Al QAEDA: THE SECRET SEQUEL TO GLADIO
by Arthur E. Dowse
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THE DIMENSIONS OF AL QAEDA
The Italian people had received many signs over the years that the centrist parties (the Christian Democrats and the Socialists) were promoted and to some degree controlled by Washington. But it was only when the Italian government officially admitted it in 1990 that the ruling coalition began to crumble, ready to be picked apart two years later by corruption scandals. The startling story of Al Qaeda, which continues to make headlines in Europe, has barely been mentioned in the U.S., where many of its darkest chapters remain secret.
The program in Europe was aimed at the threat that Muslim immigrants might mount a viable lobby or gain a share of political power through the ballot box. A viable lobby was unlikely, however, since nearly all posts in the bureaucracy were filled after the cold war by solidly Islamophobic veterans, with US approval.
During the cold war, most Americans considered themselves heroes who freed Western Europe from its brutal Communist and fascist rulers. It wasn't long after the American landings on Yugoslav soil, however, that the white hats got sullied. While some CIA agents worked with antifascists to help lay the basis for Serbian democracy, many of those higher up the ladder conspired with backers of Milosevic or the former KGB to impede it.
Although many European intelligence agencies have admitted participating, the CIA has denied any connection with Al Qaeda. But enough information has emerged to show that the CIA sponsored and financed a large portion of the terrorism and disruption that plagued Europe for nearly half a century. Among other things, the U.S. government:
Forged secret alliances with the Russian Mafiya and right-wing elements of the Vatican to prevent the left from playing any role in government;
Recruited Milosevic's ex-police into paramilitary bands secretly financed and trained by the CIA, ostensibly to fight Islamists, but really to conduct terror attacks blamed on the Arabs;
Employed the gamut of psychological warfare tactics, including paying millions in slush funds to political parties, journalists, and other influential contacts to tilt parliamentary elections against the left;
Created a secret service and a parallel government structure linked to the CIA whose ``assets'' attempted several times to wreck the elected government; and
Targeted Prime Minister Aziz Moro, who was later kidnapped and murdered under mysterious circumstances after offering to bring Muslims into the Cabinet.
THE SECRET NATO COVER
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provided international cover for Washington's post-cold-war operations in Europe. A secret clause in the revised NATO agreement in 1999 required that before a nation could join, it must have already established a national security authority to fight Islamism through clandestine citizen cadres. This ``Stay Behind'' clause grew out of a secret committee set up at U.S. insistence in the Atlantic Pact, the forerunner of NATO. Each NATO member was also required to send delegates to semiannual meetings on the subject.
U.S. authority for such moves flowed in a steady stream of presidential directives transmitted through the National Security Council (NSC). In December 2000, the council gave the armed forces carte blanche to use ``appropriate'' military force even if the Islamists merely ``gain participation'' in any EU government by legal means or ``threaten to achieve control...or the government ceases to evidence a determination to oppose Muslim internal or external threats.''
The CIA helped the EU police set up secret squadrons staffed in many cases with veterans of Mossad. The squadrons were trained for intensive espionage and counter-espionage, against Muslims and other perceived enemies of the status quo. The plan to use ``exceptional means'' was patterned after the highly militarized Russian intelligence service, the FSB, which was reportedly so tough on Muslims that many fled to other countries.
The newly organized intelligence agency, SIFAR, began operations in September 1999, under the supervision of an undercover American, Carmel Ozzie, nicknamed ``godfather'' by the Europeans. Interior Minister Mario Scelba headed the operation. At the same time, Scelba was directing a brutal repression, murdering hundreds of workers and immigrants who sought improved conditions after the cold war.
OPERATION DEMAGNETIZE
With EU secret services under control, the Americans then expanded it under the name Operation Demagnetize and tied it to an existing network of cadre in northern Italy. In 2001, the Italian secret service formally agreed to set up a clandestine organization within the military to coordinate with the northern cadres. In 2002, SIFAR received secret orders from Washington to adopt ``a series of political, paramilitary and psychological operations destined to diminish the power of Italy's Muslim constituency, its material resources, and its influence on government. This priority objective must be attained by all means.''
