Boston Terror Attack Carried Out Right Under Nose of Police and Military

Posted on April 16, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Terror Bombing Shows that Our Anti-Terrorism Policies Are Ineffective

We documented earlier today that the American government has squandered huge sums of homeland security and defense spending on useless tasks that increase – rather than prevent -terrorism.
Indeed, the head cross-country track coach at the University of Mobile – Alastair Stevenson – told Alabama’s Press-Register:

“At the starting line this morning, they had bomb sniffing dogs and the bomb squad out there,” he said. “They kept announcing to runners not to be alarmed, that they were running a training exercise.”
He added, “I’ve run a lot of races like this one, but I never saw bomb dogs at the starting line of any running event.

Stevenson provided additional details in an interview by local 15 tv news:

University of Mobile’s Cross Country Coach, who was near the finish line of the Boston Marathon when a series of explosions went off, said he thought it was odd there were bomb sniffing dogs at the start and finish lines.
“They kept making announcements to the participants do not worry, it’s just a training exercise,” Coach Ali Stevenson told Local 15.
Stevenson said he saw law enforcement spotters on the roofs at the start of the race. He’s been in plenty of marathons in Chicago, D.C., Chicago, London and other major metropolitan areas but has never seen that level of security before.

All of the marathon runners – including Stevenson – started the race hours before the bombs exploded.
Time Magazine reported yesterday:

Over the years, the Boston Marathon has undergone numerous security overhauls. TIME writer Katy Steinmetz reports: Under heightened security in 2002, 600 police officers joined the runners. There were also an unprecedented 1,500 state and local police patrolling the route and another 1,500 security guards. There were 415 National Guard troops on hand. Helicopters, bomb-sniffing dogs, hazmat teams and radiation detectors were added. Boston Globe compared to security used for the Olympics and Super Bowl. According to the Mass. National Guard website, more than 400 troops were involved in 2013, too. From the release: Pfc. Matthew S. Knowlton, a military policeman with the 747 Military Police Company, was one Soldier assigned to help out at the starting line. Describing the scene Knowlton said, “This is a very positive setting, I’m just happy to be here. There are a lot of people here but it’s a great crowd.”

Indeed, the Massachusetts National Guard release notes:

Sgt. Ezequiel Valencia, a human resources sergeant, with the 747 Military Police Company, Massachusetts Army National Guard, looks on as runners begin the 117th Boston Marathon April 15, 2013 in Hopkinton, Mass. More than 400 Guardsman were on hand to help local law enforcement keep the route clear for an estimated 27,000 runners. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class James C. Lally, Massachusetts National Guard Public Affairs)

In addition, Mother Jones reports:

At 5:20 a.m. on Monday, four hours before the Boston Marathon’s elite runners took off, a group of 15 active-duty soldiers from the Massachusetts National Guard gathered at the starting line in Hopkinson. Each soldier was in full combat uniform and carried a “ruck,” a military backpack weighing about 40 pounds. The rucks were filled with Camelbacks of water, extra uniforms, Gatorade, changes of socks—and first-aid and trauma kits. It was all just supposed to be symbolic.
“Forced marches” or “humps” are a regular part of military training, brisk walking over tough terrain while carrying gear that could help a soldier survive if stranded alone. These soldiers, participating in “Tough Ruck 2013,” were doing the 26 miles of the Boston Marathon to honor comrades killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or lost to suicide and PTSD-related accidents after coming home.
It took about eight hours for all of the soldiers to cross the finish line, some cruising nearly at a 13-minute mile, others coming in at a little slower pace. They were gathered near the medical tent behind the finish line, waiting for the elite runners to come in. That was the contingency plan in case anything went wrong—meet by the medical tent.
***

A Tough Ruck soldier marching the marathon course Military Friends Foundation
When the explosion went off, Fiola and his group immediately went into tactical mode. “I did a count and told the younger soldiers to stay put,” Fiola says. “Myself and two other soldiers, my top two guys in my normal unit, crossed the street about 100 yards to the metal scaffoldings holding up the row of flags. We just absolutely annihilated the fence and pulled it back so we could see the victims underneath. The doctors and nurses from the medical tent were on the scene in under a minute. We were pulling burning debris off of people so that the medical personnel could get to them and begin triage.”
“There was a guy behind me covered in his own blood, and I started to smell some smoke. I turn around to look and he’s actually on fire.”
Once the victims were transported away for further medical care, Fiola and the others stood guard around the blast area. “We switched to keeping the scene safe, quarantining the area and preventing people from entering. There was a guy behind me covered, just covered, in his own blood, and I started to smell some smoke.
***

The ruckers at 5 a.m., before setting off on the course Military Friends Foundation

As one of our readers notes:

All of America’s security forces were there.  Spotters.  Bomb sniffing dogs.  The whole array.  They even ran a drill beforehand.

While thousands fewer died, comparisons to 9/11 are inevitable.

Nationwide Terror Attacks? Boston, California, D.C.?

Posted on April 16, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Is Someone Trying to Create Nationwide Panic … Like In 2001?

You know about the Boston terror attack.
There have also been terrorist incidents today – in which no one has been hurt – in California and Washington D.C.
Specifically, CNN reports that an envelope containing the lethal poison Ricin was mailed to Capitol Hill. It was addressed to Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, but was intercepted at the U.S. Capitol’s off-site mail facility in Washington.
And CBS San Francisco, ABC 7, KTVU, NBC Bay Area, the San Jose Mercury News and other media outlets are reporting that someone fired bullets at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation near San Jose, California, causing damage (including a leak of 10,000 gallons of oil) and a statewide emergency alert to conserve energy.
This feels a lot like 2001, when the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were followed by the anthrax attacks … creating an atmosphere of widespread fear.
These could be unconnected incidents.  Or someone might be trying to orchestrate a nationwide terror campaign to cause panic among the American people once again.

“Legalized Injustice”: The US Judicial System “Legalizes” Political Corruption and Financial Fraud

By John Kozy

Global Research, April 16, 2013

Region: USA

Theme: Law and Justice

The problems that afflict America, and perhaps all of Western civilization, are more profound than the very great and obvious evil in the hearts of people. Bankers revel in the dishonesty of greed, but do bankers make banking dishonest or does the dishonesty of banking defile bankers? Does the corruption of politicians sully the political system or does a befouled political system force politicians to be corrupt? More importantly, do iniquitous judges make the law unjust or does an insidious legal system deprave judges?
The American colonists were principally Northern Europeans, and in the Northern European nations, those that became Protestant during the Reformation, sin is always individual. So in those nations, if the legal system is unjust, it is thought that the judges are bad; reforming the system requires that they be replaced. But if the system forces the judges to be bad, replacing them won’t be an effective reform. The replacing judges will become just as base as those replaced.
Justice is a word often heard but rarely defined precisely. The families of victims often want “justice” but mean, I suspect, revenge. A trial is just if it conforms to the rules laid down to insure fairness, but everyone knows that justice is a rare result of actions taken in American courts. The innocent are routinely found guilty and the injured are rarely adequately compensated. The wealthy are treated differently than the poor, whites are treated differently than blacks and people of other races, businesses are treated differently than consumers or injured people. In America, this most fundamental civilizing institution fails over and over again to produce civilized results. How can that be? When did it begin? How extensive is the failure?
Philosophical and even common sense definitions of justice are rather simple: “the set and constant purpose which gives to every man his due” (Justinian I). The definition is simple; determining one’s due is not. It can be anything from an eye for an eye to forgiveness. But when what one is due has been decided, not giving it is clearly unjust. Justice cannot be dispensed if a person’s due is denied. By this standard alone, American jurisprudence and its legal system are not only unjust, they promote and institutionalize injustice.
Lets look at the Supreme Court in 1803 when the USA was an adolescent nation, merely 15 years old.
As I wrote in a previous piece, The Court’s willingness to deny plaintiffs justice was demonstrated in Marbury vs Madison in which the Court held that Marbury was entitled to his commission as a Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia but was refused it on the basis of a legalistic claim that the Court lacked jurisdiction even though the Court had issued such writs of mandamus previously. No doubt, Justice Marshall wrote this opinion to keep the Court out of a rancorous political dispute between Republicans and Federalists going on at the time, but not only does the Constitution nowhere instruct the Court to act in that way, it clearly states that “We the People of the United States, in Order to . . . establish Justice . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The date of the Court’s opinion is February 24, 1803.
Marbury vs Madison is a seminal opinion; it established precedents that have continued to be exercised to this day, and the Court’s refusal to mete out justice is one of them. For two hundred years, the Supreme Court has been an unconstitutional institution if judged by what the Constitution says.
So now, on March 27, 2013, the Supreme Court rejected a proposed class-action antitrust lawsuit against Comcast Corporation in which more than two million current and former subscribers sought to prove that the company had overcharged them after unfairly eliminating competition. The rejection was not based on the merits of the case but on a “technicality,” which held that the proposed class of Comcast subscribers failed to meet formal legal guidelines for how to certify that evidence of wrongdoing was common to the group. Did it matter to the Court that more that two million people were dealt with unfairly by Comcast? Not in the least! Justice for more than two million people is not the Court’s concern. Marbury in 1803 and more than two million Comcast subscribers in 2013. Always the same! The Justices of the Court are not concerned with justice. The Court has its procedures that trump giving every man his due.
Not giving everyman his due is a common occurrence in America. Some federal programs labeled “entitlements” are under attack. Republicans want them eliminated or at least reduced. But ‘entitlement’ means having a right to something; something to which a person has a right is an entitlement. No entitlement can be justly denied. But that simple linguistic fact seems to be lost on the people who comprise the American legal system.
The courts have also allowed a plethora of unjust business practices to flourish by merely doing nothing to stop them. Although they are manifestly unjust, they are so common that hardly anyone considers them objectionable. Take, for instance, the common claim of businesses that honest customers pay more than they would if shoplifting didn’t occur. The implication is that prices are higher than required in order to compensate vendors for losses incurred by theft. But if that’s what’s going on, it’s entirely unjust; it makes the innocent, honest customers, pay for the actions of criminals. Penalizing the innocent for the actions of the guilty is never just, never has been, never will be. Yet it is condoned in American jurisprudence.
Another similar but not identical legalized injustice displays how legalized injustice affects government as a whole.
Firms can legally avoid paying taxes on money made in America by shifting profits offshore to countries with minimal or no taxes. This “Tax dodging is not a victimless offense,” says U.S. Public Interest Research Group analyst Dan Smith. “When companies use accounting gimmicks to move their profits to tax haven shell companies, the rest of us have to pick up the tab.” Again the wrong group is legally required to pay the bill for the loss the government incurs from the legalization of this unjust practice.
To understand how all this came about requires a little history. American jurisprudence did not come into being with the ratification of the Constitution on June 21, 1788. American jurisprudence landed on the shores of North America with the Pilgrims on November 21, 1620. They brought the law with them; it was English Common Law.
In the twelfth century, judges bought their jobs from the king and in turn extorted bribes from litigants. Common law judges never sought to mete out justice, but their decisions did constitute a body of law that became “common,” that is, that became commonly and uniformly practiced. William Blackstone, an English legal scholar known for his legal commentaries, described the Common Law as “the general customary law of the realm as interpreted by the royal judges.”
This common law was adopted as the basis of the legal systems in the colonial constitutions and was the only law in America between the founding of the colonies and the revolution, so it naturally became part of American law when the nation was founded. But that turned the Constitution into a contradictory document.
The Constitution makes the Congress the legislating institution of the nation. But common law judges legislate from the bench. So when Marshall in Marbury assumed that it was the function of judges to say what the law (including the Constitution) is, America’s purity as a representative democracy was sullied. Conflicts could now arise between what the people want as understood by their representatives and what the judiciary wants. These conflicts have created and exacerbated social conflicts in America ever since. The courts became representatives of America’s merchant class and pitted that class against the common people. As the representatives of merchants, the courts have rigged the system so that the protection of property became more important than the welfare of people. No common man can ever receive his due in such a system. The merchant is always protected at the expense of the consumer. If the merchant experiences losses, those losses will always be transferred to the merchant’s clients. The system reeks from the basic injustice that came about when English Common Law was absorbed without mention into American law. The Constitution never mentions it, and Article III does not grant the judiciary any legislating authority whatsoever. Yet the courts do legislate.
Judge Richard Posner has said that judges and lawyers have always been a cartel. Academics joined the cartel when law schools were created late in the 18th century. Yale law professor Fred Rodell said the legal trade is “a high class racket.” American jurisprudence exists to benefit the purveyors of an economy that too is never mentioned in the Constitution. (Any reader who believes that my description of the judiciary in America is exaggerated needs only to read Justice Lewis Powell’s Manifesto.)
In addition, common law actions are always adversarial. Actions consist of two lawyers who represent their clients before a supposedly impartial person or group that attempts to determine the truth by evaluating the evidence presented. A verdict is reached when the most effective adversary is able to convince the judge or jury that his or her perspective on the case is the correct one. For justice to ensue, the skills of counsels on both sides must be fairly equivalent. Of course, in practice, the skills are often vastly different, and cleverness often rules. Neither truth nor justice have an essential place in the action. A trial at law becomes a contest between opposing lawyers whose prize is the body of the accused or plaintiff. Justice in America is nothing but a lawyer’s game, and when lawyers predominate in legislatures, the game is extended to legislating. Legislatures become two party contests. In America, it is a contest between Democrats and Republicans, but those names are meaningless place holders. Better names would be For and Against. One party offers and the other rejects, which means, of course, that little if anything ever gets done. In America, legislatures, especially the Congress, govern by paralasis.
America is a failed state. Americans have not formed a more perfect union, established justice, insured domestic tranquility, provided for the common defense, promoted the general welfare, or secured the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Domestically, by every measure, American institutions are effete. Social problems fester for decades without resolution. Social discord abounds. Violence is endemic. Food supplies are often contaminated. Healthcare is inadequate. Public education is in disarray. The physical infrastructure is in tatters. Internationally, American policy consists of merely bribery and threats of violence, and neither has worked effectively for more than half a century. What has brought America to its knees? The answer is English Common Law. It has eliminated justice from society, the kind of justice that people, even children, all understand. A just society requires fairness not favoritism.
As it now stands, America is incorrigible. It cannot be fixed. Nothing but a complete repudiation of all law that favors one group or person over others will suffice. But such a repudiation will leave little that Americans would recognize. If justice is a light to nations, injustice is their darkness.
John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.

