Secret Terror, The Price of Ignorance By Gordon Duff

[Shallel Octavia]

Secret Terror, The Price of Ignorance

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/07/27/secret-terror-the-price-of-...

Breivik's Real Uniform, his suit of armour

A Very Real Masonic Plot

By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor

 

The slaughter in Norway last week, dramatically punctuated by mysterious photographs of a reputed mass murderer in odd regalia, festooned with symbols of the Masonic Order, is unlikely to bring rise to some important questions.  This is a mistake, in this case a fatal mistake and not for the first time as you will read below.

The highest levels of Freemasonry, after World War II, formed parallel governments, engaged in terrorism and were the subjects of investigations across Europe when it was proven that they threatened the very foundations of free societies.

This week, we learned that threat is alive and well.

Breivik was allowed to buy assault weapons, silencers, tons of explosives all while on terror watch lists.  Why?  His Masonic friends in the police, the same police whose helicopters were disabled on “terror day,” much as NORAD was mysteriously “closed” on 9/11, were looking out for him.

Norway’s police and security services are controlled by Freemasons and have a long history, dating back to 1957 when NIS Director, Vilhelm Evang stumbled on a secret organization within his own Psywar and Counter-intelligence command that had compiled “death lists” of individuals, progressives, liberals and intellectuals.

In 1978, Norwegian financier Hans Otto Meyer was arrested on what would today be termed “terrorism” charges.  Tons of arms and explosives along with radio equipment were found at a cabin he owned.  Meyer said the cache belonged to Norwegian intelligence for use by clandestine civilian groups, such as those operating in Italy at the time.  Meyer was imprisoned, there was no investigation but the parallels are there, decades later, cover stories, denials, misinformation.

On April 27, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, in a speech on press censorship, did something very unexpected.  He warned America and the world of the extreme dangers of Freemasonry.  For those in America and Europe, decent simple people, who, by the hundreds of thousands, men and women, even children, that belong to Freemasonry and related organizations, the idea of their organization, their secret society as a threat to freedom, as a cover for international terrorism, must seem unreal, or at least did.

Norway changed all of that.  I was warned, I didn’t listen.  Dimitri Khalezov, the Russian nuclear intelligence expert, told me there was a Masonic terror organization in Europe, closely aligned with Israel, one that penetrated security services, ran police and counter-terrorism forces and used them more than once to perpetrate acts of terror, London 7/7, Madrid, now Norway.

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I didn’t listen, so many of my friends are Freemasons, I have been asked to join repeatedly and refused.  I have been invited to join other organizations, some “highly exclusive” whose membership includes Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch.  I am not a joiner, I am deeply suspicious but obviously not suspicious enough.

What I do, like everyone else, when faced with surmountable odds, almost everyone else, I turn away.  Taking on Freemasonry is a death sentence.  It was for John F. Kennedy.  I knew that those who murdered him were Freemasons, those who orchestrated his death, who executed him with sniper rifles that day in Dallas, who turned out the Warren Commission Report.

Operation Gladio, the "staybehind" network that became the platform for decades of worldwide terror

Years later, when the 9/11 Commission Report came out, it was written by Freemason’s too.  As a document, it is so absurd, so patently false that those responsible have talked of little else since, the lies, the intimidation, the pressure to bury the truth in a cacophony of lies, as we have done so many times, forgotten scandals like Iran/Contra or the dozens, perhaps hundreds that have been squashed by the secret handshake.

Few know that, in the late 1980′s, Freemasons were instrumental in bringing down communism, collapsing the Soviet Union.  Today, as we look back on those heady times, we see a Russia run by a gangster elite, utterly corrupt but powerful, as technologically advanced as ever, better rockets, better air defense systems, better small arms, unimaginable secret weapons, awash in cash, power centralized in one man.

Russia is run by Freemasons.  I didn’t listen.

America?  Broke, busted, divided, preyed upon by a cancerous oligarchy of financial criminals, corrupt politicians and a massive police state bureaucracy of, yes, Freemasons.

I didn’t listen.

British culture is filled with spy stories and detective yarns.  The British air their dirty laundry so much better than America.  Their news is censored, almost beyond belief, more than any American would guess unless they have lived in the UK, but their TV heroes, their authors and screenwriters, they understand.

A major theme in British conspiracy lore is Freemasonry.  Freemasons run the police and security services, they run the Home Office kind of like “Homeland Security” on steroids, a government bureaucracy that has its hands in everything.  Freemasonry in Britain and Norway is a secret government, the organs that manage everything from political terror to fixing a parking ticket.

