Italy: Taunting Clues

And the terror spreads

An ominous voice delivered the message in identical calls to newspapers in Rome and Milan: U.S. Brigadier General James Dozier, kidnaped from his Verona apartment on Dec. 17, had been executed. The anonymous caller said the corpse of "the Yankee pig General Dozier" could be found in an abandoned building 30 miles from Pescara on the Adriatic coast. Italian police searched the area fruitlessly.

At the same time, Dozier's abductors issued a ten-page communiqué that provided details of his interrogation by a "people's court." In the transcript, the presiding officer explains to Dozier why he was captured: "Your military career is the story of American aggression against the battle for liberation and revolution in Southeast Asia and against the proletariat struggle in Europe."

With no solid clues to go on, the authorities were hoping to break the case by enticing one of the terrorists to betray his comrades and earn a 2 billion lire ($1.67 million) reward for information about the kidnaping. The money is believed to have been put up either by wealthy Italian industrialists, who fear that terrorism is eroding business confidence, or anonymously by the Italian government.

Even as police tramped the hillsides in search of Dozier, the Brigades struck again. A tiny Autobianchi A112 car moved unnoticed through the deserted streets of Rovigo, 40 miles southeast of Verona, and parked next to the walls of the town prison. Four masked men leaped from the car and began spraying machine-gun fire at two guards in a watchtower. In the prison courtyard, four women inmates who were Red Brigades members heard the shots and overpowered a guard. Then the car exploded, killing a pedestrian, shattering windows within a quarter-mile radius and blowing a 4-ft-wide hole in the wall. The four convicts scrambled through the smoking gap, joined their rescue team and vanished without a trace.

Three days later, Nicola Simone, 41, local deputy head of the special antiterrorist police force that is leading the search for Dozier, was shot three times in the face by an assailant disguised as a postman. As Simone lay critically wounded in a hospital, the Red Brigades claimed responsibility for the shooting. The attack was staged in apparent retaliation for the arrest of two Brigades suspects captured in Rome with an arsenal of machine guns, shotguns and grenades in their car. Police also arrested eleven other suspected left-wing terrorists, including Giovanni Senzani, 42, a Florence University professor who is thought to be a top Brigades leader.

The latest surge of terrorist activity has spread uneasiness throughout Italy, yet there are distressing signs that the Red Brigades still enjoy latent sympathy among younger Italians. In a poll of 20-to 24-year-olds by the newsmagazine L'Expresso, 21% believed that the Red Brigades were fighting for a better society, while 35% felt that the terrorists had the right ideals but were using the wrong means to achieve them. Only 27% said they would inform the authorities if they knew someone who was a terrorist.