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Operation: Operations!
468 Plays8 months ago
Has there ever been a good Operation? Based on the various Operations and Projects we look at in this episode, any time you see something gets called an Operation, it's a work of pure malice that produces nothing but hardship and heartache. Even Operation Dumbo Drop. ESPECIALLY Operation Dumbo Drop.
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Transcript
The Kidney Contract Dilemma
00:00:00
Speaker
So Josh, your kidney, it's time we talked about it. Hmm? Well, you don't really use it, do you? I mean, sure it filters out some toxins for you, but aside from your Mountain Dew addiction, it really has little to do day to day.
00:00:19
Speaker
My kidney, on the other hand, well, with all the alcohol I throw at it, I think it's time you give over your kidney to me. What? What? No, that's not a thing that is going to happen. Why would you even suggest that? No one just goes up to someone and says, give me your kidney, outside of urban legends. Are we in an urban legend? If so, are we in the first one with Robert England or the sequel that starred no one famous or the straight to DVD third one? I'm pretty sure if you've seen.
00:00:49
Speaker
Nobody has seen that third film, but no! This isn't an urban legend. It's a straight-up contract law case. If you'll consult your contract... My what? Your co-host contract. You know, the document that made you co-host in detail is your on-screen persona of Josh The Voice, Anderson. On page three... I don't remember signing a contract.
00:01:10
Speaker
Oh well, luckily I carry a copy with me at all times. If you consult page 3, paragraph 2, subsection 4, subsection 3, sentence 2, you'll see that upon demand any organs or organelles required by the other co-host will be surrendered immediately. Hmm, does seem to clench it.
00:01:30
Speaker
Well, precisely. I mean, I am a doctor, you know. I'll begin the operation immediately. Yeah, just one question. I'm pretty sure that's not my signature. It actually looks a lot like your handwriting. But of course it does. Josh Addison is an invention. You're playing a character I created. So of course it's my signature. I made you. And now I need your kidney.
00:01:54
Speaker
Well, that seems like an ironclad argument and the evidence is indisputable. Looks like this is no case of kidney. It's more like a kid yay. Get cutting, doctor. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dinteth.
Psychological Workshop in Xiaoman
00:02:24
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and in Zhuhai, China, if it bleeds, we can kill it. It's Dr. M.R.X.Tentive. Ah, but Josh, do I bleed? Do I bleed? And if I do bleed, do I bleed human blood? I mean, you seep fluids. I don't think there's any denying that. Yeah, but seeping fluids is not the same thing as bleeding. Yeah, it's close enough, usually.
00:02:51
Speaker
Let's just agree that your body is disgusting as are everyone's. It's true. Bodies are disgusting. We should get rid of them immediately.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yep, yep. But until such time, as you manage to download your brain into whatever it is that kids are downloading their brains into these days, what have you been up to? Well, on the weekend, I went to Shellmon to attend a workshop on self-knowledge where I gave a talk on loci of control account, which is a psychological theory
00:03:27
Speaker
that you can poll people to find out where they perceive their locus of controllers located, either internally they are self-responsible for their failures or successes, or externally they take it that their failures or successes are to be found due to external sources or powers.
00:03:48
Speaker
I'm a little bit skeptical of the way that loci control accounts are generated and surveyed for in the psychological literature. So it was a paper basically detailing some of my concerns. So that was, that was my weekend. I went to Xiaoman. Xiaoman's right next to Taiwan. So it was both rainy and there was a threat of earthquakes. Hooray. Such a wanton city. Like your homesick for Wellington, sort of.
00:04:18
Speaker
Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. I guess so. So I guess. Well, very good. So we've a regular, just a regular old episode for you. No, no Michael Shirm is a thing of the past. No book reviews here.
00:04:33
Speaker
We figured we'd just look at a grab bag of operations, where playing operation is intimated by the intro sketch. Because if there's one thing conspiracy-minded government agencies like, it's an ominously titled conspiracy. Now, Josh, was this potentially inspired by my mention of Operation Mincemeat in the patron bonus episode of Fort Nautica?
Operation Chaos - Themed Episode Introduction
00:05:01
Speaker
Not specifically, maybe on a subconscious level, but I was just looking through our list we keep of topics we really should talk about one day and noticed there were a few operations, operation, whatever, operation this and operation that, and figured, well, maybe we should just gather them all up together in one bunch and knock them all out in an episode.
00:05:22
Speaker
And yet in the process of talking about three operations, Operation Chaos, Operation Legacy, and Operation Gladio, it occurred to me that we've never really talked about Operation Menu, aka the menu bombings in Cambodia. And of course, we should probably also talk about the Phoenix program at some point. So consider this to be part one.
00:05:44
Speaker
of our playing operation because it turns out that once you start going down the operation rabbit hole it's operations all the way down so many operations well should we play a chime and start talking about them indeedy let's play that chime right about so shall we shall we start with a bit of chaos
CIA's Domestic Espionage - Operation Chaos
00:06:10
Speaker
Indeed, a word which I always find very difficult to spell. The O and the A, I just always transpose them when I'm writing it down.
