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By Root 1054 0

a series of telephone calls, one of which directed the authorities to a subway tunnel where they found a recent picture of the politician awkwardly posed before the group’s five-star banner. A communique explained that he was being held in ‘a people’s prison’ pending trial as the leading theorist of the Christian Democrat regime and the key agent of the nefarious multinationals, although some of his captors would subsequently report that the former prime minister had genially confounded the rubbish they spouted regarding how power in Italy ‘really’ functioned. From his cage in the Turin courtroom, Curcio announced that Moro was ‘in the hands of the proletariat’ and on trial. Using the tactic they had pioneered with the kidnapped judge Sossi, Moro’s captors encouraged him to communicate with his family and political colleagues thereby using the former to put psychological pressure on the latter. Eventually, in despair the family would pursue an independent strategy to release their paterfamilias. The kidnappers engaged him in prolonged discussions, in order to influence what he wrote, assuming, of course, that they didn’t simply hold a gun to his head. Moro complied, and wrote several letters, no doubt partly in the hope that the police would eventually trail one of the couriers. His letters were then edited by the kidnappers. His letters to interior minister, and future president, Francesco Cossiga warned that he was not solely responsible for decisions that had been collective, and urged the Party to involve the Vatican in negotiations to free thirteen Red Brigades prisoners.

Egged on by the US, and going against the wishes of pope Paul VI, Andreotti’s government refused to negotiate with the kidnapper-murderers, while the police engaged in a massive hunt for the victim’s whereabouts. The physical evidence was mishandled, while the police invited ridicule by bringing in mediums and spiritualists, although ironically a raid on a remote village called Gradoli near Lake Bolsena, recommended during a seance, might have turned up trumps at Rome’s Via Gradoli, where indeed there was a Red Brigades hideout. Christian Democrat politicians put out feelers to their Mafia friends, who contacted imprisoned Red Brigades terrorists to spare Moro’s life. Moro’s wife and daughter, encouraged by Moro himself, endeavoured to make the government change its inflexible line. This was made infinitely harder by the fact that the Red Brigades stepped up their campaign of shootings of industrialists and prison guards, in addition to the five bodyguards they had already cold-bloodedly murdered in the Via Fani, whose own relatives were implacably opposed to negotiations. They released a communique giving the government forty-eight hours to commence negotiating prisoner releases. A list of thirteen names, including Curcio’s, followed. These people had been convicted of eight murders, and included men serving three life sentences, and others doing a total of 172 years.17 Meanwhile, Moro wrote his increasingly desperate letters, twenty-nine in all, claiming that he was being offered up as a sacrificial figure, and insisting that he did not want any politicians at what he imagined would soon be his funeral. While the pope and UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim made impassioned interventions to secure Moro’s release, the government divided into hawks and doves, just as the Red Brigades hoped it would, and just as they themselves were also divided between the militarist Moretti and Faranda who wanted Moro released alive. In reality, these positions were always susceptible to agonies and doubt, no matter how resolved anyone may have been in advance.

The government hawks claimed that Moro was either drugged or had gone out of his mind, and that there should be no negotiations. To give in would invite further abductions. This line was picked up by many newspapers, which proclaimed that ‘Moro isn’t Moro.’ Newspaper editors also pondered whether they would publish any shocking revelations Moro might have made about Italian politics. Half said they would.