State-Sponsored Terror in the Western World

Most terrorist attacks in Europe, whether attributed to left-wing or right-wing activists or even Islamist fundamentalists, can be traced to actions by government-sponsored military or intelligence agencies.
© by Philip Coppens © 2007, PO Box 13722, North Berwick EH39 4WB, United Kingdom. Email: info@philipcoppens.com Website: http://www.philipcoppens.com
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 14, Number 2 (February - March 2007)

• Inner Terror: Your Government Doesn't Mind Killing You
• Russia's 9/99 bombings and the stifling of dissent
• NATO's secret war in Belgium 
• Gladio's terror campaign in Italy 
• The European stance against US-sponsored terror

Inner Terror: Your Government Doesn't Mind Killing You
One of the most controversial and least discussed aspects of Western society is the notion that Western governments would be able to, let alone actually, kill their own civilians. But is reality far worse than what we seem incapable of imagining?
In the movie V for Vendetta, a police detective ponders: "I want to ask a question. I don't care whether you answer me or not. I just need to ask this aloud... The question that I have to ask is: what if the worst and most horrifying attack in this country's history was not the work of religious extremists?" His assistant objects: "We know it was. They were caught. They confessed." The detective adds: "And they were executed. I know. And maybe that's really what happened... What if someone else killed all those people? Would you really want to know who that was? Even if it was someone working for this government? That's my question. If our own government was responsible was responsible for the deaths of almost 100,000 people, would you really want to know?"
On 31 December 2006, three people were killed in the Thai capital Bangkok. The military-backed interim regime blamed the ousted prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, and his supporters as prime suspects. But US security expert Zachary Abuza said that "it could be the military trying to justify further crackdowns",¹ thus demonising the former prime minister so that it could continue to enforce martial law. Whom to believe?
One of the major stumbling blocks to accepting a major conspiracy (such as the claim that 9/11 was an "inside job" performed or allowed by the authorities) is the unwillingness to believe that a nation's institutions would kill its own civilians. Thailand is not a stable Western nation and many believe that the Western world is free of such atrocious acts, whereas the sad truth is that since World War II many Western nations have seen a long series of state-sponsored terrorism-directed against its own citizens.

Russia's 9/99 bombings and the stifling of dissent
The deceased Russian dissident and former spy Alexander Litvinenko argued in his book Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within that certain Russian terrorist attacks had been engineered by the Kremlin. He alleged that agents from the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the successor to the KGB) co-ordinated the September 1999 bombings (popularly referred to as the 9/99 bombings) that killed more than 300 people during explosions in three apartment buildings in the capital Moscow and the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk in a period of two weeks.² The Russian authorities, directed by the newly appointed prime minister Vladimir Putin, blamed the bombings on Chechen separatists and, in response, ordered the invasion of Chechnya.
Former FSB officer Litvinenko, Johns Hopkins University and Hoover Institute scholar David Satter³ and Russian lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov have asserted that the bombings were actually "false flag" attacks perpetrated by the FSB in order to legitimate the resumption of military activities in Chechnya and bring Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin and the FSB to power. False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations or other organisations, which are designed to appear as if they were carried out by other entities than the ones really responsible. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colours, which was practised in both naval and land warfare. A famous example is Operation Greif, led by Otto Skorzeny,⁴ in which he ordered his men into action in American uniforms during the final stages of World War II.
Litvinenko, Satter and Yushenkov thus charged Putin with ordering state-sponsored terrorism, aimed at its own nation, killing 300 innocent citizens. This is not just a conspiracy theory emanating from Russian dissidents or critics of Putin's regime.
Shortly after the final attack (when a truck bomb exploded on 16 September outside a nine-storey apartment complex in the city of Volgodonsk, killing 17 people), FSB operatives were caught by local police and citizens in the city of Ryazan planting a bomb with a detonator in the basement of an apartment building at 14/16 Novosyelov on the night of 22 September 1999.⁵ An alert resident of the building noticed strangers moving heavy sugar sacks into the basement from a car. Explosives experts found that the bomb tested positive for hexogen and all roads from the town were brought under heavy surveillance, but no leads were found. A telephone service employee tapped into long-distance phone calls and managed to detect a conversation in which an out-of-town person suggested to take care and to watch for patrols. That person's number was found to belong to an FSB office in Moscow.