00:06:17
Speaker
So Operation Chaos is a lot like COINTELPRO, and we did a proper episode about COINTELPRO all the way back in 2020. And this is the same sort of thing, whereas COINTELPRO was an FBI thing, Operation Chaos was a CIA thing, but it was basically the same thing. This Operation Chaos was the CIA's program of domestic espionage to uncover possible foreign influence
00:06:44
Speaker
on America's domestic race anti-war and other protest movements, which ran from 67 to 74. Now, domestic espionage by the CIA, that's not what they meant to do, is it? Well, I mean, as we're going to see with the next operation we're going to look at,
00:07:06
Speaker
Playing around with people's economies and politics overseas is something that the CIA has never been particularly shy about. And it's not unusual, as we've found out from history, but it's definitely illegal, according to the way these agencies are meant to work, for them to turn their focus inwards. And look at what's happening at home, because surely Josh,
00:07:33
Speaker
Surely the greatest threat to democracy and the CIA's way of life are people who don't like the CIA. And the people who don't like the CIA might be located overseas, but Josh!
00:07:45
Speaker
some of the people who don't like the CIA are Americans. They're in the house right now. Well, yes. And I assume that's how they would have tried to justify it, because, yeah, the CIA is not meant to be doing domestic espionage. The whole point of the CIA is that they're not the domestic ones. That's the FBI. But as we all know, it's never actually the fact that they're not supposed to be doing it has never really stopped the CIA from doing stuff.
00:08:15
Speaker
And
Justifying Illegal Espionage for National Security
00:08:16
Speaker
so I assume because supposedly Operation Chaos was particularly about was wanting to look for foreign influences on domestic organizations, that's possibly how they could justify it.
00:08:33
Speaker
I mean, yeah, that's how they kind of internally justified it, that there are these foreign influencers overseas causing issues overseas. And it would be foolish to think that maybe some of those foreign influencers wouldn't be trying to cause issue back home. And of course, you can't trust the FBI to investigate these things because they're not the CIA. They don't have the CIA's resources. We need to make sure that we're looking at these things well. I mean, we're not meant to.
00:09:02
Speaker
but we're going to do it because we're doing it for the good of the country, Joshua. We're doing it for the flag. We're doing it for patriots. We're doing it for right-minded people like ourselves. It's the kind of justification they would have had. Yes, yeah. I mean, you say we can't trust the FBI to do it, although the FBI, we're literally also doing the exact same thing now. Well, you know, we can trust them to spy on people. We just can't trust them to spy on people properly. Yeah. So apparently in 1967,
00:09:31
Speaker
the Director of Central Intelligence at the time, one Richard Helms, informed then-President Johnson that the CIA had uncovered, quote, no evidence of any contact between the most prominent peace movement leaders and foreign embassies in the US or abroad. And apparently in 1959, said the same thing.
00:09:50
Speaker
You do realize what that means. They weren't looking hard enough. They found no evidence yet, but give us a few more years, Mr. President, and we will find that evidence. We just haven't looked hard enough. It's bound to be there. We have suspicions that left-wing activists are, in fact, actually non-patriotic, or even, to coin a term, unpatriotic. So we just need to look harder, and we'll find them.
00:10:17
Speaker
We'll find them. Well, that must have been what they were thinking, because here, despite that being set in 67 and again in 69, they kept it up until the mid 70s under Johnson and then Nixon. Sorry, are you saying that Nixon's government allowed wrongdoings to go on within the American intelligence apparatus? You just steady yourself. But yes, yes, I think the Nixon government was up to dodgy stuff.
00:10:48
Speaker
I've never heard a bad thing said about Richard Nixon on this podcast. I mean, I even do a decent Nixon impression. I mean, there's nothing bad. What you do with love, obviously, it's a homage to a person. And I believe it.
00:11:07
Speaker
Apparently Operation Chaos eventually resulted in files of 7,200 Americans, a computer index totalling around 300,000 civilians and approximately 100,000
CIA Projects: HT-Lingual, Merrimack, and Resistance
00:11:19
Speaker
groups. So they did a lot of monitoring.
00:11:22
Speaker
I mean, there are so many more Americans. I mean, it just sounds like they were spying on very few people. It sounds like a very small issue. I don't know why this would be concerning. I mean, the fact they spied on one or two people equivalently in America seems like tiny fist to fry. It's not a phrase. Tiny fish to fry. Yeah. I mean, you could try frying a fist. I don't think it would go well.
00:11:52
Speaker
Operation Chaos, as we say, it's operations all the way down. Operation Chaos, either included within itself or ran alongside of a whole bunch of other operations or projects with equally ominous names. The first one, not so ominous, was Project HT-Lingual. HT was some sort of classification. In fact, I believe Chaos's proper name was like MH Chaos or something. Again, their operations would have a
00:12:18
Speaker
two letters on the front that sort of designated them as what kind of operation they were. But at any rate, HT Lingual was supposedly all about intercepting mail from the US to Russia and China. And at first they were just collecting the names and addresses from the outside of the envelope, so they knew who was sending stuff to whom. But eventually they did start opening the mail and examining the contents and then passing it on.
00:12:44
Speaker
And so supposedly this their reasons for doing this was gathering foreign intelligence. But as with elsewhere in Project Curse, it's interesting that they ended up targeting peace activists and civil rights activists.
00:12:59
Speaker
Well, I mean, you say interesting, this is going to be a recurrent theme throughout this episode. It's so good. And so there's going to be a recurrent theme with spying in general when it comes to domestic matters. It seems that the establishment spy agencies, and I guess there are no anti-establishment spy agencies by definition, all spy agencies are establishment.
00:13:23
Speaker
They always seem to be very fixated on left-wing issues and don't seem to be that interested in right-wing issues. And we saw that with the response to the Christchurch terror attacks. Our domestic spy agency was very, very concerned about left-wing groups, so environmental groups and Muslim groups, and were paying virtually no attention.
