Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [127]
In September 1974, police succeeded in arresting Curcio and Franceschini, who had been too trusting of an ex-priest called Silvano Girotto, a former Bolivian revolutionary they had enthusiastically admitted to their ranks. Nicknamed ‘Father Machine Gun’, Girotto was in fact the police spy who identified the whereabouts of Curcio and others. Curcio was imprisoned in a low-security establishment at Casale Monferato, where he ‘resembled a terrorist on sabbatical’, allowed to use the telephone at will and without supervision and to receive as many visitors as he cared to in cells that were not locked. Cagol continued the struggle alone, writing to her mother: ‘I am doing the right thing and History will show that I am right as it did for the Resistance in 1945 … there are no other means. This police state is based on the use of force and it can only be fought on the same level … I can manage in any situation and nothing scares me.’ In February 1975 Cagol arrived at the prison pretending to be an engineer from SIP, the state telephone company. Three male comrades with machine guns under their coats rushed in behind her. Another member of the team used a ladder to cut the telephone wire running along the perimeter wall. They called out, ‘Renato, where are you?’ and made off with the Red Brigades leader.
Lying low until May in flats bought with hard cash, the Brigades introduced a new tactical method when they burst into the offices of a prominent Christian Democrat lawyer, tied him up and then shot him in the leg, the first of many gambizzazioni or kneecappings. In June, after they had kidnapped Vallarino Gancia, a drinks-industry magnate, the police cornered the band on a remote farm near Acqui Terme. Cagol had bought it in March 1972 claiming she was a maths teacher from Padua married to an academic. They had recently lost a baby and she needed peace and quiet to recuperate. She had indeed suffered a miscarriage, but the rest of the cover story seems like the life she had left. Neighbours did not realise that when she asked them to cut the tall grass surrounding the farm, she was clearing a field of vision. Gunshots and a grenade flew around the farm as the Brigadists tried to flee, with a policeman losing an eye and an arm, and Mara Cagol her life when she was shot twice at close range. Curcio escaped. He was recaptured in Milan after a gun battle with the police in January 1976, although this proved a mixed blessing for the Italian authorities since his release became the object of future terrorist outrages. Cagol received a Church funeral, returning to the ways of the family she had not left.
II YEARS OF LEAD
These undoubted triumphs for the forces of law and order encouraged many premature obituaries of the Red Brigades. In fact, they had set in place organisational structures that enabled them to wage a sustained terror campaign against the imminent threat, in their febrile imaginations, of gollista (an authoritarian reconstruction of the constitution as had occurred in France under de Gaulle) and golpista (a full-blown military coup). There was a central Direzione Strategica, consisting of ten to fifteen people, which met biannually or whenever requested by one of the five major regional columns in Rome, Genoa, Milan, the Veneto and Turin. These were co-ordinated by a Comitato Esecutivo. Each column consisted of several brigades which could co-operate laterally as fronts such as the ‘prison front’ or the ‘counter-revolutionary front’. Each single brigade consisted of a cellular nucleus of regulars, who lived underground and drew a modest salary of about two hundred thousand lire a month, surrounded by a larger penumbra of irregulars who operated above in the sunlight pursuing conventional careers. For