Chapter 19
PAUL COULD TALK IN CIRCLES, particularly when he didn’t want to part with information, so I’ll save you some of our back-and-forth and tell you why I think we were really in La Maddalena.
The United States panicked. America had worked hard to liberate Italy, establish NATO, and keep the peace in postwar Europe, and no one was about to watch a bunch of communists seize control of the country.
Now, you could argue that Italian communists and Russian communists were two very different kinds of communists, but the U.S.
wasn’t interested in drawing that distinction, particularly after we’d spent the better part of two decades attempting to root out communists in a host of other countries, most notably Vietnam.
The assumption was that, if the PCI was in charge, NATO and the U.S.
would be shown the door, and all the American military bases scattered across Italy would be shuttered.
This mattered because it was from Italy that the U.S.
was keeping tabs on Egypt, Lebanon, Greece, and—most especially—the Soviet Union.
I’d grown up thinking of the Cold War as little more than an arms race.
The USSR tests an atomic bomb, we roll out a hydrogen bomb.
The USSR sends a dog to space, we put a man on the moon.
But what was happening in the Med was more tactical.
American subs were spying on Soviet military installations, and Soviet subs were spying on us.
Both countries got off on surreptitiously tailing the other, trying to intercept communications and test the other’s military capabilities, and it wasn’t unusual for the subs to get into small skirmishes.
In fact, it was often encouraged, so long as no one took things too far.
President Nixon traveled to Rome in 1969 and again in 1970 to meet with President Saragat and try to figure out how to deal with Italy’s communist problem.
It was a tricky business because Italian communists didn’t think they were a problem.
Many of them had been resistance fighters during the war, and when they’d put down their pistols, they’d looked around for the political party that was, like them, championing the underdog.
The Italian Communist Party was for higher wages and safer working conditions, improved education and better access to health care, but I think what a lot of young Italians cared most about was that it was the party at the farthest end of the political spectrum from the country’s neo-fascists, who weren’t allowed to call themselves fascists anymore but voted for the Movimento Sociale Italiano, or MSI.
I suppose it’s possible President Nixon was worried about these guys, too, but the MSI had won only eight percent of the vote in the ’72 election, so they were on America’s proverbial back burner.
Ultimately, the U.S. State Department developed a multipronged approach to stem the growth of communism in Italy:
First, they decided they’d throw even more money and resources behind the Christian Democrats.
The U.S. had been propping up DC candidates since the end of the war, sometimes with suitcases full of cash, and they’d continue to do what they could to help this centrist party—the party of the Catholic Church—hold on to power.
Second, they’d send more American forces into Italy’s Red Belt, or to places like Sardinia, that were on the cusp of turning red. The U.S.S. Fulton, which was the Gilmore’s predecessor, arrived in La Maddalena just months after the ’72 election. The timing was not a coincidence.
Third, they’d build up a secret stay-behind network of anticommunist forces, which would train at a facility in Sardinia and be prepared to fight in the event that Italy ever did go communist. This shadow network, which was made up of some six hundred people, by conservative estimates, buried weapons and cash all over Italy, and if you think I’m making it up, google Operation Gladio.
It’s the stuff of spy movies, but in 1990 Prime Minister Andreotti confirmed it was real.
This is all to say that, when Paul told me it was “strategically advantageous” for the Gilmore to be in La Maddalena, he wasn’t wrong.
The archipelago was a good spot to repair and resupply American subs, and it was an even better spot to win the hearts and minds of prospective voters—Italians who might have voted communist but for the fact that they had an American family living next door.