THE SECRET WAR IN PORTUGAL
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In May 1926 General Gomes da Costa staged a military coup d'etat in Portugal, abolished both the constitution and the parliament, and turned the country into a dictatorship. In his wake dictator Salazar came to power. During the Spanish Civil War, Salazar supported right-wing dictator Franco in neighbouring Spain with troops and supplies. Thereafter the two dictators in a strategic right-wing alliance which effectively protected large parts of the Western front guaranteed to Hitler and Mussolini that Portugal would also stay neutral during the Second World War. The four dictators were in agreement that Communism both in the Soviet Union and in their own countries had to be fought and defeated. |
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As the Soviet Union emerged victorious from the Second World War and both Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, Salazar as well as Franco found themselves in a delicate situation in 1945. Yet as the United States under President Truman continued the fight against Communism on a global scale, both the dictators on the Iberian Peninsula gained at least the silent support of Washington and London. Despite Salazar's support for the coup in Spain and his alliance with Hitler and Mussolini, to the surprise of many, Portugal in 1949 was able to figure among the founding members of NATO. Thereafter Salazar ruled Portugal almost single- handedly for almost four decades until he died in 1970, whereupon the country was able to begin its transition towards a democratic state and became a member of the European Union. |
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As in right-wing dictatorships in Latin America and Franco's Spanish police state, Portugal's population was also being controlled through a security apparatus operating without transparency and beyond legal or parliamentarian control. Secret warfare against the political opposition and the Communists was therefore wide- spread throughout Salazar's rule. Operations were carried out by a number of services and organisms but most prominently by the Portuguese military secret service PIDE (Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado). In the absence of a detailed investigation into the right-wing networks and secret operations of Portugal's dictatorship, the links to the anti-Communist NATO stay-behind army remain vague and mysterious. The existence of secret CIA and NATO-linked armies in Portugal was revealed for the first time in 1990 following the exposure of the Italian Gladio stay-behind. 'In Portugal a Lisbon |
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radio station has reported that cells of the network associated with Operation
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without giving any further sources, claimed that Gladio operatives 'helped prop 2 up a fascist regime in Portugal'. was allegedly called 'Aginter Press'. Under the headline '"Gladio" was active in Portugal', the Portuguese daily O Jornal informed a stunned audience in the country that 'The secret network, erected at the bosom of NATO and financed by the CIA, the existence of which has recently been revealed by Giulio Andreotti, had a branch in Portugal in the 1960s and the 1970s. It was called "Aginter Press"' and was allegedly involved in assassination operations in Portugal as well as in 3 the Portuguese colonies in Africa. |
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Aginter Press was no press at all. The organisation did not print books or anti-Communist propaganda leaflets but trained right-wing terrorists and specialised in dirty tricks and secret warfare in Portugal and beyond. The mysterious and brutal organisation was supported by the CIA and run by European right-wing officers who with the help of the PIDE recruited fascist militants. The investigation of the Italian Senate into Gladio and the secret war and massacres in Italy discovered that Italian right-wing extremists had also been trained by Aginter Press. While in Portugal it was revealed that a sub-branch of Aginter Press called 'Organisation Armee contre le communisme International' (OACI) had also operated in Italy. The Italian Senators found that the CIA supported Aginter Press in Portugal and that the secret organisation was lead by Captain Yves Guillon, better known by his adopted name of Yves Guerin Serac, a specialist in secret warfare who had received war hero medals from the United States including the American Bronze Star for his involvement in the Korea War. 'Aginter Press', the Italian Gladio report concluded, 'in reality, according to the latest documents acquired by the criminal investigation, was an information centre directly linked to the CIA and 4 the Portuguese secret service, that specialized in provocation operations.' |
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While the government of Portugal shied away from investigating the history of the sinister Aginter Press and the secret war, the Italian Senate Commission investigating Gladio and the massacres in 1997 continued its research and questioned Italian judge Guido Salvini. With expert knowledge on right-wing terrorism in Italy and beyond, Salvini had also studied in detail the available documents on Aginter Press. 'Is the American secret service CIA', member of the Gladio commission Senator Manca asked Salvini, 'according to your analysis, directly responsible for the operations carried out by Aginter Press?' Judge Salvini replied: 'Senator Manca, you have asked a very important question now' and due to the political sensitivity of his answer demanded that he may give his answer during a secret session only. This was agreed, and the documents remain 5 inaccessible as of now. |
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Publicly judge Salvini stressed that 'it is difficult to give a precise definition of Aginter Press', while at least in vague terms he suggested the following: 'It is an |
