It was today that the Italian head of state, Giulio Andreotti, revealed to the Italian parliament the existence of Gladio, the neofascist force supposedly intended to be activated in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion, but in practice it worked to damage communism throughout Western Europe.
This documentary is a good resource on the operation, but for those of us who lack two hours to spare, here is an example from William Blum’s Killing Hope, pages 63–4:
While staging their commando attacks upon East Germany, American authorities and their German agents were apparently convinced that the Soviet Union had belligerent designs upon West Germany; perhaps a textbook case of projection. On 8 October 1952, the Minister‐President of the West German state of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, disclosed that the United States had created a secret civilian army in his state for the purpose of resisting a [Soviet] invasion.
This force of between 1,000 and 2,000 men belonged to the so‐called “Technical Service” of the German Youth Federation, the latter characterized by the New York Times as “a Right‐wing youth group frequently charged with extremist activities” (a reference to the terrorist tactics described above). The stalwarts of the Technical Service were hardly youths, however, for almost all appeared to be between 35 and 50 and most, said Zinn, were “former officers of the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht and the S.S. [Hitler’s Black‐shirts]”.
For more than a year they had received American training in infantry weapons and explosives and “political instruction” in small groups at a secluded site in the countryside and at a U.S. military installation.
The intelligence wing of the Technical Service, the state president revealed, had drawn up lists and card indexes of persons who were to be “put out of the way” when the Soviet tanks began to roll. These records, which contained detailed descriptions and intimate biographical information, were of some 200 leading Social Democrats (including Zinn himself), 15 Communists, and various others, all of whom were deemed “politically untrustworthy” and opponents of West German militarization.
Apparently, support for peaceful co‐existence and détente with the Soviet bloc was sufficient to qualify one for inclusion on the hit‐list, for one man was killed at the training site, charged with being an “East–West bridge builder”. It was this murder that led to the exposure of the entire operation.
[Washington] admitted its rôle in the creation and training of the guerrilla army, but denied any involvement in the “illegal, internal, and political activities” of the organization. But Zinn reported that the Americans had learned of the plotting in May and had not actually dissolved the group until September, the same month that German Security Police arrested a number of the group’s leaders.
At some point, the American who directed the training courses, Sterling Garwood, had been “supplied with carbon copies of the card‐index entries”. It appears that at no time did U.S. authorities communicate anything of this matter to the West German Government.
As the affair turned out, those who had been arrested were quickly released and the United States thwarted any further investigation in this the American Zone of occupied Germany. Commented Herr Zinn: “The only legal explanation for these releases can be that the people in Karlsruhe [the Federal Court] declared that they acted upon American direction.”9
To add to the furor, the national leader of the Social Democrats accused the United States of financing an opposition group to infiltrate and undermine his party. Erich Ollenhauer, whose name had also appeared on the Technical Service’s list, implied that American “clandestine” agencies were behind the plot despite the disapproval of high‐ranking U.S. officials.10
The revelations about the secret army and its hit‐list resulted in a storm of ridicule and denunciation falling upon the United States from many quarters in West Germany. In particular, the [supposed] irony of the Americans working hand‐in‐glove with “ex”‐Nazis did not escape the much‐castigated German people.
This operation in Germany, it was revealed many years later, was part of a much wider network—called “Operation Gladio”—created by the CIA and other European intelligence services, with similar secret armies all over Western Europe.
(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)
Pages 106–8:
The rationale behind it was your standard cold‐war [propaganda]: There’s a good chance [that] the [Soviets] will launch an unprovoked invasion of Western Europe. And if they defeated the Western armies and forced them to flee, certain people had to remain behind to harass the [Soviets] with guerrilla warfare and sabotage, and act as liaisons with those abroad. The “stay‐behinds” would be provided with funds, weapons, communication equipment and training exercises.
The planning for this covert paramilitary network, code‐named “Operation Gladio” (Italian for “sword”), began in 1949, involving initially the British, the Americans and the Belgians. It eventually established units in every non‐communist country in Europe—including Greece and Turkey and neutral Sweden and Switzerland—with the apparent exceptions of Ireland and Finland.
