Written by Inkspot Author, Bruno Noble
Related to This Article: Indie Book Club Podcast – What Makes a Great Historical Novel?
When, some time in 1992, a friend told me about the documentary on Operation Gladio he’d seen on the B.B.C. I wasn’t quite ready to hear it. My son had only recently been born, I’d moved house and started a new job and the 1991 recession was just behind us – life felt good. A story about secret terrorist organisations trained by Western intelligence agencies to mount campaigns of terror and murder in Europe and so discredit ‘the Left’ only clouded the sunny days ahead, and seemed far-fetched to my trusting ears.
No-one else I knew had seen the documentary and I never found any mention of it in British newspapers. I ran it by my Italian father-in-law who confirmed that what my friend had told me was true, but it was easy for me to discount what my father-in-law had to say because he was left-wing. English friends said it was probably all nonsense.
Still, I wasn’t so sure, as my wife had worked for Amnesty International in the Indonesia-occupied East Timor team in the late 80s, and I’d become aware of the extent to which the U.S.A. went to get the regime change it wanted. The Reagan and Bush administrations had trained and funded the Contras to overthrow the Nicaraguan government at around that time; in 1952 the CIA had executed a coup to overthrow Guatemala’s elected President Árbenz to install a right-wing government in its place; the Eisenhower administration had mounted a coup against Iran’s Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953; in 1973 Chile’s President Allende was overthrown with the help of the C.I.A; and in 1983, the U.S. military invaded Grenada to overthrow an elected government, and did the same in Panama in 1989. All of which made Operation Gladio’s activities all the more plausible to me.
I met an elderly American on holiday – in a fairy tale location, the medieval village of Coletta in Liguria, Italy – and following on from a discussion about the Gulf War, when he started talking about Blackwater (the U.S.’s private military contractor) and I asked him about Gladio, he became so excited he could barely contain himself. We met numerous times over the next few days, so he could share his stories of clandestine American interventions in foreign nations. He was to become my inspiration for Robert – ‘Bobby’ – Bravo in The Colletta Cassettes.
After the publication of my first novel, in 2018, I started researching Gladio, reading books, PhD theses and watching YouTube videos of interviews with former spies and politicians. The Allies’ victory never felt as certain as it appears today, with the benefit of hindsight. So, during the war, the Allies prepared for the possibility of a German victory by creating ‘stay-behind’ guerrilla warfare units – in Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Turkey. They were intended to attack enemy supply routes in each of the occupied countries, working with local partisans to destroy infrastructure and harass troop movements. Volunteers were trained in handling explosives and in living rough among the local populations, in espionage and in reconnaissance that would have to be conducted in dangerous environments. In Italy this unit was called Gladio.
However, the war won, the Allies chose not to disband Gladio.
On the contrary, it was strengthened and expanded, with two objectives. One, countering a possible Soviet invasion and, two, of weakening Italy’s Communist Party in any event, by generating anti-communist sentiment and polarising popular opinion to save the Italian nation from the perils of communism. And to think this was achieved over a period of 30 years by the bombing of trains, squares and banks that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people and blaming it on ‘the Left’. It culminated in the 1980 bombing of Bologna railway station in which 85 people were killed and over 200 wounded, two years after the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, when The Colletta Cassettes is set. The existence of Gladio was only revealed to the public in 1990 by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, in a speech to the Italian Senate.
I’d ask my wife’s relatives in Italy about Gladio and they would shrug and say, Yes, it’s all true, or, Yes, we know but we don’t want to be reminded about it; remember, we lived through these ‘years of lead’. And yet, in England, most people thought I was making it all up. Gladio was ‘just another conspiracy theory’ for many, and I began to really want to take the Gladio story to today’s English public. However, in researching it, I realised that I (a) wasn’t a historian and (b) didn’t want to rehash what others had covered before me.
At around that time, after my first novel – that purported to be philosophical and focused on questions of identity and self – my son suggested I chose a ‘lighter’ topic for my next one, so I begun to write a teenage romance set in the beautiful village of Colletta. I quickly decided that this gentle story would be ideal to carry the weightier story of Gladio, and so bring it to the attention of a wider readership without delivering an overt history lesson. Hence, I have the teenager’s father, journalist Peter Kentish, interview retired C.I.A. agent Bravo, while the son, Sebastian, pursues Rosetta in Colletta…. The novel, then, becomes a tale about the loss of innocence on two levels: Sebastian’s sexual innocence, as he experiences love and infatuation for the first time, and Kentish’s political innocence, as he becomes aware of the machinations of the West’s political class.