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organisation, which in many countries, including Italy, inspires and supports
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strategies of selected groups, which intervene according to a defined protocol against the situation they want to combat.' The anti-Communist secret CIA army Aginter Press operates, as Salvini continued, 'according to its aims and values, which in their essence are the defence of the Western world against a probable and imminent invasion of Europe by the troops of the Soviet Union and the Communist 6 Salvini, hence carried out like most other secret Gladio armies in Western Europe a twofold task. The stay-behind network clandestinely trained for the eventuality of a Soviet invasion, and, in the absence of such an invasion during the Cold War, targeted political groups of the left according to the strategies of secret warfare in several countries in Western Europe. |
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While many members of Aginter Press had been active in the secret anti- Communist war under different labels in previous decades, Aginter Press was officially founded in Lisbon only in September 1966. Domestic operations much rather than the fear of a Soviet invasion seem to have dominated the strategic thinking of its founders and the CIA at the time. For the period was characterised by large-scale left-wing protests in numerous countries in Western Europe against the Vietnam War and the US support of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America and Western Europe, including Portugal. Both dictator Salazar and the PIDE feared the potentially destabilising effects of the social movement and amongst other instruments relied upon Aginter Press to combat the movement. |
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Most of the secret soldiers that in the second half of the 1960s joined the secret CIA army Aginter Press in Lisbon had previously fought in Africa and Southeast Asia attempting in vain to prevent the loss of European colonies to strong independence movements. Aginter Press Director Captain Yves Guerin Serac himself, a catholic militant and anti-Communist recruited by the CIA, was an ex-French army officer who had seen France defeated by Hitler in the Second World War. He was a veteran of the French Vietnam War (1945-1954), a veteran of the Korean war (1950-1953) and a veteran of the French War in Algeria. Guerin Serac had served in the notorious 11th Demi-Brigade Parachutiste du Choc, a special dirty tricks unit of the French secret service SDCE closely linked to the French stay-behind, and in 1961 together with other battle-hardened 11th du Choc officers had founded the clandestine and illegal Organisation Armee Secrete, in short OAS, in order to keep French control over colonial Algeria and to overthrow the French government of President De Gaulle and replace it with a militantly anti-Communist authoritarian French state. |
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Even after Algeria gained its independence in 1962 and De Gaulle closed down the OAS, former OAS officers including Guerin Serac were in great danger. They fled from Algeria and in exchange for asylum and other amenities offered their remarkable skills in secret warfare, covert action, counter-terrorism and terrorism 7 right-wing networks internationally and in June 1962 Yves Guerin Serac was hired by dictator Franco to employ his skills together with the Spanish secret army |
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against the Spanish opposition. From Spain Guerin Serac moved on to Salazar's
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Portugal, as the country according to his analysis was not only the last remaining colonial empire, but also the last bulwark against Communism and atheism. A convinced anti-Communist Cold Warrior, he offered his services to Salazar: 'The others have laid down their weapons, but not I. After the OAS I fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its proper dimensions - which is to say, 8 a planetary dimension.' |
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In Portugal Guerin Serac linked up with French right-wingers and OAS fugitives, whereupon former Petainist Jacques Ploncard d'Assac introduced him to the right-wing establishment and the P1DE. Due to his extensive experience Guerin Serac was recruited as an instructor for the paramilitary Legiao Portuguesa and for the counterguerilla units of the Portuguese army. It was within this context that he erected Aginter Press as an ultra secret anti-Communist army with the support of both the PIDE and the CIA. Aginter Press set up training camps in which it instructed mercenaries and terrorists in a three-week course in covert action techniques including hands-on bomb terrorism, silent assassination, subversion techniques, clandestine communication and infiltration and colonial warfare. |
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Next to Guerin Serac, Italian right-wing terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie was among the founding fathers of Aginter Press. 'We acted against the Communists and against the bourgeois state, against the democracy, which deprived us from our liberty. And thus we had to use violence', Delle Chiaie later reasoned. 'We were considered to be criminals, but in reality we were but the victims of an anti-Fascist liberal movement. Thus we wanted to make our ideas public, we wanted to be heard all over the world.' Aged 30, Delle Chiaie in the mid-1960s together with Guerin Serac and the support of the CIA set up the Aginter secret army. 'Together with a French friend of mine [Guerin Serac] I decided back then [1965], to establish the press agency Aginter Press, in order to be able to defend our political 9 right-wing terrorist directly linked to the secret war. In Italy he engaged in coup d'etats and massacres, including the Piazza Fontana massacre of 1969, and in Latin America together with Nazi Klaus Barbie, the 'butcher of Lyon', he propped up 10 right-wing dictatorships. |
