---
category: Extremism & Violent Networks
created: 2026-09-21
location: Rome, Italy
summary: Founder of Avanguardia Nazionale, fugitive from Italy from 1970 through Spain,
  Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, who arranged the 1975 shooting of Bernardo Leighton
  for DINA and was received by Pinochet in Madrid.
tags:
- Person
- StefanoDelleChiaie
- AvanguardiaNazionale
- Italy
- OperationCondor
- DINA
- Bolivia
- StrategyOfTension
updated: 2026-09-21
---

Stefano Delle Chiaie led Avanguardia Nazionale, which he told an Italian parliamentary commission had "surely more than a thousand" members. A warrant in the [Piazza Fontana bombing](/events/piazza-fontana-bombing/) investigation was issued for him in 1970, and he was a fugitive from Italy for seventeen years, active, as the commission's president put it to him, in "Spain, Chile, Bolivia and Argentina." He entered Italy four times in that period.[^1]

### Rome, 1975

In 1975 Major [Raúl Iturriaga](/people/raúl-iturriaga-neumann/) of [DINA](/organizations/dina/) ordered [Michael Townley](/people/michael-townley/) "to enlist Delle Chiaie's organization in an operation to kill" [Bernardo Leighton](/people/bernardo-leighton/). Delle Chiaie advised against better-protected exiles such as Carlos Altamirano: "Leighton was a better, and easier target." On October 6, 1975, Pierluigi Concutelli shot Leighton and his wife in the street. "Townley and the Italians celebrated with dinner at Delle Chiaie's apartment, thinking that the Leightons were dead." Weeks later [Augusto Pinochet](/people/augusto-pinochet/) flew to Madrid for the funeral of Francisco Franco. "[Contreras](/people/manuel-contreras/) arranged for Delle Chiaie to come to Madrid. Delle Chiaie was given a private audience with Pinochet in his hotel room. Contreras also presented Delle Chiaie with the $5,000 payment."[^2]

### Testimony

Before the commission Delle Chiaie declined to describe his years abroad: "Non le sto a raccontare come ho vissuto da latitante perché è un fatto mio personale." He said a NATO-linked structure built against communism had been turned by "central political power" to "stabilization," and that fringes of the "movimento nazional-rivoluzionario" had been infiltrated and used in the strategy of tension. He read from an internal circular of April 1973 warning members of a "vasto piano provocatorio" to blame the movement for "una serie di ignobili fatti delittuosi," and a letter of June 8, 1974, after the Piazza della Loggia bombing, distancing it from the group of the former partisan Fumagalli. He named the intelligence officers Labruna and Maletti and Giorgio Almirante as sources of what he called slander linking his movement to the Interior Ministry's Ufficio Affari Riservati. Asked about American intelligence: "Certo, la Bolivia non era stata riconosciuta dagli Stati Uniti quando c'ero io. Il Cile non aveva una ambasciata americana." "Mi porti un documento che dice questo. Io sono pronto a fare il mea culpa se si portano delle prove concrete." The president called much of it "autodifesa" and set against it the commission's findings on [P2](/organizations/propaganda-due/) and the Argo 16 inquiry.[^1]

He was arrested in Caracas on March 27, 1987, and sent to Italy two days later. He was acquitted in Rome on February 20, 1989, in the [Bologna railway station bombing](/events/bologna-railway-station-bombing/) case and in 1991 in the Piazza Fontana case.[^3]

[^1]: Commissione parlamentare d'inchiesta sul terrorismo in Italia e sulle cause della mancata individuazione dei responsabili delle stragi, audizione del signor Stefano Delle Chiaie, stenographic record no. 25, Rome.
[^2]: Dinges, John. *The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents*. New Press, 2004, pp. 130-133.
[^3]: Press obituaries and secondary accounts of the 1987 arrest and the 1989 and 1991 acquittals, not read in the original reporting; the manner of his transfer from Venezuela, by extradition or by handover, is given differently in the accounts.