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Operation Gladio





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Emblem of "Gladio", Italian branch of the NATO "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations. The motto means "In silence I preserve freedom".


Gladio (Italian: sword) is a code name denoting the clandestine NATO "stay-behind" operation in Italy after World War II, intended to counter the eventual Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organisations, "Operation Gladio" is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organisations, sometimes called "Super NATO".[1]
Operating in many NATO and even some neutral countries,[2] Gladio was first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen by the SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official withdrawal from NATO's Military Committee in 1966 — which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements.
The role of the CIA in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the Years of Lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter.[3]





General stay-behind structure


Emblem of NATO's "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations.



The command structure of stay-behind forces, as suggested in Field Manual 31-15: Operations Against Irregular Forces.


After World War II, the UK and the US decided to create "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Arms caches were hidden, escape routes prepared, and loyal members recruited: i.e. mainly hardline anticommunists, including many ex-Nazis or former fascists, whether in Italy or in other European countries. In Germany, for example, Gladio had as a central focus the Gehlen Org — also involved in ODESSA "ratlines" — named after Reinhard Gehlen who would become West Germany's first head of intelligence, while the predominantly Italian P2 masonic lodge was composed of many members of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), including Licio Gelli. Its clandestine "cells" were to stay behind (hence the name) in enemy controlled territory and to act as resistance movements, conducting sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassinations.
However, Italian Gladio was more far reaching. "A briefing minute of June 1, 1959, reveals Gladio was built around 'internal subversion'. It was to play 'a determining role... not only on the general policy level of warfare, but also in the politics of emergency'. In the 1970s, with communist electoral support growing and other leftists looking menacing, the establishment turned to the 'Strategy of Tension' ... with Gladio eager to be involved."[4]
CIA founder Allen Dulles was one of the key people in instituting Operation Gladio, and most of Gladio’s operations were financed by the CIA.[citation needed] The anti-communist networks, which were present in all of Europe, including neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland, were partly funded by the CIA.[5] Some went as far as claiming that Democrazia Cristiana leader Aldo Moro had been the "founder of (Italian) Gladio".[6] However, whether these allegations are correct or not, his murder in 1978 put an end to the “historic compromise” (sharing of power) attempt between the PCI and the Christian Democracy (DC), thus accomplishing one of the alleged objectives of a strategy of tension.
Operating in all of NATO and even in some neutral countries or in Spain before its 1982 adhesion to NATO, Gladio was first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into the "Clandestine Planning Committee" (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen by the SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official retreat from NATO — which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements.
Ganser alleges that:[7]
If Gladio was effectively "the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II",[8] it must be underlined, however, that on several occasions, arms caches were discovered and stay-behind paramilitary organizations officially dissolved – only to be created again. But it was not until the 1990s that the full international scope of the program was disclosed to public knowledge. Giulio Andreotti, the main character of Italy’s post-WWII political life, was described by Aldo Moro to his captors as "too close to NATO", Moro thus advising them to be wary. Indeed, before Andreotti’s 1990 acknowledgement of Gladio’s existence, he had "unequivocally" denied it in 1974, and then in 1978 to judges investigating the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. And even in 1990, "Testimonies collected by the two men [judges Felice Casson and Carlo Mastelloni investigating the 1972 Peteano fascist car bomb] and by the Commission on Terrorism on Rome, and inquiries by the Guardian, indicate Gladio was involved in activities which do not square with Andreotti's account. Links between Gladio, Italian secret services bosses and the notorious P2 masonic lodge are manifold (...) In the year that Andreotti denied Gladio’s existence, the P2 treasurer, General Siro Rosetti, gave a generous account of 'a secret security structure made up of civilians, parallel to the armed forces' There are also overlaps between senior Gladio personnel and the committee of military men, Rosa dei Venti (Wind Rose), which tried to stage a coup in 1970.”[4]

European Parliament resolution concerning Gladio


Wikisource has original text related to this article: European Parliament resolution on Gladio


On November 22, 1990, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Gladio, requesting full investigations – which have yet to be done – and total dismantlement of these paramilitary structures – which, as of 2005, has not been proven. The resolution condemned "the existence for 40 years of a clandestine parallel intelligence" as well as "armed operations organization in several Member States of the Community", which "escaped all democratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO." Denouncing the "danger that such clandestine network may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so," especially before the fact that "in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime," the Parliament demanded a "a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of these clandestine organizations or any splinter groups, their use for illegal interference in the internal political affairs of the countries concerned, the problem of terrorism in Europe and the possible collusion of the secret services of Member States or third countries." Furthermore, the resolution protested "vigorously at the assumption by certain US military personnel at SHAPE and in NATO of the right to encourage the establishment in Europe of a clandestine intelligence and operation network," asking "the Member States to dismantle all clandestine military and paramilitary networks" and to "draw up a complete list of organizations active in this field, and at the same time to monitor their links with the respective state intelligence services and their links, if any, with terrorist action groups and/or other illegal practices." Finally, the Parliament called "on its competent committee to consider holding a hearing in order to clarify the role and impact of the 'Gladio' organization and any similar bodies," and instructed "its President to forward this resolution to the Commission, the Council, the Secretary-General of NATO, the governments of the Member States and the United States Government."

Allegations


Gladio has been accused of trying to influence policies through the means of "false flag" operations: a 2000 Italian Parliamentary Commission report from the Olive Tree left-wing coalition concluded that the strategy of tension used by Gladio had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI (Italian Communist Party), and to a certain degree also the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), from reaching executive power in the country".
Propaganda Due (aka P2), a quasi-freemasonic organization, whose existence was discovered in 1981, was said closely linked to Gladio.
P2 was outlawed and disbanded in 1981, in the wake of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, which was linked to the Mafia and to the Vatican Bank. Its Grand Master, Licio Gelli, was involved in most of Italy’s scandals in the last three decades of the 20th century: Banco Ambrosiano’s crash; Tangentopoli, which gave rise to the Mani pulite ("Clean hands") anticorruption operation in the 1990s; the kidnapping and the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 – the head of the secret services at the time, accused of negligence, was a piduista (P2 member). Licio Gelli has often said he was a friend of Argentine President Juan Perón. In any case, some members of Jorge Videla’s junta were discovered to be piduista, such as José López Rega, founder of the infamous anticommunist organization Triple A, Raúl Alberto Lastiri or Emilio Massera. The Vatican Bank was also accused of funneling covert US funds for the Solidarnosc trade union movement in Poland and the Contras in Nicaragua.[9]
Furthermore, Gladio has been linked to other events, such as Operation Condor[10][improper synthesis?] and the 1969 killing of anticolonialist/independentist Mozambican leader Eduardo Mondlane by Aginter Press, the Portuguese "stay-behind" secret army, headed by Yves Guérin-Sérac - the allegation on Mondlane's death is disputed, with several sources stating that FRELIMO guerrilla leader Eduardo Mondlane was killed in a struggle for power within FRELIMO. In 1995, Attorney General Giovanni Salvi accused the Italian secret services of having manipulated proofs of the Chilean secret police’s (DINA) involvement in the 1975 terrorist attack on former Chilean Vice-President Bernardo Leighton in Rome. A similar mode of operation can also be recognized in various Cold War events, for example between the June 20, 1973 Ezeiza massacre in Buenos Aires (Argentina), the 1976 Montejurra massacre in Spain and the 1977 Taksim Square massacre in Istanbul (Turkey).
After Giulio Andreotti's revelations and the disestablishment of Gladio, the last meeting of the "Allied Clandestine Committee" (ACC), was held according to the Italian Prime minister on October 23 and 24, 1990. Despite this, various events have raised concerns about "stay-behind" armies still being in place. In 1996, the Belgian newspaper Le Soir revealed the existence of a racist plan operated by the military intelligence agencies. In 1999, Switzerland was suspected of again creating a clandestine paramilitary structure, allegedly to replace the former P26 and P27 (the Swiss branches of Gladio). Furthermore, in 2005, the Italian press revealed the existence of the Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA), accused of being "another Gladio".

Gladio's strategy of tension and internal subversion operations

Further information: Strategy of tension
NATO's "stay-behind" organizations were never called upon to resist a Soviet invasion, but their structures continued to exist after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Internal subversion and "false flag" operations were explicitly considered by the CIA and stay-behind paramilitaries. According to a November 13, 1990 Reuters cable,[11] "André Moyen – a former member of the Belgian military security service and of the [stay-behind] network – said Gladio was not just anti-Communist but was for fighting subversion in general. He added that his predecessor had given Gladio 142 million francs ($4.6 millions) to buy new radio equipment."[12] Ganser alleges that on various occasions, stay-behind movements became linked to right-wing terrorism, crime and attempted coups d'état:[7]
According to Daniele Ganser, only Italy, Belgium and Switzerland carried on parliamentary investigations, while the prosecution of various "black terrorists" (terrorismo nero, neofascist terrorism) in Italy was difficult.
A 1990 article from The Guardian featured the following quote from judge Libero Mancuso:[13]
Examples of such alleged terrorist acts include the strategy of tension in Italy, or the Oktoberfest bomb blast of 1980 in Munich.[citation needed] A Gladio official said that "depending on the cases, we would block or encourage far-left or far-right terrorism".[14][15]

Gladio operations in NATO countries


First discovered in Italy

Main article: Gladio in Italy
The Italian NATO stay-behind organization, dubbed "Gladio", was set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani's (DC) supervision.[16] However, Gladio's existence came to public knowledge when Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti revealed it to the Chamber of Deputies on October 24, 1990, although far-right terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra had already revealed its existence during his 1984 trial. According to media analyst Edward S. Herman, "both the President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, had been involved in the Gladio organization and coverup..."[17][verification needed]