On 24 September, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, stated that the bomb had been a dummy and that the entire operation was a training exercise.⁶ The original chemical test was declared "inaccurate" due to contamination of the analysis apparatus from a previous test. As a consequence, the General Prosecutor's office closed the criminal investigation in April 2000.
But despite these official denials, Yuri Tkachenko, the explosives expert who defused the bomb, insisted that it was real.⁷ Tkachenko also said that the explosives, including a timer, power source and detonator, were genuine military equipment. He added that the gas analyser that tested the vapours coming from the sacks unmistakably indicated the presence of hexogen-not sugar, as the FSB officially claimed. The police officers who answered the original call and discovered the bomb also insisted that the incident was not an exercise and that it was obvious from its appearance that the substance in the bomb was not sugar.⁸
Litvinenko's prolonged fight for life following the ingestion of radionuclide polonium-210 in November 2006 was popularly depicted as Putin's revenge against this whistleblower. But Litvinenko was not the only or first person to die. Sergei Yushenkov, who shared his interest in the 9/99 bombings, was gunned down at the entrance of his Moscow apartment block on 17 April 2003.⁹ In this case, there may not be a direct relationship with the 9/99 bombings, as Yushenkov was a member of parliament and the ninth member of parliament to be shot dead in as many years, none of the cases ever having been solved. Still, one member of the Liberal Russia party, Yuly Rybakov, speculated in the Moscow Times newspaper that Yushenkov could have been killed for his attempts to show that the security services are guilty of the 9/99 bombings.¹⁰
Yushenkov had been responsible for inviting Mikhail Trepashkin,¹¹ a Moscow attorney and a former FSB agent, to assist with an independent investigation of the 9/99 bombings. After Yushenkov's death and the collapse of the official investigation, two Russian-American sisters Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, whose mother was killed in the 9/99 bombings, hired Trepashkin to represent them.¹² While preparing for the trial of the two Russian Muslims who were officially charged with the attacks, Trepashkin uncovered a trail of a mysterious suspect whose description had disappeared from the files. The suspect turned out to be one of his former FSB colleagues. He also found a witness who testified that evidence was doctored to lead the investigation away from incriminating the FSB.
On 22 October 2003, a week before the hearings commenced, Trepashkin was arrested after what appeared to be a traffic stop when, he claims, FSB agents stationed on the side of the road tossed a satchel with a stolen handgun into his vehicle. Trepashkin was imprisoned, unable to attend the hearings and thus smoothing the path for an easy conviction of the two Muslim suspects. However, the Trepashkin story made it into the Western media and on 20 May 2004, an article in the Los Angeles Times gave an overview of his tribulations, adding that the central suspect was FSB agent Vladimir Romanovich. According to Trepashkin, Romanovich was an FSB contact charged with infiltrating Chechen criminal groups in Moscow. As evidence, Trepashkin referred to Romanovich's mysterious release from custody after an arrest by the organised crime squad several years before. Trepashkin added that Romanovich was recognised by the landlord at one of the apartment buildings. The landlord, Mark Blumenfeld, confirmed that he had worked with the FSB on a sketch of the man he'd seen, only to be cast aside when his composite bore no resemblance to Gochiyayev, the man whom officials had identified as one of the masterminds behind the bombing. Romanovich subsequently died in a car crash in Cyprus.¹³
In 2003, Yuri Shchekochikhin, another MP who was on the independent 9/99 commission, died in mysterious circumstances and is believed to have been poisoned. Shchekochikhin was taken ill suddenly and developed awful symptoms: his skin peeled, he was covered in boils, his hair fell out and he eventually suffered respiratory failure. His colleagues were unable to investigate his death because they were told that the autopsy results were secret and would not be released even to his relatives. Shchekochikhin was also an editor at Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper where Anna Politkovskaya, the fierce Kremlin critic, worked until she was gunned down in October 2006, weeks before Litvinenko died in a London hospital.¹⁴

NATO's secret war in Belgium 
Whereas in the aftermath of Litvinenko's mysterious death in November 2006 people were willing to entertain that Putin could order attacks against his own citizens, "surely" Putin's Western equivalents, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, would be unable to? And as such, a "conspiracy theory" hits its major hurdle: the willingness to accept one scenario, yet reject an identical scenario elsewhere closer to if not at home.