00:13:50
Speaker
to right-wing and white supremacist groups. And then, therefore, it allows an event like the mosque attacks to occur. It seems that they are really quite fixated on people who are interested in dismantling the establishment, which are usually left-wing causes, and don't really look particularly hard at people who are all for the establishment, but also turn out to be weirdos.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yes, it is a worrying trend. Hopefully it's completely over now and nothing like that is happening in this day and age foreshadowing.
00:14:28
Speaker
So as well as Project HT-Link, we had the kind of strangely named Project Merrimack. Yeah, I was actually trying to work out exactly what that meant. I don't know. I see that's a contraction of something. I don't even know. So this was apparently just a program of infiltrating and surveilling anti-war groups, specifically in Washington. We had the more ominously named Project Resistance.
00:14:55
Speaker
So I think Merrimack actually might just be named after both a location and a Confederate naval vessel, the USS Merrimack. So it might be. Could just be your name. Yeah, yeah.
00:15:12
Speaker
Nevertheless, resistance was about collecting background information on groups around the US that the CIA might have thought posed threats to their facilities and personnel. Like, wouldn't you know it? Student radical groups that opposed the US government's foreign policies on Vietnam. Those damn students. Not like in Vietnam.
00:15:33
Speaker
I mean, I don't think they dislike Vietnam. I think they dislike the Vietnam War. The issue about Vietnam, the country, or the Vietnamese people. It was the war that America was waging there that they were concerned about. Yes, yes, if we're going to be specific.
00:15:49
Speaker
Moving on, we have a duo of projects, Project Minaret and Project Shamrock. And these were both about intercepting communication. So again, more along the lines of HTML. This was also about communication and deception, which, as I recall, we talked about two episodes ago, because Michael Shermer actually mentioned Project Shamrock.
00:16:16
Speaker
in his book. As I recall, that was in the section when he was talking about real conspiracies that we know the US government has got up to. He mentioned he was Project Shamrock, where they were busy infiltrating broadcast type networks and also doing the same thing as HTML opening, reading people's mail and sending it on.
Interception Projects - Minaret and Shamrock
00:16:36
Speaker
Back in the 70s, with which shades of the WikiLeaks NSA
00:16:41
Speaker
revelations that were still going on decades later. So, yes, Minaret and Shamrock, they were interceding communications of US citizens who had been placed on a watch list. There was this watch list that had been set up early on and then was expanded on by presidents. Apparently Nixon himself added various people to it as the program went on. Initially, it included known drug traffickers and Americans who had been to Cuba
00:17:05
Speaker
But it was eventually broadened to include, wouldn't you know it, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, journalists, and, yeah, at least two US senators were having their communications intercepted. And I believe those were the ones who were at Nixon's instructions. Again, lovely fellow Nixon. Never heard of anything about him. I'm beginning to turn against Nixon now with all of this information. He's not quite as great as I thought he was.
00:17:34
Speaker
I'm sure what will come next will exonerate him completely. We move on to, we're getting much more ominous now. Project Megiddo.
00:17:44
Speaker
Which was significant. Megiddo. Because we've both seen Megiddo. We've actually seen Megacode Toad. Megacode Megiddo, yeah. That is a film that exists that we have allowed to enter our eyeballs, yes. And with Michael Yaw yelling to God. Michael Yaw ringing it on. Yeah. Yeah. One of them's a good actor, the other is not, and I'm not saying home.
00:18:08
Speaker
So Project Megiddo was suitably biblical. It starts with the introduction to the, it's a project to compile a report. And the report begins by talking about where Megiddo is and the fact that it has this apocalyptic significance as being supposedly like a rallying point in the last battle between good and evil.
00:18:31
Speaker
But the report itself was on the potential for extremist criminal activity in the United States by individuals or domestic groups who attach special significance to the year 2000. So this was several decades before the year 2000. They commissioned this report. There's a selection of- Prince was also pretty much the end of the year 2000. I mean, frankly, if you support Prince and you support Jonathan's Cocker, you probably should be watched.
00:19:01
Speaker
Mmm, I'd say that's, well, maybe you were by Project Nagito. And so this is basically a report saying that there's these folks such as biblically driven cults, militias, adherents of racist belief systems, such as Christian identity and Wotanism.
00:19:17
Speaker
and other radical domestic extremists. And they basically said a lot of these people attach a lot of significance to the year 2000 and maybe they think the world's going to be ending then or something. So we better watch out in case they decide to do something silly around then. And as far as I'm aware, there were no actual religiously motivated
00:19:40
Speaker
millennial terrorist attacks. So maybe it worked. Oh, that takes care. That's a good point. That's something which we might need to look into. I mean, I just remember the year 2000 with the Y2K stuff, which now was thought to have been a bit of a
00:20:01
Speaker
a dead horse, but that's because nothing occurred, because the entire world rallied to make sure that nothing is going to occur. And yet a lot of climate change skeptics, oh, well, we were told Y2K was going to be a big thing and it turned out not to be. In the case of Yale, well, it's because we fixed that problem. The problem this time is we're not fixing the climate. So it is going to be the issue that people are being warned about.
00:20:28
Speaker
Yes, well, I mean, last week my car sprung a leak in its cooling system and looked like it was going to overheat, but then I took it to the garage and got it fixed and it didn't overheat and break down at all. So obviously it was all a big fuss over nothing.
00:20:42
Speaker
Which means you wasted a lot of money having a repair. I didn't waste any of this money getting my car fixed and then it never broke down. What the hell? Anyway, back to ominous projects. After Project Nagito, we have Project Mockingbird, which was about specifically wiretapping journalists trying to trace up who from the government had been leaking to journalists. And then finally, the most ominously named of all, Project 2.
