Chapter 8
False and Designing Men

In the previous chapter, we touched on one of the more devious ways that leaders can manipulate the public: they can choose to implement a a dual policy (that is, a policy of publicly pretending to honor the will of the people, while simultaneously doing everything possible to evade it). By any reasonable measure, dual policies constitute an egregious betrayal of democratic principles and public trust. They also reveal the deeply dishonest nature of the ruling class. However, dual policies are not the most effective or the most immoral way to manipulate the public. For that, we must turn to the false-flag operation.

The term “false flag” usually describes a deadly or immoral act that is planned and carried out by one group but is made to appear as if it was planned and carried out by another. Adolf Hitler’s Operation Himmler provides a good example. It consisted of a series of false-flag operations, each designed to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany. One way the Nazis achieved this was by taking prisoners from concentration camps, dressing them in German uniforms, and then killing them on the Polish frontier.1 These “dead Germans” were later used by Hitler as a justification for attacking Poland in 1939.

While false flags are commonly used as a pretext for war, they can also be used by leaders to justify silencing dissent, suspending civil liberties, and seizing additional power. Again, we can turn to Adolf Hitler for an example. Prior to the German election of March 5, 1933, the Nazi Party had done all it could to weaken and disrupt opposing political parties, but despite their best efforts, it appeared as if the Nazis would still face stiff competition at the polls. Here, Quigley describes how they dealt with this problem:

Under circumstances which are still mysterious, a plot was worked out to burn the Reichstag building and blame the Communists…After the building was set on fire…the government at once arrested four Communists, including the party leader in the Reichstag. The day following the fire [Hindenburg, the president of Germany] signed a decree suspending all civil liberties and giving the government power to invade any personal privacy, including the right to search private homes or confiscate property. At once all Communist members of the Reichstag, as well as thousands of others, were arrested…The true story of the Reichstag fire was kept secret only with difficulty. Several persons who knew the truth…were murdered in March and April to prevent their circulating the true story. Most of the Nazis who were in on the plot were murdered by Goring during the “blood purge” of June 30, 1934.2

Both Operation Himmler and the plot to burn the Reichstag provide straightforward examples of false-flag operations, but other variations do exist. For instance, sometimes the act of aggression and subsequent casualties are completely fabricated. If you recall from chapter 6, Operation Northwoods offered this type of false flag as one potential option. The proposal involved an elaborate scheme using a remote-controlled drone aircraft and fake cockpit transmissions to make it appear as if Cuba had shot down a US civilian airliner filled with students on vacation. (After being widely reported in the media, this nonevent could have then been used as a pretext for going to war with Cuba.) Northwoods also proposed other common false-flag variations like provoking the enemy and then allowing them to successfully attack (known as a “stand down” false flag) and also creating an enemy, in the form of a terrorist group, and then using the subsequent “terror attacks” as a pretext for going to war.

Although Operation Northwoods was endorsed by the highest-ranking officer in the US armed forces (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer) and although it went all the way to President Kennedy’s desk for final approval, some insist that it was just a one-time aberration that had no chance of ever going operational. Those who make this claim are not serious students of Network-directed policy. Nonetheless, it’s worth looking at the primary argument they offer in defense of their position, which is that Lemnitzer allegedly lost his job for signing off on the plan. (I suspect that you or I would face something a little more severe than unemployment if we conspired to facilitate terror attacks against US targets, but I digress.)

It is true that Lemnitzer, after signing off on Northwoods, was denied another term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he wasn’t jobless for very long. Rather, he was soon appointed Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, and NATO is the organization that, along with the CIA, created and ran Operation Gladio. In other words, Lemnitzer’s new post provided him the perfect lawless environment to operate in—where orchestrating violent government coups, engaging in false-flag terrorism, and carrying out assassinations all served to further official Network policy. He wasn’t punished; he was promoted.

Operation Gladio

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple…to force these people…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.”—Vincenzo Vinciguerra, Gladio-linked terrorist3

If Operation Gladio had been conceived and directed by the Nazis, most people would have no problem believing every despicable detail. Why? Because most people accept that the Nazis were psychotic criminals who engaged in countless violations of human rights and that they had no respect for freedom or “democracy.” Learning of additional crimes wouldn’t disrupt the average person’s world view at all…far from it. Confirmation bias4 would kick in, and the individual would experience the psychological rewards of having their world view confirmed.

But what happens when, instead of the Nazis, it’s the United States Government that is accused of countless violations of human rights? What happens when the presumed guardian of freedom and democracy is accused of using terrorism and murder to circumvent both? Now, confirmation bias begins working in reverse. The individual’s deeply held beliefs about America’s morality are challenged. There are no psychological rewards for even considering the charges, let alone accepting them. Faced with this threat to their world view, many will immediately reject the accusations as ridiculous. They will angrily defend the good name of America and shower the accuser in hatred and condemnation.

