Gladio: a documented 'false flag' terror campaign

[Peter Lemkin]

It is furthermore
unclear why the Swedish Parliament has
been very reluctant to investigate the history of the
Swedish stay-behind and why no public report was
published after the EU-Parliament had explicitly asked
all countries in Europe to carry out such investiga-
tions. Finally, and most dramatically, it also remains
mysterious whether the secret army played a role
in the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme,
and if so, what exactly the role of the secret network
was. The reason why so many important questions
remain to date without an answer derives from the
poor quality of the data available on the subject. As
historians we only possess a number of interviews
given by previous members of the army at the end
of their lives, in the 1980s and (mainly) the 1990s.
Some of these scattered interviews were, together
with some information from governmental inquiries
analyzed in a research report by Oscar Hedin, later on
popularised in a series of newspaper articles together
with journalist Thomas Kanger. Hedin today is an
acclaimed documentary producer, yet at the time
when he carried out these interviews he was just a
student of political science. It seems a bit odd that
in Sweden, despite the importance of the subject, it
is left to students to shed some light on the entire
affair.89 Of course, also the memoirs of Colby are an
important source on the Swedish stay-behind. Yet
also Colby, who had commanded death squads in
boost his importance as a defender of democracy, as
time, as a former agent, he had to be very cautious
about the information he disclosed, as the Cold War.
We come to the conclusion that the lack of sources
is the main problem when it comes to researching
NATO's stay-behind armies. Book length studies
which try to present the international structure on the
stay-behinds are rare and often say little or nothing on
Swedish stay-behind network 90 Since information often
can not be checked against documentary evidence,
it is hard to evaluate the value of the interviews that
were made with veteran soldiers. That notwithstanding,
it is probably useful to be careful about how
these persons characterize the activities which they
participated in and their importance, and also to bear
in mind that the army had the character of cells, which
means that individuals had little chance to evaluate
the overall structure of the endeavour. What remains
is the use of sources at hand in order to at least get as
good a picture as possible of the secret armies. We
are two authors, a Swedish and a Swiss historian,
who have written this paper together, and we both
consider this work a democratic exercise which
hopefully will help other researchers interested in
the topic. We were surprised that the Scandinavian
Journal of History was not willling to publish our
article. It seems important to us that the destruction
of written sources does not prevent historians from
general and the history of the Swedish stay-behind
army in particular.