The Ring (Italy)

The Ring (Italy)   (Intelligence agency)
Predecessor	Servizio Informazioni Militare
Formation	1943
Extinction	1991?
Headquarters	Via Appia Nuova,  Rome,  Italy
Membership	•  Mario Roatta •  Federico Umberto D'Amato •  Giulio Andreotti •  Solomon Hotimsky
Secret parallel intelligence agency for phone bugging and black ops under the control of Giulio Andreotti.

Anello (in English: The Ring), also called Noto servizio, was Italian parallel intelligence agency to the military SID, under control of Giulio Andreotti. It functioned as a link between political and civil hierarchies and military hierarchies united in the fight against communism. It was founded towards the end of the Second World War and survived maybe until the early nineties.

The Ring was a parallel and clandestine secret service... The history of this service intersects with many of the darkest events in the history of our country: from Piazza Fontana to the Moro case to the Cirillo case. The term Ring does not appear in any official act but is mentioned by some members of the organization, who give it the role of link between the secret services (used in an anti-communist function) and civil society" (Aldo Giannuli)

History

Giulio Andreotti

In Giulio Andreotti's 1998 roman a clef Operazione via Appia he described how he in 1943 worked in a phone bugging operation in a secret facility in Rome under the command of Federico Umberto D'Amato. The task was to report compromising or important passages contained in letters and phone calls between influential figures of the fascist government in its final days, the royal family, and the Vatican. The operation continued as a parallel intelligence agency after the war until at least until the early 1990s, under the name l'Anello (The Ring). In an interview given on February 15, 2011, the master of the P2 Masonic lodge, Licio Gelli, confirmed this declaring that:

“I had the P2, Cossiga Gladio and Andreotti the Ring.”
Licio Gelli (2011) 

The discovery of the existence of this secret structure came to light in 1996, thanks to the work of the historian and essayist Aldo Giannuli who, on behalf of the Milanese judge Guido Salvini and the Public Prosecutor of Brescia, as part of his investigations into neofascist "terrorism" and the bombings of Piazza Fontana and Piazza della Loggia, discovered a series of documents in an archive of the Confidential Affairs Office of the Ministry of the Interior abandoned on the Via Appia Nuova, in Rome. In November 2000, the prosecutor's office sent all the documents to the Parliamentary Commission on massacres and they became public knowledge.

From the documents discovered by the Public Prosecutor of Brescia, it was revealed that the structure was founded in 1943 the year in which General Mario Roatta, and head of the fascist Military Information Service (SIM) fled to Brindisi (under Allied control) after the Armistice together with King Vittorio Emanuele III, managed to involve some of his old operatives to follow him in the formation of the first nucleus of this new organization born with anti-communist purposes, which later in 1945 helped him to escape from the military hospital in which he was detained and to flee to Spain. Afterwards, the unit passed directly into the hands of the Allies, and the Jewish-Polish officer Solomon Hotimsky, code name "Otimsky", of the British-Polish army of general Władysław Anders, was appointed to direct it.

As is clear from the documentation, it seems that in 1972 the structure could count on a network of 164 operatives and to direct it operationally probably Adalberto Titta, a former aviator for Mussolini's Salò Republic and by profession surveyor, who died of a heart attack in 1981.

Federico Umberto D'Amato

The entity had two groups, a larger one in northern Italy and a smaller one in the area of Rome. The two groups had some autonomy from each other, despite both being coordinated by Titta. The organization had a plane and a helicopter in an airfield across the Swiss border and numerous weapons and ammunition concealed at a carabinieri barracks in Via Moscova in Milan. Also according to the documents uncovered by Giannuli, the famous private investigator Tom Ponzi, the right-wing extremist Gianni Nardi, the deputy Massimo De Carolis and the journalist and senator of the neo-fascist MSI Giorgio Pisano] were part of the structure. From the investigation it emerged that it was used essentially for anti-Communist political psy-ops and actions that aimed to oppose elements and parties of the left: creating dossiers, disinformation campaigns and direct interventions in many economic and criminal scandals such as kidnappings and elimination of opponents through the simulation of road accidents, as in the case of Eugenio Dugoni, socialist mayor of Mantua, and Bruno Di Pol, secretary of the Chamber of Labor of Milan.

Having a very small operational base, the agency used to turn to the circles of the right-wing subversion and organized underworld to recruit operatives for the various operations. It was always headed by the military intelligence agency SID and, informally, the Prime Minister (i.e. Giulio Andreotti)

According to the investigators, the Ring also played a role in the arms and oil trades of the era, and also in the escape of Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, responsible for the 1944 massacre of 343 civilians at the Fosse Ardeatine and helped to escape from an Italian military hospital in 1977. In 1978, a few days after the kidnapping of Moro, through the intervention of the Ring, the Red Brigades lair on Via Gradoli in Rome was identified.

The role of Andreotti

According to some witnesses, starting from 1964, politically the Ring directly controlled by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. During the interrogations conducted by the Public Prosecutor of Brescia, Michele Ristuccia, one of the adherents of the structure, declared that the Ring "depended directly on the Prime Minister. Its management was a Christian Democrat monopoly, except in the last period, in which I suppose the PSI also knew, as I understand that it had made some requests". The members of the secret structure was given "a card at the bottom of which it spelled out the cooperation and immunity from criminal liability in the line of duty. I specify that I do not know if all the members of the Ring had this card, but Titta certainly had it and I could personally see it, I remember that it had the header of the Prime Minister".

 

Known members

2 of the 4 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
Giulio Andreotti	"The ultimate insider of Italian political life", who as Italian Prime Minister publicly confirmed the existence of Operation Gladio
Federico Umberto D'Amato	Italian spook who claimed to have founded the Club de Berne. In 2020, indicated him as one of the 4 principal organizers or financiers of the 1980 Bologna train station massacre.

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 03.03.2025.
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