In the Blind Spot (The economic costs of reopening old war wounds)

DARIO COMMENT: When former heads of military services come on the record to claim a strange union between the CIA, a masonic lodge, and powerful figures in the Italian establishment were somehow responsible for the kidnapping and murder of an Italian president in 1978, we should pay attention. And it should remind us that when contemporary media and supposed experts in military affairs decry false flag operations as conspiratorial they are being ahistorical at best, and dishonest at worst.

False flag operations, the misrepresentation of a perpetrator’s allegiance or motive in a violent operation, are any military-political establishment’s bread and butter. They are remarkably expedient from a political standpoint, allowing the aggressor to don victim credentials to sell an invasion as a “righteous war” at home and abroad. The American takeover of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 from the Spanish was started by the dubious sinking of the USS Maine — when Spain had no interest in provoking an attack by their powerful neighbour.

Likewise, the Gulf of Tonkin incident comprised American raids that provoked a North Vietnamese response which allowed the United States to compile sufficient “cassus belli” to escalate their war in Vietnam. The utility of false flags is such that even the most heinous regimes — like the Nazis — felt the need to resort to false flag operations. German Wehrmacht troops donned Polish Army uniforms to attack a German radio base, enabling the Germans to call for a legitimate attack on Poland. The events stretch out into the present day — with the Russian “Special Military Operation” having commenced after a dubious attack on a Russian base in the Donbas region to provide a concrete excuse to attack Ukraine.

In the case of Aldo Moro, his false-flag kidnapping and assassination played a dual role.

On the one hand, Aldo Moro was despised by Western power brokers for seeking to include communists in his Presidential cabinet. Kissinger allegedly warned him about this in 1974: “You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration, or you will pay dearly for it.” Even the USSR reviled him for attempting to domesticate the Italian communist party and drive them further from an alliance with the Soviet Union. Aldo Moro’s independent political streak meant it wasn’t the first time the Italian President had been targeted for execution by Western intelligence services. Operation Piano Solo, an abortive planned coup against the Italian state orchestrated by the CIA and the Italian Carabinieri in 1967, was meant to start with a false flag assassination of Aldo Moro by Italian paratroopers.

On the other hand, it allowed authorities to blame the Red Brigades for this terrorist plot, damaging the Communist Party’s credibility by association, and forming a pretext for authorities to crack down on the left, questioning over 6 million leftists in less than two months and searching 37,000 houses.

But the affair is even more complex than it sounds. Let me explain.

The story begins with GLADIO, a unit of stay-behind forces built by, and based on, the remnants of Hitler’s Werewolf guerillas. These were guerillas supplied by arms dumps hidden in forests, who were quickly repurposed by the Americans in most Western countries to fight against a Soviet invasion. The story goes that GLADIO was directed by a masonic lodge to perpetrate terrorist attacks against civilians to blame on the Communist party with CIA backing. The Masonic lodge was called Propaganda Due, and dubbed “the state within the state”. Headed by Licio Gelli, it was responsible for building a massive blackmail pyramid scheme in Italy during the Cold War. Whenever a prospective recruit was identified, compromising material was compiled, and the recruit would be forced to swear themselves to secrecy —willing or otherwise — of this secretive lodge.

But that’s not the full story. When dealing with GLADIO you must do away with the concept of top-down military decisionmaking. Instead, think of the operation as a giant Matryoshka doll of deception.

This “the state within a state” was far from independent. Robert Powell, in his magnificent exposé on Gladio, claimed the apex of the P2 pyramid, Gelli, was at the bottom of another pyramid that contained the people responsible for overall strategy. This “inverted pyramid” was, predictably, comprised of Americans at its apex.

The same goes for GLADIO. This organisation was supposed to be a military one that trained special forces units that were dependably anti-communist in order to serve as stay-behind guerillas in the West. But this organisation too was compromised by an “inverted pyramid”. Information about its arms dumps were intentionally leaked to communist groups such as the Italian Red Brigades or German and Flemish neo-Nazi groups.

