Learning about Operation Gladio - a Trio of Pivotal Books
From the Historian's Bookshelf
This trio of books thoroughly outlines a major clandestine operation in place across Europe, the Americas and the Middle East since the end of WWII. Publishing in 2005, Swiss historian Daniele Ganser paved the way with NATO’S SECRET ARMY. This inspired Paul L. Williams and Richard Cottrell to dig deeper, with both publishing their findings in 2015.
Of course Wikipedia has no better term for someone who has spent decades analyzing one of the major conspiracies of the past 60 years.
Try again… refer to Daniele Ganser as a Conspiracy Analyst, for starters… the existence of NATO’s secret armies, or the “stay behind” forces is anything but “theoretical”. They were certainly a reality.
The YouTube Channel “The Cold War” has prepared a 15 minute summary of Operation Gladio based on Ganser’s writing.
US Colonel (Retired) Roxane Watkins has an extensive background in military affairs with 30 years of military service. She studied/graduated from the prestigious Air War College (2003) w/Masters Degree in Strategic Studies as well as a Masters Degree in Business. She has recently begun delving into the workings of Operation Gladio and shares her findings on her Substack as well as at public lectures.
This introduction to Operation Gladio given in May 2024 is excellent. Col.Watkins runs through Operation Mockingbird (CIA control of US media), the Jonestown disaster, Operation Northwoods and more in a conversational manner, making the content easy to follow. She recognizes the shock factor people experience when they hear this information for the first time and when they realize they had been lied to by organizations or institutions they had been trained to trust. She had spent a career in the military NOT knowing about all this back history, only recently delving into this information.
Here is an excerpt from one of Col. Watkin’s Substack posts on the topic:
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. 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….
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…. 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.
… 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.
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…
For those without time to listen to this introductory presentation on the topic, consider skimming through the transcript.
Note that elsewhere on her channel, she delves much deeper into the phases of this Operation, and includes a section by section review of Paul William’s book.
Daniele Ganser’s approach is to go country by country with chapters entitled “A secret war in Great Britain, in the USA, in each of the Western European (NATO) countries from Belgium to Turkey, and from Norway to Italy.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/765633.NATO_s_Secret_Armies
This interview from 9 years ago allowed Dr. Ganser to share this thoughts on the topic.
Paul William’s book in which he looks at the “Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia” was considered so important enough that it was chosen by the Internet Archive to be added to their collection. https://archive.org/details/OperationGladioTheUnholyAllianceBetweenTheVaticanTheCIAAndTheMafia. It is also currently available in audio-book format:
Williams addressed questions around the Drug Network and around the Vatican Bank. The cast of characters who cross his pages includes Pope Francis I, Pope John Paul II, members of the Sierra Club, Afghan warlords, key US “movers and shakers” Henry Kissenger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and many more.
Richard Cottrell focusses on the Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis discussing events and coverups from Cyprus to the Vatican and from Norway to Yugoslavia. His book is also archived in the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/gladionatosdagge0000cott
SO WHAT? NOW WHAT?
Knowing all this, where do we go from here?
As Col. Watkins explained, others have written and our in-house historian has long known, learning about this operation
reminds us that trusting the media on everything is not advisable;
opens us up to the possibility that clandestine operations have long been a reality;
teaches us that the CIA continues to operate globally;
compels us to contemplate that Operation Gladio, though revealed by the Italian Prime Minister in the early 1990s, is still ongoing with the involvement of Western intelligence. This is in order to shape and mold the ongoing conflicts with the “new enemy” Russia. Ukraine’s ultranationalist (Nazi) paramilitary battalions are now incorporated into the Ukrainian army. Their involvement and use is a continuation of the aims and goals of Western intelligence and its partners in the military establishment.