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BBC - Britain secretly trained Swiss 'stay behind army' in Cold War

Use of a multi county comms system. Perfectly good planning.
Are the Swiss kicking off about this, seeing as every male was armed something would be passed about.
I was second on the sub!

EDIT Male. Cheers @Trackpen
 
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GLADIUS

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( Dang my Latin...gladius, gladio,gladio,gladiorum...blah blah)

GLADIO

Christian Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly recognized the existence of Gladio on 24 October 1990. Andreotti spoke of a "structure of information, response and safeguard", with arms caches and reserve officers. He gave to the Commissione Stragi, the parliamentary commission led by senator Giovanni Pellegrino in charge of investigations on bombings committed during the Years Of Lead in Italy, a list of 622 civilians who according to him were part of Gladio. Andreotti also stated that 127 weapons caches had been dismantled, and said that Gladio had not been involved in any of the bombings committed from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Andreotti declared that the Italian military services (predecessors of the SISMI) had joined in 1964 the Allied Clandestine Committee created in 1957 by the US, France, Belgium and Greece, and which was in charge of directing Gladio's operations.[16] However, Gladio was actually set up under Minister of Defence (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani's supervision.[14] Beside, the list of Gladio members given by Andreotti was incomplete. It didn't include, for example, Antonio Arconte, who described an organization very different from the one brushed by Giulio Andreotti: an organization closely tied to the SID secret service and the Atlanticist strategy.[17][18] According to Andreotti, the stay-behind organisations set up in all of Europe did not come "under broad NATO supervision until 1959."
[19]
 
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Equipment for the relocation was stored in a safe in the Swiss embassy in London:

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Link to BBC article on this here- UK military helped secret Swiss force

I particularly like the fact that the Intelligence Community and UKSF trained the Swiss Army on how to jump from a helicopter onto moving submarines at sea. An essential skill for a landlocked nation...
When I left the Army and moved to Geneva in 1980, I remember being told that one of the largest blue-water merchant fleets was Swiss flagged.
Fast-roping on to the deck of a ship was, and I believe still is, a specialist skill.
 
Link to BBC article on this here- UK military helped secret Swiss force

I particularly like the fact that the Intelligence Community and UKSF trained the Swiss Army on how to jump from a helicopter onto moving submarines at sea. An essential skill for a landlocked nation...
They have a large - flagged - fleet of commercial ships, mostly tankers, I think, and mostly servicing the African markets. Sounds reasonable.

Edit: just checked: probably (formerly) their largest, "Addax Petroleum is owned by Sinopec International Petroleum Exploration and Production Corporation (SIPC), which is managed and operated by the Sinopec Group." That was a cunning buy by the Chinese.
 
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Having had the experience of discovering Hitler's plans for Op Tannenbaum and then making preparations to counter it, the Swiss forces maintained their guard up throughout the Cold War.
I was present when, in 1982, a former colleague at IDR (originally a Geneva-based publication ) was taken to task by the head of Swiss Security, who told him he 'was in serious trouble' over an article the colleague had written on Swiss defensive war plans.
Since we were both, at the time, on the standard five-year, not automatically renewable , work and residence permits, this didn't sound as if it boded well .
'What's the problem,' said the colleague. 'As requested, I submitted the article, pre-publication , for security clearance, and deleted things you asked me to cut out.'
'True,' said the Swiss, 'but there were things in there that were so secret we couldn't ask you to delete them, because , then, you would have known they were secret.'
Two lessons immediately spring to mind from that exchange:
1) Never let it be said the Swiss (and in this case he was from the German-speaking part) don't have a sense of humour, and:
2) The Great Game goes on.
 
'True,' said the Swiss, 'but there were things in there that were so secret we couldn't ask you to delete them, because , then, you would have known they were secret.'

Working with the insurance/assurance market in Switzerland that does not surprise me. You should know, but not know but we won't tell you.
 
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