Ustica, the truth in the labyrinth

“Before going home, forget everything you’ve said, read, and done! All your family wants is you.” The poster, faded now, still hangs on the wall of the big underground base. A warning, repeated first in Italian and then in English, with a reference to family that, coming from a Mafioso, would be taken as an unmistakable threat. Instead, the poster hangs inside a NATO bunker, carved into the depths of Mount Moscal, in the Veneto. The military command here has long since been dismantled, but the warning still stands: “Forget everything you’ve said, read, and done!” And that is the seal of silence that relentlessly continues to hold the truth about Ustica captive.

On June 27, 1980, while the Itavia DC-9 carrying 81 human beings was shattering to pieces in the dying light of sunset, three hundred and fifty members of the Italian and American military were keeping a close watch on the skies over Italy, updating the positions of aircraft on a map that stood ten feet tall in that very same hardened bunker, built to withstand even an atom bomb. It was called West Star, and theoretically at least, it was a top-secret base. Many people knew about its existence, though: in fact, it came up immediately in the conversations of the radar operators who were racking their brains in search of an explanation for the disappearance of the aircraft shortly after it took off from Bologna.

But no magistrate ever went to the base to demand information or documents. Ever. Now those underground galleries are a labyrinth inhabited by the phantoms of the Cold War: time there has stopped at the era of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, punctuated by maps showing missiles ready for launch and lists of interceptor fighter planes on never-ending alert. The suffocating strength of the steel cement domes, built to outlast even a nuclear apocalypse, help to make clear why no one has ever been identified as responsible for the death of four crew members, 64 adult passengers, eleven children ranging in age from two to twelve, and two newborn babies. “Forget everything you’ve said, read, and done!” An ironbound rule, common to Italy and all the other countries, whether friendly or hostile, accused of involvement in the destruction of the Bologna-Palermo flight. That rule has outlived the fall of any and all walls.

Forty years later, we still don’t know who caused the disintegration of that DC-9. After it tumbled into the ocean depths, it was known as the “the tragedy of Ustica.” Eight years later, when it reemerged from sea, piece by piece, it became clear that it had been the “massacre of Ustica.” Then the aircraft was painstakingly reassembled in the Museum of Memory (Museo per la Memoria), in Bologna, transformed into a colossal j’accuse. “Every tiny detail was a deduction,” wrote Daniele Del Giudice in a chapter of Staccando l’ombra da terra (Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore). “The flight instruments and the mats and carpets, sliced neatly on a line with the fourth row of seats. What do objects know of plots and covert actions? What do they know about masterminds and henchmen? The objects just lie there. They would be the story of the airplane, because the airplane knows its own story.” That piece of wreckage remains a plea for justice, kept alive by those lightbulbs, perpetually kept burning, one for each victim.

If not for the bitter determination of the family members, it would all still be lying, buried for all time beneath the waters of the Tyrhennian Sea. But the investigations launched by magistrates and members of parliament came too late. Key witnesses were only interviewed ten years later. Documents and tapes vanished without being acquired as evidence. Letters rogatory to foreign judicial counterparts only after a quarter century, and those answers were often fragmentary or deceptive and incomplete. Every step forward, every legal exhibit, every expert analysis has done nothing but sow doubt and trigger arrays of interpretations, rather than establishing certainties.

Even the recovery of the 2,500 fragments that went into the reconstruction of the jet. Even the black box, with the pilots’ voices, which break off with the partial word, “Qua…” or “Gua…” interpreted in a very recent analysis by RaiNews24 as “Guarda…” Meaning: “Look…”. The findings of the courts have provided conflicting results. The major preliminary investigation by Judge Rosario Priore, which concluded with a judicial order over five thousand pages long, reconstructed a wartime scenario: the DC was in the middle of a full-fledged battle, shot down by a missile, or by the shock wave from a fighter plane that brushed past it at supersonic speed. Priore ordered the indictment of a dozen officers of the Italian Air Force for obstruction of justice and omission under oath, without however managing to name those responsible for the massacre. The course of the criminal trial then methodically dismantled all the evidence brought to bear, resulting in a final and definitive acquittal of all defendants.

The verdicts of the judges in the civil cases, which are likewise final and unappealable, were diametrically opposite, and ordered the ministries of Defense and Transportation to make reparations, because they were at fault for failing to protect the Itavia aircraft from fighter jets of unknown nationality that shot down that plane, one night in the midst of an undeclared war.
Still, not even the verdict handed down by Italy’s civil Supreme Court of Cassation was enough to allay the raging disagreements. The underlying reason was that these courts decide in accordance with the principle of “greatest likelihood.” Therefore, to base ourselves on complete judicial rigor, we’d have to admit that we still have no real finding of truth about Ustica, but that the “greatest likelihood” remains that, on a long-ago night over the Tyrrhenian Sea, a ferocious battle unfolded.

Repubblica has been covering this tragic series of events from the very outset. Two generations of journalists have worked to find a thread leading through the labyrinth of evidence and falsehoods. In this investigative piece, we have tried to reexamine the various hypotheses that have been taken under consideration over the past four decades and that you find summarized here in a video presentation. We have analyzed international documents that have finally been declassified and others that have never yet reached the desks of investigators. We have talked to major figures in the various political events, aviation experts and witnesses to what happened, some of whom have still clung to the seal of silence. In other words, we have done our best to stitch together the many threads of this warp and weft, in the hopes that we might be able to find a more clearly defined pattern, or at least a signal with less of a preponderance of noise.

There is only one element of certainty. The one path to a real understanding of what happened starts out with the facts and evidence gathered in the immediate aftermath of the massacre: such as, for instance, the recordings of phone calls made from and to the air traffic control centers. Those conversations, recorded in the very minutes during which the DC-9 disappeared from the radar screens make mention of tracks of U.S. aircraft, pointing to a theoretical in-flight collision, and openly postulate the presence of an aircraft carrier. And on the maps of the Marconi radar center at Ciampino, the only radar center run by civilians, there are intermittent signals of jets that have never been identified. The hundreds of technical analyses commissioned over the years that followed were inadequate to establish any uncontestable explanation, and in fact the criminal appeals court wrote: “It was the failure of science that determined the defeat of knowledge.”

Likewise, the Deputy Prosecutor Maria Monteleone and the Assistant Prosecutor Erminio Amelio, who have been conducting the most recent investigation since 2008, questioned officials and officers from many countries and searched for documents around the world, using the testimony of a handful of convergent and undisputed witnesses and sources as crowbars to try to pry open the stubborn coffers of secrecy. Every time that a crack seemed to appear in the wall, they have tried to exploit it, in hopes of casting a ray of light. They are like a pair of archeologists, digging down through the layers of disinformation in hopes of extracting uncontaminated evidence. Not even they, however, were able to come up with a name, and the investigation seemed destined to become just another cold case, tucked away in the archives.

Archived, technically, of course, because the crime of massacre has no statute of limitations, and the case file can be reopened and added to whenever there is some new shred of evidence.

Anche il procuratore aggiunto Maria Monteleone e il sostituto Erminio Amelio, che dal 2008 portano avanti l'ultima indagine, dopo avere interrogato ufficiali di molti Paesi e cercato atti in mezzo mondo, fanno leva su un pugno di testimonianze coincidenti e indiscusse per provare a scardinare i forzieri del segreto. Ogni volta che nel muro sembra aprirsi una crepa, cercano di sfruttarla per fare luce. Sono come archeologi, che scavano negli strati di disinformazione per arrivare a estrarre prove incontaminate. Ma neppure loro finora sono riusciti a trovare un nome e l'inchiesta sembra destinata all'archiviazione.

It is clear, however, that the two public prosecutors remain convinced of what they claimed in the first trial: namely that those 81 individuals were swept away by a military operation that remains unconfessed and unconfessable.

To get a fair idea of the complexities surrounding the Ustica affair, we need first to delve into the geopolitical dynamics at play in the summer of 1980, when the boundaries of the Cold War were shifting. Italy not only found itself hunkered down in the easternmost trench of the standoff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but also occupied a position on the southern front line that was just then beginning to be deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. In the clash between the two overarching blocs, there was a creeping heightening of tensions on the part of the Arab countries, starting with Libya: terrorists of every faith became tools in the hands of powers great and small.

Suspicion reigned supreme, with spies and double agents operating as far as the eye could see: everyone was a declared enemy of Gaddafi, and at the same time everyone was secretly helping him. Italian administrations and intelligence services were moving ruthlessly and recklessly, now defending the interests of transatlantic allies, and now defending national interests, or toggling between the interests of political parties or, as often as not, personal interests and the ulterior interests of shadowy entities such as the P-2 Masonic Lodge, a structure that would in fact be unmasked the following year. Like Harlequin, they served many different masters in a tangled web that served to cover up the neofascist bombings of the so-called strategy of tension: as far as Ustica was concerned, allies and rivals remained bound by ties of brotherhood in the cover-up of mysteries, employing every tool and every branch of the armed services.

No structural failure

“What mysteries are we talking about?” Daria Bonfietti, who has been striving for exactly forty years now to uncover the truth about the massacre of Ustica, lurches in a fit of indignation when she hears the word “mystery.” Indignation and discouragement. “What is this supposed mystery? That night of June 27, 1980, in the skies over Italy, an act of war unfolded in time of peace. Period. That truth was ascertained by a panel of judges with a verdict handed down, beyond appeal, in 1999. More than twenty years ago. And that act of war resulted in the downing of a DC-9 aircraft carrying 81 civilians. One of them was my brother.”

Ustica, family members of the victims 40 years after massacre: ''The aircraft was pulled down, now tell us who was responsible''

Alberto Bonfietti was 37 years old, and he had taken off on a flight for Palermo, where he planned to join his wife and daughter. Daria remembers the last phone call. “So long, have fun, let me hear from you, talk soon.” Then she remembers another phone call, around 11 o’clock that same evening, quivering with anguish and screams: “Did Alberto take that actual airplane???”
Yes, the very same plane. A plane that plummeted into the depths of the seas off Ustica “due to structural failure,” as the official pronouncement went at the time.

An explanation that was upheld at length, for years to come. Now here that same aircraft is, before the eyes of Daria Bonfietti, reconstructed to the extent possible, around a steel skeleton in this museum, right on the outskirts of Bologna. The fuselage, the wings, and a part of the nose. All around it are an array of black boxes. Not the black boxes containing the secrets of that ill-omened flight, but rather actual black boxes, personifications of the pietas with which the artist Christian Boltanski conceived and built this museum, each black box contained the personal effects of the victim, fished out of the sea.

You can walk around the aircraft, illuminated from overhead by 81 lightbulbs, and listen to the voices of shattered lives, so many snapped threads. Daria Bonfietti leans over the railing and points to a wing. If you ask her to tell the story, the first thing she says is: “Try and stop me.” Then she begins. “Structural failure, they said. And not just some random person, this was claimed by official sources. Italy lied, some of the country’s highest officials lied — and they paid for those lies, with convictions for high treasons. There are other high officials who are probably still lying now, if they’re still alive, that is. That’s what I wonder: how can it be that no one is indignant that we still don’t know the truth behind this massacre?

Because there is, in the final analysis, a truth: a missile took down an Italian civilian aircraft. But no one ever had the courage to tell that truth. In fact, for years there was a tireless attempt to cover it all up with a government-sponsored lie that should have been unacceptable to any democracy, doubly tragic for those of us who had suffered a grievous loss.”
The relatives of the victims, who gather every June 27^th — and have done since 1988, that is, since the day that Daria Bonfietti decided to found the association — are roughly thirty in number each year, and more than half of them come from Sicily. Over the years, they have also become civil plaintiffs. She has dragged them with her, all the way up to this fortieth anniversary. “How can I bring myself to stop, if we still don’t have the truth?"

