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assassins linked to Gladio teams took direct action against communists suspected of being part of a fifth column prepared to run Moscow-puppet governments should the Red Army overrun the country. The organic nature of the Gladio network after it was secretly adopted by NATO made it inevitable that some operators from these countries were trained in Britain and elsewhere by British and American Special Forces, just like the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s.
    For four decades after the Second World War, the British army had two commitments. The first, known as Priority One, was the defense of Western Europe from attack by the Red Army and its allies. These were edgy times. As Sir John Killick, British ambassador to NATO, told the author during those years: “We know their capabilities. We do not know their intentions.” It does not seem to have struck Western governments that the Soviets, having lost 26 million dead following Germany’s invasion, might have felt it needed buffer states in eastern Europe as an insurance against a repeat performance. Meanwhile, the scope for Special Forces activity in the frozen strategy of the Cold War in western Europe—a potential conflict between lumbering dinosaurs—was limited, but not impossible.
    In Europe, throughout the forty-four years of the Cold War, a team unconnected with the wartime freemasonry founded by Gubbins and Stirling operated across the front line alongside the agent-running arm of SIS. It was known as Brixmis, or the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany. It answered to the intelligence secretariat of the Ministry of Defence and unlike the Foreign Office (vide Philby) or CIA (vide Aldrich Ames) it was never penetrated by the KGB. Its intelligence product was sent to Washington, sometimes before it reached London. From 1947 two similar, smaller missions worked alongside Brixmis. These were the U.S. Military Liaison Mission, which included Major Arthur Nicholson, and the French MLM.
    Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, from 1969 onwards, following the explosion of resentment among the minority Catholic population in response to the government’s failure to provide equal rights in voting, jobs, and housing, street politics boiled over to become an insurgency and full-blown campaign of terrorism. British intelligence was caught by surprise, asserting that the IRA was a long-dead, moribund force. After Gunner Robert Curtis, the first British casualty, was shot dead in Belfast in February 1971, elements of Britain’s conventional “green army,” configured for the European battlefield, adopted counter-insurgency methods including the use of civilian clothes, burglary of private homes to plant bugs, and assassination. For many soldiers it was a schizophrenic experience in which the Red Army’s tank divisions were the threat during one operational tour, while at other times the Improvised Explosive Device teams of the IRA awaited them on the back streets of Belfast.
    On the other side of the world, France and then the United States were fighting a war of attrition in Indochina. The French wanted to restore their pre-war colonial rule. The U.S. was persuaded by George Kennan and John Foster Dulles to adopt a policy of containment to rein in international communism. The locals wanted self-determination and were willing to take help from any quarter, as they had done during the Second World War. Step by reluctant step, the U.S. entered the Vietnam quagmire, unsupported, for once, by the U.K. Like Afghanistan today, it was a conflict fought against a guerrilla army, one in which the occupation of minds counted for more than the control of territory. It saw the emergence of strategic hamlets and free-fire zones (based on British experience in Malaya); civic action teams; recruitment of aboriginal tribes; and a steady buildup of Special Forces such as the Mobile Guerrilla Force and including, from 1962, the creation of Navy SEALs (described by their