Sott Talk Radio logo
This week on SOTT Talk Radio we discussed the biggest story never told in modern Europe: NATO's secret warfare against European civilians. Proxy wars, false-flag terrorism, assassinations, economic warfare, color revolutions, interfering in elections... it's no secret that the U.S. establishment has done all that (and more) through its application of a psychopathic 'strategy of tension' around the world since the Second World War.

What is not generally known is that such 'secret warfare' was also taking place in Europe. For the briefest of moments, CIA and MI6 coordination of a 40-year-long, Europe-wide terror campaign - going by the code-name 'Operation GLADIO' in Italy - came to light in several European media in 1990, but the scandal was quickly buried by the rather fortuitous invasion by Saddam Hussein of Kuwait and the subsequent build-up to NATO's first 'expeditionary mission' to Iraq.

We spoke with Dr. Daniele Ganser, author of the seminal book NATO's Secret Armies in Europe, now translated into ten languages. Ganser is a historian lecturing in contemporary history, energy issues and geo-strategy at the Universities of St. Gallen and Basel in Switzerland. Check it out...

Running Time: 02:11:00

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript:

Niall: Hello and welcome to another SOTT Talk Radio show. I'm Niall Bradley. My co-host is Joe Quinn.

Joe: Hi there.

Niall: And with us this week to discuss NATO's secret armies in Europe is special guest Dr. Daniele Ganser. Daniele is a historian and researcher; specializing in energy issues, economic history, geostrategy and international contemporary history since 1945. He is the founder and owner of the Swiss Institute for Peace and Energy Research. Daniele lectures history and the future of energy systems at the University of St. Gallen and conflicts studies at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Basel. His book NATO's Secret Armies in Europe has been translated into 10 languages and he has a new book out called Europe in the Oil Rush depicting the struggle for oil in the future. A very warm welcome to you Daniele. Thanks very much for coming on our show.

Daniele: Thank you very much for the invitation.

Niall: Well, we've been aware of your book for some time and we've read it and it's absolutely excellent. It was published in 2005 but the research that went into it was originally part of your PhD thesis.

Daniele: That's correct yes. I did my PhD in history in the late '90s and at that time people thought terrorism was not very interesting. But I decided to research terrorism and manipulated terrorism and I finished the PhD in September 2001.

Niall: Well that's interesting timing isn't it?

Daniele: It is.

Niall: People say "Well, that's past now".

Joe: It suddenly came back...

Daniele: It came back.

Joe: ...front and center in a big way right when you finished your PhD. What was your impression at the time of the September 11 attacks after having just completed all of this work?

Daniele: I was surprised that the terror issue came back so strongly because I started the PhD in '98, researched it in '99, 2000, 2001, and at that time it was four years of research. I had many kinds of people who said "Why don't you work on the United Nations or NATO or NGO issues? Why do you work on terrorism? That was interesting in the '70s in Germany when we had the Rote Armee Fraktion (The Red Army Faction) or when the Ireland conflict with IRA was hot and boiling, but now it's a history thing." And I said "No, no, I'm really interested in this". And then when the 9/11 attacks happened I was of course from the beginning always bothered by this question: is this now manipulated state terrorism or is this real; Al-Qaeda is guilty and it was Osama bin Laden who surprised Bush and Cheney? From the beginning I had this mindset because it was my academic training.

Joe: Yeah, so your friends or peers were suggesting that you go and work for NATO but instead you decided to investigate NATO, essentially as part of your PhD. Just in reading your book, I suppose apart from the shocking details within the actual chronology of events in Europe, the most shocking thing for me is that, as far as I'm aware of, very, very few people know about this; know about Gladio, know about NATO's stay-behind armies, or have any awareness that any of this was going on. Today if you go and ask someone if they know what Gladio is they'll say no.

Daniele: No, they have no clue. Most people out there in the street - do the test with your friends and ask them whether they know what NATO's secret armies or Gladio is, and most would say they have never heard of it because in fact when I approached the subject, I went to some professors in international history and contemporary history and I asked them "Do you have any knowledge on Operation Gladio?" That was at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the LSE in London, that was a pretty good university and these professors are widely read and they're clever guys, and they said "Oh, you know I remember vaguely that in 1990 there was some Italian political scandal and something emerged which the details I can't recall." So they had no clue of it. And if the professors for political science and contemporary history don't know it how are you going to expect anybody in the street to know much about it. And that hasn't changed until today. My book has reached a certain audience of a few thousand people but obviously it's not millions that read it. It's a few thousand.

Joe: Yeah, unfortunately. Why do you think people like you just cited, professors and eminent universities, etc., why were they not aware of this? Is it the information wasn't available? Surely they had come across it or seen reference to it, but why do you think historians would have so little interest in this? Is there some kind of emotional component where they don't want to believe what the evidence suggests? Or...?

Daniele: I think the main reason for historians not to research secret warfare - it clearly is an example of secret warfare and we have many examples of secret warfare during the last 70 years. The main reasons that they don't want to research secret warfare is because it's such a difficult area to research. You always have a mixture of lies and propaganda and hard facts and it's very hard to say is this now hard fact or is this lies or is this propaganda?

Niall: Right.

Daniele: So if go into the subject you can burn yourself, in the sense that you will pick up a story and you think it's factual and then it can be that you find out "Oh no, I got it wrong; I got it all wrong. It's the secret service who put out some stories and I followed that story." I think it's more that it's like a jungle. It's a very big jungle with very, very dangerous animals and they say "Why should I go into that jungle? It's a mess. I don't want to go into that terrorism debate. I don't want to go into the secret warfare debate." And so they stay away. But still, if you look at the market there are lots of books from veteran soldiers who write about their lives basically or people who worked in the secret services who then publish their books, or parliamentary reports from senators who've investigated the secret services, how they operate and what's going on. So I think in the end it's possible to go into that big jungle and to find a few facts. It's possible. But it's always delicate.

Joe: Yeah well, you've certainly done a very good job. You have dared to go where apparently other historians dare not go and it's a very well researched book, I don't think anybody could question the evidence that you've presented. But maybe just to start out you can give us a short as possible description of what Gladio or NATO stay-behind armies were.

Daniele: The secret armies were set up after WWII. So WWII ended in 1945 and then NATO was formed in 1949, so just four years after the end of the Second World War NATO was formed. And NATO at the time had the clear task to fight communism, to fight the Soviet Union. But they had the problem that they were thinking if western Europe is occupied by the red army, if the Russians come and occupy Germany, France and Italy and Spain - all countries - then we need to have this secret weapon. We need to have a resistance army that operates behind enemy lines. That's why you have the term 'stay-behind'. And so they set up a secret army and said "You will operate behind enemy lines. And that's why we give you arms caches hidden in forests or in Italy sometimes in cemeteries or in remote villages". And they had explosives and they had guns and the idea was to work as a resistance and to blow up communications structures of the occupying Soviet army or to blow up bridges or if you then have NATO pilots who fight in France, against Soviets occupying France, if they were shot down they could then infiltrate these pilots.

So that was the original idea, to just have a second option, a second card. And William Colby who in the '70s was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the American foreign secret service, he wrote a book called Honorable Men where he tried to defend the CIA. He wrote that book and he explained how set up the secret armies in the neutral countries, in Sweden and in Finland; then he set them up in NATO countries, in Norway and in Denmark. That really was the official story, just to become active in case of a Soviet invasion. Obviously we know today that there was no such invasion but there was a more sinister and darker option to these secret armies and that was exactly to become active in case of emergency, in the total absence of a Soviet invasion.

Niall: That was the justification for it, in the event of a Soviet invasion. What it seemed to morph into was in the event of a leftist shift in power in any given country that had a secret army. And it was at this point at which these networks would become activated.

Daniele: That is the delicate part of this.

Niall: It's incredible when you think of 14 countries; how many different political crises or even just routine elections did each of those countries have in that span of 40, 50 years and how many of them were interfered with by the activation of one of these networks.

Daniele: Yeah, that is really the thing. When you look at the history of Europe, you take it from '45 until 2014 today, most people think of Europe as just a place of peace; there was no war, there was no problem, there was no terror. It was just a place of stability. That's not true. That's a very superficial look at it. Obviously we didn't have the Vietnam War here. We didn't have the Korean War here. We were not bombed like Iraq or Afghanistan or Sudan or many other countries but Europe had many problems during the cold war. We had military coups, three of them in Turkey. We had a right-wing dictatorship in Spain; Franco was a right-wing dictatorship. And in Portugal under Salazar. And we had the military coup in Greece in the '60s.

We had a lot of terrorist attacks in Italy in the '60s and the '70s and into the '80s. We had terrorist attacks in the '80s in Belgium, in northern France terrorist attacks. I researched it and I tried to find out whether this secret army organized by NATO, run by the CIA and run by MI6, had anything to do with these tragic events because it has to be said, in all honesty, that quite a few of these secret soldiers were just waiting for the Soviet invasion. These were people inspired by the French resistance, who had fought against Hitler or with the Norwegian resistance which had fought against the German occupation of Norway in WWII. And they thought it's very possible that the Soviets come and occupy our country. Now in hindsight we know that this didn't happen but we can't sort of say that they should have known that in the '50s. They didn't have that certainty.

I always make this point, that there were a few good people in these secret armies and we can't all lump them together as terrorists. That would be unfair. But on the other hand, we also have the evidence, and that was the Italian magistrate Felice Casson. He was a judge and he investigated acts of terrorism in Italy. And we have the evidence of one specific case of a terrorist attack which occurred in 1972 in the small village of Peteano in Italy, was directly linked to this secret network of NATO. So what Felice Casson found is that "We have this terrorist attack in 1972. People were killed in this attack. And at the time the news media: television, radio, newspapers, all said that was the extreme left responsible for this terrorist attack." So the general attack on the population was to discredit the communists and the socialists because they were very strong in the Italian parliament. And people were saying "They're all terrorists".

