Armando Cossutta (2 September 1926 – 14 December 2015) was an Italian communist politician. After World War II, Cossutta became one of the leading members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), representing the most pro-Soviet Union tendency;[1] his belief in that country as the leading Communist state led him to criticize Enrico Berlinguer. Later in life, although he did not regret the choice he made, Cossutta considered that he was mistaken in opposing Berlinguer.[2]
Cossutta was targeted for decades by political opponents, including allegations that he personally received Soviet money and of being a KGB spy, both of which had been viewed with scepticism or were dismissed in two parliamentary commissions (one by the centre-right coalition in 2002, the other by the centre-left coalition in 2006) about the Mitrokhin Archive, one of the main sources of the allegations, which was also viewed with scepticism; a Supreme Court of Cassation ruling held that it was defamatory to refer to him as a Soviet spy, and awarded him damages.[1][3] Cossutta never renounced communism. He never hid or regretted his role, and claimed its legitimacy in a bipolar world, in which all involved parties, from the United States to the Soviet Union, had their international lenders.[8]
After World War II, Cossutta became part of the leadership group within the PCI, of which he embodied the more pro-Soviet current,[3] which made him a privileged interlocutor of the Moscow nomenklatura, to which he was a highly esteemed ambassador for the PCI.[1] His tendency to consider the Soviet Union as the leading state of the international Communist movement led him often and willingly to argue with Enrico Berlinguer, especially when the latter came to hold the position of general secretary.[3] In the 1990s, he engaged with some self-criticism with those from the il manifesto group that he expelled from the party in 1969, and accepted some of their objetions to his pro-Soviet views; in this sense, Cossutta's pro-Sovietism came from the fear that condemnation would have put an end to any possible alternatives to capitalism, and that rather than representing full support or praise of real socialism, it was a way to keep the party, while respecting liberal democracy, revolutionary and thus maintain the objective and possibility of a post-capitalist, socialist society.[10] About the expulsion of il manifesto members, he said: "But with the rules of the party, expulsion was inevitable."[3]
A collaborator of L'Unità and uninterruptedly a parliamentarian from 1972 to 2008 (first as a senator, then from 1994 to 2006 as a deputy, and then again as a senator), Cossutta held many political positions.[1] He was city councilor in Milan since 1951; he was a municipal and then regional secretary of the PCI (in the first case in Milan, in the second in Lombardy), and was also a member from 1959 of the National Directorate and from 1964 of the National Secretariat. Cossutta's first assignment in the party had been that of city secretary of the PCI in Sesto San Giovanni when he was 19.[8] The left wing of the party represented by Cossutta, named after him (cossuttiana),[11][12] also consisted of various ex-workerist militants and he himself was close to the demands of their movement, even though he never detached himself from the PCI.[13] He denied or diminished his own faction, and said: "Cossuttismo does not exist, and if it does exist it is only Togliattismo. It means one step after another, realizing the most advanced ideal aspirations in each step. And without unnecessary propaganda. In a word, the PCI. A great and unrepeatable reality. To be rethought, of course, in other forms.[1]
About the 1956 invasion of Hungary, Cossutta recalled: "Of course, it was a tragedy and it was suffering for many, but Togliatti could not have taken a different position. There was the Iron Curtain and it was not we Communists who coined this expression, but Churchill. There was a balance of terror, a minor thing was enough to trigger a disaster."[1] He added: "I was young then and as a Milanese member I shared the party line. The Hungarian Communists were the first to make mistakes."[1] About Cuba and Castroism, Cossutta expressed his hope for a full-democratic system. At the same time, he praised Fidel Castro for the work he did under difficult conditions. He said: "But I don't forget that Castro himself did great things under dramatic conditions, like the 40-year embargo. In 1973 I spent a whole night with him, I brought him the flag of the Oltrepò Garibaldi Brigade as a gift, the one that captured Mussolini. Fidel stayed for hours asking me questions."[1]
