Francesco Cossiga

Francesco Cossiga was born on July 26, 1928, in Sassari, Sardinia - a birthplace shared with Enrico Berlinguer, his PCI counterpart. A Democrazia Cristiana politician and close personal friend of Aldo Moro, he served as Interior Minister (1976-1978), Prime Minister (1979-1980), President of the Senate (1983-1985), and President of the Italian Republic (1985-1992). He died in Rome on August 17, 2010.¹

Interior Minister and the Moro Kidnapping

Cossiga was Interior Minister - and therefore directly responsible for the police and security services - when Moro was kidnapped on March 16, 1978. The catastrophic failure of the investigation, including the notorious non-search of the Via Gradoli safe house where the Red Brigades held operational facilities, occurred under his authority. The address of Via Gradoli - which had been specifically suggested to investigators - was not searched through conventional police work; it was eventually disclosed after a medium at a seance reportedly provided the address.

Cossiga was a personal friend of Moro and a member of Giulio Andreotti's government that maintained the refusal to negotiate for his release. When Moro's body was found on May 9, 1978, Cossiga resigned as Interior Minister, accepting personal responsibility for the investigation's failures. His resignation, genuinely painful rather than tactical, was the act that established his subsequent reputation as a person who accepted accountability in Italian politics in a way most of his colleagues did not.¹

Prime Minister and Bologna

Cossiga served as Prime Minister from August 1979 to October 1980. On August 2, 1980, while he was Prime Minister, the Bologna railway station bombing killed 85 people. His initial public statement attributed the bombing to the far left - a misdirection that he later acknowledged was based on disinformation fed to him by security service officials who knew or suspected the actual neofascist responsibility.²

Presidency and Gladio Disclosures

As President of the Republic (1985-1992), Cossiga became increasingly assertive in using the presidency's moral authority rather than its formal constitutional powers. In his final years of office and in the period following the Gladio revelation in October 1990, he made a series of public statements acknowledging and defending the stay-behind network as a legitimate Cold War defensive measure.

After leaving the presidency in 1992, Cossiga became a "piccone" (pickaxe) - the nickname "Il Picconatore" (the pickaxeman) referred to his practice of making public statements that broke Italian political conventions and exposed previously concealed arrangements. His disclosures about Gladio, about intelligence operations, and about the political management of terrorism investigations were more candid than those of any other senior Italian official of his generation.¹

He died in 2010. In his last years he made public statements about the Brigate Rosse kidnapping suggesting that the Italian and American intelligence services had information about Moro's location that was not acted upon - a claim that neither confirmed nor refuted the parallel evidence developed by parliamentary investigations.¹