The Tragic ‘Years of Lead’: Puppetmasters

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...)

The Tragic ‘Years of Lead’: Puppetmasters Author Philip Willan Talks about the Manipulation of Terrorism, the Global War on the Left, and the Links between the JFK and Aldo Moro Assassinations