Giuseppe Santovito

Giuseppe Santovito was born on August 12, 1918, in Taranto. He served as Director of SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), Italy's military intelligence service, from 1978 to 1981, and was simultaneously a member of P2, Licio Gelli's clandestine Masonic lodge. He died on February 6, 1984, in Florence.¹

SISMI Directorship

Santovito headed SISMI during a critical period that included the Bologna railway station bombing of August 2, 1980 and the subsequent obstruction of the investigation by SISMI officers. Under his directorship, SISMI officers Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte participated in the fabrication of the "Terror on Trains" dossier, which falsely attributed the Bologna massacre to international terrorists and was used to deflect investigation away from the neofascist network that had actually carried out the attack.

Whether Santovito personally authorized or was aware of the Musumeci-Belmonte obstruction operation has not been definitively established by judicial proceedings. He died before the full scope of the Bologna-related obstruction network was judicially determined.¹

P2 Membership

The discovery of Gelli's P2 membership list at the Villa Wanda in Arezzo on March 17, 1981, revealed Santovito as a member. The significance of this disclosure was not merely personal: when the full list was examined, it was found that the heads of all three major Italian intelligence services were simultaneously P2 members - Santovito at SISMI, Giulio Grassini at SISDE (domestic intelligence), and Walter Pelosi at CESIS (the intelligence coordinating body). The simultaneous P2 membership of all three intelligence chiefs demonstrated the depth of P2's penetration of Italian state institutions.²

The P2 lodge had enrolled members across the military, intelligence services, judiciary, media, and political parties - what the Italian parliamentary commission investigating the lodge described as a "state within the state" designed to exercise power outside constitutional channels.

Context

Santovito's tenure at SISMI coincided with the period in which the Gladio stay-behind network, housed within SISMI's Ufficio R, continued to operate. The relationship between Gladio operations, P2 penetration of the intelligence services, and the cover-up of the Bologna massacre's true responsibility was investigated by the Commissione Stragi over two decades, though precise chains of command and authorization for specific operations remained difficult to establish judicially. Santovito died before the major Gladio disclosures of 1990.¹