JAMES H. BIRD

 

At the height of the Cold War there was effectively a front line in Europe. Winston

Churchill once called it the Iron Curtain and said it ran from Szczecin on the

Baltic Sea to Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. Both sides deployed military power along

this line in the expectation of a major combat. The Western European powers

created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) precisely to fight that

expected war but the strength they could marshal remained limited. The Soviet

Union, and after the mid-1950s the Soviet Bloc, consistently had greater numbers

of troops, tanks, planes, guns, and other equipment. This is not the place to pull

apart analyses of the military balance, to dissect issues of quantitative versus

qualitative, or rigid versus flexible tactics. Rather the point is that for many years

there was a certain expectation that greater numbers would prevail and the Soviets

might be capable of taking over all of Europe.

 

Planning for the day the Cold War turned hot, given the expected Soviet threat,

necessarily led to thoughts of how to counter a Russian military occupation of

Western Europe. That immediately suggested comparison with the Second World

War, when Resistance movements in many European countries had bedevilled

Nazi occupiers. In 1939-1945 the anti-Nazi Resistance forces had had to be

improvised. How much the better, reasoned the planners, if the entire enterprise

could be prepared and equipped in advance.

 

The executive agents in the creation of the stay-behind networks were

the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States and the Secret

Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) of the United Kingdom. Other major actors

included security services in a number of European countries. In all cases identical

techniques were used. The intelligence services made an effort to establish

distinct networks for spying on the occupiers, that is espionage, and for sabotage,

or subverting an enemy occupation. To establish the networks the CIA and others

recruited individuals willing to participate in these dangerous activities, often

allowing such initial, or chief, agents to recruit additional sub-agents. Intelligence

services provided some training, placed caches of arms, ammunition, radio

equipment, and other items for their networks, and set up regular channels for

contact. The degree of cooperation in some cases ranged up to the conduct of

exercises with military units or paramilitary forces. The number of recruits for the

secret armies ranged from dozens in some nations to hundreds or even thousands

in others.

 

The Resistance example was always an obvious one. Observers of the secret

Cold War assumed the existence of the networks; so there are occasional

references to the stay-behind networks in spy memoirs and literature. But by and

large the subject was acknowledged with a wink and a nod. Until almost the end

of the Cold War. In the summer of 1990, after the collapse of Soviet-dominated

regimes in Eastern Europe, but prior to the final disintegration of the Soviet Union,

the Italian government made public the existence of such a network in that

country. Over the years since there has been a recurrent stream of revelations

regarding similar networks in many European nations, and in a number of countries

there have been official investigations.

 

For the first time in this book, Daniele Ganser has brought together the full

story of the networks the Italians came to call 'Gladio'. This is a significant and

disturbing history. The notion of the project in the intelligence services undoubtedly

began as an effort to create forces that would remain quiescent until war brought

them into play. Instead, in country after country we find the same groups of

individuals or cells originally activated for the wartime function beginning to

exercise their strength in peacetime political processes. Sometimes these efforts

involved violence, even terrorism, and sometimes the terrorists made use of the

very equipment furnished to them for their Cold War function. Even worse,

police and security services in a number of cases chose to protect the perpetrators

of crimes to preserve their Cold War capabilities. These latter actions resulted in the

effective suppression of knowledge of Gladio networks long after their activities

became not merely counterproductive but dangerous.

 

Mining evidence from parliamentary inquiries, investigative accounts,

documentary sources, trials, and individuals he has interviewed, Ganser tracks

the revelation of Gladio in many countries and fills in the record of what these

networks actually did. Many of their accomplishments were in fact antidemocratic,

undermining the very fabric of the societies they were meant to protect. Moreover, by

laying the records in different nations side by side, Ganser's research shows a

common process at work. That is, networks created to be quiescent became activists

in political causes as a rule and not as an exception.

 

Deep as Dr Ganser's research has been, there is a side to the Gladio story he

cannot yet reveal. This relates to the purposeful actions of the CIA, MI6 and

other intelligence services. Because of the secrecy of government records in the

United States, for example, it is still not possible to sketch in detail the CIA's orders

to its networks, which could show whether there was a deliberate effort to interfere

with political processes in the countries where Gladio networks were active. There

were real efforts carried out by Gladio agents but their controllers' orders remain in

the shadows, so it is not yet possible to establish the extent of the US role overall in the

years of the Cold War. The same is true of MI6 for Great Britain and for security

services elsewhere. At a minimum Dr Ganser's record shows that capabilities

created for straightforward purposes as part of the Cold War ultimately turned to

more sinister ends. Freedom of Information in the United States provides an avenue

to open up government documents; but that process is exceedingly slow and

subject to many exemptions, one of which is intended precisely to shield records

on activities of this type. The United Kingdom has a rule that releases documents

after a certain number of years, but there is a longer interval required for

documents of this type, and exceptions are permitted to government when documents

are finally released to the public. The information superhighway is barely a

macadam path when it comes to throwing light on the truth of the Gladio networks.

In this age of global concern with terrorism it is especially upsetting to discover

that Western Europe and the United States collaborated in creating networks that

took up terrorism. In the United States such nations are called 'state sponsors' and are

the object of hostility and sanction. Can it be the United States itself, Britain,

France, Italy, and others who should be on the list of state sponsors? The Gladio story

needs to be told completely so as to establish the truth in this matter. Daniele

Ganser has taken the critical first step down this road. This book should be read to

discover the overall contours of Gladio and to begin to appreciate the importance of

the final answers that are still lacking.

 

John Prados

Washington, DC