The massacre's causes, six hypothesis - Videoscheda

"I believe that the truth must be sought, whatever the cost. We must demand it. And really, it ought to be the government demanding it. Whatever the administration, whatever its political leanings. That night, in the skies over Ustica, there were French, American, Belgian, British, and Libyan planes. Who fired the missile? There were 81 victims. And there are countless stacks of pages of court proceedings that clearly ascertained that this was an act of war. Forty years after, a television news crew even managed to clean up a tape to the point that it became clear that one pilot was saying to the other, “Look.” Until just a short while ago, we all thought that he had said “qua” — “here”. Instead, he said, “guarda” — “look.” This is just another tiny shred of truth that has emerged, incredibly, all these years later. But that truth encourages us to go on, to insist, to ask. It’s a right we demand, it’s the state’s duty.”

A sky roiling with war on a summer night. That’s the story that the trial proceedings tell. Aircraft of various nationalities. The hypothesis that the target might well have been Gaddafi, whose presence was never ascertained, even though there was talk of a flight from Tripoli to Warsaw through the skies over Sicily. The certainty that all this was happening was, in the light of the investigations, practically normal in those days.

“The historic context in which the massacre of Ustica took place is extremely important if we are to hope to explain and understand. International tensions, agreements with the Libyans, the influence of the USA. Judges and historians have both helped us to reconstruct that episode of war that, incredibly, went on in the midst of peacetime. Those were years when, as Andreotti used to say, this country had an American wife and a Libyan lover.”

It was a crucial year, 1980. On June 27^th, an aircraft took off from Bologna, shortly thereafter to be shot out of the sky; little more than a month later, again in Bologna, a bomb exploded at the main railroad station, killing 84 more victims. Historians, accustomed to looking above and beyond the obstacle, tell of larger scenarios that were rapidly changing in that very same period. The Cold War that was changing its very nature, American foreign policy that was increasingly turning to a collision course with a Soviet Union that was then struggling for survival, and the rise of the Khomeini regime in Iran as well as the awkward influence of Gaddafi over the whole of the Mediterranean Sea.

A context that we can easily imagine as ridden with lurking tensions, a setting that makes it entirely credible to think it was by no means extraordinary to imagine the skies over Italy filled with French, American, British, Libyan, and Belgian aircraft. But who fired, and why? The most credible reconstruction is that the missile was fired by an American aircraft (whose presence was solidly ascertained) or else a French one, and that it was aimed at the Libyan aircraft, whose trajectory was then covered by the Itavia DC-9, beneath whose wing the Libyan aircraft was sheltering safely. Still, that’s only a reconstruction, however believable it might be.

“Italy can and must still forcefully demand that the countries who are its closest allies, the USA and France first and foremost, finally tell us what they’ve previously failed to disclose. Or cough up the information that they have tucked away in a desk drawer somewhere. I know that international rogatory letters sent by Judges Monteleone and Amelio are still pending, and that this process is directed to gaining access to witnesses who might know and could explain and recount. Perhaps they’re in America, or else Canada. In fact, I believe that if such a major undertaking is being mounted by the Italian judicial authorities, then the political class and the diplomatic corps ought to make some effort to support them, at the very least. In part because the investigation is still an open case, and the judicial authorities are doing their work. But we need the decisive contribution of Italy as a nation to bring pressure to bear on the U.S. and France.

I think it’s reasonable to expect that an Italian administration, our government, demand to know what their military aircraft were doing in our skies, on June 27, 1980, in peacetime. But that would have to be something more than mere dutiful pressure. It would have to be real, and highly motivated. Our government must demand answers, and be willing to bring sanctions or clear expressions of reproof to bear in case of refusal, and that’s at the very least. In part, because Italian administrations have not always been so lukewarm in their interest in this case, let it be said. The Prodi-Veltroni administration, back in 1996, for instance, supported the work of Judge Priore, who requested permission to contact NATO. And it was thanks to the intervention of our executive branch that he was given the go-ahead. And so we were able to decript the NATO records for that night, and another solid point of fact was established for this account. That is, we finally established that there was no military operation attributable to NATO underway that night. And that we therefore needed to demand accountability from individual countries. That is just one case in which we see that when the politicians want something, things happen.”

If she were asked to say, forty years later, what document or testimony she would finally be able to gain access to, Daria Bonfietti says that she’d go back to that very same night, June 27, 1980. “There was a meeting at the American embassy in Rome after the DC-9 was shot down — and the judges clearly established that the plane was shot down — where we can safely surmise that a decision was made about what to say. And, more importantly, what not to say. It has likewise been ascertained that high-ranking members of the Italian air force attended that meeting. That was where it was decided to lower a veil of silence on what was, in all likelihood, a failed terror attack with terrible collateral damage.

A silence that has lasted for many years, though riddled with cracks by small shreds of the truth. How could I forget the day that Cossiga in 2008 said — speaking of the years when he was president of the Italian Republic: “I recall that, in late 1980s, Admiral [Fulvio] Martini (then the head of SISMI, the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare [Military Intelligence and Security Service] — ed.) told me that it was the French who had been at Ustica.” It took him a while to remember, to have a twinge of I know not whether it was memory or mere human dignity, but he opened another page of the truth. And don’t forget that when Cossiga made that statement, all of the criminal trials had already been wrapped up, and we were sinking into the quicksand of the coverup.

In short, it was an important statement, and in fact it turbocharged the whole investigation once again. Even though I can’t help but thinking that if Cossiga had made that revelation at the end of the Eighties, which is when he claims to have learned of it, the effects of his statement would have been quite another matter. And after all these years, it seems unbelievable to me that a prime minister of Italy — because in June of 1980 Cossiga was the prime minister — should have held onto that secret about the night in question for all these years.”

A night during which we “narrowly averted the third world war.” But those are words Cossiga never uttered. They were spoken, instead, by Alberto Dettori, an air traffic controller serving at the military radar base of Poggio Ballone on June 27, 1980, in a confidential statement to his wife. But we will never be able to ask him about it. He took his own life a few years later.

The ghosts of the Mediterranean

The death of Marshal Dettori is just one of many like it over these past forty years, shrouded in obscurity and mystery. The list also includes the deaths of Mario Naldini and Ivo Nutarelli, who were on a training flight on a TF-104 Starfighter fight jet between Verona and Grosseto on the night of June 27, 1980: their trajectory came very close to the flight path of the DC-9. There is a record of an electronic alert signal emitted repeatedly by their jet, and it too has no clear and unequivocal interpretation: no one knows what alarmed them.

Naldini and Nutarelli later became pilots in the Italian air force’s aerobatic squadron: in 1988 they both died in the Ramstein air show disaster, at an American base in Germany, when their aircraft collided and then fell onto the crowd watching the show. There were no fewer than 67 ground fatalities among the spectators. Until then, in more than a quarter century, the Italian squadron, the Frecce Tricolori, had never made a single mistake. Hypotheses of sabotage were raised repeatedly, though no supporting evidence has ever emerged. For that matter, it would have been a massacre of innocent victims to cover up another massacre of innocent victims: a monstrosity difficult to imagine and even harder to identify. What remains a bitter fact is the discovery that for eight long years, no investigator ever thought to go and interview the two men.

If we wish to descend into the trenches of suspicion, then there’s another plane crash that has never been examined carefully. Because all the early investigations focused on fighter planes of the U.S. Navy that supposedly “scrambled” — a term used in the phone calls recorded at the time of the disappearance of the DC-9 — in the skies over Ustica, but there was not as much attention to the other branch of U.S. military aviation: the U. S. Air Force. The official response delivered by NATO in 1997 lists a number of Air Force aircraft in the air that day. A flow of air traffic from and to the major Friulian airport of Aviano.

Unlike today, there was no stable deployment of aircraft there. Rather, it was a base open to the redeployment of American units, with a frantic traffic of takeoffs and landings: bombers and fighter planes of every kind. In May, there had been a squadron di RF-4 Phantoms that had arrived from Texas to take part in the Dawn Patrol exercise. The activity at Aviano was managed by the 40th Tactical Group, commanded at the time by Colonel Henry M. Yochum II. The Italian magistrates never even tried to talk to him. If they had, they would have learned that he’d died shortly thereafter. He was a veteran of supersonic dogfights against MiGs in Vietnam, but he crashed on the landing strip of Allendale, New Jersey on November 2, 1982. He was at the controls of a small Cessna Skymaster, a plane that was considered tough and reliable. On his headstone at Arlington National Cemetery, he is described only as a “fighter pilot.”

Among the many enigmas of Ustica, one has always involved the presence of an Air Force AWACS, which is thought to have followed a circular trajectory over the Apennines. It was believed to have crossed flight paths with Naldini and Nutarelli, as well. Nor did the response from NATO make is possible to identify it: at the time, there were only a very few of these Boeing E-3A Sentries, and they were all American. Moreover, none of them was officially active in Europe. The AWACS could have been a perfect witness: an astonishing, space age aircraft, with a radar system that could scrutinize everything within a radius of 250 miles, even winkling out jets just skimming the ground in order to avoid electronic surveillance.

Quei caccia in rotta su Ustica

Repubblica turned to the Brazilian expert Sergio Ricardo, who is about to publish a monograph dedicated to the missions of this very special aircraft. Ricardo found in his files that between December 1979 and May 1980, two Sentries had been sent across the Atlantic for “training operations in central Europe and over the Mediterranean Sea, in support of the Sixth Fleet of Naples and allied air forces. Aviano was one of their bases. Then the two AWACS moved to Egypt, to take part in operation ‘Proud Phantom’ between early July and October 1980.” Once again, this is not proof, but it does provide “an elevated likelihood” that on June 27, an American AWACS was operating over central Italy, with a capability of tracking any object flying over the Tyrrhenian Sea.

“Proud Phantom” was a topic of discussion in the Ustica trial. That evening an American F-111 fighter-bomber flying from England to the Campania air base of Grazzanise was suddenly redirected to Aviano: apparently an aircraft was in transit to Egypt. The website www.stragi80.it — an online archive created by Fabrizio Colareti and Daniele Bianchessi with all the original documents of this saga — has managed to partly declassify an internal Pentagon report that describes the mission. The file is still riddled with redactions, covering a third of the pages.

But it is possible to read that the American crew reached Cairo sometime between June 17 and 28, 1980, with large cargo planes. The F4-E Phantom fighters, on the other hand, took off from the U.S. after July 9: each flew with two AIM-7E air-to-air missiles, “unarmed.” An extremely valuable detail: among the hypotheses about the destruction of the DC-9 involves, in fact, the impact of an “unarmed” missile, which means that it had no explosive warhead. Had such a warhead exploded in proximity to the fuselage, it would have shattered the plane into countless fragments. That, however, is not the state of the broken aircraft salvaged from the seabed. Officially, however, those Phantoms traveled two weeks later. Officially, at least, there is no trace of the F-111’s participation in the Egyptian exercise.

That there were American aircraft flying over the Italian peninsula however is confirmed by NATO. And when the DC-9 disintegrated, all the radar stations searched for them. At Ciampino they reported “a very intense American air traffic”. Marshal Guglielmo Diamanti spoke about it to the magistrates in 1995: at the very moment that the Itavia aircraft vanished from the radar screens, he had noticed on those same screens military maneuvers. Specifically, he stated: “Military maneuvers that lasted until the very moment of the plane’s disappearance.” He reiterated that statement during the trial: “I’d asked another air traffic controller because I couldn’t see anything anymore: ‘What happened to the maneuvers?’ ‘Everything just went dead….’ The DC-9 was gone: he had seen what looked like a trail of small stars, that is, that is, a scattered radar trail.” Those “small stars” were the result of the explosion: the fragments of the Itavia flight, along with its cargo of human beings.

The white whale

The U.S.S. Saratoga is the white whale of Ustica. A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier 1,063 feet long, with a displacement of 82,000 tons: a floating city with 70 aircraft and more than five thousand men in its crew. Like Moby Dick, she appears and disappears over the course of the investigation. And everyone was hunting her. You can hear all about it in the original audio tapes admitted as evidence in the trial, available on this site. As soon as the DC-9 vanishes from the radar screens, they start trying to find her at the air traffic control tower of Ciampino: they phoned the American embassy, asking to speak to the air force attaché, though without success.