During the strategy of tensions and Years of Lead between the 1960s and 1980s, which saw attempted anti-communist, right-wing, or military coups like Piano Solo and Golpe Borghese, Cossutta wrote an editorial in Rinascita directed by Gerardo Chiaromonte, entitled "The Comrades Know", with which he meant to explain what should have happened in the event of a coup or subversion.[14] In 2010, he recalled: "We had in mind the gravity and delicacy of the moment. Thus it was that we revived what had existed since the Liberation, i.e. the mythical 'order service' which had concrete tasks: to defend the headquarters, as the note from the secret services says, the houses of comrades, during demonstrations to avoid infiltrations. Our order service did not allow it."[14]
In 1981, Cossutta opposed the Eurocommunist perspective promoted by Berlinguer, who had stated that the progressive driving force of the October Revolution had run out and that the PCI should have severed its historical relations with the Communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc.[1] Apart from the merits, Cossutta criticized the method by which this political line was arrived at, which he defined as lo strappo (the tear),[1][3] due to its gestation extraneous to internal discussions and the history of the party itself. Later, without regrets, Cossutta declared that he was wrong in going against Berlinguer.[2] In discussing his never-repent attitude and Pietro Ingrao, he said: "I don't like this sprinkling one's head with ashes, crucify oneself, flogging those who, with hindsight, Pietro believes are their own mistakes and who also end up appearing to be mistakes of the PCI. Repentance has never been my vocation, I don't understand those who feel the need to repent of everything in order to question everything again."[1] He added: "I've made mistakes too. I have many to reproach myself for, I too am ready to take the scourge, the ashes, the hair shirt, but if I think back to the great choices in my eyes they still appear right today."[1]
Communist Refoundation Party
With the crisis that hit the PCI in the years of the riflusso (reflux), and the process of self-criticism that it undertook as a result, Cossutta distinguished himself within the internal debate as a firm supporter of the historical identity of the PCI,[3] and thus opposed the more innovative tendencies who then moved under the secretariat of Achille Occhetto and that led to the dissolution of the PCI.[1] The second motion, which was signed by Alessandro Natta and Ingrao,[3] and also included supporters of Berlinguer, supported modernization but was opposed to renouncing Marxism, while the third motion, which was more orthodox and opposed the PCI's dissolution, was led by Cossutta and his supporters; those two motions later unified but were not enough to overcome the Occhetto-led first motion that garnered the majority.[13]
In February 1991, with the establishment of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and the effective dissolution of the PCI, to which Cossutta and a few other members like Sergio Garavini and Lucio Libertini [it] were opposed, he founded, together with Garavini, Libertini, and other remnants of the old left-wing factions of the PCI, the Movement for the Communist Refoundation (MRC).[1] In December 1991, the MRC was joined by Proletarian Democracy (PDUP) and other minor left-wing parties,[15] and led to the establishment of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), of which Cossutta held the position of president from 1992 to 1998 and with which he was elected deputy in 1994.[16][17] Following the 1996 Italian general election, in which he was re-elected a member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies, the PRC was part of the majority that supported the first Prodi government.[3] As a deputy, he was a member of the Constitutional Affairs Commission (1994–2001),[18] a member of the bicameral Commission for Institutional Reforms (1996–2001), the group leader of the Fourth Defense Commission (2001–2006), and a member of the Committee for Parliamentary Diplomacy (2001–2006).[19][20]
Party of the Italian Communists
In 1998, Fausto Bertinotti, the then secretary of the PRC, withdrew confidence in Romano Prodi's government, and caused its subsequent crisis and fall. Cossutta, who disagreed with this choice and more generally with the political profile assumed by Bertinotti,[1] decided to detach himself from the party and to found, together with other exiles close to his own area, such as Oliviero Diliberto and Marco Rizzo, the Party of Italian Communists (PdCI);[21][22] it is recounted that Cossutta did so through a fax sent by Pro Loco di Bonassola, near La Spezia.[3] The PdCI participated to the subsequent birth of the first D'Alema government.[3] Cossutta then held the office of president of the PdCI and senator.[23][24] About this, he said that he did it "in the interest of the country".[1] In 2000, he participated, along with other politicians like Walter Veltroni, at the Gay Pride in Rome, where he took the opportunity to demonstrate his position in favour of same-sex marriage.[25] Going back to the World War II years, as well as the fall of Prodi's government and the establishment of a new one led by Massimo D'Alema, he said: "I fought fascism, I determined the survival of a communist force after the end of the PCI, I served a split to save the first left-wing government in the history of Italy. And if after Prodi's fall we had gone to the polls, my party would have taken off and Bertinotti's would have almost disappeared. However, the right would have won and Berlusconi would have gone up to the Quirinale. Hence my sacrifice."[1]
