MATT EVERETT

Western StateSponsored Terrorism and the Strategy of Tension

You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security.

Convicted right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. London: Frank Cass, 2005, 315 pp. ollowing the investigations of a young judge, Felice Casson, in August 1990 Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed that in Italy, as well as other Western European countries, a secret army had existed throughout the Cold War. Further research by journalists, judges, politicians, and academics led to the accumulation of a significant body of information about these covert networks. In Italy, the secret army was codenamed Gladio (from the Latin word for "sword"). In other countries, the armies went by such names as LOK in Greece, Counter-Guerrilla in Turkey, and Absalon in Denmark. They had been established after the Second World War with the aim of fighting Communism. In the event of a Soviet invasion, these "stay-behind" armies were intended to stay behind enemy lines and organize a resistance movement within the enemy-held territory. But the Soviet invasion never came, and instead the armies turned their attention to the political left in their own countries, often resorting to violence and terrorism. When details of the secret armies came to light in
The Journal of Psychohistory 35 (2) Fall 2007

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late 1990, the British press referred to their existence as "the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II."' This important yet little known aspect of modern history is the subject of Swiss historian Daniele Ganser's extensively researched book, NATO's
Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. The result

of his four-year investigation, it brings together for the first time the full story of the secret armies and examines what extent they went to in their battle against the political left. Ganser writes: "The secret armies, as the secondary sources now available suggest, were involved in a whole series of terrorist operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists in order to discredit the left at the polls."^ In the words of John Prados, a senior analyst with the U.S. National Security Archive, Ganser's book is "a significant and disturbing history."^ Though not a psychohistorical account, it raises important questions for psychohistorians. Who were the secret soldiers and what motivated them? Did the armies serve a psychohistorical purpose? And why has so little attention been paid to this most important subject?

THE SECRET ARMIES As Ganser's book reveals, the secret stay-behind armies existed throughout the Cold War in all the Western European nations that were members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and even in four neutral, non-NATO countries: Switzerland, Austria, Finland, and Sweden. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) established the networks after the Second World War, based upon the experiences of the war, during which similar networks had been set up to fight the occupying German forces. Each country's military secret service would run its secret army, in close collaboration with the CIA or MI6. On an international level, the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) of NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) coordinated the armies. SHAPE was located near Paris, France until 1967, when it relocated to Belgium, near the city of Mons. However, the Pentagon maintained significant control, since NATO's highest military commander for Europe the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR)has always been an American general. According to General Paolo Inzerilli, commander of the Italian Gladio from 1974 to 1986, the United States also dominated the CPC, along with Great Britain and France, in an inner executive group."* American and British military special forces were closely involved. Staybehind recruits would be sent to Fort Monkton, near Portsmouth and to

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Hereford in England, to train with the SAS. They secretly received training in the U.S. from the Green Berets, presumably at the U.S. headquarters for unorthodox warfare at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Selected soldiers from the Turkish Counter-Guerrilla secret army also received instruction at the notorious School of the Americas, originally located in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.^ The secret armies consisted of anything from dozens of recruits in some countries up to thousands in others. The secret soldiers came from "strictly anti-Communist segments of the society," including "moderate conservatives as well as right-wing extremists." MI6 and the CIA equipped the networks with large supplies of weapons, ammunition, explosives, and high-tech communications equipment. These were hidden in secret caches, located in places such as meadows, forests, cemeteries, or underground bunkers. In Italy, for example, there were 139 of these secret arms stores around the country; in Greece, there were 800.^ FALSE FLAG OPERATIONS While the Soviet invasion the secret armies prepared for never materialized, in many countries the armies instead resorted to terrorism and other violence for the purpose of political manipulation. These activities, as Ganser describes, "always aimed at spreading maximum fear among the population." Most notorious was a series of terrorist attacks that took place in Italy, beginning in the late 1960s. On December 12, 1969, in an incident known as the Piazza Fontana massacre, four bombs exploded in public areas of Rome and Milan. Sixteen people were killed and 80 wounded, most of them farmers. The Italian police and military secret service, SID, engaged in a cover-up, for example quickly destroying a bomb that failed to go off. The attack was then wrongly blamed on the political left, with SID planting parts of a bomb in the villa of a well-known left-wing editor. While an early, classified, internal SID report alleged that right-wingers, supported by the CIA, were to blame, the Italian public was led to believe that Communists were the culprits, and numerous Communists were immediately arrested.^ In another terrorist attack, in May 1972 an anonymous phone call lured members of the Carabinieri, Italy's military police force, to an abandoned car near the village of Peteano. When they inspected it a bomb was triggered, killing three of them. Based on an anonymous call to the police two days later, a Communist terrorist group called the Red Brigades was blamed, leading to a police crackdown on the political left. Further attacks took place in the following years. In May 1974, a bomb went off during an anti-fascist protest in Brescia, killing eight. Two months later, a bomb exploded on the Rome-to-Munich Italicus Express train, killing twelve. The worst incident

