Tag: NATO Stay Behind

US Sponsored Terrorism in Western Europe 3/3

Hard_Evidence_Gladio

More Gladio Timeline

  • 1984—In Italy, right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra reveals in court 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 country killing 28 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 WNP and the Pentagon secret service, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
  • 1990—In Italy, Judge Felice Casson discoveres documents on Operation Gladio in the archives of the Italian military secret service in Rome and forces Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm to the parliament the existence of a secret army within the state. 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. The cat is definitively out of the bag.
  • 1990—In Belgium, on November 5, NATO categorically denies Prime Ministger Andreotti’s allegations concerning NATO’s involvement in Operation Gladio and secret unorthodox 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 stay-behind armies.
  • 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.”
  • 2001—The author asks NATO for documents on the stay-behind secret armies and specifically transcripts of the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) meetings. Lee McClenny, head of the NATO press and media service, denies that NATO had been involved with Operation Gladio and claims that neither ACC nor the CPC transcripts exist.
  • 2001—The author files a FOIA request with the CIA which is rejected with the comment: “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request.”

This damning timeline offers a lot of food for thought and leads for further research. The author of NATO’s Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, is currently a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. We can be sure that he and his colleagues continue to think.

Ramifications, Conclusions

The stay-behind/Cladio program was a big success. Its deadly false-flag operations were routinely attributed to left-wing activists who were prosecuted, imprisoned and assassinated en masse for decades.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this years-long operation was the senseless taking of random innocent lives for the hollow cause of anti-communism.

The scale and extension of Operation Gladio was Europe wide and was responsible for massive twists and turns of policy in many European countries. Among the most dramatically affected were Italy, Greece, Belgium and Turkey. The tragic history of Greece since  World War II is largely attributable to British and American betrayal of the Greek resistance forces who had successfully driven the German army out of their country. That victory was reversed when the Alllies, fearing communist influence in the upcoming Greek government, retired their support. This counterfeit anti-communism in Greece led, in the sixties, to the brutal dictatorship of the Greek colonels.

Gladio helped to assure right-wing, anti-communist governments would rule Europe for decades, thus negating European countries the direction of their own democracies, their own sovereignty and the course of history.

Gladio was the test bench for subsequent CIA terrorist operations in the rest of the world. It showed what control was possible with a well-run anti-communist false-flag terrorist organization in place.

Gladio As Black Magic

Gladio permitted the Americans to pitch themselves as paladins of democracy around the world, when the truth was precisely the opposite. In this connection, recent American presidents have done the world a favor by pulling back the curtain of American government methods and motives, from criminal drone assassinations to regime-change operations. Perhaps the greatest irony today is President Trump insisting that NATO is there to “protect” Europe and demanding that they pay for that protection. It’s almost as if he had taken lessons from the Mafia.

Gladio reinforced the US self-image of altruism, exceptionalism and defense of “Western values.” Most Americans today still see their country as the beacon on the hill.

Gladio helped the US to cast the Russians as ruthless aggressors and war mongerers, a plague on the earth, while at the same time constructing an iron ring of military bases surrounding Russia. The Americans retain to this day between 800 and 1,000 bases worldwide while their gargantuan–and ever rising–“defense” budget relegates a large part of their own citizens to crushing, irreversible poverty.

What exactly are the Russians guilty of? Principally, they had the misfortune during the first third of the 20th century, to build a better mousetrap, a model for an egalitarian  society that posed a threat to American laissez-faire capitalism–until the ideals of the Russian revolution were sabotaged by Stalin in the 30s.

Now that the terrible Gladio story has been exposed time and again, we should be able to forget those lamentable times and move on. Well, not quite. Serious research and reliable witnesses have linked recent terrorist events to the offspring of Gladio. They affirm, for example, that Gladio units reappeared in Norway in 2011 with the Anders Breivik slaying of 77 peopleon the island of Utoya. They are also convinced that sons of Gladio have become active across Europe under anti-Islamic and ultra-nationalist banners.

