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Crime, Law & Social Change (2006) 45: 111154
DOI: 10.1007/s10611-006-9015-7 C
The ghost of Machiavelli: An approach to operation Gladio and terrorism in cold war Italy
DANIELE GANSER
Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract. In 1990, a document was made public in Italy that shed new light on the secret aspects of the Cold War in Western Europe. The document, dated 1 June 1959, had been compiled by the Italian military secret service SIFAR and is entitled The special forces of SIFAR and Operation Gladio. It explained that a secret stay-behind army linked to NATO had been set up in Italy for the purpose of unconventional warfare. Ever since, there have been allegations in Italy that the Gladio stay-behind army was linked to acts of terrorism during the Cold War. Despite their importance for criminal, legal and social investigations into the secret history of the Cold War, these questions have received next to no attention among the English-speaking research community since the documents discovery, partly due to language barriers. With no claim to deal with the stay-behind armies in an exhaustive manner, this essay attempts to analyse and contextualise the Italian data.
1. Introduction
In the summer of 1990, Venetian judge Felice Casson discovered the existence of a hitherto unknown so-called stay-behind army linked to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) while investigating mysterious acts of right-wing terrorism in Italy. The documents proving the existence of these clandestine forces were found by Casson in Rome in the archives of the Italian military secret service SISMI (Servizio Informazioni Sicurezza Militare, previously known as SIFAR, Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate). Casson found that it was the military secret service who directed the secret stay-behind army which in Italy operated under the code-name Gladio, the Sword. Casson found evidence that similar structures existed also in numerous other countries in Western Europe. For a few weeks in late 1990, the Gladio discoveries led to a political scandal in Italy and beyond, with the British daily The Observer claiming that the the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II had been discovered.1
Following the discoveries in Italy the parliament of the European Union (EU) debated the legal, social and political implications of the discovery. In a...