CONTENTS:

Preface by Leonardo Sciascia

The Courage of Fear

A City Under Siege

The Appointment With the Violent

Flowers in the Court Room

In the Bunker

The Next One Will Be Adelaide Aglietta

Justice For Giorgiana Masi, Justice For Marshal Berardi

The Via Fani Massacre

The Question of Self-Defense

The Debate Is Open

Tragedy in the Country, Illegality in Parliament, Boredom in the Courtroom

Curcio: An Act of Revolutionary Justice

Brother Machine-gun

The Referendum Campaign: The Schizophrenia of a Jurywoman

The Word Is With the Contending Parties

The Court Retires, My Job Is Finished

The Reason For This Book

ABSTRACT: Adelaide Aglietta, a woman of Turin, joined the Radical Party (PR) in 1974. After being active in the CISA (Italian Centre For Sterilisation and Abortion) for legalising and liberalising abortion and in the Piedmont branch of the Radical Party, she was the leading candidate on the Radical election list for Turin in the June 20, 1976 elections. The following November she was elected secretary of the PR and reconfirmed in that post for 1978 at the Bologna Congress. Her name was drawn by lots in March 1978 to be a juror in the Turin trial of the Red Brigades and she accepted the task after more than one hundred other citizens had refused it, thus allowing the trial to take place.

Thus Adelaide Aglietta was the first secretary of a party to be a member of a popular jury: her diary originates from this experience on the borderline between public and private life, from the tensions and the contradictions that are necessarily part of the role of juror, above all in a political trial.

At present she is a deputy to the European Parliament.

("DIARIO DI UNA GIURATA POPOLARE AL PROCESSO DELLE BRIGATE ROSSE" - Adelaide Aglietta - Preface by Leonardo Sciascia - Milano Libri Edizioni - February 1979)

THE DEBATE IS OPEN

Thursday, March 30. The trial is now at a crucial point in the expectation of finally turning to an examination of the accusations, the phase in which one should get to know the facts and so form an opinion about the guilt or innocence of the defendants.

On Thursday afternoon and the next day I follow the developments of the Socialist congress. I have heard that Craxi (1) has spoken of the "evident crisis and ensuing falling apart of the Radical Party". I would like to know something more about this curious thesis. On entering the Turin Sports Palace many Socialists embrace me. I don't think it is because they believe they are embracing the secretary of a party in the process of falling apart. Several of them have me sign their Socialist Party membership cards exclaiming that mine, joined with theirs, ought to make up a single membership card. If the Socialist comrades seem to me to be exceptional, the atmosphere within the Congress is quite a different thing: the display is grandiose, one feels the existence of a very strong apparatus, very well financed and employed in the attempt to give itself a new image that is different from the other parties of the majority coalition.

They lead me to the section reserved for delegations from the other parties. It is a space that seems cramped in comparison to the enormous grandstands reserved for the foreign delegations. My thought is that Craxi has done things in the grand style. To my right, in the first rows, I see Pajetta and Cervetti for the PCI (2). At my back is Magri with the PDUP (3) delegation. I am greeted very courteously by the hon. Mr. Sarti, Christian Democrat, ex minister, whom I had never seen before or otherwise known. He takes a seat beside me and asks me several questions. I try to concentrate on the speeches. Enrico Manca [Socialist deputy and president of the RAI] is talking and a third of the audience applauds while many others whistle (4). Giolitti [Socialist deputy] passes by. Sarti comments that "he would make an impeccable President of the Republic". I imagine that he is speaking seriously, but I note that he has a taste for making quips. When a little later I exchange a few words with the cultural directo

r of the PSI, he tells me: "I did it because it is part of my job. You don't know this, but I direct the cultural policies of the DC. Believe me, I have absolutely nothing to do". Magri, without greeting him, asks Giovanni Negri (5) to light his cigarette. Later our paths cross and he asks me if we are going to speak out on the health question. I answer that we have charged Giovanni with this task, but we have not had any answer from the Congress directors yet.

Those of our comrades who remain at the Sports Palace will wait in vain for Giovanni to be called on to speak. The PR's greetings to the Socialist Congress delegates have been given by means of flyers distributed at the entrance.

Friday afternoon I desert the Sports Palace when I hear from the speakers' platform the delegates being invited to "applaud comrade Magnani-Noya who, unlike those other spineless lawyers at the BR trial, has not signed the document of self-defense". The news of this speech will reach the ears of the attorneys who signed the constitutional objection. When the hearing is reopened, Fulvio Gianaria and Alberto Mittone, young lawyers of the Turin bar, will ask me to confirm this and let me read a letter they sent to "La Repubblica" (6) In this letter all twelve of the signers, basing their position on the thesis of Leonardo Sciascia (7), will re-affirm their their motivations, the dignity of their positions, their determination as lawyers to defend and guarantee the defendants legal rights as the Constitution prescribes: if this means they are "spineless", they have no intention of correcting their condition.

