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Book synopsis

In October 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti stood before parliament and confirmed what decades of rumor had never proven: that NATO, with CIA authorization, had maintained a secret paramilitary army inside Italy since 1956 - armed, trained, and hidden from every democratic institution in the country.

He called it Gladio. The sword.

What followed was the largest parliamentary intelligence scandal in Western European history.

In this book you will discover:

• The classified 1952 CIA memorandum authorizing stay-behind networks across every NATO country - and what those networks were actually used for
• The Strategy of Tension: how Gladio-connected operatives and neofascist cells coordinated bombings, including Piazza Fontana in 1969 and the Bologna railway station in 1980, to blame the left and justify authoritarian measures
• The P2 Masonic Lodge - its membership list of 962 names drawn from the military, intelligence services, judiciary, and press - and the CIA cable confirming the Gladio-P2 nexus had been known in Langley for years
• The kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and the evidence that elements of the secret state may have ensured the Red Brigades succeeded

This book also includes:

• The full story of the arms caches buried across Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Turkey - some not found until the 1990s, still loaded and operational
• The parallel networks in Germany, Greece, Spain, and Turkey, and how each was exposed - or wasn't
• Why the Italian Senate's own commission concluded the network operated "without any form of parliamentary or judicial control, in violation of the Italian Constitution" - and why no one went to prison
• What the documents still denied in full tell us about what remains classified today

Built entirely from declassified primary sources - NATO Clandestine Planning Committee records, CIA FOIA releases, the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism transcripts, Belgian Senate committee reports, and the SISMI-CIA bilateral agreements. No invented scenes. No speculation. Only the record.

The stay-behind armies were built to resist a Soviet invasion that never came. What they did instead is documented here.

Book details

• Full title: Operation Gladio
• Subtitle: The CIA's Secret Armies and the Hidden War in Europe: A Documentary History of NATO's Stay-Behind Networks
• Author: Frederic Spinola
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 298
• EAN: 9798195037611
• ID: 52257191
• Publisher: Independently published
• Weight: 403 g
• Dimensions: 229 × 152 × 16 mm
• Date of publishing: 30. April 2026

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