Operation Gladio was a top-secret operation, carried out by the CIA, MI6, and NATO agencies, that engaged in violent subversion in NATO countries. This operation was conceived as WWII was winding down, and it was so secret that practically nothing was known about it to the public until the 1980s. These agencies were killing their own people and blaming it on Communists! The object was to discredit Communism and prevent the formation of Communist governments in NATO countries. Behind this violent operation were the wealthiest families on the planet, which do not allow mankind a moment of respite and peace, and maintain it in a state of perpetual conflict and tension.
The mask on Gladio was first taken off comprehensively by a Swiss PhD scholar Daniele Ganser. Subsequently, in 2005, he published a ground-breaking work, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. In this work, he exposed terrorism and the “secret wars” in Italy, Britain, the U.S., France, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Greece, and Turkey. The name Gladio derives from Italian and means “sword”. In the year 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was compelled, as a result of judicial proceedings, to confirm the existence of secret armies in Italy and other countries of Western Europe. These secret armies existed under the umbrella of NATO.
It must not, for one moment, be forgotten that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, was bankrolled by the international banking families. Jacob Schiff, the Rockefeller family, the Rothschilds, and others, bankrolled the Communists in Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution was a Jewish coup d’état whose object was the destruction of Christianity in Russia and elsewhere and the establishment of Zionist power. Having established a Communist regime in Russia, and having deliberately handed over half of Europe to anti-Christian Communist Zionists, these families created the fake Capitalist-Communist or Democratic-Totalitarian dichotomy at the end of WWII and started a new era of controlled conflict.
During World War II the Americans had OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the precursor of the CIA, headed by a British agent named Gen. Bill Donovan. This is the same Donovan, who on orders of FDR, had Gen. Patton murdered, under the watch of Gen. Eisenhower. In fact, OSS was set up by President Roosevelt on British “advice”. As the war neared its end, Allen Dulles, then an OSS employee, a 33rd-degree Freemason tied very closely to the international bankers, entered into negotiations with the Nazi General Reinhardt Gehlen, head of German military intelligence. Gen. Gehlen had set up secret anti-Communist army units, whose members were known as werewolves. During the daytime, these “werewolves” were normal citizens, but at night they became Communist killers. In case of a Soviet takeover of Germany, these stay-behind units would offer them resistance. Dulles wished to use these units for such an eventuality throughout Western Europe. Who had authorized him to enter these negotiations?
In his book Operation Gladio, Paul L. Williams writes: “As soon as the ink dried on the Yalta agreement, Dulles transported Gehlen and his top representatives to Fort Hunt, Virginia, where they were wined and dined by Donovan and other U.S. officials. An agreement was reached. Gehlen would return to Germany under U.S. protection to establish the Gehlen Organization, which would receive full funding from U.S. Army G-2 (intelligence unit) resources. The primary purpose of this organization would be the maintenance of the existing stay-behind armies and the recruitment of new guerilla soldiers from the ranks of Third Reich veterans with staunch anti-Communist credentials.” The werewolves and the new recruits were renamed gladiators.
The man referred to as “one of the most diabolical figures in all of human history”, James Jesus Angleton, was also involved in setting up this arrangement. He managed to recruit Prince Borghese, a Catholic and staunch anti-Communist, for the Gladio set-up. Prince Borghese was the head of a naval commando unit, and, being a fascist, had aligned himself with the Germans after the defeat of Italy. His commandoes had already killed numerous Communists, and without Angleton’s protection, he would have had to face a firing squad eventually.
At the end of WWII OSS was disbanded by President Harry Truman, but ex-OSS employees became the Central Intelligence Group, and by 1947, the CIA had been set up. Dulles, Donovan and Angleton had taken a decision to set up Gladio units without the knowledge and permission of Congress as well the U.S. government. They were, astonishingly, acting in a private capacity. Since these few individuals were acting without the approval of any constitutionally approved authorities or bodies, the question of funding arose.
