Operation GLADIO represents one of the Cold War's most documented yet least understood atrocities: a NATO-coordinated network of secret armies that carried out terrorist attacks across Europe, killing hundreds of civilians including 85 in Bologna's train station in 1980, then systematically blamed these attacks on communist groups to manipulate elections and push voters rightward.
Through declassified CIA documents, parliamentary investigations, and the shocking 1990 admission by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, we trace how American intelligence and NATO built these "stay-behind" networks from recycled fascists and Nazi collaborators, armed them with hidden weapons caches, and authorized a "Strategy of Tension" that turned allied democracies into unwitting battlegrounds where civilians became acceptable casualties in the fight against communism. This isn't conspiracy theory but documented fact—confirmed by multiple European parliaments, exposed through court testimony from operatives like Vincenzo Vinciguerra who admitted they "had to attack civilians" to force populations to "turn to the state," and tracked through a money trail leading from CIA black budgets through Swiss banks to fascist bombing cells.
The podcast reveals how institutions designed to protect democracy instead built terror networks that operated for forty years, how the architects retired with honors while their weapons caches vanished, and why GLADIO's blueprint for false flag operations and manufactured fear remains terrifyingly relevant in an age of renewed authoritarianism and state surveillance.
Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?
-Daniel P. Douglas
