On January 9 and 10, 1952, Cole took testimony from Henry L. Manfredi, who had investigated the matter in Italy for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. The subcommittee received copies of statements from Tozzini and Manini to the Italian investigators and a copy of Lo Dolce’s confession, which fixed responsibility for Major Holohan’s death on Icardi and upon which Stern and Manfredi apparently based their hearsay statements in large part. The committee also had other information from the files of the OSS and CID, including Icardi’s own statements during the investigation by military authorities of Major Holohan’s disappearance, as well as Icardi’s statements to the press with respect to the charges against him.
There were no further hearings until March 26, 1953, when Icardi appeared in front of the subcommittee. He was not under subpoena and could have refused to come—Lo Dolce rejected three invitations to testify.33 Icardi could have also claimed protection under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Instead, for four and a half hours, he answered questions by Cole and the subcommittee counsel, despite being warned at the beginning that anything he said might be used against him in a “future proceeding or tribunal.” Throughout the hearing, he substantially reiterated his former statements concerning the disappearance of Major Holohan.
On May 19, 1953, the subcommittee heard the fourth and final witness, Colonel Ralph W. Pierce, former chief, Criminal Branch, Provost Marshal’s Office, who had conducted the polygraph test of Icardi in 1947 to determine whether Icardi had any knowledge of Major Holohan’s disappearance. Colonel Pierce testified that at the time he had concluded that Icardi did not kill Holohan and probably did not know who did, although he could not give a conclusive opinion on the basis of the tests made.34
In mid-July 1953, Cole and Representative Paul J. Kilday, Democrat of Texas, ranking member of the subcommittee, completed their report and submitted it to the full Committee on Armed Services, which approved and adopted it on July 24, 1953. The report concluded that a careful review of the evidence “clearly reveals that probable cause has been established against Aldo Icardi and Carl Lo Dolce for the murder of Maj. William V. Holohan.” John J. Courtney, subcommittee counsel clarified for the journalists that “probable cause” was a legal term meaning sufficient evidence for indictment. The report also said that Icardi probably could be tried for embezzlement of perhaps thousands of dollars, but that a conviction on this charge would be difficult to obtain. The report affirmed that Icardi and Lo Dolce were not subject to prosecution under existing civil law or under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and suggested that legislative amendments to the Federal Criminal Code be recommended to the Judiciary Committee, to prevent this situation from happening again.35
* * *
The report marked the end of the two-year investigation into the Holohan affair by Representatives Cole and Kilday. But the matter did not end there. In summer of 1955, a Federal grand jury was summoned in Washington, DC, to review the evidence collected by the Cole committee. The idea was to go after Icardi on perjury charges by proving that he was involved in the Holohan murder, which he had denied under oath in front of the Cole committee. The government presented to the grand jury all the evidence amassed over the years. It even arranged for seventeen witnesses to fly from Italy. They included Gualtiero Tozzini and Giuseppe Manini, who received guarantees that they would not be entangled in the American legal system if they came to the United States. The priests who had sheltered the Chrysler mission were part of the group. A notable absence was that of Aminta Migliari, who refused to come to the United States.36 At the end of August 1955, the grand jury indicted Icardi—but not Lo Dolce, who had not appeared in front of the Cole committee—on eight counts of perjury. Each count carried a maximum penalty of five years, so Icardi faced a stiff prison sentence if convicted.
At this point, Icardi turned to Edward Bennett Williams for help. Williams was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who had earned fame for representing Senator Joe McCarthy during his meteoric rise in Washington and the sudden downfall, which resulted in his censure by the Senate in December 1954. At the time, Williams was described in the press as “probably the most talented young trial lawyer in town,” “a young and tough battler,” but at the same time as “extremely personable” and as someone with “a relaxed, casual manner … [and] a disarming, boyish air.”37
A friend remembered that Williams had once said, “There are three things in life, money, power, and public relations. My wife is rich, and I wouldn’t know what to do with power, but give me those press clippings!”38 Williams saw Icardi’s case as a David and Goliath story that was sure to give him the headlines and publicity he sought. On one hand, he reminisced later, there was Icardi, “a short, bespectacled, bald-headed man, [who] looked anything but the central figure of the most widely publicized spy melodrama of World War II…. He was a desperate and despondent man and years of living under the accusation of murder had taken a toll on him.” Against him “was arrayed the majesty of the United States government,” which had spent a half-million dollars investigating all angles of the case over the past ten years. Williams wrote a letter to the Attorney General of the United States requesting that the government make available to the defense the results of its investigation, citing Icardi’s lack of funds and inability to access witnesses in Italy. When the government refused his request, Williams said that his “sense of fair play was so offended that he decided to conduct his own all-out investigation into the facts.”39
