Secret Warfare: Gladio By Daniele Ganser, PHP 11/12/04 Dec 16, 2004, 09:48 After the Cold War had ended, then Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed to the Italian Senate in August 1990 that Italy had had a secret stay-behind army, codenamed Gladio – the sword. A document dated 1 June 1959 from the Italian military secret service, SIFAR, revealed that SIFAR had been running the secret army with the support of NATO and in close collaboration with the US secret service, the CIA. Suggesting that the secret army might have linked up with right-wing organizations such as Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale to engage in domestic terror, the Italian Senate, amid public protests, decided in 1990 that Gladio was beyond democratic control and therefore had to be closed down. During the 1990s, research into stay-behind armies progressed only very slowly, due to very limited access to primary documents. It was revealed, however, that stay-behind armies covered all of Western Europe and operated under different code names, such as Gladio in Italy, Absalon in Denmark, P26 in Switzerland, ROC in Norway, I&O in the Netherlands, and SDRA8 in Belgium. The so-called Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), linked to NATOs Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), coordinated the stay-behind networks on an international level. The last confirmed ACC meeting took place on 24 October 1990 in Brussels, chaired by the Belgian military secret service, the SGR. According to the SIFAR document of 1959 the secret stay-behind armies served a dual purpose during the Cold War: They were to prepare for a communist Soviet invasion and occupation of Western Europe, and – also in the absence of an invasion – for an “emergency situation”. The first purpose was clear: If there had been a Soviet invasion, the secret anti-communist armies would have operated behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy held territory, evacuating pilots who had been shot down, and sabotaging supply lines and production centers of the occupation forces. The second purpose, the preparation for an emergency situation, is more difficult to understand and remains the subject of ongoing research. As this second purpose clearly did not relate to a foreign invasion, the emergency situation referred to is likely to have meant all domestic threats, most of which were of a civilian nature. During the Cold War, the national military secret services in the countries of Western Europe differed greatly in what they perceived to be an emergency situation. But there was agreement between the military secret services of the United States and of Western Europe that communist parties, and to some degree also socialist parties, had a real potential to weaken NATO from within and therefore represented a threat to the alliance. If they gained political strength and entered the executive, or, worse still, gained control of defence ministries, an emergency situation would result. The evidence now available suggests that in some countries the secret stay-behind armies linked up with right-wing terrorists and carried out terror attacks that were later wrongly blamed on the political left in order to discredit the communists and prevent them from assuming top executive positions. Evidence suggests that recruitment and operations methods differed greatly from country to country. The research project into NATO’s secret armies that is being undertaken by the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, and is headed by Daniele Ganser, has collected and published the available country-specific evidence in the first English-language book on the topic, entitled NATOs Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005). In a second step, the project is working on gaining access to declassified primary documents, while encouraging discussion among NATO officials, secret services and military officials, and the international research community in order to clarify the strategy, training, and operations of the stay-behind armies. (...) The NATO Response The NATO response to the discovery of the secret stay-behind armies has been defensive and at times inconsistent. When evidence of the NATO stay-behind army Gladio in Italy emerged in August 1990, NATO headquarters in Brussels initially refused to comment. About three months later, however, NATO bowed to media pressure and made a statement. However, in that statement the military alliance categorically rejected former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreottis allegation about NATOs involvement in operation Gladio and the secret armies. Specifically, Senior NATO Spokesman Jean Marcotta on Monday, 5 November 1990 at SHAPE headquarters in Mons, Belgium, said: NATO has never contemplated guerrilla war or clandestine operations; it has always concerned itself with military affairs and the defence of Allied frontiers. [1] Eventually, on Tuesday, 6 November, a NATO spokesman explained that NATOs statement of the previous day had been false. On 6 November, the spokesman left journalists with a short communiqué that said that NATO never commented on matters of military secrecy and that Marcotta should not have said anything at all. [2] The international press protested against NATO’s defensive public relations policy. For example, British daily newspaper The Observer said: As shock followed shock across the Continent, a NATO spokesman issued a denial: nothing was known of Gladio or stay-behind. Then a seven word communiqué announced the denial was incorrect and nothing more. [3] In November 1990, NATO consisted of the following 16 nations: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Greece, the United Kingdom, Island, Italy, Canada, Luxemburg, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and the United States; the last had a dominant position within the alliance. Following the press reports, NATO ambassadors demanded an explanation. While the administration of US