The next day I leave for Rome where a national assembly of Radical Party association is on the program. But little by little, day after day, I feel myself growing more distant from the party and its battles. This is understandable since for more than a month I have only received reflected light from the Radicals' affairs. The general political situation, on the contrary, involves me more than ever with its oppressive atmosphere. In Parliament the Radical deputies try in every possible way to call a hearing in the Chamber on the Moro case. But is useless, the majority coalition intends to discuss any other problem rather than face this one.

Monday, April 3. The interrogation of the defendants begins, or rather what is supposed to pass for the interrogation of the defendants. The journalists crowd the part of the courtroom reserved for the press ready to record the statements. The "historical leaders" of the BR seem calm. Even now, after months, I am still unable to form an opinion of their individual characters. What remains is at most a few superficial feelings. I am sure, for example, that they have always followed the trial with close attention calculating scientifically all the statements and never, except on two or three occasions, have they intervened impelled by emotions generated by unforeseen events. At the beginning they talked, often joked, and showed an ostentatious lack of interest in everything going on around them, even pretending to be immersed in reading the newspapers. Twice I happened to run into them in the corridors of the "bunker". Their faces were impassive and the glances of some of them with regard to me seemed to

show an ironic curiosity.

The hearing opens with the ritual attempt to interrogate them. The defendants refuse to reply to the questions of the presiding judge. But of their own volition Semeria, Franceschini, Ferrari, Curcio, Bertolazzi, Bassi and Ognibene make speeches. They denounce the special security prisons, the treatment of the political prisoners who are detained there, the negation of the convicts' right to socialise, a negation which within the prison takes the form of solitary confinement and outside the use of glass partitions during visits and control of their correspondence. The brigadiers announce the beginning of the fight within the prisons and maintain that "the BR gives better treatment to its political prisoners". Franceschini exclaims: "As for us, we fed Sossi [a judge kidnapped by the BR] with risotto". The harangue continues: "The crime we are accused of is political, the lawyers represent the parties, one is of the PSI [Socialists], another two of the PCI [Communists]". With regard to me, Franceschini st

ates that "the Radicals are the doormats of Cossiga (8). Bassi, for his part, "reserves the right to interrogate me". According to the brigadiers the true defendants are the lawyers and the jury. Never will they abandon their position as the "anti-state". Other defendants take the floor and affirm that the judges cannot be "impartial" since they apply class laws (someone also shouts: "Your laws are the Rocco code and the Reale law"). (9) The long final reproof ends with the usual threats: "Our quarrel is not with individuals but with the functions they are willing to assume. Don't come to cry over the dead."

All of this has a great effect on me. One particular often repeated phrase shakes me up: "The only relationship there can be between us is to shoot each other in the face". At the end of the long discourse the defendants desert the courtroom leaving behind as usual the three "observers". Barbaro now begins the long reading of the interrogations made during the inquiry: the phase of the trial begins which is the "great ennui". All of these acts contain some substantially new elements that can be of consequence for the trial.

Tuesday, April 4. There is a new communique, no. 13, from the defendants which shows that they are very attentive to the realities of the trial as well as what is going on outside in the country and picking up items for timely comment. With regard to the treatment that Moro will get in the so-called "people's prison" - a subject which these days is at the centre of press comment - they affirm:

"...Speaking of the presumed treatment of the prisoner Moro, the press, contrary to what it wanted to make appear in past months, has showed that it knows and understands very well what is the essence and the function of special security prisons.

"Here solitary confinement is permanent. It no longer uses the alibi of "safeguarding evidence from impairment", but that of "security". And behind this infamous word game of the usual "specialists" the months of solitary confinement become years, the definitive condition of the prisoner in the individual cubicles and the "small groups". In reality the attack on the identity of the aware proletarian, his psycho-physical destabilisation, becomes a systematic technique of annihilation.

"Thus punitive detention in reality becomes a war tactic, the screen to hide the existence of new concentration camps. And in these camps you methodically apply all your methods of psycho-physical annihilation. Now the counter-revolution, instead of limiting itself to extensive massacres "afterwards", acts in a creeping and systematic way "beforehand", becomes preventive counter-revolution in every sector of society.