And only 10 years later Felice Casson found out "Oh no, actually this was all twisted. It was all lies. It was all turned around. This terrorist attack had not been carried out by the extreme left but it had been carried out by the extreme right." Vincento Vinciguerra was the terrorist who had carried out the attack who was a member of Ordine Nuovo which is a right-wing terrorist organization in Italy. And he confessed and he said "Okay, I carried out this attack but there is, within the secret service in Italy, a lot of support for it. In fact there is a secret network within the secret service which is linked to NATO." And at the time in the 1980s, everybody went, "That's a conspiracy theory. That can't be true. It's totally impossible that the secret service would support terrorism. It's strictly impossible."

But NATO had set up secret armies and people couldn't imagine that. And then in 1990 Giulio Andreotti who was then Prime Minister of Italy, was actually forced by the Italian senate to step forward and explain "Yes, it's true indeed, we had a secret army in Italy. Yes, true indeed, the name of the secret army was Gladio. Yes, true indeed, the secret services were running this operation. The American CIA and the British MI6 set up the network after WWII." And so we have the data that the secret armies existed. We have the data that's all confirmed, that the secret armies were supplied and trained by CIA, MI6 and Special Forces like the SAS from the UK or the Green Berets from the US.

We know all that and NATO and CIA confirmed that they exist, but what we don't have is official information of CIA or official confirmation of NATO that they carried out terrorism in Europe. You have to understand that this is a huge taboo.

Niall: Yeah. It's too risky.

Daniele: I mean, if you could prove that NATO carried out terrorism in Europe, NATO would have to be dissolved immediately as a huge threat.

Niall: And it would have serious implications for its current rationale, namely for the recreation of Cold War II, you need NATO to protect Europe and the US...

Joe: Against the Russian Federation, yeah. What I find interesting though Daniele, is there seems to be a disconnect between this rationale amongst these secret groups and the NATO hierarchy. Where they all apparently were afraid of a Soviet invasion, a communist invasion of Europe, and then justified the creation of these terrorist groups essentially, to defend against a communist invasion, yet in Italy during the period that we're talking about in the '70s and '80s, the communist party and the socialist party in Italy were very strong.

Daniele: Yeah.

Joe: Reflecting kind of a consensus amongst the people who apparently weren't afraid of the communists and actually supported them.

Daniele: Yeah that's the problem that NATO has. On the one hand they had the Soviets in Moscow that had all the atomic weapons aimed against them; there was a real battle between the two groups. And on the other hand they had an elected communist members of parliament in Italy, France and Belgium and a few other countries. And they said, these members, imagine Italy, there's a member of parliament who then gets the chance to go into the executive branch, to become a minister of the interior or minister of defense even. NATO is shocked by even this thought. It never happens. But they thought it could happen and then we have a communist Italian defense minister and that's nightmare number one because he would then just phone Stalin or Khrushchev or Brezhnev or who was in charge in Moscow and tell them all the secrets of NATO because as defense minister of Italy he obviously had access to NATO secrets.

And this was the sort of thinking, that you could not have a communist in the Italian government. And in fact when Aldo Moro, who was a member of the Democrazia Cristiana which is a center government in Italy, said "We should have a communist in government" and he was killed. And the whole idea of preventing communists in Italy from coming to executive power positions was very, very far reaching in Italy. And the problem is that if you have such a problem - let's imagine you and me are NATO generals, it's hard to imagine but let's just try because that's what we have to do at the stage. We all have to think in the head of somebody else. And then we think "Okay, we're now NATO generals. We're fighting the Soviets. And we see that in Italy the communists are very strong." And that's a working assumption. Then the idea is "Okay, we have this secret army in Italy. Why don't we take this secret army and blow up a few bombs, kill a few people and then say 'the communists did it', and that will really discredit them very badly and on that basis we can keep them out of government." And that is called the strategy of tension. And that is something which an Italian magistrate, a judge in Italy, discovered. And he, Felice Casson, actually blew the whole scandal.

Joe: But the question here for me is, it seems to me that they weren't afraid of a communist ideology. You say in your book, and it's true, that at a certain point it became clear that there would be no communist or Soviet invasion of Europe, but they continued on with these actions to discredit leftist groups and communist groups in Europe to keep them out of power. I can't believe that this was just a purely ideological battle for these people. Obviously there was something they were fighting against in terms of a communist or leftist government coming to power in European countries and how that would negatively affect these western American-aligned power brokers. What did they stand to lose if a communist party or even just a leftist government came to power in European countries? What was the problem with that? It didn't include an inevitable communist invasion of Europe.

Daniele: The fear of Washington I think was that some countries might leave NATO. Take Norway. There was the idea at some point that you could have Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden as a nuclear arms free zone. That was an idea that the Swedish, who still are not a member of NATO, put forward and said "Let's try that. Let's try to have this nuclear-free zone." So you did not only have the communists. You also had the peace movement which is always very critical of NATO. And they said "We don't need all this military spending. We don't need all these arms in Europe and we don't want these Pershing missiles. There's many things we don't want."

And once you have a population which goes against the Vietnam war and goes against NATO and basically says "We shouldn't kill each other"; all these ideas of the peace movement, if they get very strong then as a NATO general, once again let's think as a NATO general, then you just blow up a bomb somewhere in Rome or in Milan or in Bologna. And then you say "The world is full of terrorists and now we're here to protect you." It's like the fireman who sets fire to your house and then the next morning comes over and says "Hey, gee it's good that you have a fire department here in the city. We need an extra thousand dollars from you to support our work." So create the problem and you present yourself as the solution. It's a very diabolic strategy but if you come to think of it, it works.

What I tried to do then is I looked to any evidence that Pentagon generals signed anything like that because obviously we have Italian judges who say "Okay, the Americans created terrorism in Europe." We have Italian members of the secret services even. You have to imagine that in Italy you then had trials, so trials on these terrorist attacks. And then the secret services from Italy were accused that they had carried out terrorist attacks in the countries. And people were outraged and were like "Why did you kill children and women? What sort of secret service are you to go out there and kill people?"

And then the members of the Italian secret services, one was Gianadelio Maletti, he said "I tried to keep that secret for many years and now Prime Minister Andreotti comes forward and tells it to parliament. It's incredible. The Americans have asked us to do this to fight and discredit the left in Italy and to increase the strength of NATO." But for historians like me it was very, very complicated to find a Pentagon document that would give support to the theory that the Pentagon indeed uses strategy of tension. The whole debate is the strategy of tension debate. Carry out a terrorist attack; blame somebody else for it. The one document I found is Operation Northwood, you're probably familiar with it.

Niall: Yeah.

Daniele: Should I quickly explain what it is?

Joe: Yeah.

Daniele: Operation Northwoods was in operation in the Caribbean in the 1960s. The idea of the US at the time was to have a regime change in Cuba and overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. And so what they did is in 1961 they had the Bay of Pigs invasion carried out by the CIA and it was obviously illegal but they did it and it failed. The Bay of Pigs invasion by the CIA failed in 1961. And then the Pentagon said "Well the CIA messed it up. Now we have a good plan because we're much cleverer than the CIA people here at the Pentagon." And the Pentagon generals drew up this plan and said "Let's blow up an American ship on Guantanamo Bay" which is the US military base in Cuba. And that was a very diabolic idea again. Blow up your own ship and then blame Fidel Castro for it. And say "Oh you know, Fidel Castro blew it up."

And this is again the same trick of the fireman that I said before; set fire to the house and then present yourself as the solution. And the second idea was not only to blow up a ship, the second idea of Operation Northwoods was let's take civilian planes, fly them over Cuba and then blow them up, so they would be drones, you wouldn't put people in them. But blow them up and say on the American television, say "Fidel Castro shot down planes and in these planes we had American girls who want to go to Bolivia to help the poor people there." So if you connect a very strong story with a false flag terrorist attack, then you have everybody in shock and then people go "Oh, let's invade Fidel Castro's Cuba and overthrow this dictator. He's really bad."

And the third idea was to carry out terrorist attacks in Miami and in Washington, and then prepare fake documents that would say "These were communists, these were Cubans." Now this Operation Northwoods, and we have the original documents and we know that the Pentagon generals, the highest members of the Pentagon the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed it. That was Lyman Lemnitzer. And then Kennedy, President at the time, didn't want it. At the time he was really fighting the military industrial complex and he said "We don't want that." And Lemnitzer was then transferred to Europe as supreme allied commander of NATO. So he was actually going to Europe and worked within NATO at a time when he was in the US thinking about strategy of tension terrorism in Cuba. And the European researchers and I tried to find out is it possible that Pentagon generals have carried out strategy of tension terrorism in Europe. And we can't prove it, we just have...

Joe: Circumstantial evidence.

Daniele: Yes, circumstantial evidence. We've never had a US officer coming forward and saying "I'm sorry. We did it." Never. Never has been.

Joe: Although there's been plenty of people in Europe who have come forward and said that.

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: But just to link that back to what I was saying earlier on then, it seems that this strategy of tension and NATO stay-behind armies and their funding of terrorist groups to attack civilian populations; this wasn't really to fight against the spread of communism or Europe but rather to maintain Europe in the western sphere of influence and also to ensure that it remained on a militarized war footing which ultimately generates money for the arms manufacturers.

