The Car by the Road
Operation Gladio was NATO’s secret Cold War army. This is what it was actually used for.
On the evening of 31 May 1972, a telephone call came in to the Carabinieri station at Gorizia, in north-eastern Italy. An abandoned Fiat 500 had been spotted on a country road near the village of Peteano. Three officers drove out to investigate.
The car was booby-trapped. When one of the officers opened the bonnet, a charge detonated. All three men died.
The investigation that followed was swift, confident and wrong. Marco Morin, an explosives expert attached to the Italian police, examined the scene and produced his analysis: the explosive was consistent with material used by the Red Brigades, the far-left urban guerrilla group responsible for a wave of violence across Italy during that period. Arrests were made. The left was blamed. The case, officially, was closed.
It would stay closed for twelve years.
In 1984, a Venetian magistrate named Felice Casson began reviewing old terrorism cases that had never sat right with him. When he came to Peteano, he pulled the original forensic report and had it re-examined. What he found was unambiguous. Marco Morin had not made a mistake. He had deliberately falsified his analysis. The explosive used at Peteano was C4 — the most powerful military-grade material available at the time, and not something the Red Brigades had access to.
Casson traced the C4 to its source. It had come from a weapons cache hidden in a cave a few miles from the bomb site. The cache had not been stocked by left-wing terrorists.
It had been stocked by NATO.
What People Were Told
To understand what Casson had found, it helps to understand what Western European governments had been saying — and not saying — for the previous forty years.
After the Second World War, as the Iron Curtain descended across Europe and the Soviet Union consolidated its grip on the eastern half of the continent, NATO planners confronted an uncomfortable possibility. What if the Red Army came west? What if it moved through West Germany, through Austria, into Italy, into France? What would be left behind in the occupied countries to resist?
The answer, developed quietly in the late 1940s and formalised through a Clandestine Planning Committee established in 1951, was a network of secret stay-behind armies. In each NATO country, small groups of carefully vetted civilians and former military personnel were recruited, trained and equipped. Arms caches were hidden across the countryside. Radio equipment was buried. Escape routes were mapped. In the event of Soviet occupation, these networks would activate — conducting sabotage, gathering intelligence, maintaining resistance from behind enemy lines.
The historical precedent was the British Special Operations Executive, which had supported partisan networks across occupied Europe during the war. The stay-behind concept was, in that framing, simply a Cold War extension of something that had already worked.
In Italy, the network was codenamed Operation Gladio — from the Latin gladius, the short sword of the Roman legions. In Denmark it was Absalon. In Belgium, SDRA8. Each country had its own version, its own codename, its own chain of command. The network as a whole spanned sixteen countries.
When Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti finally acknowledged the network’s existence in 1990, he described it as a “structure of information, response and safeguard.” A sensible precaution for dangerous times. Nothing to trouble a democracy.
Nobody in official life had ever claimed otherwise — because nobody in official life had ever admitted it existed.
This, it turned out, was not a coincidence. The secrecy was not incidental to the programme. It was, in the words Andreotti used before the Italian parliament, carried out “in a framework of absolute secrecy.” Parliamentarians had not been told. Cabinet ministers had not been told. The populations in whose countries the caches were buried had certainly not been told.
What they also had not been told — what Judge Casson was now beginning to understand — was what the network had actually been used for.
The Cracks
Felice Casson had been a magistrate in Venice since the late 1970s, quietly working through cases that other investigators had closed too quickly. He was methodical and persistent in the way that occasionally makes investigating magistrates the most dangerous people in a country.
When he established that the C4 at Peteano had come from a NATO weapons cache, he had a problem. He knew what the cache was, but he did not yet know what the cache was connected to. To find out, he needed access to classified intelligence archives. In July 1990, he did something extraordinary: he formally petitioned Prime Minister Andreotti for permission to search the files of the Italian military secret service, SIFAR.
Andreotti granted the request.
It is worth pausing on that decision. Andreotti was one of the most powerful figures in post-war Italian politics — a Christian Democrat who had served as prime minister seven times, widely understood to be the keeper of the republic’s deepest secrets. What he knew about the network that Casson was investigating, and for how long he had known it, would become one of the central questions of the decade that followed. At the Gladio training headquarters at Capo Marragiu in Sardinia, a shining brass plate had hung above the billiard table for years, reading: “To the men of Gladio from Giulio Andreotti.” The plate was removed in 1990.
What Casson found in those archives forced Andreotti to make his parliamentary statement three months later. The Prime Minister who admitted Operation Gladio’s existence had personally authorised the judicial investigation that made denial impossible.
