In 1976, two years after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger threatened then-Italian Foreign Minister Aldo Moro about forming a coalition with the Communists, right-wing hardliner Senator ‘Scoop’ Jackson, on a trip to Italy, issued a similar warning to Moro.

In Philip Willan’s Puppetmasters, Moro’s widow recounted Kissinger’s warning, which was undoubtedly echoed by Jackson: “You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration… or you will pay dearly for it.”

Moro was kidnapped for 55 days by the so-called Red Brigades, who were later found to be in the service of Italian fascists, Italian intelligence, the P-2 Masonic Lodge, a parallel SID (Italian Defence Intelligence Service), and the CIA.

Some of these same elements would be behind the infamous Niger yellowcake forgeries used by the neo-cons to prove the case for war against Iraq.

Wayne Madsen has written the same neo-con network would transform Mehmet Ali Agca, the would-be assassin of Pope John Paul II, from a right-wing member of the Turkish Gray Wolves to a Communist in the employ of the KGB and Bulgarian intelligence.

The journalist who spun the story about Agca’s Soviet Bloc connections in those days was Claire Sterling, whose disinformation was quickly picked up by The Reader’s Digest, New York Times, NBC News, and other mainstream media outlets.

Mr Madsen wrote that Agca told a fantasy story about his orders to kill the Pope coming from a Bulgarian “control officer” and that he had also been involved in a plot to kill Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, and Malta’s Prime Minister Dom Mintoff.

In fact, Mr Madsen wrote, there was a plot to overthrow and possibly kill Mintoff, Allende-style, but it was being crafted by US Navy intelligence in conjunction with the neo-fascist and renegade Italian intelligence elements in Rome.

The US Navy wanted to overthrow Mintoff to gain access to its former NATO base on the island nation off the Libyan coast. Bourguiba was not popular with the neo-cons because he allowed Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation to maintain its headquarters-in-exile in Tunis.