The Golpe Borghese was a fascist coup attempt orchestrated in Italy in 1970 by Junio Valerio Borghese, an aristocrat known as the Black Prince of the Borghese family. The plot represented a direct effort to overthrow the Italian Republic and install an authoritarian regime, carried out by a figure whose postwar career had been carefully nurtured by American intelligence. Its failure did not prevent the ideological and organizational currents behind it from resurfacing throughout the following decades, culminating in the exposure of the P2 Masonic lodge and infiltrating the networks of elite criminality later documented across Europe. ### The Black Prince and Operation Gladio Junio Borghese had commanded the Decima Flottiglia MAS, a naval regiment that fought for Mussolini's Nazi puppet state, the Republic of Salo, in northern Italy until the end of the Second World War. Unlike other fascist collaborators who were executed at Piazzale Loreto alongside Mussolini, Borghese was chaperoned to the sanctuary of Vatican City by OSS operative James Angleton. He subsequently became the primary OSS and later [[CIA]] asset in establishing the Italian branch of Operation Gladio, a stay-behind network designed to suppress left-leaning political movements through sabotage, propaganda, and terrorism. This intelligence protection allowed Borghese to live on as a figurehead of Italy's postwar fascist movement, giving him the resources and connections necessary to attempt an open seizure of power in 1970. ### The 1970 Coup Attempt The Golpe Borghese coup was carried out in Borghese's name by armed fascists with the apparent intention of destabilizing the Italian state and creating the pretext for a military takeover. When the attempt failed, Borghese fled to Spain, where he died in 1974, possibly by poisoning. The director Pier Paolo Pasolini made his film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, explicitly in response to the Golpe Borghese, using the structure of the Marquis de Sade's novel to depict the torture and murder of kidnapped youths by fascist leaders. Pasolini dressed the guards in the uniforms of Borghese's Decima Flottiglia MAS, making clear that he viewed the coup not as an aberration but as an expression of enduring elite depravity. A year after the failed coup, and shortly before Salo's premiere, Pasolini was himself murdered in horrific circumstances, his body found burned and broken on a beach outside Rome. ### P2 and Continued Influence In 1981 a fascist secret society known as P2, or Propaganda 2, was uncovered after a membership list fell into police hands during a raid on the villa of the financier Licio Gelli. The list included cabinet ministers, military officers, magistrates, industrialists, and journalists, including the future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. P2 was directly linked to the Golpe Borghese coup attempt a decade earlier, demonstrating that the networks behind the plot had simply moved underground rather than disappeared. One P2 member, Alessandro Moncini, was arrested in the United States in 1988 after attempting to purchase a ten-year-old Mexican girl for a weekend of sadistic torture, telling an undercover officer that he possessed a snuff videotape of the real murder of a young girl after sex. The same currents of fascist elitism, protected by intelligence services and expressed through ritualistic violence against children, reappear in the Belgian [[Marc Dutroux|Dutroux]] affair, where witness testimonies describe orgies and murders attended by politicians, magistrates, and nobility reminiscent of the world Pasolini depicted. [^1]: Dovey, S. (2023). *Eye of the Chickenhawk*. United States: Thehotstar.