& you C any difference ..in  what IS going on now?        PLAYBOOK  doesn't change folks !

9/11: Criminal Incompetence and Ass-Covering by the Bush Administration

Posted on August 26, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog

14 Facts Which Show Criminal Negligence and Ass-Covering

On this eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, we would like to take a look back at what went wrong.
While the Bush administration tried to make its response to 9/11 its crowning achievement, the truth is that they acted with criminal incompetence and ass-covering.
(1) The U.S. is at least partly responsible for creating Al Qaeda.  For example, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser admitted on CNN that we organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets.
Professor of strategy at the Naval War College and former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer John R. Schindler documents, the U.S. supported Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda terrorists in Bosnia.
(2) The chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable.  It is thoroughly-documented that an attack such as 9/11 was entirely foreseeable.  Specifically, Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services – and our allies – knew could happen.
(3) U.S. intelligence services have repeatedly infiltrated Al Qaeda and related groups, but then idiotically failed to stop them.  For example – as the New York Times, CBS News and others reported – the FBI informant involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center begged the FBI to substitute fake bomb power for real explosives, but his FBI handler moronically let real explosives be used.
Similarly – as reported by Newsweek, the New York Times and others – an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to 2 of the 9/11 hijackers while they were in the U.S., but then stupidly failed to stop them.
Indeed, former counter-terrorism boss Richard Clarke theorizes that top CIA brass tried to recruit the hijackers and turn them to our side, but were unsuccessful. And – when they realized had failed – they covered up their tracks so that the FBI would not investigate their illegal CIA activities , “malfeasance and misfeasance”, on U.S. soil.
In other words, our intelligence services’ attempts to infiltrate and work with people inside of terrorist cells was horribly botched; and they did a horrible job of stopping terrorist attacks once they were set in motion.
(4) Dick Cheney was in charge of all of America’s counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement and this CNN article.  As such, at least part of the blame for failing to stop the attacks is on his shoulders.
(5) The Energy Task Force chaired by Dick Cheney prior to 9/11 collected maps of Iraqi oil, Saudi and United Arab Emerates fields and potential suitors for that oil. And you might have heard that the oil bigs attended the Task Force meetings.
According to the New Yorker – a secret document written by the National Security Council (NSC) on February 3, 2001 directed NSC staff to cooperate fully with  the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy:

“The review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields”.

It is difficult to brush off Cheney’s Energy Task Force’s examination of arab oil maps as a harmless comparison of American energy policy with known oil reserves because the NSC explicitly linked the Task Force, oil, and regime change.
The above-linked New Yorker article quotes a former senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the NSC said:

If this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.

See also this essay.
Is that why idiot Cheney – the guy in charge of all terror protection efforts before and on 9/11 – failed to effectively respond to 9/11 with normal air defense?  Was he too busy pining over Iraqi oil maps to pay any attention?
(6)  The military – under the idiot Vice President’s command that day – didn’t scramble enough fighter jets, and then scrambled jets far over the Atlantic Ocean, in what Senator Mark Dayton called:

The most gross incompetence and dereliction of responsibility and negligence that I’ve ever, under those extreme circumstances, witnessed in the public sector.

Cheney – and the other people in charge of anti-terror response that day – screwed up big time.
But just like the bank CEOs who are rewarded for causing the financial crisis by being given bailouts and subsidies and breaks, the military and intelligence officials who dropped the ball that day have been promoted. As Time reported:

They have basically promoted the exact same people who have presided over the … failure,” says a former Justice Department official, “and those individuals took the same thinking with them.

As the Washington Post reported, no one from the  CIA, FBI or NSA has been reprimanded, punished, or fired for the events of 9/11.
The same is true for the military personnel on watch that day. For example, General Myers, who was Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 11th, was quickly confirmed as Chairman two weeks later. General Ralph Eberhart, Commander in Chief of NORAD at the time of the attack, was promoted to head the new “Northern Command” a year after the attack.
Just as with the financial crisis, no one has been punished, and the people who screwed up have been allowed to fail upwards.
(7) On the day of 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney initiated Continuity of Government Plans that ended America’s constitutional form of government (at least for some undetermined period of time.)
On that same day, a national state of emergency was declared … and that state of emergency has continuously been in effect up to today. … even though U.S. military and intelligence officials say that the threat from Al Qaeda is now almost entirely non-existent.
(8) Many of the draconian “national security programs” – such as the Patriot Act, spying on Americans and indefinite detention – overtly approved after 9/11 had actually been implemented or planned before 9/11.  September 11th was used as an excuse to ramp up these programs.
These programs were approved during the Bush administration … but were never terminated by the Obama administration.  In fact, while Obama is a nicer and smarter guy than Bush, top constitutional law professors say that Obama has actually expanded these programs. And top national security experts say that these programs actually harm our national security and increase the threat from terrorism.  See this and this.
(9)  The Bush administration immediately used the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to carry out decades-old neoconservative plans to implement regime change throughout the Middle East and North Africa.  And see this,
(10) The Bush administration pretended that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11 …  one of the two main justifications for that war.
(11) Allegedly,  Saddam offered to leave Iraq – and the Taliban offered to turn over Bin Laden - in order to prevent U.S. invasion.  But the U.S. turned down the offers and invaded anyway.
We can’t get the bad guys using peaceful means, now can we?  We have a war to fight!
(12) In contrast, other governments that might actually have sponsored the attacks have been let off scot-free … and have even been given huge amounts of financial support.
(13) As the 9/11 Commission itself notes, as part of its ass-covering efforts, the Bush administration engaged in criminal obstruction of justice.
There are numerous examples of obstruction of justice into the 9/11 investigation, including:

• The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 said that Soviet-style government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses

• The 9/11 Commissioners concluded that officials from the Pentagon lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements

• The tape of interviews of air traffic controllers on-duty on 9/11 was intentionally destroyed by crushing the cassette by hand, cutting the tape into little pieces, and then dropping the pieces in different trash cans around the building as shown by this NY Times article (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view) and by this article from the Chicago Sun-Times

• As reported by ACLU, FireDogLake, RawStory and many others, declassified documents shows that Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001

Moreover, the CIA videotaped the interrogation of 9/11 suspects, falsely told the 9/11 Commission that there were no videotapes or other records of the interrogations, and then illegally destroyed all of the tapes and transcripts of the interrogations.
9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton wrote:

Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

This is particularly disturbing because the torture methods used were specially-targeted at producing false confessions.  And according to NBC News:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”

• One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

The 9/11 Commissioners publicly expressed anger at certain cover ups and obstructions of justice:

• The Commission’s co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) “obstructed our investigation”

• 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that “There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn’t have access . . . .”

• 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said “We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting”

• 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: “It is a national scandal”; “This investigation is now compromised”; and “One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up”

• The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry – said “At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened“. He also said “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”

And the Co-Chair of the official Congressional Inquiry Into 9/11 – and former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee – has called for a new 9/11 investigation.
(14)  The American government – like many other governments – has long spun accidents and intelligence failures as justifications for war propaganda.   Unscrupulous Americans – just like dishonest people all over the world – have long used deception as a basis for war.
Whatever the details of the screw-ups on 9/11, the Bush administration used the attacks as a justification to promote their agenda.  And – instead of changing the agenda – Obama has continued it.
          

Obama Administration Calls Pro-Lifers Terrorists Again

& do you expect anything less ...from the demons that infest D.C. (degenerate city) ... !       this scum IS at War with the American  People ! 

Obama Administration Calls Pro-Lifers Terrorists Again

by Steven Ertelt | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 7/6/12 11:13 AM

National

Once again, the Obama administration has called “terrorists” the majority of Americans who support the pro-life view on abortion. A January 2012 Department of Homeland Security document is making the rounds on the Internet and it paints an unflattering picture of pro-life Americans.
The January, 31, 2012 document is titled, “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008″ and was released by the Behavioral Sciences Division of the department.
“The authors of this report are Gary LaFree, director of START and professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, and Bianca Bersani, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston,” the document says. “This report is part of a series sponsored by the Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in support of the Counter-IED Prevent/Deter program. The goal of this program is to sponsor research that will aid the intelligence and law enforcement communities in identifying potential terrorist threats and support policymakers in developing prevention efforts.”
“This material is based upon work supported under Grant Award Number 2008ST061ST0003 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security made to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland,” it adds.
Under a headline, “Terrorism” on page 9, the manual describes the frequency of terrorist attacks and details what it terms “category of ideological motivation” to describe groups it believes are more prone to acts of terrorism. One section includes pro-life advocates:

Single Issue: groups or individuals that obsessively focus on very specific or narrowly-defined causes (e.g., anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, anti-nuclear, anti-Castro).

Later the document includes tables that graphically show the number of attacks and the manual, again, claims pro-life people are behind them.
“Table 6 shows the concentration of single issue terrorism for the four decades spanned by the data. Recall, single issue events include such attacks as anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, or anti-nuclear. Interestingly, among the types of terrorism examined here, single issue terrorism is probably the most temporally diverse, with substantial numbers of attacks occurring in all four decades,” the Obama administration paper says.
This isn’t the first time the Obama administration has referred to pro-lifers as terrorists.
In January 2010, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the agency charged with keeping American travelers safe from terrorism said as much. A video showed Transportation Security Administration nominee Erroll Southers including pro-life advocates in a list of terrorist groups.
The documentary asked Southers, “Which home-grown terrorist groups pose the greatest danger to the U.S.”
Southers explained, “Most of the domestic groups that we pay attention to here are white supremacist groups. They’re anti-government, in most cases anti-abortion, they are usually survivalist type in nature, identity oriented.”
“Those groups are groups that claim to be extremely anti-government and Christian identity oriented,” he continues.
In May 2009, details emerged about a terrorism dictionary the Obama administration had put together in March. The “Domestic Extremism Lexicon,” was essentially a terrorism and political extremism dictionary for the Obama administration’s internal use.
The March 26, 2009 document features numerous definitions and the headline “antiabortion extremism,” appears on page two of the eleven-page manual.
The Obama administration called pro-life advocates violent and claims they employ racist overtones in engaging in criminal actions.
The definition read: “A movement of groups or individuals who are virulently antiabortion and advocate violence against providers of abortion-related services, their employees, and their facilities. Some cite various racist and anti-Semitic beliefs to justify their criminal activities.”

That followed a report the Department of Homeland Security sent out saying pro-life advocates were right-wing extremists.
In that document, the Department of Homeland Security warned law officials about a supposed rise in “rightwing extremist activity,” saying the poor economy and presence of a black president could spark problems.
According to the Washington Times, a footnote attached to the nine-page report from the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis say the activities of pro-life advocates is included in “rightwing extremism in the United States.”
“It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration,” the warning said.