The Network knows this. Countless university studies (along with secret operations like MK Ultra) have provided their experts an understanding of human psychology that exceeds anything we can comfortably imagine. They are masters at manipulating the well-meaning public away from scrutinizing their crimes. But there is a key to understanding this particular manipulation; its success relies almost entirely on how the accusation is framed. (In this case the more sweeping the accusation, the better it is for the Network.)

In other words, it actually is ridiculous to accuse the United States government of facilitating terror attacks when 99.9 percent of the government’s employees had no idea what was going on and had no say in the matter. It is ridiculous to accuse “America” of supporting ruthless dictators and working to destroy freedom around the world when none of the American public was ever asked its opinion on the policy.

Though stated in earlier chapters, this point deserves further clarification before we continue: the average government employee, the average American citizen, and the nation as a whole has nothing to do with operations like Gladio. These operations are created and run by the Network, and the Network is composed of criminals in the truest sense of the word. These criminals do not respect “America” or the American form of government. Quite the contrary, they despise it. If permitted to do so, they will destroy the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, because the ideals enshrined in these documents are nothing more than a limitation on their power. They do not represent the United States or its people.5

Unfortunately, it makes no difference whether or not the people agree with the Network’s policies at this point. Under the current system, public opinion is skillfully manipulated or outright ignored. This is the heart of our problem, and it leads us to a troubling question from Daniele Ganser’s book on Operation Gladio:

If democracy is a system of rules and procedures which define the parameters within which political action can take place, what happens when alongside this system there is another [system] whose rules are mysterious, its procedures unknown, its power immense and which is able to protect itself against the formal institutions of democracy by a wall of secrecy?6

That’s a pretty easy question to answer. The hidden system is where the real power resides. The visible system is only there to maintain the illusion of legitimate government and conceal the hand of those who’ve taken hold. So let’s reveal that hand now.

The CIA created Gladio, in cooperation with British intelligence (MI6), under the pretext of containing the Communist threat. (Even this seemingly valid pretext was a deception, because the Network had been instrumental in creating and sustaining the Communist threat all along,7 with even deadlier consequences than the Hitler-empowerment project.) Gladio’s network of secret armies engaged in “unorthodox warfare” under NATO command. They operated not only in all sixteen NATO countries during the Cold War, but also within the neutral countries of Sweden, Finland, Austria, and Switzerland.8 The existence of these armies was kept hidden from all but a handful of government personnel within each country. Ganser writes:

The secret armies were equipped by the CIA and the MI6 with machine guns, explosives, munitions and high-tech communication equipment…Leading officers of the secret network trained together with US Green Berets…and the British SAS Special Forces…The secret armies, as the secondary sources now available suggest, were involved in a whole series of terrorist operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists in order to discredit the left at the polls. The operations always aimed at spreading maximum fear among the population and ranged from bomb massacres in trains and market squares (Italy), the use of systematic torture of opponents of the regime (Turkey), the support for right-wing coup d’états (Greece and Turkey), to the smashing of opposition groups (Portugal and Spain.)9

Though these secret armies were allegedly created to protect the Western European democracies from Soviet invasion, they were instead used to interfere with the democratic process whenever the electorate threatened to vote contrary to the Network’s desires. This dual policy (claiming to protect national sovereignty and democracy, while simultaneously working to undermine it) was apparently outlined in a secret NATO document dating back to 1949. The document stated that before a nation could join NATO, it had to agree to remain aligned with the “West” regardless of what the electorate of the nation wanted.10 Another top-secret NATO document went further. If the citizens within a nation became so fed up with their puppet NATO leadership that they rose up against it, the US military would come in and suppress the uprising, even if that meant acting without the consent of the national government itself.11

There are many very disturbing things about Operation Gladio, but perhaps the most disturbing is that the CIA and NATO managed to keep it secret for so long. Despite a long list of murders and atrocities committed by the armies, and by ruthless regimes that the armies supported, both the operation and its architects remained hidden for more than forty years. It wasn’t until 1990 that the first on-the-record government disclosure was made, and not because of a desire to come clean, but because former denials could no longer stand.12 If not for the efforts of an inquisitive Italian judge named Felice Casson, Gladio might never have been exposed.

Uncovering Gladio

In 1984 Judge Felice Casson began digging into an unsolved crime: a car-bomb attack that took place near Peteano, Italy, in 1972. Though the attack killed three police officers and seriously wounded another, the Italian government never managed to find and prosecute the terrorists involved. While conducting his research, Casson discovered a series of suspicious “blunders and fabrications” that had derailed the original investigation. One of those fabrications included a deliberately falsified report about the type of explosive used in the attack. This specific piece of evidence not only led Casson to the man who had planted the bomb, it also led him to the reason why the terrorist had escaped punishment for more than a decade.

