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Abstract
This essay is based on an analysis of the official documentation made available to the Italian Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry on the origins and development of the stay-behind network in Italy. It tries to use these materials and integrate them with those of historical research on some related subjects in order to sketch out a tentative outline of the chronology and of the reasons for the creation of ‘Gladio’, as the stay-behind network was officially denominated. The article concludes that the documents released to the Parliamentary Committees do not permit the assumption that Operation ‘Gladio’ was involved in any illegal activities connected with the terrorism of the late 1960s and of the 1970s. The documents, in other words, do not help solving any of the mysteries which beleaguered Italian post-war history for more than a decade. On the other hand, the parliamentary reports tell a story which fits very well with the results of historical research on Italy's foreign and security policy after World War II, and confirm some of its key assumptions.
Key words:
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marilena Gala, Maria Eleonora Guasconi, Paul Koedijk and Olav Riste for their comments on a previous version of this paper; and Tim Naftali for allowing me to cite extensively from his unpublished paper ‘Villa Angleton: The United States and Italian Intelligence’.
Notes
1Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul terrorismo in Italia e sulle cause della mancata individuazione delle stragi, ‘Prerelazione sull’inchiesta condotta dalla Commissione in ordine alle vicende connesse con l’operazione Gladio, con annessi gli natti del dibattito svoltosi sul documento stesso’, 9 July 1991, in Atti Parlamentari, X Legislatura, doc. XXIII, n. 36. (Hereafter cited as Prerelazione).
2At some time or the other, similar stay-behind organizations existed in Austria (Schwert), Belgium (SDR-8), Denmark, France (Glaive), West Germany, Greece (Operation ‘Sheepskin’), Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden (Sveaborg), Switzerland (P26), and Turkey. Most, but not all, of these units had some link to each other, but some only had bilateral liaisons with the UK or the US. Operation ‘Gladio’, in <http://users.westnet.gr/∼cgian/gladio.htm>. According to the later comments of one of the generals who headed the Italian SB, the Italian revelations unleashed some very sharp reactions from some of the foreign partners: Paolo Inzerilli, Gladio: La verità negata (Bologna: Edizioni Analisi 1995), 67.
3For the pre-report, see footnote 1. The two final reports are ‘Relazione del Comitato Parlamentare per i servizi di informazione e di sicurezza e per il segreto di stato sulla “Operazione Gladio”’, 4 March 1992, in Atti Parlamentari, X Legislatura, Doc. XLVIII, n.1 (hereafter, REPORT 1) and ‘Relazione sull’inchiesta condotta sulle vicende connesse all’operazione Gladio dalla Commissione Parlamentare d’inchiesta sul terrorismo in Italia e sulle cause della mancata individuazione dei responsabili delle stragi’, 22 April 1992, in Atti Parlamentari, X Legislatura, doc. XXIII, n.51 (hereafter, REPORT 2).
4For a rather critical assessment of the quality of the way the original records have been filed and handed over to the parliamentary committees, see Comitato Parlamentare per i servizi di informazione e di sicurezza, ‘Primo rapporto sul sistema di informazione e di sicurezza’, Per Aspera ad Veritatem 2 (May–Aug. 1995), Ch.4, ‘Quattordici casi emblematici di deviazione del servizio segreto militare’.
5For a powerful, if somewhat emphatic, description of the situation in the immediate post-war period, see ‘Future policy towards Italy’, by Chief Commissioner Rear Admiral Ellery Stone, 23 June 1945, in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), Vol. 1, 688–94.
6Timothy J. Naftali, ‘Villa Angleton: The United States and Italian Intelligence’, paper presented at the March 1998 conference on ‘Italy and the US 50 Years after the Marshall Plan’, Roma, Centro Studi Americani. For a general, and often biased, survey of some of these clandestine networks, see the collection of documents in Nicola Tranfaglia, Come nasce la repubblica: La Mafia, il Vaticano e il neofascismonei documenti americani e italiani, 1943–1947 (Milano: Bompiani 2004).
7Virgilio Ilari, Storia militare della prima repubblica, 1943–1993 (Ancona: Casa editrice Nuove Ricerche 1994), 524–25.
