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2022

Antonio Mariani, 'The 36th Strategic Interdiction Brigade: An Italian Contribution to the Cold War' (Excerpts)

These excerpts from the memoirs of a former member of Italy’s 36th Air Brigade, published by the Italian Air Force, provides fascinating perspective on the shock felt by officers when they received the dismantling instructions and then how they planned and carried out their tasks. The following sentences convey the emotional reactions: “The dismantling, for those who experienced it, was a real demolition. A frenetic destructive activity pervaded the military community which, almost with anger and a certain sadism, destroyed and reduced to useless remains everything on which it had studied, worked and operated.” As the excerpts makes clear, not everything was destroyed and junked. Consistent with the Joint Staff’s original proposals, sensitive components, such as the warheads were returned to the U.S., while other parts of the missiles were salvaged and made available to other organizations. Some equipment went to Italy’s “San Marco” space research program, just as Prime Minister Fanfani had proposed to President Kennedy during their meeting in January 1963.

To what extent the dismantling procedure in Turkey paralleled the one in Italy remains unclear, at least on the basis of available documentation.

March 28, 1963

American Embassy Rome Airgram A-1368 to State Department, 'Exchange of Notes Affecting Replacement of Jupiter Missiles in Italy'

On March 22, 1963, through an exchange of notes, the U.S. and Italy confirmed the final agreement on the dismantling of the Jupiter missiles and their replacement with patrols of Polaris submarines assigned to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe. The Polaris patrols would begin on April 1, 1963, and the dismantling operation would occur during the next 25 days.

January 24, 1963

Diary Entry of Amintore Fanfani for 24 January 1963 [Excerpt]

In his diary, Fanfani recorded that the Council of Ministers has approved his report on the talks with President Kennedy and the recommendation to withdraw the Jupiters on April 1, 1963. The Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense would have a “mandate” to implement the withdrawal. As agreed, the Jupiters would be replaced by Polaris, and the latter would not be based in Italy. Italy would support a NATO multilateral force, without the tripartite directorate that De Gaulle had espoused.

January 17, 1963

Diary Entry of Aminitore Fanfani for 17 January 1963 [Excerpt]

In the morning, Fanfani met with his advisers, and they agreed to accept the Jupiter-Polaris arrangement. He then met with Kennedy for a series of conversations on East-West issues and the developing countries. During their private meeting, Fanfani conveyed to Kennedy the conditions for the agreement—Polaris submarines would not be based in Italy, and Italy would be a participant in the MLF and a member of the NATO committee establishing it. As he noted in his diary, Fanfani asked that language referring to “bases in the Mediterranean” (“which could lead one to suppose they are in Italy”) be removed from the “minute of understanding” of the meeting. Kennedy accepted the stipulations, and a memorandum of their understanding was prepared.

January 16, 1963

Diary Entry of Amintore Fanfani for 16 January 1963

Fanfani covered the events of the day in this journal entry, noting that he told Kennedy he would make no commitment on the Jupiter-Polaris replacement until he spoke with McNamara. With McNamara, Fanfani emphasized the point about using the Jupiter base for space launches. Both Kennedy and McNamara denied that there was a trade with the USSR, with McNamara emphasizing the risks posed by the Jupiters during the Missile Crisis.

June 10, 1960

Enrico Mattei, 'On the Decolonization of States and of the Economy'

This is the English translation of the translation, into Italian, of a French speech that Enrico Mattei (1906-1962) held in Tunisia in 1960 while negotiating an agreement in his function as the 1953 founder and director of Italy’s Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI)—a conglomerate that managed Italy’s energy needs and led Italy’s energy foreign policy, pleasing many citizens but displeasing some high-ranking officials.

Already in the 1950s Mattei openly supported independence movements, also French Algeria’s. Moreover, he was a sharp Western critic of the world’s dominant oil companies, British Petroleum (until 1954, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company), Royal Dutch Shell, and the five US firms Standard Oil Company of California, Gulf Oil, Texaco, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and Standard Oil Company of New York, who in various combinations enjoyed oil monopolies in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. He talked of Anglo-Saxon oil imperialism and in the 1950s coined the moniker the “Seven Sisters”—after the seven Pleiades sisters of Greek mythology—for those companies, leaving out the Compagnie Française des Pétroles that formed part of Iran’s and Iraq’s consortium, too. Unable to break into these two consortia or into the Saudi one, he succeeded to circumvent the Iranian one, which had been midwifed by the US government a year after the 1953 CIA-led coup d’Etat against Prime Minister Muhammad Musaddiq, who in 1951 had nationalized Iran’s oil.

In 1957 Mattei and Iran’s monarch, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980; r. 1941-1979), cut a deal whose profit terms—75-percent for Iran, 25-percent for ENI—undercut the Iranian consortium’s 50-50 terms. The US government did not oppose the deal, hoping it would buoy the shah’s popularity and hence stabilize a Cold War client bordering the Soviet Union. When in 1959 Mattei signed an oil deal with the Soviet Union, he again shocked the consortia and now also Washington: for dealing with the Soviets, and because they sold oil for less than the consortia. (This deal was a contributing factor to a price cut by the large US companies in July 1960, which angered oil producing countries and triggered the birth, in September, of the Organization of the Petroleum Producing Countries, or OPEC, a project discussed from 1959 by Arabs including the Saudi Abdallah al-Tariqi.) In 1958 and 1960, Mattei negotiated deals inter alia with two minor Arab oil producers, Morocco and Tunisia, respectively. Moreover, he entertained contacts with the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale. In 1962 he died in an airplane crash that in 1997 was ruled to have been caused by a bomb—perpetrators unknown.

July 13, 1979

Report on the Italian "nuclear supplies" to Iraq

In July 1979, U.S. diplomats told their Italian counterparts that it was an “American strong belief” that Iraq was pursuing nuclear capability, and they requested the Italian government to provide information on the nature of the “nuclear supplies” to Iraq. Italy dutifully complied with the United States’ demand for information and assured the US government that all supplies to Iraq were provided in compliance with the "NPT, the London agreements, and the other international regulations”

August 30, 1986

Letter to Comrades Natta, Napolitano, Rubbi

A summary of political information gathered from Italian Communist Party's delegation to China on international relations, reforms and economic situation, and ideological and cultural positions of China.

May 29, 1989

Statement of the Communist Party of Italy

This document dated May 29, 1989, is a statement by the Italian Communist Party in which it expresses solidarity for Chinese students, workers and popular forces who are demanding greater democracy.

July 7, 1988

Report on the Visit to China by the Delegation of the Organizing Commission (7-20 June 1988)

This document - received by the Direction of the PCI on July 7th 1988- is a report on the visit to China of a PCI delegation to China from June 7 to 20, 1988. According to the author, Sandro Morelli, the Chinese expressed their satisfaction with the progress of détente and that relations with the USSR had improved. The main concerns regarded the reform of prices and salaries and the need to accelerate the “urban reform.”

Pagination