On November 5, 1990, The Guardian reported on what they termed:

Over the past few weeks, government after government, with the notable exception of the British, has been forced to admit that the organisation – whose original purpose was to set up resistance groups against occupying Warsaw Pact forces – still exists. It has come be to known as Operation Gladio, after its Italian branch.

Two threads have emerged. Ministers, let alone parliaments, knew nothing about the secret units; second, while nominally established as “stay-behind” sabotage groups to combat communist forces, in some countries they soon had internal political targets in their sights.

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Representatives from these units have been meeting regularly in Brussels in the Allied Coordination Committee. This consists of civilian and military personnel, according to Italian and Belgian sources. Guy Coeme, the Belgian defence minister, has said it last met in Brussels in late October.

The network was not confined to Nato countries. An inquiry in Switzerland recently revealed the existence of a secret organisation, P26. It had 400 agents with access to guns and explosives with a German radio system, Harpoon, set up in 1985 to contact parallel groups in neighbouring countries.

One early task was to take over plans for a Swiss government-in-exile in south-west Ireland in the event of invasion. Another was to prepare for action against “subversion”.

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.

What isn’t mentioned, however, is that the force described, a mix of civilians, extremist political parties, anti-immigration groups, police, military and security services had gotten totally out of hand and had, in fact, begun operating as terror organizations, robbing banks, assassinating political leaders and partnering with other organizations from Israel’s Mossad to the PLO.  Two other things are left out of the Guardian’s story, the fact that these were Masonic Organizations, named as such but not clearly identified in the story and that they were never really dismantled.  The Guardian continues:

Although the Ministry of Defence has repeatedly refused to comment on Britain’s involvement, Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, a former commander of Nato forces in northern Europe, has confirmed that a secret network of arms – to be handed out to a civilian guerrilla force in the event of an invasion – was set up in Britain after the war.

The Guardian has learned of 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, 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.

Mrs Thatcher is said to have 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.

British co-operation with the Gladio network since the 1950s appears to have concentrated on offering training expertise for continental cells. Werner Carobbio, a member of the Swiss parliamentary inquiry, referred the Guardian to Swiss press reports that P26 personnel had received training in Britain.

General Gerardo Serravalle, a retired officer, told the Italian parliamentary inquiry that a Gladio unit trained in Britain in the early 1970s. General Fausto Fortunato, head of the Italian Gladio cell until 1964, referred to a “crucial” meeting of the network held in Britain, followed by others in France, Belgium and Luxembourg in the early 1960s.

Revelations about the Gladio network have provoked embarrassed reactions. Wilfried Martens, Belgium’s prime minister almost continuously since 1979, has said he was never told about its network, now under investigation after allegations that it was linked to a series of terrorist attacks in the 1980s.

The Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, told parliament last month that a secret organisation had been set up inside the defence ministry in the 1950s originally to provide intelligence to a government in exile. Members of the cell are believed to have taken part recently in a training exercise in Sicily.

The French defence minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, has announced that the French section, code-named Gallio, had been dissolved by presidential decree.

The German section, set up with the help of second world war army veterans and the extreme rightwing Federation of German Youth, allegedly drew up plans to assassinate leading members of the opposition Social Democrat party in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion. The German government has promised to consider winding it up.

In Greece, where it was given the code-name, Sheepskin, a cell was set up by the CIA in the 1950s but was dismantled in 1988, according to the government. Officers in the underground unit were involved in the Colonels’ coup in 1967.

In Turkey, Bulent Ecevit, prime minister at the time of the invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974, has said he was informed at the time of a “special warfare” department within the headquarters of the general staff. He said he was told it had been financed until then by the US but needed funds from Ankara.

A former Italian Gladio officer has said Gladio agents were trained by US instructors at a military base in Spanish Canary Islands from 1966 to the mid-1970s. He said France proposed Spain for membership of the network in 1973 but Britain, Germany and the Netherlands blocked the move on the grounds that Spain was not a democracy.

By “Masons,” we don’t mean uncle Bob and his friends.  Real Freemasons are 33rd degree and above, the 7 levels above 33rd degree that few can imagine aspiring to.  Therein lies real power.

Scene of the Bologna P2 Lodge bombing

Before calling any of this conspiracy theory, you have to look at Italy after World War II and the Masonic Lodge, now defunct, known as “P2.”