8Luciano Garibaldi, L’altro italiano. Edgardo Sogno: sessant’anni di antifascismo e di anticomunismo (Milano: Edizioni Ares 1992), 177–78.
9Tranfaglia, Come nasce la repubblica, 178–88 and 204–10.
10Pre-report, 32. The tension between the partisan groups was already high even in the final months of the war, and in Feb. 1945 a non-communist formation was ambushed and massacred by a communist one in the notorious Porzus incident.
11Virgilio Ilari, Il generale col monocolo: Giovanni De Lorenzo, 1907–1973 (Ancona: Casa Editrice Nuove Ricerche 1994), 68.
12For the creation of the unit and its deployment in 1948, see Pre-report, 33. The story of the clash is told by Ilari, Il generale col monocolo, 69. The tension with Yugoslavia in the spring of 1946 is described in Leopoldo Nuti, L’esercito italiano nel secondo dopoguerra. La sua ricostruzione e l’assistenza militare alleata, 1945–1950 (Rome: Ufficio Storico Stato Maggiore Esercito, 1989).
13Pre-report, pp.33 and 36.
14Tranfaglia, Come nasce la repubblica, 69, footnote 62.
15Leopoldo Nuti, ‘Security and Threat Perceptions in Italy in the Early Cold War Years, 1945–1953’, in Francesca Gori and Silvio Pons (eds.), The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1945–1953 (London: Macmillan 1996), 412–29.
16Timothy J. Naftali, ‘ARTIFICE: James Angleton and X-2 Operations in Italy’, in George C. Chalou (ed.), The Secrets' War. The Office of Strategic Services in World War II (Washington DC: NARA 1992); Naftali, ‘Villa Angleton’.
17According to Naftali, ‘Villa Angleton’, the two key connections that Angleton built early on were with the Pubblica Sicurezza (i.e. with the Police forces of the Ministry of the Interior) and with the Naval Intelligence Service.
18For Colby's own version of this episode, see William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster 1978), Ch. 3, ‘Covert Politics in Italy’.
19Promemoria trasmesso l’8 ottobre 1951 dal generale Broccoli al Capo di Stato Maggiore della difesa, Generale Marras, sotto il titolo di ‘Organizzazione informativa-operativa nel territorio nazionale suscettibile di occupazione nemica’, cited as attachment 1 in REPORT 2, 14–15.
20REPORT 2, 15–16.
21REPORT 1, 83–4.
22On the military relations between the US and Italy see Leopoldo Nuti, ‘Appunti per una storia della politica di difesa italiana nella prima metà degli anni ′50’, in Ennio Di Nolfo, Romain Rainero, Brunello Vigezzi (eds.), L’Italia e la politica di potenza in Europa negli anni ′50 (Milan: Marzorati 1992), 625–70; idem, ‘US Forces in Italy, 1955–1963’, in Wolfgang Krieger (ed.), US Forces in Europe: The Early Years (Boulder, CO: Westview 1994), 251–72.
23Ilari, Il generale col monocolo, 72.
24Naftali, ‘Villa Angleton’, 20.
25Pre-report, 28.
26This description of the structure of SAD comes from a later document, Stato Maggiore della Difesa, SIFAR – Ufficio ‘R’, Sezione SAD, 1 June 1959, ‘Le Forze Speciali del SIFAR e l’operazione Gladio’, reproduced in Mario Coglitore and Sandro Scarso, La notte dei gladiator: Omissioni e silenzi della repubblica (Padua: Calusca edizioni 1992). The book offers an extremely biased interpretation of the creation of Gladio, but it also includes the complete reproduction of this important record. The sequence of the creation of the various groups is described in REPORT 1, 63–5, according to which the groups had slightly different tasks.
27REPORT 1, 65.
28Ibid., 6–7.
29Ibid., 5–7. The title of the Italian copy of the agreement does not include the word ‘Restatement’, and this difference had led to much speculation about the real beginning of the operation.
30REPORT 1, 104. See also Paolo Emilio Taviani, Politica a memoria d’uomo (Bologna: Il Mulino 2002), 408.
