Tom Secker | Mar 11, 2013

At the end of WW2, as the Allied forces withdrew from continental Europe, the American Office of Strategic Services and the British Special Operations Executive left some paramilitary and intelligence units in place in the host countries. These so-called ‘stay behind’ secret armies had been used successfully against the Axis powers during the war, alongside various other commando-type units. Notably, Ian Fleming (author of James Bond) was loosely in charge of the famed 30 Assault Unit, and his brother was involved in setting up the stay-behinds used during the war.

The purpose of these secret armies in the post-war period was to act as a first resort fall back option in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. However they also had an implicit mission of harassing the Soviets pro-actively in time-honoured guerrilla fashion. During the Yalta conference Josef Stalin referred to this, talking about “agents of the London government connected with the so-called resistance” in Poland who had killed 212 Russian soldiers. Franklin Roosevelt suggested that would be a good point to adjourn the meeting, before Winston Churchill, without explicitly denying what Stalin had claimed, said, “I must put on record that both the British and Soviet governments have different sources of information in Poland and get different facts.” Given that it was Churchill who notoriously gave the order that British commando and resistance forces “set Europe ablaze”, the old soak was clearly just covering his back with this remark [1].

So, when the war ended this mission continued, with secret military and intelligence units operating in all the NATO member states, and even in those countries that were not members of NATO such as Sweden and, at least for a time, France. Only select members of the governments of the host countries were let in on the secret – sometimes even the heads of governments were kept in the dark by those within the military and intelligence institutions who were in the know. As such, the stay behind armies operated in the shadows, with almost no public recognition of their influence until 1990, when then Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti admitted that the units in Italy, codenamed Gladio, did exist and had existed for decades.

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The Deception and Terrorisation of Populaces from the Era of Gladio to the War on Terror

Adeyinka Makinde - 6 January 2013

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, unknown people far from any political game. The reason was quite simple – to force the people to turn to the state for greater security.” - Vincenzo Vinciguerra

The nature, necessity and scope of the miscellany of powers exercised by the state over the nation is in one sense arguably as contentious in the contemporary circumstances of the Western world as it was in the distant pre-democratic medieval past.

In his work Della Ragion di Stato (The Reason of State), which was completed in 1589, the Italian thinker Giovanni Botero argued against the underpinning philosophical amorality espoused by Niccolo Machiavelli in Il Principe (The Prince), a political treatise centred on the ways and methods of the manipulation of the levers of the power by a ruler in an organised state.

The thrust of Machiavelli’s seminal piece was that virtually any action taken by a ruler to preserve and promote the stability and the prosperity of his domain was inherently justifiable. Thus, the employment of violence, murder, deception and cruelty toward achieving these ends were not ignoble in so far as the ends justified the means.

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Reality is often more deadly than anything dreamed up in a novel:

What was the inspiration for the name Gladio? It was named after a small stabbing knife used by the gladiators; this knife would produce a superficial wound with a lot of blood. It would not finish off the opponent quickly, and thus finish the contest, but it would terrify and prolong the entertainment for the crowds. A spymaster explains it to Dark: “They are not interested in killing many innocent people — but they want to terrify many people, with a superficial but spectacularly bloody wound.”

In preparation for his novel Duns read through pages and pages of classified documents now released under the time-lapse rules. Sadly his research on İstanbul is less accurate: he has our hero driving a jeep across the Galata Bridge from Pera and continuing on by land to İzmit. Even if he had accurately identified the Bosporus Bridge as connecting the two continents, that wasn’t built until some 20 years after the action took place.

This does no more than put a small dent in an otherwise well researched and documented set of guesses. In the notes at the end of the novel, Duns points out that “the existence of British stay-behind network and their offshoots had been publicized prior to Andreotti’s statement” — here referring to an admission by the Italian prime minister in 1990 that Gladio was part of a secret NATO operation.

Peter Edel, 15 July 2010

Each time just after an act of terrorism in Turkey there is this strange obscure vacuum. When the assault is claimed and even when suspects have been detained there will always be questions about the facts.

