by Rene Lavanchy
BRITAIN’S Foreign Office planned to join a coup d’etat in Italy in 1976 if a Communist government came to power, official documents have revealed.
Officials considered a number of options from financing opposition forces to supporting ‘a clean and surgical coup’, according to recently declassified files unearthed by an Italian researcher at the National Archives.
The correspondence – including letters from the British Ambassador in Italy and American’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger – shows growing alarm that year that Communists could destabilise Nato and the European Community.
But the idea of a coup was dismissed as ‘unrealistic’ owing to the prospect of Soviet intervention and a ‘long and bloody’ civil war.
The records, published for the first time in the newspaper La Repubblica, show the Foreign Office’s concern as the parliamentary election of June 1976 approached.
While the Italian Communist Party (PCI) rose in the polls, Aldo Moro’s governing Christian Democrats were riven by factionalism.
In a letter to London, British ambassador to Nato John Killick wrote: ‘The presence of communist ministers in the Italian government would bring an immediate security problem to the Alliance’. He suggested expelling Italy from Nato: ‘Accordingly, a clean amputation is preferable to an internal paralysis.’
The Ministry of Defence went further. ‘To put it bluntly,’ a memo said, ‘the risk is that sensitive documents would end up in Moscow.’ Communists had probably already infiltrated Nato’s Naples headquarters, it added.
In January, British Ambassador Guy Millard wrote despairingly to Foreign Secretary James Callaghan, saying it was a sin that Italy’s defence from communism was in the hands of a party as bad as the Christian Democrats.
In April the FCO’s planning unit drew up a list of options, including one headed ‘Subversive or military intervention’. Democratic forces, it said, could be given financial or other assistance.
The army was mostly â’of the right or the extreme right’, though a third might support the communists. The Carabinieri, it was suggested, were loyal to governments of any political colour.
The perceived threat passed, however: in the June elections the Christian Democrats secured a majority over the communists in both houses of parliament.