In turn, these communist and neo-Nazi groups were themselves compromised, often by a willing agent situated at its head. The organisations were either formed from the ground up by intelligence agencies for a specific purpose, or their original leaders were arrested and replaced by key agents, or genuine idealist leaders were misled into fulfilling the goals of this “state within a state”.

Like with the Brabant massacres, where thugs with connections to neo-Nazi groups armed with machine guns and dressed in bizarre costumes and masks gunned down families and children in a Belgian supermarket, the GLADIO organisation’s military nature was coopted to fulfil a political goal: to instigate chaos and insecurity to push the ordinary voter towards the stability of the centre-right.

Aldo Moro was held, of all places, in a building owned by SISMI, Italy’s military agency. The bullets that riddled Moro’s body were treated with a preserving paint characteristic of ammo treated for long-term preservation in Gladio ammo dumps. The committee responsible for discovering Moro’s kidnappers, and who put out falsified memos by the Red Brigades claiming Moro had been executed before he was killed, were, you guessed it, all Propaganda Due members.

And before you accuse me of conspiracy, all the events I’ve described were thoroughly vetted by a large number of judicial trials following not just the Moro kidnapping but also the Bologna bombing and a host of other Vatican-linked financial scandals. These led to the eventual arrest of Licio Gelli, which provided a long list of names of P2 members (which included a young Berlusconi) and top secret documents from the US Army. The findings from investigators under Judge Felice Casson were enough to convince this judicial team that P2 had been involved in terrorist attacks all over the Western world as proxies for the CIA.

If you think this is juicy, you don’t even know the half of it. Reading on the topic of Gladio will introduce you to the world of “The Great Game” — the dark alliance between intelligence agencies, drug runners and religious organisations, as they weaved a web of billions in untraceable drug flows in Vatican and CIA-linked banks to fund the fight against the anti-capitalist, anti-religious Soviets. The above has barely touched on the subject.

It’s a dangerous web that slithers through American gangster Lucky Luciano’s employment by American Naval Intelligence to co-opt the Sicilian Mafia into fighting against Mussolini, to the smashing of Corsican mafia opium laboratories in Provence under Nixon’s drug war to the benefit of Italian-American drug consortiums importing from South-Asian poppy producers. It also touches on the collapse of Vatican-linked banks that laundered for the Sicilian mafia called “Il Crash Sindona“, the curious hanging of God’s Banker, Roberto Calvi, in Blackfriars Bridge with an orange rope after he spilled one too many secrets, to the untimely death of John Paul I, and more.

You can’t be blamed for feeling confused or overwhelmed in believing any of the above is true. Federico Umberto D’Amato, called an “eel” by Roberto Jucci, aptly summarised the real workings of this “state within a state” with a brilliant metaphor:

After the strings are pulled, this lifeless puppet reveals different objects under his cones. Here’s a cube, and now here’s a cinnamon swirl. Look, here’s a rectangle.

Perhaps we should look beyond the scandal of Vatican banks laundering for mafias and NATO-linked organisations engaging in terrorist activities and the murder of presidents. These facts lead the reader into confusion and fear, as they shine a terrible light on the modern-day institutions that govern so much of our lives.

Considering that we’re dealing with shady figures who perpetuated horrific displays of secret power to create chaos and insecurity, we should pause and mull whether these cursed revelations are as intrinsic to the “Great Game” as its violence.

All of these shady facts and figures, naturally, lead back to the United States, the modern-day incarnation of the Roman Empire. If Propaganda Due was the “state within the state”, the intricate web described above may be “the empire within the empire”, or as Eisenhower described it, the “military-industrial complex”.

Named many names, if you think this Black Empire somehow dismantled itself after the Cold War, you haven’t been paying attention. But perhaps, for your sake, you shouldn’t be.

A lot is made of Western use of Nazis in the period after the second world war. The rise of the Cold War meant diehard anti-Communists became a sought-after currency, particularly those with experience in warfighting, deception, and engineering that could tip the scales in favour of the West.

This led to well-documented and subsequently declassified projects like Paperclip, where Nazi scientists were shipped out en masse to the US and eventually formed the majority of senior staff at NASA in its founding years. And that’s without going into the masse of Nazi exiles used as centrepieces in NATO security mechanisms. Dr Strangelove was a trope for a reason.

