Recently I received an email congratulating me on this site. This is not why I am telling you about it, I receive many emails like this. What was different about this email was the fact that it mentioned Project Gladio. I would like to thank the writer for bringing it up. I thought that it might make an interesting article, so here are the facts that I could glean.

Apparently we, in the U.S., take a lot more active role in the politics of other countries at times than the American population realizes. Of course there is no way that I can verify that anything I am about to tell you is 100% accurate, but I can tell you this, some of it seems to be a well known fact. This country has a long history of trying to keep communist and fascist leaders out of power. They have also helped to put or keep right wing dictators in power when the choice was between them or the communists. I am not issuing any moral judgments here, I am only stating what has gone on for many years. I myself thought that when communism fell in most of the world that this kind of thing would have ceased, but again it is so hard to know what is going on.

One of the countries that the U.S. feared would turn communist was Italy. It was thought that this nation might be an easy mark and why not, their political system with so many parties was in a shambles and just begging for a strong leader to take it over? This country was very worried that Italy was ripe for a leftist takeover. All this ended when out of no where Silvio Berlussoni ran for office with a slate of people that were mostly new to politics. Since he was a very rich media mogul, he was well known. Project Gladio has to do with this final outcome. By the way Gladio was the Roman sword carried by the soldiers.

When people talk about Gladio, the project not the sword, they are referring to what is purported to be a program run by the U.S. that kept Italy in turmoil ever since World War II ended. Supposedly the U.S. had some control over political parties in Italy, such as the Christian Democrats and the Socialists. The idea was to keep Italian politics in chaos rather than let communists or leftists take power. It is said that the Italian Government admitted that this was true in 1990. It is said that other countries were involved and even the Mafia was brought into the picture. Here is a part of Gladio that is really hard to swallow. It is said that the CIA recruited former police that served under Mussolini and financed and trained them. What were their duties? Were they only used to fight the communists? The word is that they had other duties which were a lot more ominous.

The project also involved NATO. Before any nation could join NATO, it is said that they had to sign an agreement to fight communism, and that this served as a cover for Project Gladio. These NATO nations were obligated to keep the secret of what was really going on. or at least that is the way the story goes. Many deaths occurred according to this tale, when at the end of the 1940s, after the war, a new Italian minister repressed and murdered hundreds of peasants, Of course these murders were attributed to the U.S. but this seems a little far out to me. I know this statement will make many conspiracy theorists angry, but I think that even they have to admit that more proof is needed.

It is said that different organizations were formed in Italy with U.S. backing and the sole purpose of these organizations was to prevent the communists from getting into power. Even though these efforts were said to have started right after the war, the first time Project Gladio was referred to was in 1956. In that year the Italian army was purged of officers that were not right wing. Did the U.S. actually have units in the field that were used to destabilize the Italian government? According to some they did and it was all part of the project. Supposedly many different types of units were now in place and the move against the communists could now be made. It is said that terror attacks were conducted that seemed to come from the left or communists but were really from the right. The result of all this terror was to scare the population into voting for the right wing candidates.

It is also said that at one point there were thousands of U.S. trained right wing guerillas just waiting to take over the Italian government. When three Italian Policemen were killed by a car bomb in 1972 the Red Brigade was implicated and many of them rounded up. No evidence was ever found against them and no charges were ever brought. It is said that the police never investigated the scene of the explosion. A judge was able to trace the explosives ten years later and Vincenzo Vinciguerra confessed. He never implicated others by name but he did say that many police and government agencies knew the truth about the cover up.

Many terror acts occurred in Italy and many implicate the U.S. and name Project Gladio as proof. Did Project Gladio actually exist? Did we interfere in the politics of other countries and do we still? Conspiracy theories abound. Whether Gladio actually existed or not we can not know for sure but many say it did and even books have been written about it. As far as us interfering in the politics of other countries, of this there can be no doubt. One has just to look at Iraq and Afghanistan to know the answer to that question. Justification is in the eye of the beholder. One country will state that it did something to insure it's protection but another country will totally disagree, that is the way of life and of nations. Many believe that we shouldn't be in Iraq and it seems that more and more people are feeling this way. You don't hear too much sentiment on Afghanistan. Let's hope that most of these conspiracy theories are just that, theories. I would hate to find out that most of them are true.