One of the leading proponents of the existence of a Gladio B, is whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, the ex-FBI contract interpreter/translator who was fired from the FBI for her inconvenient truth telling. In the process she won national whistleblower awards for revealing serious irregularities with wide-ranging implications in the bureau’s translation department. She went on to participate in founding a news agency (Newsbud) and to write an autobiography: Classified Woman – The Sibel Edmonds Story: A Memoir. Edmonds goes so far as to implicate Gladio B in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

What’s next?

When the CIA feels they’re onto a good thing–And why wouldn’t they feel that way about Gladio?–it’s not easy to convince them to change course. We may be plagued by CIA/NATO terrorism for years to come. The current COVID-19 crisis makes attempts at prediction absurd, of course, but time will tell. One thing is certain. It would take tectonic political changes in the United States to halt–or even slow–their strategy of world domination.

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US Sponsored Terrorism in Western Europe 2/3

Gladio False Flag

American Genius Converts Churchill’s Stay-Behind Experiment into a Europe-Wide Terrorist Operation

Ganser’s book takes the reader across Europe country by country tracing the incredible development of Churchill’s serpent’s egg. The American cold warriors soon realized that, though the Russian invasion was not about to happen, the stay-behind infrastructure could be diverted to their own purposes. In fact, it was perfect. The Americans’ initial recruitment criteria demanded that the officials and soldiers of the stay-behind armies be convinced anti-communists. So they started by mining the richest vein, the remnants of German Nazi-ism. According to Ganser’s book it was the same American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) that rounded up the defendants for the Nurenburg trials that, at the same time, “secretly recruited selected right-wing extremists for the anti-communist army.” Their first important find was Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” whom they used to root out other hard-core Nazis.

Though one of the most important, General Reinhard Gehlen, fell from the tree like ripe fruit. Perpetrator of some of the worst atrocities of the war, including “the torture, interrogation and murder by starvation of some four million Soviet prisoners of war,” Gehlen turned himself in to the CIC and managed an introduction to US General Edwin Luther Siber (who would promote Gehlen’s career in the stay-behind organization). Not only did Gehlen lead the Americans to a cache of watertight steel drums with microfilmed documentation on the USSR that he had thoughtfully buried in the Austrian Alps, but went on to recruit several hundred other Nazi officers for the American project. This activity was in Germany but similar procedures covered the rest of the European NATO membership, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, as well as the neutral European countries of Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland.

The Sinister Stay-Behind/Operation Gladio Timeline

Author Daniele Ganser created a timeline for the most significant events in the history of Gladio. Here is an extract complete with places, dates, and names He calls it his “Chronology.” Its contents are all in the public record and they form the backbone of his narrative.

