Rigged

Much of Washington’s leverage came from the European Recovery Program, a massive economic program for Western Europe. Marshall had announced the policy, today known as the Marshall Plan, in June 1947. The Front’s leaders claimed that if they won, Italy could still take part in the initiative, even though the Soviet Union had declined to participate and ordered its Eastern European satellites to do the same. In early 1948, Dunn urged Marshall to rebut the Front’s claims publicly and loudly, and, in the process, turn the Marshall Plan into a tool of electoral interference.28

After receiving Dunn’s cables, Marshall declared in a March speech at the University of California, Berkeley, that a Communist-led Italy would not receive Marshall Plan aid. “If [the Italian people] choose to vote into power a Government in which the dominant political force would be a party whose hostility to this program has been frequently, publicly and emphatically proclaimed,” Marshall said, “this Government would have to conclude that Italy had removed itself from the benefits of the European Recovery Program.”29

Marshall’s message reverberated across Italy, reaching impoverished voters who believed a better future was contingent upon American assistance. “His language is crystal clear,” observed Italy’s Il Tempo newspaper, which reported that a Front victory would result in the “suspension of American aid with resulting economic catastrophe in Italy.” Italy’s left-leaning publications reacted scathingly. “Marshall’s language clearly shows how [the] US intends to use aid as electoral weapon of blackmail against [the] Italian people,” read the Communist-affiliated l’Unità paper. For the Christian Democrats, Marshall’s speech was a political gift. The Italian government worked with American officials to produce six million posters and, with the Vatican’s approval, ten million prayer cards about the benefits of American aid.30

Italian voters had a choice: America’s open hand or its closed fist. Back in Washington, other parts of the government raised the stakes still higher. In conjunction with Marshall’s announcement, the Department of Justice, citing a decades-old law, announced that it would not permit Italians who supported the Communist Party to enter the United States. “There sh[oul]d be no doubt left [in the] minds [of] Ital[ian]s that policy [in] this regard [is] unchanged,” Marshall wrote to the U.S. embassy in Italy. This rule had the potential to influence millions of voters; the State Department estimated that as many as fourteen million Italians wanted to move to the United States.31

With these sticks also came carrots. American aid continued to flood Italy. In February, Dunn urged Marshall to ensure that the United States kept providing Italy with wheat; otherwise, De Gasperi’s government would have to reduce bread rations. The following month, Truman signed an order transferring twenty-nine merchant ships to the Italian government. As more and more assistance arrived, Dunn, recognizing its psychological power, personally welcomed every hundredth delivery.32

This overt interference had costs, which Marshall recognized. In a cable to Dunn’s embassy, he emphasized the importance of “offset[ting] possible communist attacks against US ‘interference.’ ” De Gasperi often had to rebut accusations that he was a tool of the United States. On one occasion, he told Italian lawmakers that “there is nothing servile in accepting American aid,” which he described as a “free gift.” Directing his comments at Communist politicians, De Gasperi said, “You should explain this to the working masses. If, after giving them the facts, you should decide to do without American help, you should say so and assume full responsibility for your attitude.”33 Italy’s struggling economy offered De Gasperi much-needed cover.

But there were limits to what Washington could accomplish overtly. All of its tactics had a common weakness: None targeted voters personally, based on their individual views and biases. The State and Justice Departments, at least, lacked the means to engage in such behavior.

Italian Americans picked up the slack. Between 1876 and 1930, five million Italians had immigrated to the United States; many retained connections to their native country.34 As April approached, the sizable Italian American community became a weapon of electoral interference, participating in a project that at the time seemed spontaneous.

