NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and JFK

[Rob Couteau]

18 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

BTW, has anyone asked this question:  what was so important about Italy?

Jim,

Well put. Is that not the quintessential question? And what was James Angleton doing spending so much time in postwar Italy ... helping to weave the web that would soon be called Gladio. Stuart Christie calls him "the key American figure controlling all right wing and neofascist political and paramilitary groups in Italy in the postwar period."

There is this to consider:

"Italy's strategic importance to the Western Alliance should not be underestimated. Until 1988 the country did not possess an aircraft carrier. This was not just because of its studiedly unaggressive foreign policy stance but because its geographic position, jutting into the central Mediterranean, enables it to project air power throughout the Mediterranean basin. On 5 June 1967, the decision was made to base the NATO Mediterranean naval command in Naples. At about the same time the NATO Defense College was moved from Paris to Rome and the US Sixth Fleet from Villefranche [coast of southeast France] to Gaeta [western coast of Italy] following the decision by General Charles de Gaulle on 7 March of the previous year to withdraw his country from full membership of the Atlantic Alliance. The importance of Italian naval bases was further increased after Dom Mintoff came to power in Malta, in June 1971, and promptly closed Maltese ports to Western warships as part of his country's new policy of non-alignment. With a total of 10,000 personnel in nine military bases, including a submarine base in Sardinia and air bases scattered throughout the Italian peninsula, it is not surprising that the US government were not keen to see the communists growing in electoral strength and knocking on the door of government."

I feel that is one of the most important paragraphs in "Puppetmasters." This one, which directly follows, is another:

"The growth in the electoral support for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was accompanied by a progressive distancing of the party from Moscow, as it spearheaded the development of Eurocommunism and sought a middle way between Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism and Western free-market capitalism. In elections for the Chamber of Deputies, the PCI's share of the vote moved from 26.9% in 1968, to 27.2% in 1972, to 34.4% in 1976, tailing off in 1979 to 30.4%. Over the same period, the Christian Democratic Party's (DC's) share of the vote remained stable at around 39%, making it the largest party in the country, followed by the Communists in second place and then by the PSI [Italian Socialist Party] under 10%. The tendency of the PCI to perform better at regional elections, where control over the national government was not at stake, made this trend seem all the more alarming to those who were ideologically committed to keeping the PCI out of government. The parabola of electoral support for the PCI was shadowed and paralleled by the amount of terrorist activity in the country. There were 398 terrorist attacks in 1969, the figure rising to 595 in 1972, and to 1,353 in 1976. The peak period for terrorist activity came in the following three years: 1,926 attacks in 1977; 2,379 in 1978; 2,513 in 1979. After 1980, with 1,502 attacks, the figure began to decline steadily, to 634 in 1981, 347 in 1982, with a return to double figures in 1984. It is hard to believe that the increase in the communist vote and the matching increase in terrorist violence were pure coincidence."  (Some nice British understatement in that last phrase.  From pages 16-17.)

The key sentence in the second paragraph is: "The parabola of electoral support for the PCI [Italian Communist Party] was shadowed and paralleled by the amount of terrorist activity in the country."

So isn't that strange. Just when the Communist Party is gaining more and more support from ordinary working class and middle class folks all across the country, supposedly the "Left" responds with ... increased "left-wing" terrorism. What a great way to get more support from across the political spectrum. The thing is, so many Italians didn't buy that the terror was coming from the left that they continued to vote Communist anyway; hence the continual increase in votes year after year.

I think we can see that pattern (of increased support for the left followed by increased terror) repeating itself elsewhere in Europe during the Cold War period, thanks to Gladio. But because of Italy's key strategic position and the reasons delineated by Philip Willan in the first paragraph, the monkey business in Italy took on truly terrifying dimensions. Imagine that: 2,513 terrorist attacks in 1979. That's about an average of 6.88 per day.

Also good to keep in mind: Lemnitzer served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 1963-69; Andrew J. Goodpaster (1969-1974), Alexander M. Haig (1974-1979). The three worst years were under Haig. Nixon's involvement in all this is very clear from some of the testimony that emerged in the judicial inquiries launched by courageous magistrates in Italy as a result of the Years of Lead. But even Nixon and Haig were merely doing the bidding of the Power Elite.

 

Edited July 24, 2019 by Rob Couteau

[James DiEugenio]

That makes perfect sense Rob.

And I am glad that others have explained it.

And yes, its like the majority of the citizenry did not buy the whole blame it on the left technique through the years of lead.

