John Foot’s history of the Red Brigades is as comprehensive a study as you will find, and it should be the final one. Yet it won’t be. The Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse in Italian) will continue, perhaps forever, to haunt the Italian psyche. Italy today still debates the ruthless violence perpetrated by the Marxist-Leninist organisation from around 1970 to 1988, a barbarous campaign that reached its peak at the end of the 1970s. 

By way of example, in 2024 RAI (Italy’s equivalent of the BBC) aired a documentary about an investigation, drawing on files at the UK’s National Archives, into whether MI5 were involved in the Red Brigades’ plot to kidnap and murder the former Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978, in what became Europe’s ‘JFK moment’. Moro was seized on the streets of Rome and held captive for fifty-five days before Mario Moretti, a leading brigatista, fired eleven bullets at point-blank range into his 61-year-old body as he lay scrunched like a dishcloth in the boot of a red Renault 4 (the car had to be French and red, no?) sporting the same suit, shirt and tie he had been wearing on the day of the kidnapping. The Red Brigades, together with the mysteries and conspiracy theories they spawned, are never going away. 

The last sentence of Foot’s introduction reads: ‘where did the Red Brigades come from?’ Good question. Officially, the group was founded in 1970 at the University of Trento in northern Italuy by Renato Curcio, a sociology student and self-professed Maoist, together with his lover (later wife) Margherita Cagol and Alberto Franceschini. Its roots, however, lay much deeper. During and after the Second World War, Italy was effectively colonised by the United States. Disquiet at this in the poor, industrial heartlands of northern Italy steadily grew, finding expression in strikes and civil unrest in the 1960s and, finally, ultra-left-wing terrorism.

In the early 1970s, the Red Brigades launched a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare with the aim of bringing about the total destabilisation of the Italian state. The force they unleashed was so destructive that it almost tore the country apart. For Italy, these were the Anni di Piombo (‘Years of Lead’): in 1979 alone, there were 2,514 ‘acts of terrorism’ (that’s more than six a day). Those of us who lived through the IRA’s campaign in mainland Britain during those years never had it this bad (I know – I lived in both Italy and the UK during the period). Robert Katz wrote in The Days of Wrath, his book on the Moro kidnapping, that in the year of Moro’s death ‘there was plenty of law … but not much order’. 

Foot has carried out an immense amount of research and provides an extraordinary quantity of detail – occasionally too much, as when he reaches the Turin maxi-trials of 1976–8, the first mass prosecution of brigatisti. Around the middle of the book, he finally turns to what became known as the Moro Affair. The ambush, kidnap and murder of Moro – the most visible expression of the Red Brigades’ mantra ‘strike one to educate one hundred’ – was the group’s zenith and nadir. 

Moro was a champion of compromise who had painstakingly negotiated a coalition between his Christian Democracy party and the USSR-funded Italian Communist Party. Foot dismisses out of hand theories suggesting the involvement of the CIA, Mossad, NATO and other organisations in the murder of Moro, though many – including this reviewer – diverge with Foot on this question. Moro’s kidnapping was far too slick and professional an operation for a ragtag group of young left-wing revolutionaries to have pulled off alone. Moreover, the United States had long voiced loud and public opposition to the Communist Party playing any role in the Italian government – the Cold War was still at full growl – and had ample reason for wanting to remove Moro from the scene. 

Either way, after Moro was found dead in the Renault 4, it became clear that the Red Brigades were failing in their aim of creating an ‘alternative state’. All they seemed able to offer were bloodshed and carnage. When the Red Brigades shot 44-year-old Guido Rossa, a left-wing trade unionist, in January 1979 – barely eight months after Moro’s death – Italy’s president, Sandro Pertini, a decorated First World War hero and revered Second World War resistance fighter, declared: ‘I knew the real red brigades. They fought alongside me against fascists, not against democrats. For shame.’ The Red Brigades’ days were now numbered. 

So began the beginning of the end. The kidnapping in Verona of Brigadier General James Dozier, a NATO deputy chief of staff, in December 1981 and the threat to murder him smacked of stupidity and a loss of control. Shoot, maim, kill, kneecap your fellow countrymen – okay. Kidnap a US general on Italian soil? No. Dozier was rescued after forty-two days in captivity – Foot suggests the police used torture to discover his whereabouts – and his kidnappers were arrested. In January 1983, following a nine-month trial, fifty-nine of sixty-three Red Brigades members were found guilty of multiple crimes, including Moro’s kidnapping and murder. 

It wasn’t until April 1988 and the cold-blooded murder of Senator Roberto Ruffilli, a close friend and adviser to incoming prime minister Ciriaco De Mita, that the coup de grâce was delivered. Multiple arrests followed, and in October 1988 the once all-feared Red Brigades – with some fourteen thousand acts of violence on their rap sheet – disbanded themselves, just like that. 

Were the Red Brigades pawns of the Italian quinquevirate of state, government, freemasons, business and Church, to be used in their own struggles for power? Possibly. Whatever the truth, Italians’ fascination with killing – and the killing of – their leaders, from Caesar down, will doubtless continue.