Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 9:02 pm Post subject: Operation Gladio - NATO's Secret Nazi 'Stay Behind' Army
Operation Gladio, NATO's Darkest Secret
Found this after watching the 3 Timewatch documentaries about Gladio on Google Video.
"GLADIO Europe's best kept secret
They were the agents who were to 'stay behind' if the Red Army overran Western Europe. But the network that was set up with the best intentions degenerated in some countries into a front for terrorism and far-right political agitation.Hugh O'Shaughnessy reports."
Very interesting copy of a Gladio story ran in the Observer in 1992.
GLADIO Europe's best kept secret
They were the agents who were to 'stay behind' if the Red Army overran Western Europe. But the network that was set up with the best intentions degenerated in some countries into a front for terrorism and far-right political agitation.Hugh O'Shaughnessy reports.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy, Observer, 7 June 1992, pages 53-54
The codename was Gladio and it was the most ambitious and secret operation in Western Europe since the Second World War. But now, with the Cold War over, it is ending on notes of pure farce.
The Belgian authorities have lost the code for getting in touch with their most secret agents, men who would have gone into action when the Soviet army swept into Flanders: they have no means of working it out again. One Belgian officer, Colonel Bernard Legrand, knows some of the names but he won't co-operate: it's confidential he says. The British and United States governments know how to break the code but won't tell the wretched Belgians.
At 10.15 on the morning of 31 January last year Colonel Jean Bodart of Belgian military intelligence landed in a Belgian air force plane at RAF Northolt. He collected 13 packages filled with cyphers and an old Remington type-writer from British intelligence and two hours later flew back to Brussels. The packages contained the names of the members of the Gladio network in Belgium. The Remington typewriter was part of the decoding equipment. But Belgian intelligence, whose skills at cryptography have sadly been allowed to get rusty, have wrestled in vain with the task of decyphering the names in the packages.
One day in 1984 a party of US Marines set out from an airport north of London. Highly trained men, each fluent in one Eastern European language, they parachuted to their secret rendezvous and were met by an agent, a local bank manager, who offered them guidance. They lived off the land for a fortnight, hiding from the local civilian population as they stalked towards their prey. Steathily they approached their objective and opened fire, killing a warrant officer. One of the Marines lost an eye in the operation.
Their language skills were not much use: the objective was the police station in the sleepy southern Belgian town of Vielsalm and none of the Marines spoke French. If they had, they could have saved one man's life and another man's eye.
The object of the exercise had been twofold: to jolt the local Belgian police into a higher state of alert and, no less important, to give the impression to the population at large that the comfortable and well-fed Kingdom of Belgium was on the brink of red revolution. Guns used in the operation were later planted by a shadowy Belgian intelligence outfit in the Brussels squat used by a Communist splinter group.
On such notes of opera buffa is Gladio being wound up. Mercifully for the reputations of all concerned perhaps, the farce is overlaying memories of large-scale incursions into terrorism and crime which transformed a clever plan to defend Western democracy into a scheme which, according to startling new evidence unearthed by Observer researchers in many countries, struck at the very roots of Western values of freedom and the rule of law.
Starting as an unexceptional piece of forward planning, it moved on to unauthorised political surveillance and then, finally, to the mounting of a series of outrages with the far Right which cost the lives of hundreds of innocent Europeans. The dead include at least one Western European leader, Aldo Moro of Italy. Much still remains to be investigated, particularly about Gladio's operations in Franco's Spain.
The strategy behind Gladio when it was set up in the late 1940s was impeccable. As Stalin consolidated his political and military power in Eastern Europe and promoted his version of totalitarianism where he could, the Western allies came together to prevent any recurrence of the debacles at the beginning of the Second World War when democracies were knocked over like nine-pins by the Wehrmacht.
In 1939 and 1940 the German army had been able to overrun its European neighbours with supreme ease. Polish cavalry was no match for German tanks, the Dutch surrendered after Rotterdam had been destroyed from the air, Paris was taken without difficulty, scarcely a shot was fired as the Nazis conquered Denmark. The Channel Islands, the only British soil Hitler conquered, had already been deemed indefensible.
As the swastika flew everywhere in Europe, from Brittany to the Russian steppes, it was only with the greatest difficulty and sacrifice that resistance movements were established from Britain which were eventually to be capable of harrying and sabotaging the German army of occupation and finally to collaborate with the Allied forces of liberation.
Such a lack of foresight, it was agreed in Western capitals, was never to be permitted again in the face of Stalin's threat, particularly after the Communist putsch in Prague in 1948. Under the aegis of Britain and the US, a secret network of recruits was to be set up all over the continent. They were to be provided with caches of radios, money and weapons.
If the Red Army did overrun Western Europe and Western armies were defeated and forced to flee, there would be someone left with intimate local knowledge who could receive orders from abroad, send out information and go into action against the Soviet occupation forces. They were not to be so many Captain Mainwarings, openly organised in Dad's Army outfits around the local drill hall, who could be easily rounded up by the Russians. Their role was to be serious and totally clandestine. They were to be known as 'stay-behinds'
This continent-wide operation, which became known as Gladio, also had the task of keeping an eye on what were considered domestic threats to Western democracies by agents of the Soviet Union. In the post-war years when Moscow-line Communist parties were strong, particularly in France and Italy, that task was challenging. It was to lead to particular abuses.
Although the networks were initially set up at the initiative of democratically elected national leaders, they soon took on and independent life of their own so that even commanders-in-chief, defence ministers, prime ministers and presidents were unaware of what they were doing.
The network and their caches were to remain ultra-secret until 1990. General Bernard Rogers, the former US commander of Nato, for instance, says he was unaware of the details. 'The organisation of any stay-behinds must have been at the national level and not at the Nato level,' he comments.
The lid was lifted a little in November 1990 by the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who had strongly denied the existence of Gladio for well over a decade. In a statement to parliament in Rome, Andreotti became the first major politician to talk publicly of the project.
IT ALL started at the end of the last war. On 27 January 1949 Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, set out the grand strategy in a top secret and personal letter to Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Socialist Prime Minister who was later to become secretary-general of Nato. As the idea took shape, Sir Stewart wrote of Anglo-Belgian collaboration in particular:
The present object of this collaboration should be directed to two main aims:
a) The improvement of our information on the subject of Cominform and potential enemy activities in so far as they concern our two countries.
b) The preparation of appropriate intelligence and action organisations in the event of war.
At the same time the letter, a copy of which is in The Observer's possession, throws light on what became an increasingly important factor in the Gladio operation - the rivalry between the British and the Americans.
Menzies continued:
I have always regarded American participation in the defence of Western Europe as a matter of capital importance. I am however, convinced that all effort, American not excluded, must be integrated into an harmonious whole. Should, therefore, the Americans wish to pursue with your Service certain preparations to meet the needs of war, I regard it as essential - and I understand I have your agreement - that these activities should be co-ordinated with my own. Such co-ordination, moreover, will prevent undesirable repercussions with the Western Union chiefs of Staff. I have already indicated to the Head of the American Service that I am ready to work out plans for detailed co-operation with him on this basis, and I therefore suggest that any projects formulated by them should be referred back to Washington for subsequent discussion between the British and American Services in London.
The correspondence should, Menzies suggested, be regarded as 'highly secret'.
Early the following month Spaak wrote back to Menzies agreeing with his ideas but begging Britain and the US to get their act together.
I agree with you that it would be highly desirable that the three services (British, American and Belgian) should collaborate closely. If two of them, the American and the British, refuse that collaboration, the situation of the Belgian service would be extremely delicate and difficult.
Thus I feel it is indispensable that at the highest level there should be negotiations to settle this question...
In the event both powers helped to pay for the Gladio operations in Belgium. Senator Roger Lallemand, had of the parliamentary inquiry into Gladio set up in Belgium after Andreotti's revelations, recalls: 'What was striking about the Belgian stay-behinds was that the financing at the beginning was in part undertaken by the British and the Americans. We were able to note that the Belgian stay-behinds had received gold coins...The sums were quite large and in fact were stored away since they couldn't have been used.'
As the years went by, the stay-behind network, which ended up as a semi-detached operation of Nato, extended across Europe, the British taking the lead in Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the Iberian peninsula, the Americans elsewhere. The fact that various powers involved were not members of Nato - did not hinder Gladio being extended to their territory. The names of all the stay-behinds were lodged for safe keeping in London and Boston, Massachusetts.
The extreme secrecy, and lack of supervision of the Gladio networks by elected governments meant that time and again they were to fall victim to right-wing extremists inside and outside the Western security services, who set their own political agendas and acted on them.
The way down that slippery slope was typified by the attitude of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's chief of counter-intelligence. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, Angleton was convinced that Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt were Moscow agents. His black list of pro-Communists also included Henry Kissinger, the Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson and Averell Harriman, a former US Ambassador in Moscow and governor of New York.
A US military field manual published for the guidance of its officers stated: 'There may be times when host-country governments fall into passivity or indecision in face of Communist or Communist-inspired subversion and react with inadequate vigor to intelligence estimates transmitted by US agencies...In such cases US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince host-country governments and public opinion of the reality of insurgent action and assess the counter-action.'
Although doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the text, Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA who joined US intelligence as a young man during the Second World War, has no doubt it is genuine.
In Belgium, for instance, all evidence points to the fact that a US-born Gladio agent, Wood Gardiner, infiltrated the Belgian pacifist movement and persuaded some of its members in 1984 to steal shells from the missile base at Florenne. When the theft was discovered it did the pacifist cause no good at all.
More important were the apparently random shootings in Belgian supermarkets which ended with a particularly nasty incident in 1983 in the town of Aalst, a few miles from Brussels, which became known as the Brabant-Walloon massacres. Senator Lallemand has linked the killings to 'the work of foreign governments or of intelligence services working for foreigners, a terrorism aimed a destabilising democratic society'.
Martial Lekeu, a former member of the Belgian gendarmerie who was close to the investigation of the atrocities, that members of his own force were involved in the murders and that official inquiries into it were aborted.
The British authorities, leaders with Washington in the scheme, are refusing all comment on Gladio. But
continued overleaf
The secrets of Gladio
continued from previous page
information about Britain's role has come from parliamentary and other investigations carried out elsewhere in Europe.
Belgian documents, starting with Spaak's letter of 1949, show what a major role Britain has constantly played. Papers presented to the parliamentary inquiry set up in Belgium on Gladio show that in Belgium in 1981 and in Britain in 1982 Belgian personnel received training from British instructors. In April 1982 Belgians prepared for a Gladio exercise involving Britain and the US, codenamed Blackbird, which was called off at the last minute when Argentina invaded the Falklands.
