“I’ll tell you about my father’s relationship with General Dalla Chiesa” –

Stephen Andreotti

September 23, 2024

Dear Director, during the Rai Tango broadcast, the Honorable Rita Dalla Chiesa returned to talk about the murder of General Carlo Alberto, claiming that her father was killed to do a favor to a politician. Without directly naming my father Giulio Andreotti because, kindly, «there is a family and families, he has a lot of respect», she practically endorsed the host’s statement that my father’s name was mentioned. With my sister Serena, for many years we have been trying to make known who our father really was with our testimonies but above all with the dissemination of the mountain of deeds and documents that he left in his archive kept by the Luigi Sturzo Institute and opened to the public at his request, his diaries and many other writings that we preserve, in the hope that historical reconstruction will finally prevail over a biased chronicle that has polluted Italian history since the nineties. My father always maintained an excellent relationship of esteem and consideration with General Dalla Chiesa, following him and encouraging him in the extraordinary abilities he demonstrated, particularly in the fight against terrorism, in which he was an absolute protagonist.

I cite for example the circumstances of when in August 1979 my father left Palazzo Chigi recommending to the incoming Cossiga not to dismantle the nucleus presided over by the General despite the latter’s aspirations to be assigned to another position. In a letter dated 9 September he expressed all his gratitude for the General’s acceptance and received in response the letter of 16 September in which the General really demonstrates what his opinion was of our father and the relationships that really tied them. In the years that followed, even though my father did not hold government positions, the General often asked for a meeting when passing through Rome, as testified by the collaborators he requested and which never took place when summoned by my father. Of some topics discussed on those occasions my father preferred precisely out of respect for the general to never mention them, but in addition to having spoken about them privately with us and his close collaborators, I cite for example the testimony of Luigi Bisignani: “As for the general, I clearly remember several visits to Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina. He almost always arrived at very short notice, but once I noticed that, lingering longer than usual, he left with an unusually subdued tone, unlike Mrs. Enea who, instead, greeted him as always with good-natured irony. I asked the president what had happened and collected the confidence that today, in the face of so much nastiness, I feel like revealing. “This very brave man wanted to speak to me as a father to a father about the relationship with his son Nando, of whom he cannot understand some choices that distress him. This causes him a lot of pain, so much so that he was moved in front of me and I tried to reassure him.”

My father was particularly saddened by the tragedy of the barbaric killing of the general and his wife Emanuela Setti Carraro, with whom my father had an equally excellent relationship, he sent a warm telegram of condolences to the family, he did not go to the funeral because he was unable to and moreover he did not hold any official positions at that time. There are numerous other testimonies of the relationship between my father and the general, I cite among many an article he wrote in on 7 October 1984 and a page from the diary of 17 September 1986 regarding a formal visit from Judge Falcone. Then came the years of the trials, which saddened him for thirteen years, with the accusations of some informants also of compromising the murder of the general. Unfortunately, even the trial results are often given a biased interpretation by some, recently taken up by some films full of inaccuracies that would claim to write the history of Italy, daughter of the very poor result obtained compared to the mountain of accusations that had been heaped upon him. However, in the sentences there is no evidence whatsoever of responsibility regarding the murder of the general. Perhaps if all those who often speak without really being informed were willing to read the many documents available, including the trial documents, we would also obtain from them a “historical” reconstruction of those years and among them also the family, whose immense pain I naturally humanly understand. For what it’s worth, and for me it’s worth a lot, I report the oath that my father left to us children in one of the posthumous letters he left us: “I wish to repeat with the seriousness of an oath before God, from whom nothing can be hidden or manipulated, that I have never had anything to do with the mafia (except to fight it with laws or public acts) or with the death of Pecorelli, of General Dalla Chiesa and of anyone else among those murdered.”