For instance, the West German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND, was a re-branding of the Gehlen Organisation. The Gehlen Org was an intelligence agency headed by Reinhard Gehlen, head of Nazi German military intelligence on the Eastern Front, whose military intelligence outfit was put back into place by American funding in June 1946 with little more than spit and shine.

Another was the NATO-funded Gladio units, based on the Hitlerian stay-behind Werewolf brigades, who were supposed to use arms dumps to combat a presumed Soviet invasion of the West. These were rapidly repurposed by the CIA to engage in subversive anti-Communist activities from the 1950s all across Europe. This usually meant hijacking or masquerading as active communist movements like the Italian Red Brigades or the German Red Army Fraktion and committing terrorist attacks to weaken support for national Communist parties, the most notable being the Bologna Massacre which claimed 85 souls in 1980.

While the Soviets had their own version of Paperclip, they found most remaining Nazi engineers in their territories were only second-order experts — unlike the cream of the crop which escaped to the West. This meant the Soviets found it practical to bring on the Nazis to begin their missile and space programs, but dismissed them soon after.

So while American, British and French officers carried out the denazification programs in West Germany with some zeal and seriousness on the one hand, they were promoting and supporting the most ruthless Nazis back into power with the other.

The same could not be said for the Soviets and East Germany. While the Soviets held a much greater distaste for arming and supplying their former Nazi enemies, their denazification program practically never existed. With one broad brushstroke, the Soviet’s proclamation of the German Democratic Republic immediately relieved the East Germans of any guilt of association with the Nazi regime. The Nazi regime, in their minds, was a savage form of capitalism — one which had emerged from the rapacious Weimar Republic, currently represented by the West German Republic. Since the GDR was by definition anticapitalist, its population was not in any way responsible for Nazi crimes.

Therefore, with one rhetorical wand stroke, millions of former Hitler-saluting East Germans were alchemised into loyal socialists overnight, as Martin Butler wrote in The Beast Reawakens.

As one can imagine, this came back to bite the GDR in the butt. It may seem counterintuitive, but there was a significant growth of neo-Nazism in the East German republic. Mostly formed of leather-clad youths, many of whom were based around GDR’s football clubs, they rebelled against the GDR’s straitjacketed state. Many of their leaders, such as Ingo Hasselbach, took inspiration and ideological guidance from well-funded West German neo-Nazis (and from old-fashioned Nazis), many of whom, such as Wehrsportgruppe Hoffman, pinned as the neo-Nazi group responsible for the Oktoberfest bombing of 1980, appeared to have access to well-supplied arms dumps carefully concealed in German forests.

The Stasi and the GDR were more than content to let these neo-Nazi movements flourish, particularly because the neo-Nazis’ main opponents were their own; those perceived unsavoury or destabilising elements for their republics — like the Roma people or liberal reformists the neo-Nazis liked to batter and bruise. Furthermore, once the violence occurred — with East German police units typically standing by without intervening — the GDR could easily point the blame at West German destabilisation attempts.

It was all well and good until it wasn’t. What began as a timid reformist movement inspired by Michael Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms in East Germany in 1989 was rapidly repurposed into a movement for German national unity.

A little-known fact of the 1989 peaceful uprisings in East Germany was just how central the Imperial German Flag and swastika-wielding neo-Nazis were in this shift. For one, they would consistently beat up and isolate the reformist socialists who merely sought to remake the GDR rather than unify with capitalist West Germany. The second was in the rather ominous change in protesters’ chants. Whereas the chants had begun with “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), as the unionist movement gathered force the chant became “Wir sind Ein Volk” (We are One people), a direct parallel to the Nazi slogan Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer. This fact was seized upon by the East German propaganda services, who decried “Western-inspired hooligans” as being central figures in the protests.

More curiously still, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, coincided with the anniversary of Kristallnacht and Hitler’s beer hall putsch in Munich. Initially regarded as the original date of German reunification, it was then moved to 15 March 1991, the date both states merged, for obvious reasons. The subsequent dramatic rise in anti-foreigner, neo-Nazi violence in the former GDR was mostly ignored by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to the great concern of Western Capitals faced with the resurgence of a unified Germany. [And not just because of the simultaneous rise of David Hasselhoff.]

