Italy

On 17 March 1981, Italy's Guardia di Finanza raided Licio Gelli's Villa Wanda in Castiglion Fibocchi and found the 'Elenco degli iscritti' — a membership list of 962 P2 affiliates. Members included three cabinet ministers, 43 parliamentarians, senior military generals, intelligence chiefs (SISMI's Giuseppe Santovito and SISMI deputy Pietro Musumeci; CESIS head Walter Pelosi), magistrates, and prominent journalists including Maurizio Costanzo. Investigators also found the 'Piano di Rinascita Democratica' — a coup-plot document outlining a programme to reshape Italian democracy. Prime Minister Forlani's government fell. Gelli fled Italy in 1981, was recaptured in Geneva in 1987, and received sentences for slander (1996) and financial fraud in connection with BNL (1998). He died in 2015. The existence of P2 and its membership are confirmed facts; the full extent of its activities and connections to specific crimes (Moro, Calvi, JPI) remains partially unresolved.

Pope Albino Luciani (John Paul I) died on the evening of 28 September 1978, after a 33-day pontificate — the shortest in modern history. Sister Vincenza Taffarel found him unresponsive in bed at about 5:30 a.m. the next morning. The Vatican announced death by heart attack and reported that he had been reading the Imitation of Christ. No autopsy was performed. David Yallop's 'In God's Name' (1984) alleged poisoning orchestrated by the P2 Masonic lodge and Vatican Bank insiders — Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, banker Roberto Calvi, and Licio Gelli — who feared Luciani's planned financial reforms. John Cornwell's counter-investigation 'A Thief in the Night' (1989), commissioned by the Vatican, found no evidence of murder and attributed death to an undiagnosed pulmonary embolism.

Christian Democrat President Aldo Moro was abducted on Via Fani, Rome, on 16 March 1978 — the morning of the confidence vote on the Andreotti government, which could govern only with the Communist Party's indirect support under Moro's 'compromesso storico' strategy. A Brigate Rosse operational core of eleven people (the figure in the first-instance judgment, later questioned), led by Mario Moretti, killed Moro's five escort officers in the ambush. Moro was held 55 days and wrote 86 letters from captivity to his family, party colleagues, newspapers and the Pope; the State refused all negotiation. His body was found in the trunk of a Renault 4 on Via Caetani on 9 May 1978. Moretti received a life sentence in 1983; Prospero Gallinari and Anna Laura Braghetti were also convicted. Parliamentary commissions (1979–83 and 2014–18) found gaps in the original investigation, with allegations of overlap with the NATO stay-behind network Gladio and a broader 'strategy of tension'. In mid-2026 a Rome judge ordered further investigation into possible additional participants at Via Fani.

Secret "stay-behind" networks, set up with US and British intelligence services and kept from their own parliaments, existed in Cold War Western Europe; the Italian branch, Gladio, was disclosed by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1990. That the networks themselves directed the "strategy of tension" bombings is not established and is not what the verdict confirms; the courts attribute the major bombings to neo-fascist groups and convicted officials who obstructed the inquiries.