Established in 1877 as a secret government lodge, “Propaganda Massonica” or “P” became “Propaganda Due” or “P2″ after the war.  Mussolini had crushed the Masonic lodges during his reign but they reemerged in 1945 and became fervently anti-communist.  About a third of Italy is Communist, then and today.

As the Cold War got hotter, the anti-communist Freemasons became the “go to” secret society for, not only political dirty tricks but terrorism as well, terrorism orchestrated to bring down governments that the United States and CIA were uncomfortable with.

The CIA/NATO cover name for this Masonic terror organization was Gladio.

How many Americans have heard of Operation Gladio? Many ask, how could simple Arabs or even Israel, put together an organization capable of 9/11? If, as 78% of Australians indicate, in a recent Herald Sun poll, America planned 9/11 herself, how did a democracy lose its way? How did America’s intelligence and defense groups become terrorists? When did it happen and why? The answer isn’t simple, it started decades ago, when the world was at the edge of obliteration and two systems, or what we then believed were systems, fought for the hearts and minds of the world.

Today, all that sounds childish. A mature look at the Cold War looks more like two rats fighting over a corpse. Then, however, some saw it as “light and dark,” clear as that. Many believed the Soviet Union would drive its tanks through Europe like a knife through hot butter. To fight this “eventuality,” NATO built a terrorist organization of massive proportions. The remaining cells of Operation Gladio, one of the greatest disasters of military ignorance in history, are busy today.

We call some of them “Al Qaeda.”

Operation Gladio is the heart of world terrorism, alive and well, and built by NATO, built by the United States and used against America and the world. Gladio, created to save us from communism, quickly became a terrorist organization itself, murdering political leaders, rigging elections, terror attacks to blame on one group or another. The “medicine” became the disease. It is now killing us.

In Italy, 1981, prosecutors investigating the Mafia role in the Vatican banking scandal found that the P2 Masonic lodge was at the heart of it.  A list was discovered, 962 members of this secret organization.  Among them was Silvio Berlusconi, current prime minister along with the heads of Italy’s Carbineri, the army and nearly every corrupt banker and major gangster in Italy.

On August 2, 1980, an explosion at the Central Station at Bologna killed 85 and wounded hundreds.  A small “fascist” organization was blamed immediately, part of a coverup orchestrated by security chief, General Pietro Musumeci, but few took his efforts seriously.  It was more than obvious from the political climate that “P2″ was responsible and General Musumeci, a member of the P2 Lodge, was charged with falsifying evidence in order to divert attention from the real planner, Licio Gelli, Grand Master of the P2 Masonic Lodge.

The trials continued through 2004 with Gelli convicted of “obstruction” and the original patsies, part of an anti-nuclear group, to languish in prison.

The operations uncovered in Norway had their beginnings in Italy and follow a clear pattern.  This same pattern is now emerging in Norway, a pattern seen in the United States with 9/11, in Britain with 7/7 and across Europe and the world, concealed behind the myth of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

The following is a timeline of planning and operations of the Masonic P2 organization in Italy:

1965 3-6- May Parco dei Principi Rome:  In the Parco dei Principi hotel, Rome, a conference is held to discuss the theme “Revolutionary War”; it is organized by the Alberto Pollio Institute of Military Studies, and financed by the REI office of the SIFAR secret services. Its underlying assumption is the danger of the Italian Communist Party coming to power and the need by a section of the right to take on responsibility for reacting to such a danger and, in this activity, to join forces with particularly “sympathetic” parts of the state: men of the secret services, the carabineers and neo-fascist members of the army. In the opinion of some, this conference marks for Italy the planning and start of the “strategy of tension” and “opposing extremes”, part of a wider international operation, “False Flag” or “Operation CHAOS”, aimed at opposing the advance of Communism in the world.

1969 25 April Bombs in Milan:  A bomb explodes in the Fiat booth in the Milan trade fair, wounding six; the explosion took place at 7 p.m., after the fair’s public closing time. A second, unexploded bomb is found in the central station. 1969 9 August Attacks on Trains 8 bombs, placed on various trains, explode, wounding 12. A further two unexploded bombs are discovered in Milan’s central station and in the Santa Lucia station in Venice 1969 12 December Piazza Fontana A bomb explodes in the headquarters of the Banca dell’Agricoltura In Piazza Fontana in Milan. 17 people die and another 88 are wounded. The same day bombs also explode in Rome, in the Banca Nazionale di Lavoro in Via Veneto, wounding 16 people, and at the Altare della Patria.

