In Search of the Red Brigades

ddITALY

The Moro kidnaping triggers a duel of nerves

At the corner of Via Stresa and Via Fani, obscure street names that everyone in Italy knows today, a small, squat school bus braked slowly to a stop, and a flock of teen-age schoolgirls solemnly disembarked. They were 14 pupils of the school of the Little Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, all in dark sweaters over blue smocks and white collars. Two of them walked over to a flower vendor's panel truck near by, bought a bouquet of pink carnations and rejoined the group, now standing'all in a row. They laid down their flowers, crossed themselves and paused for a moment of silence.

Before them, on the pavement under a budding willow tree, was an impromptu folk memorial to the five bodyguards who had been murdered during the kidnaping of Aldo Moro, leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Party and a former Premier. The memorial is now a symbol of what the Italian press has come to call, among many other things, the "Strage di Giove`ii Nero"-- the Massacre of Black Thursday. Several hundred bouquets of flowers were piled neatly in front of a low cross. Pinned to the cross in a cellophane shield were five newspaper photos of the dead. Below them was a brief inscription: ''The neighborhood draws close around the families of the five assassinated policemen and the family of The Honorable Aldo Moro, in a commitment of human and civil solidarity." Tacked to a tree near by was a lurid, half-torn Sunday magazine cover showing the bloodied, sheet-covered body of one of the victims. Those scenes of tribute were enacted last week as Rome was virtually turned inside out in the hunt for Moro and the Red Brigades terrorists who had abducted him. Rome Bureau Chief Jordan Bonfante reports:

That baroque pavement memorial in the residential Trionfale district on the northwest side of Rome is all that marks the site of the terrorist kidnaping that has traumatized the country. The only real sign of normality was the flower vendor at his usual corner. Having been kept away from the scene by the kidnapers, who slashed the tires of his truck beforehand, he was back selling flowers.

Around the corner from the ambush site, the occupants of three blue-and-white police cars surveyed the passing traffic. Two blocks away, in the opposite direction, uniformed border police, pressed into special service, manned a roadblock and checked every tenth car or so. They concentrated on large vehicles, whose drivers were made to show identification while the trunk was searched. Every few hundred yards more police, more roadblocks, more searches extended the tight security blanket over the entire Trionfale district.

"There is nothing more we can search around here," said a young mustachioed lieutenant, putting his drawn automatic pistol on safety to gesticulate more freely. "It is an endurance test now--the winner will be the one who lasts the longest. If they are hidden anywhere around here, they are going to have to come out sooner or later." Then, like any soldier, he griped that the squad scheduled to relieve his men for the next eight hours was late.

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.

> 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 "Communique 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 communique.

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