Underground Italy

AGENT IN ITALY--S. K.--Doubleday Doran ($3).

One dismal night in Milan, Italy, the secret agent who wrote these anonymous reminiscences was haled into an office of the Questura (police) and left alone for two or three hours in the stench of moldy paper and urine characteristic of Italian police stations. Then he was told that he was guilty of high treason and would be shot in the morning. S. K. could not commit suicide, because the police had discovered where he kept his granule of cyanide, and took it away from him. How he got out of that one proved to be a turning point in S. K.'s relations with the anti-Fascist "underground"--the cryptic groups that with sabotage, strikes, espionage, propaganda and murder wage an unremitting subterranean war to overthrow Mussolini and his Blackshirts.

If authentic, Agent in Italy is the only firsthand description of the organization and workings of this great secret movement yet published in English. It is also the first revelation in detail of the extent to which Italy has become a Nazi-occupied province. And from the internal evidence alone, it may be that Agent in Italy is authentic.

Who is S. K.? A German, he claims--Reich representative of the Italian silk firm of Seta Inc. One day the Gestapo rushed a non-Aryan friend of his into a concentration camp, and S. K. made history by getting him out. Later he got others out, with the help of a sympathetic Gestapo official and some forged steamship tickets. Then the Gestapo asked S. K. himself to drop in one afternoon.

Twenty-four hours later S. K. had forcibly liquidated the house he owned, his assets, his goods, and was on his way to Italy--a practically penniless exile for the duration of Naziism.

Odd Jobs. He went first to Milan, hunted up his old boss, Commendatore Luigi Venturi, general manager and chief owner of the Seta Co., and head of the Fascist federation of silk factories. Said Venturi: "You have nothing to fear here. We're not barbarians like your Nazis." He gave S. K. a part-time job with Seta.

S. K. soon made contact with the antifascist underground. It consists, he reports, of two main groups--the Matteotti group and the Communist-Anarchist group. "The Matteotti is in fact a people's front, for it embraces political persuasions ranging from Social Democrats on the left over to and including the aristocracy on the right. . . . It is no longer a movement for any set of principles as much as against the regime. . . . By the time I arrived in Italy, its membership of three hundred thousand reached into Fascist circles, into the Questura, and especially into the student body of Italy. . . . Its leadership is responsible and must be taken seriously.

"The smaller group had grown out of a union of Communists and Anarchists. The Stalinists are strongest among the workers in Lombardy, with a small admixture of students and teachers. The Anarchists . . . have their chief strength in the south, especially in Sicily. ... In 1941 it numbered perhaps a hundred thousand and was organized on the cell system."

The Matteotti group publishes a thrice-weekly newspaper, Italia Libera (Free Italy) . . . in print shops changed with each issue from city to city. The Matteotti also uses three short-wave transmitters, for interregional communication, not for propaganda broadcasts. "Penetration of the regime has gone so far that one of the largest [Fascist] party organizations has become virtually a branch of the underground."

Stratosphere. S. K. was active not only in the underground. His special importance lay in the fact that he knew how to navigate the Fascist stratosphere. When Boss Venturi went to Rome (as head of one of the seven divisions of the Ministry of Corporations), S. K. followed him. In Rome he was introduced to Rome's exclusive Circolo della Caccia (Hunt Club), where Count Ciano gave most of his political dinners. Soon S. K. carried a guest card. At the Hunt Club he met Count Roberto Pinelli, member of the undersecretariat of the Ministry of War. S. K. and Pinelli discovered "a mutual enthusiasm for the writings of Thomas More," author of Utopia, 16th-Century blueprint of the society of the future. Though Pinelli wore "the founder emblem of the Fascist party . . . [S. K.] caught hints of his underlying hope that Fascism could and would eventually lead to the spiritual consolidation of Italy and the adoption of democratic principles." While waiting, S. K. found other uses for Pinelli.