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'Our number consists of two types of men: (1) Officers who have come to us from the fighting in Indo-China and Algeria, and some who even enlisted with us after the battle for Korea', Aginter Director Guerin Serac himself described the anti-Communist secret army. '(2) Intellectuals who, during this same period turned their attention to the study of the techniques of Marxist subversion.' These intellectuals, as Guerin Serac observed, had formed study groups and shared experiences 'in an attempt to dissect the techniques of Marxist subversion and to lay the foundations of a counter-technique'. The battle, it was clear to Guerin Serac, had to be carried out in numerous countries: 'During this period we have systematically established close contacts with like-minded groups emerging in Italy, Belgium, Germany, Spain or Portugal, for the purpose of forming the kernel 11 of a truly Western League of Struggle against Marxism.' |
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Coming directly from war theatres, many secret soldiers, and above all their
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instructors, including Guerin Serac, had little respect for or knowledge of non-violent conflict solutions. Guerin Serac himself, together with many others, was convinced that in order to defeat Communism in Western Europe secret terrorist operations were necessary: 'In the first phase of our political activity we must create chaos in all structures of the regime' he declared without specifically indicating the state targeted. 'Two forms of terrorism can provocate such a situation: The blind terrorism (committing massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims), and the selective terrorism (eliminate chosen persons)'. In each case the terror carried out secretly by the extreme right had to be blamed on the left, as the master and eminence grise of anti-Communist terrorism insisted: 'This destruction of the state must be carried out as much as possible under the cover of "Communist activities".' The terrorist attacks of the secret armies are designed as a means to discredit the ruling government and force it to shift to the right: 'After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the juridical power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a solution, and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus... Popular opinion must be polarised in such a way, that we are being presented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation. It is obvious, that we will need considerable financial resources, to 12 carry out such operations.' |
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The CIA and Salazar's military secret service PIDE provided the finances for the terrorism of Captain Guerin Serac. An Aginter document, entitled 'Our Polit- ical Activity' and dated November 1969, was found in late 1974. It describes how a country can be targeted with secret warfare: 'Our belief is that the first phase of political activity ought to be to create the conditions favouring the installation of chaos in all of the regime's structures'. As the most essential component of the strategy the violence inflicted had to be blamed on the Com- munists and traces had to be planted accordingly. 'In our view the first move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state under the cover of Communist and pro-Chinese activities.' The document continued to stress that left-wing militant groups had to be infiltrated and manipulated: 'Moreover, we have people who have infiltrated these groups and obviously we will have to tailor our actions to the ethos of the milieu - propaganda and action of a sort which will seem to have emanated from our Communist adversaries.' Such false flag operations, the secret soldiers concluded, 'will create a feeling of hostility towards those who threaten the peace of each and every nation', i.e. the 13 Communists. |
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During the early phase of Aginter Press one of the main efforts of its officers and trained mercenaries and terrorists was to weaken and destroy the national liberation guerrilla groups operating in Portuguese colonies. Thus in the mid-1960s the first theatre of operations for Aginter Press was not Europe but Africa where Portugal in its colonies fought against the national liberation movements. Aginter dispatched its operation chiefs to the countries bordering Portuguese Africa. 'Their aim included the liquidation of leaders of the liberation movements, infiltration, |
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the installation of informers and provocateurs, and the utilisation of false liberation
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14 and other branches of the Portguese government.' Aginter Press had written |
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15 contracts with PIDE to carry out special operations and espionage missions.' |
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The most prominent victims of the political assassinations carried out by Aginter secret soldiers in Portugal and the colonies allegedly included Humberto Delgado, Portuguese opposition leader, Amilear Cabral, one of Africa's foremost revolu- tionary figures and Eduardo Mondlane, leader and President of the Mocambique liberation party and movement FRELIMO (Frente de Liberacao de Mocambique), 16 Portugal was unable to prevent its colonies from becoming independent. Goa became a part of India in 1961. Guineau-Bissau became independent in 1974. Angola and Mocambique reached their independence in 1975 while East Timor was invaded in the same year by Indonesia. |