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came in August 1980, when a bomb exploded at the waiting room of the Bologna railway station, killing 85 and seriously wounding two hundred.^ In 1984, after the Italian public had believed for more than a decade that the Red Brigades were to blame for the Peteano bombing, a young judge called Felice Casson reopened the case and found that in fact the fascist group Ordine Nuovo had collaborated with the SID to engineer the attack, then falsely put the blame on the extreme left. Ordine Nuovo member Vincenzo Vinciguerra was arrested for having planted the bomb, and confessed to his crime. He then explained how a network of sympathizers within official agencies had ensured that he'd been able to get away with it. He told Casson that other right-wing organizations such as Avanguardia Nazionale had also cooperated with the SID, in an attempt to weaken the Italian political left. On trial he stated: "With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages." According to Vinciguerra, this structure "lies within the state itself." What he was describing was the Gladio stay-behind army.^ In June 2000, Italy's formerly communist Left Democrat party presented a 326-page report on Gladio, which inciuded the testimonies of some former secret soldiers. This concluded that the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks that had plagued Italy were rarely caught because, "those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence."' General Giandelio Maletti, a former head of Italian military counterintelligence, also alleged United States involvement. During the trial of right-wing extremists accused of complicity in the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre, in March 2001 he testified: "The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism. I believe this is what happened in other countries as well." During an interview, he elaborated: "The impression was that the Americans would do anything to stop Italy from sliding to the left. Don't forget that Nixon was in charge and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives."" THE STRATEGY OF TENSION Regarding the motivation behind this terrorism, judge Felice Casson later explained for a BBC documentary: "As far as the secret services are concerned, the Peteano attack [in 1972] is part of what has been called 'the

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strategy of tension.' That's to say, to create tension within the country to promote conservative, reactionary social and political tendencies." According to Peteano bomber Vincenzo Vinciguerra: "You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened."'^ Captain Yves Guillou, a Frenchman and specialist in secret warfare who went by the adopted name of Yves Gurin-Srac, further articulated the mentality behind these "false flag" operations (i.e. covert operations designed by the actual perpetrators to appear as if they were committed by someone else, such as Communists). Srac was among the founders of the Portuguese secret army, called Aginter Press. He declared his views on how to defeat Communism in Western Europe:
In the first phase of our political activity we must create chaos in all structures of the regime. Two forms of terrorism can provoke such a situation: The blind terrorism (committing massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims), and the selective terrorism (eliminate chosen persons). This destruction of the state must be carried out as much as possible under the cover of 'Communist activities.' After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the juridical power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a solution, and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus. ... Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being presented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation.

An Aginter Press document, dated November 1969, laid out a similar ideology: "In our view, thefirstmove we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state under the cover of Communist and pro-Chinese activities. Moreover, we have people who have infiltrated these groups and obviously we will have to tailor our actions to the ethos of the milieupropaganda and action of a sort which will seem to have emanated from our Communist adversaries." Committing false flag operations, the document continued, would "create a feeling of hostility towards those who threaten the peace of each and every nation," meaning the Communists.'^ While not every country's stay-behind network appears to have resorted to violence, the Italian secret army was far from alone in using terrorism and false flag operations. For example, in 1984, members of the Belgian secret army along with a squad of U.S. Marines attacked a police

