The C.I.A.'s secret armies in Europe

URL:		http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-12148091.html
TITLE:		The C.I.A.'s secret armies in Europe
AUTHOR:		Jonathan Kwitny
SOURCE:		The Nation
DATE:		6 April 1992
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Eighteen months have passed since the sensational disclosure of Operation Gladio in Italy brought to light more than a dozen secret armies established in Western Europe by the United States Central Intelligence Agency at the start of the cold war. The armies were to constitute a "stay-behind network" to operate behind Soviet lines if the Red Army overran the Continent. After forty years of secrecy, the discovery of well-armed guerrilla organizations linked to the C.I.A.--even in officially neutral Switzerland, Sweden and Austria--provoked government inquiries, journalistic exposes and parliamentary debate [see Daniel Singer, "The Gladiators," December 10, 1990].

Today, however, public and most private investigations seem to have run out of steam. Although suspicions persist, evidence so far hasn't supported initial allegations that the secret armies used their hidden C.I.A.-supplied caches of weapons and explosives to carry out political violence that killed civilians.

But an inquiry conducted by InterNation in Europe discovered that the armies did become intertwined at times in other possible violations of law--conspiracies between the C.I.A. and many Europeans to keep Communist or militant socialists out of power in governments, labor unions and businesses across the Continent. Much new evidence of these political manipulations has surfaced because of interest in the secret armies. The programs, though officially separate, overlapped. As was the case when such C.I.A. operations were disclosed in the past, however, European authorities, mostly from political parties the agency was helping, have been disinclined to take action.

It was also learned that secret armies like Gladio and its counterparts in Germany and France at times got out of control and were used by groups promoting a return to fascism.

Additional research in the United States has revealed many efforts within the C.I.A. over the years to disband the secret armies on the grounds that they were obsolete or out of control. But the efforts were stopped by higher U.S. military and intelligence officials. Interviews with dozens of former C.I.A. and other intelligence officers involved in the armies revealed that agents were ordered to disband the German and French operations as early as 1953 after a scandal over the C.I.A.'s recruitment of a neo-Nazi group threatened to expose the German program. But both the French and German groups continued, at least until recently. Because of the C.I.A.'s practice of compartmentalizing information, some officers say they believed the programs they worked with had been ended long ago, only to learn otherwise in 1990.

Lieut. Col. Bernard Legrand, head of the Belgian stay-behind force for seven years until the government ordered it disbanded after the Gladio scandal, says programs continue covertly in many countries. But he won't name them; he says he thinks the armies are still necessary because the Eastern bloc threat could revive. Civilian authorities in Italy and Belgium say they worry the armies may still be operating extralegally in their countries.

The C.I.A. says everything about the armies is still classified and it won't discuss them.

Mark Wyatt, an acting chief of station in Rome in the 1960s who attended a secret C.I.A. training camp for Gladio soldiers in Sardinia, says he believes the program was valid and important in its early days. But, he adds, "in the sixties, the danger of Soviet invasion had lessened to the point that the Americans should have withdrawn. I think this thing should have been stopped long ago."

"Quite frankly," he says, the agency wanted to disband the armies and "tried to sell it [the idea] to the Pentagon. C.I.A. was unable to sell that." The reason, he says, was political: "The United States had made a commitment to keep Italy free, which meant being behind the centrist political parties--we'll give you funds, we'll give you logistical support, we'll give you training to run it [the armies]." The danger, he says, was that "in Italy, there's always a number of people that have adventurous ideas. And when they became aware that there were large numbers of arms buried all over Italy, it could have led to a coup d'etat."

Indeed, a coup was attempted in Italy in 1970, and at least one man involved in Gladio acknowledges supporting it. Col. Amos Spiazzi, a third-generation officer in the regular Italian Army, says he tipped off coup leaders when he learned the army was about to act against them, but he was acquitted of criminal charges of participating in the coup. Also, while in the army Colonel Spiazzi selected candidates for Gladio; he says he was recruited for that job by an older officer he knew. Now he sits for an interview in his fortresslike home in Padua beside a large Italian flag and in front of a picture of Mussolini giving a Hitler-like salute.

Soon after the coup attempt, the C.I.A. tried to expand Gladio's covert role in Italian politics, according to documents and testimony from former Italian intelligence officials in the Gladio investigation last year. In 1972, evidence shows, C.I.A. officers Howard (Rocky) Stone, who in 1953 helped run the coup that brought the Shah to power in Iran, and Michael Sednoui visited Italian intelligence chiefs and urged them to use Vietnam-style counterinsurgency tactics against Italy's large Communist Party. Former intelligence chief Gen. Gerardo Serravalle testified that the C.I.A. men were "very explicit and urgent in requesting the organization Gladio be a key force in the anti-Communist opposition."

