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Europe
On October 24, 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti told the Italian Parliament that NATO had long held a covert policy of training partisan groups in the event of a Soviet Invasion of Western Europe. Under Operation Gladio the CIA, British MI6 and NATO trained and armed partisan groups in NATO states to fight a guerrilla war if they were captured during a future Soviet invasion. It has been alleged that these groups and individuals in them were responsible for various acts of violence perpetrated against leftists during the cold war, political assassinations in Belgium, military coups in Greece (1967) and Turkey (1980) The supposed aim of this group was to prevent Communist movements in Western Europe from gaining power and thus contain the expansion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose "iron curtain", as Winston Churchill termed it, had "descended across the Continent."

In 2000, a report from the Italian Democratic Party of the Left (formerly the Italian Communist Party) claimed that the strategy of tension had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI (Communist Party) (itself sponsored to the tune of over $60 million from Moscow during the Cold War), and to a certain degree also the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), from reaching executive power in the country." Intending to drawing a pejorative linkage to the atrocities of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, during which millions were persecuted and an estimated half million killed, the centrist Italian Republican party said the report was worthy of a 1970s Maoist group. Aldo Giannuli, a historian who works as a consultant to the parliamentary terrorism commission, see the release of the Left Democrats' report is a manoeuvre dictated primarily by domestic political considerations. "Since they have been in power the Left Democrats have given us very little help in gaining access to security service archives," he said. "This is a falsely courageous report."

The U.S. State Department has admitted the existence of Gladio only as a plan which was to be activated in the event of Soviet occupation of Western Europe during the Cold War It denies any involvement in terrorism. The United States maintains that several researchers have been influenced by a Soviet forgery, US Army Field Manual 30-31B.