Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the Cia, and the Mafia

by Paul L. Williams

Gladio’s role in the strategy of tension might have gone undetected save for the massacre in Bologna. At 10:25 a.m. on August 2, 1980, a time bomb within an unattended suitcase exploded in the crowded, air-conditioned waiting room of the Central Station in Bologna, destroying most of the main building. Eighty-four people were killed in the bombing and more than two hundred wounded, making it the most savage attack to take place on Italian soil since World War II.61 Blame, of course, was placed on the Red Brigades and the radical left. But there was a problem that could not be resolved by the roundup of the usual suspects. The bomb that had been used in Bologna was not an ordinary explosive. It was a sophisticated device made of TNT and Composition B—a device that had been developed for use by the US military. What’s more, the bomb was very similar to the explosives which the Italian police had found in the arms dump near Trieste. The planners had made a mistake—a mistake that was complicated by the presence of members of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR, “Armed Revolutionary Nuclei”) at the train station. The NAR, like Ordine Nuovo, was a violent neofascist group, and its leader Valerio Fioravanti, had been slightly injured by blast.