Investigators have accepted testimony that the Italians turned down Stone and Sednoui, after which the agency's training and support role in Gladio diminished somewhat--although American agents continued to provide money and attend meetings. Calls to Stone's office in Maryland were not returned. Sednoui couldn't be located.

David Whipple, retired head of the C.I.A.'s operations (covert action) branch for Europe, recalls that through 1979, when he moved to an unrelated assignment, "there were continued meetings, exercises, something like practice drills." On first being questioned, Whipple insisted the program was "neither designed nor used for any domestic purpose," and that "all this cock and bull about interference in domestic politics is a political thing from the opposition group in Italy." But later, Whipple conceded that after 1960, "the organizations continued because they took on a life of their own inside their own countries. For the United States to diminish its help for those groups would have indicated a lack of support. They wanted it. It was a gesture of good will. To justify that militarily, I would be hard pressed to do it."

Former C.I.A. officer Victor Marchetti, who held top headquarters staff posts in the 1960s before quitting to co-write a book about the agency, says, "When I was on the director's staff, Young Turks like me wanted to cut this stuff out. You had to replace teams overseas as they got older and died. With the advent of tactical nuclear weapons it became ridiculous. But operations people kept finding excuses for keeping them. People became assets in other ways for local station chiefs--a built-in network for any kind of covert acts we wanted to run."

Richard Helms, who was Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973, insists that the programs were all stopped before he took over as Director. "I had to sign off on all these projects--I would have known," he says, adding, "What would be the sense of keeping these operations so long?" Helms's assertion is simply untrue. (Helms has lied in the past about agency operations; in 1977, he was fined $2,000 by a U.S. district court for not testifying accurately to Congress about the C.I.A.'s role in Chile in the early 1970s.) Former Deputy Director for Intelligence Ray Cline says that when he was station chief in Bonn from 1966 to 1969, during the Helms era, he recommended to headquarters that the program be phased out; he says he was later surprised to learn that it hadn't been.

Retired C.I.A. officer Thomas Polgar, who held the Bonn post after Cline, says he doubted the merit of the stay-behind programs all along. "These plans were based on the assumption that Soviet forces would overrun Europe and very kindly stop at the channel and allow us to run the same kind of operations we were able to run the last years of World War II," he says. Polgar contends the programs were coordinated by "a sort of unconventional-warfare planning group" linked to NATO. The link is disputed in Italy and other countries, where supporters of the stay-behind armies say that parliamentary endorsement of the NATO treaty made the armies legal; opponents say the coordinating group was separate from NATO, and therefore the armies were unconstitutional.

At any rate, says Polgar, "they would meet every couple of months in different capitals, have wonderful lunches and discuss having compatible communications equipment, I.D. procedures, codes, food and, if the Russians advance, [ways] to overcome bureaucratic barriers to take people across borders. Each national service did it with varying degrees of intensity. In Italy in the 1970s, some of the people went a little bit beyond the charter that NATO put down."

When he became chief of station in Germany in the late 1970s, Polgar recalls, "I don't think anybody took this very seriously. It wasn't an activity to which you necessarily assigned your smartest people. But stopping something in a bureaucracy is always very difficult. Budgets are involved, jobs, power. I think a lot of the American taxpayers' money was sunk into the ground, as well as the German taxpayers' money and Italian taxpayers' money." How much? "I don't think anybody could tell you," Polgar says. "The national programs were run by the national services. There's no way the C.I.A. could be asked to give an accounting of what the Italians did with their caches."

Polgar claims the stay-behind armies were kept distinct from other C.I.A. operations that intervened in local politics, although he acknowledges that personnel sometimes overlapped. "If you used a local labor union to fight the Communists, it is quite possible that you would have asked the same labor leaders into the stay-behind network," he says.

Originally, stay-behind armies were built from groups that worked with Allied forces in World War II, except in Germany and nearby areas of Austria and Italy where former Nazi or Nazi-allied officers were knowingly recruited. Officials in some countries say the stay-behind idea existed locally before the C.I.A. became involved. In the late 1940s, European intelligence officials learned of Red Army contingency plans to sweep across Europe. The likelihood of such an invasion was always debated, but the danger seemed real enough to be worth protecting against, at least at the beginning.

"It took two years to establish communications with Tito after the Germans took over Yugoslavia," says Franklin Lindsay, who worked in that effort during World War II, and who later joined the C.I.A. and helped initiate the stay-behind programs. "People said, |God, we don't want that to happen again.'" So, Lindsay says, it was decided to recruit "a small number of people with radios and codes." He emphasizes small. "The more people who were involved, the worse your security would be," he says. Caches of weapons were supplied "just for a few people so they could go to the forest and secure themselves." The caches contained "maybe a few hundred pounds of explosives to attack a very important target such as a railway bridge." Eventually, the armies ranged from about 100 men, the best estimate in Belgium, to more than 2,000, the best estimate in Italy.

