Belgium: Into the Heart of Darkness Part I"As the Cold War ended, following judicial investigations into mysterious acts of terrorism in Italy, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to confirm in August 1990 that a secret army existed in Italy and other countries across Western Europe that was part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Coordinated by the unorthodox warfare section of NATO, the secret army had been set up by the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 or SIS) after the end of the Second World War to fight communism in Western Europe. The clandestine network, which after the revelations of the Italian Prime Minister was researched by judges, parliamentarians, academics and investigative journalists across Europe, is now understood to have been code-named 'Gladio' (the sword) in Italy, while in other countries the network operated under different names including 'Absalon' in Denmark, 'ROC' in Norway and SDRA8' in Belgium. In each country the military secret service operated the anti-Communist army within the state in close cooperation with the CIA or the MI6 unknown to parliaments and populations. In each country, leading members of the executive, including Prime Ministers, Presidents, Interior Ministers and Defense Ministers, were involved in the conspiracy, while the 'Allied Clandestine Committee' (ACC), sometimes also euphemistically called the 'Allied Co-ordination Committee' and the 'Clandestine Planning Committee' (CPC), less conspicuously at times also called 'Coordination and Planning Committee' of NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE ), coordinated the networks on the international level. The last confirmed secret meeting of ACC with representatives of European secret services took place on October 24, 1990 in Brussels.
"As the details of the operation emerged, the press concluded that the 'story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller'. The secret armies were equipped by the CIA and the MI6 with machine guns, explosives, munitions and high-tech communications equipment hidden in arms caches in forests, meadows and underground bunkers across Western Europe. Leading officers of the secret network trained together with US Green Berets Special Forces in the United States of America and British SAS Special Forces in England. Recruited among strictly anti-Communist segments of the society the secret Gladio soldiers included moderate conservatives as well as right-wing extremists such as notorious right-wing terrorists Stefano delle Chiaie and Yves Guerain Serac. In its strategic design the secret army was a direct copy of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which during the Second World War had parachuted into enemy-held territory and fought a secret war behind enemy lines.
"In case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe the secret Gladio soldiers under NATO command would have formed a so-called stay-behind network operating behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy-held territory, evacuating shot-down pilots and sabotaging the supply lines and production centres of the occupation forces with explosives. Yet the Soviet invasion never came. The real and present danger in the eyes of the secret war strategists in Washington and London were the at-times numerically strong Communist parties in the democracies of Western Europe. Hence the network in the total absence of a Soviet invasion took up arms in numerous countries and fought a secret war against the political forces of the left. 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. The operations always aimed at spreading maximum fear among the population and ranged from bomb massacres in trains and market squares (Italy), the use of systematic torture of opponents of the regime (Turkey), support for right-wing coup d'etats (Greece and Turkey), to the smashing of opposition groups (Portugal and Spain). As the secret armies were discovered, NATO as well as the governments of the United States and Great Britain refused to take a stand on what by then was alleged by the press to be 'the best-kept, and most damaging political-military secret since World War II'."
(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 1-2)
Like Italy during the so-called "Years of Lead," Belgium experienced an especially turbulent period in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. While bombings were the signature acts of the terrorism that rocked Italy during this period, Belgium experienced a series of mass shootings. most notably the still unsolved Brabant massacres, that gave the impression of a state being over run by gangs and far left political terrorism. While political terrorism was no doubt a major issue in this era (and beyond), the situation was far more complicated than then masses were lead to believe.
The same could be said of the Dutroux affair that further rocked the Belgium state during the 1990s. In this instance dark whispers of high ranking Belgium politicians and security officers engaged in child sex trafficking (and far worse) threatened to totally topple the always fragile nation state. Things came to a head in October of 1996 when over 300,000 Belgiums took to the streets in protest of official stonewalling in the Dutroux affair in what became known as La Marche Blanche. But despite the widespread outrage, the truth behind the Dutroux affair as well as much of the Gladio skullduggery that has destabilized Belgium for decades remains as elusive as ever.
