RED BRIGADES

Italian Brigate Rosse, extreme left-wing terrorist organization in Italy that gained notoriety for kidnappings, murders, and sabotage, beginning in the 1970s. Its self-proclaimed aim was to undermine the Italian state and pave the way for a Marxist upheaval led by a revolutionary proletariat. The reputed founder of the Red Brigades was Renato Curcio (b. 1945), who first set up a leftist think-group at the University of Trento in 1967, dedicated to studying such figures as Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara. Marrying a fellow radical, Margherita Cagol, in 1969, he moved with her to Milan and gathered a coterie of zealots. They proclaimed the existence of the Red Brigades in November 1970 in the firebombing of various factories and warehouses in Milan. In 1971 they began kidnappings and in 1974 began the first murders, killing, among others, the chief inspector of Turin's antiterrorist squad. In 1978 the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered former prime minister Aldo Moro; and, in spite of the efforts of the authorities, who arrested and jailed hundreds of alleged terrorists throughout the country (including Curcio in 1976), the random murders continued. In December 1981 a U.S. officer with NATO, Brigadier General James Dozier, was abducted and held captive by the Red Brigades for 42 days before Italian policemen rescued him unharmed from a hideout in Padua. At their height in the 1970s, the Red Brigades were believed to consist of 400 to 500 full-time members, another 1,000 members who helped periodically, and a few thousand supporters who provided funds and shelter. Careful, systematic police work led to the arrest and imprisonment of many of the Red Brigades' leaders and ordinary members from the mid-1970s on, and by the late 1980s the organization had been greatly weakened.