The public face of this effort was Generoso Pope, the owner of the largest Italian-language newspaper in the United States. Ahead of Italy’s April election, Pope executed a clever idea: to use his newspaper to influence Italian voters. He urged readers to mail anti-Communist letters back home, into the mailboxes of their friends and relatives. “I knew that the only way to beat the Communists was to have the people of Italy know the truth,” Pope said at the time. “I started the campaign, realizing that the people of Italy would believe the truth when it was told by a brother, or a friend, or a blood relation.”35

The idea spread quickly. Other non-state actors, from the Roman Catholic Church to more Italian-language newspapers, pressed their followers to take part in what became known as the “Letters to Italy” initiative. Victor Anfuso, a New York–based lawyer and OSS veteran, distributed 250,000 pre-written form letters for Italian Americans to sign and mail home. Anfuso’s letter read, in part, “We implore you not to throw our beautiful Italy into the arms of that cruel despot Communism.” Another form letter, distributed in New Jersey, warned, “If you should vote for the Communists or the Left-wing Socialists you will become the slaves of Russia.”36

As letters poured into Italy, American officials were euphoric. Even the typically pessimistic Dunn was uplifted. “Surge of letters and packages mainly to southern Italy from America definitely is harming Front vote prospects to extent that loud protests have been made,” he told Marshall on April 7. The State Department encouraged Italian Americans to keep writing letters, and just before the election the U.S. government expedited mail deliveries to Italy.37

In all, Italian Americans sent an estimated ten million messages to Italy. In one town in New York, more than 40 percent of Italian American residents took part in the campaign. John Ellis, a Republican politician who traveled to Italy in April, found that the letter writing was “heard all over” the country, in what can best be understood as a primitive form of micro-targeting. In 1948, loved ones could influence voters on a personal basis. The major cost of the initiative, as with Marshall’s speech, was that it was not a secret. Italy’s Communist leaders swiftly denounced the letter writing as foreign interference.38

The letter writers were not alone in influencing Italy’s politics. In an open statement, luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Stimson expressed solidarity with Italians struggling against “the threat of oppression and slavery.” Famous Italian Americans like Frank Sinatra, Rocky Graziano, and Joe DiMaggio broadcast similar messages across Italy. (One Christian Democratic campaign poster read, “Even Hollywood stars are against Communism.”) And private American companies sent anti-Communist films to cinemas in Italy. Just before the election, an estimated five million Italians were watching them each week.39

Italians’ psyches were under assault from all angles as a result of American efforts to influence their opinions ahead of the election. In their mailboxes were letters begging them to vote against the Front; in their theaters were anti-Communist productions; on their radios were celebrities urging them to back De Gasperi; and in their newspapers was a clear warning: Voting Communist meant sacrificing Marshall Plan aid and the ability to enter the United States.

Events beyond Washington’s control shaped aspects of foreign interference in Italy’s election. The most important had unfolded in February 1948, when Communists staged a coup d’état in Czechoslovakia. The value of the Italian lira plummeted in reaction to fears that Italy’s Communist Party would similarly seize power. Christian Democrats used these concerns to highlight the stakes of the election. The party’s manifesto stated, in part, that the “recent tragic experiences” of Eastern European countries had elucidated the treachery of Communism and that Italians had to decide between “Bolshevik totalitarianism and sincerely democratic parties.”40

In the United States, the Czechoslovak coup assured the passage of the Marshall Plan. Truman urged a joint session of Congress to approve the plan, citing “the tragic death of the republic of Czechoslovakia” as well as the ongoing effort of a “Communist minority to take control” of Italy. Lawmakers voted in favor of the bill, and on April 3 Truman signed it into law at a high-profile ceremony, just fifteen days before Italy’s election.41

The Czechoslovak coup also alarmed the Roman Catholic Church, which, alongside the United States, had been influencing Italy’s election. Not only did the Vatican instruct its clergy to vote, but Church leaders also encouraged their followers, especially women and nuns, to turn out on Election Day in opposition to the Front.42 On March 10, Pope Pius XII issued a directive to priests. “In this grave moment,” he said, “it is your right and duty to draw the attention of the faithful to the extraordinary importance of the forthcoming elections.” All citizens who could vote, he stressed, must do so. “Anybody who abstains, especially because of laziness or cowardice, commits a grave sin—a mortal transgression.”43 The pope had “placed the whole weight and influence of the Catholic Church behind the Christian Democratic party,” The New York Times reported. On March 28, in his Easter address, the pope gave what the U.S. media described as “one of the most political speeches he has ever uttered.” Appearing in St. Peter’s Square, he told more than 150,000 worshippers that “the great hour of Christian conscience has struck.”44