Giulio Andreotti's October 24, 1990 revelations

Prime minister Giulio Andreotti (member of the Christian Democracy, DC) publicly recognized the existence of Gladio on October 24, 1990. Andreotti spoke of a "structure of information, response and safeguard", with arms caches and reserve officers. He gave to the Commissione Stragi, the parliamentary commission led by senator Giovanni Pellegrino in charge of investigations on bombings committed during the years of lead in Italy, a list of 622 civilians who according to him were part of Gladio. Andreotti also assured that 127 weapons' cache had been dismantled, and pretended that Gladio had not been involved in any of the bombings committed from the 1960s to the 1980s (further evidence implicated neofascists linked to Gladio, in particular concerning the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, the 1972 Peteano attack by Vincenzo Vinciguerra, the 1980 Bologna massacre in which SISMI officers were condemned for investigation diversion, along with Licio Gelli, head of Propaganda Due masonic lodge, etc.). Andreotti declared that the Italian military services (predecessors of the current SISMI) had joined in 1964 the Allied Clandestine Committee created in 1957 by the US, France, Belgium and Greece, and which was in charge of directing Gladio's operations.[18] However, Gladio was actually set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani's supervision.[16] Beside, the list of Gladio members given by Andreotti was incomplete. It didn't include, for example, Antonio Arconte, who described an organization very different from the one brushed by Giulio Andreotti: an organization closely tied to the SID secret service and the Atlantist strategy.[19][20] According to Andreotti, the stay-behind organisations set up in all of Europe did not come "under broad NATO supervision until 1959."[21]

2000 Parliamentary report: a "strategy of tension"

In 2000, a Parliament Commission report from the "Gruppo Democratici di Sinistra l'Ulivo" concluded that the strategy of tension had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI, and to a certain degree also the PSI, from reaching executive power in the country". A 2000 Senate report, stated that "Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence." According to The Guardian, "The report [claimed] that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several rightwing terrorist bombings, including the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later, but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place. It also [alleged] that Pino Rauti [current leader of the MSI Fiamma-Tricolore party], a journalist and founder of the far-right Ordine Nuovo (new order) subversive organisation, received regular funding from a press officer at the US embassy in Rome. 'So even before the 'stabilising' plans that Atlantic circles had prepared for Italy became operational through the bombings, one of the leading members of the subversive right was literally in the pay of the American embassy in Rome,' the report says."[22]

General Maletti's testimony concerning alleged CIA involvement

General Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter-intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975, alleged in March 2001 during the eight trial for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombings that the CIA had foreknowledge of the event.[23] According to the Guardian, he said:[24]
General Maletti told the Italian court that "the CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of rightwing terrorism," and continued on by declaring: "I believe this is what happened in other countries as well." Gianadelio Maletti also said to the court: "Don't forget that Nixon was in charge and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives."
General Maletti himself in the first Piazza Fontana trial received a four year sentence for providing a false passport to one of the accused bombers, this sentence was overturned in 1985.[25] Maletti received, while in exile, a 15-years sentence in 2000 for his role in trying to cover up a 1973 bomb attack in Milan against the Interior minister, Mariano Rumor (DC - 4 killed and 45 injured), but was acquitted on appeals.[26] According to the court, General Maletti knew in advance of the plan of the attacker, Gianfranco Bertoli, allegedly an anarchist but in reality a right-wing activist and a "long-standing SID informant" according to The Guardian, but had deliberately failed to inform the interior minister of it.[24]
Responding to charges made by Maletti in La Repubblica one year earlier, the CIA called the allegation that it was involved in the attacks in Italy "ludicrous."[27]

A quick chronology of Italy's "strategy of tension"

• 1964 Operation Solo
  

In 1964, Gladio was involved in a silent coup d'état when General Giovanni de Lorenzo in Operation Solo forced the Italian Socialists Ministers to leave the government.[28]

• 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing
  

According to Avanguardia Nazionale member Vincenzo Vinciguerra: "The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the politic and military authorities to declare a state of emergency"[29]

• 1970 Golpe Borghese
  

In 1970, the failed coup attempt Golpe Borghese gathered, around fascist Junio Valerio Borghese, international terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and P2 headmaster Licio Gelli.

• 1972 Gladio meeting
  

According to The Guardian, "General Geraldo Serravalle, a former head of "Office R", told the terrorism commission that at a crucial Gladio meeting in 1972, at least half of the upper echelons "had the idea of attacking the communists before an invasion. They were preparing for civil war." Later, he put it more bluntly: "They were saying this: "Why wait for the invaders when we can make a preemptive attack now on the communists who would support the invader? The idea is now emerging of a Gladio web made up of semi-autonomous cadres which – although answerable to their secret service masters and ultimately to the NATO-CIA command – could initiate what they regarded as anti-communist operations by themselves, needing only sanction and funds from the existing 'official' Gladio column (...) General Nino Lugarese, head of SISMI from 1981-84 testified on the existence of a 'Super Gladio' of 800 men responsible for 'internal intervention' against domestic political targets."[4]

• May 31, 1972 Peteano massacre
  

Magistrate Felice Casson discovered that "the explosives used in the attack came from one of 139 secret weapons depots of a secret army organized under the code name Operation Gladio".[17] Neofascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra confessed in 1984 to judge Felice Casson of having carried out the Peteano terrorist attack, in which three policemen died, and for which the Red Brigades (BR) had been blamed before. Vinciguerra explained during his trial how he had been helped by Italian secret services to escape the police and to fly away to Francoist Spain. However, he was abandoned by NATO as soon as he started talking about Gladio, declaring for example during his 1984 trial: "with the massacre of Peteano and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages. [This structure] lies within the states itself. There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity, that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army... A super-organization which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on NATO's behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the politcial balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces..." He then said to The Guardian, in 1990: "I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organised matrix... Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo (the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s), were being mobilised into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance."[4][7]

• November 23, 1973 Bombing of the plane Argo 16
  

General Geraldo Serravalle, head of Gladio from 1971 to 1974, told a television programme that he now thought the explosion aboard the plane Argo 16 on 23 November 1973 was probably the work of gladiatori who were refusing to hand over their clandestine arms. Until then it was widely believed the sabotage was carried out by Mossad, the Israeli foreign service, in retaliation for the pro-Libyan Italian government’s decision to expel, rather than try, five Arabs who had tried to blow up an Israeli airliner. The Arabs had been spirited out of the country on board the Argo 16.[30]

• 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing, Italicus Express massacre, and arrest of Vito Miceli, chief of the Army intelligence service and member of P2, on charges of "conspiracy against the state"
  

In 1974, a massacre committed by Ordine Nuovo, during an anti-fascist demonstration in Brescia, kills eight and injures 102. The same year, a bomb in the Rome to Munich train "Italicus Express" kills 12 and injures 48. Also in 1974, Vito Miceli, P2 member, chief of the SIOS (Servizio Informazioni), Army Intelligence's Service from 1969 and SID's head from 1970 to 1974, got arrested on charges of "conspiration against the state" concerning investigations about Rosa dei venti, a state-infiltrated group involved in terrorist acts. During his trial, he revealed the existence of the NATO stay-behind secret army.

• 1977 Reorganization of Italian secret services following Vito Micelli's arrest
  

In 1977, the secret services were thus reorganized in a democratic attempt. With law#801 of 24/10/1977, SID was divided into SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), SISDE (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica) and CESIS (Comitato Esecutivo per i Servizi di Informazione e Sicurezza). The CESIS was given a coordination role, led by the President of Council.

• 1978 Murder of Aldo Moro
  

Prime minister Aldo Moro was murdered in May 1978 by the Second Red Brigades (BR), headed by Mario Moretti, in obscure circumstances. The head of the Italian secret services, accused of negligence, was a P2 member. The so-called "historic compromise" between the Christian-Democracy and the PCI was abandoned:[31] "As the conspiracy theorists would have it, Mr. Moro was allowed to be killed either with the acquiescence of people high in Italy’s political establishment, or at their instigation, because of the historic compromise he had made with the Communist Party" "During his captivity, Aldo Moro wrote several letters to various political figures, including Giulio Andreotti. In October 1990, "a cache of previously unknown letters written by the former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, just prior to his execution by Red Brigade terrorists in 1978... was discovered in a Milan apartment which had once been used as a Red Brigade hideout. One of those letters made reference to the involvement of both NATO and the CIA in an Italian-based secret service, 'parallel' army."[32] "This safe house had been thoroughly searched at the time by Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the head of counter-terrorism. How is it that the papers had not been revealed before?" asked The Independent[31] Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was murdered in 1982 (see below). In May 1978, investigative journalist Mino Pecorelli thought that Aldo Moro's kidnapping had been organised by a "lucid superpower" and was inspired by the "logic of Yalta". He painted the figure of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa as "general Amen," explaining that it was him that, during Aldo Moro's kidnap, had informed Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga of the localization of the cave where Moro was detained. In 1978, Pecorelli wrote that Dalla Chiesa was in danger and would be assassinated (Dalla Chiesa was murdered four years later). After Aldo Moro's assassination, Mino Pecorelli published some confidential documents, mainly Moro's letters to his family. In a cryptic article published in May 1978, wrote The Guardian in May 2003, Pecorelli drew a connection between Gladio, NATO's stay-behind anti-communist organisation (which existence was publicly acknowledged by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in October 1990) and Moro's death. During his interrogation, Aldo Moro had referred to "NATO's anti-guerrilla activities."[33] Mino Pecorelli, who was on Licio Gelli's list of P2 members discovered in 1980, was assassinated on March 20, 1979. The ammunitions used, a very rare type, where the same as discovered in the Banda della Magliana 's weapons stock hidden in the Health Minister's basement. Pecorelli's assassination has been thought to be directly related to Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was condemned to 20 years of prison for it in 2002 before having the sentence cancelled by the Supreme Court of Cassation in 2003.