Il centro di controllo radar di Ciampino: "Collisione con gli americani"

They had seen a great many American aircraft in that area. One taped voice states: “The most plausible hypothesis is that the plane crashed with one of their aircraft.” The military rescue center of Martinafranca, in Puglia, was also looking for the Saratoga, and scrambled its helicopters to intervene: they called the high command of the Italian Air Force, in a bureaucratically surreal dialogue, to learn whether there was an aircraft carrier. Then the answer arrived at midnight from the major West Star base, the secret bunker that oversees all NATO operations, and the answer was no.

The official version was never to vary: that night the Saratoga was in the port of Naples, without any operative capability. The commanding officer, James Flatley, declared that the ship remained there from June 23 until July 7, practically on rest and relaxation. Even the ship’s powerful radar units were turned off, to avoid interfering with the city’s television broadcasts. What about the ship’s Phantom interceptors? The investigative journalist Claudio Gatti, in his book, Il quinto scenario, has reconstructed that detail: they had been at Sigonella for days and, after 6 pm, they had remained in the hangars. In other words, a full acquittal.

Repubblica was able to examine one especially interesting document: the informal scrapbook of the Saratoga’s cruise in the Mediterranean Sea, a sort of photographic souvenir produced for the crew, with the names and faces of all the men and the very few women aboard. As you leaf through it, it’s clear that the climate on the aircraft carrier was anything but warlike: these are armed forces in the aftermath of the American defeat in Vietnam, and the atmosphere is far more reminiscent of Love Boat than Top Gun.

Slovenly uniforms, crews playing basketball among the bombers in the hangars, rock bands and women dancing below deck. There were outings to the Tower of Pisa, through the streets of Florence, an audience with Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) at St. Peter’s: they prayed with the pope during the very same days that the plane was shot down over Ustica. During the crucial week, we see Naples in the background, with a ceremony of a Neapolitan yachting club invited aboard the ship, and the major festivities for the Fourth of July, with a group of paratroopers who even jumped out of a plane above Mt. Vesuvius to land aboard Big Sara. There were also operational activities.

During that cruise, the Phantom fighter jets took off frequently, and the commanding officer Flatley set a personal record of 1,500 landings. Sharing the CO’s cabin was his son, a twenty-year-old Naval Academy cadet, now an executive working for a company that supplies the Pentagon: he did not reply to Repubblica’s emails. The ship’s crews also performed live-fire exercises, shooting bursts of ammunition at floating targets and firing missiles off the shores of Sardinia. This all took place within the confines of a community of 5,000 seamen living aboard a thousand-foot-long ship. If the aircraft carrier had played a role in the downing of the DC-9, would so many people have been capable of keeping that secret for so many years?

All at once, however, in 2017 the mystery of the Saratoga finally seemed to crumble. In the summer of 1980, Brian Sandlin was a young sailor: the big commemorative book features him among the crew, in charge of anchors and deck maintenance. Thirty-seven years later, he decided to reveal an unsettling detail: two fighter planes had returned without their missiles. He claims that something like that couldn’t possibly have gone unnoticed. And so the commanding officer Flatley addressed the entire crew: “He informed us that during our flight operations two MiG Libyans had come to meet us aggressively and we had to shoot them down.”

This is the testimony that everyone had been searching for, and which Sandlin claims occurred right on the day of the downing off Ustica. He agreed to be interviewed on the TV program Atlantide by Andrea Purgatori, the former Corriere della Sera journalist who played a major role in the history of these events with his investigative pieces. Sandlin repeated his statements in front of the TV cameras and put Purgatori in touch with a second seaman — whose name was kept confidential — who confirmed the story: the fighter jets took off with missiles and returned without them.

It seemed like a turning point, it seemed that everything was about to change, and that the truth was finally within reach. Deputy Prosecutor Maria Monteleone and Public Prosecutor Erminio Amelio presented a letter rogatory to the American authorities to be allowed to interview Sandlin. When permission arrived, they organized a conference call for the deposition. But this time, Sandlin denied everything. He denied his statements, filmed by TV cameras during the interview with Purgatori. He denied it all so drastically that he seemed to be misstating the facts.

Impossible to understand what could have pushed Sandlin to reverse course. Had he been pressured? Had he suddenly realized that he’d mixed up the episode with the air battle of March 1986, when Saratoga scrambled her air squadrons against the Libyans, destroying Gaddafi’s patrol boats and radar installations? That would have been far too elementary an error. But one of the details he gave to Purgatori in order to provide corroboratory evidence for his version — the unexplained murder of an American petty officer in the alleys of Naples immediately after Ustica — actually took place months later, in Spain.

Still, the enigma of the White Whale has not yet been resolved. The Roman magistrates have in hand the testimony of a former Alitalia pilot, collected in 2013: “I flew over Ustica, in command of an Alitalia airliner the day before and then, again, just a few minutes prior to the tragedy,” wrote Federica Angeli in Repubblica, reporting his story. “Just a few minutes after takeoff from Palermo airport, I noticed below me a fleet of ships: one that looked like an aircraft carrier and at least three or four other vessels. I commented to my copilot about this presence, and when I learned of the tragedy, my mind immediately went to that congregation of ships.” The witness is highly qualified: before taking a job with Alitalia, for years he was an officer in the Italian Air Force, with positions involving military intelligence and analysis. His testimony was classified and now remains a solid piece of evidence in the last investigation.

A difficult puzzle to untangle. As we shall see, the former Italian president Francesco Cossiga attributed the downing of the DC-9 to the fighter jets of the French navy. Paris had two aircraft carriers. The Foch was in drydock at the time for repairs. The Clemenceau, on the other hand, was officially deployed in the waters of Toulon from May 13 until July 4 in order to complete tests of the new radar systems and the Super Étendard fighter-bombers. In technical terms, however, the French carriers were carrying older interceptors: the F-8 Crusader, American-made, which the U.S. Navy had already retired years previously. This certainly wasn’t an aircraft to send out on a high-risk raid.

In that period, the British had no aircraft carriers in service. As for the Americans, the presence of another aircraft carrier has occasionally been suggested: the Kennedy. The day of Ustica, however, the Kennedy was back in the United States: it sailed for the Mediterranean Sea on August 4, 1980. Which brings us back to square one: is it possible to rule out the possibility that the Saratoga left Naples? When, six years later, two American aircraft carriers took part in the heavy bombing mission on Libya, they pretended to be engaged in a routine cruise to the Italian and Spanish ports. Only on the last day did the carriers finally reach the theater of action at top speed.

They did so in conditions of radio silence and with their anti-radar countermeasures activated, in order to conceal their movements, even from the Italian authorities. They were only sighted as they crossed through the Strait of Messina. But the Italian F-104 fighter jets that approached the fleet found their radar screens totally white, blinded by the countermeasures. Something that, in purely theoretical terms, could certainly have happened on June 27, 1980 as well.

Strage Ustica, sul fondo del mare i resti di un reattore del DC-9 precipitato

That evening, a number of aviation navigation systems had malfunctioned. None other than Domenico Gatti, the pilot of the DC-9, had reported as much to Ciampino’s control tower: “So, listen, is Ponza also not functioning?” “Excuse me?” “It was a graveyard tonight. From Florence on down, practically speaking, we didn’t find a single functioning beacon.”

There’s another detail, never yet incorporated into the evidence gathered by the investigation. The photo log of the Saratoga shows a unique event with a very formal atmosphere: the visit aboard in the Bay of Naples by a very high-ranking officer. Admiral Thomas B. Hayward Chief of Naval Operations for the United States Navy: after the recent failure of the raid to free the American hostages in Iran, he had received the assignment of reorganizing the special forces. We don’t know whether he arrived on the aircraft carrier immediately before or immediately after Ustica. But if there was a top secret mission to be carried out, he was certainly the right man to plan it.

A secret about a secret

 “The story of Ustica is one of a secret about a secret,” says Rino Formica. When the aircraft was downed, Formica was 53 years old and had just become, less than three months earlier, a cabinet minister for the first time, in charge of the Ministry of Transportation for Bettino Craxi’s Socialist Party, in the coalition government led by Francesco Cossiga.
“What do you mean by a secret about a secret?” we ask him.

“The secret is exactly what happened in the skies over Ustica that night, how the aircraft was shot down; the secret about the secret is how the decision was made, and kept, to conceal the truth about the reasons for the downing.
“The investigation by Judge Rosario Priore, the most complete and cohesive judicial document about the massacre that exists, reaches the conclusion that there was an air battle around the DC-9. It involved the air forces of at least three countries: France, Libya, and the U.S. The leaders of those countries were Jimmy Carter, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and Muammar Gaddafi. They knew the truth. But the truth can also be found in the archives of France and the United States. If those archives have not made accessible, if no one has ever chosen to refute the thesis of the air battle, that means that the decision has been made to maintain the secret.”

At first, Formica recalls, the idea spread in the administration and in the Italian parliament, that the aircraft had crashed due to structural failure. Itavia was a company with a bad reputation and that theory seemed to be the most logical one. Formica was almost the only one who rejected it from the outset, however, and he opposed the presentation of an order of the day proposed by the various political groups of members of parliament, which would have attributed the accident to the poor maintenance of Itavia’s aircraft.

On July 8, 1980 — that is, eleven days after the tragedy — replying in the Italian Senate to several parliamentary inquiries, Minister Formica reported that, according to the technical documentation concerning the DC-9’s fitness for flight, provided by the RAI (Registro aeronautico italiano), the DC-9 appeared to be regularly in compliance with the program of maintenance and inspection “under the direct supervision of the RAI,” as was later confirmed, in April 1992, by the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Massacres, under the leadership of the Republican MP Libero Gualtieri.

“Immediately after the tragedy, I sent for the president of the RAI, General Saverio Rana. I knew him well, he was a respected and independent Socialist comrade.” He had also been Pietro Nenni’s personal pilot. “I asked him to tell me the whole truth, because the hypothesis of structural failure would have implied a monitoring problem at RAI, and if that were the case I was going to have to remove his. He replied with great confidence that he could rule out the hypothesis of structural failure. And as evidence of that statement, he showed me a radar track that showed a series of dots. ‘You see,’ he explained to me, ‘these dots tell me that there’s been an explosion, or else that the aircraft has been hit by an external object, possibly a missile.’”

Thanks to this revelation, Formica was able to publicly rule out the idea of structural failure in Italian parliament. “With whom did he talk about it?” we asked him. “With the Minister of Defense, Lelio Lagorio. He was a Socialist, just like me.” But Lagorio didn’t take it seriously, given that years later he described that revelation as “one of those imaginative and fantastic lightning bolts that famously seemed to strike Minister Formica.” “Yes, I know,” Formica laughs, bitterly: “He said that I had an overactive imagination….”
In 1980, the PSI, the Italian Socialist Party, had returned to government after six years. On April 4, the Cossiga government took power, actually succeeding itself: this time with a coalition composed of the DC (the Christan Democrats), the PSI (the Socialists), and the PRI (the Republicans), which spelled the end of the period of the historic compromise with the Communists.

Both Formica and Lagorio were members of the administration for the very first time. Lagorio later admitted he didn’t know much about the military world, and possibly because of this lack of experience, or perhaps because he actually considered not particularly credible the hypothesis formulated by Formica, he failed to follow up on it. Nevertheless, from the very beginning, the newspapers spoke of an explosion with mysterious causes. On June 29, Repubblica ran this headline: “The Itavia aircraft exploded in midair, and the causes of the disaster remain a mystery.” While the Corriere della Sera headlined the story: “The tragic mystery of the DC-9’s crash: the only hypothesis for now is an explosion.”

“One of the very first things I did,” Formica recalls, “was to appoint, on June 28, a Technical Investigatory Commission to look into the causes of the aircraft’s crash. I chose as chair of the commission the director of the airport of Alghero, Carlo Luzzatti. I introduced a new detail in the process, with Cossiga’s approval: the Commission was ordered to present a series of pre-reports, so as to update public opinion on the state of progress, well in advance of the report’s final conclusions. This was to avoid the risk that the truth might be communicated with years of delay.”