ITALY’S SUPREME COURT PRESIDENT BLAMES BILDERBERGERS FOR TERRORISM

April 16, 2013 By Joseph P. Farrell http://gizadeathstar.com/2013/04/italys-supreme-court-president-blames-bilderbergers-for-terrorism/

You may have missed this one, but it’s significant. Indeed, it’s big. And of course, you’re never going to hear about it on SeeBS, CNoNews, Faux news, or hear about it from all the Great  Americans in the mutual admiration society of certain radio talk shows on the right, and you won’t hear about it from Bill Maher and all the Compassion mongers on the left. It appeared on Alex Jones’ site, Infowars:
Italian Supreme Court President Blames Bilderberg For Terrorist Attacks
Pour yourself some coffee or a scotch, light a cigar, or cigarette, and let that article sink in a bit…
Italy’s supreme court president, and former prosecutor of the assassin of John-Paul II, says that there is a terrorist network in Europe and elsewhere, run by rogue elements within various NATO members’ intelligence. In effect, Signor Imposimato is arguing the same thing I advanced in Covert Wars and Breakaway Civlizations, and that Daniele Ganser detailed in his study, NATO’s Secret Armies. 
However, Signor Imposimato is adding a new layer: that behind this is the international cabal of thugs – they call themselves something else of course – known as the Bilderberg group. This, he says, is ultimately the nerve center of the Gladio units that Ganser detailed in his book, and that I reviewed in Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations.
But I hope you caught the real news here:

“Imposimato’s broadside against Bilderberg follows in the footsteps of his compatriot Alfonso Luigi Marra, a prominent lawyer who recently requested that the Public Prosecutor of Rome investigate the Bilderberg Group for criminal activity, questioning whether the elitist organization’s 2011 meeting in Switzerland led to the selection of Mario Monti as Prime Minister of Italy.

“Labeling the group a ‘unique, illegal brotherhood’ of elitists who consider themselves to be ‘above the law,’ Marra pointed the finger at Bilderberg for engineering wars, economic collapses, and arming dictators, activities which, ‘constitute an obvious, blatant violation, to say the least, of the articles of the Criminal Code.’”

In other words, major political figures in one of Europe’s major powers have “had it,” and are talking prosecution. That’s the news… and it is in a way good news, because it means that people in positions of real power are getting fed up with the stench emanating from London and New York, and the malodorous people producing it.

Watch this one carefully, because I suspect this is a trend that is going to increase, not decrease, and will spread from country to country throughout Europe, and eventually cross the the Atlantic. As such moves fail, and as the criminal oligarchs themselves turn on each other, and toss ever bigger bones to this movement to avoid their own exposure, possible prison time, or worse, other things will begin to happen.   We know what they’re capable of, and they are certainly capable of turning on each other as all crime bosses do. Popular demonstrations are now added to increasing official awareness that something must be done. Eventually, too, people on the “inside” will come forward, as the great scheme unravels even further.

And that will makes these sharks even more dangerous.

Read more: ITALY'S SUPREME COURT PRESIDENT BLAMES BILDERBERGERS FOR TERRORISM
- Giza Death Star Community

Italian Lawyer Demands Public Prosecutor Investigate Bilderberg Group

Alfonso Luigi Marra charges secretive organization colluded to pick Mario Monti as Prime Minister
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
February 12, 2013

Photo: World Economic Forum

Italian lawyer Alfonso Luigi Marra has requested that the Public Prosecutor of Rome investigate the secretive Bilderberg Group for criminal activity, questioning whether the elitist organization’s 2011 meeting in Switzerland led to the selection of Mario Monti as Prime Minister of Italy.

The Bilderberg Group is an annual confab of around 120 of the most influential power brokers on the planet from the world of politics, business, banking, academia, media, and even royalty. Mainstream press reports routinely downplay the significance of the meeting despite the fact that it has proven its kingmaker status on numerous occasions in the past and is clearly not just a “talking shop,” as some have characterized Bilderberg.

Marra’s full request that the Public Prosecutor of Rome investigate Bilderberg, a translation of which is posted here (original version in Italian here), identifies the organization as a “secret world government seeking to destabilize democracies through carnage,” that has relied on “institutional collusion” to keep its agenda largely secret.

Marra cites article 18 of the Italian Constitution, which explicitly bans secret societies from engaging in political activities.

Labeling the group a “unique, illegal brotherhood” of elitists who consider themselves to be “above the law,” Marra points the finger at Bilderberg for engineering wars, economic collapses, and arming dictators, activities which, “constitute an obvious, blatant violation, to say the least, of the articles of the Criminal Code.”

Marra urges the Public Prosecutor to investigate Bilderberg for engaging in illegal activities, “with particular reference to the legality of the conduct of Mario Monti as a member of Bilderberg,” and an “assessment of whether there are connections between some politicians” who attended the 2011 Bilderberg meeting in St. Moritz “and his appointment to the Presidency of the Council.”

Mario Monti, a former international advisor for Goldman Sachs, the European Chairman of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and also a leading member of the Bilderberg Group, assumed office as Italian Prime Minister following the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi in November 2011.

Monti’s cabinet was entirely comprised of unelected bureaucrats, prompting charges that Monti was merely the latest of a growing list of ex-Goldman Sachs technocrats selected undemocratically to seize control of European economies.

Monti attended the 2011 Bilderberg meeting in St. Moritz, Switzerland, at which Luigi suggests a deal may have been struck to appoint Monti as Berlusconi’s successor. Since the conference took place in June, five months before Monti’s appointment as PM, if evidence of this was uncovered by the Public Prosecutor it would clearly indicate that underhanded scheming had secured the position for Monti.

There are innumerable other examples of how Bilderberg has influenced major global events ahead of time, picking Presidents and Prime Ministers on a regular basis with total contempt for the democratic process.

In 2009, Bilderberg chairman Étienne Davignon even bragged about how the Euro single currency was a brainchild of the Bilderberg Group.

The former Prime Minister of Belgium, Herman Van Rompuy, was picked for the role of European Union President just days after he attended a Bilderberg Group dinner meeting in November 2009.

In 2010, former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes admitted that Bilderberg attendees are mandated to implement decisions that are formulated during the annual conference of power brokers. If this is the case, it would violate laws in numerous countries that forbid politicians from being influenced by foreign agents in secret.

During the 2011 meeting in St. Moritz, Dominique Baettig, a prominent member of Switzerland’s largest political party, attempted to confront other Swiss politicians attending the secretive confab and called for a parliamentary investigation into the activities of the group.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

This article was posted: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 2:44 pm

Tags: bilderberg, foreign affairs

Operation Gladio

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Emblem of "Gladio", Italian branch of the NATO "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations. The motto means "In being silent I serve freedom".

Operation Gladio (Italian: Operazione Gladio) is the codename for a clandestine NATO "stay-behind" operation in Europe during the Cold War. Its purpose was to continue anti-communist actions in the event of a Soviet invasion and conquest. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, "Operation Gladio" is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organizations, sometimes called "Super NATO". The name Gladio is the Italian form of gladius, a type of Roman shortsword.^[1]
Operating in many NATO and even some neutral countries,^[2] Gladio was part of a series of national operations first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen by SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official withdrawal from NATO's Military Committee in 1966 – which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements.
The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to right-wing terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the "Years of Lead" (late 1960s to early 1980s) and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation but never proved. Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter.^[3]

Contents 1 Origins 2 General stay-behind structure 2.1 European Parliament resolution concerning Gladio 3 Allegations 3.1 Gladio's strategy of tension and internal subversion operations 4 Gladio operations in NATO countries 4.1 First discovered in Italy 4.1.1 Giulio Andreotti's October 24, 1990 revelations 4.1.2 2000 Parliamentary report: a "strategy of tension" 4.1.3 General Maletti's testimony concerning alleged CIA involvement 4.1.4 A quick chronology of Italy's "strategy of tension" 4.1.4.1 1964 Piano Solo 4.1.4.2 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing 4.1.4.3 1970 Golpe Borghese 4.1.4.4 1972 Gladio meeting 4.1.4.5 May 31, 1972 Peteano massacre 4.1.4.6 November 23, 1973 Bombing of the plane Argo 16 4.1.4.7 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing, Italicus Express massacre, and arrest of Vito Miceli, chief of the Army intelligence service and member of P2, on charges of "conspiracy against the state" 4.1.4.8 1977 Reorganization of Italian secret services following Vito Miceli's arrest 4.1.4.9 1978 Murder of Aldo Moro 4.1.4.10 1980 Bologna massacre 4.1.4.11 1982 murder of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, head of counter-terrorism 4.1.4.12 October 24, 1990 Giulio Andreotti’s acknowledgement of Operazione Gladio 4.1.4.13 1998 David Carrett, officer of the U.S. Navy 4.1.5 The DSSA, another Gladio 4.2 Belgium 4.3 France 4.4 Denmark 4.5 Germany 4.5.1 The 1980 Oktoberfest terror attack 4.5.2 CIA's documents released in June 2006 4.5.3 Norbert Juretzko's 2004 revelations 4.6 Greece 4.7 Netherlands 4.8 Norway 4.9 Portugal 4.10 Turkey 4.11 United Kingdom 4.11.1 General Serravalle's revelations 4.11.2 Column 88 4.11.3 The Guardian's November 1990 revelations concerning plans under Margaret Thatcher 5 Parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries 5.1 Austria 5.2 Cyprus 5.3 Finland 5.4 Spain 5.5 Sweden 5.6 Switzerland 6 FOIA requests and US State Department's 2006 communiqué 7 Politicians on Gladio 8 Books 9 Films 10 Gladio in Fiction 11 Literature 12 See also 13 References 14 External links 15 Bibliography

Origins

The origin of Gladio can be traced to the so-called "secret anti-Communist NATO protocols", which were allegedly protocols committing the secret services of NATO member states to work to prevent communist parties from coming to power in Western Europe.^{[citation needed][unreliable source?]} According to the Italian researcher Mario Coglitore, the protocols required member states to guarantee alignment with the Western block "by any means".^{[citation needed][unreliable source?]} According to US journalist Arthur Rowse, a secret clause exists in the North Atlantic Treaty requiring candidate countries, before joining NATO, to establish clandestine citizen cadres standing ready to eliminate communist cells during any national emergency.^{[citation needed][unreliable source?]} These clandestine cadres were to be controlled by the country's respective security services.^[4]

General stay-behind structure

Emblem of NATO's "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations.

After World War II, the UK and the US decided to create "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Arms caches were hidden, escape routes prepared, and loyal members recruited: i.e., mainly hardline anticommunists, including many ex-Nazis or former fascists, whether in Italy or in other European countries. In Germany, for example, Gladio had as a central focus the Gehlen Org – also involved in ODESSA "ratlines" – named after Reinhard Gehlen who would become West Germany's first head of intelligence. Its clandestine "cells" were to stay behind (hence the name) in enemy controlled territory and to act as resistance movements, conducting sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassinations.
However, Italian Gladio was more far reaching. A briefing minute of June 1, 1959, reveals that Gladio, 'in case of Soviet military invasion' of the country, considered a concrete possibility at the time, had to organize resistance by 'internal subversion' rather than by trying to make plans for open warfare. It was to play 'a determining role... not only on the general policy level of warfare, but also in the politics of emergency'. In the 1970s, Italy experienced a period of communist revolutionary activity with the country continuously blocked by political motivated strike, violent mass demonstrations aimed at subverting the democratically elected Institutions, with communist Red Brigades terrorism and murders and most effectively through mainstream media strategic infiltration by dedicated extreme left wing activists. The electoral support for the Italian Communist Party and other leftists was growing to more than 1/3 of the italian popular vote so that the establishment of a communist regime in Italy seemed possible even without a Soviet invasion, as it had been the case in Eastern Europe. The revolutionary elites and avantguards feared only a right-wing reaction, which never really materialized. Fearing such supposed menace, the institutionalized revolutionary forces of the Italian Communist Party turned to demonize any possible reaction: they started referencing to all terrorist deeds, even those clearly originated by the extreme left wing, as part of the 'Strategy of Tension' ... with Gladio eager to be involved."^[5]
CIA director Allen Dulles was one of the key people in instituting Operation Gladio, and most of Gladio’s operations were financed by the CIA.^{[citation needed]} The anti-communist networks, which were present in all of Europe, including in neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland, were partly funded by the CIA.^[6] Some went as far as claiming that Christian Democrat (Democrazia Cristiana) leader Aldo Moro, a had been the "founder of (Italian) Gladio", a completely unsupported allegation.^[7] His murder by the Red Brigades in 1978 put an end to the “historic compromise” (sharing of power) making a formal alliance between the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Christian Democrats (DC) politically non feasible. Thus the propaganda tactic of describing all the extreme left-wing terrorist activity as a rogue strategy of tension meant at preventing the parliamentary access to power by the Italian Communist Party was not needed any longer.
Operating in all of NATO and even in some neutral countries such as Spain before its 1982 admission to NATO, Gladio was first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into the "Clandestine Planning Committee" (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen by the SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official retreat from NATO – which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements.
Daniele Ganser alleges that:^[8]

Next to the CPC, a second secret army command center, labeled Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC), was set up in 1957 on the orders of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR). This military structure provided for significant US leverage over the secret stay-behind networks in Western Europe as the SACEUR, throughout NATO's history, has traditionally been a US General who reports to the Pentagon in Washington and is based in NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium. The ACC's duties included elaborating on the directives of the network, developing its clandestine capability, and organizing bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime, it was to plan stay-behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE. According to former CIA director William Colby, it was 'a major program'.