In 1990 Colonel S. Schwebach of Belgian intelligence reported to his Defence Minister that an exercise called Waterland had taken place the previous year. In it, members of the Royal Marines Special Boat Squadron parachuted into the seas off the coast of Flanders, were guided ashore by Belgian civilians and went on to simulate the dynamiting of the massive canal locks at Zeebrugge.
There were even reports, so far unconfirmed, in Belgium that Belgian personnel had been part of a recent Gladio exercise in Britain aimed at demonstrating that Dover docks could be put out of action were the Russians to occupy Kent.
Britain was active too in the Gladio operation in Switzerland. Effrem Cattalan, who headed the Swiss P26 intelligence organisation and helped to organise Gladio in his country, told us how his organisation 'has English colleagues who instructed them in general training, like covert operations and parachute jumps at night in which England has had exceptionally good experience since the war'.
The British also collaborated, he said, with his predecessor at P26, Colonel Albert Bachmann, for the possible evacuation of the headquarters of a Swiss resistance movement to Britain, known as Operation Edelweiss. The report of the Swiss official investigation into the Gladio affair, led by Judge Pierre Cornu and published last September, shows that, with admirable meticulousness, a supply of Swiss army buttons and other insignia was lodged, against the day they might come in useful, in the safe of the Swiss embassy in Bryanston Square.
Discussions, the Swiss inquiry revealed, had also taken place between 1976 and 1979 about the evacuation of a Swiss government-in-exile to Ireland if the Russians had come over the Alps.
Unlike the Nato countries, Cattalan claimed, the Swiss banned British or other foreign military personnel from taking part in exercises on Swiss soil. According to the Swiss report, however, such exercises did take place, some codenamed Targum, probably annually between 1973 and 1979, certainly from 1982 to 1988. Others, called Cravat and Susanne, were held in 1976, 1978, 1983, 1986 and 1988.
The report frankly confesses that such were the links between the Swiss and the British officials and agents who dealt with the Gladio scheme that British intelligence knew more about Swiss plans than the Swiss government and high command.
No detail was too small for the Swiss judges. Their report expressed concern, for instance, that the issuing by Swiss officials of false documents to Swiss agents of Gladio who went abroad infringed federal law. It went on to point out that one Swiss Gladio agent who had used his false identity card to obtain a fishing licence in Britain had contravened Article Six of the Swiss penal code, which covers the punishment in Switzerland of crimes committed by Swiss abroad.
Meanwhile, at least one British family still mourns a victim of the darkest chapter of Gladio, a series of bombings a decade ago which were at first attributed to the Red Brigades.
The largest, at Bologna railway station on 2 August 1980, claimed 86 lives. Harry Mitchell, a civil servant, and his wife Shirley, of Bloomfield Road, Bath, lost their daughter Catherine, who was 21. She died in the blast with her 22-year-old fiance John Kolpinski, from Bristol. Her body was so disfigured that it was identified only by the Miss Selfridge label on her blouse.
The explosion was part of a series of atrocities which left at least 300 dead as bombs went off in the Piazza Fontana in Milan, on trains at Brescia and on the Naples-Milan express in a tunnel south of Bologna. The Mitchells are outraged that Britain is refusing to extradite back to Italy one of those sought for questioning about the crime, Roberto Fiore.
Fiore, now 33, has lived freely here in Pimlico since 1980, running a prosperous accommodation agency and mixing in extreme right, anti-semitic circles. There is strong suspicion that MI6 is grateful for information Fiore was able to give them about Lebanon, where he learnt some of his terrorist techniques, and is blocking efforts to question him.
The Mitchells got no satisfaction when they wrote about the Fiore affair to Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street in June 1985. But the other day they were been brought up to date on British government thnking. On 29 March, Sir Patrick Mayhew, then Attorney-General, explained in a letter to the Mitchells' MP, Chris Patten, how British justice could do nothing about sending Fiore back.
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.
Francesco Cossiga, who stepped down from the presidency of Italy in April, helped to organise Gladio when he was Interior Minister. He recalls how Britain and the US collaborated in setting up the network in Italy in 1951, 'concerned with what might happen to Europe if it were invaded'.
He traces the official formalities at the inauguration of Gladio by the principal figures of the Atlantic Alliance. At the instigation of the Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe, the first statute of the clandestine planning committee to oversee Gladio was approved.
'It was agreed that three countries, the US, France and Britain, would be permanent members and the rest would be associate members - that meant Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece and Turkey. Italy was invited to become an associate member. Italy turned down this invitation and instead asked to become an permanent member, but did not get an answer at the time. In 1956 Germany joined.' Cossiga adds: 'It was standard policy of Nato to deny the existence of anything that it had been agreed to keep secret.'
He described how he was Interior Minister when Moro was kidnapped. He contacted Merlyn Rees, then Britain's Home Secretary, for help and together they visited the SAS headquarters in Hereford. Thus Gladio in Italy was seeking help from British forces involved in training Gladio personnel so that the Italians could put an end to an Italian terrorist action launched with the knowledge of Gladio itself.
Decimo Garau, an army doctor and friend of Cossiga, told us how he had a week's training at Poole with British special services, practising parachute landings in the English Channel before visiting the SAS at Hereford.
No less important were the continuing concerns about the political strength of the Communists. Senator Libero Gualtieri, head of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into Gladio, told us: 'When Gladio was started, the Americans would often insist in their briefings, their meetings, that the organisation also had to be used to counter any insurgencies.'
Galtieri explained how the secret service tail soon began to wag the government dog. He cites the case of Amintore Fanfani, Prime Minister six times, and Giovanni Spadolini, also Prime Minister and Defence Minister, neither of whom was informed of Gladio. 'To a large extent Gladio was hidden from the politicians because we allowed a situation in which the secret services had the task of those in power and not vice versa.'
LICIO GELLI, head of the P2 freemasons' lodge, who fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, was one of the greyest eminences in post-war Italy. He later became enmeshed with the Vatican in the Banco Ambrosiano swindle. After the war, he was recruited by Canadian occupying forces to work in the 'stay-behind' operation being set up throughout Italy. There were, he told us, 250 Gladio squads, each consisting of nine men.
'Many came from the ranks of the mercenaries who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and many came from the fascist republic of Salo. They chose individuals who were proved anti-Communists. I know it was a well-constructed organisation. Had Communist strength grown in Italy, America would have assisted us, we would have unleashed another war and we would have been generously supplied with arms from the air.'
He is convinced that the Italian authorities let Aldo Moro go to his death. 'I think Moro could have been saved. Everything can be salvaged in Italy if someone wants to salvage it.'
Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a convinced Fascist who was a member of the extremist Ordine Nuovo organisation and had close links with Gladio, has testified to us of his personal involvement in such schemes. Now serving a long sentence in Parma prison for his part in the killing of three carabinieri in the village of Peteano, he talked despite the Italian authorities' efforts to prevent access to him.
'You had to attack civilians, the people, women children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game,' he said. '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.'
Vinciguerra recounted how the authorities covered the traces after the killing of the three carabinieri. 'A whole mechanism came into action - that is, the carabinieri, the Minister of the Interior, the customs services and the military and civilian intelligence services accepted the ideological reasoning behind the attack.'
The commanders of the carabinieri foiled a thorough investigation of the Peteano affair for years, he claims. 'It was more convenient to cover it up than to turn on those who killed their comrades. All the members of the Red Brigades were known by the police, the carabinieri and the intelligence bureaux and on one made nay attempt to stop them. So you see, "revolutionary warfare" should not be seen as being directed against Western democracy but rather as the means of defence adopted by Western democracies and implemented cynically and indiscriminately.'
The gravest charge against the Gladio project is that it co-operated in - or at least did nothing to prevent - the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro, a former Prime Minister of Italy. Moro, a Catholic and Christian Democrat, was known for his view that the Italian Communist Party should be brought closer to government.
It is well known that Moro died in March 1978 at the hand of the Red Brigades. What is less understood, but borne out by a number of well-informed witnesses, is that the Red Brigades were deeply infiltrated by Western intelligence. At the time of Moro's killing the principal leaders of the Brigades were in prison. Colonel Oswald Le Winter of the CIA, who served as a US liaison officer with Gladio, goes as far as to say that the planning staff of the Brigades was made up of intelligence agents. From his prison cell, Vinciguerra agrees.
How was it that Colonel Guglielmi, a senior figure in Italian intelligence, was on hand in the Via Fani in Rome when Moro was kidnapped and his body-guards murdered? Why did Guglielmi say he was there by accident on the way to lunch with a friend when the kidnapping happened at nine o'clock in the morning? Why was it that the bullets which killed the bodyguards were of a type only used by the Italian special services?
As Gladio winds down and governments on the continent declare they have shut down their parts of the operation, the silence in Whitehall and the almost total lack of curiosity among MPs about an affair in which Britain was so centrally involved are remarkable. Perhaps John Major's new commitment to more openness in government will eventually produce some answers to the many Gladio riddles.
'The Ringmasters', the first of three weekly Observer Film Company programmes on Gladio in the 'Timewatch' series, will be shown on BBC2 on Wednesday at 8.15pm. They are directed by Allan Francovich and produced by Kimi Zabihyan.
Clarion notes
The text above was taken by Clarion directly from a copy of the Observer.
Like other newspaper articles on Gladio, it is (self-evidently) filled with contrived apologetics for Gladio and terrorism. To take just a few examples, on page 54 there is a photograph with the caption: "Aldo Moro's body is found in Rome in 1978. Could the secret services have prevented his kidnap?" In fact the real question - as the text of even this article makes clear - is not whether the "secret services" could have prevented his kidnap and murder but whether they were involved in murdering him. Gladio, the Observer asserts in the first paragraph, without a shred of supporting argument or evidence, "was set up with the best intentions". We are not told how the Observer was able to divine the intentions of the the network's creators. The description of US Marines invading Belgium in 1984 is so badly written that it is impossible to be sure what it means. Is O'Shaughnessy suggesting that they murdered a Belgian police officer? And afterwards were in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice with planted evidence? And this he describes as a "farce" and "opera buffa".
On page 53 there are three photographs from right to left, a portrait photograph of an elderly man wearing glasses, rubble in a damaged building with men climbing over it, and another portrait photograph of a younger man. The caption reads: "A key figure in the 'stay-behind' operation, P2 Lodge head Licio Gelli, and (right) fascist terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra. Was Gladio involved in the bombing of Bologna railway station?(centre)/Photographs by Vladimir Sichov and Graham Macindoe" _________________ Make love, not money.