Daniele: Yeah, if we have bombs that drop on Syria, if we have bombs in Ukraine, if we have bombs on Iraq, Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Ratheon, they always profit from it. War is a business. That's something I explain to my students all the time. I tell them "Get rid of this nonsense idea that war is some sort of a project to help the poor or help women or help the elderly. They suffer tremendously in war. You have more rape in war - always - because soldiers go completely mad and start to rape women." And they go "Wasn't the war meant to help women?" I go "No, no, no. The war was never meant to help anybody. War has always been a tool to help the defense industry, one, and second, to gain influence; to change the shift of power; to overthrow a government that you don't like; to install a new government that you like and then control a country like Iran, where you had a coup d'รฉtat in 1953 by the CIA."

So we're going through all these episodes of history in the last 70 years and we find a lot of data that secret warfare is real. These are wars that are not declared. You don't read them in the press and it says: "Tomorrow the CIA and the MI6 are going to overthrow the government of Mossadeq in Iran because they nationalized the oil and that's no good. We want the oil and therefore we are overthrowing." You don't have that in the news. In the news you have the first novel of Ian Fleming and you can read it in the stories of James Bond. But that's fiction okay. And in the real world we have similar things that are happening with no accountability. It's all illegal and criminal but they get away with a lot of that stuff.

Joe: There's a horribly-fantastic, if I can use that term, quote in your book from one of these right-wing terrorist in Italy, Vinciguerra. He said that "You had to attack civilians; the people, women and children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political gain. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

Daniele: Yeah, that quote is correct. And keep in mind Vinciguerra was the man who carried out the terrorist attack in Peteano. So he was one who knows the strategy of tension. Again, strategy of tension is a diabolic strategy. You carry out a terrorist attack, blame somebody else for it. Let's put it this way, if I blow up a bomb and then just blame my neighbour, my neighbour will have a huge problem to explain that he didn't blow up the bomb if I put his passport next to it or whatever, his card, some incriminating evidence. And then I need the media, that's all I need. The media must tell my story to the whole world and then people will be shocked and they'll believe it. And only ten years later, historians like I come and say "Hey we found out that it's totally impossible that this man carried the bomb there. It has to be a lie." And it's very difficult for us to reconstruct strategy of tension.

But the quote that you just gave is an original quote which shows that terrorism exists and we have terrorism in the form of manipulated state terrorism. I'm not saying all terrorist attacks are state-sponsored; I'm not saying that. I'm saying some of the terrorist attacks that we've had during the last 70 years were state-sponsored. And today historians have to go through all these terrorist attacks again and find out "Okay, there's a lot of terrorism we have. Which one was state-sponsored? Which one was carried out by agents of the secret service who were actually trained to protect the population?"

Joe: You say that we have no hard evidence that the Pentagon, or the US government, or the CIA, were directly involved in this but it strikes me from reading some of the details in your book that we don't really need it, because you mention that in March 2001 a General Maletti, who was former head of Italian counter-intelligence, was talking about the Gladio secret army. He said that the massacres which had discredited the Italian communists had also been supported by the White House and Washington and the US secret service, the CIA.

Daniele: Yes. That's one of those quotes. And then Maletti says - and not in private conversation with his wife at 12:00 at night, but in public in Italy under huge pressure, in the trial of the Piazza Fontana, a place in Milano where we had terrorist attacks. Keep in mind the American government, the White House and especially Nixon - he said Nixon was a strange man - and he goes as far as to say that Nixon promoted terrorism in Italy. Now he says it in a way that they don't shoot him right away, but he says it in a way that historians who read his testimony, they go "Jesus Christ! Did he just say Nixon sponsored terrorism? Did he just say that?!" And then we read the quote again and he basically says that.

And you know, it is probably a form of racism that here in Europe we've been thinking that okay, yes of course the Americans have bombed Iraq. Yes they have overthrown the government in Chile in 1973. Oh yes they have supported the Contras in Nicaragua in the '80s and yes they've overthrown the Guatemalan government in 1954. And of course they've bombed Vietnam and Cambodia. But they would certainly not do such things in Europe. And that's very deep in European academics' heads. We researched these cases in Africa, in Latin America or in Southeast Asia and we go "Well jeez, that's gruesome." But we never think that it could have happened in Europe because we have this idea that we're friends and among friends you wouldn't do it. And then you see that within NATO it was not just friends. It was a huge battle for who runs the shop and who decides. And there the Americans it seems, support terrorism in Europe. But when I say today, still in lectures, people go "Well, that's all conspiracy theory." And then I say "No, it's not a conspiracy theory. We have Operation Gladio." And then people go like "Oh, Operation Gladio. But you know that was just for self-defense in case of a Soviet invasion and a Soviet invasion never came so it's no problem."

But no, it's not that simple. We have specific cases of terrorist attacks where right-wing extremists testify that they were protected by the secret services. And the members of the secret services testify that they were supported by members of the American establishment from the White House and the American secret service and from the Pentagon.
So it's not hard proof. I can't call it hard proof, but as you said it's circumstantial evidence that we have US terrorism in Europe.

Joe: Well I don't know because, again from your book you quote an Italian parliamentary commission that investigated Gladio...

Daniele: Yes.

Joe: ...and the Italian massacres. The commission concluded in the year 2000, that those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.

Daniele: Correct.

Joe: And this from an Italian parliamentary commission. So are they conspiracy theorists too?

Daniele: No, no of course not. They're not. This is hard data. This is historical fact. But keep in mind you can't talk about these things with many people. Many people would go mad. They'd go like, "This means that the NSA has not only spied on enemies of Anglo-America and Germany, because everybody goes 'we know that', and Obama said they wouldn't do it and then they did it." But it's another thing if you set up totalitarian surveillance. It's not a good thing either, but if you kill people with a terrorist attack it is clearly worse. People are like "Is it possible?" And I've debated it with many colleagues and these are highly trained academics and I've told them, "Can you imagine that the Pentagon or the CIA or the MI6 from the UK would kill people in other countries of Europe with the strategy of tension." And most just from their gut feeling have said "No, no. I can't imagine that." And then I've shown them the quotes, like the one that you read from the Italian senate. And the Italian senate has spent a lot of time investigating these secret operations and they know the truth okay? They've really found out the data but they couldn't publish the names. So in that quote you don't have a specific name of a specific person and a specific date of attack. It's a very general phrase which says "US terrorism in Italy is a fact."

And the problem is that we can't go and say "Oh here it says: Henry Kissinger in the National Security Council meeting of that date argued for strategy of tension in Italy." We don't have that specific data. And that's why I still say it is circumstantial evidence. I think it's solid evidence, but standing under rather strong pressure. I found the Freedom of Information Act from the CIA. This is a law which allows you to get all the data from the CIA on all CIA operations during the CIA's history. It was created in 1947.

And then I said "Give me the data on Operation Gladio" and then they wrote back "Sorry, can't give you that data. It's top secret". And I said "Well, we have a lot of data anyway here in Europe" because I read Italian and a lot of this data is just in Italian. And some is in French and some is in German. The American scholars don't read these different languages but I'm Swiss and we speak quite a few languages just because our country's made up of three languages. Then I read these Italian documents and I write back to the CIA and I say "Please, give me the data because then you can participate in a discourse on Operation Gladio. And this discourse will take place anyway." And then they wrote back and said "No, we can't give you any data." So the CIA is not transparent. They will never admit that they carried out terrorism in Italy.

The second thing I did is I wrote to NATO. And NATO said "Oh we can't give you any details on Operation Gladio." and I said "Why not?" And they said "Switzerland is not a NATO country." And I said "Well we're surrounded by NATO countries and I'd like to have some more details." And they said "Okay, hand in a letter through the Partnership for Peace office because Switzerland is a member of Partnership for Peace" - and that's a stupid name for a sort of kindergarten of NATO, for countries who are not NATO members yet but NATO would like to have them in NATO soon. I wrote a letter and I gave them all the details on the specifics that I was researching and they said 'it didn't exist. It never existed.' And that's a lie, okay? NATO just says Operation Gladio never existed. And that is incredible. You really have to keep in mind that the CIA and NATO don't like the Gladio story at all.

Niall: Yeah. And to this day that is their official line.

Daniele: And their official line in 1990 when the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti said "We have this secret army in Italy and it existed also in France and in Greece and in Belgium and everywhere" and people were totally shocked in many countries. Then NATO said "We have never had secret armies. We don't do guerrilla warfare. We don't do secret warfare." And on the next day a NATO spokesman had to come forward and say "What we said yesterday was wrong. Very sorry for it. We can't give you any further information because that's military secrets." (laughs)

Niall: Yeah, they said we can either...

Daniele: Ask yourself, what world are we living in?

Niall: Yeah, it's so Orwellian. "We can neither confirm nor deny what we just said yesterday."

Daniele: Yes. In the end you have to take it with a pinch of irony because otherwise it would be completely...

Joe: Farcical.

Daniele: yeap, you can't really support it.

Joe: When we talk about these terrorist attacks perpetrated by essentially NATO in Europe during the '60s, '70s and '80s, we're not talking about small scale, like one or two people killed. And some of these are major terror attacks. For example, Bologna was 80 people killed I think, right?

Daniele: Yeah. Bologna was 80 people. The problem is I have to repeat that we can't link NATO directly to Bologna. We can link Bologna to right-wing terrorists. We can link the right-wing terrorists to the Italian secret service and we can link the Italian secret service to NATO. That's what we can do. The problem is that NATO then always comes forward and says "Oh gee, these were just runaway crazy guys on the lower level." We don't have written data where you have a NATO supreme allied commander of Europe who says "Please blow up a bomb in Bologna train station". We don't have that. And that makes it very difficult for historians to nail it down, to really say "Okay, come on, what have you done?" It's the same thing with the Brabant massacre because I have to quickly explain what the Brabant massacres is. We have to shift away from Italy and go to Belgium for a moment.

