Transcription
Although the Second World War was over in 1945, the American, British, and European elites continued to fight a covert war to keep Western Europe under capitalist control and to secure allies in the growing Cold War. This effort was consolidated under the joint NATO and CIA operation titled Gladio. Originally established as a stay-behind network of ardent right-wing fighters to repel a Soviet invasion, Gladio quickly morphed into an underground army of vanguard warriors intent on crushing any left-wing activity in the Western sphere.
This ominous operation, named after the Roman short sword of the same name, has continued to baffle researchers and skeptics for the past three decades since its declassification in the early nineties. Although we still remain in the dark about many aspects of Gladio, we do know that the story largely begins in post-war Italy in 1948 by rigging Italy's first democratic elections since their fall to fascism in the twenties.
Folks, today we begin in earnest to untangle the decades-long Operation Gladio by looking at its origins in Italy, its ties to the Vatican, and the establishment of confidential pan-European forums to administer this shadowy and dangerous web. Most importantly, we will be tracking the fingerprints of the US intelligence apparatus, the CIA, who is all over this tangled and intricate web.
Today, I plan on breaking from my usual format slightly. This will be Part 1 of a new three-part mini-series within the history of the CIA, exploring the origins of Gladio, the transatlantic organized crime networks that permeated this operation, the spooks and deep state weirdos that helped organize the whole gambit, and the significance of these post-war operations to our larger narrative.
If you are joining us for the first time, welcome aboard. As I do in all my videos, I cite all my sources in the description of each part. When a number shows up at the top of the screen like this, you can find a matching bibliographic citation in the description, which will point you to where I found that info. I encourage you to check it out, as we are covering some very sensitive and often debated topics today.
Well, without further ado, let's get into the origins of Operation Gladio and how the CIA stole the first post-war elections in Italy. Let's begin. I will do my level best to stand up for freedom and democracy around the world by keeping the United States of America strong and by keeping our eyes wide open as we welcome change in the world by keeping our eyes wide open.
Before we begin to get into the early establishment of Gladio operations throughout Europe in earnest, I want to lay out a few disclaimers about this whole concept. To this day, we still do not have the full story of Operation Gladio. We have access to some primary sources that have been declassified, and we have been exposed to some leaks and inquiries across Europe about this program. Otherwise, however, as researchers, historians, and students, we are largely left with disparate pieces of a puzzle that I'm afraid we might never be able to fully solve.
We know for a fact that yes, Gladio existed. NATO and the CIA operated secret anti-communist armies in Europe for the better part of the Cold War, and that major attacks in the West were likely orchestrated by these agencies.
In August of 1990, as the Cold War was coming to a close, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, a harrowing figure of Cold War Italy and the Christian Democratic Party, having served as prime minister in seven governments and 21 times as a minister, stood before the Italian parliament and admitted bluntly that there had been secret armies across Europe and Italy and that a report would be presented to the public detailing these networks. For a time in the early nineties, it appeared that this would be a bombshell story. Other countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark had similar reckonings and organized committees to investigate these matters.
Well, long story short, Andreotti's report was delivered late and was heavily redacted by the Italian security apparatus. The investigations in the other European countries into their own NATO programs largely went nowhere, and most importantly, the United States and NATO themselves remained suspiciously quiet. As these stories tend to go, the whole Gladio scandal fell into the background, especially as in December 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved and the West declared the end of history. Gladio fell to the wayside.
We cannot forget, however, that despite the time that has passed and the silence of our security agencies on this topic, that this secret that was so heavily theorized throughout the Cold War has been confirmed to be real, and it was everywhere.
As we delve deep into the Gladio web, I want you all to remember that much of the evidence we will cover is circumstantial evidence. We have very little in terms of smoking guns, such as agendas or lists of names of operatives or the operations that Gladio forces were directly involved in. Throughout these three next parts, I will be laying out events, people across the world, links, and motives that are all rooted in fact. I will leave it up to you to evaluate this information and come away with your own conclusions.
