Gladio and the stay-behind networks

What a stay-behind network was

According to the 1992 report of the Italian parliamentary commission on terrorism and massacres, the network was prepared for a crisis in NATO countries. It was to protect territories and populations that came under occupation and help restore lawful authority and legitimate institutions there.¹

The networks differed in scale. In 2008 Luxembourg's parliamentary commission for the oversight of intelligence found that the country never had more than twelve agents: unpaid volunteers in dormant cells who did not know one another. Their job was to gather information and move people (exfiltration and infiltration), not sabotage or armed action.³

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to a summary of the Belgian parliamentary commission's findings published by Statewatch, the Belgian network was run jointly by the civilian security service (STC/Mob) and military intelligence (SDRA 8). Besides resistance after a Soviet attack, there were plans to evacuate important people and secret documents and to keep in contact with ministers.⁵

Italy: from SIFAR to 1990

The first steps were taken in 1951 (a SIFAR military intelligence memo of 8 October 1951). According to the commission's report, the agreement between SIFAR and the CIA was concluded on 28 November 1956.¹

Between 1963 and 1969, 139 hidden caches of weapons and supplies, known as Nasco, were set up (see cache). On 24 February 1972 the Carabinieri came across one of them by chance at Aurisina; the dismantling of the caches was completed in June 1973.¹

On 18 October 1990 Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti sent the commission a document entitled “Il cosiddetto SID parallelo – il caso Gladio” (“The so-called parallel SID – the Gladio case”). On 27 November 1990 he ordered the structure dissolved.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to the newspaper Il Post, on 24 October 1990 Andreotti confirmed the existence of Gladio in a speech to the Chamber of Deputies.⁶

Coordination: the CPC and ACC committees

According to the Luxembourg report, the networks were coordinated successively by the Western Union's clandestine committee (from 1949), the CPC (from 1951) and the ACC (from 1958), which it describes as a regional committee of six powers. Each national network kept its autonomy.³

Italy joined the CPC on 19 May 1959 and the ACC on 15 April 1964. The Italian commission concluded that neither committee was an integral part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Leopoldo Nuti, writing in the Journal of Strategic Studies, by contrast calls the CPC a NATO structure set up by the Alliance in 1952, and the ACC a liaison body of the NATO countries with stay-behind networks, created mainly to standardise them.^1,4

In its answer to the Bundestag in May 1991, the West German government stated that there was no NATO institution coordinating Gladio.⁷

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to Statewatch, the ACC coordinated the networks of ten countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States) and held its last meeting on 23–24 October 1990. The head of the Belgian unit SDRA 11, the CPC's secretariat, refused to answer the commission's questions, citing NATO confidentiality, and the commission dropped that line of inquiry.⁵

Reckoning in Europe in 1990

On 22 November 1990 the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the Gladio affair. It stated that for over 40 years the organisation had escaped all democratic controls and had been run by national secret services in collaboration with NATO; it condemned the clandestine creation of such networks, called for a full investigation and urged governments to dismantle all clandestine military and paramilitary networks. The minutes of the sittings of 19–23 November 1990 were published in Official Journal of the EC C 324 of 24 December 1990.^2,8,9

In Luxembourg, Prime Minister Jacques Santer ordered the network dissolved on 14 November 1990 and on 17 December briefed the Chamber of Deputies' institutions committee; the committee found no grounds for a parliamentary inquiry.³

In West Germany the government stated in May 1991 that the dissolution of the BND's stay-behind organisation had been ordered and that the individual steps were to be completed before the end of 1991.⁷

In Switzerland the matter was examined by a parliamentary commission of inquiry (PUK EMD, report of 17 November 1990). The secret resistance organisation P-26, in its current form since 1981, had about 400 members against a planned 800 and held, among other things, several hundred submachine guns and explosives. The commission pointed to the lack of a legal basis and regarded P-26 as a potential danger to the constitutional order. The Federal Council dissolved P-26 on 14 November 1990 and the secret intelligence service P-27 on 12 December 1990; in 2018 it published an anonymised version of Pierre Cornu's 1991 report on P-26.^10,11,12,13

Legality and oversight in Italy

The Italian commission found that the parliamentary committee on the intelligence services had not been informed about Gladio, and that it was the services themselves that decided which prime ministers and defence ministers to brief. According to the report, Giovanni Spadolini was never informed while prime minister (1981–1982).¹

The commission left the assessment of the network's original creation to Parliament, bearing in mind the situation of the 1950s. It described the breach of the 1977 intelligence reform law (no. 801), however, as “systematic, unscrupulous and entirely intentional”.¹

The strategy of tension: what was established and what is a thesis

The European Parliament's 1990 resolution states, citing judicial inquiries, that military secret services or uncontrolled branches of them were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime. It does not attribute these acts to Gladio itself.²

In the Italian commission's debate on the draft report (23 May 1991), Cicciomessere said the records contained no episodes of Gladio involvement in subversive acts. Macis put forward, as a hypothesis to be tested, that the network served as a logistical base and cover for “dirty operations”, and called the possible use of Nasco explosives a line being pursued by magistrates. These were the views of commission members, not its findings.¹⁴

In the part of the 1992 report we checked, the commission does not hold Gladio responsible for any bombings; it reports the charges brought by the Padua prosecutors and by Judge Felice Casson as charges. Leopoldo Nuti (2007) concludes that the released documents do not support the claim that Gladio was involved in illegal activities linked to the terrorism of the late 1960s and 1970s.^1,4

The Luxembourg commission found no link between the local network and the bombings of 1984–1986.³

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to Il Post, until 2001 four prosecutor's offices investigated the matter and ten trials were held; none ended in a conviction.⁶