Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the Cia, and the Mafia

by Paul L. Williams

Pecorelli wrote that Moro’s kidnapping had been carried out by a “lucid superpower” and was inspired by the “logic of Yalta.” He described the crime as “one of the biggest political operations carried out in recent decades in an industrialized country integrated into the Western system.”46 In one of his last articles, published on January 16, 1979, Pecorelli had written, “We will talk about Steve R. Pieczenik, who participated for three weeks in the interior ministry’s expert meetings, then returned to America before Moro was killed, and reported to Congress that the measures taken by Cossiga on the Moro affair were the best possible in the circumstances.”47 Several months after making these claims, Pecorelli was gunned down near his office on Via Orazio in Rome. The barrel of a gun had been shoved down his throat and the trigger pulled twice. As a classic gesture of the Mafia’s practice of sasso in bocca (stone in the mouth), police officers discovered a stone within Picorelli’s mouth as an announcement that the journalist never again would divulge a secret.