Synopsizing Sibel Edmonds: The Evolution of Operation Gladio Part One

There are two seminal world events that, more than any other events since, have shaped my understanding of how the world really works as opposed to what we are told and have galvanized my consciousness to document my awareness of political reality.  One is the lies that led this country to go to war in Iraq and the government treachery, culminating in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, used to justify this crime.  The other is the lies surrounding 9/11 that led to the termination and gagging of FBI translator Sibel Edmonds.  Recently, Edmonds was interviewed in a podcast by Canadian journalist James Corbett (Well, he says he's originally from Canada, though his link about his website states he has been living and working in Japan since 2004) for his show The Corbett Report.  The interview was broken up into four different segments lasting over four hours, as well as a listener Question and Answer session lasting an hour and a half.  I've listened to the interview segments twice, the first time just sitting back having my mind blown, the second time taking feverish notes, trying to lay out all the pieces of the puzzle which Edmonds describes as Gladio B.  This blog post is the first in a series attempting to synopsize the interview from the notes I scribbled, as well as to provide analysis with how the explosive information provided by Edmonds connects with earlier research I have conducted on 9/11 and Valerie Plame.

 (If you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, [no sleight intended toward Sibel Edmonds' appearance, who happens to be quite beautiful] here are the links for the interview: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and the Question and Answer session.)


Sibel Edmonds on 60 Minutes in 2002


Part One Synopsis:  Sibel Edmonds begins this mammoth interview with an overview of how Operation Gladio morphed in Turkey.  She makes clear that though the field of operations is global, and that she would delve into the former Soviet bloc countries of Central Asia, Turkey was always the most important operation center of Gladio before the fall of the Soviet Union.  The reasons for this are a) geographic and b) drugs (Edmonds didn't explicitly make this the b point, but I believe the implication based on the subsequent account is correct).  During the Cold War, behind the Turkish military there was always the para-military or ultra-nationalist groups.  These groups had their Godfathers, or "Babas" running drugs.  She says you could always tell who these guys were by their looks, many wore little "Hitler" mustaches.  What NATO, which was running Operation Gladio, did that was so scandalous was they took these guys out of prison, trained with Turkish military and given passports for the express purpose of running operations.  What kind of operations?  Drug running, false flag ops, assassinations and murder.

The primary example Edmonds gives of this type of Gladio operative is Abdullah Çatlı.  He was a major para-military nationalist with a criminal record so notorious he was on Interpol's 10 Most Wanted list.  Arrested in Switzerland during the 80's and placed in a high-security prison, he escaped via a helicopter that was owned by NATO!  Çatlı (pronounced Chat-lee) next shows up in London in 1989 where he is granted UK citizenship!  Next he comes to the United States, specifically Chicago in 1990-1991 where he is given a green card.  There are dozens of exits and entrances from America indicating his participation in the kind of nefarious operations listed above, but because he carries 4 or 5 diplomatic passports, he has immunity to do whatever he wants.  In 1995, Çatlı travels to Azerbaijan from Chicago and attempts to assassinate President Aliyev.  The attempt fails to kill Aliyev, but succeeds in Çatlı's real goal: making Aliyev loyal to US/NATO.  Prior to the assassination attempt, Aliyev was loyal to Russia but had a terrible weakness ripe for exploitation: he had big debts with casinos.  Following the assassination attempt, Aliyev became pro-US, so with his mission accomplished, Çatlı came back to Chicago.  He was also heavily involved with organizing terror operations in an area of West China known as Turkestan prior to his death.

Before discussing the dirty details of Çatlı's death and the scandal erupting from it, Edmonds sets up the context in which this occurs by stating that during the period of 1994-1996, there is a debate within NATO.  This debate is focused on how to proceed with Operation Gladio in having Soviet bloc nations on our side.  There are two options: 1) Continue like before the fall of the Soviet Union or 2) Proceed like with the Balkans and Afghanistan.  Edmonds can't confirm whether the decision to proceed with option 2 occurred prior to Çatlı's death or as a result of it.  What's undeniable is that the enormity of scandal in the wake of his death kind of forced NATO's hand to evolve that direction.

In 1996, Çatlı was killed in a major car crash in Susurluk, Turkey.  But he was not the only big name involved in this crash.  Also in the car with him was the chief of police, a powerful member of Parliament and Çatlı's lover, a former beauty queen.  Before the details could be covered up, local police had confirmed the event and local media reported it.  The subsequent investigations exposed what is called the Deep State: that killings were done for the state and drug runnings were done by the state.  The fear within the US/NATO was that our role in this would come out, state secrets would be exposed.  You know how people in this country scream "9/11!" to protest a cover-up and/or conspiracy?  Edmonds says that in Turkey people scream "Susurluk!" to protest the cover-up there.  The US Ambassador to Turkey Marc Grossman was pulled even though he still had 1-2 years left to serve.  Also pulled was someone who figured directly in Sibel Edmonds' termination from the FBI, Major Douglas Dickerson, who directed Gladio in Khazakstan and Turkmenistan.  Another big blow was the chief guy in the Turkish military was pulled who was in charge of "counter-terror", i.e. false-flag operations.