1969 15 December Giuseppe Pinelli:  The anarchist railway worker, Giuseppe Pinelli, is arrested as part of the Inquiries into the slaughter in Piazza Fontana. During an interrogation by the police commissioner, Luigi Calabresi, Pinelli dies after falling from a fourth floor window of the police station.

1970 22 July The Gioia Tauro Massacre A few hundred metres from the Gioia Tauro railway station there is an explosion resulting in the derailment of the Palermo-Turin fast-train, known as the “Treno del Sole” or Sun Train. The attack results in 6 mortalities and over 60 wounded.

1970 7 December The Borghese Coup:  During the night between 7 and 8 December 1970 there is an all-out attempt at a military coup which only lasts a few hours as it is called off before becoming a real insurrection. A group from the Avanguardia Nazionale movement gathers in the building sites of Montesacro, owned by the builder Remo Orlandini who is close to the secret services headed by Vito Miceli. Just outside Rome, an armed column of forest-rangers from Cittaducale, near Rieti, await orders. Another group of neo-fascists, led by Junio Valerio Borghese, ex-commander of the X Mas, or 10th Assault Vehicle Flotilla, enter the armoury of the Home Office accompanied by Aviation General Giuseppe Casero, the neo-fascist Sandro Saccucci, and Police Major Salvatore Pecorella.

1972 31 May The Peteano Massacre:  After an anonymous tip-off to the carabineer station in Gorizia a white Fiat Cinquecento car is found with two holes in the windscreen. Three carabineers try to open the vehicle’s bonnet; the car explodes killing them all, while a further two are severely wounded.

1973 17 May Milan Police Station:  The self-styled anarchist Gianfranco Bertoli throws a bomb at the Milan police station killing four people.

1974 28 May During a trade union demonstration in Brescia, a bomb explodes in Piazza della Loggia. Eight persons are killed and 94 are wounded.

1974 4 August The Italicus Train:  A bomb explodes in the Italicus train running between Rome and Munich. In coach number five 12 people die and 48 are wounded.

1975 22 May The Reale Law:  The principle writer of this law is the Justice Minister Oronzo Reale; he is a member of the Italian Republican Party. It regularizes the rights of the law enforcement agencies to use arms, extends the use of preventive custody, even if the accused is not caught in the act, and in fact allows preventive custody for 96 hours within which the judicial authorities can issue a validation order. And, finally, it regulates the use of helmets and other elements that might make citizens unrecognizable.

1975 2 November Pier Paolo Pasolini On the night between 1 and 2 November Pasolini was beaten to death and run over by his own car on the beach near the Ostia seaplane base.

1978 16 March The Via Fani Massacre:  At 9.15 a.m. in Via Mario Fani in Rome, a Red Brigade terrorist group kidnap Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democrat party. In the attack the five members of his escort are killed.

1978 21 March Special Laws:  The Italian government approves the first of the special laws (decree law n. 59) providing for, amongst other things, life imprisonment for kidnappers in the case of the hostage’s death; an extension of police detention-powers and of phone-tapping; the possibility of being interrogated without a lawyer.

1978 9 May Prime Minister Aldo Moro:  At 1.30 p.m., in Via Michelangelo Caetani in Rome, Aldo Moro’s body is discovered. The corpse of the president of the Christian Democrat party is in the boot of a red Renault 4.

1980 2 August Bologna Station: At 10.25 a.m., in the crowded 2nd class waiting-room of Bologna station, a high-explosive bomb is set off. The blast is so violent that part of the building falls on the passengers inside.85 people lose their life while another 147 are wounded.

1980 6 February The Cossiga Law:  The law provides heavy sentences for those judged guilty of “terrorism” and gives the police further powers.

1981 17 March Confiscation of the P2 Masonic Lodge Lists:   Castiglion Fibocchi The investigating magistrates Gherardo Colombo and Giuliano Turone, in the course of an inquiry into the alleged kidnapping of the Sicilian lawyer and businessman Michele Sindona, search Licio Gelli’s house in Arezzo, “Villa Wanda”, and his factory, “Giole”, in Castiglion Fibocchi near Arezzo; the operation, undertaken by Colonel Bianchi of the Financial Police, finds in the “Giole” archives a list of almost a thousand members of the P2 Masonic lodge, among them the commanding officer of the Financial Police itself, Orazio Giannini (membership number 832). Michele Sindona himself is also on the P2 list thus confirming the suspicions of the investigating magistrates.