I actually uploaded those Gladio videos to google and despite their reseting the count of how many times they had been viewed I make it around 100,000 in total. _________________ UK-based alternative news site:
http://www.underthecarpet.co.uk
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 12:39 am Post subject: GLADIO - Europe's best kept secret
GLADIO - Europe's best kept secret
They were the agents who were to 'stay behind' if the Red Army overran Western Europe. But the network that was set up with the best intentions degenerated in some countries into a front for terrorism and far-right political agitation.Hugh O'Shaughnessy reports.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy, Observer, 7 June 1992, pages 53-54
The codename was Gladio and it was the most ambitious and secret operation in Western Europe since the Second World War. But now, with the Cold War over, it is ending on notes of pure farce.
The Belgian authorities have lost the code for getting in touch with their most secret agents, men who would have gone into action when the Soviet army swept into Flanders: they have no means of working it out again. One Belgian officer, Colonel Bernard Legrand, knows some of the names but he won't co-operate: it's confidential he says. The British and United States governments know how to break the code but won't tell the wretched Belgians.
At 10.15 on the morning of 31 January last year Colonel Jean Bodart of Belgian military intelligence landed in a Belgian air force plane at RAF Northolt. He collected 13 packages filled with cyphers and an old Remington type-writer from British intelligence and two hours later flew back to Brussels. The packages contained the names of the members of the Gladio network in Belgium. The Remington typewriter was part of the decoding equipment. But Belgian intelligence, whose skills at cryptography have sadly been allowed to get rusty, have wrestled in vain with the task of decyphering the names in the packages.
One day in 1984 a party of US Marines set out from an airport north of London. Highly trained men, each fluent in one Eastern European language, they parachuted to their secret rendezvous and were met by an agent, a local bank manager, who offered them guidance. They lived off the land for a fortnight, hiding from the local civilian population as they stalked towards their prey. Steathily they approached their objective and opened fire, killing a warrant officer. One of the Marines lost an eye in the operation.
Their language skills were not much use: the objective was the police station in the sleepy southern Belgian town of Vielsalm and none of the Marines spoke French. If they had, they could have saved one man's life and another man's eye.
The object of the exercise had been twofold: to jolt the local Belgian police into a higher state of alert and, no less important, to give the impression to the population at large that the comfortable and well-fed Kingdom of Belgium was on the brink of red revolution. Guns used in the operation were later planted by a shadowy Belgian intelligence outfit in the Brussels squat used by a Communist splinter group.
On such notes of opera buffa is Gladio being wound up. Mercifully for the reputations of all concerned perhaps, the farce is overlaying memories of large-scale incursions into terrorism and crime which transformed a clever plan to defend Western democracy into a scheme which, according to startling new evidence unearthed by Observer researchers in many countries, struck at the very roots of Western values of freedom and the rule of law.
Starting as an unexceptional piece of forward planning, it moved on to unauthorised political surveillance and then, finally, to the mounting of a series of outrages with the far Right which cost the lives of hundreds of innocent Europeans. The dead include at least one Western European leader, Aldo Moro of Italy. Much still remains to be investigated, particularly about Gladio's operations in Franco's Spain.
The strategy behind Gladio when it was set up in the late 1940s was impeccable. As Stalin consolidated his political and military power in Eastern Europe and promoted his version of totalitarianism where he could, the Western allies came together to prevent any recurrence of the debacles at the beginning of the Second World War when democracies were knocked over like nine-pins by the Wehrmacht.
In 1939 and 1940 the German army had been able to overrun its European neighbours with supreme ease. Polish cavalry was no match for German tanks, the Dutch surrendered after Rotterdam had been destroyed from the air, Paris was taken without difficulty, scarcely a shot was fired as the Nazis conquered Denmark. The Channel Islands, the only British soil Hitler conquered, had already been deemed indefensible.
As the swastika flew everywhere in Europe, from Brittany to the Russian steppes, it was only with the greatest difficulty and sacrifice that resistance movements were established from Britain which were eventually to be capable of harrying and sabotaging the German army of occupation and finally to collaborate with the Allied forces of liberation.
Such a lack of foresight, it was agreed in Western capitals, was never to be permitted again in the face of Stalin's threat, particularly after the Communist putsch in Prague in 1948. Under the aegis of Britain and the US, a secret network of recruits was to be set up all over the continent. They were to be provided with caches of radios, money and weapons.
If the Red Army did overrun Western Europe and Western armies were defeated and forced to flee, there would be someone left with intimate local knowledge who could receive orders from abroad, send out information and go into action against the Soviet occupation forces. They were not to be so many Captain Mainwarings, openly organised in Dad's Army outfits around the local drill hall, who could be easily rounded up by the Russians. Their role was to be serious and totally clandestine. They were to be known as 'stay-behinds'
This continent-wide operation, which became known as Gladio, also had the task of keeping an eye on what were considered domestic threats to Western democracies by agents of the Soviet Union. In the post-war years when Moscow-line Communist parties were strong, particularly in France and Italy, that task was challenging. It was to lead to particular abuses.
Although the networks were initially set up at the initiative of democratically elected national leaders, they soon took on and independent life of their own so that even commanders-in-chief, defence ministers, prime ministers and presidents were unaware of what they were doing.
The network and their caches were to remain ultra-secret until 1990. General Bernard Rogers, the former US commander of Nato, for instance, says he was unaware of the details. 'The organisation of any stay-behinds must have been at the national level and not at the Nato level,' he comments.
The lid was lifted a little in November 1990 by the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who had strongly denied the existence of Gladio for well over a decade. In a statement to parliament in Rome, Andreotti became the first major politician to talk publicly of the project.
IT ALL started at the end of the last war. On 27 January 1949 Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, set out the grand strategy in a top secret and personal letter to Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Socialist Prime Minister who was later to become secretary-general of Nato. As the idea took shape, Sir Stewart wrote of Anglo-Belgian collaboration in particular:
The present object of this collaboration should be directed to two main aims:
a) The improvement of our information on the subject of Cominform and potential enemy activities in so far as they concern our two countries.
b) The preparation of appropriate intelligence and action organisations in the event of war.
At the same time the letter, a copy of which is in The Observer's possession, throws light on what became an increasingly important factor in the Gladio operation - the rivalry between the British and the Americans.
Menzies continued:
I have always regarded American participation in the defence of Western Europe as a matter of capital importance. I am however, convinced that all effort, American not excluded, must be integrated into an harmonious whole. Should, therefore, the Americans wish to pursue with your Service certain preparations to meet the needs of war, I regard it as essential - and I understand I have your agreement - that these activities should be co-ordinated with my own. Such co-ordination, moreover, will prevent undesirable repercussions with the Western Union chiefs of Staff. I have already indicated to the Head of the American Service that I am ready to work out plans for detailed co-operation with him on this basis, and I therefore suggest that any projects formulated by them should be referred back to Washington for subsequent discussion between the British and American Services in London.
The correspondence should, Menzies suggested, be regarded as 'highly secret'.
Early the following month Spaak wrote back to Menzies agreeing with his ideas but begging Britain and the US to get their act together.
I agree with you that it would be highly desirable that the three services (British, American and Belgian) should collaborate closely. If two of them, the American and the British, refuse that collaboration, the situation of the Belgian service would be extremely delicate and difficult.
Thus I feel it is indispensable that at the highest level there should be negotiations to settle this question...
In the event both powers helped to pay for the Gladio operations in Belgium. Senator Roger Lallemand, had of the parliamentary inquiry into Gladio set up in Belgium after Andreotti's revelations, recalls: 'What was striking about the Belgian stay-behinds was that the financing at the beginning was in part undertaken by the British and the Americans. We were able to note that the Belgian stay-behinds had received gold coins...The sums were quite large and in fact were stored away since they couldn't have been used.'
As the years went by, the stay-behind network, which ended up as a semi-detached operation of Nato, extended across Europe, the British taking the lead in Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the Iberian peninsula, the Americans elsewhere. The fact that various powers involved were not members of Nato - did not hinder Gladio being extended to their territory. The names of all the stay-behinds were lodged for safe keeping in London and Boston, Massachusetts.
The extreme secrecy, and lack of supervision of the Gladio networks by elected governments meant that time and again they were to fall victim to right-wing extremists inside and outside the Western security services, who set their own political agendas and acted on them.
The way down that slippery slope was typified by the attitude of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's chief of counter-intelligence. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, Angleton was convinced that Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt were Moscow agents. His black list of pro-Communists also included Henry Kissinger, the Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson and Averell Harriman, a former US Ambassador in Moscow and governor of New York.
A US military field manual published for the guidance of its officers stated: 'There may be times when host-country governments fall into passivity or indecision in face of Communist or Communist-inspired subversion and react with inadequate vigor to intelligence estimates transmitted by US agencies...In such cases US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince host-country governments and public opinion of the reality of insurgent action and assess the counter-action.'
Although doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the text, Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA who joined US intelligence as a young man during the Second World War, has no doubt it is genuine.
In Belgium, for instance, all evidence points to the fact that a US-born Gladio agent, Wood Gardiner, infiltrated the Belgian pacifist movement and persuaded some of its members in 1984 to steal shells from the missile base at Florenne. When the theft was discovered it did the pacifist cause no good at all.
More important were the apparently random shootings in Belgian supermarkets which ended with a particularly nasty incident in 1983 in the town of Aalst, a few miles from Brussels, which became known as the Brabant-Walloon massacres. Senator Lallemand has linked the killings to 'the work of foreign governments or of intelligence services working for foreigners, a terrorism aimed a destabilising democratic society'.
Martial Lekeu, a former member of the Belgian gendarmerie who was close to the investigation of the atrocities, that members of his own force were involved in the murders and that official inquiries into it were aborted.
The British authorities, leaders with Washington in the scheme, are refusing all comment on Gladio. But
continued overleaf
The secrets of Gladio
continued from previous page
information about Britain's role has come from parliamentary and other investigations carried out elsewhere in Europe.
Belgian documents, starting with Spaak's letter of 1949, show what a major role Britain has constantly played. Papers presented to the parliamentary inquiry set up in Belgium on Gladio show that in Belgium in 1981 and in Britain in 1982 Belgian personnel received training from British instructors. In April 1982 Belgians prepared for a Gladio exercise involving Britain and the US, codenamed Blackbird, which was called off at the last minute when Argentina invaded the Falklands.
