Rumors Swirled for Years About a Spy Agency’s Scandalous History. It Wasn’t Evil—Just Incompetent. 52%
By Michael Natale24%
7/17/2026, 1:30:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Negativity Bias, and Appeal to Authority, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 22.7% saturation with 278 hits. Analysis detected 2,299 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,227 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 51.9% and a BS Rank of 52% (9,116 of 18,912 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 51.80% of the article peer group.
Just under 60 years ago, Italy fell into a troublesome period of its history known as the Anni di piombo, or Years of Lead.
From roughly 1968 to 1988, domestic terrorism and other acts of political violence spilled out onto the streets regularly.
Far-left communist- and anarchist-aligned factions engaged in quasi-guerilla warfare with militant far-right nationalist and neofascist groups.
Early in this period, in 1969, a spate of bombings rocked Milan and Rome, the deadliest being the horrific Piazza Fontana bombing.
The explosion at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura building killed 17 people and injured dozens more.
Police first pinned the blame on anarchists, rounding up nearly 100 suspects.
This round-up included railroad worker Guiseppe Pinelli, who died falling from a fourth-floor police station window while in custody.
Police commissioner Luigi Calabresi would ultimately be assassinated by the left-wing militant group Lotta Continua, who blamed him for Pinelli’s death despite Calabresi not being present when it happened.
More than two years after those attacks, Italian authorities pivoted their focus and arrested members of the far-right neofascist paramilitary organization Ordine Nuovo (which translates to New Order).
Ordine Nuovo, founded by the neofascist Pino Rauti in 1956, relied on a “strategy of tension” (a term first used by the British newspaper The Observer in the wake of the Piazza Fontana bombing).
The idea was that increased violence, which could be attributed to left-wing activists, would drive the public to support a stronger central government and more vigorous crackdowns on the perceived communist threat.
The Italian government’s inability to effectively prosecute the terrorists behind the Piazza Fontana bombing fostered, in at least a portion of the population, a belief that certain wings of the Italian government were actually complicit in the crimes.
The suspects were acquitted in 1985 despite evidence connecting them to the plot, and many came to believe that the Servizio Informazioni Difesa (SID) in particular had been collaborating with the same neofascist groups they were supposed to be stopping.
Over the years, popular opinion pushed this belief into the realm of what Niccolò Petrelli, an assistant professor of strategic studies at Roma Tre University, considers “scholarly consensus.”
Real-world revelations about acts of foreign interference in Italy during the Cold War undoubtedly added fuel to the fire.
The court of public opinion arrived at a determination of government coordination with neofascist groups based on an array of circumstantial evidence.
But that doesn’t actually make it established fact.
Petrelli’s article, “Between Manipulation and Adaptation: The Italian Intelligence and Right-Wing Subversion and Terrorism, 1966–1974,” endeavors to correct the record on the SID’s relationship with far-right terrorists, without absolving or heroizing the intelligence organization, or the role it played in the chaos of the Years of Lead.
Petrelli unearthed newly declassified documents that paint a portrait of an organization that was neither puppet-master of a neofascist movement, nor innocent bystander to a terror campaign.
Rather, Petrelli’s research suggests that the SID was simply ill-prepared to meet the moment.
It was created in the wake of a scandal that led to the official dissolution of its predecessor agency.
Given the institutional shortcomings it inherited, the SID could not effectively manipulate a rising nationalist movement it was too understaffed and outdated to truly understand.
“To understand how the SID developed its strategy toward right-wing extremism between 1969 and 1974,” Petrelli writes, “it is essential to examine its structure and capabilities as well as the internal-security approach it inherited from its predecessor, the Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate – SIFAR (Armed Forces Intelligence Service).”
The SIFAR, which operated from 1949 to the early part of 1966, was dismantled after it became public that they had secretly, and illegally, maintained dossiers which “contained reports on leading political, business, intellectual and ecclesiastical figures.”
“Like its predecessor,” Petrelli’s study summarizes, “the SID thus remained structured primarily around two core missions: meeting the armed forces’ requirements for operational planning against Warsaw Pact threats (a task that absorbed nearly all SIGINT and special-operations capabilities) and safeguarding the internal security of the state rather than projecting national interests abroad.”
Some have asserted that the SID took the first part of that mandate, with its Cold War mentality, far more seriously than its second, to the nation’s detriment.
But Petrelli found that, instead, the SID did try to strike a balance.
The problem was that in its approach to domestic counterterrorism, the agency adhered to the Cold War understanding of the hierarchical centralized leadership structure commonly found in left-wing terrorist groups.
This made them unable to truly understand neofascist terrorist groups like Ordine Nuovo, or ON, who “by contrast, represented an almost classic example of a ‘hybrid terrorist organization,’ one that combined a small central hierarchical structure with a broad set of diffuse and rather autonomous local networks.”
“Such a mistake resulted from shortcomings in both collection and analysis,” Petrelli writes.
“In fact, in 1966 the SID had only four sources in the extreme-right sector: one in the Padova area, three in the Rome area (and none in the Verona area).
None of these sources was a member of ON or deeply familiar with the local networks of the movement, particularly in the Triveneto area.”
This lack of recruited sources within the terrorist organization led to the SID making a decision that even Petrelli can’t fully explain the reasoning behind, and one that drastically damaged the SID’s reputation: a collaboration with neofascist and journalist Guido Giannettini.
Scholars who wanted to paint the SID as complicit in the tactics of right-wing paramilitary organizations often point to the Giannettini connection, speculating that he may have acted as a go-between, carrying instructions from the SID to groups like ON.
Petrelli’s study probes that speculation, and finds that in reality, the SID was simply using Giannettini as a standard paid informer, whose role was to keep tabs on the confounding emergence of “synergies between left-wing Maoist extremists and neofascist organizations” within Italy.
Ultimately, Petrelli’s study doesn’t so much rewrite history as shift the focus from speculation and narrative creation to actual history, as the study moves the conversation away from the motive of the SID to the means at hand.
The study concludes that the SID had no ideological motivation to support and direct neofascist groups.
On the contrary, the SID was woefully incapable of exhibiting even a fraction of the influence needed to achieve such a goal.
“The SID was established with obvious shortcomings,” Petrelli concludes.
“The average level of education in the armed forces was rather low, and no professional comprehensive in-house training was provided by military intelligence.”
The deficit in both resources and training led to the SID not understanding ON’s structure, nor recognizing its “shift to a strategy of armed struggle” until it was far too late.
Rather than finding evidence that “intelligence had significant capabilities that it chose not to deploy in order to take advantage of neofascist groups as covert tools in the fight against communism,” Petrelli’s research paints a portrait of an intelligence apparatus that was strained, lacked resources, and relied on a wildly outdated idea of how to recruit sources and gather information.
It suggests that the SID was not behind the horrors of the Years of Lead, but rather woefully unable to understand the neofascist organizations it naively thought it could infiltrate and influence.
Analysis
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