Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [126]
Rhetorical violence in the group’s review, notably ‘for every eye, two eyes; for every tooth, an entire face’, was initially accompanied by planting red flags on factory roofs and expelling the management and foremen, followed by burning cars belonging to managers and industrialists. There was something goliardic about these activities. Kidnapping came next. On 3 March 1972 they abducted for all of twenty minutes Idalgo Macchiarini of Sit-Siemens, caricatured as ‘a neo-Fascist in a white shirt’, releasing him with a sign around his neck which read ‘Strike one to educate a hundred’. At that point, the ranks of the Red Brigades were augmented by the leaderless remnants of Feltrinelli’s Partisan Action Groups. They carried out a few robberies, while burning the cars of nine Fiat executives at a time when they were negotiating with striking metal workers. In February 1972 they kidnapped Bruno Labiate, the provincial secretary of a right-wing union, leaving him four hours later shaven-headed and bound to the gates of Fiat Montefiori. In the spring Cagol and her husband unexpectedly joined her parents who were on vacation in an almost deserted Rimini. Curcio and her father discussed the irrevocable choice the couple had made to engage in armed activities. That summer a separate Red Brigades column was established in Turin. In December they abducted and detained Fiat executive Ettore Amerio for eight days.
If these actions could be interpreted as strategic interventions on behalf of militant workers, the kidnapping of a Genoese judge, Mario Sossi, who was held captive for over a month in the spring of 1974, was a direct challenge to the state at a time when passions were already high over a referendum on divorce. Inadvertently giving the lie to the notion that the Italian Establishment was capable of a coherent conspiracy to do anything, the Red Brigades immediately and successfully opened a rift between the police, four thousand of whom searched for Sossi, and the magistracy who wanted to call off the hunt so as to do a discreet deal regarding the prisoners whose release the Red Brigades had demanded.
Not for the last time, the Red Brigades exploited the psychological distress of the victim to sow dissension in government. Between bouts of blubbering like a baby, Sossi issued angry denunciations of a state that had failed to protect him, warning that he would take the attorney-general Coco down with him as co-responsible for the crimes the Red Brigades accused him of. The attorney-general then flouted agreed government policy by offering to exchange eight prisoners for Sossi, and broke his own word when he then failed to keep his side of the bargain after Sossi had been released. Sossi himself was put out by the attorney-general’s insinuation that he had gone insane during his captivity. There was some truth in the Red Brigades’ limpid observation that ‘during these thirty-five days the contradictions of the various state organs have been manifested’. Italy being what it is, many leftists either sympathised with what the Red Brigades were doing or imagined that they were some artful mirage acting on behalf of more sinister right-wing forces.
While the Red Brigades were keen to claim credit for their actions, terrorists of the extreme right preferred to envelop their carnage in an air of mystery since they acknowledged responsibility for only a few of the terrorist attacks attributed to them. Unlike the left, they preferred indiscriminate bombing, eschewing kidnapping entirely, in their bid to create maximum public insecurity. It is very likely that they received assistance from elements in the Italian security services; moreover, the judiciary did not hasten to investigate their crimes. On 28 May 1974 a powerful bomb exploded in a refuse bin amid a crowd of 2,500