In the 1980s in Belgium you had a series of shootings, of killings, of assassinations which were carried out by highly trained gunmen. They drove to supermarkets and just shot everybody down there, women, children, elderly; they just didn't care. And they didn't even take the money from the supermarket, so they were not robbers. They were gunmen who wanted to terrorize Belgium. And they even went as far that sometimes they drove away and then the police followed them. So they waited for the police and shot the police too. These guys were really very nasty.

And now in Belgium you have a debate, because Belgium is the headquarters of NATO in Europe. You have a debate whether these terrorist attacks on the Belgian supermarkets which are so-called the Brabant massacres because that's how they're called - whether they were carried out by the stay-behind or were they carried out by NATO. And once again you have to keep in mind that this is ongoing research. There's no definitive proof of one or the other version, but it is very, very difficult for the Belgians, as it was for the Italians, to find out that there was a secret army in Belgium. Now we have the confirmation it existed. Its code name was SER8, so a different name to Gladio. There was a secret army; it was linked to NATO, it was trained by the CIA, it was trained by MI6; it was assisted by the special air service of the British and the Green Berets by the Americans. So they were trained in covert action operations but we still don't know whether the Brabant massacres were NATO terrorists. But they really could be. But think of it! Think of the NATO operation killing people in supermarkets. How bizarre is that?

Niall: We do know that those same SAS and US Special Forces were doing that exact kind of thing in places like Latin America.

Daniele: That's it. We know that, yes. But there they always say "Oh yes, these are just Latinos, kill them. Oh yes, these are just Africans, kill them. Oh yes, Vietnamese, kill them." There is racism in research that if you kill somebody in Belgium it's not the same as if you kill somebody in Sierra Leone. It's not the same. And this has to do with the discourse that we have in NATO countries. And the discourse basically is that we kill people outside of NATO. We bomb the Iraqis.

I researched the language of the soldiers and American soldiers in Iraq used phrases like "shoot the fucking sand niggers". Sorry for the language but that's a direct quote. And what does it mean? It means that the other human being has no right to live anyway. He's something like a cockroach. And that's the same thing that we had in Rwanda. I'm very active in peace research and we always have the same thing. First you lose the right to be a human being and lose the right to be alive through the language. It happened also to the Jews during WWII. They were considered animals and then you just gas them. It happened to the policemen in Germany during the Rote Armee Fraktion (The Red Army Faction). The Rote Armee Fraktion is a German left-wing terrorist organization and they said policemen are pigs and pigs, you can slaughter pigs. And it's always in the language where human beings are sort of put on a level of ready to kill, death row basically.
And in this lingo we know that we had strategy of tension in Chile. We know that we had it in Latin America, many places. We know that Cambodia was bombed illegally and that Nixon manipulated the entries of the air force to say that the bombs were dropped in Vietnam where in fact some of them were dropped in Cambodia, but that would have been illegal so they just changed the data. And we know all these things, but still when we talk about Operation Gladio or when we talk about NATO and the terrorism in Europe, it's like a massacre in your own family.

Joe: Yeah, so in dismissing the idea that white westerners in power would kill white western civilians...

Daniele: Women, children.

Joe: Women and children, yeah. They evoke a kind of latent racism within western populations, that it's okay to kill them in other countries far off with brown-colored or whatever-skinned people. And of course if you mention the second world war and the Jews, as you just did, the holocaust, that was of course a crazed Nazi regime with Hitler the madman, so that can be dismissed as well. But as you mention in your book, when the Gladio and strategy of tension and NATO stay-behind armies were brought up in Germany, it was on a private television channel. RTL announced that the German operation of Gladio had included former members of Hitler's Special Forces.

Daniele: Yeah, that's true. The evidence is here. We have that evidence. Nazis in NATO's secret armies.

Joe: Yeah, but also...

Daniele: It's a bizarre world, isn't it?

Joe: Jeez! But when we talk about this kind of racism, there's a lot of evidence from Northern Ireland that the British military intelligence and civilian intelligence agencies, during the so-called "troubles" in Northern Ireland, were involved in carrying out these kind of attacks on civilians in order to defame or to blame the IRA, for example. And just talking about the UK in your book as well, when it was brought up in 1990 or '91, the then-British defense secretary Tom King had to handle those kind of question from reporters about Gladio and NATO stay-behind armies, and he kind of joked about it and dismissed it. And there was also the fact that Operation Desert Storm had just been announced.

Daniele: Yeah.

Joe: So that kind of pushed Gladio off the papers. But it's interesting to me anyway, because I'm from Northern Ireland, that Tom King the defense secretary at the time who dismissed these Gladio questions from the reporters, had just come from a post in Margaret Thatcher's government which was just the year before in 1989. He was the Northern Ireland secretary. So he came from being the Northern Ireland secretary and overseeing at that time effective a kind of Gladio-style operation in Northern Ireland where a strategy of tension was used to divide the communities and to discredit the political parties like Sinn Fein and the IRA.

Daniele: I think we can learn a lot if we look at these details. If we look at the conflict in Northern Ireland - you probably know more about it than I do - but one element which struck me, was this "military reaction force". MRF it was called. That was a secret force of British soldiers but they were in plain clothes. And they had guns with silencers on them and they patrolled through Belfast and their job was to shoot IRA terrorists. So plain clothes military people walking around Belfast. And sometimes they shot a real terrorist and sometimes they got the wrong man and just shot him. And then you ask yourself "Wait a moment. That's British tax money. And they give that to the assassins and these assassins then kill people." It's already hard to pay taxes, right? But when you know that your taxes are really going to assassins who are not accountable because they're in plainclothes.

So if you walk around Belfast you'd think this is just gangs. And then only years later you find out "Jesus Christ! Some of them were gangs in the sense of these were young men angry with no job and they started to kill each other." If they're 18, have no job and they're really angry - because if their friend's been shot you don't need a state to sponsor you, you can get angry yourself; it's possible. But not everybody was just in a gang. Some of them were agents of the state. And if I look at that then the military reaction force, MRF, I remember that name, operating in Northern Ireland, was a state terrorist organization.

And I'm struck at the level of superficial discourse that we have today. We always go like "No we wouldn't do that. We know it has never happened" or "A democratic state would never use terrorism to reach an aim." And I say "That's just nonsense. If you look at the French, what did they do? In 1985 they wanted to test nuclear bombs in the Pacific. And then this Greenpeace organization, which is an environmental organization, said "We don't want to have nuclear tests above ground in the Pacific" so they had a ship which is called Rainbow Warrior and they drove into that testing zone with their ship. And then obviously the French couldn't do their nuclear test; Greenpeace was positioned exactly there where they wanted to explode the bomb.

And then the French President Mitterrand, who was a socialist by the way, he said "Oh that's no good. We have a ship in the way. Get rid of that ship." And then he said to his defense minister Pierre Hernu, "Get rid of that rid of that ship." And then he said "Okay, I have to go to the boss of the secret service, Admiral Pierre Lacoste" And the boss of the secret service said "Okay, I have to go to my agents of the Director General for External Security, that's the French CIA. And they just had people who went to the ship, put a bomb on the ship and then blew it up. That's terrorism, French state terrorism. And many in academia close their eyes and say "No, we have no state terrorism."

And that's a problem because if we're blind towards state terrorism, we'll not understand what happened during the last 70 years. We'll never understand it. It's part of the problem of this violence that we're all trapped in. I'm not saying everything is state terrorism. That's nonsense. But we need to understand that on the higher levels of defense ministers, Tom Haig or in the secret services, they are convinced that you can somehow do 'violence management'; a bit of terrorism there, a bit of war lines here, and they will provide some good results. And in fact it doesn't.

Niall: I think part of the mental/emotional block that ordinary people, and academics who have access to far more information come against, is "Oh jeez. We're talking about a conspiracy here. I can think of a conspiracy, like a local one, where party A wants to come into power and conspires against party B. But this is so big and we're talking about a large number of people, a large number of weapons and a lot of money. And over 40 years", because the story really only broke in the 1990s. So I think when people try to do the arithmetic in their heads that's probably where they go "No, this can't be true."

Daniele: They prefer to sort of block themselves from certain facts instead of having one heavy disappointment. And I tell all my students: "Why don't you go through this one heavy disappointment which basically tells you that some things are very nasty out there. It's not only in James Bond. It's really out there that you have secret warfare. You have manipulated terrorism and we have the data to prove it." At the end of the day it makes you sad and you go like 'what place do I live in and why is this like that'? But once you've gone through this sadness and depression, you wake up again and you have a clearer vision. You are not blocked by following the mainstream media every day and they tell you 'Now we have to bomb this country or that country'. You go like 'Oh why? Is that now true? Is it false? What's going on? Who's this terrorist organization I've never heard of which is now the biggest threat worldwide.' It gives you back your thinking basically, your independence, and that's what German philosopher Emmanuel Kant once said. He said "Sapere aude". It's in Latin and it basically means "use your brain". Be an independent human being. Be in dignity and don't get fooled every day. There's no dignity in it.

Niall: And the truth shall set you free, as they say.

Daniele: Yeah.

Niall: Daniele, thank you so much for being on with us today.

Daniele: Thanks very much for an interesting conversation. And good luck to you.

Joe: Do you have any further plans for any updates on this story?

