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From: Mario Profaca <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: September 16, 2008 10:09:11 AM PDT
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Subject: [SPY NEWS] NATO Secret Armies Linked to Terrorism?
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By Dr. Daniele Ganser
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.
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.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the
author and do not necessarily reflect those of MINA.
More at: *The Global Intelligence News Portal* <http://mprofaca.cro.net>
http://mprofaca.cro.net
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