placed in various newspapers by the Agency to be read on Monte Carlo TV and Swiss TV, both of which were received in Italy. The programs were produced in Milan by Franklin J. Tonnini of the US Diplomatic Corps, and Michael Ledeen, a reporter with Giornale Nuovo.11 (Ledeen, an American, was later a consultant to the Reagan administration and a senior fellow at the conservative think-tank of Georgetown University in Washington, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.)

The relentless fight against the Italian Communist Party took some novel twists. One, in the 1950s, was the brainchild of American Ambassador Clare Booth Luce. The celebrated Ms. Luce (playwright and wife of Time magazine publisher Henry Luce) decided to make it known that no US Department of Defense procurement contracts would be awarded to Italian firms whose employees had voted to be represented by the Communist-controlled labor union. In the case of Fiat, this had dramatic results: The Communist unions share of the vote promptly fell from 60 to 38 percent.12

Then there was the case of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, another beneficiary of CIA largesse. The payments made to him reveal something of the Agencys mechanistic thinking about why people become radicals. It seems that the good Cardinal was promoting orphanages in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s and, says Victor Marchetti, The thinking was that if such institutions were adequately supported, many young people would be able to live well there and so would not one day fall into Communist hands. 13 The Cardinal, as a Monsignor, had been involved with the Vaticans operation to smuggle Nazis to freedom after World War II. He had a long history of association with Western governments and their intelligence agencies. In 1963, he became Pope Paul VI.14

In a 1974 interview, Marchetti also spoke of the training provided by the Agency to the Italian security services:

They are trained, for example, to confront disorders and student demonstrations, to prepare dossiers, to make the best possible use of bank data and tax returns of individual citizens, etc. In other words, to watch over the population of their country with the means offered by technology. This is what I call techno-fascism.15

William Colby, later Director of the CIA, arrived in Italy in 1953 as station chief and devoted the next five years of his life to financing and advising center/right organizations for the express purpose of inducing the Italian people to turn away from the leftist bloc, particularly the Communist Party, and keep it from taking power in the 1958 elections. In his account of that period he justifies this program on the grounds of supporting democracy or center democracy and preventing Italy from becoming a Soviet satellite. Colby perceived all virtue and truth to be bunched closely around the center of the political spectrum, and the Italian Communist Party to be an extremist organization committed to abolishing democracy and creating a society modeled after the (worst?) excesses of Stalinist Russia. He offers no evidence to support his conclusion about the Communists, presumably because he regards it as self-evident, as much to the reader as to himself. Neither, for that matter, does he explain what was this thing called democracy which he so cherishes and which the Communists were so eager to do away with.16

Colby comes across as a technocrat who carried out the orders of his side and mouthed the party line without serious examination. When Oriana Fallaci, the Italian jout-nalist, interviewed him in 1976, she remarked at the close of a frustrating conversation, Had you been born on the other side of the barricade, you would have been a perfect Stalinist. To which, Colby replied- I reject that statement. But ... well ... it might be. No, no. It might not. 1

American policy makers dealing with Italy in the decades subsequent to Colbys time there did not suffer any less than he from hardening of the categories. Colby, after all, took pains to point out his liberal leanings. These were men unable to view the Italian Communist Party in its indigenous political context, but only as a national security threat to the United States and NATO. Yet, all those years, the party was proceeding along a path revisionist enough to make Lenin turn in his grave if he were in one. The path was marked by billboards proclaiming the democratic advance to socialism and the national road to socialism , the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The party pushed its national role as responsible opposition, participated in the drive for productivity , affirmed its support for a multiparty system and for Italy remaining in the Common Market and in NATO, and was second to none in its condemnation of any form of terrorism. On many occasions, it was the principal political force in city governments including Rome, Florence and Venice, without any noticeable return to barbarism, and was a de facto participant in the running of the Italian state. (The Socialist Party, a prime target of the United States in the 1948 elections, was a formal member of the government for much of the 1960s to the 1990s.)

In the files of the State Department and the CIA lie any number of internal reports prepared by anonymous analysts testifying to the reality of the Communist Partys historic compromise and the evolution of its estrangement from the Soviet Union known as Eurocommunism.

In the face of this, however-in the face of everything-American policy remained rooted in place, fixed in a time that was no longer, and probably never was; a policy that had nothing to do with democracy (by whatever definition) and everything to do with the conviction that a Communist government in Italy would not have been the supremely pliant cold-war partner that successive Christian Democrat regimes were for decades. It would not have been enough for such a government to be independent of Moscow. The problem with a Communist government was that it would probably have tried to adopt the same position towards Washington.

19. Vietnam 1950-1973

The hearts and minds circus

Contrary to repeated statements by Washington officials during the 1960s that the United States did not intervene in Vietnam until, and only because, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam , the US was deeply and continually involved in that woeful (and from the year 1950 onwards.

The initial, fateful step was the decision to make large-scale shipments of military equipment (tanks, transport planes, etc.) to the French in Vietnam in the spring and summer of 1950. In April, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had told French officials that the United States government was set against France negotiating with their Northern-based Vietnamese foes, the Vietminh1 (also spelled Viet Minh or Viet-Minh: the name was short for League for the Independence of Vietnam, a broadly-based nationalist movement led by Communists). Washington was not particularly sympathetic to Frances endeavor to regain control of its colony of 100 years and had vacillated on the issue, but the rise to power of the Communists in China the previous autumn had tipped the scale in favor of supporting the French. To the Truman administration, the prospect of another Communist government in Asia was intolerable. There was a secondary consideration as well at the time: the need to persuade a reluctant France to support American plans to include Germany in West European defense organizations.

During World War II, the Japanese had displaced the French. Upon the defeat of Japan, the Vietminh took power in the North, while the British occupied the South, but soon turned it back to the French. Said French General Jean Leclerc in September 1945: I didnt come back to Indochina to give Indochina back to the Indochinese. 2 Subsequently, the French emphasized that they were fighting for the free world against communism, a claim made in no small part to persuade the United States to increase its aid to them.

American bombers, military advisers and technicians by the hundreds were to follow the first aid shipments, and over the next few years direct American military aid to the French war effort ran to about a billion dollars a year. By 1954, the authorized aid had reached the sum of $1.4 billion and constituted 78 percent of the French budget for the war.3

The extensive written history of the American role in Indochina produced by the Defense Department, later to be known as The Pentagon Papers , concluded that the decision to provide aid to France directly involved the United States in Vietnam and set the course for future American policy.4

There had been another path open. In 1945 and 1946, Vietminh leader Ho Chi Minh had written at least eight letters to President Truman and the State Department asking for Americas help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that the four powers (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.5 (This was a remarkable repeat of history. In 1919, following the First World War, Ho Chi Minh had appealed to US Secretary of State Robert Lansing for Americas help in achieving basic civil liberties and an improvement in the living conditions for the colonial subjects of French Indochina. This plea, too, was ignored.)6