Marc Dutroux
What has been revealed points to a cabal of NATO and leading Belgium political figures in collaboration with a vast far right underground network engaged in arms, drugs and sex trafficking as well as highly coordinated political terrorism. This series will attempt to shed more light on this network.
We shall begin our journey by focusing on two groups that seem to have been on the outer spheres of this strange netherworld. One was a paramilitary organization that operated largely like a street gang. The other was a political affiliation promoting a united Europe and "Red-Brown" alliance.
As to the later, I am of course referring to Jean Thiriart's Parti Communautaire Européen. While little known in the English-speaking world, Thiriart was one of the most influential fascist thinkers in Continental Europe during the twentieth century. He had been a Nazi collaborator during the war and was imprisoned for it. In the early 1960s, due to the colonial struggle in the Congo and Algeria, he became an agent of the far right Organisation de l'armée secrete (OAS), a rogue French paramilitary organization comprised Algerian veterans and their supporters. This organization would be linked to multiple assassination attempts on the anti-NATO French President Charles de Gaulle as well as US intelligence.
During the early 1960s he founded Jeune Europe, a group dedicated to unifying Europe. Another one of the group's key early supporters was Emile Lecref, who in Rogue Agents David Teacher describes as a notorious Belgian journalist of the far right who would go on to become one of the key figures in the Belgian branch of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in the 1970s. The WACL was an international network that brought together assorted US military and intelligence personnel, international arms and drug traffickers, religious fanatics of various stripes and the inevitable "former" fascists. It has long been suspected of being extensively tied to Gladio as well similar international operations."The establishment of a global fascist network was Guerin-Serac's keenest, most burning ambition, to which Aginter was the springboard. Around the world, at different times and locations, other elements of the structure were dropping into place, amounting to an evolving 'ring of containment' that even George Frost Keenan might have admired at one stage of his life. In 1966, a significant (and lasting) development occurred, namely the establishment in Taiwan – following on plans laid earlier in the South Korean capital, Seoul – of the CIA-sponsored World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The organisation arose from a previous regional effort, the Asian People's Anti-Bolshevik League, sponsored by the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang regime. Financial backers of the new anti-communist world rang included ravenous cash-hungry Korean cult tycoon Sun Myung Moon, whose recruitment methods and renowned mass nuptials uncannily mirrored certain CIA experiments in brainwashing. The tentacles of this sprawling octopus eventually extended to all corners of the planet. This was visibly the Fascist International, the huge global Gladio, for which Guerin-Serac's heart yearned. It was charged with the pure Guerin-Serac brief to overcome and eliminate any governments or forces considered sympathetic to communism. The means were not precisely specified, save for talking about warfare in psychologically political terms. Yet WACL was tracked to Operation Condor, death squads in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, the twin Kennedy assassinations and general oiling of Iran-Contra in life-after-death mode. So, it would not be surprising to discover WACL fingerprints thickly plastered all over The Enterprise or drug and arms dealing in its latter-day formation. In Europe, WACL was tied up with various neo-fascist fronts, particularly Licio Gelli's P2/Gladio activities, in Italy as well as South America. The 'liquidations' of both Aldo Moro (communist fraterniser) and Olof Palme (Iran-Iraq meddler, irritating Palestine interloper) have been cited as promoted in some degree by WACL.
"The WACL was an excellent vehicle for having a great deal of important work performed by the CIA by remote control and off the balance sheet by an organisation which raised its own funds, presenting itself to the world as a charitable body dedicated to freedom and democracy. (The name was changed to World League for Freedom and Democracy after the fall of communism.) Borrowing an earlier cue from Ganser, we can say 'beautiful,' if morally disturbing. WACL was the hub with spokes leading to many important subsidiary organizations. Not the least of these was the Paladin group, a CIA guns-four-hire outfit initiated by former Waffen-SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny in 1970. By now he occupied an eyrie in Madrid, working alongside one of Guerin-Serac's chief sidekicks, his old OAS compatriots Jean-Denis Raingeard. Paladin had ties from the outset to Aginter and the World Anti-Communist League."
(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 123-124)
Much more at: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2016/03/b ... art-i.html