I'll address your Putin issue later.... In the meantime, here's an interesting scrap on disturbing activities perpetrated in Europe over the last 30 years by various intelligence services.
Searchlight, January 1991
GLADIO
Over the last few weeks an international team of Searchlight investigators has been working hard to build up an accurate picture of the significance of the revelations in Italy late last year of illicit operations by an organisation given the code name Gladio. This was the Italian section of a top secret NATO organisation that had its roots in the very earliest days of the cold war at the end of the second world war, even before NATO was created.
Clearly, while there existed a threat to the west, the people given the task of looking after our defence were entitled to look at all options, including a partisan or 'Stay Behind' policy. We do not question this. Our difference in opinion is over their choice of former and present nazis for the task and their decision to undermine democratic institutions in their own countries.
In Britain, for example, Operation Clockwork Orange, of which details have been revealed in the press in the last two years, was not confined to Ulster but was aimed at both moderate Conservative and Labour governments on the mainland.
Regular Searchlight readers will know that we have campaigned for the public release of information about operations like those of which the Italian Parliament has heard reports recently. The story of secret deals between Column 88 and Tory Action and sections of our intelligence service are nothing new and much of what has recently been exposed was known to us a long time ago. Are such deals the reason for so many almost inexplicable goings on over the last 20 years across western Europe including Britain?
Is this the reason for the continuing presence in Britain of convicted Italian terrorists like Roberto Fiore and Massimo Marsello? Not only, as we have previously revealed, were they working part-time for British intelligence, but they may well also have been part of the illegal mechanism operating for 20 years with such a devastating effect on Italian society.
Why is it that for several years, the exmilitary personnel who ran Column 88, the nazi underground paramilitary and intelligence cell system in Britain, were able to claim: "When the Russians come we have our allotted tasks to kill those who would co-operate with them", i.e. the enemy within, a phrase so popular during the last eleven and a half years?
Why have no serious charges ever been brought against senior members of Column 88 and why did Special Branch even deny that it had files on them when questions were raised in the House of Commons in the mid-seventies? And how was Column 88 able to have free use of military equipment in its early days before we exposed it?
Maybe we should ask why convicted illicit arms dealers and sex offenders have been allowed to organise sections of Whitehall-backed 'Stay Behind'-type bodies?
Why for so many years was George Kennedy Young, former deputy head of MI6, able to bridge the gap between neonazis here and abroad, particularly in Italy, on the one hand, and the Italian intelligence service and anti-democratic elements in Britain's armed forces, parliament and the city, on the other?
We are not suggesting that every right-wing Conservative who got mixed up in Tory Action is an anti-democratic conspirator, only that Young and his close associates used organisations like Column 88 as a smoke screen for their more criminal plans.
Why was David Muire, another "former" intelligence officer, allowed to recruit and use paid-up members of Britain's most notorious nazi group, British Movement, to act as couriers in the eastern Mediterranean using false passports supplied by Muire?
The murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, the massacres of innocent shoppers in Belgian supermarkets, with a crude attempt to portray this barbarism as a left inspired action, and the wave of bombings over so many years in Italy, have all turned out in reality to have had one form or another of secret service involvement. Now it seems that all these crimes are connected with those who were involved in the 'Stay Behind' policies across Europe. The Stasi and KGB have had to come clean as the cold war dies away, but unfortunately questions that affect our own democratic way of life still demand full and honest answers.
OPERATION 'STAY BEHIND' - The Norse Connection
Nazis were the mainstay of NATO's secret 'Stay Behind' (or 'Gladlo', as it was known in Italy) programme in several European countries, a former NATO intelligence operative has claimed in a remarkable interview with a Searchlight journalist.
The interview, in which the source did not wish to be identified for reasons of his own safety, was conducted in December in the Netherlands.
In the interview, the ex-NATO man confirmed that former nazis in Sweden and West Germany, in particular, had "been recruited as part of the Stay Behind operation" in which secret army formations were built up across the whole of northern and western Europe to prepare to fight a Soviet invasion.
Until a scandal erupted in Italy over the investigation into the 1978 killing of Premier Aldo Moro, Stay Behind had remained one of the cold war's best-kept secrets.
"Right-wing extremists in Sweden were part of the Stay Behind set-up and I cannot understand why the Swedish authorities never took a closer look at one organisation". the former NATO man said.
He went on to name the organisation as Sveaborg, which was founded in 1941 by Otto Hallberg and is a shadowy and highly secretive group, mainly composed of veteran Swedish volunteer battalion members who fought in the Finnish-Soviet war, some of whom went on to join the Waffen-SS Nordland division.
Many of Sveaborg's members and those of the Swedish volunteer units in the Finnish-Russian war had been recruited from the war-time Swedish Socialist Society (SSS). which despite its name was nazi and was led by one of the country's most notorious Hitlerites, Sven Olov-Lindholm.
Searchlight, in co-operation with journalists on the Swedish weekly magazine Arbetaren, have been able to confirm that the former NATO man's allegations about the Swedish Stay Behind operation are not mere speculation.
In particular, they were able to track down Lennart Hansson, an ageing former close associate of Otto Hallberg, who says that even before the end of the war Hallberg had begun to put together the nuts and bolts of an anti-communist resistance movement.