• 1980 Bologna massacre
  

"The makings of the bomb... came from an arsenal used by Gladio... according to a parliamentary commission on terrorism... The suggested link with the Bologna massacre is potentially the most serious of all the accusations levelled against Gladio, and comes just two days after the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, cleared Gladio’s name in a speech to parliament, saying that the secret army did not drift from its formal Nato military brief."[34] In November 1995, Neo-Fascists terrorists Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro, members of the Nuclei Armati Revoluzionari (NAR), were convicted to life imprisonment as executors of the 1980 Bologna massacre. The NAR neofascist group worked in cooperation with the Banda della Magliana, a Mafia-linked gang which took over Rome's underground in the 1970s and was involved in various political events of the strategy of tension, including the Aldo Moro case, the 1979 assassination of Mino Pecorelli, a journalist who published articles alleging links between Prime minister Giulio Andreotti and the mafia, as well as the assassination of "God's Banker" Roberto Calvi in 1982. The investigations concerning the Bologna bombing proved Gladio's direct influence: Licio Gelli, P2's headmaster, received a sentence for investigation diversion, as well as Francesco Pazienza and SISMI officers Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte. Avanguardia Nazionale founder Stefano Delle Chiaie, who was involved in the Golpe Borghese in 1970, was also accused of involvement in the Bologna massacre[35][15]

• 1982 murder of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, head of counter-terrorism.
  

General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa's 1982 murder, in Palermo, by Pino Greco, one of the Mafia Godfather Salvatore Riina's (aka Toto Riina) favorite hitmen, is allegedly part of the strategy of tension. Alberto Dalla Chiesa had arrested Red Brigades founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini in September, 1974, and was later charged of investigation concerning Aldo Moro. He had also found Aldo Moro's letters concerning Gladio.

• October 24, 1990 Giulio Andreotti’s acknowledgement of Operazione Gladio
  

After the discovery by judge Felice Casson of documents on Gladio in the archives of the Italian military secret service in Rome, Giulio Andreotti, head of Italian government, revealed to the Chamber of deputies the existence of "Operazione Gladio" on October 24, 1990, insisting that Italy has not been the only country with secret "stay-behind" armies. He made clear that "each chief of government had been informed of the existence of Gladio". Former Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi said that he had not been informed until he was confronted with a document on Gladio signed by himself while he was Prime Minister. Former Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini (Republican Party), at the time President of the Senate, and former Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani, at the time secretary of the ruling Christian Democratic Party claimed they remembered nothing. Spadolini stressed that there was a difference between what he knew as former Defence Secretary and what he knew as former Prime Minister. Only former Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga (DC) confirmed Andreotti's revelations, explaining that he was even "proud and happy" for his part in setting up Gladio as junior Defence Minister of the Christian Democratic Party. This lit up a political storm, requests were made for Cossiga's (Italian President since 1985) resignation or impeachment for high treason. He refused to testify to the investigating Senate committee. Cossiga narrowly escaped his impeachment by stepping down on April 1992, three months before his term expired.[36]

• 1998 David Carrett, officer of the U.S. Navy
  

David Carrett, officer of the U.S. Navy, was indicted by magistrate Guido Salvini on charge of political and military espionage and his participation to the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, among other events. Judge Guido Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, Italian official for the US-NATO intelligence network, and pentito Carlo Digilio. La Repubblica underlined that Carlo Rocchi, CIA's man at Milan, was surprised in 1995 searching for information concerning Operation Gladio, thus demonstrating that all was not over.[29]
1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, which started Italy's anni di piombo, and the 1974 "Italicus Expressen" train bombing were also attributed to Gladio operatives. In 1975, Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Pinochet during Franco's funeral in Madrid, and would participate afterward in operation Condor, preparing for example the attempted murder of Bernardo Leighton, a Chilean Christian Democrat, or participating in the 1980 'Cocaine Coup' of Luis García Meza Tejada in Bolivia. In 1989, he was arrested in Caracas, Venezuela and extradited to Italy to stand trial for his role in the Piazza Fontana bombing. Despite his reputation, Delle Chiaie was acquitted by the Assize Court in Catanzaro in 1989, along with fellow accused Massimiliano Fachini (as yet no convictions have been made for the attack). According to Avanguardia Nazionale member Vincenzo Vinciguerra: "The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency."[29]

The DSSA, another Gladio?

In July 2005, the Italian press revealed the existence of the Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA), a "parallel police" created by Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindoca, two leaders of the National Union of the Police Forces (UNPF), a trade-union present in all the state security forces. Both said they were former members of Gladio. According to the DSSA website — closed after these revelations — Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq after being taken hostage, was there "for the DSSA". According to the Italian investigators, the DSSA was trying to obtain international and national recognition by intelligence agencies, in order to obtain finances for its parallel activities. Furthermore, Il Messaggero, quoted by The Independent, declared that, according to judicial sources, wiretaps suggested DSSA members had been planning to kidnap Cesare Battisti, a former communist activist. "We were seeing the genesis of something similar to the death squads in Argentina" (the AAA groups) the magistrate is reported to have said.[37][38][39][40][41]


Continued next post[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio#cite_note-40"]

Belgium

Main article: Belgian stay-behind network
After the 1966 retreat of France from NATO, the SHAPE headquarters were displaced to Mons in Belgium. In 1990, following France's denial of any "stay-behind" French army, Giulio Andreotti publicly said the last Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) meeting, at which the French branch of Gladio was present, had been on October 23 and 24, 1990, under the presidency of Belgian General Van Calster, director of the Belgian military secret service SGR. In November, Guy Coëme, the Minister of the Defense, acknowledged the existence of a Belgium "stay-behind" army, lifting concerns about a similar implication in terrorist acts as in Italy. The same year, the European Parliament sharply condemned NATO and the United States in a resolution for having manipulated European politics with the stay-behind armies.[28]
New legislation governing intelligence agencies' missions and methods was passed in 1998, following two government inquiries and the creation of a permanent parliamentary committee in 1991, which was to bring them under the authority of Belgium's federal agencies. The Commission was created following events in the 1980s, which included the Brabant massacres and the activities of far right group Westland New Post.[42]

France

In 1947, Interior Minister Edouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed "Plan Bleu". The next year, the "Western Union Clandestine Committee" (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. In 1949, the WUCC was integrated into NATO, whose headquarters were established in France, under the name "Clandestine Planning Committee" (CPC). In 1958, NATO founded the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare.
The network was supported with elements from SCEDE, and had military support from the 11th Choc regiment. The former director of DGSE, admiral Pierre Lacoste, alleged in a 1992 interview with The Nation, that certain elements from the network were involved with terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. A section of the 11th Choc regiment split over the 1962 Evian peace accords, and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), but it is unclear if this also involved members of the French stay-behind network.[43][44]
La Rose des Vents and Arc-en-ciel ("Rainbow") network were part of Gladio. François de Grossouvre was Gladio's leader for the region around Lyon in France until his alleged suicide on April 7 1994. Grossouvre would have asked Constantin Melnik, leader of the French secret services during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), to return to activity. He was living in comfortable exile in the US, where he maintained links with the Rand Corporation. Constantin Melnik is alleged to have been involved in the creation in 1952 of the Ordre Souverain du Temple Solaire, an ancestor of the Order of the Solar Temple, created by former A.M.O.R.C. members, in which the SDECE (French former military intelligence agency) was interested.[45]

Denmark


The Danish stay-behind army was code-named Absalon, after a Danish archbishop, and led by E.J. Harder. It was hidden in the military secret service Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE). In 1978, William Colby, former director of the CIA, released his memoirs in which he described the setting-up of stay-behind armies in Scandinavia:[46]
On November 25, 1990, Danish daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende, quoted by Daniele Ganser (2005), confirmed William Colby's revelations, by a source named "Q":
Germany

Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi intelligence agent on the East front during the war, turned towards the US after the war, and set up the "Gehlen Organisation," which used many former Nazi party members for intelligence purpose in the frame of the Cold War. But alongside the Gehlen organisation, which became the nucleus of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, Federal Intelligence Service), West Germany's intelligence agency created in 1956, US intelligence also set up a German stay-behind network parallel (and juxtaposed) to the Gehlen Org (which also had a role in the organisation of the ODESSA network, used to exfiltrate Nazi war criminals). CIA documents released in June 2006 under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, more than fifteen years after Prime minister Giulio Andreotti's revelations concerning Gladio, show that the CIA organized "stay-behind" networks of German agents between 1949 and 1955.[47]
One of these networks supported by the CIA was the Technische Dienst (TD, Technical Service) section within the Bund Deutscher Jugend (BDJ, Union of German Youth). The anti-communist BDJ was founded in 1950 by ex-Nazis Erhard Peters and Paul Lüth. The existence of TD came to light, after a speech in the Hesse Landtag by PM Georg August Zinn.[48] During the investigations into BDJ, which started in September 1952, a couple of arms caches were found, including one in the Odenwald region, Hesse.[49] The claim by August Zinn that the BDJ supposedly was in the possession of a list of Social Democracts and Communists to be liquidated in case of a Soviet invasion, including leading figures of the opposition Social Democratic Party[50]) was denied by German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.[49] The BDJ was outlawed in January 1953.[51][52]
Documents shown to the Italian parliamentary terrorism committee revealed that in the 1970s British and French officials involved in the network visited a training base in Germany built with US money.[50]
In 1976, the secret service BND secretary Heidrun Hofer was arrested after having revealed the secrets of the German stay-behind army to her husband, who was a spy of the KGB.[28]