With all that being said, let's talk about post-war European politics and the complex state of Cold War Italy. An often overlooked and important fact for our story is that socialism was also a competing and at times dominant ideology in post-war Europe. During the war, the Axis occupiers had to contend with resistance groups of partisans and guerrilla fighters across their newly acquired European territory. Most of these partisans who bravely fought against the fascist forces across the continent were not moderate liberals or conservatives; they were mostly socialist and communist.
Inherent in fascism is a fervent and violent anti-communism that put leftists at risk of imprisonment or extermination alongside other European minority groups. This existential fact led to the formation of prominent leftist guerrilla armies across Western and Southern Europe. In Italy, the Communist Party, known as the Partito Communista Italiano, otherwise known as PCI, doubled in size between 1943 and 1944. In Greece, out of a population of 7 million at war's end, 2 million were members of the communist Greek People's Liberation Armies' political wing, and 50,000 were armed resistance fighters under the red flag. The first post-war government of Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle in France included two Communist cabinet members. The municipal elections of 1945 saw the communists finish first with 30% of the vote, with the second and third spots taken by other leftist parties.
Socialism was not just merely an aberration in post-war Europe; it did not appear out of nowhere. The working classes of Europe had gained a deep respect for leftist ideologies throughout the war in witnessing the brave resistance that socialists and communists had mounted against the fascist invaders. The political shift across the liberated Europe was quickly noticed by the Western power elite, as they quickly began to mount a secret and violent war against the rise of leftist ideologies across the continent. This war often involved arming and empowering the fascists that they had just defeated in the World War.
When the threat of communism or even nationalism arose in the developing world, the Western security apparatus often responded with strong-armed intervention, either regime change or all-out war. As we covered in the previous episode, the same blatant strategy was not employed in Europe. Although blood was still shed, due to Europe's historic position as a Western capitalist continent with deep ties to the global financial system, Washington and London opted for a less overt strategy of resistance to the rise of socialism across Europe. Instead of fighting an overt war against the left, as they would do in such places as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Cuba, the US and British governments fought the war for the hearts and minds of Europe with a $13.7 billion carrot in the case of the Marshall Plan and a hidden and deadly stick in the case of the CIA and NATO's Operation Gladio.
The Marshall Plan presented the war-torn European countries with a conditional offer: receive much-needed financial aid and, in return, organize your society under capitalist lines and establish moderate capitalist ruling parties. Importantly for this series, the Marshall Plan was also a key source of funds for the burgeoning CIA in Europe, as has been recently disclosed. Over 5%, or $685 million, in Marshall Plan funds were skimmed by the Central Intelligence Agency to fund their illegal operations across the continent during the early Cold War. This massive money-laundering scheme was recently disclosed, yet we have little visibility into the actual application of those funds. Despite this fact, we can't imagine the impact of $685 million of unaccountable cash in post-war Europe, and as we will see in this episode, money was running rampant through the Mafia circles, church institutions, and underground far-right networks in the former Axis-occupied states. This cash had to come from somewhere, and as we know, much of it came directly from the Marshall Plan.
The first country to feel the impact of the new CIA was Italy in the late 1940s, as the country teetered towards communism following the retreat of Nazi forces. Italy will feature prominently throughout this series, as it was a main staging ground for CIA activity and one of the essential secret ideological battlegrounds of the Cold War.
The first numbered CIA memo ever created, titled "The Position of the United States in Respect to Italy," or NSC Document 1/1, which was issued on November 14th, 1947, stated the following from George Kennan, director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff: "As far as Europe is concerned, Italy is obviously the key point. If communists were to win elections there, our whole position in the Mediterranean and possibly Western Europe as well would probably be undermined."
The entire United States government under Truman and the CIA viewed the battle for Italy as one of, if not the single most important battleground of the emerging Cold War. And looking through a Cold Warrior's lens, they were not wrong to view it this way. At the end of the war, Italy had the largest and most organized Communist Party outside of the Iron Curtain, the PCI. As we mentioned earlier, by war's end, the Italian partisan network comprised over 150,000 armed communist sympathizers, mostly in the north of the country.