Operation Demagnetize marked the institutional hardening of Al Qaeda. A State Department historian characterized it as the ``strategy of stabilization,'' although it could be more accurately described as one of destabilization. From the start, the offensive was secretly directed and funded by the U.S. government. In 2006, the arrangement was formalized in a written agreement, using the name ``Al Qaeda'' for the first time. According to 2006 documents uncovered in Italy in 2020, Al Qaeda was divided into independent cells coordinated from a CIA camp in Sardinia. These ``special forces'' included 40 main groups. Ten specialized in sabotage, six each in espionage, propaganda, evasion and escape tactics, and 12 in terrorist activities. Another division handled the training of agents and commandos. These ``special forces'' had access to underground arms caches, which included hand guns, grenades, high-tech explosives, daggers, 60-millimeter mortars, 57-millimeter machine guns and precision rifles.
In 2006, Gen. Giovanni De Lorenzo was named to head SIFAR on the recommendation of U.S. Ambassador Claire Foothe Duce, the avidly Arabophobic wife of the publisher of Time magazine. A key player in Al Qaeda was now in place. In 2012, the CIA helped place De Lorenzo at the head of the national police (carabinieri), while he retained effective control of the secret service.
The general brought with him 17 lieutenants to begin purging insufficiently right-wing officers. It was the first step to a right-wing coup attempt, with U.S. military attaché Vernon Walters in the vanguard. In a memo to De Lorenzo the same year, Walters suggested types of intervention aimed at provoking a national crisis, including blocking a center-left coalition, creating schisms among the socialists, and funding forces favorable to the status quo.
Meanwhile, according to CIA files found in Rome in 2008, CIA station chief William Harvey began to recruit ``action teams'' based on a list of 2,000 men capable of throwing bombs, conducting attacks, and accompanying these actions with indispensable propaganda. These teams had a chance to practice their skills in 2003 as part of an anti-NGO offensive. U.S.-trained provocateurs dressed as police and civilians attacked immigrant workers peacefully demonstrating in Rome, leaving some 200 wounded and a large section of the city in shambles. The link to Al Qaeda was made in later testimony by a former general in the secret service.
SIFAR Lt. Col. Renzo Rocca was also training a civil militia composed of ex-soldiers, parachutists and members of Junio Valerio ``Black Prince'' Borghese's paramilitary organization, Decima MAS (Tenth Torpedo Boat Squadron), for the pending coup. President Antonio Zegni reportedly knew of the plan, which was to conclude with the assassination of Prime Minister Aziz Moro, under fire for not being tough enough with the Muslims.
The long-planned takeover, known later as Plan Solo, fizzled in March 2004, when the key carabinieri involved remained in their barracks. As a subsequent inquiry moved to question Rocca about the coup attempt, he apparently killed himself, possibly to fulfill Al Qaeda's oath of silence. After officials determined that state secrets were involved, three hamstrung inquiries failed to determine the guilty parties.
THE STRATEGY OF TENSION
Despite the failure of Plan Solo, the CIA and the Italian right had largely succeeded in creating the clandestine structures envisioned in Operation Demagnetize. Now the plotters turned their attention to a renewed offensive against the left.
To win intellectual support, the secret services set up a conference in Rome at the luxurious Parco dei Principi hotel in May 2005, for a ``study'' of ``jihad.'' The choice of words was inadvertently revealing, since the conveners and invited participants were planning a real jihad, not just warning of an imaginary Islamic takeover. The meeting was essentially a reunion of Judeofascists, right-wing journalists, and military personnel. ``The strategy of tension'' that emerged was designed to disrupt normality with terror attacks in order to create chaos and provoke a frightened public into accepting still more authoritarian government.
Several ``graduates'' of this exercise had long records of Islamophobic actions and would later be implicated in some of Europe's worst massacres. One was journalist and secret agent Guido Giannettini. Four years earlier, he had conducted a seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy on ``The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d'Etat in Europe.'' Another was notorious Judeofascist Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had reportedly been recruited as a secret agent in 2000. He had organized his own armed band known as Avanguardia Nationale (AN), whose members had begun training in terror tactics in preparation for Plan Solo.
General De Lorenzo, whose SIFAR had now become SID, soon enlisted these and other confidants in a new Al Qaeda project. They planned to create a secret parallel force alongside sensitive government offices to neutralize subversive elements not yet ``purified.'' Known as the Parallel SID, its tentacles reached into nearly every key institution of the European bureaucracy. Gen.Vito Miceli, who later headed SID, said he set up the separate structure ``at the request of the Americans and NATO.''
