The somewhat obsessive campaign of Fatto Quotidiano against Matteo Renzi ‘s attempt to appoint his Florentine friend Marco Carrai as consultant, or something similar, of the security information department, seems to have found the key topic or man to close successfully. That is with the resignation of the Prime Minister of the appointment or, as the newspaper of Marco Travaglio occasionally wishes, with a veto by the Quirinale.
The key man, in the sense that he can double-lock the office destined for Carrai, is a seventy-year-old American named Michael Ledeen, already adviser to several presidents of the United States of America, a good connoisseur of Italy, friend, indeed very close friend of Carrai himself, so much so that he rushed to his wedding in Tuscany, perhaps also his business partner or friends, and very much at home in Jerusalem. So much at home that he became a spy in America, according to the reconstructions of the Fact . A spy so inexperienced, or brazen, as you prefer, to be caught out, to mess with the justice a lot of American diplomats who frequented him and to be finally expelled from Washington. Can Renzi – Il Fatto
has practically asked himself – to insist on bringing a friend to the Italian secret services in turn, a friend of such a man
And luckily the question stops there. And it does not affect that definition of “Mossad man”, that is, of the powerful Israeli secret service, given by Renzi by Massimo D’Alema in a dinner with friends and revealed by the political notist of Corriere della Sera Maria Teresa Meli , among the useless requests for a denial or clarification advanced by Formiche.net .
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It may not seem true to you, but Michael Ledeen has practically been at the foot of my memory for a lifetime, if memory had legs.
I met Ledeen about forty years ago in the Roman editorial office of Indro Montanelli ‘s Giornale, introduced to me by my predecessor at the head of the office, Renzo Trionfera . That, considering myself an expert on that complex party that was the Christian Democrats, I beg me to explain its internal games to his friend at the American Embassy. In particular, those of Aldo Moro . Who, returning from what unfortunately would have turned out to be his last experience at Palazzo Chigi, had woven as president of the party a laborious agreement with the PCI directed by Enrico Berlinguer in the aftermath of a round of early elections, those of 1976, from which they were two winners paralyzed by their own victory came out, as Moro himself used to say.
The DC and the PCI had both won full votes, to the detriment of their old or potential government allies, proposing themselves to the voters as alternatives. Therefore, since no one had obtained an absolute majority of parliamentary seats, they could not improvise themselves as members of the same government. And, having neither of the two parties of the allies willing to govern with one without the support or collaboration of the other as well, it was necessary either to go back to the polls immediately or to invent something, so to speak, strange, exceptional.
Thus the so-called majority of national solidarity was born from the fantasies of Moro and Berlinguer. Which was a reductive variant of the more demanding or organic “historical compromise” theorized by Berlinguer as a real alliance of government between the two major parties. A reductive variant because translated into an entirely Christian Democratic government, chaired by Giulio Andreotti and supported externally by the Communists with abstention, or “no distrust”.
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Ledeen was convinced that a Catto-Communist “regime” was being prepared in Italy, which, moreover , Giovanni Spadolini already a few years earlier , when he was directing Corriere della Sera, before moving on to politics, he had aulically defined the “Conciliar Republic”.
I tried to dissuade Ledeen by explaining to him, also because of the personal knowledge I had of Moro, that the president of the DC had come up with that singular majority only to buy time, in a perspective more of attrition than of alliance with the PCI, in expectation or in the hope that the socialists, however, who had just passed from the leadership of Francesco De Martino to that of Bettino Craxi , should return to their autonomous willingness to collaborate with the DC regardless of the communists.
Neither in that, nor in other subsequent meetings did I get the impression of having convinced Ledeen, who looked at me like a naive one. And of which I imagined who knows what bizarre reports intended for his superiors, and for the US State Department. Where – coincidentally – some friends of Moro, starting with his main collaborator, Corrado Guerzoni – were convinced that they did not want to do anything to save him, when the president of the DC, in 1978, was kidnapped and then killed by the red brigades.
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I found Ledeen at the foot of memory in 1985, when it became known that on the famous night of Sigonella, when Prime Minister Craxi prevented the Americans from capturing and bringing to the US the Palestinian hijackers of the Italian ship Achille Lauro, who had landed by force in that Sicilian NATO base while they were traveling between Cairo and Tunis, after having released the Italian ship with a twisted negotiation in Egypt, where they had killed an invalid Jew of American nationality. She then consumed herself on the phone between Craxi himself and American President Ronald Reagana sensational breakup. From which, among other things, the Minister of Defense Spadolini took his cue to resign and provoke a government crisis. Which ended quickly for a clarification intervened between the two presidents, realizing that they had not understood each other on the phone because of the translator on duty. The name
Ledeen, devil of a man.
Not too hell, however, I thought many years later, when the American ambassador to Rome between 1977 and 1981 Richard N. Gardner, married to an Italian, I publish with Feltrinelli the memoirs on his “Mission: Italy”. A book in which Gardner expressed political judgments compatible with those I confided to Ledeen about Moro, kidnapped and killed during his diplomatic mandate in Italy. That he had evidently made good use of it, unless Gardner had trusted any stubborn suspicions of his informant, or his adviser, and had developed other convictions about him on his behalf.