Judge Casson…discovered that the report which at the time claimed that the explosive used in Peteano had been the one traditionally used by the [Communist] Red Brigades was a forgery. Marco Morin, an expert for explosives of the Italian police, had deliberately provided fake expertise. He was a member of the Italian right-wing organization “Ordine Nuovo” [New Order] and within the Cold War context contributed his part to what he thought was a legitimate way of combating the influence of the Italian Communists. Judge Casson was able to prove that the explosive used in Peteano contrary to Morin’s expertise was C4, the most powerful explosive available at the time, used also by NATO.13

Casson’s investigation revealed that…Ordine Nuovo had collaborated very closely with the Italian Military Secret Service…Together they had engineered the Peteano terror and then wrongly blamed [the Communist] Red Brigades. Judge Casson identified Ordine Nuovo member Vincenzo Vinciguerra as the man who had planted the Peteano bomb…He confessed and testified that he had been covered by an entire network of sympathizers in Italy and abroad who had ensured that after the attack he could escape. “A whole mechanism came into action,” Vinciguerra recalled, “[the Italian military police] the Minister of the Interior, the customs services and the military and civilian intelligence services accepted the ideological reasoning behind the attack.”14

Out of Casson’s investigation, and the successful prosecution of Vinciguerra that followed, the Gladio secret finally began to unravel. Unpunished attacks that had terrorized Italian citizens through the 1970s and 1980s were now examined in a new light. The Piazza Fontana massacre of 1969, the 1974 “Italicus Express” attack, the 1980 Bologna railway bomb that killed eighty-five and maimed two hundred: all of these served to further the aims outlined by Vincent Vinciguerra during his sworn testimony in 1984. Keep in mind, Vinciguerra provided his testimony six years before the Italian government admitted that the secret armies existed. He described Gladio, including its link to the Italian secret service and NATO, in unequivocal terms:

With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages…[it] lies within the state itself…There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity…A secret organization, a super-organization with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them…A super-organization which…took up the task, on Nato’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country.15

In another statement Vinciguerra stated:

The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix…Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo…were being mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organizations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s relations within the [NATO] Atlantic Alliance.16

Although Vinciguerra wasn’t the first person to expose Gladio under oath (the former head of the Italian secret service had resentfully confessed ten years earlier17), his testimony and Casson’s further research is what finally broke the story. It forced the Italian prime minister to retract his earlier denials and publicly admit the existence of Gladio to the amazement of citizens and parliamentarians alike.

This watershed moment not only exposed the Network’s secret armies in Italy, but it led to the discovery of secret armies in nineteen other countries as well. From the torture and terror in Francisco Franco’s Spain (where a former defense minister admitted “here Gladio was the government”18), to the assassinations and false flags carried out in Turkey; from the indiscriminant mass shootings of men, women, and children in Belgium,19 to the imposition of a military dictatorship in Greece, the Network ruthlessly violated the sovereignty of nations while claiming to defend freedom, human rights, and democracy. For insight into the level of hypocrisy, consider this snapshot of what occurred in Greece immediately following the “Gladio coup.”

In the space of some five hours, over 10,000 people were arrested by military squads according to detailed files and planning, and were taken to “reception centers”…Most of those who were arrested in the first hours after the coup were later moved to police and army cells. Communists, Socialists, artists, academics, journalists, students, politically active women, priests, including their friends and families, were tortured. Their toe and fingernails were torn out. Their feet were beaten with sticks until the skin came off and bones were broken…Filthy rags, often soaked in urine, and sometimes excrement, were pushed down their throats…“We are all democrats here”…the chief of the secret police in Athens was fond of stressing. “Everybody who comes here talks. You’re not spoiling our record.” The sadist torturer made it clear to his victims: “We are the government, you are nothing…The whole world is in two parts, the Russians and the Americans. We are the Americans. Be grateful we’ve only tortured you a little. In Russia, they’d kill you.”20

Side Note: It would be bad enough if the Network limited its policy of employing terrorists and propping up ruthless dictators to just Western Europe. But that, of course, would be ridiculous. The Shah in Iran, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the military junta in Argentina—each of these regimes brutalized their citizens with torture and murder; each of these regimes was brought to power by the Network. Worse still, they represent only a few of the proven “regime change actions”21 conducted by the Network and its instruments in recent history.