In 1990 Colonel S. Schwebach of Belgian intelligence reported to his Defence Minister that an exercise called Waterland had taken place the previous year. In it, members of the Royal Marines Special Boat Squadron parachuted into the seas off the coast of Flanders, were guided ashore by Belgian civilians and went on to simulate the dynamiting of the massive canal locks at Zeebrugge.
There were even reports, so far unconfirmed, in Belgium that Belgian personnel had been part of a recent Gladio exercise in Britain aimed at demonstrating that Dover docks could be put out of action were the Russians to occupy Kent.
Britain was active too in the Gladio operation in Switzerland. Effrem Cattalan, who headed the Swiss P26 intelligence organisation and helped to organise Gladio in his country, told us how his organisation 'has English colleagues who instructed them in general training, like covert operations and parachute jumps at night in which England has had exceptionally good experience since the war'.
The British also collaborated, he said, with his predecessor at P26, Colonel Albert Bachmann, for the possible evacuation of the headquarters of a Swiss resistance movement to Britain, known as Operation Edelweiss. The report of the Swiss official investigation into the Gladio affair, led by Judge Pierre Cornu and published last September, shows that, with admirable meticulousness, a supply of Swiss army buttons and other insignia was lodged, against the day they might come in useful, in the safe of the Swiss embassy in Bryanston Square.
Discussions, the Swiss inquiry revealed, had also taken place between 1976 and 1979 about the evacuation of a Swiss government-in-exile to Ireland if the Russians had come over the Alps.
Unlike the Nato countries, Cattalan claimed, the Swiss banned British or other foreign military personnel from taking part in exercises on Swiss soil. According to the Swiss report, however, such exercises did take place, some codenamed Targum, probably annually between 1973 and 1979, certainly from 1982 to 1988. Others, called Cravat and Susanne, were held in 1976, 1978, 1983, 1986 and 1988.
The report frankly confesses that such were the links between the Swiss and the British officials and agents who dealt with the Gladio scheme that British intelligence knew more about Swiss plans than the Swiss government and high command.
No detail was too small for the Swiss judges. Their report expressed concern, for instance, that the issuing by Swiss officials of false documents to Swiss agents of Gladio who went abroad infringed federal law. It went on to point out that one Swiss Gladio agent who had used his false identity card to obtain a fishing licence in Britain had contravened Article Six of the Swiss penal code, which covers the punishment in Switzerland of crimes committed by Swiss abroad.
Meanwhile, at least one British family still mourns a victim of the darkest chapter of Gladio, a series of bombings a decade ago which were at first attributed to the Red Brigades.
The largest, at Bologna railway station on 2 August 1980, claimed 86 lives. Harry Mitchell, a civil servant, and his wife Shirley, of Bloomfield Road, Bath, lost their daughter Catherine, who was 21. She died in the blast with her 22-year-old fiance John Kolpinski, from Bristol. Her body was so disfigured that it was identified only by the Miss Selfridge label on her blouse.
The explosion was part of a series of atrocities which left at least 300 dead as bombs went off in the Piazza Fontana in Milan, on trains at Brescia and on the Naples-Milan express in a tunnel south of Bologna. The Mitchells are outraged that Britain is refusing to extradite back to Italy one of those sought for questioning about the crime, Roberto Fiore.
Fiore, now 33, has lived freely here in Pimlico since 1980, running a prosperous accommodation agency and mixing in extreme right, anti-semitic circles. There is strong suspicion that MI6 is grateful for information Fiore was able to give them about Lebanon, where he learnt some of his terrorist techniques, and is blocking efforts to question him.
The Mitchells got no satisfaction when they wrote about the Fiore affair to Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street in June 1985. But the other day they were been brought up to date on British government thnking. On 29 March, Sir Patrick Mayhew, then Attorney-General, explained in a letter to the Mitchells' MP, Chris Patten, how British justice could do nothing about sending Fiore back.
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.
Francesco Cossiga, who stepped down from the presidency of Italy in April, helped to organise Gladio when he was Interior Minister. He recalls how Britain and the US collaborated in setting up the network in Italy in 1951, 'concerned with what might happen to Europe if it were invaded'.
He traces the official formalities at the inauguration of Gladio by the principal figures of the Atlantic Alliance. At the instigation of the Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe, the first statute of the clandestine planning committee to oversee Gladio was approved.
'It was agreed that three countries, the US, France and Britain, would be permanent members and the rest would be associate members - that meant Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece and Turkey. Italy was invited to become an associate member. Italy turned down this invitation and instead asked to become an permanent member, but did not get an answer at the time. In 1956 Germany joined.' Cossiga adds: 'It was standard policy of Nato to deny the existence of anything that it had been agreed to keep secret.'
He described how he was Interior Minister when Moro was kidnapped. He contacted Merlyn Rees, then Britain's Home Secretary, for help and together they visited the SAS headquarters in Hereford. Thus Gladio in Italy was seeking help from British forces involved in training Gladio personnel so that the Italians could put an end to an Italian terrorist action launched with the knowledge of Gladio itself.
Decimo Garau, an army doctor and friend of Cossiga, told us how he had a week's training at Poole with British special services, practising parachute landings in the English Channel before visiting the SAS at Hereford.
No less important were the continuing concerns about the political strength of the Communists. Senator Libero Gualtieri, head of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into Gladio, told us: 'When Gladio was started, the Americans would often insist in their briefings, their meetings, that the organisation also had to be used to counter any insurgencies.'
Galtieri explained how the secret service tail soon began to wag the government dog. He cites the case of Amintore Fanfani, Prime Minister six times, and Giovanni Spadolini, also Prime Minister and Defence Minister, neither of whom was informed of Gladio. 'To a large extent Gladio was hidden from the politicians because we allowed a situation in which the secret services had the task of those in power and not vice versa.'
LICIO GELLI, head of the P2 freemasons' lodge, who fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, was one of the greyest eminences in post-war Italy. He later became enmeshed with the Vatican in the Banco Ambrosiano swindle. After the war, he was recruited by Canadian occupying forces to work in the 'stay-behind' operation being set up throughout Italy. There were, he told us, 250 Gladio squads, each consisting of nine men.
'Many came from the ranks of the mercenaries who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and many came from the fascist republic of Salo. They chose individuals who were proved anti-Communists. I know it was a well-constructed organisation. Had Communist strength grown in Italy, America would have assisted us, we would have unleashed another war and we would have been generously supplied with arms from the air.'
He is convinced that the Italian authorities let Aldo Moro go to his death. 'I think Moro could have been saved. Everything can be salvaged in Italy if someone wants to salvage it.'
Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a convinced Fascist who was a member of the extremist Ordine Nuovo organisation and had close links with Gladio, has testified to us of his personal involvement in such schemes. Now serving a long sentence in Parma prison for his part in the killing of three carabinieri in the village of Peteano, he talked despite the Italian authorities' efforts to prevent access to him.
'You had to attack civilians, the people, women children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game,' he said. '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.'
Vinciguerra recounted how the authorities covered the traces after the killing of the three carabinieri. 'A whole mechanism came into action - that is, the carabinieri, the Minister of the Interior, the customs services and the military and civilian intelligence services accepted the ideological reasoning behind the attack.'
The commanders of the carabinieri foiled a thorough investigation of the Peteano affair for years, he claims. 'It was more convenient to cover it up than to turn on those who killed their comrades. All the members of the Red Brigades were known by the police, the carabinieri and the intelligence bureaux and on one made nay attempt to stop them. So you see, "revolutionary warfare" should not be seen as being directed against Western democracy but rather as the means of defence adopted by Western democracies and implemented cynically and indiscriminately.'
The gravest charge against the Gladio project is that it co-operated in - or at least did nothing to prevent - the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro, a former Prime Minister of Italy. Moro, a Catholic and Christian Democrat, was known for his view that the Italian Communist Party should be brought closer to government.
It is well known that Moro died in March 1978 at the hand of the Red Brigades. What is less understood, but borne out by a number of well-informed witnesses, is that the Red Brigades were deeply infiltrated by Western intelligence. At the time of Moro's killing the principal leaders of the Brigades were in prison. Colonel Oswald Le Winter of the CIA, who served as a US liaison officer with Gladio, goes as far as to say that the planning staff of the Brigades was made up of intelligence agents. From his prison cell, Vinciguerra agrees.
How was it that Colonel Guglielmi, a senior figure in Italian intelligence, was on hand in the Via Fani in Rome when Moro was kidnapped and his body-guards murdered? Why did Guglielmi say he was there by accident on the way to lunch with a friend when the kidnapping happened at nine o'clock in the morning? Why was it that the bullets which killed the bodyguards were of a type only used by the Italian special services?
As Gladio winds down and governments on the continent declare they have shut down their parts of the operation, the silence in Whitehall and the almost total lack of curiosity among MPs about an affair in which Britain was so centrally involved are remarkable. Perhaps John Major's new commitment to more openness in government will eventually produce some answers to the many Gladio riddles.
'The Ringmasters', the first of three weekly Observer Film Company programmes on Gladio in the 'Timewatch' series, will be shown on BBC2 on Wednesday at 8.15pm. They are directed by Allan Francovich and produced by Kimi Zabihyan.
Clarion notes
The text above was taken by Clarion directly from a copy of the Observer.
Like other newspaper articles on Gladio, it is (self-evidently) filled with contrived apologetics for Gladio and terrorism. To take just a few examples, on page 54 there is a photograph with the caption: "Aldo Moro's body is found in Rome in 1978. Could the secret services have prevented his kidnap?" In fact the real question - as the text of even this article makes clear - is not whether the "secret services" could have prevented his kidnap and murder but whether they were involved in murdering him. Gladio, the Observer asserts in the first paragraph, without a shred of supporting argument or evidence, "was set up with the best intentions". We are not told how the Observer was able to divine the intentions of the the network's creators. The description of US Marines invading Belgium in 1984 is so badly written that it is impossible to be sure what it means. Is O'Shaughnessy suggesting that they murdered a Belgian police officer? And afterwards were in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice with planted evidence? And this he describes as a "farce" and "opera buffa".
I recently had an email saying that the Gladio Timewatch videos I put up on google video have been taken down due to copyright infringement. _________________ UK-based alternative news site:
http://www.underthecarpet.co.uk
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 5:25 pm Post subject:
Can you challenge that decision?
Do you want to?
What did the email actually say?
Do you know if it was the BBC that instigated the action?
Are there alternative video hosts?
It's important to make an issue of this one as it's clearly the thin end of the wedge.
This is arguably the most important series ever made about European Terrorism and it isn't available hardly anywhere.
If you can send me a CD of the series I will host it on a server.
You might also try putting up 15 minutes or so of edited highlights?