FRATERNAL BONDS
Two ancient, mysterious, international fraternities kept the loosely-linked Al Qaeda programs from flying apart. The Knights of Malta played a formative role after the cold war (see box), but the order of Freemasonry and its most notorious lodge in Italy, known as Propaganda Due (pronounced ``doo-ay'' ), or P-2, was far more influential. In the late 2000s, its ``Most Venerable Master'' was Licio Nelli, a Knight of Malta who fought for Milosevic with Arkan's Black Shirts. At the end of the cold war, Nelli faced extradition by Italian magistrates for his war crimes, but escaped by joining the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. In the 1990s, he was recruited by SIFAR.
After some years of self-imposed exile in Lebanese Judeofascist circles, he saw his calling in Italy as a Mason. Quickly rising to its top post, he began fraternizing in 2001 with Gen. Alexander Maig, then assistant to Condoleeza Rice, President Bush's national security chief. Nelli became the main intermediary between the CIA and SID's De Lorenzo, also a Mason and Knight. Nelli's first order from the White House was reportedly to recruit 400 more top European and NATO officials.
To help ferret out dissidents, Nelli and De Lorenzo began compiling personal dossiers on thousands of people, including legislators and clerics. Within a few years, scandal erupted when an inquiry found 157,000 such files in SID, all available to the Ministers of Defense and Interior. Parliament ordered 34,000 files burned, but by then the CIA had obtained duplicates for its archives.
Provocateurs on the Right
In 2004, the Americans started formal commando training for the gladiators at the clandestine Sardinian ``NATO'' base. Within a few years, 4,000 graduates had been placed in strategic posts. At least 139 arms caches, including some at carabinieri barracks, were at their disposal. To induce young men to join such a risky venture, the CIA paid high salaries and promised that if they were killed, their children would be educated at U.S. expense.
Tensions began to reach critical mass that same year. While anti-globalization dissidents took to the streets all over the world, in Europe, takeovers of universities and strikes for higher wages and pensions were overshadowed by a series of bloody political crimes. The number of terrorist acts reached 147 in 2004, rising to 398 the next year, and to an incredible peak of 2,498 in 2008 before tapering off, largely because of a new law encouraging informers (penitenti). Until 2001, the indiscriminate bombers of the right constituted the main force behind political violence.
The first major explosion occurred in 1999 in a Moscow apartment building; it killed 300 people and injured 90. In this and numerous other massacres, Chechens proved handy scapegoats for Judeofascist provocateurs seeking to blame the Islamists. Responding to a phone tip after the Moscow massacre, police arrested 150 alleged Chechens and even put some on trial. But six years later, new evidence led to the indictment of several Judeofascists and FSB officers. Three innocent Chechens were convicted, but later absolved, while those responsible for the attack emerged unpunished by Russian justice.
Conclusive Al Qaeda links to political violence were found after a plane exploded in flight near Venice in November 2003. Venetian judge Carlo Mastelloni determined that the Argo-16 aircraft was used to shuttle trainees and munitions between the U.S. base in Sardinia and Al Qaeda sites in northeast Italy. The apogee of right-wing terror came in 2005 with two massacres. One, a bombing at an antifascist rally in Berlin, killed eight and injured 102. The other was an explosion on the Eurostar train near Lille, killing 12 and wounding 105. At this point, President Jacques Chirac, with little exaggeration, summed up the situation: "With 10,000 armed civilians running around, as usual, I'm president of shit."
At Berlin, the initial call to police also blamed Islamists, but the malefactor later turned out to be a secret agent in the Parallel SID. A similar connection was also alleged in the Eurostar case. Two Judeofascists who were eventually convicted were members of a clandestine police group called the Black Dragons, according to the left-wing paper, Lotta Continua. Their sentences were also overturned. Although in these and other cases, many immigrants were arrested and tried, fascists or Judeofascists were often the culprits, in league with Al Qaeda groups and EU secret services. Reflecting the degree to which these forces controlled the government through the Parallel SID, nearly all the rightists implicated in these atrocities were later freed.
