INTRODUCTION As the Cold War ended, following juridical investigations into mysteriousacts of terrorism in Italy, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forcedto confirm in August 1990 that a secret army existed in Italy and other countriesacross Western Europe that were part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO). Coordinated by the unorthodox warfare section of NATO, the secretarmy had been set up by the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 or SIS) after the end of theSecond World War to fight Communism in Western Europe. The clandestine network, which after the revelations of the Italian Prime Minister was researched by judges, parliamentarians, academics and investigative journalists across Europe, is now understood to have been code-named ‘Gladio’ (the sword) in Italy,while in other countries the network operated under different names including’Absalon’ in Denmark, ‘ROC’ in Norway and ‘SDRA8′ in Belgium. In each country the military secret service operated the anti-Communist army within the state in closecollaboration with the CIA or the MI6 unknown to parliaments and populations.In each country, leading members of the executive, including Prime Ministers,Presidents, Interior Ministers and Defence Ministers, were involved in the daniele ganser – nato’s secret armies – operation gladio and terrorism in western europe conspiracy, while the ‘Allied Clandestine Committee’ (ACC), sometimes also euphemistically called the ‘Allied Co-ordination Committee’ and the ‘Clandestine Planning Committee’ (CPC), less conspicuously at times also called ‘Coordination and Planning Committee’ of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe(SHAPE), coordinated the networks on the international level. The last confirmed secret meeting of ACC with representatives of European secret services took place on October 24, 1990 in Brussels.As the details of the operation emerged, the press concluded that the ‘story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller’. The secret armies were equipped by the CIA and the MI6 with machine guns, explosives, munitions andhigh-tech communication equipment hidden in arms caches in forests, meadow sand underground bunkers across Western Europe. Leading officers of the secretnetwork trained together with the US Green Berets Special Forces in the United States of America and the British SAS Special Forces in England. Recruitedamong strictly anti-Communist segments of the society the secret Gladio soldiers.
For Greece, the operation notes that
To prevent a communist-led Greek resistance from taking power after the end of World War Two, British prime minister, Winston Churchill ordered a secret army to be created in Greece in late 1944. It became known variously as the Greek Mountain Brigade, the Hellenic Raiding Force, or Lochos Oreinon Katadromon,(with its Greek acronym LOK). In order to guarantee its members were staunchly anti-communist, LOK commander, Field Marshall Alexander Papagos excluded,“almost all men with views ranging from moderately conservative to left wing.”
When Greece joined NATO in 1952, LOK, under the command of Papagos,was firmly integrated into the European stay-behind network. The CIA and LOK reconfirmed on March 25, 1955 their mutual cooperation in a secret document signed by United States General Trascott for the CIA, and Konstantin Dovas, chief of staff of the Greek military.
British journalist Peter Murtagh found,
The Raiding Force doubled as the Greek arm of the clandestine pan-European guerrilla network set up in the 1950s by NATO and the CIA which was controlled from NATO headquarters in Brussels by the Allied Coordination Committee.
He also relates,
The idea behind the network was that it would operate as a stay-behind force after a Soviet invasion of Europe. It would co-ordinate guerrilla activities between Soviet occupied countries and liaise with governments in exile.
In addition to preparing for a Soviet invasion, the CIA instructed LOK to prevent a leftist coup. According to former CIA agent Philipp Agee, The Greek-American CIA officer recruited several groups of Greek citizens for what the CIA called ‘a nucleus for rallying a citizen army against the threat of a leftist coup’… Each of the several groups was trained and equipped to act as an autonomous guerrilla unit, capable of mobilizing and carrying on guerrilla warfare with minimal or no outside direction.
In Greece, as in all countries of Western Europe, the stay-behind was equipped with light weapons hidden in arms caches. Agee maintains, These guerrilla groups were armed with automatic weapons, as well as small mountain mortars. The weapons were stored in several places. Most of the military supplies were cached in the ground and in caves. Each member of these paramilitary groups knew where
GANSER The Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations such cached weaponry was hidden, in order to be able to mobilize himself to a designated spot, without orders.
Agee, who was sharply criticized in the United States for having revealed sensitiveinformation, insisted,
Paramilitary groups, directed by CIA officers, operated in the sixties throughout Europe[and he stressed that] perhaps no activity of the CIA could be as clearly linked to the possibility of internal subversion.
There is a possibility the LOK was directly involved in the Greek military coupd’état on April 20, 1967, which took place one month before the scheduled nationalelections for which opinion polls predicted an overwhelming victory of the left-leaning Center Union of George and Andreas Papandreou.
Based on a NATO-designed response to a communist insurgency, the so-called Prometheus plan, the LOK under the command of paratrooper Lieutenant Colonel Costas Aslanides,took control of the Greek Defense Ministry. In the darkness of the night, tanks with flashlights rolled into Athens and under the command of Brigadier General SylianosPattakos gained control over communication centers, the parliament, the royal palace,and according to detailed lists, arrested over 10,000 people. Many of those arrested were later tortured. Phillips Talbot, the Unitd States ambassador in Athens, disapproved of the operation and complained to the CIA chief of station in Athens, Jack Maury,that the coup represented, “a rape of democracy,” to which Maury answered, “How can you rape a whore?”
Those arrested and imprisoned by the military in 1967 included Andreas Papandreou and his father George. After years of exile in Canada and Sweden, Andreas Papandreou returned to Greece, won the 1981 election for prime minister,and formed the first socialist government of Greek’s post–war history. According tohis own testimony, he discovered the existence of the secret NATO army, then codenamed “Red Sheepskin,” as acting prime minister in 1984 and had given orders to dissolve it. Papandreou’s defense minister, Nikos Kouris confirmed he believed the secret deal with the CIA represented an “unacceptable pact.”
In 1990, the socialist opposition called for a parliamentary investigation into the secret army and its alleged link to terrorism and the 1967 coup d’état. Publicorder minister Yannis Vassiliadis declared that there was no need to investigate such“fantasies” as, Sheepskin was one of 50 NATO plans which foresaw that when a country was occupied by an enemy there should be an organised resistance. It foresaw arms caches and officers
Read more by clicking here - scribd article
And check out the Wikipedia reference to Gladio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
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