Golpe Borghese

The Golpe Borghese was an attempted coup d'etat organized by Junio Valerio Borghese and his Fronte Nazionale (National Front) on the night of December 7-8, 1970. Several hundred armed men, drawn from Fronte Nazionale membership, elements of Ordine Nuovo, and members of the Guardia Forestale, assembled in Rome with plans to seize key government installations including the Interior Ministry, the RAI state broadcasting network, and telephone exchanges. The operation was aborted in the early hours of December 8 when Borghese, for reasons that have never been definitively established, issued a stand-down order to the assembled men. Participants dispersed, and the attempt went publicly unknown for months. Borghese fled to Spain in early 1971; the plot became widely known following parliamentary investigations that year.¹

Borghese's Wartime Career and OSS Relationship

Junio Valerio Borghese had commanded the Decima Flottiglia MAS (10th MAS Flotilla), a naval special forces unit that continued fighting for Mussolini's Italian Social Republic (the Republic of Salo) in northern Italy after the September 1943 armistice. The Decima Mas under Borghese committed documented atrocities during the occupation and was responsible for the killing of partisans and civilians.

In April 1945, as partisan forces moved to execute prominent fascist figures, OSS officer James Angleton intervened to take Borghese into protective American custody before partisans could reach him, a decision that almost certainly saved his life. Borghese was subsequently tried by an Italian court and in 1949 sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment for wartime crimes; the sentence was substantially reduced on appeal and he was released. This pattern - American intelligence protection followed by rapid reintegration into Italian civic and political life - positioned Borghese as a continuing asset in the networks that would eventually formalize as Operation Gladio.²

Borghese remained a figurehead of the Italian far right throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1968 he founded the Fronte Nazionale as a vehicle for extra-parliamentary fascist politics.¹

The 1970 Coup Attempt

The coup attempt on December 7-8, 1970, was one of several plots against Italian democracy during the strategy of tension era. The operational plan called for armed groups to simultaneously seize the Interior Ministry and its weapons stores, the RAI television and radio facilities, and telecommunications infrastructure - establishing control of communications before announcing a change of government. A recorded address by Borghese was prepared for broadcast.

Participants assembled and the Interior Ministry's armory was actually entered and its weapons temporarily secured. Then, in the early morning hours of December 8, Borghese issued an unexpected order to stand down. The armed men dispersed and returned home. No shots were fired and the operation left no immediate public trace.¹

Parliamentary investigations later documented that the coup had participants at multiple levels of Italian institutional life, including active-duty and retired military officers. The precise reasons for the stand-down were never established; theories included intervention by persons within the Italian state who had known of the plot, American intelligence pressure, or Borghese's own loss of confidence that the moment was right.¹

Borghese fled Italy in February 1971 as the plot became known to investigating magistrates. He died in Cadiz, Spain, on August 26, 1974, of what Spanish authorities recorded as a heart attack. Italian intelligence sources subsequently raised allegations of assassination - a claim that was never formally investigated.²

Pasolini and Salo

The film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was working on Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom during the years when the strategy of tension was at its height. The film - based on the Marquis de Sade's novel but reset in the Republic of Salo in 1944 - uses the uniforms and imagery of the Decima Mas and the RSI militia as the framework for its depiction of fascist violence. Pasolini stated explicitly in interviews that the film was intended as an allegory of contemporary Italian power and its relationship to violence and corruption, connecting the historical RSI to the political forces he saw operating in Italy in the 1970s.

Pasolini was murdered on November 2, 1975, near Ostia outside Rome, three weeks before the film's Italian premiere. The case was initially attributed to a young man, Giuseppe Pelosi, who confessed but later recanted, claiming he had acted on instructions from others. The murder was never fully resolved. Pasolini had been publicly outspoken about the strategy of tension and the complicity of Italian political elites in the bombings and coup attempts of the period.³

P2 and Continued Networks

The parliamentary investigation into the Golpe Borghese documented that the networks involved in the coup attempt had connections extending into institutional Italy through the P2 Masonic lodge. When the P2 membership list was discovered in March 1981 following a raid on Licio Gelli's villa in Arezzo, it contained the names of senior military officers, intelligence service directors, magistrates, journalists, and politicians - the same milieu that parliamentary investigators had identified as the enabling environment for the Golpe Borghese. Silvio Berlusconi appeared on the list, as did the directors of all three Italian intelligence services at the time of the list's compilation.²

The parliamentary Commission on Terrorism (Commissione Stragi) concluded in subsequent years that P2 served as the continuing organizational framework through which fascist-aligned elements of Italian institutional life maintained contact and coordination after the Golpe Borghese's failure.¹