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Partisan Action Groups (Gruppi di Azione Partigiana, GAP)

In the quagmire of terrorist and subversive groups, the relationship among them frequently eludes classification. However, certain asppets of this pattern are relatively simple to analyze. Residual assets (manpower, bases, documents, weapons, etc.) of no long-er viable groups have been absorbed by more dynamic ones throughout the history of the terrorist wave. At the same time, there have been cases of militants passing from one terrorist group to another.

The massacre of Fosse Ardeatine took place in Italy on 23-03-1944, after 33 German soldiers (members of an SS military police battalion from South Tyrol) were killed when members of the Italian Resistance set off a bomb close to their column, and attacked the soldiers with firearms and grenades while they were marching along Via Rasella, in Rome. This attack was led by the Gruppi di Azione Partigiana (GAP).

German Commander Herbert Kappler in Rome quickly compiled a list of 320 prisoners to be killed. Kappler voluntarily added ten more names to the list when the 33rd German died after the partisan attack. The total number of people executed at the Fosse Ardeatine was 335, mostly Italian. The largest cohesive group among those executed were the members of Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag), a non-mainstream communist (Trotskyist) military resistance group, along with more than 70 Jews. On 24 March, led by SS officers Karl Hass and Erich Priebke, the victims were killed inside the Ardeatine caves in groups of five.

The new Partisan Action Groups (Gruppi di Azione Partigiana, GAP), named for the World War II prototype, was a small organization which existed in northern Italy from the late 1960's to 1972. It was financed by the millionaire, publisher and Communist revolutionary ideologist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli as part of his plan to conduct partisan-style field-and-mountain warfare to preempt an alleged impending Fascist takeover of the government. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the Italian terrorist, was blown apart trying to attach a bomb to power lines outside of Milan. A police investigation revealed that he had made 22 visits to Czechoslovakia under a false name.

Along with other sundry elements, GAP absorbed the October XXII Circle (Circolo XXII Ottobre), another small group in existence in northern Italy from 1969 to 1971, made up of Communist hard-liners and former partisans who were no longer satisfied with the official Italian Communist Party. Following Feltrinelli's accidental death in 1972, the GAP was in turn absorbed by the BR, which subsequently took over the residual assets of the Armed Proletarian Nuclei (Nuclei Armati Proletari, NAP), a terrorist group with southern Italian roots active from 1974 to 1977 and bent on serving as the operational revolutionary link between prison inmates and the proletarians on the outside, as well as a portion of the remaining assets of PL.

Furthermore, the birth of individual BR columns entailed, at least in part, the absorption of local subversive groups. For example, the Rome column, founded in the second half of the 1970's, initially acquired the assets of the Communist Armed Formations (Formazioni Armate Comuniste, FAC, a splinter of the now defunct extraparliamentary party Workers' Power) and later on elements of the Communist Combat UniLs (Unita Combattenti Comuniste, UCC, another now presumably neutralized offshoot of the extra-parliamentary left with a propensity for both political and common crime as well as links with organized crime groups in the region of Calabria).

In addition to absorption cases, there were several instances of terrorists of the left leaving one group to join another. The most notorious case was that of Corrado Alullni, a member of the historic nucleus (an original member) of the BR, who moved on to PL.

In 1971, the BR and the GAP contemplated a merger, but this plan was discarded because of the fundamental difference between the BU's urban-warfare orientation and the GAP's preference for more classical partisan operations. In 1976 a series of joint BR/NAP actions was launched against police barracks and vehicles in Pisa, Rho, Genoa, Turin, Rome, Naples, and Florence. In 1978, while the late Aldo Moro, then Christian Democratic Party President and former Prime Minister, was a captive of the BR, PL inquired as to the feasibility of submitting questions to the elder statesman. Even more numerous were those cases involving the joint perpetration of lesser terrorist crimes by minor formations that proliferated particularly in the period 1977-80.

In connection with this pattern, it is worth noting that the terrorist organizations of the left exercise varying degrees of influence on one another. The GAP and the October XXII Circle included common criminals in their ranks. The NAP's aim was to politicize the prisons and their inmates. After these three organizations were totally crippled by successful law enforcement operations, the BR not only added to their own objectives the specific mission of the NAP, but also began to recruit politicized common criminals. The NAP, PL, and all the minor groups emulated the BR's ambush and/or hit-and-run targeting techniques. One NAP kidnaping, that of Supreme Court Judge Di Gennaro, was modeled after the BR's political abduction pattern of the time. Mass leg shooting, inaugurated by PL on December 11, 1979, was quickly paralleled by the BR on April 1, 1980. Many more examples could be cited.