Barbara Balzerani took part in the kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro

Former Italian Prime Minister Moro was kidnapped and held for 55 days before a sham trial after which he was shot dead in Rome.

Barbara Balzerani (centre) while jailed with other Red Brigade terrorists in the mid-1980s.

OBITUARY

Barbara Balzerani

Terrorist and assassin. Born Colleferro, Italy, January 16, 1949. Died Rome, March 4, aged 75.

Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci called it a “war of position”. In the 1960s, German activist Rudi Dutschke, subtly reinterpreting it and borrowing from the exploits of Mao Zedong, described this infiltration of the foundations of democracy as “the long march through the institutions”.

Given the explosion of support for Hamas in recent months on the streets of Western capitals, at universities, in parliaments and across town halls, that march might be nearing its Shaanxi moment.

But there are always those more impatient, who insist on revolution with eruptive violence as their means. And it was Gramsci who said “every political struggle … always has its military substratum”.

Italy’s vile Red Brigades saw itself as this. But its members were a gang of arrogant, self-selected, self-satisfied loafers who found fulfilment in sitting around grubby flats deciding who, in the name of self-starting the Marxist revolution, should be assassinated next. And they always thought big.

Barbara Balzerani was there from 1975 and took part in the worst of the Red Brigades’ murders and assaults on democracy. She infamously took part in the kidnapping of former prime minister Aldo Moro, then leader of the Christian Democracy party. He was grabbed in a bloody shootout on a Rome street at 8.45am on March 16, 1978.

The Moro kidnap and his subsequent murder resonates in Italy the way the assassination of John F. Kennedy does in the US – and with as many conspiracy theories.

About 20 of the terrorists – some so new to the team that the lead shooters were dressed in Alitalia crew uniforms so as not to be taken down by friendly fire – gathered as lookouts, shooters and kidnappers. They killed all of Moro’s five bodyguards. They held Moro for 55 days – photographing him before their banners – and it was reported that Moro’s old friend from student days, Pope Paul VI offered to swap places with his old mate.

On May 9, after a “people’s trial”, Moro was found guilty and shot dead by Balzerani’s boyfriend, Mario Moretti, and his body dumped in the back of a van.

Balzerani also helped arrange the execution of magistrate Girolamo Minervini on March 18, 1980, the day after Minervini was appointed director-general of the Institutes of Prevention and Punishment at the Ministry of Justice. She hated justice unless it was on her terms. Minervini knew he’d be a target, so he eschewed the armed escort he thought would only draw attention to him and risk his guards’ lives. He anonymously caught a bus to work. But the Red Brigades learned of this and shot him dead on a packed coach.

Balzerani met her match when she was part of the crew – posing as plumbers – that kidnapped US general and NATO boss James Dozier from his apartment in Verona in Italy’s north on December 17, 1981. They held his wife at gunpoint, bound her in chains and left her for dead. In various communications about the general, the Red Brigades made no mention of ransom. They planned to kill him.

They forced him to wear headphones through which they blasted loud music while he was strapped to a small bed in a tent in a room. Lights shone on him 24 hours a day. But the self-disciplined Vietnam vet was able to slip out of the headphone briefly at times after a few days when his captors’ attention waned. He took note of the morning and evening peak hour traffic to keep count of the days. He also asked for a pack of cards to play the game Solitaire and invented his own alphanumeric code to record the events taking place around him in the “scores” he recorded for himself on scraps of paper.

All this proved valuable when, 42 days later, police – ironically alerted to the gang’s presence because of a water leak – raided an apartment almost 100km away in Padua. Not a shot was fired as the Italian police nabbed the terror cell and liberated the brave soldier. But Balzerani had left.

She was arrested in 1985, tried, convicted and jailed. The following year she boasted that she had ordered from jail the assassination of Lando Conti, a former mayor of Florence shot dead in his car on February 10, 1986.

After she was paroled in 2006, Balzerani never repented and indeed, on the 40th anniversary of Moro’s murder, launched her book I’ve Always Known on a podium before a poster that stated Long Live Lenin.

She died after a long illness.

Dozier, who turns 93 next month, lives in fulfilled retirement in Florida.