Source: Patch One Knife
Writer / Li Xiaofei Knife
"Some Operation Shortsword agents smuggled Xinjiang people out of the country, trained them, distributed weapons, and sent them back to China. We cannot help but ask: What did the US ambassador to Turkey talk about in his meeting with the anti-China elements? What is Operation Shortsword? Is the purpose of the United States to bring havoc on Xinjiang? ”
At the Foreign Ministry's regular press conference on the 14th, spokesman Zhao Lijian played a video of a Xinjiang-related interview with Edmonds, a former translator of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, in 2015. She said in the video that we are going to install military bases there [in Xinjiang], and we never care about these people, because the people are not in our interests, unless they can be used to achieve our goals.
Edmonds highlighted Operation Shortsword.
So, what exactly is Operation Shortsword? What is the purpose of the United States? ”
1
On August 2, 1980, thousands of passengers poured into Italy's Bologna Central Railway Station, most of them tourists ready to take advantage of the summer holidays to the Adriatic Riviera.
As the temperature rose, the air-conditioned second waiting room was quickly crowded, and no one noticed that someone had secretly leaned a handbag against the load-bearing wall of the waiting room, which contained 23 kilograms of tnt and t4 explosives, and the explosion time was set at 10:25 a.m.
Blasia, a 19-year-old police officer, was waiting for a bus to go to Rome for his cousin's wedding when he smoked a cigarette and leaned against the door of the waiting room. Suddenly, he didn't know anything, and when he woke up again, he found himself lying under a train, the water from the firefighter's hose dripping into his face, his mouth bitter and fishy, blood flowing from his eyes, mouth, ears, nose, everywhere people's cries, everywhere was foul-smelling dust, everything was yellow.
Rosa, the bus driver, who happened to be outside the station at the time, said she heard a loud noise, the part of the roof of the train station was blown into the air and then fell, and a large hole was blown out of the center of the station, full of rubble.
The explosion caused lifelong pain to Brasia, who later underwent 24 surgeries, losing one eye, unable to move an arm, and not hearing very well in his ears.
The bombing of the Bologna Central Railway Station was the worst terrorist attack in Italian history and the fourth largest in the history of Western Europe. The attack killed 85 people and injured 200 others.
At first, the Italian government and police blamed the old boiler for the blast, but authorities soon received calls from far-right and far-left groups claiming responsibility for the attack. Officials then turned their attention to the military organization Red Independent Brigade, accusing it of being a "communist conspiracy."
Eventually, investigators targeted members of the far-right group Armed Revolution (NAR), and the defendants were later sentenced to life in prison, yet no one has yet admitted guilt.
To this day, the mastermind behind the bombings and the real purpose remains a mystery, but italians have found that much of the evidence points to the CIA's operation in Italy at the time, the "Shortsword".
2
The word "gladio" is derived from Latin and refers to the shortsword, the standard equipment of the ancient Roman legions.
After world war II, the U.S. government at the time envisioned that if western European armies were defeated by Soviet forces, they should train latent forces throughout Western Europe to conduct guerrilla warfare in advance. So, planned by the then director of the CIA, Alan Dulles, and implemented by michio6 and Swedish intelligence agencies, a group of militants, including former Nazis, was secretly assembled in Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Italy, trained them, and stored secret weapons and explosives throughout Western Europe, code-named "Shortsword".
As the confrontation between the two camps gradually shifted to the "Cold War" and the left-wing movement unfolded in Western European countries, the focus of Operation Shortsword shifted from "lurking" to using extraordinary means to provoke social contradictions and prevent left forces from coming to power, that is, "tension strategy".
The purpose of the "strategy of tension" is to manipulate and control public opinion and to create tension through fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, espionage and terrorist acts. First, to create terrorist incidents and blame them on communists; second, to spread fear, and then to pass laws that restrict the freedom of the people.