Italy was a divided country, not by race or by culture, but by ideology. The northern part of the country, where much of the partisan fighting took place and where the Nazis had entered after Mussolini's fall in 1943, was dominated by communists and socialists. The south of the country, and most importantly, the southern island of Sicily, was dominated by right-wing Catholic forces and a nascent Mafia underground. This tension between the socialist north and the Catholic south was noticed by the CIA, who sought allies for the new post-war Italy on the island of Sicily.
In episode 3 of this series, we discussed Operation Underworld, which was a US naval intelligence operation during World War II that led to collaboration between the US intelligence agencies and the Mafia to further the war effort. The US government alleged that this was a necessary alliance in their time of need, but as I outlined in that previous video, a major outcome of this collaboration was the reestablishment of the global opium trade, which would lead to the rise of American addicts and would, in turn, help secure laundered funds for the future Operation Gladio in Europe.
This drug cash scheme was only one half of Operation Underworld, however. The emphasized wartime goal of this dirty alliance between organized crime and the US security state was to obtain Mafia intelligence to help with the Allied invasion of Sicily, otherwise known as Operation Husky in 1943. The Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, was charged with implementing the psychological warfare plan drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the OSS to bring Italy's southern island of Sicily under Allied control. The plan had been dropped in enclosed consultation with Lucky Luciano, the Sicilian mob boss and head capo in the National Crime Syndicate, the Jewish-Italian super mob that combined Luciano and Meyer Lansky's organizations for nearly 40 years. From his cell in upstate New York, Lucky shared the location and identities of key Mafia figures that could help administer Sicily for the Allies once Mussolini's forces were expelled, and this would largely be undertaken by the OSS.
During Mussolini's reign as Il Duce, the Sicilian mob had been forced to largely disband. Organized crime represented a serious threat to the fascist dictator's total control of the Italian economy and civil society, imposing a potential risk of resistance in times of political instability. Despite all his flaws, Mussolini was, unsurprisingly, very effective at rooting out the Mafia's deep grasp of Sicilian and southern Italian society. Although the Mafia was largely halted by the fascists, they remained dormant in Sicily, ready to reactivate at war's end.
This is exactly what OSS Director Wild Bill Donovan and his agents did in Italy. One of his subordinates, Earl Brennan, the OSS director in Italy, took an additional step to finding adequate administrators for post-war Italy. He reached out to the Vatican. The Catholic Church was one of the most prominent institutions in southern Italy before the fascists took control in the 1920s. The Catholic Church had a few unique traits that made it an ideal deep political partner in this global anti-communist crusade. Firstly, they were inherently reactionary. Leftist ideology is generally atheistic, which clearly puts the Vatican's power in jeopardy and places them as stark anti-communists. Secondly, the Vatican had already established a global network of advocacy and outreach through the Catholic Church, which was present in much of Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. These forums would present useful hideouts for foreign spies and militias, and in Italy, would form useful hiding places for weapons caches used in Gladio. Finally, the Vatican was and still is a sovereign state. This status as a nation-state allows for a level of secrecy and legality that is even stronger than organized crime or the American security state. Even the CIA and other intelligence community members do on occasion have to report and be accountable to the elected US government.
This last element of state sovereignty of the Vatican will be especially relevant in the next few parts, as we explore the secret banking network they established within the confines of their tiny state and how the Vatican Bank acted as a shadow financial instrument for Gladio operations. Working alongside the Vatican on future Gladio operations would become a mainstay of CIA operations in Italy and later France, as well as other operations in Latin America and even Vietnam.