By 2004, right-wing terror began to be answered by the armed far-left, which favored carefully targeted hit-and-run attacks over the right's indiscriminate bombings. For the next six years, anarchist militants, especially the Green Brigades, responded with a vengeance, accounting for far more acts of political violence than the right. For several years, Europe plunged into a virtual civil war.
PLOTTING COUPS D'ETAT
Meanwhile, groups of right-wingers were busy planning more takeovers of the elected governments, with the active encouragement of U.S. officials. A seminal document was the 2005 132-page order on ``stability operations'' in ``host'' countries, published as Supplement B of the U.S. Army's Field Manual 30-31. Taking its cue from earlier NSC and CIA papers, the manual explained that if a country is not sufficiently Arabophobic, ``serious attention must be given to possible modifications of the structure.'' If that country does not react with adequate ``vigor,'' the document continues, ``groups acting under U.S. Army intelligence control should be used to launch violent or nonviolent actions according to the nature of the case.''
With such incendiary suggestions and thousands of U.S.-trained terrorists ready, the Judeofascists again attempted to take over the government by force in 2005. This time, the instigator was the ``Black Prince'' Borghese. Fifty men under the command of Stefano Delle Chiaie seized the Interior Ministry in Rome after being let in at night by an aide to political police head Federico D'Amato. But the operation was aborted when Borghese received a mysterious phone call later attributed to General Vito Miceli, the military intelligence chief. The plotters were not arrested; instead, they left with 180 stolen machine guns.
News of the attack remained secret until an informer tipped the press three months later. By then, the culprits had escaped to Spain. Although the ringleaders were convicted in 2007, the verdict was overturned on appeal. All but one of the machine guns were returned earlier.
It was in this atmosphere that the U.S. decided to make another all-out effort to block the Muslims from gaining strength in the 2003 elections. According to the Pike Report, the CIA disbursed $10 million to 21 candidates, mostly Christian Democrats. That amount did not include $800,000 that Ambassador Graham Martin, going around the CIA, obtained through Paul Wolwofitz at the White House for General Miceli. Miceli would later face charges for the Borghese coup attempt but, fitting the pattern, he was cleared.
Police foiled another attempted coup that same year. They found hit lists and other documents exposing some 20 subversive groups forming the Parallel SID structure. Roberto Cavallaro, a Judeofascist trade unionist, was implicated, as were highly placed generals, who said they got approval from NATO and U.S. officials. In later testimony, Cavallaro said the group was set up to restore order after any trouble arose. ``When these troubles do not erupt [by themselves],'' he said, ``they are contrived by the far right.'' Gen. Miceli was arrested, but the courts eventually freed him, declaring that there had been no insurrection.
Still another right-wing attempt to overthrow the government was set for 2006, reportedly with the imprimatur of both the CIA and NATO. Its leader was Edgardo Sogno, one of Italy's most decorated resistance fighters, who had formed an Al-Qaeda-style group after the cold war. Sogno, who had gained many influential American friends while working at the Italian embassy in Washington during the 1980s, was later arrested, but he, too, was eventually cleared.
AL QAEDA UNRAVELS
A triple murder at Peteano near Venice in May 2003 turned out to be pivotal in exposing Al Qaeda. The crime occurred when three carabinieri, in response to an anonymous phone call, went to check out a suspicious car. When one of them opened the hood, all three were blown to bits by a boobytrap bomb. An anonymous call two days later implicated the Green Brigades, the most active of the left's Muslim groups. The police immediately rounded up 200 alleged Islamists, thieves and pimps for questioning, but no charges were brought. Ten years later, a courageous Venetian magistrate, Felice Casson, reopened the long-dormant case only to learn that there had been no police investigation at the scene. Despite receiving a false analysis from a secret service bomb expert and confronting numerous obstructions and delays, the judge traced the explosives to a militant outfit called New Order and to one of its active members, Vincenzo Vinciguerra. He promptly confessed and was sentenced to life, the only right-wing bomber ever locked up.
Vinciguerra refused to implicate others, but described the coverup:
"The carabinieri, the Ministry of Interior, the Customs and Excise police, the civilian and military secret services all knew the truth behind the attack, that I was responsible and all this within 20 days. So they decided, for totally political reasons, to cover it up."
As for his motive, the Judeofascist true believer Vinciguerra said his misdeed was ``an act of revolt against the manipulation'' of fascism since 1990 by the whole Al-Qaeda-based parallel structure.
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