I communicated with an Italian author way back in the nineties who had written on Permindex, and that is what he said.  To him, the Red Brigades posed the same mystery as Lee Harvey Oswald. Who was he really?

Edited July 24, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

By the way Rob, your article is already in the Top Five at Kennedys and King.

Even though it has been up for a significantly less time than the four articles ahead of it.

Correction:  I just checked the stats Rob, you are at number four.

Edited July 24, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[Anthony Thorne]

I mentioned Rob's article at Kennedys and King to Phillip Willan. He was very happy and appreciative to be sent a link to it but I haven't heard yet what he thought of it - although I doubt he'll have any problems. It's an excellent article by Rob.

Italy, with a strong Communist party, was a true domino that the US and the military industrial complex did not want to see fall. PUPPETMASTERS has a really clever and nuanced view on it, amid the sections that were quoted above by Rob. Not just the fear that it could inspire other countries to lean that way, but also - and I forget if this is Willan's commentary or comes from the other articles I've read this week - Israel dreaded seeing the Cold War thaw and possible warmer relations develop with the Soviets. If an Italian communist parliamentary party became successful, and entrenched, and supported in the region, it would make it easier for the Soviet Union to pursue the same accepted status. And then Israel, sitting as a bulwark for the West in the Middle East, would lose some of it's necessary status as a vital buffer in the area against Communist influence. 

The other complex thing about Italy through that period is something else. It's the link to right wing groups, fascists, weird collections of freemasons and the like all plotting methods to take over the government there. Michael Ledeen's career in Italy elicits head-scratches from every researcher that has ever looked at it. Ledeen had numerous links to P2 and Licio Gelli and the top guys there, and was eventually kicked out of the country as an 'intriguer' by the head of Italian intelligence - from memory - when elements of the State started to push back against the nastier groups that had formed. Ledeen eventually left the country, and - amid his various activities in and out of government - he became a fixture at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. Ledeen worked there alongside venerated political scientist Edward Luttwak, the guy who wrote the barely tongue in cheek COUP D'ETAT: A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK, which goes into detail about how a gang of plotters could take over a government if they were really determined to.

This big push against the possibility of an electorally successful left-wing/Communist government in Italy has to be looked at in the light of the other big global push against left-wing governments that also started in the mid 70's - Operation Condor in Latin America - and you have the same succession of right-wing military alliances with US intelligence, coups, assassinations and so on. So it was really one big push started by US intelligence and military forces, and Gladio and Condor were big parts of the same effort. J. Patrice Sherry even includes a sub-chapter in her book PREDATORY STATES: OPERATION CONDOR AND COVERT WAR IN LATIN AMERICA titled 'Links between Condor and Operation Gladio' where she digs in to some of the same personalities that were involved in both.

But back to Gladio, it's a fascinating subject, and Ganser's stuff is great. And neither Gladio or Operation Condor would have started if Kennedy had not been assassinated, so the tally of victims accrued by both of those is another lot to add to the ripples caused by JFK's death.

 

 

[Rob Couteau]

13 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

I just checked the stats Rob, you are at number four.

Jim, That is mind-blowing. Thanks for letting me know. There must be great curiosity out there on the subject of Gladio.

9 hours ago, Anthony Thorne said:

all plotting methods to take over the government there.

Anthony, Thanks for this great post. I believe that Willan makes the point that one of the reasons they were so focused on plotting coups is that, as mentioned in my previous post, the false-flag ops and attempts to blame the Left were not working as well as they had hoped, since the electorate support for the PCI and PSI continued year after year. 

And thanks for reaching out to Philip Willan. What a great writer and researcher he is. Indefatigable.

[Rob Couteau]

17 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

To him, the Red Brigades posed the same mystery as Lee Harvey Oswald. Who was he really?

I'm fascinated by how, all along and on one side of the Atlantic as well as the other, the patterns just keep repeating. This illustrates how a whole organization can be turned into a patsy. That is really interesting that he said that, even way back then.

[Paul Brancato]

2 hours ago, Anthony Thorne said:

I mentioned Rob's article at Kennedys and King to Phillip Willan. He was very happy and appreciative to be sent a link to it but I haven't heard yet what he thought of it - although I doubt he'll have any problems. It's an excellent article by Rob.

