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By Root 934 0

The victim found himself in the grotesque position of having to prove that he was compos mentis when he wrote his subsequent prison letters. The opposition Communists, and Berlinguer in particular, took the hardest line against negotiations. Doves, led by Socialist Bettino Craxi, urged covert talks, a view urgently endorsed by the extra-parliamentary left who belatedly realised where their rhetorical flirtations with the Red Brigades had led them. The sinister professor Negri held seminars where he and his comrades pontificated about whether the distinguished statesman should be released or killed. Craxi opened up a back channel to the Red Brigades through Giannino Guiso, a Socialist acting as defence lawyer to Curcio and other Red Brigades defendants. From him Craxi learned that, unlike the case of Sossi, Moro would be killed if the government failed to release terrorist prisoners. The Social Democrat president of the Italian Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, weighed in by reminding his colleagues that ‘no democratic form of power could exist outside the sense of humanity and pity’.

That hawks and doves were not neatly distributed along party lines only increased the pressure on the government. The former resistance fighter and leading socialist Sandro Pertini was a hardliner, as was the widow of one of Moro’s bodyguards, who threatened to incinerate herself if Andreotti negotiated with terrorists. Even as it kneecapped an industrialist and a union leader, the Red Brigades issued communiques claiming that ‘The state of the multinationals has revealed its true face, without the grotesque mask of formal democracy; it is that of the armed imperialist counter-revolution, of the terrorism of mercenaries in uniform, of the political genocide of communist forces.’ That sentence alone indicates how much they inhabited a world of dangerous delusions. Acting under the suasion of higher historic logic, the Red Brigades were now ‘compelled’ to conclude this chapter in their ‘valiant struggle’ by putting an end to their hostage’s life.

Moro, who had stopped shaving and was refusing solid foods, was allowed to write a final letter, and was then repeatedly shot by Moretti and Gallinari on the morning of 9 May after being told to ready himself for a journey in the trunk of the car. In a bold gesture, the Red Brigades left his corpse in the car symbolically parked midway between the Christian Democrat and Communist headquarters. At noon the following day a telephone call revealed his whereabouts; Christian Democrat notables arrived to ponder the last fifty-four days and the body awkwardly slumped in the car. Renato Curcio triumphantly shouted from the dock: ‘the act of revolutionary justice administered to Aldo Moro was the highest act of humanity possible in this class society’ before he was led away. In line with her late husband’s wishes, Eleanore Moro insisted that he be buried in a small parish church at Torrita Tiburina, with no music and little fuss, and no politicians present. No family members attended the memorial service conducted by the ailing pope, who himself died that August.

While the government contemplated its next steps, the Red Brigades sent a team to shoot Antonio Esposito, a thirty-six-year-old anti-terrorist officer, as he journeyed on a bus to work. In October, they killed Italy’s director of penal affairs, followed by the country’s leading expert on academic penal anthropology. In January 1979 they killed Guido Rossa, a charismatic Communist union official, for allegedly denouncing a workmate who had handed out Red Brigades literature in his plant. Shortly afterwards, sixteen thousand workers at the Italsider steel works demonstrated against ‘Fascist/Brigadists’, and half a million people attended Rossa’s funeral in Genoa. Oblivious to such scenes, Prima Linea gunmen murdered a leading left-wing lawyer who had investigated Right - as well as left-wing terrorism. When a heroic jeweller shot two Brigadists as they held up a pizza restaurant he was patronising, gunmen from the Proletari Armati per il Comunismo turned