Red Brigades

aka Brigate Rosse

The Red Brigades were a Marxist terrorist group active in Italy throughout the 1970s.

Since World War II, in which Communist-led resistance fighters contributed decisively to the Allied victory in Italy, the Italian Communist Party has been a potent force in that country's politics. By the late 1960s, the party was more interested in attaining parliamentary power than in fomenting revolution, and when student protests swept across Italy, the party did little to aid the protesters. The Red Brigades were founded in Milan in 1969 by former students and factory workers who had abandoned the official Italian Communist Party. The brigadiers claimed to follow pure Marxist-Leninist doctrine, in which a small group of revolutionaries is supposed to inspire massive worker uprisings through attacks on the political structure.

The Red Brigades began by distributing pamphlets and releasing statements that attacked the government and Italian industrialists. In the early 1970s, they orchestrated a series of bank robberies and bombings, but they did not emerge as a significant force until members kidnapped prosecutor Mario Sossi in 1974. He was released unharmed in exchange for eight imprisoned Red Brigade members. The group then began to concentrate on kidnappings as its main tactic, snatching business leaders and government officials. If demands were met, the hostages were often released unharmed; if they were not, the victims were usually executed. Initially, the Italian government and security forces had little success in stopping the brigadiers; prominent Italian officials and businessmen hired armed bodyguards.

In 1978, the Red Brigades seized their most famous victim, Aldo Moro, the reformist leader of the scandal-plagued Christian Democrat Party that had ruled Italy since the end of World War II. On the morning of March 16, 1978, the day Moro was to announce that the Italian Communist Party would become part of a new governing coalition, he was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, who saw his attempts to bring the Communists into government as a threat to revolution. For 55 days, Moro was held in a secret location; the Red Brigades released his increasingly desperate pleas for the government to attempt to secure his release. The prime minister refused to negotiate. Thousands of police conducted the most intensive investigation in modern Italian history, but turned up nothing. On May 9, 1978, Moro's body was found in the trunk of a car in Rome. The case remains a seminal event in Italian politics, in part because of the lengthy series of criminal trials that followed, but also because of the many conspiracy theories that sprang up around his abduction and murder.

When Moro was kidnapped, the Red Brigades were at the peak of their power, with an estimated 1,500 active volunteers. The volunteers were organized into columns—areas of the country overseen by a single individual who served on the executive committee, the Red Brigades' ruling body—with each column further subdivided into four-or five-person [Page 309]cells, or brigades. Moro's murder soured the public on the brigadiers, however, and a reorganized police force finally began to make progress against the group.

During the autumn of 1981–1982, after a number of arrests had hurt the group's operational capacity, the executive committee decided to strike back with a daring series of attacks codenamed “Winter of Fire.” The first attack, the kidnapping of North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander Brigadier General James Dozier, was executed successfully. While Dozier was being held hostage, however, the Brigades' other operations were complete disasters, resulting in dozens of arrests. Some of those arrested became police informants, eventually providing information that led police to Dozier. After 42 days of captivity, Dozier was freed in a commando raid that helped restore the credibility of the Italian police.

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