"But in order to realise the objective of annihilation, it does not satisfy you to eliminate the socialising within the prisons, you must push on further and eliminate the socialising with the outside as well. Thus you have imposed the "conversations" through glass and interphones whose only function is to eliminate the conversations. It is another step in your programme whose cynical ferocity extends from the words of useful idiots such as Trombadori [PCI deputy] and Corvisieri [Autonomia Operaia deputy] to the deeds of the silent thugs of an Italian Videla. (10) In these days we are rejecting these so-called "conversations"...

"...There are cases in which psychological violence, inevitable and necessary in YOUR idea of imprisonment, is not sufficient to obtain the desired effects. There are the cases where the dignity, the pride, and the sense of responsibility of the prisoner are such as to keep him from falling into an individualistic view of the world. On the one side, he does not bend, he maintains his political identity, precisely because on the other side his class comrades do not abandon him like sharks blinded by their petty affairs and power games. In that case the

"confession" is extorted through so-called "physical pressures"...

"...The goal of our revolutionary war, Communism, is profoundly different and necessarily manifests itself by different means. Trials and people's prisons are for the Communists unsuitable words taken from your vocabulary for the sole purpose of demonstrating the abyss that separates the principles of the proletariat from those of the bourgeoisie in its means of battle. A trial, for us, is not an "act of justice" but of battle between the antagonistic interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the moment in which this battle takes on the form of the more general confrontation before the people.

For this reason the Philistine "objections" that the bourgeoisie is making these days against the trial that is going on in the country against the DC are not "relevant" as you like to say, dear sirs. They are not relevant because their intention would be to measure the class struggle and the forms it takes with the yardstick of a presumed absolute legality "that is above the parties". In reality you are trying desperately to hide the political character of the clash, and to do so you have recourse "to these petty expedients". Today the initiatives of the revolutionary forces bring about the collapse of the miserable hypocrisy too that hides behind the use - so well loved by the bourgeoisie - of abstract values such as "justice", "liberty", and "equality". The revolution, for its part, always expresses the concrete value of the fight to destroy the bourgeois apparatus for the realisation of the interests and needs of the proletariat.

"As a consequence, from the proletarian and Communist viewpoint, not only trials but imprisonment too is an explicit act of war against a class and not only single individuals; and it is to be understood exclusively as the affirmation of proletarian interests.

"Since in that way the political identity of the captured enemy is explicitly recognised, there is no need to repress the individual, neither physically nor psychologically by beating down his personal identity..."

Once the hearing ends I fly to the party offices. We discuss once more the question of the conversations through glass partitions. For a long time now, in the context of the fight against the special security prisons, our comrades had denounced their inhumanity.

April 5,6,7. The interrogation of the defendants on bail takes place. We hear Levati, Borgna, Caldi, Carletti, Sabatino. The first three, a doctor, a lawyer, and a union man, are part of the so-called Borgomanero group because they live and work in that area. The accusation is strictly limited to the figure of Girotto (11) which will continue to hover over the trial until his sudden and well-orchestrated appearance at the time when he was already given up as lost despite the "careful searches" made by Dalla Chiesa's (12) Carabinieri.

The charges against them are rather serious: the organisation of armed bands for Levati (he is the one who will procure the interview of Girotto with Lazagna), and membership in an armed band for Borgna and Caldi. Above all they are charged with acts performed in the months of June-July, 1974. I wonder how they can be organisers and members of a clandestine armed band and thus bound by iron rules and precautions (at least one can presume as much) for a period of only thirty days. The circumstantial evidence - because that is all it is - regarding Borgna and Caldi is that they had talks with Girotto and put him in contact with Levati. The evidence against Levati is that he talked with Girotto and put him in contact with Lazagna. Reading the trial documents and the contents of the talks, I have trouble understanding how it was possible to charge them with such serious crimes. Reasoning with a head not weighed down with the responsibility of an inquiry and without taking into account the rumours or the art

icles in weeklies like "Il Candido", whose sources are to say the least suspicious, and without being influenced by "political" necessity or opportunism, one could at most consider that there was evidence of possible "contacts".

Levati gave me the impression of being a bit confused, and I would say also fearful. What he had to say about his past acquaintance with the defendants seemed to me absolutely free of reticence and of opportunism. Some of us were left with the feeling not that he had been part of the BR but that he knew how to reach the group. But none of that necessarily constitutes "membership" in the group; and in any case is the doubt not supposed to be in favour of the accused?

Borgna and Caldi seem to me to be completely above suspicion; their interrogation shows them to be extremely ingenuous and frivolous, but nothing more. When I learn that Levati and Borgna have been sentenced (to six and three years respectively, plus being banned from holding public office) I will be terribly upset.