Europeans at the time believed that Soviet Cossack cavalry would drink horses in the fountains of the Vatican. Only by making ordinary Europeans so fearful will The United States' security commitments become credible, any act of suppressing dissidents within society can have legitimacy, and the "short sword" has made a "major contribution" to the establishment of a submissive Europe.
Some media have concluded that in Europe, in the Western world, people know nothing about Operation Shortsword, they don't know why terrorism persists for a long time, and they don't know who the real terrorists are.
Italy, as a country with historical influence on the left, is the focus of Operation Shortsword.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was a period of social and political upheaval in Italy, known as the "lead-color era", inflation to the skyrocketing prices, the rise of the workers' movement, and the approach of the Communist Party to the core of the government. Violence has been commonplace during these decades, with some 12,000 attacks and hundreds of deaths.
One of the more famous was the explosion of the National Agricultural Bank in Piazza Fontana in Milan on December 12, 1969, which killed 16 people and injured 58 others. Three more bombs were detonated in Rome and Milan that afternoon. The government immediately took aim at the left, but later investigations revealed that it was an explosion orchestrated by the far-right neo-fascist group controlled by Operation Shortsword to frame the left, and that the government was aware of it in advance.
In 1978, when Italy's then Prime Minister Aldo Moreau was kidnapped and killed by the "Red Independence Brigade", the government used this to arrest members of the left, which is known as the "4.7 arrest". Workers' leaders such as Negri and Scarzonne were imprisoned. It also prompted U.S. President Ronald Reagan to deploy the MGM-31 Pershing ballistic missile in Italy. Then, decades later, investigations found that the Red Independent Brigades were actually secretly manipulating Operation Shortsword to prevent Morrow from forming a coalition government with the Communists.
As the stronghold of the Communist Party, Bologna is even more focused.
On March 11, 1977, police shot and killed 24-year-old leftist Francesco Loruso, and street clashes erupted in Bologna that lasted for several days. The Italian government sent armored vehicles into universities and neighborhoods to suppress it.
On 27 June 1980, a DC-9 flight from Bologna to Palermo, Sicily, crashed in the Tyrrhenian Sea near ustica, killing all 81 passengers and crew members on board. Like the Bombing of the Bologna Railway Station, the causes and culprits of this disaster remain shrouded in mystery. A 1994 report concluded that it was terrorist missiles that shot down the plane.
Operation Shortsword was also keen to incite separatist movements, such as the South Tyrol Separatist Liberation Commission (bas), which was infiltrated by the South Tyrol separatist forces, which created the 1961 power tower attack, which NATO and the CIA immediately seized on, intervened and suppressed the separatist movement.
In 1984, former Nazi member Vinchigueira opened the corner of the "Shortsword" by admitting in court that he had helped Operation Shortsword recruit the 1972 car bombing. Vinchigueira testified: "In Italy, there is a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and soldiers, with anti-Soviet capabilities. "Without a Soviet military invasion (which probably wouldn't have happened), [they] took on the task of preventing the country's political balance from shifting left on behalf of NATO." They did this with the assistance of official intelligence agencies and military forces. ”
Vito Misery, italy's former head of military intelligence, testified that "this accused organization ... It was established within the framework of NATO under a secret agreement with the United States. Former Secret Service Chief Geraldo Seravale said that as Operation Shortsword evolved into a terrorist operation, "CIA representatives were always present" to attend the meeting, even though Americans did not have the right to vote.
In 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted to participating in Operation Shortsword. In the same year, the European Parliament denounced the role played by NATO and the United States in illegally interfering in the internal political affairs of European countries and endangering the democratic structures of European countries.
In addition to Italy, Operation Shortsword has been confirmed or suspected of involvement in the planning of numerous terrorist or subversive incidents in NATO and other countries. For example, the overthrow and hanging of Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in 1960; the attempted coup d'état in Algeria in 1961; the Military Coup in Greece in 1967; the massacre of communists at Madrid's Antocha station in 1977; the Turkish coup in 1980; the "crazy Brabant killer" in Belgium in 1985, in which a professionally trained murderer "mysteriously disappeared" after storming a supermarket and killing 28 civilians; "Operation Shortsword" before Switzerland in 1990. The person in charge was killed the day after writing to the U.S. Department of Defense to reveal the "whole truth."