Italy, with a strong Communist party, was a true domino that the US and the military industrial complex did not want to see fall. PUPPETMASTERS has a really clever and nuanced view on it, amid the sections that were quoted above by Rob. Not just the fear that it could inspire other countries to lean that way, but also - and I forget if this is Willan's commentary or comes from the other articles I've read this week - Israel dreaded seeing the Cold War thaw and possible warmer relations develop with the Soviets. If an Italian communist parliamentary party became successful, and entrenched, and supported in the region, it would make it easier for the Soviet Union to pursue the same accepted status. And then Israel, sitting as a bulwark for the West in the Middle East, would lose some of it's necessary status as a vital buffer in the area against Communist influence. 

The other complex thing about Italy through that period is something else. It's the link to right wing groups, fascists, weird collections of freemasons and the like all plotting methods to take over the government there. Michael Ledeen's career in Italy elicits head-scratches from every researcher that has ever looked at it. Ledeen had numerous links to P2 and Licio Gelli and the top guys there, and was eventually kicked out of the country as an 'intriguer' by the head of Italian intelligence - from memory - when elements of the State started to push back against the nastier groups that had formed. Ledeen eventually left the country, and - amid his various activities in and out of government - he became a fixture at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. Ledeen worked there alongside venerated political scientist Edward Luttwak, the guy who wrote the barely tongue in cheek COUP D'ETAT: A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK, which goes into detail about how a gang of plotters could take over a government if they were really determined to.

This big push against the possibility of an electorally successful left-wing/Communist government in Italy has to be looked at in the light of the other big global push against left-wing governments that also started in the mid 70's - Operation Condor in Latin America - and you have the same succession of right-wing military alliances with US intelligence, coups, assassinations and so on. So it was really one big push started by US intelligence and military forces, and Gladio and Condor were big parts of the same effort. J. Patrice Sherry even includes a sub-chapter in her book PREDATORY STATES: OPERATION CONDOR AND COVERT WAR IN LATIN AMERICA titled 'Links between Condor and Operation Gladio' where she digs in to some of the same personalities that were involved in both.

But back to Gladio, it's a fascinating subject, and Ganser's stuff is great. And neither Gladio or Operation Condor would have started if Kennedy had not been assassinated, so the tally of victims accrued by both of those is another lot to add to the ripples caused by JFK's death.

 

 

Interesting post - much appreciated. It is certainly true that Gladio and Condor were part of a consistent global strategy. There are undoubtedly many other such operations. 

The question I wish we would all ponder is what about our current endless war with Islamists - George Bush’s War on Terror?

Rob makes the point that it was very illogical for the Italian Communists to engage in terrorist activities at the very time that they were making public relation gains. Who benefits? Certainly not the Italian Communists. So why would they do it? We know now that they didn’t, that the acts were perpetrated by right wing forces but blamed on the left through a very carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign by the press and the government. 

Shouldnt we be asking why Islamists would engage in a global war they cannot win? What purpose does it serve? Who benefits? 

Edited July 24, 2019 by Paul Brancato

[Rob Couteau]

 

7 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Shouldnt we be asking why Islamists would engage in a global war they cannot win? What purpose does it serve? Who benefits? 

I agree with Paul. The interview I posted earlier with Dr Ganser (the first one) also addresses this issue of what Sibel Edmonds rightly calls Gladio B. Although his book ends with the Cold War period, i.e., 1990, he does address this in interviews. The Cottrell book goes into Gladio B at great length but as Anthony has advised it should be approached with caution. Despite that it contains much food for thought. On an aside, Cottrell begins his book with a discussion of the Jimmy Savile scandal and its ties to deep state politicians. This makes for some eerie reading in light of the current Jeffrey Epstein scandal. (I also wonder if the latter was a honey pot operation, reminiscent of the call-girl ring operated from within DNC headquarters of Watergate according to our man Jim Hougan.)

Edited July 24, 2019 by Rob Couteau

[Paul Brancato]

10 minutes ago, Rob Couteau said:

 

I agree with Paul. The interview I posted earlier with Dr Ganser (the first one) also addresses this issue of what Sibel Edmonds rightly calls Gladio B. Although his book ends with the Cold War period, i.e., 1990, he does address this in interviews. The Cottrell book goes into Gladio B at great length but as Anthony has advised it should be approached with caution. Despite that it contains much food for thought. On an aside, Cottrell begins his book with a discussion of the Jimmy Savile scandal and its ties to deep state politicians. This makes for some eerie reading in light of the current Jeffrey Epstein scandal. (I also wonder if the latter was a honey pot operation, reminiscent of Watergate according to our man Jim Hougan.)

Ganser makes some interesting conjectures at the end of the long interview you posted a link to early in this thread. He points out that he cannot accept the official explanation for building 7 collapse on 9/11, and that Swiss engineers do not agree with the official position that excessive heat brought it down. 

