General Paolo Inzerilli, who in the Cold War years was head of the military intelligence service and led Gladio, a clandestine structure created for anti-communist purposes, has died at age 90. Inzerilli acted in Italy in the 1970s, when the rift between Atlanticists and Communists declined into opposing covert organizations: the Gladio structure, which the former Alpine general led from 1972 to 1986, included in the NATO Stay-Behind network by an agreement between NATO governments (and with the CIA), and the so-called "Red Gladio", which had the task of exfiltrating communist leaders to the USSR in case of open war between the West and the Soviets. The moment in 1990 when the then Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, removed the veil and revealed the existence of Gladio, the nightmare of judicial investigations into the Service's alleged deviations began for the general. Until his early retirement and acquittal. Defending him was President of the Republic Francesco Cossiga, who went so far as to self-deport himself for the same crimes that were being charged against Inzerilli. Gladio's training and operational command, eventually composed of 622 people (on a volunteer basis) had its base at Capo Marrangiu in Sardinia. Each Gladiator, in the event of an attack from the east, would have headed about 100 units. Similar organizations were present in the former Yugoslavia and beyond the Iron Curtain. "They however," Cossiga explained, "were the enemy”.
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