Let us therefore begin in Belgium. In 1983, the Cellules Communistes Combattantes (CCC) was founded in Belgium and claimed to be the only Marxist revolutionary organisation that would wage an armed fight against the capitalist system. In 1984 and 1985, 28 "terrorist" attacks were committed by the CCC, allegedly in the hope of engaging the "proletariat" in its revolution. The figure of 28 is actually a record number when it comes to armed terrorist attacks by one group in Western Europe.¹⁵ The CCC targets were, like 9/11 but unlike the 7/7 London bombings, flagships of the Western economy and American hegemony: factories that produced military equipment, the headquarters of political parties or offices, military infrastructure, the police force, a NATO oil pipeline and banks. The CCC furthermore operated not in one specific region but across Belgium, which underlined their capability to strike anywhere and cause fear anywhere. On 1 May 1985, the group exploded a small van that was placed in front of a government office but, unfortunately, two firefighters died in this explosion. "Unfortunate", for the CCC's campaigns were organised to minimise, if not exclude, a human death toll. Indeed, this makes the CCC not fit neatly into those attacks in which civilian casualties are acceptable. But this was just stage one.
The CCC became part of the government investigation after Belgium, together with Switzerland and Italy, set up parliamentary commissions following the discoveries of "stay-behind armies" in 1990. The scope of the investigation was the extent to which the existence of a national secret army, co-ordinated by NATO (and inspired by the US and the UK in the wake of World War II) within several NATO and non-NATO states, had interfered with these democracies.
The Belgian defence minister, the Socialist Guy Co‘me, who stated to have been unaware of the existence of the secret armies, had this to say about this secret army's involvement with terrorism: "Furthermore, I want to know whether there exists a link between the activities of this secret network and the wave of crime and terror which our country suffered from during the past years."¹⁶
Co‘me was referring to the years 1983 to 1985 and the CCC, but also to a series of brutal robberies and attacks by the so-called Nijvel gang, in which the geographic area around Brussels saw 14 brutal terrorist attacks on shoppers in supermarkets. These attacks left 28 people dead and many more injured in a series of 17 burglaries and armed robberies, which in late 1985 turned extremely violent. In the three final attacks, 16 people died during armed robberies in supermarkets in Braine-l'Alleud, Overijse and Aalst, the gang stealing (in total) not more than US$56,000 (reducing a human life to $3,500).¹⁷
The Belgian Senate inquiry revealed that the secret army was staffed by Belgian citizens and took its orders from the Belgian State Security, the equivalent of the Russian FBS or the American CIA. The cell was code-named SDRA8 and was directly linked to NATO's stay-behind centres, the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC). However, the Senate inquiry was unable to clarify whether the secret army had anything to do with the Nijvel gang murders, as the Belgian military secret service refused to co-operate.
Several journalists, including Allan Francovich, suggested that SDRA8 had linked up with the Belgian right-wing organisation Westland New Post (WNP), an opinion that was confirmed by WNP member Michel Libert, who stated during a televised interview that he had been told by his SDRA8 handlers that: "'You, Mr Libert, know nothing about why we're doing this. Nothing at all. All we ask is that your group, with cover from the Gendarmerie, with cover from Security, carry out a job. Target: the supermarkets. Where are they? What kind of locks are there? What sort of protection do they have that could interfere with our operations? Does the store manager lock up? Or do they use an outside security company?'" Libert added: "We carried out the orders and sent in our reports: hours of opening and closing. Everything you want to know about a supermarket. What was this for? This was one amongst hundreds of missions. Something that had to be done. But the use it was all put to, that is the big question."¹⁸ A "big question" that would soon be answered, and which had a human death toll of twenty-eight.
