Ignazio Silone, best known as a remarkable writer and novelist, was born on the First of May 1900 in a small village in the Abruzzo. His real name was Secondino Tranquilli. The son of a small landowner who died when he was eleven, he became an orphan at the age of fifteen when a massive earthquake wiped out his home town in twenty-five seconds. During the First World War he became a teenage militant in the ranks of the Young Socialists, rising quickly through its ranks in the ‘two red years’ (biennio rosso) between 1919 and 1920, when he was active in Rome. When the Italian Socialists split in 1921, he became a founder member of the Italian Communist Party. Nominated to the Young Communist International, he was a frequent visitor to Berlin and Moscow, and organized Italian workers’ groups in Spain, France, Belgium and Luxemburg. Within a few years, as Fascism consolidated its rule in the country, he became one of the eight top leaders of the PCI in exile, and in 1927 was sent back into Italy as head of the party’s underground network. When Moscow imposed the sectarian policies of the Third Period on the Communist International at the end of the decade, a line which threatened to tear the Italian party apart, Silone was eventually expelled from the PCI for sympathies with the opposition to it.

Withdrawing from active politics after his expulsion, Silone wrote his masterpieces Fontamara (1933) and Bread and Wine (1936), two of the most powerful anti-fascist novels ever written, in Switzerland. His analytic study School for Dictators (1938) remains unsurpassed in the brilliance and accuracy of its dissection of fascism’s rise to power and of Mussolini’s rule. In 1941, he rejoined the Socialist Party in Zurich; he was arrested and interned by the Swiss police a year later. In October 1944 he returned to Rome, and played a leading role in the Socialist Party, opposing Nenni’s alliance with the Communist Party. In 1947 he left the PSI and, as the Cold War developed, took a prominent part in the anti-communist politics of the time, contributing to the notorious symposium The God that Failed (1950), and creating the journal Tempo Presente under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of whose Italian section he became the director. Detested as a Cold Warrior by the PCI, Silone was widely admired outside it. His Emergency Exit (1965), a collection of essays and testimonies on his time in the Party, became a touchstone for the non-Communist left. Continuing to write and revise his novels, Silone described himself as ‘a socialist without a party, a christian without a church’. For so long a central figure in the Italian intellectual landscape, he died in 1978. For many, his life and work embodied the vicissitudes, alternately tragic and heroic, of the century.

Some ten years later, plans for an exhibition of documents about the novelist were mounted in his home town. Requests were sent to Rome for relevant materials. There a senior official of the State Archive, looking through a file devoted to Silone by the OVRA, the political police of the Fascist period, came upon two letters that he set aside from the rest of the file, which he sent on. The documents that he abstracted, he neither made public nor put back where they belonged. He removed them. In one, written in early 1930 and addressed to Emilia Bellone, sister of Guido Bellone, General Inspector of Public Security charged with stamping out subversion, the writer speaks of a deep moral and psychological crisis, and pleads to be released from ‘all falsehood, doubt and secrecy’, expressing a desire ‘to repair the damage that I have caused, to seek redemption, to help the workers, the peasants (to whom I am bound with every fibre in my body) and my country.’ No word of this document reached the outside world. But as it happened, a young historian working on a biography of Silone, Dario Biocca, was starting to come across other documents which suggested that Silone might have been a police informer between 1928 and 1930. At a conference held in Florence in 1996, Biocca for the first time aired this conclusion in public. A storm immediately broke over the allegations, which generated a huge controversy in the national press. At this juncture, a lesser official at the Archive in Rome who knew of the letter of 1930, but had neither restored it to its place nor informed Biocca of its existence, decided to release a copy to the newspaper La Repubblica. Not surprisingly, its publication was greeted with consternation and further furious debate. (The letter, along with other documents and a commentary, is now available in English in an article by Mauro Canali, ‘Ignazio Silone and the Fascist Political Police’, published in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 5(1) 2000.)

Since then Biocca has continued his research, joined by Mauro Canali, a historian working on the Fascist secret police. The fruits of their careful and patient study of the archives, pursued amidst great hostility, are now available in the book they have jointly published, L’informatore. Composed of a joint introduction, a long essay by Canali on the 1919–23 period, another by Biocca covering the decade following 1924, and 117 pages of transcribed documents and explanatory notes, it is a formidable body of work which removes all doubt about the activities of Secondino Tranquilli in the twenties. The chilling truth is that Silone was an informer for the Italian secret police from 1919 to 1930. This revelation is so staggering that many still hesitate to believe it, but the evidence presented by Biocca and Canali, neither of whom has any political axe to grind, is overwhelming. The suppressed letter of 1930 establishes beyond question that ‘Silvestri’, a long-time informant of the police and in particular of Guido Bellone in Rome, was in fact Silone. ‘Silvestri’ was by far the most important spy working for the Fascist regime within the Communist movement. He also informed for far longer than any other agent. A series of smaller signs—handwriting, style, substance, numerous biographical details—confirm his identity. Silone’s complicated movements in the twenties mirror those of ‘Silvestri’: when Silone is in Berlin, ‘Silvestri’ writes from Berlin; when Silone is in Paris, ‘Silvestri’ writes from Paris. The reports dry up after Silone was expelled from the PCI (and left active political life) in 1931. A police document from 1928, which has played a key role in convincing many previous doubters of Silone’s guilt, identified Silone as a spy for the benefit of Mussolini himself. Others show that Silone was protected from arrest on a series of occasions, or given privileged treatment by the Fascist police. Much of the information provided by ‘Silvestri’ could only have come from within a very small group of Communist leaders. Silone himself was often left out of lists of names supplied, and on one occasion a photograph of PCI leaders sent by ‘Silvestri’ was reproduced and distributed to various Fascist agents, with all figures in the frame except that of Silone (the photograph, together with others supplied by ‘Silvestri’, is reproduced in L’informatore).

