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THE CIA IN WESTERN EUROPE |
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by wakeupmag.co.uk
"They are trained, for example,
to confront disorders and student demonstrations,
to prepare dossiers, to make the best possible use of bank data and tax returns of individual citizens, etc. In other words, to watch over the population of their country with the means offered by technology. This is what I call techno-fascism." - Ex-CIA officer VICTOR
MARCHETTI on the training provided by the Agency to the While most people can accept the fact that the CIA has intervened covertly in the domestic affairs of Third World, Soviet and Central American states, many may not realise the extent of the Agency's same tactics of infiltration, sabotage and terrorism against its supposed allies in the West. In fact Western Europe has been the theatre of CIA undertakings of major proportions, designed to create the false idea of a "Soviet threat", to win the hearts and minds of liberals, social democrats and assorted socialists and steer them in an anti-Communist direction, and to manipulate the political path of every European country…. THE PROPAGANDA WAR "We "had" at least one newspaper in every foreign
capital at any given time." During World War II, many European labour leaders had been rescued from the Nazis with the aid of funds raised by American trade unions. This brought them closely in touch with American military intelligence, in particular the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA), whose chief in Switzerland and Germany was Allen Dulles, later to become the first head of the CIA. The principal union leader in these secret operations was Jay Lovestone, who had switched from being the leader of the American Communist Party to secretly working for U.S. intelligence. As the Allied armies advanced across Europe, Lovestone's men followed as political commissars, trying to make sure that the liberated workers were provided with trade union and political leaders acceptable to Washington. In France, Germany, Italy and Austria, the commissars provided lavish financial and material support for moderate socialists who would draw the sting from left-wing political movements, and the beneficiaries of this assistance survive in European politics to this day. The CIA set up dozens of American foundations, charitable trusts and the like as conduits for payments to all manner of organisations, which in turn funded other groups, all working covertly for an anti-Communist propaganda campaign. So numerous were the organisations involved, and so many were their interconnections and overlaps, that it is unlikely that the full picture of their activities will be revealed. The principal front organisation set up by the CIA in this period was the Congress For Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose purpose was to "defend freedom and democracy against the new tyranny sweeping the world." Given massive CIA funding, the CCF was soon launching political seminars, conferences , newspapers and periodicals, news services, student exchanges and a wide range of political and cultural activities throughout Western Europe, as well as India, Australia, Japan, Africa, and elsewhere. The CCF set up Forum World Features, a news agency based in London, which sold weekly packets of features stories to newspapers all over the world. At its peak, Forum supplied over 250 newspapers world-wide, including The Guardian and The Sunday Times in Britain. The CIA used it as a conduit for U.S. propaganda and also as a cover to send undercover agents almost anywhere as "journalists." According to one of Forum's leading writers, by 1967 it had become "the principal CIA media effort in the world" - quite an achievement considering that in its heyday the CIA was devoting a reported 29% of its budget to media and propaganda. Another important beneficiary of CIA funding was the West German press baron Axel Springer, who was secretly channelled about $7 million in the early 1950s to help build up his vast media empire. Until he died in 1985, Springer was the head of the largest publishing conglomerate in Western Europe, spreading pro-Western and anti-Communist propaganda to an unprecedented degree. His relationship with the CIA reportedly continued until at least the early 1970s. The magazines and journals produced by Forum World Features appealed to the non-Marxist left throughout Europe. They promoted the concepts of a strong, well-armed and united Western Europe, allied to the United States as a bulwark against the insidious threat of the Soviet bloc; support for the Common Market and NATO; and scepticism of disarmament and pacifism. The head of the CIA's International Organisations Division, Tom Braden, later wrote that it was a policy of the Forum magazines to protect their credibility by "not supporting every aspect of official American policy." They generally eschewed the class struggle and excessive nationalisation of industry, and advocated the idea of a reformed capitalism, a capitalism with a human face. (This is the ideology espoused today by European social democratic leaders such as Tony Blair and Helmut Kohl). In 1960, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and other elements of the British Labour Party's left wing succeeded in passing a resolution at the party's conference supporting a policy of complete, unilateral, disarmament. Although the Labour Party was not in power at the time, the turn of events was viewed with some anxiety by Washington. The right wing of the Labour Party, which had intimate connections to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with CIA-funded magazines such as Encounter and New Leader and other Agency fronts, undertook a campaign to reverse Labour's commitment to disarmament. Over the following year, the CIA provided funds for a permanent office, a full-time paid chairman and paid staff, field workers, travelling expenses, tons of literature sent to a large mailing list within the Labour movement and a regular free bulletin. Their