THE SECRET WAR IN THE UNITED STATES
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After the defeat of Germany and Italy, US President Harry Truman ordered the US Air Force to drop atomic bombs on the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki whereupon the surrender of Japan ended the Second World War in 1945. While Western Europe was in ruins the economy of the United States was going strong. But despite its military and economic strength the White House feared what it perceived to be an irresistible advance of world Communism. After the United States and Great Britain had invaded the Soviet Union repeatedly but unsuccessfully between 1918 and 1920 the military alliance with the Red Army during the Second World War only served to defeat Hitler and Mussolini and liberate Europe. Immediately after the war the hostilities resurfaced and the former comrade in arms became bitter adversaries in the Cold War. As the United States after the war secured Western Europe and fought the left in Greece, the Soviet Union under Stalin secured its Eastern front from where it had been attacked twice in the century during the two world wars. Truman observed the installation of Communist puppet regimes in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia with great unease as, according to the doctrine of limited sovereignty, Stalin placed the countries of Eastern Europe under the control of local oligarchs, the brutal Soviet military and the Soviet secret service KGB. Likewise Truman was convinced that also in the nominally sovereign democracies of Western Europe the Communist parties had to be secretly fought and weakened. |
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The CIA also tried to set up a secret army in China in order to stop the advance of Communism but failed as in 1949 Mao and the Chinese Communist Party took over control. Former CIA Director William Colby recalled: T have always wondered whether the stay-behind net we built would have worked under Soviet rule. We know that last-minute efforts to organise such nets failed in places like China in 1950 and North Vietnam in 1954.' After the Korean War erupted in 1950 along the fragile border that separated US-controlled South Korea from Communist North Korea, the US army also tried to reduce the influence of Communism in North Korea but failed. Furthermore the CIA attempted to gain control over a number of countries in Eastern Europe with covert action operations and secret armies but failed in these nations also. 'We know that efforts to organise them from outside were penetrated and subverted by the secret police in Poland |
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and Albania in the 1950s', Colby recalled the efforts of the CIA to set up
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moustaches and wooden daggers and announced that the first CIG Director,
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The Central Intelligence Group remained a weak interim agency and Truman soon
Admiral Sidney Souers, was to become 'Director of Centralised Snooping'.
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realised that the secret hand of the White House had to he strengthened. Thus in July 1947 the 'National Security Act' was passed which created hoth the 'Central Intelligence Agency' (CIA) as w e l l a s t h e ' National Security Council' (NSC). This time the 'American Gestapo' was not exposed by the press. Composed by the President himself, the Vice-President, the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary, the Director of the CIA, the National Security adviser, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high-ranking personnel and special advisers, 'the National Security Council has evolved into what, without exaggeration, has 4 repeatedly throughout history, the concentration of power in the White House and the NSC led to abuse. Also in the twenty-first century the NSC remains 'a particular institution, which is known to have been at or across the borderline of 5 legality in the past'. |
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Most importantly the National Security Act provided a 'legal' basis for US covert action and secret wars against other countries by giving the CIA the duty to 'perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the 6 national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct'. No irony intended, this phrase was an almost exact copy of what Hoover had exposed in 1945. The vague formulation on the one hand helped to uphold the pretence that US covert action rested on a solid legal basis, and on the other hand avoided to explicitly contradict numerous US laws including the US constitution and many international treaties. CIA deputy Director Ray Cline rightly called the 7 explained that 'We did not mention them [the covert action operations] by name because we felt it would be injurious to our national interest to advertise the fact 8 that we might engage in such activities.' |
