Brigate Rosse

The Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) were an Italian far-left terrorist organization founded in Milan in 1970 by Renato Curcio, Alberto Franceschini, and Mara Cagol, drawing on operaismo (workerist Marxist) theory and Marxist-Leninist armed struggle doctrine. The organization conducted bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and kneecappings of corporate executives, magistrates, politicians, and journalists through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Their most significant operation was the kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.¹

Origins and Ideology

The Red Brigades formed at the University of Trento, where Curcio had been a student leader in the 1968 protest movement. They were ideologically distinct from mainstream Italian communism - the Italian Communist Party (PCI) explicitly rejected them - and drew their theoretical framework from third-world liberation movements and the concept of urban guerrilla warfare developed by Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella.

The organization's operational focus was the Italian industrial north, particularly Milan and Turin, where the large Fiat factories and metalworkers' unions provided both a milieu and a potential constituency. Their early operations targeted corporate property and executives with non-lethal kneecappings (gambizzazioni) before escalating to assassinations.¹

The Moro Kidnapping

On March 16, 1978, a Red Brigades unit ambushed the motorcade of Aldo Moro, five times Prime Minister and president of the Democrazia Cristiana (DC), in Rome. All five of his bodyguards were killed; Moro was taken prisoner. The kidnapping occurred on the morning that Moro was scheduled to present to Parliament a DC-PCI "historic compromise" coalition government - a political arrangement that the Red Brigades, paradoxically, opposed as a vehicle for integrating the left into the capitalist state.

Moro was held for 55 days. During his captivity he wrote extensively - letters to his family, to DC colleagues, and to government officials - urging negotiation for his release. The government, led by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, refused to negotiate. On May 9, 1978, Moro's body was found in the trunk of a car in central Rome.²

Strategy of Tension Controversy

Italian parliamentary and judicial investigations from the late 1970s onward raised persistent questions about whether the Red Brigades' operations served, at some level, the objectives of the right-wing Gladio-linked strategy of tension - by creating political conditions that justified authoritarian security measures and made the communist-Christian Democrat coalition politically toxic.

The specific questions included:

Whether state security services had penetrated the Red Brigades at a high enough level to have intervened in the Moro kidnapping and chose not to, or actively prevented rescue.

Whether the group contained agents provocateurs who pushed it toward more extreme operations.

Whether the timing of the Moro kidnapping - precisely on the day of the historic compromise government's presentation - was coincidental or guided by outside influence.

The Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism (Commissione Moro) and subsequent investigations did not produce definitive answers. Former Red Brigades members, particularly Alberto Franceschini, made statements in later years suggesting the organization had been more extensively penetrated by intelligence services than originally known.¹³

Decline

The Italian state response to Red Brigades violence, including the pentiti (repentant collaborators) legislation of the early 1980s that offered sentence reductions to members who provided information, effectively broke the organization's command structure. Curcio was arrested in 1974 (escaping briefly before re-arrest in 1976). By the mid-1980s, mass arrests and informant cooperation had dismantled the organization's operational capacity. The last significant Red Brigades violence occurred in the late 1980s; the organization fragmented into isolated cells and eventually ceased to function as a coherent entity.¹