This article serves as an open letter, primarily to Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI) designee. It would also be of interest to planners in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO). Take note that rather than re-hashing some well-documented historical subjects, I will be relying heavily on quoting the InfoGalactic Wiki. Also, note that this is an article about strategy rather than tactics.
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Carborundum
With casualties mounting after more than two years of intense fighting in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Army is quite simply losing its war of attrition against the combined Russian ground and air forces. Russia is a much larger nation with a much larger army and air force. In a war of attrition, time is on their side. Meanwhile, Ukraine is now running out of Military Age Males (MAMs). The MAM manpower shortage is now so acute that the Biden administration recently urged the Ukrainian government to start drafting 18-year-olds. The sad truth is that if the war drags on, by 2027 the Ukrainian Army will predominantly be composed of very young conscripts, and men in the 50s. Most of those in the ages between will be battlefield statistics. (Read: killed or permanently disabled.)
With that demographic imperative in mind, it seems obvious that in a best case, Ukraine will be forced to cede some territory in Crimea — the eastern portion of their nation — to the Russians, and parlay for peace. In a worst case, Russia will commit to a much longer war, and seek to conquer the proverbial “Whole Enchilada.” That would transform the war from a simple war of attrition and limited territorial conquest into a full-scale war of subjugation and genocide.
The fight that the Ukrainian armed forces have put up in defending its territory is commendable. But the sheer weight of the Russian forces and the Russian government’s willingness to fight a relatively static war of numbers has made the loss of some ground in Ukraine almost inevitable.
In rethinking the American strategy in Ukraine, one key aspect is contingency planning for if and when Ukraine is partly or entirely overrun by Russian forces. In my estimation, Moldova is similarly at risk. The thrust of this article is that the United States needs to develop a Stay Behind Strategy, in planning their military assistance for Ukraine, and possibly elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Baltic nations, and Scandinavia.
What Is A Stay-Behind?
To quote the InfoGalactic Wiki:
“A stay-behind operation is one where a country places secret operatives or organizations in its own territory, for use in case of a later enemy occupation. The stay-behind operatives would then form the nucleus of a resistance movement, and act as spies from behind enemy lines. Small-scale operations may cover discrete areas, but larger stay-behind operations envisage reacting to the conquest of whole countries.
The term stay-behind also refers to a military tactic whereby specially trained soldiers let themselves be overrun by enemy forces in order to conduct intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance tasks often from pre-prepared hides.”
[JWR Adds: A good example of this was the construction of an elaborate hidden subterranean British Army surveillance post on the island of Gibraltar during World War 2. Its existence was not revealed publicly until 1997.]
The History of Stay-Behinds
Again quoting the InfoGalactic Wiki:
“Stay-behind operations of significant size existed during World War II. The United Kingdom put in place the Auxiliary Units. Partisans in Axis-occupied Soviet territory in the early 1940s operated with a stay-behind element.
During the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) coordinated and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) helped to set up clandestine stay-behind networks in many European countries, intending to activate them in the event of Warsaw Pact forces taking over an area. According to Martin Packard they were “financed, armed, and trained in covert resistance activities, including assassination, political provocation and disinformation”. These clandestine stay-behind organizations (SBOs) were created and run under the auspices of intelligence services and recruited their agents from amongst the civilian population. Specially selected civilian stay-behind networks or SBOs were created in many Western countries, including Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Austria and others, including Iran. They prepared to organize resistance, sabotage and intelligence-gathering in occupied (NATO) territory. The most famous of these clandestine stay-behind networks was the Italian Operation Gladio, acknowledged by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on October 24, 1990.
Many hidden weapons caches have been found in Italy, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries that had been at the disposition of these “secret armies”. As late as 1996, the United Kingdom revealed to the German government the existence of stay-behind weapons and equipment caches in West Berlin. The content of these caches offer an insight into the equipment supplied to (German) stay-behind networks. In two of the secret caches, buried in the Grunewald forest, police found boxes with 9 mm pistols and ammunition, knives, navigation equipment, an RS-6 “spy radio”, various manuals, tank- and aircraft-recognition books, a flask of brandy, and chocolate, as well as a copy of Total Resistance, the guerrilla warfare manual written in 1957 by Swiss Major Hans von Dach.
