The following transcript is of a tape-recorded broadcast by NO-commercials, NO-corporate-influences, listener- funded, beacon-of-truth Pacifica Radio Network station of the People: WBAI-FM (99.5) 505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl. New York, NY 10018 (212) 279-0707 ROBERT KNIGHT: Today on UNDERCURRENTS: the secret society of "GLADIO". In a number of countries around the World, the so-called concept of terrorism -- as a tool of political control and, in fact, sometimes as a provocation for elements of political control -- is pretty much part and parcel of operations around the World. And now that the so-called era of "glasnost" and the relaxation of some elements of the Cold War is taking place, we find that just such a pattern of clandestine terrorism, on behalf of conservative or right-tending institutions, has also been very much a part of European politics. Our guest is Martin Lee, author of ACID DREAMS and yet another book on the Media about detecting bias inside the Media. UNRELIABLE SOURCES is the title of that one. Martin has also spent quite a bit of time researching a clandestine set of organizations known collectively as "GLADIO". What, precisely, is GLADIO? MARTIN LEE: GLADIO is the Italian component of a NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] operation that spanned forty years, beginning in the early 1950s, that covered all of Western and Northern Europe like a spider web. GLADIO was ostensibly an operation set up by NATO and the CIA to organize what they called "stay-behind units", paramilitary forces that would stay behind, forces that would be ready, in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, to undertake resistance operations or sabotage activities against the Soviet troops. They would stay behind the lines and do this. That's where it got it's name. "Operation Stay-Behind" was the name of the entire European operation. In Italy, it was called "GLADIO". And it was discovered when an Italian magistrate named Felige Cassone[sp] was investigating a terrorist incident in Patano[sp]. And he found that the Italian Secret Service had laid a false trail which led investigators to seek the culprits among the left-wing terrorist milieu in Italy, when it turned out that neo-fascist terrorists had actually perpetrated the deed in which a number of policemen were killed. And what he further uncovered was that the neo-fascist terrorists had used arms that they had gotten from a NATO arms depot in Italy. And that led him to investigate the question: How did these neo-fascist terrorists get access to NATO arms? And that's what led him to uncover this NATO operation that was going on in Italy which was explicity linked to terrorism. What is significant about it is that the cover story was that it [GLADIO] was just simply a plan, a contingency plan, set up in CASE of a Soviet invasion -- a plan that was ultimately never used. That's the cover story. In fact, in a number of European countries, these so-called "gladiators" or stay-behind units were engaged in terrorism and other kinds of political subversion, ostensibly against allies of the United States. ROBERT KNIGHT: The organization had quite a bit of resources in the various Western European and NATO countries. Where were these people recruited from in places like Italy, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere? MARTIN LEE: Well, in a number of the countries -- not all of them -- but in a number of them, the recruits for these stay-behind units or GLADIO units were from fascist or Nazi organizations. In Germany, the stay-behind unit there was composed largely of SS officers. In Great Britain, some of the stay-behind units were drawn from a clandestine group called "Column 88". The name was taken from the fact the the eighth letter of the English alphabet is "H". "88" is the code for "HH", meaning "Heil Hitler". That is where they got their name. In Greece, some of the GLADIO personnel were later involved in the coup d'etat in 1967 that succeeded in putting that country under the control of the fascist military junta. In Turkey, human rights activists have now linked the GLADIO unit there to the Gray Wolves, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization. In Italy, the gladiators were composed largely of former members of Mussolini's Secret Police, and so forth. There were OTHER countries .... This NATO operation was, in fact, active in countries that were NOT EVEN part of NATO, countries like Sweden, Austria and so forth. In some of these countries, the GLADIO units were composed of people who were anti-communist in their orientation. They weren't explicitly or validly neo-Nazis. But, nonetheless, it is a scandal in its own right. When this story came out about the neo-Nazi connections to these stay- behind units, it invoked headlines throughout Western Europe. And yet, it was ostensibly a story that was just not covered in the United States. ROBERT KNIGHT: The German wing of this network was formed from former members of the so-called "Gehlen Operation", an ex-Nazi intelligence network that was very instrumental in the formation of the CIA, which would later link up again with the CIA. Is that correct? MARTIN LEE: Yes. What happened was that after the Second World War, the United States saw that it lacked an intelligence capability directed against the Soviet Union because it was our wartime ally, obviously. So the CIA incorporated into its ranks a lot of Nazi intelligence officers. The main person among them was General Reinhard Gehlen who was Hitler's chief intelligence officer directed towards the Soviet Union to the East. The Gehlen Organization ostensibly became the CIA's eyes and ears in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. And again, that is A MAJOR SCANDAL in its own right! So, it was from within the ranks of the Gehlen Organization that some of these stay-behind personnel were recruited for West Germany, which played a very important role, along with Britain, in running the operation. This was a CIA operation that was run through NATO. It was CIA- funded and CIA-directed. THAT is important to emphasize! ROBERT KNIGHT: In the contingency for creating disturbances in the event of this scenario of Soviet tanks rolling into Western Europe or taking over NATO countries, the organization was, by no means, latent. Was it? What kind of activities did it use its resources for during its period of existence? PSYOPS- HTTP://WWW.TELEPORT.COM/~WALTER _______________________________________ blast trauma data fer social dissection made available to: realpolitic junkies, info tyros, kultur buzzards & da masses ======================================= FBI-CIA-KGB-NSA-BCCI-DIA-DEA-FEMA-THULE KKK-CONTRA-JFK-RFK-MLK-MKULTRA-LAROUCHE COINTELPRO-ILLUMINATI-P2-CFR-ADL-MOSSAD BLUEBIRD-OSS-ONI-SOE-BIS-AIDS-ARTICHOKE OTO-OCCULT-NEA-BILDERBERGER-40 CTTE-SLA VELIKOVSKY-SDI-INSLAW-TESLA-TSS-CROWLEY JIM JONES-GURDJIEFF-ABWEHR-T4-WACO-BATF EFF-PGP-RHIC/EDOM-PANDORA-CAN-TAVISTOCK ENIGMA-BEARDEN-GEHLEN-SPETZNAZ-EUGENICS MASONS-ODESSA-WFMH-IRS-MI5-FOIA-TRILATS