Public reports show that Operation Shortsword ended in 1990 after the end of the Cold War, but some Western media believe that Shortsword was not hidden in the snow, but turned to Islamist terrorism.
3
As early as the Soviet War in Afghanistan, the United States resisted Soviet expansion and invaded the region by supporting "jihadist forces", and some analysts believe that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States continued this strategy, as Brzezinski outlined in the "Big Chess Game", controlling Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan "Central Asian Five" is a key factor in controlling Eurasia and the entire world.
This aspect is a geopolitical reason that directly threatens southern Russia. On the other hand are resource considerations, as we all know, this region has a large number of energy resources. Analysts, however, note that its role in the drug trade is little known. Afghanistan accounts for almost 95 per cent of the world's opium production. Most of the profits from the illegal trade are used to finance the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.
Given the region's colonial history and distrust of the West, the United States realized that it was difficult to control directly and needed to find proxies. Bin Laden and Zarqawi were his guests. During the 1992 Bosnian War, the Russian Secret Service, which infiltrated bin Laden's camp, found that its internal documents were written in English.
What Americans did not expect was that the "blue out of blue" Zarqawi also proposed his own version of the "tension strategy" to instigate terrorist incidents in the local area in order to trigger government repression and thus incite the local people to rise up against the government.
In Turkey, the combination of the remaining forces of Operation Short Sword with the Islamic Revival Movement and East Turkistan terrorism became the tools needed by the United States, such as the "bozkurtlar," an organization that claimed to create a single "Turkic" state with "one language, one people, one religion" from the Adriatic Sea to the Great Wall. They provide religious education and military training to participants and cultivate "forces that are available, easily deployable, and easily disposable."
"There are seeds outside the country and soil in the country" is a typical experience of "Operation Short Sword". Since the 1990s, the severity of the counter-terrorism situation in Xinjiang has remained high, which is not unrelated to Operation Short Sword. The "World Uyghur Congress," the "East Turkestan Islamic Movement," and other foreign East Turkistan forces, through Afghanistan and Central Asia, which border Xinjiang, have frequently infiltrated into Xinjiang, tricking Uyghur youth who have been seduced by extremism into leaving the country, and the al-Qaida organization has been trained, and then returned to China to cause terrorist incidents such as explosions and attacks. A few years ago, domestic terrorist organizations plotted to exit the country through Xinjiang and China's southwest border to participate in "jihad", and then lurked back to China to create violent terrorist incidents and the external characteristics of "Operation Short Sword" were surprisingly similar.
4
In Europe, the pain of Operation Shortsword continues.
In Belgium, there is no conclusive evidence to confirm the link between the "Crazy Brabant Killer" incident and Operation Shortsword, but independent researchers believe that this is "largely due to state secrets". Although the Belgian government has repeatedly ordered the security services to cooperate with the investigation, they have also repeatedly refused.
Western mainstream media reports on those in the know avoid mentioning "Operation Shortsword", but only imply that these are "politically motivated crimes disguised as crazy violent gang behavior".
In Italy, the investigation and trial of the Bologna train station tragedy has not yet been completed, and the families of the victims of the tragedy have set up an organization to arouse people's attention.
"I can't accept that they took my life," Blacia said, "and I used to be passionate about life, but they ruined me." We don't know the truth, and that's where the difficulty lies. We want to know the truth. Who did it? ”
There is a clock on the wall outside the gate of Bologna Central Park, which stops permanently at 10:25. Like the unrepaired bomb craters and memorial walls in the station halls, it is a forever reminder of that hellish morning 40 years ago, and the questions that may never be fully answered.
(Thanks to the knife group "Milan's little iron knife" for their help for this article)