Francovitch is (was) to be respected, however that Gladio series had input from two spook sources
--the Searchlight organisation
--Oswald Le Winter (MI6-connected).
..therefore should be taken with a couple of barrel-fulls of salt. Those who uncritically quote this programme consistently ignore these two inputs.
There has never been anything of substance on the British end of Gladio: Dorril promised it, but never delivered...
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 12:14 am Post subject:
One of the most damning bits of anti-fascist and anti-spook television ever made and nearly successfully buried and Mr Larry O'Hara blithely decides that whilst the director might be a nice guy his film is rubbish.
He's also plain wrong about the lack of available stuff about the UK connection. There's plenty in the Danielle Ganser book and some of the most damning in the Hugh O'Shaunnersey article.
Having a cheap pop ad Dorrill too... Do we have to put up with his constant flippant drivel?
Larry O'Hara wrote:
Francovitch is (was) to be respected, however that Gladio series had input from two spook sources
--the Searchlight organisation
--Oswald Le Winter (MI6-connected).
..therefore should be taken with a couple of barrel-fulls of salt. Those who uncritically quote this programme consistently ignore these two inputs.
There has never been anything of substance on the British end of Gladio: Dorril promised it, but never delivered...
One of the most damning bits of anti-fascist and anti-spook television ever made and nearly successfully buried and Mr Larry O'Hara blithely decides that whilst the director might be a nice guy his film is rubbish.
He's also plain wrong about the lack of available stuff about the UK connection. There's plenty in the Danielle Ganser book and some of the most damning in the Hugh O'Shaunnersey article.
Having a cheap pop ad Dorrill too... Do we have to put up with his constant flippant drivel?
Larry O'Hara wrote:
Francovitch is (was) to be respected, however that Gladio series had input from two spook sources
--the Searchlight organisation
--Oswald Le Winter (MI6-connected).
..therefore should be taken with a couple of barrel-fulls of salt. Those who uncritically quote this programme consistently ignore these two inputs.
There has never been anything of substance on the British end of Gladio: Dorril promised it, but never delivered...
Leaving aside the routine personal abuse I have come to expect on here.
1) The Ganser book cites as its key source on the British end of Gladio the Timewatch programmes in question.
2) You do not deny, or disprove, my comments about Le Winter & Searchlight. Or do you see either/both as credible sources? I bet you do.
3) I am not (here) having a 'pop' at Dorrill, merely referring to the fact that he promised to analyse the Brit end of Gladio (in his short-lived version of Lobster) but never did.
4) I never said the film was 'rubbish'--but then, attribution of fictitious quotations & views to me on here is routine, and not just from Dogs Breath.
Mr Gosling, you have already had to eat humble pie on this forum recently when claiming that Machon/Shayler never made pro-FBI comments over Lockerbie in her book. Thus, I can see that rather than engage with, or refute, what I have said here you will again engage in abuse & invocations to ban me--and banning me is clearly your intention, because I have the temerity to make evidence-based comments. So be it. Other posters on this forum (especially those who look past centrally-imposed labels like 'critic') can make up their own mind--or at least some of them can.
Joined: 15 Aug 2006 Posts: 137 Location: southend essex
Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 2:36 pm Post subject:
I can see more bannings on the horzion. I remain thankful to you Larry and Paul Scott for your insightful postings. There is clearly a cultish element on this site. I continual to look past the labeling and make my own mind up. Still I find the abuse distasteful and hope is stops soon.
Are you able to question Google's decision at all?
It is likely that Frankovich died because he made this film so it would at least be nice to know who called for it to be pulled.
Please will someone else upload them to google video
Skeptic wrote:
I recently had an email saying that the Gladio Timewatch videos I put up on google video have been taken down due to copyright infringement.
Forget Google - you're just playing the Quantico/Verizon game.
Quote:
Are there alternative video hosts?
Brasscheck
Liveleak
TruTube
and many others on the way...
Bottom line - go interview Cossiga?
As for the in-fighting here - it's just human nature when entrenched camps collide, IMO. Hence my stance that 'movements' should be confined to the bathroom... _________________ "We will lead every revolution against us!" - attrib: Theodor Herzl
"Timely Demise to All Oppressors - at their Convenience!" - 'Interesting Times', Terry Pratchett
Joined: 28 Jul 2005 Posts: 274 Location: North West London
Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:03 pm Post subject:
What are you lot on about? Allan Francovich’s legendary three-part BBC ‘Timewatch’ series (1992) concerning ‘Gladio’ is up here still, for anyone to watch:
Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2008 2:05 pm Post subject: Cossiga, Gladio Stalwart, Says it like it's the 1970's
Cossiga of Gladio fame opens his mouth once more and states it bluntly.....
---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, 20 November 2008
– as Cossiga calls to put out the flame before the fire spreads ‘THE forces of law and order should massacre the demonstrators without pity’ was the ruling class response from former Italian Prime Minister and president Francesco Cossiga to the revolutionary eruption of millions of students and workers that for over a month have held general strikes, mass demonstrations and occupations against the privatisation of education.
Last Friday saw over 500,000 university and high school students, teachers and lecturers from across Italy take part in a national demonstration through Rome against government spending cuts in the higher education sector.
They were joined by thousands of workers after the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) union had called for a ‘mass mobilisation’.
Sure to send shock waves that resonate throughout Europe, is the Italian students’ call for international support from students and workers abroad who will positively warm to the bold declaration from youth given to the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government: ‘we won’t pay for your crisis’.
This powerful movement of Italian workers and youth to defend state education has, however, not only rocked the Italian government but has also exposed the Italian trade union bureaucracy with its reformist outlook to be incapable of leading a fight. The CGIL, Italy’s largest trade union, could only manage to call a four-hour general strike for December 12.
Students, on the other hand, were clearly not put off by the news that three trade unions – the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Cisl), The General Labour Union (UGL) & The National Autonomous School Workers’ Trade Union (SNALS) – had withdrawn from of Friday’s university strike after holding ‘talks’ with the government, which was accused by the CGIL of dividing the unions.
The day before, Roma Tre students launched a ‘counter-inauguration’ of the academic year and later in the evening held a party of the ‘wave’ at the occupied faculty of arts of Roma Tre.
On the same day, Milanese students gathered at the central railway station in order to pressure Trenitalia to allow hundreds of students to travel with reduced prices to Rome to participate in the demonstration on Friday.
After police blocked the students from entering the platform, CGIL and left-wing party Rifondazione got their fares reduced to ‘market prices’ so students could attend on Friday.
There were at least three marches of students last Friday. One started at Piazzale Aldo Moro, the main entrance of the occupied Sapienza University, which was swelled by students who arrived from outside of Rome by special trains and buses.
Another march started at Piazzale dei Partigiani, near Piramide, composed of students of Roma Tre University, while secondary school students protesting against school reforms already passed by parliament assembled at Piazza della Repubblica.
At Piazza dei Cinquecento, near Termini station, students from other Italian universities joined the demonstration. At Piazza Venezia the parades joined together and headed towards Montecitorio, the location of the Italian Parliament.
Traffic was paralysed as students marched through the streets towards Piazza Navona where they joined CGIL and Italian Labour Union (UIL) members for the main rally.
What has sparked this explosion of anger and revolt are proposals put forward by the Italian government, among them Law 133, which is an attempt by the minister of education Mariastella Gelmini to dump the country’s economic crisis onto the working class by making drastic cuts to public expenditure on schools and universities.
On October 28th the government presented the Decreto Gelmini to the Senate for the final and decisive vote, on the day the union of teachers planned yet another big demonstration. By the weekend of November 7th students had been demonstrating nationally against the measures for more than three weeks.
The so-called Gelmini decree will lead to at least 87,000 teaching jobs and 44,500 administrative posts being lost at state schools over the next three academic years to 2012.
Many smaller schools are to be closed as part of eight billion euros in cuts. Universities also face the threat of privatisation by being allowed to have ‘Foundation’ status. They will be divided into institutions of class A and class B depending on the expenditure power of the respective region.
Able to benefit from private funding as a precursor to privatisation, ‘Foundations’ will rule out the opportunity of studying in university for many low-income students.
In primary schools the number of school teachers per class will be reduced from two to one. The school working week is also being reduced from 40 to 24 hours.
The government’s reform of the public university system has yet to be finalised but guidelines outlining further attacks were presented by Gelmini on November 6. These include a reduction in teaching hours, a rationalisation of the number of degree courses offered and plans to distribute 30 per cent of public funding on a performance-related basis.
Article 66 calls for the rationalisation of staff at universities. Only one in five vacancies amongst lecturers will be filled in the next few years.
The proposals also include clear racist policies like establishing ‘bridge classes’ for the children of immigrants. This is supported by Lega Nord which previously relished the introduction of fingerprinting for the identification Roma gypsy children.
This has led students to declare that they are building an anti-racist movement and expressed solidarity with immigrants under attack.
From October 1, there have been 300 recorded demonstrations against the reforms with 150 schools and 20 university departments occupied. Students claim 60 high schools have been occupied in Naples and 120 in the region of Campania, in southern Italy alone.
On October 23, an estimated 30,000 university students took over Rome’s streets. Marching to the chant of ‘Berlusconi is a piece of *’, students passed the train station, receiving cheers from young Kurdish immigrants.
The students then joined up with young people from the Horus social centre, which was brutally cleared out by the police a few days earlier. The students were met with a large police presence.
On October 27, some 10,000 students occupied La Sapienza University in Rome before moving away and blockading several main roads and the central railway station Roma Termini. Protests continued with students finally surrounding the Senate building in the city.
On October 29, the government passed Law 133 by 162 votes to 134. The Senate was forced to suspend the sitting twice due to the building being besieged by thousands of students demanding the withdrawal of the decree.
On the same day fascist youth attacked student demonstrations. The students and their supporters had arrived in the square after taking part in seven marches departing from various points of the city.
As the law was passed, students staged a sit-in outside the Senate’s Palazzo Madama building in Rome shouting, ‘Clowns, Clowns!’ referring to the politicians inside.
On October 30, an estimated one million teachers, university and high school students demonstrated in Rome following the ratification of the Gelmini reform. The demonstration was called by several unions led by the CGIL.
A number of students expressed their disgust at the government by throwing eggs and other objects at the ministry of education building in Trastevere. The demonstration was part of a one-day general strike by teachers. During the day, 90 per cent of schools were closed nationally. In Milan, at least 5,000 students occupied the Milan Stock Exchange in the Piazza Affari while chanting, ‘We won’t pay for your crisis’.