Edward Barnes, a former C.I.A. colleague of Lindsay's, says, "All kinds of things were stuck away in remote places, almost anything people would think might be needed," including gold coins and bicycles, although Barnes says radio equipment and codes were the top priority. Resisting a Soviet occupation was the primary motivation, he contends, but he acknowledges that promoting anti-Communist political activity in the host country "might have been a secondary consideration."

Members were recruited by Americans. The nationals who were brought in then recruited others, as troops, as leaders or for a needed skill. The C.I.A. supplied the equipment and the local forces buried or otherwise hid it, sources agree. Lindsay says most European intelligence officials welcomed C.I.A. leadership for fear their own governments had been infiltrated by Communist supporters.

The C.I.A.'s stay-behind program in Germany was the first to cause a public scandal. In 1952, West German police discovered that the C.I.A. was working with a 2,000-member fascist youth group led by former Nazi officers. Although the nature of the international stay-behind network wasn't exposed, the United States was embarrassed by the resulting furor in the German Parliament. It was disclosed that the C.I.A.-supported group had a blacklist of persons to be "liquidated" as "unreliable" in case of conflict with the Soviet Union. On the list were not just Communists but leaders of the Social Democratic Party serving in Parliament, plus socialists and other government officials. Recently declassified documents obtained by American historian Christopher Simpson reveal a calculated State Department cover-up of the incident. The United States denied "knowledge of the political activities" and suggested, falsely, that the program had been ended (an assertion accepted by The New York Times). Other documents Simpson has unearthed from the Truman era show a detailed program to persuade French and Italian political allies to harass Communist Party members covertly and deprive them of ordinary jobs and even normal social welfare benefits. Similar activities were carried out in neutral Austria.

When Gladio exploded late in 1990, there were calls in the German Parliament for an investigation of the German program. Then the calls were quietly withdrawn. But last year, a newsletter published by the Austrian Defense Ministry alleged that Germany's stay-behind program may have suffered a second scandal, similar to the one in 1952, but one that never became public. The newsletter reported extraordinary parallels between the location and contents of the buried arms caches of the stay-behind networks, and weapons storehouses found in 1981 by West German forest workers near the East German border. Those weapons--rifles, ammunition and grenades--were traced to the military training of a youth group run by neo-Nazi Heinz Lembke, who was arrested.

At the time, Lembke was portrayed as a crazed extremist training troops secretly in the forest. He had founded other neo-Nazi youth groups since 1960; at least one had been banned. The day before Lembke's scheduled trial, he died in prison and his death was ruled a suicide. The editor of the Austrian Defense Ministry publication, retired Gen. Franz Freistaetter, says he personally oversaw the article suggesting Lembke was using stay-behind caches to train his neo-Nazi troops, and believes it, though its author insisted on anonymity.

In Austria itself, the press has used the Gladio scandal as an excuse to report C.I.A. violations of Austrian neutrality. Documents obtained by Simpson show that, in 1955, when the Allied occupation of Austria ended on condition the country would stay neutral, the United States double-crossed the Soviet Union by insisting on secret U.S.-Austrian agreements making Austria almost a silent partner in NATO in return for stepped-up U.S. aid.

American taxpayers unwittingly spent up to $10 million a year to arm and fund unionists who opposed labor groups that were aggressively seeking a larger slice of the national economic pie. One former C.I.A.-supported unionist, Franz Olah, who eventually became Austria's Minister of the Interior, told an Austrian television interviewer last year how he and his group defeated a 1950 general strike by rival unionists.

"It wasn't our intention to fight Communism in the Soviet Union," he said, "but to fight against the attempts of Communism in our own country. We took weapons. We also had modern plastic explosives, which were easy to handle. I had a small arsenal of weapons in my office. There must have been a couple of thousand people working for us." He told of coordinated armed bands with radio gear in each of Austria's nine provinces, and hinted that all the supplies came from his American contacts. "Only very, very high politicians and some members of the union knew about it," he said.

Olah declined to tell InterNation whether he was part of a stay-behind unit, or how the weapons and explosives were used. Eugen Burgstaller, who retired from the C.I.A. in 1979 and spent much of the 1950s in Vienna, says Olah was in other C.I.A. operations but not a stay-behind network.

Retired officer Barnes remembers that while he was in France in 1953, the C.I.A. ordered him to end the stay-behind program there, but to keep contact with the recruits, who might be used in other ways. He says he was told that the scandal-scarred program in Germany was also slated to close. Obviously, he was misinformed.

Barnes says the French program consisted of several dozen men individually recruited by the agency, each of whom was to build a small network of his own recruits. In all, he says, the C.I.A. "had no record of how many people would come out of the woodwork. There was no way to calculate that. Those I met were farmers, townspeople, tradespeople." Mostly war veterans, they didn't need much training, he says. Barnes emphasizes the instability of French politics before de Gaulle, the frequent changes of prime ministers. "There were probably a lot of Frenchmen who wanted to be ready if something happened," he says.

