Gladio: The covert war on democracy

Mr. Ganser, our last and the most important question - is there any reason to say that NATO's secret armies were not dismissed and did not stop its activities in Europe?

The question of what NATO is doing today and whether it still has secret armies is a very delicate question. I always say that the problem with NATO is that it does not want to talk about its secret armies that it had in the Cold War. I once wrote a letter to NATO and asked them about more data of the secret armies and they just refused to talk about the subject. So, NATO is not really transparent, it is a military organization and if it doesn't want to talk about something it just doesn't talk about it.

So, I think it is possible that NATO today is still using a secret warfare to achieve its interests and therefore we need more and also more critical research on what NATO is really doing, I mean it is always the same but it is a force for peace, but we know that NATO is the biggest military organization now existing worldwide. We know that NATO is basically directed by the United States and that the Europeans are only on the secondary line of command and therefore it is very important to have this discussion in Europe about NATO history - past, present and future.

Gladio was a well-coordinated covert campaign of terrorism directed by the U.S. and other Western governments against their own populations. Hundreds of innocent people were killed or maimed in terrorist attacks which were then blamed on leftist subversives or other political opponents.  Italian General Paolo Inzerilli commanded the Italian forces of Gladio from 1974 to 1986 and he later said that “the omnipresent United States dominated the secret CPC that directed the secret war.”[13]

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Operation Northwoods called “for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. [This would provide] the public and international backing they needed to launch their war.”[10] The signed documents are available today and because of this we know that high level U.S. government representatives conspire, on occasion, to commit crimes against the American people for the purpose of starting wars.

 

One of the earlier examples of such a modus operandi, still widely ignored, is Gladio, "NATO's European stay-behind army", active during the Cold War. Controlled by the CIA and Britain's MI6, Gladio members orchestrated terrorist attacks in Western Europe, which were blamed on Communist entities. 

Gladio was falsely presented to key European state officials as a stand-by secret army ready to counter a possible communist take over. The ultimate goal of Gladio was to demonize the Communist and Socialist parties and encourage European citizens to endorse their governments' commitment to "National security".   

American citizens were not exempt from such scheming. As Prof. James F. Tracy explains:

"The string of still unresolved US political assassinations throughout the 1960s suggest how such practices were not restricted to foreign countries. Nor were they solely the terrain of intelligence agencies. Along lines similar to Gladio, in the early 1960s the US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed Operation Northwoods, where terrorist attacks would be initiated against US civilians in American cities and the violence blamed on Cuban combatants to justify war against the island nation.[2] The Kennedy administration rejected the proposal. While Northwoods exhibited the capacity for government to conceive and propose such plans, Gladio was demonstrably carried out against Western civilian populations in multiple locations over many years." (Prof. James F. Tracy False Flag Terror and Conspiracies of Silence.)

The recruitment of  paramilitary armies and death squads played a key role in the conduct of US foreign policy. These “secret soldiers” were turned into highly visible “freedom fighters”, waging the Empire’s war at the forefront and in plain sight: Afghan Mujahideen, Nicaraguan Contras, Kosovar and Haitian rebels, etc.