Coordinated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), {the secret armies} were run by the European military secret services in close cooperation with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British foreign secret service Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also MI6). Trained together with US Green Berets and British Special Air Service (SAS), these clandestine NATO soldiers, armed with underground arms-caches, prepared against a potential Soviet invasion and occupation of Western Europe, as well as the coming to power of communist parties. The clandestine international network covered the European NATO membership, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, as well as the neutral European countries of Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland.

The Central Intelligence Agency's response to the series of accusations made by Mr. Ganser in his book regarding the CIA's involvement in Operation Gladio, deals with the fact that neither Ganser nor anyone else have solid evidence supporting their accusations. At one point in his book, Mr. Ganser even talks about the CIA's covert action policies as being "terrorist in nature" and then accuses the CIA of using their "networks for political terrorism". After being attacked by Ganser, the CIA has responded to these unfounded attacks by demonstrating that Daniele Ganser's sourcing is "largely secondary" and that Ganser himself has complained about "not being able to find any official sources to support his charges of the CIA’s or any Western European government’s involvement with Gladio".^[9]
The existence of these clandestine NATO armies remained a closely guarded secret throughout the Cold War until 1990, when the first branch of the international network was discovered in Italy. It was code-named Gladio, the Italian word for a short double-edged sword [gladius]. While the press said that the NATO secret armies were 'the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II', the Italian government, amidst sharp public criticism, promised to close down the secret army. Italy insisted identical clandestine armies had also existed in all other countries of Western Europe. This allegation proved correct and subsequent research found that in Belgium, the secret NATO army was code-named SDRA8, in Denmark Absalon, in Germany TD BJD, in Greece LOK, in Luxemburg Stay-Behind, in the Netherlands I&O, in Norway ROC, in Portugal Aginter, in Switzerland P26, in Turkey Ozel Harp Dairesi, In Sweden AGAG (Aktions Gruppen Arla Gryning), and in Austria OWSGV. However, the code names of the secret armies in France, Finland and Spain remain unknown.
Upon learning of the discovery, the parliament of the European Union (EU) drafted a resolution sharply criticizing the fact (...) Yet only Italy, Belgium and Switzerland carried out parliamentary investigations, while the administration of President George H. W. Bush refused to comment, being in the midst of preparations for war against Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf, and fearing potential damages to the military alliance.
If Gladio was effectively "the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II",^[10] it must be underlined, however, that on several occasions, arms caches were discovered and stay-behind paramilitary organizations officially dissolved – only to be created again. But it was not until the 1990s that the full international scope of the program was disclosed to public knowledge. Giulio Andreotti, the main character of Italy’s post-World War II political life, was described by Aldo Moro to his captors as "too close to NATO", Moro thus advising them to be wary. Indeed, before Andreotti’s 1990 acknowledgement of Gladio’s existence, he had "unequivocally" denied it in 1974, and then in 1978 to judges investigating the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. And even in 1990, "Testimonies collected by the two men (judges Felice Casson and Carlo Mastelloni investigating the 1972 Peteano fascist car bomb) and by the Commission on Terrorism on Rome, and inquiries by The Guardian, indicate that Gladio was involved in activities which do not square with Andreotti's account. Links between Gladio, Italian secret services bosses and the notorious P2 Masonic lodge are manifold (...) In the year that Andreotti denied Gladio’s existence, the P2 treasurer, General Siro Rosetti, gave a generous account of 'a secret security structure made up of civilians, parallel to the armed forces' There are also overlaps between senior Gladio personnel and the committee of military men, Rosa dei Venti (Wind Rose), which tried to stage a coup in 1970.”^[5]

European Parliament resolution concerning Gladio

Wikisource has original text related to this article: European Parliament resolution on Gladio

On November 22, 1990, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Gladio, requesting full investigations – which have yet to be done – and total dismantlement of these paramilitary structures. In 2005, the first academic examination of Gladio was published by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser. Mr. Ganser, as of 2010, is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. His book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, is a documented study of how Gladio operated.
British journalist Philip Willan, who, by 2010, was writing for the UK Guardian and Observer newspapers, described in the book, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, how the US intelligence services used their relationship with the P2 Masonic lodge to prop up Christian Democrat governments, undermining the growing political influence of the Italian Communist Party.
The 1990 European resolution condemned "the existence for 40 years of a clandestine parallel intelligence" as well as "armed operations organization in several Member States of the Community", which "escaped all democratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO." Denouncing the "danger that such clandestine network may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so," especially before the fact that "in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime," the Parliament demanded a "a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of these clandestine organizations or any splinter groups, their use for illegal interference in the internal political affairs of the countries concerned, the problem of terrorism in Europe and the possible collusion of the secret services of Member States or third countries." Furthermore, the resolution protested "vigorously at the assumption by certain US military personnel at SHAPE and in NATO of the right to encourage the establishment in Europe of a clandestine intelligence and operation network," asking "the Member States to dismantle all clandestine military and paramilitary networks" and to "draw up a complete list of organizations active in this field, and at the same time to monitor their links with the respective state intelligence services and their links, if any, with terrorist action groups and/or other illegal practices." Finally, the Parliament called "on its competent committee to consider holding a hearing in order to clarify the role and impact of the 'Gladio' organization and any similar bodies," and instructed "its President to forward this resolution to the Commission, the Council, the Secretary-General of NATO, the governments of the Member States and the United States Government."

Allegations

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2008)

The first academic examination of Gladio was published in 2005 by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser. Mr. Ganser is currently a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. His book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Gladio has been accused of trying to influence policies through the means of "false flag" operations: a 2000 Italian Parliamentary Commission report from the Olive Tree left-wing coalition concluded that the strategy of tension used by Gladio had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI (Italian Communist Party), and to a certain degree also the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), from reaching executive power in the country".^[11][12][13]
Propaganda Due (also known as P2), a quasi-freemasonic organization, whose existence was discovered in 1981, was said closely linked to Gladio^{[citation needed]}.
P2 was outlawed and disbanded in 1981, in the wake of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, which was linked to the Mafia and to the Vatican Bank. Its Grand Master, Licio Gelli, was involved in most of Italy’s scandals in the last three decades of the 20th century: Banco Ambrosiano’s crash; Tangentopoli, which gave rise to the Mani pulite ("Clean hands") anticorruption operation in the 1990s; the kidnapping and the murder of Aldo Moro in 1978 – the head of the secret services at the time, accused of negligence, was a piduista (P2 member). Licio Gelli has often said he was a friend of Argentine President Juan Perón. In any case, some important figures of his circle were discovered to be piduista, such as José López Rega, founder of the infamous anticommunist organization Triple A and provisional president Raúl Alberto Lastiri. Some members of later Jorge Videla’s dictatorship were part of the P2 as well, such as Admiral Emilio Massera and General Guillermo Suárez Mason. The Vatican Bank was also accused of funneling covert US funds for the Solidarnosc trade union movement in Poland and the Contras in Nicaragua.^[14]
Furthermore, Gladio has been linked to other events, such as Operation Condor^{[15][improper synthesis?]} and the 1969 killing of anticolonialist/independentist Mozambican leader Eduardo Mondlane by Aginter Press, the Portuguese "stay-behind" secret army, headed by Yves Guérin-Sérac – the allegation on Mondlane's death is disputed, with several sources stating that FRELIMO guerrilla leader Eduardo Mondlane was killed in a struggle for power within FRELIMO. In 1995, Attorney General Giovanni Salvi accused the Italian secret services of having manipulated proofs of the Chilean secret police’s (DINA) involvement in the 1975 terrorist attack on former Chilean Vice-President Bernardo Leighton in Rome. A similar mode of operation can also be recognized in various Cold War events, for example between the June 20, 1973 Ezeiza massacre in Buenos Aires (Argentina), the 1976 Montejurra massacre in Spain and the 1977 Taksim Square massacre in Istanbul (Turkey).
After Giulio Andreotti's revelations and the disestablishment of Gladio, the last meeting of the "Allied Clandestine Committee" (ACC), was held according to the Italian Prime minister on October 23 and 24, 1990. Despite this, various events have raised concerns about "stay-behind" armies still being in place. In 1996, the Belgian newspaper Le Soir revealed the existence of a racist plan operated by the military intelligence agencies. In 1999, Switzerland was suspected of again creating a clandestine paramilitary structure, allegedly to replace the former P26 and P27 (the Swiss branches of Gladio). Furthermore, in 2005, the Italian press revealed the existence of the Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA), accused of being "another Gladio".

Gladio's strategy of tension and internal subversion operations

Further information: Strategy of tension

NATO's "stay-behind" organizations were never called upon to resist a Soviet invasion, but their structures continued to exist after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Internal subversion and "false flag" operations were explicitly considered by the CIA and stay-behind paramilitaries. According to a November 13, 1990 Reuters cable,^[16] "André Moyen – a former member of the Belgian military security service and of the [stay-behind] network – said Gladio was not just anti-Communist but was for fighting subversion in general. He added that his predecessor had given Gladio 142 million francs ($4.6 millions) to buy new radio equipment."^[17] Ganser alleges that on various occasions, stay-behind movements became linked to right-wing terrorism, crime and attempted coups d'état:^[8]

"Prudent Precaution or Source of Terror?" the international press pointedly asked when the secret stay-behind armies of NATO were discovered across Western Europe in late 1990. After more than ten years of research, the answer is now clear: both. The overview aboves shows that based on the experiences of World War II, all countries of Western Europe, with the support of NATO, the CIA, and MI6, had set up stay-behind armies as precaution against a potential Soviet invasion. While the safety networks and the integrity of the majority of the secret soldiers should not be criticized in hindsight after the collapse of the Soviet Union, very disturbing questions do arise with respect to reported links to terrorism.

There exist large differences among the European countries, and each case must be analyzed individually in further detail. As of now, the evidence suggests the secret armies in the seven countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands, focused exclusively on their stay-behind function and were not linked to terrorism. However, links to terrorism have been either confirmed or claimed in the nine countries, Italy, Ireland,^{[citation needed]} Turkey, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Sweden, demanding further investigation.

According to Daniele Ganser, only Italy, Belgium and Switzerland carried on parliamentary investigations, while the prosecution of various "black terrorists" (terrorismo nero, neofascist terrorism) in Italy was difficult.
A 1990 article from The Guardian featured the following quote from judge Libero Mancuso:^[18]

On the eve of the 1980 Bologna bombing anniversary, Liberato [sic] Mancuso, the Bologna judge who had led the investigation and secured the initial convictions [of the Bologna bombers] broke six months of silence: "It is now understood among those engaged in the matter of democratic rights that we are isolated, and the objects of a campaign of aggression. This is what has happened to the commission into the P2, and to the magistrates. The personal risks to us are small in comparison to this offensive of denigration, which attempts to discredit the quest for truth. In Italy there has functioned for some years now a sort of conditioning, a control of our national sovereignty by the P2 – which was literally the master of the secret services, the army and our most delicate organs of state."