The 1980 Oktoberfest bomb blast

Revelations of a witness in the investigation of the Oktoberfest bomb blast of 1980 in Munich lead to the conclusion that the explosives might have come from the German Neo-Nazi Heinz Lembke.[citation needed] In 1981, German police by chance found an arms cache in the Lüneburg Heath, which led to the arrest of Lembke and the discovery of other arms caches in Lower Saxony. A few days later, Lembke hanged himself in prison. Lembke had been questioned in Oktoberfest investigation, but the public prosecutors found no evidence that he supplied the explosives for the bombing.[53]
Lembkes arms caches were supposed to be connected to Gladio by a number of researchers and journalists.[7]

CIA's documents released in June 2006

One network included Staff Sergent Heinrich Hoffman and Lieutenant Colonel Hans Rues, and another one, codenamed Kibitz-15, was run by Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kopp, a former Wehrmacht officer, described by his own North American handlers as an "unreconstructed Nazi."[54] In an April 1953 CIA memo released in June 2006, the CIA headquarters wrote: "The present furore in Western Germany over the resurgence of the Nazi or neo-Nazi groups is a fair example — in miniature — of what we would be faced with." Therefore some of these networks were dismantled. These documents stated that the ex-Nazis were a complete failure in intelligence terms. According to Timothy Naftali, a US historian from the University of Virginia who reviewed the CIA documents then released, "The files show time and again that these people were more trouble than they were worth. The unreconstructed Nazis were always out for themselves, and they were using the West's lack of information about the Soviet Union to exploit it."[54] The US NARA Archives themselves stated in a 2002 communique, concerning Reinhard Gehlen's recruiting of former Nazis, that "Besides the troubling moral issues involved, these recruitments opened the West German government, and by extension the United States, to penetration by the Soviet intelligence services."[55]
Hans Globke, who had worked for Adolf Eichmann in the Jewish Affairs department and helped draft the 1935 Nuremberg laws, became Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's national security advisor in the 1960s, and "was the main liaison with the CIA and NATO" according to The Guardian.[54] A March 1958 memo from the German BND agency to the CIA wrote that Adolf Eichmann is "reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias CLEMENS since 1952." However, the CIA did not pass the information on to the Israeli MOSSAD, as it feared revelations concerning its use of former Nazis for intelligence purposes — Eichmann, who was in charge of the Jewish Affairs department, was abducted by the MOSSAD two years later. Among these information that might have been revealed by Eichmann were the ones concerning Hans Globke, CIA's liaison in West Germany. At the request of Bonn, the CIA persuaded Life magazine to delete any reference to Globke from Eichmann's memoirs, which it had bought from his family.[47]

Norbert Juretzko's 2004 revelations

In 2004 the German spymaster Norbert Juretzko published a book about his work at the BND. He went into details about recruiting partisans for the German stay-behind network. He was sacked from BND following a secret trial against him, because the BND could not find out the real name of his Russian source "Rubezahl" whom he had recruited. A man with the name he put on file was arrested by the KGB following treason in the BND, but was obviously innocent, his name having been chosen at random from the public phone book by Juretzko.
According to Juretzko, the BND built up its branch of Gladio, but discovered after the fall of the German Democratic Republic that it was 100% known to the Stasi early on. When the network was dismantled, further odd details emerged. One fellow "spymaster" had kept the radio equipment in his cellar at home with his wife doing the engineering test call every 4 months, on the grounds that the equipment was too "valuable" to remain in civilian hands. Juretzko found out because this spymaster had dismantled his section of the network so quickly, there had been no time for measures such as recovering all caches of supplies. Civilians recruited as stay-behind partisans were equipped with a clandestine shortwave radio with a fixed frequency. It had a keyboard with encryption, making use of Morse code unnecessary. They had a cache of further equipment for signalling helicopters or submarines to drop special agents who were to stay in the partisan's homes while mounting sabotage operations against the communists.

Greece

The aim of British Prime minister Winston Churchill was to prevent the communist-led EAM resistance movement from taking power after the end of World War II. After the suppression of a pro-EAM uprising in April 1944 among the Greek forces in Egypt, a new and firmly reliable unit was formed, the Third Greek Mountain Brigade, which excluded "almost all men with views ranging from moderately conservative to left wing."[56] After liberation in October 1944, EAM controlled most of the country. When it organized a demonstration in Athens on December 3, 1944 , members of rightist and pro-royalist paramilitary organizations, covered by "British troops and police with machine guns... posited on the rooftops", suddenly shot on the crowd, killing 25 protesters (including a six-year-old boy) and wounding 148.[57] This marked the outbreak of the Dekemvriana, which would lead to the Greek Civil War.
When Greece joined NATO in 1952, the country's special forces, the LOK (Lochoi Oreinōn Katadromōn, i.e. "Mountain Raiding Companies") were integrated into the European stay-behind network. The CIA and LOK reconfirmed on March 25, 1955 their mutual co-operation in a secret document signed by US General Trascott for the CIA, and Konstantinos Dovas, chief of staff of the Greek military. In addition to preparing for a Soviet invasion, the CIA instructed LOK to prevent a leftist coup. Former CIA agent Philip Agee, who was sharply criticized in the US for having revealed sensitive information, insisted that "paramilitary groups, directed by CIA officers, operated in the sixties throughout Europe [and he stressed that] perhaps no activity of the CIA could be as clearly linked to the possibility of internal subversion."[58]
The LOK was involved in the Greek military coup d'État on April 21, 1967,[59][not in citation given] which took place one month before the scheduled national elections for which opinion polls predicted an overwhelming victory of the centrist Center Union of George and Andreas Papandreou. Under the command of paratrooper Lieutenant Colonel Costas Aslanides, the LOK took control of the Greek Defence Ministry while Brigadier General Stylianos Pattakos gained control over communication centers, the parliament, the royal palace, and according to detailed lists, arrested over 10,000 people. Phillips Talbot, the US ambassador in Athens, disapproved of the military coup which established the "Regime of the Colonels" (1967-1974), complaining that it represented "a rape of democracy" - to which Jack Maury, the CIA chief of station in Athens, answered: "How can you rape a whore?".[28][not in citation given]
Arrested and then exiled in Canada and Sweden, Andreas Papandreou later returned to Greece, where he won the 1981 election for Prime minister, forming the first socialist government of Greece's post-war history. According to his own testimony, he discovered the existence of the secret NATO army, then codenamed "Red Sheepskin", as acting prime minister in 1984 and had given orders to dissolve it.
Following Giulio Andreotti's revelations in 1990, the Greek defence minister confirmed that a branch of the network, known as Operation Sheepskin, operated in his country until 1988.[60] The socialist opposition called for a parliamentary investigation into the secret army and its alleged link to terrorism and the 1967 coup d'état. Public order minister Yannis Vassiliadis declared that there was no need to investigate such "fantasies" as "Sheepskin was one of 50 NATO plans which foresaw that when a country was occupied by an enemy there should be an organised resistance. It foresaw arms caches and officers who would form the nucleus of a guerilla war. In other words, it was a nationally justifiable act."
In December 2005, journalist Kleanthis Grivas published an article in To Proto Thema, a Greek Sunday newspaper, in which he accused "Sheepskin" for the assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens in 1975, as well as the assassination of British military attaché Stephen Saunders in 2000. This was denied by the US State Department, who responded that "the Greek terrorist organization '17 November' was responsible for both assassinations", and that Grivas's central piece of evidence had been the Westmoreland Field Manual which the State department, as well as an independent Congressional inquiry have alleged to be a Soviet forgery.[61] The document in question, however, makes no specific mention of Greece, November 17, nor Welch. The State Department also highlighted the fact that, in the case of Richard Welch, "Grivas bizarrely accuses the CIA of playing a role in the assassination of one of its own senior officials" while "Sheepskin" couldn't have assassinate Stephen Saunders for the simple reason, according to the US government, that "the Greek government stated it dismantled the “stay behind” network in 1988."[61]

The Netherlands

A large arms cache was discovered in 1983 near the village Velp. In 1990 the government by means of then-prime-minister Ruud Lubbers was forced to confirm that the arms were related to planning for unorthodox warfare. He insisted that the Dutch organisation was, contrary to the operations in other European countries, totally independent from NATO command, and during wartime occupation would be commanded by the Dutch government in exile. The operating bureaus of the organisation would also move to safety in England or the USA at the first sign of trouble.
In his television show of 22 April 2007 Dutch crime journalist Peter R. De Vries revealed that weapons had been illegally supplied to Gladio well after the network was supposed to have been disbanded.[28]
A Dutch investigative television program revealed on September 9, 2007, that an arms cache that belonged to Gladio was ransacked in the 1980s. The cache was located in a forest near Scheveningen. Some of stolen weapons later turned up, including hand grenades and machine guns, when police officials arrested criminals Sam Klepper and John Mieremet in 1991. The Dutch military intelligence agency, MIVD, feared at that time that the disclosure of the Gladio history of these weapons was politically explosive.[62][63]