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The first country that the White House targeted with the newly created instrument of CIA covert action was Italy. The first numbered document issued by the NSC, NSC 1/1 of November 14, 1947, analysed that 'The Italian Government, ideologically inclined toward Western democracy, is weak and is being subjected to continuous attack by a strong Communist Party.'9 Therefore in one of its first meetings the newly created NSC on December 19, 1947 adopted directive NSC 4-A that ordered CIA Director Hillenkoetter to undertake a broad range of covert activities to prevent a Communist victory in the coming Italian election. NSC 4-A was a top-secret document as US covert action in Western Europe was particularly sensitive. There were only three copies, one of which Hillenkoetter had 'closely guarded in the Director's office, where members of his own staff who did not "need to know" could gain no access to it'. A second copy was with George 10 F. Kennan at the State Department. The 'reason for so great secrecy was altogether clear', the official CIA history records, for 'there were citizens of this country at 11 that time who would have been aghast if they had learned of NSC 4-A'. |
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Operations in Italy weakened the Communists and were a success. President
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Truman became fascinated with covert action aa an instrument of statecraft and urged that the power of the CIA in the field had to be extended beyond Italy. Therefore on June 18, 1948 the NSC passed the notorious directive NSC 10/2 which authorised the CIA to carry out covert action operations in all countries of the world and within the CIA created a covert action branch under the name of 'Office of Special Projects', a label soon changed to the less revealing 'Office of Policy Coordination' (OPC). NSC 10/2 directed that OPC shall 'plan and conduct covert operations'. By 'covert operations' NSC 10/2 designated all activities 'which are conducted or sponsored by this government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and conducted that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorised persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them'. Specifically covert action operations according to NSC 10/2 'shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world'. The directives of NSC 10/2 thus also covered the setting up of secret anti-Communist Gladio armies in Western Europe but explicitly excluded conventional warfare as well as intelligence and counter- intelligence operations: 'Such operations shall not include armed conflict by recognised military forces, espionage, counter espionage, and covert and deception 12 from the values and principles that Truman had publicly expressed in his much discussed 'Truman Doctrine' in March 1947. |
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The relatively short period of five years following the end of the Second World War had thus seen the establishment of a US powerful intelligence complex which operates largely beyond the control of US citizens both inside and outside the country. 'I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations', a fragile Truman claimed 13 after his retirement. gence community he had brought into being', British historian Christopher 14 And in 1964, eight years before his death, Truman once Andrew summarised the feelings of the retired President. |
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Also George Kennan, covert action fanatic and ardent anti-Communist within the State Department's Policy Planning Stiff under the Truman administration, had strongly promoted the passing of NSC 10/2 and CIA covert actions in Italy and beyond. Yet like Truman he was aware of the slippery slope the United States was thus following. 'After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping |
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with this problem of Soviet Communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to
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become like those with whom we are coping'. Kennan observed in his famous long telegram on the Soviet Union with a reference to secret government, totalitarian 15 structures and manipulation of foreign governments. Thirty years later Kennan, |
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16 then an old man, admitted: 'It did not work out all the way I had conceived it.' In order to guarantee that plausible denial could be upheld, the majority of transcripts of the NSC meetings as well as the majority of NSC assessments and decisions remained inaccessible to researchers. Yet in the aftermath of the Watergate crisis the US parliament critically investigated the CIA and the NSC and found that The national elections in Europe in 1948 had been a primary motivation in the establishment of OPC.' The danger of Communism in Western Europe thus directly influenced the beginning of CIA covert action after the Second World War. 'By channelling funds to centre parties and developing media assets, OPC attempted to influence the election results - with considerable success', the US Senators found in their final report which was published in 1976. 'These activities formed the basis for covert political action for the next twenty years. By 1952 approximately forty different covert action projects were under way in one central European country alone.' On the explicit request of the Pentagon the work of the CIA covert action branch OPC also included the setting up of the Gladio secret armies in Western Europe: 'Until 1950 OPC's paramilitary activities (also referred to as preventive action) were limited to plans and preparations for stay-behind nets in the event of future war. Requested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these projected OPC operations focused, once again, on Western Europe and were designed to 17 support NATO forces against Soviet attack.' |