Hansson admitted that his movement first made base with officials at the US embassy in Stockholm in 1947-48 and that it was promised covert US assistance in the event of a Soviet attack.
"The name of the secret movement", he said, "was Sveaborg and the nucleus of the movement consisted of military personnel".
In the 1950s, Sveaborg had over 1,000 "contact persons" who were the core of the would-be guerrilla force. Many of these people were serving in the Swedish armed forces and the group held regular military exercises.
Both Hansson and the still living Svenolov Lindholm claim that the resistance movement was very much under Hallberg's personal direction and control and Hansson maintains that contacts with the US continued until about 1955.
In mid-November, the former head of the CIA, William Colby, who was stationed in Stockholm from 1951 to 1953, told the Swedish news agency, TI', that he had been engaged in establishing an armed anti-communist movement in Scandinavia.
Interestingly in 1953, soon after Colby left Stockholm, Otto Hallberg was seized by the Swedish authorities and accused of creating an "illegal military formation".
However, after a secret investigation, he was set free and the charges were mysteriously dropped. The files on the case were closed to public scrutiny.
Today Sveaborg keeps an extremely low profile but does exist and is said to have taken younger people into its ranks. Its only public activity takes place on 14 April each year when it gathers at a Stockholm cemetery to honour the Swedish nazi "hero", Gosta Hallberg-Cuula, who was killed in action on the Finnish front.
However, it is alleged that Sveaborg, which started its life as an elite arm of the SSS, has also secretly bankrolled activity by right-wing extremists in more recent times. Certainly it has always seen its role as fighting communism.
In her book Hakkorset och Wasakarven, published this year, Dr Helena Loow of Gothenburg University's Institute of History wrote that Sveaborg "considered itself to be a secret unit whose foremost task was to fight the enemy within and without".
The former NATO informant commented: "The choice of Sveaborg was a logical one for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) because elsewhere in Europe nazis were also being recruited as the most reliable anti-communists".
Though the Stay Behind operation was officially started only in 1952, "the whole exercise had been in existence for a long time, in fact, ever since it was born in the head of Allen Dulles", said the ex-NATO source who has had access to files in several West European nations.
According to him, Dulles, the first chief of the CIA, worked out the original plan to build secret anti-communist guerrilla forces across Europe when he was based in Switzerland at the end of the second world war.
"Dulles, Sir Stewart Menzies, boss of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and the Belgian Premier Paul-Henri Spaak codified the plan in a secret pact sometime between 1949 and 1952 under the umbrella of the Clandestine Co-ordinating Committee at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). which became NATO.
"There was a division of labour between the British and the US", he continued, "with Britain taking responsibility for the operation in France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal and Norway and the Americans looking after Sweden, Finland and the rest of Europe".
In the light of this statement, it would appear that when Colby was talking about Scandinavia he was, in fact, talking about Sweden, since Norway was "British territory" and he was operating only in Sweden.
Ironically it was in Norway that the first hint of Stay Behind surfaced in 1978 when a police raid on ship-owner Hans Otto Mayer turned up a huge quantity of weapons, explosives and sophisticated communications equipment.
Mayer told the police investigators that he was the leader of a Stay Behind group and after a brief row when police made this public. The story was quickly buried.
Asked about the exact nature and purpose of Stay Behind, the NATO source explained that it was two-fold: "to destabilise any left-leaning government, even a Social Democratic one, and in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack to function as a guerrilla army using classical guerrilla tactics."
OPERATION 'STAY BEHIND' - One Dead Prime Minister
The emphasis varied from country to country. In Italy and France, which both had very strong Communist Parties, the objective was to thwart their influence by disruption from within and causing acts of terror which would increase popular demands for restrictive measures and benefit right-wing conservative parties
He alleged that in Italy British intelligence had assisted in the formation of (secret military units and had provided training in both Britain and Sardinia to which hundreds of men had been flown in blacked-out planes. The strength of the Italian Stay Behind group was put at about 12,000 men.
So far the existence of the plan was officially admitted in Holland Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Greece, Germany, Turkey, and Italy where the story first hit the headlines and caused a massive political scandal as part of the investigation into the terrorist murder of Aldo Moro.
According to our source, Moro was sacrificed because he defied a US veto on appointing communists to his government. The murder was carried out by the Red Brigade, which had been heavily penetrated by agents of the Italian security services.
"There were other activities as well and there were Stay Behind people implicated in the fascist bomb attack on Bologna railway station in 1980". In that attack, 85 people were killed and hundreds injured.
Last summer one of the men jailed for his part in the Bologna mass murder - Licio Gelli, the grandmaster of the P2 masonic lodge - was released after a sucessful appeal against his conviction.
In the interview the ex-NATO operative said that Ted Shackley, the CIA's deputy station chief in Rome, "fixed a meeting between Alexander Haig and Gelli at the US embassy in Rome in the early 1970s, when Haig was President Nixon's chief of staff".
"Money", he said, "was then filtered to Stay Behind or Gladio as it was called in Italy with the blessing and knowledge of both Haig and the then head of the US National Security Council, Henry Kissinger. Their aim was to prevent a communist takeover at all costs.
[snip]
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