At this point in 1997, NATO went ahead with the plans to change to what Edmonds calls Gladio B.  Plan B would no longer involve paramilitary, ultra-nationalist groups.  Instead they would go with Islamic factions, the Mujahadeen.  Some of these ultra-nationalist, paramilitary groups went rogue in some very interesting ways which Edmonds will detail later.  There was quite a bit of uncertainty at the time in Turkey as to how the evolution of Operation Gladio would proceed.  But in the aftermath of Çatlı's death, it appears they did have a leader in mind.

That leader was Fethullah Gulen.  An Islamic preacher who has been called "moderate", his message is similar to other Turkish preachers in calling for bringing Islamic brothers together, but is unique in that it is not nationalistic, but inclusive of other Central Asian nations.  But his movement was not particularly well liked by the Turkish military, so after receiving threats from them, he came to Washington, D.C.  He now heads a $20 billion organization through which 350 mosques and madrassahs have opened!  But there's a catch if you want to join: you must learn English.  And all "English teachers" are given diplomatic passports!  Edmonds also lists another big player in the Gladio B network, Yusuf Turani.  Turani was actually given US citizenship in 1997 and called the President of Turkestan in absentia.  Again, Turkestan is an area of West China known as the Xinjiang province.

But another relationship NATO had was with a name more familiar: Ayman al-Zawahiri.  Known as the "brains" behind al-Qaeda in many circles, Edmonds says that NATO through Gladio worked closely with Zawahiri and Bin Laden.  From 1997-2001, Plan B of Gladio included dozens of operations with Mujahadeen.  Edmonds points out that during this time they were never called al-Qaeda within official circles, always Mujahadeen.  NATO asked President Mubarak of Egypt (where Zawahiri is originally from) to release anti-regime people (friends of Zawahiri) who they had tasks for in Turkey.  During this time, Zawahiri had come to Turkey, but was also working in Albania and Kosovo.  Edmonds mentions an interesting fact regarding the FBI: they keep tabs on all countries (their diplomatic arms) through monitoring (i.e. wiretapping) except four.  These four countries are 1) Turkey 2) Azerbaijan 3) United Kingdom and 4) Belgium, the seat of NATO.  The Cold War within the context of a "war over resources" didn't end.  The ultimate prize, as Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Grand Chessboard, is Central Asia.

So then 9/11 happens.  What's the official reaction?  Edmonds characterizes it as the US saying "our partners", those we did joint operations with, did it.  And of course we had nothing to do with it.  It's one of the oldest games in the UK we've now learned: "Use Islam to get what you want!"  Edmonds then goes into the role that drugs played.  One of the reasons Belgium is one of the four countries not being monitored is that it is "extremely important" in the distribution of heroin.  She notes that while many sites write about the Taliban getting rid of heroin prior to 9/11, this is not quite the whole story.  The Taliban cut production from 2000-2001, but did not relinquish control.  The Taliban was in charge of Afghanistan since 1996, and from 1996-2000, there was no slack in heroin production.  Until 9/11, the majority of heroin operations were by Russia, an estimated 70-80% under Russian control.  After 9/11 that control shifts to NATO.  With their takeover of the Afghan poppy, production skyrockets.  Edmonds ends Part One of the interview mentioning that Gladio operations were linked to Chechnyan operations and that in the wake of the transition to Gladio B, many ultra-nationalists defected to Russia.



Abdullah Çatlı, convicted drug dealer, Operation Gladio asset


Part One Analysis:  To call Operation Gladio labyrinthian is an insult to labyrinths, the understatement of the millenium.  What really blew my mind is how some of the information within this interview dovetailed with what I learned from my research in 2006 for the second edition of American Judas.  Specifically information on Operation Gladio that I obtained from a reporter working for an online news service who wishes to remain anonymous.  What I learned about Gladio was in the context of the Valerie Plame scandal and how Michael Ledeen, who was involved with the Niger forgeries that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq that Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, debunked, had a dark history with Italian intelligence going back to the late 70's.  Now Edmonds made an effort in the interview to distinguish between the Italian side of Gladio, which has been heavily documented, and the Turkish side, which has received less press here.  But I had no idea about the Operation Gladio connection with a Masonic lodge in Italy called P2, which engaged in a series of terror attacks called the Strategy of Tension.  It was a campaign of false-flag terror in the late 1970s, waged by outright fascists who enjoyed the patronage of the CIA, the Mafia and far right elements of the Italian State.  At the time the reporter detailed this skullduggery culminating in the 1980 Bologna train station bombing that killed 81 people, I really had a faint sketch of how this fit into the context of the War on Terror.  After listening to Part One, my understanding is that just as Gladio B is the next stage of Operation Gladio, the War on Terror is the next stage of the Strategy of Tension.  9/11 was an Operation Gladio false-flag operation on steroids.

