In 1983 the Italian secret services allegedly concluded an agreement with the Marxist-Leninist terrorists of Asala, the Armenian secret army for the liberation of Armenia, through Yasser Arafat’s PLO, to avoid attacks in Italy. This was revealed by Panorama, in possession of the dossier recovered a few days ago by researcher Giordana Terracina from the State Archives
In 1983 the Italian secret services allegedly concluded an agreement with the Marxist-Leninist terrorists of Asala, the Armenian secret army for the liberation of Armenia, through Yasser Arafat’s PLO, to avoid attacks in Italy. It is the so-called ‘Scalfaro award’, a twin agreement of the ‘Lodo Moro’, which emerged from the analysis of 163 documents “declassified” by the Meloni government. This was revealed by Panorama, in possession of the dossier recovered a few days ago by researcher Giordana Terracina from the State Archives: a 429-page folder containing cables, minutes and exchanges of messages between Colonel Stefano Giovannone, head of the SISMI center in Beirut ( nicknamed ‘Bermude’), and the Italian government. Documents that stop chronologically in front of the abyss of 27 June 1980, the day of the Ustica massacre, to then resume in September of the same year, but also ‘skipping’ the Bologna massacre.
Founded in 1975 in Beirut, during the Lebanese civil war, by Hagop Hagopian, the Asala was a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization responsible, in 11 years of intense subversive activity, for dozens of deadly attacks, above all against Turkish diplomats in Worldwide. “Of that agreement with Asala – underlines Panorama – the then Italian Interior Minister, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro was certainly informed. So much so that in one of the hundreds of declassified documents, the one dated 19 August 1983 and which has subject ‘Problems of interest to the security of Italy’, the director of the Intelligence and Military Security Service of the time, General Ninetto Lugaresi, wrote to the then owner of the Interior Ministry (‘Referring to the conversation I had this morning with Your Honourable Lordship…’) soliciting your intervention in relation to three topics: one is, precisely, the agreement to be reached and signed to stop the chain of attacks also carried out on Italian soil by the Asala”.
In the note addressed to Scalfaro, here is what Lugaresi writes: “In April 1980 (four months later the bomb exploded at the Bologna station, ed), with the aim of blocking Armenian terrorist actions against Italy, they were taken contacts via the PLO with Asala, concluded in December of the same year with a draft agreement (Annex 1) which states that Italy is asked not to allow the transit of Armenian emigrants (heading towards the United States)”. In fact, the Asala did not want its people to flee abroad because this would have weakened the battles against Turkey and tried in every way to hinder Armenian citizens from leaving the country, even demanding by force from other countries, Including Italy, limitations or bans on emigrants.
The officer reminded Scalfaro that “recently the US consul general asked the Mae (the Farnesina, ed) to grant a visa also at the Italian embassy in Beirut”. And he warned him: “I believe that the implementation of the provision proposed by the US consul could have negative repercussions for security purposes because it could be taken as a pretext by the Asala to renew violent actions against Italian interests, including those, relevant, present today in Lebanon”.
The subject had already been dealt with by Lugaresi who, on February 28, 1982, had brought to the attention of Cesis (the Executive Committee for information and security services) the “threats of the Asala against targets in Italy”. A month earlier, on 29 January 1982, Lugaresi also wrote to Cesis and to the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and the Interior, recalling the prodromes of the agreement with Asala. Which had materialized in December 1980 in a draft, through the PLO, and “on which the opinion of the Italian authorities had to be expressed”. Subsequently, Lugaresi pointed out, “there was a request to promote the diffusion of the Armenian idea and related problems in the Italian mass media”. A month later there will actually be an interview in L’Espresso with Hagop Hagopian, founder of Asala. He will go differently to the weekly Panorama, “punished” by Hagopian – for an interview that the founder of Asala evidently must not have appreciated – with an attack on the Mondadori warehouse in Porta Ticinese.
Source-www.adnkronos.com