In a conversation with the journalist Mario Scialoja, published by L’Espresso on May 1, 1988, Formica revealed eight years later who his source had been: “A few hours after the crash I made a phone call to General Saverio Rana, at the time president of the Registro Aeronautico Italiano and therefore the highest official in charge of safety for civilian air traffic; he immediately gave me a very specific piece of information. He told me that the Itavia DC-9 had exploded in flight 60 miles north of Ustica, and that it had been approached by an unidentified flying object and immediately afterward the aircraft had been hit by a missile.”

The interview immediately prompted a huge political debate. In the issue dated May 15, 1988, the newsweekly published a letter from Formica. “I’m sorry for the journalist Scialoja: what he published in quotes was a distortion of my actual thoughts. It has been distorted and imbued with certainties, while I had expressed only opinions and hunches. [...] Rana assured me that all the RAI’s inspections had been positive, but that he couldn’t rule out the hypothesis of a missile impact. [...]Rana never went any further than that formulation of a hypothesis [...]. In the light of what is emerging from recent investigations, I can boast that I was the first to utter the word ‘missile.’ But that is nothing more than a logical deduction that sprang from the insightful observations of General Rana.”

Scialoja replied: “During our conversation, the minister did not attribute hypotheses to General Rana, but rather statements of fact. ‘With great determination, Rana told me that the DC-9 had been downed by an outside event, and that from the radar tracks and his sources, it appeared that at the moment of the crash, there was an external object near the airliner that hit it’: those are Formica’s words, jotted down on my notepad during our meeting.”

But why did Formica fail to inform the judicial authorities about Rana’s revelations? After the publication of the L’Espresso article, both Libero Gualtieri and Stefano Rodotà, a member of parliament for the Independent Left and a member of the Committee for the Truth about Ustica, would criticize him for that failure. Because of that, the investigators lost precious time, and entirely unfounded hypotheses were kept alive. Rodotà told L’Espresso: “If Formica and Lagorio had informed the investigators about the evidence in their possession, the magistrates could have interviewed General Saverio Rana. But today Rana can no longer be interviewed, because he is dead.”

How does Formica reply to these objections? “The RAI formed part of the Luzzatti Commission, in the person of one of its members, and therefore the theory of an explosion was channeled through that commission. The commission and the judicial authorities were working in collaboration. In fact, almost immediately, the hypothesis of structural failure was taken off the table. One of the supporters of that theory was, initially, Libero Gualtieri, who later changed his mind. What I had to say I said, in parliament, and if a magistrate wanted to talk to me, he had only to pick up the phone. But no one did.”
In November 1980, the reports of American experts were acquired by the Luzzatti Commission.

Particularly explosive was the report submitted by an engineer named John Macidull, a specialist at the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that monitors the safety of flights in the United States. This report highlighted the presence in Ciampino’s radar track of three echoes that can be attributed to an unidentified object that was at first traveling parallel to the trajectory of the airlinger and then turned toward the DC-9 on the last echo. These findings were also conveyed to the judicial authorities.

In 1992, the Gualtieri Commission wrote as follows: “The Assistant Prosecutor Giorgio Santacroce, after traveling to the United States in October 1980, on a visit to the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), was able to acquire significant confirmation of the presence of another aircraft in proximity to the Itavia DC-9 From the NTSB report it was possible to infer — once one rules out the hypothesis of an in-flight collision — that the DC-9 had been downed by this other aircraft, which we must suppose launched a missile in the direction of the Itavia aircraft.

This hypothesis was corroborated by a Xeda analysis conducted in November 1980 in the NTSB’s metallurgy laboratories on a metal fragment with a trapezoidal shape, found in the corpse of a female passenger. The original provenance of that fragment was a structure located in the plane’s wheel well, and the fragment showed signs of the presence of phosphorus, a substance associated with the explosive charges of warfare ordnance.” In other words, as early as the late autumn of 1980, the theory of a missile seemed like the only one possible.

On December 13, 1980, the Luzzatti Commission in fact released a preliminary report, in which it ruled out the possibilities of structural failure and collision. On December 16, Itavia’s president, Aldo Davanzali, sent a letter to Formica, in which he lays out “the certainty of the destruction, as the result of a missile strike, of the Itavia DC-9, which had been traveling, in perfect weather and cruising conditions, along a flight path reserved by the Italian government for civil aviation.” The letter was published by the Italian press to great excitement and indignation. On December 17, Formica, speaking before the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian parliament, said that he considered the hypothesis of a missile as “more likely than others.” The following day Davanzali was summoned as a witness by Assistant Prosecutor Santacroce and then notified that he was suspected of the crime of spreading exaggerated and unfounded reports likely to result in the disturbance of the public peace and order.

Davanzali, born at Sirolo in the Marche, was 57 years old and had close ties to the Christian Democratic Party, the DC, and especially to Forlani, who was a friend. And in fact it was Forlani who became prime minister in September 1980, when the Cossiga government fell. That meant the government would be able to launch a rescue operation to save him from bankruptcy once it became possible to dismiss once and for all the hypothesis of structural failure. Instead, the government did nothing. Davanzali then wrote to Formica. “Forlani never said a word to me about Davanzali. He never asked me about him, never made any reference to him,” the former Socialist cabinet minister now says.

What happened after his testimony before the Italian parliament? Francesco Mazzola, DC undersecretary to the office of the prime minister — during the kidnapping of Aldo Moro he had served as undersecretary to the Minister of Defense for coordination of secret services — requested information from the prefect Walter Pelosi, secretary general of CESIS (Comitato Esecutivo per i Servizi di Informazione e Sicurezza, meaning Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services), the agency supervising the coordination of the Italian intelligence services. Pelosi dismissed Formica’s claim as “fanciful.” And he added: “There is no evidence supporting this idea, it was a case of structural failure.” “I accepted what they told me,” Mazzola later admitted in testimony before the Commission on Massacres.

“We learned a year later,” Formica now says, “that Pelosi had been a member of the P2 Masonic Lodge and was therefore forced to resign from his position at CESIS. The P2 members supported the theory of a terror bombing. The P2 Masonic Lodge, moreover, was one of the tentacles of the NATO right wing. P2 was supporting the idea of a bomb as part of a disinformation campaign. There was a transversal array of positions, an alliance of institutional entities, judicial authorities, the Italian parliament, political alliances, and mass media, which happened to line up, intentionally or unconsciously, with the line of the P2, and that line focused on concentrating attention on the theory of an onboard explosion, which could therefore be nothing other than a terroristic act. With the classification of the downing as an “act of terror,” there would be an abandonment of any investigations of potential responsibility of the armed forces and the intelligence services of the countries involved in what Judge Priore described as “the battle in the skies.”

A terrible year

Mazzola, years later, justified himself by recalling the white-hot and dramatic climate of that period. The worst year of terrorism, if possible, was 1980. Murders, massacres, kidnappings, and highly placed deaths. And just when it became clear that it had been missile that downed the civilian airliner, even more tragic events crowded the public stage: Judge Giovanni Urso was kidnapped and held hostage by the Red Brigades from December 12 to January 15, 1981; on December 28 an uprising broke out in the prison of Trani, where 29 people were taken hostage, an assortment of policemen and Carabinieri; on December 31 the Carabinieri general Enrico Riziero Galvaligi was assassinated in Rome by the Red Brigades. And on November 23 an earthquake devastated the southern area of Irpinia. The government’s attention was absorbed entirely and dramatically by the tragic events of those weeks, and it promptly forgot all about Ustica.

Mazzola said: “I believe that whoever moved to throw investigators off their tracks enjoyed the enormous advantage of operating in a situation where they worked on this to the exclusion of all else while the people that he was working against had a thousand other problems on a daily basis, problems that were overwhelming, huge, and terrible, for which they were unable to exercise the kind of oversight that in a normal situation would probably have been exercised. In a normal situation, in all likelihood, the matter of the discrepancy between Formica’s statements and what the intelligence services were telling us would have been delved into in greater depth. At the time, we couldn’t face up to one problem before there was another, even larger one. We were simply being overwhelmed by the flood of events.”

“After the end of 1980, no one spoke about Ustica again,” the Gualtieri Commission observed. Rino Formica confirms that observation now, forty years later. “There was waning interest on the part of the various political forces at play. Which can’t be explained simply by the fact that other emergencies were jostling relentlessly for attention. There was also a degree of reluctance to venture into the coils of such a muddy and unclear matter. There was no pressure, for instance, on the part of the political parties, whether in the majority coalition or from the opposition, to salvage the wreckage. It was not until 1986 that the Craxi administration, in response to the appeals of the associations of the survivors, decided to take up the matter. Salvage operations began a year later, and that was already seven years after the tragedy.

A French company was hired to recover the aircraft, and their technicians were certainly operating under a vigilant gaze…” Formica emphasizes with bitter emphasis. “And yet, recovering the black boxes would instantly have put an end to a debate that focused abstractly on various hypotheses. The point is that both the majority and the opposition, were ‘under the guardianship of the East-West border’: the Christian Democrats, or DC, looked to America, the Italian Communist Party, or PCI, looked to the Soviet Union. It was a world divided between countries with a western allegiance, such as Italy, Communist nations, and non-aligned nations, among them Yugoslavia under Tito. The Cold War kept anyone from taking decisive steps, from operating in full freedom.”

“All of the political forces in play were determined to avoid taking an in-depth look, to avoid that actual search for truth, and the risk of losing something in the process. Even the PCI. In that connection we should recall that the Communists introduced a bill to reform state secrecy laws, and in the process, they attached the text of the NATO documents. But Nilde Iotti, then presiding over the Chamber of Deputies, demanded that they remove those attachments, thus forcing her own comrades to formulate a second version, which the Communist member of parliament Antonio Bellocchio later refused to sign, in protest. The DC agreed with the Communists on all of the chiefs of the intelligence services in those years, and many of their names were found on the membership list of the P2 the following year.”

What kind of a year was 1980? We ask Formica. “A terrible year. It was the year that marked the beginning of the great crisis in the world order established at Yalta. In Italy, it began with the murder of the president of the Sicilian Region, Piersanti Mattarella, and then continued with the assassination of Vittorio Bachelet, the former vice president of the High Council of the Judiciary. Then, in the spring, came the murders of the magistrates Nicola Giacumbi, Girolamo Minervini, and Guido Galli; on May 28 the journalist Walter Tobagi was assassinated, and on June 23, four days before Ustica, the NAR, or Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei), killed the magistrate Mario Amato. Forty days after Ustica came the massacre of the Bologna train station bombing, which can certainly be read as a warning to Italy. There was no clear connection to Ustica, but I certainly consider that bombing to have been a message not to dig any deeper.

The year 1980 was also when the world took a right-wing turn. In November Reagan was elected, defeating Carter. In England, Thatcher grew stronger. In Italy, it marked the end of time of the historic compromise with the Communists, and the beginning of the period of the preamble, when the DC put an end to any understanding with the Communists. Italy was in a state of recession, and was suffering record inflation of 21 percent. The highest inflation in history. Solidarity (Solidarno??) took root in Poland and Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, was financing Lech Walesa’s labor union through the offices of Cardinal Marcinkus, as an anti-Communist force. Then, in October came the march of the 40,000 white-collar Fiat employees, who thus put an end to the strike of the factory workers, in Turin.”

In another interview, given to the newsweekly Epoca in November 1988, Rino Formica spoke about “scientific obstruction of justice.” Would he use the same terminology today? “Certainly I would, though nowadays I’d use the adjective ‘methodical,’ not ‘scientific.’ Unfortunately, there are secrets which simply can’t be revealed, because certain systems of alliance remain standing: NATO, the western alliance, and even major portions of the world that were Communist are still around, with their important relationships. If we had had the technology then that we possess today many of these mysteries would long since have been unmasked. Judge Priore admitted that he found himself facing an international wall that he could not get around.”