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George Kennan selected Frank Wisner, as the first commander of the CIA covert action unit OPC, Wall Street attorney from Mississippi who had commanded OSS 18 detachments in Istanbul and Bucharest during the Second World War. 19 British attitudes toward the coloured races of the world'. Wisner Wisner guarded the top-secret NSC 10/2 charter closely. 'Whenever someone in the OPC wanted to read 10/2 he had to sign a special access document. Then he would be handed one of the two or three copies of the directive which Wisner kept in a safe in his 20 office.' The spirit in the new US covert action centre OPC was aggressive, enthusiastic, secretive and morally careless, and Wisner insisted in one of the first OPC meetings with Hillenkoetter and Kennan on August 6, 1948 that he be allowed to exploit NSC 10/2 to its full extent and be given a 'broad latitude' in selecting his 'methods of operations'. Wisner wanted to run covert action as he saw it fit without restraint 21 by codes or 'any existing methods'. Hillenkoetter and Kennan assented. |
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Wisner, Director of OPC, Wisner became the chief architect of the network of secret armies in Western Europe. 'Frank Wisner of the OPC charged his adjoint Frank Lindsay to co-ordinate the stay-behind network in Europe', the Belgian press revealed after the discovery of the secret Gladio armies. Lindsay, as Wisner, had learned his tradecraft in the US secret service OSS during the Second World War |
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in Yugoslavia and knew Communist tactics at first hand. Lindsay, as the Belgian
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Gladio revelations highlighted, 'sent William Colby (who directed the CIA from 1973 to 1976) to the Scandinavian countries and Thomas Karamessines to Greece |
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22 where the latter could count on the support of the KYP, the Greek secret service'. As the United States were intensifying international covert action operations, OPC continued to grow and by the end of Wisner's first year in office he had three hundred employees and seven overseas field stations engaging in numerous different clandestine missions. Three years later, in 1951, OPC had grown to 2,812 full-time people, 47 overseas stations with another 3,142 overseas contract agents and a budget which had grown in the same period from $4.7 to $82 million 23 of the CIA, argued in May 1951 that 'the scope of the CIA's covert operations 24 already far exceeded what had been contemplated in NSC 10/2'. The covert action expansion was so drastic that also hard-nosed 'Smith had been concerned 25 about the magnitude and growth rate of the OPC budget.' |
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Allen Dulles, who replaced Smith as Director of the CIA in 1953, was convinced that covert action was a formidable instrument to combat Communism and clandestinely promote US interests abroad. He monitored the work of OPC Director Frank Wisner and his adjoint Frank Lindsay, who concerning the secret armies collaborated closely with Gerry Miller, chief of the CIA Western Europe desk. Miller, together with other high-ranking CIA officers, recruited CIA agents who were thereafter flown to Western Europe with the task to erect stay-behind nets. Among those recruited was also William Colby, later to become CIA Director. Like many other secret soldiers, Colby during the Second World War had joined the OSS and had been parachuted into occupied France to work with the resistance. During the war he had been exiled again only to be dropped shortly before the end of the war into Norway to blow up transportation lines there. In April 1951 Colby sat in front of Miller's desk. The two men knew each other well, for Miller during the Second World War had been Colby's superior in OSS operations in Norway. According to their understanding the war had never ended and Miller assigned Colby to the unit of Lou Scherer of the CIA's Western Europe Scandinavian Division: 'All right, Bill, get on with it, then'. Miller said 'What we want is a good solid intelligence and resistance network that we can count on if the Russkis ever take over those countries. We have some initial planning, but it needs to be filled out and implemented. You will work for Lou Scherer 26 until we see what more needs to be done.' |
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Colby was thus instructed by the CIA to support the setting up of the Gladio network in Scandinavia - 'For as it turned out, one of the main fields of the OPC's work then was planning for the not unlikely possibility of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. And, in the event the Russians succeeded in taking over any or all of the countries of the Continent, Miller explained, the OPC wanted to be in a position to activate well-armed and well-organised partisan uprisings against the occupiers' Colby relates in his memoirs. 'This time Miller said, we intended to have that resistance capability in place before the occupation, indeed even before |
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an invasion; we were determined to organise and supply it now, while we still