Examples of such alleged terrorist acts include the strategy of tension in Italy, or the Oktoberfest bomb blast of 1980 in Munich.^{[citation needed]} A Gladio official said that "depending on the cases, we would block or encourage far-left or far-right terrorism".^[19][20]

Gladio operations in NATO countries

First discovered in Italy

Main article: Gladio in Italy

The Italian NATO stay-behind organization, dubbed "Gladio", was set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani's (DC) supervision.^[21] However, Gladio's existence came to public knowledge when Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti revealed it to the Chamber of Deputies on October 24, 1990, although far-right terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra had already revealed its existence during his 1984 trial. According to media analyst Edward S. Herman, "both the President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, had been involved in the Gladio organization and coverup..."^{[22][verification needed]}

Giulio Andreotti's October 24, 1990 revelations

Christian Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly recognized the existence of Gladio on October 24, 1990. Andreotti spoke of a "structure of information, response and safeguard", with arms caches and reserve officers. He gave to the Commissione Stragi, the parliamentary commission led by senator Giovanni Pellegrino in charge of investigations on bombings committed during the Years Of Lead in Italy, a list of 622 civilians who according to him were part of Gladio. Andreotti also assured that 127 weapons' cache had been dismantled, and pretended that Gladio had not been involved in any of the bombings committed from the 1960s to the 1980s (further evidence implicated neofascists linked to Gladio, in particular concerning the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, the 1972 Peteano attack by Vincenzo Vinciguerra, the 1980 Bologna massacre in which SISMI officers were condemned for investigation diversion, along with Licio Gelli, head of the P2 Masonic lodge, etc.). Andreotti declared that the Italian military services (predecessors of the SISMI) had joined in 1964 the Allied Clandestine Committee created in 1957 by the US, France, Belgium and Greece, and which was in charge of directing Gladio's operations.^[23] However, Gladio was actually set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani's supervision.^[21] Beside, the list of Gladio members given by Andreotti was incomplete. It didn't include, for example, Antonio Arconte, who described an organization very different from the one brushed by Giulio Andreotti: an organization closely tied to the SID secret service and the Atlantist strategy.^[24][25] According to Andreotti, the stay-behind organisations set up in all of Europe did not come "under broad NATO supervision until 1959."^[26]

2000 Parliamentary report: a "strategy of tension"

In 2000, a Parliament Commission report from the "Gruppo Democratici di Sinistra l'Ulivo" concluded that the strategy of tension had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI, and to a certain degree also the PSI, from reaching executive power in the country". A 2000 Senate report, stated that "Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence." According to The Guardian, "The report [claimed] that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several rightwing terrorist bombings, including the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later, but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place. It also [alleged] that Pino Rauti [current leader of the MSI Fiamma-Tricolore party], a journalist and founder of the far-right Ordine Nuovo (new order) subversive organisation, received regular funding from a press officer at the US embassy in Rome. 'So even before the 'stabilising' plans that Atlantic circles had prepared for Italy became operational through the bombings, one of the leading members of the subversive right was literally in the pay of the American embassy in Rome,' the report says."^[27]

General Maletti's testimony concerning alleged CIA involvement

General Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter-intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975, alleged in March 2001 during the eight trial for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombings that the CIA had foreknowledge of the event.^[28] According to The Guardian, he said:^[29]

...his men had discovered that a rightwing terrorist cell in the Venice region had been supplied with military explosives from Germany. Those explosives may have been obtained with the help of members of the US intelligence community, an indication that the Americans had gone beyond the infiltration and monitoring of extremist groups to instigating acts of violence...

General Maletti told the Italian court that "the CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of rightwing terrorism," and continued on by declaring: "I believe this is what happened in other countries as well." Gianadelio Maletti also said to the court: "Don't forget that Nixon was in charge and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives."^{[citation needed]}
General Maletti himself in the first Piazza Fontana trial received a four-year sentence for providing a false passport to one of the accused bombers, this sentence was overturned in 1985.^[30] Maletti received, while in exile, a 15-years sentence in 2000 for his role in trying to cover up a 1973 bomb attack in Milan against the Interior minister, Mariano Rumor (DC – 4 killed and 45 injured), but was acquitted on appeals.^[31] According to the court, General Maletti knew in advance of the plan of the attacker, Gianfranco Bertoli, allegedly an anarchist but in reality a right-wing activist and a "long-standing SID informant" according to The Guardian, but had deliberately failed to inform the interior minister of it.^[29]
Responding to charges made by Maletti in La Repubblica one year earlier, the CIA called the allegation that it was involved in the attacks in Italy "ludicrous."^[32]

A quick chronology of Italy's "strategy of tension"

1964 Piano Solo

In 1964, Gladio was involved in a silent coup d'état when General Giovanni de Lorenzo in the so-called Piano Solo ("Operation Alone") forced the Italian Socialists Ministers to leave the government.^[33]

1969 Piazza Fontana bombing

According to Avanguardia Nazionale member Vincenzo Vinciguerra: "The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the politic and military authorities to declare a state of emergency".^[34]

1970 Golpe Borghese

In 1970, the failed coup attempt Golpe Borghese gathered, around fascist Junio Valerio Borghese, international terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and P2 grand master Licio Gelli.^{[citation needed]}

1972 Gladio meeting

According to The Guardian, "General Geraldo Serravalle, a former head of "Office R", told the terrorism commission that at a crucial Gladio meeting in 1972, at least half of the upper echelons "had the idea of attacking the communists before an invasion. They were preparing for civil war." Later, he put it more bluntly: "They were saying this: "Why wait for the invaders when we can make a preemptive attack now on the communists who would support the invader? The idea is now emerging of a Gladio web made up of semi-autonomous cadres which – although answerable to their secret service masters and ultimately to the NATO-CIA command – could initiate what they regarded as anti-communist operations by themselves, needing only sanction and funds from the existing 'official' Gladio column (...) General Nino Lugarese, head of SISMI from 1981 to 1984 testified on the existence of a 'Super Gladio' of 800 men responsible for 'internal intervention' against domestic political targets."^[5]

May 31, 1972 Peteano massacre

Magistrate Felice Casson discovered that "the explosives used in the attack came from one of 139 secret weapons depots of a secret army organized under the code name Operation Gladio".^[22] Neofascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra confessed in 1984 to judge Felice Casson of having carried out the Peteano terrorist attack, in which three policemen died, and for which the Red Brigades (BR) had been blamed before. Vinciguerra explained during his trial how he had been helped by Italian secret services to escape the police and to fly away to Francoist Spain. However, he was abandoned by NATO as soon as he started talking about Gladio, declaring for example during his 1984 trial:

with the massacre of Peteano and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages. [This structure] lies within the states itself. There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity, that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army... A super-organization which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on NATO's behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces..." He then said to The Guardian, in 1990: "I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organised matrix... Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo (the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s), were being mobilised into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance."^[5][8]

November 23, 1973 Bombing of the plane Argo 16

General Geraldo Serravalle, head of Gladio from 1971 to 1974, told a television programme that he now thought the explosion aboard the plane Argo 16 on 23 November 1973 was probably the work of gladiatori who were refusing to hand over their clandestine arms. Until then it was widely believed the sabotage was carried out by Mossad, the Israeli foreign service, in retaliation for the pro-Libyan Italian government’s decision to expel, rather than try, five Arabs who had tried to blow up an Israeli airliner. The Arabs had been spirited out of the country on board the Argo 16.^[35]

1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing, Italicus Express massacre, and arrest of Vito Miceli, chief of the Army intelligence service and member of P2, on charges of "conspiracy against the state"

In 1974, a massacre committed by Ordine Nuovo, during an anti-fascist demonstration in Brescia, kills eight and injures 102. The same year, a bomb in the Rome to Munich train "Italicus Express" kills 12 and injures 48. Also in 1974, Vito Miceli, P2 member, chief of the SIOS (Servizio Informazioni), Army Intelligence's Service from 1969 and SID's head from 1970 to 1974, got arrested on charges of "conspiration against the state" concerning investigations about Rosa dei venti, a state-infiltrated group involved in terrorist acts. During his trial, he revealed the existence of the NATO stay-behind secret army.^{[citation needed]}

1977 Reorganization of Italian secret services following Vito Miceli's arrest

In 1977, the secret services were thus reorganized in a democratic attempt. With law #801 of 24/10/1977, SID was divided into SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), SISDE (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica) and CESIS (Comitato Esecutivo per i Servizi di Informazione e Sicurezza). The CESIS was given a coordination role, led by the President of Council.^{[citation needed]}

1978 Murder of Aldo Moro

Prime minister Aldo Moro was murdered in May 1978 by the Second Red Brigades (BR), headed by Mario Moretti, in obscure circumstances. The head of the Italian secret services, accused of negligence, was a P2 member. The so-called "historic compromise" between the Christian Democrats and the PCI was abandoned:^[36] The Italian Government led by Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga (a member of the extreme right faction of Italy's Christian Democrat party, a pro-NATO atlantist was also suspected of involvement in the killing of Aldo Moro).^{[citation needed]}

As the conspiracy theorists would have it, Mr. Moro was allowed to be killed either with the acquiescence of people high in Italy’s political establishment, or at their instigation, because of the historic compromise he had made with the Communist Party^{[citation needed]}.
During his captivity, Aldo Moro wrote several letters to various political figures, including Giulio Andreotti. In October 1990, "a cache of previously unknown letters written by the former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, just prior to his execution by Red Brigade terrorists in 1978... was discovered in a Milan apartment which had once been used as a Red Brigade hideout. One of those letters made reference to the involvement of both NATO and the CIA in an Italian-based secret service, 'parallel' army."^[37] "This safe house had been thoroughly searched at the time by Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the head of counter-terrorism. How is it that the papers had not been revealed before?" asked The Independent^[36] Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was murdered in 1982 (see below).

In May 1978, investigative journalist Mino Pecorelli thought that Aldo Moro's kidnapping had been organised by a "lucid superpower" and was inspired by the "logic of Yalta". He painted the figure of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa as "general Amen," explaining that it was him that, during Aldo Moro's kidnap, had informed Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga of the localization of the cave where Moro was detained. In 1978, Pecorelli wrote that Dalla Chiesa was in danger and would be assassinated (Dalla Chiesa was murdered four years later). After Aldo Moro's assassination, Mino Pecorelli published some confidential documents, mainly Moro's letters to his family. In a cryptic article published in May 1978, wrote The Guardian in May 2003, Pecorelli drew a connection between Gladio, NATO's stay-behind anti-communist organisation (which existence was publicly acknowledged by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in October 1990) and Moro's death. During his interrogation, Aldo Moro had referred to "NATO's anti-guerrilla activities."^[38] Mino Pecorelli, who was on Licio Gelli's list of P2 members discovered in 1980, was assassinated on March 20, 1979. The ammunitions used, a very rare type, where the same as discovered in the Banda della Magliana 's weapons stock hidden in the Health Minister's basement. Pecorelli's assassination has been thought to be directly related to Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was condemned to 20 years of prison for it in 2002 before having the sentence cancelled by the Supreme Court of Cassation in 2003.^{[citation needed]}

1980 Bologna massacre

"The makings of the bomb... came from an arsenal used by Gladio... according to a parliamentary commission on terrorism... The suggested link with the Bologna massacre is potentially the most serious of all the accusations levelled against Gladio, and comes just two days after the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, cleared Gladio's name in a speech to parliament, saying that the secret army did not drift from its formal Nato military brief."^[39] In November 1995, Neo-Fascists terrorists Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro, members of the Nuclei Armati Revoluzionari (NAR), were convicted to life imprisonment as executors of the 1980 Bologna massacre. The NAR neofascist group worked in cooperation with the Banda della Magliana, a Mafia-linked gang which took over Rome's underground in the 1970s and was involved in various political events of the strategy of tension, including the Aldo Moro case, the 1979 assassination of Mino Pecorelli, a journalist who published articles alleging links between Prime minister Giulio Andreotti and the mafia, as well as the assassination of "God's Banker" Roberto Calvi in 1982. The investigations concerning the Bologna bombing proved Gladio's direct influence: Licio Gelli, P2's headmaster, received a sentence for investigation diversion, as well as Francesco Pazienza and SISMI officers Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte. Avanguardia Nazionale founder Stefano Delle Chiaie, who was involved in the Golpe Borghese in 1970, was also accused of involvement in the Bologna massacre^[20][40]

1982 murder of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, head of counter-terrorism

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General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa's 1982 murder, in Palermo, by Pino Greco, one of the Mafia Godfather Salvatore Riina's (aka Toto Riina) favorite hitmen, is allegedly part of the strategy of tension. Alberto Dalla Chiesa had arrested Red Brigades founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini in September, 1974, and was later charged of investigation concerning Aldo Moro. He had also found Aldo Moro's letters concerning Gladio.