He says: “The downing of the plane was unexpected, the intrigue came later. The radar track that General Rana showed me that evening had come to him from the Italian Air Force general Licio Giorgieri. He never told me that. I only learned it later, when Giorgeri was murdered in Rome by the Unione Comunisti Combattenti (Union of Fighting Communists, a splinter group of the Red Brigades). The claim of responsibility was a fake, as the Minister of Defense Giovanni Spadolini pointed out immediately.”

Then, Formica insists, “Basically, history should not be seen as nothing more than a summary of various episodes, but should instead be studied in a larger context. Craxi, who never ostracized me, believe that Ustica needed to be contextualized in a larger international order. He had learned that from Pietro Nenni: there is no national event that isn’t linked to larger, supranational events.”

So what actually happened, in the final analysis? “Ustica was a wartime episode. I believe that Cossiga’s theory is the most logical one. The former president of the Italian republic claims that he was told it was a French missile. The objective had been to kill Gaddafi. The French knew that a Libyan aircraft, with none other than Gaddafi aboard, was going to transit through the Italian skies. Our intelligence services also learned of it, probably because they were informed by the American intelligence services, and they immediately warned Gaddafi.” Cossiga said that it was General Santovito of SISMI who informed Libyan leader and that Gaddafi, immediately after taking off, turned around and returned home. “It’s probable,’ Formica says, “that Gaddafi sent an aircraft out anyway, to see whether the news was accurate.”

“That means that we are in the presence of a tragic episode of hot war, a fluke twist in history, inside a larger system dominated by the Cold War. Those who have been accused of involvement never denied this reconstruction of events. No one ever said: “It isn’t true.” Gaddafi covered up for his informants, Reagan covered up for Carter, and Mitterrand had to cover up for Giscard d’Estaing, to preserve France’s honor.”

Eliminate Gaddafi

At the beginning of 1980, relations between France and Libya were at an all-time low. Gaddafi was extending his reach toward Chad, organizing hostile actions against Tunisia. In February 1980, demonstrators set fire to the French embassy in Tripoli and the French cultural center in Benghazi was attacked. At the Élysée, Valery Giscard d’Estaing grew increasingly convinced that the Rais of Tripoli was an enemy to be eliminated. In his book, Le Pouvoir et la Vie, the former French president says that as early as March 1977, he’d already begun conversations with Anwar el-Sadat, the Egyptian head of state, in a bid to get shed of the Libyan colonel, who not only supported an array of terrorist groups, but had also become the leading mastermind behind many of the anti-French plots unfolding in Africa.

Giscard’s obsessive hostility to Gaddafi contaminated the SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, or External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service), under the leadership of the powerful Alexandre de Marenches. The aristocratic spymaster of Piedmontese descent, who reigned over the French intelligence services from 1970 to 1981, conducting various clandestine operations with the Service Action (Action Service), was never willing to acknowledge France’s determination to eliminate the Libyan Rais, preferring to recall the “somewhat improbable question” asked by Sadat in March 1978, whom he claims to have set back on his heels by replying that he was hardly “the head of a team of paid assassins.”

That is the official version. In private, however, de Marenches boasted that he had wanted to eliminate Gaddafi, and he made mention of it in conversations with SISMI as well. This is a fact confirmed by Jean-Christophe Notin, the author of a biography of the former chief of the SDECE that came out two years ago, Le Maître du Secret. As early as the late Seventies, de Marenches had organized and financed a vast program to strike at the entire Libyan galaxy. “Not just targeted operations to eliminate Gaddafi,” Notin explains, “but also the destruction of his varied interests, ideally in countries accused of helping him.” He was clearly referring to Italy, as well. In the program, dubbed “Piovra” (Octopus), there was also an expedition in October 1980 of two combat frogmen who hoped to sink the flagship of the Libyan navy in the Mediterranean Sea.

There were also mysterious fires, one against the residence of Tripoli’s ambassador in Europe. And there was a bomb hidden in a shipping container in the port of Naples, which failed to explode due to an act of God: a blackout that paralyzed the city for several hours. “On at least two occasions,” Notin continues, “the French intelligence services came very close to their objective.” The Action Service, special teams of what was then the SDECE (nowadays the DGSE), had planned to set off a bomb as a motorcade carrying Gaddafi went past. Another time, they planned to take him out during a press conference. In both cases, due either to his instincts or solid actionable intelligence, the Rais of Libya managed not to be present.

The most spectacular plan, which has by now been documented in various historical reconstructions, was supposed to have gone into effect on August 5, 1980, just a few weeks after the massacre of Ustica. Disappointed by de Marenches’ string of failures, Giscard decided to bypass him and entrust the special mission to the number two at the French intelligence services, Alain de Marolles: “You are tasked with overthrowing Gaddafi.” That’s what de Marolles, who died in 2000, had confided years after the fact to the journalists Roger Faligot, Jean Guisnel, and Rémi Kauffer, as recounted in their book, Histoire politique des services secrets français. But this operation, carried out by the so-called “Safari Club”, a joint operation by the French, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Saudi intelligence services, turned out to be a spectacular fiasco. De Marolles was fired in September. De Marenches was dismissed a year later, dumped by François Mitterrand after his election in May 1981.

Until the very last days of his term in the Élysée, Giscard never once gave up on the idea of ridding himself of the “Piovra.” He himself says so in his memoirs. The then-French leader sent de Marenches to the White House in January 1981 for Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. The new president of the United States, according to Giscard’s account, asked France to imagine an operation that could erase the humiliating memory of the hostages taken in Teheran.

“I need a victory,” said Reagan. “I wondered where that victory could unfold,” Giscard recalls. “I could only see one possibility.” Libya. A few months later, when Mitterrand took power, Giscard insisted on the importance of France insisting with the US for regime change in Libya. Mitterrand duly noted that advice. Years later, Giscard wrote: “I regret that nothing was done about it. It would have been advantageous for both Egypt and Africa at large. It would have spared Chad the bloody crisis that later ensued.”

France’s pursuit of Gaddafi came to an end a few decades later. On October 20, 2011, the Libyan strongman was killed during the bombings of Libya that were led by Paris and London. In response to a question from Repubblica about a possible involvement of France in the massacre of Ustica, the ninety-four-year-old Giscard d’Estaing today says that “he does not remember” those events. His assistant adds that the former French president has no intention of discussing the matter further. De Marenches and de Marolles are dead, and with them, their secrets. Few of those around at the time are still alive. One of them is Michel Roussin, de Marenches’ chief of staff between 1977 and 1981, and now a consultant in Africa for the Bolloré group.

“It’s a long-ago story, news from another time,” Roussin told Emmanuel Ostian, the writer of the documentary, “Crash de Ustica, une bavure française?” The documentary aired on Canal Plus in 2016 and it is one of the few pieces of investigative journalism broadcast outside of Italy on the affair. Ostian successfully debunked many official claims, beginning with the claim that activity at the base of Solenzara had been halted after 5 pm. That was what the retired French military said when interviewed by Italian magistrates after 2014, once France finally agreed to accept the letters rogatory. The turning point came with the Socialist president François Hollande, who was persuaded at the time by new requests from Italian Premier Matteo Renzi.

Hollande’s decision led to the first glimmers of light after decades of silence and darkness. Emmanuel Macron continued along the same line, allowing the progress of other letters rogatory in connection with the Ustica investigation, as Repubblica is now able to reveal. “In the summer of 2018, at the request of the Italian authorities, the highest levels of the French Armed Forces declassified five documents,” explains a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense. And what is contained in those five French documents? Do they concern the aircraft carrier Clémenceau, or the base of Solenzara? The spokesman for the Ministry of Defense directed us to the Italian magistrates for further information. “The documents,” he concludes, “were delivered to the Italian authorities via the French embassy in Rome and are meant to contribute to the work of commemoration begun in 2014 by the Italian prime minister.”

The journalists who are experts in intelligence matters continue to dismiss the theory of a French involvement in the tragedy. Jean-Dominique Merchet, author of the Secret Défense blog, says: “Thanks to in-flight refueling, the area around Ustica was not out of reach of a French fighter plane. But an interception would have required midair coordination that could only have come from the Italians or the Americans, because France didn’t have the necessary AWACS flying radar stations to guide the pilots.” Jean Guisnel, one of the authors of Histoire secréte des services secrets, talks about reading DGSE sources that described the charges against Paris as having “SISMI fingerprints all over them,” placing them on the same plane as the insinuations leveled some time later in Nigergate, the fake evidence manufactured in support of uranium supplies used as a pretext for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The researcher Guillaume Origoni, who worked on a thesis about the international influences on the terrorism of the Years of Lead, is convinced that the French lead is not a solid one. “France has done terrible things like many other countries, but in this case, from the point of view of method, the charges are based solely upon Cossiga’s word, the alleged statements of de Marenches, and the presence of French aircraft in the skies at the moment of the massacre. Too little.” Origoni has carried out a study of the French Hyperion school, which was at the center of the plots concerning the hidden relations of red terrorism. He is convinced that this is just another of the many instances of the way that relations between French and Italian intelligence services in that period between the late seventies and the early eighties were poisoned by a “culture of suspicion,” kindling and feeding a reciprocal mistrust.

North of the Alps remains a wall of rubber that does little to brush away all doubts. The military archives will not be declassified for another twenty years. And France has her own Ustica. Still today, the families of the 95 victims killed in the crash of the Ajaccio-Nice flight that went down on September 11, 1968 off the shores of Antibes are demanding that light be shed on the hypothesis of a downing by missile during military exercises at the bases of Toulon. The investigation is still underway. Just a few months ago, Macron promised the families full collaboration from the French government in their quest for the truth.

A truth that is still too slow in coming. Only after 34 years have French officials admitted that from the Corsican base of Solenzara, on the same day as Ustica, there were takeoffs even after 5 pm. They had always denied the fact, in spite of the testimony of Nicolò Bozzo, Carabinieri general and right-hand man of Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who happened to be there on vacation and had heard jets roar overhead until late at night. We know that there were also Belgian squadrons, busy simulating battles with the brand new F-16 fighter jets, newly delivered from the United States. Specialty magazines of the sector feature the names of two officers involved in the Corsican exercises in late May of 1980: Claude “Shake” Scheecqmans and a Captain Baudot. Brussels however has cited issues of secrecy in response to the letters rogatory from the prosecutor’s office, reiterating its stance just three years ago: the only country to defend its attitude of total silence. Why?

Solenzara was and remains a veritable French aircraft carrier on the central Mediterranean Sea, and it is from here that France has launched its most sensitive missions against Libya, Chad, and the rest of Africa. This is demonstrated clearly in an official video placed online by the French air force in 2014: it celebrates the nonstop flight of four Mirage F-1 fighter jets from Corsica to Djibouti, on the Red Sea. This record-setting flight was undertaken on January 28, 1980, five months prior to the massacre: in the original video, we see the pilots being briefed on their route with maps. There’s no mistaking the trajectory: the squadron flies directly over Ustica, the customary flight path across the Tyrrhenian Sea. The video camera focuses twice on the commanding officer’s hand as he charts the route on the map. Considering what happened on that very site, the footage sends chills down your spine.

Flying spies in plain clothes

Gaddafi was not a problem for the French alone. Many in the west had reasons to be annoyed with him. Jimmy Carter’s America had expelled Libyan diplomats accused of organizing the murder of dissidents in exile: in December 1979, a mob had attacked the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. And for the same reasons, Margaret Thatcher was clashing with the Libyan Colonel. The Iron Lady discussed this problem with her cabinet on June 19, 1980, eight days before Ustica. Here is the report on that meeting, declassified by the National Archives: “THE FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH SECRETARY said that the Head of the Libyan Mission in London had been expelled because of his public threats against the lives of two Libyan exiles in Britain.

It seemed possible that he had been exceeding his instructions, since the Libyan Government had not so far retaliated against Her Majesty’s Ambassador. The British Embassy in Tripoli had suffered minor damage from an attempt at arson, but the Libyan authorities had co-operated in putting out the fire.” Precisely because of an agreement between Malta and Libya, the British had been forced the previous year to leave the Maltese base in Luqa. Though they did not give up their presence in the Mediterranean Sea: Phantom interceptors reached Sicily and Sardinia, accompanied by Victor flying tankers, to patrol the Tyrrhenian Sea. Those missions were called “Phantom Trail.”