It was in the matter of funding Gladio that the hidden hand of the international banking families came to the fore. A staggering amount of $200 million (20 crores) was provided by the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations for arming the Gladio units in 1945. In today’s money, this is almost 3.4 billion dollars. One may note that Rockefellers had the closest ties with Stalin’s Soviet Union. When Stalin nationalized foreign businesses he left the Rockefeller businesses untouched. The Rockefeller Foundation was now providing funds for waging war against Communism when, in fact, Trotsky was a Rockefeller guest and had been given $10,000 in cash by Rockefeller to proceed to Russia to oust the Czar’s regime. Based on documented evidence, it is established that the international bankers funded the Bolshevik Revolution and built Communist Russia into power. And now they were establishing stay-behind armies throughout Europe, ostensibly against Communist Russia!
By 1946 Western Europe had acquired numerous secret Gladio units in different countries. The Gladio units carried different names in different countries. In Sweden, the secret army was known as Sveaberg, in Austria the unit carried a codename which may be translated as Austrian Hiking, Sports and Society Club, while in Germany it was the Technischer Dienst des Bundes Deitscher Jugend (TD-BD, the Technical Branch of the League of German Youth). The Greek Gladio outfit had the codename Sheepskin, while the Turkish Gladio was named Counter-Guerilla. In Denmark it was called Absalon, in Norway ROC, and SDRA8 in Belgium. The Italian units carried the name Gladio. After the initial funding by the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations, the Gladio units were sustained by drug money and other sources. Ganser points out that in each country the secret service operated the Gladio units in collaboration with the CIA or the MI6 without any knowledge of the parliaments or the people.
Let us quote Daniele Ganser: “The secret armies were equipped by the CIA and the MI6 with machine guns, explosives, munitions and high-tech communication equipment hidden in arms caches hidden in forests, meadows and underground bunkers across Western Europe. Leading officers of the secret network trained together with U.S. Green Berets Special Forces in the United States of America and the British SAS Special Forces in England. Recruited among strictly anti-Communist segments of society the secret Gladio soldiers included moderate conservatives as well as right-wing extremists Stefano delle Chiale and Yves Guerain Serac. In its strategic design, the secret army was a direct copy of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which during the Second World War had parachuted into enemy-held territory and fought a secret war behind enemy lines.”
The ostensible purpose of setting up these stay-behind army units was to fight the Soviets in case the Soviets invaded Western European countries. The Soviet invasion never happened and the role of these clandestine Gladio units was diverted to subversion and terrorism. The subversion and terrorism were then blamed on the left wing or the Communists and thus, by discrediting them in this way, their chances of either coming to power or power sharing in governments through elections were ruined in various countries.
The brutal and ruthless philosophy behind Galdio terrorism was outlined by Yves Guerin Serac, a notorious secret soldier who had served in Korea and Vietnam, in the following words: “Two forms of terrorism can provoke such a situation [breakdown of the state]: blind terrorism (committing massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims) and selective terrorism (eliminate chosen people) … The destruction of the state must be carried out under the cover of ‘communist activities.’ Popular opinion must be polarized … that we are the only instrument capable of saving that nation.”
Captain Yves Serac had also served in the Algerian war and was a member of the 11th Demi-Brigade Parachutiste du Choc, a special dirty tricks unit of the SDCE (the French Secret Service). The notorious French organization OAS (Organisation Armee Secrete) was formed by officers of the 11th du Choc and made attempts on the life of Charles De Gaulle, who banned OAS. Consequently, Yves Serac and others escaped to Latin American and European countries offering their skills in terrorism and repression to dictators in return for asylum.
British journalist and former EU Parliament member Richard Cottrell asks the question: “But from whom precisely” is the nation to be saved? There was no danger of a Communist takeover in any Western European state. There were no mass movements for the overthrow of any government anywhere. In predominantly Catholic Italy, there was a strong Communist party, but it took part in elections and had no intention of a forcible takeover of the government. Despite good performance in elections, the Italian Communists were never given a ministerial portfolio due to American pressure. Cottrell comments on the philosophy of Yves Guerin Serac: “His real target was the western liberal and tolerant model of democracy…. Stefano Della Chiaie, a prominent Italian neo-fascist and close confederate of Guerin Serac, admitted that all his acts were foremost intended to destabilize the liberal state. He mentioned very little about the communists.”
