page_title: Kidnapping of Aldo Moro
section_title: Involvement of foreign powers
hierarchical_section_title: Kidnapping of Aldo Moro / Subsequent hypotheses, investigations and trials / Involvement of foreign powers
caption_attribution_description: Henry Kissinger.
context_page_description: The kidnapping of Aldo Moro, also referred in Italy as Moro Case, was a seminal event in Italian political history.
  On the morning of 16 March 1978, the day on which the new cabinet led by Giulio Andreotti was supposed to have undergone a confidence vote in the Italian Parliament, the car of Aldo Moro, former prime minister and then president of Christian Democracy, was assaulted by a group of Red Brigades terrorists in Via Fani in Rome. Firing automatic weapons, the terrorists killed Moro's bodyguards, and kidnapped him.
  On 9 May 1978 Moro's body was found in the trunk of a Renault 4 in Via Caetani after 54 days of imprisonment, during which Moro was submitted to a political trial by the so-called "people's court" set up by the Brigate Rosse and the Italian government was asked for an exchange of prisoners. Despite the common interpretation, the car location in Via Caetani was not halfway between, but was very close to both, the locations of the national offices of DC and of the Italian Communist Party in Rome.
context_section_description: In 2005 Giovanni Galloni, former national vice-secretary of Christian Democracy, said that during a discussion with Moro about the difficulty to find the Red Brigades' bases Moro told him that he knew of the presence of US and Israeli intelligence agents infiltrated within the BR. However the information obtained was not given to the Italian investigators. He also declared that the reason of the assassination of journalist Carmine Pecorelli was the same information, perhaps coming from the United States.
  During an interview in front of the Italian parliament commission on terrorism Galloni also stated that, during his trip to the United States in 1976, he had been told that a government like that envisaged by Moro, which would include the Communist presence, would be opposed at "any cost" by the American Republicans.
  During the 1983 trial against the BR Moro's widow, Eleonora Chiavarelli, declared that her husband was unpopular in the United States due to the historic compromise matter, and that he had been repeatedly warned by American politicians to stop disrupting the political situation which had been established in the Yalta conference (in reference to the possible executive role of the Italian Communist Party). According to her Henry Kissinger was one of the American personalities who menaced Moro in 1974 and 1976. She said that the words to Moro which he repeated to her were:
   ... you have to put an end to your political plan of mustering all the forces in your country to collaborate directly. Here, or you stop doing this thing, or you will be badly punished.
  Kissinger denied these accusations.
  Alberto Franceschini, one of the founders of BR, mentioned the possibility that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by Israeli agents as early as 1974. He reported a confidence told to him by co-founder Renato Curcio, according to whom Mario Moretti would be an infiltrated agent. Curcio has always denied this reconstruction. Moretti took the reins of the Red Brigades after Franceschini and Curcio were arrested in the mid-1970s, introducing a far stronger militarization of the organization's activities.
  Moretti, in the Italian RAI TV programme La notte della Repubblica denied these accusations, saying that he had never seen an Israeli in his life and that it was wrong to think that the change of RB's strategy depended from the arrest of some militants. He also added:
  The hypothesis that the Red Brigades have been manipulated by anyone is a thesis dear to the conspiracy, which would divide the RB into good and bad.
caption: Henry Kissinger
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