Shane Mage wrote:
> Why this slander? Wheatcroft wrote "It does seem that Silone had at
> least some contact with the police, who had arrested his one
> surviving brother, Romolo (who would die in prison at the hands of his
> captors), but it’s hard to see evidence of any great betrayal."
New Left Review 3, May-June 2000
John Foot on Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, L’informatore. The
sensational revelation of Ignazio Silone’s long-term service as informer
for Mussolini’s regime—the Italian Orwell as a fascist spy.
JOHN FOOT
THE SECRET LIFE OF IGNAZIO SILONE
Ignazio Silone, best known as a remarkable writer and novelist, was born
on the First of May 1900 in a small village in the Abruzzo. His real
name was Secondino Tranquilli. The son of a small landowner who died
when he was eleven, he became an orphan at the age of fifteen when a
massive earthquake wiped out his home town in twenty-five seconds.
During the First World War he became a teenage militant in the ranks of
the Young Socialists, rising quickly through its ranks in the ‘two red
years’ (biennio rosso) between 1919 and 1920, when he was active in
Rome. When the Italian Socialists split in 1921, he became a founder
member of the Italian Communist Party. Nominated to the Young Communist
International, he was a frequent visitor to Berlin and Moscow, and
organized Italian workers’ groups in Spain, France, Belgium and
Luxemburg. Within a few years, as Fascism consolidated its rule in the
country, he became one of the eight top leaders of the PCI in exile, and
in 1927 was sent back into Italy as head of the party’s underground
network. When Moscow imposed the sectarian policies of the Third Period
on the Communist International at the end of the decade, a line which
threatened to tear the Italian party apart, Silone was eventually
expelled from the PCI for sympathies with the opposition to it.
Withdrawing from active politics after his expulsion, Silone wrote his
masterpieces Fontamara (1933) and Bread and Wine (1936), two of the most
powerful anti-fascist novels ever written, in Switzerland. His analytic
study School for Dictators (1938) remains unsurpassed in the brilliance
and accuracy of its dissection of fascism’s rise to power and of
Mussolini’s rule. In 1941, he rejoined the Socialist Party in Zurich; he
was arrested and interned by the Swiss police a year later. In October
1944 he returned to Rome, and played a leading role in the Socialist
Party, opposing Nenni’s alliance with the Communist Party. In 1947 he
left the PSI and, as the Cold War developed, took a prominent part in
the anti-communist politics of the time, contributing to the notorious
symposium The God that Failed (1950), and creating the journal Tempo
Presente under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of
whose Italian section he became the director. Detested as a Cold Warrior
by the PCI, Silone was widely admired outside it. His Emergency Exit
(1965), a collection of essays and testimonies on his time in the Party,
became a touchstone for the non-Communist left. Continuing to write and
revise his novels, Silone described himself as ‘a socialist without a
party, a christian without a church’. For so long a central figure in
the Italian intellectual landscape, he died in 1978. For many, his life
and work embodied the vicissitudes, alternately tragic and heroic, of
the century.
Some ten years later, plans for an exhibition of documents about the
novelist were mounted in his home town. Requests were sent to Rome for
relevant materials. There a senior official of the State Archive,
looking through a file devoted to Silone by the OVRA, the political
police of the Fascist period, came upon two letters that he set aside
from the rest of the file, which he sent on. The documents that he
abstracted, he neither made public nor put back where they belonged. He
removed them. In one, written in early 1930 and addressed to Emilia
Bellone, sister of Guido Bellone, General Inspector of Public Security
charged with stamping out subversion, the writer speaks of a deep moral
and psychological crisis, and pleads to be released from ‘all falsehood,
doubt and secrecy’, expressing a desire ‘to repair the damage that I
have caused, to seek redemption, to help the workers, the peasants (to
whom I am bound with every fibre in my body) and my country.’ No word of
this document reached the outside world. But as it happened, a young
historian working on a biography of Silone, Dario Biocca, was starting
to come across other documents which suggested that Silone might have
been a police informer between 1928 and 1930. At a conference held in
Florence in 1996, Biocca for the first time aired this conclusion in
public. A storm immediately broke over the allegations, which generated
a huge controversy in the national press. At this juncture, a lesser
official at the Archive in Rome who knew of the letter of 1930, but had
neither restored it to its place nor informed Biocca of its existence,
decided to release a copy to the newspaper La Repubblica. Not
surprisingly, its publication was greeted with consternation and further
furious debate. (The letter, along with other documents and a
commentary, is now available in English in an article by Mauro Canali,
‘Ignazio Silone and the Fascist Political Police’, published in the
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 5(1) 2000.)