In Turin, an estimated 50,000 people protested and were accompanied by the city’s theatre orchestra. In Venice, the causeway linking the lagoon city to the mainland was occupied by several thousand young people.
On November 7, demonstrations and protests were held nationally in all the main cities and towns including Rome, Torino, Bari Bologna, Cagliari, Florence, Milan, Naples, Pisa, Lecce, Padua and Turin as well as in Palermo, Sicily.
Some 1,000 students attempted to occupy the Ostiense railway station in Rome when they were attacked by riot police. One student suffered a head wound during the clashes while others were also hurt by police batons.
In Naples, students marched in the thousands chanting, ‘If they block our future, we’ll block the city’. In Pisa, students staged sit-ins on several platforms at the railway station, while on November 10, students in Florence announced that they would hold a further protest and teach-in.
Berlusconi branded the protesters as ‘violent’ and Gelmini spoke of a ‘terrorist threat, comparing the protests to the Red Brigades in the 1970s.
As the demonstrations began, Berlusconi warned, ‘I want to give a weather warning: We won’t allow schools and universities to be occupied. . . I will call the interior minister and give him detailed instructions on how to intervene with the police forces to stop these things happening.’
Following the October 30 demonstrations he added: ‘I regret that young people have been manipulated by the left. . . I see a scandalous left wing which has the ability to reverse the truth and speak the contrary.’
But his condemnation was already overshadowed by Cossiga’s comments on October 28, in an interview with the far-right newspaper Quotidiano Nazional. Cossiga is a former Christian Democrat Prime Minister and President of Italy from 1985 to 1992. He is a now a lifetime member of the Senate.
When asked whether Berlusconi had, ‘gone too far in threatening the use of State force against the students,’ he replied, ‘I’m afraid that his words will not be followed by action’.
He then advised current Home Secretary Roberto Maroni of the Lega Nord, to ‘do what I did when I was Home Secretary. Withdraw the police from the streets and the universities, infiltrate the movement with agent provocateurs ready for anything and allow the demonstrators to run loose for a week or so, devastating shops, setting cars on fire and causing havoc in the streets. . .
‘Then, with public opinion on your side, the sound of ambulance sirens should drown out the sirens of police and carabinieri cars. . . the forces of law and order should massacre the demonstrators without pity and send them all to hospital.
‘Not arrest them – the magistrates would set them free straight away in any event – beat them bloody and beat the teachers stirring them up, bloody too.’
To the question, ‘The teachers, too?’ he replied, ‘The teachers above all. Not the older ones, of course. . . the young girls. Have you any idea of the seriousness of what’s happening? There are teachers indoctrinating children and encouraging them to demonstrate—that’s criminal behaviour!’
The interviewer replied, ‘But you realise what they would say in Europe after something like you suggest? “Fascism returns to Italy”, they’d say.’
Cossiga replied, ‘Rubbish, it’s the democratic way – put out the flame before the fire spreads.’
The revelation that the British government contemplated supporting an anti-communist coup in Italy in 1976 is not as surprising as might at first seem. It confirms a long British tradition of marching in lockstep with the global policies of the United States, even when those policies were morally ambiguous or misguided.
The political conditions of cold-war Italy that emerge from the declassified Foreign Office documents published by the Rome daily La Repubblica on Sunday would appear to justify the prevailing sense of strategic panic. The Italian Communist party (PCI) was threatening to achieve power through the ballot box, held back only by the fragile bulwark of a corrupt and effete Christian Democrat party (DC).
Communist participation in the government of a key Nato ally, as proposed two years later by DC leader Aldo Moro, could have momentous consequences. "The presence of communist ministers in the Italian government would pose an immediate security problem for the Alliance," Britain's ambassador to Nato, John Killick, warned London. The security of nuclear bases in Italy could be at risk, military secrets were likely to leak to Moscow, and the US Sixth Fleet's land base in Naples would no longer be secure.
It was not, then, surprising that a Foreign Office planning document, drawn up on May 6 1976, should consider "Action in support of a coup d'etat or other subversive action." British opinion was by no means monolithic on the subject. The country was, after all, under the Labour government of James Callaghan. Though apparently attractive, the idea of a surgical military coup was "unrealistic" for the Foreign Office planners, and an authoritarian government was considered just as unpalatable as a government comprising communists.
Britain's ambassador to Rome, Sir Guy Millard, wisely concluded there was not much his country could do, lamenting the fact that the fate of the country was in the undependable hands of the DC. But British planners ran through the whole gamut of options, including "Subversive or military intervention against the PCI". The latter included financial support for "democratic forces" and the encouragement of a coup. Callaghan was acutely aware of the sensitivity of the subject, highlighting the "grave harm" that would be caused if the documents became public, revealing Britain's "interference in the internal affairs of a European ally".
All this was at a time when Italy was wracked by industrial unrest, terrorist bombings and authentic coup plots enjoying varying degrees of support from the US government. 1976 saw the arrest on coup-plotting charges of Edgardo Sogno, a former resistance fighter turned anti-communist partisan who had also served as a diplomat in Washington. Sogno claimed in a memoir that his coup project had been given a green light by the Rome CIA station chief, who assured him of US support for "any initiative designed to keep the communists out of government".
In 1990, Sogno told the magazine Panorama that he had made a personal commitment to shoot anyone who was prepared to form a government with members of the PCI. The admission, and the anti-communist planning outlined in the Foreign Office documents, provide an interesting backdrop to the fate of Aldo Moro. The moderate DC leader was kidnapped by the Marxist revolutionaries of the Red Brigades on the day he was due to present a new government - enjoying for the first time the external support of the PCI - for a confidence vote in parliament. He was shot dead after 55 days in captivity, on May 9 1978.
The maverick journalist Mino Pecorelli, who had close ties to the Italian intelligence services and the anti-communist P2 masonic lodge, described the kidnap operation as bearing "the hallmark of a lucid superpower". Moro had to be removed because his "historic compromise" with the PCI was disturbing the post-war balance of power, he claimed. Like the FCO planners, Pecorelli saw the development as potentially destabilising for Moscow as well as for the west, its eastern bloc hegemony threatened by the model of Enrico Berlinguer's democratic "Eurocommunism".
(As at 11/7/2009) _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joint resolution replacing B3-2021, 2058, 2068, 2078 and 2087/90
A. having regard to the revelation by several European governments of the existence for 40 years of a clandestine parallel intelligence and armed operations organization in several Member States of the Community,
B. whereas for over 40 years this organization has escaped all democratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO,
C. fearing the danger that such clandestine network may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so,
D. whereas in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime as evidenced by, various judicial inquiries,
E. whereas these organizations operated and continue to operate completely outside the law since they are not subject to any parliamentary control and frequently those holding the highest government and constitutional posts are kept in the dark as to these matters,
F. whereas the various 'Gladio' organizations have at their disposal independent arsenals and military ressources which give them an unknown strike potential, thereby jeopardizing the democratic structures of the countries in which they are operating or have been operating,
G. greatly concerned at the existence of decision-making and operational bodies which are not subject to any form of democratic control and are of a completely clandestine nature at a time when greater Community cooperation in the field of security is a constant subject of discussion,
1. Condemns the clandestine creation of manipulative and operational networks and Calls for a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of these clandestine organizations or any splinter groups, their use for illegal interference in the internal political affairs of the countries concerned, the problem of terrorism in Europe and the possible collusion of the secret services of Member States or third countries;
2. Protests vigorously at the assumption by certain US military personnel at SHAPE and in NATO of the right to encourage the establishment in Europe of a clandestine intelligence and operation network;
3. Calls on the governments of the Member States to dismantle all clandestine military and paramilitary networks;
4. Calls on the judiciaries of the countries in which the presence of such military organizations has been ascertained to elucidate fully their composition and modus operandi and to clarify any action they may have taken to destabilize the democratic structure of the Member States;
5. Requests all the Member States to take the necessary measures, if necessary by establishing parliamentary committees of inquiry, to draw up a complete list of organizations active in this field, and at the same time to monitor their links with the respective state intelligence services and their links, if any, with terrorist action groups and/or other illegal practices;
6. Calls on the Council of Ministers to provide full information on the activities of these secret intelligence and operational services;
7. Calls on its competent committee to consider holding a hearing in order to clarify the role and impact of the 'Gladio' organization and any similar bodies;
8. Instructs its President fo forward this resolution to the Commission, the Council, the Secretary-General of NATO, the governments of the Member States and the United States Government."
This entry is from Wikisource, the free library of source texts. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
Gladio is old news though, there are some good books on the subject, the timewatch specials can be viewed on youtube. Newsnight covered it quite extensively when it came out.
If anyone has any decent links or books on Gladio please post them.
Managed to get a good book via inter library loan Puppet Masters - The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy - Philip Willan (don't inter lib loan it yet! I haven't finished reading it). It is also available on amazon.
PS: You must get through some serious popcorn Tony...LoL _________________ "The likelihood of one individual being right increases in direct proportion to the intensity to which others are trying to prove him[her] wrong."
- - Harry Segall
"The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves." Lenin 1917
The corporatists and fascists who have steered Europe into bankruptcy are now using their media assets to morph their favorite threat over the last two decades — Islamist terrorism — to a combined menace of Islamist terrorists teamed up with an international network of anarchists. The change of threat was necessary with corporatists and fascist-led governments in Europe besieged by workers and students who are militantly opposed to severe cuts in social spending that were dictated from supranational institutions in order to financially bail out greedy bankers and their lackeys in governments.
In Greece and Italy, where governments are under street pressure to resign over corruption and austerity moves, there are already signs that the paradigm shift from Islamist terrorism to leftist anarchism is already occurring, with highly-suspicious and likely false flag bombings taking place at embassies and other facilities.
Europe has seen such false flag terrorist attacks in the past blamed on leftist revolutionary groups like the Italian Red Brigades and the West German Red Army Faction, but actually carried out by a network of CIA and fascist operatives, supported by local police and intelligence agencies, to blame leftists for such attacks. The operation, known generally as "Gladio," was a ploy to damage the reputation of the Communist parties of Western Europe in order that they were not invited to join in any leftist government coalitions, particularly in Italy and France.
Gladio has raised its head again in the last decade, especially in Turkey, where the Gladio successor, "Ergenekon," has attempted coups and plotted and carried out false flag terrorist attacks in an effort to undermine the Justice and Development (AKP) government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Bombings at embassies in Athens and Rome followed massive street demonstrations directed at the Greek government's draconian budget and pension cuts on behalf of the international banking elite and similar moves, as well as corruption, by the Italian government. European law enforcement, which now serves as a virtual arm of the European Union bureaucrats and their banking allies, is pointing to a network of anarchists who may be carrying out the bombings. The same psychological operation is being used to lump together all Muslim groups opposed to neocon European policies in the Middle East, as well as Israeli human rights violations, as somehow being linked to a worldwide network of Islamic "jihadists."