During the Cold War, military stay-behind units were usually long-range reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition units that were specifically earmarked for operations in the early phase of a potential war (D-Day to D+1-5). These units would quickly deploy forward, link up with the rear guard or ‘aggressive delaying force’ and ‘stay-behind’ as these forces withdrew, letting themselves be bypassed by advancing Warsaw Pact troops. Exploiting pre-reconnoitred hide sites and caches of arms, ammunition, and radios, they would then start to conduct intelligence gathering operations in what is called static covert surveillance as well as target acquisition for high value targets such as enemy headquarters, troop concentrations, and atomic weapons systems. They would also perform demolition tasks, in what was referred to as the ‘demolition belt’, at places where bottlenecks were likely to occur for enemy formations. Another task would have been escape and evasion (E&E) assistance to downed pilots and others needing repatriation.
Operation Gladio
Operation Gladio was the codename for clandestine “stay-behind” operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union (WU) (founded in 1948), and subsequently by NATO (formed in 1949) and by the CIA (established in 1947), in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, Operation Gladio is used as an informal name for all of them. Stay-behind operations were prepared in many NATO member countries, and in some neutral countries.
After World War II, the UK and the US decided to create “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Arms caches were hidden, escape routes prepared, and loyal members recruited, whether in Italy or in other European countries. Its clandestine “cells” were to stay behind in enemy-controlled territory and to act as resistance movements, conducting sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassinations. Thankfully, NATO’s “stay-behind” organizations were never called upon to resist a Soviet invasion.”
There were fairly sophisticated stay-behind units that were well-financed and well-stocked with key logistics. Some of these were kept in traditional aboveground overt warehouses, but others were covert buried caches with locations that were known only by a few trusted operatives. It has been reported by journalists that some of these Cold War stay-behind caches still exist to the present day, and have been maintained by families multi-generationally. They are now completely detached from and without any oversight from their original “sponsoring” intelligence agencies.
SBOs in NATO countries
The following is a truncated list of nations with Stay-Behind Operations (SBOs), as described by InfoGalactic:
Italy
“The Italian NATO stay-behind organization, dubbed “Gladio”, was set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani‘s (DC) supervision.
General Gerardo Serravalle, who commanded the Italian Gladio from 1971 to 1974, related that “in the 1970s the members of the CPC [Coordination and Planning Committee] were the officers responsible for the secret structures of Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Italy. These representatives of the secret structures met every year in one of the capitals… At the stay-behind meetings representatives of the CIA were always present. They had no voting rights and were from the CIA headquarters of the capital in which the meeting took place… members of the US Forces Europe Command were present, also without voting rights. “
Next to the CPC a second secret command post was created in 1957, the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC). According to the Belgian Parliamentary Committee on Gladio, the ACC was “responsible for coordinating the ‘Stay-behind’ networks in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, United Kingdom, and the United States”. During peacetime, the activities of the ACC “included elaborating the directives for the network, developing its clandestine capability and organising bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime, it was to plan stay-behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE; organizers were to activate clandestine bases and organize operations from there”. General Serravalle declared to the Commissione Stragi headed by senator Giovanni Pellegrino that the Italian Gladio members trained at a military base in Britain.
Belgium
After the 1967 withdrawal of France from NATO’s military structure, the SHAPE headquarters were displaced to Mons in Belgium. In 1990, following France’s denial of any “stay-behind” French army, Giulio Andreotti publicly said the last Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) meeting, at which the French branch of Gladio was present, had been on October 23 and 24, 1990, under the presidency of Belgian General Van Calster, director of the Belgian military General Service for Intelligence (SGR). In November, Guy Coëme, the Minister of Defense, acknowledged the existence of a Belgian “stay-behind” army, raising concerns about a similar implication in terrorist acts as in Italy. The same year, the European Parliament sharply condemned NATO and the United States in a resolution for having manipulated European politics with the stay-behind armies.