Since then Biocca has continued his research, joined by Mauro Canali, a
historian working on the Fascist secret police. The fruits of their
careful and patient study of the archives, pursued amidst great
hostility, are now available in the book they have jointly published,
L’informatore. Composed of a joint introduction, a long essay by Canali
on the 1919–23 period, another by Biocca covering the decade following
1924, and 117 pages of transcribed documents and explanatory notes, it
is a formidable body of work which removes all doubt about the
activities of Secondino Tranquilli in the twenties. The chilling truth
is that Silone was an informer for the Italian secret police from 1919
to 1930. This revelation is so staggering that many still hesitate to
believe it, but the evidence presented by Biocca and Canali, neither of
whom has any political axe to grind, is overwhelming. The suppressed
letter of 1930 establishes beyond question that ‘Silvestri’, a long-time
informant of the police and in particular of Guido Bellone in Rome, was
in fact Silone. ‘Silvestri’ was by far the most important spy working
for the Fascist regime within the Communist movement. He also informed
for far longer than any other agent. A series of smaller
signs—handwriting, style, substance, numerous biographical
details—confirm his identity. Silone’s complicated movements in the
twenties mirror those of ‘Silvestri’: when Silone is in Berlin,
‘Silvestri’ writes from Berlin; when Silone is in Paris, ‘Silvestri’
writes from Paris. The reports dry up after Silone was expelled from the
PCI (and left active political life) in 1931. A police document from
1928, which has played a key role in convincing many previous doubters
of Silone’s guilt, identified Silone as a spy for the benefit of
Mussolini himself. Others show that Silone was protected from arrest on
a series of occasions, or given privileged treatment by the Fascist
police. Much of the information provided by ‘Silvestri’ could only have
come from within a very small group of Communist leaders. Silone himself
was often left out of lists of names supplied, and on one occasion a
photograph of PCI leaders sent by ‘Silvestri’ was reproduced and
distributed to various Fascist agents, with all figures in the frame
except that of Silone (the photograph, together with others supplied by
‘Silvestri’, is reproduced in L’informatore).
What was the content of the information Silone was sending for over a
decade to the State Police and (after 1922) to those employed under
Mussolini’s regime? Much of it is generic material, as in all
police-informant reports, in this case bearing on political debates
within the PCI and Socialist movement, and relationships with the USSR.
But much else is specific delation of individuals. ‘Silvestri’ provides
photographs of militants; he indicates when activists from the
underground will be moving across borders and under what false names; he
identifies addresses and secret printing presses; he draws maps; he
describes people. Such information led to swift repression and arrests.
In 1923 ‘Silvestri’ told the police: ‘Yesterday evening Mauro
Scoccimarro left for Italy via Switzerland. He has a passport under the
name of the Neapolitan Communist Vergili, upon which he has substituted
his photograph.’ Almost immediately, the authorities were able to
circulate the following message to every prefect in Italy: ‘The noted
Communist Mauro Scoccimarro will return into Italy via Switzerland with
a passport under the name of Virgili or Vergili (from Naples) upon which
he has substituted his own photo. Investigate and arrest the subject if
the passport has been changed.’ Biocca and Canali cite numerous other
examples in L’informatore, and further documents will certainly emerge
from the archives. The evidence also seems to suggest that ‘Silvestri’
was aware of fellow collaborators working within the Communist movement
and helped warn them of possible discovery. The conclusion is
inescapable: Silone was almost certainly invaluable in the detection and
depletion of the Communist and anti-Fascist networks built up across
Europe in the twenties.