Norway

In 1957, the director of the secret service NIS, Vilhelm Evang, protested strongly against the pro-active intelligence activities at AFNORTH, as described by the chairman of CPC: "[NIS] was extremely worried about activities carried out by officers at Kolsås. This concerned SB, Psywar and Counter Intelligence." These activities supposedly included the blacklisting of Norwegians. SHAPE denied these allegations. Eventually, the matter was resolved in 1958, after Norway was assured about how stay-behind networks were to be operated.[64][page number needed]
In 1978, the police discovered an arms cache at a mountain cabin and arrested Hans Otto Meyer, a NIS officer. Meyer claimed that these were supplied by Norwegian intelligence. Rolf Hansen, defense minister at that time, stated the network was not in any way answerable to NATO and had no CIA connection.[65]


Portugal
Further information: Aginter Press
In 1966, the CIA set up Aginter Press which, under the direction of Captain Yves Guérin-Sérac (who had taken part in the founding of the OAS), ran a secret stay-behind army and trained its members in covert action techniques amounting to terrorism, including bombings, silent assassinations, subversion techniques, clandestine communication and infiltration and colonial warfare. Aginter Press was suspected of having assassinated General Humberto Delgado (1906-1965), founder of the Portuguese National Liberation Front against Salazar's dictatorship (prominent historians and several sources also claim Delgado's assassination was performed by PIDE operational Rosa Casaco), as well as anti-colonialist leader Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973), founder of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) and Eduardo Mondlane leader of the liberation movement FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), in 1969 (prominent historians and several sources also claim Cabral's assassination was performed by indivuduals within Cabral's guerrilla movemment, the PAIGC, and Mondlane's death was work of his enemies inside FRELIMO - according to these versions, both assassinations were the result of struggles for power within the independentist movements).[28][66]

Turkey

Main article: Counter-Guerrilla
Further information: Deep state, Ergenekon network, and Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele
As the country which gave rise to the Truman Doctrine, Turkey is one of the first countries to participate in Operation Gladio and, some say the only country where it has not been purged.[67] According to Italian magistrate Felice Casson, the Turkish stay-behind forces are two-pronged: the military "Counter-Guerrilla", and the civilian "Ergenekon".[68] An offshoot of the latter organization is currently the subject of a major investigation. Casson says Turkey is home to the most powerful branch of Operation Gladio.[69]
The counter-guerrilla's existence was revealed by prime minister Bülent Ecevit in 1973.[70]

The United Kingdom

In Great Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1940 to assist resistance movements and carry out subversive operations in enemy-held territory across occupied Europe. Guardian reporter David Pallister wrote in December 1990 that a guerrilla network with arms caches had been put in place following the fall of France. It included Brigadier "Mad Mike" Calvert, and was drawn from a special-forces ski battalion of the Scots Guards which was originally intended to fight in Nazi-occupied Finland.[21] Known as Auxiliary Units, they were headed by Major Colin Gubbins, an expert in guerrilla warfare who would later lead the SOE. The Auxiliary Units were attached to GHQ Home Forces, and concealed within the Home Guard. The units were created in preparation of a possible invasion of the British Isles by the Third Reich. These units were allegedly stood down only in 1944. Several of their members subsequently joined the Special Air Service and saw action in France in late 1944. The units' existence did not generally become known by the public until the 1990s though a book on the subject was published in 1968.[71] In fiction, Owen Sheers' Resistance (2008), set in Wales, takes as one of its central characters a member of the Auxiliary Units called to resist a successful German invasion.
After the end of World War II, the stay-behind armies were created with the experience and involvement of former SOE officers.[28] Following Giulio Andreotti's October 1990 revelations, General Sir John Hackett (1910-1997), former commander-in-chief of the British Army on the Rhine, declared on November 16, 1990 that a contingency plan involving "stay behind and resistance in depth" was drawn up after the war. The same week, Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley (1924-2006), former commander-in-chief of NATO's Forces in Northern Europe from 1979 to 1982, declared to The Guardian that a secret arms network was established in Britain after the war.[50] General John Hackett had written in 1978 a novel, The Third World War: August 1985, which was a fictionalized scenario of a Soviet Army invasion of West Germany in 1985. The novel was followed in 1982 by The Third World War: The Untold Story, which elaborated on the original. Farrar-Hockley had aroused controversy in 1983 when he became involved in trying to organise a campaign for a new Home Guard against eventual Soviet invasion.[72]
Gladio membership included mostly ex-servicemen but also followers of Oswald Mosley's pre-war fascist movement.[citation needed] Among the 200,000+ Polish ex-servicemen in the UK after the end of WW2, unable to return home for fear of communist repression, were conspiratorial groups maintaining combat readiness ready to fight for a free Poland should the Warsaw Pact attack western Europe. The 'Pogon' organisation, linked to the Polish Government-in-Exile held regular paramilitary exercises until the 1970s; many of its members were associated with the Polish scouting movement in the UK which had a strong paramilitary flavour. Links with 'Stay-behind' networks are strongly suspected.[citation needed]

General Serravale's revelations

General Gerardo Serravalle, who commanded the Italian Gladio from 1971 to 1974, related that "in the 1970s the members of the CPC [Coordination and Planning Committee] were the officers responsible for the secret structures of Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands and Italy. These representatives of the secret structures met every year in one of the capitals... At the stay-behind meetings representatives of the CIA were always present. They had no voting rights and were from the CIA headquarters of the capital in which the meeting took place... members of the US Forces Europe Command were present, also without voting rights. ".[73] Next to the CPC a second secret command post was created in 1957, the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC). According to the Belgian Parliamentary Committee on Gladio, the ACC was "responsible for coordinating the 'Stay-behind' networks in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States". During peacetime, the activities of the ACC "included elaborating the directives for the network, developing its clandestine capability and organising bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime, it was to plan stay-behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE; organisers were to activate clandestine bases and organise operations from there".[74] General Serravale declared to the Commissione Stragi headed by senator Giovanni Pellegrino that the Italian Gladio members trained at a military base in Britain.[50] Documents shown to the committee also revealed that British and French officials members of Gladio had visited in the 1970s a training base in Germany built with US money.[50]

The Guardian's November 1990 revelations concerning plans under Margaret Thatcher

The Guardian reported on November 5, 1990, that there had been a "secret attempt to revive elements of a parallel post-war plan relating to overseas operations" in the "early days of Mrs Thatcher's Conservative leadership". According to the British newspaper, "a group of former intelligence officers, inspired by the wartime Special Operations Executive, attempted to set up a secret unit as a kind of armed MI6 cell. Those behind the scheme included Airey Neave, Mrs Thatcher's close adviser who was killed in a terrorist attack in 1979, and George Kennedy Young, a former deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6." The newspaper stated that Thatcher had been "initially enthusiastic but dropped the idea after the scandal surrounding the attack by the French secret service on the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in New Zealand in 1985."[59] The Swiss branch, P-26, as well as Italian Gladio, had trained in the UK in the early 1970s.[59][75]

Parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries


Austria

In Austria, the first secret stay-behind army was exposed in 1947. It had been set up by far-right Soucek and Rössner, who both insisted during their trial that "they were carrying out the secret operation with the full knowledge and support of the US and British occupying powers." Sentenced to death, they were then pardoned under mysterious circumstances by Chancellor Körner (1951-1957).
Franz Olah set up a new secret army codenamed Österreichischer Wander-Sport-und Geselligkeitsverein (OWSGV, literally "Austrian hiking, sports and society club"), with the cooperation of MI6 and the CIA. He later explained that "we bought cars under this name. We installed communication centres in several regions of Austria", confirming that "special units were trained in the use of weapons and plastic explosives". He precised that "there must have been a couple of thousand people working for us... Only very, very highly positioned politicians and some members of the union knew about it".
In 1965, the police forces discovered a stay-behind arms cache in an old mine close to Windisch-Bleiberg and forced the British authorities to hand over a list with the location of 33 other caches in Austria.[28]
In 1990, when secret "stay-behind" armies were discovered all around Europe, the Austrian government said that no secret army had existed in the country. However, six years later, the Boston Globe revealed the existence of a secret CIA arms caches in Austria. Austrian President Thomas Klestil and Chancellor Franz Vranitzky insisted that they had known nothing of the existence of the secret army and demanded that the US launch a full-scale investigation into the violation of Austria's neutrality, which was denied by President Bill Clinton. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns - appointed in August 2001 by President George Bush as the US Permanent Representative to the Atlantic treaty organization, where, as ambassador to NATO, he headed the combined State-Defense Department United States Mission to NATO and coordinated the NATO response to the September 11, 2001 attacks - insisted: "The aim was noble, the aim was correct, to try to help Austria if it was under occupation. What went wrong is that successive Washington administrations simply decided not to talk to the Austrian government about it."[7]

Finland

In 1945, Interior Minister Yrjö Leino exposed a secret stay-behind army which was closed down (so called Weapons Cache Case). This operation was organized by Finnish general staff officers (without foreign help) in 1944 to hide weapons in order to sustain a large-scale guerilla warfare in the event the Soviet Union tried to occupy Finland in the aftermath of the Continuation War. See also Operation Stella Polaris.
In 1991, the Swedish media claimed that a secret stay-behind army had existed in neutral Finland with an exile base in Stockholm. Finnish Defence Minister Elisabeth Rehn called the revelations "a fairy tale", adding cautiously "or at least an incredible story, of which I know nothing.".[28] However, in his memoirs, former CIA director William Colby described the setting-up of stay-behind armies in Scandinavian countries, including Finland, with or without the assistance of local governments, to prepare for a Soviet invasion.[46]