president George Bush Senior refused to comment on the topic in public, immediately after the public relations debacle, on 7 November 1990, then-NATO secretary-general Manfred Wörner invited NATO ambassadors at the headquarters in Belgium to a closed meeting of the North Atlantic Council. On 7 November 1990, Wörner, who was NATO’s highest-ranking civilian officer in Europe confirmed to NATO ambassadors the existence of the secret stay-behind armies. His information was based on the testimony of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) US General John Galvin (NATO’s highest-ranking military officer in Europe). This was leaked to the Spanish press who reported: “During this meeting behind closed doors, the NATO Secretary General related that the questioned military gentlemen – precisely General John Galvin, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe – had indicated that SHAPE co-ordinated the Gladio operations. From then on the official position of NATO was that they would not comment on official secrets. [4] Subsequent investigations revealed that NATO had coordinated the secret stay-behind armies through two clandestine centers: The Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC). Italian General Paolo Inzerilli, who commanded the Italian stay-behind Gladio from 1974 to 1986, testified that the “omnipresent United States” had dominated the CPC, which, he said, was founded “by order of the Supreme Commander of NATO Europe. It was the interface between NATOs Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and the Secret Services of the member states as far as the problems of non-orthodox warfare were concerned. [5] The United States, together with their allied junior partner Britain and France, dominated the CPC and within the committee formed a so-called executive group. The meetings were on the average once or twice a year in Brussels at CPC headquarters and the various problems on the agenda were discussed with the Executive Group and the Military, Inzerilli explained. [6] (...) The EU Response The refusal of NATO to inform the public on the respective purpose and history of the secret stay-behind armies in the countries of Western Europe lead to a heated debate on the topic in the parliament of the European Union (EU) on 22 November 1990. Italian MP Falqui, who opened the debate on that day, was strongly critical of the secret armies: Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, there is one fundamental moral and political necessity, in regard to the new Europe that we are progressively building. This Europe will have no future 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. 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. (...) Following this debate the EU parliament passed the following resolution in which it criticized NATO sharply for having used the stay-behind networks to manipulate the democracies of Western Europe: A. Having regard to the revelation by several European governments of the existence for 40 years of a clandestine parallel intelligence and armed operations organisation in several Member States of the Community, B. whereas for over 40 years this organisation has escaped all democratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO, C. fearing the danger that such clandestine network may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so, D. whereas in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime as evidenced by various judicial inquiries, E. whereas these organisations operated and continue to operate completely outside the law since they are not subject to any parliamentary control and frequently those holding the highest government and constitutional posts are kept in the dark as to these matters, F. whereas the various GLADIO organisations have at their disposal independent arsenals and military resources which give them an unknown strike potential, thereby jeopardising the democratic structures of the countries in which they are operating or have been operating, G. greatly concerned at the existence of decision-making and operational bodies which are not subject to any form of democratic control and are of a completely clandestine nature at time when greater Community co-operation in the field of security is a constant subject of discussion 1. Condemns the clandestine creation of manipulative and operational networks and calls for a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of these clandestine organisations 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; 2. 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; 3. Calls on the governments of the Member States to dismantle all clandestine military and paramilitary networks; 4. Calls on the judiciaries of the countries in which the presence of such military organisations has been ascertained to elucidate fully their composition and modus operandi and to clarify any action they may have taken to destabilize the democratic structures of the Member States; 5. Requests all the Member States to take the necessary measures, if necessary by establishing parliamentary committees of inquiry, to draw up a complete list of organisations 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; 6. Calls on the Council of Ministers to provide full information on the activities of these secret intelligence and operational services; 7. Calls on its competent committee to consider holding a hearing in order to clarify the role and impact of the GLADIO organisation and any similar bodies; 8. Instructs 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. Most of the requests made by the EU parliament in its resolution on the stay-behind armies remained mere words on paper and were never followed. Already during the debate Dutch MP Vandemeulebroucke had correctly observed that the EU parliament had no competence in the field of defense and security issues which remained in the sovereign control of each EU member state. I realize”, Vandemeulebroucke had stressed, “that we in the European