A good time to investigate the secret wars in Greece and Turkey?

NATO Watch Comment

The commemorations of the 60th anniversary of Greek and Turkish membership of NATO have tended to focus on the two countries’ contributions to grand strategy: guarding the Alliance’s southern flank (during the Cold War Turkey protected a third of NATO’s total borders with Warsaw Pact countries) and their more contemporary assistance in addressing new security challenges such as violent extremism or the Afghanistan ‘stabilisation’ mission. There is only limited recognition that Greece and Turkey joined NATO in 1952 as part of the Truman containment policy—directed at ensuring that these two countries and others like them ended up on the right side of the Iron Curtain—and none whatsoever as to the controversial nature of that policy.

No aspect was more controversial than the CIA and NATO’s ‘secret armies’ (Operation Gladio) that operated under various guises and names for nearly four decades from the start of the Cold War. This shadowy network of parallel intelligence and armed organisations across many NATO and even neutral countries was intended to continue anti-communist operations in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion.  When the allegations first came to light in 1990, NATO responded with a denial (nothing was known of Gladio) and official indifference continues to this day, despite parliamentary inquiries in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium. An incisive study by Daniele Ganser on the issue published in 2005 concluded that the secret stay-behind armies of NATO were both a prudent precaution and a source of terror.

The 60th anniversary of NATO membership ought to provide a timely opportunity for a joint Greek-Turkish parliamentary investigation of the history of the Gladio activities in the Alliance’s southern edge. NATO should throw open its archives to support such an inquiry. Several accounts attribute these clandestine Turkish and Greek Gladio activities as contributing, either actively or passively, to many of the destabilising and terrorist activities within both countries during the Cold War, including four coup d'états (three in Turkey in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and one in Greece in 1967).

With periodic whispered fears of a return to military rule in both Greece and Turkey, a joint truth and reconciliation process to examine past state sponsored terrorist operations and human rights violations might contribute to a reduction in contemporary extremist positions, as well as mark an important step on the path towards Greek-Turkish reconciliation.

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