American agents formed a brutal gang of robbers that murdered 28 people in Belgium in the early 1980s? El Periodico says it's true!

The "Brabant massacres," as this dark episode in recent Belgian history is called, continue to torment the people's memory. Especially because it is suspected that these crimes were motivated by political reasons to destabilize the Belgian state, and that former secret service members in the service of American geostrategic interests were involved.

Wait. Why would the Americans want to destabilize the allied government of Belgium, a NATO member? And why would they do so by forming a gang of robbers and killing a bunch of people?

The "Brabant massacres" occurred during the years of the massive protests of the people against the installation of the American Euromissiles in the last episodes of tension of the Cold War.

Oh, that explains it. We want to destabilize Belgium's government, which is supporting our missiles policy, because of anti-nuke demonstrations.

The gratuitous violence of the robberies, the small booty, and the cold, precise, and military action of the group support the thesis of a plot to destabilize the State and harden government policy, as finally occurred when the power of the gendarmerie was increased.

Okay, that proves it. The Americans wanted the Belgian gendarmerie to have more power, so they killed a bunch of people.

The researchers Rene Haquin (Belgian) and Daniele Ganser (Swiss) argued, in different books, in favor of the implication of the American secret network Gladio and NATO in these episodes.

What more evidence could one possibly want? It must be true, and so we urgently need to run an article on it!

Of course, this is complete bushwah, bosh, bunkum, and baloney. According to the US State Department, the entire "Operation Gladio" conspiracy theory is 30-year-old Soviet disinformation.

The Greek writer making the claim – and a Swiss researcher who wrote a 2005 book on the “stay behind” networks – both give credence to a Soviet forgery from the 1970s, which has long been publicly identified as a phony document...Grivas and other prominent “stay behind” researchers appear to have been influenced by a bogus text that first surfaced in 1976, a Soviet forgery purporting to be Supplement B to the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 30-31.

So what's the Spanish connection?

FM 30-31B reappeared in 1978 when it was reprinted in two Spanish publications, El Pais (18 September) and Triunfo (23 September). This was the work of a Spanish communist and a Cuban intelligence officer. Since September 1978, the manual and/or articles concerning it have appeared in the world press in more than 20 countries, including the United States.

Oh, so that's it. El Pais fell for this one back when they were pro-Soviet, and that's how this conspiracy disinformation has stayed alive.

Here's the State Department's conclusion:

A thirty year-old Soviet forgery has been cited as one of the central pieces of “evidence” for the false notion that West European “stay-behind” networks engaged in terrorism, allegedly at U.S. instigation. This is not true, and those researching the “stay behind” networks need to be more discriminating in evaluating the trustworthiness of their source material.

Gee, I think that sums it all up pretty well.