October 24, 1990 Giulio Andreotti’s acknowledgement of Operazione Gladio

After the discovery by judge Felice Casson of documents on Gladio in the archives of the Italian military secret service in Rome, Giulio Andreotti, head of Italian government, revealed to the Chamber of deputies the existence of "Operazione Gladio" on October 24, 1990, insisting that Italy has not been the only country with secret "stay-behind" armies. He made clear that "each chief of government had been informed of the existence of Gladio". Former Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi said that he had not been informed until he was confronted with a document on Gladio signed by himself while he was Prime Minister. Former Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini (Republican Party), at the time President of the Senate, and former Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani, at the time secretary of the ruling Christian Democratic Party claimed they remembered nothing. Spadolini stressed that there was a difference between what he knew as former Defence Secretary and what he knew as former Prime Minister. Only former Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga (DC) confirmed Andreotti's revelations, explaining that he was even "proud and happy" for his part in setting up Gladio as junior Defence Minister of the Christian Democratic Party. This lit up a political storm, requests were made for Cossiga's (Italian President since 1985) resignation or impeachment for high treason. He refused to testify to the investigating Senate committee. Cossiga narrowly escaped his impeachment by stepping down on April 1992, three months before his term expired.^[41]

1998 David Carrett, officer of the U.S. Navy

David Carrett, officer of the U.S. Navy, was indicted by magistrate Guido Salvini on charge of political and military espionage and his participation to the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, among other events. Judge Guido Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, Italian official for the US-NATO intelligence network, and pentito Carlo Digilio. La Repubblica underlined that Carlo Rocchi, CIA's man at Milan, was surprised in 1995 searching for information concerning Operation Gladio, thus demonstrating that all was not over.^[34]
1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, which started Italy's anni di piombo, and the 1974 "Italicus Expressen" train bombing were also attributed to Gladio operatives. In 1975, Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Pinochet during Franco's funeral in Madrid, and would participate afterward in operation Condor, preparing for example the attempted murder of Bernardo Leighton, a Chilean Christian Democrat, or participating in the 1980 'Cocaine Coup' of Luis García Meza Tejada in Bolivia. In 1989, he was arrested in Caracas, Venezuela and extradited to Italy to stand trial for his role in the Piazza Fontana bombing. Despite his reputation, Delle Chiaie was acquitted by the Assize Court in Catanzaro in 1989, along with fellow accused Massimiliano Fachini (as yet no convictions have been made for the attack). According to Avanguardia Nazionale member Vincenzo Vinciguerra: "The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency."^[34]

The DSSA, another Gladio

In July 2005, the Italian press revealed the existence of the Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA), a "parallel police" General Gaetano Saya and General Riccardo Sindoca, two leaders of the National Union of the Police Forces (UNPF), a trade-union present in all the state security forces. Both said they were former members of Gladio. According to the DSSA website – closed after these revelations – Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq after being taken hostage, was there "for the DSSA". According to the Italian investigators, the DSSA was trying to obtain international and national recognition by intelligence agencies, in order to obtain finances for its parallel activities. Furthermore, Il Messaggero, quoted by The Independent, declared that, according to judicial sources, wiretaps suggested DSSA members had been planning to kidnap Cesare Battisti, a former communist activist. "We were seeing the genesis of something similar to the death squads in Argentina" (the AAA groups) the magistrate is reported to have said.^{[42][43][44][45][46]}

Belgium

Main article: Belgian stay-behind network

After the 1976 retreat of France from NATO, the SHAPE headquarters were displaced to Mons in Belgium. In 1990, following France's denial of any "stay-behind" French army, Giulio Andreotti publicly said the last Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) meeting, at which the French branch of Gladio was present, had been on October 23 and 24, 1990, under the presidency of Belgian General Van Calster, director of the Belgian military secret service SGR. In November, Guy Coëme, the Minister of the Defense, acknowledged the existence of a Belgium "stay-behind" army, lifting concerns about a similar implication in terrorist acts as in Italy. The same year, the European Parliament sharply condemned NATO and the United States in a resolution for having manipulated European politics with the stay-behind armies.^[33]
New legislation governing intelligence agencies' missions and methods was passed in 1998, following two government inquiries and the creation of a permanent parliamentary committee in 1991, which was to bring them under the authority of Belgium's federal agencies. The Commission was created following events in the 1980s, which included the Brabant massacres and the activities of far right group Westland New Post.^[47]

France

In 1947, Interior Minister Edouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed "Plan Bleu". The next year, the "Western Union Clandestine Committee" (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. In 1949, the WUCC was integrated into NATO, whose headquarters were established in France, under the name "Clandestine Planning Committee" (CPC). In 1958, NATO founded the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare.^{[citation needed]}
The network was supported with elements from SDECE, and had military support from the 11th Choc regiment. The former director of DGSE, admiral Pierre Lacoste, alleged in a 1992 interview with The Nation, that certain elements from the network were involved with terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. A section of the 11th Choc regiment split over the 1962 Evian peace accords, and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), but it is unclear if this also involved members of the French stay-behind network.^[48][49]
La Rose des Vents and Arc-en-ciel ("Rainbow") network were part of Gladio. François de Grossouvre was Gladio's leader for the region around Lyon in France until his alleged suicide on April 7, 1994. Grossouvre would have asked Constantin Melnik, leader of the French secret services during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), to return to activity. He was living in comfortable exile in the US, where he maintained links with the Rand Corporation. Constantin Melnik is alleged to have been involved in the creation in 1952 of the Ordre Souverain du Temple Solaire, an ancestor of the Order of the Solar Temple, created by former A.M.O.R.C. members, in which the SDECE (French former military intelligence agency) was interested.^[50]

Denmark

The Danish stay-behind army was code-named Absalon, after a Danish archbishop, and led by E.J. Harder. It was hidden in the military secret service Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE). In 1978, William Colby, former director of the CIA, released his memoirs in which he described the setting-up of stay-behind armies in Scandinavia:^[51]

"The situation in each Scandinavian country was different. Norway and Denmark were NATO allies, Sweden held to the neutrality that had taken her through two world wars, and Finland were required to defer in its foreign policy to the Soviet power directly on its borders. Thus, in one set of these countries the governments themselves would build their own stay-behind nets, counting on activating them from exile to carry on the struggle. These nets had to be co-ordinated with NATO's plans, their radios had to be hooked to a future exile location, and the specialised equipment had to be secured from CIA and secretly cached in snowy hideouts for later use. In other set of countries, CIA would have to do the job alone or with, at best, "unofficial" local help, since the politics of those governments barred them from collaborating with NATO, and any exposure would arouse immediate protest from the local Communist press, Soviet diplomats and loyal Scandinavians who hoped that neutrality or nonalignment would allow them to slip through a World War III unharmed."

On November 25, 1990, Danish daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende, quoted by Daniele Ganser (2005), confirmed William Colby's revelations, by a source named "Q":

"Colby's story is absolutely correct. Absalon was created in the early 1950s. Colby was a member of the world spanning laymen Catholic organisation Opus Dei, which, using a modern term, could be called right-wing. Opus Dei played a central role in the setting up of Gladio in the whole of Europe and also in Denmark... The leader of Gladio was Harder who was probably not a Catholic. But there are not many Catholics in Denmark and the basic elements making up the Danish Gladio were former [WW II] resistance people – former prisoners of Vestre Fængsel, Frøslevlejren, Neuengamme and also of the Danish Brigade."

Germany

Reinhard Gehlen, German military intelligence officer on the East front during the war, turned towards the US after the war, and set up the "Gehlen Organisation", which used many former Nazi party members for intelligence purposes during the Cold War. But alongside the Gehlen organisation, which became the nucleus of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, Federal Intelligence Service), West Germany's intelligence agency created in 1956, US intelligence also set up a German stay-behind network parallel (and juxtaposed) to the Gehlen Org (which also had a role in the organisation of the ODESSA network, used to exfiltrate Nazi war criminals). CIA documents released in June 2006 under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, more than fifteen years after Prime minister Giulio Andreotti's revelations concerning Gladio, show that the CIA organized "stay-behind" networks of German agents between 1949 and 1955.^[52]
One of these networks supported by the CIA was the Technische Dienst (TD, Technical Service) section within the Bund Deutscher Jugend (BDJ, Union of German Youth). The anti-communist BDJ was founded in 1950 by ex-Nazis Erhard Peters and CIA money-contact Paul Lüth. The existence of TD came to light, after a speech in the Hesse Landtag by PM Georg August Zinn.^[53] During the investigations into BDJ, which started in September 1952, a couple of arms caches were found, including one in the Odenwald region, Hesse.^[54] The claim by August Zinn that the BDJ supposedly was in the possession of a list of Social Democrats and Communists to be liquidated in case of a Soviet invasion, including leading figures of the opposition Social Democratic Party^[55]) was denied by German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.^[54] The BDJ was outlawed in January 1953.^[56][57]
Documents shown to the Italian parliamentary terrorism committee revealed that in the 1970s British and French officials involved in the network visited a training base in Germany built with US money.^[55]
In 1976, the secret service BND secretary Heidrun Hofer was arrested after having revealed the secrets of the German stay-behind army to her husband, who was a spy of the KGB.^[33]

The 1980 Oktoberfest terror attack

Main article: Oktoberfest terror attack

Revelations of a witness in the investigation of the Oktoberfest bomb blast of 1980 in Munich lead to the conclusion that the explosives might have come from the German Neo-Nazi Heinz Lembke.^[4] In 1981, German police by chance found an arms cache in the Lüneburg Heath, which led to the arrest of Lembke and the discovery of other arms caches in Lower Saxony. A few days later Lembke hanged himself in his prison cell. Lembke had been questioned in Oktoberfest investigation, but the public prosecutors found no evidence that he supplied the explosives for the bombing.^[58]
Lembke's arms caches were supposed to be connected to Gladio by a number of researchers and journalists.^[8]

CIA's documents released in June 2006

One network included Staff Sergent Heinrich Hoffman and Lieutenant Colonel Hans Rues, and another one, codenamed Kibitz-15, was run by Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kopp, a former Wehrmacht officer, described by his own North American handlers as an "unreconstructed Nazi."^[59] In an April 1953 CIA memo released in June 2006, the CIA headquarters wrote: "The present furore in Western Germany over the resurgence of the Nazi or neo-Nazi groups is a fair example – in miniature – of what we would be faced with." Therefore some of these networks were dismantled. These documents stated that the ex-Nazis were a complete failure in intelligence terms. According to Timothy Naftali, a US historian from the University of Virginia who reviewed the CIA documents then released, "The files show time and again that these people were more trouble than they were worth. The unreconstructed Nazis were always out for themselves, and they were using the West's lack of information about the Soviet Union to exploit it."^[59] The US NARA Archives themselves stated in a 2002 communique, concerning Reinhard Gehlen's recruiting of former Nazis, that "Besides the troubling moral issues involved, these recruitments opened the West German government, and by extension the United States, to penetration by the Soviet intelligence services."^[60]
Hans Globke, who had worked for Adolf Eichmann in the Jewish Affairs department and helped draft the 1935 Nuremberg laws, became Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's national security advisor in the 1960s, and "was the main liaison with the CIA and NATO" according to The Guardian.^[59] A March 1958 memo from the German BND agency to the CIA wrote that Adolf Eichmann is "reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias CLEMENS since 1952." However, the CIA did not pass the information on to the Israeli MOSSAD, as it feared revelations concerning its use of former Nazis for intelligence purposes – Eichmann, who was in charge of the Jewish Affairs department, was abducted by the MOSSAD two years later. Among these information that might have been revealed by Eichmann were the ones concerning Hans Globke, CIA's liaison in West Germany. At the request of Bonn, the CIA persuaded Life magazine to delete any reference to Globke from Eichmann's memoirs, which it had bought from his family.^[52]

Norbert Juretzko's 2004 revelations

In 2004 the German spymaster Norbert Juretzko published a book about his work at the BND. He went into details about recruiting partisans for the German stay-behind network. He was sacked from BND following a secret trial against him, because the BND could not find out the real name of his Russian source "Rübezahl" whom he had recruited. A man with the name he put on file was arrested by the KGB following treason in the BND, but was obviously innocent, his name having been chosen at random from the public phone book by Juretzko.^{[citation needed]}
According to Juretzko, the BND built up its branch of Gladio, but discovered after the fall of the German Democratic Republic that it was 100% known to the Stasi early on. When the network was dismantled, further odd details emerged. One fellow "spymaster" had kept the radio equipment in his cellar at home with his wife doing the engineering test call every 4 months, on the grounds that the equipment was too "valuable" to remain in civilian hands. Juretzko found out because this spymaster had dismantled his section of the network so quickly, there had been no time for measures such as recovering all caches of supplies.^{[citation needed]} Civilians recruited as stay-behind partisans were equipped with a clandestine shortwave radio with a fixed frequency. It had a keyboard with digital encryption, making use of traditional Morse code obsolete. They had a cache of further equipment for signalling helicopters or submarines to drop special agents who were to stay in the partisan's homes while mounting sabotage operations against the communists.^{[citation needed]}
In a German documentary about the Munich massacre happening at the 1972 Summer Olympics Juretzko further claims that BND stay-behind forces were activated and on alert shortly after the hostage taking. The German police had no specially trained counter-terrorist units at hands at that time. The BND agents however, according to Juretzko, were uniquely skilled and equipped for covert operations, which included sharpshooting and helicopter insertion. Due to fears of revealing the German stay-behind operation to the public, these vital forces were ultimately not used to free the Israeli hostages, resulting in the catastrophic outcome of the crisis and subsequent formation of the GSG 9 counter-terrorism and special operations unit.^[61]

