Explosion Norway

[Peter Lemkin]

Anders Behring Breivik: Shades Of Gladio, 'Deep Events'

Brit Dee, Contributor
Activist Post

It is the third day of Anders Behring Breivik's trial for the shocking murders of 77 people in Norway last July, and prosecutors have been questioning the ultra-nationalist terrorist about his associates in the radical counter-Jihad movement.

Perhaps we should raise further troubling questions, and ask: could there be powerful individuals and criminal political networks operating above Breivik, who enabled his brutal attack, in order to further their own agendas?

Breivik, in his 1500-page manifesto, and in statements given to the police, claimed to be part of an organisation called the "Knights Templar", which he says has cells across Europe who are ready to commit similar atrocities in their war against "cultural Marxists" and Islamic immigration. Whilst Breivik has admitted creating an exaggerated image of the network, describing the manifesto and his wearing of a uniform in photos as a deliberately "pompous" "sales tool", he has been insistent that the network really exists. He says that its four founding members met at an inaugural meeting in London in 2002 (his presence in London at the time having been confirmed by a credit card receipt), and that the network now consists of "more than 15 people", with numbers of up to 80 claimed in his manifesto. Breivik warned today that there are two cells in Norway, capable of carrying out attacks similar in scale to his own.

Norwegian authorities say they have found no evidence to support Breivik's claims, with prosecutor Svein Holden telling the court on Monday that "In our opinion, such a network does not exist". Their position appears to have shifted slightly in the last couple of days, with prosecutors now saying that a network does exist, albeit not "in the way he describes it."

Something that is not disputed is the fact that the Norwegian intelligence service (the PST) were aware of Breivik months prior to his attack; his name had been on a watch list, but the PST had
failed to follow up on a tip about...Breivik's acquisition of materials that could be used to produce explosives. PST also came under criticism for failing to pay enough attention to Norway's right-wing extremist groups, and failing to pick up any suspicions about Breivik.
The PST say that they did not act on the information because they did not think it "relevant"; Breivik regrettably "slipped through the net", a predictably standard excuse that we have seen offered many times by other intelligence services following successful terror attacks - after the 7/7 London bombings, for example, and more recently following Mohamed Merah's murder spree in Toulouse.

There have also been reports of contact between Breivik and other European intelligence operatives. Though unsubstantiated, a Belarusian opposition politician claimed that Breivik received paramilitary training from a former special service officer in Belarus.

Whilst there is not enough evidence to make any firm assertions about whether or not Breivik was indeed being "handled", the case very much brings to mind the widely-documented state-sponsored terror operation known as "Gladio". Operation Gladio, also called the "strategy of tension", was a clandestine European-wide NATO "stay behind" operation launched after the end of the second world war, and which ran for decades.

Its aim was to prevent Communism from gaining a foothold in Europe, and far-right militants in various countries were given funding, weapons, and explosives by state security services, with which they were encouraged to commit domestic terror attacks.

These attacks were classic "false flags", blamed on left-wing and Communist parties, politicians, and sympathisers, serving to create widespread fear, and turning domestic populations against those espousing leftist political ideologies and towards the supposed protection of the state - ensuring the continued power of the controlling elite. Operation Gladio is not a "conspiracy theory"; it was admitted to the Italian senate by prime minister Giulio Andreotti in 1990, when The Observer newspaper described the revelations as the "best kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II".

Many innocent people were murdered during Operation Gladio. The Bologna train station bombing of 1980 killed 85 and wounded more than 200. The "Brabant massacres" in Belgium during the early 1980s, when 28 people died during indiscriminate shootings at restaurants and supermarkets, are also believed to have been part of the murderous "strategy of tension".

Whilst we cannot make any definite assertions, it is certainly a possibility that Breivik's attack was similar in nature to Operation Gladio - a covert elite-sanctioned atrocity designed to ratchet up tension, and instill shock and fear in the Norwegian population, and amongst the population of Europe more widely. Fear and disorientation can be exploited by those in control and used by such rogue elites, operating outside the publicly visible political sphere, to further consolidate power.

Professor Peter Dale Scott has characterised Breivik's attack as "systemic destabilisation", a "deep event" influenced by, and furthering, the agendas of a shadow elite.

Rather than such dark forces working "in the structures of the state itself", however, Scott looks to "the demi-monde mobilized outside and against the state" - and in particular, to international drugs and arms networks.

Scott perceptively notes that the video Breivik released onto the internet immediately before his attack bears striking similarities to a video made by the German anti-Jihadist Nick Greger, and that most of the "Christian freedom fighters" featured in Greger's video "are united, not by ideology, but by their involvement in the lucrative arms-for-drugs traffic" - with six having been directly identified as drug traffickers.

States Scott:
It is not surprising that Greger's militia leaders should become traffickers: illicit paramilitaries usually have to acquire and pay for their arms through illicit arms-for-drugs networks. The video's line-up of Christian drug traffickers reminds us of the current symbiosis between non-state violence (whether that of revolutionaries or of militias hired to fight them) and the drug traffic: the drug traffic now thrives where there is non-state violence, and those involved in such violence (whether of the right or left) support themselves by drugs. Today the global maps of major drug-growing and of non-state violence are virtually one and the same.

Scott concludes by suggesting that to identify those who may have enabled Breivik's attack, we might look "beyond the parastatal structures of nations (including the CIA) to a more unstructured and paranational deep force or dark force, or forces, colluding with, and sometimes perhaps manipulating, these parastatal structures".

Breivik is scheduled to stand trial for his terrible crimes for the next 10 weeks. During that time, more evidence will hopefully be revealed that can help shed light on such troublingly plausible theories; theories that will no doubt be dismissed by some as ridiculous, even obscene, but which, given the many proven examples of the murderous capabilities of powerful criminal elites, are certainly worthy of consideration and research.

This article first appeared at Resistance Radio.