In his book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell emphasizes that the strategy of tension outlined by Yves Serac functioned at three levels. Firstly, “The guerilla war was fought in the streets formed a classic demonstration of synthetic terrorism. It was intended to stiffen loyalties in those countries considered at the greatest risk of falling under the sway of the Soviet Union.” Secondly, on the political front, NATO and its CIA, MI6, etc., engaged in instigating coups and overthrowing elected governments and replacing them with their puppets or with more pliable regimes. Thirdly, those deemed an obstruction to NATO’s aims and interests were assassinated, either after being toppled, or otherwise.
Adnan Menderes, the Turkish prime minister, was sentenced to death by a kangaroo military court. He was ousted by the military in conjunction with the Turkish Gladio named Counter-Guerilla. The real reason for his assassination was that he had threatened to cut off the highly profitable drug trails passing through Turkey. CIA had a significant share in this contraband business with partners in the Turkish mafia, the army high command, the Turkish Secret Service MIT, as well as ultra-Right groups. The allegation that Menderes was pro-Islamic was a propaganda ploy of the CIA. Upon restoration of civilian rule, Col. Alparslan Turkes, one of the coup leaders, established a National Action Party, with a para-military youth wing known as Grey Wolves. Both, the National Action Party and the Grey Wolves were funded by the CIA and espoused a pan-Turkic ideology laying claims to parts of the Soviet Union.
The Italian ex-prime minister Aldo Moro fell victim to Gladio. He was murdered and the blame was laid on the Red Brigade immediately by then-Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti. Aldo Moro was prime minter from 1963-68 and 1974-76. He had wished to include the Italian Communist Party in his government. Paul Williams points out that during a 1974 visit to the U.S., Aldo Moro was threatened by the war criminal Henry Kissinger who told him: “You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration, or you will pay dearly for it.” It is said that Aldo Moro was so disturbed by this threat that he fell ill upon return. Francesco Cossiga was the President of Italy at the time of Aldo Moro’s abduction (March 16, 1978). In the year 2008, Cossiga admitted to having authorized the issuance of a false statement that Moro had been killed at a time when he was still alive. He also stated that Moro was killed for the sake of “the stability of the state.” This was a direct admission of the involvement of the state in the assassination. Cossiga was a founding father of the Italian Gladio and, as Interior Minister, was one of its commanders! The Italian left-wing never recovered after Moro’s murder and NATO achieved its goal.
The Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was another victim of NATO’s policy not to allow anyone of significance to stand in the way and obstruct its goals. Olaf Palme was a charming leader who stood for the rights of the Palestinians and was actively trying to stop the Iran-Iraq war. The Iran-Iraq war resulted from U.S. manipulation and the U.S.-U.K-Israel coalition made every effort to prolong it as much as possible. Olaf Palme’s efforts ran counter to these policies. He was also Cuba-friendly and anti-apartheid. A couple of weeks before his assassination he delivered an impassioned speech against apartheid. He was thus a highly important international figure who opposed the policies of the Malthusian Anglo-American-Israeli establishment. He had great international stature and had to be stopped.
Olaf Palme was shot as he came out of a cinema on February 28, 1986. The police cars took a full seven minutes to arrive from next door and an officer on the scene refused to recognize Olaf Palme! Cottrell writes: “The superintendent Gosta Soderstrom, blew the whistle that police units in the capital were in the thrall of Right-wing extremism and ‘were lying about the murder.’ His most serious charge was that ‘they [police at the scene] helped him [the gunman] escape.’ Many factual records of the night’s events vanished.”
Apart from assassinations, Gladio carried out numerous acts of terrorism in various countries killing and maiming innocent people. Giovanni Pellegerino, president of the Italian parliamentary commission investigating Gladio crimes stated: “The official figures say 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. It may be worth remembering that these `acts’ have left behind 491 dead and 1,181 injured and maimed – figures of war without parallel in any other European country.”