These terror organizations, initially founded with help of former Nazi Abwehr agents and later supplemented by, not just Israeli operatives but terror organizations of every kind, established cells and arms caches in every nation in Europe, particularly Switzerland, never a member of NATO.  Operational “fall back” locations were set up in Ireland, the Canary Islands, Cyprus and even Libya.

What is Freemasonry?  Don’t ask a Mason, they are sworn to secrecy.  More truthfully, they would never know.  Most, almost all, are decent citizens, known for their civic responsibility.  Europeans know them as a cult of police and corrupt petty officials who use their secret handshakes to rig courts, get friends off the hook for crimes, a “social club from hell.”

Europeans also know of the bombings, Octoberfest in Munich, Italy has we have examined already, the acts attributed to the ‘Red Brigades,” and now the slaughter in Norway.

Americans know the Founding Fathers and 14 presidents are known to have been Freemasons, with Truman among the real elites. The founding of Israel may well have been a deal cut between the Freemasons and their Rothschild partners with Truman “carrying the water.”  Americans are very unlikely to ever know what a disaster this as been.

Alexander Hamilton was a Freemason.  He was also the intermediary between that organization and the Rothschild banking family.  His attempts to turn the US Treasury over to that group were stopped by a bullet from Vice President Aaron Burr.

It wasn’t until 1913 that Rothschild banks took over the United States under the guise of the Federal Reserve System.  One could mark their calendar with that year, noting it to be a milestone in the loss of American freedom and independence.  Many American’s, better informed in that horse and buggy era, knew what had happened.  Today, few have an idea, they only know all the money is gone and they don’t know where it went.

The Federal Reserve took it, they, the Freemasons, the Rothschilds and a cabal investigative journalists keep working to name, a cabal that destroys any who get too close.

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Referred by one of our researchers today, from 2004:

NATO’s secret armies linked to terrorism?

by Daniele Ganser

ISN Security Watch, 15 December 2004

www.globalresearch.ca 17 December 2004

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/GAN412A.html

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At a time when experts are debating whether NATO is suited to deal with the global “war on terror”, new research suggests that the alliance’s own secret history has links to terrorism.

ISN Editor’s Note:

This report written by Daniele Ganser is based on excerpts from his newly released book, “NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe”, released this week by Frank Cass in London.

The book describes NATO’s clandestine operations during the Cold War. The research was prompted by a story that made world headlines in 1990 but quickly disappeared, ensuring that even today, NATO’s secret armies remain just that – secret.

Until now, a full investigation of NATO’s secret armies had not been carried out – a task that Ganser has taken on single-handedly and quite successfully.

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In Italy, on 3 August 1990, then-prime minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed the existence of a secret army code-named “Gladio” – the Latin word for “sword” – within the state. His testimony before the Senate subcommittee investigating terrorism in Italy sent shockwaves through the Italian parliament and the public, as speculation arose that the secret army had possibly manipulated Italian politics through acts of terrorism.

Andreotti revealed that the secret Gladio army had been hidden within the Defense Ministry as a subsection of the military secret service, SISMI. General Vito Miceli, a former director of the Italian military secret service, could hardly believe that Andreotti had lifted the secret, and protested:

“I have gone to prison because I did not want to reveal the existence of this super secret organization. And now Andreotti comes along and tells it to parliament!” According to a document compiled by the Italian military secret service in 1959, the secret armies had a two-fold strategic purpose: firstly, to operate as a so-called “stay-behind” group in the case of a Soviet invasion and to carry out a guerrilla war in occupied territories; secondly, to carry out domestic operations in case of “emergency situations”.

The military secret services’ perceptions of what constituted an “emergency” was well defined in Cold War Italy and focused on the increasing strength of the Italian Communist and the Socialist parties, both of which were tasked with weakening NATO “from within”. Felice Casson, an Italian judge who during his investigations into right-wing terrorism had first discovered the secret Gladio army and had forced Andreotti to take a stand, found that the secret army had linked up with right-wing terrorists in order to confront “emergency situations”. The terrorists, supplied by the secret army, carried out bomb attacks in public places, blamed them on the Italian left, and were thereafter protected from prosecution by the military secret service. “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game,” right-wing terrorist Vincezo Vinciguerra explained the so-called “strategy of tension” to Casson.

“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”

No comment from NATO or the CIA

How strongly NATO and US intelligence backed and supported the use of terror in Italy in order to discredit the political left during the Cold War remains subject of ongoing research. General Gerardo Serravalle, who had commanded the Italian Gladio secret army from 1971 to 1974, confirmed that the secret army “could pass from a defensive, post-invasion logic, to one of attack, of civil war”.

