45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An interpretative key for the understanding of many European misteries, August 1, 2005
The author is a Swiss researcher who has nicely managed to document in one volume the modus operandi of a secret stay-behind army in Europe which operated since the end of WWII until the end of the Cold War. The book provides a complete documentation of the general patterns of this army across Europe that if taken in isolation would seem improbable. This super secret Army was operating in all Western European countries under different codenames and coordinated by the Allied Clandestine Committee and the Clandestine Planning Committee under the umbrella supervision of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) within the NATO and with the active supporting role of the Pentagon, CIA and the British MI6. The goal of this army was to operate behind enemy lines setting up resistance movements in case of a Soviet invasion of Europe. The secret army was clandestine and illegal in many countries and staffed by loyal anti-communist soldiers and rightwing activists recruited from various sectors, many with a past with the nazis or fascist armies during WWII. These armies have been employed also against the national communist (and in some case socialist) parties (Demagnetize Operation) under the complacence of domestic intelligence services with several suspect cases of assassinations and some documented cases of terrorist attacks against civilian targets, or in overturning democratically elected governments (Greece and Turkey) too dangerously left-leaning. Italy plays an important part in this story since Italy was theatre of several operations and last but not least, a former prime minister eventually admitted before Parliament in 1990, after the investigations of a judge, that a stay-behind army had operated since WWII, opening a Pandora's box of revelations. To each country are dedicated 18 specific chapters (UK, USA, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria) with specific documented episodes, that offers a clarifying picture of this super secret organization. Much remains to be discovered, but the merit of this book is to have put together scattered information in a well organized way. Recommended.
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant study of state-sponsored terrorism, October 25, 2006
This path-breaking work by Daniele Ganser, a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology, exposes the secret anti-communist terrorist organisation set up across Europe by the US and British states after World War Two. They created the Gladio network in all 16 NATO member countries and in the neutral nations of Sweden, Finland, Austria and Switzerland. They recruited former SS members as part of Germany's network.
As Ganser writes, these networks "became activists in political causes as a rule and not as an exception." The US and British states used them "to manipulate and control the democracies of Western Europe from within, unknown to both European populations and parliaments. This strategy led to terror and fear, as well as to `humiliation and maltreatment of democratic institutions'." They created and manipulated a terrorist threat, developing a `strategy of tension' to strengthen Europe's ruling classes.
Ganser points out, "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." He observes, "The secret armies ... 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 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 coups d'etats (Greece and Turkey), to the smashing of opposition groups (Portugal and Spain)."
The Gladio terrorists massacred 38 people in Turkey in 1977, 491 people in Italy between 1969 and 1980, and 28 people in Belgium in 1983-85. They assisted coups in France in 1958 and 1961, in Greece in 1967 and in Turkey in 1960, 1971 and 1980. They carried out the assassinations of Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of Mozambique's national liberation movement, in 1969, and of Aldo Moro, who had been Prime Minister of Italy, in 1978.
The USA and Britain thus became state sponsors of terrorism. Ganser concludes, "Many of these state-sponsored terrorist operations, as the subsequent cover-ups and fake trials suggest, enjoyed the encouragement and protection of selected highly placed governmental and military officials in Europe and in the United States." As an Italian parliamentary commission reported in 2002, "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 United States intelligence."
The British state still uses the Gladio `strategy of tension', exploiting fundamentalist terrorists to increase state powers. For example, MI5 ran Abu Hamza: for ten years they let him recruit and train terrorists for use abroad. Inevitably, some, like the 7/7 London bombers, turned on their hosts. Even now the state protects Hamza, refusing to prosecute him on terrorism charges.
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