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station in the town of Vielsalm in south Belgium, shooting dead a warrant officer. Guns used during the attack were later planted in a flat belonging to a Communist splinter group, thus falsely implicating it. According to journalist Ren Haquin: "For months, the explanation the civilian authorities gave us was that the attack was the work of common criminals or of terrorists." Furthermore, between 1983 and 1985 Belgium suffered a series of horrific attacks in the province of Brabant. Sixteen armed assaults occurred, targeting food shops, restaurants, a factory, and supermarkets. Known as the Brabant massacres, the attacks were notable for the professionalism with which they were carried out, and for their sheer brutality. In the final one, on November 9, 1985, three armed men parked their car outside a supermarket in the city of Aalst. Proceeding inside, they fired on shoppers with a pump-action shotgun. Eight people were killed, including children. To this day, the killers have not been identified or arrested.''' After the existence of the stay-behind armies across Western Europe was revealed in 1990, the Belgian parliament asked whether their country's secret network had been involved in the Brabant attacks. But no clarification was possible, due mainly to the lack of cooperation from the Belgian stay-behind network. However, a parliamentary report earlier in 1990 had blamed the massacres on former members of the security forces: "extreme right-wingers who enjoyed high-level protection and were preparing a right-wing coup," according to the London Independent.^^ In 1992, the BBC broadcast a three-part documentary about the staybehind armies. In it. Martial Lekeu, a former gendarme and member of the neo-Nazi group Westland New Post (WNP), confirmed that the Belgian secret army had indeed been involved in the Brabant attacks, in order to "create a climate of terror in the country" and discredit the political left. He said: "They'd have two plans. The first one was to organize gangs to do hold up of hostage, you know, killing; the second one was to organize the so-called 'Left movement' who will do a terrorist attempt just to make believe, make the population believe that these terrorist attempts were done by the left." Another former WNP member, Michel Libert, confirmed that over the period the massacres occurred, his group had been given a topsecret assignment. He was ordered, he recounted: "All we ask is that your group, with cover from the Gendarmerie, with cover from Security, carry out a job. Target: the supermarkets. Where are they? What kind of locks are there? What sort of protection do they have that could interfere with our operations? Does the store manager lock up? Or do they use an outside security company?" "We carried out the orders and sent in our reports," he continued. "But the use it was all put to, that is the big question."'^

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In Turkey, the stay-behind army, Counter-Guerrilla, was particularly violent. It too carried out false flag operations, particularly against the Kurdish minority in the southeast. In a campaign against the Kurdish militant group PKK, Counter-Guerrilla soldiers would dress as PKK fighters and then attack villages, committing rapes and random executions. By doing this they aimed to turn people against the PKK. In Greece, the secret army Hellenic Raiding Force (or LOK, its Greek acronym) was directly involved in the 1967 coup d'tat. During the coup, over 10,000 people were arrested within the space of five hours; eleven articles of the Greek constitution were suspended, and the totalitarian regime that seized power maintained its authority through a brutal reign of torture and imprisonment. As Ganser explains, the involvement of the Greek secret army has meant the coup has been labeled a "Gladio coup."'^ PSYCHOHISTORICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT STAY-BEHIND The stated aim of the stay-behind armies in Western Europe was to resist a possible invasion by the Soviet Union. Though they may have served this purpose, their involvement in domestic terror operations shows their function went well beyond this. In fact, in the case of Turkey, while former CIA Director William Colby claimed that the aim of the Counter-Guerrilla was to prevent the country "from falling into the hands of the Communists," there should have been little need for this, since the Turkish Communist Party was outlawed throughout the Cold War. There is even a question as to how useful the armies would actually have been had the Soviets invaded. According to Hans Otto, a member of the German stay-behind. Technischer Dienst (TD): "The ideas of the Americans was to have all members [of the secret army] overrun by the Soviets, and to use them after that as partisans." But this would not have worked, he said, "because all men interested in the organization wanted to escape to the West under all circumstances in case of a Soviet invasion. "^^ However, if we examine the secret armies from a psychohistorical viewpoint, we can see another possible role they fulfilled. To make this analysis, we first must be aware of the types of individuals that would have existed in the nations where the stay-behinds operated, as a result of the kinds of childrearing in these countries. CHILD ABUSE IN THE WEST According to Lloyd deMause, based upon his decades of research into the history of childhood: "The further back in history one goesand the further away from the West one getsthe more massive the neglect and cruelty

