Missiles, Mafia, and Power Before Pio La Torre and Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa

1. Commemoration Is Not Enough

The question this article raises is: what happened when the Italian state and the United States decided to make the Comiso base in Sicily operational for nuclear cruise missiles?

The question does not arise from a taste for intrigue. It arises from the nature of the operation itself. Comiso meant converting an old airfield, building infrastructure, opening construction sites, moving enormous sums of money and, above all, ensuring that military convoys bound for launch sites could move across Sicilian territory. In a Sicily where Cosa Nostra exercised real control over the territory, operational security could not be treated as a detail.

In 2016 I wrote that many answers might be found in the intelligence-service archives, the Carabinieri archives, and the papers left by Francesco Cossiga. Today that request is even better founded. The new sources do not close the case; they do make it harder to dismiss it with commemorations and ritual formulas.

2. Comiso: Territory, Contracts, and Money

The Comiso base was a strategic undertaking and, inevitably, an economic one. The old Magliocco airfield had to be transformed into an installation capable of hosting the BGM-109G GLCM “Gryphon” cruise missiles, with storage facilities, security systems, roads, and a large enough operational hinterland for the mobile launchers to disperse across the territory in the event of an alert.

The economic dimension should be handled without slogans. The contracts were not monopolized by any single circle. The first local contract currently documented, for demolition of the old airfield structures in March 1982, went to the Sicilian ICI consortium; in 1983, Parma-based Pizzarotti won the contract for missile installation. The picture was therefore mixed, both Sicilian and national. That makes the question of political, business, and territorial intermediaries more important, not less.

The 1984 minority report of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission described the base as a factor capable of accelerating “to an extraordinary degree” the degeneration and contamination of social and political life. Pio La Torre had predicted speculation, black markets, drugs, and social decay. No gift of foresight was required: it was enough to understand the amount of money pouring into a territory where politics, business, and the Mafia had intersected for decades.

3. A Story That Began Before the 1981 Announcement

The best-known public date is August 7, 1981, when the choice of Comiso was announced. But the preparation went back much further. Luigi Caligaris, then among the senior officials of the Defense Ministry’s Office of Military Policy, confirmed to me that the “complex political and military negotiation” had already begun in 1977. General Mario Arpino, for his part, recalled the U.S. preference for Comiso and the operational requirements created by launcher mobility. The present author was assigned to the Defense General Staff, Office of Military Policy, on July 28, 1988. The first file entrusted to him concerned the decommissioning of Comiso. The papers clearly showed that the first documents proposing Comiso dated from late 1976—in October.

That fact is decisive. A nuclear base is not born with a press release. It requires surveys, technical choices, political agreements, security assessments, available land, infrastructure, and interlocutors. NATO’s December 1979 decision was a fundamental formal step, not the starting point of the process.

The PCI found itself inside this transformation. Enrico Berlinguer’s Atlantic turn, made explicit in June 1976 with his famous statement that he felt safer “under the NATO umbrella,” had changed the picture. In 1978 Giorgio Napolitano led a PCI delegation to the United States during the Moro kidnapping. Pio La Torre, by contrast, later became the most visible force in Sicily opposing the missiles. The tension within the party is not a biographical footnote: it helps explain his growing isolation.

4. The Decisive Question: Who Guaranteed Control of the Territory?

The most serious passage in the entire reconstruction does not come from an anonymous source. Carlo Jean, a general and a trusted adviser to Cossiga, told me: “The ability to deploy the missiles in Sicily was guaranteed by the Mafia’s control of the territory. Cossiga sent Admiral Fulvio Martini to negotiate.” Asked whether this had happened while Cossiga was prime minister, Jean replied: “Yes.”

This is testimony from a named source, and it should be called what it is. By itself, it is not a record of negotiations, nor does it give us the terms of any exchange. But it prevents the question of contacts between state apparatuses and Mafia power around Comiso from being dismissed as fantasy.

Miguel Gotor, in his 2025 book on Piersanti Mattarella, also links construction of the base to the need for a territorial agreement with Cosa Nostra. The issue is therefore more precise: one thing is Mafia acquiescence or the protection money that accompanied every major public project in Sicily; another is a negotiation at the top, mediated through an intelligence channel. The first belongs to the historical context; the second, on the evidence cited here, rests above all on Jean’s testimony and still awaits the operational document.

