Conspiracies, large-scale conspiracies with significant impact, actually do occur. For example, the Gladio conspiracy in post-World War II Italy was a clandestine organization set up by NATO and recruited from the remnants of Italian Fascism in order to combat what NATO feared might be the rise of a popular-Left movement. Commentators have linked Gladio to a wider, European “stay-behind network” of similar organizations with a similar agenda. In the Italian context, Gladio, and its parallel organization, P2, have been linked to such actions as the Bologna railway-station bombing in 1980, in which 83 people were murdered, and to the assassination of Aldo Moro. (Moro was disapproved of by NATO because of the “historic compromise” which he authored, by which the Italian Communist Party under Enrico Berlinguer was to be invited into the parliamentary process.) The existence of Gladio was at first denied by the Italian government but then finally admitted by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1990.
William McMurtrie (Sat,) studied this question.