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By Root 1042 0

’s’ anonymity. After killing someone, Peci felt tense with an internal unease, which he later thought was ‘sorrow for the end of a life’. By 1979 he was exhausted and disillusioned with an organisation that had failed to increase its support in the factories. He collapsed almost immediately after he fell into the hands of the state; the police did not treat him as the big shot he imagined himself to be, a strategy which may have led him to confess so as to reassert his own importance. Kept in isolation he was free to contemplate the prospect of a lifetime behind bars, where the main obsessions, apart from cooking - Italian prisons had no communal mess - were acquiring cosmetics and hair dye to disguise the ageing process and trying to avoid getting knifed in a Mafia gang fight. The future consisted of watching oneself grow pallid, thin, bald, grey-haired, sick and old. He trusted general Dalla Chiesa, and began to like the policemen and judges he dealt with more than his erstwhile comrades. Pressure to turn was intense. The sentence for illegal possession of a firearm alone was three years and four months in jail; he had committed eight murders. Then he heard that Alberto Franceschini had rejoiced at Peci’s arrest as it would spur others to release him. He was already a derisory ‘object’ to the police; now apparently he was just a functional object for a senior comrade.

Having deromanticised himself, Peci took a long hard look at the organisation he belonged to. The Red Brigades had no popular support. Their actions were diminishing the space available to legitimate protest by filling the public sphere with paranoia. And finally what they called the armed struggle was harming working-class interests: ‘All in all, we were beaten, militarily and politically.’ Further rationalisations followed. Like the medieval crusaders who regarded killing in this light, he claimed that his betrayals were acts of love, for former comrades whose errant ways he had prematurely halted. Betrayal was also a form of recompense towards his own victims and a form of personal redemption.21 One of Peci’s first revelations was the location of a hideout in Genoa. When the carabinieri stormed this in force, five Red Brigades terrorists decided to make a stand; all five were killed by withering police fire. Two policemen were indicted (and acquitted) for summarily shooting two of them. In his two hundred hours of taped confessions, Peci - quickly dubbed ‘the infamous one’ or ‘that bastard’ by his former comrades - revealed the whereabouts of major arms dumps and who was who in the Red Brigades operation. In total, he was responsible for the arrest of over seventy ‘ferocious beasts’ as he called his former colleagues. Another pentito, Antonio Savasta, was more eloquent on why he had betrayed his comrades:

The necessity and the inevitability of armed struggle represented our bet with history. Well, we lost that bet, and our isolation and defeat are the price we paid for having defined reality by abstract theories which oversimplified it, for having concentrated the social reasons for change in an instrument unable to express it, for having diminished our own force and capacity for change and isolated them in an absurd and futile project.22

The arrest of Sergio Zedda and Roberto Sandalo gave the police similar insights into the workings of the piellini - that is, the terrorist group Primea Linea - thirteen of whom were immediately arrested. Quite independently of the pentiti the Moro affair had triggered ructions within the Red Brigades between those who wished to embed the organisation in the wider revolutionary movement and those of a hardline militaristic frame of mind for whom killing people had become a career. When the Red Brigades sought help from Prima Linea it caused a fatal split between those prepared to go along and those who thought the armed struggle had had its day. Virtually all of Prima Linea’s leaders were arrested, including Marco Donat Cattin, the son of one of the Christian Democrats’ most anti-Communist politicians. Clearly buckling