Operation Gladio

Excerpt from Antony C. Black's review of Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance by Paul L. Williams:

The primal author of the ‘stay-behind-armies’, Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had “concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics” ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as ‘werewolves’.
Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.
The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the ‘werewolves’ were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as ‘gladiators’. Operation Gladio was born.
In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, ‘Gladio’ was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.
In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist ‘problem’. The arrival of the ‘made men’ was the result of Donovan’s efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS’s off-books’ operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.

This sounds fantastical enough that it could either be a complete fabrication or the unvarnished truth, so I looked up the names to see if they really existed. I found links for them all and added them to the above text.

From this you could conjure a theory that the War On Drugs exists only to keep drug prices high so the CIA can make enough money to keep funding their counter-communist efforts. Since the so-called communists are not really communists, they are freedom hating, tyrannical dictatorships, you might think that the prosecution and imprisonment of drug dealers and smugglers is all being done in the name of freedom (!?!). Golly, this sounds like Ollie North and the Contras.

The news media makes a lot of noise about addiction, but I wonder how much of a problem it really is. If you look at the estimates of how much heroin and cocaine are being imported, it looks like either everyone is getting stoned every day -or- some people are using a heck of a lot, like a gram a day. I don't think everyone is getting stoned, so there must be large population of heavy drug users.

As for busts (arrests), I wouldn't be surprised if it was just the newcomers who are getting busted. The old established outfits don't want any competition, so they are happy to tip off the cops whenever they get wind of an upstart trying to horn in on their racket.

P.S. I remember seeing a movie or a series that was set during the end of WW2 in Germany, and werewolves, as in "die-hard fascist fanatics", were a bit of a problem. I think there was a train involved, but I cannot remember much more than that.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away