We may just give one example. On August 2, 1980, a bomb exploded at the Bologna train station killing 64 people and wounding 200. This incident shook the entire country and was the real beginning of the unraveling of the hideous Gladio secret. The explosives used were TNT and composition B, an explosive exclusively used by the U.S. Army. An earlier incident at Pateano, in which three policemen were killed in 1971, involved the exclusive NATO explosive C4, but the discovery had been covered up at the time.
Vincent Vinguerra, a member of a fascist group, gave revealing testimony. He stated: “With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages…[it] lies within the state 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 organize a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army . . . A secret organization, a super-organization with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them… 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 . . .”
Vinguerra continued: “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. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix . . . Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo (the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s), were being mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organizations 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.”
It was a young Italian judge Felice Casson who, in 1984, began an investigation into the dormant Peteano case and found out that not only had there been any police investigation on the scene, but also the report regarding the nature of the explosive was a forgery. The actual explosive was C4, an explosive used only by NATO. Casson’s highly courageous investigation, at risk to his life, exposed the fact that Marco Morin, the explosives expert who had forged the explosives report, was a member of “Ordine Nuovo” a secret fascist organization linked to Gladio. It was judge Casson who, singlehandedly, unraveled the entire Gladio conspiracy in Italy and exposed its international links. His investigation compelled Giulio Andreotti to admit the existence of the Gladio conspiracy in Parliament. It gives one food for thought that it was an Italian judge who achieved a feat in a highly dangerous matter, a feat that no American, British, German, or other Western European judge could achieve, or even dare to look into fully and fearlessly.
In the then West Germany the 1980 Munich Oktoberfest bombing killed 13 people and injured over 200, 68 of them seriously. The Munich Oktoberfest lasts 16 days from the last week of September to the first week of the first week of October and is the largest beer fest attended by around 6 million people! The bomb exploded on Friday night September 26 and had been placed in a wastepaper basket. The explosion was immediately blamed on the Red Army Faction (RAF).
Investigative journalists were able to expose the police lies about the matter. Gundolf Kohler, a 21-year-old geology student, who had very strong leanings towards the far-right parties, was then held solely responsible for the blast. Kohler himself was killed in the blast. The authorities said that he was lovesick and wanted to harm others! Witnesses had seen him arguing with some people before the blast so that he was not really alone. He had been, according to a 2011 Der Spiegel report going around saying that exploding a bomb in Hamburg or Bonn or Munich and then blaming it on the leftwing could influence the Bavarian elections in favor of the right-wing candidate Franz Josef Strauss. The police must have known this at the time of the early investigation but suppressed it.
Papers found near the body of Kohler were linked to a group known as “Military Sport Group Hoffman”. When police raided the homes of some members of the group, it found grenades, mines and explosives. Karl Heinz Hoffman, leader of the group, was apprehended along with five other members of the group, but, as it happens with Gladio cases, the matter was made to die down. Three off-road trucks and three personnel carriers that were trying to enter Austria were confiscated by the West German police. The Bavarian Interior Minister would neither confirm nor deny the arrest of the drivers. After two years the Bavarian authorities terminated the investigation on the grounds that Kohler was the sole perpetrator. This was despite the fact that 47 cigarette butts of 6 different brands were found in Kohler’s car parked near the explosion site. Six different brands could not be smoked by the same person. It is thus clear that Kohler was not alone.
Non-fiction writer Ulrich Chaussy, and attorney Werner Dietrich, who represented the families of the victims did not allow the case to die down and the investigation was reopened in 2011, three decades after the event! Dietrich was able to gain access to files of the case which showed suppression of testimony of five witnesses. Further, a file (no 253) connected Kohler to Heinz Lembke, who had escaped from East Germany and had joined extreme right-wing groups, including the Patriotic Youth League (BJV) which was banned in 1962.
In his investigative article, posted on wsws.org on 29 December 2014, Deitmar Henning wrote: “Lembke oversaw at least 33 weapons depots—stockpiling rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, explosives, machine guns, pistols, ammunition and even chemical warfare agents, all of which was mostly obtained from Bundeswehr (German army) reserves. He also organized “paramilitary exercises” and became a supplier of weapons for neo-Nazi terrorists. Lembke, a forestry official, evidently maintained contact with Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, as did Köhler. The day after the Oktoberfest bombing, two detained right-wing extremists drew the investigators’ attention to Lembke. A subsequent house search allegedly came up with nothing. It was only by chance that Lembke’s weapons caches were discovered and he was arrested a year later.” Hidden weapon caches clearly point to Gladio type set-up.
