At no point in the last 70-odd
years has there been a single
second when some country,
somewhere in the world, wasn’t
at war. The same can also be
said of a specialised type of
warfare – the ones that fl y
under the radar, skillfully
avoiding the public glare. They go under various
guises: covert operations, black ops, special
missions, secret wars.
Call them what you want, but the one
thing that binds them is their undercover
nature. Journalists or whistleblowers may
eventually expose them at a later date, but
at the time of conception, whether it’s a daring
plot to assassinate Hitler or a high-stakes
SAS raid in Iraq, these specialist battles
are conducted at the highest level of
classifi cation. On strictly a need-to-know
basis. Above most people’s pay grades.
And in the modern age, they’re conducted as
much by government intelligence agencies as
they are military units. According to United
States law, the CIA are the only agency allowed
to lead covert operations, unless the president
himself fi nds another agency better equipped
to do the job – which is rare. Sometimes, as
became popular during the confl icts in Iraq and
Afghanistan, undercover missions can even be
farmed out to private companies.
There’s often good reason for secrecy. After all,
surprise is a key tactic in warfare. As is playing
dirty. And herein lies another defi ning feature of
any covert operation: they’re not always
conducted according to the rule book. Laws are
broken, international conventions ignored. Lives
are taken, human rights abused. In a secret war,
a ‘mission accomplished’ stamp on the operation
fi le is the only thing that matters. How you get
there is open to interpretation.
Over the following pages, World of Knowledge
lifts the lid on some of these clandestine
missions – the ones you weren’t supposed
to know about. The perpetrators didn’t
always play clean, and they didn’t always
get the job done. They did, however,
create some fascinating stories…
Of all history’s political leaders, none have been
subject to as many assassination attempts as
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Even so, the boldest effort
to kill Hitler was hatched within his own ranks. The
events were so dramatic, they formed the basis of Tom
Cruise’s 2008 movie Valkyrie.
Not all high-ranking offi cers in the German military
supported Hitler’s politics; there was a groundswell of
opinion within the Nazi party that Germany would be
better off bargaining peace with the Allies as soon as
possible – stretching back as far as 1938. But it wasn’t
until 1944 that Hitler’s opponents fi nally got their chance.
Chief of Staff Claus von Stauffenberg had always
believed that assassinating the German leader was
a lesser evil than Hitler staying in power – so, after
collecting various allies in the military, including General
Carl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel, Stauffenberg initiated
what became known as the ‘July 20’ plot.
At lunchtime that day, the Chief of Staff walked into
a military conference held at Hitler’s fi eld HQ near
Rastenburg, known as the Wolf’s Lair, attended by the
Führer and 20 of Germany’s highest-ranking offi cers. In
Stauffenberg’s hands was a briefcase loaded with a onekilo
plastic explosive. He took his place at the conference
table and after a few minutes, stood up to leave the room
to take a phone call that had been preplanned. As he left,
Stauffenberg said a mental good riddance to Hitler: the
briefcase was stashed under the table.
What followed is pure bad luck. It’s believed the case
was accidentally moved by the foot of Colonel Heinz
Brandt, who was sitting next to Hitler, defl ecting the
blast away from the Führer when the bomb exploded.
Hitler survived, only suffering a perforated eardrum.
The ramifi cations of the mission’s failure were
massive; a furious Hitler mobilised his secret police,
the Gestapo, to arrest more than 7000 people he
suspected were connected with his assassination
attempt. Almost 5000 were executed, including
Claus von Stauffenberg, who was killed by a makeshift
fi ring squad the following night
For the 300,000 coalition soldiers on stand-by,
it was a tense 48 hours. On March 18, 2003, US
President and Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush had
given Saddam Hussein an ultimatum to stand down from
his position, and avoid another deadly, costly war.
Little did anyone suspect at the time, but while
the Iraqi dictator was weighing up his options,
a crack team of Australian SAS soldiers were
allegedly already inside the country, engaged
in a ‘turkey shoot’ against enemy troops.
These are the revelations of former Australian
diplomat Tony Kevin, who claims that, based on
information he obtained from Department of Defence
briefi ng papers, two units of 75 men each entered
Iraq 30 hours before Coalition troops sprang into
action. One of the groups travelled west of Baghdad,
scouting the highways for possible Iraqi missile
movement and weren’t involved in any fi ghting; the
other unit, however, descended on suspected missile
sites near the Jordanian border and “was in active
and high-level military combat”.
“They were heavily armed with high-technology
weaponry and they used it in ambush-type situations,”
Kevin told the Green Left Weekly newspaper in
2004. “They took out a lot of Iraqi casualties.