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Next to the colonial wars Aginter also directly influenced the secret wars against the Communists in Western Europe. The evidence available as of now on the NATO stay-behind armies and the secret war in Western Europe suggests that maybe more than any other secret army the Lisbon-based Aginter Press was responsible for much brutality and bloodshed in Portugal and beyond. The secret soldiers of Aginter Press operated with a different mentality. Unlike the secret soldiers of, for instance, the Swiss stay-behind P26 or the Norwegian stay-behind ROC, the members of the Portuguese stay-behind Aginter Press were engaged in real wars in the colonies, killed repeatedly and were lead by a captain who viewed violence as a primary tool to solve conflicts after having served in Vietnam, Korea and Algeria. |
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Maybe the best-documented atrocity carried out by the secret soldiers in Western Europe in their anti-Communist battle is the Piazza Fontana massacre which hit Italy's political capital Rome and Italy's industrial capital Milan shortly before Christmas on December 12,1969. On that day four bombs exploded in Rome and Milan killing 16 citizens indiscriminately, predominantly farmers who after a day on the market wanted to deposit their modest earnings in the Banca Nationale Dell' Agricultura at Piazza Fontana in Milan, while 80 were maimed and wounded. One bomb in Piazza Fontana did not explode because its timer had failed, yet upon arriving on the scene the Italian military secret service SID together with the police immediately destroyed the compromising evidence and made the bomb go off after its discovery. The massacre was carried out exactly along the secret warfare strategies drafted by Guerin Serac. The Italian military secret service blamed the massacre on the left and planted parts of a bomb as evidence in the villa of well-known leftist editor, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, and arrested immediately 17 numerous Communists. |
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A classified internal report of the Italian military secret service SID dated December 16, 1969 had already alleged at the time that the massacres of Rome 18 Yet the Italian public had been made to believe that the strong Italian Communists and Milan had been carried out by the political right with support of the CIA. |
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had begun u s i n g violence to achieve power. Presumably the massacre had been
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carried out by the I t a l i a n right-wing groups Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale which cooperated closely with the stay-behind armies in the secret war. Italian right-wing extremist Guido Giannettini who was directly involved in the massacre cooperated closely with the Lisbon-based Aginter Press. 'In these investigations data has emerged which confirms the links between Aginter Press, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale' judge Salvini explained to the Italian Senators investigating the secret war in Italy and beyond. 'It has emerged that Guido Giannettini had contacts with Guerin Serac in Portugal ever since 1964. It has emerged that instructors of Aginter Press... came to Rome between 1967 and 1968 and instructed the militant members of Avanguardia Nazionale in the use of explosives.' Judge Salvini concluded that based on the available documents and testimonies it emerges that the CIA front Aginter Press had played a decisive role in secret warfare operation in Western Europe and had started the great massacres to discredit the Communists 19 in Italy. |
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This fact was further confirmed in a far-reaching testimony in March 2001 by General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counter-intelligence, at a trial of right-wing extremists accused of killing 16 in the Piazza Fontana massacre. Maletti testified in front of a Milan court that 'The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left, and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism.' It was a far-reaching testimony confirming that the CIA is a terrorist organisation. 'Don't forget that Nixon was in charge', Maletti elaborated, 'and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician, but a man of rather unorthodox 20 secret service'. 'By saying "foreign secret service", do you mean the CIA?' Italian journalists inquired, to which Salvini cautiously replied: 'We can say that we know very well who assisted in the preparations for the massacres and who sat at the same table from where the orders for the massacres have been given. 21 That is the truth.' |
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Apart from fighting Communism in Italy Captain Guerin Serac made it a point that the anti-Communist struggle had to be carried out on a global scale. Therefore Aginter operatives, including American Jay Sablonsky, together with the CIA and US Green Berets Special Forces participated in the notorious Guatemalan counter- terror of 1968-1971, in which some 50,000 people, mostly civilian, were estimated to have been killed. Furthermore Aginter operatives were present in Chile in 1973 and were involved when the CIA ousted elected Socialist President 22 Salvador Allende and replaced him with right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet. From its safe haven in Portugal's right-wing dictatorship Aginter was able to dispatch its secret soldiers to numerous territories across the globe. |
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This changed only when in May 1974 Portugal's 'Revolution of the Flowers' finally abolished the dictatorship and paved the way for a democratic transition of the country. The secret soldiers of Aginter knew that the survival of their |