The interests of Washington and the Vatican were aligned. Moscow saw only conspiracy. A leading Soviet newspaper reported that “the subversive activity of the Vatican is inspired in every way by American military authorities in Italy.” Knowing the Roman Catholic Church held immense influence in Italy, the Christian Democrats took advantage of its support. One of the party’s slogans was “God can see you in the secrecy of the election booth, but not Stalin.”45

The CIA, meanwhile, closely tracked this confluence of overt electoral interference. The agency recorded internally how the Vatican and the State Department were working against the Front. One CIA report said that “to assure the defeat of the Communists,” Dunn wanted America to send more supplies to Italy in support of De Gasperi’s government. Another explained that the State Department had recommended taking “every opportunity” to illustrate the “close support being given to the Italian people by the western powers.”46 When overt and covert mechanisms are deployed jointly, intelligence officers often study the former to enhance the latter.

Behind the scenes, CIA officers—with limited time, experience, and tradecraft—were interfering in the election covertly. By the end of 1947, the CIA had dispatched a special operations team to Italy. “We very hastily moved to support the Christian Democrats,” F. Mark Wyatt, who participated in this effort, said in retirement. In January 1948, Defense Secretary James Forrestal pushed Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA director, to expand operations in Italy.47 The CIA’s methods had to be unattributable; otherwise, they would backfire. “The United States saw fit to conduct a covert operation in Italy,” Clark Clifford, then the White House counsel, later testified. “Had they done so openly, it not only would have been counterproductive, but I think it would have assured a Communist victory.”48

What the CIA did in Italy during those crucial months has long been kept secret. More than seven decades later, many files relating to the operation remain classified. Inside the CIA, however, the History Staff has full access to these documents. The head of this department is David Robarge, who became the CIA’s Chief Historian in 2005. Robarge spends much of his time writing classified histories based on classified sources. One summer morning in 2019, he met me at a coffee shop near Langley, Virginia, where we spent several hours discussing the CIA’s history of electoral interference, including and especially in Italy.

As our conversation progressed, it became clear that the CIA had been intimately involved with overt tactics that had appeared spontaneous. When asked about the makeup of the CIA’s operation, Robarge cited initiatives that ostensibly had nothing to do with the agency: “the letter-writing campaign from the U.S.” and “working with the church.” In March 1948, an NSC directive had said to “immediately initiate in this country … [a] letter-writing campaign by private citizens, regarding the political issues in Italy.”49 But still, wouldn’t the letter-writing initiative have happened without the CIA? “I can’t say whether anybody would have either come up with the idea or reinforced it the way we did,” Robarge responded, since the CIA was “facilitating it through American contacts, principally the church, but also the ethnic communities in New York and Boston and elsewhere.”50

The same went for the Roman Catholic Church’s propaganda campaign. The church opposed the Communist Party on its own initiative, Robarge said, but the CIA “piggybacked” on its efforts by “making them more expansive [and] more robust.” To Robarge, it was this synergy between the overt and the covert that made the CIA’s operation more effective than any funding from the Soviet Union. “Ours is much more tactically savvy because of the tradecraft,” he explained. “The Communists did not have a letter-writing campaign, the Communists did not work with the Catholic Church, etc., etc. You can just baldly see the differences.”