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had the time in which to do it right and at the minimum of risk', Colby described what he perceived to be an honourable operation. 'Thus, the OPC had undertaken a major program of building, throughout those Western European countries that seemed likely targets tor Soviet attack, what in the parlance of the intelligence trade were known as "stay behind nets", clandestine infrastructures of leaders and equipment trained and ready to be called into action as sabotage and espionage forces when the time came.' To this end Miller sent CIA agents to all countries in Western Europe, 'and the job Miller was assigning to me was to plan and build 27 States in Western Europe were carried out 'with the utmost secrecy', as Colby stresses. 'Therefore I was instructed to limit access to information about what I was doing to the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in 28 Washington, in NATO, and in Scandinavia.' |
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Within NATO the command centre in the Pentagon in Washington was informed in detail about the secret Gladio armies in Western Europe, while in Western Europe the SACEUR, always a US officer, closely supervised the secret army and the command centres CPC and ACC. An internal Pentagon document of 1957, formerly top-secret but declassified in 1978, reveals the existence of a 'CPC charter' which defines CPC's functions within NATO and SHAPE and the European secret services, although unfortunately the CPC charter itself is not part of the declassified document. The document in question is a memorandum for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff written by US General Leon Johnson, US representative to the NATO military committee, on January 3, 1957. In it General Johnson comments on the complaints of the then acting SACEUR General Lauris Norstad concerning the poor quality of intelligence which the latter had received during the 1956 Suez crisis: 'SACEUR has stated a belief that the intelligence received by SHAPE from national authorities during the recent period of tension was inadequate. He states that any re-examination of intelligence support to SHAPE should include the question of increasing and expediting the flow of clandestine intelligence.' |
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It was in this context that SACEUR Norstad was considering whether the CPC could be used to enhance the situation: 'In addition, SACEUR notes in reference a that there is no provision in reference b, the charter of the SHAPE Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), which forbids the examination of peace- time clandestine activities. He specifically recommends that the SHAPE CPC be authorised to: a) Examine SHAPE'S urgent peacetime intelligence requirements. b) Investigate ways in which the national clandestine services can contribute to an improvement of the flow of clandestine intelligence to SHAPE.' Contrary to NATO's SACEUR Norstad, General Johnson believed that the charter of CPC prevented it from being employed in such a manner. Norstad in his memorandum wrote: 'While there is nothing in reference b [the CPC charter] which clearly forbids the CPC examining the various clandestine intelligence activities, I believe that this would be an unwarranted extension of the CPC activities. It is my |
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interpretation of reference b [the CPC charter] that the CPC was set up solely for
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the purpose of planning in peacetime the means by which SACEUR's wartime clandestine operational requirements could be met. It would appear to me that any increase in the flow of intelligence to SHAPE, from whatever source, should |
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be dealt with by normal intelligence agencies.' Hence the General concluded: 'I recommend that you do not approve an extension of the scope of activity of the 29 SHAPE CPC... Leon Johnson.' |
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Next to the Pentagon the US Special Forces were also directly involved in the secret war against the Communists in Western Europe, as together with the SAS they trained the members of the stay-behind network. After the US wartime secret service OSS had been disbanded after the end of the war the US Special Forces were reborn with headquarters at Fort Bragg, Virginia, in 1952. General McClure established a Psychological Warfare Centre in Fort Bragg and in the sum- mer of 1952 the first Special Forces unit, somewhat misleadingly called the 10th Special Forces Group, started its training under Colonel Aaron Bank. The 10th Spe- cial Forces Group was organised according to the OSS experience during the Second World War, and directly inherited the latter's mission to carry out, like the British SAS, sabotage missions and to recruit, equip and train guerrillas in 30 order to exploit the resistance potential in both Eastern and Western Europe. |
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Colonel Bank emphasised that Special Forces training included the 'organisation of resistance movements and the operation of their component networks' as well as 'guerrilla warfare, which in itself is a comprehensive area, including not only organisation, tactics, and logistics, but specialised demolition; codes and radio communication; survival, the Fairbairn method of hand-to-hand combat, and 31 instinctive firing'. 32 and/or in civilian attire.' The recruitment pamphlet for young men interested to join |
