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, partisan and political figure. A feverent anti-communist, he was part of the planning, along with Luigi Cavallo and Randolfo Pacciardi, of the Golpe bianco ("white coup d'etat") in 1974.
Contents
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 "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 served in the ranks of the pro-Francoists Italian volunteers, he was never a fascist, but a national liberal.
Opposition to Fascism and the Second World War
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 the military victory of the United States of America, but was then released on 25 July and discharged.
After the 8. September armisitice, Sogno crossed the front, making contact with the Royal Army which garrisoned the regions of the South and here, having established contact with the government of Vittorio Emanuele III , he took an active part in organizing a spy network at the order to free the northern regions now in the hands of the Germans.
He returned to the North thanks to the support of the British army and the British were his immediate contacts, through Radio London; his armed formation was aided with numerous drops of weapons and materials. Together with two companions, Sogno was initially parachuted from an English plane taken off from Tunisia, to create and direct the Organization Franchi, a monarchist military formation linked to the Intelligence Service, active since the winter of 1944. For a period he found himself at the Tenuta La Mandria supported by the owners, the marquisws of Medici del Vascello.
In the same period, Lieutenant Sogno, in weaving his spy network, also made contact with the Osoppo Brigade and, when the fate of the German forces now seemed to be sealed, from the beginning of 1945 he would have tried to start negotiations with the 10th MAS Flotilla of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese in order to coordinate and unite the efforts in a common front to stop the advance of the Yugoslav militias led by Tito in the eastern territories of Istria and the Julian area.
Political career after WW2
At the beginning of the fifties he published an anti-communist newspaper entitled " Peace and freedom ", which in 1953 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 deputy for the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party Jean Paul David.
The members of Peace and Freedom were nicknamed "Praetorians", as those of the Gladio Organization were the "gladiators". Luigi Cavallo also joined the group, started by former monarchist partisan and former Paris-correspondent of L'Unità, Colonel Ottorino Bonessa. Also part of the movement was Commissioner Dides, a man of the US services, 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 Alcide De Gasperi, as they were part of the agreements to be able to enter the Atlantic Pact (another of these groups was the Gladio Organization, which, however, was not private, but directly composed of state employees) and enjoyed economic aid and US protection.
The diplomatic career
Disagreeing with the liberals, he left politics to devote himself to diplomacy. Due to 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 served in Buenos Aires, Paris, London and the United States, 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.[1]
The alleged coup d'état project
In May 1970 Sogno left his diplomatic posts and returned to Italy, where he gave birth to the Committees of Democratic Resistance[2], a series of political centers born with an anti-communist function, to which numerous former "white" and "blue" partisans joined, such as Enrico Martini (commander "Mauri"). Enzo Tortora will 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).
The arrest of Edgardo Sogno in 1976
In the seventies Sogno became convinced that Italy needed a presidential republic and therefore a constitutional reform similar to the one that General Charles de Gaulle had obtained in France with the establishment of the Fifth Republic. He became friends with Randolfo Pacciardi, a former partisan and republican politician, an advocate of the presidential republic, and joined the Freemasonry of the Grand Orient of Italy, associating himself with the P2 Masonic lodge.
He made contact with several generals and prepared a government project. In his intentions, "a largely representative operation on the political level and of maximum efficiency on the military level" was to take place, as Sogno himself writes[3] and the aim was to push the President of the Republic Giovanni Leone to appoint a new government capable of modify the constitution in a presidential sense, headed by Pacciardi, who should have been "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 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 broadcast. Sogno denounced Violante as a pro-communist, in a trial that acquitted him because the accusation does not constitute a crime.
The cause of the decision 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 liberal, republican, monarchist and even repentant former communists, after the events in Hungary.
The coup project consisted in creating the basis for a government form that would hinder 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", 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,Sindona
Convinced of benefiting the anti-communist cause, he testified, with Licio Gelli (the 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 bancrupcy, 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).
References
- ↑ A. Pannocchia e F. Tosolini Gladio. Storia di finti complotti e di veri patriotip 183
- ↑ http://www.ecn.org/uenne/archivio/archivio2000/un26/art1219.html
- ↑ Messori-Cazzullo, Il mistero Torino, p 423.