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one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers." Over the centuries though, some innovative parents have been able to improve on how they were treated during their childhoods, and have given their children a less abusive and more loving upbringing than experienced by previous generations. Thus, says deMause: "The evolution of childhood from incest to love and from abuse to empathy has been a slow, uneven path, but one whose progressive direction is, I think, unmistakable." However, "different groups have moved different distances up the ladder of psychological evolution ... and different subgroups of our more advanced nations still terrorize and abuse their children in ways identical to those that were commonplace centuries ago, producing the 'historical fossils' (early 'psychoclasses') we now call borderline personalities and other severe character disorders."'^ The truth of this observationmeaning that a proportion of the populations of the most advanced, democratic nations will have been the victims of particularly cruel and severe abuse during childhoodbecomes obvious when we look at the relevant statistics. For example, a 1964 survey of West German parents found 35 percent of them beat their children with a cane. Another survey in the early 1970s found "up to 60 percent of parents" in West Germany "believe in beating, not slapping or spanking, but beating their children."2 A 1985 survey in Nottingham, England found that 22 percent of seven-year-olds had been hit by their mothers with an implement, usually a strap, belt, cane, or stick.^' A more recent UK survey found that 25 percent of young people aged 18 to 24 reported having experienced at least one form of "violent treatment" during childhood. This included "being hit with implements such as sticks, punched, kicked, knocked down, shaken, deliberately burned or scalded, throttled or threatened with a knife or gun."^^ A survey of UK families conducted in the early 1990s gave a shocking insight into the cruel punishments that many British children still suffered. Around 42 percent of children were found to have experienced "physical restraint," defined as: "wipe face with cold flannel, physically restrained child, cold bath/shower, hand/object over mouth, place head under water, choke, shake, push/shove, throw." The same proportion had suffered "punishment by example," meaning: "pulling hair, scratch, pinch, bite/nip/chew, Chinese burn, burn/scald, put in cold water, use knife/scissors, trap in door, pull nails out." And 12 percent of children had suffered "ingestion," which was defined as: "force to eat food, make eat something nasty (e.g. mustard sandwiches), force to drink salt water, wash mouth out with soap and water, force to drink poisonous or dangerous substances. "^^

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Sexual abuse of children has also been found to be far more common than many people realize. However, estimating its prevalence is problematic, with different studies having given greatly varying results. The recent United Nations Secretary General's Study on Violence Against Children reported that an overview of studies in 21 mostly developed countries found figures ranging from 7 to 36 percent of women and 3 to 29 percent of men reported sexual victimization during childhood, most of which had occurred within the family.2"* As deMause has pointed out, though, among the different estimates, "The lower figures are in response to written questionnaires or brief telephone calls, contacts that were considered intrusive by the respondent, while the higher figures... were the result of carefully structured face-to-face interviews."^^ Therefore, he concluded: "The best studies of incidence of sexual molestation of children are those of American adults conducted by Wyatt and Russell, both based on face-to-face interviews lasting from one to eight hours, so that time is allowed for the trust necessary for accurate recall. Russell found 38 percent and Wyatt 45 percent of women interviewed reported memories of sexual abuse during their childhood. "^^ In fact, the actual prevalence could be even higher than these two studiesfrom the mid-1980sindicated. This is because the women interviewed did "not include many people in the American population who have far higher than average sexual molestation experiences, including institutionalized criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters and psychotics." Furthermore, the studies only included "clear conscious memories of eventsunconscious memories, which are usually only uncovered during psychotherapy, would increase these rates." Taking these and other factors into account, deMause in 1991 estimated child sexual abuse incidence rates of "60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys" in the U.S.^^ One would expect rates of child sexual abuse in Western Europe (where the stay-behinds operated) to be comparable to the rate in the U.S. In fact, two British surveys in the 1980s found "incidence rates the same or higher than the U.S. studies."^** At the very least, we can assume that a significant proportion of Western Europeansliterally miiiions of peoplewill have experienced sexual abuse during childhood. For example, in Italy the same country as the Gladio army reportedly engaged in terrorism the establishment of "SOS-infanzia" hotlines in the 1980s revealed "widespread pedophile networks, baby prostitution and Boy Scout/Girl Guide molestation, as well as the widespread sexual abuse of children within families, with a particular emphasis on the pederasty of boys."^^ Based upon this information, we can see that, while the "evolution of childhood" has meant there are now significant numbers of individuals who have experienced less abusive upbringings, the reality is that a spec-