Williams called for help an old friend, Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent who ran his own international investigative agency. He also enlisted Giuseppe Dosi, former head of the Italian branch of Interpol. In March 1956, they traveled 12,500 miles in four countries meeting with former partisans who had knowledge of the events of December 1944 in Lake Orta. They met Giuseppe Manini who lived with his wife and sons in abject poverty in a one-room house. Manini was first scared but quickly grew angry when Williams confronted him with the conflicting statements he had made over time regarding the events of December 6, 1944. Williams described the meeting:
It was apparent that he was a violent and unstable man. He sat before us flicking the blade of his switchblade knife. Finally, he exploded in a burst of profanities and shouted that Migliari and Tozzini were responsible for all his trouble and that Tozzini was a “Communista.” When he ordered us from his home, we left. The switchblade was very persuasive.40
Tozzini was more stable and less unwilling to talk. The real breakthrough came when Williams and Maheu met Vincenzo Moscatelli in Rome. They visited him at his offices in the Italian parliament and then continued the conversation over a laid-back lunch with wine flowing freely at Ristorante da Pancrazia. Williams recalled the meeting:
Moscatelli was completely open and frank about the whole matter. As far as he was was concerned, the incident was just another war story, and he could not understand how it could be the subject of a criminal case. He readily conceded that the Communist partisans had eliminated Holohan, and he defended it as a necessary act. He ridiculed the selection of a man who did not speak Italian as the head of a behind-the-lines mission in Italy. He told in dismay of Holohan’s insistence on wearing this uniform at all times. Moscatelli’s position was that Holohan was an obstructionist who had to be removed. There was no way to remove him except by murder. He absolved Icardi and Lo Dolce of any knowledge of or involvement in the killing, and was ready and willing to testify in court. He gave us details which checked out in every instance, and we were able to prepare a documented line of proof.41
Williams felt so confident in his ability to convince the jury of his version of events that he laid out his entire case in his opening statement at the trial on April 17, 1956. Williams told the jury that the Army had been correct in its initial investigation after the war, when the CID had concluded, “The disappearance of Major Holohan was a political move engineered by the Communist group headed by Moscatelli, a man of few scruples who was capable of weakenin
g the opposite party to enrich his group.” He promised to show the jury that “Major Holohan was liquidated after a meeting that he had with Vincenzo Moscatelli on December 2, 1944. He was liquidated because Moscatelli believed that he constituted an obstruction to Moscatelli’s plans after the war.”42
When the investigation was open again in early 1950, it came too close to Moscatelli and his brigands for their comfort. The Communist Party of Italy devised a line of action to point the investigators away from the role of the Communists. Tozzini and Manini were coached to pin the blame on Icardi who, according to the party line, had killed Holohan under orders from the State Department and higher American authorities.43 “Lieutenant Aldo Icardi is not a murder, or a thief, or a liar, but one of the real heroes of World War II,” Williams said as he concluded his opening statement.44
Williams’s opening argument was strong, but it served only as a smokescreen to hide his true plan to win the case. The plan unfolded as soon as the first witness for the prosecution, Congressman Cole, took the stand. Confident in himself, Cole described the proceedings of his subcommittee, which had given rise to the perjury charges against Icardi. On cross-examination, Williams focused on making Cole admit that the purpose of his investigation had not been to identify inadequacies in the existing legislation that Congress needed to address, which is within the bounds of a congressional committee’s responsibilities. Instead, Cole had exceeded the constitutional powers of a congressional committee by carrying out a legislative investigation against Icardi with the mere goal of finding a way to punish him in face of the inability of civilian or military courts to prosecute him. Williams delivered his decisive blow when he had Cole admit that he had discussed with his staff the possibility of perjury charges against Icardi even before they had invited him to testify. The line of questioning went like this:
Williams: Didn’t you have a conversation with your counsel and with Mr. Kilday during which you discussed inviting Icardi to testify, during which you discussed that you would swear him if he accepted the invitation, and during which you discussed that a perjury case could be spelled out against him if he testified in accordance with the reports that you then had in your committee files obtained from the Army?
Cole: I cannot deny that that happened. On the other hand, I cannot swear that it did happen. I could very readily say that in all probability it did happen.
W: And you best recollection here today is that it did happen?
C: It could very well have happened.
W:And that is your best recollection here today?
C: I could not swear that it did, but it is my recollection.
W: It is you recollection that it did, is that your answer, sir?
C: Yes, sir.
W: I have no further questions.45
At this point, Williams asked the judge to dismiss the charges. He explained that the investigation conducted by the Cole commission had been totally unrelated to its constitutional duty because the Congress had already closed the loophole that had existed in the Icardi case by passing the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The investigation had been a show for the sake of headlines and, worse than that, a carefully laid perjury trap, a preconceived plan by members of the Congress to get to Aldo Icardi. Judge Richmond B. Keech presiding over the trial suspended the proceedings and took the case under advisement for the night.
