04.12.15
Before the war, Churchill offered Il Duce a deal. After the war, British intelligence tried to destroy their correspondence. Years later, a mystery man offered them to me.
It was a gruesome end for the fascist dictator who had once dominated Italy. The corpses of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were hung upside down on meat hooks in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. Seventy years ago this month, Mussolini had tried to escape to Switzerland in a convoy of German trucks, but it was intercepted by Italian communist partisans while it was weaving its way along one of the most ravishingly beautiful landscapes in Italy, the western shores of Lake Como.
Just who killed Mussolini remains contentious in Italy, with many theories still unresolved. But there is no disputing that he was executed by machine gun fire while standing against a wall of the Villa Belmonte in a small village near Lake Como, according to most accounts by a communist partisan commander, on the orders of the communist leadership.
Whatever the truth, the death of Il Duce set off instant alarms in the British security services. Somewhere in the Italian archives were copies of correspondence between Winston Churchill and Mussolini. When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 he tried, in a series of letters, to dissuade Mussolini from joining the Axis powers. He was ignored. Three weeks later Italy joined Nazi Germany and declared war on Great Britain.
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