00:21:09
Speaker
It's the sequel. Was it a Piranha 2, the Spawning? Or maybe an Aliens 2 sequel, one which improves radically upon the first film? Or is it like the Matrix sequel, something which really just didn't need to exist?
00:21:32
Speaker
I think you could argue it didn't need to exist, but also it's one of those sequels that just completely rehashes the original, I think, because it was just more undercover operations, infiltrating domestic radical organizations, and also foreign intelligence targets, just a program of undercover operations, apparently, partly to get information on these foreign intelligence targets, but also
00:21:59
Speaker
so that they could establish a network of undercover operatives who had credibility from acting within these organizations, presumably so they would then be able to do more undercover work in the future. So that's a whole bunch of projects, a whole bunch of projects that were either in Operation Chaos or at least going on at the same time as in doing the same sort of stuff.
00:22:21
Speaker
They're looking into all sorts of looking into the students for a democratic society, the Black Panther Party, obviously. Martin Luther King Jr. comes up time and time again in terms of people who are being surveilled. The Young Lords, which ones were the Young Lords? So I think they weren't they the Chicago based anti-war activists who came up with the spelling of America, but replacing the C with three K's.
00:22:49
Speaker
I think that's the evidence. Yeah. They also looked into the Woman Strike for Peace Ramparts magazine.
00:22:55
Speaker
Now, they particularly didn't like Rampart's magazine because not only was it a left-wing magazine, but it was also very professionally produced. So it had glossy covers, it had striking layout. It was the kind of thing that people might pick up and not even realize its bias towards the left. Oh, dear, you can't have that. I know. So apparently, I say it stopped around 74,
00:23:24
Speaker
Apparently, it was Watergate that caused them to put a stop to it, at least for the time. Watergate happened. Some of the guys involved in Watergate were ex-CIA. I assume this means that the CIA decided, well, we better keep our noses clean for a bit. We better not get caught doing anything else. Just for now, while everyone's aware of this sort of thing.
00:23:48
Speaker
That's when Operation Chaos stopped. I'm assuming the sort of stuff that Operation Chaos was doing carried on, but Operation Chaos itself apparently was revealed to the public by good old Seymour Hirsch in 74. What I've read about it didn't mention the Church Commission, although, as I recall, Michael Shermer in his book did say that Operation Shamrock had come out as part of the Church Commission. So I'm guessing possibly some of these numerous projects did come out.
00:24:16
Speaker
The cases where the CIA was spying on members of Congress were of particular interest to the members of the Church Commission. Of course, Josh, it's one thing to spy on the American people, but it's another thing to spy on the elected representatives of the American people. You might be allowed to get away with one of those, but you can't get away with both.
00:24:41
Speaker
No, no, fair enough. So that's what was going on in the 60s and 70s. And like we say, fortunately, everybody learned their lessons and nothing like that happened again. Oh, hang on, sorry. I'm just being given right now a story from last month.
00:24:56
Speaker
about undercover FBI agents infiltrating left-wing activist organizations to gather intel and also to bait them into committing crimes. And if I'm not mistaken, this is a case where the agents who were doing the infiltration of left-wing activists had been pulled off an investigation of a neo-Nazi who then went on to shoot a bunch of people. History repeats.
00:25:20
Speaker
We are doomed to learn nothing, Joshua. We are doomed to learn nothing.
Operation Gladio - European Networks and Terrorism
00:25:27
Speaker
Yes. Oh, well, let's look into a bit more history here. What can you tell me about Operation Gladio? First of all, is it Gladio or Gladio? I don't know. Or Gladio. I kind of like the sound of Gladio. I think we should go with Gladio now because I actually now am going... Listen here, Gladio. Tell you an interesting tale. I actually now don't know which way I've been pronouncing it. So I'm probably going to pronounce it in different ways at different times. I've given it some time tonight. Just go with your whim, yeah.
00:25:56
Speaker
So we have actually talked about Operation Gledio in the past. The thing which is interesting about Operation Gledio is that I've had a kind of change of heart about Operation Gledio. And that when I first heard about it, I kind of poo-pooed it as a concept. It seemed like one of those all-embracing, overarching conspiracy theories designed to explain a lot of things in post-war
00:26:21
Speaker
Europe and a kind of tidy, the Americans and the British were responsible for all the chaos that occurred afterwards. And now these days I'm going, there might be a nomenclature issue with Operation Gladio.
00:26:36
Speaker
But it definitely did happen and it needs to be talked about. So I guess we should probably talk about how it started, why it's got its name, and then what they did. Because the way it started is interesting. Because Operation Gladio, when people talk about it, is a theory about a series of operations in Europe using stay-behind
00:27:03
Speaker
executive orders that originated during World War II and the aftermath of World War II.
00:27:11
Speaker
So the idea of stay behind actually comes from the UK at the kind of beginning of World War II, when the British were very concerned the Nazis would actually eventually overtake and overrun the United Kingdom. So the Special Operations Executive, which is essentially the precursors to MI5 and MI6, is established in World War II by Winston Churchill.
00:27:38
Speaker
they decided that because there was a distinct possibility the Nazis might win, they needed to train special and secret troops in order to have a stay behind network, a kind of military reserve lying in wait. So if the Nazis did successfully invade, there would be a ready base of operations in the UK using secret troops.
00:28:03
Speaker
So they train particular militia and kind of put them into locations around the UK. They created caches of ammunition located in different locations. So if the Nazis invade, you've got military equipment ready to go and armed troops hiding in plain sight, ready to use that as a resistance network and engage in guerrilla warfare against the invaders.