And in the NATO analysis of the radar tracks recorded on June 27, 1980, there are a number of British aircraft, with generic indications that have always made it impossible to identify them. According to records, on the afternoon of June 27, a British military exercise was underway, codenamed “Patricia.” Experts in the history of the Royal Air Force have never heard of such an exercise, and they do not recall maneuvers with female names. In fact, in this same period, the preferred names were always aggressive, such as Strikeback, Counter Punch, Dragon Hammer, Demon Jam.

London in any case did not consider Gaddafi to be a genuine threat: the files of Thatcher’s meeting make it clear how the country continued to strike deals with the dictator, working all the while to contain and hedge against his tantrums. A common line they were toeing, along with Rome, Paris, and even Washington: the Libyan Colonel’s oil and cash aroused everyone’s appetites. It was not until Ronald Reagan’s arrival in the White House that the scenario changed: hostilities became increasingly overt, until the air battle over the Gulf of Sidra in September 1981.

This was not the first time that outright war had been narrowly averted in the skies. Starting in 1978, Paris had begun monitoring Libyan radar installations with a four-engine civilian Douglas DC-8 modified for electronic espionage: the colors of the plane closely resembled an airliner, even if it was emblazoned with a small tricolor cockade of the French air force on the fuselage. On some unspecified day in that year, two Libyan MiG-25 fighter jets took it by surprise “over the central Mediterranean Sea.” The French pilot, Colonel Michel Gambs, promptly reversed course and headquarters back in Tripoli ordered the jets to turn back home. But one of the pilots disobeyed: first he roared under the DC-8’s belly and then around in front of the plane. As he did so, he accelerated sharply, lighting up his afterburners and increasing his thrust, causing a brutal shock wave.

Colonel Gambs wrote: “I still vividly recall the terrifying crescendo caused by the afterburners and the shockwaves that practically caused us to lose control of the aircraft.” At the time of Judge Priore’s Ustica investigation, this episode was still secret. But the dynamic of the close brush matches the theory entertained by the experts for the downing of Itavia’s smaller DC-9: the “near collision” with a fighter jet would have generated a shockwave powerful enough to knock the smaller and structurally more fragile Itavia jetliner right out of the sky.

The dogfights continued in 1980, as well. On March 23, three months prior to Ustica, a French twin-engine Atlantic maritime patrol aircraft was confronted by two Libyan Mirages, which opened cannon fire without, however, hitting the plane. On September 16, it was the turn of an American spy plane: a Boeing RC-135, externally indistinguishable from a commercial Boeing 707, even though it was visibly marked, “U.S. Air Force.” Two MiG-25s approached and signaled for it to clear out. But the American jet ignored them. A Libyan fighter jet launched a missile, but it failed to hit its target: probably because the missile’s guidance system was blinded by the Boeing’s radar-jamming equipment.

And that wasn’t all. Five days later, on September 21, 1980, another Boeing RC-135 was intercepted by five Mirages from Gaddafi’s air force. This time, however, the spy plane wasn’t alone. It was being escorted by three F-14 Tomcats, the fighter jets from Top Gun, which had taken off from the aircraft carrier Kennedy. They showed the Libyans who was strongest and convinced them to alter course. These close encounters were only revealed a few years ago, and are described in Libyan Air Wars, three volumes that are the product of the research of a pool of specialized journalists — Tom Cooper, Albert Grandolini, and Arnaud Delalandre — who have analyzed mountains of documents and testimony about the Libyan Rais’s fighter squadrons.

Material that has never been taken into consideration by the judicial investigations. But there is one fundamental element that we should keep in mind: all of these high-altitude skirmishes took place to the south of Sicily. Ustica is much further from the African coasts: 400 miles from Tripoli, 600 miles from Benghazi. The tactics of Gaddafi’s squadrons never called for solo missions, only actions performed under the guidance of land-based radar, which couldn’t assist them over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Moreover, at that distance, they could only have sustained combat for ten minutes or so, otherwise they’d be left without sufficient fuel.
Which is exactly what happened to the MiG-23 later found in the Sila mountains.

The ubiquitous Mig

This plane is one of the central pillars of Ustica’s mysteries. The wreckage of the Libyan fighter was officially found on July 18, 1980: the pilot’s corpse was still in the cockpit. Witnesses however claim that it fell days earlier, and this has frequently been seen as a link to the downing of the DC-9, even though some later retracted their statements, while the findings concerning the decomposition of the corpse were contradicted in the trials. One thing is certain: the recovery of this aircraft was riddled by the same conflict of interests that has dominated every aspect of this saga. There were officials of the Italian Air Force intelligence services who wanted to study the wreckage in detail, because that particular Soviet aircraft was virtually unknown in the West, and they certainly intended to make off with some of its instrumentation.

There was intense pressure from Tripoli to secure the restitution of the wreckage, and Libyans reached out to contacts in both the Italian intelligence services and at Fiat, which at the time was running in part on a major Libyan cash infusion in company stock: even Fiat’s Cesare Romiti was interviewed by the magistrates. And then there was the usual, troublesome carelessness in the preservation of the “crime scene,” making it impossible to secure and protect potential evidence. An Italo-Libyan investigative commission was set up, which came to conclusions that were wedded to the hypothesis of an unfortunate crash: the pilot was on a training mission and had simply suffered a medical mishap. His name was Ezzedin Koal, and he was a young second lieutenant.

The authors of Libyan Air Wars interviewed one of his colleagues from the time, the Libyan officer Hazem al-Bajigni. “Koal was a Syrian air force pilot, assigned to one of two MiG-23MS-squadrons at Benina, exclusively manned by Syrians. We could not fly with them because they used Arabic language while flying, while we used English. So, we flew in the morning and they flew in the afternoons and evenings. […] Koal was a young pilot on a regular training mission.

His aircraft was unarmed and carried no extra fuel tanks. He has got a new breathing mask that day. Our subsequent investigation has shown that this mask was too big. When he climbed to an altitude above 5,000 metres, he forgot to activate 100% oxygen and went into hypoxia. His wingman called him several times, but Koal was not responsive. His head slumped down when he was last seen and all efforts to communicate with him. His MiG, set to semi-auto-pilot (activated by a green button on the control stick) was set at 'straight and level' mode, so it just went on. Eventually, it crashed in Italy after running out of fuel. The crash report we've got from Italian authorities did not indicate any kind of collision or combat damage of any kind.”

Hazem al-Bajigni is a one-of-a-kind witness. He described in great detail the problems the Libyans were having managing the latest-generation MiG-23, purchased en masse by Gaddafi, especially with the missiles supplied by the Russians, which were an older, barely functional model. He witnessed efforts to make the Soviet jets more efficient, with the assistance of technicians recruited in France, Switzerland, and Great Britain: he also remembers two American pilots, who flew MiG-23s to write an operating manual to improve their performance.

And he described the climate of suspicion surrounding it all. A few months later, al-Bajigni fell into the regime’s crosshairs: it was thought he had taken part in a plot against the Rais of Libya. So he decided to desert: on February 11, 1981, he pushed his MiG-23 to its maximum velocity and landed in the northern part of Crete, without attracting the notice of NATO radar stations. The Greeks returned the aircraft to Gaddafi and he received political asylum in the west. His reconstruction of the crash on Mount Sila is no different than the official version: but it’s the version that circulates among the officers at Benina airport. He explains however that Syrian pilots in Libya lived separately “and never mixed with us. Out of curiosity, however, I socialized with their commanding officer.”

The Syrian air force was an elite corps, and among others it was the training ground for President Hafez al-Assad, as well as many of the upper echelon officials of the Damascus regime: staff carefully trained to face off against Israeli fighter formations. In the dogfights in the years that followed over the Gulf of Sidra against the U.S. Navy, the Syrian pilots were the only ones who held their own against the Americans. And one element in the deserter’s story is important: in the evening and at night, the only planes that took off from Benina airport were the MiG-23s flown by Syrians. True, but according to the Italian-Libyan Commission — which does not specify that the pilot is Syrian — the one-way flight to Mount Sila took place in the morning. And Koal was an experienced officer, qualified as a squad leader, with numerous night flights under his belt in the previous months. Details that have considerable importance.

And that is because the public prosecutors in Rome are still convinced that there is a link between the aircraft that crashed on Mount Sila and Ustica. Despite the fact that it crashed three weeks after Ustica, they believe that the dead pilot might have played a role in the destruction of the DC-9. They say so on the basis of two pieces of eyewitness testimony, unshaken even decades later: in the pocket of Koal’s flight suit was a note, written in Arabic. The interpreter for the intelligence service who read it remembers words of remorse for having caused “the death of eighty innocent souls” and a determination to expiate that guilt. An intelligence officer also saw that note. The note was then handed over to a general in the intelligence service and promptly vanished: but a specific reference to it remained in the desk diary of the chief of staff of the Minister of Defense. How exactly did the Syrian second lieutenant wish to pay for what he’d done?

By defecting to Italy and revealing what had happened? In the trial minutes there is mention of a defector expected on Malta in that period: a twin-engine plane stood ready to whisk that defector off to Rome, but the mission was then canceled. Most of all, however, what did he have to do with the death of eighty innocent souls? With its auxiliary fuel tanks, the MiG-23 enjoyed increased range sufficient to reach the Tyrrhenian Sea and still make it back home, with the possibility of still engaging in a brief dogfight. Certainly, however, Tripoli possessed better planes to send out on special missions: the MiG-25s, extremely fast and equipped with modern missiles, which were also closer to Italy at their base in Libya’s capital. And Tripoli could also scramble the Mirage F-1s that France had delivered. These jets were considered the crown jewels of Libya’s air force.

But Gaddafi placed greater faith in the foreign legion that had been sent from Damascus, who were accustomed to total secrecy. Assuredly in those years, there were Libyan jets that overflew the Italian peninsula, ranging up and down toward Yugoslavia for periodic maintenance stops. Among them were none other than the MiG-25s that NATO had dubbed, in code, Foxbats, named after a type of bat also known as the flying fox. At the time, these were the world’s fastest interceptor jets, capable of rocketing up to speeds of 3,000 kilometers per hour, almost 1,900 mph. That was a velocity greater than any western counterpart could hope to attain. On Italian bases, the tale is told of the many times that Italian Air Force F-104 Starfighters and U.S. Navy F-4 Phantom scrambled to surprise MiG-25 Foxbats transiting over the Adriatic Sea: an aerial “fox hunt,” as the pilots tried to hedge their trajectories to make up for the difference in velocity. High-speed chases, at twice the sound barrier, but which never degenerated into dogfights.

The magistrates who conducted the latest investigation on Ustica believe that there was a tacit understanding between Rome and Tripoli to establish a highway through the Italian skies for Libyan aircraft: a corridor along which, in 1980, those planes could whisk along, undisturbed, on their way to Yugoslavia and even France. If, however, they once strayed from that corridor, their immunity would cease immediately. And the flight path of the DC-9 wasn’t one of those “neutral territories”: if a patrolling fighter had spotted a MiG concealed beneath the DC-9 heading for Palermo, it would surely have treated the Libyan plane as a dangerous enemy. But an enemy to whom? We know for certain that that night there were no Italian jets in action. But there’s another thing that the investigating magistrates know for certain, and that is that the Italian military never lifted a finger to decipher what actually happened in the sunset over Ustica.

