Roberto Fiore - The Security Connection
Did MI6 recruit a notorious Italian fascist in the 1980s?
That's the allegation reported in last Saturday's Telegraph, which claims that Roberto Fiore was given safe haven in Britain when he fled Italy following the 1980 bombing of Bologna Railway station, which killed 85 people.
Although Fiore was eventually acquitted of the attack, he was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for armed conspiracy. This was never served as the British courts ruled against his extradition, and the Government refused to deport him. Only after his sentence timed out under a statute of limitations did he return to Italy where he is currently on trial, accused of attacking the headquarters of the CGIL labour federation.
Patrick Sawer reports:
much of his activity in the UK will remain secret after Whitehall officials refused to release his intelligence files. The Home Office has said it will not publish its file dealing with Italy's extradition request for Fiore and three other members of the far right Terza Posizione (Third Position) party, despite the passage of nearly 40 years (Telegraph, 1 April 2023).
The file in question, HO 306/269 in the National Archives catalogue, was requested by Sabrina Provenzani of Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, in collaboration with The Citizens, a journalism website founded by Carole Cadwalladr.
According to Provenzani's article for Il Fatto, the denial of the request invoked the Security and Intelligence Instrument, which allows intelligence related material to be withheld from the National Archives. While it is possible to imagine more than one reason for this, it has fuelled existing allegations about Fiore's intelligence contacts.
Alfio Bernabei reports in Searchlight magazine:
On his own admission made in 2018, Fiore was visited by Italian secret service agents while he was in jail in London in 1982. They suggested that if he agreed to collaborate a deal could be struck for his early release if extradited to Italy. ‘I refused,’ said Fiore, who let it be understood that this could not have taken place without the knowledge of the British secret service. Rumours have abounded over the years about Fiore’s alleged recruitment by MI6 in efforts to gather intelligence about training camps in Lebanon for would-be terrorists. No evidence has ever been produced about Fiore visiting that country (Searchlight, 3 March 2023).
The 'rumour' formulation is interesting given that the earliest source for the allegation I can find seems to be a June 1989 edition of Searchlight itself, which is not online.
One early source which is available is the 1991 report of the European Parliament Committee of Inquiry into Racism and Xenophobia, for which the rapporteur was Labour MEP Glyn Ford.
It features this account of the evolution of the 'Political Soldiers' wing of the British far-right, with which Fiore was involved while in Britain:
...the Political Soldiers, became more and more extreme in both their thinking and their connections. Praise for lran and Libya and their failure to condemn the terrorists on both sides of the Northern lreland conflict led to the loss of the bulk of the already diminishing membership of the organization. They declared they had no interest in Parliamentary democracy. A number of key members gained convictions for violence, sometimes against the police.
They claimed that they wanted to develop friendly contacts with black and Jewish nationalist extremists. But when seriously challenged over these relationships, they said they still believed in racial separate development.
This combination of marginality and political eclecticism is suggestive. Nevertheless, while there must be some rationale for the invocation of the Security and Intelligence Instrument, its precise nature is still far from clear.