Dictator-in-training got $9,500 a week to help convince Italians to keep fighting
(NEWSER) - Britain’s overseas intelligence service helped Benito Mussolini finance his first forays into Italian politics, newly uncovered documents show. Hoping to keep Italy on its side in 1917, during World War I, MI5 gave Mussolini, then 34 and editor of a right-wing newspaper, the equivalent of what’s now $9,500 a week to keep propaganda flowing. He used some of that, the Guardian reports, to pay veterans to beat up peace activists—a move his fascist blackshirts later used. More»