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trum of people exists, ranging from those who have experienced severely abusive childhoods to others who have had more loving, "helping mode" childhoods. Consequently, even in the most advanced. Western nations, "Your neighbor is as likely to be a result of medieval parenting as of modern parenting."^ It is when we take into account the significant proportion of lower psychoclass individuals (i.e. people who have suffered the lowest levels of childrearing) in the developed and democratic countries of Western Europe that we can understand the psychohistorical function served by the secretive, often violent, stay-behind armies. They represented the influence of the less advanced, lower psychoclasses within the governing of these nations. As Italian parliamentarian Enrico Falqui complained during a European Union discussion on the secret armies: "There will be no future ... if we do not remove the idea of having lived in a kind of double stateone open and democratic, the other clandestine and reactionary. "^^ To further understand this psychohistorical role of the stay-behinds, we need to examine two things: firstly the personalities of the secret soldiers, and secondly the kind of upbringing that has been shown to produce such individuals. THE SECRET SOLDIERS Evidence presented in NATO's Secret Armies indicates what kinds of people comprised the stay-behinds: many were right-wing extremists and some were notoriously violent. In Germany, the stay-behind network included former members of the Nazi SS. Licio Gelli, head of the neo-fascist P2 Masonic lodge and a key Gladio player, described the members of the Italian secret army: "Many came from the ranks of mercenaries who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and many came from the fascist republic of Salo. They chose individuals who were proven anti-Communists." Two of the founders of Portugal's Aginter Press were right-wing terrorists: Stefano Delle Chiaie and Yves Gurin-Srac. Srac was a former officer of the illegal French militant group Organisation de l'arme secrte (OAS), and Delle Chiaie, according to Ganser, was "maybe the most brutal right-wing terrorist directly linked to the secret war." Delle Chiaie has explained what motivated him: "We were considered to be criminals, but in reality we were but the victims of an anti-fascist liberal movement. Thus we wanted to make our ideas public, we wanted to be heard all over the world." Furthermore, "We acted against the Communists and against the bourgeois state, against the democracy, which deprived us from our liberty. And thus we had to use violence. "^^ The U.S. department involved in setting up the stay-behind armies after the Second World War was the CIA's covert action branch, called the Office

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of Policy Coordination (OPC), which was headed by former Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. Wisner and his OPC colleagues have been described as "white [male] Anglo-Saxon patricians from old families with old money," who "somewhat inherited traditional British attitudes toward the colored races of the world." Wisner, the "chief architect" of the secret armies, later suffered deteriorating mental health and in 1965 shot himself.^^ It has been pointed out that these kinds of individuals, with extreme political views, tend to be the products of appalling childhoods. For example, early research into the "authoritarian personality"the type of person that would be inclined towards fascismfound that highly authoritarian individuals came, "for the most part, from homes in which a rather stern and distant father dominated a submissive and long-suffering but morally restrictive mother." As children, these authoritarians experienced discipline characterized by "relatively harsh application of rules, in accordance with conventional values; and this discipline was commonly experienced as threatening or traumatic or even overwhelming. "^^ Psychotherapist Alice Miller has written: "Descriptions of the childhoods of Nazi criminals, and of Vietnam volunteers, the Green Berets, show that mindless programming to destructiveness always begins with a brutal upbringing aimed at enforcing unthinking obedience and total contempt for the child." For example, she quotes from the autobiography of Rudolf Hess, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, where he described his childhood: "Above all, I was constantly reminded that I was to comply with, and follow, the wishes or commands of parents, teachers, priests, etc., indeed all grown-ups including the servants, and that I was to allow nothing to distract me from that duty. Whatever they said, went."^^ Miller analyzed in detail the childhood of the most notorious of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler. She concluded that the family structure in which he was raised "could well be characterized as the prototype of a totalitarian regime." According to one pre-war biography. Hitler's father not only "tyrannized" him, he also treated the young Adolf like a dog: "If he wanted the boy to come to him, the former noncommissioned officer would whistle on two fingers." Hitler's younger sister Paula has said: "It was my brother Adolf who especially provoked my father to extreme harshness." This "harshness" included "beatings every day." Hitler later recounted to one of his secretaries how, as a boy, he'd read that it was a sign of courage to show no pain. So, he recalled: "I resolved not to make a sound the next time my father whipped me." This he'd achieved by silently counting the blows. Said Hitler: "My mother thought I had gone crazy when I beamed proudly and said, 'Father hit me thirty-two times!'"^*