What the archives revealed was not simply the existence of a stay-behind army. It was evidence of something the network had been doing in the absence of the Soviet invasion it had been built to resist.
By 1984, even before Casson began his work, a convicted far-right terrorist named Vincenzo Vinciguerra had provided the first explicit account of what that something was. Vinciguerra was a member of Avanguardia Nazionale, a neo-fascist organisation. He had been caught for the Peteano bombing and, rather than staying silent, had chosen to confess — and to explain. The moment he began talking, the network that had protected him for twelve years abandoned him entirely.
By the time Casson reached the archives, a pattern had already been visible to those looking carefully: bombing after bombing, massacre after massacre, across Italy’s anni di piombo — the Years of Lead — attributed to left-wing groups, investigated superficially, and closed without convictions. The forensic cover at Peteano was not unique. It was a system.
Former Italian intelligence chief Giandelio Maletti, reflecting on what he had witnessed from inside that system, would later put it plainly. “The impression,” he said, “was that the Americans would do anything to stop Italy from sliding to the left.”
Operation Gladio: What the Documents Showed
On 12 December 1969, a bomb exploded inside the National Agrarian Bank on Milan’s Piazza Fontana. It was a Friday afternoon. The banking hall was full. Sixteen people were killed and eighty-eight wounded. Three further bombs detonated in Rome and Milan the same afternoon. Anarchists were arrested within hours. The case against them eventually collapsed, but it had served its immediate purpose: the left had been blamed, the story had run, and the connection between political radicalism and mass murder had been planted in the Italian public consciousness.
What was not known at the time was that US intelligence had received prior warning of the bombing and had not passed it to Italian authorities.
This was not an isolated incident. It was the opening act of a decade of political violence — the strategy of tension, as it came to be known — in which the mechanisms of the Italian state and a network of far-right operatives worked in concert to destabilise the country, discredit the left, and prevent the Italian Communist Party from ever taking governmental power through the democratic process it had been winning at the ballot box.
Vinciguerra’s testimony, given under oath in 1984 and cited in full in Daniele Ganser’s definitive 2005 study, described the network’s domestic purpose with a directness that no official document has since managed to contradict:
“There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army. Lacking a Soviet military invasion, which might not happen, they took up the task, on NATO’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.”
Eight years later, in Allan Francovich’s 1992 BBC documentary on the subject, Vinciguerra described the civilian targeting logic directly:
“You were supposed to attack civilians — women, children, innocent people outside the political arena — for one simple reason: To force the Italian public to turn to the State, turn to the regime and ask for greater security.”
Democratic governments, in other words, had used terrorism against their own populations to make those populations afraid enough to vote for stability. That is what the documents showed. That is what the testimony confirmed.
In March 2001, at the trial of far-right extremists for the Piazza Fontana bombing, Giandelio Maletti — former head of Italian counter-intelligence — gave testimony that placed American direction at the centre of what had happened:
“The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism, capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left, and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism.”
His former colleague Paulo Taviani, who had served as defence minister during the years the network was being constructed, had already told Magistrate Casson what the chain of command actually looked like:
“The Italian secret services were bossed and financed by CIA agents.”
— operating out of the US Embassy on the Via Veneto in Rome.
By October 1990, Andreotti had presented the Italian parliament with an incomplete reckoning: 622 civilians named as Gladio members, 127 weapons caches dismantled, and an insistence that the network had never been involved in domestic terrorism. The list of members was later established to be substantially incomplete. The denial of involvement in domestic terrorism was, given the testimony already on the public record, received with corresponding scepticism.
The Italian network was not an anomaly. In Belgium, the stay-behind structure was subsequently linked to the Brabant killings of 1982–85 — a series of apparently purposeless attacks on supermarkets that left twenty-eight shoppers dead, a pattern with no apparent political logic unless the purpose was the creation of fear itself. In Switzerland, the revelations caused a constitutional crisis and the resignation of a cabinet minister. In Greece, Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou confirmed the network’s existence in October 1990. The administration of President George H.W. Bush declined to comment on any of it. This pattern of domestic intelligence operations targeting a country’s own citizens for political purposes was not unique to Europe — the FBI’s parallel campaign against American civil rights groups had been running simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic.
The European Parliament passed a resolution that year condemning what it called an attempt to “jeopardize the democratic structures” of European nations and demanding full investigations. The resolution was largely ignored.
What Happened Next
In Italy, the answer to that question depends on who you were.
