anni di piombo or cloak and dagger

Prompted by the events and outcome of the Korea War, the US Central Intelligence Agency operating under the aegis of NATO and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) coordinated with Western European intelligence agencies to raise a secret “stay-behind” paramilitary force, whose sleeper cells were to be activated in the event of a Soviet invasion to bolster a resistance movement.
The existence and scope of these units remained unknown until October of 1990, just weeks after the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the revelation of the prime minister of Italy and admission of a project under the codename Operation Gladio (from the Latin gladius, a short double-edged sword and standard issue for Legionnaires). Although involvement in the political turmoil and terrorism that characterized Italy’s civic landscape from the 1960s through the mid-1980s (called the Years of Lead for the bombings) was quickly downplayed and then ruled-out completely, as the international reach and collusion of the organizations became known—it went by different handles in each country where it was based but the Italian guise, Operation Gladio, became convenient short-hand for similarly vetted groups, and particularly because the social unrest and left-wing violence was especially tumultuous in Italy—attention turned back to the potential for governmental manipulation and intimidation. Other alleged undertakings seemed only for engendering chaos, a pact of panic to justify those security measures, suspicions and misgivings long since become a habit. Never deployed in response to an invasion nor ever the subject of deep political scrutiny even after the disclosure, there was of course the incentive to turn a defensive stance into an offensive posture and keep certain elements, socialist or left-leaning, out of European politics. Such Machiavellian mission drift is a common occurrence, and the US has remained evasive on the clandestine ventures that went on for decades. The fact that the tactics that the operatives reputedly employed comes from a playbook, a field manual, that was a supposed hoax leaked by the Soviets to members of the press willing to bite that outlines the strategic tensors of propaganda and terror is a just a rehashing of previous disinformation campaigns, the US maintains, does not mean that there is not something beneath this recursiveness and divestment. The legacy of Operation Gladio is poorly defined and often forgotten—indeed most referenced as an analogy—but does appear in reporting from time to time.