Провал итальянского переворота Боргезе

Failed Italian coup d'etat

The Golpe Borghese (English: Borghese Coup) was a failed Italian coup d'état allegedly planned for the night of 7 or 8 December 1970. It was named after Junio Valerio Borghese, wartime commander of the Decima Flottiglia MAS and a hero in the eyes of many post War Italian fascists. The coup attempt became publicly known when the left wing journal Paese Sera ran the headline on the evening of 18 March 1971: Subversive plan against the Republic: far right plot discovered. The secret operation was code named Operation Tora Tora after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The plan of the coup in its final phase envisaged the involvement of US and NATO warships which were on alert in the Mediterranean Sea. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reportedly followed the coup, with President Richard Nixon being personally informed of it. Yet in leaked documents, the US ambassador to Rome is quoted saying "The last thing we need right now is a half cooked coup d’état We wouldn’t support it."

The botched right wing coup took place after the Hot Autumn of left wing protests in Italy and the Piazza Fontana bombing in December 1969, while in Reggio Calabria the Reggio revolt was supported by neofascists and ongoing. The failed coup involved hundreds of neo fascist militants from Stefano Delle Chiaie's National Vanguard, and army dissidents under Lt. Colonel Amos Spiazzi, helped by 187 members of the Corpo Forestale dello Stato, who were to seize the headquarters of the Italian public television broadcaster RAI. The plan included the kidnapping of the Italian President Giuseppe Saragat; the murder of the head of the police Angelo Vicari; and the occupation of RAI, the Quirinale, the Ministry of the Interior (from which Vanguard militants would seize weapons), and the Ministry of Defense. Spiazzi's Milan based battalion also planned to occupy Sesto San Giovanni, at that time a workers' town and a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party. Apparently some militants briefly entered the Ministry of the Interior, but Borghese suspended the coup a few hours before its final phase. A submachine gun (a Beretta Model 38) not returned by one of the militants was later viewed as a key piece of evidence in the sedition trial. According to the later testimony of Spiazzi, the coup was in fact fictitious: it would have been immediately suppressed by government forces through an emergency plan called Esigenza Triangolo (Triangle Exigency) similar to the 1964 Piano Solo, which would have provided the Christian Democratic (DC) government an excuse to declare martial law and enact special laws allowing the deployment of thousands of government troops, as well as military and civil police to seize control of political parties and publishers and undertake mass arrests and deportations, to quell the ongoing social unrest and left wing protests. However, Borghese, for unknown reasons or acting on a tip off, aborted the coup at the last minute as the plotters moved into position. Several members of the National Front were arrested and a warrant was served for Borghese. Borghese himself fled to Spain and died there in August 1974.

On 18 March 1971, the leftist journal Paese Sera was published with the headline: Subversive plan against the Republic: far right plot discovered. The first arrests concerning the coup attempt were made on the same day. The first people arrested on 18 and 19 March were Mario Rose, a retired army major and National Front secretary; Remo Orlandini, also a former army major, a real estate proprietor and close associate of Borghese; and Sandro Saccucci, a young paratrooper. An arrest warrant for Borghese was also served, but he could not be found. Later arrestees included businessman Giovanni De Rosa and a retired Air Force colonel, Giuseppe Lo Vecchio. The investigation into the coup attempt was resurrected after Giulio Andreotti became defense minister again. Andreotti handed over a report by the secret service to the Rome public prosecutor in July 1974, Miceli's interrogation led to his arrest two days later. Miceli was then sacked, and the Italian intelligence agencies were reorganized by a 1977 law.

Three trials were started for conspiracy against the Italian state. In 1978, Miceli was acquitted of trying to cover up a coup attempt. Saccucci, Orlandini, Rosa, and others were convicted of political conspiracy, which also included Delle Chiaie, whose specific role is unclear. According to a 1987 UPI news cable, he had already fled Italy to Spain on 25 July 1970. However, according to other sources, Delle Chiaie led the commando team which occupied the premises of the Interior Ministry. At the appeal trial in November 1984, all 46 defendants were acquitted because the "fact did not happen" (il fatto non sussiste) and only existed in "a private meeting between four or five sixty years olds". The Supreme Court of Cassation confirmed the appeal judgment in March 1986. The final trial connected with the Golpe Borghese began in 1991, after it was discovered that evidence involving prominent persons (Licio Gelli and admiral Giovanni Torrisi) had been destroyed by the secret service before the first trial. Andreotti, minister of defence at the time the evidence was destroyed, declared in 1997 that names had been deleted so that the charges would be easier to understand. This last trial ended without convictions because the period of prescription for destruction of evidence had passed. According to Leggio, testifying at the Maxi Trial against the Mafia in the mid 1980s, Buscetta and Salvatore "Ciaschiteddu" Greco were in favour of helping Borghese. The plan was for the Mafia to carry out a series of terrorist bombings and assassinations to provide the justification for a right wing coup. Although Leggio's version differed from Buscetta's, the testimony confirmed that Borghese had requested assistance by the Mafia. According to the pentito Francesco Di Carlo, the journalist Mauro De Mauro was killed in September 1970 because he had learned that Borghese – one of De Mauro's childhood friends – was planning the coup.

The failed coup has gone down in history as "a comic opera coup staged by naive incompetents, which posed no real threat to the state" and newspapers wrote about it as "the coup that never was". Nonetheless, the secret service reported connections with the Nixon administration and NATO units in Malta based on claims made by Orlandini. Orlandini asserted that the plotters would receive assistance from a NATO fleet, though this never materialized.

A comic film directed by Mario Monicelli and starring popular Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi was released in 1973 and was in the selection of Italian films for the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. It is called Vogliamo i colonelli (We Want the Colonels, in reference to the contemporary US backed Greek military dictatorship). In this film, Tognazzi portrays a boisterous and clumsy far right MP called Tritoni trying to stage a coup against the government. Though the botched attempt sinks in ridicule and chaos, and Tritoni has to go in exile, right wing political measures are nevertheless enforced, such as forbidding labor strikes and political gatherings. The character's name Tritoni (Triton) is a direct reference to Borghese and his military past as the leader of an assault frogmen unit. The film is peppered with joke references to the fascist period, the post war neo fascist Italian Social Movement and the Decima MAS frogmen unit.