One thing is evident: the witch hunt that was unleashed during the time of Sossia's kidnapping did not split hairs; there was a general round-up of the far left. It was in this climate that the Girotto operation was thought up, organised - since when? - and brought to its conclusion. It was certainly influenced by political requirements and directed a priori towards the Borgomanero group, some of whose members had had relations with the "proletarian left" before Curcio and others split off, choosing the way of clandestinity. Some were heard to suggest - including by no accident the weekly "Candido" - that they were close to the BR. Lazagna, an old Resistance fighter and old PCI militant although no registered member after '72, was once again involved in this operation. Like Levati, Lazagna had already been arrested in '72 during the inquiry into the Feltrinelli case. (13) He was freed but with the obligation of presenting himself twice a week to the Genoa authorities and his telephone was put under sur

veillance. In '74 the accusations of Silvano Girotto sent him back to prison with the charge of being the ideological head of the BR. He was freed once again after a year in which there was a big campaign of appeals, subscriptions and petitions in his favour. Since then he has lived in "confinement" (14) in Rocchetta Ligure where he is active in agriculture in order to make a living. Girotto's accusations are based on an hour-long conversation with him, a general conversation which did not go into details regarding the political and organisational facts of the BR which Lazagna himself criticised in the course of the conversation. Girotto will later say that "he was employed in recruitment".

Lazagna is calm and serene at the interrogation. He is tanned and white-haired. His glance is firm and intense. He calmly contests Girotto's charges and recalls how his activities have always been publicly known and controlled by the police from '72 - '74. He also recalls that he has always been critical of the BR's political and strategic activities and that this has been known since the time of his arrest. Under examination he defended his right to his own ideas and political opinions which are those of a Communist who believes in the revolution. He affirms his right to denounce and oppose the the shadows that darken the history of our country and its political and ruling classes. He makes no attempt to minimise his ideological positions or to renounce his principles to favour his position in the trial.

Some of the jurors begin to suspect that "Operation Girotto" is an attempt to frame a large area of the left by exaggerating the subversive danger of the BR and trying to connect it with various personalities and groups on the left. During the examination of Carletti ("Grandma Mao" as she is affectionately called in Turin) the absurdity appears of the accusations against her in the light of her personality and her past. Small, delicate and with her huge eyeglasses, she has lived for years behind her stall at the Porta Palazzo market, attentive to everything going on on the left, but experiencing it still today in the spirit, the psychology, and the reactions of someone who lived through the Resistance, the persecutions and tortures of the concentration camps. Only by understanding this experience, which cannot help but have marked her indelibly for life, can one get to understand her behaviour. Her presence at the trial, her spontaneity and frankness, which come out not only when she is being examined,

but throughout the entire debate, have often been a source of relaxation of tension helpful to all.

After Carletti's interrogation, two or three jurors approach me to exchange judgements of sympathy and understanding for the defendant. In particular, one of the two workers approaches me. He tries to bring me back to a level of dialogue with the rest of the jury. In fact, my relations with a number of the jurors are strained. Often we do not speak at all. This situation was already created the first time we went into camera to decide on an important matter. On that occasion, besides defending my viewpoint with decision, I quarrelled with a part of the jury about absenteeism in the discussions and their tendency to delegate judgement to the two judges in robes. The next day three jurors send a letter to Barbaro asking that the auxiliary jurors be prohibited from speaking during the consultations in camera. In the face of this attempt to exclude me not only from the voting, but also from the debate, Barbaro's response was as diplomatic as it was correct: he said he hoped for a multiplicity and variety o

f positions among the jurors. On that same occasion there was the start of a bad quarrel between me and a woman who from the beginning of the trial had assumed the role of "mamma", always concerned with everyone's indispositions and troubles, careful to straighten the tassel of the judge's toga or the tri-colour sashes of the other jurors in her worry over "not cutting a poor figure". I will recover in her regard a real relationship and a degree of solidarity after many days of not speaking and as, little by little, she becomes aware of the full drama of having to sit in judgement on other people.

I never succeeded, however, in connecting up with two other women aside from a generic and reciprocal approach to discussions on the life conditions and difficulties, the moments of isolation which as women we each experience. Later I will be much struck at seeing how the apparently more sensitive of the two on these subjects will be very much influenced by the facts of masculine "knowledge" and hence "power". The other seems to me to live very far from all realities.