From 1999 to 2004, Cossutta was a member of the European Parliament. During his role as a member of the European Parliament, he was member of the Commission for Constitutional Affairs (21 July 1999 – 14 January 2002), member of the Delegation to the European Union–Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee (29 September 1999 – 14 January 2002), member of the Commission for Constitutional Affairs (17 January 2002 – 19 July 2004), and member of the Delegation for the Relations with Australia and New Zealand (7 July 2002 – 19 July 2004). He was also a substitute member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defense Policy (21 July 1999 – 14 January 2002) and of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market (17 January 2002 – 19 July 2004).[26]
In 2004, Cossutta published his autobiography entitled Una storia comunista (A Communist History).[3] In the 2006 Italian general election, he was elected senator for the list Together with the Union, which the PdCI created for the election to the Senate of the Republic in the Emilia-Romagna region. During the second Prodi government, he was a member of the Third Commission for Foreign Affairs, Emigration, from 6 June 2006 to 28 April 2008;[27] in his earlier senatorial terms, he held many parliamentary positions.[28] In June 2006, opposed to the political line taken by Diliberto, Cossutta resigned from the position of president of the PdCI.[1] On 21 April 2007, Cossutta presented his resignation from the membership of the party, as he no longer renewed his card, and effectively left active politics.[29][30] Despite this, from time to time, he was seen in the Senate's restaurant.[1] In 2008, he took side against what he described as the cultural revisionism that, in his view, was tended to obscure the anti-fascist resistance, the Italian Civil War, and the Liberation of Italy.[1] He was also opposed to the naming of a street in Rome after the founder of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, Giorgio Almirante, whom he described as "a politician who was not simply a member of the First Republic but a partisan shooter and supporter of racism."[1]
Later years
For the 2008 Italian general election, Cossutta said that he voted for the Democratic Party (PD).[31] In 2009, asked by Fabrizio D'Esposito whether he was no longer a communist, Cossutta replied: "I was, am and will remain a communist."[1] He expressed one regret to D'Esposito, namely the lack of communist representation, and that his vote for the PD did not change his views. He said: "And what should I regret? I was among the builders of a large party. Of course, we are small compared to the founders, to the generation of Palmiro Togliatti. I'm celebrating my 80th birthday, but at 19 I found myself secretary in Sesto San Giovanni where the PCI had 18,000 members in a huge concentration of workers."[1] Among the leaders who guided the growth of the party, Cossutta named Giorgio Napolitano in Naples, Emanuele Macaluso in Palermo, Alfredo Reichlin in Rome, Ugo Pecchioli [it] in Turin, and Guido Fanti in Bologna.[1]
In 2009, Cossutta became vice-president of the National Association of Partisans of Italy (ANPI).[3] Until his death in 2015, Cossutta remained a committed communist and faithful to the October Revolution. He said: "In Italy there are millions of communists who no longer feel represented. We have to shoot ourselves with this poor left."[1] Despite political differences, Cossutta was one of the few parliamentarians and First Italian Republic figures, including Giulio Andreotti, who was respected by political opponents, who shaked his hands or saluted respectfully.[1]
Post-Cold War allegations and controversies
In 1991, the Russian journalist Alexander Evlakhov, citing documents from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, stated that Cossutta had received $824,000 million from Russia for propaganda reasons during the 1980s.[32] Cossutta dismissed these claims, saying that he had never received money from the Soviet Union.[33][34] In 1999, Cossutta appeared on a list of alleged Italian KGB spies.[35] In 2000, he sued Silvio Berlusconi, the then prime minister of Italy, for slander and defamation, asking for ₤100 billion in compensation. In a Porta a Porta broadcast, he had stated that "Cossutta managed armed gangs in the post-war years and had continued until a few years ago to keep an armed organization in Italy."[36] He later retired the lawsuit after Berlusconi issued a statement of retraction and apology.[37]
