by James Corbett
“The Lone Gladio,” the new novel by FBI whistleblower and BoilingFrogsPost.com founder Sibel Edmonds, is not just another spy novel. Yes, it is about spies…of a sort. And clandestine missions. And double-crosses and unsure loyalties. But that’s where the similarity ends.
“The Lone Gladio” derives its name from Operation Gladio. As even the most mainstream source (read: Wikipedia) will tell you, Operation Gladio was a NATO-led “stay-behind” operation to build up paramilitary forces that could resist Soviet occupation in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe. It operated in many countries but is most closely associated with Italy where the program was first exposed in spectacular fashion by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in October, 1990. The scale of the scandal involved with the revelation of this program is hard to overstate; Gladio stay-behind operatives were intimately involved with some of the worst atrocities of Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead” including the Bologna Massacre, a bombing of the Bologna railway station that left 85 dead and over 200 wounded.
What the mainstream sources do not tell you about Operation Gladio is that it is not merely a NATO-led operation, but a CIA-sponsored and Pentagon-connected one; that it is not merely operative in Europe but throughout the world; that its main area of operations is not Italy but Turkey; and that it did not end operations after the fall of the Soviet Union, but merely changed tactics, from fostering right-wing paramilitary groups (original Gladio) to fostering Islamic terrorist groups (Gladio “B”).
All of this is documented fact, although for the deeper analysis of these facts and how they relate to the current “war on terror” you’ll have to invest the time in my landmark interview series with Sibel Edmonds on Gladio B that was conducted last year. In that series, Sibel Edmonds went further than ever before in laying out what she gathered in her time as a translator in the Washington Field Office of the FBI, including: US State Department / Gladio operative’s liaison with Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man throughout the 1990s; the NATO takeover of Afghan poppy fields after 9/11 and Gladio-protected drug running and money laundering operations; the dramatic life (and death) of drug trafficker, assassin and Turkish government collaborator Abdullah Çatlı; the direction of billionaire Imam Fethullah Gulen’s mysterious fortune and his 600 madrasas from his Pennsylvania castle with his CIA backers; Gladio-sponsored false flag terror operations in Central Asia and the Caucasus; and much more.
Any way you slice it, the information packed into the Gladio B series is explosive, pun intended. But as deeply involved as it is with characters, names, places and events that most in the Western world have little or no familiarity with, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees. “The Lone Gladio” is a work of ‘fiction’ that steps back from the trees to show you the forest.
The central conceit of the novel is that a high-ranking Gladio operative, stung by the incidental killing of his lover (“collateral damage” as he himself would have termed it), goes rogue, setting in motion a series of events that threatens to expose the entire Gladio B operation. Caught up along the way are a high-ranking Congressman on a child sex tour of Cambodia; the CIA team that is surveilling and blackmailing him; an American reporter caught in the crossfire; a US mogul searching for his son’s killers; the Russian operatives who have penetrated his organization; and Elsie Simon, a plucky 5 foot 3 inch 105 pound FBI translator haunted by the disappearance of her father.
The novel has all the twists and turns of any spy thriller, and then some. There is action, suspense, high-tech spy gadgetry, violence, and a love story. But what sets this book apart is that, unlike a Tom Clancy or John Le Carré novel, “The Lone Gladio” is not escapism. In fact, it is exactly the opposite: it is a vehicle for revealing the shocking reality underneath the surface of the mundane picture of the world we are presented with on the nightly news. No jingoistic patriotism and good guys in service to the president bunkum here. Consider this description of the shadow government from “OG 68″ aka Greg MacPhearson, the high-ranking Gladio operative gone rogue:
“There are others outside the government, and they are the ones on top. They are the true power that controls the second tier: the government front system—because government is a front. The CIA too sets up front companies; it’s strikingly similar. The real power—the Deep State, let’s call it—is out and above the actual visible government.”
The true power of this novel is that, although it is a work of fiction with fictional characters and fictional license is taken (the 9/11 false flag is revealed as a hoax on national television, after all), it is still a tale told by an insider with an insider’s knowledge of this system and how it functions. We would be fools not to take this book and the message it is desperately trying to impart seriously. And that message is that there is a deep state, that it has been functioning a long time, and that it is puppeteering the events we see playing out across the nightly news.
Eat your heart out, Fleming, Ludlow, Clancy, Le Carré; “The Lone Gladio” boldly goes where no mere spy yarn would dare.
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