The question of whether the units were more under the control of national governments or NATO remains purposely unclear, although from an operational point of view, it appears that the CIA and various other intelligence services were calling the shots.
As matters turned out, in the complete absence of any [Soviet] invasions, the operation was used almost exclusively to inflict political damage upon domestic leftist movements.
As in Germany (see Germany chapter), the Italian operation was closely tied to terrorists. A former Gladio agent, Roberto Cavallero, went public to charge that there was a direct link between Gladio and Italy’s wave of terrorist bombings in the 1970s and early 1980s which left at least 300 dead.
He said that Gladio had trained him and many others “to prepare groups which, in the event of an advance by left wing forces in our country, would fill the streets, creating a situation of such tension as to require military intervention.” Cavallero was of course referring to electoral advances of the Italian Communist Party, not an invasion by the Soviet Union.
The single worst terrorist action was the bombing at the Bologna railway station in August 1980 which claimed 86 lives. The Observer of London later reported:
The Italian railway bombings were blamed on the extreme Left as part of a strategy to convince voters that the country was in a state of tension and that they had no alternative to voting the safe Christian Democrat ticket. All clues point to the fact that they were masterminded from within Gladio.
One of the men sought for questioning in Italy about the Bologna bombing, Roberto Fiore, has lived in London ever since and the British government has refused to extradite him. He is apparently under the protective wing of MI6 (Britain’s CIA) for whom he has provided valuable intelligence.
The kidnapping and murder in 1978 of Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democrats, which was attributed to the Red Brigades, appears now to have also been the work of Gladio agents provocateurs who infiltrated the organization. Just prior to his abduction, Moro had announced his intention to enter into a governmental coalition with the Communist Party. Colonel Oswald Le Winter of the CIA, who served as a U.S. liaison officer with Gladio, has stated that the planning staff of the Red Brigades was made up of intelligence agents.
In Belgium, in 1983, to convince the public that a security crisis existed, Gladio operatives as well as police officers staged a series of seemingly random shootings in supermarkets which, whether intended or not, led to several deaths. A year later, a party of U.S. Marines parachuted into Belgium with the intention of attacking a police station.
One Belgian citizen was killed and one of the Marines lost an eye in the operation, that was intended to jolt the local Belgian police into a higher state of alert, and to give the impression to the comfortable population at large that the country was on the brink of Red revolution. Guns used in the operation were later planted in a Brussels house used by a Communist splinter group.
As late as 1990, large stockpiles of weapons and explosives for Operation Gladio could still be found in some member countries, and Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti disclosed that more than 600 people still remained on the Gladio payroll in Italy.
(Emphasis added.)
Extrastate neofascists, given their lower budgets, tend to execute false‐flag operations that are less violent. In the 2010s, for example, they published outrageous announcements—calls for violence against white women, prohibitions on dating whites, condemnations of St. Patrick’s Day, to name a few—and misattributed them to antifascist activists (antifa). Such operations are easy to spot, not only because they deliberately misunderstand antifascism, but also because neofascists keep forgetting that innocent people can screenshot their inane plans.
In contrast, the bourgeois state almost certainly continues its bloodier false‐flag operations today, and as in Operation Gladio’s case, the truth rarely reaches the public before it’s too late (Operation Northwoods being one notable exception).
Other events that happened today (October 24):
1910: Gunter d’Alquen, SS officer and journalist, was sadly born.
1922: The Fascists held a huge rally in Naples and made the final plans for the march on Rome.
1934: The Gestapo sent a telegram to every police station in the Reich ordering them to send to Berlin all files on men known for their ‘homosexual practices’.
1938: Joachim von Ribbentrop contacted Warsaw to suggest an anti‐Soviet alliance that would guarantee the Polish–German border for twenty‐five years.
1941: Axis troops shot 142 Greek hostages in another reprisal to discourage antifascism. Meanwhile, other Axis soldiers marched Jews from Odessa’s jail two kilometers down the road toward Dalnik, shooting any who fell behind.
1944: The Empire of Japan’s center force suffered temporary repulsion in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
1945: A firing squad executed the infamous Vidkun Quisling, Minister President of Norway.