Man with the Facts

In Italy's Chamber of Deputies, cries of crook, assassin and Fascist come so often from the Communist benches that they no longer get a rise. Last week the tables were reversed, and the result was an uproar. A right-wing Christian Democrat named Giuseppe Togni, who has always supported the government, took the floor and said: "This government has not conducted a sufficiently energetic anti-Communist policy. Italy is not trusted abroad. It is considered defiled by Communism."

Catcalls from the left began. Togni stood his ground. "I fought for Italy," he shouted, "when many of you Communists were serving in Mussolini's Fascist militia and in the Fascist Party." That set off a ten-minute outburst of invective. When it quieted down, Togni resumed: "I would like to know how many ex-Fascists are in your ranks. Also, I would like to know how many ex-spies of the OVRA [Mussolini's secret police] there are."

At that, more than 100 Red Deputies and their Nenni Socialist allies rushed into the well of the Chamber to start a brawl. Togni got little help from his fellow Demo-Christians, who stayed in their seats. But neo-Fascists and Monarchists met the Reds with swinging fists. Six Deputies, all right-wingers, had to be treated at the Chamber's first-aid station.

Education of Sogno. This was the first time that such strong charges had been aired in Italy's Parliament--which explained the Communists' wrath. But millions of Italians had been talking about the accusations in recent weeks, as the result of a systematic campaign to dish out the true dirt on the Reds. The campaign is the work of slight, natty Edgardo Sogno, 39, who was one of Italy's top resistance heroes in the war. Toward the end of the war, when the Germans were still holding on in the north, Sogno smuggled so many refugees out and so many agents in that he became known as Italy's Scarlet Pimpernel. But he saw clearly that the Communists were trying to get control of Italy's liberation movement, not for Italy's good but for their own power. He developed an admiration for their skill and an abiding hatred of their purposes.

In Paris, after the war, as a member of the Italian foreign service, Sogno became impressed by the posters and publications of Jean Paul David's anti-Communist Paix et Liberte movement (TIME, Nov. 13, 1950). After the heavy blow to Italian democracy in the 1953 elections, Sogno returned to Rome and started an anti-Communist monthly called Pace e Libert`a. For his editor Sogno chose a formidable man: square-jawed Luigi Cavallo, an ex-Communist and ex-editor of the Red daily L'Unit`a. To dish the dirt on the Reds, Cavallo drew on extensive files, a long memory and sources inside the party.

Recent tidbits from Pace e Libert`a:

P: Giacomo Pellegrini, presently sitting in the Parliament as a Communist Senator, slipped into Italy from France in 1938, was caught almost immediately by the OVRA, saved his skin by offering to spy for Mussolini's police. He betrayed half a dozen underground comrades. This story was told in great detail, with names, dates, places and documentary excerpts.

P: A full account of a recent closed Communist meeting in Turin. Since its publication, the Turin comrades have been looking at each other with suspicion.

P: In 1929 Moscow ordered Palmiro Togliatti, who was then outside the country, to step up agitation in Italy. Togliatti knew that nothing much could be done under the careful watch of the Fascist police. But he seized the occasion to order four of his rivals in the Italian party to go in and get to work. Three refused, knowing that the mission was hopeless, and were expelled from the party. The fourth, a woman, obeyed and was caught by the OVRA. These maneuvers not only kept Togliatti in good standing with Moscow but made him--by a process of elimination--the No. 1 Italian Communist.

P: One piquant item dealt with sex among Communist bigwigs--particularly buxom Nilde Jotti, who is currently Togliatti's mistress, but had a long career in Red-style amore before that. The article made instructive reading at a time when the Communists, exploiting the Montesi scandal, have been rending the air with their own pretensions to morality.

Begun on a shoestring, Pace e Libert`a got off to a slow start, but now is growing by leaps and bounds. Its paid circulation is 70,000, and an almost equal number of copies are distributed free, many of them to the Communists themselves. Recently Sogno got enough funds to buy up the entire poster space in Rome for five days, and put up 6,000 posters devoted to the past of Italy's top Communists. At first, the Reds said disdainfully that they would not reply to such "drivel," but lately they have felt driven to long and unconvincing refutations. Palmiro Togliatti, once quick to sue defamers, has so far not sued Edgardo Sogno--a fact which convinces innumerable Italians that Sogno's statements are essentially correct.

Demand for the Facts. By itself, Sogno's campaign is probably not enough to inflict mortal wounds on Italian Communism. But it may be a sign of a belatedly turning tide. Dozens of Communists in the Chamber and Senate, accused of various crimes (including the murder of rivals and wholesale robbery during the upheavals of the liberation), are unmolested because the Parliament as a whole has been reluctant to lift their parliamentary immunity: since the war hundreds of judicial requests for action against Communist M.P.s have been blocked. Said an editorial in Il Borghese: "This is the first time since the war that public attention has been focused on Communist scandals. Hundreds of Red mayors have been caught stealing. Organizations for espionage for Russia have been uncovered. There have been changes of wives among Communist leaders. And for some reason the public has not been interested." If Italian newspapers and Italian politicians were to show some of Sogno's spunk, the problem of interesting the public might turn out to be not nearly so difficult.

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