The Italian Senate chose to be more explicit and concluded in its investigation in 2000: “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.” Ever since the discovery of the secret NATO armies in 1990, research into stay-behind armies has progressed only very slowly, due to very limited access to primary documents and the refusal of both NATO and the CIA to comment. On 5 November 1990, a NATO spokesman told an inquisitive press: “NATO has never contemplated guerrilla war or clandestine operations”.

The next day, NATO officials admitted that the previous day’s denial had been false, adding that the alliance would not comment on matters of military secrecy. On 7 November, NATO’s highest military official in Europe, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) US General John Galvin, together with NATO’s highest civilian official, Secretary-General Manfred Wörner, briefed NATO ambassadors behind closed doors. “Since this is a secret organization, I wouldn’t expect too many questions to be answered,” reasoned a senior NATO diplomat, who wished to remain unnamed. “If there were any links to terrorist organizations, that sort of information would be buried very deep indeed.” Former CIA director William Colby confirmed in his memoirs that setting up the secret armies in Western Europe had been “a major program” for the CIA. The project started after World War II in total secrecy, and access to information was limited “to the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington, in NATO” and in the countries concerned. Yet when in Italy in 1990 former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner was questioned on television on Gladio, he strictly refused to answer any questions on the sensitive issue, and as the interviewer insisted with respect for the terror victims, Stansfield angrily ripped off his microphone and shouted: “I said, no questions about Gladio!”, whereafter the interview was over.

Protest from the EU

If there had been a Soviet invasion, the secret anti-communist soldiers would have operated behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy-held territory, evacuating shot down pilots, and sabotaging the supply lines and production centers of occupation forces. Upon discovery of the secret armies, the European Parliament responded with harsh criticism, suspecting it to have been involved in manipulation and terror operations. “This Europe will have no future,” Italian representative Falqui opened the debate, “if it is not founded on truth, on the full transparency of its institutions in regard to the dark plots against democracy that have turned upside down the history, even in recent times, of many European states.” Falqui insisted that “there will be no future, ladies and gentlemen, if we do not remove the idea of having lived in a kind of double state – one open and democratic, the other clandestine and reactionary. That is why we want to know what and how many “Gladio” networks there have been in recent years in the Member States of the European Community.” The majority of EU parliamentarians followed Falqui, and in a special resolution on 22 November 1990 made it clear that the EU “protests 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”, calling for 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, and the problem of terrorism in Europe”.

Secret armies across Western Europe

Only the parliaments in Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium had formed a special commission to investigate the national secret army, and after months or even years of research, presented a public report. Building on this data and secondary sources from numerous European countries, “NATO’s Secret Armies” confirms for the first time that the secret networks spread across Western Europe, with great details on networks in Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Luxemburg, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, as well as the strategic planning of Britain and the US. The stay-behind armies were coordinated on an international level by the so-called Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), linked to NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). And they used cover names such as “Absalon” in Denmark, “P26” in Switzerland, “ROC” in Norway or “SDRA8” in Belgium. Interestingly, large differences existed from country to country. In some nations the secret armies became a source of terror, while in others they remained a prudent precaution.

In Turkey, the “Counter-Guerrilla” was involved in domestic terror and torture operations against the Kurds, while in Greece, the “LOK” took part in the 1967 military coup d’état to prevent a Socialist government. In Spain, the secret army was used to prop up the fascist dictatorship of Franco, and in Germany, right-wing terrorists used the explosives of the secret army in the 1980 terror attack in Munich. In other countries, including Denmark, Norway, and Luxemburg, the secret soldiers prepared for the eventual occupation of their home country and never engaged in domestic terror or manipulation. In the context of the ongoing so-called war on terror, the Gladio data promotes the sobering insight that governments in the West have sacrificed the life of innocent citizens and covered up acts of terrorism in order to manipulate the population.

Allegations that NATO, the Pentagon, MI6, the CIA, and European intelligence services were linked to terror, coups d’état, and torture in Europe are obviously of an extremely sensitive nature, and future research is needed in the field. In the absence of an official investigation by NATO or the EU, ongoing international research into terrorism is about to tackle this difficult task, the first step of which I hope to have promisingly taken with “NATO’s Secret Armies”.

 

Dr Daniele Ganser is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the ETH in Zurich. For more information on the topic, compare the research of the Center of Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich.

Music Video:  Frank Zappa’s “Gladio”

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