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organisation depended upon the survival of the right wing dictatorship. Upon
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learning that left-wing officers within the Portuguese military were planning a |
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couptostartthe'Revolution of the Flowers', Aginter operatives plotted with right-wing General Spinola against the Portuguese centrists. Their plan was to occupy the Portuguese Azores islands in the Atlantic and use them as an independent territory and offshore base for covert operations against the Portuguese mainland. Unable to realise their plan Aginler Press was swept away together with the dictatorship when on May 1, 1974 the left-wing of the Portuguese military took over power and ended the dictatorship which had lasted for almost half a century. Three weeks after the revolutionary coup, on May 22, 1974, special units of the Portuguese Police on the orders of the new rulers broke into the Aginter Press headquarter in the Rua das Pracas in Lisbon in order to close down the sinis- ter agency and confiscate all material. But by then the premises were deserted. With good relations to the intelligence community all Aginter Press agents had been warned and had gone underground and nobody was arrested. Leaving their offices in a hurry some documents were left behind. The special police units were able to collect a large amount of criminal evidence, proving that the CIA front Aginter Press had very actively engaged in terrorism. |
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As the young democracy was attempting to cope with the security apparatus left behind by the dictatorship, the military secret service PIDE as well as the Legiao Portuguesa were being dissolved. The 'Commission to dissolve the PIDE and the Portuguese Legion' (Comissao de Extincao da PIDE e da Legiao) quickly learned that PIDE with the support of the CIA had ran a secret army labelled Aginter Press and thus demanded that it be provided with the files which had been compiled on Aginter Press after its headquarters had been ambushed and which contained all the relevant evidence. The history of the secret army of Portugal was about to be investigated for the first time when suddenly the files disappeared. 'The dossier "Aginter-Press" was taken away from the Commission to dissolve the PIDE and the Portuguese Legion, and vanished thereafter', the Portuguese daily O Jornal related the scandal years later with much regret in its 23 article on the Gladio network. |
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How could this happen? Why had the commission not been more careful with its sensitive data? Italian journalist Barbachetto of the Milan-based political magazine L'Europeo later recalled: 'Three of my colleagues were present back men during the confiscation of the Aginter archive. They managed to take pictures of parts, only of very small parts, of the large amount of confiscated data.' Under the headings 'Mafia' or 'German financial contributors' the confiscated docu- ments indicated the cover names of Aginter supporters. 'The documents were destroyed by the Portuguese military,' Barbachetto recalls, 'because obviously they feared diplomatic complications with the governments of Italy, France and Germany, if the activities of Aginter in the various European countries would be 24 revealed'. |
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PIDE was replaced by a new Portuguese military secret service labelled SDCI which investigated the secret Aginter army and concluded that the sinister |
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organisation had had four tasks. First, it had been an internationally well-connected
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'espionage bureau run by the Portuguese police and, through them, the CIA, the West German BND or "Gehlen Organisation", the Spanish Direccion General De Seguridad, South Africa's BOSS and, later, the Greek KYP''. Next to this intelligence-gathering task Aginter Press had secondly functioned as a 'centre for the recruitment and training of mercenaries and terrorists specialising in sabotage and assassination'. According to the SDCI document, Aginter Press had thirdly been a 'strategic centre for neo-fascist and right-wing political indoctrination operations in sub-Saharan Africa, South America and Europe in conjunction with a number of sub-fascist regimes, well-known right-wing figures and internationally active neo-fascist groups'. Fourth, Aginter had been a secret anti-Communist army, an 'international fascist organisation called "Order and Tradition" with a clandestine paramilitary wing called OACI, "Organisation Armee contre le communisme 25 International'". |
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After the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship Guerin Serac and his militant anti-Communists had fled to neighbouring Spain and protected by Franco re-established headquarters in Madrid. True to their trade, Aginter secret sol- diers in exchange for asylum agreed with Franco's secret service to hunt down and assassinate leading members of the Bask separatist movement ETA. Further- more they continued their clandestine operations abroad and amongst others attempted to discredit the Algerian liberation movement. 'I can provide you with another very interesting example', Italian judge Salvini related to the Italian Senators, whereupon he explained that from their Spanish base in 1975 the group of Guerin Serac, together with the American Salby and militant French, Italian and Spanish rightists, had organised a series of bomb attacks each time leaving the signal SOA, which signifies 'Algerian Opposition' in order to dis- credit a group of the Algerian opposition. |