In my view we are stuck in endless war, and the people that depend on war for profits, and for political control, will do whatever they have to to keep the game going. It is the one area studiously avoided by Democratic lawmakers and candidates, other than Tulsi Gabbard. The reason - that people who attempt to criticize this part of our foreign policy are never allowed to gain steam. Careers will be ruined. Everything that we are concerned about in our world revolves around this nexus. It’s the Achilles heal of the control system and is thus defended mightily. If the truth about endless war were ever to be revealed there would be no defense against the critique. So it never gets that far. But we cannot tackle any substantive change without dismantling the permanent war state first. 

[Anthony Thorne]

Rob and Paul, my current research is looking at the same linkages. Specifically the period from 1987 - 2001, and the activities of the neocons and their various military and private industry connections.

I can't summarise too much, especially as this minute I'm taking my son to school, but I can say that a great deal of really important and pertinent info on the subject has been overlooked simply as not many people have bothered to sit down and look.

Here's one tidbit. The CSIS group I cited above - home for many of the neocons through the 80's and 90's - ran a program through 1991 called the STRENGTHENING OF AMERICA COMMISSION. There are papers and documents available online showing what it got up to. It gathered various bigwigs and rightwing folk and had them meet and give various proclamations on what direction the US should take now that the Cold War had run its course.

Most of the 1991 sessions were nondescript. They did some on industry, on tech, on education, things like that.

Then, at the end of 1991, while Bush Sr was in the thick of negotiations with Gorbachev and the Bush (Sr) admin was debating giving a huge amount of aid to the Soviets, the Commission held a special meeting. It featured a talk by James R. Schlesinger. And Schlesinger discussed the need for a new US military strategy, now that the Cold War had turned a corner. 

Three days after Schlesinger's talk, Senators Nunn and Lugar held a pivotal meeting with future SecDef Ashton Carter, where they set up the Preventive Defense program, put in place to deal with the fallout - including the risk of loose nukes if the country fell apart - of the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union. The funding for the Preventive Defense program participants span off various sub-projects and activities. And one of those projects was the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group that Carter would run with future 9/11 Commission head Phillip Zelikow at Harvard in 1997, where they spent 8 months scratching their chins with other neocons and pondering how the US would deal with a future catstrophic act of terrorism if it just so happened to occur.

There's a cute page in Paul Fitzgerald's mainstream history of Afghanistan, INVISIBLE HISTORY, where Fitzgerald, no dummy, slips in some observations that only the more acute will catch. On the page where Osama Bin Laden is given a big media push by the US media - a moment that occurred just a couple of weeks after that aforementioned Zelikow/Carter study group finished, btw - Fitzgerald compares the 'damning' imagery of Bin Laden to those pictures of Oswald in the backyard with his rifle for the JFK case, and says that Bin Laden fit the militarists purpose so closely at that point, 'it was almost as if he had been constructed for it'. There's a few things like that in the book, which I recommend. Oliver Stone has a quote of praise on the back of it.

 

 

Edited July 25, 2019 by Anthony Thorne

[Anthony Thorne]

Just some other quick notes. Phillip Willan mentioned a few years back that he was researching a new book about the Aldo Moro case. Willan called it the 'Mount Everest of Italian political conspiracies', so it appears he's taking his time with it.

Re Paul's comments about endless war. One observation I read this week was that the 'external enemy' was frequently used as a fig-leaf for the US to assert dominance overseas, construct overseas bases, send troops into a country, do the occasional coup and invasion. If that external enemy disappeared, the militant elements of the US establishment were left wanting for lack of that excuse to go overseas and chuck small countries up against the wall and generally be the boss of whichever area they chose. Those goals became just that little bit harder when the external enemy disappeared. So around 1991 the hawk establishment was preoccupied with what to do next, and they put out countless books and articles and commissioned military intel reports (some of which you can read online) discussing the issue. There were a few other big gatherings through 1990-'92 where most of the infamous neocons met to discuss the topic.

CSIS put out a 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' style book in 1999, AVERTING THE DEFENSE TRAIN WRECK IN THE NEW MILLENIUM. Daniel Gouré was a co-author, and James R. Schlesinger wrote the foreword. I was curious about Gouré as I didn't know much about him. It turns out that his father was Leon Gouré, a RAND analyst whose studies were important influences on US policy through the 60's and 70's. And so looking at him, look what the BBC says about Leon Gouré's role in the Vietnam war, in the middle of this article about RAND analyst Konrad Kellen.