Vincenzo Vinciguerra received a life sentence for the Peteano bombing. He remains the only person ever convicted directly for terrorism carried out as part of the Gladio network’s domestic operations. His protection lasted as long as his silence. Once he spoke, it ended immediately, which tells you a great deal about the nature of the protection and the network behind it.
Operation Gladio’s architect Giulio Andreotti was never prosecuted. He faced other charges over the course of the 1990s — including allegations of links to the Sicilian Mafia — and was variously convicted and acquitted as cases wound through the Italian courts over more than a decade. He remained a senator for life. He died in Rome on 6 May 2013, at the age of ninety-four. The brass plate from the Sardinian training base had been removed twenty-three years earlier.
Giandelio Maletti, whose 2001 court testimony was among the most explicit official accounts of CIA involvement in Italian domestic terrorism ever placed on the public record, was not subsequently called before any international inquiry. The CIA did not respond to his account.
Of the three countries that conducted serious parliamentary investigations — Italy, Belgium and Switzerland — none produced prosecutions at the level of political or intelligence leadership. Several archives were destroyed before investigators could access them. The full membership lists of the networks across the sixteen countries have never been publicly released.
In August 2021, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi announced the declassification of further documents relating to Gladio and the P2 Masonic lodge, whose membership had included politicians, military officers, intelligence chiefs and senior judges. The announcement came on the forty-first anniversary of the Bologna train station bombing that killed eighty-five people. The declassification process is ongoing.
The Operation Gladio Question Nobody Has Answered
The European Parliament’s 1990 resolution called for two things: full investigations and total dismantlement of the paramilitary structures involved. More than three decades later, neither has been completed to the satisfaction of any independent observer. The documents released under Draghi have added detail, but the architecture of accountability has remained largely unchanged. Every government that participated in the network retains a legal and political interest in the files remaining sealed.
What the Operation Gladio case demonstrated, and what subsequent revelations have done nothing to refute, is that the institutional structures of democratic states can be turned against the populations those states claim to represent — not by rogue actors operating outside the system, but by people operating from within it, with the knowledge of their counterparts in allied governments, over a period spanning decades. Italy was not an isolated case. The same governments were simultaneously running Operation Condor — a coordinated campaign of state terror across South America that disappeared thousands of people under the same Cold War rationale.
The question is not whether this happened. The testimony is on the public record. The question is whether the mechanisms that allowed it to happen have been genuinely dismantled, or merely renamed.
The Pentagon’s own plans to stage attacks on American citizens never left the planning stage. In Italy, the planning stage was a long time ago.
The CIA has never confirmed or denied what it knew about the domestic terrorism carried out under the network it helped create. It has had thirty-five years to consider the question.
The Documents
The Special Forces of SIFAR and Operation Gladio, Italian Military Secret Service (SIFAR), 1 June 1959. Reproduced in Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry reports, 1990. Cited in Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 2005.
Andreotti, Giulio. Parliamentary address to the Chamber of Deputies, 24 October 1990. Italian parliamentary record.
Vinciguerra, Vincenzo. Testimony before Italian investigators, 1984. Cited in Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Frank Cass, London, 2005. 🔗 https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/31/the-bologna-massacre-the-strategy-of-tension-and-operation-gladio/
Operation Gladio, BBC documentary directed by Allan Francovich, 1992. 🔗 https://archive.org/details/vincenzo-vinciguerra-operation-gladio-interview
Maletti, Giandelio. Testimony at the Piazza Fontana massacre trial, Milan, March 2001. Reported by Philip Willan, ‘Terrorists “helped by CIA” to stop rise of left in Italy,’ The Guardian, 26 March 2001. Cited in Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 2005, p.6.
Maletti, Giandelio. Interview, La Repubblica, 2000. Cited by CBC News, 5 August 2000.
Taviani, Paulo. Testimony to Magistrate Felice Casson, 1990. Reported in The Observer, 18 November 1990. (no link — plain text only)
European Parliament Resolution on Gladio, 22 November 1990. 🔗 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/cb40eb27-7f5a-4c9c-b97c-6a0ec8ad367e/language-en
Ganser, Daniele. NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Frank Cass, London, 2005. 🔗 Your Amazon Associates affiliate link
Willan, Philip. ‘Terrorists “helped by CIA” to stop rise of left in Italy.’ The Guardian, 26 March 2001. 🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/26/terrorism
Go Deeper
The only comprehensive English-language account of the full operation across all sixteen countries. NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser draws directly on Italian parliamentary commission reports and declassified documents to reconstruct how the network was built, how it was used, and how it was — imperfectly, incompletely — exposed.