A Secret Army That Stopped The Soviets From Conquering Europe
The bespectacled man you see here is Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s former prime minister. Although his tenure was filled with several controversies, the biggest of them is probably the time he let the world know about a cover paramilitary network called Operation Gladio in 1990.
Spearheaded by the CIA, this secret army was created in the ‘50s as a way to deter Soviet invasion in Europe. It had a presence in several North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. Andreotti revealed that Italy itself had hidden caches of arms across the country. By the time he publicly acknowledged the operation, it had already scaled down but still employed over 600 people.