Daniele: I follow secret warfare generally. I look at it, I look at the 9/11 debate, I look at the Ukrainian debate, I look at Syria, I look at Libya, because I want to tell people also that it's only a very small minority of human beings who are engaged in this secret warfare. If you take one percent of the world population, that would make it 70 million people who carry out these attacks, who conspire and then blow up things and really kill and maim. It's only 70 million people. That's one percent of the world's population. The problem is that this one percent can do a lot of damage, that's true. Seventy million armed people shooting around, raping. You can see the mess. But I'm saying it's only one percent and there's a lot of people out there who don't want it, who don't like it and who try to get access to research that actually shows how this whole thing works. Then there's still reason to be positive, so that's maybe my conclusion. I don't want to people to be negative once they've heard of secret warfare and strategy of tension and manipulated terrorism. Yes it exists, yes we have the data for it. But I also want to mention that human beings I think are wonderful creatures. They can help each other; they can love each other. They can support each other and it's not that they're all terrorists.

Joe: Okay, well we'll let you go Daniele and thanks again for being on and thanks for writing your book because it's extremely valuable, and everybody who's listening to the show should really consider getting themselves a copy because it lays out in very, very stark and plain detail exactly the kind of reality we live in and this one percent and what they're capable of. So get the book.

Daniele: Okay. Thanks a lot for your help. All the best. Take care. Bye.

Niall: Well, that was very, very interesting. And what a book it is too. Obviously there's only so much you can cover in an hour but it's all there; the strategy of tension, Operation Gladio. Operation Gladio is what it's most known as and referred to by those few people who do refer to it, but just to clarify, Gladio was the specific name given within Italy for what was a much larger operation across Europe. He gave one other name, I think it was a military name, SDR8 or something for Belgium and other countries had other bland, Orwellian terms. Of course the question is... there's no reason to believe this stopped. Obviously today we're in the War on Terror phase and the narrative has switched from: 'it's the evil commies we want to protect you from' to 'it's the evil Muslims we want to protect you from'.

But there's absolutely no reason to believe the existing structures in 1990, which were very, very briefly exposed, would have been uprooted. Well why would they? Because the CIA and NATO and other institutions to this day do not even acknowledge the existence of anything to do with any of this stuff. And yet, it's irrefutable because separate sources in different countries have their own investigation at as high a level as you can go on a civilian level, parliamentary investigations at least in Belgium and Italy and they had all the circumstantial evidence they needed to make such statements as "This clearly goes all the way to Washington and the Pentagon." So yes, this is a conspiracy and yes, it's real conspiracy fact, not conspiracy theory.

Joe: Yeah absolutely. The whole discussion leaves me with, not for the first time, a sense of two parallel realities, when someone like Daniele can unearth all of this information effectively about how our governments and the elite really operate and what they've really been doing, and then you consider how most people actually think about how they operate and what they're doing, I get a sense of a disconnect from reality. You have to kind of do a double-take. It's difficult to live in both of those kind of worlds; one where governments basically go out and kill their own civilians to further their political goals and then the other warm, fuzzy reality where they are our leaders and they're elected by us and they're public servants and they do what we tell them to do.

Niall: And they're constantly telling us their raison d'รชtre is to protect us when the only major threat to anybody anywhere is these same people.

Joe: Yeah, pretty much.

Niall: Dr. Ganser was naturally kind of circumspect about drawing any hard and fast conclusions as to whether or not the actual original purpose of Gladio/secret armies was ever to do with fending off NATO invasion. Well let's assume it was but that it quickly evolved into something quite different. There are a few things though that fly in the face of that narrative ever being true, even for the original creators of this program; namely that, for starters, the program was up and running before the Warsaw Pact was created. Same for NATO. So when they tell us that no, NATO was there to protect us from clear Soviet aggression, well historically, the western military alliance came first and then the Soviet one. Anyway, nevertheless, because Ganser's been as diligent as he would be, because this was his PhD thesis and he ended up getting tenureship and founding his own organization, so he's been very diligent. He's never stuck his head out too far, but you still are left with at least the collection of views of other people whose views cannot be easily dismissed, whether it's a senator in Italy or a minister in Belgium, or a minister in France or Germany for that matter - and Ganser has collected them in his book - who all make such statements as "Well this is clearly something that goes to the very top."

Circumstantial evidence, that's what you go on but, of course, if this is the kind of operation that we suspect it is, it's naturally going to be something without a paper trail, or if there is, they're not going to give you those papers. So there never is a smoking gun. We know this just from reporting on contemporary events that have happened in the post-9/11 terror framework. So it wouldn't be any different for a similar set up going on between 1945 and 1990. It's like what 'X' says in the movie JFK. 'X' is supposed to be the character who plays the kind of role of Colonel Prouty whose great book Secret Team goes into very good insider detail as to how these operations are carried out. There's a great part in the movie where he's telling the New Orleans attorney general, I've forgotten his name, [Jim Garrison] but he's investigating the assassination of JFK: "Nothing is ever written down. It's just words on the wind."

Nevertheless there is in fact, like the way Prouty described it, a kind of a sales structure within the Pentagon within the CIA. Ganser seems to have hit on that as well. It's not that he uncovered it, but the Italian parliamentary commission and the Belgian one both came to the same conclusion that the way these meetings worked was on a rotating basis where the heads of intelligence of each of the fourteen European countries involved in this would meet. And they even had a name for it. They both had the same name, both of these independent investigations. I think the initials were ACP or something bland. They would meet in Brussels regularly; alternatively they'd meet on a rotating basis in European capitals and the CIA station chief of whichever capital they met in, always sat in; they were present at every meeting.

Right there you have an informal network. No minutes are taken. There's no report issued. Nobody says "I hereby declare you need to do this." "Excellent, yes, I can support you with this." Signed and filed. There's no need to. They can just talk among themselves and say "You know, this upcoming election in Austria, it's not looking good. I don't like this guy and to be honest he's got a bit of a commie attitude about him." "Yeah, we could help you with that." God knows how often this goes on. If you're talking about 40 or 50 years and you know how intelligence operations tend to snowball, to spiral. First they get their fingers in one pie, and then it's the next thing, and before you know it - 40 years of total secrecy. In fact let's just call it 70 years because since 1990 it was buried.

You probably notice Daniele made reference a few times to this episode in 1990. The one glimpse of NATO's secret warfare against Europeans that came out, came out in the Italian papers and therefore across Europe, the day before or the day of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, after which it was totally buried because this was the whole build up to the first Gulf War.

Joe: Yeah.

Niall: What timing.

Joe: I know it would be a bit conspiratorial to think that the Gulf War was planned around it. Obviously it wasn't.

Niall: Well there are some clues in the book that Giulio Andreotti, then Italian Prime Minister, was being delayed as much as possible, despite the inevitability of some form of disclosure, that he'd have to because he was put under pressure by the Italian senators. Yeah, it could just be one of those things. I think Ganser himself just notes it as a remarkable coincidence but it's just curious how history works like that. Can you imagine if today the news broke that there is, let's say, official confirmation in some form or another, that the US government and the British government and other governments in Europe have been deliberately creating terror plots; 9/11, for example, that they were behind 9/11. That's essentially what happened in 1990, very briefly. The fact that NATO issued two statements one after the other. Ganser described where a NATO press spokesman makes a statement to the effect of "We don't know anything about this, or anything we do know about this must remain secret." But even that worried them because the next day they backtracked with another statement to say: "The statement we made yesterday, we can neither confirm nor deny what we said."

Joe: Yeah.

Niall: But it's too late! It's not too late because the people we're talking about here are powerful enough to bury something.

Joe: Yeah. It's really hard to tease it out, exactly what the plan was here. It's the same problem you have with the Cold War, whether or not the Cold War was a manipulation, was bullshit essentially, simply a means to an end, that there was no real threat from the commies or there certainly was no sense of a threat from the commies in the west. It's not as simple as that. Certainly there probably were people who were manipulating the whole thing and knew that the Cold War wasn't a real war or there wasn't a Soviet threat. But there were far more people, kind of underling-type people below them who all believed the Cold War propaganda, the hype and got their knickers in a twist about the whole thing; McCarthyism and reds under the bed and "our way of life" and all that stuff.

There's a lot of stuff there that's believable for a lot of people. But at a higher level, let's say there were people who realized that more than anything else we're using it. It's a big sham. It's a big manipulation. And that is proven essentially by... [technical problems - talking to listeners about feedback and discussion about Google video chat]...

But anyway, getting back to the point; what was I saying? Yes, the Cold War; whether the Cold War was all a load of nonsense. It was for certain people but for most people they believed the hype. But as I was saying Ganser exposed the fact that certain people did see it as something to be used to further their political goals. Because they hyped up the threat from the reds. It is a bit more complicated than this obviously, because not that people believed the commie threat, "the commies are coming, the commies are coming" scare, but they realized that if the commies did come or if the "communists" got into power, got into government or they had a communist party prime minister in a European country, you would have significant changes in the economic system and the social system in that country, which generally speaking tends to limit the extent of the abuses of corporations, for example, corporatists. It's generally a more humanitarian type of system. The socialist system, at least in theory, is a more humanitarian type of system.

And I think that's one of the things these people who knew they were using the Cold War as a manipulation, that there was no real threat of the commies spreading across the globe and dominating the whole world and lording it over everybody and making us all work in the mines type of thing. They pretended that was the case but what they were really afraid of was left-leaning governments getting into power in European countries and effectively kicking out America. Maybe kicking out NATO, kicking out corporations or certainly reeling them in and preventing them from becoming a secret government in many countries with the power that they wielded.

