DECEMBER 20, 2019
Rome
Albert Camus in his essay
“L’Exil d’Hélène” discusses contemporary disregard for the Greek value of
limits. Camus writes that only the artist by his nature recognizes his limits,
limits which the historic spirit disregards. The very idea of a super-secret organization
like Gladio to remake the world in its own image reflects that same disregard
for the Greek values that Camus so cherished.
When in the early 1970s an
Italian right-wing journalist told me about a secret army training in Italy’s
mountains, I scoffed at first thinking he was repeating a rumor picked up from
some scoop-obsessed reporter. But my tune began changing when he gave it a
name—“Stay Behind Army”—and explained it was a secret army to fight the Soviet
armies which someday soon would invade West Europe. He gave me the name of a
member of that secret army who would talk with me.
A few days later on a street
corner near Rome’s Sapienza University I met a sleazy-looking Roman in his
early twenties accompanied by a friend. Both of them kept looking around us, as
if checking for tails. Their behavior was that of men on the run, yet men of
destiny. They talked readily. And I, without realizing it, was being shown a
speck of a new planet. Speaking softly in a crisp language with their Rome
accents, they told me they had just finished a military training course in the
nearby Abruzzi Mountains after having done basic training in Sardinia. Several
times they used the term “Secret Army”, lowering their voices and glancing
around each time they pronounced the words. And no, they answered, the
organizers would not allow journalist visits, and that yes, the secret army was
well equipped and ready.
Years later, in the late
1980s or early 90s, it happened by chance that I met in a Rome hotel bar an
American who knew details about that secret army. I was sitting on a stool at
the bar of the luxurious Grand Hotel waiting for an appointment with a well-known
writer when the man sat down on the stool next to me. I recognized William
Colby from pictures of him in the press announcing the presence in Rome for a
conference of the former Director of the CIA. I nodded, said hello, and we
chatted bar talk until the chat turned into a short interview, which I
subsequently published in the European press. I told him I knew who he was, and
as we spoke I asked him point-blank about the mysterious Stay-Behind Army.
To my surprise Colby almost
boasted that the covert action branch of the CIA to which he was attached in
the 1950s built throughout Western Europe what in intelligence trade parlance
were known as ‘Stay-Behind Nets’, in Italy known as Gladio, the headquarters of
which was in Rome. In that post-war period Colby was a young intelligence
officer assigned to the CIA station in the US Rome Embassy. Officially the
network was clandestine, he related, ready to be called into action as sabotage
forces when the time came, confirming the few words of those two young Romans
of years earlier. Colby said that in 1951 the chief of the CIA in West Europe
sent him to the field to help build the Stay-Behind network. ‘Our aim was the
creation of an Italian nationalism capable of halting the slide to the left,’
he said, as if speaking of ancient Greek history.
Officially, Operation
Gladio—the code name of the clandestine Stay-Behind Net—was founded on November
26, 1956, to defend Europe from invasion by Warsaw Pact nations. Gladio was a
CIA Italian operation from the start and linked to NATO. However, it belonged
heart and soul to the USA/CIA. Gladio was officially dissolved on July 27,
1990. Or, as is likely, the operation assumed another name. Al Qaeda is named
as its successor.
After World War Two many top
US military personnel had favored marching straight on to Moscow. Russia was
their real enemy. Allied armed forces were still fresh. Western Intelligence
knew of the enormous Soviet war losses and that the mood of the Russians was to
return home Moreover many coopted German military and intelligence leaders
repeated over and again: ‘The time is now. Together we can crush Communist
Russia.’ Yet, Allied leaders also knew well of the historical capacity of
Russians to resist. Saner appraisals favored prudence. The long Cold War was
the result.
Although it existed and was
fought, for more discerning minds also the Cold War was a sham. A cover. If the
Cold War was a certain guarantee of relative peace, the One World Order without
limits was burgeoning in the minds of secret powers in the western world.
