Gladio. Does anybody know what Gladio is, or was, or still is? I certainly didn’t until I was unceremoniously tossed into the snake pit of the attacks of 9/11. Them vipers bite deep, but while you are trying to cope/survive/conquer, you learn a few things. Operation Gladio is/was a NATO/CIA/MI6 effort to be ready when the Russians invaded Europe. It was a “stay behind” secret army, complete with training and caches of equipment that would be useful for the unorthodox warfare that would be necessary against a Soviet occupying force.
There was such a force in each of the NATO countries, begun just after the end of the 2nd World War, and still having meetings in 1990 when it was discovered and confirmed by leaders all over Europe thanks to investigations begun by courageous Italian judges. That sounds vaguely okay to me on an instinctual level. I don’t think too many people think the Resistance in France was not enormously helpful in defeating the Nazis. Why not have the capability before the occupying forces actually took over the country?
There are a number of problems, not the least of which is the undemocratic nature of the enterprise–almost no one in the various governments was aware of the existence of these forces. But there are further far more disturbing things to be learned about Gladio. The reason it ever came to my attention is that the central underpinning of the attacks of 9/11 is their “false flag”/”inside job” nature which makes it SO difficult for normal people to think about– that their own government would intentionally create casualties amongst their own fellow citizens.
There are now ample confessions by an abundance of operatives to allow the open-minded observer to conclude that Gladio was not simply for the purpose of defeating a future occupying army. It was also there to make sure that Communists never held any rein of power in Europe. One estimate is that $1 billion a year was spent in France alone to manipulate the electorate.
But as bad as that is, it is not the worst part. The right wing anti-Communists that made up the ranks of the Gladio forces engaged in terrorist acts as well. They blew up three policemen in Italy in the early ’70’s and exploded other bombs around the country during the resurgence of the Left in that decade killing, most spectacularly, 85 civilians at the Bologna railway station on August 2, 1980. It was NATO/Italian state operatives who committed these atrocities. They blamed the Red Brigade, the most notorious leftist terrorist group in Italy, and used the attacks to justify a crackdown on the Left throughout the country.
Investigations in the 1990’s and into 2000 have established further, that the files on the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, in 1978, at the time blamed on the Red Brigade, have disappeared. The conclusion by parliamentary investigators, because of that and much other evidence, is that the Red Brigade was used by Gladio forces to kill Moro and terrorize the country. At the time Moro was the president of the Social Democratic Party, the one supported by the US, but he was a left-of-center politician who wished to have the Communists, who had won the greatest percentage of votes in the 1978 elections, 34.4%, hold positions in the government. He was warned off such a course two years before in a visit to the US where the infamous Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State. Moro was told, by a person he would not name, that he would pay dearly if he pursued such a course. And so he did.
Our handlers at the New York Times, you know, the people who determine what we will see and know, somehow felt it was alright if we learned that “stay behind” secret armies had been created to fight the occupying Russians, though by the count they certainly didn’t make a big deal about it. What they apparently felt we should not know is all of that business about meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, and our agents engaging in acts of terrorism, killing and maiming hundreds of people, and covering up after the kidnapping and murdering of a prominent political leader, the courageous and beloved Aldo Moro. It is enough to make a person ill, but if, as THE paper of record, you find yourself able to ignore mountains, and oceans, and galaxies of evidence about 9/11, what is one to expect?.