And then, of course, there was cash—lots of it. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets,” F. Mark Wyatt has said. With these funds, Christian Democrats and other anti-Front politicians could better reach and manipulate voters. “We bought that election,” Donald Gregg, who worked for the CIA from 1951 to 1982, told me. “It is a classic example of how really interfering in another country’s political system can pay off, if you’re convinced that it needs to be done, as we were.”51

Some historians have claimed that the CIA expended as much as $10 million interfering in Italy’s 1948 election (roughly $107 million in 2020 values), although no known source corroborates this figure. One report by the U.S. Congress in the mid-1970s pegged spending at just $1 million, far less. The truth, Robarge said, is in the middle. “It was several million,” he maintained. “It was a very high-priority operation and one that the U.S. was committed to seeing through.”52

Much of the propaganda that the CIA funded had a specific purpose: to frighten. “Mainly it was to scare the Italians into not voting for the Communists,” Robarge said, including by spreading disinformation. Some pieces of propaganda warned that the Communists would stage a coup d’état in Italy, as they had in Czechoslovakia. Others raised the specter of the Soviet military inside the country. “The point here was to get out the vote, in part by scaring people,” Robarge explained. “It was spending a lot of money, sending people to do the work to get people to vote: knock on doors, organize rallies to stir up pro-western voter centers, and scare people against the Communists.”53

In executing this operation, Wyatt claimed that the CIA worked directly with De Gasperi, the Italian prime minister. “Certainly, De Gasperi was witting and engaged with us,” Robarge confirmed. “He’s certainly aware the funding is coming in, he knows where it’s going, he’s approving its use and its distribution… . We haven’t recruited him, we don’t control him, but [there’s] a relationship.” The agency also collaborated with lower-ranking Christian Democratic officials. “You have an effective party with a ground structure, why not use it?” Robarge asked. The CIA relied on its party contacts, he explained, for “passing the money around, making sure it got into the right hands, letting us know about upcoming rallies, letting us know that they were in touch with certain media individuals, that kind of synchronization of activities.”54 The U.S. embassy was operating alongside the CIA. In the weeks preceding the vote, Dunn’s team functioned, by his own account, as a “political action committee” working to defeat the Front.55

The CIA focused on manipulating the psyches of Italian voters. Today, billions of people have uploaded their psyches onto the internet, exposing them to targeted manipulation. The platform is new, but the goal of shaping people’s views is not. For renowned diplomats like George Kennan, whose writings had provided a foundation for the strategy of containment, psychological tactics held immense promise.56 At a public lecture prior to Italy’s election, he said, “It would be a mistake to consider psychological measures as anything separate from the rest of diplomacy.”57

The CIA did have limits, though: Its officers focused on changing minds rather than changing actual ballots. The CIA has “hardly ever” altered votes directly, Robarge said, and the agency did not stuff ballot boxes or bribe election officials in Italy.58 With the CIA’s operational files still classified, some of the agency’s work has undoubtedly escaped the historical record. What is certain, though, is that the CIA enhanced overt tools, spread misleading and incendiary propaganda, and funneled millions of dollars into De Gasperi’s campaign.

But would it be enough? Because the CIA was influencing voters rather than altering votes, its work brought no guarantees. This uncertainty unnerved Kennan, who, during the Italian campaign, was serving as the State Department’s first-ever director of policy planning. On March 15, 1948, he sent Marshall, his boss, a top secret cable proposing even bolder action. “It would clearly be better that elections not take place at all than that Communists win in these circumstances,” he wrote. The message continued,

I question whether it would not be preferable for Italian Government to outlaw Communist Party and take strong action against it before elections. Communists would presumably reply with civil war… . This would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy; but we are getting close to the deadline and I think it might well be preferable to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula at one coup and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas.59

For Kennan, the question was how, not whether, to manipulate Italy’s democracy. His proposal—basically, to cancel the election—lacked the subtlety of electoral interference. His colleagues felt that such rash action would prove self-defeating. John Hickerson, a senior State Department official, scribbled onto Kennan’s memorandum the many reasons why he opposed this “drastic” and “unwise” recommendation. “Instead, U.S. Govt. should do everything it properly can to strengthen non-communist forces and parties,” Hickerson wrote, endorsing electoral interference anew.60 Kennan’s idea was a nonstarter, but it reflected Washington’s priority at the time: to defeat the Communists and maintain its influence over Italy, even if that meant violating the country’s electoral sovereignty.