A parliamentary commission to investigate the allegations, among others, was instituted in 2002.[38] Although it was led by the centre-right coalition majority, which instrumentalized it and used the contents of the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of handwritten notes, primary sources, and official documents that were secretly made, smuggled, and hidden by the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin,[39] to attack its political opponents and delayed the final report, it was sceptical or dismissive of the claims; criticized as politically motivated, as it was focused mainly on allegations against opposition figures,[40] it was shut down in 2006 without having developed any new concrete evidence beyond the original information in the Mitrokhin Archive.[41] A subsequent parliamentary commission, this time led by the centre-left coalition, was established in 2006 to determinate whether the allegations were politically motivated. The 2006 parliamentary commission concluded: "Considering the British precautions that have been analyzed above, and which led to the elimination of many surnames and to making many events indecipherable and many characters unrecognizable, one can only speak, in the case of Cossutta – so clearly identified and accused, and moreover without the use of documents from the Mitrokhin Archive but on the basis of documentation, however distorted, of journalistic origin – of authentic persistence."[42]
The main sources of the allegations were Evlakhov, Mitrokhin and Andrew Christopher, and Stephen Hellman,[43] who based his claims on Evlakhov (who said that he never had the documents he was referring to but that he had seen them) and supported Occhetto's turn in 1989 and opposed Cossutta.[44] According to the 2006 commission, the case of Cossutta was different from others because it was alleged that SISMI, Italy's secret service, engaged in a cover up;[45] in fact, SISMI delivered news articles making the allegations to the British secret services, who were in the process of writing a book about it. All these newspapers, from Avanti!, La Padania, and Il Giornale, to Il Giorno and Il Tempo, were opposed to Cossutta and the centre-left government.[46] In addition, there were many changes between the draft and Hellman's book, and in the footnotes, regarding Cossutta, who was variously referred to as "the Soviet loyalist on the Directorate" and "a KGB informant on the Directorate".[47]
Especially during the years of the First Italian Republic, Cossutta had been accused of being a "confidential contact of the KGB" in Italy.[48][49] Despite the conclusions of the 2002 and 2006 parliamentary commissions (Mitrokhin Commission), these allegations continued to be reiterated by some media even after his death. Il Tempo called him a "man of the KGB", and wrote that he traveled "frequently to the USSR to develop strategies against the deviationist drift" of Berlinguer.[50] In November 2009, Cossutta was awarded €30,000 for moral damages as a result of the defamatory content of an article by Roberto D'Agostino [it], the founder of Dagospia [it],[51] in which it was alleged that he was involved in the 1973 attempt on Berlinguer's life.[52] In January 2015, the publisher of Libero in the legal entity Editoriale Libero s.r.l., the director Maurizio Belpietro, and the author of the 2003 article were definitively sentenced by Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation to compensate Cossutta to €50,000 for moral damages as a result of the defamatory content of an article in which the newspaper,[1] "in relation to the so-called Mitrokhin case, identified him as a spy for the Soviet Union".[53]
Personal life and death
Cossutta was married to Emilia Clemente, with whom he had been linked for about seventy years and who died on 8 August 2015.[54] Together, they had three children: Anna, Dario, and Maura, who was also active in politics as a parliamentarian.[3] He died on 14 December 2015 at the San Camillo Hospital in Rome, where he had been hospitalized for some time, at the age of 89.[55][56] He was buried in the PCI's resting place of the Campo Verano cemetery. In 2016, Milan's comune decided to inscribe his name, among fourteen other personalities, in the city pantheon inside Milan's Cimitero Monumentale.[57] His nephew, Simon Cossutta, is a member of the PD, and in 2015 was part of Gianni Cuperlo's and left-wing opposition within the party to the then PD secretary Matteo Renzi.[1]
Cossutta was an atheist.[58] He was also a supporter of Inter Milan,[59][60] and was one of the founders, alongside Ignazio La Russa and Roberto Zaccaria [it], of the Inter Club Montecitorio in the Italian Parliament.[61][62] In 1998, he was imitated by Teo Teocoli during a broadcast of Quelli che il calcio. Cossutta appreciated the comedian's sketches and called him to congratulate him.[63]
Works
I problemi del finanziamento del partito e la campagna per la stampa comunista. Rome: Iter. 1974.