New legislation governing intelligence agencies’ missions and methods was passed in 1998, following two government inquiries and the creation of a permanent parliamentary committee in 1991, which was to bring them under the authority of Belgium’s federal agencies. The commission was created following events in the 1980s, which included the Brabant massacres and the activities of the far-right group Westland New Post.
Denmark
The Danish stay-behind army was code-named Absalon, after a Danish archbishop, and led by E. J. Harder. It was hidden in the military secret service Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE). I
France
In 1947, Interior Minister Édouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed “Plan Bleu”. The next year, the “Western Union Clandestine Committee” (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. In 1949, the WUCC was integrated into NATO, whose headquarters were established in France, under the name “Clandestine Planning Committee” (CPC). In 1958, NATO founded the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare.
The network was supported with elements from SDECE, and had military support from the 11th Choc regiment. The former director of DGSE, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, alleged in a 1992 interview with The Nation, that certain elements from the network were involved in terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. A section of the 11th Choc regiment split over the 1962 Évian peace accords, and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), but it is unclear if this also involved members of the French stay-behind network.
La Rose des Vents and Arc-en-ciel (“Rainbow”) network were part of Gladio. François de Grossouvre was Gladio’s leader for the region around Lyon in France until his alleged suicide on April 7, 1994. Grossouvre would have asked Constantin Melnik, leader of the French secret services during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), to return to activity. He was living in comfortable exile in the US, where he maintained links with the Rand Corporation.
Germany
US intelligence also assisted in the set up of a West German stay-behind network.
In 1976, West German secret service BND secretary Heidrun Hofer was arrested after having revealed the secrets of the West German stay-behind army to her husband, who was a spy of the KGB.
Civilians recruited as stay-behind partisans were equipped with a clandestine shortwave radio homed in on a fixed frequency. It had a keyboard with digital encryption, making use of traditional Morse code obsolete. They had a cache of further equipment for signalling helicopters or submarines to drop special agents who were to stay in the partisan’s homes while mounting sabotage operations against the communists.
Greece
When Greece joined NATO in 1952, the country’s special forces, LOK (Lochoi Oreinōn Katadromōn, i.e., “mountain raiding companies”), were integrated into the European stay-behind network. The CIA and LOK reconfirmed on March 25, 1955, their mutual cooperation in a secret document signed by US General Truscott for the CIA, and Konstantinos Dovas, chief of staff of the Greek military.
The Greek defense minister confirmed that a branch of the network, known as Operation Sheepskin, operated in his country until 1988. They reportedly dismantled the ‘stay behind’ network in 1988.
The Netherlands
Speculation that the Netherlands was involved in Gladio arose from the accidental discovery of large arms caches in 1980 and 1983. In the latter incident, people walking in a forest near the village of Rozendaal, near Arnhem, chanced upon a large hidden cache of arms, containing dozens of hand grenades, semiautomatic rifles, automatic pistols, munitions, and explosives. That discovery forced the Dutch government to confirm that the arms were related to NATO planning for unorthodox warfare.
Already in 1990, it was known that the weapons cache near Velp, while accidentally ‘discovered’ in 1983, had been plundered partially before. It still contained dozens of hand grenades, semiautomatic rifles, automatic pistols, munitions, and explosives at the time of discovery, but five hand grenades had gone missing. A Dutch investigative television program revealed on 9 September 2007, that another arms cache that had belonged to Gladio had been ransacked in the 1980s. It was located in a park near Scheveningen. Some of the stolen weapons, including hand grenades and machine guns, later turned up when police officials arrested criminals John Mieremet and Sam Klepper in 1991. The Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD feared at the time that disclosure of the Gladio history of these weapons would have been politically sensitive.
