Terrorist Tip

A suspect's story rocks Rome

When police arrested Roberto Sandalo, 26, in Turin last April, they could hardly wait to quiz him about his activities in the terrorist Prima Lima (Front Line) group, a leftist organization second in notoriety only to the Red Brigades. Sandalo's testimony, they hoped, might enable them to catch and indict a few of his revolutionary comrades. It had a vastly greater effect. It threatened to topple the center-left coalition of Christian Democratic Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga, one of the most promising governments in Rome in many years. It transformed this week's regional and local elections from a ho-hum event into a hard-fought and hard-to-predict contest. And it seemed certain to give the powerful Communists a valuable opposition issue for some time to come.

The most stunning part of Sandalo's testimony was his account of a remarkable meeting he had with Carlo Donat-Cattin, deputy secretary-general and No. 2 man in the dominant Christian Democratic Party. It seemed that Donat-Cattin's son Marco, 28, was a fellow member of Prima Linea. According to San-dalo, when the father learned that police were about to start a man hunt for Marco, he summoned Sandalo and begged him to warn his son that he should flee the country. But who tipped off Donat-Cattin about the impending arrest? Sandalo claimed it came from the top—from Prime Minister Cossiga himself.

Donat-Cattin resigned from his post last week "to be at liberty to answer the insinuations." So far he has not been very successful. At first he insisted that he had not been in touch with his son for a couple of years; later he conceded that he had contacted him through Sandalo. He also admitted that he had gone to see Cossiga to learn details about his son's case, but denied that he got any solid information from the Prime Minister. The warning about his son's arrest warrant, he claims, came in an anonymous letter that he says he later destroyed.

Although a parliamentary commission questioned the Prime Minister and voted 11 to 9 to drop the case, Enrico Berlinguer's Communist Party accused Cossiga of misusing his office and demanded his resignation. Publicly, the parties that constitute Cossiga's coalition—the Christian Democrats, Socialists and Republicans—proclaimed their support of the beleaguered Prime Minister, and he staunchly refused to resign. "Is it possible that anyone could accuse me of protecting terrorists?" Cossiga asked friends incredulously. After all, Cossiga had served as Interior Minister from 1976 to 1978, Italy's worst period of terrorism, and had refused to negotiate with the Red Brigades for the release of Aldo Moro, his close friend and the country's most widely respected politician. After Moro's murder, Cossiga took full moral responsibility and resigned.

After returning from political oblivion last August, he acquired a strong reputation for vigor and rectitude, appointing experts instead of political cronies to a number of difficult government jobs, launching an effective energy conservation program, implementing a tough anti-terrorist law and pushing an ambitious three-year economic program. Now, once again because of terrorism, he was fighting for his political life.