When the trial resumed the next morning, April 19, 1956, Judge Keech read a long opinion that essentially agreed with Williams’s position that the Cole subcommittee had not acted for legislative purposes. Citing language from the Cole report of 1953 calling Icardi as the “accused” and concluding that there was “probable cause” to charge both Icardi and Lo Dolce for murder and embezzlement, the judge said that the subcommittee had functioned as a “committing magistrate.” Citing from Cole’s testimony, Judge Keech said, “neither affording an individual a forum in which to protest his innocence nor extracting testimony with a view to a perjury prosecution is a valid legislative purpose.”46 Congress, he said, had the right to inquire whether a crime has been committed and to “ascertain whether an executive department charged with the prosecution of such crime had acted properly.” But, he added, “this authority cannot be extended to sanction a legislative trial and conviction of the individual toward whom the finger of suspicion points.”47
Countering the government suggestion that “frequently individuals are adjudged guilty of an offense by a congressional committee in the exercise of its functions,” the judge said that “such practice should not be condoned, as it denies to the accused the constitutional safeguards of judicial trial.” Judge Keech ended his opinion with the words:
For the foregoing reasons the defendant’s motion to dismiss, which … I must treat as a motion for judgment of acquittal must be granted.
I shall ask the Marshal to call in the jury and I shall direct a verdict of acquittal for the defendant.48
It was a stunning end right at the beginning of a trial that was supposed to last for days. One of the Italians called to testify, unhappy that his trip to America at the United States government’s expense was cut short, mused that someone must have gotten to the judge. Icardi collapsed in Williams’s arms, sobbing.
“What do I owe you?” he asked.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Williams said. “Go back to your family.”49
* * *
Aldo Icardi lived with his family near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, until 1969 when he moved to Maitland, Florida. He was admitted to the Florida bar in 1972 and practiced law until he was eighty years old. He died in 2011. He never wavered from the story he told about his role in the OSS and Operation Chrysler-Mangosteen and always denied any involvement in Holohan’s death.
Vincenzo Moscatelli retired from active participation in the Italian legislature and the Communist Party of Italy in the early 1960s for health reasons. He dedicated himself to the glorification of the resistance and its ideals and founded the Institute for the History of the Resistance, which today bears his name. He died in 1981.50 Giuseppe Manini committed suicide in 1965. His body was found hanging from a stair rail at his home. He was said to be ill and faring poorly in his construction business.51 Aminta Migliari considered the 1953 trial in Novara the most terrible experience of his life. He lived quietly afterward working as a land surveyor for many years. He proudly spoke of the network of 354 agents he had run during the war as the largest intelligence net of the resistance in Italy. When he died in 1991, the local press called him the “007 of the Resistance” and described him as “a champion of intelligence without having the body of Sean Connery or the drive of Charles Bronson.”52
Epilogue
The Operational Group Command, formally known as the 2671st Special Reconnaissance Battalion (Separate), was among the most successful components of the OSS and, as such, earned recongnition both at the individual and unit level. Out of 805 officers and men who made up the OGs, 335 received individual decorations for heroism in battle. The awards included three Distinguished Service Crosses, sixteen Legions of Merit, thirty Silver Stars, and nine decorations by foreign governments. Company A—the Italian OGs, Company B—the French OGs, and Company C—the Balkan OGs, received unit citations for outstanding performance of duty in action against the enemy in Italy from April 15 to May 1, 1945, in southern France from August 1 to 15, 1944, and in Greece from August 15 to September 1, 1944. In an official commendation of the Italian OGs for their work in the Italian campaign, General Mark Clark, commanding officer of the US Fifth Army and the 15th Allied Army Group in Italy, said:
Their attacks on enemy supply lines, dumps, convoys, and similar targets … were a constant and harassing problem for the enemy … With the knowledge that if captured they probably would be tortured and executed by the enemy, these men volunteered for these extra-hazardous missions. The outstanding success of partisan operations where they operated, and the excellent intelligence as to enemy dispositions received was in large measure due to
the presence of these men and their leadership of partisan formations.1
Lieutenant General Alexander M. Patch, commanding officer of the US Seventh Army, offered similar praise for the 27 officers and 155 enlisted men of Company B who carried out missions in widely scattered areas of strategic importance in southern France in preparation for and during Operation Dragoon. “In performing this extra hazardous mission, the members of the unit inflicted heavy casualties upon the enemy, destroyed enemy installations of great military importance, and stimulated notably the morale of the French patriot groups with which they came in contact,” Patch wrote.2
With the end of the war in Europe, there were plans to deploy the OGs in China against the Japanese, after a period of rest and refitting in the United States. The Japanese surrender announced on August 15, 1945, made such a deployment unnecessary and triggered the rapid demobilitzation of the OG personnel. There was broad consensus at the time that specialized unorthodox warfare practiced by the OGs in particular and special operations in general belonged in open conflict and were not useful to the nation at peace. There was hope, at best, that the experience gained during the war would be preserved and studied. In a letter addressed to each officer and soldier of the 2671st Special Reconnaissance Battalion on August 22, 1945, Colonel Livermore wrote:
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