00:28:29
Speaker
And of course the thing about this is you have to keep it very secret. You can't tell the public about it, because if the public knows it's a stay-behind network, the Nazis are going to find out about it, and they're going to try to do something about it. Now...
00:28:45
Speaker
When it became clear the UK was not going to be invaded by the Nazis, the Stay Behind Network plan moved into Europe, particularly in France, where they started establishing stay behind networks during World War II to act as guerrilla warfare fighters against Nazi occupation, and also crucially, as Europe got liberated, to make sure that forces couldn't just surge back and take back control as the front moved on.
00:29:15
Speaker
So the whole idea of a stay-behind network came out of resisting the occupying forces or potential occupying forces in World War II.
00:29:27
Speaker
post-World War II, the stay-behind networks continued to work, at which point they were then being run by NATO and the CIA. And this is where things get slightly awkward. Because during World War II, the enemy was quite clearly the fascists.
00:29:51
Speaker
post-World War II, the enemy became communism. And it turns out some of the most anti-communist people in post-World War II Europe were the former Nazis and the former fascists, who they also didn't like communists. The Americans and the Brits didn't like communists. They thought, well, you know, we're all friends now. Let's get together and fight our real enemy, Russia.
00:30:21
Speaker
you
00:30:21
Speaker
Yeah, so there was, there'd always been implications that some of these operatives involved in Ingladio were, if not Nazi sympathizers, then actual ex-Nazis, because they were like, yeah, like you say, Nazis, I mean, from what I gather, not particularly nice people, were quite good at fighting communists. Yeah, I mean, they hated communists as much as the anti-fascists did, apart from the anti-fascists who were themselves
00:30:51
Speaker
I mean this, which is where things get very confused. Yes, so that's one sort of black mark against Operation Gladio.
00:31:00
Speaker
It gets more complicated. I mean, do we get into the naming stuff yet? Or is there more setup? Yeah, a little. So the naming thing I think is worth pointing out here because Gladio is the name of the operation in Italy. So that's the Italian operation. So in Denmark, it was called Epsilon. In France, it was planned blue.
00:31:21
Speaker
One of the issues you get with talking about Operation Gladios is that people talk about it as if it applies to all of the things that happened in Europe using the Stay Behind Network. Technically, the name only applies to the Istellian Stay Behind Networks, or even the Italian Stay Behind Networks.
00:31:44
Speaker
And so you can actually quite easily poo-poo the idea of Operation Gladio, because these people make these sweeping claims about it being a Europe-wide operation. Operation Gladio only concerned Italy. These people don't know their history. They're talking out of their arse, which I think kind of is where my skepticism of the Operation Gladio stuff originally came from. And that there were people going, well, look, it's not
00:32:12
Speaker
you can't generalise about the Italian situation to the entire European situation. So really, when we talk about Operation Gladio, we should really be talking about Gladio-esque operations or just refer to them as the stay-behind networks as sponsored by the UK and increasingly by the US and the CIA. Yeah, so Gladio came to be used as an umbrella term for all of these sorts of operations, even though technically it was only
00:32:41
Speaker
only just one of them. Yeah. And they did a lot of bad things. We'll talk about that very soon. Yes. So the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Sakhir, established an ad hoc committee, the clandestine planning committee, or CPC,
00:33:02
Speaker
at SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. Someone was an acronym freak. Yeah, they really, really were. So NATO knew what was going on. But of course, as you say, by the nature, they have to remain secret. Otherwise, there's no point. So NATO wasn't publicising what they were doing, what they knew about them.
00:33:25
Speaker
Once the EU found out about these operations, these networks in the 1990s, they put a stop to it. But when we say put a stop to it, they didn't officially exist anymore. But does that mean they didn't actually exist anymore? Well, therein lies the issue, because even though these stay-behind networks were meant to be ostensibly fighting a kind of resurgent communism,
00:33:53
Speaker
Turns out these stay-behind networks largely engage in terrorist activities involving left-wing causes or left-wing governments.
00:34:03
Speaker
And let's just say that right-wing terrorism has not stopped in the EU. And many of the names and groups and people involved in these right-wing terrorist activities before the 90s are still involved in terrorist activities post the 90s. And some of those people were involved and stay behind networks supported by the CIA. So yes, technically, it's all been put a stop to.
00:34:32
Speaker
And yet it kind of feels like it hasn't.
Investigating Gladio - Italy, Belgium, Switzerland
00:34:35
Speaker
And this is compounded by the fact that even though when the EU found out about it, only three governments actually got involved, and actually one of those governments isn't even an EU government. So, Italy and Belgium, which are both EU nations,
00:34:52
Speaker
They had parliamentary inquiries. Switzerland, which is independent, they also had what was going on with the stay behind networks. But they were the only government to explicitly do something at a governmental level about it. Interestingly enough, even though the CIA were involved in all of this, the US response was simply to just say nothing. Just make no comment about their role at all.
00:35:22
Speaker
Yeah, so it's one of those things, depending on who you listen to, it stopped in the 90s, or it never really stopped at all. Which is a slight worry, because as you say, when you look at what they did, this is anti-communist networks. And we know we there's a long history of the CIA doing some particularly nasty stuff in the name of stopping international communism. And when we look at the things they do in Italy,
00:35:48
Speaker
Apparently there were far right terrorist organizations who acted as the troops of a secret army linked to the CIA, which apparently there were instructions to infiltrate left-wing groups, provoke social tension by carrying out attacks and then blaming them on the left. Good old false flag material.