Greece

The aim of British Prime minister Winston Churchill was to prevent the communist-led EAM resistance movement from taking power after the end of World War II. After the suppression of a pro-EAM uprising in April 1944 among the Greek forces in Egypt, a new and firmly reliable unit was formed, the Third Greek Mountain Brigade, which excluded "almost all men with views ranging from moderately conservative to left wing."^[62] After liberation in October 1944, EAM controlled most of the country. When it organized a demonstration in Athens on December 3, 1944 , members of rightist and pro-royalist paramilitary organizations, covered by "British troops and police with machine guns... posited on the rooftops", suddenly shot on the crowd, killing 25 protesters (including a six-year-old boy) and wounding 148.^[63] This marked the outbreak of the Dekemvriana, which would lead to the Greek Civil War.^{[citation needed]}
When Greece joined NATO in 1952, the country's special forces, the LOK (Lochoi Oreinōn Katadromōn, i.e. "Mountain Raiding Companies") were integrated into the European stay-behind network. The CIA and LOK reconfirmed on March 25, 1955 their mutual co-operation in a secret document signed by US General Trascott for the CIA, and Konstantinos Dovas, chief of staff of the Greek military. In addition to preparing for a Soviet invasion, the CIA instructed LOK to prevent a leftist coup. Former CIA agent Philip Agee, who was sharply criticized in the US for having revealed sensitive information, insisted that "paramilitary groups, directed by CIA officers, operated in the sixties throughout Europe [and he stressed that] perhaps no activity of the CIA could be as clearly linked to the possibility of internal subversion."^[64]
The LOK was involved in the Greek military coup d' État on April 21, 1967,^[65] which took place one month before the scheduled national elections for which opinion polls predicted an overwhelming victory of the centrist Center Union of George and Andreas Papandreou. Under the command of paratrooper Lieutenant Colonel Costas Aslanides, the LOK took control of the Greek Defence Ministry while Brigadier General Stylianos Pattakos gained control over communication centers, the parliament, the royal palace, and according to detailed lists, arrested over 10,000 people. Phillips Talbot, the US ambassador in Athens, disapproved of the military coup which established the "Regime of the Colonels" (1967–1974), complaining that it represented "a rape of democracy" – to which Jack Maury, the CIA chief of station in Athens, answered: "How can you rape a whore?".^[66]
Arrested and then exiled in Canada and Sweden, Andreas Papandreou later returned to Greece, where he won the 1981 election for Prime minister, forming the first socialist government of Greece's post-war history. According to his own testimony, he discovered the existence of the secret NATO army, then codenamed "Red Sheepskin", as acting prime minister in 1984 and had given orders to dissolve it.^[67]
Following Giulio Andreotti's revelations in 1990, the Greek defence minister confirmed that a branch of the network, known as Operation Sheepskin, operated in his country until 1988.^[68] The socialist opposition called for a parliamentary investigation into the secret army and its alleged link to terrorism and the 1967 coup d'état. Public order minister Yannis Vassiliadis declared that there was no need to investigate such "fantasies" as "Sheepskin was one of 50 NATO plans which foresaw that when a country was occupied by an enemy there should be an organised resistance. It foresaw arms caches and officers who would form the nucleus of a guerilla war. In other words, it was a nationally justifiable act."^{[citation needed]}
In December 2005, journalist Kleanthis Grivas published an article in To Proto Thema, a Greek Sunday newspaper, in which he accused "Sheepskin" for the assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens in 1975, as well as the assassination of British military attaché Stephen Saunders in 2000. This was denied by the US State Department, who responded that "the Greek terrorist organization '17 November' was responsible for both assassinations", and that Grivas's central piece of evidence had been the Westmoreland Field Manual which the State department, as well as an independent Congressional inquiry have alleged to be a Soviet forgery.^[69] The document in question, however, makes no specific mention of Greece, November 17, nor Welch. The State Department also highlighted the fact that, in the case of Richard Welch, "Grivas bizarrely accuses the CIA of playing a role in the assassination of one of its own senior officials" while "Sheepskin" couldn't have assassinated Stephen Saunders for the simple reason that, according to the US government, "the Greek government stated it dismantled the “stay behind” network in 1988."^[69]

Netherlands

A large arms cache was discovered in 1983 near the village Velp. In 1990 the government by means of then-prime-minister Ruud Lubbers was forced to confirm that the arms were related to planning for unorthodox warfare. He insisted that the Dutch organisation was, contrary to the operations in other European countries, totally independent from NATO command, and during wartime occupation would be commanded by the Dutch government in exile. The operating bureaus of the organisation would also move to safety in England or the USA at the first sign of trouble.^{[citation needed]}
In his television show of 22 April 2007 Dutch crime journalist Peter R. De Vries revealed that weapons had been illegally supplied to Gladio well after the network was supposed to have been disbanded.^[33]
A Dutch investigative television program revealed on September 9, 2007, that an arms cache that belonged to Gladio was ransacked in the 1980s. The cache was located in a park near Scheveningen. Some of stolen weapons later turned up, including hand grenades and machine guns, when police officials arrested criminals Sam Klepper and John Mieremet in 1991. The Dutch military intelligence agency, MIVD, feared at that time that the disclosure of the Gladio history of these weapons was politically explosive.^[70][71]

Norway

In 1957, the director of the secret service NIS, Vilhelm Evang, protested strongly against the pro-active intelligence activities at AFNORTH, as described by the chairman of CPC: "[NIS] was extremely worried about activities carried out by officers at Kolsås. This concerned SB, Psywar and Counter Intelligence." These activities supposedly included the blacklisting of Norwegians. SHAPE denied these allegations. Eventually, the matter was resolved in 1958, after Norway was assured about how stay-behind networks were to be operated.^{[72][page needed]}
In 1978, the police discovered an arms cache and radio equipment at a mountain cabin and arrested Hans Otto Meyer, a businessman accused of being involved in selling illegal alcohol. Meyer claimed that the weapons were supplied by Norwegian intelligence. Rolf Hansen, defense minister at that time, stated the network was not in any way answerable to NATO and had no CIA connection.^[73]

Portugal

Further information: Aginter Press

In 1966, the CIA set up Aginter Press which, under the direction of Captain Yves Guérin-Sérac (who had taken part in the founding of the OAS), ran a secret stay-behind army and trained its members in covert action techniques amounting to terrorism, including bombings, silent assassinations, subversion techniques, clandestine communication and infiltration and colonial warfare. Aginter Press was suspected of having assassinated General Humberto Delgado (1906–1965), founder of the Portuguese National Liberation Front against Salazar's dictatorship (prominent historians and several sources also claim Delgado's assassination was performed by PIDE operational Rosa Casaco), as well as anti-colonialist leader Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), founder of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) and Eduardo Mondlane leader of the liberation movement FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), in 1969 (prominent historians and several sources also claim Cabral's assassination was performed by individuals within Cabral's guerrilla movemment, the PAIGC, and Mondlane's death was work of his enemies inside FRELIMO – according to these versions, both assassinations were the result of struggles for power within the independentist movements).^[33][74]

Turkey

Main article: Counter-Guerrilla

Further information: Deep state, Ergenekon network, and Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele

As one of the nations that prompted the Truman Doctrine, Turkey is one of the first countries to participate in Operation Gladio and, some say, the only country where it has not been purged.^[75] According to Italian magistrate Felice Casson, the Turkish stay-behind forces are two-pronged: the military "Counter-Guerrilla", and the civilian "Ergenekon".^[76] An offshoot of the latter organization is currently the subject of a major investigation. Casson says Turkey is home to the most powerful branch of Operation Gladio.^[77]
The counter-guerrilla's existence in Turkey was revealed in 1973 by then prime minister Bülent Ecevit,^[78] and he immediately became a target for several assassination plots.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1940 to assist resistance movements and carry out subversive operations in enemy-held territory across occupied Europe. Guardian reporter David Pallister wrote in December 1990 that a guerrilla network with arms caches had been put in place following the fall of France. It included Brigadier "Mad Mike" Calvert, and was drawn from a special-forces ski battalion of the Scots Guards which was originally intended to fight in Nazi-occupied Finland.^[26] Known as Auxiliary Units, they were headed by Major Colin Gubbins, an expert in guerrilla warfare who would later lead the SOE. The Auxiliary Units were attached to GHQ Home Forces, and concealed within the Home Guard. The units were created in preparation of a possible invasion of the British Isles by the Third Reich. These units were allegedly stood down only in 1944. Several of their members subsequently joined the Special Air Service and saw action in France in late 1944. The units' existence did not generally become known by the public until the 1990s despite a book on the subject being published in 1968,^[79] although in recent years, much more research has been undertaken on the Auxiliary Units, such as the books by John Warwicker ("Churchill's Underground Army" and "With Britain In Mortal Danger") and the Coleshill Auxiliary Research Team (CART), which publishes its work online. In fiction, Owen Sheers' Resistance (2008), set in Wales, takes as one of its central characters a member of the Auxiliary Units called to resist a successful German invasion.
After the end of World War II, the stay-behind armies were created with the experience and involvement of former SOE officers.^[33] Following Giulio Andreotti's October 1990 revelations, General Sir John Hackett (1910–1997), former commander-in-chief of the British Army on the Rhine, declared on November 16, 1990 that a contingency plan involving "stay behind and resistance in depth" was drawn up after the war. The same week, Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley (1924–2006), former commander-in-chief of NATO's Forces in Northern Europe from 1979 to 1982, declared to The Guardian that a secret arms network was established in Britain after the war.^[55] General John Hackett had written in 1978 a novel, The Third World War: August 1985, which was a fictionalized scenario of a Soviet Army invasion of West Germany in 1985. The novel was followed in 1982 by The Third World War: The Untold Story, which elaborated on the original. Farrar-Hockley had aroused controversy in 1983 when he became involved in trying to organise a campaign for a new Home Guard against eventual Soviet invasion.^[80]
Gladio membership included mostly ex-servicemen but also followers of Oswald Mosley's pre-war fascist movement.^{[citation needed]}

General Serravalle's revelations

General Gerardo Serravalle, who commanded the Italian Gladio from 1971 to 1974, related that "in the 1970s the members of the CPC [Coordination and Planning Committee] were the officers responsible for the secret structures of Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands and Italy. These representatives of the secret structures met every year in one of the capitals... At the stay-behind meetings representatives of the CIA were always present. They had no voting rights and were from the CIA headquarters of the capital in which the meeting took place... members of the US Forces Europe Command were present, also without voting rights. ".^[81] Next to the CPC a second secret command post was created in 1957, the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC). According to the Belgian Parliamentary Committee on Gladio, the ACC was "responsible for coordinating the 'Stay-behind' networks in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States". During peacetime, the activities of the ACC "included elaborating the directives for the network, developing its clandestine capability and organising bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime, it was to plan stay-behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE; organisers were to activate clandestine bases and organise operations from there".^[82] General Serravale declared to the Commissione Stragi headed by senator Giovanni Pellegrino that the Italian Gladio members trained at a military base in Britain.^[55] Documents shown to the committee also revealed that British and French officials members of Gladio had visited in the 1970s a training base in Germany built with US money.^[55]

Column 88

Column 88 was a neo-nazi paramilitary organization based in the United Kingdom. It was formed in the early 1970s, and disbanded in the early 1980s. The members of Column 88 undertook military training under the supervision of a former Royal Marine Commando, and also held regular gatherings attended by neo-nazis from all over Europe. The name is code: the eighth letter of the alphabet 'HH' represents the Nazi greeting 'Heil Hitler'. Many suspected that this group were behind the arson attack that destroyed the Albany Empire in Deptford, south London in July 1978 during the Rock Against Racism campaign.^[83]
In January 1991, the well known UK anti-fascist Searchlight magazine as part of a series of often contradictory articles variously alleging that C88 was the paramilitary wing of the British nationalist movement or a "honeytrap operation set up by British Intelligence, claimed that Column 88 was part of an alleged European Gladio "stay-behind" network, set up and trained by special forces units (such as the British SAS) to conduct sabotage and assassinations in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. This European-wide underground network is also alleged to have recruited neo-Nazis in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy and other European countries.^[83]
References

• Ganser, Daniele: NATO's Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. (London: Frank Cass, 2005). ISBN 0-7146-8500-3.

