GLADIO NEWS 4 feb 08

Ultra-Secret Gladio's Former Staff Still Being Paid

THE HAGUE, 02/02/08 - Nearly 400,000 euros is still annually paid out to some 40 former staff - or their next of kin - of the ultra-secret organisation 'Gladio,' a letter from Premier Jan Peter Balkenende to parliament reveals.

Gladio, officially called 'Operations and Intelligence,' was set up after the Second World War to fight the Soviets in case of an invasion. In 1992, the organisation was apparently wound up. Its existence was made known last year by a documentary, which also suggested that there was still a budget for Gladio.

Balkenende acknowledged after the documentary that payments to former staff and next-of-kin continued after 1992. The payment of the 'pensions' have been made outside the tax system to protect the personal lives of those involved, Balkenende writes now.

Conservative (VVD) MP Fred Teeven and Socialist Party (SP) MP Krista van Velzen wanted to know whether moneys were still made available after 1992 apart from the payment of pensions. Balkenende writes that no evidence has been found of this.

http://www.nisnews.nl/public/020208_2.htm

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Ahmet Cem Ersever.s top-secret archive found in general.s house

An archive containing state secrets belonging to a major who was mysteriously killed in 1993 was found in the home of a retired brigadier general arrested for membership in a crime group, newspapers reported yesterday.

More and more claims have been emerging as the investigation into the .Ergenekon. crime network, which appears to be part of a formation that operates with the knowledge of parts of the government bureaucracy, the armed forces, the police and the judiciary.

According to reports, an archive containing top state secrets previously belonging to Maj. Cem Ersever, who was assassinated in 1993 with the perpetrator never being captured, was found during a search of a ranch house belonging to retired Brig. Gen. Veli Küçük, arrested in the Ergenekon operation last week. Another file, which documented that journalist Ug(ur Mumcu was assassinated with a bomb by the National Intelligence Organization (MI.T) in 1993, was found in the home of another retired army member, Zekeriya Öztürk, news reports claimed. However, this document never made its way to the prosecutor.s desk, they also stated.

Ersever.s secret archive

Ersever was a former major who left the army after Gendarmerie Commander Gen. Etref Bitlis was killed in a suspicious plane crash. Ersever, in a confession made to the press after he left the army, told the public about figures who would become some of the most famous names in Turkey in 1996 when for the first time the Turkish public.s suspicions of a .deep state. would be confirmed with a car crash in the town of Susurluk, in which a police chief and an internationally sought criminal would be killed and a deputy who also led a southeastern Kurdish clan armed by the state against Kurdistan Workers. Party (PKK) terrorists would be seriously injured.

Although scores of definitions are offered for the phrase .deep state,. ample evidence shows that Ergenekon-like groups acting to protect to interests of cliques inside the military and the bureaucracy have been responsible for a number of political assassinations and attacks blamed on various other parties. Some analysts believe this clandestine phenomenon, the deep state, is a remnant of Operation Gladio, a network of secret paramilitary units organized within most NATO countries after WWII, although there is evidence that suggests such structures existed even in the times of the Ottomans.

Ersever.s confessions were later compiled in a number of books by author Soner Yalç?n. The major before his assassination also said he was in charge of the southeastern operations of JI.TEM, an intelligence unit in the gendarmerie that does not exist on paper.

Ersever.s body was found in Ankara on Nov. 4, 1993. His girlfriend and right-hand man were also killed, and his archive disappeared.

In a report that Hanefi Avc?, a police chief investigating deep state links, would compile three years later on the above-mentioned car crash, the location of Ersever.s archives was noted as the home of the driver of a customs police chief. According to the report filed by Avc?, these were taken by the gendarmerie, which also trapped Ersever, who had arrived to meet with the police chief.s driver. The document also states that Ersever was killed by a man who used the code name Yes,il and who worked for Küçük.

The archive, which had been lost for more than a decade, might shed light on the dirty jobs Ersever did for JI.TEM.

The Mumcu link

According to a news report from the Taraf daily, a document that journalist Ug(ur Mumcu was killed by .deep state. forces was found in the home of Zekeriya Öztürk, another Ergenekon member who was arrested after an armed attack at the Council of the State in 2006 that left a senior judge dead, apparently the work of Ergenekon. However, this document later mysteriously disappeared and never made its way to the prosecutor working on the Council of State shooting case.

Who was Cem Ersever?

Ahmet Cem Erserver was born in the eastern city of Erzurum in 1950. On Dec. 11, 1979 he was assigned by the Gendarmerie Command to investigate smuggling incidents in various crimes. After the Sept. 12, 1980 coup d.état, Ersever was assigned to a southeastern post to collect intelligence on the PKK. Establishing JI.TEM, a paramilitary intelligence unit in the gendarmerie set up to carry out operations with the intelligence collected on terrorists, was his idea. Ersever set up the first lines of communication between Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. He also had sound links with northern Iraq.s Turkmens and Iraqi intelligence units. After Gendarmerie Commander Gen. Bitlis died in a suspicious plane crash, he left the gendarmerie in March 1993. In his resignation he wrote, .A gang formed inside the authorized organization in the Southeast is preventing the Turkish nation from seeing the real dimensions of the events taking place there.. His dead body was discovered by the gendarmerie in Ankara on Nov. 4. 1993. He wrote the books .Conspiracy in the Triangle. (Üçgendeki Tezgah) and .APO-PKK-The Kurds. (APO-PKKO-Kürtler). His death and his archive are covered in an entire chapter of the 1996 Susurluk car crash police report.

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=133117

02.02.2008 - Veli Küçük