Edgardo Sogno

Edgardo Sogno   (diplomat, military)
Born	29 December 1915
Nationality	Italian

Count Edgardo Pietro Andrea Sogno Rata del Vallino di Ponzone was an Italian diplomat, WW2 British-led partisan and political figure. A feverent anti-communist and friend of the Agnelli family, he was part of the planning, along with Luigi Cavallo and Randolfo Pacciardi, of the Golpe bianco ("white coup d'etat") in 1974.

Background

Sogno descends from a family of ancient Savoyard nobility. After having obtained his high school diploma in 1933, he entered the army and was appointed second lieutenant in the posh "Nizza Cavalry Regiment", as befitted an aristocrat. He then graduated in law and political science from the Politecnichal University in Torino. In 1938 he took part in the Spanish Civil War. Although he was in the ranks of the pro-Francoists Italian volunteers, he was never a fascist, but a national liberal.

Opposition to Fascism

As an aristocrat from the traditional ruling elite, he could dare to show some opposition to the fascist government. In 1938, as a gesture of protest against the newly introduced fascist racial laws, he pinned a yellow Star of David on his jacket (the distinctive sign imposed on Jews in Nazi Germany) and showed himself in public.

The same year, 1938, an anti-fascist plot convened by the future Queen Maria José of Belgium, planned, with the help of parts of the regime's military circles who did not want an alliance with Nazi Germany, including Galeazzo Ciano, Rodolfo Graziani, Pietro Badoglio and Dino Grandi, the deposition and arrest of Mussolini and abdication of the king, to be replaced by a regency. Sogno was distantly involved in this scheme.

In 1940 he entered the diplomatic service. In 1942 he was called to arms and transferred to France, but a year later, in May 1943 he was arrested in Nice on charges of high treason, for having publicly wished an American military victory, but was then released on 25 July and discharged.

Work with the British Intelligence Services

After the armistice on 8. September 1943, Sogno crossed the frontline, making contact with the Royal Army (now on the Allied side) which garrisoned the regions of the South. There, having established contact with the government, he took an active part in organizing a spy network at the order to free the northern regions now occupied by the Germans.

He returned to the North thanks to the support of the British army. The British were his immediate contacts, through Radio London; his armed formation was aided with numerous British drops of weapons and materials. Together with two companions, Sogno was initially parachuted from an English plane, to create and direct the Organizzazione Franchi, a monarchist military formation linked to the British Intelligence Services and active since the winter of 1944. For a period was quartered with his fellow aristocrat, the marquis of Medici del Vascello.

In the same period, Lieutenant Sogno, while creating his spy network, also made contact with the Osoppo Partisan Brigade and, when the fate of the German forces now seemed to be doomed, from the beginning of 1945, he tried to start negotiations with the 10th MAS Flotilla of Prince Junio ​​Valerio Borghese (fighting on the fascist side) in order to coordinate and unite the efforts in a common front to stop the advance of the Yugoslav militias led by Tito in Trieste, on Italy's eastern frontier.

Political career after WW2 and the CIA

At the beginning of the fifties he published an anti-communist newspaper, "Peace and freedom". In 1953 it was transformed, with US funding, into the homonymous movement, an Italian subsidiary of the French "Paix et liberté", directly linked to the CIA and financially supported by NATO, and chaired by the French politicin Jean Paul David. The members of Peace and Freedom were nicknamed "Praetorians", as those of the Gladio Organization were "gladiators".

Luigi Cavallo also joined the group, which was started by former monarchist partisan and former Paris-correspondent of L'Unità, Colonel Ottorino Bonessa. Also part of the movement was French Police Commissioner Dides, a man owning his allegiance to the US services, and responsible for the construction of a network parallel to the French police (the Dides network), which included the commissioners and inspectors purged after the fall of the Vichy regime and specially reinstated, which inspired interior minister Mario Scelba in the reorganization of the Italian Police.

Groups such as Peace and Freedom, often private but funded by NATO and the State Department, which engaged in unorthodox warfare, especially psychological warfare and anti-communist propaganda, were born and were supported by the Italian government, with the approval of PM Alcide De Gasperi, as they were part of the agreements being necessary to enter the Atlantic Pact (another of these groups was the Gladio Organization, which was not private, but directly composed of state employees and enjoyed economic aid and US protection.

Diplomatic career

Disagreeing with the liberal government, he left politics to devote himself to diplomacy. Because of his military background, he was appointed a member of NATO's Planning Coordination Group in 1951, which resulted in his transfer to London, to the secretariat of the Atlantic Alliance. The following year he attended courses at NATO's Defense College in Paris, an organization created by Eisenhower to train cadres for psychological warfare against communism. It was around this time that he was awarded the American Bronze Star, the highest honor a non-American can aspire to.

He was in Buenos Aires, Paris, London and the Washington, then was appointed ambassador of Italy to Burma but, not approving the center-left government's negative attitude to the Vietnam war, he decided to resign.

In the meantime, he sought funding for the anti-communist cause from both NATO and Italian industrialists:

 «I have always easily found financial resources. For example, after the war I founded a newspaper, the "Corriere Lombardo", founded with 5 million given to me by Invernizzi, the owner of Galbani (I was the partisan of Confindustria, I went to meetings in the Via Torretta, I was the only one they trusted); it was an American-style information newspaper, which stood out among the party and traditional newspapers. I used these Confindustria friendships to finance the newspaper, with money from other entrepreneurs as well (and even some bills paid by me). I had the same ease in the anti-communist battle. I returned from Valletta, etc. Just think that at Via Torretta, headquarters of Confindustria, the tasks of financing the anti-communist forces were evenly divided between the 3-4 big names; Angelo Costa financed the Christian Democrats, Faina the monarchists, Viscosa the [neo-fascist] MSI and Valletta [[Pace e Libertà]; we were equated with a political party and earned 15-20 million a month, in support of our anti-communist line.