The logical conclusion is that there was a NATO-sponsored secret army operating within Belgium, apparently outside the knowledge and control of the government itself.
A most interesting statement came from a member of the inquiry, Hugo Van Dienderen, who said: "This secret network did more than prepare for a war against a Communist threat... Agents tried to infiltrate peace movements. Certain American groups tried to contact them... A former director of the CIA [William Colby] leaves no doubt that it was their intelligence agencies that were at the basis of these networks."¹⁹
When Jean Bultot, one of the suspected killers in the supermarket murders, spoke from his hideout in Paraguay, he stipulated that certain members of the gang were indeed part of the national intelligence network. He added, without being asked, that the activities of the CCC followed the same formula.
Two police officers, Martial Lekeu and Robert Beijer, made similar statements. According to Lekeu: "There must exist a type of organisation between the members of the national intelligence agency, the gendarmes and the judiciary department.
In my opinion, the attacks of the CCC are part of the same plan. One of the caches of the CCC was hired by a brother of a member of the State Security."²⁰
And thus, the two terror campaigns that Belgium witnessed in the early 1980s were apparently carried out by a group of Belgians operating as a secret army, sponsored by an organisation-NATO-to which Belgium not only belonged but whose headquarters it actually hosted.
Furthermore, though politicians were apparently unaware, the Belgian intelligence agencies were not, and they specifically and consistently accused "communists" (the CCC) as well as the "extreme right" (the Nijvel gang) of carrying out terror activity, whereas they were actually part of the planners if not executioners. Remarkably, in 1985, despite never-before-seen protest marches, NATO installed nuclear missiles in Belgium. This time, it seems the intended goal was not an invasion.
In 1995, the Belgian Chamber of Representatives organised a parliamentary inquiry into the effectiveness of the Belgian police and judiciary with regard to the Nijvel gang investigation. The conclusions of this inquiry, as well as the earlier Senate inquiry on SDRA8 and the Chamber inquiry on banditry, resulted in the preparation of new legislation governing the mission and methods of the Belgian State Security, which was passed in 1998.
Unlike the US government with its so-called Patriot Act, which was signed into law on 26 October 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11, the Belgian government decided to contain the powers of the intelligence and law enforcement network as much as possible, so that the wilful complicity of the Belgian State Security in allowing, if not organising, the deaths of people it was supposed to protect would not happen again.

Gladio's terror campaign in Italy 
The scope of Belgium's state-sponsored terrorism is minimal compared to in Italy, where the then prime minister Guilio Andreotti stated in August 1990 that the report into Gladio²¹ (the local name for the stay-behind networks) confirmed that in his country, too, Gladio had been run by NATO with funding from the CIA.
As early as 1983, the Italian intelligence agencies had published a study on international arms trafficking which stated that in 1969, with the agreement of Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger (Haig was Military Assistant to the Presidential Assistant for National Security Affairs, Kissinger), the Italian secret services recruited 400 military officers within the freemasonic Propagande Due (P2) lodge. (Interestingly, the Swiss stay-behind network was known as P26.) This was later confirmed by former CIA agent Richard Brenneke, who worked as an arms trafficker within Gladio. Brenneke stated that the US government had $10 million per month at its disposal for this service. Brenneke added that P2 "...was used during the 1970s to let Italian terrorism explode, as well as in other countries. This lodge is still active."²²
Brenneke was specifically referring to one of the cruellest terrorist attacks that occurred in Europe before the new threat of "Islamist fundamentalism" was identified: the 1980 Bologna massacre. The Bologna massacre was a terrorist bombing at the city's central station on the morning of 2 August 1980; it killed 85 people and wounded more than two hundred. The timed explosive device was left in an unattended suitcase inside a waiting room, the subsequent explosion destroying the roof, which collapsed onto the passengers.
