Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [119]
An important feature of Italian politics in the period from 1966 through 1981 was the protection given by the intelligence services to right-wing terror, under a program designated the “strategy of tension.”17 One aspect of this strategy was the carrying out of right-wing terrorist attacks, which were then attributed to the left, frequently with the help of forged documents and planted informers committing perjury. The point of the strategy was to polarize society, discredit the left, and set the stage for a rightist coup. Many P-2 members in the armed forces and intelligence services took part in implementing this program, and many others were sympathetic to its aims. In July 1984, an Italian parliamentary commission published its final report on the P-2 conspiracy, and it and its accompanying volumes of hearings pointed up the politicization of the intelligence services, their frequent use of techniques of disinformation, and their connivance with and protection of right-wing terror. In July 1985 a Bologna court issued a decision in which it named SISMI and its officers as having engaged in numerous forgeries, and also in having collaborated in covering up the Bologna terrorist bombing of 1980.18
SISMI participated in a five-hour interrogation of Agca in December 1981, exploring his link to “international terrorism.” Investigating Judge Martella acknowledges in his long investigative report that he had spoken to Agca about the possibility of a commuted sentence if he “cooperated,” and the Italian press quoted Agca’s lawyer’s report of the terms of proposed deals that had been offered to Agca.19 There were also a variety of reports in the European and dissident media of pressures applied to Agca while in prison. A London Sunday Times team pointed out in May 1983 that the secret services “visited Agca and warned him that once his solitary confinement was over, ‘the authorities could no longer guarantee his safety.’”20 According to Orsen Oymen, a Turkish expert on the case, the Catholic chaplain in Agca’s prison, Father Mariano Santini, had frequent access to Agca and was one of those who pressed him to cooperate with the authorities.21 There is some possible confirmation of Santini’s pressure tactics in a letter which Agca addressed to the Vatican, dated September 24, 1982, which complained bitterly of threats to his life emanating from a Vatican emissary.
During the course of the Rome trial, Giovanni Pandico, the principal Italian state witness in the trial of Mafia leaders in Naples and an associate of Raphael Cutolo, a Mafia leader who had been in Ascoli Piceno prison with Agca, claimed in an interview (and subsequently before the court) that Agca had been coerced, persuaded and coached to implicate the Bulgarians by Cutolo, Santini, and others. Pandico claimed that Cutolo himself had been coerced into working on Agca by threats to himself, and that former SISMI officials Giuseppi Musumeci and Francesco Pazienza were key initiators of the plot. One of the important individuals accused by Pandico, Francesco Pazienza, while denying the charges, gave his own detailed account of who in SISMI had participated in persuading Agca to talk.
From the inception of the case, there were points suggesting that Agca was coached while in prison. After his long (and unexplained) silence, Agca identified the Bulgarians in a photo album allegedly shown to him for the first time on November 9, 1982. But in a speech before the Italian parliament, the minister of defense, Lelio Lagorio, stated that Agca had identified the Bulgarians in September