CNN - October 11, 1999

ROME (Reuters) -- A prominent figure in Italy's center-left ruling coalition, communist leader Armando Cossutta, was named Monday as a KGB spy, a member of a special parliamentary commission said on Monday.

The right had a field day when a parliamentary commission made public a 650-page dossier that pointed the finger at an ally of Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, himself an ex-communist.

"Given the fact that ... Cossutta appears as an informer and confidant of the KGB, the highest rank a spy can attain, we ask officially for D'Alema's government to resign," said Enzo Fragala of the far-right National Alliance (AN) party, a member of the commission which earlier made public the list.

Commission secretary Mario Palombo, also an AN member, told reporters a former general-secretary of the small Socialist Party and current life senator, Francesco De Martino, was also among the 261 names in the so-called Mitrokhin dossier.

"We knew Cossutta was there, but just imagine, there is also the name of a monk," he added.

Palombo said other high-ranking ministry officials were also down as spies, but many of the names on the list were in code.

Cossutta, 73, a World War II resistance fighter and one of the founding fathers of what was once the most powerful Marxist party in the West, laughed off the "secret agent" tag.

Cossutta and his supporters broke away from communist hard liners last year and joined D'Alema's coalition when it was formed on October 21, 1998. Two of his party members are ministers, the first Marxist ministers in an Italian administration since a government of national unity more than 50 years ago.

"Oh I see. So I had contact with the Soviets. What a discovery!" the head of the Party of Italian Communists said to reporters, adding he had met a string of Soviet leaders including Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev.

"Were they all KGB spies who were trying to milk me for information? Cossutta the informer -- oh do let's try not to be ridiculous," he said.

De Martino, 92 and recovering from flu, said he was staggered to learn he was on the list, telling reporters at his home in Naples that he had felt stunned, then bitter.

"I've done nothing I'm ashamed of," he said. "I don't know how to explain this...but everything happened legally."

De Martino, a member of the Socialist Party leadership in the 1970s, said the idea he was a Soviet spy was "pure fantasy." He added: "I have never had any ties of any sort with any person or body connected with the Soviet secret services."

Reporters clamored to get their hands on the list which has dominated headlines for days and was said to include many top names in the media world. Parliamentary officials hunted for 10,500 sheets of paper to make 150 copies for hungry reporters.

The list is part of the Mitrokhin archive -- a huge cache of Soviet documents smuggled out of Moscow by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin when he defected to the West in 1992. According to Mitrokhin's documents, Italy was second only to France as a base for KGB spies in Europe.

The government of Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, the first ex-communist to become an Italian premier, passed the documents on to prosecutors last week for investigation. A person convicted of spying faces at least 15 years in prison in Italy.

Carlo Leoni of D'Alema's Democrats of the Left defended publication of the list and said the right had been left with egg on its face by trying to imply only "reds" were named.

"It seems that there are the names of numerous journalists, including that of Jas Gawronski, a member of the European Parliament for the (conservative) Forza Italia party and former spokesman for (ex-Prime Minister) Silvio Berlusconi," he said.

"Is it credible to think all these were Soviet spies? For the right, this case is becoming a real boomerang. They thought they'd find a list of communists and what they found were names of people from all political and cultural walks of life."

Berlusconi demanded names be named and referred to the P2, or Propaganda Due, Masonic lodge scandal in the early 1980s, which brought down the government when the beans were spilled.

The lodge was found to have some 1,000 prominent members, mostly of the right, including top politicians, businessmen and military officers.