How have Silone’s admirers reacted to these discoveries? In the initial
rush to defend him, the documents found in the archives were denounced
as forgeries, which could only have been planted in the files by the
Fascist authorities themselves, with the aim of discrediting him. But as
more and more evidence came to light, the idea that the OVRA had created
folders full of sophisticated forgeries in the thirties waiting to be
discovered (and then hidden, and then released) by future generations,
had to be abandoned. Many who were initially sceptical now accept that
‘Silvestri’ was, in fact, Silone. But for others the psychological shock
is so great that they simply ‘refuse to believe’ that Silone could
possible have been a spy. Indro Montanelli, a leading liberal
commentator, had declared he would not believe it even if Silone were to
reappear and tell him it was so to his face. The Socialist historian
Giuseppe Tamburrano, biographer of Nenni, has tried to counter-attack
with what Canali has described as ‘a poorly executed form of collage of
random documents found in Silone’s file’ from the mid-thirties, with
some success in recruiting others to his cause, the latest being none
other than Norberto Bobbio, in a letter to La Repubblica of 5 May 2000.
The single serious issue raised by Silone’s supporters concerns the fate
of his younger brother, Romolo Tranquilli. The only one of Silone’s five
siblings to survive childhood illness and the earthquake, Romolo was
arrested by the police in 1928 on suspicion of participation in a
bungled bomb-attack against the King in Milan, which left eighteen
bystanders dead. Silone, who was devoted to his brother, tried to
intervene on his behalf with the Fascist authorities. Various ‘official’
Silone publications have glossed this as the only reason for his having
been in touch with the OVRA. Thus Bruno Falcetto, introducing the 1998
edition of Silone’s Collected Works, Ignazio Silone. Romanzi e saggi,
1927–1944, writes: ‘We cannot exclude the possibility that contacts were
made for a time, between 1928 and 1930, with Emilio (sic) Bellone, head
of the special office of the political police of the Interior Ministry.
[But] these contacts would seem definitely linked to attempts to explore
every avenue and try and help young “Romolotto”.’ A somewhat more
ingenious version of the same line of argument can be found in Ottorino
Gurgo and Francesco de Core’s 1998 hagiography Silone: L’avventuradi un
uomo libero, which devotes just three pages out of its nearly five
hundred to the charges against Silone, suggesting that he had a plan ‘to
make the OVRA believe that he was their informer in order to obtain the
liberation of Romolo or, at the very least, an improvement in his
terrible conditions in prison.’ This desperate effort to reinvent
Silone’s activities as a heroic triple game holds no water. For not only
is there ample evidence that ‘Silvestri’ was in communication with
Bellone well before 1928, but it was the issue of Romolo that led the
OVRA to identify Silone as an informer to Mussolini himself. Biocca and
Canali’s account turns the whole question on its head. What they show is
that it may have been the tragedy of his younger brother that finally
forced Silone to cut his ties with Bellone. Romolo was tortured by the
Fascists, cleared of the attentat against the King, but sentenced to
twelve years imprisonment as a Communist. He died in jail from pneumonia
in 1932. Silone’s ‘moral and psychological crisis’ could well have had
its origins here.
His brother’s ordeal, however, leaves the problem of Silone’s role in
the PCI after 1929 unanswered. His activities in the Third Period have
always seemed ambiguous. He appeared to support neither those Communists
who resisted the Soviet doctrine that social democrats were no better
than ‘social fascists’, nor the PCI leaders who implemented Stalin’s
line. After a long period of this ‘double game’, Silone was expelled
from the Party in 1931. How are we to understand his role in the light
of the revelations about him? Was he intent on provoking his own
expulsion, to escape from the ‘falsehood, doubt and secrecy’ of his
letter to Bellone in 1930? Or was he deliberately prolonging the
internal conflict in the PCI to damage the Party? We cannot be sure;
maybe he was doing both at once. What is clear is that ‘Silvestri’
stopped reporting to Rome in 1930. When he was expelled from the PCI the
following year, Silone withdrew from politics altogether and underwent
an analysis by Carl Jung in Zurich. His apparently bizarre and solitary
‘dissent’ had allowed him to escape from the grip of the PCI and the
OVRA at the same time.
