Blowback: NATO’s secret right-wing armies
Can it be true that Europe during the Soviet era set up secret armies in each country, linked to its security services and coordinated by NATO, to carry out internal resistance in the case of a Communist invasion? It seems to be a fact, one recognized by historians but rarely discussed. Each country’s secret army had a code name: Absalon in Denmark, Gladio in Italy, SDRA8 in Belgium. Their members were recruited from the country’s far right wing (believed to be more resistant to the lure of communism). These secret state-linked and financed groups, at least in Turkey, appear to have been responsible over decades for some of its most gruesome incidents of assassination and other violence, some of which had been attributed to the religious right and the Kurdish PKK. Terror was used to manipulate and frighten the population and to increase support for the state as powerful protector. One can easily see this logic continue to be in play in post-Communist Europe, with new enemies in the Left and later Islam. There are always new enemies for armies that need them.
The fact that NATO set up secret anti-Communist armies operating outside the law using ideologically right-wing shock-troops and that these have continued their operations and now threaten the stability of at least one European nation is a classic example of blowback, of unanticipated consequences. The Taliban in Afghanistan similarly were created and armed by the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service to counter the Communist insurgency in Afghanistan. Once the Soviets withdrew, the Taliban turned against new enemies in the West, forging alliances with other anti-West terror groups like Al-Qaeda, and using US-supplied Stinger missiles against US planes. Blowback.
The Turkish parliament is now discussing the appointment of a powerful parliamentary committee to investigate, since judges and prosecutors who have tried to grapple with elements of what in Turkey is being called the Ergenekon group, have not fared well. One judge was fired and now works in a supermarket. Prosecutors have been killed.
Italy has had its own Gladio problem, but what of the secret armies in other European states?
Interview with Swiss historian Daniele Ganser about the secret armies (click here)