The commander's challenge

In April 1992, the Parliamentary Commission on Massacres chaired by Libero Gualtieri, a senator from the Italian Republican Party and a partisan veteran of the Action Party in WWII, concluded his preliminary investigation with a harsh j’accuse, a harangue against the Italian Air Force. “Just as the magistrates have accused numerous high-ranking officers of the Italian Air Force and intelligence services of misdirecting their investigations and obstructing the pursuits of the various investigating entities, rather than wait and contribute to the definitive determination of the actual mechanical dynamic of the crash, likewise for this Commission it is possible to point an accusatory finger, in this note to the Italian parliament, at public officials and military institutions for having transformed a ‘normal’ investigation into the loss of a civilian aircraft, with all 81 of its passengers, into a teeming welter of lies, half-truths, and red herrings, and at the conclusion of this process, another victim has been added to the 81 dead passengers and crew members: the Italian Air Force itself, which, considering what it has long represented and still represents, certainly never deserved to be dragged in its entirety into this regrettable piece of reckless adventurism.”

The parliamentary commission claims that it was the Italian Air Forces report, defended and upheld by the then-Minister of Defense Lagorio, that inflicted, early on, already in July 1980, the scarlet letter of infamy upon the Itavia DC-9, by blaming the crash on structural failure. The commission writes that starting in December 1980, when Formica brought up once again the theory of the missile, the Italian Air Force broke its duty of maintaining silence and instead became an active accomplice in concealing the truth. For eight years the investigations of the judicial authorities lay fallow and, in all that time, the documentation simply dissolved.

“Certain things shouldn’t have been done,” the Gualtieri Commission report continues. “The highest levels of the Italian Air Force have always known that the judicial investigation into the Ustica case was open and ongoing, from the day of the crash to the present day, and that they therefore had the ongoing duty to preserve all pertinent evidence and documentation, wherever it might be stored, and make it available to the magistrate for any and all requirements. The massive destruction of evidence of all kinds, justified by the fact that internal regulations demanded this as a normal bureaucratic practice, once a certain period of time had passed, constituted an entirely unacceptable form of behavior on the part of the Italian Air Force, creeping up to, if not overstepping the bounds of criminal guilt.”

“Sure, everyone always quotes from that report and from the judicial order that Judge Rosario Priore issued to complete his preliminary investigation, with the indictment of four officers for obstruction of justice. But no one ever remembers how the trial ended….” As far as Leonardo Tricarico is concerned, the Italian Air Force is everything. He was the chief of staff of the Air Force and before that he served as the military adviser to three prime ministers: Massimo D’Alema, Giuliano Amato, and Silvio Berlusconi. In the summer of 1980 he had abandoned the joystick of his beloved fighter jets for a desk at Italian Air Force headquarters. “For the officers of my generation, Ustica was our cross to bear, a cross we did nothing to deserve.”

He sees a different history, a history that has nothing to do with obstruction of justice and red herrings. “What does the verdict of the Court of Cassation, Italy’s supreme court, say about the criminal case? A full acquittal on the charges of obstruction of justice. And what about the air battle in the skies over Ustica? According to the judges of the criminal court, this is literally political science fiction. I can quote from the verdict by heart: “The charges cannot be considered proven unless we accept as fact the scenario hypothesized above, but one cannot help but see it as little more than the plot of a spy thriller, not certainly a line of reasoning befitting a judicial verdict.” With every anniversary of the crash, though, they continue to rail at us, blithely ignoring that acquittal.”

There is another verdict, however, handed down by the highest civil court, which instead accepted the theory of a missile and also ordered the Ministry of Defense to pay compensation to the victims’ survivors and to Itavia. “But the court issued that verdict in accordance with the principle of greater likelihood, without proof. Whereas the expert witnesses who testified in the criminal trial stated that the DC-9 was destroyed by a bomb. This civil verdict goes perfectly with the civil verdict ordering the commander of the Carabinieri military base of Nasiriyah to pay compensation, because he was found guilty of having failed to protect the base adequately against the terrorist attackers. This introduced a devastating principle for the military chain of command: no individual officer can afford to take on any responsibility or issue any order at the risk of being ordered to pay enormous sums out of his own personal pockets. It’s inconceivable!”

At age 78, Tricarico has preserved his Top Gun physique and a passion for challenges. He is the chairman of the Fondazione ICSA, a strategic think tank created by Cossiga, but he also still sets forth his opinions with rough emphasis: in 2011 he returned his Légion d’honneur, the highest French order of merit, to the French government as a form of protest against the attitude of French President Sarkozy toward the Italians. The general is about to publish a book with the Rubettino publishing house, written with the journalist and history professor Gregory Alegi, perhaps the only reporter to have attended all the court hearings in the various trials related to Ustica.

“When I was a colonel and our generals were indicted, I wanted to go on television to fight back against those charges. I told my superior officers: if it goes badly, you’re free to cut me loose, I’ll take the responsibility on myself. But the chief of staff forbade me to do it: General Pisano didn’t believe we should venture out into the open arena. He established a line of conduct that he called one of “responsible silence.” I think that it was a major mistake, which forced honest officers to suffer that ordeal, and leaving the entire institution to suffer a slow roasting over the coals of public opinion.”

Judges old and new are united in saying that you could and you should have done more. “For six years, until 1986, everyone forgot all about Ustica. We’ve always made available our expertise and our knowledge. None other than General Pisano later created an ‘Ustica office’ in the offices of the high command, whose task it was to collect information and offer cooperation: it remained active for years.”

Tricarico mentions one memory: his visit to Paris with Prime Minister Amato, in preparation for a G-7 summit meeting to be hosted by Italy. “We were at lunch with President Chirac. After discussing the various points of the day’s agenda, Amato addressed Chirac: ‘I’m going to have to ask you to step in on the matter of Ustica: France has failed to respond to our letters rogatory. The Italian parliament and public opinion want the truth. You see, it’s a damned complicated situation with few if any certainties, but one thing we do know is that officers in our Italian Air Force have been lying.’ I was sitting next to him, in uniform, and I lurched in my chair. When we went back to the embassy, I could no longer control myself, and I told the prime minister exactly what I thought, in an open and wholehearted manner. I raised my voice and at a certain point someone grabbed my arm to stop me.”

Members of the military, and officers in particular, live their lives according to values that civilian society has a hard time understanding. From the day they enter the academy they are trained to a standard of discipline and they enter a community where everything is shared: loyalty to their fellow soldiers rules supreme and so does loyalty to the force they belong to. You’re preparing yourself for war: you know that survival depends on your fellow soldiers having your back, and victory springs from the platoon. If you can’t enter into this mindset, it’s hard to have a notion of the actions taken by officers like Tricarico, who are ready and willing to risk their career in order to defend their institution.

“In 2004, when I became commander in chief of the Italian Air Force, I set myself certain objectives. One of these goals was to win justice for the generals indicted, tried, and acquitted by the trial court: they were old and they were facing the possibility of dying with that stain on their reputations with the appeals trial. I reached out to the magistrates who would be judging them, well aware of the sensitivity of such a move, and I managed to arrange for a meeting. In full respect of their independence, I begged them to do just one thing: try to move quickly.”

The appeals court trial lasted only a month and a half, record time for the Italian courts, and it reaffirmed their acquittal with an even more resounding formulation. The survivors of the victims were infuriated and complained about “an overhasty verdict.” In June 2006, the newly elected prime minister Romano Prodi announced that the government would be appealing the case to an even higher court. That is when Tricarico announced his resignation from the highest position in the Italian Air Force.

Another development that had never previously been reported. “The head of the armed forces, Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, the Italian military’s Chief of Staff, discussed the matter with the Minister of Defense Arturo Parisi, who arranged for a meeting with Prodi. Enrico Letta, then Secretary of the Council of Ministers, was there, too. I made it clear to Prodi just how absurd that initiative really was: a special plea on the part of the administration to arrange for the trial and condemnation of members of the military. And offensive to the Italian Air Force, to boot. The prime minister admitted that he hadn’t considered that aspect. We discussed how we could present, in a visible manner our respect for the institution, in the nascent Museum of Memory, as well. Because of this, Prodi arranged for me to meet with the mayor of Bologna, Sergio Cofferati. I withdrew my resignation, but in reality, little or nothing changed.”

Tricarico retired three months later. He’s convinced that the new generations of officers have put the “trauma of Ustica” behind them. But for veterans like him, the matter isn’t closed: even the latest investigators believe that the Italian Air Force has done nothing to help bring justice. By now the public prosecutors no longer hope to find uncontaminated documents, but they do hope that some of the protagonists of that period might feel the need to tell what they know before dying.

More than once they have shown up to question witnesses in their nineties for the umpteenth time. The general, however, makes a show of confidence: “There are no secrets. The radar tracks of military aircraft so often mention have been cleared up by dozens of expert studies and dozens and dozens of letters rogatory. The presidents of the United States and of France have written personally to rule out the involvement of their armed forces. Why shouldn’t we believe them?”

The paper bombs

Another secret persists, however, even if it is known to a number of people. And it is the personal obsession of Carlo Giovanardi, a former Italian senator for the Catholic right wing: another striking figure in the liturgies of Ustica, because he is a fierce opponent of the thesis of the missile. In the summer of 1980, he was a young regional councilor for the DC, in Emilia Romagna itself, where he stood in the front row at the funeral for the Bologna train station massacre. For years he’s been a leading figure in the association, “Per la verità su Ustica” (For the Truth about Ustica), chaired by Giuliana Cavazza, who lost her mother on that DC-9: between them and the association of family members chaired by Daria Bonfietti the squabbling never ceases. And the reason? They are stubbornly convinced that the massacre was caused by a bomb planted aboard the plane.

For Bonfietti, a bomb is synonymous with obstruction of justice. Just hours after the plane went down, an anonymous phone call claimed that traveling aboard the Itavia aircraft had been Marco Affatigato, an extreme right-wing militant who is still actually alive and well. The Bolognese investigations later accused secret operatives linked to Licio Gelli’s P-2 Masonic Lodge as having been responsible for that call. Years later, in 1990, the “Blasi superpanel of experts” split on this exact point. At first they solidly agreed that there had been an aerial dogfight, then two out of the five reconsidered and opted instead for the theory of a terrorist bomb. In the trial, too, discussion continued at length, with the position in favor of an internal explosion that shifted with the interpretations, from the restroom in the back of the plane all the way up to the first row, near the cockpit, so movable that in the end the public prosecutor talked about a “dancing bomb.”

Giovanardi instead rejected all doubts: “What Priore claims has been rejected by the criminal courts, but it has nevertheless become the basis of the civil verdict. That’s just incredible. The expert witnesses offered an incontrovertible finding: the DC-9 was destroyed by a bomb. Read Frank Taylor’s analysis and you’ll understand: he is one of the greatest experts on the subject. Ninety percent of the aircraft has been recovered, and there’s no mistaking what happened.”

Aside from dismissing the expert testimony, the former senator pointed to a potential motive. But he could not discuss it, because he was obliged to maintain confidentiality on the matter. Yet another in the endless succession of funhouse mirrors that make up this affair, where each and every tile of the mosaic fits into a larger, surreal puzzle, and every crack that might let in a gleam of light instead fades until it becomes opaque and divisive. The noisy shouting arguments always seem to take precedence over the facts.

In the view set forth by Giovanardi, while still keeping it under wraps, the motive would be a Palestinian vendetta. Which might be intertwined with the Libyan lead. But it’s still about explosives, which means ruling out missiles, dogfights in the skies, and therefore concealment by the Italian armed forces or guilt on the part of the Americans. The politician became convinced of it when, together with other members of parliament taking part in the last Commission of Inquest into the Moro case, he was given the opportunity to view the correspondence and papers of Colonel Stefano Giovannone, Italy’s chief spy in Beirut from 1974 until 1981: with the code name “Maestro,” he managed the unconfessable relations between the Italian government and the various Palestinian organizations. The state seal of secrecy on those files expired in 2015, but they were then subjected to another further classification of secrecy: just describing their content is tantamount to committing a crime. That means that Giovanardi knows, but cannot say. But what he has read pushes him all the more to believe in the theory of a bomb.