As his acquaintances and activities spread, S. K. began to cultivate a dual personality. "After all," he says, "I had none of the assets of a Mata Hari. So I played the role of a man who understands nothing at all. . . . My incredible ignorance provoked people--Italians as well as Germans--into giving me detailed explanations of matters I wanted to know. ... To carry this off I had to plan every conversation in the greatest detail, word for word, even to facial expressions." For S. K. did not underestimate his task. It was: to out-Gestapo the Gestapo, already very active in Italy. Says S. K.: "We have all still got a great deal to learn from the Gestapo. It is a magnificent organization, and it will continue to be effective until it is opposed by worldwide counter-espionage equally well organized."

Sabotage. S. K. reports for the first time several sabotage successes by the underground, including the blowing up of the torpedo factory at the Pola naval base. But the group's sabotage was hampered by Fascist laws forbidding workers to shift jobs. The group asked S. K. if his friend Pinelli could put the necessary transfers through the war ministry. Pinelli stared out the window a while, then said yes. Soon his fine Italian hand had set off the biggest of the Matteotti's explosions: of the buried oil reservoirs at the Spezia naval base.

S. K. gives a detailed account of the bloodless Nazi invasion of Italy. First the Gestapo arrived. Soon a Nazi military commission moved into the Italian Ministry of War. S. K.'s friend, Pinelli, had to install them in the "most elegant suite of rooms in the building." Then German commissions moved into the Air and Navy offices. By 1940 "German experts moved in on the Fiat and Ansaldo tank and engine plants, Montecatini chemicals and steel, Caproni (makers of Italian dive-bombers) and Breda (makers of the excellent idrosiluranti--torpedo bombers). This was the cream of the peninsula's heavy industry." The Nazis, having lapped off the cream, drank the rest of the bottle. Soon they controlled the Sardinian coal mines, the Istrian mercury pits, the Ansaldo engine works, the Viscose textile company.

Corn on the Cob. They also kept the Italians grumbling about food and fuel shortages. Every morning at 11, Ambassador von Mackensen would call on Mussolini "with a list of German demands, complaints and advice." Said the Italians: "Peccato emme cambiato." ("Too bad the M has been changed"--M for Mackensen instead of Mussolini.) One day Mackensen demanded immediate delivery of 40 carloads of sweet corn. Nazi soldiers in Italy had acquired a taste for corn on the cob. At last Mussolini requisitioned the 40 carloads from his severely rationed subjects. Another day a group of 20 women on their way to the depleted markets passed the sidewalk tables on the Corso which were full of German and Italian officers and their women. "Shrill voices rose. 'Why aren't you at the front? . . . No milk for our children. . . . No potatoes in the markets. . . . Our sons are dying and you loaf here. . . .' " Then the women marketers swore at the German officers, overturned the tables, smashed dishes. Thereafter the coffee houses were forbidden to have sidewalk tables.

The presence of so many Germans in Italy also troubled S. K. He never knew when he might turn up in the morning papers as an obituary. The underground gave him a bodyguard, but S. K. knew that, if the assassin is determined, assassination is a practically unpreventable crime. He was not surprised when Friend Pinelli invited him to supper one evening and suddenly said: "I think the time has come for you to leave Italy." S. K. did not argue. Three days later he was on his way to the U.S.

He had some suggestive last thoughts about Italy. Among them:

> Italy is in a state of unacknowledged civil war. This fact is essential to a grasp of grand strategy.

> Almost 500,000 Italians belong to the underground. They are the skeleton of the future Italy.

> The underground leaders do not plan on revolt now. "They have no trained parachutists, no tanks, guns or airplanes."

> Italy will not drop out of the war by itself, but "invasion by the United Nations . . . would be warmly welcomed and abetted by the mass of the people."

In the democracies, people tend to regard Fascists as an undifferentiated hostile mass. What this book reveals is that a Fascist party is not a concrete block. It is a human conglomerate, and a conglomerate crumbles. Agent in Italy reveals parts of this crumbling process and the human factors that are bringing it about. It also suggests that the process might be speeded up tremendously if a propaganda could be devised that offered to Fascists who are disillusioned with Fascism an alternative that was more than a vaguer version of totalitarian collectivism.

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