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Ghost Dog

(16,881 posts)
2. The CIA rigged the 1948 Italian elections
Tue Mar 1, 2016, 02:46 PM
Mar 2016
...during WWII (1939 – 1945) the Special Operations Executive (the British branch of this secret effort) was operating behind enemy lines and trying to fight the Germans with unorthodox warfare, while the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, the American branch) was pretty much doing the same thing. For instance, in Italy they were co-operating with the communists because they wanted them to grow stronger so as to defeat Mussolini (the WWII Italian dictator). But as the war came to an end, the OSS realised that if they continued to support the Italian communist resistance, then Italian communists would end up in power at the end of the war, and they didn't want that at all.

So they had to do two things. First, the SOE and OSS stopped arming and co-operating with this resistance network. Second, the CIA rigged the 1948 Italian elections. (That was the very first thing the CIA did. Today we talk about CIA torture and other issues, but people forget about the past.) Their job was to make sure that no communist gained a dominant position in the Italian Parliament, otherwise Italy could not have become a member of NATO in 1949. So, first there was the vote, and then it was rigged, manipulated. And it worked! In '49, Italy was brought into NATO, but the CIA and MI6 made sure that through this network of stay-behind soldiers they maintained secret control of all NATO countries... - op. cit.
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