A prolific journalist and regular contributor to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Philip Willan is author of The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons, and the Killing of Roberto Calvi (2007), recently revised and updated under the title The Vatican at War: From Blackfriars Bridge to Buenos Aires (2013). In 1991, he published what would eventually become a classic history on the crimes of politically-motivated violence that occurred during Italy’s horrendous Years of Lead. Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy is both an in-depth analysis and a chronicle of such events. Its publication date is also significant. Just a year before, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti acknowledged the existence of a top-secret NATO operation, code-named Gladio. This clandestine network featured paramilitary groups that, in certain cases, employed rabidly right-wing operators whose sympathies lay closer to fascism and “black” terror than to democratic institutions. Questions concerning the interweaving threads between Gladio and right-wing terror constitute a principal theme running throughout Puppetmasters. The author also explores how left-wing or “red” terror was manipulated and possibly controlled by Western security forces in order to cripple Italy’s Communist Party and enfeeble the Socialist Party. (more...)
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