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DeMause has found that brutal childhood experiences such as these were in fact the norm, rather than the exception, in Germany and Austria around the time when Hitler and his future supporters were growing up. Childhood was a misery from the day the baby was born. The overall rate of infanticide at the end of the 19th century was over 20 percent in Germany, which was significantly higher than in England and France. Infant mortality rates ranged from 21 percent in Prussia up to 58 percent in Bavaria. Two hundred years after the practice had been abandoned in England and America, German mothers were still swaddling their infants, tying them up tightly in yards of bandages for the first six to 12 months of their lives. Furthermore, an estimated 89 percent of German children at the start of the 20th century suffered severe beatings, often with canes, whips, or sticks. The childhood suicide rate was three to five times higher than in other Western European countries; the most common reason given by German children for their suicide attempts was fear of being beaten by their parents. DeMause has concluded: "The punitive atmosphere of the German home was so total that one can convincingly say that totalitarianism in the family led directly to totalitarianism in politics."^^ Alice Miller concurs: "The fact that Hitler had so many enthusiastic followers proves that they had a personality structure similar to his, i.e., that they had had a similar upbringing."^" A NETWORK OF SYMPATHIZERS The Nazis were therefore supported and enabled in their brutal actions by millions of Germans who were products of brutal childhoods. Similarly, we can conclude that the continuing prevalence of severe child abuse in Western Europe during the Cold War period would have meant there were sufficient numbers of like-minded individuals around to enable the staybehind armies to engage in their anti-democratic and terrorist actions. For example, Ganser points out that in Italy, while the terrorists of the Communist Red Brigades "ended up in jail, the terrorists of the right mysteriously escaped after each massacre." This was because "the security apparatus of the Italian state and the military secret services protected them." After right-wing extremist Vincenzo Vinciguerra was eventually arrested for the 1972 Peteano bombing, he recounted how, after he'd committed the attack, "A whole mechanism came into action ... That is, the Carabinieri, the Minister of the Interior, the customs services and the military and civilian intelligence services accepted the ideological reasoning behind the attack."^^ He added: "[A]ll knew the truth behind the attack, that I was responsible, and all this within 20 days. So they decided, for totally political reasons, to cover it up."''

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A similar network of sympathizers, that could enable terrorists to get away with their crimes, appears to have existed in Belgium. According to a 1997 parliamentary report, the initial investigations following the Brabant massacres during the early 1980s had been characterized by "a litany of official incompetence." The report accused Belgian police of having conducted "a dislocated and inefficient inquiry during which documents had been lost or destroyed, leads not pursued and information not passed on to the neighboring forces." In Turkey, the secret CounterGuerrilla army had drawn many of its members from the Grey Wolves, a fascist group. According to Ganser, this group enjoyed "broad public support." At the beginning of the 1980s, it had "about 200,000 registered members and a million sympathizers."''^ Clearly, though, the anti-democratic stay-behinds generally lacked the level of support that the Nazi regime had in Germany. If they'd had that much support, all of the countries involved in the stay-behind operations would simply have been fascist dictatorships, which was not the case. Instead, great efforts had to be taken to deceive publics and maintain an appearance of untainted democracy. That this was necessary would have been thanks to there being adequate numbers of individuals who were inclined towards democraticrather than authoritarianpolitics. We can credit this fact to achievements in parenting. Indeed, the research into the authoritarian personality cited earlier found that individuals rated as low in authoritarianism (i.e. the kinds of individuals necessary for democracy to function) tended to have experienced less harsh discipline as children, "and [their] parents more often made an effort to explain the issues to the child, thus enabling him to assimilate the discipline." In contrast to highly authoritarian individuals, the 'low authoritarians' would more often describe their fathers as relaxed and mild, and their mothers as warm, sociable and understanding."*^ Therefore, just as the continuation of severe child abuse accounts for the continuing secretive and undemocratic elements within advanced nations, the opposite also holds true: Improvements in parenting over the last few hundred years helped bring about the establishment of modern democratic politics. According to deMause, gradual advances in parenting are "an independent source of historical change," meaning that "new variations in historical personality are formed, and history begins to move in new, innovative directions."'*'' As he points out, "Since England led the rest of Europe in ending swaddling and wet nursing [beginning in the 16th century], it is no accident that soon after it also led the world in science, political democracy, and industrialization." The political world we experience

