THE CIA manipulated its first foreign election only half a year after the agency’s establishment in 1947. To keep Italy, economically and morally lacerated after two decades of Fascist wantonness, from going Communist, the newly formed National Security Council approved a program of covert action to buttress the conservative premier Alcide De Gasperi and his Christian Democratic Party against the Popular Democratic Front established by the Communist and Socialist parties in an election scheduled for April 18, 1948. The CIA provided as much as ten million dollars in cash to finance the
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