CIA rigged the 1948 Italian elections. (That was the very first thing the CIA did. Today we talk about CIA torture and other issues, but people forget about the past.) Their job was to make sure that no communist gained a dominant position in the Italian Parliament, otherwise Italy could not have become a member of NATO in 1949. So, first there was the vote, and then it was rigged, manipulated. And it worked! In ’49, Italy was brought into NATO, but the CIA and MI6 made sure that through this network of stay-behind soldiers they maintained secret control of all NATO countries.
You have to keep in mind that this stay-behind network was not discovered by accident; it was discovered by an Italian magistrate, a judge, who was investigating a 1972 terrorist attack in Peteano, a small village in Northern Italy. An anonymous telephone call summoned the police to investigate an abandoned car in the village, and when they opened the door the car exploded killing three police officers. Right after that, someone telephoned claiming that the Red Brigades (an Italian terrorist group of the extreme left) were responsible. This was later supported by a police explosives ‘expert’, who told the investigators that the explosive was very clearly one used by the Red Brigades. This official story stood for a long time, until an Italian judge, Felice Casson, looked again at the attack, and found that the facts must have been falsified and manipulated; it was a sea of lies. Subsequently he discovered that the attack had not been carried out by the extreme Left, but by the extreme Right, and that a terrorist named Vincente Vinciguerra had carried it out, an extreme right-wing member of Ordine Nuovo, a neo-Fascist group in Italy. Vinciguerra openly admitted this, saying: “Yes, it’s true, but I’m being protected by a network of secret services. Furthermore, there’s a secret network all over Europe coordinated by NATO.” That’s what he said.
Remember, that was in the 1980s. Many people in Italy simply thought, “This man is mad; a secret NATO army is just impossible!” But this Italian judge was determined to discover the truth, so he pressed Italian Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti to give him access to the Italian Military Secret Service’s archives. Strange to say – and I admit I can’t explain this – he obtained access. Imagine that! Suppose I, an historian, were given access to the archives of the CIA, MI6, Mossad, or the Italian Secret Service: needless to say, I would discover most revealing things too!
So, this Italian judge gets access to the archives, and there – only there – he finds the documents which state very clearly that Operation Gladio was designed to fight two enemies. First, a Soviet invasion (that never happened); and Second, a domestic enemy. The second idea goes like this: first, you carry out a terrorist attack – (usually terrorist attacks shock everybody and make them fearful) – and then you blame it on your enemy. During the Cold War it would have been the communists; today it is the Muslims. Thus, your enemy is totally discredited, even if they didn’t do it, and that is called a false-flag Strategy of Tension. The judge, Felice Casson, came to realise that the Strategy of Tension was actually used to shock Italy into a very strong fear of communist terrorism. So, really, it was fabricated. Today, when we try to put the pieces together, NATO declines to comment, as do the CIA and MI6; it’s all a bit tricky. But what we know today is that these terrorist attacks were carried out, and many of them were false-flag strategies of tension. We were being lied to.
JC: So, in this case, you have an extreme right-winger, Vinciguerra, a member of Ordine Nuovo, carrying out a false-flag attack; that’s one strategy. But wasn’t there also another strategy of infiltrating left-wing groups and getting them to commit acts of terror?
DG: That’s true; that’s another idea. Simply infiltrate a left-wing group that you think is not sufficiently violent, and push it to do something violent, such as to kill somebody. Then you have created a so-called domestic emergency that you can exploit by saying: “We need more money for the military and NATO, and more power for the Secret Service to guarantee your freedom and liberty. We have proof that these communists are evil and dreadful.” In 2000, the Italian Senate (one branch of the Italian Parliament) investigated the spate of terrorist attacks in Italy, and published their conclusions in a report. Let me quote this one sentence. The Italian Parliament writes:
Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian State Institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of the United States Intelligence.
That is a very revealing quote. (And just to be clear, the terrorist attacks in Italy – Straggia, as they’re called in Italy – such as Bologna, Piazza Fontana and Peteano, are undisputed and well-established facts of the Cold War.) So, here we have the Italian Senate admitting, some fifteen years ago, that men inside Italian State institutions – such as the Italian Defence Ministry and Military Intelligence units (the secret services) – were linked to these attacks. Furthermore, people from the American secret services – such as the CIA, and possibly the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) – were also linked to these acts of terrorism. It is very saddening to realise that your taxes (which are already hard enough to pay) are being used so that your country’s own defence department and its secret services can attack, kill and maim their own citizens. When I discuss this with people, they react with disbelief: “Oh no, that’s impossible”, and I reply: “No, it is possible; look at the data.”
JC: I wanted to ask you about that at the end, but please do tell us now.
DG: In 1985 there was a terrorist attack carried out by the French. The French were carrying out atomic tests in the Pacific, and Greenpeace (the environmental NGO) was protesting by sailing their ship,
Rainbow Warrior, right into the area where the French Ministry of Defence planned to explode their atomic weapons.
Unamused by this defiance, Paris decided to take retaliatory action and sent a group of agents from the French Military Secret Service (the DGSE,
Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, a secret service within the Defence Ministry able to carry out covert operations) to New Zealand where the ship was moored to blow it up. One Greenpeace member died in the attack. Once the story broke, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, then Director of the DGSE, was forced to step down, and since it was he who directed this terrorist operation one might call him a terrorist, although not in the sense we normally think.
Lacoste then claimed that, during the time that NATO’s stay-behind network operated in the ’60s and ’70s, terrorist action against then French President De Gaulle and his Algerian Peace Plan had been carried out by groups that included, and I quote, “a limited number of people from the French stay-behind network”. That is a very sensitive statement, because that means that a section of a country’s military or secret service can turn against its own Government. De Gaulle was intent on granting Algeria independence, to which the French military was opposed on the grounds that this could be seen as a humiliation, especially given their defeat in Vietnam and German occupation of France during WWII. So, they turned against De Gaulle with terrorism. Thus the problem was not limited to Italy. It’s intriguing to think that even within France there were rogue element conspiring to overthrow the Government.
JC: Returning to Lemnitzer, he’s in charge of the group that suggests this, and then he becomes Head of NATO around the same time when these stay-behind armies start to morph into something much more hideous.
DG: Yes, that’s right, and we must thank JFK that when he learned of
Operation Northwoods, he rejected it. However, he then had the problem of what to do with this top general Lemnitzer, who was clearly nuts (in the sense that he planned terrorism in the US). Kennedy now suspected that the military-industrial-complex was more dangerous than he had realised, so he judged that he needed to move Lemnitzer sideways to another high position (maybe slightly lower) so that it wouldn’t look like a demotion. He came up with the idea of NATO Commander in Europe. A year later, in 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. Although it’s still unclear who killed him, we do know that he tried to confront what Eisenhower, in his farewell address, called the military-industrial-complex. (It’s no hoax, as some people think; the military-industrial-complex exists, and the documents of Operation Northwoods prove that it plans fabricated terrorist attacks.)
JC: But it’s a piece of circumstantial evidence; it’s very suggestive, but it doesn’t amount to proof. It doesn’t actually
prove NATO/PENTAGON/MI6/CIA involvement in the terror aspect of this. Do you agree?
DG: We have to keep it apart. However, we do know for a fact that they were
planning to carry out terrorism in the US in order to confront Cuba.
(I often have conversations with Europeans who say things like: “Well, I know US intelligence did nasty things in Iran to overthrow Mosaddegh in 1953, and in Chile to otherthrow Allende in 1973; but we’re talking here about the Persian Gulf and Latin America. Who cares about them? They’re all barbarians. The Americans would never do anything like that in Europe.”)