On 7 June 1976, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama reported on the forthcoming Italian general election. Two weeks before the poll, the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) – the largest communist party in Europe – stood “on the threshold of power”.
Introducing the first foreign television interview with the then PCI leader, Enrico Berlinguer, David Dimbleby stood in front of a picture of Berlinguer captioned “Would you trust this man?” Highlighting the consequences of a PCI victory, Dimbleby informed BBC viewers that if Italy voted the party in, “the ripples will spread far beyond Italy itself”.
The interview had been secured by one of Panorama’s leading correspondents, Richard Lindley. As Berlinguer sat with cigarettes and a drink to hand, Lindley interrogated him on his party’s attitude towards political repression in the Soviet Union, its commitment to Nato and, “if the cold war came again … where your loyalties would lie?”
Lindley also pressed him on the strength of the PCI’s declared independence from the Soviet communist party, quoting a previous PCI leader’s reference to a “bond of steel” between the two parties. “Our independence is simply a fact,” Berlinguer said.
The exchange caused satisfaction in Whitehall. “We were interested to note the ‘bond of steel’ quotation used by Lindley,” wrote a Foreign Office official, Peter Joy, to a colleague in Rome. “I assume you may have had the chance to talk to Lindley before the interview?” he wrote. “If so, well done!”
Joy’s interest was not academic. He oversaw a top-secret unit of the Information Research Department (IRD), the covert cold war propaganda arm of the Foreign Office. The IRD’s Special Editorial Unit (SEU) was responsible for the department’s most sensitive operations, running propaganda missions around the world against communists and others deemed to threaten British interests. The unit worked closely with MI6.
Recent investigations by the Observer have revealed how the IRD incited mass murder in Indonesia in the 1960s and ran a secret campaign to smear Oginga Odinga, the leftwing vice-president of Kenya.
Now, newly declassified documents reveal that the IRD ran a campaign with MI6 to “undermine the credibility” of the Italian communist party and influence the 1976 election.
According to Prof Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham, the IRD appears to have crossed a line “that democracies don’t interfere in other countries’ democratic processes”, and Italy was “a fellow member of Nato, a fellow member of the European Economic Community and a democracy.”
The declassified files reveal that embassy officials in Rome briefed Lindley, handing him an unattributed IRD memorandum on the PCI. It contained the quote attributed to former party leader Palmiro Togliatti about the “bonds of steel” which IRD claimed still characterised the PCI’s relationship with the Soviets.
Heulyn Dunlop, an SEU official seconded to Rome for the campaign, reported that the correspondent planned to ask Berlinguer “a number of awkward questions”.
Joy was later pleased to note: “Lindley succeed in getting under Berlinguer’s guard – especially on the Nato issue”.
According to the then head of the IRD, Ray Whitney, the unattributable briefing paper was “a quarry of basic information on the party for the use of trusted contacts”. Journalists would be told it had been produced for diplomats, “but we are allowed to show them on a personal basis to people who may find them useful”.
It provided Lindley with painstaking research on the PCI, including quotes from disparate sources that could be deployed against Berlinguer. The documents suggest that Lindley was unknown to the propagandists and unaware who was behind the briefing. The same brief was handed to foreign correspondents working for the Financial Times and Washington Post.
Just as many observers now fear Italy’s new right-wing government might go soft on Putin’s Russia and disrupt the EU, in the mid-1970s British officials feared a similar outcome if the PCI joined a coalition.
In local elections in 1975, the PCI won 33% of the vote, just behind the governing Christian Democrats, attracting support by attacking corruption, distancing itself from Moscow and committing to democracy, freedom and private enterprise. Berlinguer promised an accommodation with Nato and the EEC.
The Foreign Office was divided on how genuine this was. Some believed Berlinguer’s leadership offered a chance of a “glittering prize” – detaching a western European communist party from Moscow – but others saw the PCI as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
In fact, KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin would later tell British intelligence that while Moscow continued to fund the PCI, the Soviets were dismayed by Berlinguer and, like the IRD, tried to discredit him.
But the cold war warriors prevailed.
Alarmed by Italy’s slide to the left, in November 1975 Foreign Office officials asked the IRD to target Berlinguer and his party and expose the contradiction between the PCI’s new democratic image and its official commitment to Marxism-Leninism.
“We do not want the communist parties of western Europe to come to power in any form,” a senior British diplomat noted. They “must continue to be opposed by every possible means”. Britain’s ambassador in Rome argued it would be “catastrophic” if the PCI entered government.
In April 1976, Britain’s new Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, appointed Anthony Crosland to replace him as foreign secretary. The declassified files show that the Foreign Office’s top mandarin, Sir Michael Palliser, told the incoming foreign secretary it was “not too late” to “prevent a communist accession to power in Italy” and promised him proposals. There was good reason for the Foreign Office to expect Crosland’s blessing. A dedicated social democrat, he opposed Soviet communism and had written critically about Eurocommunism.
Four days after the date of the Italian election was announced, officials put forward their “options for action” in a paper sent to Crosland. It warned that PCI participation in government was “a very dangerous prospect” and that if the party achieved “majority participation … leading on to full power, the situation would probably have to be regarded as irretrievable by the Nato allies and Community partners”.
A “clean surgical coup” was rejected as “unrealistic”, although “in the right circumstances”, officials mused, they could encourage the Italian government to repress the PCI, and suggested “it might be worth” arranging pretexts for this. But officials advised they could “orchestrate a campaign” against Berlinguer and the PCI, recommending “increased action in the propaganda field, both overt and covert, to undermine the credibility of the PCI”.