Il finanziamento pubblico dei partiti. Roma: Editori Riuniti. 1974.
Decentramento e partecipazione. Iniziativa dei comunisti per l'attuazione della legge sui consigli di circoscrizione. With Marcello Stefanini and Renato Zangheri. Rome: Editori Riuniti. 1977.
I comunisti nel governo locale. With Enrico Berlinguer. Rome: Editori Riuniti. 1978.
Il modo nuovo di governare. Rome: Edizioni delle autonomie. 1980.
Lo strappo. Usa, Urss, movimento operaio di fronte alla crisi internazionale. Milan: A. Mondadori. 1982.
Dissenso e unità. Dibattito politico nel PCI dal XVI al XVII congresso. Milan: Teti. 1986.
Vecchio e nuovo corso. Milan: Vangelista. 1988.
Una storia comunista. With Gianni Montesano. Milan: Rizzoli. 2004. ISBN88-17-00430-8.
^Castellini, Luciana (16 December 2015). "Armando Cossutta, carissimo avversario". Il manifesto (in Italian). Retrieved 19 July 2023. ... despite the harshness of our expulsion, to which the group of comrades who were inspired by Cossutta gave a substantial contribution, mutual esteem has remained. Which allowed us to find ourselves together, committed on the same front, starting from the start of the process of dissolution of the PCI, in 1989. ... Even today I wonder the why of his pro-Sovietism, which he himself rethought when in the early 1990s he came one day to the editorial staff of [il] manifesto to discuss it calmly, recognizing the validity of our objections which had instead only been hastily condemned. It is a question that concerns the entire PCI, even if the 'Cossuttian' current protracted its loyalty for a long time, in controversy with the break that Berlinguer had instead made in 1981. I believe that more than a judgment on the merits of that socialism already since the 1960s so marked by 'Brezhnevism', it was a question of the fear that, in condemning that experience, the horizon of otherness would disappear in the large body of Italian communists, the awareness that despite acceptance by part of the PCI of the rules of the representative democratic system, its full inclusion in its institutions, the strategic objective had not been lost: the construction of an alternative society to capitalism. A need that perhaps he felt the most for having been in charge of the policy of the party's local bodies for years, which he oriented towards the most reckless moderate alliances. In short, the link with Moscow was for him a sort of security policy, a certification of the persistence of a revolutionary identity.
^"Cossuttiano". Neologismi (in Italian). 2008. Retrieved 21 July 2023 – via Treccani.
^"Cossuttista". Neologismi (in Italian). 2008. Retrieved 21 July 2023 – via Treccani.
^Castellini, Luciana (16 December 2015). "Armando Cossutta, carissimo avversario". Il manifesto (in Italian). Retrieved 19 July 2023. Many years later, moreover, in the first phase of the life of Communist Refoundation, when a strong agreement was reached between Armando Cossutta (not with all his followers) and the former PDUP comrades who had entered that party, on the connotations that the new formation should have, there was no dissent on the political document prepared for the founding Congress, in which the distance from the Soviet experience was clear. (Not the cancellation of the importance of the October Revolution, as the PDS then hastened to do, which it was good – he reaffirmed – that it had existed, even though 'it had exhausted its [progressive] driving force', to quote Berlinguer's phrase).
^Marroni, Stefano (13 October 1991). "La guerra dei rubli". La Repubblica (in Italian). Archived from the original on 21 February 2014. Retrieved 19 July 2023.
^"Documento conclusivo; sull'attività svolta e sui risultati dell'inchiesta"(PDF) (in Italian). Italian Parliament. 23 March 2006. p. 114. Retrieved 19 July 2023. On 13 October 1991, 'La Repubblica' published a sharp letter of denial from Cossutta himself, who stated that he had 'never received anything – I mean nothing – either in cash or in checks or in any other way from and on behalf of Soviet exponents or persons.' Evidently, however, the denial in '[La] Republica' did not interest either Professor Hellman or the Commission, because it has not been talked about since then. Just as the extensive interview that at the time Cossutta gave to Correre della sera (25 October 1991) in which he explained that in particular a Soviet loan to 'Paese sera' had taken place at the request of Enrico Belinguer's secretary, Antonio Tato. After that, for both Hellman and Andrew-Mitrokhin and the Commission, only what Evlakhov said counted.
