Sporchi trucchi (Anglo-American intervention in Italy)

... The revelation that the British government contemplated supporting an anti-communist coup in Italy in 1976 is not as surprising as might at first seem. It confirms a long British tradition of marching in lockstep with the global policies of the United States, even when those policies were morally ambiguous or misguided.

The political conditions of cold-war Italy that emerge from the declassified Foreign Office documents published by the Rome daily La Repubblica on Sunday would appear to justify the prevailing sense of strategic panic. The Italian Communist party (PCI) was threatening to achieve power through the ballot box, held back only by the fragile bulwark of a corrupt and effete Christian Democrat party (DC).

Communist participation in the government of a key Nato ally, as proposed two years later by DC leader Aldo Moro, could have momentous consequences. "The presence of communist ministers in the Italian government would pose an immediate security problem for the Alliance," Britain's ambassador to Nato, John Killick, warned London. The security of nuclear bases in Italy could be at risk, military secrets were likely to leak to Moscow, and the US Sixth Fleet's land base in Naples would no longer be secure ...

All this was at a time when Italy was wracked by industrial unrest, terrorist bombings and authentic coup plots enjoying varying degrees of support from the US government. 1976 saw the arrest on coup-plotting charges of Edgardo Sogno, a former resistance fighter turned anti-communist partisan who had also served as a diplomat in Washington. Sogno claimed in a memoir that his coup project had been given a green light by the Rome CIA station chief, who assured him of US support for "any initiative designed to keep the communists out of government" ...

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/philip_willan/2008/01/sporchi_trucchi.html

I lived for almost a decade in Italy, so I can sort of get around, but I could use a translation of the headline.

Dirty Fakers? Rotten BS'ers ??


Filthy Dissemblers?

I just don't have the sense of the expression down....

Not a native speaker, but conversant.

It was just flying over my head for some reason....!

Thanks!