The Italian government, led by Francesco Cossiga, and police authorities first thought that the blast might have been accidental, then tried to suggest that the militant Red Brigades (communists, of course) were responsible for the bombing. But it was then discovered that the bombs came from an arsenal used by Gladio, and the awful truth slowly began to dawn.
The commission into this terrorist attack reached its conclusion in 1986, after years of sabotage by the Italian State Security apparatus. The conclusion was that "a private structure existed in Italy which was composed of military people and citizens who co-operated, with the express goal of influencing democracy through non-democratic means". To achieve this goal, the group used terrorist attacks organised by neo-fascist movements. "There was an invisible government, in which the lodge P2, certain levels of the secret services, organised crime and terrorism were intimately connected," concluded the judges. Subsequent investigations reached the same conclusion: "During several years, a clandestine group, with extra-institutional connections, operated in our country with the goal to politically condition the democracy and to acquire personal power. To achieve its goal, this group used terrorism." In short, a nation's authorities, specifically its intelligence agencies, had organised a terrorism campaign, killing innocent civilians in an effort to "condition the democracy"-condition the people, that is, in an effort to prove that there was an enemy out there, even inside, intent on killing them.²³
As a consequence, the term "strategy of tension" was coined. It is described as a way to control and manipulate public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs and false-flag terrorist actions. Throughout the 1980s, the suspected aim of these actions was to make the public believe that the bombings were committed by a communist insurgency, with the cause being not to create an authoritarian government (which itself was a victim of this campaign) but to make sure that the people accepted the need for NATO and the need for weapons on its soil aimed firmly at the enemy "out there" who, as the terrorist campaign had proven, was inside as well. In the cases of Belgium and Italy, the governments fought back and came down against the self-granted, illegal powers of its security services.
Eventually it was found that Gladio's first terror campaign in Italy dated back to 12 December 1969, when a bomb exploded in the National Agrarian Bank in Piazza Fontana, in Milan's centre, killing 16 people and wounding up to ninety. Giuseppe Pinelli, a young anarchist, was first accused of the crime. Pinelli then suffered a suspicious death, which the authorities labelled as suicide.
But there was more to come. General Gerardo Serravalle, the head from 1971 to 1974 of "Office R" (the office that controlled Gladio from within the Italian military secret service, SIFAR), told the terrorism commission that, at a crucial Gladio meeting in 1972, at least half of the upper echelons "...had the idea of attacking the communists before an invasion. They were preparing for civil war." Later, he put it more bluntly: "They were saying this: 'Why wait for the invaders when we can make a pre-emptive attack now on the communists who would support the invader?'"²⁴
If we are to transpose this onto 9/11, we should note that there is substantial evidence that al-Qaeda was indeed planning an attack on the United States. But was 9/11 an attack or a "pre-emptive strike"?
General Serravalle was not alone. Avanguardia Nazionale member Vincenzo Vinciguerra confessed in 1984 to judge Felice Casson of having carried out the 31 May 1972 Peteano terrorist attack, in which three policemen died and for which the communist Red Brigades had previously been blamed. Vinciguerra explained during his trial how he had been helped by Italian secret services to escape the police and to fly away to Spain-very much like Belgian terrorists were able to escape to Paraguay.
Vinciguerra confirmed Serravalle's warnings: "I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organised matrix... Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo [the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s], was being mobilised into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance [NATO]... The December 1969 explosion [in the Piazza Fontana] was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency."²⁵

The European stance against US-sponsored terror
On 22 November 1990, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Gladio, requesting full investigations-which have yet to be carried out-and the total dismantling of these paramilitary structures-which has not yet been proven.
