In 1949, as the newly formed Italian Republic entered the new bipolar world of the Cold War, a parallel structure was created within the Viminale (the Ministry of the Interior), destined to remain in the shadows for decades: the Ufficio Affari Riservati (UAR), nominally under the command of the Chief of Police. Officially created to coordinate information between the various police forces, the UAR soon became much more: a true internal secret intelligence service, parallel to SIFAR first (1949–1966) and then to the SID (1966–1977), the "official" secret services. From 1952 to 1974, the key figure in this office was Prefect Federico Umberto D'Amato; during his leadership, especially from 1971 to 1974, the office developed a widespread network of informants and collaborators that ranged across politics and journalism, trade unions, and universities. D'Amato, a controversial and powerful figure, transformed the UAR into an instrument of social and political control, operating in a grey area between legality and arbitrariness, forging ties with subversive right-wing circles. The Office's activities initially focused on the surveillance of communist and socialist movements, but over time, it extended its influence to all sensitive sectors of Italian society. Massive dossiers, illegal wiretaps, and information manipulation: the UAR operated according to its own logic, often in conflict with the democratic principles of the Republican Constitution. The UAR would be the undisputed protagonist of the era of cover-ups, planting false evidence or concealing evidence or suspects, as confirmed in the various trials for the Piazza Fontana attack. The Office's archive, discovered in a building on the Via Appia in 1996 by historian Aldo Giannuli, contained over 157,000 personal files, evidence of pervasive control over citizens' lives. As the scholar of massacres Benedetta Tobagi writes, the deliberately disordered and fragmented state of the documents signalled the fact that "an atypical management of documentation was applied within institutional bodies to carve out spaces that were in reality removed from any control."