The originator of the American program, the head of the CIAs International Organizations Division, Tom Braden, later wrote that the Agency placed one operative in the CCF and that another became an editor of the CCFs most important magazine, Encounter* Presumably there was at least one CIA agent or officer in each of the funded groups. Braden stated that The agents could ... propose anti-Communist programs to the official leaders of the organizations. He added, however, that it was a policy to protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy. 9

The Cultural Freedom journals appealed to the non-Marxist left (Forum, by contrast, was cobservative), generally eschewing the class struggle and excessive nationalization of industry. They subscribed to Daniel Bells the end of ideology thesis, the raison detre of which was that since no one could call for dying for capitalism with a straight face, the idea of dying for socialism or any other ideology had to be discredited. At the same time, the journals advocated a reformed capitalism, a capitalism with a human face.

To the cold warriors in Washington who were paying the bills, however, the idea of reforming capitalism was of minimal interest. What was of consequence was the commitment of the magazines to a strong, well-armed, and united Western Europe, allied to the United States, which would stand as a bulwark against the Soviet bloc; support for the Common Market and NATO; critical analysis of what was seen as the intellectual compo-nent of international communist subversion; skepticism of the disarmament, pacifism, and neutralism espoused by the likes of the prominent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in Great Britain. Criticism of US foreign policy took place within the framework of cold-war assumptions; for example, that a particular American intervention as not the most effective way of combatting communism, not that there was anything wrong with intervention per se or that the United States was supporting the wrong side.

Private publications such as these could champion views which official US government organs like the Voice of America could not, and still be credible. The same was true of the many other private organizations on the CIA payroll at this time. In 1960, CND and other elements of the Labour Partys left wing succeeded in winning over the partys conference to a policy of complete, unilateral nuclear disarmament and neutrality in the cold war. In addition, two resolutions supporting NATO were voted down. Although the Labour Party was not in power at the time, the actions carried considerable propaganda and psychological value. Washington viewed the turn of events with not a little anxiety, for such sentiments could easily spread to the major parties of other NATO countries.

The right wing of the Labour Party, which had close, not to say intimate, connections to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Encounter, New Leader, and other CIA assets and fronts, undertook a campaign to reverse the disarmament resolution. The committee set up for the purpose issued an appeal for funds, and soon could report that many small donations had been received, together with a large sum from a source that wished to remain anonymous. Over the next year, there was sufficient funding for a permanent office, a full-time, paid chairman and paid staff, field workers, traveling expenses, tons of literature sent to a large mailing list within the movement, a regular bulletin sent free, etc.

Their opponents could not come close to matching this propaganda blitz. At the 1961 conference, the unilateralist and neutralist decisions were decisively overturned and the Labour Party returned to the NATO fold.10

Supporters of the CIA have invariably defended the Agencys sundry activities in Western Europe on the grounds that the Russians were the first to be so engaged there and had to be countered. Whatever truth there may be in this assertion, the fact remains, as Tom Braden has noted, that the American effort spread to some fields where they [the Russians] had not even begun to operate .11 Braden doesnt specify which fields, but it seems that political parries was one: The CIA had working/financial relationships with leading members of the West German Social Democratic Party, two parties in Austria, the Christian

Democrats of Italy, and the Liberal Party, in addition to the Labour Party, in Britain,12 and probably at least one party in every other Western European country, all of which purported to be independent of either superpower, something the various Communist parties, whether supported by the Soviet Union or not, could never get away with.

The media provides another case in point. Neither Braden, nor anyone else apparently, has cited examples of publications or news agencies in Western Europe-pro-Communist or anti-NATO, etc.-which, ostensibly independent in the cold war, were covertly funded by the Soviet Union. More importantly, it should be borne in mind that all the different types of enterprises and institutions supported by the CIA in Western Europe were supported by the Agency all over the Third World for decades on a routine basis without a Russian counterpart in sight. The growing strength of the left in postwar Europe was motivation enough for the CIA to develop its covert programs, and this was a circumstance deriving from World War II and the economic facts of life, not from Soviet propaganda and manipulation.