This is truly terrifying information to digest.  It's so much easier for Americans to look at a scandal like Susurluk and say, "Well, that's something that happens over there, we don't have that kind of corruption here." Someone on the internet, I'm not sure who to credit, made this analogy: “Imagine a car accident at, say, a hotel in West Viginia. Several people are killed, among them Jeff Gannon, Douglas Feith, Warren Christopher, and Osama bin Laden.”  But if we look closer at what Sibel actually says about the scandal, there was a high ranking American official who had to high-tail it out of Turkey in the wake of these criminal revelations: Marc Grossman.  I've documented some of his other dark deeds in American Judas, which I will quote directly here:

One man described as a pillar of the ATC that Edmonds has been able to talk about is Marc Grossman. http://sibeledmonds.blogspot.com/2006/09/doug-feith-richard-perle-and-marc.html The same Marc Grossman who told Scooter Libby on June 11 or 12, 2003, more than a month before Novak’s column, about Wilson’s wife working at the CIA. http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001046.php The same Marc Grossman mentioned in the 1st edition of American Judas who had a meeting that was reported on September 10, 2001, as “most important” with General Mahmoud Ahmad, who resigned from being Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Chief the following month in the wake of an investigation by Times of India, confirmed by the FBI, that he authorized ISI agent Omar Saeed Sheikh to wire transfer $100,000 in August 2001 to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker of the 9/11 attacks. http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essaysaeed.html When questioned in April 2006 by director Mathieu Verboud for an interview that was later cut out of a documentary about Sibel Edmonds titled Kill the Messenger, Grossman claimed he didn’t know anything about Sibel Edmonds or Valerie Plame. This cannot be true, according to Edmonds, because Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002. http://sibeledmonds.blogspot.com/2006/09/doug-feith-richard-perle-and-marc.html

Now, if I'm connecting the dots correctly, I really have a deeper understanding of why Valerie Plame's cover was blown.  The popular story has always been either the benign, "Armitage-the-gossiper-made-a-boo-boo" or the malignant, "Neo-cons-made-Plame's-CIA-cover-Fair-Game-for-hubby-criticizing-Bush".  I always leaned toward blaming the neo-cons.  But when we understand that Grossman is the genesis from which Plame's CIA identity was spread within the government (Armitage, Libby, Rove) and subsequently to reporters (Woodward, Cooper, Miller, Novak), the "Neo-cons-protecting-their-justification-for-invading-Iraq" motive becomes a sheep-dipped cover for the real motive: protecting Operation Gladio's criminal networks, including the A.Q. Khan Nuclear Walmart that Plame was tracking through her CIA cover company.  Does this let my favorite American Judas villain Dick Cheney off the hook since he is a neo-con?  Not by a long shot.  First, the Grossman revelations do not change the documented links between Cheney and the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network where the motive to blow Valerie Plame's CIA cover is concerned.  Second, Cheney's complicity in the facilitation of 9/11 in light of the history of Gladio false-flag operations only makes the case seem stronger.

If all this is correct, that would make the assessment I made on September 11, 2010 that the genesis of 9/11 originates in 1972 with the creation of BCCI a bit premature.  The true origins go all the way back to at least 1947, when the United States was constructing a clandestine network in Northern Italy to act if there was a communist electoral victory or insurrection.  Operaton Gladio was first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union in 1948, which was integrated into the Clandestine Planning Committee under NATO in 1949.  Though Gladio initially referred to the Italian branch, Operation Gladio has become the name for all the NATO "stay behind" paramilitary organizations, each with its own shady history.  In Germany, for example, it was involved with the ODESSA ratlines, helping Nazi war criminals escape to safety, through the Gehlen Org, named after Reinhard Gehlen, himself a Nazi Major General who became West Germany's first head of intelligence.  But it was in Italy during the 1970's that Gladio erupted into a truly ugly machine of mayhem, murder and false-flag terror operations through the Strategy of Tension, as mentioned above, which almost served as a template for 9/11.




Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence from 1953-1961


So who do I hold ultimately responsible for this hydra-headed monstrosity?  That would be Allen Dulles.  The whole exercise that became known as Operation Gladio was "born in the head of Allen Dulles" and was financed by the CIA.  For those who are familiar with the political world that author Peter Dale Scott describes as "Deep Politics", this puts Dulles squarely in the nexus of two of the biggest "deep events" in American history.  Scott defines a deep event as “events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”  Dulles has long been suspected of involvement in the assassination of JFK, or at least covering up CIA involvement through his position on the Warren Commission.  Though Dulles died in 1969, long before the events of 9/11, by being the architect of Operation Gladio, his influence is all over that conspiracy as well.

Stay tuned next week for Part Two of this series!