Operation Gladio Then and Gladio Now
Some refer to it as Gladio A and Gladio B; by Col. Roxane Watkins, Edited by Megan Towner
As WWII drew to a close, the Allied forces withdrew from Europe. The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) left paramilitary and intelligence units in place in the host countries. These Gladio forces or ‘stay behind’ units were secret armies that had been used successfully against the Axis powers during the war. Notably, it is alleged that Ian Fleming was loosely in charge of the 30 Assault Unit, and his brother aided in setting up the stay-behinds used during the war.
The purpose of the Gladio units after the war was to supposedly fend off a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. They had an implicit mission of harassing the Soviets pro-actively in time-honored guerrilla fashion, because General Reinhard Gehlen had scattered them across all Axis occupied territory during the war. At the Yalta conference, Josef Stalin called them “agents of the London government connected with the so-called resistance” in Poland.
When the war ended, Gladio continued with secret military and intelligence units operating in all NATO member states and former Axis countries, including ‘neutral’ countries like Sweden. France had these units. However, when Charles de Gaulle discovered NATO was administering them on French territory and attempted to assassinate him, he ordered NATO out of France and withdrew his forces out of NATO.
Only select members of the governments were aware of Gladio. Even the heads of governments were kept in the dark. The stay behind armies operated in secret with no public awareness of their influence until 1990, when Italy’s Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti admitted Gladio units in Italy had existed for decades.
Andreotti may have admitted Gladio units were a reality; however, he did not explain the actual purpose of their strategy of tension. He continued to allow the public to believe they were anti-communist units when in fact they were always used for domestic control. Gladio spied on all domestic activities but the only operational elements used were terror attacks to ensure western friendly politicians were elected. If not, Gladio would engineer a coup or assassination. MI5 files now available by way of the National Archives show that the paranoia in Western intelligence agencies about communist political subversion took hold even well before the Cold War and WWII. Just as they had spied on, infiltrated, and manipulated the turn of the century Anarchist movement, they subjected the trade unions, the labour movement, all communist groups, and many suspected communists in positions of public authority (such as authors) to the same tactics. They even spied on their own former spies, including Arthur Ransome, who had been in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, keeping an eye on Leon Trotsky.
Numerous terrorist attacks in Turkey, Belgium, Ireland, and more were carried out by members of Gladio units, including numerous bombings in Italy, the assassination of Italy’s former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, the Oktoberfest bombing in Munich, and the Brabant Massacres in Belgium. Gladio troops would disguise themselves as communists, in order to terrify the public and polarize public opinion. This would result in legislation that eroded the individual rights of citizens in exchange for safety from the terror attacks. The process was a great success, ensuring that the policies chosen by the leaders of NATO countries were keeping with the overall trajectory desired by the Anglo-American establishment. NATO was the coordinating body for all such actions.
It was no coincidence that the moment Gladio units were being formed in Europe, Ireland had a ‘reign of terror.’ The same tactics were applied to the political movement for independence in Ireland as to the democratic communist movement in Italy and elsewhere. Both the republican and loyalist radical factions were infiltrated, radicalized, militarized, and sent down a path of self-destructive and counter-productive violence. This issue of collusion in the Irish conflict has, like the stay behind armies, been outlined in numerous official and unofficial inquiries, most prominently the Cory inquiry.
While this knowledge about Gladio and the other secret armies is extremely significant, it is not history by any means. It is very much alive and well today. Look around you at all the ‘terror’ events. Instead of losing what became an exceedingly effective tool when the USSR collapsed, the intelligence agencies and NATO just created a new target or enemy: radical Islam.
Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds believes so. Edmonds outlined how the contemporary spy-game around radical Islam, documented in the works of Nafeez Ahmed among others, is actually a follow-on from Gladio. She refers to it as ‘Gladio B,’ identifying a change in policy around 1996, following the Suserluk incident that once again betrayed the forces at work in Turkey and NATO at large.
