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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: robnhood who wrote (16459)	4/20/2000 5:28:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Well.... I'm afraid your Harper's scrap is bang on the mark. Keep in mind, though, that this mass-conditioning of public opinion sometimes turned out to be a bit more "proactive".... *GLADIO -- OR YOUR BRAVE-FREE-WORLD'S DEATH SQUADS* .... The growing strength of the left in post-war Europe was motivation enough for the CIA to develop its covert programs, and this was a circumstance deriving from World War II and the economic facts of life, not from Soviet propaganda and manipulation. OPERATION GLADIO The rationale behind it was your standard cold-war paranoia: there's a good chance the Russians 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 Russians 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 [Grey Wolves?] 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 Russian invasions, the operation was used almost exclusively to inflict political damage upon domestic leftist movements. The Gladio story broke in Italy in the fall of 1990, stemming from a judicial investigation into a 1972 car-bombing which discovered that the explosives had come from one of the 139 secret weapons depots kept for Gladio's forces in Italy. Subsequently, the head of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the matter revealed that "When Gladio was started, the Americans would often insist ... that the organization also had to be used to counter any insurgencies." Retired Greek Gen. Nikos Kouris told a similar story, declaring that a Greek force was formed with CIA help in 1955 to intervene in case of Communist threat, whether external or internal. "There were ex-military men, specially trained soldiers and also civilians. What held them together was one ideological common denominator: extreme rightism." As in Germany (cf. 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 US 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 US 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. From: ftp://ftp.alternatives.com/%2f/library/polintel/c15.txt