  • 1940—Churchill creates the secret stay-behind armies, Special Operations Executive (SOE).
  • 1944—London and Washington set up first stay behind in Greece.
  • 1947—Truman creates the NSC and the CIA, whose covert action branch sets up stay-behind armies in Western Europe.
  • 1948—Western Union Clandestine Committee (WUCC) created in France to coordinate secret anti-communist unorthodox warfare.
  • 1949—NATO founded with HQ in France. (In US Senator Eugene McCarthy denounces Communists in the US government. He produces no evidence, but the Cold War is tacitly declared.)
  • 1951—CIA agent (and later director) William Colby, based in Stockholm,  supports training of stay-behind armies in neutral Sweden and Finland and NATO member countries Norway and Denmark.
  • 1952—In Germany former SS officer Hans Otto reveals to Frankfurt police the existence of fascist German stay-behind army BDJ-TD. Arrested right-wing extremists found not guilty under mysterious circumstances.
  • 1953—In Sweden right winger Otto Hallberg is arrested and  uncovers the Swedish stay-behind army.  Hallberg is released and the charges against him mysteriously dropped.
  • 1957—In Norway, the director of the secret service NIS, Vilhelm Evang, protests against the domestic subversion of his country by US and NATO and temporarily withdraws Norway from the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) meetings.
  • 1958—In France, NATO founds the Alllied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare and the stay-behind armies. When de Gaulle expels NATO from France in 1966, a new NATO headquarters is established in Brussels. The ACC, under the code name SDRA11 is hidden within the Belgian military secret service SGR, with its headquarters next door to NATO.
  • 1964—In Italy, the Gladio secret stay-behind army is involved in a silent coup d’etat when Genejral Giovanni de Lorenzo in Operation Solo forces a group of elected socialist ministers to leave the government.
  • 1966—In Portugal, the CIA sets up Aginter Press under the direction of Captain Yves Guerin Serac, a stay-behind army that 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 forces NATO to leave French soil. In the move 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 control of the Greek Defense Ministry and starts a military coup d’etat 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 KGB secret service. From here until the outing of the NATO secret armies by the Italian judiciary and press in 1990, the “secret stay-behind armies” are unknown to everybody except the Russians.
  • 1969—In Italy, the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan kills 16, injures 80 and is blamed on the left.  Thirty years later, during a trial of right-wing extremists General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counterintelligence, alleges that the massacre had been carried out by the Italian stay-behind army and right-wing terrorists on the orders of the CIA in order to discredit the Italian Communists.
  • 1972—In Italy, a bomb explodes in a car near the village of Peteano killing three Carabinieri. The terror, first blamed on the left, is later traced back to right-wing terrorist, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, and leads to the exposure of 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 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 the trial.
  • 1977—In Spain, the secret stay-behind army with the support of Italian right-wing terrorists carries out the Atocha massacre in Madrid and, in an attack on a lawyers’ office closely linked to the Spanish Communist Party, kills five lawyers.
  • 1978—In Norway, the police discover a stay-behind arms cache and arrests Hans Otto Meyer who reveals the Norwegian secret army.
  • 1978—In Italy, former Prime Minister and leader of the DCI, Aldo Moro, is taken hostage in Rome by a secret unit. His bullet-ridden body appears in the boot of a car 55 days later. Before his death he was about to form a coalition government that included the Italian Communist Party.
  • 1980—In Italy, a bomb expodes in the second-class waiting room of the Bologna railway station, killing 85 and seriously injuring and maiming a further 200. Investigators trace the crime back to right-wing terrorists.
  • 1981—In Germany, a large stay-behind arsenal is discovered near the German village of Uelzen in the Lúneburger Heide. Right-wing extremists are alleged to have used the arsenal in the previous year to carry out a massacre during the Munich Octoberfest killing 13 and wounding 213.
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US Sponsored Terrorism in Western Europe 1/3

Book1

Author’s Note

I wrote a four-part article on Operation Gladio, NATO’s secret stay-behind/terrorists armies in Western Europe in April of 2018. So what’s the point of writing another one? I need to enlarge and improve it. To research the first story I used Daniele Ganser’s book merely as a reference work, picking data out of the index. By limiting myself in that way I missed what I now consider to be the main thrust of Ganser’s excellent work. The stay-behind/terrorist project that was “Operation Gladio” (the Italian code name for the organization which became the generic term for operations in the rest of Europe) was the origin of an ongoing American project of world domination that relied on classic terrorist false-flag strategies and virulent anti-communism to undermine the sovereignty and democracies of Western European countries.

The NATO/CIA playbook for these operations established the modus operandi for later secret wars in other parts of the world, notably Central and South America and the Middle East. A summary analysis of these operations is enough to convince an unbiased observer that the United States will stop at nothing to impose their unjust model of “free-market,” predatory capitalism around the world. The least-valued element in their game plan, as demonstrated in all these places, is the value of human life. I realize these are strong words and I will do my best to support them here with ample evidence.

In short, the supposed objective of Operation Gladio, designed, financed and implemented by NATO and the CIA, was to create an organization to combat communist terrorism in Western Europe. The truth is that Gladio was, itself, an American-run terrorist group set up to simulate supposed communist terrorism in order to discredit the European left wing’s credibility at the polls, where  they were having some success based on their effective opposition to the Nazis in World War II. The ideological motor of the whole operation was the Americans’ hysterically exaggerated fear of communism. As this strategy has worked itself out to this day not much has changed. American Cold War- vintage anti-communism has always been based more on self-interest, hypocrisy and opportunism than anything else. Let’s take a closer look at it.