Spain

Main article: Montejurra
Several events prior to Spain's 1982 membership in NATO have also been tied to Gladio: In May 1976, a year after Franco's death, two left-wing Carlist members were shot down by far-right terrorists, among whom Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and members of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), demonstrating connections between Gladio and the South American "Dirty War". This incident became known as the Montejurra massacre.[76] According to a report by the Italian CESIS (Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services), Carlo Cicuttini (who took part in the 1972 Peteano bombing in Italy alongside Vincenzo Vinciguerra), participated in the 1977 Massacre of Atocha in Madrid, killing five people (including several lawyers), members of the Workers' Commissions trade-unions closely linked with the Spanish Communist Party. Cicuttini was naturalized Spanish and exiled in Spain since 1972 (date of the Peteano bombing)[77]
Following Andreotti's 1990 revelations, Adolfo Suárez, Spain's first democratically elected Prime minister after Franco's death, denied ever having heard of Gladio.[78] President of the Spanish government in 1981-82, during the transition to democracy, Calvo Sotelo stated that Spain had not been informed of Gladio when it entered NATO. Asked about Gladio's relations to Franquist Spain, he said that such a network was not necessary under Franco, since "the regime itself was Gladio."[79]
According to General Fausto Fortunato, head of Italian SISMI from 1971 to 1974, France and the US had backed Spain's entrance to Gladio, but Italy would have opposed its veto to it. Following Andreotti's revelations, however, Narcís Serra, Spanish Minister of Defense, opened up an investigation concerning Spain's links to Gladio.[80][81] Furthermore, Canarias 7 newspaper revealed, quoting former Gladio agent Alberto Volo, who had a role in the revelations of the existence of the network in 1990, that a Gladio meeting had been organized in August 1991 in the Gran Canaria island.[82] Alberto Vollo also declared that as a Gladio operative, he had received trainings in Maspalomas, in the Gran Canaria island between the 1960s and the 1970s.[83] El País daily also revealed that the Gladio organization was suspected of having used former NASA installations in Maspalomas, in the Gran Canaria island, in the 1970s.[84]
André Moyen, former Belgian secret agent, also declared that Gladio had operated in Spain.[85] He said that Gladio had bases in Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastián and the Canarias islands.

Sweden

In 1951, CIA agent William Colby, based at the CIA station in Stockholm supported the training of stay-behind armies in neutral Sweden and Finland and in the NATO members Norway and Denmark. In 1953, the police arrested right winger Otto Hallberg and discovered the Swedish stay-behind army. Hallberg was set free and charges against him were mysteriously dropped.[28]

Switzerland

Main article: Projekt-26
In Switzerland, a secret army named P26 was discovered, by coincidence months before Giulio Andreotti's October 1990 revelations. After the "secret files scandal" (Fichenaffäre), Swiss parliamentaries started investigating the Defense Department in the summer of 1990. According to Felix Würsten of the ETH Zurich, "P26 was not directly involved in the network of NATO's secret armies but it had close contact to MI6."[86] Daniele Ganser (ETH Zurich) wrote in the Intelligence and National Security review that "following the discovery of the stay-behind armies across Western Europe in late 1990, Swiss and international security researchers found themselves confronted with two clear-cut questions: Did Switzerland also operate a secret stay-behind army? And if yes, was it part of NATO's stay-behind network? The answer to the first question is clearly yes... The answer to the second question remains disputed..."[87]
Swiss Major Hans von Dach published in 1958 Der totale Widerstand, Kleinkriegsanleitung für jedermann ("Total Resistance," Bienne, 1958) concerning guerrilla warfare, a book of 180 pages about passive and active resistance to a foreign invasion, including detailed instructions on sabotage, clandestinity, methods to dissimulate weapons, struggle against police moles, etc.[88]
In 1990, Colonel Herbert Alboth, a former commander of the Swiss secret stay-behind army P26 declared in a confidential letter to the Defence Department that he was willing to reveal "the whole truth". He was later found in his house, stabbed with his own military bayonet. The detailed parliamentary report on the Swiss secret army was presented to the public on November 17, 1990.[28] According to The Guardian, "P26 was backed by P27, a private foreign intelligence agency funded partly by the government, and by a special unit of Swiss army intelligence which had built up files on nearly 8,000 "suspect persons" including "leftists", "bill stickers", "Jehovah's witnesses", people with "abnormal tendencies" and anti-nuclear demonstrators. On November 14, the Swiss government hurriedly dissolved P26 — the head of which, it emerged, had been paid £100,000 a year."[59]
In 1991, a report by Swiss magistrate Pierre Cornu was released by the Swiss defence ministry. It said that P26 was without "political or legal legitimacy", and described the group's collaboration with British secret services as "intense". "Unknown to the Swiss government, British officials signed agreements with the organisation, called P26, to provide training in combat, communications, and sabotage. The latest agreement was signed in 1987... P26 cadres participated regularly in training exercises in Britain... British advisers — possibly from the SAS — visited secret training establishments in Switzerland." P26 was led by Efrem Cattelan, known to British intelligence.[75]
In a 2005 conference presenting Daniele Ganser's research on Gladio, Hans Senn, General Chief of Staff of the Swiss Army between 1977 and 1980, explained how he was informed of the existence of a secret organisation in the middle of his term of office. According to him, it already became clear in 1980 in the wake of the Schilling/Bachmann affair that there was also a secret group in Switzerland. But former MP, Helmut Hubacher, President of the Social Democratic Party from 1975 to 1990, declared that although it had been known that "special services" existed within the army, as a politician he never at any time could have known that the secret army P26 was behind this. Hubacher pointed out that the President of the parliamentary investigation into P26 (PUK-EMD), the right-wing politician from Appenzell and member of the Council of States for that Canton, Carlo Schmid, had suffered "like a dog" during the commission's investigations. Carlo Schmid declared to the press: "I was schocked that something like that is at all possible," and said to the press he was glad to leave the "conspirational atmosphere" which had weighted upon him like a "black shadow" during the investigations.[89] Hubacher found it especially disturbing that, apart from its official mandate of organizing resistance in case of a Soviet invasion, P26 had also a mandate to become active should the left succeed in achieving a parliamentary majority.[86]

The Order of the Solar Temple mystery

Psychiatrist Jean-Marie Abgrall has alleged[90][verification needed] that the "collective suicides" allegedly committed by various Order of the Solar Temple (OST) members, in December 1995 in the Vercors region of France, were somehow related to Gladio. According to Jean-Marie Abgrall's declarations to Le Point magazine and Nice Matin newspaper in February 2003, which he renewed in official justice documents, the Renewed Order of the Solar Temple cult ("Ordre Rénové du Temple" - ORT[91]), ancestor of the OTS, had relations with Gladio networks. Abgrall also claimed that the AMORC, of which he had been a member, was also related to "Foccart networks" (Jacques Foccart was De Gaulle's spindoctor for African affairs, and retained an important role long after him).
The theory of the mass suicide has been heavily contested by family of the victims Alain Vuarnet, René and Muguette Rostan, Willy and Giséla Schleimer and their lawyer, Alain Leclerc. According to a Reuters cable dated March 22, 2004 (19:03:46), the lawyer explained that he had two documents upholding the theory of a murder, the first one being Jean-Marie Abgrall's juridical declaration above-mentioned. According to the lawyer, psychiatrist Jean-Marie Abgrall "reveals... that the Order of the Solar Temple, as the AMORC and the ORT, were created and controlled by French and foreign secret services". Those information weren't given at the time of investigations; the lawyer thus asked that Dr. Abgrall be heard by the judge, according to a Reuters cable.
One document was a copy of an April 21, 1997 letter addressed by a lawyer office to a bank, concerning the distribution of 17 million French Francs (about 2.5 millions Euros) between various personalities and political parties, the OST and the Rosicrucian Order AMORC (Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis), an organization suspected of links with the OST. In his demand for more investigation, Dr. Leclerc wrote: "If the document is true, it shows that the Order of the Solar Temple was in activity after the last March 22, 1997 massacre (the "collective suicide" of five adepts in Canada) and that the responsibles of this organization are still alive". However, the court refused further expertise: thus, it hasn't been possible to verify the validity of this document.
A third document was sent by the French secret services (RG) to the judge, discrediting the family of the victims' claims and demands for further investigations. If Jean-Marie Abgrall's claims of relationship between the ORT (OST's ancestor) and Gladio may seem far-fetched, Propaganda Due's juridically proven involvement[citation needed] in Gladio's strategy of tension inclines one to keep open various possibilities during investigations. Furthermore, connections between ORT founder Luc Jouret and far-right Belgian activist Jean Thiriart have been alleged by other sources; together, they had found in the 1970s a far-right party which was controlled by Belgium's branch of Gladio. In any case, the mass suicides haven't been clearly explained, let alone financial links concerning those various cults.[92][93][94]

