Blog Tour for The Colletta Cassettes by Bruno Noble

 

The Colletta Cassettes by Bruno Noble

Liguria, Italy. Summer 1978.

The Kentish family are on holiday in idyllic medieval village of Colletta. Sixteen-year-old Sebastian is smitten with Rosetta, the hotel cleaner and waitress, much to his snobbish mother's dismay, while his younger brother and their fellow hotel guests are obsessed by the World Cup, hosted by the murderous military junta in Argentina.

 The boys' father, Peter Kentish, has very different motivations for the trip. An investigative journalist, he spends much of his time interviewing a mysterious American, a disillusioned ex-CIA agent.

 As Kentish uncovers the shocking extent of Operation Gladio, he delves into some of Italy's darkest secrets. Darker still is the involvement of the USA. Those complicit will do anything to ensure that the truth is buried. For good.

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Operation Gladio

Many people had forgotten – if they’d ever known – about American illegal interference in other countries’ politics in the 1970s.  When I told people what I’d discovered when researching The Colletta Cassettes – about the role of the C.I.A. in destabilising democratically elected left-wing governments in Europe – I was told that I was making it up, or must be mistaken.  The Americans are our friends – they’re the good guys!  They’d never do anything underhand.  And, of course, neither would we…

            After the second world war, NATO, the C.I.A. and some European countries’ intelligence agencies established ‘stay behind’ paramilitary organisations to combat what they feared would be a Soviet invasion.  The U.K.’s Special Operations Executive, formed to undertake espionage, reconnaissance and sabotage activities during the war, assisted the allies in recruiting and training fighters, establishing escape routes and maintaining arms caches.  Operation Gladio was the name given to the Italian branch of this endeavour, publicly recognised only in 1990 by Italy’s then prime minister.  Denmark’s was code-named Absalon, France’s was Plan Bleu, and Greece’s was Operation Sheepskin.  Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and others had their secret armies; Austria established the Austrian Association of Hiking, Sports and Society with the help of C.I.A. and M.I.6.  Portugal had Aginter Press, supposedly an international press agency but really a mercenary organisation devoted to anti-communist covert actions.

            After the war, the fear was that the Soviets would invade via the Gorizia ‘gap’, Gorizia being an Italian town on the border with Slovenia in the Julian Alps at an elevation of only 100 metres.  It’s a pleasant enough town but without the elegance and grandeur of Trieste, some 40 kilometres to the south.  It’s not hard to imagine Red Army tanks trundling through the town and hundreds of Gladio cells of a dozen or so ex-soldiers each disinterring the arms dumps in the province of Friuli-Venezia Giulia to defend the border.  Of the 140 or so arms dumps in Italy, roughly 100 were in the north east.  Typically, they contained small arms, rifles, ammunition, explosives and communications equipment, hidden in churches, cemeteries and ruins or buried in woodland and fields.

            Initially, the C.I.A. sought to influence voters in post-war elections by publishing books and pamphlets and by having the Italian diaspora in the U.S. write home warning against a communist victory. 

However, controversially, Operation Gladio grew to become entangled with domestic politics and terrorism in Italy – after all, the weapons were there and might as well be used, right?  The 1960s through to the 1980s came to be known as the ‘years of lead’, a period in which far left and far right organisations embarked on campaigns of bombing, kidnapping and assassination.  While the far left sought to destabilise the state and inspire a people’s revolution, the far right pursued a ‘strategy of tension’ designed to fuel people’s fear of the left.

            Just two examples of this: in 1969, Ordine Nuovo, a neo-fascist terrorist group, exploded a bomb in a bank in Milan, killing 17 people, and, five years later, exploded another bomb in the main square in Brescia, killing 8 people.  Hundreds were injured.  These were ‘false flag’ attacks, insofar as the left-wing Red Brigades terrorist group were blamed.  In 2000, a parliamentary report declared that the C.I.A. had been informed about the bombings but had failed to alert the Italian authorities or try to stop the attacks from taking place.

            Here’s the ultimate irony to my mind.  It’s the West, that represents freedom, the liberty of the individual against the tyrannical utilitarianism of communism, justifying to itself the murder of a small number of individuals for ‘our’ greater good, ‘our’ greater good being a democratic society in which the individual reigns supreme, one in which individual freedoms are held up as the ultimate prize.  We were blind to the irony of this, this violent, bloody elimination of some lives so that others might prosper.  We failed to see that no-one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. 

            Operation Gladio was disbanded not long after the Bologna station bombing in 1980 in which 85 people were killed and over 200 wounded.  The Italian courts effectively delivered the verdict that the bombing was executed by Italy’s secret intelligence services with the assistance of their associates in the criminal underworld of Italian neo-fascism that Gladio, created over thirty years earlier by American and European intelligence services to repel Soviet invasion, had become.   

Author Bio – Bruno Noble study Philosophy and French literature at Southampton University.  A circuitous route selling advertising space in financial magazines took him to the City where, amongst other things, he wrote markets and investment reports while impatient to write a novel.  His first, ‘A Thing of the Moment’, was published by Unbound in 2018, and his second, ‘The Colletta Cassettes’, was published by Indie Novella in 2022 before being re-published by Inkspot Publishing in 2025.  

Having enjoyed working collaboratively with other writers when he joined the Collier Street Fiction Group in 2021, Bruno started a part-time (two-year) Creative Writing M.A. at Birkbeck University in 2024.

Social Media Links – Insta: @inkspotpub FB: Inkspotpublishing

 

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