The Men Too Dangerous for NATO to Admit

For three years, string of supermarket attacks paralyzed Belgium. They looked like robberies. They were the loose ends of something far larger, and pulled hard enough, that thread would unravel the best-kept secret of the postwar West: hidden armies, buried weapons, political assassinations. conspiracy that reached well beyond Belgium. silver Volkswagen Golf GTI swings into the lot of the Delhaize on Parklaan. Three men climb out. The first is huge, over six feet four and broad as doorframe, dressed in black with his face painted. second carries riot shotgun. The third stays behind the wheel, engine running. The date is November 9, 1985. The time is 7:40pm. The city is Aalst, 15 miles west of Brussels. Gilbert Van de Steen and his daughter Rebecca are walking back to their family car. His wife Thérèse follows few paces behind, holding the hand of their nine-year-old son, David. The first shotgun blast cuts Gilbert down. She screams. The man shoots her, too. Four minutes after the gunmen entered the parking lot, all three are back in the Volkswagen, firing shotguns at the gendarmes as they roar onto the highway toward Brussels. Eight people have lost their lives. The till has yielded less than 20,000 euros. The youngest victim is nine. Between October 1982 and November 1985, three masked men hit Delhaize supermarkets, textile store, restaurant, and gun shop across Brabant, the province south of Brussels. 28 people perished. 22 wounded. The Belgian press named them les Tueurs du Brabant, the Brabant Killers, or the Nivelles Gang, after the town where they first turned robbery into massacre in September 1983. Three figures earned codenames. The Giant, the largest of the three, was masked and always calm. The Killer, theatrical and gleeful, was the man inside the store. Then comes the Old Man, the older driver who never goes inside the building, always behind the wheel of stolen high-performance car. They follow strange pattern. They walk in armed like commandos and walk out with pocket change. 46 months of slaughter yield total proceeds of less than the cost of small family car. Belgian investigators reach the conclusion they had been resisting. These are not robberies. The weapons do not fit. Franchi SPAS 12 combat shotguns. Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. An Ingram MAC 10 chambered for .45 ACP. Researchers would later trace some of these weapons to 1984 raid on Belgian gendarmerie armory at Vielsalm, in the Ardennes forest, carried out during NATO training exercise codenamed Oesling by United States Marines working alongside secret Belgian unit no civilian had ever heard of. The tactics do not fit. The gunmen move in coordinated fire teams. They cover angles and act as if someone with serious military training has taught them. According to David Van de Steen, the masked man who found him hiding behind the comic books at Aalst grinned at him before pulling the trigger. And there is something deeper off. On the night of the Aalst attack, gendarmerie roadblock at critical crossroads on the perpetrators' escape route is called off by radio in the final minutes, using command code reserved for senior officers. Evidence files vanish from secure storage between intake and trial. Witness statements disappear. In June of 2024, after forty-two years, Belgian authorities formally closed the file. They have identified no one. The questions remain open. The answers are not in Belgium but in Italy. For 12 years, Italy believed that three of its own Carabinieri had been murdered by communist terrorists. The truth, when young magistrate finally pried it out of maximum-security cell, would force the Prime Minister of Italy to admit on the floor of Parliament that the country had been ruled in secret, since the founding of NATO, by shadow government. switchboard in Gorizia receives an anonymous phone call on the night of May 31st, 1972. The voice describes an abandoned white Fiat 500 parked on country road near the village of Peteano, in the northeastern province of Friuli, less than 15 miles from the Yugoslav border. Three Carabinieri are dispatched. One of them lifts the hood. The bomb takes off the front of the car. Three officers perish in the grass. fourth is gravely wounded. Within 48 hours, second anonymous call directs Italian authorities to group of left-wing extremists. 200 Italian communists are arrested. The Italian police explosives expert, Marco Morin, files forensic report identifying the bomb material as compound favored by the Red Brigades. For 12 years, every Italian believed the Red Brigades mowed down those three Carabinieri. In 1984, 30-year-old Venetian magistrate named Felice Casson reopened the file. He commissions fresh forensic analysis. The Peteano bomb was built from C-4, the most powerful explosive then in existence, used by NATO militaries, and substance the Italian left had no access to whatsoever. Casson then finds buried report. Three months before Peteano, on February 24th, 1972, Carabinieri patrolling country road near Trieste had stumbled on hidden weapons cache containing C-4 identical to the explosive used that May. The cache had been hushed up. No one had ever asked who had buried it. Marco Morin, the explosives expert who filed the false report, turns out to be card-carrying member of Ordine Nuovo. The neo-fascist group that the prosecution was supposed to be ruling out. Casson is no longer investigating bombing. His investigation leads to an Ordine Nuovo militant named Vincenzo Vinciguerra. On June 28th, 1984, in courtroom in Venice, Vinciguerra confesses to building and detonating the Peteano car bomb. Then he keeps talking. He names the Italian military secret service, SID, as his operational handlers. He