^"Forza Italia, Berlusconi – Diffamazione querela rettifica". Segnalo.it (in Italian). 20 March 2002. Retrieved 19 July 2023. What follows is the text written by the Prime Minister to retract the accusations made against Armando Cossutta when, during an episode of Porta a Porta, he defined the current president of the Italian Communists as an organizer of armed gangs. Cossutta agreed to withdraw the lawsuit on condition that Berlusconi, in addition to writing the text of the retraction, published it for a fee in some important newspapers. The Hon. Silvio Berlusconi in the television broadcast 'Porta a Porta' of April 2000 declared that the Hon. Armando Cossutta 'managed armed gangs in the distant post-war years and had continued until a few years ago to keep an armed organization in Italy.' Following the legal action brought, the Hon. Berlusconi made it clear that these statements were a consequence of the exasperated electoral climate existing at the time and that it must be irrefutably excluded, also on the basis of the subsequent verification of historical, judicial, and parliamentary sources, that the Hon. Cossetta of such activities. The Hon. Berlusconi was keen to confirm the sentiments of esteem he always had towards the Hon. Cossutta whose life was entirely dedicated to the creation of a democratic regime in Italy and to the defense of democracy. The Hon. Cossutta, following this clarification, remitted the lawsuit.
^"Commissione parlamentare d'inchiesta concernente il 'dossier Mitrokhin' e l'attività d'intelligence italiana"(PDF) (in Italian). Italian Parliament. 29 September 2004. p. 36. Retrieved 19 July 2023. In the final part of the proposed report, a certain parallelism is mentioned between certain political events that took place between 1995 and 1999 and the publication, or rather the non-publication, the inertia, in the face of the arrival of what was reported in the documentation. In particular, attention is paid to the attitude of the honourable Armando Cossutta, who, together with an important part of the party to which he belonged, made significant changes in his political position, being decisive, first of all for the continuation of the Dini government and, subsequently, for the birth of the D'Alema government.
^Getty, J. Arch (2001). "Review of The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB". The American Historical Review. 106 (2). Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association: 684–685. doi:10.2307/2651786. ISSN0002-8762. JSTOR2651786. Mitrokhin was a self-described loner with increasingly anti-Soviet views ... Maybe such a potentially dubious type (in KGB terms) really was able freely to transcribe thousands of documents, smuggle them out of KGB premises, hide them under his bed, transfer them to his country house, bury them in milk cans, make multiple visits to British embassies abroad, escape to Britain, and then return to Russia, and carry the voluminous work to the west, all without detection by the KGB ... It may all be true. But how do we know?
^"Documento conclusivo; sull'attività svolta e sui risultati dell'inchiesta"(PDF) (in Italian). Italian Parliament. 23 March 2006. p. 115. Retrieved 19 July 2023. And as for Hellman, he thought well of transforming the 'personally' affirmed by Evlakhov into 'into the pockets', which had a very different meaning because it could suggest that Cossutta had pocketed that money out of private interest. In other words, it was a substantial (and politically oriented) forgery by this Canadian political scientist, then taken up verbatim by Andrew–Mitrokhin.
^"Documento conclusivo; sull'attività svolta e sui risultati dell'inchiesta"(PDF) (in Italian). Italian Parliament. 23 March 2006. p. 116. Retrieved 19 July 2023. Both in the draft and in the Italian and English text, after those quotation marks there is a note stating that the sentence comes from an essay by Stephen Hellman published in an English book of 1992 (The Difficult Birth of the Democratic Party of the Left, in Italian Politics. A Review, Pinter, London 1992, pp. 80 and 86). And it's true, the phrase comes exactly from there. Stephen Hellman was then and still is a professor at York University, Toronto. The essay was dedicated to Occhetto's 'turn', which had led to the transformation of the Italian Communist Party into the PDS, a turn towards which Cossutta had been hostile. Hellman, for his part, instead sided completely with Occhetto. As can be seen from the footnote to the aforementioned passage, Hellman relied on the statements of the journalist Alexandr Evlakhov released on 11 October 1991, according to which the honourable Cossutta 'personally' (i.e. 'in person ', not out of self-interest) had received some money from a KGB agent. Moreover, Evlakhov himself also declared that he did not physically have the documents he referred to, but that he had seen them 'with his eyes'.
