In the second half of the twentieth century, Italy faced the shortcomings of cover-ups and the often suspicious behavior of its intelligence services.
In this book, Benedetta Tobaji narrates, against the backdrop of the massacres, the debate between the intelligence agencies, the judiciary, and the executive authority from the time of the P2 organization until the fall of the Berlin Wall.Drawing on mostly declassified and unpublished intelligence documents, "Secrets and Loopholes" explores the conflicts between the judiciary, the intelligence services and the executive during the trials of major terrorist attacks (1969-1980), in the period between the 1977 intelligence reform and the mid-1990s, when Italy was recovering from the political turmoil that followed the end of the Cold War.From this point, the book addresses broader issues, such as the perennial problem of how to exercise effective democratic control over the activities of the intelligence services, and at the same time the possibilities and limits of reconstructing historical events in the Italian Republic, where the political dimension is intertwined with the criminal dimension: that is, how to accurately address even the unspeakable aspects and the hidden dimension of politics.“A civil book that represents an inquiry into power, the extent and nature of its ‘inexpressibility’, and a condemnation of the blatant arbitrariness in the administration of secrecy and state causes by those whose duty it was to exercise it in a manner consistent with the oath of constitutional loyalty they had sworn.”