31REPORT 1, 16–17.
32Taviani's statements are fully reported in REPORT 1, 12–13, as well as in P. E. Taviani, Politica a memoria d’uomo, 406–7.
33Foreign Service dispatch No. 996, ‘Request by Minister of Defence for Increase in US forces Stationed in Italy’, 21 Jan. 1957, in NAW, RG 59, Central Decimal Files, box 3620, f. 765.5-MSP/1-257, 765.5-MSP/1-257. See also a later document, Italian Minister of Defence (Taviani) to the US Secretary of State (Wilson), 11 Jan.1957, in NAW, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–1959, box 2539, TAB A to 611.65/2–1457.
34On this subject see Leopoldo Nuti, Gli Stati Uniti e l’apertura a sinistra: Importanza e limiti della presenza americana in Italia (Roma: Laterza 1999), Ch.1.
35REPORT 1, 79.
36Ibid., 81.
37REPORT 1, 88, footnote 121.
38Actually 10 of the original 139 caches were not retrieved in 1973 but in 1990, as they had been hidden in places where their retrieval would require some complex demolition work. REPORT 1, 91–8.
39Stato Maggiore della Difesa, SIFAR – Ufficio ‘R’, Sezione SAD, 1 June 1959, ‘Le Forze Speciali del SIFAR e l’operazione Gladio’, reproduced in Coglitore and Scarso, La notte dei gladiatori. Inzerilli in his memoirs gives more or less the same figure, 220 million lire: Inzerilli, Gladio, 72.
40REPORT 1, 84–5.
41Taviani, Politica a memoria d’uomo, 408 and 427–8 for his personal relationship with Gruenther.
42While the CPC was a NATO structure, having being set up by the Alliance in 1952 and being strictly linked to SACEUR, the ACC was a sort of liaison agency between those NATO countries which had a stay-behind network and was created mainly with the purpose of standardizing them. REPORT 1, 104–5. See also Inzerilli, Gladio, 61–4.
43Inzerilli, Gladio, 27–8.
44In his book, Daniele Ganser repeatedly tries to demonstrate, for instance, that ‘Gladio’ was behind the 1964 coup manqué organized by Gen. De Lorenzo, a demonstration of force that was probably conceived by the General and President Segni to illegally influence the course of Italian politics and steer the Italian centre-left government towards the right: and yet Ganser offers no primary sources to support his thesis, nor does he succeed in doing so in the following pages of his chapter on Italy. Daniel Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass 2005), 70–2.
45REPORT 1, 41–2.
46REPORT 2, 19.
47Ibid., 42–6. Inzerilli mentions a similar large-scale exercise, still carried out in Trieste but by the Carabinieri, in 1965, under the codename ‘Aquila Bianca’: Inzerilli, Gladio, 38.
48REPORT 1, 46–8.
49Inzerilli, Gladio, 66.
50For a long list of possible links between US intelligence operatives and Italian terrorists, see for instance the work of Judge Salvini, one of the legal authorities who investigated the strategy of tension: Sentenza - ordinanza del Giudice Istruttore presso il Tribunale Civile e Penale di Milano, dr. Guido Salvini, nel procedimento penale nei confronti di ROGNONI Giancarlo ed altri, in <www.strano.net/stragi/tstragi/salvini/index.html>. Salvini, however, takes for real the (in) famous document ‘Supplement B’ of the US Army Field Manual (FM) 30–31, demonstrated to be a Soviet forgery since 1976. On the influence of counterinsurgency theories in the US, and on the Kennedy administration in particular, there is an ample literature: Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York: Free Press c1977); Larry E. Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War (NY UP 1986); Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: US Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counter-Terrorism, 1940–1990 (New York: Pantheon Books 1992); Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Ballantine Books 1979), 495–503; Theodore Shackley, The Third Option: An American View of Counterinsurgency Operations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981).
51Ilari, Il generale col monocolo, 77–82. Inzerilli hints that one of his men had been in touch with general surveillance against terrorist attacks in Alto Adige: Inzerilli, Gladio, 16.
52Inzerilli, Gladio, 38 and 66.