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Defeated Germany was the first nation to which the newly created American Special Forces were deployed. In November 1953 the 10th Special Forces Group erected its first overseas base in a former Nazi SS building that had been set up during Hitler's reign in 1937, the Flint Kaserne at Bad Tolz in Bavaria. Later, headquarters for US Special Forces operations in Latin America were set up in Panama, and Special Forces operations in South East Asia were run by headquarters set up in Okinawa on the territory of defeated Japan. After the Gladio scandal broke in 1990 it was revealed that Gladiators had been trained at the camp of the 10th Special Forces Group at Bad Tolz in Germany and that European Gladiators from numerous countries had received special training from the US Green Berets, 33 allegedly also in Fort Bragg in the USA. |
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Italian Gladio commander General Serravalle related that in 1972 the Italian 34 58 |
the 10th Special Forces Group at Bad Tolz at the old former SS barracks at least
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twice. Their commander was Colonel Ludwig Fastenhammer, a Rambo ante- |
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litteram' the I t a l i a n Gladio General remembers, 'During briefings in which the |
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missions were explained which I have already mentioned above (counterinsurgency, assistance to local resistance groups etc.) I asked several times whether an operational plan existed between their unit and the various stay-behind units, especially with Gladio.' Serravalle mused that 'You do not need a degree from a Defence College to notice that if unit X is designed to support in times of war in territory Y a resistance movement directed by the secret unit Z, that there should be planning and understandings at least in a very embryonic state between X and Z already during time of peace' and hence the existence of operational plans between US Green Berets and British SAS Special Forces and Gladio were to be expected. 'But on the contrary, they did not exist', Seravalle claimed. 'Thus, in case of war the Special Forces of Bad Tolz would have infiltrated our country to engage in resistance and insurrection operations. How would our Gladiators have welcomed them? With gunfire, of this I am sure, mistaking them for Spetzsnaz, the special forces of the Red Army. Partisan warfare has taught that in case of doubt first you 35 shoot, and then you go and see who lies on the ground.' |
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At all times the US Special Forces collaborated closely with the covert action department of the CIA. As the Special Forces were set up in Fort Bragg in 1952 the name of the CIA covert action branch changed from 'OPC to 'Directorate of Plans' (DP), and Wisner was promoted Deputy Director for Plans. Together with CIA Director Allen Dulles he intensified US covert action operations on a global scale. Dulles authorised CIA assassination attempts on Castro and Lumumba as well as the CIA's LSD experiments with unwitting subjects some of whom ended up throwing themselves from skyscrapers. Together with Wisner he organised the overthrow of Iran's President Mossadeh in 1953, and the coup d'etat that overthrew the Socialist President Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. And in 1956 in a reference to left-leaning President Sukarno of Indonesia, Wisner ordered his Far East Division covert action chief Alfred Ulmer that 'It's time we held Sukarno's feet to the 36 could achieve on a global scale with their secret wars and terrorism, but when clandestine operations against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro failed most prominently with the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, President Kennedy angrily fired Dulles and nominated John McCone as the new Director of the CIA. |
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Allen Dulles during his time as Director of CIA had been the brain behind the secret anti-Communist armies. When the Gladio secret armies were discovered across Western Europe in 1990, an unnamed former NATO intelligence official explained that 'Though the Stay Behind operation was officially started only in 1952, the whole exercise had been in existence for a long time, in fact ever since it 37 Allen Dulles had been stationed in Bern in unoccupied Switzerland, and from there had coordinated covert action strategies against Nazi Germany entertaining contacts with both the American OSS as well as with the British secret services. Running 59 |
secret armies in Western Europe was his training and passion. 'Allen Dulles',
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reports in Belgium at the time of the Gladio discovery highlighted, 'sees in the [Gladio] project... apart from resisting a Soviet invasion an instrument to stop 38 the Communists from coming to power in the countries concerned!' |
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As the secret wars of the CIA continued, Wisner increasingly suffered from psychological pain as his soul could no longer find peace. Allan Dulles 'had a 39 unable to carry out 'the dirty work' of the CIA in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, Wisner in 1958 was replaced by Richard Bissel who ran the covert action department for the following four years until in 1962 Richard Helms became Deputy Director for Operations. By that time the psychological state of Gladio 40 architect Frank Wisner had seriously deteriorated and in 1965 he shot himself. In the same year Richard Helms was promoted and became Director of CIA and at Wisner's funeral he praised Wisner for his covert action work, ranking him 'Among pioneering men who have had this not always happy responsibility... 41 unhappy responsibility to testify on the role of the CIA in the coup against leftist President Salvador Allende in Chile. Acting CIA Director Helms bluntly lied to the Senators when he denied that the CIA had attempted to prevent the leftist Allende from being elected President of Chile: 'I had to sign off on all these projects - I would have known.' When the lie was discovered Helms had to resign as Director of the CIA in February 1973 and was fined the amount of $2,000 by the 42 US Senate for perjury. |