00:36:07
Speaker
We know groups existed in Belgium and there are fears that they had acted the same as the Italian ones. In France, elements from there, for what was it, Plan Bleur, they were involved in terrorist activities against Charles Gaul and his policy of giving Algeria independence. Yes, so they were feeling that we can't
00:36:28
Speaker
We can't let the Gaul engage in this kind of left-wing activity of giving up a French-occupied territory. We're going to use our stay-behind networks to oppose the government of the day. Giving independence to a region that France has no real claim to.
00:36:47
Speaker
Colonialism, eh? Keep that in mind as well. More foreshadowing. In Greece, it's believed that their stay behind network was involved in the military coup in 1967, which led to a military junta being in control of Greece for over seven years.
00:37:04
Speaker
And in Turkey, it's a good chance they were also, the networks there were involved in their coup in 1980. So a bit of a worry. Yeah, and all right wing causes. So in every single case, they stay behind networks, which ostensibly with fighting communism, were engaging in not just right, but in most cases, far right activity.
00:37:32
Speaker
supported by the US, because the US absolutely loves and extreme right-wing government overseas. Oh, yes, they do. For a country that prides itself on spreading freedom and equality, they don't really like it when other people are free and equal. Indeed.
00:37:51
Speaker
Let's finish then on something a little bit different, a little bit the same, but a little bit different as well, because this isn't about undercover right wing terrorism or anything like that, or doing dodgy things specifically targeted at left wing organizations.
Operation Legacy - Concealing Colonial Crimes
00:38:07
Speaker
This is about a good old fashioned British colonial bastardry. Let's talk about operation legacy.
00:38:14
Speaker
Ah, yes. We're going back to the 2010s, when this is revealed. Not when this isn't going on, but when they decided to actually finally go, oh, by the way, as we were ending the empire, we didn't really want the people that we'd been governing or controlling in the past to know about the shady stuff we'd got up to.
00:38:35
Speaker
So we made sure that we destroyed as much documentation as possible that showed how bad colonial rule had actually been. Because those people, they can't be trusted to understand the intricacies or the nuance of British rule. They can't understand what they tried to exterminate this group or make sure this group starved. They will never understand the true calculus that the British mind went through when we controlled their countries through no fault of their own.
00:39:02
Speaker
Indeed, pip pip. So yes, the story of Operation Legacy, in the early 2010s, this stuff started to come out that during the final years of the British Empire, the government carried out this big purge of official documents, showed all the dodgy things I've been up to, and
00:39:21
Speaker
things that weren't purged got sent back to England and were held on to by the Foreign Office Archive for much longer than they should have been in terms of, had they been following the law about when sort of secret documentation eventually gets made public, all this stuff should have been released in the 1980s, but it wasn't until 30 years later that it actually started to come out and we'll see why in a little while.
00:39:50
Speaker
So this is, again, this is another case of like Operation Gladio or Gladio or Gladio, where Operation Legacy, technically Operation Legacy was the name of what was going on in the former British colony of Uganda. There were a whole bunch of other operations in the other British colonies with some of which had different names. But again, Operation Legacy has come to be the umbrella term for all of the stuff that was going on.
00:40:17
Speaker
So there's a good summary of everything that went on I found in the 2017 paper Operation Legacy, Britain's Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide by Shohei Sato, which is published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. What a great name for a journal, although I suspect they've got a very limited scope. Quite possibly. But so the abstract of this paper reads,
00:40:43
Speaker
The end of the British Empire was accompanied by a large-scale rearrangement of sensitive colonial war record worldwide. A great number of these records were destroyed and a sizeable portion sent to prison to be kept secret. This article advances studies of this policy, eventually codenamed Operation Legacy.
00:41:10
Speaker
by reading the mitigated archives that had been newly discovered and declassified in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It asked where the policy was decided, for what reason and how it was carried out. Sources suggest that the policy was not planned in the colonial office in London and delivered to the colonies in a hierarchical fashion, but rather significant elements of the policy were developed in the colonial government overseas in response to each local context.
00:41:36
Speaker
The general idea was to save Britain's honour and to protect its collaborators. However, the limitation in terms of time and manpower often prevented the officers from pulling sufficient thought into the actual screening of the documents. At the same time, some officers demonstrated a level of historical awareness regarding their actions.
00:41:57
Speaker
This episode reminds us that the official mind as it relates to decolonization is to be understood not only by reference to the highest levels of strategic planning, but also in terms of how it worked at the lower levels in the colonial administrations on the graph.
00:42:13
Speaker
Yes, as we shall see, there was how this stuff worked at the highest central level and then also how it worked on the ground, as it were. Now, the reason this wasn't discovered until 2011, or the reason why in 2011 did eventually come out,
00:42:30
Speaker
was that a group of Kenyans who were detained and tortured during the Malamal Rebellion, which happened back in the 50s going up to 1960, they won the rights to sue the British government for their treatment. And they, I don't know the full details of how people knew this stuff was there. But basically, as a result of this court case, the Foreign Office started releasing this documentation that they'd kept. So I think from the memory, because I actually have a vague
00:43:00
Speaker
memory of this being in the news in 2011. I think from memory some of the Kenyan lawyers and historians who were supporting the people suing the British government had had reports
00:43:16
Speaker
that document had left Kenya, so documents that should have remained behind and been in the archives in Kenya. There were reports they had been taken away. And so they were basically asking the British, you know, do these documents still exist? And the British government had to eventually go, yes, they do still exist. We did take some documents with us when we left.
