An Industrial Saga Marred by Conspiracy-Mongering

 

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Meryle Secrest
The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World’s First Desktop Computer
Alfred A. Knopf. 304 pp., $30

 

By Richard Drake

 

    An award-winning author of a dozen biographies, Meryle Secrest in her most recent book examines the rise and fall of a great Italian industrial family, the Olivettis of Ivrea in the Piedmont region.

    Camillo Olivetti, an assimilated Jew born in 1868, was named for the Italian liberal statesman Camillo Cavour. Trained as an electrical engineer, he founded a typewriter company in 1908 that would become one of the most amazing economic success stories of the twentieth century. For a capitalist entrepreneur, he developed unusual political interests and attachments. Camillo embraced the moderate reform version of socialism espoused by Filippo Turati, a founder of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892. 

Camillo Olivetti in the 1930s

    He became friends with Turati, served as a Socialist member of the Ivrea communal council, and wrote articles   that appeared in the Party’s daily Turin newspaper, Il Grido del Populo (The Cry of the People). In his factory, he intended to create a humane work environment for his employees.

    Camillo’s enlightened reform ideas would become dramatically augmented and realized when leadership of the company passed to his son Adriano whose mother, Luisa Revel, was a Waldensian Protestant. Founded as an ascetic movement by Peter Waldo in the twelfth century, the Waldensians were declared by the Roman Catholic Church to be heretical and endured harsh persecution. They later became part of the Calvinist tradition.

    Adriano, one of the most fascinating Italians of his time, dominates Secrest’s narrative almost from the beginning of the book. Though dead for sixty years, he continues to be a subject of recurrent interest in Italy. A large Italian-language scholarly and popular literature is devoted to him. In the English-speaking world, however, the extraordinary life and legacy of this international celebrity businessman and social thinker have been largely forgotten. Secrest’s errors and far-fetched conclusions mar her account, but it is to be hoped that The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti will help to counteract this forgetfulness.