opponents could not come close to matching this propaganda blitz. At the 1961 conference, the unilateralist decision was decisively overturned and the Labour Party returned to the NATO fold, where it has remained ever since. The CIA had similar working/financial relationships with leading members of the West German Social Democratic Party, two parties in Austria, the Christian Democrats of Italy, the Liberal Party (in addition to the Labour Party) in Britain, and probably at least one party in every other Western European country. THE PARAMILITARY WAR Soon after the end of World war II, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, worked out a plan to build secret anti-Communist guerrilla forces across Europe. Dulles, Sir Stewart Menzies (boss of Britain's Secret Intelligence Services, SIS - later known as MI6) and the Belgian Premier Paul-Henri Spaak, secretly formed Operation "Stay Behind" under the umbrella of the Clandestine Co-ordinating Committee at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), which became NATO in 1949. The supposed purpose of Operation Stay Behind was to defend against a Soviet invasion; however the real purpose was "to destabilise any left-leaning government, even a social democratic one" and to prevent the left from coming to power anywhere in Europe The most willing and experienced people they found to aid in this endeavour were ex-Nazis, fascists and collaborators. Highly trained and fervent anti-Communists, these were the cadres of Stay Behind. During the 1950s and 60s in Italy, the CIA gave millions of dollars to support many activities promoted by the Catholic Church, such as orphanages and missions. The thinking was that if such institutions were adequately supported, many young people would be able to live well there and so would not one day take up Communist ideology. The money went to a great number of bishops and monsignors. One in particular, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, was heavily involved in a joint operation between the CIA and the Vatican to smuggle Nazis to freedom after World War II. Montini had a long history of association with the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. In 1963 he became Pope Paul VI. 
U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps
Document Detailing Plans to Recruit Members of the SS.
Britain took responsibility for Operation Stay Behind in France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, and Norway. America took responsibility for Sweden, Finland and the rest of Europe. The operation varied from country to country. In Italy and France, which both had very strong Communist parties, the objective was to disrupt them from within and "cause acts of terror which would increase popular demands for restrictive measures and benefit right wing conservative parties." In 1949 in Italy, British intelligence assisted U.S. intelligence in setting up a 12,000 strong secret military unit code-named Gladio (Italian for "sword"). Similar secret armies in other countries were created by the CIA and European intelligence services as part of Operation Gladio. Far from being a defence force against possible Soviet invasion, Gladio was used exclusively to inflict damage upon domestic leftist movements throughout Europe. In Italy in the 1960s, there was a marked increase in social and economic dissatisfaction and the left were growing in popularity. Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, revealed that in the 1950s and 60s the Agency spent some $10 to $30 million a year to finance its covert programmes in Italy. The CIA itself admitted that between 1948 and 1968 it paid a total of $65 million to anti-Communist political parties, labour groups and a wide variety of other organisations in Italy. It also spent an undisclosed amount on propaganda, magazine and book publishers and other means of news and opinion manipulation, such as planting news items in non-American media around the world which cast unfavourable light on Communism, then arranged for these stories to be reprinted in friendly Italian publications. In 1963 the ruling Christian Democratic Party led by Aldo Moro entered into a coalition with the Socialist Party (PSI) to form a government. Washington was worried about where such a coalition would lead. In a posthumous memoir published in 2000, the Italian wartime resistance hero Count Edgardo Sogno described his visit to the CIA station chief in Rome in July 1974 to inform him of his plans for an anti-communist coup. "I asked him what the attitude of the American government would be. He answered what I already knew: the United States would have supported any initiative tending to keep the communists out of government." General Gianadelio Maletti, former head of SID, the Italian military counter-intelligence service, revealed to a Milan court in March 2001 that US intelligence services had instigated and abetted rightwing terrorism in Italy during the 1970s. For instance, General Maletti's men had discovered that a right wing terrorist cell in the Venice region had been supplied with military explosives from Germany with the help of US intelligence. Maletti told the court, "The CIA wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left, and for this purpose, it made use of rightwing terrorism. I believe this is what happened in other countries as well." Maletti gave evidence of the CIA's involvement in the bombing of a bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana, an atrocity that inaugurated the "strategy of tension", a series of bombings intended to shift the country's political centre of gravity to the right. In 1973, four members of the public were killed and 45 injured when an anarchist, Gianfranco Bertoli, hurled a grenade into a crowd outside police headquarters in Milan. It was later revealed that Bertoli was really a right-winger and a long-standing SID informant codenamed Negro. General Maletti's men were warned in advance of the attack but took no action to prevent it and failed to pass on their information about Bertoli, even after the killings.