It’s far from illogical to bring up questions like, “Who really did it?” An analytical view of modern history shows that terrorism is often not what it appears to be at first. An act of terrorism may very well be instigated by provocateurs who have infiltrated groups. Or it may be a “false flag” operation, meaning terrorism committed in ways that make it appear as though it was done by others. With such strategies entering the arena, the edges between various forms of extremism can become very blurred. And they become even more blurred with the phenomenon that extremists on whatever side usually have more in common with each other than with the moderates in society. This effect can lead to the most paradoxical alliances and is often the reason why nothing is really what it seems at first with terrorism.

There is a distinctive psychological side to terrorism. While traditional warfare is about gaining territory, the terrorist wants to conquer public opinion instead. Whether based on religious or political ideologies, terrorists always go for public opinion one way or another. The intention to create political chaos through violence is another common denominator between them. These common grounds can to a certain extent lead to contacts and sometimes even to cooperation and joint operations by groups which oppose each other entirely in the “normal world.” A similarity in strategies applied by various terrorist groups is usually the basis for connections of this kind. Let’s illustrate this with the strategies of radical left and extreme right terrorist groups in Italy during the ’70s. Of course, we see opposing schemes. Violence from the left follows the expectation that political chaos will unmask the state, followed by a sequence of unchained revolutionary events. In the approach of right-wing terrorism, political chaos and instability will make the public demand drastic measures, with success for right-wing parties during elections, or a military takeover as an imagined result. Major differences. The point is that as long the state of political chaos has not been reached, the strategies are almost identical, which is the lubricant for infiltration and black flag operations. This combination is able to cover any terrorist attack in a shroud of uncertainty. That’s what happened in Italy during the ’70s. And that’s what seems to be taking place in Turkey nowadays.

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TODAY’S ZAMAN
29 January 2009

It would be a surprise not to have clandestine groups and structures in Turkey that bear the basic qualities of Operation Gladio — a stay-behind army set up in NATO countries during cold war years to counter a communist invasion — says Philip Willan, who has been researching the level and pattern of cooperation between secret services and the mafia, in addition to unsolved and mysterious assassinations.

Speaking to the Cihan news agency, Willan said Ergenekon, a clandestine terrorist organization charged with plotting to overthrow the government, is very similar to the Gladio network. He also stated that newly emerging evidence about Ergenekon in Turkey also highlighted the similarity. Describing Gladio as an organization set up by NATO through the US and British secret services and special operations units during World War II to prevent an invasion of Italy by the Eastern Bloc, Willan said the Gladio operation recruited individuals known for their anti-communist beliefs. The group also had arms and explosives caches buried underground in a large number of places in Italy.

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ALİ İHSAN AYDIN - 12 November 2008

“Towards the end of the investigation, I received a letter. It said: ‘You have come to the door of power. If you try to enter through that door, we do not know what may happen.’

I pushed that door ajar and saw what was inside,” Felice Casson says. Thus the famous Italian prosecutor first uncovered the illegal armed network, Gladio.

He stresses that a prosecutor or a judge cannot enter and go it alone. Having served as an example for many prosecutors in other European countries with his historic investigation in Italy, Casson asserts that powerful political support is a must for the success of any fight against illegal networks such as Gladio or Ergenekon. “A parliamentary commission equipped with special powers should be set up. Prosecutors can go up to a point. But this commission can go wherever it wishes if the government is determined,” he says.

The prosecutor is now a member of the Italian Senate, but without the support of then-Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, he could not have overcome all the difficulties he faced during the Gladio investigation, including vociferous opposition from the president. In his office in the Senate in Rome, the Italian politician spoke to Today’s Zaman about his experiences and the difficulties in his quest to fight Gladio.

For the prosecutor, networks such as Gladio and Ergenekon are only pawns. There are many other illegal networks apart from Gladio in Italy. There is a “power” above that manages all of them, and nobody knows much about this power. Depending on circumstances that change with time, some organizations may be used and wound up, but the “power at the top” continues to assert itself using different means. The prosecutor was even able to jail some generals at the end of the investigation, but wasn’t able to touch the whole of the network.

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