Parliament have no competence regarding peace and security matters and hence the compromise resolution asks for parliamentary committees of inquiry to be set up in each of the twelve Member States so that we do get total clarification. This project failed, as only the EU members Italy and Belgium, as well as the non-EU member Switzerland, in subsequent months and years set up a parliamentary commission of inquiry and presented a public report on their respective secret armies. All other countries, including the United States, dealt with the issue behind closed doors. The Council of the twelve EU Defense Ministers declined to reply to the resolution of the EU parliament. [15] (...) Field Manuals (FM) of the US Pentagon, designed to advise US military officers, do not usually mention the stay-behind secret armies. Yet there is one exception: the top secret FM 30-31B which describes “internal stabilisation operations” and is dated 18 March 1970, Headquarters of the US Army, Washington DC, and signed by General of the US Army William C Westmoreland. FM 30-31B is maybe the most important Pentagon document with regard to the stay-behind armies. It explicitly stresses that the Pentagon and the CIA, in order to be able to carry out clandestine operations in Western Europe, must depend heavily on the cooperation of Western European secret services: The success of internal stabilisation operations, which are promoted in the context of strategies for internal defence by the US military secret service, depends to a large extend on the understanding between the US personal and the personal of the host country.“ The evidence now available to researchers confirms that the secret stay-behind armies in Western Europe were in all countries run by the respective national military secret service, many of which cooperated closely with the US: „However high the mutual understanding between US personal and the personal of the host country might be, the option to win over agents of the secret service of the host country for actions is a much more reliable basis for the solution of the problems of the US military secret service,” FM 30-31B notes. “The recruitment of senior members of the secret service of the host country as long time agents is thus especially important. In order to establish a solid working relationship the US officers in FM 30-31B were instructed to cooperate with European military secret service officers with close links to the US: As for the recruitment of long time agents the members of the following categories deserve particular attention: [...] b) Officers, that had the opportunity to familiarize with US military training programs, especially those which had been trained directly in the United States.” The most sensitive part of the Pentagon Field Manual concerns the passage which describes how the “internal stabilisation operations” were to be carried out in practice, hence how the Pentagon advised the European military secret services to fight what the Pentagon perceived as the “communist” or “socialist” thread. In what seems to be a description of the operations which some stay-behind armies actually carried out during the cold war, namely terrorist attacks in public places which were thereafter wrongly blamed on the communists and socialists by planting false evidence, is described by FM 30-31B like that: There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness. Most often such situations come about when the revolutionaries temporarily renounce the use of force and thus hope to gain an advantage, as the leaders of the host country wrongly consider the situation to be secure. US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger. Ongoing research now investigates whether the United States have according to this directive promoted terrorism in Western Europe carried out through the network of the secret NATO armies in order to convince European governments of the communist threat. These special operations must remain strictly secret, the US Field Manual FM 30-31B concludes. Only those persons who are acting against the revolutionary uprising shall know of the involvement of the US Army in the internal affairs of an allied country. The fact, that the involvement of forces of the US military goes deeper shall not become known under any circumstances. [20] Still today it remains very difficult to fully understand the crucial document FM 30-31B. Journalist Allan Francovich in his BBC documentation on Gladio and NATO’s secret armies asked former CIA director William Colby on the sinister FM 30-31B directives, whereupon Colby denied that the United States had engaged in such operations in Europe: I never heard of such a thing. Frankly, I dont know the origins of the statement - and you can find any statement in any country, I mean you can find jack-ass statements anywhere. Journalist Francovich also interviewed Ray Cline, CIA Deputy Director from 1962 to 1966, who replied: Well, I suspect it is an authentic document. I dont doubt it. I never saw it but it’s the kind of special forces military operations that are described. On the other hand you gotta recall, that the defense department and the president dont initiate any of those orders, until there is an appropriate occasion.