"The Americans
had gone beyond the infiltration and monitoring Under the guise of "left wing insurgency", Operation Gladio embarked on a reign of terrorist bombings across the country that left at least 300 dead. The bombings were blamed on the extreme left as part of a strategy to mould public opinion to the idea of an alternative government taking power by force. The Gladio personnel created a parallel government called P2 (Propaganda Duo), a neo-fascist Masonic Lodge composed of most of the country's top military officers, political leaders, industrialists, bankers, and diplomats. P2 had close connections with the CIA and carried out drug smuggling missions and assassinations for them. They infiltrated the Red Brigades and carried out the murder of Aldo Moro in 1978. Colonel Oswald Le Winter of the CIA, who served as U.S. liaison officer with Gladio, has stated that the planning staff of the Red Brigades was made up of CIA intelligence agents. Gladio also carried out the bomb attack on Bologna Railway station in 1980 in which 85 people were killed and hundreds injured. The outcry over this led to the exposure of much of the conspiracy and the CIA arranged for P2's Grandmaster, fascist Lucio Gelli to escape to Argentina. 
The Aftermath of the Bologna
Terrorist Bombing
It is not known if the CIA ever ended its practice of funding anti-Communist groups in Italy. Internal CIA documents revealed contributions of tens of millions of dollars to political parties and individuals in each of the parliamentary elections in the 1970s and 80s to prevent the Communists from achieving electoral gains. In May 1981, it was the CIA-run Milan newspaper Il Giornale Nuovo, which set in motion the particular piece of international disinformation known as "The KGB Plot to Kill the Pope." In Germany the U.S. Office of Policy Co-ordination, which fronted for the CIA, incorporated the entire espionage outfit run by Hitler's spy chief, Reinhard Gehlen. Upon West Germany's entry into NATO in May 1955, West German leader Konrad Adenauer signed a secret protocol with the U.S. agreeing that the West German authorities would not take legal action against known right wing extremists. Operation Stay Behind in Germany drew its main personnel from former SS and Waffen SS men, who were trained by officers of the British SIS. Later, the operation was taken over by a secret wing of the Federal German Intelligence Service, the BND. Documentary evidence in the hands of the British All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes group shows that Nazi Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie himself ("The Butcher of Lyon") kept in close contact with American secret services and functioned as a recruiter of ex-Nazis for operation Stay Behind. Later, the U.S Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) helped Barbie to escape to Argentina in 1951. From the late 1940's until the mid 50's, the CIA organised sabotage and propaganda operations against every country of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They tried to ferment rebellion and to hinder those countries' efforts to rebuild their economies from the devastation of World War II. In 1955, anti-Communist Eastern Europeans trained with the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, learning guerrilla warfare tactics to be used in their native lands. By the following year, hundreds of Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles and others were being trained by CIA paramilitary specialists at a secret installation in West Germany. The Agency laid plans for uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland and Rumania. The CIA's propaganda stations Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty assured Eastern European people of American backing for their liberations. At the same time, CIA paramilitary groups were being infiltrated into those countries' capitals to provoke anti-Communist uprisings.
Ukrainian volunteers for the Nazi SS 'Galicia' Division, on parade during the war. Many had committed war crimes while serving in auxiliary police units; they were blessed by Archbishop Szepticky at the Vatican and recruited by British intelligence after the war as part of the fascist Stay Behind network across Europe, engaged in sabotage and subversion against the Communists. In particular, East Germany was an easy target before the Berlin Wall went up. The CIA's forces damaged power stations, shipyards, a dam, canals, docks, public buildings, petrol stations, shops, a radio station, public transportation; they derailed freight trains (seriously injuring workers), blew up road and railway bridges, used special acid to damage vital factory machinery, promoted work slow-downs in factories, stole blueprints and samples of new technical developments, killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy by poisoning the wire used to bale the cow's corn fodder, added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools, raided and wrecked left-wing offices in East and West Berlin, stole membership lists, assaulted and kidnapped leftists and, on occasion, murdered them, forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment and much more. The murder of one man, for being nothing more than "an East-West bridge builder" led to the exposure of the entire operation. When arrested by the East German authorities, one of the CIA forces were in possession of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin, with which they planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans. In Belgium the Stay Behind group SDRA-8 was linked with terror tactics and coup attempts. In 1983, in order to convince the Belgian public that a security crisis existed, Gladio operatives and police officers staged a series of seemingly random shootings in supermarkets. The following year, a group of U.S. marines parachuted into Belgium and attacked a police station. A civilian died in the operation, which was intended to give the impression that the country was on the brink of Red revolution. Guns used in the operation were later planted in a Brussels house used by a Communist splinter group. In Sweden, ex-SS officers were recruited into a Stay Behind organisation called Sveaborg and the CIA arranged for P2 to assassinate Swedish Premier Olaf Palme. In the April 1967 national elections in