The latter psy-op is now being advanced by the head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET), Jakob Scharf, who has close connections to Israel and is of Jewish descent. Scharf led a joint Danish PET-Swedish SAPO security service law enforcement team in self-congratulating themselves for rounding up a group of five alleged Islamist terrorists who were charged with planning to attack the Copenhagen offices of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in a Mumbai-like attack planned for January. Scharf stated, "It is our assessment that this is a militant Islamist group and they have links to international terrorist networks," adding that the group could have been linked to David Headley, an American charged with aiding in the Mumbai attacks. Scharf conveniently left out the fact that Headley was covertly working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) at the time of the Mumbai attacks and may have been a false flag terrorist operative working for U.S. intelligence.
Will 2011 see a return to Gladio false flag terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere? Early signs say yes.
Jyllands-Postensparked outrage among Muslims worldwide when it published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed considered blasphemous by Muslims. The newspaper's cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who approved the publication of the cartoons, was identified as being linked to various neocon and Israel Lobby operatives in Washington, including the propagandists at the neocon American Enterprise Institute. While Scharf, who has moved Denmark's PET closer to Mossad more than his predecessors have done, talks of international Islamist conspiracies to carry out terrorism, he is silent on the international conspiracy by Israeli propagandists to incite violence by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The neocon Mohammed cartoon operation, which incited violence that resulted in deaths from riots staged in cities in the Muslim world, never registered on Scharf's "criminal conspiracy meter" since he is part and parcel of it. Rose's columns have been welcomed by the neocon and Israel Lobby-owned and operated Wall Street Journal.
Scharf's operation against the alleged terrorists, lauded by the Obama administration, is already beginning to fall apart. One of the five charged, Abdullah Muhammed Salman, an Iraqi immigrant, was released after his arrest due to lack of evidence. He said that he merely rented an apartment to three of the accused in the plot and was unaware of their plans.
The linking of Islamist groups to leftist anarchist groups opposed to globalization and the multinational banks will gain steam as the psy-op of the Wikileaks release of classified State Department cables, accomplished with the help of the Swedish government, as recently reported by WMR, results in more calls for curbs to be placed on the Internet. Already, Greek and Italian law enforcement are claiming that European anarchist groups link to one another through the Internet. The Internet has also been cited by the neocons and the Israeli propagandists as a means for "Jihadist" groups and the fakery called "Al Qaeda" and its "affiliates" to communicate and raise funds.
2011 will see the rise of Gladio-like "anarchist" front groups that will be used to not only crack down on leftist and anti-globalist organizations but push through legislation curbing communications on and access to the Internet. Already, one such shadowy and likely front group called the "Informal Anarchist Federation" (FAI), has claimed responsibility for recent bomb attacks on the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome and another unsuccessful bomb attack on the Greek embassy in the Italian capital. A suspicious package was also found at the U.S. and Finnish embassies to the Vatican and the Albanian embassy to Italy in Rome and 160 consulates in Milan, once a center for Gladio activity, were placed on "high alert." Two small bombs also recently exploded at the northern Italian headquarters of the right-wing and anti-immigrant governing coalition party, the Northern League, which may be an attempt to falsely draw a link between Muslim immigrants and leftist "anarchists."
Also, bombs blamed on "anarchists" exploded at a branch of the Spanish-owned Banco Santander in Santiago, Chile and the Banco Francés in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The explosions occurred after Argentina recgoinized the independence of Palestine and as Chile was under pressure from the Chilean left and the large Palestinian-Chilean community to follow suit. During Gladio operations in Europe, links were discovered between the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance (AAA) and the Chilean junta of General Augusto Pinochet. Chile's current right-wing billionaire president, Sebastian Pinera, was a member of the Pinochet junta. Pinera's Interior Minister, Rodrigo Hinzpeter Kirberg, has been accused by Chilean Senator Eugenio Tuma of being an "activist and militant for the Israeli cause."
True to form The New York Times, on December 28, reported on the Italian-Greek "anarchist" link: "Col. Maurizio Mezzavilla of the Carabinieri paramilitary police said the device sent to the Greek embassy was a response to the arrests in Greece in November of two alleged members of an anarchist group, the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, which claimed responsibility for sending 14 letter bombs to embassies in Athens last month" The Times quotes Mezzavilla as saying the note found with the unexploded bomb at the Greek embassy in Rome stated: "We’re striking again, and we do so in response to the appeal sent by the Greek comrades of the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire . . . That is why we are directing the new attack to one of the structures that represents the Greek state and its servants, in solidarity with the comrades arrested in Athens and the Conspiracy’s project which, like ours, is based on the actions and methods of revolutionary violence.” Of course, it was advantageous that the bomb at the Greek embassy failed to explode, thus leaving the highly-suspicious note intact for dissemination to the media. The operation comes right out of the Gladio playbook designed by the CIA and Pentagon special operations forces.
On December 30, The Washington Post tried to link the Danish-Swedish "plot" and the British round0up of nine suspected terrorists linked to "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" to the bombs in Italy: "The arrests on charges of Islamist-inspired terrorism came as Italy confronted a spurt of homegrown bombings attributed to European anarchist undergrounds."
Police have called for restrictions on access to Google Maps by protest groups that have been charged with using the maps and their smart phones to track police movements, including the movement of detainee transport and police command post vehicles, at mass protest rallies against the G-8 and other conclaves of the world's elite class.
It is noteworthy that the rise of previously unknown "anarchist" groups is occurring in the very same countries where Gladio's operations were most extensive: Italy and Greece. Italy was the nexus for Organazzizione Gladio, the Italian branch of the pan-European CIA-led terrorist operations. In Greece, the Gladio group was known as "Operation Sheepskin."
With larger anti-government and anti-banking strikes and street protests planned for not only Italy and Greece, but also France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and other countries, 2011 will see a rise in the number of false flag terrorist attacks that will be blamed by law enforcement and their corporate media echo chambers on "anarchists." The neocon and pro-Israeli media will also step up planted stories designed to link "anarchists" to "Jihadists." Gladio cells in all these countries, which never actually disappeared but were placed on reserve, will be activated as "leftists" are lumped in with "Islamists" and "Jihadists" as "enemies of the global state."
This time next year may see an entirely different kind of Internet and a more fascist America, a situation that may even see WMR heading into exile abroad in order to continue reporting the truth.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written
for several renowned papers and blogs.
Madsen is a regular contributor on Russia Today. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows. He has been invited to testifty as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government.
As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation.
Good timing T
Reminds me I had an interesting conversation int Kebabery
I was reliably informed of a Valley Of Wolves film Gladio :0 _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2011 8:20 pm Post subject:
Government Infiltrates Terror Cells Time and Again ... But Fails to Stop Attacks
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23373
by Washington's Blog
Global Research, February 24, 2011 - Washington's Blog - 2011-02-23
It's amazing how governments infiltrate terror cells time and again, but then fail to actually stop the attacks.
London
The Guardian noted on February 13th:
A remark from the sentencing judge that Babar "began co-operating even before his arrest", has raised the possibility, supported by other circumstantial evidence obtained by the Guardian, that he may have been an informant for the US government before his detention by the FBI in April 2004.
***
Having reviewed the court transcript himself, bereaved father Graham Foulkes said: "There's a hint from one or two of the sentences [in the transcript] that do strongly suggest [Babar's] co-operation was going well beyond his official arrest. And it looks as if the Americans may well have known in detail what Babar was up to in Pakistan [at the time] and that is a very, very serious matter."
When judge Marrero's office was asked to clarify the remarks, his office declined to comment. The US attorney's office declined to comment on whether Babar had been working with US agencies before his arrest.
The law enforcement officer involved in Babar's arrest and debriefing also refused to discuss the allegations.
Indeed, this short Fox news interview with terrorism expert and former prosecutor for the Justice Department shows that the bombing "mastermind" was a British intelligence agent (or read the transcript here). And see confirming story here.
An MSNBC translator confirms that claim of responsibility by Al-Qaeda was a fake. And see this this regarding the unreliability of the translation.
This article from the Independent raises the question of whether attackers were "arrested and then released" while remaining under close observation by the government".
Times Online reports that the police were "bugging" the car of the mastermind of the bombings.
And apparently Israel was warned ahead of the blasts (confirmed here).
Madrid
BBC reported in 2004:
The Spanish interior ministry says it is investigating reports that two suspects in the 11 March Madrid train bombings were police informants.
The move came after Spain's El Mundo newspaper said Moroccan Rafa Zuher and Spaniard Jose Emilio Suarez had been in contact with police before the attacks.
The men are suspected of providing dynamite for the attacks, which killed 191 people and injured more than 2,000.
The paper said they passed on details about drug deals and other crimes.
New York: 1993
For example, the FBI had penetrated the cell which carried out the 1993 world trade center bombing, but had -- at the last minute -- canceled the plan to have its FBI infiltrator substitute fake powder for real explosives, against the infiltrator's strong wishes (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view)?
And see this TV news report:
New York: 2001
The government had also infiltrated the 9/11 terror cell:
An FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. And see this Newsweek article and this New York Times report
According to the large French newspaper Le Monde, the intelligence services of America's close ally France and of other governments had infiltrated the highest levels of Al-Qaeda's camps, and actually listened to the hijackers' debates about which airlines' planes should be hijacked, and allied intelligence services also intercepted phone conversations between Al-Qaeda members regarding the attacks
According to journalist Christopher Ketcham, America's close ally Israel tracked the hijackers' every move prior to the attacks, and sent agents to film the attack on the World Trade Centers
The National Security Agency and the FBI were each independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind's phone calls
According to various sources, on the day before 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker "tomorrow is zero hour" and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind's phone calls
Shortly before 9/11, the NSA also intercepted multiple phone calls to the United States from Bin Laden's chief of operations
The CIA and the NSA had been intercepting phone calls by the hijackers for years (see also this)
According to the Sunday Herald, two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her "In two days, you're going to hear big news and you're not going to hear from me for a while.” U.S. officials later told CNN that “in recent years they've been able to monitor some of bin Laden's telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded." Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.