Following orders from Wild Bill, Italian OSS Director Earl Brennan liaised with Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the Vatican's Under Secretary of State and the future Pope Paul VI, on potential allies in the future anti-communist struggle in Italy. Montini allegedly suggested the OSS ally themselves with Calogero Vizzini, Don Calogero Vizzini, the boss of all bosses of the Vizzini-Agostino crime family. This sentiment was also shared by Lucky Luciano, who had grown up in a house 15 minutes away from Don Calogero's estate. Brennan relayed the message to Wild Bill, and he ordered the airdrop of a communique to Don Calogero's estate asking for his assistance in the invasion of Sicily. Don Calogero's men would guide the American tanks through Sicily, leading to an astounding military victory on the island. In return, Mafia boss Don Calogero was appointed mayor of Villalba, and he immediately murdered the police chief of the town. Alongside Don Calogero were a series of other Mafia appointments throughout Sicily. Most notably, New York's former Lieutenant Governor Charles Poletti, who according to Lucky Luciano was "one of our good friends," would become the military governor of Italy under the Allied military government and essentially allowed the free flow of dope through Italy's ports by giving Vito Genovese's dockworkers union complete control of Italy's harbors.
Charles Poletti's appointment in post-war Italy is indicative of a larger trail of corruption between the New York City political establishment and Italian Gladio that we will explore in further detail in the second part of this mini-series. So, in turn, through Operation Underworld, the OSS had essentially reformed the Sicilian mob, a key vector in future transnational narcotics trading and major allies in the underground war in Cold War Italy. The impacts of this mob revival were immediately felt on the island. According to Claire Sterling in her book *Octopus*, the Sicilian mob committed on average three murders a week between the years of 1944 and 1960. The age of terror in Italy had begun.
In the final section of this episode, we will look at arguably the first Gladio operation: the CIA's interference in the 1948 Italian elections. As we mentioned in the previous part of this series, the CIA was created in 1947, the same year that the Truman administration formally declared the United States as an overt enemy of global communism in response to the Greek Civil War and enacted his self-titled Truman Doctrine. With the creation of the CIA came a new organizational structure. Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter was made the first Director of Central Intelligence, although his tenure would be mostly overshadowed by his successors. The CIA was subsequently organized into different arms, each with a specific intelligence purpose that could be largely divided into two functions.
The first side of the CIA, which we will be largely overlooking in this series, is the intelligence-gathering side of the agency. This side can be essentially seen as a news agency for the president and is largely uncontroversial. Every country in the world has some form of intelligence-gathering service, and for the most part, it falls within the ethical boundaries of international relations. The more dangerous and controversial side of this new organization was the operating portion of the agency, largely consolidated under the innocuously named Office of Policy Coordination. The OPC essentially acted as the CIA's covert operating arm. The OPC would lead many of the CIA's global operations and insurrections throughout the Cold War in the name of anti-communism. For the beginning of its history, the OPC was headed by Frank Wisner, the wealthy son of a southern plantation owner and an agent in the wartime Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. Frank Wisner would oversee the foundation of Gladio throughout Europe in the early years of the Cold War and would continue to be a recurring character throughout this period.
The CIA and the OPC's first operation abroad was in Italy in 1948, where the Communist-Socialist Coalition Party was threatening to win a supermajority in the first post-war national elections. Let's dive in.
As the war came to a close, the OSS was disbanded, but the former OSS agents continued to work on their future plan for Operation Gladio. The main priority during this period was money, specifically the sticky issue of payment to less-than-desirable elements of the Gladio network. Although the CIA would have the authority to act covertly abroad, there were certain limits to this legal authority, especially when considering that much of the Italian Gladio operating budget would come from organized crime and the global narcotics trade. Coincidentally, the Vatican was also looking for beneficiaries at the time. Given the popularity of the PCI and communism in Italy, they were seeking financial aid for their political mission against communism and for the furtherance of Catholic conservatism.