Niall: Yeah. The clue to that is the fact that in the atmosphere of the time, the '60s, '70s, even into the '80s, anyone who was pro-peace falls into that category. Just the fact that as Ganser mentioned, the Nordic and Scandinavian countries were considering creating a nuclear-free zone across the band of northern Europe. That is the kind of thing that already is threatening to the US power structure. I think this is the big secret. The big secret is that we live in and have done since 1945, the United States of Europe. Europe is US occupied.

Joe: Yeah.

Niall: This is what they don't want people to really come to terms with.

Joe: Yeah. I'm getting distracted with...

Niall: Who are you waving at?

Joe: I'm waving at those Canadian people (on Google video chat). (laughing) It's like a silent movie. It would make it a bit complicated basically if we were to have everybody on there because we'd have multiple voices, background noise and sounds of tea being slurped and people talking and laughing in the background and that kind of thing. So it's probably better that we don't have a complete free-for-all.

Niall: Also, this ties in with what's going on at the moment. We've talked about it in recent shows and it's in the press; tens of thousands of westerners allegedly making their way to fight as proxies, as mercenaries in the Middle East. How in the hell are they managing that? They're not doing it just of their own accord. There must be a support structure along the way, first to induce them to do it, then to get them to the country, funding, training, etc., etc. And I have no doubt that this western jihadi structure is just the same structure adapted for current operational needs post-9/11.

There's a story recently in Belgium. The only way that they could answer it was just to call the whole thing a hoax because one of the idiot jihadis in Belgium posted on his Facebook page, proudly, all the pictures of him and his buddies training in the Ardennes in Belgium before heading out to Syria. He's got 5 or 6 photos of him and the boys dressed head-to-toe, full camo, war paint, clearly military issue helmets, visors, vests and weapons of course, as if to say "Look at us! Here we are! We're training in Belgium and we've been set up by NATO/CIA and soon we're going out to fight their war for them." And of course he himself and the individuals involved in this to some extent or other are on a need-to-know. Maybe they're true believers. Maybe they really do think they're going to fight a holy war in the Middle East. Maybe they weren't even Muslim at all. In fact I can see in two of the photos the guys are white, so they're clearly completely westerners.

The point I'm making is these training camps are probably still operational. One of the things that came out was the extent to which this was not just an ideological network ready for the eventuality of this Soviet invasion that never came; it was very well managed. There were 150-some sites in Italy alone where they had built stashes of weapons. Okay, 1945, so you're thinking well by 1990 they were old. No, when they were uncovered in 1990 they were brand new weapons. Forty years to keep this system updated, to expand the sites. There always people you can dupe into believing the commie threat. Or they just like to kill people. We know in Ukraine right now there are trained killers. They're on safari. They like to hunt people.

So yes, Ganser's right. No need to freak out. We're talking about a tiny minority of people, but they're there in numbers. The German investigation into their Gladio network talks of up to 13,000 people at any one time a part of this conscious network. Thirteen thousand people! It makes sense though because there were a lot of terrorist attacks in Germany. Germans know them as the Red/Rota Faction, a communist brigade of Germany. This was a NATO/CIA operation from the start.

Joe: It's a standard 'painting yourself up as your enemy and essentially carrying out a false flag operation', carrying out attacks. It's not new. In the modern era that kind of operation and tactic goes back a long, long time. But there's a notable example from Kenya in the early 1950s when the Kenyan resistance, the Mau Mau they were called, essentially fighting against British occupation. One of their military captains at the time came up with the idea of going out with other British soldiers, dressed up with their faces painted in black boot polish and attacking white settlers in Kenya to make the resistance look bad. So that's a standard operation.

People just don't want to go there in their minds and think that "they" would do that, your leaders or anybody in power would do that because it's a scary thing for people to contemplate; the idea of the people on which you believe you depend for a lot of things, for running the country and also just the idea of them being your leaders and someone to look up to and someone to look after you. It's a very childish kind of thing, but it's very scary for people to have to consider the idea that your leaders actually are working against you and don't really care very much about you at all and will use and abuse and sacrifice you for their own gain.

That's why this idea of false flag operations doesn't gain much traction amongst the ordinary members of the public; not because there isn't evidence for it, because there's a vast amount of evidence for it. And cold, hard logic type of thing would suggest, especially when you factor in the idea of psychopaths, that it's obvious that that would happen eventually. But people don't want to believe it.

So it's an emotional reaction or resistance to believing something because it scares people and they don't want to believe, and they'd rather not believe it and stay in their happy, pink bunny land where everything's fine and god is in his heaven and all is right with the world and ignore the reality of the world they live in. And that's the perennial problem of life on this planet I think, people refusing or unwilling to accept and see the world as it actually is. And that's the bizarre thing. That's how it actually is.

Sure there's deception and cover-ups. The elite don't want to expose themselves in this way and they're not so blatant about it. I don't know what else to say about it. That's the state of the world.

Niall: Something else that strikes you about Ganser's research is that time and again it keeps coming back to the role of the CIA but a special shout out needs to be given for the British role. MI6 I think got the ball rolling on this, during the war, before this Gladio/stay-behind network was officially or formally started up after the war. Because of course it wasn't until 1946 that Churchill makes his famous Iron Curtain speech that turns Stalin's Russia from the ally which actually won the war to the ally which is now the evil empire which threatens our very existence.

So during the war the British intelligence was key in setting up resistance movements against the Nazis and thereafter they also played a central role. This is kind of another way in which we see the extent of the nature of the empire we live in, that it is Anglo-American. There's so many angles. You keep coming back to this. What is going on there? Is it an English language thing? Is it national? Is it ethnic? Is it genetic? The ruling elite, the head people, are substantially found in the highest echelons of power in London and Washington.

Joe: Well there's maybe an argument to be made that they were on first. That doesn't mean there isn't a genetic component to it, but once you have a group of people of whatever race who have these ideas and set out to implement them and to dominate and control the world, then they establish a system into a hierarchy and a system within their country, wherever they live, and that over generations it embeds itself and it comes then to dominate the rest of the world. So you could argue that maybe any other race on the planet might have or could potentially end up in the same position as the rulers of the world type of thing. It's just that the white westerners, largely English, Anglo-Saxon types got on first.

But then there is still the question of why they decided to do that in the first place. There's something different about them. They recognize it themselves, whether it was just because that's the way it was or that's the position they found themselves in, when they coined the phrase "the white man's burden". That's a very cynical, elitist idea. Essentially it's we're better than everybody else and it's our burden to civilize the rest of the world. So even that attitude in itself, you can see yourself, you can find yourself in a position of power and influence just by a result of your natural talents, let's say, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you then view everybody else as inferior. But they did and do. So for me that's the best argument that there's something fundamentally wrong with them in terms of when they're in that position of power, how they exercise it.

But then you could say "Well it's just human nature. Power corrupts and ultimate power corrupts ultimately, completely."

Niall: No! That never satisfies me, that it's just human nature because if that was just human nature, they wouldn't need to be doing this kind of stuff, to terrorize people and to keep them in line. To quote one of the actual Gladio terrorists in Italy - this is interesting. The lower level guys understood it well. Joe read out the quote from Vinciguerra who was one of these terrorist operatives connected with Italian intelligence. And there's another guy who said "Well the reason we do what we do, we destabilize in order to stabilize." That's a pretty complex concept. What does he mean? Stabilize - keep a system in place where we remain privileged and we do that by periodically provoking people in a controlled manner, in a manner which we control, because otherwise actual instability arises.

Now that's 'instability' from a kind of psychopathic side. It's actually not. What they fear is real stability where a country is actually ruled in a fairly rational, reasonable, civilized way. That is the outcome they are so terrified of that they will terrorize other people to prevent that from ever happening. This is why we have fake democratic governments in Western Europe. They're not democratic at all. The EU epitomizes it. They jokingly refer to this among themselves as the 'democratic deficit', the very fact that the EU is the structure where the vast majority of the decisions made, are made by people who were not elected. They're unknown. And this is 'stability' for them. And what do we see around us? Day after day, just unfolding chaos, and it is substantially their fault.

Joe: Yeah. Today was the commemoration of the...

Niall: Remembrance Sunday.

Joe: Remembrance Day, Remembrance Sunday, First World War. And this is a big thing for the British. They wear their red poppies but over the past few years there's been a campaign going on where they wear black poppies. It got some media attention this year at least where there's a group of people who say that we should be wearing black poppies to remember basically what the war was about; that it was an imperialist war and that people were conscripted into it and millions of people died.

Niall: It was a British war.

Joe: Yeah, it was a British war.

Niall: People get into the "Well there were imperialist powers all over Europe" and "Oh they squabbled" and "Oh they hated the little people, therefore they had a war." That's the acceptable counter-narrative to "It was great and glorious". No, substantially this was created by the British elite. But that's a whole other show.

Joe: Yeah, but it's kind of heartening to see that at least some people are aware enough to mount this kind of campaign, to wear black poppies. And of course they've been demonized in the media and all that kind of stuff. You're meant to glorify 'the war dead'. And it's all couched in terms of 'respect for the dead' but it's essentially glorifying the sacrifice of civilian lives for elite profit. That's what Remembrance Sunday's about. It's about getting everybody to feel good and proud about all the people who died; their grandfathers who died in the first world war and to honor their sacrifice for this or that other good when in fact the sacrifice they made was a completely unwitting sacrifice. They didn't know what they were fighting for, they were fooled into believing they were fighting for something when they were fighting for something else. And the sacrifice they made ultimately was to sacrifice their lives so that a global elite could solidify or strengthen its position as a global elite.