If you’re interested in seeing my original article, here’s a link.

Swiss Graduate Student’s Book Reveals US Post-WWII Secret Agenda

In July of 1940, 10 months after World War II broke out in Europe and a year and a half before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war, British prime minister Winston Churchill had an idea. It occurred to him to establish secret armies all over Europe against the possibility of a Soviet invasion when the war was over. So he got MI6, Britain’s clandestine intelligence service, to work on it. Thus began the story of a sinister secret operation that got out of hand and lingers on till today.

With his 2005 book, NATO’s Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Daniele Ganser, a Swiss doctoral candidate, wrote the inside story of this ill-fated initiative. Almost incidentally he also created the Rosetta Stone for the interpretation of 20th-century American foreign policy. This seemingly inconsequential by-product of a doctoral thesis turned out to be an essential guide of our time for tracing the beginnings in Europe of the United States’s misdirected muscle flexing after the Second World War.

In the early 2000s, when Ganser set out to write his thesis–later to become this book–his humble objective was to elucidate the origins of Europe’s post-World War II stay-behind armies. But his research took him much further, into the sinister Cold War labyrinth. Like Cerberus, the fearsome multi-headed dog of Greek mythology that guarded the gates of Hell to prevent the dead from escaping, Churchill’s stay-behind armies promised to defend Europe from Soviet aggression. It’s not clear what inspired Churchill to concoct an elaborate plan for betraying Britain’s principal ally against the NAZIs (the US didn’t enter the war for another year and a half, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor). Perhaps it had to do with a son of British aristocracy’s aversion to a Russian experiment in collectivism. In any case, this cranky, hard drinking, cigar smoking British prime minister became the grandfather of American Cold War anticommunism.

Churchill Leads the Way into the Dark Labyrinth

Churchill’s plan was to recruit, equip and train secret armies and conceal arms caches all over Western Europe. These clandestine forces would go into action in the event of a Soviet invasion. The theory wasn’t entirely outlandish, but as it  played out it became the nightmare that Daniele Ganser recounts–and lavishly documents–country by country in NATO’s Secret Armies. If you manage to find a copy of the book, published 15 years ago with little resonance, after reading it you will ask yourself, “How is it possible that I have never heard of this massive scandal nor this seminal book on the subject? Why has it been ignored by the American, British, European and world press? Shouldn’t it be the first reference work for anyone seriously interested in the Cold War in Europe?”

Yes, of course it should be, but it isn’t. At best it is a glaring example of how effectively American censorship can bury even the most important information if they consider it to be a threat to their voracious geopolitical agenda. The cold warriors of the American intelligence community were not stupid. They knew that, if Ganser’s information were disseminated in the way it deserved, it would open an iceberg-sized breach in the Americans’ ongoing campaign of world domination, camuflaged until then under the guise of workaday anti-communism.

The stay-behind program didn’t remain British for long, as the Brits had their hands full fighting the war, but the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was happy to take over the nascent anti-communist project, which dovetailed neatly with their own purposes. It was the pioneering cold warrior, William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan, who suggested to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 the creation of a secret service to carry out covert actions against the communists, socialists and their followers in Europe. Donovan became the director of the OSS which financed and ran the operation from 1942 until 1947 when the CIA–more specifically their covert action department, the Directorate of Operations (DO)–under the leadership of legendary dirty-war operators like William Colby, who went on to become  the CIA director; Frank Wisner, who was so revolted by his CIA missions that he finally shot himself in 1965; and Richard Helms who was to lie to Congress regarding the US role in the September, 1973, Chilean military coup.

In 1949, the recently-created North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) took over the stay-behind program definitively. NATO provided a friendly new face, cast as it was as an allied organization that was going to “protect” Europe. But the CIA and the British MI6, as well as the military secret  services of the countries that hosted stay-behind armies, each had a say in the running of the operation. The way Ganser’s book discredits in a scholarly manner the notion that NATO was a beneficent society, only serves to make it more credible. The content of his book suggests implicitly that the United States has been actively pursuing world domination since the Second World War and they will stop at nothing to achieve it.

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