At this intersection, a deal was struck. It turns out that the papacy had a perfect vehicle to launder the dirty Mafia cash and to distribute clean, holy dollars to the Gladio combatants. This was the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or the IOR, otherwise known as the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank, to this day, is completely obscured from the public. Despite the Vatican publishing its yearly financial records publicly, the bank's records remain completely private. The bank is only accountable to the Pope and three boards of directors: a board consisting of high-ranking cardinals, a second of international bankers, and a third of Vatican financial officers. The Vatican Bank was and still is the perfect vehicle for mass money laundering. According to Moneyval, which is the money laundering authority of the Council of Europe, the Vatican Bank remains one of the world's most prominent money laundering instruments in the world, even today under Pope Francis.
So, in 1945, Wild Bill Donovan and Pope Pius XII met in the Vatican just as the war was coming to a close. The details of the meeting are not clear, but what we do know is that Wild Bill was decorated as a "crusader against communism" and was granted the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Sylvester, which, according to Paul Williams, is the oldest and most prestigious papal knighthood. With Wild Bill becoming a Knight of the Vatican, the pieces were set in motion for future money laundering.
The Truman administration began funneling legal cash to the Vatican. $350 million in US taxpayer dollars were sent to the Catholic Church to establish the Christian Democratic Party, or the CDP, the only ruling party of Italy throughout the Cold War. An additional $30 million were sent to create the Catholic Action Groups, an anti-communist propaganda network run by the church. The United States had created their party, the Christian Democrats, and had obtained the papacy as an anti-communist ally.
The election of 1948 would not be won this easily, however. Money laundering, hush payments, propaganda, and bloodshed would be required, and that is where Gladio began.
For the sake of fairness, I want to highlight that there were also allegations of Soviet interference in the 1948 Italian elections, mostly surrounding Soviet funding for the PCI. The major allegations come from a CIA agent named F. Mark Wyatt, who claimed in a 1998 CNN documentary that the PCI was funded directly by "black bags of money" directly out of the Soviet compound in Rome. Wyatt also went on to claim in that same interview that he helped deliver millions of dollars to the Christian Democrats, who would eventually be victorious in the upcoming election.
These claims of Soviet meddling in the 1948 elections are dubious at best, as noted by Italian historian Alessandro Brogi, who notes that Soviet support for the PCI was made up of "ad hoc, last-minute diplomatic and financial support," in stark contrast to the $10 million a month figure laid out by Wyatt in the documentary. From my perspective, Wyatt's claim does seem dubious, given his conflict of interest as a CIA agent in Italy at the time, and that Stalin was largely disengaged from supporting Western communist parties, such as in Greece and Yugoslavia, where Stalin refused to send military or financial support for the revolutions. Just know that these allegations of campaign interference by the Soviets exist, and you make your own judgment to their veracity. I just thought I would lay that out.
The Truman administration and the American security state feared a communist victory in the upcoming 1948 Italian general elections, and as previously mentioned, this was not unfounded. Future CIA Director under the Nixon administration, William Colby, wrote later in his life that had the Mafia not intervened in the 1948 Italian elections, the communists would have gained 60% of the vote. So, it was up to the anti-communist coalition of the Mafia, the Vatican, and the CIA to bring Italy into the Western fold. And as these things tend to go, the pieces of the puzzle appear to magically fall into place.
To begin with, enter George White, a New York City-based Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, which was the precursor of the DEA, and a senior member of the OSS X-2 program, the counterintelligence branch of the agency, under one James Jesus Angleton. At the CIA, Angleton happened to be in charge of the Italy desk and was specifically in charge of Sicily during the 1948 elections. Well, in 1946, George White, the FBN agent, reached a deal with Lucky Luciano to release him on parole on the island of Sicily. Angleton allegedly also ensured that Luciano was deported alongside Detroit mob boss Frank Coppola. According to some sources, Coppola and Sicilian mobster Salvatore Giuliano had been behind the 1947 May Day massacre, where Mafia men opened fire on a crowd of rallying workers in Sicily, where eight were killed and 33 were wounded. Allegedly, this attack had been funded directly by former OSS agent Wild Bill Donovan, now a private citizen and owner of the mysterious World Commerce Corporation, which he used to funnel funds to the mob associates. According to Peter Dale Scott, another 498 people, mostly members of the PCI or the Italian Socialist Party, were murdered in 1948 alone.