FOIA requests and US State Department's 2006 communiqué

Three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have been filed to the CIA, which has rejected them with the standard reply: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request." One request was filed by the National Security Archive in 1991; another by the Italian Senate commission headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino in 1995 concerning Gladio and Aldo Moro's murder; the last one in 1996, by Oliver Rathkolb, of Vienna university, for the Austrian government, concerning the secret stay-behind armies after a discovery of an arms-cache.[28]
Furthermore, the US State Department published a communiqué in January 2006 which, while confirming the existence of stay-behind armies, in general, and the presence of the "Gladio" stay-behind unit in Italy, in particular, with the purpose of aiding resistance in the event of Soviet aggression directed Westward, from the Warsaw Pact, dismissed claims of any United States ordered, supported, or authorized skullduggery by stay-behind units. In fact, it claims that, on the contrary, the accusations of US-sponsored "false flag" operations are rehashed former Soviet disinformation based on documents that the Soviets themselves forged; specifically the researchers are alleged to have been influenced by the Westmoreland Field Manual, whose forged nature was confirmed by former KGB operatives, following the end of the Cold War. The Soviet-authored forgery, disseminated in the 1970s, explicitly formulated the need for a "strategy of tension" involving violent attacks blamed on radical left-wing groups in order to convince allied governments of the need for counter-action. It also rejected a Communist Greek journalist's allegations made in December 2005 (See above).[61]

Politicians about Gladio

Whilst the existence of a "stay-behind" organization such as Gladio was disputed, prior to its confirmation by Giulio Andreotti, with some skeptics describing it as a conspiracy theory, several high ranking politicians in NATO countries have made statements appearing to confirm the existence of something like what is described:

• Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti ("Gladio had been necessary during the days of the Cold War but, that in view ...

http://www.325collective.com/gladio-ganser.pdf

Daniele Ganser's PhD manuscript on Operation Gladio "NATO's Secret Armies - Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe"

INTRODUCTION
As the Cold War ended, following juridical investigations into mysterious
acts of terrorism in Italy, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forced
to confirm in August 1990 that a secret army existed in Italy and other countries
across Western Europe that were part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). Coordinated by the unorthodox warfare section of NATO, the secret
army had been set up by the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 or SIS) after the end of the
Second World War to fight Communism in Western Europe. The clandestine
network, which after the revelations of the Italian Prime Minister was researched
by judges, parliamentarians, academics and investigative journalists across
Europe, is now understood to have been code-named 'Gladio' (the sword) in Italy,
while in other countries the network operated under different names including
'Absalon' in Denmark, 'ROC' in Norway and 'SDRA8' in Belgium. In each country
the military secret service operated the anti-Communist army within the state in close
collaboration with the CIA or the MI6 unknown to parliaments and populations.
In each country, leading members of the executive, including Prime Ministers,
Presidents, Interior Ministers and Defence Ministers, were involved in the
conspiracy, while the 'Allied Clandestine Committee' (ACC), sometimes also
euphemistically called the 'Allied Co-ordination Committee' and the 'Clandestine
Planning Committee' (CPC), less conspicuously at times also called 'Coordination
and Planning Committee' of NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
(SHAPE), coordinated the networks on the international level. The last confirmed
secret meeting of ACC with representatives of European secret services took
place on October 24, 1990 in Brussels.
As the details of the operation emerged, the press concluded that the 'story
seems straight from the pages of a political thriller'.1 The secret armies were
equipped by the CIA and the MI6 with machine guns, explosives, munitions and
high-tech communication equipment hidden in arms caches in forests, meadows
and underground bunkers across Western Europe. Leading officers of the secret
network trained together with the US Green Berets Special Forces in the United
States of America and the British SAS Special Forces in England. Recruited
among strictly anti-Communist segments of the society the secret Gladio soldiers
included moderate conservatives as well as right-wing extremists such as notorious
right-wing terrorists Stefano delle Chiale and Yves Guerain Serac. In its strategic
design the secret army was a direct copy of the British Special Operations Executive
(SOE), which during the Second World War had pararachuted into enemy-held
territory and fought a secret war behind enemy lines.
In case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe the secret Gladio soldiers under
NATO command would have formed a so-called stay-behind network operating
behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in
enemy-held territory, evacuating shot-down pilots and sabotaging the supply lines
and production centres of the occupation forces with explosives. Yet the
Soviet invasion never came. The real and present danger in the eyes of the secret
war strategists in Washington and London were the at-times numerically strong
Communist parties in the democracies of Western Europe. Hence the network in
the total absence of a Soviet invasion took up arms in numerous countries and
fought a secret war against the political forces of the left. The secret armies, as the
secondary sources now available suggest, were involved in a whole series of terrorist
operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists
in order to discredit the left at the polls. The operations always aimed at spreading
maximum fear among the population and ranged from bomb massacres in trains
and market squares (Italy), the use of systematic torture of opponents of the
regime (Turkey), the support for right-wing coup d'etats (Greece and Turkey), to
the smashing of opposition groups (Portugal and Spain). As the secret armies were
discovered, NATO as well as the governments of the United States and Great
Britain refused to take a stand on what by then was alleged by the press to be 'the
best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II'.2

Secret Warfare: Operation Gladio and NATO's Stay-Behind Armies
Chronology

1940 In England Prime Minister Winston Churchill creates the secret stay-behind army Special Operations Executive (SOE) to set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory. After the end of World War Two the stay-behind armies are created on the experiences and strategies of SOE with the involvement of former SOE officers. 1944 London and Washington agree on the importance of keeping Western Europe free from Communism. In Greece a large Communist demonstration taking place in Athens against British interference in the post war government is dissolved by gunfire of secret soldiers leaving 25 protesters dead and 148 wounded. 1945 In Finland Communist Interior Minister Leino exposes a secret stay-behind which is being closed down. 1947 In the United States President Harry Truman creates the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The covert action branch of the CIA, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) under Frank Wisner sets up stay-behind armies in Western Europe. 1947 In France Interior Minister Edouard Depreux reveals the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed „Plan Bleu“. 1947 In Austria a secret stay-behind is exposed which had been set up by right-wing extremists Soucek and Rössner. Chancellor Körner pardons the accused under mysterious circumstances. 1948 In France the "Western Union Clandestine Committee" (WUCC) is being created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. After the creation of NATO a year later the WUCC is being integrated into the military alliance under the name “Clandestine Planning Committee” (CPC). 1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is founded and the European headquarters is established in France. 1951 In Sweden CIA agent William Colby based at the CIA station in Stockholm supports the training of stay-behind armies in neutral Sweden and Finland and in the NATO members Norway and Denmark. 1952 In Germany former SS officer Hans Otto reveals to the criminal police in the city of Frankfurt in Hessen the existence of the fascist German stay-behind army BDJ-TD. The arrested righ-wing extremist are found non guilty under mysterious circumstances. 1953 In Sweden the police arrests right winger Otto Hallberg and discovers the Swedish stay-behind army. Hallberg is set free and charges against him are mysteriously dropped. 1957 In Norway the director of the secret service NIS, Vilhelm Evang, protests strongly against the domestic subversion of his country through the United States and NATO and temporarily withdraws the Norwegian stay-behind army from the CPC meetings. 1958 In France NATO founds the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare and the stay-behind armies. When NATO establishes new European headquarters in Brussels the ACC under the code name SDRA 11 is hidden within the Belgian military secret service SGR who has its headquarters next to NATO. 1960 In Turkey the military supported by secret armies stages a coup d’état and kill Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. 1961 In Algeria members of the French stay-behind and officers from the French War in Vietnam found the illegal Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS) and with CIA support stage a coup in Algiers against the French government of de Gaulle which fails. 1964 In Italy the secret stay-behind army Gladio is involved in a silent coup d’état when General Giovanni de Lorenzo in Operation Solo forces the Italian Socialist Ministers to leave the government. 1965 In Austria police forces discover a stay-behind arms cache in an old mine close to Windisch-Bleiberg and force the British authorities to hand over a list with the location of 33 other MI6 arms caches in Austria. 1966 In Portugal the CIA sets up Aginter Press which under the direction of Captain Yves Guerin Serac runs a secret stay-behind army and trains its members in covert action techniques including hands on bomb terrorism, silent assassination, subversion techniques, clandestine communication and infiltration and colonial warfare. 1966 In France President Charles de Gaulle denounces the secret warfare of the Pentagon and expells the European headquarters of NATO. As the military alliance moves to Brussels secret NATO protocols are revealed that allegedly protect right-wingers in anti-communist stay-behind armies. 1967 In Greece the stay-behind army Hellenic Raiding Force takes over control over the Greek Defence Ministry and starts a military coup d’état installing a right wing dictatorship. 1968 In Sweden a British MI6 agent closely involved with the stay-behind army betrays the secret network to the Soviet secret service KGB. 1969 In Mocambique the Portugese stay-behind army Aginter Press assassinates Eduardo Mondlane, President of the Mocambique liberation party and leader of the FRELIMO movement (Frente de Liberacao de Mocambique). 1969 In Italy the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milano kills sixteen and injures and maimes 80 and is blame on the left. Thirty years later during a trial of right-wing extremists General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counter-intelligence, claims that the massacre had been carried out by the Italian stay-behind army and right wing terrorists on the orders of the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in order to discredit the Italian Communists. 1970 In Spain right wing terrorists including Stefano delle Chiaie of the Gladio stay-behind army are hired by Franco’s secret police. They had fled Italy following an aborted coup during which right-wing extremist Valerio Borghese had ordered the secret army to occupy the Interior Ministry in Rome. 1971 In Turkey the military stages a coup d’état and takes over power. The stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla engages in domestic terror and kills hundreds. 1972 In Italy a bomb explodes in a car near the village Peteano killing three Carabinieri. The terror, first blamed on the left, is later traced back to right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra and the Italian stay-behind code named Gladio. 1974 In Italy a massacre during an anti-fascist demonstration in Brescia kills eight and injures and maims 102, while a bomb in the Rome to Munich train “Italicus Express”, kills 12 and injures and maims 48. 1974 In Denmark the secret stay-behind army Absalon tries in vain to prevent a group of leftist academics from becoming members of the directing body of the Danish Odense University whereupon the secret army is exposed. 1974 In Italy General Vito Miceli, chief of the military secret service, is arrested on charges of subversive conspiracy against the state and reveals the NATO stay-behind secret army during trial. 1976 In Germany in the secret service BND secretary Heidrun Hofer is arrested after having revealed the secrets of the German stay-behind army to her husband who was a spy of the Soviet secret service KGB. 1977 In Turkey the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla attacks a demonstration of 500'000 in Istambul by opening fire at the speaker's platform leaving thirty-eight killed and hundreds injured. 1977 In Spain the secret stay-behind army with support of Italian right-wing terrorists carries out the Atocha massacre in Madrid and in an attack on a lawyer's office closely linked to the Spanish Communist party kill five people. 1978 In Norway the police discovers a stay-behind arms ache and arrests Hans Otto Meyer who reveals the Norwegian secret army. 1978 In Italy former Prime Minister and leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Aldo Moro, is taken hostage in Rome by an armed secret unit and killed 55 days later because he wanted to include the Italian Communists in the government. 1980 In Italy a bomb explodes in the waiting room of the second class at the Bologna railway station, killing 85 and seriously injuring and maiming a further 200. Investigators trace the crime back to right-wing terrorists. 1980 In Turkey the commander of the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla, General Kenan Evren, stages a military coup and seizes power. 1981 In Germany a large stay-behind arsenal is being discovered near the German village of Uelzen in the Lüneburger Heide. Right wing extremists are alleged to have used the arsenal in the previous year to carry out a massacre during the Munich October bear festival killing 13 and wounding 213 1983 In the Netherlands strollers in the forest discover a large arms cache near the Dutch village Velp and force the government to confrim that the arms were related to NATO planning for unorthodox warfare. 1984 In Turkey the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla fights against the Curds and kills and tortures thousands in the following years. 1984 In Italy right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra in court reveals Operation Gladio and the involvement of NATO’s stay-behind army in acts of terrorism in Italy designed to discredit the communists. He is sentenced to life and imprisoned. 1985 In Belgium a secret army attacks and shoots shoppers in supermarkets randomly in the Brabant county killing twenty-eight and leaving many wounded. Investigations link the terror to a conspiracy among the Belgian stay-behind SDRA8, the Belgian Gendarmerie SDRA6, the Belgian right-wing group Westland New Post, and the Pentagon secret service Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). 1990 In Italy judge Felice Casson discovers documents on Operation Gladio in the archives of the Italian military secret service in Rome and forces Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm the existence of a secret army within the state to parliament. As Andreotti insists that Italy had not been the only country involved in the conspiracy the secret anti-communist stay-behind armies are discovered across Western Europe. 1990 In Switzerland Colonel Herbert Alboth, a former commander of the Swiss secret stay-behind army P26, in a confidential letter to the Defence Departement declares that he is willing to reveal „the whole truth“. Thereafter he is found in his house stabbed with his own military bayonet. The detailed parliamentary report on the Swiss secret army is being presented to the public on November 17. 1990 In Belgium the NATO linked stay-behind headquarters Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) meets on October 23 and 24 under the presidency of Belgian General Van Calster, director of the Belgian military secret service SGR. 1990 In Belgium on November 5 NATO categorically denies the allegations of Prime Minister Andreotti concerning NATO's involvement in Operation Gladio and secret unorthdox warfare in Western Europe. The next day NATO explains that the denial of the previous day had been false while refusing to answer any further questions. 1990 In Belgium the parliament of the European Union (EU) sharply condemns NATO and the United States in a resolution for having manipulated European politics with the stay-behind armies. 1991 In Sweden the media reveals that a secret stay-behind army existed in neutral Finland with an exile base in Stockholm. Finnish Defence Minister Elisabeth Rehn calls the revelations "a fairy tale", adding cautiously "or at least an incredible story, of which I know nothing.” 1991 In the United States the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in Washington files a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request concerning the secret stay-behind armies with the CIA in the interest of public information and scientific research. The CIA rejects the request with the standart reply: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request." 1995 In England the London based Imperial War Museum in the permanent exhibition "Secret Wars" reveals next to a big box full of explosives that the MI6 and SAS had set up stay-behind armies across Western Europe. 1995 In Italy the Senate commission headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino researching Operation Gladio and the assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro files a FOIA request with the CIA. The CIA rejects the request and replies: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request." 1996 In Austria stay-behind arms caches set up by the CIA are discovered. For the Austrian government Oliver Rathkolb of Vienna University files a FOIA request concerning the secret stay-behind armies with the CIA. The CIA rejects the request and replies: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request."http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/coll_gladio/chronology.cfm?navinfo=15301