To paraphrase Edmonds, though the collusion with radical Islam had been going on for decades, it was not until 1996 that a formal decision was made by NATO to abandon their previous secret relationship with neo-fascists and arch-nationalists and replace them with Islamists.
This is corroborated by a lot of data. For example, the international Islamist organization Al-Muhajiroun suddenly became very prominent in the UK in 1996-7. Omar Bakri, who later admitted to being an MI5 informant, was a key figure in Al-Muhajiroun and its partner organizations like the International Islamic Front. They were central to the process by which young Muslims were recruited, radicalized, trained, and sent to fight NATO’s war of destabilization in the Balkans.
Likewise, Al Muqatila, more commonly known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), were prominent in Britain at this time. Following their failed assassination attempt against Colonel Gaddafi in February 1996, several senior members of the group moved to Britain and established their main office. Among them was Anas Al-Liby, who appears to have been an MI6 agent, was recruited as part of their sponsorship of the assassination attempt. He lived in Manchester from 1996 until 2000, having been granted political asylum. A raid on houses connected to Al-Liby in May 2000 resulted in several arrests, but Al-Liby slipped away. They were likely tipped off by the authorities. This is a tell-tale sign of being a Gladio operator.
According to Edmonds, since that time, the Gladio B operation has expanded and includes the radical Islamization of Central Asia and the Caucasus region specifically and across the Middle East more generally. Again, much of the available information supports her claims, especially regarding the Gulen Movement, who was given sanctuary in the US, but also NATO’s relationship with Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist groups like Jundullah, who are destabilizing Iran and the MEK/MKO. Most of this can be gleaned from reading mainstream media reports with a basic understanding of Gladio operations and by being patient enough to tolerate their habit of dropping occasionally truthful stories.
While much of Edmonds’s analysis of Gladio B is eminently verifiable by those who know where to look. In the 1970’s, Gladio A was exposed in Turkey, gaining considerable attention after several Gladio documents were published. These included U.S. Army Field Manual 31-15: Operations Against Irregular Forces, a 1960’s US special warfare training manual that had been translated into Turkish. It was perhaps inevitable that following the Turkish revelations, the overall Gladio story would have to be admitted, but it would not go away.
Meanwhile in Italy, a judge named Felice Casson was investigating various acts of terrorism including the 1972 Peteano bombing. This eventually led him to the perpetrator, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a neo-Fascist and member of Ordine Nuovo (New Order) and Avanguardia Nazionale, a fascist group, who had been spirited out of the country after the bombing and protected by the international Gladio network. Vinciguerra was brought back to Italy and started to talk, explaining the whole operation. At this point, his protection was stopped, and he was subsequently put on trial. If the information coming out of Turkey was not enough to signal to NATO that the veil of secrecy around the secret armies was wearing thin, Vinciguerra’s testimony certainly finished the job.
Fortunately for them, it was at this point in the story of NATO’s collusion with radical Islam that Ali Mohamed entered the fray in a significant way. In 1984, as Vinciguerra was laying out the story of Gladio in Italy, Ali offered his services to the CIA. He was sent to spy on Hezbollah in Germany, which he did by using the ‘dangled mole’ tactic by revealing to his targets that he was working for the CIA but attempted to convince them of his loyalty. Even though he infiltrated the group successfully, he was allegedly fired by the CIA for being untrustworthy.
However, there is a lot of evidence that this was all a piece of theatre designed to make Ali a deniable agent for use as a deep-cover spy. For one, Ali’s first contact with the CIA was not when he approached them in Cairo in 1984, but when they approached him in America in 1981. While members of the same Egyptian army squadron as Ali were assassinating Anwar Sadat, Ali was on a four month training scheme at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. While there, he was approached by the CIA to recruit him. Despite its implications, this information remarkably comes from official sources, namely the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. They produced a biographical sketch of Ali Mohamed describing the 1981 contact and the FBI agent seconded to the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, who debriefed Ali after he was ultimately arrested, citing an interview with Dan Coleman as their source. That profile is no longer available on the West Point Center’s website but is available through the Wayback Machine.