The Mafia held up their end of the bargain by reigning terror on leftists and labor activists. This period of tension is best summarized by CIA officer Miles Copeland, who had been in Italy at the time, who stated years later, "Had it not been for the Mafia, the Communists would now be in control of Italy."
The Vatican worked on their end to ensure that the 1948 election swung in the US-backed Christian Democrats' favor. The Vatican's tactics ranged from far-reaching propaganda campaigns to targeted violence against leftists through Catholic underground armies. The most indicative propaganda effort was that of Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York. I believe that Francis Spellman's career throughout the forties and to the sixties displays the true depth of this parapolitical network surrounding Gladio and the intelligence agencies. Throughout this part, I've been hinting at the New York connection to Italian Gladio. I won't get into it too much because that is the main feature of Part 2 of this mini-series, but for the purposes of this video, Cardinal Spellman of New York worked as an American propagandist against the PCI in the 1948 Italian election. He distributed pamphlets across Catholic churches in the United States and even arranged to propagate radio messages from Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Gary Cooper urging the Italian people to fight back against communism.
This may seem fairly minor comparatively to the Mafia violence, but Spellman's active participation in alleged work with the CIA during the 1948 Italian elections shows the transatlantic quality to Gladio and the true breadth of the Vatican's propaganda efforts. Accordingly, the United States dumped an additional $65 million of dirty drug money into the Vatican Bank in 1948, and this money was paid out through Vatican front groups, such as Catholic Action, a Vatican aid organization that was perfect for doling out laundered cash to mob associates. And finally, the Vatican allegedly organized their own terror squads in charge of smashing leftist installations, terrorizing communists, and working to push the CDP to victory. If any of you watched episode 2 of this series, it is speculated that Junio Valerio Borghese, the Black Prince, that was saved by James Jesus Angleton, was a part of these networks and worked directly with the Vatican to push this agenda.
As all these forces coalesced, finally, election day came around. Don Calogero, the Sicilian mob boss that had helped the Allies invade Sicily, worked with his men to stuff ballot boxes and bribe election officials. Pope Pius sat in his chambers nervously awaiting the count. Well, the final results left the Christian Democratic Party victorious with 48% of the vote and 307 seats in parliament. The Communist-Socialist coalition had only reached 31% of the vote, nearly 30% lower than their projected total, and only reached 200 seats in parliament.
At the end of the day, though, the election didn't really matter. According to plans drafted by US State Department official George Kennan, the Department of State recommended a naval invasion of Italy if the communists succeeded, nullifying any potential win for that group. Democracy was not a possibility for post-war Italy. Through coercion, bribery, and violence, the CIA, the Mafia, and the Vatican had successfully put their party in power, the Christian Democrats, who under Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, who from 1945 to 1953 ruled with eight different cabinets and never once purged any members of parliament. To this day, researchers speculate that former fascists ran rampant in the early Christian Democratic Party. And as for the future of Italy, the Christian Democrats would remain in power for the entirety of the Cold War, essentially establishing Italy as a one-party state for the rest of the period. Communism would not go out without a fight, however. Gladio would only intensify from here, as the battle was won, but the war had just begun.
Well, that's all I've got for today, folks. But in Part 2 of this mini-series, which will be coming out quite shortly, we will zoom out a bit. We will jump across the ocean to New York City and explore the linkages between American Catholic authorities, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the FBI, and the CIA, and how these forces were essentially linked by blackmail and corruption, and how all of this tied into Italian Gladio. I promise it will make more sense then. I've hinted at it a little bit here, but we really have a lot more depth to cover. This is really just the surface.
So, thank you all for watching today. If you enjoyed this video, a like goes a long way, and I love hearing all your thoughts in the comments, so please make sure to share any thoughts you have. Subscribe if you haven't already. I try to upload quite regularly, so, uh, um, yeah, I hope that I won't let you down. All that being said, thank you so much for watching, and remember to always keep your eyes wide open. Take care.