The coup d'état project

In May 1970 Sogno left his diplomatic posts and returned to Italy, where he helped create the Committees of Democratic Resistance, a series of political centers with an anti-communist function. Numerous of his former partisan colleagues from the war joined, such as Enrico Martini (commander "Mauri"). Enzo Tortora also write in the newspaper Resistenza Democratica; during this period he was also vice-president of the resistance association Italian Federation of Volunteers of Freedom (FIVL).

Among the members of the first groups of Democratic Resistance were also John McCaffery, son of the former head of the British secret services in Italy between 1943 and 1945, and British WW2 agent Edward Philip Scicluna, who now was general manager of the FIAT Agency and Head Office in Malta. Among the contacts of Sogno were also Hung Fendwich, an American engineer executive, considered one of the most important CIA agents of that period in Italy, and intermediary between the Nixon presidency and the black prince Junio ​​Valerio Borghese.

The arrest of Edgardo Sogno in 1976

In the seventies Sogno became convinced that Italy needed a presidential republic to hinder any communist participation in government. He therefore wanted a constitutional reform similar to the one that General Charles de Gaulle had created in France with the establishment of the Fifth Republic. He became friends with the politician Randolfo Pacciardi, a former partisan, an advocate of such an presidential republic. Sogno also joined the Freemasonry of the Grand Orient of Italy, associating itself with the P2 Masonic lodge.

Sogno under arrest in 1976

This plan was hatched only four years after the attempted Borghese coup in 1970.

Sogno now made contact with several generals and prepared a government project. His intentions in the coup were, "a largely representative operation on the political level and of maximum efficiency on the military level", as Sogno himself writes. The aim was to push the President of the Republic Giovanni Leone to appoint a new government capable of modifying the constitution to strengthen the presidency, and should be headed by Pacciardi, who was envisaged as "the Italian de Gaulle".

Defense Minister Giulio Andreotti is credited with having the military leaders involved transferred, hindering the coup project, which in any case allegedly never went beyond the conception phase. Paolo Emilio Taviani, Minister of the Interior at the time, wrote, after Sogno's death, that he had received information and had instructed the Chief of Police to investigate; Taviani assumes that in this way such information reached the Turin Public Prosecutor's Office.

In 1974 the magistrate Luciano Violante accused him of having planned, together with Randolfo Pacciardi and Luigi Cavallo, the so-called White Coup "in order to change the State Constitution and the form of government with means not permitted by the constitutional order": he ended for a month and a half in prison together with Luigi Cavallo, considered by judge Violante to be the true creator of the White coup.

Randolfo Pacciardi and Luigi Cavallo denied any attempted coup d'état in interrogations and in television broadcasts. Sogno denounced Violante as a pro-communist, in a trial that acquitted him because the accusation did not constitute a crime.

The reason for the decision to try to force president Leone's hand with a coup was the increased possibility of the left faction of the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party getting into government. This fear was shared by key sectors of the army and by numerous former liberals, republicans, monarchists and even repentant former communists, especially after the events in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).

The coup project intended to create a government form that would stop the risk of the Communists getting into government. According to Sogno, it was necessary to "bring the country back to the vision of the Risorgimento" (its foundation), by means of an alliance between Western laity, liberal Catholics and anti-Marxist socialists, against the Communists of the Italian Communist Party (still closely linked with the Soviet bloc) and those of the extra-parliamentary left, as well as against the neo-fascists.

The trial against Sogno, Cavallo and Pacciardi ended on 13 September 1978 with a full acquittal "for not having committed the crime".

Gelli and Sindona

Convinced that this was benefiting the anti-communist cause, he testified, with Licio Gelli (the lodge master of P2) and Luigi Cavallo, in favor of the fixer Michele Sindona (in what he considered a political persecution by the "pro-Communist judiciary") in a Swiss investigation for banking fraud and a dubious bankruptcy, to prevent the United States from extraditing him to Italy; later Sindona's connivance with American Cosa Nostra would be discovered. Sogno, like Gelli, thought that Sindona would not receive a fair trial for the crime of bankruptcy and would risk being killed in prison (he did indeed die from a poisoned coffee in the Voghera super prison).

Last Years

An awkward and abrasive personality, he was detested by a large part of the left, but also little loved by the right. Apart from the coup, they disliked his friendship with the Agnelli family (in particular with the lawyer Gianni Agnelli) and the top management of FIAT.

In the nineties, with Tangentopoli and the collapse of the old political system, he had the feeling that his hope of a Gaullist Italy could finally come true. He therefore resumed writing with great enthusiasm, published some books and wrote in newspapers.

Finally he returned to the political scene in 1996, running for the Senate with the National Alliance (a party with post-fascists roots, who nevertheless offered him the candidacy as an independent candidate). Not elected, he retired to private life, arguing with the presence in the institutions of former members of the Communist Party who remained in politics, such as Massimo D'Alema.

He died in the year 2000. By decision of the center-left government of Giuliano Amato, he was decreed a state funeral, which took place in Turin, which was also attended by members of the government.

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