There were no casualties whatsoever among
the SAS.” Kevin described the attack as a “turkey
shoot”, with the SAS “going out all guns blazing”.
The fact that neither Australia nor Iraq were offi cially
at war at the time of the attack raises questions about
the legality of this covert mission, which Kevin says
“was a huge risk to those men, quite apart from the
hundreds of Iraqis they killed or wounded. Had they
been captured they would have been war criminals.
They could have been up before the International
Criminal Court, to which Australia subscribes”.
You can’t judge a war by its Hollywood treatment:
in movie-land, explosions are bigger, the rescue
missions more heroic. But the real-life events that
unfolded on the night of September 19, 2005, in southern
Iraq, would be worthy of any gung-ho war blockbuster.
It began in the afternoon when two undercover British
Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers, dressed as Arabs, were
approached by local police at a checkpoint, believing the
duo looked suspicious. According to Iraqi authorities, the
British men refused to stop, opening fi re on the offi cers.
One policeman was killed and another seriously wounded.
The special forces duo were captured and then jailed
when they refused to disclose the details of their mission.
Senior SAS fi gures feared for their soldiers’ safety –
a feeling compounded when local Iraqis began gathering
around the prison, demanding the soldiers be jailed.
Rumours were also circulating that Islamic militants had
infi ltrated the police, and were holding the SAS men
hostage. British tanks sent to the scene were stoned and
petrol-bombed; one was set alight. Meanwhile, diplomatic
tensions between London and Baghdad bristled. Within
a few hours, events were spiralling out of control. Then
someone took an executive decision…
At an undetermined time that night, SAS forces
returned to the prison with six tanks and broke down the
prefab walls of the facility, before storming in and freeing
the undercover soldiers. In the confusion, around 150
other prisoners escaped. The Governor of Basra province,
Mohammed al-Waili, claimed the British had used “more
than 10 tanks backed by helicopters”, and described the
raid as “barbaric, savage and irresponsible”.
It’s believed the SAS Lieutenant-Colonel on the ground
defi ed his Ministry of Defence bosses in order to save his
two captured men. In fact, the incident almost sparked
a mutiny in the British military, according to a report by
UK politician Adam Holloway. Many SAS offi cers were on
the verge of quitting, claiming the government refused
to sanction the rescue because they feared it would
undermine claims that the British were successfully
handing over power to the local security services.
The Cold War – with the US and NATO-backed
countries on one side, the Soviet Union and the
Eastern Bloc nations on the other – was a time defi ned
by mutual distrust, both ideological and political.
Though it wasn’t until 1990, when the Berlin Wall
had fallen and the Cold War effectively ended, that
the true extent of the paranoia was revealed.
Enter Operation Gladio – a secret, NATO-organised
‘stay-behind’ operation in Europe, set up to ward off
a possible Soviet military invasion.
The public fi rst became aware of the project when
Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti disclosed its
existence to the country’s Chamber of Deputies in October
1990. One British newspaper at the time described the
operation as “the best-kept, and most damaging,
political-military secret since World War Two”.
Twelve countries hosted this undercover network of
paramilitary cells – even so-called neutral nations such
as Switzerland and Sweden. It’s thought that under the
leadership of NATO, in particular the CIA and Britain’s
MI6, weapons were stashed all over the continent –
including guns, ammo, explosives, radio transmitters and
various tools. Operatives had orders to carry out guerrilla
warfare and assassinations if need be.
And while the movement was offi cially supposed to
counter the rise of communism, the most damaging
accusations against Operation Gladio concern its
dubious relationship with political terrorism – as part
of its agenda to discredit left-wing groups.
In 2001, former Italian head of military counterintelligence,
General Gianadelio Maletti, claimed
the CIA had helped source the explosives used in
the infamous 1969 bombing of a Milan bank, in
which 16 people were killed. The terror attack was
at fi rst blamed on left-wing anarchists, but later
investigations cast doubt on the claims. According
to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Maletti said during
a trial relating to the bombing that Americans were
no longer merely monitoring and infi ltrating extremist
groups, but were now actually instigating violent acts.
Could these claims be true? A 2000 parliamentary
report by Italy’s Olive Tree political coalition insisted
US intelligence agencies knew about the bombing yet
turned a blind eye. Several European governments,
including Belgium, France and Greece, have admitted
that NATO’s secret army did exist (12 EU countries
involved even debated the issue in the European
parliament in 1990). NATO itself, the CIA and MI6
have remained cagey on the subject.