The Guardian's November 1990 revelations concerning plans under Margaret Thatcher

The Guardian reported on November 5, 1990, that there had been a "secret attempt to revive elements of a parallel post-war plan relating to overseas operations" in the "early days of Mrs Thatcher's Conservative leadership". According to the British newspaper, "a group of former intelligence officers, inspired by the wartime Special Operations Executive, attempted to set up a secret unit as a kind of armed MI6 cell. Those behind the scheme included Airey Neave, Mrs Thatcher's close adviser who was killed in a terrorist attack in 1979, and George Kennedy Young, a former deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6." The newspaper stated that Thatcher had been "initially enthusiastic but dropped the idea after the scandal surrounding the attack by the French secret service on the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in New Zealand in 1985."^[84] The Swiss branch, P-26, as well as Italian Gladio, had trained in the UK in the early 1970s.^[84][85]

Parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries

Austria

In Austria, the first secret stay-behind army was exposed in 1947. It had been set up by far-right Soucek and Rössner, who both insisted during their trial that "they were carrying out the secret operation with the full knowledge and support of the US and British occupying powers." Sentenced to death, they were then pardoned under mysterious circumstances by President Körner (1951–1957).
Franz Olah set up a new secret army codenamed Österreichischer Wander-, Sport- und Geselligkeitsverein (OWSGV, literally "Austrian hiking, sports and society club"), with the cooperation of MI6 and the CIA. He later explained that "we bought cars under this name. We installed communication centres in several regions of Austria", confirming that "special units were trained in the use of weapons and plastic explosives". He precised that "there must have been a couple of thousand people working for us... Only very, very highly positioned politicians and some members of the union knew about it".
In 1965, the police forces discovered a stay-behind arms cache in an old mine close to Windisch-Bleiberg and forced the British authorities to hand over a list with the location of 33 other caches in Austria.^[33]
In 1990, when secret "stay-behind" armies were discovered all around Europe, the Austrian government said that no secret army had existed in the country. However, six years later, the Boston Globe revealed the existence of secret CIA arms caches in Austria. Austrian President Thomas Klestil and Chancellor Franz Vranitzky insisted that they had known nothing of the existence of the secret army and demanded that the US launch a full-scale investigation into the violation of Austria's neutrality, which was denied by President Bill Clinton. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns – appointed in August 2001 by President George Bush as the US Permanent Representative to the Atlantic treaty organization, where, as ambassador to NATO, he headed the combined State-Defense Department United States Mission to NATO and coordinated the NATO response to the September 11, 2001 attacks – insisted: "The aim was noble, the aim was correct, to try to help Austria if it was under occupation. What went wrong is that successive Washington administrations simply decided not to talk to the Austrian government about it."^[8]

Cyprus

The Turkish branch of Gladio Counter-Guerrilla formed the TMT Turkish Resistance Organisation in Cyprus in 1958 and manned it with turkish officers. The 1960 constitution of the republic of Cyprus only had provision for a very small professional army of a few hundred men from both Cypriot communities. Following the 1963–64 clashes that led to the collapse of the power sharing between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the National Guard was created as a conscription Greek cypriot army. The officers for the National Guard where almost exclusively Greek nationals, officers of the Greek Army. LOK units were created in Cyprus modelled on the Greek LOK units, though Cyprus never joined NATO and was at the time a member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Reporter Makarios Drousiotis^[86] has written about Greek officer Dimitris Papapostolou, commander of LOK in Cyprus at the time, conspiring with ex-interior minister Polykarpos Yorkatzis to kill elected president Makarios by attacking his helicopter, and after the failure of that attempt, being involved in the assassination of Yorkatzis. The 15 July 1974 coup d'etat against Makarios was executed by National Guard units, with the attack on the presidential palace perpetrated by 31 and 32 Moira Katadromon LOK units with the help of 21 Epilarhia Anagnoriseos tanks reconnaissance unit.^[87]

Finland

In 1944, the Swedes worked with Finnish Intelligence to set up a stay-behind network of agents within Finland to keep track of post-war activities in that country. While this network was allegedly never put in place, Finnish codes, SIGINT equipment and documents were brought to Sweden and apparently exploited until the 1980s.^[88]
In 1945, Interior Minister Yrjö Leino exposed a secret stay-behind army which was closed down (so called Weapons Cache Case). This operation was organized by Finnish general staff officers (without foreign help) in 1944 to hide weapons in order to sustain a large-scale guerrilla warfare in the event the Soviet Union tried to occupy Finland in the aftermath of the Continuation War. See also Operation Stella Polaris.
In 1991, the Swedish media claimed that a secret stay-behind army had existed in neutral Finland with an exile base in Stockholm. Finnish Defence Minister Elisabeth Rehn called the revelations "a fairy tale", adding cautiously "or at least an incredible story, of which I know nothing."^[33] However, in his memoirs, former CIA director William Colby described the setting-up of stay-behind armies in Scandinavian countries, including Finland, with or without the assistance of local governments, to prepare for a Soviet invasion.^[51]

Spain

Several events prior to Spain's 1982 membership in NATO have also been tied to Gladio: In May 1976, a year after Franco's death, two left-wing Carlist members were shot down by far-right terrorists, among whom were Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and members of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), demonstrating connections between Gladio and the South American "Dirty War". This incident became known as the Montejurra incident.^[89] According to a report by the Italian CESIS (Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services), Carlo Cicuttini (who took part in the 1972 Peteano bombing in Italy alongside Vincenzo Vinciguerra), participated in the 1977 Massacre of Atocha in Madrid, killing five people (including several lawyers), members of the Workers' Commissions trade-unions closely linked with the Spanish Communist Party. Cicuttini was naturalized Spanish and exiled in Spain since 1972 (date of the Peteano bombing)^[90]
Following Andreotti's 1990 revelations, Adolfo Suárez, Spain's first democratically elected Prime minister after Franco's death, denied ever having heard of Gladio.^[91] President of the Spanish government in 1981–82, during the transition to democracy, Calvo Sotelo stated that Spain had not been informed of Gladio when it entered NATO. Asked about Gladio's relations to Franquist Spain, he said that such a network was not necessary under Franco, since "the regime itself was Gladio."^[92]
According to General Fausto Fortunato, head of Italian SISMI from 1971 to 1974, France and the US had backed Spain's entrance to Gladio, but Italy would have opposed its veto to it. Following Andreotti's revelations, however, Narcís Serra, Spanish Minister of Defense, opened up an investigation concerning Spain's links to Gladio.^[93][94] Furthermore, Canarias 7 newspaper revealed, quoting former Gladio agent Alberto Volo, who had a role in the revelations of the existence of the network in 1990, that a Gladio meeting had been organized in August 1991 in the Gran Canaria island.^[95] Alberto Vollo also declared that as a Gladio operative, he had received trainings in Maspalomas, in the Gran Canaria island between the 1960s and the 1970s.^[96] El País daily also revealed that the Gladio organization was suspected of having used former NASA installations in Maspalomas, in the Gran Canaria island, in the 1970s.^[97]
André Moyen, former Belgian secret agent, also declared that Gladio had operated in Spain.^[98] He said that Gladio had bases in Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastián and the Canarias islands.

Sweden

In 1951, CIA agent William Colby, based at the CIA station in Stockholm, supported the training of stay-behind armies in neutral Sweden and Finland and in the NATO members Norway and Denmark. In 1953, the police arrested right winger Otto Hallberg and discovered the preparations for the Swedish stay-behind army. Hallberg was set free and charges against him were dropped.^[33]

Switzerland

Main article: Projekt-26

In Switzerland, a secret army named P26 was discovered, by coincidence months before Giulio Andreotti's October 1990 revelations. After the "secret files scandal" (Fichenaffäre), Swiss parliamentaries started investigating the Defense Department in the summer of 1990. According to Felix Würsten of the ETH Zurich, "P26 was not directly involved in the network of NATO's secret armies but it had close contact to MI6."^[99] Daniele Ganser (ETH Zurich) wrote in the Intelligence and National Security review that "following the discovery of the stay-behind armies across Western Europe in late 1990, Swiss and international security researchers found themselves confronted with two clear-cut questions: Did Switzerland also operate a secret stay-behind army? And if yes, was it part of NATO's stay-behind network? The answer to the first question is clearly yes... The answer to the second question remains disputed..."^[100]
Swiss Major Hans von Dach published in 1958 Der totale Widerstand, Kleinkriegsanleitung für jedermann ("Total Resistance," Bienne, 1958) concerning guerrilla warfare, a book of 180 pages about passive and active resistance to a foreign invasion, including detailed instructions on sabotage, clandestinity, methods to dissimulate weapons, struggle against police moles, etc.^[101]
In 1990, Colonel Herbert Alboth, a former commander of the Swiss secret stay-behind army P26 declared in a confidential letter to the Defence Department that he was willing to reveal "the whole truth". He was later found in his house, stabbed with his own military bayonet. The detailed parliamentary report on the Swiss secret army was presented to the public on November 17, 1990.^[33] According to The Guardian, "P26 was backed by P27, a private foreign intelligence agency funded partly by the government, and by a special unit of Swiss army intelligence which had built up files on nearly 8,000 "suspect persons" including "leftists", "bill stickers", "Jehovah's witnesses", people with "abnormal tendencies" and anti-nuclear demonstrators. On November 14, the Swiss government hurriedly dissolved P26 – the head of which, it emerged, had been paid £100,000 a year."^[84]
In 1991, a report by Swiss magistrate Pierre Cornu was released by the Swiss defence ministry. It said that P26 was without "political or legal legitimacy", and described the group's collaboration with British secret services as "intense". "Unknown to the Swiss government, British officials signed agreements with the organisation, called P26, to provide training in combat, communications, and sabotage. The latest agreement was signed in 1987... P26 cadres participated regularly in training exercises in Britain... British advisers – possibly from the SAS – visited secret training establishments in Switzerland." P26 was led by Efrem Cattelan, known to British intelligence.^[85]
In a 2005 conference presenting Daniele Ganser's research on Gladio, Hans Senn, General Chief of Staff of the Swiss Army between 1977 and 1980, explained how he was informed of the existence of a secret organisation in the middle of his term of office. According to him, it already became clear in 1980 in the wake of the Schilling/Bachmann affair that there was also a secret group in Switzerland. But former MP, Helmut Hubacher, President of the Social Democratic Party from 1975 to 1990, declared that although it had been known that "special services" existed within the army, as a politician he never at any time could have known that the secret army P26 was behind this. Hubacher pointed out that the President of the parliamentary investigation into P26 (PUK-EMD), the right-wing politician from Appenzell and member of the Council of States for that Canton, Carlo Schmid, had suffered "like a dog" during the commission's investigations. Carlo Schmid declared to the press: "I was shocked that something like that is at all possible," and said to the press he was glad to leave the "conspirational atmosphere" which had weighted upon him like a "black shadow" during the investigations.^[102] Hubacher found it especially disturbing that, apart from its official mandate of organizing resistance in case of a Soviet invasion, P26 had also a mandate to become active should the left succeed in achieving a parliamentary majority.^[99]

FOIA requests and US State Department's 2006 communiqué

Three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have been filed to the CIA, which has rejected them with the Glomar response: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request." One request was filed by the National Security Archive in 1991; another by the Italian Senate commission headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino in 1995 concerning Gladio and Aldo Moro's murder; the last one in 1996, by Oliver Rathkolb, of Vienna university, for the Austrian government, concerning the secret stay-behind armies after a discovery of an arms-cache.^[33]
Furthermore, the US State Department published a communiqué in January 2006 which, while confirming the existence of stay-behind armies, in general, and the presence of the "Gladio" stay-behind unit in Italy, in particular, with the purpose of aiding resistance in the event of Soviet aggression directed Westward, from the Warsaw Pact, dismissed claims of any United States ordered, supported, or authorized skullduggery by stay-behind units. In fact, it claims that, on the contrary, the accusations of US-sponsored "false flag" operations are rehashed former Soviet disinformation based on documents that the Soviets themselves forged; specifically the researchers are alleged to have been influenced by the Westmoreland Field Manual, whose forged nature was confirmed by former KGB operatives, following the end of the Cold War. However since then counter sources from within gladio and the CIA have admitted its authenticity. The alleged Soviet-authored forgery, disseminated in the 1970s, explicitly formulated the need for a "strategy of tension" involving violent attacks blamed on radical left-wing groups in order to convince allied governments of the need for counter-action. It also rejected a Communist Greek journalist's allegations made in December 2005 (See above).^[69]

Politicians on Gladio

Whilst the existence of a "stay-behind" organization such as Gladio was disputed, prior to its confirmation by Giulio Andreotti,^{[citation needed]} with some skeptics describing it as a conspiracy theory, several high-ranking politicians in NATO countries have made statements appearing to confirm the existence of something like it:

• Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti ("Gladio had been necessary during the days of the Cold War but, that in view of the collapse of the East Bloc, Italy would suggest to NATO that the organisation was no longer necessary.")^{[citation needed]}
• Former French minister of defense Jean-Pierre Chevènement ("a structure did exist, set up at the beginning of the 1950s, to enable communications with a government that might have fled abroad in the event of the country being occupied.").^{[citation needed]}
• Former Greek defence minister, Ioannis Varvitsiotis (Greek: Ιωάννης Βαρβιτσιώτης) ("local commandos and the CIA set up a branch of the network in 1955 to organise guerrilla resistance to any communist invader")^{[citation needed]}

As noted above, the US has now acknowledged the existence of Operation Gladio.^{[citation needed]}

Books

• NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe (Contemporary Security Studies), by Daniele Ganser, 2005, ISBN 0-7146-8500-3
• Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, by Philip Willan, 2002, ISBN 0-595-24697-4