Niall: So that a British elite could solidify its position.

Joe: A British global elite.

Niall: It's more complex now.

Joe: Well it was the height of the British Empire, so they certainly were the global elite at that time.

Niall: Yeah, although the New York bankers came out on top in the end. The British won a lot of territory. I was reading about the First World War and what was going on. At one point there was kind of a mini-betrayal, among countless other betrayals, the British had promised to send more troops to the western front but they left that with France and instead sent over a million soldiers to where? The Middle East. And that's where the occupation of the Middle East began. Over a million soldiers; the justification being "We can't let the Germans" - but the Germans had long since been stopped. This was the whole fear of the First World War, that oil was coming online and Germany was trying to build a railway to Mesopotamia where they know there are vast reserves of oil. World War I starts and immediately Britain gets its priorities straight and sends a million troops to Iraq and Syria; for their own interests first and foremost. It was the most disgusting venture. It's sickening to this day if remembered as something totally different from what it was, the Great War to end all wars. And now here we are living in the endless war on terror.

Joe: It's just ridiculous. They're talking about this war and this Middle Eastern war taking 30 years; that they're going to be fighting ISL for 30 years. It's just so farcical. On the one hand you could say it's ridiculous to ignore it; it's stupid. But you can't because it has serious implications for everybody on the planet essentially and it involves people being killed. But it's amazing that they've been able to pass that off again. The war on terror was going to last, if people remember, the war on terror, which was 9/11. Provoked by 9/11; they were hunting down bin Laden and these groups that wanted to attack America, was going to last 50 years or a generation, whatever. But then they supposedly 'got' bin Laden, so that was done. But then they just changed the narrative. They moved the goalposts. They started to move the goalposts saying "Well, there are still groups out there" and they were trying to resurrect different people to be the new leader of Al-Qaeda, but then Al-Qaeda just went away and they just come up with something called ISL and it's going to last 30 years now. It's ridiculous. God, it just bugs me so much, the inanity of the narrative. It's just so stupid.

And then this idiot comes out, whoever he is, this daywalker, so-called navy Seal that claims that "I shot bin Laden". Yeah, well you know what? Somebody shoot him or shoot me because I can't take it anymore. It's ridiculous. Bin Laden died in 2001 of liver failure.

Niall: Kidney failure.

Joe: Kidney failure in December 2001. And the last thing bin Laden said, the last verifiable video tape from bin Laden was where he denied involvement in 9/11 and told Americans to look to their government for the culprits. That's the last thing he said and then he died. And yet they're hunting him for another 10 years and then found him in this silly, made-up raid in Abbottabad in Pakistan and got him and threw his body into the sea and the fish ate him. It's like a comic book!

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: It's ridiculous. The whole narrative is just absolutely ridiculous. And that gets back to what I was saying earlier on. Is this real? Is any of this real?! This divergence between these narratives about how the world works and then you see how it obviously really works and it doesn't take a lot of digging. And you just go "What's going on here?" It could drive you bonkers actually, if you thought about it for long enough.

Niall: Well we can see it and it drives us bonkers. It drives us bonkers at how others don't see it. We're talking here about a 13-year-long horrific fantasy and how many people believe it? But then, going back to Remembrance Day and the Great War and the fantasy of it, it's somewhat less a fantasy narrative, but it's still pretty much up there. Obviously the Cold War was a fantasy narrative, just the absurdity of Reagan calling Soviet Russia the evil empire in the 1980s.

Joe: Yeah, it was like something out of people's nightmare. They just created this or something out of a Hollywood movie although there were Hollywood movies then. It was Star Wars. You can get into all sorts of stuff there about "Well they actually reinforced the fantasy narrative that they presented to people, that they wanted people to believe, that they reinforced that in Hollywood movies." Or was it the other way around? Did the make believe of movies kind of give government officials how to pitch the truth about the world or what was going on in the world to the people? Either way it's fantasy. Either way they hit on make believe and they pitched it to people as pure and utter make believe. And they asked people to believe things that are completely illogical and irrational. And people suck it up because they want to believe nice fairy stories and happy pink bunny rabbits and fluffy things. And "everything's alright in the world and I can just forget about anything happening in the world and just focus on my little life, type of thing. Somebody has taken care of that." Yeah, somebody's taken care of it alright. They're taking care of you in the not-so-positive meaning of that phrase.

Niall: The glue that holds this fantasy together is the terror, the fear.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. So it's pretty sad, but maybe it'll just break at some point, just break down. You never know. But then you come back to the fact that people don't want to believe. They block against it ever coming out, even if the powers that be screwed up royally and just left something hanging out the window and exposed themselves.

Niall: People would cover it up for them.

Joe: Exactly. People would cover because they don't want to believe. People would never, ever believe it no matter what happened.

Niall: You don't see the great awakening on the horizon there Joe?

Joe: Well how can it be when people won't accept the harsh version of reality, a scary version of reality; a reality where they have to take responsibility for themselves, where they're not children anymore. In the same way kids' parents feed them. There's another level up from that where the government ensures that everybody has enough to eat and it decides what's good for you and all this kind of stuff. It's a real shirking of responsibility. And you see people who don't want to take that responsibility because it's too complicated for them, because it's always tied with the idea that what you've been eating all these years, for example, is bad for you. It's very hard to convince anybody of that. Obviously there's an addiction aspect to it. People have been fed stuff that's addictive to them, so there's that block as well. People are really resistant to thinking that government agencies and corporations could have been selling to them and encourage them to eat toxic food for so long.

So there's two reasons. One of them is that they're addicted to the toxic food and the other one is that old one that they don't want to believe that a corporation or a government or anybody in a position of power over them would ever not have their best interests at heart, would ever do something consciously malevolent or evil to them. It's a real conundrum; I don't know what the solution is. It kind of is like the whole population of this planet are like a bunch of children and it's like asking a child to take responsibility for itself where until then adults have been taking responsibility.

So it's almost like I can't blame a lot of people because it is like that, getting a child to take responsibility that is unreasonable for the child to take for itself. You know what I mean?

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: So I can't complain too much where people are not doing that because in some way they are very child-like and don't have the ability or the inclination or whatever to assume that kind of responsibility for themselves and their own safety and their own lives, and to reject all authority. What it comes down to is rejecting the idea of authority, at least an earthly authority. Rejecting the apparent absolute need that some people have to have a human authority guard over them and watch over them and be responsible for them. I don't understand it really. It's something very deep because there's a lot of people who feel that who have never felt threatened in their whole lives, have never really felt the need for that kind of an authority to watch over them. The only time they feel it, and this is where we get back to the elite pushing that terrorism threat or terror threat or some vague, amorphous, large, terrible, scary, monster-type threat thing that is going to attack ordinary people. And they've repeated applied that kind of dose of terror to people to get them to look to authority to protect them from it. Because otherwise maybe they think that people would just say "Well why do we need the government anyway? Who are these people?"

But that in itself is part of growing up, when you realize that there are bad people out there, i.e., like people in positions of power who would use that terror threat or terrorism threat or something amorphous against you to manipulate you. And it's simply growing up and accepting the fact that that reality exists and that ties into psychopathy because psychopathy is ultimately the explanation that people need to really believe what you're telling them in that respect. Because it doesn't make sense from a human nature point of view because the other problem people have is that they self-reference. They use themselves and what they would or wouldn't do, as a reference for what other people in positions of power would or wouldn't do. And to get around that one you have to say "Well listen, not everybody's the same." That's why the concept of psychopaths is extremely important for people to grok because it gets them over that hurdle of "Well I wouldn't do that. I'm just your average kind of person and so are they. That's unconscionable what you're suggesting they would do! A human being would never do that." That's what they feel within them and they're right; a human being would never do that. But you're not really talking about human beings here.

Niall: No you're not. And I think they are behaving increasingly erratically. They're just doing what they've always done. We do think there is an accentuation of their behavior. It seems to feed back into the system in terms of making more of those children more petulant. I'm not going to suggest a revolution is underway and/or it will have any success, but notice that there are mass protests happening pretty much everywhere. There were some major ones in Europe this week and in the US the numbers for which the police always say "Ah yes, 30,000 people" but even the media who are present say you know what? We're talking about a million people in Rome protesting recently. And there have not been such figures before, at least not in the modern era.

So that is something new that is at least a marker of some kind of a reaction, even if it only amounts to a naรฏve petulance or anger on the part of people. It's fully justified, etc. It may or may not lead to anything but it's something. I think it's a symptom or growing up.

Joe: Yeah. When people have had enough and the abuse and the corruption. There's more and more evidence for it coming out all the time and at least certain people are finally getting to the point where the only way that they can actually express how they feel and what they're seeing is to get out in the street. And there's just going to be more and more of those.

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: Especially when it's well organized. Brussels was the anti-austerity.

Niall: I've seen a few because I used to live in Brussels and I always complained that when the trade unions organize a demonstration, they pick a nice, safe day like a Saturday or Sunday. People get out, they wave their flags, they go home. You haven't given two fingers to the man at all. You haven't made any kind of a dent.

Well this week they did it in the middle of the week and people rioted. I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing. Chances are high the riots were instigated by agents provocateurs. Nevertheless it was different. There's anger that's present. A hundred thousand people in Brussels, one of the most boring places on the planet - sorry to any Belgian friends who live there but it is. It's good to see them really bringing it home, or at least to some of the middle level managers. "We have a problem here." Yes, you do have a problem here. People are pissed off! It must have been at least a million people. People went home because the city flooded and then they just came back out within hours or the next day. "Yeah there was a flood, but hell, we're back." Which is very interesting because we really think that part of what's going on, another symptom of a reaction to the psychopathology is that the environment itself mirrors this back.

