Federico Umberto D'Amato (4 June 1919 – 1 August 1996)Carlo Lucarelli, ''Piazza Fontana'', Turin, Einaudi, 2007. p. 100 was an Italian secret agent, who led the Office for Reserved Affairs of the Ministry of Interior (Italy) from the 1950s till the 1970s, when the activity of the intelligence service was undercover and not publicly known.

Biography

D'Amato was born in

Marseille Marseille ( , , ; also spelled in English as Marseilles; oc, Marselha ) is the prefecture of the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône and capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Situated in the camargue region of southern Fra ...

, and during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

he worked for the US

Office of Strategic Services The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branc ...

. After the end of the conflict he was at the head of the North Atlantic Treaty Special Office, a link between

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two N ...

and the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

. At the end of World War II US intelligence recruited large numbers of officials from the Republic of Salò and from the Italian Special Forces, Decima MAS, with the help of D'Amato to operate in the newly founded Italian state. This recruitment program included prominent figures such as Prince Valerio Borghese, Pino Rauti and Licio Gelli, who are believed to have played a major role in the terrorist attacks in

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...

Italy. D'Amato's later contact with the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

was

James Jesus Angleton James Jesus Angleton (December 9, 1917 – May 11, 1987) was chief of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1974. His official position within the organization was Associate Deputy Director of Operations for ...

. He entered the Office for Reserved Affairs of the Italian of the Minister of Interior in 1957. In 1974, two days after the

Piazza della Loggia bombing The Piazza della Loggia bombing was a bombing that took place on the morning of 28 May 1974, in Brescia, Italy during an anti-fascist protest. The terrorist attack killed eight people and wounded 102. The bomb was placed inside a rubbish bin at t ...

, he was removed from the position and assigned to the boundary police, although he kept a strong influence on the office until the 1980s. For his activity as the office's director (1969-1974) he has been accused of sidetracking numerous investigations about the massacres occurred in that period. D'Amato was a member of Propaganda 2 (P2), a secret masonic lodge involved in numerous political and economical scandals in the 1970s. An expert of gastronomy, he held a column in the weekly ''

L'espresso ''L'Espresso'' () is an Italian weekly news magazine. It is one of the two most prominent Italian weeklies; the other is ''Panorama''. Since 2022 it has been published by BFC Media. History and profile One of Italy's foremost newsmagazines, '' ...

'', under the pseudonym of Federico Godio. He appeared in a BBC documentary about

Operation Gladio Operation Gladio is the codename for clandestine " stay-behind" operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union (WU), and subsequently by NATO and the CIA, in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies durin ...

in 1992.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:D'Amato, Federico Umberto 1919 births 1996 deaths People from Marseille

Biography

See also

References