The EP, in its resolution, condemned "the existence for 40 years of a clandestine parallel intelligence" as well as an "armed operations organisations in several Member States of the Community" which "escaped all democratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO", itself sponsored by the American CIA. In this resolution, the EP denounced the "danger that such clandestine network may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so", especially before the fact that "in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime". The European Parliament obviously held the US responsible, for it made the extraordinary directive that the United States Government should receive a copy of the resolution.²⁶
The full investigations have not yet occurred; hence, on the American State Department website, we can read a denial of any involvement: "...West European 'stay-behind' networks engaged in terrorism, allegedly at US instigation... This is not true."²⁷
Or is it? Richard Brenneke was a stay-behind insider. And it is thus perhaps unsurprising that his name comes up in a "terrorist" and "Islamist" campaign, in which the lives of 66 US citizens were treated as pawns in a political manoeuvre in which the goal was to determine who would occupy the Oval Office between 1981 and 1984.
The Iran hostage crisis took place from 4 November 1979 until 20 January 1981. During the crisis, the "Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line" held hostage 63 diplomats and three other US citizens inside the American diplomatic mission in Tehran. During the 444-day period, the hostage-takers released several captives, leaving 53 hostages at the end. The United States launched a rescue operation, Operation Eagle Claw, which failed and which caused the deaths of eight servicemen. Some historians consider the crisis to have been a primary reason for US President Jimmy Carter's loss in his re-election bid for the presidency in 1980. But that is not all.
A BAC 1-11 aircraft left Andrews Air Force Base in the late afternoon of 19 October 1980, its destination Paris, France. Among its passengers were: Richard Brenneke; William Casey, soon to be director of the US Central Intelligence Agency; Donald Greggs, soon to be US ambassador to South Korea; and George H. Bush, future vice-president and president of the United States and former director of the CIA under President Ford. Officially, Bush claims he spent the weekend at Andrews Air Force Base, which is of course not exclusive with what Brenneke has said about Bush; Brenneke merely adds that Bush left Andrews AFB on a secret mission that weekend.²⁸ The incident has become known as the "October Surprise" and Brenneke was the first to testify, for which he was charged with perjury though a Federal jury later acquitted him, upholding his testimony that the flight actually took place.
The crux of the October Surprise is that an agreement was made between Bush and Casey and the government of Iran to delay the release of American hostages until after the November 1980 election. Bush, while in Paris, met with Hashemi Rafsanjani, the second in command to the Ayatollah and later the president of Iran, and Adnan Khashoggi, a controversial Saudi Arabian businessman. Arrangements were apparently made to pay Iran US$40 million to delay the release of hostages in order to thwart President Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. The October Surprise would grow into the "Iran-Contra scandal", but it seems that in this long series of scandals and abuse of power, the initial claim-namely, that civilians were used for political purposes-was forgotten. Most importantly, the statement that the US "does not negotiate with terrorists" was here exposed as the greatest of lies.
Finally, we note that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, several Saudi Arabians, including members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to fly out of America at a time when another member of the bin Ladens was identified as the main culprit in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The comparison to Jean Bultot and Vincenzo Vinciguerra and their flights to safety following their terrorist attacks is no doubt too logical and simple to be the truth.
The sad truth is that state-sponsored terrorism is not an invention of the post-World War II political climate. There is a long list of military false-flag attacks that have served as pretexts for war. In the Gleiwitz incident in 1939, Reinhard Heydrich fabricated evidence of a Polish attack to mobilise German public opinion and to fabricate a false justification for a war with Poland-the start of World War II. In the 1931 Mukden Incident (often referred to as the "September 18 Incident"), Japanese officers fabricated a pretext for annexing Manchuria by blowing up a section of railway.
The planned, but never executed, 1962 Operation Northwoods plot by the US administration for a war with Cuba involved scenarios such as hijacking a civilian passenger plane and blaming it on Cuba (though in this scenario, no US citizens would die, as only military personnel would board the plane as civilians and the plane would later be substituted by a drone). It is clear that in 1999, the Russian state, specifically the security service, planted bombs in people's apartments in an effort to blame Chechen rebels and to restart a war and again invade Chechnya. Dare we ask whether 9/11 followed the scenario of 9/99, whereby sections of the US intelligence agencies planted bombs and carried out terrorist attacks, killing 2,973 civilians, in an effort to blame Islamist fundamentalists and to start wars by invading Afghanistan and Iraq?