Gladio was one of its newer weapons.
An occupied country atmosphere
haunted Europe, especially Italy and Germany. US troops were everywhere and
showed no signs of going back home. Unbeknownst to the troops and to Americans
at home, the Gladio-Stay-Behind complex was growing. It had settled in for the
long haul. Though Soviet tanks never arrived, Gladio helped keep occupied
Europe in line. Terrorism was the means. Social unrest, changing borders and
ethnic protests required attention. In the next years the rise of Socialist
parties opened a new front: Gladio had to tame overly ambitious socialists like
François Mitterrand, Willy Brandt and Olof Palme. Sweden’s Social Democratic
Prime Minister, Palme, opposed the Vietnam War and maintained good relations
with Castro’s Cuba, with Allende in Chile and the Communist bloc of nations. In
1986, Olof Palme was assassinated on the streets of Stockholm. His
killer was never found.
Terrorism erupted in north
Italy in the late 1950s when the separatist Committee For the Liberation
of the South Tyrol, or BAS from the German Befreiungsausschuss Südtirol, spread
terror in the Italian Tyrol. and already in that early post-war terrorists were
manipulated by the CIA as in Italy’s northern region. Tyrolean people loved the
terror they believed was perpetrated in the name of secession from Italy and
union with Austria—357 attacks causing the death of twenty-one people in
thirty-two years of terror. But people did not know that BAS had become a CIA
affair and in effect ran against their desire for secession. At first
it had all seemed so easy to Tyroleans. A Rasputin-like priest, Michael Gamper,
and nine militant activists founded BAS. Their goal: secession of South Tyrol
from Italy and unification with Austria of the entire Tyrol, north and south.
The CIA did not share that goal. In CIA minds, Tyrolean unification with
Austria with its strong Communist Party (KPO) was a nightmare: it would open a
corridor from Soviet-occupied Eastern Austria for Soviet tanks headed for Rome.
As BAS distributed pamphlets and destroyed symbolic places, the CIA and NATO
saw the mouth-watering opportunity BAS terrorism offered. BAS terrorists were
international with close ties to Neo-Nazi organizations in Austria and Germany,
they too infiltrated and used by the CIA. On Fire Night in June of
1961, BAS commandos destroyed thirty-seven electrical towers, interrupting the
power supply of all of Upper Italy. That violence prompted a ready and willing
NATO (now including the newly created secret army of Gladio) and Rome to
intervene and crush the secessionist movement. Carrot and stick rule over
mutinous Tyrolean-Italians. And according to the script US/NATO power had set
things right: an early example of the strategy of tension at work.
Create the terror. Then suppress the popular secessionist movement. Clearly the
South Tyrol would remain Italian Alto Adige. There would be no secession here.
It would not unite with North Tyrol. It would not become part of dangerous
Austria. A whole panoply of evidence confirms the Tyrol-as-laboratory to test
the CIA strategy of tension. No surprise that a decade later, Italy’s
Marxist-Leninist Red Brigades imitated BAS tactics; in the end both Tyrolean
terrorists and the Red Brigades were manipulated by Gladio They were the actors
in the strategy of tension. If the Gladio secret army conspiracy could
function so well in Italy, they were organized in many other European
countries.
North Italy made a model for
Flemish terrorists in the late Fifties and the Sixties Belgium when Brussels
was considered a most dangerous city. And again during Belgium’s “Bloody
Eighties” and the Flemish rebellion against the French-speaking Wallon urge for
power. Belgium’s own secret army worked as in Italy.
Tension strategy exists
for the manipulation and control of public opinion: fear, propaganda,
disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs … and false flag
terrorist actions. Gladio’s raison d’etre in Italy: first organize terrorism
and blame it on Communists; spread fear and then pass laws restricting the
freedoms of the people. As they had done in the Alto Adige when people fell for
the propaganda of the threat of a Soviet invasion: the scary image of Russian
Cossacks watering their horses in Vatican fountains. But people never get it!