Operation Gladio

The rationale behind it was your standard cold-war paranoia: Theres a good chance the Russians will launch an unprovoked invasion of Western Europe. And if they defeated the Western armies and forced them to flee, certain people had to remain behind to harass the Russians with guerrilla warfare and sabotage, and act as liaisons with those abroad. The stay-behinds would be provided with funds, weapons, communication equipment and training exercises. The planning for this covert paramilitary network, code-named Operation Gladio (Italian for sword !, began in 1949, involving initially the British, the Americans and the Belgians. It eventually established units in every non-communist country in Europe-including Greece and Turkey and neutral Sweden and Switzerland-with the apparent exceptions of Ireland and Finland. The question of whether the units were more under the control of national governments or NATO remains purposely unclear, although from an operational point of view, it appears that the CIA and various other intelligence services were calling the shots.

As matters turned out, in the complete absence of any Russian invasions, the operation was used almost exclusively to inflict political damage upon domestic leftist movements.

The Gladio story broke in Italy in the fall of 1990, stemming from a judicial investigation into a 1972 car-bombing which discovered that the explosives had come from one of the 139 secret weapons depots kept for Gladios forces in Italy. Subsequently, the head of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the matter revealed that When Gladio was started, the Americans would often insist... that the organization also had to be used to counter any insurgencies. Retired Greek Gen. Nikos Kouris told a similar story, declaring that a Greek force was formed with CIA help in 1955 to intervene in case of Communist threat, whether external or internal. There were ex-military men, specially trained soldiers and also civilians. What held them together was one ideological common denominator: extreme rightism.

As in Germany (see Germany chapter), the Italian operation was closely tied to terrorists. A former Gladio agent, Roberto Cavallero, went public to charge that there was a direct link between Gladio and Italys wave of terrorist bombings in the 1970s and early 1980s which left at least 300 dead. He said that Gladio had trained him and many others to prepare groups which, in the event of an advance by left wing forces in our country, would fill the streets, creating a situation of such tension as to require military intervention. Cavallero was of course referring to electoral advances of the Italian Communist Party, not an invasion by the Soviet Union.

The single worst terrorist action was the bombing at the Bologna railway station in August 1980 which claimed 86 lives. The Observer of London later reported:

The Italian railway bombings were blamed on the extreme Left as part of a strategy to convince voters that the country was in a state of tension and that they had no alternative to voting the safe Christian Democrat ticket. All clues point to the fact that they were masterminded from within Gladio.

One of the men sought for questioning in Italy about the Bologna bombing, Roberto Fiore, has lived in London ever since and the British government has refused to extradite him. He is apparently under the protective wing of MI6 (Britains CIA) for whom he has provided valuable intelligence.

The kidnapping and murder in 1978 of Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democrats, which was attributed to the Red Brigades, appears now to have also been the work of Gladio agents provocateurs who infiltrated the organization. Just prior to his abduction, Moro had announced his intention to enter into a governmental coalition with the Communist Party.

In Belgium, in 1983, to convince the public that a security crisis existed, Gladio operatives as well as police officers staged a series of seemingly random shootings in supermarkets which, whether intended or not, led to several deaths. A year later, a party of US Marines parachuted into Belgium with the intention of attacking a police station. One Belgian citizen was killed and one of the Marines lost an eye in the operation, that was intended to jolt the local Belgian police into a higher state of alert, and to give the impression to the comfortable population at large that the country was on the brink of Red revo-lution. Guns used in the operation were later planted in a Brussels house used by a Communist splinter group.

As late as 1990, large stockpiles of weapons and explosives for Operation Gladio could still be found in some member countries, and Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti disclosed that more than 600 people still remained on the Gladio payroll in Italy.13

16. British Guiana 1953-1964

The CIAs international labor mafia

For a period of 11 years, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths to prevent a democratically elected leader from occupying his office.

The man was Dr. Cheddi Jagan. The grandson of indentured immigrants from India, Jagan had become a dentist in the United States, then returned to his native Guiana. In 1953, at the age of 35, he and the Peoples Progressive Parry (PPP) were elected by a large majority to head the government of the British colony. Jagans victory was due in part to the fact that Indians comprised about 46 percent of the population; those of African origin made up about 36 percent.

The PPPs program in office was hardly revolutionary. It encouraged foreign investment in the mining sectors while attempting to institute liberal reforms such as strengthening the rights of unionists and tenant farmers, creating a public school system that would lessen church control of education, and removing a ban on the import of undesirable publications, films and records. But the British Conservative government was not disposed to live with such policies advocated by a man who talked suspiciously like a socialist. The government and the British media, as well as the American media, subjected the Jagan administration to a campaign of red-scare accusations and plain lies