So while the Russian military can sort-of-accurately claim that Germany was never denazified, and the United States’ cold warfighting in many ways encouraged rather than eliminated support for Nazism, they should first look in the mirror and study the role played by the Soviet Union’s own wilful dismissal of East German responsibility for Nazism in the collapse of their empire.

DARIO COMMENT: When former heads of military services come on the record to claim a strange union between the CIA, a masonic lodge, and powerful figures in the Italian establishment were somehow responsible for the kidnapping and murder of an Italian president in 1978, we should pay attention. And it should remind us that when contemporary media and supposed experts in military affairs decry false flag operations as conspiratorial they are being ahistorical at best, and dishonest at worst.

False flag operations, the misrepresentation of a perpetrator’s allegiance or motive in a violent operation, are any military-political establishment’s bread and butter. They are remarkably expedient from a political standpoint, allowing the aggressor to don victim credentials to sell an invasion as a “righteous war” at home and abroad. The American takeover of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 from the Spanish was started by the dubious sinking of the USS Maine — when Spain had no interest in provoking an attack by their powerful neighbour.

Likewise, the Gulf of Tonkin incident comprised American raids that provoked a North Vietnamese response which allowed the United States to compile sufficient “cassus belli” to escalate their war in Vietnam. The utility of false flags is such that even the most heinous regimes — like the Nazis — felt the need to resort to false flag operations. German Wehrmacht troops donned Polish Army uniforms to attack a German radio base, enabling the Germans to call for a legitimate attack on Poland. The events stretch out into the present day — with the Russian “Special Military Operation” having commenced after a dubious attack on a Russian base in the Donbas region to provide a concrete excuse to attack Ukraine.

In the case of Aldo Moro, his false-flag kidnapping and assassination played a dual role.

On the one hand, Aldo Moro was despised by Western power brokers for seeking to include communists in his Presidential cabinet. Kissinger allegedly warned him about this in 1974: “You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration, or you will pay dearly for it.” Even the USSR reviled him for attempting to domesticate the Italian communist party and drive them further from an alliance with the Soviet Union. Aldo Moro’s independent political streak meant it wasn’t the first time the Italian President had been targeted for execution by Western intelligence services. Operation Piano Solo, an abortive planned coup against the Italian state orchestrated by the CIA and the Italian Carabinieri in 1967, was meant to start with a false flag assassination of Aldo Moro by Italian paratroopers.

On the other hand, it allowed authorities to blame the Red Brigades for this terrorist plot, damaging the Communist Party’s credibility by association, and forming a pretext for authorities to crack down on the left, questioning over 6 million leftists in less than two months and searching 37,000 houses.

But the affair is even more complex than it sounds. Let me explain.

The story begins with GLADIO, a unit of stay-behind forces built by, and based on, the remnants of Hitler’s Werewolf guerillas. These were guerillas supplied by arms dumps hidden in forests, who were quickly repurposed by the Americans in most Western countries to fight against a Soviet invasion. The story goes that GLADIO was directed by a masonic lodge to perpetrate terrorist attacks against civilians to blame on the Communist party with CIA backing. The Masonic lodge was called Propaganda Due, and dubbed “the state within the state”. Headed by Licio Gelli, it was responsible for building a massive blackmail pyramid scheme in Italy during the Cold War. Whenever a prospective recruit was identified, compromising material was compiled, and the recruit would be forced to swear themselves to secrecy —willing or otherwise — of this secretive lodge.

But that’s not the full story. When dealing with GLADIO you must do away with the concept of top-down military decisionmaking. Instead, think of the operation as a giant Matryoshka doll of deception.

This “the state within a state” was far from independent. Robert Powell, in his magnificent exposé on Gladio, claimed the apex of the P2 pyramid, Gelli, was at the bottom of another pyramid that contained the people responsible for overall strategy. This “inverted pyramid” was, predictably, comprised of Americans at its apex.