00:43:45
Speaker
Why do you want to know?
00:43:48
Speaker
Hmm, exactly well. Because of what those documents contained, including things such as monthly intelligence reports on the quote-unquote elimination of the colonial authorities' enemies in 1950s Malaya, records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of a man said to have been roasted alive. Hooray. Papers detailing the links to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
00:44:18
Speaker
uh another list of it talks about um this is from the an article in the guardian among the documents that appear to have been destroyed oh sorry so this is um those were documents that were uncovered as part of these hidden ones but then the
00:44:33
Speaker
The hidden documents also include references to ones that had been destroyed. And so according to the Guardian, among the documents that appear to have been destroyed were records of the abuse of malign insurgents detained by British cloning authorities who were tortured and sometimes murdered, reports that may have detailed the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers and Malaya by soldiers of the Scots Guards in 1948.
00:44:55
Speaker
Most of the sensitive documents kept by colonial authorities in Arden, where the army's intelligence cooperated a secret torture centres for several years in the 1960s, and every sensitive document kept by the authorities in British Guyana, a colony whose policies were heavily influenced by successive US governments and whose post-independence leader was toppled in a coup orchestrated by the CIA. The CIA are not coming out well in this story, are they? Yeah, I forgot that came up. I thought we were done with the CIA, but there's no getting away from them.
00:45:24
Speaker
So these documents that came out, it wasn't just here are some documents showing dodgy things that have been going on. It was also here are documents showing how a whole lot more documents have already been destroyed. And also here are documents showing that the government knew about this and was indeed encouraging it, apparently.
00:45:41
Speaker
In 1961, Ian McLeod, who was then Secretary of State for the Colonies, had directed that post-independence governments should not be allowed to keep any material that, quote, might embarrass Her Majesty's government, or that could embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants, or others, e.g. police informers, or anything that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might be used unethically by ministers in the successor government.
00:46:07
Speaker
Yes, because it would be very unethical to point out that we employed murderers and continue to employ the same murderers decades later. It would be very unethical to point out that some of these people had engaged in grossly abusive behaviour. That would be such a bad thing for someone to point out. Be so impolite.
00:46:29
Speaker
So yeah, the documentation that we do have involves stuff that talks about the process by which this happened and the orders that were given to see that it did happen. So there were, in some colonial administrations, you had things like MI5 or special branch agents would be vetting all these documents and then classifying them according to whether they could remain, whether they would have to be destroyed, whether they should be shipped back to Britain. Some of these classifications determined who was allowed to access the documents. And some of these classifications were along ethnic lines.
00:46:58
Speaker
Basically, you'd have documents from an African former colony where they'd say, yeah, Africans aren't allowed to read this, so only British people are allowed to access these ones. Or in some cases, non-British officials from colonies like, say, New Zealand or Australia or South Africa, the white ones. I'm saying the white ones. We're allowed to look at them.
00:47:22
Speaker
Some of the African colonies, the instructions about this operation itself included the directive that no African people should be involved in Operation Legacy or whatever it was being called in that particular host colony. Also, these orders made sure that there was to be no reference to the destroyed or removed documentation left
00:47:45
Speaker
behind. So the whole idea was we want to get rid of this stuff. We want to make sure that the post-independence governments don't have access to them, don't know that they ever even existed in the first place. And so some of this documentation we have includes fairly specific instructions that these documents should be burned and the ashes should be scattered or packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast.
00:48:14
Speaker
In particular, one example we have is from northern Rhodesia, where colonial officials were issued with orders to destroy all papers which are likely to be interpreted either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty's government. We couldn't possibly have anyone suggesting that the British government might be motivated by racial prejudice and religious bias. That just would not do.
00:48:39
Speaker
So again, as the quote from the Sato paper at the beginning said, this wasn't necessarily a top down operation so much as a case of all of these administrations kind of having the similar idea that what was the quote from the abstract? Some offices demonstrated a level of historical awareness regarding their actions, essentially being if people find out what went on here, it's not going to look good for us. So let's make sure that doesn't happen.
00:49:06
Speaker
So the people who were there on the ground had the motivation to do this anyway. And so the idea is that a lot of this kind of happened independently, but was then coordinated. Encouraged. Encouraged, and eventually all the stuff was gathered and sent to London. So it's a thing where individual actors initially started working on their own edges.
00:49:34
Speaker
And then the British government went, oh, it looks like a whole bunch of these people are independently covering up the crimes we've committed them. Wouldn't it be a good idea if we helped them with that cover up? So they create the conspiracy based upon pre-existing criminal activity.
00:49:54
Speaker
So, yeah, which is an interesting illustration of the way conspiracies can be structured. And I know in the past we've talked about things like the Murdoch media empire and how people say, well, come on, you know, you talk about all the Murdoch outlets are biased, but it's not like Murdoch himself is sending letters to everyone saying you must take this editorial slant and reply to it as well, but he doesn't need to.
00:50:20
Speaker
Yeah, he just needs to be the boss with a clearly stated political opinion. And all you've got to do is then go, well, how do I get promoted in the organization where the ultimate boss has a distinct political opinion? I probably don't write stories which praise Democrats and criticise Republicans. I'm not going to get promoted.
00:50:41
Speaker
Yeah, so in this case, you don't need a directive. This doesn't need to be kicked off by a directive from London saying, okay, everybody disposes the documents because their colonial or post-colonial administrations are already stacked with people who would be motivated to do exactly that.
