After World War II, the UK and the US decided to create "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines.

[12] Following Giulio Andreotti's October 1990 revelations, General Sir John Hackett, former commander-in-chief of the British Army on the Rhine, declared on November 16, 1990, that a contingency plan involving "stay behind and resistance in depth" was drawn up after the war.

Western secret services had cooperated in various bilateral, triparty, and multilateral fora in the creation, training, and running of clandestine Stay-behind organisations (SBO) soon after World War II.

The peacetime role of the CPC would have been to coordinate the different military and paramilitary plans and programmes in NATO nations (and partners like Switzerland and Austria) in order to avoid duplication of effort.

According to a November 13, 1990, Reuters cable,[18] "André Moyen – a former member of the Belgian military security service and of the [stay-behind] network – said Gladio was not just anti-Communist but was for fighting subversion in general.

According to media analyst Edward S. Herman, "both the President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, had been involved in the Gladio organization and coverup ..."[21][22][23][verification needed] Researcher Francesco Cacciatore, in an article based on recently de-classified documents, writes that a "note from March 1972 specified that the possibility of using 'Gladio' in the event of internal subversions, not provided for by the organization's statute and not supported by NATO directives or plans, was outside the scope of the original stay-behind and, therefore, 'never to be considered among the purposes of the operation'.

Andreotti declared that the Italian military services (predecessors of the SISMI) had joined in 1964 the Allied Clandestine Committee created in 1957 by the US, France, Belgium and Greece, and which was in charge of directing Gladio's operations.

[32] Judge Gerardo D'Ambrosio found out that in a conference that had the patronage of the Chief Staff of Defense, there were instructions to infiltrate left-wing groups and provoke social tension by carrying out attacks and then blame them on the left.

[33] In 2000, a parliamentary commission report from the left-wing coalition Gruppo Democratici di Sinistra l'Ulivo asserted that a strategy of tension had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI, and to a certain degree also the PSI, from reaching executive power in the country".

It also reported that Pino Rauti, former leader of the MSI Fiamma-Tricolore party, journalist and founder of the Ordine Nuovo (new order) subversive organisation, received regular funding from a press officer at the US embassy in Rome.

[34] General Gerardo Serravalle, who commanded the Italian Gladio from 1971 to 1974, related that "in the 1970s the members of the CPC [Coordination and Planning Committee] were the officers responsible for the secret structures of Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Italy.

Norway and Denmark were NATO allies, Sweden held to the neutrality that had taken her through two world wars, and Finland were required to defer in its foreign policy to the Soviet power directly on its borders.

These nets had to be co-ordinated with NATO's plans, their radios had to be hooked to a future exile location, and the specialised equipment had to be secured from CIA and secretly cached in snowy hideouts for later use.

A section of the 11th Choc regiment split over the 1962 Évian peace accords, and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), but it is unclear if this also involved members of the French stay-behind network.

"[44] Documents shown to the Italian parliamentary terrorism committee revealed that in the 1970s British and French officials involved in the network visited a training base in Germany built with US money.

When Greece joined NATO in 1952, the country's special forces, LOK (Lochoi Oreinōn Katadromōn, i.e., "mountain raiding companies"), were integrated into the European stay-behind network.

According to his own testimony, Ganser alleges, he discovered the existence of the secret NATO army, then codenamed "Red Sheepskin", as acting prime minister in 1984 and had given orders to dissolve it.

[49] In the latter incident, people walking in a forest near the village of Rozendaal, near Arnhem, chanced upon a large hidden cache of arms, containing dozens of hand grenades, semiautomatic rifles, automatic pistols, munitions and explosives.

[55] In 1978, the police discovered an arms cache and radio equipment at a mountain cabin and arrested Hans Otto Meyer (no), a businessman accused of being involved in selling illegal alcohol.

Historians and outside investigators have speculated that Counter-Guerrilla and several subordinate Intelligence, Special Forces, and Gendarmerie units were possibly involved in numerous acts of state-sponsored terrorism and engineering the military coups of 1971 and 1980.

Additionally, the CIA employed people from the far-right, such as Pan-Turkist SS-member Ruzi Nazar (father of Sylvia Nasar),[60] to train the Grey Wolves (Turkish: Bozkurtlar),[61] the youth wing of the MHP.

Nazar was an Uzbek born near Tashkent who had deserted the Red Army to join the Nazis during World War II in order to fight on the Eastern Front for the creation of a Turkistan.

It had been set up by the far-right Theodor Soucek and Hugo Rössner, who both insisted during their trial that "they were carrying out the secret operation with the full knowledge and support of the US and British occupying powers."

"[65] Interior Minister Franz Olah set up a new secret army codenamed Österreichischer Wander-, Sport- und Geselligkeitsverein (OeWSGV, literally "Austrian Association of Hiking, Sports and Society"), with the cooperation of MI6 and the CIA.

This operation was organized by Finnish general staff officers (without foreign help) in 1944 to hide weapons in order to sustain large-scale guerrilla warfare in the event the Soviet Union tried to occupy Finland following the end of combat on the Finnish-Soviet front of WWII.

"[12] However, in his memoirs, former CIA director William Colby described the setting-up of stay-behind armies in the Nordic countries, including Finland, with or without the assistance of local governments, to prepare for a Soviet invasion.

[69] According to a report by the Italian CESIS (executive committee for Intelligence and Security Services), Carlo Cicuttini (who took part in the 1972 Peteano bombing in Italy alongside Vincenzo Vinciguerra), participated in the 1977 Massacre of Atocha in Madrid, killing five people (including several lawyers), members of the Workers' Commissions trade-unions closely linked with the Spanish Communist Party.

[84] In a 2005 conference presenting Daniele Ganser's research on Gladio, Hans Senn, General Chief of Staff of the Swiss Armed Forces between 1977 and 1980, explained how he was informed of the existence of a secret organisation in the middle of his term of office.

[87][88] Hayden Peake's book review Intelligence in Recent Public Literature maintains that, "Ganser fails to document his thesis that the CIA, MI6, and NATO and its friends turned GLADIO into a terrorist organization.

"[89] Philip HJ Davies of the Brunel University Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies likewise concludes that the book is "marred by imagined conspiracies, exaggerated notions of the scale and impact of covert activities, misunderstandings of the management and coordination of operations within and between national governments, and... an almost complete failure to place the actions and decisions in question in the appropriate historical context."