Stockholm
One of my motivations for writing The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians was to demythologise the stay-behind networks of the Cold War. Since their discovery across Europe in the early 1990s, these organisations—established to defend their countries from Soviet occupation—have been interpreted through conspiratorial, anti-American and anti-nationalist frameworks. One suspects that adversaries of the West have helped to nourish such narratives from the very beginning. In today’s renewed Cold War, these efforts have resurfaced with force.
Russia and its proxies are eagerly promoting the myth that the Italian stay-behind network Gladio—and, by extension, similar European organisations—were CIA-backed subversion networks designed to discredit the left through acts of domestic terrorism. Indeed, a television host in the Iran-aligned Arabic-language propaganda ecosystem claimed as recently as January tha…
