the
cutting edge
Monday, May 14, 2007The
Strategy of Tension , State Terrorism
"We are at War
against International Terrorism,
defending our Values
and our Civilization."
Western anti-terror legislation does not allow the state
to be considered in any way culpable for terrorist
activities. As far as our elected representatives are
concerned, terrorism is a problem of loosely associated
groups of reactionary fanatics attacking our
freedoms. The assumption, never explicitly stated
for then it would be revealed, and easily and permanently
ridiculed, is that the state is innocent, immune to
indulging in such barbaric practices. Written into the
rule of law itself, this assumption posits the state as a
paternal Fuhrer, a God figure whom we must all entrust
our lives and liberties to.
Yet whichever way you look at it, international terrorism
has its origins in the state itself. There are many ways
of understanding this, but perhaps the most pertinent for
our purposes is contemporary history. We dont need
to go very far back either. Only twenty odd years, to the
era of the Cold War, when we were also getting
Trigger-Happy trying to defend the Free World
from the Evil Empire of International
Communism, as Ronald Reagan put it so aptly.
The strategy of tension denotes a highly
secretive series of interconnected covert operations
conducted jointly by the CIA and MI6 largely in Western
Europe during the this period. Well-documented by several
respected historians, confirmed by official inquiries,
and corroborated by former intelligence officials, the
strategy of tension is one of those unsavoury
moments in contemporary history that we dont learn
about in school, or even university.
My favourite book on the subject, and the most
authoritative in my view, is Dr. Daniele Gansers
NATOs
Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and
Terrorism in Western Europe (2004). Published in the
UK as part of the Contemporary Security
Studies series of London-based academic press
Routledge, Gansers study is the first major
historical work to bring the strategy of
tension into the mainstream of scholarship.
During the Cold War, indeed through to the late 1980s,
the United States, United Kingdom, and Western European
governments and secret services, participated in a
sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer terrorist
attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on the Soviet
Union. The objective was to galvanize public opinion
against leftwing policies and parties, and ultimately to
mobilize popular support for purportedly anti-Soviet
policies at home and abroad most of which were
really designed to legitimize brutal
military interventions against nationalist
independence movements in the Third World.
Ganser was a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security
Studies in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,
Zurich, before he moved to Basel University to teach
history. Citing the transcripts of European parliamentary
inquiries; the few secret documents that have been
declassified; interviews with government, military and
intelligence officials; and so on, Ganser shows how
intimately the British were involved.
In fact, it wasnt even an American idea it
was very much ours. The strategy of tension began on the
order of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in
July 1940 called for the establishment of a secret army
to set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance
movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy
held territory. (p. 40) By 4th October 1945, the
British Chiefs of Staff and the Special Operations branch
of MI6 directed the creation of what Ganser describes as
a skeleton network capable of expansion
either in war or to service clandestine operations
abroad: Priority was given in carrying out these
tasks to countries likely to be overrun in the earliest
stages of any conflict with the Soviet Union, but not as
yet under Soviet domination. (p. 41) In the ensuing
years, Col. Gubbins Special Operations branch of
MI6 cooperated closely with Frank Wisners CIA
covert action department Office of Policy Coordination
(OPC) on White House orders, and in turn coordinated US
and UK Special Forces, to establish stay-behind secret
armies across western Europe. (p. 42)
Among the documents Ganser brings to attention is the
classified Field Manual 30-31, with appendices FM 30-31A
and FM 30-31B, authored by the Pentagons Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) to train thousands of
stay-behind officers around the world. The field manual
was published in the 1987 parliamentary report of the
Italian parliamentary investigation into the terrorist
activities of P2, the CIA-MI6 sponsored
Italian anti-communist network. As Ganser observes:
FM 30-31 instructs the secret soldiers to carry out
acts of violence in times of peace and then blame them on
the Communist enemy in order to create a situation of
fear and alertness. Alternatively, the secret soldiers
are instructed to infiltrate the left-wing movements and
then urge them to use violence. In the
manuals own words:
There may be times when Host Country
Governments show passivity or indecision
in the face of Communist subversion and according
to the interpretation of the US secret services do not
react with sufficient effectiveness
US army intelligence must have the means of launching
special operations which will convince
Host Country Governments and public opinion of the
reality of the insurgent danger. To
reach this aim US army intelligence
should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of
agents on special assignment, with the task of forming
special action groups among the most radical elements of
the insurgency
In case it has not
been possible to successfully infiltrate such agents into
the leadership of the rebels it can be useful to instrumentalise
extreme leftist organizations for ones own ends in
order to achieve the above described targets
These special operations must remain strictly secret.
