Revealed: CIA Provided Italy With $5Mln Annually to Thwart Communist Takeover

The Central Intelligence Agency provided Italy with an average of $5 million in covert aid each year until the early 1960s in a campaign to prevent the Italian Communist Party from taking over the country, according to documents posted online by George Washington University’s National Security Archive on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The claim is based on a recently declassified US Department of Defense study, according to a separate press release that was simultaneously posted on the archive’s website.

"The study, declassified in 2016… focuses on the role of Clare Boothe Luce as ambassador to Italy, 1953-1957," the release stated. "The author also concludes that the Eisenhower administration, faced with the possibility of civil war in Italy or the Communist Party coming to power legally, was ‘willing to intervene militarily only if the Communists seized power forcibly and then only in concert with other European nations’."

The study was completed in 2012 by Department of Defense historian Ronald Landa.

Landa’s report concluded that US covert aid to Italy continued until the early 1960s.

Because details were lacking in official reports on US foreign relations, Landa said in an author’s note attached to the release that he based his conclusions on CIA records, an examination of Luce’s extensive personal collection at the Library of Congress and records at the National Archives from her tenure as ambassador.