Untold Stories about the terrorist attacks in Italy part 2/3

Untold Stories about the terrorist attacks in Italy part 2/3

Is Vinciguerra thus a credible source? The events following the trial suggest that he is. The secret army was discovered in 1990. And in what amounted to an indirect confirmation that the right-wing terrorist had revealed the truth, Vinciguerra immediately lost all higher protection he had enjoyed dining the previous years.

In marked contrast to other right-wing terrorists that had collaborated with the

Italian military secret service and walked free, Vinciguerra after his revelations was sentenced for life and imprisoned.

But Vinciguerra had not been the first to draw the link between Gladio, NATO and the massacres, he had not been the first to reveal the Gladio conspiracy in Italy. In 1974 the Italian investigating judge Giovanni Tamburino in the course of his investigation into right-wing terrorism in Italy had taken the unprecedented step of arresting General Vito Miceli, the chief of the Italian military secret service SID on the charge of 'promoting, setting up, and organising, together with others, a secret association of military and civilians aimed at provoking an armed insurrection to bring about an illegal change in the constitution of the state and the form of government'.

Miceli, previously responsible for the NATO Security Office, on trial on

November 17, 1974 furiously revealed the existence of the Gladio army hidden as a special branch of the military secret service SID: 'A Super SID on my orders?

Of course! But I have not organised it myself to make a coup d'etat. This was the

United States and NATO who asked me to do it!'12 With his excellent transatlantic contacts Miceli got off lightly. He was released on bail and spent six months in a military hospital. Forced by the investigations of Judge Casson, Prime Minister

Andreotti 16 years later exposed the Gladio secret in front of the Italian parliament.

This angered Miceli greatly. Shortly before his death in October 1990 he shouted:

'I have gone to prison because I did not want to reveal the existence of this super secret organisation. And now Andreotti comes along and tells it to Parliament!'

In prison Peteano bomber Vinciguerra explained to judge Casson that not only

Ordine Nuovo but also other prominent Italian right-wing organisations such as

Avanguardia Nazionale had cooperated with the military secret service and the

Gladio secret army to weaken the political left in Italy: 'The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single organised matrix.'

Right-wing terrorist and Ordine Nuovo member Vinciguerra explained that he and his fellow right-wing extremists had been recruited to cooperate with the Gladio secret army to carry out the most bloody operations: 'Avanguardia Nazionale, like

Ordine Nuovo, were being mobilised into the battle as part of an anti-Communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance.'

Judge Casson was alarmed at what he had found. In an attempt to eradicate this rotten core of the state he followed the traces of the mysterious Gladio underground army which had manipulated I talia n politics during the Cold War and in January 1990 requested permission from the highest Italian authorities to extend his research to the archives of the Italian military secret service Servizio informazioni sicurezza Militare (SISMI), until 1971 known as SID. In July 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti consented and allowed Judge Casson to research in the archives of Palazzo Braschi, the headquarters of SISMI in Rome.

It was inside Palazzo Braschi where Casson discovered the documents, which proved for the first time that a secret army code-named Gladio existed in Italy as a sub-branch of the military secret service with the task to carry out unorthodox warfare. Moreover Casson found documents that connected both the biggest military alliance of the world, NATO, and the world's only remaining superpower, the United States, to Gladio, subversion, and right-wing terrorists in Italy and also other countries in Western Europe. This knowledge meant that Casson for some time was in serious danger, of which he was aware, for Italian judges with too much knowledge had been shot in the streets of Italy before: 'From July until October 1990 I was the only one who knew something [about operation Gladio], this could have been unfortunate for me.'