Henning notes: “After he had notified the federal prosecutor on Friday, October 30, 1981, that he wanted to make a comprehensive statement the following Monday, Lembke was found hanging from a cord in his cell. The Bundeswehr immediately destroyed the weapons found in Lembke’s depots. A forensic comparison with the explosive used in the Oktoberfest bomb was not carried out.” Why was no forensic comparison carried out? This leads to the suspicion that the explosives used in the Oktoberfest bombing might be linked to explosives in Lembke’s caches. And he was obviously killed, because if he had notified that he would be making a comprehensive statement, suicide makes no sense. And Dietrich found out that Lembke’s files contained the following remark: “Known facts about Lembke are only partly admissible in court.” Such observations, according to Dietrich, are found only when one is dealing with secret service or undercover agents. All facts mentioned above, and other facts not mentioned due to lack of space, point out to a cover-up of Gladio type involvement in Oktoberfest bombing. Yet despite admission by Italian PM Giulio Andreotti, that Gladio type units existed in other West European countries, no German leader has had the courage to come forward in this regard. The Anglo-American-Zionist grip over Germany is far stronger than in Italy. No wonder the German authorities closed the Oktoberfest investigation in 2020 stating that there was no evidence of any conspiracy – Kohler alone was responsible!
When De Gaulle threw out NATO from France, because NATO had been involved in attempts to assassinate him, NATO headquarters moved to Belgium. From 1982-1985 mysterious masked men, dressed in black, gunned down people in supermarkets from time to time. These are known as the Brabant massacres. In these random killings, that took place in the Brabant province of Belgium, a total of 28 people were killed and 40 injured. A Belgian Gladio operator told the BBC that the purpose of all these killings was to discredit the left. According to Daniel Ganser, “The Brabant massacres range among the worst cases of terrorism that Western Europe has seen in the second half of the twentieth century.” The first attack occurred on August 14, 1982 on a food shop in the Belgian city of Maubeuge and the last one on November 9, 1985 in the city of Aalst in the supermarket chain Delahize. There were a total of 16 such attacks.
There was an outcry in Belgium. Cottrell points out that Supermarket Massacres is a misnomer because restaurants and shops, including Jewish jeweler shops, were also attacked. The intensity of the public reaction was such that the NATO authorities were taken aback. The Belgian parliament unanimously rejected the explanation of the police authorities according to which these were carried out by criminal elements as absurd. The Belgians began thinking of moving out of NATO. The Parliament constituted an inquiry but the inquiry faced enormous difficulty in extracting information. The Parliamentary report appeared in 1990 shortly before the revelations by Andreotti. One point in the reports states: “The killers were cited as members or former members of the security forces – extreme Right-wingers who enjoyed high-level protection and were preparing a Right-wing coup.”
Cottrell writes: “The inquiry concluded the attacks were intended to send Belgians flocking to a strong central power. However, they obstinately rushed in the opposite direction. They connected the attacks and murders to the organs of a thoroughly-diseased public state, and the infiltration of high public offices by organized crime, which led to the sheltering of criminals committing abominable deeds. When stories appeared of paedophile gangs operating in brazen contempt of forces of law and order, it seemed that beneath the surface of a model civilized modern European state was a descent into a nightmare world of inhumanity.” The inquiry also noted: “The refusal however of responsible of SDRA8 and STC/Mob to provide the expert judges with the identity of all civilian agents has not allowed to carry out the verifications, which, probably, could have eliminated all doubt.” STC/Mob refers to the civilian branch of the Belgian stay-behind army. If the secret army had nothing to hide, then it should have released the names of its members.
Cottrell points out: “A common stripe ran through all the urban revolutionary forces that arose in Europe. They were riddled with double agents planted by the secret intelligence services to provoke takeaway terror to order.” This observation must be kept in mind when one deals with ”Islamic” terrorism and Western agencies. But that is another story for another time.