[21] The history of FM 30-31B itself is remarkable. The Pentagon document first surfaced in Turkey in 1973 where the newspaper Baris in the midst of a whole range of mysterious acts of violence and brutality which shocked the Turkish society announced the publication of a secretive US document. Thereafter the Baris journalist who had come into the possession of FM 30-31B disappeared and was never heard of again. Despite the apparent danger Turkish Colonel Talat Turhan two years later published a Turkish translation of the top-secret FM 30-31 and revealed that in Turkey NATO’s secret stay-behind army was codenamed “Counter-Guerrilla” directed by the Special Warfare Department. From Turkey the document found its way to Spain where in 1976 the newspaper Triunfo, despite heavy pressures to prevent the publication, published excerpts of FM 30-31B upon the fall of the Franco dictatorship. In Italy on 27 October 1978 excerpts of FM 30-31B were published by the political magazine LEuropeo, whereupon the printed issues of the magazine were confiscated. The breakthrough for the document came arguably not in the 1970s, but in the 1980s, when in Italy the secret anticommunist P2 Freemason lodge of Licio Gelli was discovered. Among the documents seized by the Italian police ranged also FM 30-31B. The Italian parliamentary investigation into P2 decided to publish FM 30-31B in the appendix of the final public parliamentary report on P2 in 1987. (...) The CIA Response The foreign secret service of the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with headquarters in Langley, Virginia, has repeatedly refused to comment on its stay-behind armies in Western Europe. At the same time retired CIA agents have spoken on the subject in a number of different circumstances. The first to speak about CIA’s stay-behind armies was William Colby, Director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976. In his book Honorable Men, published in 1978, Colby related that the covert action branch of the CIA, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), had after World War Two “undertaken a major program of building, throughout those Western European countries that seemed likely targets for Soviet attack, what in the parlance of the intelligence trade were known as stay-behind nets, clandestine infrastructures of leaders and equipment trained and ready to be called into action as sabotage and espionage forces when the time came.” Gerry Miller, chief of the CIA Western Europe desk, was overseeing this CIA operation and in 1951 sent Colby, then a young CIA officer, to plan and build such stay-behind nets in Scandinavia. The clandestine operations of the United States in Western Europe were carried out with the utmost secrecy, as Colby stressed. Therefore I was instructed to limit access to information about what I was doing to the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington, in NATO, and in Scandinavia. [32] (see document section of this webpage below for the stay-behind chapter from Colby’s book “Honorable Men”.) Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA from 1977 to 1981, strictly refused to answer any questions about Gladio in a television interview in Italy in December 1990. When with respect for the victims of the numerous massacres in Italy the journalists insisted and repeated the question the former CIA director angrily ripped off his microphone and shouted: I said, no questions about Gladio! whereupon the interview was over. [33] Thomas Polgar, who had retired in 1981 after a 30 year long career in the CIA, confirmed in 1991 that the CIA stay-behind armies were coordinated by a sort of unconventional warfare planning group linked to NATO. In the secret headquarters the chiefs of the national secret armies “would meet every couple of months in different capitals. Polgar insisted that “each national service did it with varying degrees of intensity while admitting that in Italy in the 1970s some of the people went a little bit beyond the charter that NATO had put down. [34] Italian experts are investigating whether the CIA had sponsored terrorism in their country. In March 2001 General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counter-intelligence, at a trial of right-wing extremists accused of killing sixteen in the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre testified in front of a Milan 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 right-wing terrorism. Maletti added: Dont forget that Nixon was in charge, and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician, but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives. [35] Specializing in academic research on the secret Cold War the academics at the distinguished National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request with the CIA on 15 April 1991. Malcolm Byrne, Deputy Director of Research at the National Security Archive, asked the CIA for all agency records related to […] The United State Governments original decision(s), probably taken during the 1951-55 period, to sponsor, support, or collaborate with, any covert armies, networks, or other units, established to resist a possible invasion of Western Europe by communist-dominated countries, or to conduct guerrilla activities in Western European countries should they become dominated by communist, leftist, or Soviet-sponsored parties or regimes.” Furthermore Byrne highlighted: “With reference to the above, please include in your search any records relating to the activities known as Operation Gladio, particularly in France, Germany, or Italy. [36] The CIA refused to make any data available and on 18 June 1991 replied The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request. When Byrne appealed this refusal of the CIA to provide any Gladio information the appeal was turned down. The CIA based its refusal to cooperate on two catch-all exemptions to the FOIA law which protect documents either properly classified pursuant to an Executive order in the interest of national defence or foreign policy (exemption B1), or the Directors statutory obligations to protect from disclosure intelligence sources and methods, as well as the organisation, functions, names, official titles, salaries or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency, in accord with the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949, respectively. (Exemption B3). European officials who asked the CIA for data on the stay-behind armies were also turned down. In March 1995 the Italian Senate commission headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino - after having investigated Gladio and the massacres in Italy for five years - placed a FOIA request with the CIA. The Italian Senators asked the CIA for all records relating