These acts of aggression against national sovereignty send a crystal-clear message to any leadership that dares to disobey: resist, and the consequences for you and the people of your country could be very dire. Here again the Gladio coup in Greece provides some insight. In 1964 (prior to the coup), the Greek ambassador had rejected Network demands to divide the island nation of Cyprus. Infuriated, President Lyndon Johnson warned: “Then listen to me, Mr. Ambassador, fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea…If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long.”22 In 1967, after some additional “disagreements” with the Network, Greek Gladio carried out Johnson’s threat.23

Although Operation Gladio was exposed more than twenty years ago, most public officials still aren’t ready to admit that the Gladio armies facilitated coups, carried out terrorist attacks, or sought to provide “a strategic direction to the outrages.” To be fair, there isn’t much of an incentive for them to do so. Since we still live in a Network-dominated world, such unflattering statements could bring a wide range of consequences—everything from a ruined career, to torture, to a bullet in the head.24 However, that’s not to say that all public officials have turned their backs on the evidence and remained silent. One of the more-damning indictments came from an Italian investigation in 2000:

A 2000 Senate report, stated that “Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.” According to The Guardian, “The report [claimed] that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several rightwing terrorist bombings…but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place.”25

In 1990, the European Union (EU) parliament “sharply condemned NATO and the United States in a resolution for having manipulated European politics with the stay-behind armies.”26 The parliament called for a full investigation, but the political will to get this done (or maybe the political power to get this done) has yet to materialize. Sadly, the EU parliament isn’t alone in its lack of resolve. Out of the twenty countries affected by Gladio, only three (Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium) have bothered to conduct a parliamentary investigation.

During the Swiss investigation, Colonel Herbert Alboth (former commander of P-26, the Swiss secret army) sent a confidential letter to a member of the defense department declaring that he was willing to reveal the “whole truth.” Soon thereafter, Alboth was found stabbed to death with his own military bayonet.27 The investigation continued but only yielded a heavily redacted report that said, in part, that the secret army was without “political or legal legitimacy,” and that it worked closely with the British secret service who provided “training in combat, communications, and sabotage.”28 This fell far short of what might have come to light if not for Alboth’s death and its predictable chilling effect on witnesses and parliamentarians.

The Belgian inquiry yielded even less information. Hamstrung from the start by the unwillingness of witnesses to disclose what they knew and made worse by the government’s insistence that the commission operate behind closed doors (unlike normal parliamentary inquiries), public and press access to information proved insignificant. In the end, the inquiry “resulted in the preparation of new legislation governing the mission and methods of the Belgian State Security Service and Belgian General Information and Security Service.”29 For lack of a better word, it amounted to a whitewash.

Maybe Switzerland and Belgium are “fleas.” Maybe the EU and all of the other nations affected by Gladio are fleas. Maybe these European leaders are so afraid of the Network’s “elephant” that they cannot effectively do their job. Ah, but we can’t just blame the European leaders for their lack of courage. How many US leaders have called for an investigation into Gladio? (Have you ever even heard the word “Gladio” leave the lips of any US representative?)

It’s likely that less than 1 percent of the US population has heard of Operation Gladio. Even fewer could explain its undeniably antidemocratic and illegal influence on sovereignty. But since the Network is strongest in the United States, a total lack of mainstream coverage and knowledge is predictable. The media, the public schools, the government: all of these instruments constantly profess the sanctity of justice, freedom, and democracy. If US citizens were to get a good look at what their rulers will do to maintain control overseas, they might just start looking into what they will do to maintain control at home. They might just ask themselves: If these criminals will lie, cheat, steal, torture, maim, and murder to control “fleas,” what will they do to maintain control of their elephant, their most cherished and powerful instrument?

Final Note: As early as 1991, the US National Security Archive at George Washington University filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding the CIA’s role in Operation Gladio. In 1995, the Italian senate filed a FOIA request regarding Operation Gladio and the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. In 1996, Oliver Rathkolb of Vienna University filed a FOIA request regarding Gladio’s role in Austria. In 2001 (and beyond), Daniele Ganser has filed FOIA requests regarding the CIA’s role in Gladio. In each instance, the CIA has rejected the requests with the standard reply of “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request.”

In 2006, the State Department tried to dismiss30 the mountain of evidence presented by Ganser in NATO’s Secret Armies by challenging the authenticity of one very damning document he presents in the book. That document, FM 30-31B, is similar to Operation Northwoods in its shocking content but worse because the false-flag operations described were actually carried out by members of the secret armies. The document was first discovered by a journalist in Turkey seventeen years prior to the public admission of Gladio. (That journalist was disappeared before he could provide additional details.) In 1976, after the fall of the Franco/Gladio dictatorship in Spain, excerpts of the document were published in the Spanish press, and in 1978 excerpts were also published in Italy.31 The US government responded promptly, with the help of a “KGB defector,” to declare the document a forgery. However, “the discovery in the early 1990s of Operation Gladio in Europe led to renewed debate as to whether or not the manual was fraudulent.”32 In 1992 the former deputy director of the CIA, Ray Cline, confirmed, “This is an authentic document,” and Licio Gelli (believed to be a major player in Italian Gladio), stated bluntly, “The CIA gave it to me.”33