Norway
In 1957, the director of the secret service NIS, Vilhelm Evang, protested strongly against the proactive intelligence activities at AFNORTH, as described by the chairman of CPC: “[NIS] was extremely worried about activities carried out by officers at Kolsås. This concerned SB, Psywar, and Counter Intelligence.” These activities supposedly included the blacklisting of Norwegians. SHAPE denied these allegations. Eventually, the matter was resolved in 1958, after Norway was assured about how stay-behind networks were to be operated.
In 1978, the police discovered an arms cache and radio equipment at a mountain cabin and arrested Hans Otto Meyer, a businessman accused of being involved in selling illegal alcohol. Meyer claimed that the weapons were supplied by Norwegian intelligence. Rolf Hansen, defene minister at that time, stated the network was not in any way answerable to NATO and had no CIA connection.
Portugal
In 1966, the CIA set up Aginter Press which, under the direction of Captain Yves Guérin-Sérac (who had taken part in the founding of the OAS), ran a secret stay-behind army and trained its members in covert action techniques amounting to terrorism, including bombings, silent assassinations, subversion techniques, clandestine communication and infiltration and colonial warfare.
Turkey
In an excerpt from Mehtap Söyler’s 2015 book entitled The Turkish Deep State: State Consolidation, Civil-Military Relations and Democracy, Söyler details how certain Western forces encouraged Turkish nationalism via Operation Gladio. Specifically, Operation Gladio empowered Turanism through the founding member of the Counter-Guerrilla; Alparslan Türkeş — a product of that CIA initiative.
As one of the nations that prompted the Truman Doctrine, Turkey is one of the first countries to participate in Operation Gladio and, some say, the only country where it has not been purged. The counter-guerrillas’ existence in Turkey was revealed in 1973 by then-prime minister Bülent Ecevit.
Parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries
Austria
In Austria, the first secret stay-behind army was exposed in 1947. It had been set up by the far-right Theodor Soucek and Hugo Rössner, who both insisted during their trial that “they were carrying out the secret operation with the full knowledge and support of the US and British occupying powers.” Sentenced to death, they had their sentences commuted to life in prison and 20 years, respectively, by Karl Renner, to prevent them from potentially becoming martyrs. In August 1952, the convicts were pardoned and released by President Theodor Körner.
While there is evidence suggesting that the activities of Soucek and Rössner were tolerated to an extent by local occupation authorities, available American archives do not suggest that they had any connection to U.S. intelligence. A secret review of the situation by US forces in Austria in early January 1948 implies that while the group were presenting themselves as anti-communist allies, the Americans did not trust them, viewing them as “adventurers and opportunists.”
Interior Minister Franz Olah set up a new secret army codenamed Österreichischer Wander-, Sport- und Geselligkeitsverein (OeWSGV, literally “Austrian Association of Hiking, Sports and Society“), with the cooperation of MI6 and the CIA. He later explained that “we bought cars under this name. We installed communication centers in several regions of Austria”, confirming that “special units were trained in the use of weapons and plastic explosives”. He stated that “there must have been a couple of thousand people working for us… Only very, very highly positioned politicians and some members of the union knew about it”.
In 1965, police discovered a stay-behind arms cache in an old mine close to Windisch-Bleiberg and forced the British authorities to hand over a list with the location of 33 other caches in Austria.
In 1990, when secret “stay-behind” armies were uncovered all around Europe, the Austrian government said that no secret army had existed in the country. However, six years later, The Boston Globe revealed the existence of secret CIA arms caches in Austria.
Finland
In 1944, Sweden worked with Finnish Intelligence to set up a stay-behind network of agents within Finland to keep track of post-war activities in that country. While this network was allegedly never put in place, Finnish codes, SIGINT equipment, and documents were brought to Sweden and apparently exploited until the 1980s.