Actually, though, everyone knows what Giovannone’s mission was. He was the operative guardian of the so-called “Lodo Moro”: the pact signed in 1974 between the then-prime minister and the Palestinians, guaranteeing them freedom movement in Italy in exchange for an agreement not to carry out terror attacks in our country. If the militants were arrested, then we would find a way of silently taking them home. The Christian Democratic statesman wrote about this in two letters from his Red Brigades prison, in hopes there was a possibility of negotiations for his liberation: “And then there’s Miceli and Colonel Giovannone, whom Cossiga respects... So, not once but numerous times various imprisoned Palestinians were liberated with various mechanisms, even some who had been sentenced to prison terms, in order to avert grave reprisals....”

In November 1979, the pact was violated. The Carabinieri arrested several militants of Prima Linea in the port of Ortona who had just taken delivery of two Strela surface-to-air missiles that had been shipped from Lebanon. The missiles weren’t intended for them, but for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, headed by George Habbash: a Jordanian member of the Popular Front who lived in Bologna wound up behind bars. From Beirut word went out demanding his release. Even judges wrote letters urging the government to respect the agreement with the administration in Rome, which of course denied the existence of any secret pact. The man from the PFLP remained in prison. And from protests, the Palestianians escalated to threats. And those threats were directed at Colonel Giovannone.

The director of intelligence services alerted Rome. He stated that the situation was becoming unsustainable. He reported on the internal dynamics of the Palestinian diaspora, with Arafat supporting more moderate positions and Habbash insisting on punishing Italy: a scenario in which Gaddafi, sponsor of the hardliners, brought pressures to bear. The hawks wanted a spectacular terror attack; they considered hijackings; they argued in favor of arming Carlos the Jackal and his network of European terrorists. And they pushed for quick action. Warnings that were reiterated by the SISMI officer during the very week of Ustica, as well, and perhaps even on the same day, June 27, 1980. Giovanardi repeats his question: “All the various administrations have promised the truth about Ustica, so why won’t they make those proceedings public? If I reveal their contents, I could be looking at three years behind bars….”

True, but still, we need to understand why, in spite of the promises of every prime minister, the seal of secrecy has remained on those papers. The latest classification was determined when Matteo Renzi was in power in the Chigi Palace, and he worked to push through the letters rogatory concerning the Itavia DC-9, as well as signing a law for the complete declassification of the archives. But not Giovannone’s case files. The years of Palestinian guerrilla warfare belong to history and it isn’t clear why those documents should still be so frightening. Certainly, perhaps we would see in black and white what is concealed by the “Lodo Moro”: in exchange for our immunity from terror attacks, Italy guaranteed the terrorists a chance to move freely and strike Israeli targets in Europe.

But Israel has always known this. This is proven by the investigations carried out by the judicial authorities into the destruction of Argo 16, the aircraft the intelligence services used to take the Palestinians who had been released, blown out of the air by Mossad in 1973, over Marghera. And in the summer of 1980 the Israelis had other motives for resentment against Italy: the Italians were supplying the technology and the systems that allowed Saddam Hussein to produce his first nuclear power plant, the first step on the road to an Arabic atom bomb. On the nights of early August, the Roman offices of the companies involved in the Iraqi program were bombed.

Claudio Gatti, one of the most capable and rigorous investigative journalists working today, wrote a book with Gail Hammer in which they theorize that the downing of the DC-9 might have been the work of Israeli fighter planes: the Itavia flight path might have coincided with the cargo plane that was supposed to transport uranium for that power plant from France Iraq. Certainly, the Israeli air force would have no difficulty crossing the Mediterranean Sea and carrying out an operation of that nature, and they could camouflage their jets behind NATO codes and blind the radar. Claudio Gatti’s reconstruction was denied roundly by Israel and never had any judicial follow-up. It’s just another tile in the mosaic, however, of tangled and intertwining ulterior interests and rivalries, all of them buried under veils of deadly secrecy, and all of them coiling back to that terrible summer of 1980: a network so dense, and linking so many warring protagonists, that it has irrevocably trapped, at least as of this writing, the truth beyond hope.

Party business

The hypothesis of a bomb clashes with other objective data. First and foremost, the delay in takeoff of the Bologna-Palermo flight, which left 113 minutes after its scheduled departure. Back then, there were no suicide bombers and if the bomb had been set off with a timer, then it would have been set to go off long after scheduled landing, when the DC-9 would have been empty and safely on the ground in Sicily. The other question is: why strike at Itavia and not the national airlines, Alitalia?

Itavia was the only private carrier, and in the preceding years it had launched an ambitious plan for flights to carry tourists from Northern Europe to Italy. Then the oil crisis and the rising price of fuel had transformed expansion into bad business. But the company was well protected within the government. Unexpectedly, this is shown by a British document that had been confidential for more than three decades. On June 15, 1979, one year before the massacre, Margaret Thatcher received a state visit from Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and the Foreign Minister Arnaldo Forlani. In preparations for the meeting, at Point 13, it was pointed out that: “The Italians may, however, refer to the difficulties presently being experienced by the Italian charter flight company, Itavia, in obtaining sufficient fuel supplies from Mobil at Gatwick. This is not a matter for HMG. A defensive brief is included on this point.”

The problem was laid out in detail for Thatcher. It was a matter of fuel rationing, bound up with the oil crisis, and a series of reprisals between the two countries. “Now the Italian Civil Air authorities have threatened to cut British charters’ fuel if ITAVIA (a different Italian charter company this time) runs short this summer season. After earlier difficulties in May (when MOBIL, ITAVIA’s supplier, were persuaded to resolve by increasing their allocation) MOBIL this month cut ITAVIA (along with all their other customers in the UK and most other countries) to 90 percent of their June 1978 supply. ITAVIA need twice as much again for their expanded 1979 programme. After officials had made informal enquiries of oil companies in this country at the request of the Italian Embassy, BP have offered to let ITAVIA have enough extra to last through June, but at the spot rate of $1.30 per US gallon, as compared with the contract rate of about 65c. ITAVIA are unhappy at this. They have enough fuel from MOBIL to last until early next week.”

And the report continues: “Retaliation against British charter traffic, at least against those refueling in Italy on their way to Yugoslavia, cannot be ruled out. There is some risk that retaliation might go beyond this, and lead to bad feeling spilling over into other fields. This would be unfortunate, given the advantages of making common cause with Italy on some major EEC issues.” In short, Itavia was sufficiently important to push the government in Rome to risk their good relations with London. But why? The explanation is in a confidential side note, with a warning for Thatcher: “(Not for use with Andreotti).” Here we read: “ITAVIA has strong political backing from Forlani, the Italian Foreign Minister, who is powerful in the Christian Democratic Party.”

That document shows how, in the international halls of power, the airliner of Ustica was linked directly to the strong man of Italy’s majority party: hitting it would have meant striking directly at the heart of power. And yet Forlani never lifted a finger to save Itavia: he was prime minister when the cabinet minister Formica revoked its license and pushed the company into bankruptcy. But he did nothing to intervene. He let Itavia sink under a load of debt and did nothing to bring the truth about the DC-9 to the surface. From international plots, we move on to palace intrigue. Over the course of Italy’s First Republic, Ustica opened a transversal fault line between the political parties.

This process is described by Cora Ranci, a young researcher who just published a book with Laterza titled, Ustica, una ricostruzione storica: “It is clear that, concerning Ustica, the PSI was trying to establish a reputation in the eyes of the Italian public opinion as a different kind of party — if not in actual fact, at least in its words — from the DC, the state-party that the Socialists were trying to challenge. Exposed to a withering hail of criticisms, the DC has responded by maintaining its position in favor of the guarantees of legal process for the military, emphasizing the need to await the findings of judicial investigations.”

It was the Socialist Formica who first ventured the hypothesis of a missile. It was the Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi, along with his undersecretary Giuliano Amato, who ordered the recovery of the plane’s wreckage. Then Amato, in a 1989 interview with Avanti, the party newspaper, answered the question: Can we rule out political responsibilities? “It is possible that there were political responsibilities. But we would need to ascertain them, document them, in short, prove them. Here is my opinion: I wouldn’t rule out the thought that whoever decided to cover up the tragedy of Ustica might also have decided to keep the political authorities in the dark on the matter, considering them to be unreliable guardians of such a horrifying secret.” In fact, a small scale coup. “I’m not saying that it happened. I’m just saying that it strikes me as a highly credible hypothesis.”

Escaping the labyrinth

Cora Ranci’s book, in fact, opens a new front in the debate, with the renunciation of judicial truth. “Theorizing whether there was a plot by various military authorities in order to cover up an international incident in which friendly or allied or enemy states might be involved is not a task for the halls of justice, which work only in terms of certain and irrefutable proofs, but rather of historians if they ever have the chance, inasmuch as it is entirely mistaken to believe that history is made with verdicts, given the limitations that criminal procedure imposes on judges.”

That would be an acceptable statement, if Italy was a country capable of settling its accounts with history. But we’ve never been able to do it. From the Unity of Italy on, every chapter always remains entangled in controversial debates, and there is never just one shared truth. That’s always been the case, and the disagreements about Ustica have become even more profound. At all levels.
Particularly enlightening are the conclusions of the first investigation undertaken by the Commission on Massacres, over the signature of the chairman, Libero Gualtieri, in 1992: “This leads us to the problem of the oversight and supervisory powers of the Italian parliament and the responsibilities of the administration.

Concerning the tragedy of Ustica and the story of the MiG-23, there have been, over the course of the past twelve years, dozens and dozens of parliamentary inquiries. The responses provided to them by the administration (that is, when there were responses at all), provide no assistance in reading the nature of events at all and they do nothing to satisfactorily answer any of the queries and doubts set forth by a number of members of parliament. Taken as a whole, the adminstrations’ responses are a stunning document. It is sad to think that the Italian parliament accepted them, utterly abdicating its powers of supervision to obtain anything more satisfactory and more serious. Even the evidence supplied as far back as 1980 by Minister Rino Formica has been shrouded in the mists that have settled over the story.

When the Italian parliament, with the appointment of this commission, demanded the appropriate answers, then in fact the judicial authorities came back to life, investigations were revived, technical investigations were resumed in greater depth, and the protections and measures of impunity hitherto granted subsided and receded. Over the course of the investigation carried out by the commission, there have been many occasions for bitterness and lack of understanding. When you lift certain rocks, there is no telling what you’re going to find under them. There was even an attempt to make people believe that a systematic campaign to denigrate our military institutions, and the Italian Air Force in particular, was underway. There was a deplorable use of patriotism to these ends.”

As we have seen in this investigative coverage, there are obscure aspects that we can still explore. In spite of the dozens of books, trials, technical reports, and parliamentary inquests, there remain a number of unexplored chapters and accounts that can be reconsidered in the light of the new documents. From the activities of the U.S. Air Force, the French missions, and the survivors of the Gaddafi regime to the pilots of the U.S. Navy, the veterans of Palestinian terrorism, and the spies of each and every nation, and that’s leaving aside other more modern explorations of the archives of the Italian armed forces. We can and we must try to bring together as many individual points as possible in order to construct an identikit of the guilty parties.

And in the face of a wall of secrecy so stout and sturdy that it has held out for forty years, it is the judicial authorities who can wield the tools that are best suited to pry them open. But they can’t do it alone. They need the vigorous support of the civic institutions and the loyal collaboration of every qualified contributor, and especially the assistance of historians. Only a mobilization that reaches beyond national borders can hope to free the truth from the cobwebs imprisoning it, a poisonous welter woven by so many different entities and individuals that it’s impossible to keep track. The guilt involved in the destruction of that DC-9 lies concealed at the end of a long and twisting labyrinth, and the only way to triumph over it is to start over from zero.

Because — as the Gualtieri Commission wrote — “the tragedy of the 81 victims and their family members has been transformed into a tragedy of the nation’s collective conscience. The story of Ustica and that of the Libyan MiG-23 could not have been handled any worse than they were. Certain behaviors seen at various levels of responsibility, which we’ve described and denounced, have ricocheted against the people involved with devastating force and ruinous effect; but even more devastating has been their impact on the possibility of clarifying matters. Even innocence would have had great difficulty emerging from the tangle of lies, recklessness, arrogance, and contempt that enveloped from the very beginning the attempt to ascertain what has happened. But there was no innocence.”