Gladio, and its South American counterpart Operation Condor, are the internal control tools that the US used (and still uses) to keep countries as its satellites. By killing politicians, activists, union leaders. By even creating fake terror organizations in the name of the left etc, committing attacks and then claiming them in the name of a competing ideology to alienate those countries’ public from those ideologies. It is a very dirty, very illegal affair that has been going on for ~70 years.