describes the C-4, the staged phone calls, the cross-border escape they arranged for him and his accomplice Carlo Cicuttini into Francoist Spain, and the falsified forensic report. Then he gives Casson the sentence that will define the next thirty years of Italian history: (QUOTE) “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people, far removed from any political game. The reason was simple. To force the Italian public to turn to the State and ask for greater security.” He calls it la strategia della tensione: the strategy of tension. Bombs blamed on the left, designed to push the country right. Conscience has nothing to do with the confession. Vinciguerra is talking because the secret services that had directed him for 12 years have begun preparing to scapegoat him. The asset is taking his handlers down with him. Casson follows the C-4. The trail leads to buried weapons depot in cemetery near Verona. Then to second depot. Then to third. He requests official access to the archives of Italian military intelligence. He is refused. He requests again. He is refused again. By 1990, the magistrate’s name had climbed to the desk of the Prime Minister of Italy. The Prime Minister’s name is Giulio Andreotti. He has held office in every Italian government since 1947. He knows exactly what is in those archives. Andreotti has choice. Bury the magistrate, or admit the operation. He chose to talk. What followed was the longest criminal investigation in modern European history. On October 24th, 1990, the Prime Minister of Italy walked into the Chamber of Deputies in Rome and read aloud from classified document. The document described an organization called Operazione Gladio, the Italian word for Roman short sword. Gladio, Andreotti told the chamber, had been operating since 1956. It had recruited 622 Italian civilians as operational agents. It had buried 127 weapons caches across the country. It had been funded by the CIA. It had been reported, through SHAPE and the Pentagon, to NATO. Italian magistrates began pulling the thread Casson had pulled at Peteano through one massacre after another. Piazza Fontana, Milan. December 12th, 1969. bomb in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura takes out 17 people and wounds 88. Three days later, the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, arrested in connection with the bombing, falls from the fourth-floor window of Milan police headquarters during interrogation. After 30 years of trials, the courts place final responsibility on Ordine Nuovo. General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counter-intelligence, testifies under oath that the CIA ordered the attack. Piazza della Loggia, Brescia. May 28th, 1974. bomb hidden in trash bin takes out eight people at an anti-fascist rally. Italicus Express. August 4th, 1974. bomb planted on the Rome-to-Munich night train detonates at 1:23am as the train passes under the Apennines. Twelve casualties, 48 wounded. Ordine Nero claims responsibility. Bologna Centrale. August 2nd, 1980, 10:20 am. suitcase bomb destroys the second-class waiting room at the height of the summer travel season. Eighty-five people lost their lives. Over 200 are wounded. It is the largest postwar terror attack on Italian soil. The clock above the platform is shattered at 10:25 and, by order of the city, has remained frozen at that time for 45 years. The Bologna investigation never closes. Names emerge across the decades. Fioravanti. Mambro. Cavallini. Ciavardini. On July 1st of 2025, 45 years after the bombing, Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation confirms the life sentence of Paolo Bellini, former operative of the neo-fascist Avanguardia Nazionale. The pattern is, by then, impossible to miss. The same explosives, C-4 from buried Gladio caches. The same neo-fascist cells. The same false leads point to the left. The same magistrates pushed off the file before they could finish. The bombs were the symptom of much larger sickness. And Italy was not the only country that had one. What Italian magistrates had spent 30 years uncovering existed in every Western European democracy on the map. And in at least one country that did not even belong to NATO. Within weeks of Andreotti’s October 1990 speech, governments across the continent were forced to admit that they too had been running secret army. Belgium called its network SDRA8, the unit whose Vielsalm armory had been raided in 1984. Switzerland, country that had stayed officially neutral through two world wars and never joined NATO, called its network P-26. Germany’s was drawn heavily from former Waffen-SS veterans. Norway’s was confirmed by its Defense Minister within days of Andreotti’s speech. Greece was called LOK, and its operatives would later be implicated in supporting the colonels’ coup of 1967. Turkey’s was called the Counter-Guerrilla. It was never officially dissolved. The networks coordinated. Their commanders met annually at the Clandestine Planning Committee and the Allied Clandestine Committee, both headquartered at SHAPE, NATO’s military command in Belgium. Personnel rotated. Doctrine was shared. C-4 from single shipment could end up under cemetery in Verona, in an armory in the Ardennes, and in the hands of an Ordine Nuovo cell in Friuli. And the network was not only military. In March of 1981, Italian investigators raided the villa of man named Licio Gelli outside Arezzo. Inside, they found the membership rolls of Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due, known as P2, that read like who’s who of postwar Italy. The heads of all three Italian intelligence services. 