And this is another stream of information that feeds back into the system where I think sooner rather than later, something has to give. If it's not people literally overrunning parliament and chucking out a government, it's a major catastrophic flood or a fireball event.

Joe: I'm wondering what Jane's cat thinks about all this. (seen on video chat)

Niall: Jane's cat. Who?

Joe: Yeah.

Niall: That's her handle name?

Joe: No, no, she's got a cat down there. He was listening very intently. I think he wanted to say something.

Niall: Meow!!

Joe: Meow. Feed me. So like you said, there have been a lot of protests and I think they'll be playing down protests a lot. As they increase they'll be played down more and more. There was the one in Brussels; protests all over France last week over the killing of that guy down here, near where we are. There were protests in...

Niall: Ireland. And London.

Joe: And was it in Pakistan?

Niall: No, there was a big one in India.

Joe: In India, yeah.

Niall: And that was also climate-related. There'd been major flooding and the angle was at the lack of response. There's another thing feeding back into it, it wasn't the political; it was more or less spontaneous reaction to...

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Niall: ...the government not giving a shit.

Joe: Yeah, because that's what happens. People essentially believe the lies. They're too afraid to believe the truth about their leaders and the way the world actually works and how they're running the place into the ground. So they just sit down and believe the happy narrative type thing and ignore it and shut it out because they can still. They can just get on with their lives, keep their heads down and just get on with their normal lives. But it seems that by some strange kind of mechanism - it seems to be - that when people continue to do that and the excesses of the elite get worse and worse and worse, that's when mother nature intervenes and, in a strange sort of way, provokes them to get out in the street and start protesting over lack of government response to things like climate change for example and flooding, earthquakes, all sorts of stuff that the government isn't responding to and doesn't care about because it's in its nature not to care. And it's not really going to do very much to help people, especially in maybe poorer countries. And that's going to provoke far more protests and people in the streets than any kind of actual understanding of political abuses.

Niall: Yeah.And there was also in Mexico just recently, that horrible story about I think 43 students being abducted and killed a week or two ago. And there were protests at the Presidential palace in Mexico City just last night and they were using barriers and stuff to break down the door and they set fire to the front doors. First of all they tried to blame it on the mayor and his wife of the town where they were abducted but then it was revealed that the police had handed the students over to whoever it was. You're never going to figure out who but there's a guy who was arrested for it and said the police actually handed these students over to people to have them killed because they needed to be taught a lesson.

Joe: That's kind of crazy! No offence to any Mexicans listening, but Mexico...

Niall: Is loco.

Joe: ...is completely nuts. In terms of just the transparency with which the elite there carry out their policies and expose their true nature; the clarity with which they expose it seems to beat every other country in the world. In every other country the elite try to cover it up but in Mexico they don't even really make a show of hiding the fact that they're involved in murder on an extremely regular and extremely large scale.

Niall: Putin needs to get into some regime change there in Mexico.

Joe: He does, yeah.

Niall: Use it as a base to make a (laughing) full ground war assault on Washington.

Joe: Yeah, it would be nice. There'd be nothing to lose at this stage really. I think I'm getting close to the point where I wish there was a nuclear exchange, just to shake things up a bit. Maybe I'd regret saying that but it's just you get so frustrated with the slow slide into the pit. You'd rather see it all just out in the open. But they're never going to do that because ultimately it's not the elite against the elite anywhere. It's generally speaking the globalists, as Alex Jones would say, against ordinary people. Ordinary people are the collateral or the value or the wealth essentially, that's being fought over on this planet at the highest level. It's keeping people corralled and contained and stupid and ignorant and allow the elite to lord it over them continuously.

So the idea of a nuclear war isn't really in the cards because that would just kill off too many of the cattle. You're not a very good farmer if you blow up a bunch of your herd.

Niall just put together last month's summary, climate change, if you want to call it that; major climate events and other similar events as we do every month. This one carries on in the same theme as the last several months. I don't know if things are getting worse. I'm not sure we can say they're getting worse. They're certainly getting worse over a number of years. Over the past several months it's kind of more of the same. It's just mad floods.

Niall: Well I see something new, something that I didn't even know was possible before. Seventy centimeters. I think it's over two feet of rain...

Joe: It is. 2 feet is 50 centimeters.

Niall: ...fell in three days in Genoa.

Joe: That's about 30 inches of rain, yeah.

Niall: That's 700 millimeters. Their annual average...

Joe: Is about that.

Niall: Is about 900. So there's something kind of new. I think the news on the weather front which I think American listeners are already aware of, the cold front has hit the US already. The snow coverage total for Siberia is I think at a record. Basically the whole width of Russia, from Pacific Time zone to Moscow, is covered in snow, which is the earliest ever this has happened. It's either simultaneous with or it has a knock-on effect on the jet stream which worsens the loop that goes down and creates the so-called polar vortex over North America. So that's not really breaking news to Americans but they're going to expect another super cold winter.

Joe: It seems that it's starting kind of early and in earnest because if you notice, there's two storms right now. There's one in the Pacific that's heading towards Alaska and another one crossing the Atlantic heading towards the UK and they're both going to hit land. They're not hurricanes or anything, but they're storms and the one off the Pacific, as it meets the warm southerly flow, is going to cause this polar vortex or cold to push across 42 US states which are going to get this blast of Artic air. And then at the same time Western Europe is getting this major storm that is going to cause record levels of rainfall across not just the UK, but also northern Europe. There's winter storms, like you just mentioned Russia, and the US already has had major record early snow fall in different places.

But there's winter storms that are extending right now from Turkey, just on the other side of those rains that are falling in Italy, further east from Turkey to Japan. Across that big swathe of Eurasia there are winter storms. So it all shapes up to look like a mini ice age really making its presence felt this winter and it's just begun right now because we're just in early November and we've got several months of winter to go. I think it's probably going to be worse than any year previously. This winter is probably going to be worse in places; maybe not everywhere. In the way that you're seeing this unprecedented rainfall in Italy, I think you're going to see unprecedented snowfall in a lot of places that maybe for the first time is really going to cause serious problems for people. It's going to cause social problems, not just like "Oh, I've got to dig myself out or dig my car out". It's going to be snow on a level that people haven't seen in a long time, not in our lifetimes anyway.

And just in homage to Harrison who left us, there's some crazy animal attacks going on this week as well. An elephant tramples man to death in Zambia. A woman was killed in an elephant attack in Nepal which is the sixth fatality in ten weeks. So in the last ten weeks elephants have killed six people in Nepal. This may be tied to the ultimate cause of these anomalous weather patterns that we're seeing as well. And that ultimately goes on, and out into the solar system the fact that the sun is in a minimum; essentially that this solar cycle has been extremely low which results in the planet losing its protective sheath, which means that cosmic radiation is much more prevalent or can penetrate onto the planet much more easily and that has electrical effects I suppose, and that then leads into strange weather and it's all very complicated.

Niall: And it increases cloud cover.

Joe: Exactly.

Niall: For one, which is part of why there's so much more precipitation. The other thing is volcanoes going off. Above land it's noticeable. There are people who are dedicated to monitoring volcanic activity and if you go to their blogs, they're like "What the hell is going on?" Of course we include a couple of videos this month. Another exploded in Japan spectacularly. There's one in Costa Rica that went. "Oh, this is dormant, it'll never go again." It just did. And of course this is going to be happening under the oceans as well.

Joe: Yeah, and there's been a lot of fireballs but there's a really interesting little snippet in this month's SOTT Summary that we just uploaded today. There's a video of a fireball detonating. Most of the fireballs we've seen so far have been just these trails of light in the sky and then maybe breaking up and little sparks coming off it and it just fading out. But this one, actually more than any other, in fact may be the first one where you see it detonating. You see it just exploding and you see a kind of dust trail from it, where it's like a rock that just went "Boom!" There isn't so much light to it. There's fire with it, but you see that it kind of leaves a ring of dust and that brings home the idea of the amount of these things in our atmosphere and all of the booms people have been hearing over several years, this is all space rocks and meteorites exploding into dust in our atmosphere and filling our atmosphere with dust which leads to a lot more precipitation because precipitation is associated with dust in the atmosphere that condenses around atmospheric dust. And the more dust, the more heavy rainfall you're likely to have.

So anyway, I think we're going to leave it there for this week folks. We have done our duty.

Niall: On camera!

Joe: On camera even.

Niall: For the first time.

Joe: We weren't even dressed for it.

Niall: I didn't even know this was going to happen until Joe said "Sit here. Look at the camera." "What?!"

Joe: You're on Candid Camera. Niall didn't even get any makeup on or anything like that. It's just terrible; he'd usually have the makeup on. So we have to excuse our terrible appearances here. We'll never get on CNN. So thanks to Daniele Ganser. He's been a great guest and he's done some great work. And thanks to all our chatters and all you people tuned in.

Niall: All you hang-outers and YouTubers and Tweeters.

Joe: This is going directly onto YouTube so I'm going to have to go and edit it afterwards. But we'll probably do the same thing again next week, until y'all get bored of just looking at our faces. So maybe we'll try and bring in some props or something to make it a bit more interesting. I think we have an inflatable alien somewhere. We could sit him on one of the chairs. And when we get a better camera we'll have a wider view of what's actually going on here. But until then, we'll be back next week with another show.

Niall: Yeah. We'll do some dot connecting next week, same time, same place. See you then.

Joe: Alright folks. Bye-bye.

Niall: Bye-bye.