to the Red Brigades and the Moro affair in order to find out whether the CIA according to the Gladio domestic control task had infiltrated and radicalised the Red Brigades before the latter killed former Italian Prime Minister and leader of the Christian Democrat Party Aldo Moro in 1978. Refusing to cooperate the CIA raised FOIA exemptions B1 and B3 and in May 1995 declined all data and responded that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of CIA documentation concerning your inquiry. The Italian press stressed how embarrassing this was and headlined: The CIA has rejected the request to collaborate with the Parliamentary Commission on the mysteries of the kidnapping. Moro, a state secret for the USA. [37] (...) Links to Terrorism and Crime Prudent Precaution or source of Terror? the international press wondered when the secret NATO armies were discovered in 1990. [46] The implication at the time was that the stay-behind armies were either a prudent precaution or a source of terror. Now, 15 years later, we know that they were both. The “prudent precaution” refers to the stay-behind function of the secret armies. In case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe the secret armies would have strengthened the resistance and harassed the enemy. We know now that there was no Soviet invasion, and that the secret armies were never confronted with the test of reality, yet during the Cold War that danger was real. Some within the CIA and in the European stay-behind nets had their doubts as to whether they could have survived for very long within a context of total occupation. But even those who share these doubts agree that from a general strategic perspective the stay-behind armies represented one more defense strategy for Western Europe and were therefore a prudent precaution. That some of the secret armies became a “source of terror” is only gradually being understood and continues to cause great concerns across countries and continents. Especially within the context of the ongoing so called “war on terrorism” in which democracies must increasingly rely on their secret services to protect them from terrorist attacks, it is most unsettling to discover that some secret services in coordination with secret armies have themselves promoted terrorism and crime and manipulated the evidence of terrorist attacks. The links of the stay-behind armies to terrorism and crime represent beyond any doubt the most sensitive and the most difficult aspect of all research into NATO’s stay-behind armies. The data varies greatly from country to country. In some countries the stay-behind armies were repeatedly linked to terrorism and crime, in other countries the links are still unclear and mysterious, while in a third group of countries the stay-behind armies were never linked to either terror nor crime. It is therefore of utmost importance to look at each country specifically. The crimes and terrorist attacks themselves are often very complex. What follows hereafter can at the present stage of research therefore be no more than a short general country specific overview of the problem. The countries are listed in alphabetical order. (...) Italy Italy suffered from numerous terrorist attacks during the Cold War. The attacks started in 1969 when on 12 December four bombs exploded in public places in Rome and Milan. The terror, remembered as the “Piazza Fontana massacre”, killed 16 and maimed and wounded 80 most of which were farmers who after a day on the market had deposited their modest earnings in the Farmers Bank on the Piazza Fontana in Milan. The terror was wrongly blamed on the Communists and the extreme left, traces were covered up and arrests followed immediately. In the Peteano terrorist attack of 31 May 1972 a car bomb gravely wounded one and killed three members of the Carabinieri, Italys paramilitary police force. On 28 May 1974 a bomb exploded in the Italian town Brescia in the midst of an anti-fascist demonstration, killing eight and injuring and maiming 102. On 4 August 1974 another bomb exploded on the Rome to Munich train “Italicus Express”, killing 12 and injuring and maiming 48. The terror in Italy culminated on a sunny afternoon during the Italian national holiday when on 2 August 1980 a massive explosion ripped through the waiting room of the second class at the Bologna railway station, killing 85 people in the blast and seriously injuring and maiming a further 200. The official figures say that alone in the period between January 1, 1969 and December 31, 1987, there have been in Italy 14 591 acts of violence with a political motivation”, Italian Senator Giovanni Pellegrino, president of Italys parliamentary commission investigating Gladio and the massacres, recalled the very violent period of Italy’s Cold War history. “It is maybe worth remembering that these acts have left behind 491 dead and 1181 injured and maimed. Figures of a war, with no parallel in any other European country. [60] According to right-wing extremist Vincenzo Vinciguerra the Italian state together with NATO had backed the terror secretly. In order to discredit the Italian communists and socialists the secret Gladio stay-behind army had with the support of the CIA linked up with right-wing organizations who carried out the terrorism. The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration”, Vincenzo Vinciguerra recalled. Right-wing organisations across Western Europe “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 the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the states relations within the Atlantic Alliance. [61] Vinciguerra was found guilty of the Peteano terror attack, confessed, and was imprisoned. From behind prison bars he explained the strategy which he had followed like that: You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. 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. [62]
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 05:03:33 +0000
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