"NATO’s secret armies linked to terrorism?
The military secret services’ perceptions of what constituted an “emergency” was well defined in Cold War Italy and focused on the increasing strength of the Italian Communist and the Socialist parties, both of which were tasked with weakening NATO “from within”. Felice Casson, an Italian judge who during his investigations into right-wing terrorism had first discovered the secret Gladio army and had forced Andreotti to take a stand, found that the secret army had linked up with right-wing terrorists in order to confront “emergency situations”. The terrorists, supplied by the secret army, carried out bomb attacks in public places, blamed them on the Italian left, and were thereafter protected from prosecution by the military secret service.
"You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game,” right-wing terrorist Vincezo Vinciguerra explained the so-called “strategy of tension” to Casson.
“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened."
The Italian Senate chose to be more explicit and concluded in its investigation in 2000: "Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence." Ever since the discovery of the secret NATO armies in 1990, research into stay-behind armies has progressed only very slowly, due to very limited access to primary documents and the refusal of both NATO and the CIA to comment.
On 5 November 1990, a NATO spokesman told an inquisitive press: "NATO has never contemplated guerrilla war or clandestine operations”.
The next day, NATO officials admitted that the previous day’s denial had been false, adding that the alliance would not comment on matters of military secrecy. On 7 November, NATO’s highest military official in Europe, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) US General John Galvin, together with NATO’s highest civilian official, Secretary-General Manfred Wörner, briefed NATO ambassadors behind closed doors.
Secret Warfare: From Operation Gladio to 9/11
I looked at how the CIA handled Gladio in 1990. In Italy, former CIA director Stansfield Turner was asked by a journalist about Gladio, and answered “No questions on Gladio.” When the journalist insisted, he ripped off the microphone and walked out of the room.
In countries where the government is, so to speak “asleep,” U.S. military intelligence must link up with up local military intelligence. The task at hand is to make the local government “wake up.”
To that end, special units that secretly cooperate with the Pentagon can covertly stage terrorist attacks.
These terrorist attacks, within a Strategy of Tension, would then be attributed—in a “false flag” mode— to the Communists.
If there’s a prospect of private property getting nationalized, investors will become very brutal—look at what happened to Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. They will not refrain from anything, and, if they can get governments to run covert operations against a regime they see as threat to their economic interests, they will do just that.
In your NZZ article before Christmas [Dec. 15, 2004], you compared the way international terrorism—mostly “Islamic terrorism”—is currently deployed to be part of the Strategy of Tension. Can you explain that further?
Not exactly the type of "waking up" advocated by WUFYS."
