The Moro Séance #1: The Background March 10, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
On 16 March 1978 the Rome commando of the Red Brigade carried out a deadly and efficient attack on a leading Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro. They murdered five bodyguards on the spot and carried Moro into a two month captivity that would end with this death in the boot of a car. The Moro kidnapping is perhaps the most successful in history (until Hilary Clinton falls into the clutches of ISIS). The most important politician Italy, a five time president and a powerbroker of the left block of the CDs had been spirited away by a group of amateurs, some of whom were barely out of their teens. The murder of Moro is a fascinating episode in its own right, but Beach wants to bring up one of several small mysteries associated with the killing, which will be tagged here as the Moro Seance. Beach will split this into two posts but here is an efficient introduction from one of our best books in English on red terrorism in Italy in the 1970s The Heart Attacked by Alison Jamieson. Naturally the Italian police (all branches) were hysterically searching for their lost leader.
On Thursday [6 April] the inhabitants of a sleepy little village called Gradoli in the Province of Viterbo must have wondered what had hit them, for their rural peace was rudely shattered by the arrival of hundreds of police and carabinieri officials with sniffer dogs and machine guns who kicked down the doors of barns, sheds and chicken coops, and insisted on searching every house. For hours, helicopters circled incessantly overhead. They would have been ever more bewildered had they known that the cause of the intrusion was a spiritualist seance held four days earlier in a country house near Bologna, the home of a university professor. The séance had been attended by twelve people, including a number of academics and industrialists, all linked either by friendship or family ties. What had begun as a game took on a more serious tone when the ‘spirit’ was asked for the whereabouts of Aldo Moro’s prison. The resultant name of Gradoli was apparently unknown to all, but on production of a map, proved to be a village near Lake Bolsena. A report was duly made to the Bolognese police, hence the exhaustive but fruitless search (141-142).
At this point readers may be getting bored. So some weekenders carried out a séance and the police were foolish enough to take them seriously! (Only in Italy etc etc etc) But anyone who knows even the slightest detail of the Moro kidnapping will have noticed instead something jarring. The Roman Red Brigade had, we now know, three hideouts in the city and one of these was on Via Gradoli, Gradoli Road: it is not clear whether Moro was actually kept there at this date, but he may have spent some of his confinement in the Red Brigade flat there. Certainly a police raid on Gradoli may have led to Moro’s recovery. Interestingly the existence of Via Gradoli seems not to have escaped the wife of Aldo Moro.
Signora Moro was convinced there was a street called Gradoli somewhere in Rome, and urged a policeman to look it up. When he was unable to find it she appealed to a senior officer and also to someone in the DC (Christian Democrats), insisting that the street existed. She was again told that it could not be found. In fact, Via Gradoli is on any comprehensive street map of Rome (142)
There are two problems here, both of which will defeat easy analysis. The first, where did the information ‘Gradoli’ come from really? And second why did the police not investigate the Roman Via Gradoli? The second Beach will leave to the conspiracy types, the first though deserves a bit of research.
Other thoughts on the Moro Séance: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
28 Mar 2016: Bruce T. ‘Reminds me of hints in Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic strip re; the location of Patty Hearst during her “kidnapping”. Her location would occasionally pop up in the last letters in certain talk bubbles. Trudeau, of course, wasn’t involved, but he and his comic strip were the darlings of the radical Left at the time. The correlation between the strip and Hearst’s locations wasn’t discovered until after Hearst was captured. When info came out on the various places she’d been in hiding, it lined up with some of he locations in the bubbles. I don’t know if Trudeau ever gave a complete public explanation, but apparently someone with the trust of the SLA was passing Trudeau info on Hearst whereabouts. Why Trudeau was so cryptic with the info still perplexes me. Protecting a source? Being used by the FBI to keep the SLA on the move until they used a known safe house? Who knows? The entire Patty Hearst episode was a fiasco that ended in the destruction of a city block in Los Angeles before her capture. All over the Paris Hilton of her time.