^"Documento conclusivo; sull'attività svolta e sui risultati dell'inchiesta"(PDF) (in Italian). Italian Parliament. 23 March 2006. pp. 113–114. Retrieved 19 July 2023. Among them we mention in particular that of the president of the [2002] Commission, Paolo Guzzanti, who sent a letter to 'Corriere della sera', published on 29 July 2004, in which he maintained that for the honourable Cossutta the SISMI, following the directives of Government, decided to carry out a sensational 'white washing' on Mitrokhin's book which accused him of pocketing the money intended for the party.' In the meantime, what has simply been 'forgotten' so far is that that sentence – which in the book, according to the Italian exegetes, would have been removed on the recommendation of SISMI – was not Andrew–Mitrokhin's. The sentence, on the other hand, was from a specific 'commentator' ('observer' in the Italian ed.), of whom Andrew and Mitrokhin in fact spoke and who they quoted in highly visible quotation marks.
^"Documento conclusivo; sull'attività svolta e sui risultati dell'inchiesta"(PDF) (in Italian). Italian Parliament. 23 March 2006. pp. 115–116. Retrieved 19 July 2023. Immediately after the passage regarding Cossutta's 'pockets' that we have just considered, and therefore in the text, in the book with respect to the 'draft' 5 lines against Cossutta were added ex novo (and complete with a new note) with data on dollars of the alleged loans received in 1985–87 (p. 390 English ed. and p. 374 Italian ed.). As stated in the footnote, these were data taken from two newspaper articles (Il Giorno and Il Tempo of 30 April 1998) and which reported on the funding of the CPSU to the PCI, and in particular to Cossutta, passed by the prosecutor of Moscow to that of Rome. Now, precisely those articles, together with three others (from the newspapers 'L'Avanti!', 'La Padania', 'Il Giornale', all, like 'Il Giorno' and '[Il] Tempo', hostile to Cossutta and the Government of centre-left) were requested by the British Service and delivered by SISMI on 12 June 1998. At that point, as we know, SISMI knew perfectly well that the British were preparing a book and therefore could at least suspect that those articles would be used there, that is, in a published text.
^"Documento conclusivo; sull'attività svolta e sui risultati dell'inchiesta"(PDF) (in Italian). Italian Parliament. 23 March 2006. p. 113. Retrieved 19 July 2023. The case of Armando Cossutta ... is radically different from those just considered – indeed opposite – because in this case it was not at all, as has been stated in an undocumented or irresponsible way, a 'bleaching' in the transition from the 'draft' to the book – which had no reason for being accomplished – but rather, on the contrary, for a worsening of the judgment on him. ... 1) In one passage of the book, with respect to the draft, the surname of Cossutta, defined as 'the Soviet loyalist on the Directorate' was removed and replaced with the anonymous indication, taken from report no. 132, which listed him as 'a KGB informant on the Directorate'. It is difficult to say whether it was a better qualification (because it cannot be referred to him with certainty) or worse (because it attributes to him the title of 'informant', even if it was not difficult then, from the context, to trace his name). In any case it should be remembered that Andrew himself, presenting his book in Italy, has excluded that Cossutta could be considered a 'real and proper agent', or rather 'a fifth column of the Soviet regime in Italy'. 2) Another explicit reference to Cossutta is further on in the 'draft', where we read: 'It soon became clear that if Soviet funds has been channeled into Italy, they went through the hands, and sometimes directly into the pockets of, Cossutta.' In the book, on the corresponding page, 390 (374 of the Italian ed.), the phrase 'and sometimes directly into the pockets of' does not appear and is replaced by ellipsis. It is a detail referred to several times and in a scandalous way both during the work of the Commission and above all in interventions in the press.