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today in the most advanced nations is the product of an improved level of chiidrearing called the "socializing mode." Parents raising their children this way use smacking and psychological manipulation, rather than outright battering. Socialized children are allowed "far more freedom and respect than any previous mode." When the socializing mode first emerged in the 18th century, "Mothers began to actually enjoy child care ... and even fathers began to play with and teach their young children." This improvement in parenting contributed to the emergence of modern democratic politics, since "the end of childhood battering allows the socializing psychoclass to reduce its need to cling to an authoritarian leader. "'' The terrorism of the stay-behinds, though, would have been a product of the lower psychoclasses: a subgroup of the population totaling many millions of people in the larger Western European countries. It is as if, in these countries that had advanced and achieved democracy, an element of the population and the government lagged, remaining undemocratic and fascistic, in just the same way as a proportion of parents lagged, continuing to use outdated and particularly harsh chiidrearing methods. For example, as mentioned previously, the German stay-behind network included former Nazis. Calvo Sotelo, the Spanish prime minister between 1981 and 1982, succinctly described the anti-democratic function of the stay-behinds. When asked about the existence of a Gladio-like secret army in Spain, he remarked that during Francisco Franco's fascist dictatorship (which lasted until 1975), "the very government was Gladio." Daniele Ganser himself observes how the stay-behinds represented the continuation of a non-democratic, lower psychoclass element within advanced nations: "Totalitarian states have long been known to have operated a great variety of largely uncontrolled and unaccountable secret services and secret armies. Yet to discover such serious dysfunctions also in numerous democracies comes as a great surprise, to say the least."''^ CONCLUSIONS Ganser concludes his book asking whether the stay-behind armies set up across Western Europe during the Cold War were a "prudent precaution" or a "source of terror." His answer: "Both." Based on the experiences of the Second World War, when many countries suffered the trauma of occupation by German and Italian forces, "military experts feared the Soviet Union and became convinced that a stay-behind army could be of strategic value when it came to the liberation of the occupied territory." Whereas we can now see the level of fear was excessive, "such a certainty was not available at the time." However, the fact that the secret armies en-

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gaged in terrorism has attracted much criticism. As Ganser points out, this feature of the armies "in the future will need more investigation and research."^* Considering that terrorism and its causes are currently such major public concerns, this feature also deserves to be the subject of future psychohistorical research and analysis. The story told by NATO's Secret Armies is of great importance to all of us, since the stay-behinds engaged in terrorism, deliberately targeted civilians, and set out to manipulate public opinion. Yet, so far, there has been remarkably little interest in this topic. Only three countriesItaly, Belgium, and Switzerlandhave had parliamentary investigations into their secret armies and produced public reports. Even in Germanywhere the stay-behind army was confirmed to have included right-wing terrorists, and was suspected of links to right-wing terrorist attacksthere has been no similar investigation.'*'' In 1992, Observer journalist Hugh O'Shaughnessy complained: "As Gladio winds down and governments on the continent declare they have shut down their parts of the operation, the silence in Whitehall and the almost total lack of curiosity among MPs about an affair in which Britain was so centrally involved are remarkable.""*" That same year, the BBC broadcast an excellent and revelatory three-part documentary about the stay-behind armies, directed by awardwinning filmmaker Allan Francovich.'*^ Yet after the last installment aired, the London Times lamented: "It was one of those programs which you imagine will bring down governments, but such is the instant amnesia generated by television you find that in the newspapers the next morning it rates barely a mention. "''"'' Even now, 15 years on, the apathy towards this subject appears to be as strong as ever, as not a single British or American newspaper has reviewed Daniele Ganser's shocking and groundbreaking book. In his foreword to NATO's Secret Armies, John Prados sums up the most disturbing implication of this book: "In this age of global concern with terrorism it is especially upsetting to discover that Western Europe and the United States collaborated in creating networks that took up terrorism. In the United States such nations are called 'state sponsors' and are the object of hostility and sanction. Can it be the United States itself, Britain, France, Italy, and others who should be on the list of state sponsors?"^'
Matt Everett is a contributing editor to the Journal of Psychohistory and also writes for the Center for Cooperative Research website.

