Junio Valerio Borghese

Junio Valerio Borghese was born on June 6, 1906, in Rome into one of Italy's most prominent aristocratic families - a descendant of the family of Pope Paul V. A career naval officer, he commanded the Decima Flottiglia MAS (Tenth Assault Vehicle Flotilla, or Decima Mas) during World War II, directing naval commando operations that achieved significant tactical successes. After the war he became the central figure of Italian neofascism, organized a coup attempt in December 1970, and died in exile in Cádiz, Spain, on August 26, 1974.¹

Wartime Command and OSS Protection

The Decima Mas under Borghese conducted frogman and human torpedo attacks on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, sinking or damaging numerous vessels including two British battleships in Alexandria harbor in December 1941. After the Italian armistice in September 1943, Borghese aligned the Decima Mas with the German-backed Italian Social Republic (RSI, or Salò Republic) rather than the Allied-aligned government in the south. In this capacity his unit conducted not only naval operations but anti-partisan operations in northern Italy in which war crimes were committed.¹

At the liberation of Italy in April 1945, Borghese faced trial and execution. He was instead sheltered, transported from Milan to Rome dressed in a U.S. Army uniform, and protected from Italian partisan justice by James Angleton, then an OSS officer and future head of CIA counterintelligence. The precise rationale Angleton offered for this intervention was never officially documented; subsequent analysis has attributed it to Angleton's judgment that Borghese's intelligence networks and anti-communist commitments made him an asset worth protecting for postwar operations. Borghese was subsequently tried by Italian courts, convicted of collaboration with the Nazis, and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment - of which he served approximately four, with the remainder suspended.¹

Postwar Neofascism

After his release Borghese became the dominant figure of Italian neofascism. He led the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) for a period before concluding that electoral politics was an insufficient vehicle for his objectives. In 1969 he founded the Fronte Nazionale, a more explicitly extra-parliamentary organization that attracted former Salò Republic military officers, Decima Mas veterans, and elements of the violent neofascist fringe.

Borghese maintained connections with figures who were simultaneously involved in P2 and with elements of Italian military intelligence (SID). His access to former military networks - and the protection those networks provided - was a direct legacy of the OSS/CIA decision in 1945 to shelter him from justice rather than prosecute him.²

The Golpe Borghese

On the night of December 7-8, 1970, a Borghese-organized conspiracy involving several hundred armed men was set in motion. The plan called for seizure of the Interior Ministry, the state television and radio building (RAI), and the armories of the Corpo Forestale dello Stato (forest service) in Rome. Armed groups actually entered and partially occupied some facilities before the operation was abruptly called off in the middle of the night.

The reasons for the abort were never definitively established. Borghese reportedly called off the coup by telephone, with various accounts attributing the cancellation to the failure of promised external support to materialize, the appearance of carabinieri, or a last-minute decision by Borghese himself. The conspirators dispersed; Borghese fled to Spain within weeks, where he remained until his death.²

Italian judicial investigation of the coup attempt, which continued for years, produced indictments of numerous participants but convictions of only a small number, with many charges dismissed on procedural or evidentiary grounds. The investigation uncovered that the coup network had expected support from elements of Italian military intelligence and possibly from external actors - a finding consistent with the Gladio-linked strategy of tension apparatus documented by subsequent inquiries.²

Death and Legacy

Borghese died in Cádiz on August 26, 1974, under circumstances that were not fully explained. An Italian autopsy performed years later suggested he may have been poisoned, though no prosecution resulted. His death preceded by several years the parliamentary and judicial investigations that would have placed him at the center of the emerging picture of the strategy of tension, P2, and the Gladio stay-behind network.

His legacy in Italian history is the most explicit demonstration of how the OSS/CIA decision to shelter and deploy former Fascist military officers in the early Cold War created operational networks that were used for domestic political purposes decades later - Angleton's 1945 intervention producing the 1970 coup attempt and the full elaboration of the strategy of tension that followed.¹