Greece, the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou seemed certain to be re-elected as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected in 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. A joint campaign by the Greek military and the CIA to unseat him began immediately. Former General Nikos Kouris revealed that a Greek Gladio force was formed with CIA help "to intervene in case of Communist threat, whether external or internal…. There were ex-military men, specially trained soldiers and also civilians. What held them together was one ideological common denominator: extreme rightism." The Gladio "Sheepskin" group was involved in a campaign of terrorist bombings, which were blamed on the left, and two days before the election campaign was to begin, a military coup brought to power a junta led by George Papadopoulos, a member of the Greek intelligence service KYP. The CIA had created the KYP and Papadopoulos was on the payroll of the Agency for some 15 years. Along with hundreds of other KYP officers, he had received training in anti-subversive techniques in the United States. Papadopoulos was "a great believer in Hitler's new order"; declaring that the coup had taken place to save the nation from a "Communist take-over", he plunged Greece for the next seven years into a nightmare of martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture and murders. 8,000 were killed in the first month alone. Before the end of the year, Amnesty International reported that "torture as a deliberate practice is carried out by the Security Police and the Military Police." The Greek junta contributed $549,000 to the 1968 Nixon-Agnew election campaign in the United States. A Senate investigation to discover if this was CIA money finding its way back home, was abruptly cancelled at the direct request of Henry Kissinger. The Greek junta allowed the U.S. to install dozens of military installations, from nuclear missile bases to major communications sites. In turn, the United States provided the regime with ample military hardware, despite an official congressional embargo. Much of the junta's torture equipment came as U.S. military aid, including such items as a special "thick white double cable" whip and a headscrew known as an "iron wreath", which was progressively tightened around the head or ears. In 1969, the European Commission of Human Rights found Greece guilty of torture, murder and other violations, and rejected the junta's claim that their country had been in danger of a Communist take-over. Philip Deane, a Greek UN official, was told by leading politicians that "for the sake of preserving good relations with the U.S., the evidence of U.S. complicity in the coup will not be made fully public." As far as can be determined, the CIA's paramilitary group in Greece was never disbanded. In the eyes of senior CIA officials, it is seen as a long-term "insurance" for U.S. interests in Greece, to be used to assist or to direct the possible overthrow of an "unsympathetic" Greek government. In Britain, MI6 was involved in recruiting Latvian police and ex-SS men from Germany into the Gladio network. They were trained in the UK and at British bases in West Germany and returned home to carry out contra-style sabotage raids aimed at disrupting the post-war economy of the Baltic states. SS Major Emil Hoffman was used to recruit former Gestapo and SS agents. The Special Air Services (SAS) functioned with MI6 to train Italian Stay Behind units in Britain for the purpose of guerrilla warfare and sabotage well into the 1980's. Amongst those involved in running secret armed cells within Britain were George K. Young, ex-director of MI6, and Tory MP Airey Neave, one of Margaret Thatcher's closest advisors, later murdered by the IRA. Young formed the group Tory Action which was at the centre of a smear campaign to discredit the Labour government of Harold Wilson. The CIA and MI6 collaborated to spread disinformation about the Labour Party and portray Wilson as a KGB agent. Former MI6 officer Leigh Tracey revealed that Neave plotted to organise a paramilitary army of resistance in case Labour won the general election of 1979. Young, General Sir Walter Walker (former NATO commander) and Ross McWhirter set up a secret paramilitary army called "UNISON" and a covert group called "Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee" (RPOC) was formed, hidden inside the government-funded Reserve Forces Association (RFA) which took control of Stay Behind in 1971 and was given access to Ministry of Defence departments such as the Joint Warfare Establishment near Salisbury. The existence of Operation Stay Behind has been officially admitted in France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Luxembourg, Turkey and Italy, where the investigation into the murder of Aldo Moro caused a massive political scandal. The CIA spent over $100 million on the operation and there were arms dumps all over Europe. As late as 1990, large stockpiles of weapons and explosives for Operation Gladio could still be found in some countries, and Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti disclosed that more than 600 people still remained on the Gladio payroll in Italy. As many as 900 arms dumps across Europe remain intact today…. As the veneer of Western democracy fades, it should be clear that the current governments of the West have come to power not by the free will of the people but with the aid of subterfuge, manipulation and (where necessary) armed aggression - created and controlled by the CIA. It is evident that the Agency has not hesitated to use the same tactics it has applied throughout the rest of the world to the supposed democracies of Western Europe. It is crucial that we understand the extent and methodology of the CIA's tactics if we are to help prevent the subversion of democracy in the future. How far have the intelligence services infiltrated our national press, TV and radio? If any European government tried to implement radical left wing policies, what measures would the CIA resort to, in order to prevent it? These and many more questions need to be answered while the secret services of the U.S., Britain and other Western governments still have much to hide.... For more details of the CIA's interference in British politics, see:
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