5. Pio La Torre: The Issue Is Not Martyrdom but Isolation

Pio La Torre was assassinated on April 30, 1982. Reducing the motive to the asset-seizure law that would later bear his name is not enough to account for the sheer number of interests converging on Sicily at that moment. His opposition to the Euromissiles, his attention to contracts, and his knowledge of the Mafia structure placed him at the point where national politics, economic interests, and territorial power met.

This does not prove that Comiso was the motive for his murder. It does prove, however, that Comiso belonged to the context in which La Torre operated and in which he became increasingly inconvenient. The proper question is therefore an archival one: what had he learned about contracts, intermediaries, and the relationships among businesses, political parties, and Cosa Nostra? What records was he looking for? Who knew what he was doing?

Commemorations are useful as long as they do not replace investigation. La Torre does not need to be turned into a harmless icon; the interests he was disrupting need to be reconstructed.

6. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa: A Prefect Inside a System Already in Motion

Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was assassinated on September 3, 1982. He was an investigator who knew the Mafia, its political connections, and its international relationships far better than the commemorative image of the “lone prefect” suggests. The point to be investigated is not some generic Mafia revenge, but the system of interests he would encounter once he reached Palermo.

Comiso was by then a reality under construction. The Second Mafia War was giving the Corleonesi an unprecedented capacity for control. Contracts, trafficking, military security, and national politics overlapped on the same territory. In that setting, a prefect with real powers and deep information could become incompatible with more than one set of interests.

The La Torre–Dalla Chiesa sequence makes it legitimate to ask whether the two murders should also be studied through the Comiso file, not only through the Mafia motives traditionally cited.

7. Piersanti Mattarella: Real Power Is More Interesting Than Hagiography

Piersanti Mattarella is often portrayed along an almost straight line: Moro’s protégé, the reformer, the opponent of the Mafia. Political reality is more interesting. Gotor himself recalls that in 1970 Mattarella took part in the Christian Democratic majority that brought Vito Ciancimino to the office of mayor of Palermo and that Ciancimino entered Palazzo delle Aquile accompanied by him. Mattarella later distanced himself from that system and, after 1975, broke with the Ciancimino group. The two phases do not cancel each other out: they describe the path of a man of power inside the Sicilian DC.

That is precisely why two U.S. documents take on particular significance. The first directly concerns Mattarella. On April 13, 1978, the U.S. Consulate in Palermo sent Washington the CONFIDENTIAL cable “Regional President’s Views on Moro Kidnapping,” archival identifier 1978PALERMO0398_d. The cable reported an official conversation the previous day with the president of the Region. Mattarella, who was closely tied to Moro, believed that “whatever the outcome” of the captivity, it was highly unlikely that Moro would return to the highest offices of state; he did not rule out an internal role in the DC, but considered the paths to the Quirinal Palace and Palazzo Chigi closed.

The document does not prove that Mattarella knew in advance what Moro’s physical fate would be. It does, however, document a politically enormous fact: while Moro was still alive and a prisoner, a central figure in his political current was already reasoning as though the kidnapping had produced an irreversible effect on Moro’s future institutional career. In this respect, the phrase “whatever the outcome” makes a live return and death equivalent. The question is not accusatory; it is historical. Why?

The second document does not directly concern Mattarella, but it changes the American context in which his words must be read. On April 28, 1978—two weeks after the previous cable—a U.S. memorandum was delivered to Francesco Cossiga; it is now held in the Cossiga Papers at the Historical Archive of the Chamber of Deputies. The cover sheet records delivery by a “Mr. Montgomery.” The text proposed a large, tax-free reward, a new identity and passport for anyone providing decisive information, psychological profiles of the kidnappers, and the opening—“even at this late date”—of discreet and reliable channels between the Italian authorities or the DC and the Red Brigades, with the stated objective of Moro’s “safe recovery.” It is a document that, within two weeks, reverses the State Department’s position, until then draconian: “No negotiations with terrorists.”

The memorandum became available for consultation in 2024. Gotor’s book appeared in 2025. Gotor uses British diplomatic sources and devotes extensive attention to the United States, the Republican right, P2, and Gelli; yet the full text does not appear to discuss either cable 1978PALERMO0398_d or the April 28 memorandum by its archival identity. It is legitimate to measure the historiographical effect: without the first document, Mattarella’s position appears less problematic; without the second, the American position appears more monolithically hostile to any initiative aimed at bringing Moro back alive.

