Operation Gladio (Italian: Operazione Gladio) is the codename for a clandestineNATO "stay-behind" operation in Europeduring the Cold War. Its purpose was to continue anti-communist actions in the event of a Soviet invasion and conquest. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, "Operation Gladio" is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organizations, sometimes called "Super NATO". The name Gladio is the Italian form of gladius, a type of Roman shortsword.[1]
Operating in many NATO and even some neutral countries,[2] Gladio was part of a series of national operations first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into theClandestine Planning Committee (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen bySHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official withdrawal from NATO's Military Committee in 1966 – which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladio
References:
TimeWatch: Operation Gladio - BBC
Operation Gladio - Timeline
http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/operation_gladio.htm http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/ops/gladio.htm
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