What was the content of the information Silone was sending for over a decade to the State Police and (after 1922) to those employed under Mussolini’s regime? Much of it is generic material, as in all police-informant reports, in this case bearing on political debates within the PCI and Socialist movement, and relationships with the USSR. But much else is specific delation of individuals. ‘Silvestri’ provides photographs of militants; he indicates when activists from the underground will be moving across borders and under what false names; he identifies addresses and secret printing presses; he draws maps; he describes people. Such information led to swift repression and arrests. In 1923 ‘Silvestri’ told the police: ‘Yesterday evening Mauro Scoccimarro left for Italy via Switzerland. He has a passport under the name of the Neapolitan Communist Vergili, upon which he has substituted his photograph.’ Almost immediately, the authorities were able to circulate the following message to every prefect in Italy: ‘The noted Communist Mauro Scoccimarro will return into Italy via Switzerland with a passport under the name of Virgili or Vergili (from Naples) upon which he has substituted his own photo. Investigate and arrest the subject if the passport has been changed.’ Biocca and Canali cite numerous other examples in L’informatore, and further documents will certainly emerge from the archives. The evidence also seems to suggest that ‘Silvestri’ was aware of fellow collaborators working within the Communist movement and helped warn them of possible discovery. The conclusion is inescapable: Silone was almost certainly invaluable in the detection and depletion of the Communist and anti-Fascist networks built up across Europe in the twenties.

How have Silone’s admirers reacted to these discoveries? In the initial rush to defend him, the documents found in the archives were denounced as forgeries, which could only have been planted in the files by the Fascist authorities themselves, with the aim of discrediting him. But as more and more evidence came to light, the idea that the OVRA had created folders full of sophisticated forgeries in the thirties waiting to be discovered (and then hidden, and then released) by future generations, had to be abandoned. Many who were initially sceptical now accept that ‘Silvestri’ was, in fact, Silone. But for others the psychological shock is so great that they simply ‘refuse to believe’ that Silone could possible have been a spy. Indro Montanelli, a leading liberal commentator, had declared he would not believe it even if Silone were to reappear and tell him it was so to his face. The Socialist historian Giuseppe Tamburrano, biographer of Nenni, has tried to counter-attack with what Canali has described as ‘a poorly executed form of collage of random documents found in Silone’s file’ from the mid-thirties, with some success in recruiting others to his cause, the latest being none other than Norberto Bobbio, in a letter to La Repubblica of 5 May 2000.

The single serious issue raised by Silone’s supporters concerns the fate of his younger brother, Romolo Tranquilli. The only one of Silone’s five siblings to survive childhood illness and the earthquake, Romolo was arrested by the police in 1928 on suspicion of participation in a bungled bomb-attack against the King in Milan, which left eighteen bystanders dead. Silone, who was devoted to his brother, tried to intervene on his behalf with the Fascist authorities. Various ‘official’ Silone publications have glossed this as the only reason for his having been in touch with the OVRA. Thus Bruno Falcetto, introducing the 1998 edition of Silone’s Collected Works, Ignazio Silone. Romanzi e saggi, 1927–1944, writes: ‘We cannot exclude the possibility that contacts were made for a time, between 1928 and 1930, with Emilio (sic) Bellone, head of the special office of the political police of the Interior Ministry. [But] these contacts would seem definitely linked to attempts to explore every avenue and try and help young “Romolotto”.’ A somewhat more ingenious version of the same line of argument can be found in Ottorino Gurgo and Francesco de Core’s 1998 hagiography Silone: L’avventura di un uomo libero, which devotes just three pages out of its nearly five hundred to the charges against Silone, suggesting that he had a plan ‘to make the OVRA believe that he was their informer in order to obtain the liberation of Romolo or, at the very least, an improvement in his terrible conditions in prison.’ This desperate effort to reinvent Silone’s activities as a heroic triple game holds no water. For not only is there ample evidence that ‘Silvestri’ was in communication with Bellone well before 1928, but it was the issue of Romolo that led the OVRA to identify Silone as an informer to Mussolini himself. Biocca and Canali’s account turns the whole question on its head. What they show is that it may have been the tragedy of his younger brother that finally forced Silone to cut his ties with Bellone. Romolo was tortured by the Fascists, cleared of the attentat against the King, but sentenced to twelve years imprisonment as a Communist. He died in jail from pneumonia in 1932. Silone’s ‘moral and psychological crisis’ could well have had its origins here.