Alive and Well

The Red Brigades are back

It was 6:45 in the evening when the sleek blue Alfa Romeo pulled up before the large two-story house at 20 Via Sud-africa in a prosperous section of Rome.

While the car idled in the street, the chauffeur operated a remote-control device, opening the metal gates that sealed off the driveway. Suddenly, three men sprang from a blue Fiat 128 parked across the street, spraying the Alfa Romeo sedan with bullets. The driver yelled at his passenger to get down; the armored car's heavy metal plating and triple-thick bulletproof glass held true.

Then one gunman jumped onto the trunk and fired several rounds into the upper edge of the rear window. A single bullet ripped through the rubber and thin-metal frame holding the window in place, striking the head of American Leamon R. Hunt, 56, director general of the Multi-National Force and Observers in the Sinai. Hunt died within minutes of his arrival at Rome's San Giovanni hospital.

Half an hour after the attack, a Milan radio station received an anonymous phone call. "This is the Fighting Communist Party," said a man with a thick Roman accent. "We must claim the attempt on General Hunt, the guarantor of the Camp David agreements."

Italian authorities believe the organization is one of the extreme factions of the leftist Red Brigades, which have been responsible for dozens of terrorist attacks in Italy, including the 1981 kidnaping of U.S. Brigadier General James L. Dozier.

Dozier's rescue and a series of arrests of key Red Brigades leaders had led many Italians to hope that the group had been neutralized. Instead, it seems that terrorism may be once again on the rise in Italy. Shortly before Hunt's assassination, a repentant Red Brigades leader warned on national television that the organization is "alive and they will strike in Rome." On the day of the Hunt killing, Prime Minister Bettino Craxi sent a report to parliament on the growing danger of resurgent terrorism in Italy linked to the turmoil in the Middle East.

As investigators pored over the sparse evidence in the Hunt case, it was beginning to appear that a Middle East connection was involved. Hunt, a civilian, was head of the 2,600-man contingent patrolling the Sinai under the terms of the 1978 Camp David agreements. A retired foreign-service officer, he was not among the highest-ranking Americans in Italy, but Middle East duties would have made him a prime target for extremists from the region. Authorities are most alarmed over the possibility that some of the estimated 300 Italian terrorists known to be at large may have allied themselves with the pro-Iranian Shi'ites responsible for car-bomb attacks on the French and U.S. Marine compounds in Beirut and the Israeli headquarters in Tyre last fall.

Hunt's killing was the latest in a series of assassinations in which Middle East involvement has been suggested.

Unidentified assassins gunned down the Libyan Ambassador to Italy, Ammar el Taghazi, last month. More recently, two radical terrorist groups claimed responsibility for the fatal shooting on a Paris street of Gholam Ali Oveissi, who commanded Iran's army under the Shah. The next day the United Arab Emirates Ambassador to France, Khalifa Ahmed Abdel Aziz Mubarak, was slain as he left his Paris home. Italy is not alone in serving as a killing ground for Middle Eastern vendettas, and the Red Brigades, specialists in death, may have found new life through ties to the Middle East's more murderous factions.