Quote

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23037957

And finally, in the early 1960s, he joined the Rand Corporation, a prestigious think tank in California started by the Pentagon after the war to do top-level defence analysis. And there he faced the greatest challenge of his career - the Vietnam Motivation and Morale Project. 

The morale project was started by Leon Goure, who was also an immigrant. His parents were Mensheviks. They escaped from the Soviet Union during one of Stalin's purges. Goure was brilliant, charismatic, incredibly charming and absolutely ruthless, and he was Kellen's great nemesis. 

The morale project grew out of the Pentagon's great problem in the early part of the Vietnam War. The US Air Force was bombing North Vietnam because they wanted to stop the North Vietnamese communists from supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam led by the Viet Cong. 

The idea was to break the will of the North Vietnamese. But the Pentagon didn't know anything about the North Vietnamese. They knew nothing about Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese history, Vietnamese language. It was just this little speck in the world, in their view. 

How do you know that you're breaking the will of a country if you know nothing about the country? So Goure's job was to figure out what the North Vietnamese were thinking. 

He came into Saigon and took over an old French villa on Rue Pasteur in the old part of the city. He hired Vietnamese interviewers and sent them out into the countryside. 

The job was to find captured Viet Cong guerrillas and to interview them. Over the next few years, they came up with 61,000 pages of transcripts. Those transcripts were translated into English and summarised and analysed.

Goure took those analyses and he gave briefings to all the top military brass in the American military establishment. And every time he gave a presentation on the Vietnam Motivation and Morale Project, he said the same things:

• that the Vietcong were utterly demoralised
• that they were about to give up
• that if pushed a little bit more, if bombed just a little bit more, they'll throw up their hands in despair and run screaming back to Hanoi 

It's hard to overestimate just how seriously Goure was taken in those years. He was the only man who understood the mind of the enemy. When dignitaries came to Saigon, their first stop would be the villa in Rue Pasteur, where Goure would hold forth at cocktail parties with insights into this strange, mysterious enemy they were fighting.

He'd be picked up by helicopter and whisked to aircraft carriers off the coast of Vietnam, so he could brief the top military brass who had flown in from Washington. They used to say that Lyndon Johnson would walk around with a copy of Goure's findings in his back pocket. What Goure said formed the justification for US policy in Vietnam.

 

 

So Leon Gouré was one of the most influential analysts justifying the course of the Vietnam war. So it's something to see Schlesinger cheerleading his son Daniel's call for a big rebuilding of America's defense industry during the time when so many hawks were keen to do exactly that.

Edward  Luttwak - as mentioned, a CSIS fixture through the 80's - wrote an earlier book back in 1984, THE PENTAGON AND THE ART OF WAR. It's yet another request for an urgent increase in military spending. The back cover has quotes of praise from Sam Nunn - one half of the Nunn-Lugar team that met with Ashton Carter a few days after Schlesinger's talk. It has quotes from Donald Rumsfeld and R. James Woolsey, who were pushing the 'we need increased military spending' theme hard in the late 90's, when Daniel Gouré's book came out. It has a quote from Newt Gingrich, who sponsored the congressional amendment that gave birth to Rumsfeld's Ballistic Missile Commission, which was another hands-out request for big military spending. And it has a quote from James R. Schlesinger. So this theme was continually on the mind of these guys, and had been for a while.

The Rightweb article on CSIS begins with the comment "The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is a right-wing, neoconservative think tank which was founded in 1962. Ray S. Cline was a cofounder." If you run through the list of members and senior advisors from the late 80's, it's hard to find someone who wasn't embedded in the military-industrial complex elite. Quite a bunch, Kissinger and Brzezinski and Dick Cheney and Schlesinger and many, many others. Ledeen, who hung around the P2 activities in Italy like a bad smell, is a permanent fixture and is named as a 'senior associate' of the group. And many names link back to the Committee on the Present Danger, which is covered in Jerry Sander's PEDDLERS OF CRISIS. The Sanders book makes good reading alongside Michael Swanson's THE WAR STATE, which James DiEugenio already reviewed for Kennedys and King, as both books look really closely at Paul Nitze, possibly the key figure in driving the national state of mind towards anti-Communism through the 50's and into the 70's, beginning with Nitze's overseeing of the NSC 68 policy paper that was drafted for Truman in 1950. And Nitze was eventually a mentor to both Donald Rumsfeld and - really bringing the circle back around - R. James Woolsey. From Andrew Cockburn's NYT article THE RADICALIZATION OF JAMES WOOLSEY - 