Magda - excellent work, as usual! :handkiss:

The heart of Gladio is the recruitment of extreme right-wing elements, who specialized in the ruthless use of violence to achieve their ends, by American & British intelligence. These elements included hardcore, unreformed Nazis, and their compadres such as Croatian Ustaša. Their recruiters were usually far right elements within western Europe & the WASP/capitalist establishment, who were rabidly anti-communist and supporters of rapacious, imperialist, capitalism best symbolized perhaps by the behaviour of the United Fruit Company.

The control of Gladio elements in Europe was highly compartmentalized, and sometimes non-existent. Nazi spymaster Gehlen was pretty much allowed to do what he liked, and ended up running post-war West German intelligence.

The little we know of Gladio is still a litany of shame and horror.

For instance, a Gladio faction tried to assassinate DeGaulle for taking France out of NATO.

Another Gladio faction staged a military coup d'etat in Greece.

Permindex, of Clay Shaw notoriety, was a Gladio cut-out.

Gladio factions perpetrated brutal false-flag bombings in Italy, as part of a "strategy of tension" - a disgraceful euphemism for war crimes against a civilian population.

Look beneath the surface of Gladio, and one finds a vast intelligence-industrial-political complex operating completely out of public view. Run by rabid far right elements who absolutely believe that the End justifies ruthless and bloody Means.

Gladio is not just the "most damaging, political-military secret since World War II". Gladio is proof that WW2 never really ended, and that the politics truly was all theatre.

In a recent article the German "Der Spiegel" mentions (here) in talking about the Stasi's codebreaking abilities that among the messages intercepted were Orders from the Bundesnachrichtendienst BND to Gladio.
Of course, the fact is not really surprising, but German mass media were not really advertising anything about Gladio (or the shady history of the BND).

Quote:Documents from the Stasi records department indicate that the one of the Stasi cryptologists' achievements was to break Vericrypt and Cryptophon standards that had been used until the 1980s. This meant that they were capable of decoding encrypted radio transmissions by the two main West German intelligence agencies -- the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) -- and the West German border police. The East Germans even managed to decode the BND's orders to members of the clandestine "Gladio" group, which was intended to continue anti-communist operations in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe.

Yes, Magda does great work...and hard work....finding and posting here! Brava!!! However, the link to Ganser's PhD thesis is not correct. I did however, find it on the internet on most peer-to-peer download sites...and have it all. As I live in Europe, I often have the opportunity to tell Europeans about it...and usually they've never heard of it - or anything of that kind. I've given his book to a few and opened many an eye!!!! As Jan says, it is really the classic and perhaps largest post-War network [and still operational!!!!!] proving that it was just one 'evil empire v. another evil empire'......a game of sham football - where the citizens of the world were/are the big loosers. We have an infinite number of OTHER options for world and national polity other than those two horrible models...but their 'game' was and still is to make it seem one has to choose between the two and only the two. I vote for neither. I can construct an infinity of better worlds.....without the creeps at the 'top' trying to manipulate and control by brute force, deception and propaganda all power and wealth, et al.....

Carsten Wiethoff Wrote:In a recent article the German "Der Spiegel" mentions (here) in talking about the Stasi's codebreaking abilities that among the messages intercepted were Orders from the Bundesnachrichtendienst BND to Gladio.
Of course, the fact is not really surprising, but German mass media were not really advertising anything about Gladio (or the shady history of the BND).

Quote:Documents from the Stasi records department indicate that the one of the Stasi cryptologists' achievements was to break Vericrypt and Cryptophon standards that had been used until the 1980s. This meant that they were capable of decoding encrypted radio transmissions by the two main West German intelligence agencies -- the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) -- and the West German border police. The East Germans even managed to decode the BND's orders to members of the clandestine "Gladio" group, which was intended to continue anti-communist operations in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe.

Carsten - excellent and important find. Thank you.

I note in passing that Der Spiegel uses the conventional "anti-communist stay behind army" cover story to describe Gladio.

Of course the heart of Gladio is false flag assassinations and atrocities against civilian populations as part of a Strategy of Tension. I suspect Der Spiegel neglected to provide this crucial context (but, Carsten, please correct me if I'm being unfair...)

Did they mention the creation of the BND by Nazi spymaster Gehlen? Or is that verboten too?

I tried several torrent sites and could not find any active torrents. Is email possible?

Jan,
"Der Spiegel" is actually not the worst on the Gladio issue. A quick keyword search finds a 12/2005 article on Gansers book (here, in German) and the Aldo Moro murder (here, in German) among around 10 others.

Also the history of Gehlen and the BND is not completely hidden. I easily found this Theme-Page on Gehlen: [URL="http://www.spiegel.de/thema/reinhard_gehlen/"]http://www.spiegel.de/thema/reinhard_gehlen/
[/URL]
But the Springer-Press and also TV is mostly silent on this and I would guess that 90% of the German populace never heard the word Gladio.