This is the “oversight” that deserves an answer. Not because it overturns Mattarella’s biography by itself, but because two primary sources complicate precisely the two axes on which that biography builds its scenario: Moro and the United States.

8. A Necessary Technical Correction: There Were No Pershing IIs at Comiso

The 2016 text contained an inaccuracy that now needs to be corrected openly. Comiso hosted the land-based BGM-109G GLCM/Gryphon cruise missiles, not Pershing IIs. The latter, ballistic and much faster, were deployed in West Germany. This is not a detail: the logic of extremely short flight times to Soviet command centers applied to the Pershing II, not to the subsonic Gryphon.

The question of Comiso’s geographic location, the need to disperse the launchers, and the relationship among the base, its hinterland, and territorial security remains legitimate. Mario Arpino cited precisely the availability of a large hinterland and the changes made at Gioia del Colle among the reasons Comiso was preferred. The military question should therefore be framed correctly: not “why move the Pershings back,” but why choose Sicily for a mobile system that needed to move safely across the territory.

9. Three Levels of Evidence, So as Not to Confuse History and Suspicion

The strength of this reconstruction depends on keeping different things on different evidentiary levels. It is documented that preparations for Comiso preceded the public announcement; the exceptional scale of the work is documented; Mafia penetration of the Sicilian economy is documented; the Anti-Mafia Commission reported the base’s corrupting effects; and the U.S. cable on Mattarella and the memorandum to Cossiga exist.

There is also named testimony of particular importance: Caligaris on the political-military negotiations begun in 1977; Jean on Fulvio Martini being sent to negotiate with the Mafia during Cossiga’s premiership; and the author’s own account of the start of the “Comiso exercise.”

Finally, inferences remain: what exactly was the quid pro quo in any agreement? Was immunity granted for trafficking or contracts? What concrete relationship, if any, existed between Comiso and the murders of Mattarella, La Torre, and Dalla Chiesa? On these points, the thesis must remain a thesis until orders, minutes, service reports, chains of authorization, or converging testimony emerge.

Evidentiary Framework

10. Open the Archives Before Laying the Wreaths

The Comiso thread runs through the years when Sicily became, at the same time, a rear area for NATO nuclear strategy, a theater of the Second Mafia War, and a laboratory for a new political balance. Treating that as a permanent coincidence is no longer sufficient.

We need the records: intelligence files on the Martini mission; communications among Palazzo Chigi, the Defense Ministry, the U.S. Embassy, and the Sicilian authorities; the complete documentation on contracts; Carabinieri information flows; U.S. cables from 1977 through 1982; the documents showing who knew what, and when.

Pio La Torre and Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa do not need only streets, plaques, and anniversaries. They need the system in which they were killed to be reconstructed. And Piersanti Mattarella does not need to be protected from the complexity of his own biography: his very political importance requires that it be read in full, including the records that make it less linear.

History is not made with “what ifs.” But it is easily falsified with documents that go unread.

Essential Sources

1. Piero Laporta, “Dalla Chiesa e La Torre, non basta commemorare,” May 6, 2016 (original text attached and author’s archive).
2. U.S. Department of State, telegram 1978PALERMO0398_d, “Regional President’s Views on Moro Kidnapping,” U.S. Consulate Palermo, April 13, 1978, originally classified CONFIDENTIAL.
3. Historical Archive of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Francesco Cossiga Papers, “Moro Case” series, box 62, file 5, memorandum of April 28, 1978.
4. Miguel Gotor, L’omicidio di Piersanti Mattarella. L’Italia nel mirino: Palermo, Ustica, Bologna (1979–1980), Einaudi, 2025, especially the chapter on Comiso and the international context.
5. Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Mafia phenomenon, Minority Report, 1984, passages concerning the Comiso base.
6. Author’s interviews with Luigi Caligaris, Mario Arpino, and Carlo Jean, cited in the original article and in the Comiso research notes.
7. Author’s research memo “La posizione di Piersanti Mattarella nel caso Moro, il retroscena della base di Comiso e le lacune del volume di Miguel Gotor,” updated July 16, 2026.
8. Documentary verification memo “Moro, Mattarella, Stati Uniti e la pista Gelli–Est,” August 9, 2026.