00:50:59
Speaker
So I'll now skip to the end of that paper to read the conclusion, which restates this and sums it up quite well. It says, I'm not going to do the movie voice. Sources suggest that after the independence of India, the British Empire quickly started to prepare for eventual decolonisation in terms of the treatment of administrative records.
00:51:17
Speaker
Thus a policy of systematically purging documents originated in Ceylon and was codified in the Gold Coast. In both cases, important parts of the policy were developed more in the colonial governments than in London. The general idea was to remove documents that were deemed inconvenient, either for Britain or for its collaborators.
00:51:34
Speaker
As the protests expanded to other colonies such as Malaya and Tinganyika, London shared information about these precedents. Eventually, when the policy reached Uganda and Kenya, it started to attain a distinctively racialist character, strictly prohibiting servants of non-European descent from being involved. This was decided locally.
00:51:51
Speaker
The limitations in terms of time and manpower often mean that the job had to be finished very quickly, but at the same time, some officers were aware of the historical significance of the actions. Thus, Operation Negacy was conducted largely in a bottom-up fashion, initiated by the overseas governments, with the colonial office in London performing the role of a hub. London was not so much the brains of the operation as it was a sort of bookshelf, a place where the institutional memory of the different colonies was stored, information extracted when even necessary.
00:52:17
Speaker
The whole episode reminds us that the official mind as it relates to decolonization needs to be understood not only by reference to the highest level of strategic planning, but also in light of how it worked at the lower levels in each colonial administration on the ground.
00:52:31
Speaker
Now, interestingly, there were apparently 8,800 documents concerning Operation Legacy that were released by the Foreign Office. But those 8,800 were part of a secret archive of 1.2 million files in the Foreign Office's so-called special collections. So I've read articles that talked about the release of the stuff relating to Operation Legacy, which said that the Foreign Office had
00:52:59
Speaker
By 2013, the Foreign Office had said, we have a plan to release all of these documents. And at the time, people said, OK, what's the plan? And they said, we won't tell you yet.
00:53:11
Speaker
I'm not quite sure now, nine years on, what the state of it is. There is a website, there's a place that relates to the whole lot, but I don't know if absolutely all 1.2 million files of it has been released. No, I wasn't able to find out exactly how many documents may still remain unreleased. So there's a kind of interesting thing that goes on, and this will be relevant in a minute. There's a thing that goes on in the Roman Catholic Church.
00:53:41
Speaker
So it turns out that the Dominicans, by and large, control the Vatican presses, which is why Dominican scholars, like Augustine, there are complete works that have been published. But Franciscan scholars, say, like Don Scotis, those works are still being very, very slowly doled out. And Franciscans have accused the Dominicans
00:54:10
Speaker
of engaging in a kind of activity to delay Dunscoaters' work because some people might read the work of Dunscoaters and go, actually, he was a better thinker than Augustine or Aquinas.
00:54:25
Speaker
And so the Franciscans say, look, there is a plan to release all of the books and letters and bits of correspondence that Dunscotis produced. It just is really interesting how slow that plan is.
00:54:42
Speaker
In the same respect, you go, look, we're going to release all of the documents, but not right now. Not in one go. No, we need to go carefully through the documents and make sure that we redact the names of people who are still alive, who are alive in 1960 and still alive in the year of our Lord 2024.
00:55:03
Speaker
So I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a slow leak of information to try and make the pain of what happened at the end of the empire not be so bad for the current conservative administration. Yes, I mean, if they release it slowly enough, then by the time the worst of it or most of it is out, then, you know, maybe they just run out the clock or the people involved can be dead.
00:55:30
Speaker
Especially given that the reason why this documentation came out was that people who were tortured and the ones who didn't die during the prosecution of the Malmal Rebellion were going, we're going to sue the British government. The longer it takes for this information to count, the less likely there are to be people alive who can sue the British government for those historical injustices.
00:55:53
Speaker
And I think that's enough talk of operations. I think basically if you ever hear anything is designated as an operation, run a mile the other way. I would not trust any operation after this. Even one that might fix your spine? Well, I mean, I don't know. It depends if it has a particularly ominous name or not, I guess.
00:56:14
Speaker
What if it's Operation Josh Spying? No, that's not too bad. But I prefer... What about Operation Correction? Now that's a bit ominous. No. I don't want something like Operation Sunshine or Operation Fluffy Rebbits or something. I don't know.
00:56:34
Speaker
But anyway, that's it. We're done talking about operations here, but as you say, there are other operations, there are so many more operations, so we'll probably return to this topic at some time in the future. But now is not some time in the future, now is some time right now. Although, of course, by the time you're listening to this, now is actually the past. Yes, now will be then. What past is prologue?
00:56:55
Speaker
Two, in this case, a bonus episode, which although really I guess the bonus episode is more epilogue to this one, I'm not sure. But we're going to record one anyway, is the point. We're going to stop doing this episode and we're going to do a bonus episode for our patrons because they deserve it. Our patrons, they need every bonus that can be heaped upon them. So we might talk a little bit about the eclipse that occurred this week at Time of Recording in the US.
00:57:22
Speaker
And those wacky, those wacky funsters at Mossack Fonseca are back in the news again, apparently.
00:57:28
Speaker
Yes, so we're going back to a story that we reported on eight years ago, back in episode 92. Finally, the wheels of justice are turning. We'll talk about that after the break. Yes, no. So if you're a patron, strap in for some interesting talk about financial investigations or something. For the rest of you, thanks for listening anyway. And for all of you,
00:57:58
Speaker
Goodbye. Goodbye. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon.
00:58:41
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December was a night.