NATO Has Harbored Active Domestic Terrorist Groups Since at Least 1969—4/4

Who Can Condone Such Actions?

Can any sane human being on the planet condone the random slaying of an innocent and unsuspecting family of five at the supermarket? Who can even conceive of such villainy? Beyond that, there’s the issue of blaming the crime on innocent citizens participating in legitimate democratic processes. This practice was not only not condemned by the government of the land of the free and the home of the brave; it was actually perpetuated in the CIA playbook, as now-almost-daily “false flag” operations continue.

Greece is another example of large-scale American and British secret interference in its domestic affairs. With the justification of the “Communist threat,” forces organized by Washington and London dissolved a Communist demonstration on the streets of Athens in 1944 with gunfire, leaving 25 protesters dead and 148 wounded. In 1967 Greece’s Hellenic Raiding Force stay-behind organization seized control of the Greek defense ministry, the first step in a military coup that installed the right-wing dictatorship that became the dreaded Greek colonels’ military junta that lasted until 1974.

Why Didn’t We Know about This? The Information is on Public Record

How is it possible that most of us haven’t heard any hint of any of this outrageous story before? It’s all over the Internet in articles, studies, timelines, long documentary videos on YouTube… I’m ashamed to admit that I had never heard any of it until last month when I bought William Blum’s fascinating book, Rogue State, A Concise History of US Global Interventions. In a 308-page book it occupies just three short paragraphs. On page 130 I found this:

The United States also created a secret civilian army in Germany, which drew up a list of 200 leading Social Democrats, 15 Communists and various others who were to be “put out of the way” if the Soviet Union invaded.

This secret army had its counterparts all over Western Europe as part of ‘Operation Gladio,’ developed by the CIA and other intelligence services, and not answerable for its actions under the laws of any state. After NATO was formed in 1949, Gladio came under its discreet aegis. ‘Gladiators’ were responsible for numerous acts of terrorism in Europe, foremost of which was the bombing of the Bologna railway station in 1980, claiming 86 lives. The purpose of these random terrorist acts was to place the blame for these atrocities on the left and thus heighten public concern about a Soviet invasion and at the same time discredit leftist electoral candidates. NATO feared that if the left came to power in the government of any of its members, they might pass legislation that would be a threat to the NATO installations or operations in that country.

Just Google It

Then, by googling “Gladio,” I discovered Daniele Ganser’s pioneering book on the subject, NATO’s Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Interestingly, Ganser picked up the thread that gave rise to his doctoral thesis and, later, his own book on the subject of the stay-behind armies in Blum’s Rogue State book. That’s how simple it is, once you discover that first thread and start tugging on it. But if you don’t stumble across that thread, you’ll probably never know. The other face of that coin is the millions of people, especially on the western side of the Atlantic, who don’t want to know. That is almost as frightening as the events themselves.

It seems that the stay-behind-armies ploy was just another brilliant piece of American salesmanship. How did they sell it? The hook was, as always, the never-fail formula: “The Russians Are Coming!” Once the operation was firmly in place all over the European continent—with countless extreme-right-wing components—it was an easy matter to give the business a slight twist to initiate domestic anti-Communist terrorism, a form of terror that permitted the Americans to sow enough fear in European countries to permit them to call almost all the shots. (And the spillover of anti-communist black propaganda to the United States was a bonus.)

It was this reality that prompted de Gaulle in 1966 to opt out of NATO’s military command structure and oust the NATO headquarters from France. NATO moved to Brussels, where it has remained.  Finland also left NATO, and Sweden is a special case. Officially they never joined but in 1953 police arrest a right-wing militant named Otto Hallberg and uncover elements of a Swedish stay-behind army. For reasons that are not quite clear Hallberg was set free and the charges against him dropped.

Similar situations occurred in Austria, Germany and Norway, with stay-behind officers (often military intelligence operatives at the same time) being arrested and then released without explanations. The outrage goes even further. Neo-fascist groups in Italy were secretly granted immunity to commit random atrocities against civilian targets for political purposes. This may have happened in other NATO countries, as well.

A New Approach for a New Century

This sub-head is a line from the NATO website. It seems their strategy has gone beyond purely clandestine anti-communist false-flag atrocities. It now encompasses a new holistic approach, with a new cover story. NATO now assumes the responsibility—and the right—for taking complete control of our world from one end to the other, from beginning to end. What their propaganda portrays as “a greater role for cooperative security” looks from here suspiciously like what the Pentagon has dubbed “full spectrum dominance.” It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to decipher it. Here’s how it’s presented in the Short History of NATO section on their own website:

In the new Strategic Concept agreed in 2010, the Alliance committed itself to dealing with ‘all stages of a crisis – before, during and after’ — an all-embracing principle that implies a greater role for cooperative security. This idea is at the heart of the “comprehensive approach”. Geopolitical instability demands complex remedies that combine military might, diplomacy, and post-conflict stabilization. Only the widest possible coalition of international actors can provide elements of all three. Accordingly, the Alliance is not only developing security partnerships with countries across the Mediterranean, the Gulf region, and even the Pacific area, but it is also reaching out to other fellow international organisations and non-governmental organisations that have mandates in such areas as institution-building, governance, development, and judiciary reform. Whether helping to build lasting peace in Kabul or Pristina, countering piracy off the Horn of Africa or providing military assistance in Sudan, NATO has been increasing cooperation with other international organisations that can bring their superior reconstruction and civil-society building capabilities to bear.

Welcome to the brave new world of Greater Gladio.

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Author: Michael Booth

Michael Booth, the creator of TrumpAndAllTheRest.com, is a US-born publicist, author and online publisher who has lived in a Spanish village in the foothills of Sierra Nevada for the past five decades. Though better known abroad for his fine-art printmaking sites and online magazine, Booth's day job for the past decade and a half, until recently, was his communications agency, dedicated principally to designing and implementing Internet strategies for Spanish companies and institutions. It took him a long time to get out of publicity and into writing but it was worth the wait. View all posts by Michael Booth