Barnes says he could meet with only about ten C.I.A. recruits. He had to be careful "for fear of blowing me and blowing them. You couldn't go out and just say, |Dig this stuff up, Joe.' There were probably all kinds of things that went awry. Some of those guys didn't bury things where they said they did." Still, he says, he thought he had disbanded the army without the French government's ever having heard of it. He hadn't.

Barnes left France in 1956. Three years later, says Constantin Melnik, then the new security adviser for the de Gaulle government, he was told about the network--which he says he already knew about--and was asked to disband it. Melnik, who had just worked six years in France for the RAND Corporation, a California-based planning contractor for the C.I.A. and the Pentagon, says de Gaulle's intelligence chief, Paul Grossin, told him the French government felt threatened by the network, some of whose members supported a group of generals who were resisting, sometimes violently, de Gaulle's attempts to negotiate Algerian independence and end the war there. "Any group with radios and training would be very dangerous for the security of France," Melnik says. And so, he says, he disbanded the network. In fact, according to Remy Calandra, Defense Ministry spokesman for the Mitterrand administration, the program continued until recently. Calandra denies any misconduct by the secret army in France but says the program "went out of control in some countries like Belgium and Italy, where it was used as an opportunity for mobsters or the far right to meet."

Adm. Pierre Lacoste, who was dismissed as head of the French secret service in 1985 for his role in the sinking of the Greenpeace protest vessel Rainbow Warrior, still believes that Soviet contingency plans for invasion justified the program through his term in office. He acknowledges that some "terrorist actions" against de Gaulle and his Algerian peace plan were carried out by groups that included "a limited number of people" from the French stay-behind network. But he says that's the only time it got political.

The stay-behind networks of officially neutral countries like Switzerland and Sweden distanced themselves from the C.I.A. by not sending representatives to coordinating council meetings, according to people who attended. But the programs were parallel. The Swiss Parliament determined that the secret army there, known as P-26, didn't violate official neutrality because it worked under a bilateral security training arrangement with Britain. The Swiss press, however, has observed that P-26 followed the same pattern as other networks--for example, adopting an expensive new radio system, known as Harpoon, when it was acquired by the rest of the networks in the 1980s. Opponents call the bilateral pact with Britain a fig leaf, but the investigation appears closed.

Former C.I.A. officer Paul Garbler confirms that Sweden had a C.I.A.-coached stay-behind program, created by former Director of Central Intelligence William Colby (who told about it in his 1978 memoirs without hinting that the program continued past the 1950s). But Garbler says, "I'm not able to talk with you about it without causing the Swedes a good deal of heartburn." Garbler, who served two tours of duty in Sweden, the last ending in 1976, says the Swedish government was a "direct participant," as were "local people outside of politics, but of some standing in the country." He adds, "If it has ended, I don't know when it ended."

Still, what seems to interest European prosecutors most is that investigations haven't substantiated charges that stay-behind members masterminded a series of terrorist bombings in Italy and supermarket shootings in Belgium. Belgian official investigators and journalists say they have discredited allegations by a prisoner that the supermarket shootings were tied to the stay-behind program.

Senator Libero Gualtieri, the head of the Italian Parliament's recently completed investigation, says he thinks that if the committee had been given the full truth, it would "probably" show that some missing C.I.A.-supplied explosives from Gladio were used in terrorist bombings in Italy. He found records showing that Gladio had been used for domestic spying, but the examples seemed relatively innocuous. His staff points out, however, that intelligence agencies were given time to cleanse their files before having to turn them over. The committee couldn't find solid evidence of violence or subversion.

Judge Felice Casson of Venice, whose investigation of a 1972 bombing that killed three policemen led to the discovery of Gladio, says he's still investigating. So are military prosecutors. But charges that Judge Casson brought against two former intelligence chiefs last year over their involvement in Gladio were recently thrown out in Rome by senior prosecutors, who rebuked Casson for filing them.

Pending unexpected new evidence of violence, the stay-behind matter seems closed--not because there was no wrong-doing but because most people are satisfied with the outcome of the cold war and aren't inclined to open old wounds over politics. Many Socialist and Communist politicians who think their parties were illegally deprived of power would still like to see justice done and the truth uncovered. Some journalists and historians, naturally eager to solve mysteries, would like to see an all-European official probe.

But the predominant reaction right now seems to be that of Roberto Cicciomessere, a parliamentarian from Italy's Radical Party. A year ago, Cicciomessere says, he was eager to undertake his assignment on the committee investigating Gladio. Like Judge Casson, he suspected a great scandal. But having looked at what he found, and reflecting on the defeat of Communism, Cicciomessere has turned 180 degrees. "I think Gladio was a good thing," he says.