ITALY: In Search of the Red Brigades

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> The sale of three airline caps worn by the terrorists was traced to a Rome uniform shop. The buyer could have been the same woman.

The vast dragnet had at least one salutary effect: the capital's normally thriving crime rate was down 30%; there were simply too many cops on the streets. The police presence was also meant to prevent any follow-up terrorist attack, although that deterrent failed to stop Red Brigades gunmen in Turin from shooting and wounding Giovanni Picco, 46, the former Christian Democratic mayor.

Italian authorities, meanwhile, were being aided by a team of specialists from the West German Federal Criminal Bureau and by two agents of Britain's Special Air Service, famed for its undercover counterterrorist operations in Northern Ireland. Investigators suspected that the meticulously planned Moro abduction may not have been entirely made-in-Italy. Some believed that a precision team of highly trained foreign terrorists, probably West German, may have committed the attack itself and then turned Moro over to indigenous Red Brigades. The technical planning and organization of the kidnaping was more proficient than anything the Red Brigades had previously undertaken. Police experts estimated that the operation must have required a minimum of 30 people to organize transportation to safe houses, telephone contacts, surveillance of Moro and even of the florist.

Members of the West German terrorist group, the Red Army Faction, were natural suspects because the Moro incident was strikingly similar, both in its cold-blooded sophistication and its implementation, to the abduction last September of West German Industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer. One witness thought she heard a kidnaper speak in German , ''Achtung! Achtung!'' Another bystander was waved off by a terrorist who spoke with what sounded like heavily accented Italian. An additional element was the chilling professional precision exhibited by one of the killers. One bodyguard had managed to get out of the car and fire three shots at the terrorists—yet one of the killers was cool enough to take two to three seconds for careful aim before shooting the bodyguard in the center of his forehead.

At midweek, a special seven-hour Cabinet meeting drew up a set of stiff new antiterrorist measures, including life imprisonment for murder committed in the course of a kidnaping. The Cabinet also gave police wider power in interrogation and arrests, and relaxed restrictions on police wiretappings and searches. Suspects could be detained for 24 hours just for verification of their identity, and police could carry out preliminary interrogations without the presence of an attorney.

The action did not daunt Moro's captors, who last Saturday night issued "Communiqué No. 2" almost simultaneously in Rome, Milan, Turin and Genoa. The 1,700-word message, a rambling revolutionary harangue about the "menace of imperialist terrorism," made no demand for an exchange of prisoners. It did claim that Moro was being "interrogated" and warned that he would be given "proletarian justice." The police said they had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the ominous communiqué. -