They are afraid. More special laws are passed and thousands of leftists are
imprisoned. Keep the populace afraid so that promises of security will be
believed. You create fear with lies. And the state then suppresses dissent. The
state media define Communists as the enemy. Anything is justified to crush
them. Communism and terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists … and today
‘immigrants.’ Gladio made a major contribution to the creation of an obedient
Europe … an obedience today finally at the rupture point because the USA has
exceeded all limits.
People in Italy, in
Europe—in the western world—know nothing about Gladio and the strategy of
tension. They do not know why terrorism persists … nor who the real terrorists
are. Italy’s parliamentary investigations of Gladio resulted in a 300-page
report on Gladio operations in Italy and its connections with the United
States. Yet people are ignorant of that report that explains Gladio and casts
the blame on the USA for the terrorism in Italy in the years of lead in
the 1970s and 80s. It shows that the massacres, bombings and paramilitary
actions were organized by shadowy men within Italian state institutions—by men
linked to American Intelligence. A bomb inside the Banca Nazionale dell’
Agricoltura on Milan’s Piazza Fontana on December 12, 1969 marked the
continuation of the strategy of tension: the Piazza Fontana massacre.
Sixteen dead, fifty-eight injured. The bombing took place at the height of the
biggest strike wave that Italy had seen since the end of WWII.
Automobile and sheet metal
workers were militant and aggressive in those times. Inflation drove prices to
the sky. Trade unions dominated headlines. The word agitation was in
wide use. Governments rose and fell as strikes and demonstrations became daily.
Soaring interest rates, tottering governments, power outages and water
rationing, second, third and fourth houses for the new rich and evictions for
the poor. The people were incensed … until the bombs on Milan’s Piazza Fontana.
Those bombs stopped the spread of agitation and the strike wave dead in its
tracks. The police hauled suspected leftist sympathizers in for questioning and
intimidated their families while the government passed emergency laws against
suspected terrorists. Hand in hand, police and the media then blamed the Piazza
Fontana bombing on a pathetic group of anarchists, the Bakunin Club, which
anyway was already penetrated by the Italian secret services. An anarchist was
pushed to his death from a fourth-story window of police headquarters in Milan.
More than twenty years after
the bombing, official sources revealed that the bombs in the Piazza Fontana
bank were placed by Gladio operating under the control of NATO intelligence
worried that the strike wave would lead to the entry of the Italian Communist
Party into the Rome government. Throughout the seventies and into the eighties
NATO and Italian ruling circles were obsessed with keeping the Communists out
of the government, exemplified by the abduction and murder of Prime Minister
Aldo Moro in 1978 for his attempts to bring the Italian Communist Party into
the government coalition. The Moro murder was executed by the CIA/Gladio-run
Red Brigades. The general public knew nothing about the real perpetrators:
Gladio. They still do not.
A romantic time in Old
Europe? Hardly. Soldiers in full battle dress patrolling the streets of Rome.
Sirens screaming citywide day and night. Once in 1978 I returned from Iran with
two of my Italian businessmen bosses and a potential, very Eastern-looking
Iranian customer. It was the day Premier Moro was abducted by the infiltrated
and CIA-manipulated Red Brigades. While we drove around the city police stopped
us five times for identification and searches. Two Italians, an American and an
Iranian in the same car were suspect. Tension was rife in Rome. The abduction
of the Premier exemplified the strategy of tension method of social
control
It is a mystery that the
people know nothing about Operation Gladio. Despite the 300-page Italian
parliamentary report on it, despite mentions even in the New York Times,
despite coincidences like William Colby’s free-and-easy revelations in a Rome
bar, despite studies and articles about it in the leftist press, and despite
decades of its nefarious activities worldwide which know no limits, people have
remained ignorant about the US/NATO-run Operation Gladio. Join the debate on Facebook
More articles by:GAITHER STEWART
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