Furthermore, if Ali was considered unreliable in 1984, then why did they arrange a visa for him to fly to the US in 1985? Why did they not alert anyone to the danger he posed when he applied to join the army? Why did they send an agent to meet him again at Fort Bragg after his application was successful and he was posted to the US Army’s Special Warfare Center? Why did everyone who knew him, from his wife and friends in California to his commanders at Fort Bragg, think that he was still working for the CIA throughout this period?
The significance of this is that Ali was to Al Qaeda what Yves Guerin-Serac and Pino Rauti were to the Aginter Press and Ordine Nuovo. He was an experienced special forces spy who could turn wild-eyed recruits into hardened men capable of acts of extreme violence. Ali was Al Qaeda’s principle trainer from the late 1980’s until his arrest in 1998, nearly 20 years later. One key location was the Al-Kifah refugee centre in New York, taken over in the early 1990’s by followers of the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman who, like Ali, got into the US on a CIA-sponsored visa. The Al-Kifah hosted training sessions and seminars led by Ali. This went on during the Soviet-Afghan War; while Ali was posted to Fort Bragg; after the war had ended; and while Ali was still in the US army reserve and applying for jobs with the FBI.
Ali’s trainees in New York perpetrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and he likely trained Ramzi Yousef, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the bombing. They were certainly in the same area of Afghanistan, circulating in the same training camps throughout much of 1992. When Ramzi and his companion arrived in New York in September 1992, they were carrying with them books of bomb recipes translated into Arabic, likely the product of Ali Mohamed’s work. Although he was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in one of the World Trade Center trials, Ali never testified in those trials even though he was called as a witness for the defense. The defense argued that his activities at the Al-Kifah were officially sanctioned by the US government as a follow on from Operation Cyclone, the backing of the Afghan Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation.
In the years after the World Trade Center bombing, Ali virtually ran the 1998 African embassy bombings operation under the pseudonym ‘Jeff.’ According to his extensive confession, in late 1993, he carried out surveillance on the American Embassy in Nairobi used to decide how to bomb the building several years later. Alongside him doing the surveillance was Anas Al-Liby, the LIFG member who moved to Manchester, England a couple of years later. When Al-Liby’s home was raided in May 2000, the authorities found a copy of the Al Qaeda training manual written by Ali Mohamed. Just as with the training documents for the Turkish kontrgerilla secret army, the Al Qaeda training manual was adapted and translated from US army manuals that Ali had stolen from Fort Bragg.
With these sorts of connections and parallels, we should ask whether the preliminary steps of what has become a modern day Gladio operation were being taken, by way of Ali Mohamed, for more than a decade prior to the formal decision identified by Sibel Edmonds as taken place in 1996. One key aspect of Gladio, beyond using proxies to carry out violence and spread ideology to try to reshape the world, is the creation of an enemy image. Just as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Irish Republican Army in the UK, and Ireland among others, were infiltrated by Gladio agents and manipulated into functioning symbols for fear and hatred. The same has happened with Al Qaeda. Ali Mohamed was instrumental in this process, helping Al Qaeda to carry out the terrorist attacks in the 1990’s. That would then make it plausible that they were responsible for 9/11.
It is clear that Sibel Edmonds’s story of a large scale effort on behalf of NATO to engage radical Islam as a proxy force through a network of collusion, assets, double agents, and terrorists following orders is true. The aims and strategies of the new model of NATO terrorism is still to a large extent the same as the old one: use urban terror to scare the domestic population away from constructive policies and towards the consolidation of the security state, provide an enemy image, provide a guerrilla force to harass Russia and China, and to assist in the overthrowing of targeted governments, including our own. Gladio is an on-going operation.