I try however to explain to my interlocutor (a card-carrying Communist) that, for example, it is not easy for me to discuss anything with one of the jurors who never misses a chance to reveal and impose an absolutely authoritarian, and violent conception of the state which is not obliged to guarantee individual rights. When discussion is absolutely inevitable, it cannot help but degenerate into a clash. Then too, I cannot manage to justify the highly passive attitude of several jurors and their excessive familiarity with a Communist lawyer who, during the debate, circulated calumnious rumours regarding those attorneys who supported self-defense. His relations with some jurors overstep the limits of correctness: he occupies himself with arranging various dinners or theatre parties to the Teatro Regio (Turin's most important theatre). In conclusion I reassure this comrade, with whom despite political divergences I have had excellent relations for three months, that my availability and desire for dialogue

have never been and never will be lacking. But I repeat that the rigorous and intransigent defense of certain principles and norms of behaviour cannot be set aside in the name of a presumed and fictitious "solidarity".

While the examination of Carletti is going on in the courtroom ("I feel as if I am back in Fascist times"), in Parliament the debate over the public order decrees is taking place. I listen to it live over Radical Radio in the afternoon and what I get out of it is the confirmation of my feeling that the politicians are worried about once again giving an illusory reply to the demands and the dismay of the country without confronting the problems nor getting on with the long urgent question of a new way of governing public order. The problem, for the majority coalition, is not the inefficiency of the police (possibly the reform of the police, which by now has disappeared from the Parliament's agenda), the disorganisation and the ambiguity of the secret services, the need of clearing up the doubts, which are getting stronger and stronger, of a direct or indirect cover-up of the Moro kidnapping, and the opening of a debate on this in Parliament: No. With Preti as a mouthpiece (and not only him) it is asked

that the Turin judges hurry up the hearings and pronounce an "exemplary" sentence. The words sound like an explicit and impatient criticism of the judges.

But where do they get the nerve, I ask myself, to come and anticipate the verdict of a jury, as if we were not there in order to judge on the basis of what emerges, but to recite a prepared script? I immediately write a communique:

"One cannot help but be astonished at the President of the Council, the hon. Giulio Andreotti, appealing to the Italian judges so that all trials be held and be held quickly (an appeal with whose contents I perfectly agree in principle). For decades the Christian Democratic government and ministers like Bonifacio have worked for the bogging down of hundreds of trials for theft or massacres in which members of the regime were involved. The situation of disintegration in which the Republic finds itself is the responsibility of this regime that for thirty years has refrained from actuating the Constitution and which now has placed itself outside of and against it by preparing in Parliament to scuttle the referendums of the opposition within the course of a few weeks. The appeal made by the hon. Mr. Preti to the Turin judges ("Hurry up and condemn them") sounds like a shameless interference in the work of the Court of Assizes. This political class, whose running of public order has borne the fruits we see b

efore us, cannot permit itself to give any lessons to the citizens of a republic they are bringing to the point of ruin."

I arrive at the courthouse and go to see Barbaro who, as usual, is speaking to his wife on the telephone. I let him read the communique. Almost every morning I have an exchange of opinions with the presiding judge on the course of the trial and the behaviour of the "powers" with regard to it. He often indicates to me (and not only to me) intolerance towards any form of interference: he refuses to take telephone calls from the Public Prosecutor's Office, from the ministries and from Rome. He doesn't speak to journalists. He knows that he is responsible for the course of the trial and he is determined to carry it to the very end in the first person. With that paternalistic and ironically affectionate tone in which he sometimes makes teasing quips to me, Barbaro assures me that he shares the ideas in the communique and he asks me: "Do you think it will pass?" In fact, it doesn't pass.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Bettino Craxi, Socialist Party secretary.

2) Italian Communist Party

3) Democratic Party of Proletarian Unity

4) In Italy whistling is a sign of disapproval.

5) Giovanni Negri, Radical deputy and sometime party secretary.

6) The popular Rome daily.

7) The well-known Sicilian writer who was also a Radical Party member after being a Communist deputy.

8) Francesco Cossiga, sometime Minister of the Interior.

9) The Rocco code is the Fascist penal code still in force in Italy and the Reale law special public order laws giving police special powers.

10) Videla - An Argentine general and president who was responsible for many political assassinations and was eventually imprisoned for life.

11) Girotto - A priest who infiltrated the BR as a police spy.

12) Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa - A Carabinieri general who was the co-ordinator of the investigation of the BR. In 1982, as prefect of Palermo, he was assassinated there by the mafia whose activities he was investigating.

13) Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the leftist publisher, was found dead in 1972. There was uncertainty as to whether he had been murdered or accidentally killed in attempting a terrorist action. The conclusion eventually reached favoured the latter hypothesis.

14) "Confinement" in Italy was a measure imposed on characters considered dangerous, even without their being convicted of a particular crime. It obliged them to reside in a particular place, usually a small town, to better control their activities and to remove them from "circulation". It has since been abolished.