The same goes for GLADIO. This organisation was supposed to be a military one that trained special forces units that were dependably anti-communist in order to serve as stay-behind guerillas in the West. But this organisation too was compromised by an “inverted pyramid”. Information about its arms dumps were intentionally leaked to communist groups such as the Italian Red Brigades or German and Flemish neo-Nazi groups.

In turn, these communist and neo-Nazi groups were themselves compromised, often by a willing agent situated at its head. The organisations were either formed from the ground up by intelligence agencies for a specific purpose, or their original leaders were arrested and replaced by key agents, or genuine idealist leaders were misled into fulfilling the goals of this “state within a state”.

Like with the Brabant massacres, where thugs with connections to neo-Nazi groups armed with machine guns and dressed in bizarre costumes and masks gunned down families and children in a Belgian supermarket, the GLADIO organisation’s military nature was coopted to fulfil a political goal: to instigate chaos and insecurity to push the ordinary voter towards the stability of the centre-right.

Aldo Moro was held, of all places, in a building owned by SISMI, Italy’s military agency. The bullets that riddled Moro’s body were treated with a preserving paint characteristic of ammo treated for long-term preservation in Gladio ammo dumps. The committee responsible for discovering Moro’s kidnappers, and who put out falsified memos by the Red Brigades claiming Moro had been executed before he was killed, were, you guessed it, all Propaganda Due members.

And before you accuse me of conspiracy, all the events I’ve described were thoroughly vetted by a large number of judicial trials following not just the Moro kidnapping but also the Bologna bombing and a host of other Vatican-linked financial scandals. These led to the eventual arrest of Licio Gelli, which provided a long list of names of P2 members (which included a young Berlusconi) and top secret documents from the US Army. The findings from investigators under Judge Felice Casson were enough to convince this judicial team that P2 had been involved in terrorist attacks all over the Western world as proxies for the CIA.

If you think this is juicy, you don’t even know the half of it. Reading on the topic of Gladio will introduce you to the world of “The Great Game” — the dark alliance between intelligence agencies, drug runners and religious organisations, as they weaved a web of billions in untraceable drug flows in Vatican and CIA-linked banks to fund the fight against the anti-capitalist, anti-religious Soviets. The above has barely touched on the subject.

It’s a dangerous web that slithers through American gangster Lucky Luciano’s employment by American Naval Intelligence to co-opt the Sicilian Mafia into fighting against Mussolini, to the smashing of Corsican mafia opium laboratories in Provence under Nixon’s drug war to the benefit of Italian-American drug consortiums importing from South-Asian poppy producers. It also touches on the collapse of Vatican-linked banks that laundered for the Sicilian mafia called “Il Crash Sindona“, the curious hanging of God’s Banker, Roberto Calvi, in Blackfriars Bridge with an orange rope after he spilled one too many secrets, to the untimely death of John Paul I, and more.

You can’t be blamed for feeling confused or overwhelmed in believing any of the above is true. Federico Umberto D’Amato, called an “eel” by Roberto Jucci, aptly summarised the real workings of this “state within a state” with a brilliant metaphor:

After the strings are pulled, this lifeless puppet reveals different objects under his cones. Here’s a cube, and now here’s a cinnamon swirl. Look, here’s a rectangle.

Perhaps we should look beyond the scandal of Vatican banks laundering for mafias and NATO-linked organisations engaging in terrorist activities and the murder of presidents. These facts lead the reader into confusion and fear, as they shine a terrible light on the modern-day institutions that govern so much of our lives.

Considering that we’re dealing with shady figures who perpetuated horrific displays of secret power to create chaos and insecurity, we should pause and mull whether these cursed revelations are as intrinsic to the “Great Game” as its violence.

All of these shady facts and figures, naturally, lead back to the United States, the modern-day incarnation of the Roman Empire. If Propaganda Due was the “state within the state”, the intricate web described above may be “the empire within the empire”, or as Eisenhower described it, the “military-industrial complex”.

Named many names, if you think this Black Empire somehow dismantled itself after the Cold War, you haven’t been paying attention. But perhaps, for your sake, you shouldn’t be.