Operation Gladio was, in John Kiriakou’s account, an operation hatched by the CIA, MI6, the Vatican and NATO at the end of World War II to leave “stay-behind” sleeper agents across Western Europe in case of a Soviet invasion.[1][2] He says everything he knows about it he learned after leaving the CIA, and that it became public only when Italian Prime Minister Andreotti disclosed it to parliament in 1990. It intersected, he notes, with Italy’s P2 Masonic lodge and figures like Michele Sindona and Licio Gelli.[3] Some analysts, he adds, treat Gladio as a template for later programs — the Iran-Contra death squads and the arming of anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan.[4] In the same conversation, Kiriakou also recounted the discovery of Saudi princes’ phone numbers in Abu Zubaydah’s diary.
In another telling, Kiriakou described Gladio as a U.S. government decision to leave people — in some cases CIA officers — behind in countries liberated during World War II, mostly in Eastern Europe, in case an uprising against the Soviet Union was needed; he named Italy, where it fed into the 1949 Italian election operation, as the first place it played a role.[5]
The Olof Palme assassination
Asked about a claim that the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was the work of a Gladio-linked cell, Kiriakou said he had no knowledge of any such connection. His own understanding of the case: he had always heard Palme was killed by a Kurdish man, who was convicted and then had his conviction overturned on appeal; the murder was never conclusively solved.[6]