Peteano bombing

The Peteano bombing occurred on May 31, 1972, near the village of Peteano in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy. Three Carabinieri (military police) officers were killed and two injured when a booby-trap bomb exploded as they investigated an abandoned Fiat 500 that had been left on a road with a note claiming it had been used in a crime. The attack was part of the strategy of tension and proved foundational to the eventual exposure of the Gladio stay-behind network eighteen years later.¹

The Attack

The three Carabinieri who died - Donato Poveromo, Franco Dongiovanni, and Silvio Bellini - responded to a report of the abandoned vehicle. When they opened the hood of the Fiat 500, they triggered a charge packed into the engine compartment. The bomb used C4 plastic explosive - a military-grade material that was not commercially available in Italy, a detail that investigators initially suppressed.

Initial investigation blamed the Red Brigades, then a new organization operating in northern Italy. No charges were brought for years. SID (Italian military intelligence) was later found to have provided false forensic evidence in the initial investigation, misidentifying the explosive used as a different material consistent with civilian manufacture, in order to prevent the military-grade identification from pointing toward the stay-behind network's weapons caches.¹

Vincenzo Vinciguerra's Confession

In 1979, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of Ordine Nuovo who had fled to Spain after the attack, surrendered voluntarily to Italian authorities in 1979. In 1984, facing a life sentence, he made a voluntary confession to the Peteano bombing and provided detailed testimony about the network that had organized and protected the attack.

Vinciguerra's testimony was explicit: the attack had been carried out with the knowledge of elements of SID, weapons from the Gladio stay-behind network's caches, and with the expectation of intelligence service protection from prosecution. He described a structure in which neofascist operatives provided deniable capacity for attacks that served the strategy of tension's political objectives of creating fear and justifying authoritarian responses.

Vinciguerra was convicted and received a life sentence. He subsequently continued providing testimony and statements that constituted the most detailed first-person account of how the strategy of tension network functioned operationally.¹

Felice Casson and the Gladio Documents

The Peteano case was reopened in 1984 by Felice Casson, a young Venice investigating magistrate. Pursuing the explosive identification discrepancy and Vinciguerra's testimony, Casson obtained access to SID/SISMI records. In 1990, Casson discovered documents in SISMI's archives that directly referenced the Gladio stay-behind network and its arms caches.

Casson requested authorization from the government to access further classified Gladio materials. Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, faced with the disclosure request, chose to acknowledge the network's existence to Parliament on October 24, 1990. The Peteano bombing - a single attack in a remote Friulian village in 1972 - thus became the direct chain of evidence that forced the exposure of the entire NATO stay-behind infrastructure eighteen years after it occurred.²