Italy’s Craxi believed parliamentary secret service and security committee chief was KGB spy

In the winter of 1993 Bettino Craxi, former Italian Prime Minister and then head of the Italian Socialist Party, asked Giovanni Spadolini and Giorgio Napolitano, then Presidents of the Italian Senate and Lower House respectively, to obtain the resignation of Ugo Pecchioli, the President of the Parliamentary Committee in charge of the secret service and civil and military security. Craxi thought Pecchioli was a Soviet agent, a KGB spy. Was he wrong? Perhaps Giorgio Napolitano and Giuliano Amato, who were in charge of prevention, intelligence and repression as Ministers of the Interior could shed some light on the question. Two letters from Craxi to Spadolini and Napolitano have been published in Le vene aperte del delitto Moro, a book by Salvatore Sechi, professor of Modern History at Ferrara University, written as part of the Radici del Presente series to mark the 31st anniversary of the murder by the Red Brigades of Aldo Moro, former leader of the Christian Democrat Party and former Prime Minister of Italy, news agenci AGI reports. Franco Mazzola, former undersecretary to the Council of Ministers along with Craxi and Cossiga, judge Luigi Carli, who sentenced the Genovese branch of the Red Brigades; two experts on the Red Brigades, Marco Clementi and Vladimiro Satta, an expert on Western European history, Fernando Orlandi, historian Richard Drake and two terrorism experts, Gabriele Paradisi and Roberto Bartalli all contributed to the book.