"When we found ourselves dealing with these characters, or rather, with these problems—because initially these characters did not exist—we knew very little. As time went on, and only as time went on, we began to understand a few things. For example, that a terrorist group can, unfortunately, easily become powerful. In the sense that all it takes is a mixture of certain ingredients: ideological fanaticism, a certain ability to organize, exploiting the myriad opportunities for camouflage offered by a large city, organizing by diversifying tasks between regular and irregular members, organizing by seeking connections with civil society at various levels. These capabilities are enough to be able to strike hard, even with a terrorist group that is not very large in number. All this—we discovered over time—was what the Red Brigades were. All this made the Red Brigades dangerous, especially from a political point of view: it is not so much their military danger—for which, in my opinion, a large number of members is not necessary—as their political danger deriving from their connections, or potential connections, with sectors of civil society and the intellectual world that the BR had at that stage, and which made them a very serious political problem."