ITALY: In Search of the Red Brigades

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The inner core of the search for Moro and his captors covered a quadrant of more than 20 square miles. Working outward from the scene of the ambush, police made from 2,000 to 3,000 searches, building to building, concentrating on garages and basements. The hunters were organized in squads of twelve, infantry-style, with flanking and rear guards.

Outside the city, at key junctions, was a second concentric ring of roadblocks manned by police and thousands of soldiers called in from around the country. Some ten miles farther, the third and outermost ring of roadblocks was set up. As drivers discovered to their discomfort, police stopped cars and leveled their guns at them, while soldiers stood at the ready in the background, sometimes behind sandbags. Tens of thousands of vehicles have been checked. Hundreds of suspicious youths, in particular, have been pulled into local police stations for verification of identity. Suspects have been detained, questioned, released. Clues have gone cold.

Aside from the intensive man hunt, the uneasy country was all too aware of the duel of nerves being played out between the state and the terrorists in two vastly different trials. The first was the legal trial, in a fortified barracks in Turin, of 15 Red Brigades members charged with previous counts of kidnaping, assassination and armed insurrection. Though the trial has been repeatedly postponed as a result of Red Brigades intimidation, authorities were more determined than ever that it must go on.

It was doubtful that the defendants, who have been in jail for more than two years, had anything to do with planning Moro's kidnaping. But they made the most of it, shouting to the courtroom, "Moro is in the hands of the proletariat, and he will be tried. Long live the Red Brigades!" The defendants refused to cooperate with their court-appointed counsel, but Judge Guido Barbaro rejected a request that the prisoners be allowed to represent themselves. Having resolved the legal ruckus, the court ordered the trial to resume again this week.

The other trial, presumably being conducted in a deep hideout somewhere in Rome, was the "People's Tribunal" of Moro. This, according to a Red Brigades message that was left atop an automatic photo booth in the center of the city along with a picture showing Moro in captivity, was the terrorists' way of dealing with the man whom they accused of "criminal counterrevolution." Other public officials who have been similarly kidnaped in the past have also been subjected to these "trials," which consisted largely of forcing the victims to endure endless Marxist diatribes before they were released.

For all its intensity, the search for Moro yielded precious few leads. Items: > The police found five automobiles used by the terrorists. Two cars had been left at the scene. A Fiat 132 that carried Moro away was found the same day half a mile away, and two more getaway cars turned up on the same quiet, narrow street. Investigators theorize that the vehicles were planted there as decoys designed to lead police to concentrate their search in the wrong neighborhood.

>Witnesses provided good descriptions of four of the twelve terrorists. One was a youthful man with bushy, modish hair and a mustache; two others, clean-shaven, were described as older and heavier. The fourth was a slim young woman with long brown hair and glasses.