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1. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. London: Frank Cass, 2005, pp. 1-2. 2. Ibid. p. 2. 3. Ibid. p. xii. 4. Ibid. pp. XV, 1, 25-29 and 165. 5. Ibid. pp. 42, 172, 186 and 233. 6. Ibid. pp. xi-xii, 1-2, 12 and 217. 7. Ibid. pp. 2, 5 and 119-120. 8. Ibid. pp. 3-5. 9. Ibid. pp. 3-4 and 7-8. 10. Philip Willan, "U.S. 'Supported Anti-Left Terror in Italy'." The Guardian, June 24, 2000; Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, p. 82. 11. Philip Willan, "Terrorists 'Helped by CIA' to Stop Rise of Left in Italy." The Guardian, March 26, 2001; Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, p. 6. 12. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Anjxies, p. 7. 13. Ibid. pp. 115 and 118. 14. Hugh O'Shaughnessy, "Gladio: Europe's Best Kept Secret." The Observer, June 7, 1992. Online at: http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/gladio_obs_7 junl992.html; Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, pp. 136-139. 15. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, pp. 140 and 143. 16. Ibid. pp. 144 and 146. 17. Ibid. pp. 220-222 and 240-241. 18. Ibid. pp. 195 and 241. 19. Lloyd deMause, "The History of Child Abuse." oumal of Psychohistory 25 (3) 1998: 216-236. Online at: http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html. 20. Quoted in Peter Newell, Children Are People Too: The Case Against Physical Punishment. London: Bedford Square Press, 1989, p. 64. 21. John and Elizabeth Newson, The Extent of Parental Physical Punishment in the UK. London: Approach, 1989, pp. 10-11. 22. Pat Cawson et al.. Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom: A Study of the Prevalence of Child Abuse and Neglect, Exeaitive Summary. London: NSPCC, 2000, p. 8. Online at: http://www.nspcc.org.uk/lnform/Publications/Downloads/ChildMaltreatmentInThe UKExecSummary_pdf_gf25453.pdf. 23. Marjorie Smith, A Community Study of Physical Violence to Children in the Home and Associated Variables. Ixsndon: Thomas Coram Research Unit, 1995. 24. David Finkelhor, "The International Epidemiology of Child Sexual Abuse." Child Abuse and Neglect 18 (5) 1994: 409-417. Quoted in UN Secretary General, Report of the Independent Expert for the United Nations Study on Violence Against Children, A/61/299. August 29, 2006, pp. 13-14. Online at: http://www.violencestudy.org/IMG/pdf/ English.pdf. 25. Lloyd deMause, "The Universality of Incest." oumal of Psychohistory 19 (2) 1991:134. 26. Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac, 2002, p. 359. 27. Lloyd deMause, "The Universality of Incest," pp. 135-136. 28. Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 359. 29. Lloyd deMause, "The Universality of Incest," pp. 141-142.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

Lloyd deMause, "The History of Child Abuse." Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, pp. 20-21. Ibid. pp. 16, 75, 108 and 117. Ibid. pp. 42, 55 and 60. Nevitt Sanford, "The Approach of 'the Authoritarian Personality."' In Fred Greenstein and Michael Lerner (Editors), A Source Book for the Study of Personality and Politics. Chicago: Markham, 1971, pp. 337-338; See also Michael Milburn and Sheree Gonrad, "The Politics of Denial." foumal of Psychohistory 23 (3) 1996: 238-251. Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: To foin the Waiting Child. London: Virago, 1991, p. 83. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. London: Faber and Faber, 1983, pp. 146 and 152-159. Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 188-197. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, p. 170. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, pp. 4-5. Allan Francovich, "Gladio: The Puppeteers." Timewatch, BBC 2, Second episode of a three-part documentary, June 17, 1992. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Annies, pp. 142, 229 and 240. Nevitt Sanford, "The Approach of 'the Authoritarian Personality,'" pp. 337-338. Lloyd deMause, "The History of Child Abuse." Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 245 and 248-250. The "socializing mode" is not the most advanced level of parenting, though. This is the "helping mode," which only began around the mid-20th century. Ghildren raised this way will not be subjected to any physical punishments whatsoever, nor to psychological manipulation, in the way that socialized children are. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, pp. 105, 190 and 247. Ibid. pp. 245-246. ibid. pp. 24 and 211. Hugh O'Shaughnessy, "Gladio: Europe's Best Kept Secret." This superb documentary is available to download or watch over the Internet at http://www.thedossier.ukonline.co.uk/video_CIA.htm or http://video.google.com/ videosearch?q=gladio. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Annies, pp. 49-50. Ibid. p. xiii.