Kennan’s letter points to a broader issue for interfering actors: the need for contingency planning. In any election that attracts foreign attention, the question lingers of what will come after the vote of interest. In this case, American officials feared that Italy’s Communists would claim in defeat that the race was “not free,” stage riots, and mount a coup d’état. Italians, too, braced for chaos. “There is no doubt that the Communists intend in the more or less distant future to plunge Italy into a frightful civil war,” the Tempo newspaper reported just before the election.61

There was also the possibility that the United States would stage a coup d’état if the Front prevailed. Kennan had already proposed canceling Italy’s election. In February, the left-wing l’Unità and Avanti! newspapers alleged that the Italian government intended to call off the contest. A CIA memorandum from March 1948 read that if the Front won, its “actual accession to power might be prevented by falsification of the returns or by force.” On Truman’s orders, the United States had been smuggling arms and supplies to the Italian military. “The CIA has its emergency plans,” Victor Marchetti, a Cold War–era CIA officer turned agency critic, later said, for if Italy’s leftist parties won a national election. “Support to Italian colonels would not be lacking.”62

Italy’s election had become a dual contest: one between the Front and the Christian Democrats, and the other between Moscow and Washington. TASS, the Soviet news agency, emphasized American “interference” in the election. From the other side of the world, The New York Times summed up the dynamic with the headline “The Great Issue in Italy: Russia or the U.S.” Inside Italy, this superpower competition had become a key campaign issue. Communist politicians warned that “every vote for De Gasperi is a vote for Truman,” while Christian Democrats retorted that “every vote for Togliatti is a vote for Stalin.” To increase turnout, the Vatican rescheduled church services so that its followers could get to the polls. Come Election Day on April 18, a remarkable 92 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots.63

In the end, it wasn’t even close. The Christian Democrats triumphed with 48.5 percent of the vote, compared with just 31 percent for the Front. “Most interpret results primarily as striking defeat for communism,” Dunn reported. And critically, the Front’s leaders announced that they would respect the results. (Soviet officials had, behind the scenes, discouraged Togliatti from resorting to violence.) The right-wing l’Ora newspaper ran the headline “No to Stalin!,” while The New York Times declared that the “U.S. has scored over Russia in worldwide battle.”64

Reactions were swift and emotional. Pope Pius XII announced his “profound joy.” Truman celebrated publicly. At a news conference, he said, “I know that free peoples everywhere will be encouraged by the outcome of the recent Italian elections.” A few weeks later, Italy received its first Marshall Plan delivery.65 Towns like Gravina reaped the benefits.

Members of the Italian Left fumed. Togliatti attributed his defeat to “the intervention of foreign powers and the Vatican,” while l’Unità accused the Catholic Church of manipulating its followers. Pivotal elections can divide a country, especially when a foreign actor involves itself in the contest. Much of America’s operation had been overt, exposing its hand and, in the process, polarizing Italy’s electorate. Many Front voters felt they had been tricked into participating in an unfair election.66

Some Americans, too, protested Washington’s interference. Just before the election, about eighty individuals, including a U.S. senator, had sent a joint telegram to Truman requesting “an end to all outside interference with democratic electoral procedure” in Italy. “The Italians are not a savage people who need to be taught what to do,” they wrote. “No American would tolerate Italian interference in American elections.” Foreign interference in a U.S. election, though, was unthinkable at the time. Washington was operating from a position of strength: As a well-established democracy, its elections seemed impenetrable.67

The most consequential reactions to De Gasperi’s victory unfolded in CIA headquarters. For America’s intelligence officers, the outcome had confirmed the value and potential of covert electoral interference. “It was very, very exciting,” Wyatt recalled. “I mean, we were euphoric: ‘We’ve won this one, and we’ll win others.’ ” Within the U.S. government, this operation became legend and inspiration. “Italy was always raised as one of the successes that we had staged,” said Bobby Inman, the CIA’s deputy director in 1981 and 1982. John Negroponte, the U.S. deputy national security adviser toward the end of the Cold War, likewise said, “The policy makers of the next generation, they all remembered Italy, and the threat of Communists taking over, and the huge effort we made to prevent that from happening, when we went in big-time to influence things.”68