If 9/11 and 9/99 eventually turn out to be proved as state-sponsored terrorist acts (noting that it took Italy 15 years before such conclusions were reached for their own internal atrocities), both incidents will only be set apart from the rest because of the massive human death toll. On average, less than a hundred civilians "need" to die for the government to invade a country. In 1999, 300 Russians died; in 2001, 2,973 Americans died. °

About the Author:
Philip Coppens is the editor-in-chief of Conspiracy Times (http://www.conspiracy-times.com). He has previously contributed seven articles to NEXUS, the most recent being "Ezekiel's Code and the Ark of the Covenant" (see 13/06). His website is http://www. philipcoppens.com, and he can be contacted by email at info@philipcoppens.com.

EndnotesSeveral books on Gladio, the CCC and the Nijvel gang have been written in Dutch and French, amongst these a series of books by the Belgian investigative journalist Hugo Gijsels. Equally, a lot of sources on the Russian bombings are in Russian. Below, an effort has been made to quote as many English-language, Internet-based resources as possible. Though this has resulted in a slightly less authoritative look for these sources, they do show the difficulty that English-speaking people have in collating the various pieces of the Gladio puzzle.
1. Associated Press, January 1, 2007, reported in various newspapers and online, e.g., Taiwan News Online, http://tinyurl.com/tyew8
2. Various sources, including http://eng.terror99.ru/
3. Satter, David, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, Yale University Press, 2003; http://www.hoover.org/bios/satter
4. http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Operation:Greif.htm
5. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-satter043002.asp 
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/programs/res/papers/Satter_edited_final.pdf
6. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=19795
7. Various sources, including http://tinyurl.com/yy7stz
8. Satter, David, "The Shadow of Ryazan: Is Putin's government legitimate?", National Review, April 30, 2002; Satter, Darkness at Dawn, op. cit.; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
9. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2958997.stm
10. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2958997.stm
11. Various sources, including http://eng.trepashkin.ru/
12. An independent documentary Nedoverie ("Disbelief") about their campaign was made by Russian director Andrei Nekrasov and premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival; http://tinyurl.com/y2puus
13. Various sources, including http://eng.terror99.ru/who_is_who/index/
http://www.diacritica.com/communique/content/issuefour/e.html
14. http://www.yabloko.ru/Publ/2006/2006_06/060620_novg_shekoch.html
15. Cellules Communistes Combattantes, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
16. Various sources, inc. http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/gladio.htm, http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection_gladio/synopsis.htm
17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nijvel_gang
18. Various sources, including http://tinyurl.com/584ol and http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection_gladio/synopsis.htm
19. Various sources, including http://tinyurl.com/y452cs
20. Various sources, including http://tinyurl.com/yyghop (noteworthy for being a site by students for students), but also http://tinyurl.com/vddm5. The best overview of Gladio in Belgium is Hugo Gijsels, Netwerk Gladio, Kritak, Leuven, Belgium, 1991.
21. For a general overview of material on Gladio as a whole, see: http://users.skynet.be/terrorism/html/italy_gladio.htm
22. Various, including http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/gladio.htm
23. Willems, Jan (ed.), Gladio, EPO, 1991, see http://tinyurl.com/u9v2c
24. "Secret agents, freemasons, fascists and a top-level campaign of political 'destabilisation'", The Guardian, 5 December 1990; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
25. Various sources, including http://tinyurl.com/y3g67j
26. Joint resolution replacing B3-2021, 2058, 2068, 2078 and 2087/90, available at http://tinyurl.com/y3yjq2
27. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2006/Jan/20-127177.html
28. http://sonic.net/sentinel/usa3.html; http://tinyurl.com/y3yjq2