Only those persons which are acting against the
revolutionary uprising shall know of the involvement of
the US Army
(p. 234-297)
The existence of this secret operation exploded into
public controversy when in August 1990 upon the
admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister Giulio
Andreotti, the existence of Gladio was
exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian
military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic
bombings blamed on Italian Communists. Ganser documents
in intricate detail how a subversive network created by
elements of western intelligence services
particularly that of the US and UK - orchestrated
devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the
Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain,
Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, i.e. throughout western
Europe. Despite a number of European parliamentary
inquiries; an European Union resolution on the Gladio
phenomenon; NATOs close-doors admissions to
European ambassadors; confirmations of the international
operation from senior CIA officials; and other damning
documentary evidence; NATO, the CIA and MI6 have together
consistently declined to release their secret files on
the matter.
The Strategy of Tension simply isnt part of our
historical consciousness. Very few historians of the Cold
War are fully conversant with it, let alone academics
working in international relations and political science.
This is despite the fact that it played an instrumental
role in physically constructing a threat, projected into
the USSR, which did not ultimately exist. Ipso facto, the
Strategy of Tension belongs to the waste-bin of history.
The immense fear and chaos generated by the impact of the
Operation Gladio phenomenon throughout western Europe was
instrumental in legitimizing the interventionist policies
of the Anglo-American alliance in the South, throughout
the Cold War period. Although the Soviet Union was
supposed to be the real threat and source of terror, and
thus the ultimate object of the over 70 military
interventions conducted since 1945 [see William
Blums Killing Hope (London: Zed, 1995)] the Soviet
threat was in fact actively exaggerated ideologically
and even physically constructed through
clandestine operations to mobilize the
comprehensive militarization of western societies. This
does not mean that many government officials did not
believe their own propaganda. But we now know that there
was a secretive sub-section of the Western intelligence
community, known only to very few members of elected
governments, that was involved in this.
The number of people who were killed across the
Third World as a consequence of this
militarization process is shocking, its implications
genuinely difficult to absorb. According to Dr. J. W.
Smith, a US development economist who runs the Institute
for Economic Democracy in Arizona, in our glorious
self-evidently noble fight to defend the Free
World from imminent Soviet attacks, invasions, and
general inconceivably irrational hell-bent pure evilness,
Western states:
were responsible for violently
killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II
and causing the death of hundreds of millions more as
their economies were destroyed or those countries were
denied the right to restructure to care for their people.
Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been
standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the
record of the Western imperial centers of capital from
1945 to 1990 [Smith, Economic Democracy: The
Political Struggle of the 21st Century (2003)]
12 to 15 million people from 1945 to 1990.
I have to repeat these figures to myself to absorb their
implications.
Repeat these figures to yourself.
Six million Jews in the Second World War, and now 12 to
15 million innocents in the post-WWII period. The former
in the name of German lebensraum. The latter in
the name of the free market.
Yet as a society, as a Civilization, we are oblivious,
utterly blind, to our historic complicity in the
systematic destruction of "Other" societies who
fail to conform to our (deluded) self-image of universal
prosperity.
It is a blindness with which we remain afflicted.
Consider Blairs rendition of the War
on Terror in early 2007, as a clash not
between civilizations, but rather about
civilization. The War on Terror is therefore a
continuation of the age-old battle between progress
and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world
and those who reject its existence.
And what is this "progress",
this "modernity" that should be embraced?
The "progress" that slaughtered millions of
men, women and children across continents, in Nicaragua,
El Salvador, in Somalia, Rwanda, in Kenya, Malaya, in
Oman, Iraq, etc. etc. (in no particular order and with
significant omissions)?
If this is modernity then I must be a backward,
semi-feudal ignoramus. Along with most of the population
of the entire world. But then, who cares what the world
says? Bush, Blair, and their enlightened ilk are no doubt
the modern civilized ones. As long as they do what they
think is right. Right???
Drafted by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Department of
International Relations, University of Sussex
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