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William Colby due to the details he had offered in his own memoirs until today, has remained the most famous CIA agent involved in operation Gladio. But also his biography ended in tragedy. After having supported the setting up of Gladio networks in Scandinavia, Cold Warrior William Colby in 1953 was transferred to the CIA station in Rome to combat Communism in Italy and promote the clandestine CIA Gladio network. Moving from Cold War battle- field to battlefield, Colby in 1959 left Italy for Saigon and from there ran CIA's covert operations in Vietnam and Laos. Among them CIA's Operation Phoenix devoted to the destruction of the Vietcong's underground organisation and the physical liquidation of its members. In front of the US Congress Colby admitted in 1971 that more than 20,000 Vietcong had been killed while he was in charge of Phoenix but refused to comment whether indeed most of them had died from torture, commenting: 'I would not want to testify that nobody was killed or executed in this kind of programme. I think it probably happened, 43 'Directorate of Operations' (DO) and Colby replaced Thomas Karamessines as the new Deputy Director of Operations. When Helms had to step down, President Nixon in the same year promoted Colby to become Director of CIA, a position which Colby held until he had to resign prematurely in 1976 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Colby drowned in a river in Maryland in 1996, aged 76. |
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Colby was succeeded by George Bush Senior as Director of the cia under
President Ford and, in this function, controlled from the While House in Washington
the secretive operations of the network in Western Europe. Thereafter George
Bush Senior under President Ronald Reagan was promoted to the position of
Vice President and continued to sponsor secret wars, most prominently the brutal
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Contras in Nicaragua. In 1990, as Italian Prime Minister Andreotti revealed the secret CIA armies in Western Europe, George Bush was the acting President of the United States and concerned with preparing the war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. As the US population remained lukewarm about a war in the Gulf a dirty trick was employed to stir up feelings of hatred and revenge. A 15-year-old girl introduced only as 'Nayirah' testified under tears to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 that while volunteering as a nurse in a hospital in Kuwait she had witnessed brutal Iraqi soldiers who after the invasion of the country had come to the hospital and taken babies from incubators 'leaving 44 them on the cold floor to die' . 45 George Bush junior would once again stir up feelings of fear and revenge, by misleadingly claiming that Iraq was developing chemical, biological and atomic weapons, and that President Saddam Hussein had been linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The incubator story created an outcry among the |
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In December 1990 Bush Senior did not escape sharp criticism from the par- liament of the European Union. In a resolution forwarded to the White House and the administration, the EU fiercely condemned the secret war of the United States and the White House. The European Union made it clear that it 'Con- demns 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 organisations 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'. Above all the European Union 'Protests vig- orously 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 intel- 46 ligence and operation network'. |
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Due to his large experience in secret operations President Bush Senior was presumably well aware of the most sensitive operations and the terror the secret armies had been involved in and therefore strictly refused to take a stand. Unaware of the dimension of the scandal also the US Congress refrained from asking |
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sensitive questions. Furthermore, also the US media did not carry out critical
inquiries. In one of the very few US articles on the subject in the Washington Post,
under the headline 'CIA Organised Secret Army in Western Europe. Paramilitary
Force Created to Resist Soviet Occupation' an unnamed 'US government official
familiar with Operation Gladio' was quoted to have said that Gladio was 'solely
an Italian operation. We have no control over it whatsoever', adding, 'If there are
allegations that the CIA was involved in terrorist activities in Italy, they are abso-
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lute nonsense.' As subsequent investigations revealed in Europe, every single
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claim in this statement of the CIA was nonsense.
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6
THE SECRET WAR IN ITALY
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