Much remains to be explored in this period of Silone’s life. But the
weight of evidence on display is now such that defenders of his
reputation, after half-hearted attempts to block the publication of
L’informatore, are now very much on the back foot. Biocca’s forthcoming
full-length biography of Silone should provide a more complete picture.
Meanwhile, the enigma that remains unresolved is the question of motive.
What lay behind Silone’s decade of betrayals? Retrospectively, we can
read in his fiction signs of an inner turmoil that bear on his other
life. The confession of a young militant befriended by a policeman and
turned into an informer in chapter 25 of Bread and Wine could reflect
something of his own ‘recruitment’. The themes of The Fox (1934),
published in Italy in 1958, and the play And He Hides Himself (1944),
are spying and treachery. The historian Mimmo Franzinelli mentions an
unpublished work (held in the Silone archive) called Il Dossier, in
which an anti-Fascist Minister of the Interior re-reads his own life
through the police records of the Fascist period, as if Silone knew that
one day he would be unmasked. ‘In my solitary brooding, that left me not
a moment’s peace,’ confesses the spy in Bread and Wine,
I passed from fear of punishment to fear of non-punishment. The
idea that I was haunted by the wrong I had done only because of the
continual risk of being found out began to frighten me. So I began to
wonder whether, if better technique enabled one to betray one’s friends
with the certainty that one would never be found out, that would make it
more supportable . . . So might technique be capable of destroying the
distinction between right and wrong, by eliminating the risk of
punishment? The idea frightened me.
As Adriano Sofri wrote in La Repubblica on 15 April 2000: ‘One re-reads
all of Silone, and one thinks: how could we not have seen it before?’
Biocca and Canali, too, invite us to look within Silone’s fiction for
the unravelling of his secrets. Indeed, Biocca says, it was a close
study of Bread and Wine that first led him to suspect the truth.
Certainly, reading works like Fontamara will never be quite the same again.
But literary clues, suggestive though they may be, can only take us so
far. Historical evidence for Silone’s motivation in becoming an agent of
the secret police still remains too thin for any confident answers. He
was very young when he embarked on his career as an informer, only
nineteen. From childhood he would have been psychologically fragile;
maybe he needed money to support his family in the Abruzzo. Certainly he
was paid for his betrayals over a decade, on occasion even, it would
seem, bargaining for more generous pieces of silver. He began to inform
on the socialist movement before Mussolini came to power, and his
reports to the political police, whose personnel was largely continuous
before and after the March on Rome, reveal little ideological commitment
to Fascism later. If he was tempted by the glamour or power of the
regime in the twenties, there is no clear sign of it. He does express
extreme hostility to the leadership of the PCI by 1930, and was
certainly a violent anti-Communist after 1945, so it is just possible
that he was driven by hatred of the revolutionary left from the start
(in 1919 the PSI was still an insurrectionary party). But this would
require some dramatic teenage conversion, of which we know nothing.
What is clear is that at the centre of the mystery lies his relationship
with Bellone. What was the bond between ‘Silvestri’ and his controller,
the ‘gentlemanly’ interlocutor for whom he expresses his respect in
1930? Bellone went to visit Silone abroad, convinced his informant to
continue when he was wavering in 1924, and tried to dissuade him from
quitting in 1930. There is no hint of blackmail in the documents, and it
is striking that the regime did not expose Silone in the thirties, when
his novels had become very effective weapons against it. Bellone himself
retired in 1936, eventually dying in a lunatic asylum in 1948. Documents
show the Fascist authorities were not indifferent to Silone’s fame, but
they took no action against him. Could Bellone initially have protected
him? These are at best speculations. What is clear is that once Silone
had begun to inform, it was very difficult (and dangerous) to stop, and
that the price he had to pay for ending his duplicity was high, a
complete detachment from political activism. For someone whose whole
adult life had been lived within the labour movement, this was a
traumatic decision, which led to a kind of psychological breakdown. Out
of it came the distinguished writer and pillar of anti-fascism the world
has thought it knew ever since. Beyond the factual mystery of the
reasons for Silone’s service as a spy for the regime, the psychological
mystery of his emergence from it as a literary-ethical phoenix is yet
greater.
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