In 1945, Lauri Kumpulainen, a Finnish soldier with left-wing sympathies, exposed a secret stay-behind army which was closed down (so-called ‘Weapons Cache Case‘). This operation was organized by Finnish general staff officers (without foreign help) in 1944 to hide weapons in order to sustain large-scale guerrilla warfare in the event the Soviet Union tried to occupy Finland following the end of combat on the Finnish-Soviet front of WWII. Of those 5,000 to 10,000 people involved in the case, 1,488 of them were convicted. Most of them received prison terms of 1–4 months. Overall, the prison sentences of those convicted totaled nearly 400 years.
In 1991, the Swedish media claimed that a secret stay-behind army had existed in neutral Finland with an exile base in Stockholm.
Spain
Several events prior to Spain’s 1982 membership in NATO have also been tied to Gladio. In May 1976, half a year after Franco‘s death, two Carlist militants were shot down by far-right terrorists, among whom were Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and members of the Apostolic Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), demonstrating connections between Gladio and the South American “Dirty War” of the Operation Condor. This incident became known as the Montejurra incident. According to a report by the Italian CESIS (executive committee for Intelligence and Security Services), Carlo Cicuttini (who took part in the 1972 Peteano bombing in Italy alongside Vincenzo Vinciguerra), participated in the 1977 Massacre of Atocha in Madrid, killing five people (including several lawyers), members of the Workers’ Commissions trade-unions closely linked with the Spanish Communist Party. Cicuttini was a naturalized Spaniard and exiled in Spain since 1972 (date of the Peteano bombing).
Following Andreotti’s 1990 revelations, Adolfo Suárez, Spain’s first democratically elected prime minister after Franco’s death, denied ever having heard of Gladio. President of the Spanish government in 1981–82, during the transition to democracy, Calvo Sotelo stated that Spain had not been informed of Gladio when it entered NATO. Asked about Gladio’s relations to Francoist Spain, he said that such a network was not necessary under Franco, since “the regime itself was Gladio.”
André Moyen, former Belgian secret agent, also declared that Gladio had operated in Spain. He said that Gladio had bases in Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastián, and the Canary Islands.
Sweden
In 1951, CIA officer William Colby, based at the CIA station in Stockholm, supported the training of stay-behind armies in neutral Sweden and Finland and in the NATO members Norway and Denmark. In 1953, the police arrested Swedish Nazi Otto Hallberg and discovered the preparations for the Swedish stay-behind army. Hallberg was set free and charges against him were dropped.
In 1990, General Bengt Gustafsson, confirmed that a stay-behind network had existed in the country, but incorrectly added that neither NATO nor the CIA had been involved. Paul Garbler, a CIA officer who had served in Sweden, corrected that Sweden was a “direct participant” in the network, adding, “I’m not able to talk about it without causing the Swedes a good deal of heartburn.”
Switzerland
In Switzerland, a secret force called P-26 (“Projekt 26”) was discovered, by coincidence, a few months before Giulio Andreotti’s October 1990 revelations. After the “secret files scandal” (Fichenaffäre), Swiss members of parliament started investigating the Defense Department in the summer of 1990. According to Felix Würsten of the ETH Zurich, “P-26 was not directly involved in the network of NATO’s secret armies but it had close contact to MI6.”
In 1990, Colonel Herbert Alboth, a former commander of P-26, declared in a confidential letter to the Defense Department that he was willing to reveal “the whole truth”. He was later found in his house, stabbed with his own bayonet. The detailed parliamentary report on the Swiss secret army was presented to the public on 17 November 1990. According to The Guardian, “P-26 was backed by P-27, a private foreign intelligence agency funded partly by the government, and by a special unit of Swiss army intelligence.
Total Resistance
Hans von Dach (1927–2003) was a Swiss military theorist. He was the author of the influential seven-volume 1957 guerrilla warfare manual Total Resistance (Der totale Widerstand: Kleinkriegsanleitung für Jedermann), which made him the internationally best-known Swiss tactical theorist.