44 members of parliament. Dozens of generals and admirals. Senior magistrates. Leading journalists. The pretender to the Italian throne. And businessman named Silvio Berlusconi, who would one day be Prime Minister. P2 was the civilian arm of Gladio. It moved money, planted stories, and named bishops. The money moved through Banco Ambrosiano, the private Italian bank deeply intertwined with the Vatican. Its chairman, Roberto Calvi, known to Italian newspapers as “God’s Banker,” was found in June of 1982 hanging from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge in London, his pockets weighed down with bricks. His predecessor at the bank, Michele Sindona, was poisoned with cyanide in his prison cell in March of 1986. He collapsed on the floor. The propaganda moved through fake press agency in Salazar’s Lisbon called Aginter Press, run by French OAS veteran named Yves Guérin-Sérac. Aginter trained operatives, planted stories, and exported the strategy of tension methodology to clients across Africa and Latin America. In November of 1990, the European Parliament passed resolution condemning the stay-behind networks in unsparing language. The administration of US President George Bush refused to comment. Only three countries conducted full parliamentary investigations: Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland. Everywhere else, the files were quietly closed. This was conspiracy the size of continent. It had all been born out of fear. For the men who built the stay-behind networks in 1945, the whole apparatus was insurance against the worst thing they could imagine: the Red Army marching west, and not stopping. The blueprint had been written during the war. Between 1940 and 1945, the British Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services had built networks of saboteurs behind Nazi lines across occupied Europe. Ordinary citizens. Buried weapons. Sleeper cells waiting for coded radio signal. The model had worked. By 1945, the same intelligence officers were turning it against the enemy they had spent the war fighting alongside. By 1948, the fear was no longer theoretical. The Italian Communist Party was the largest in Western Europe and was growing. France was right behind it. Greece was in civil war. Berlin was under blockade. Stalin’s Red Army stood on the Elbe. The first Cold War massacre in Western Europe happened before NATO even existed. On May 1st, 1947, 1,500 Sicilian peasants and their families had gathered at mountainside meadow called Portella della Ginestra, near Palermo, to celebrate leftist victory in regional elections. As the speeches began, machine-gun fire opened up from the ridges above the field. 11 lost their lives by nightfall. The bandit Salvatore Giuliano was publicly named as the shooter. Then Giuliano’s lieutenant was poisoned with coffee in his prison cell. Giuliano himself was found “shot in firefight” with police, except the autopsy showed he had perished in his sleep, and his body was dragged into courtyard for the photographers. On April 4th, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded. Within months, NATO had stood up Clandestine Planning Committee at SHAPE, its supreme military headquarters in Belgium. The mandate was simple. Every Western European country would have buried stay-behind network, armed and waiting, ready to fight as partisans the day Soviet tanks rolled west. Some of the new recruits already knew the work. Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi Germany’s wartime intelligence chief for the Eastern Front, had surrendered to the Americans in 1945 with 20 crates of files on Soviet operations. By 1949, he was running the Gehlen Organization, the backbone of what would become West German intelligence, and his agents were running the German wing. Italy’s stay-behind army was formally established on November 26th, 1956. They named it Operazione Gladio. The CIA built logistics base at Camp Darby, near Livorno, from which they shipped plastic explosives, Schmeisser submachine guns, gold coins, fake passports, and cyanide capsules to the field. By 1970, 139 caches had been buried across the Italian countryside. They were called Nasco, the Italian word for hiding place. Some were dug under cemeteries, under churches, even in farmers’ fields. The men who buried them believed they were buying their grandchildren free Italy. Then they waited for an invasion that would never come. The waiting changed the men who were doing it. By the early 1960s, the secret army had been in place for decade and half and the Soviets had not moved. The Cold War had hardened into détente. The men recruited to fight Red Army that no longer seemed to be coming began to drift rightward. In Italy, anti-communism meant something specific: veterans of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò, monarchist officers, Catholic ultras who saw the PCI as the Antichrist. In France, the network absorbed OAS veterans embittered by the loss of Algeria. In Germany, men who remembered the SS. The recruitment pool of stay-behind soldiers narrowed and darkened. These men were armed. They were trained. They were paid. And they had no operational purpose. Then 1968 arrived. Student revolts in Paris, Berlin, and Rome. The Hot Autumn of 1969 paralyzed Italy with strikes. The Italian Communist Party won 27% of the national vote and kept climbing. The threat the gladiators had been built to fight was no longer arriving in tanks. It was arriving at the ballot box. If the Soviets did not invade, the threat would be redefined as internal. If communism could win at the ballot box, the response would be to make the public reject it. What Vinciguerra had described from his cell as the strategy of tension was the network’s new mandate. The campaign reached its apex on the morning of March 16th, 1978. Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro was being driven through Rome to present new coalition he had brokered, one that would bring the Italian Communist Party into government for the first time in the country’s postwar history. His motorcade was ambushed in Via Fani. The attackers poured automatic fire into the cars. Moro’s five bodyguards were down in under 30 seconds. The marksmanship was beyond anything the Brigate Rosse had ever shown. Moro was held for 55 days. His captors permitted him to write letters. In several, he named names. In several, he wrote that there were factions inside the Italian state that wanted him gone. On May 9th, 1978, his body was found in the trunk of red Renault 4 parked on Via Caetani in Rome, halfway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the headquarters of the Communist Party. The Red Brigades claimed responsibility. The American crisis negotiator sent to Rome during the kidnapping, Steve Pieczenik, would later state on the record that the Italian and American governments had decided Moro was no longer useful alive. The network designed to defend Italian democracy was now eliminating the Italian politician about to expand it. These are the cases the courts could prove. The ones they could not prove are bigger — and they all follow the same pattern: each one reveals how far the network reached, and how completely it had been protected from above. On June 27th, 1980, an Itavia Airlines DC-9 carrying 81 civilians vanished from radar over the Tyrrhenian Sea, in clear weather. After three decades of contested theories, Italian courts concluded it had been brought down by missile fired during covert NATO dogfight with Libyan aircraft believed to be carrying Gaddafi. Nearly every officer who investigated met sudden, unexplained end before testifying. The protection extended all the way to military command. It worked the same way in Germany. bomb at the Munich Oktoberfest, September 1980. Authorities closed it in 1982 as lone-wolf attack — the same move used across Italy throughout the Years of Lead. When prosecutors reopened the file in 2014, they found the bomber had been radicalized inside neo-fascist paramilitary with documented ties to the German stay-behind network. The lone wolf had kennel. Then Turkey showed what happens when nobody even bothers closing the file. In November 1996, black Mercedes hit tractor on highway near Susurluk. In the wreckage, they found senior police official, Grey Wolves hitman wanted by Interpol carrying diplomatic passport signed by the Interior Minister, and Kurdish parliamentarian who was the only survivor. The four had been traveling together. The crash didn't expose conspiracy so much as one that had never bothered to hide. Turkey's Counter-Guerrilla, Gladio's longest-surviving network, had been running inside the state for 30 years in plain sight. Then there is the tier historians cannot prove but cannot dismiss. The 1967 colonels' coup in Greece was carried out by officers with documented ties to the LOK stay-behind network. Pope John Paul was found unresponsive in his Vatican apartment 33 days into his papacy. There was no autopsy or explanation. And it all happened right when he had been reviewing P2's connections inside the Vatican Bank. And one number still lingers in investigators' minds. Andreotti told parliament in 1990 that 127 Gladio weapons caches had been dismantled. There had been at least 139. Somewhere in the cellars and cemeteries and farmers’ fields of half of Europe, weapons sealed 60 years ago, in preparation for the third world war, are still in the soil. We know the names of most of the victims. We will never know the names of most of the perpetrators. Except for one. The answer Belgium had failed to find for 40 years finally arrived in 2015, in sickroom outside Aalst, from man on his deathbed. His name was Christiaan He had been member of the Diana Group, an elite anti-terror unit of the Belgian gendarmerie, before being dismissed from the unit under circumstances the Belgian state has never made public. Before he perished, he called his brother to his bedside and told him secret. Two years later, in 2017, the brother went on Belgian state television and revealed it on camera. His dying sibling had confessed to being the Giant. Belgian authorities confirmed they were following the lead. They never opened trial. Christiaan was already in the ground. The man who had walked into the Delhaize on Parklaan on the evening of November 9th, 1985, had been serving Belgian policeman. Everything else fit. The weapons were traced to NATO armory raid. The military training. The military discipline. The obstruction — carried out from inside the building, by men who knew which files to make disappear. The strategy of tension Vinciguerra had described from his Italian cell in 1984 had crossed the border into Belgium and stayed there, long after anyone in Washington still remembered why it had been built. The clock above the platform at Bologna Centrale remains stopped at 10:25 in the morning. The Italian state will not restart it. In June of 2024, after 42 years, Belgian authorities formally closed the file without naming single perpetrator. The buried Nasco are still in the ground. Operation Gladio had begun as an answer to question. The question had been: what do we do if the worst happens? The men who buried the weapons in 1956 believed they were arming their grandchildren against tyranny. They were honest men. They were patriots. They were also wrong about who their grandchildren would need protection from. The networks they built outlived the war they were built to fight. The training survived. The doctrines survived. The buried weapons, some of them, survived. The men who learned in those networks how to murder civilians for political effect went on to teach others.