And according to CBS News, at 9:53 a.m on 9/11, just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon, "the National Security Agency, which monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin Laden's operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia", and secretary of Defense Rumsfeld learned about the intercepted phone call in real-time (if the NSA monitored and transcribed phone calls in real-time on 9/11, that implies that it did so in the months leading up to 9/11 as well)
What About the Terror Arrests?
But what about the arrests which have been made of would-be terrorists? Doesn't that show that governments do sometimes catch the bad guys?
Maybe ... but:
Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said:
A lot of the cases after 9/11 were manufactured or enormously exaggerated and were announced with great trumpets by the attorney general and the FBI director so that we felt that they were doing something when, in fact, what they were doing was not helpful, not relevant, not needed.
The Washington Post ran a story about one alleged threat entitled "Was it a terror sting or entrapment?", showing that the U.S. government lent material support to the wanna-be terrorists, and put violent ideas in their heads
Raw Story reports that the alleged terrorist group that is alleged to have planned to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower was non-violent before a government informant infiltrated the group and planted violent ideas in their heads
PBS' Frontline ran a special report focusing on the the alleged Al Qaeda plot in Lodi, California, which showed -- based upon interviews with top law enforcement officials involved in the case -- that the bust amounted to little more than entrapment and coerced and fabricated confessions from two men who, in fact, had nothing to do with the terrorist group
There are numerous other instances of entrapment of peaceful or mentally incompetent people who are then arrested as "terrorists". For example, the "mastermind" of the terrorism plot was a self-confessed "pothead" , another was a crackhead, and that they were all semi-retarded. And see this, this and this
So while there are a lot of loud announcements about catching terrorists, most of the convictions are optics without substance.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23373 _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Here are some comments ‘about’ Henry Kissinger; “'Former Nixon aide Charles W. Colson, the Watergate victim who spoke out clearly about conspiracy in high places, has said that Nixon told him as early as December 18, 1973, that Kissinger 'is really unstable at times'.” “'He's got us all buffaloed. He can (and will) lift your security, get you a foundation black ball, bong you at the colleges, put you in Coventry. He's got spies in every department. He's running the Ministry of Fear. All of his phones are tapped and he keeps long dossiers.'” “'Thanks to the sworn testimony of Guerzoni, Italy and Europe but not the U.S. learned that Kissinger was behind the death of Aldo Moro. This tragic affair demonstrates the ability of the Committee of 300 to impose its will upon any government without exception. Secure in his position as a member of the most powerful secret society in the world, and I am not talking about Freemasonry, Kissinger not only terrified Moro, but carried through on his threats to 'eliminate' Moro if he did not give up his plan to bring economic and industrial progress to Italy. In June and July of 1982, the wife of Aldo Moro testified in open court that her husband's murder came about as a result of serious threats against his life, made by what she called 'a high ranking United States political figure'. Mrs. Eleanora Moro repeated the precise phrase reportedly used by Kissinger in the sworn testimony of Guerzoni. 'Either you stop your political line or you will pay dearly for it'. Recalled by the judge, Guerzoni was asked if he could identify the person Mrs. Moro was talking about. Guerzoni replied that it was indeed Henry Kissinger as he had previously intimated.'” Let’s make a new paragraph for appearances sake. Okay?
“'In any case, by 1971 Henry had become, as the Times noted, virtually 'all-powerful in the sprawling sector of the government which seeks to advise the President on national security matters. His dominance of the expanded, 110-member National Security Council was so complete that he controlled every piece of intelligence to reach the President from the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency.'” “'In my book Hank Kissinger is a suspicious, fearful misanthrope surrounded by people who are compelled to maintain a low profile to keep their jobs. I'd sooner dig ditches than work for him again.'” “'Phyllis Schlafly and Rear Admiral Chester Ward (U.S.N-Ret.) produced an exhaustive study of Kissinger deeds, misdeeds, and mentality. Their 800-page analysis, Kissinger on the Couch, concludes that Kissinger is obsessed with both megalomania and defeatism. They contend he is a man so driven by a lust for power that he would lie to anyone, including the President, to achieve a goal.'” “' Another example of the influence of the CFR can be seen in the meteoric rise of Henry Kissinger. In 1955, Kissinger was merely another unknown academic who attended a meeting at the Marine Corps School at Quantico, Virginia, hosted by then presidential foreign affairs assistant Nelson Rockefeller. This meeting was the start of a lengthy friendship between the two culminating in a $50,000 outright gift to Kissinger from Rockefeller. Kissinger soon was introduced to David Rockefeller and other prominent CFR members. Through the CFR, Kissinger obtained funding and entree to ranking officials of the Atomic Energy Commission, the three branches of the military, the CIA, and the State Department. He used this access to produce a best-selling book entitled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, in which he argued that a nuclear war might be 'winnable.' By the time of Nixon's administration, Kissinger was secretary of state, and he remains a formidable force in world affairs.'
... ... ...
From Les Visible's newish -its-a-dirty-job-but-someones-gotta-do-it- blog at:-
http://profilesinevil.blogspot.com/ _________________ "We will lead every revolution against us!" - attrib: Theodor Herzl
"Timely Demise to All Oppressors - at their Convenience!" - 'Interesting Times', Terry Pratchett
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 5:13 pm Post subject:
Not often you see Operation Gladio mentioned in the national newspapers
The Nazi leadership also planned to plant sleeper agents around the world after the war to provoke global unrest and create a "Fourth Reich", the files disclose.
Olivier Mordrelle, a leader of a separatist nationalist movement in Brittany, told his interrogators after he was captured that "ample funds" had been transferred to South America and "trustworthy key men" had been sent to live in Spain and Switzerland.
Mordrelle said he attended a meeting in Deisenhofen, near Munich, in April 1945 at which German postwar resistance plans were discussed.
He said he was told by a senior SS officer that underground agents were to lie low after the war ended until they were told to organise anti-Bolshevik movements in their countries in order to "stir up unrest culminating in civil war".
The allies also set up a secret network of agents and arms dumps, called Gladio, in the event of communist-led uprisings in western Europe, it has already been revealed.
Dr Jacob Bronowski, whose series The Ascent of Man was a TV milestone, was one of MI5’s high-profile targets. Photograph: David Newell Smith
MI5 bugged the phones of leftwing journalists and writers in an intensive but unsuccessful attempt to discover more about the Cambridge spy ring, according to newly released, hitherto top-secret files.
It also drew up voluminous reports on scientist Dr Jacob Bronowski, who became a popular broadcaster, in surveillance operations described by his daughter as "shocking ... just like a Stasi file".
Files released by the National Archives include transcripts from phonetaps from the London flat of journalist and author Philip Toynbee, made shortly after his friend Donald Maclean fled to Moscow with Guy Burgess, a fellow member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring.
The files, from the early 1950s, suggest MI5 was mainly interested in Cyril Connolly, editor of the literary magazine Horizon, who lived in Toynbee's Paddington flat at the time.
MI5 recorded conversations in which poet Stephen Spender, publisher George (later Lord) Weidenfeld, poet WH Auden, painter Lucian Freud and philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin were all talked about.
MI5 was most keen to discover what Connolly and his friends knew about Burgess and Maclean.
It carefully annotated newspaper articles that Connolly had written about his former acquaintances.
The files show that MI5 identified the art historian Anthony Blunt and journalist and academic Goronwy Rees as being among Burgess's friends in October 1952, 12 years before Blunt confessed to spying for the Russians.
"We are, for your own information, still making active enquiries in the Burgess circle, which, of course, included Rees, Blunt and many others," an MI5 officer wrote to the British embassy in Washington.
He added: "We do not wish to encourage the FBI to direct a lot of questions at us about our progress in this peculiarly British field of counter-espionage."
Although Blunt, the official surveyor of the Queen's pictures, confessed in 1964, a hugely embarrassed establishment covered the matter up until he was exposed in a deathbed tipoff from Rees in 1979.
The FBI was particularly interested in the Cambridge spy ring, as both Burgess and Maclean had worked at the UK's Washington embassy.
The papers show how MI5 built up a large file on Bronowski, a mathematician and scientist who became a successful broadcaster and household name through his 1970s BBC documentary series, The Ascent of Man. He first came to MI5's notice in October 1939 when a "casual informant" in Hull, where Bronowski was a university lecturer, claimed he held "extreme left and anti-British opinions".
A year later, a Hull police officer told MI5: "I am well acquainted with the members of the local Communist party and at no time have I ever known him to be associated with them."
A series of subsequent police reports warned MI5 that Bronowski had spoken at a Left Book Club meeting about the "alarming growth of fascism". One report described him as a "skilful speaker and agitator of the 'communist intellectual' type", another as a "red intellectual". Yet another misinterpreted a satirical poem.
But his mathematical talents and expertise on the impact of bombing led the government to give him, in 1943, a job in the research and experiments department of the Ministry of Home Security.
He was later appointed a member of an official investigation into the effects of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The files show the BBC told MI5 it had "abandoned" a series of planned broadcasts by Bronowski on atomic power.
His daughter, Professor Lisa Jardine, director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London, told the Guardian: "I can't tell you how shocking it is for me ... It's just like a Stasi file. It's scary." Members of his family were Communist party members, but her father "took the decision very early on never to have an official association with politics", she said.
He turned down the offer of a post in Harold Wilson's Labour government and later emigrated to the US, because he could not get a senior post in Britain, Jardine said. But he never suspected that MI5 had a file on him.Harmonica player Larry Adler, who performed with Elton John and Sting, was investigated by MI5 over concerns about his alleged communist sympathies, the files confirm.
US-born Adler moved to Britain after being labelled a communist and blacklisted in America, but the files make it clear that MI5 did not consider him a subversive, the files make clear.
Nazis' nasty surprises
German spies were supplied with poisoned products – including chocolate, sugar, pills that looked like aspirin and doctored Nescafé – as well as cigarette lighters that gave off lethal fumes when ignited, to kill prominent individuals among the allies after the Nazis' defeat in the second world war, the MI5 files reveal. Female agents were supplied with "microbe" weapons hidden in handbag mirrors.
The Nazi leadership also planned to plant sleeper agents around the world after the war to provoke global unrest and create a "Fourth Reich", the files disclose.
Olivier Mordrelle, a leader of a separatist nationalist movement in Brittany, told his interrogators after he was captured that "ample funds" had been transferred to South America and "trustworthy key men" had been sent to live in Spain and Switzerland.
Mordrelle said he attended a meeting in Deisenhofen, near Munich, in April 1945 at which German postwar resistance plans were discussed.
He said he was told by a senior SS officer that underground agents were to lie low after the war ended until they were told to organise anti-Bolshevik movements in their countries in order to "stir up unrest culminating in civil war".
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