While officials awaited Crosland’s approval, the documents reveal, the IRD was already starting covert operations. Dunlop of the SEU was seconded to the embassy in Rome to discover ways “to influence Italian opinion” to support “the middle ground in the run-up to the election”.
Discussions began as to possible tactics. One IRD official suggested that “it might be rumour-mongered” that Alto Adige, a northern region transferred to Italy after the first world war, planned to declare independence or rejoin Austria if the PCI won.
IRD wanted the BBC to broadcast western comment on “Italian political developments” to listeners to its Italian Service and reported they “seem very ready to be cooperative”.
But in Rome, embassy diplomats feared “the direct surfacing of material” would reveal “HMG’s hand”, Dunlop wrote. These sensitivities guaranteed MI6’s involvement in the IRD operations, which were planned in collaboration with Britain’s spies. A secret memorandum reveals how the IRD and MI6 proposed to collaborate. Joy asked Britain’s spies to provide secret intelligence on the PCI leaders, their relations with Moscow and Soviet funding, and which media outlets were most used by swing voters.
Others show a longstanding agent handled by MI6’s Swiss station chief, Terry O’Bryan-Tear, recruited rightwing Swiss politician Franco Masoni to print anti-Communist material in the Gazzetta Ticinese. Masoni offered to circulate 60,000 copies across the Swiss border, giving IRD a covert media outlet in Italy. O’Bryan-Tear’s “agent” also agreed to print a booklet showing how Communists exploited the democratic process of Czechoslovakia to seize power in 1948.
The British operation could not have been more sensitive. A few months earlier, the CIA’s funding of Italian political parties had been revealed in the US press. David Lipsey, then Crosland’s political adviser, warned Britain “could hardly expect the [communist party] to play to democratic rules if we resorted to dirty tricks”. “If we give the communists enough rope, they may prove themselves innocent; or they may hang themselves.” A “lynching operation” threatened to damage “our democratic credibility … not theirs”, he wrote.
“This was potentially incendiary with the British Labour party,” David, now Lord, Lipsey, told the Observer. “Here was this party, putting forward its credentials to be a democratic socialist party opposing a right-wing Italian government.” Going against it “would be like backing the US in Vietnam. I don’t think we would have minded if we thought … they [the PCI] were just Moscow’s tools in Italy.”
Just over a month before the election, at a meeting to discuss Foreign Office “options for action” in Italy, Palliser and senior colleagues failed to convince Crosland to accept their recommendations, and no decision was made one way or the other.
Lipsey advised the IRD’s head, Whitney, not to send the department’s paper on the PCI outside the diplomatic service. The following day, Crosland met his ministerial colleagues and agreed that Britain should issue “no public statements or private warnings to affect the election result”. Nevertheless, IRD operations in Italy went ahead, seemingly circumventing Crosland’s apparent reluctance. An internal IRD minute dated 3 June 1976 reveals that at a meeting held by Richard Sykes, then deputy undersecretary for Europe at the Foreign Office, it was agreed that “continuing unattributable information activity” did not require “ministerial sanction”.
Lipsey said: “Nobody could think that that shouldn’t have been brought to [Crosland’s] attention”. IRD “should be working to the instructions of the foreign secretary of the day”. He is convinced Crosland did not give “the go-ahead for a campaign of this kind”.
David, now Lord, Owen, who succeeded Crosland as foreign secretary in 1977, told the Observer: “Needless to say, democratic politicians should not interfere clandestinely in other democracies holding elections.”
The IRD paper on the PCI was distributed for “interested contacts” at the “discretion” of each embassy. The Rome embassy issued a bulletin of UK press comment on the election slanted against the PCI.
From Rome, Dunlop sent Joy suggestions for articles, including comparing the PCI’s surge to the rise of Benito Mussolini. Joy sent covert press contacts anti-communist articles written by the IRD, highlighting the insincerity of Berlinguer and the communists, and other anti-communist themes.
Following an article by the former Labour minister Lord Chalfont in the Times about the communist threat to democracy and how their victory would lead to Italy’s expulsion from Nato, Dunlop called for another article to refute “arguments adduced by the PCI”. In an interview two days later, Lord Chalfont rebutted the PCI arguments using lines provided by Joy.
Dunlop reported that the IRD paper on the PCI had been passed “to the Christian Democrat party, which intends some of it for circulation to candidates before the elections”.
A week before the election, two forged pamphlets purporting to have been issued by Soviet news agency Novosti were circulated.
Dunlop reported that they appeared to be “evidence of Soviet attempted manipulation of the elections” and “probably contributed to some degree to strengthening the vote for the Christian Democrats”. Although the origin of the forgeries is unclear, the IRD had previously produced at least 11 Novosti forgeries. Joy said they were “clearly very successful and provide important lessons for the future”.
On election day, there was a swing to the left, but the Christian Democrats emerged as the largest party. Dunlop, reporting afterwards, identified the key development as “a largely spontaneous and effective campaign” by the Italian press, alerting Italians “to the dangers of voting the PCI into power”. The IRD’s operations against the PCI were, she wrote, “last minute” and “could only have had a limited impact”.
Joy said the elections had “won us a short breathing space in which to prepare for the second round in Italy”. But the secret operation was the last major “black job” mounted by the IRD and its SEU: the following year, the new foreign secretary, David Owen, shut down the IRD.