Quote

Despite a brief foray as an activist against the Vietnam War at Yale Law School, Woolsey's first and most important mentor in Washington was Paul Nitze, the legendarily hawkish cold warrior, whom he met when Nitze's daughter was marrying one of Woolsey's Stanford classmates, W. Scott Thompson. Soon after, Nitze hired him for the SALT 1 negotiating team. From there, Richard Perle, feared as the "prince of darkness" for his ruthless effectiveness as a hard-liner, eased him into a potent post as general counsel of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

So you're really looking at the same circle of guys, and then - really obviously - their proteges, and occasionally their sons, pushing the same themes. The Committee on the Present Danger, Team B, the Project for a New American Century, these are all points on the same trail, marked by the same people. And it's this group that you'd have to look at closely when pondering which mindset conjured both Operation Gladio and Operation Condor out of the murk, along with other events both before and after those.

 

Edited July 25, 2019 by Anthony Thorne

[Ron Bulman]

This is outstanding Rob.  I'm embarrassed.  It exposed my ignorance and naivety on the subject, though I'm confident I'm not alone in this respect.  I knew nothing of the subject other than the name Gladio read on this site, gathering it was some Italian "thing".  Paul posted some about it but I didn't follow closely or look further.  That it was created by Dulles and Angleton is both astonishing and not surprising.  I had read about their rat lines through Italy for both the Nazis and Jews.  As well as Angleton's rescue of the Black Prince.  However, the NATO secret armies developed and controlled by the CIA, the extent of the reverberations of JFK's Algeria speech in 1957, and the reaction to his willingness to include the Italian left in 1962 as well as much more are news to me.  Thank you.

[Rob Couteau]

On 7/24/2019 at 6:30 PM, Anthony Thorne said:

Fitzgerald compares the 'damning' imagery of Bin Laden to those pictures of Oswald in the backyard with his rifle for the JFK case, and says that Bin Laden fit the militarists purpose so closely at that point, 'it was almost as if he had been constructed for it'.

"It was almost as if he had been constructed for it." That's the sort of short and simple, and right-to-the-point line that a novelist might struggle to conjure all day. You can't make this stuff up. I read through your entire post and clearly you are on to some great info. It sounds like the bottom line is money: war profits. (What else?) I remember during the Bush II presidency when Cheney was giving a news briefing or maybe a broadcast interview and he actually came right out and said that the American people need to understand that there may be a need for "continual war." He actually used that phrase. I remember being really jolted by it.

I'm glad you are focusing on this post-1990 period, because it is beyond my scope yet I am very curious about what it's all about. But I've decided to stay within the 1945-1990 period of Gladio as there is already so much to explore there.  

[Rob Couteau]

On 7/24/2019 at 10:18 PM, Ron Bulman said:

Thank you.

Ron, thanks for reading! And for your feedback. If you have a chance, catch the interview on Black Op Radio. Len was really great. It's such a pleasure speaking with an interviewer who has such a broad base of knowledge like that. BTW I think you'd really like the Ganser and Willan books. And as Anthony has mentioned, the "Last Supper" book by Willan is also really good. 

Edited July 25, 2019 by Rob Couteau

[Anthony Thorne]

Quote

It sounds like the bottom line is money: war profits. (What else?)

Some of the guys I mention truly believe they are doing a service to the country. The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) evoked by Andrew Marshall and other high up guys was designed to 'strengthen America' to the extent that many of them felt the country was weaker if it didn't have an external enemy to rail against. And when those guys were decided, the getting rich aspect was used as an incentive for many, and a reward for others who felt they deserved the largesse. 

For Cheney and some others, it was about winding back the restrictions that Congress had enacted over the powers of the Presidency during the 70's. Hence Cheney leads the group that wrote the 'dissenting opinion' in the Iran Contra verdict, arguing that things were okay if the President did them, as the President is the President and can do what he likes etc.

But a big new war against an external enemy - provoked by false flag or not - was very attractive to the weapons manufacturers, and they lurk in the background of neocon activity throughout the 90's. The REBUILDING AMERICA'S DEFENCES document was written by a guy who later became the senior counsel of strategy to Lockheed Martin. One big militarist conference in 90-91 where many neocons voiced the need for a new military strategy was co-funded by Raytheon. The former head of Lockheed - a prior Rumsfeld associate - even wrote a piece for a Harvard newspaper in the mid 90's where he cited what bad luck it was to become CEO of the company right after the Berlin Wall fell and military profits dropped.