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'The bombs were planted at Algerian embassies in four different countries, France, Germany, Italy and Great Britain' and made the Algerian opposition look bad, while 'in reality the bombings were carried out by the group of Guerin Serac, who thus demonstrated his great camouflage and infiltration capabilities'. The bomb in front of the Algerian embassy in Frankfurt did not blow up and was meticulously analysed by the German police. 'In order to understand the links of Guerin Serac and Aginter Press, it is important to notice the complex fabrication of the bomb', judge Salvini highlighted. 'It contained C4, an explosive exclusively used by the US forces, which has never been used in any of the anarchist bombings. I repeat, this was a very sophisticated bomb. That Aginter had C4 at its disposability, 26 certainly shows which contacts it enjoyed.' |
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When the Spanish right-wing dictatorship collapsed with the death of dictator Franco on November 20, 1975, Guerin Serac and his secret army were once again forced to flee. The Spanish police took its time to investigate what Aginter had left behind and only in February 1977 staged a razzia in Madrid's Calle Pelayo 39, where at Aginter headquarters they discovered arms caches with rifles and explosives. By this time Delle Chiaie, Guerin Serac and their secret soldiers had |
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long left Europe for Latin America, where in Pinochet's Chile many found a new
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secure operational base. Guerin Serac was last seen in Spain in 1997. 27 |
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Public attention was once again drawn in the history of the secret and mysterious anti-Communist army in Portugal when in late 1990 Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti revealed that NATO-linked secret stay-behind armies existed in Italy and beyond. On November 17, 1990 the European discoveries reached Lisbon where the Portuguese daily Expresso, under the headline 'Gladio. The Cold War Soldiers', reported that 'The scandal has transgressed the frontiers of Italy and until now the existence of secret Gladio networks has been confirmed officially in Belgium, France, Holland, Luxemburg, Germany, and semi-officially in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Spain, United Kingdom 28 and Portugal.' |
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Greatly worried, Portuguese Defence Minister Fernando Nogueira on November 16, 1990 declared to the public that he had no knowledge of the existence of any kind of Gladio branch in Portugal and claimed that there existed neither in his Defence Ministry nor in the General Staff of the Portuguese Armed Forces 'any information whatsoever concerning the existence or activity of any "Gladio structure" 29 in Portugal'. knowledge on the issue. The same position has also been taken by oppositional 30 The Portuguese newspaper Diario De Noticias lamented that 'the parliamentarians in the Parliamentary Defence Committee.' |
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Costa Gomes, former Portuguese liaison officer to NATO, insisted that he had no knowledge of a secret network linked to NATO, 'despite the fact that between 1953 and 1959 I have taken part in all reunions of the Alliance'. At the same time he admitted however that a Portuguese Gladio could have been linked to the PIDE or to certain persons in Portugal who were not members of the government. 'Such links', Costa Gomes explained, 'if they indeed existed, would have run parallel to the official structures', and were thus unknown to him. Similar to Costa Gomes, Franco Nogueira, who had been foreign minister under Salazar, claimed: 'Never have I had the slightest idea that this organisation existed. Not even during the time that I was foreign minister and was in contact with NATO officials, nor during the time thereafter.' He explained that if Gladio had been active in Portugal, 'the activity would certainly have been known to Dr. Salazar'. Salazar would of course, as Nogueira implied, have communicated this information to his foreign minister: 'It would be very difficult for me to believe that the network would have had connections to the PIDE or to the Legiao Portuguesa. Therefore I am convinced that this Gladio did not exist in our country, despite of course, that all 31 is possible in life.' |
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While governmental officials were unable to provide information on the secret war, the Portuguese press observed the obvious and lamented that 'obviously various European governments have not controlled their secret services', criticising NATO |
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for having followed 'a doctrine of limited trust. Such a doctrine claims that certain
governments would not act sufficiently against Communists, and were thus not
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worth being informed on the activities of NATO's secret army'. Only one
senior Portuguese military officer was willing to lift parts of the secret if allowed to remain unnamed. A Portuguese General, who had been Chief of the Portuguese Chiefs of Staff, confirmed to O Jornal that 'a parallel operation and information service had indeed existed in Portugal and its colonies, the financing and command of which escaped the Armed Forces, but was dependent on the Defence Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the Ministry for Colonial Affairs. This parallel operation and information service, the General confirmed, was also
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directly linked to PIDE and to the Legiao Portuguesa.' There was no parliamentary
investigation into the affair, let alone a parliamentary report and with these vague confirmations the matter rested.
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10
THE SECRET WAR IN BELGIUM
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