Von Dach, a Bernese, was employed from 1970 to 1980 in the training division of the Swiss Defense Department. His emphasis on broadly based irregular warfare was not shared by senior Army leaders, who preferred to focus Switzerland’s Cold War defense efforts on conventional combined-arms tactics and equipment. Consequently, his views had no influence on army strategy.
Despite the wide readership reached by Total Resistance, von Dach was not promoted beyond the relatively junior rank of Major which he attained in 1963, 25 years before his retirement in 1988. This may have been to make it easier for the army to disclaim responsibility for his writings, which were criticized as advocating conduct that would violate the laws of war. In 1974, the Chief of the General Staff vetoed the publication of Total Resistance, then very popular among officers, as an army manual, partly because of these concerns. Von Dach dismissed them; believing that the Soviet Union, which he considered the most likely occupying force during the Cold War, would have no regard for the legalities of war in any case. He did enjoy tacit support for his authorial work by his military superiors, because the implicit threat of a sustained defensive guerrilla warfare effort represented by his writings was considered to contribute to the overall Swiss defense strategy of deterrence (dissuasion).
In addition to Total Resistance, von Dach authored more than a hundred publications about tactics, including army manuals, defense journal articles and books, such as Gefechtstechnik (“Combat technique”, various editions from 1958 to 1977), Kampfbeispiele (“Combat examples”, 1977) and Kampfverfahren der Verteidigung (“Defensive combat techniques”, 1959). A gifted draftsman, he illustrated many of his own works.”
[End of Ingfogalactic Wiki quotes]
Simple and Widely Dispersed
To my mind, Stay-Behind logistics and training should center around just a few types of relatively simple weapons cached in huge numbers, in small, very widely dispersed underground or architectural caches. To keep this leaderless resistance system impenetrable and resiliant, no paper trail should be maintained.
Ideally, there should be firearms and explosives hidden in or near about 30% of Ukraine’s detached private homes and farmhouses. For far less money than the U.S. has invested in artillery shells for Ukraine, we could help arm an enormous Stay Behind army that would be capable of operating for decades without additional support. In essence, we’d be enabiing an army of resistance that could fight a guerilla war that the Russians could never truly win.
The Stay Behind weapons should include:
- Bulgarian, Romanian (FEG), and Chinese Makarov pistols. (A 9x18mm Makarov pistol is pictured at the top of this article.) Perhaps a few other pistols chambered in the 9×18 Makarov cartridge could also be produced or procured as surplus. In Eastern Europe, 9×18 Makarov cartridges are much more widely available than 9×19 Parabellum, so the Makarov round is the logical choice. Substantial numbers of Makarov pistols are available on the global surplus market.
- Folding-stock variant AKM battle rifles. In my estimation, folding stock variants are the most apropos, because they are more concealable than fixed-stock rifles. Folding-stock AKMs have been produced by more than a dozen countries. Huge numbers of them are available on the global surplus market.
- Fragmentation hand grenades of various types.
- LAW Rockets, or clones thereof. (For example: Russian RPG-18, Polish RPG-76 Komar, or Yugoslavian M80 Zolja)
- Command-detonated MON-50 Claymore mine clones.
- Thermite grenades of various types.
For the sake of plausible deniability, all of the weapons and ammunition could be older surplus, sourced from former Soviet Bloc nations. Without a chain of custody (sans end-use paperwork), their source would be fully deniable. And any items of new manufacture could be “sterile” — with no origin markings. Again, deniable.
Ukraine, Moldova, and?
In my estimation, Moldova should actually be the higher priority for covert Stay Behind logistics and training. Why? Because it is a smaller and weaker country than Ukraine. So it is at risk of being completely overrun by invading Russian forces in just a few weeks or perhaps even in just a few days.
And if Russia begins to hint at any further territorial ambitions, then Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway are also all good candidates for new Stay Behind programs.
The spirit of resistance is indomitable. Let’s do our part, by making provision for it. – JWR