Operation Gladio

[Magda Hassan]

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