I have always been intrigued by the fact that in the subversive operation against the Italian State of 7-8 December 1970, called Golpe Borghese (named after its organiser), the operative role of the subversive plan, i.e. to establish a reactionary and neo-fascist government through a direct attack on the democratic institutions of the Republic, should have fallen to the military column of the State Forestry Corps. The foresters, assisted by former paratroopers and neo-fascist paramilitaries, were to occupy the RAI TV headquarters in via Teulada, the Ministry of the Interior and Defence: their task was to take power in a coup d'état and their objectives were the deposition of the Head of State (the then President of the Republic Giuseppe Saragat) and the police.
The operation was never completed, although it was said that about two hundred men were already ready to leave when a phone call arrived in Borghese that led him to stop the operation. A thousand men of the forester, like the other armed forces and police, were certainly not unprepared, on the contrary, they were a compact body and certainly had enough weapons and ammunition at their disposal.
However, it was ascertained that almost all the students, NCOs and officers who took part in the expedition of the two hundred were unaware of the real intentions of their nocturnal mobilisation. On the contrary, they collaborated fully to bring important evidence to justice. The weapons, however, were not only those of the forester: some were found in the house of conspirators, while others, with the complicity of some soldiers, had to be taken away from the armouries of the barracks. It was not possible to ascertain why the counter-order was given. One thing is certain: that evening Borghese did not bluff and went very close to his intentions. Most probably the black prince (so-called because of his past in the Italian Social Republic where he commanded an independent militia flanking the Nazi army against the allies) really thought he had complicity nested in political and military classes that instead of at a certain point turned out to be insubstantial.