Operation Blue Moon

Italy

 Operation Blue Moon(CIA/Drug trafficking)

File:Bluemoon.png
Date	1974 - 1980s
Location	Italy
Description	A CIA operation using Gladio, Aginter Press and the Italian Mafia to flood Italy with heroin, to subvert a revolutionary-oriented youth culture by turning it into a generation of junkies.
Perpetrators	CIA, Aginter Press, Italy/Mafia,Ronald Stark

Operation Blue Moon was a 1970s CIA operation to subvert revolutionary-oriented youth culture in Italy by turning it into a generation of junkies. The operation involved Gladio, both the Italian operation and the Portuguese Gladio front Aginter Press, and the Italian mafia. According to testimony given in 1995 by Roberto Cavallaro, a member of the I Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato and external collaborator of the SID, in 1972 he learned of the existence of a CIA operation in Italy called Blue Moon. According to Cavallaro, this form of" unorthodox war" was handled by the Lisbon Aginter Press, an undercover CIA organization that operated with the aim of training far-right militants to make bombs and infiltrate left-wing revolutionary groups.

Background

File:Roberto Cavallaro.png

The spook Roberto Cavallaro was 22 in 1972, when he found out the existence of Blue Moon during a Gladio training camp in France

In when being questioned for a 1996 police report, Roberto Cavallaro said that he had found out in 1972, during a brief training carried out in France, of the existence of an operation of the CIA in Italy, called BLUE MOON, at the time already underway, consisting in the spread of drugs in the youth strata with destabilizing purposes.

Cavallaro received knowledge of the operation during a meeting between members of the secret services of various European countries, held in a secret location in the Vosges mountains in the Alsace region of France. Participants included Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Poles - what Cavallaro concluded were not exile-Poles, but members of the (communist) Polish security agencies.

Cavallaro specified that:

• Two Portuguese officers of the Aginter Press were present at the training where he was told of OPERATION BLUE MOON;
• believed that the French trainers were former OAS
• OPERATION BLUE MOON was conducted in Italy by the United States using men and structures that belonged to the official representations of that country in our state;
• widespread substances were hallucinogenic and targets were transgressive environments;
• the instructors explained that this type of destabilization was considered unsuitable by them for Europe, but that some US operations, "out of regard", had to be supported.

According to the investigating judge Guido Salvini, holder of several investigations on the strategy of tension, the man connecting with the CIA for the Blue Moon operation was Ronald Stark, a personal friend of LSD-guru Timothy Leary.

Main components

The operation had three main components.

• The mafia, through their control of the soft drugs market, had no difficulty in orchestrating a drought of one set of narcotics and a glut of another; heroin. Thousands of people, who had no prior experience of the drug, or knowledge of its effects, were not resistant to trying it.
• To ensure heroin dominated every area of the market, the regulated supply of opiates – principally in the form of morphine – similarly dried up. Although prices were higher, morphine users had no choice but to switch to heroin, considering that it is a pharmacologically suitable substitute.
• Arrests related to other drugs such as hashish and cannabis, along with interdiction of these substances increased as the government enforced a clampdown on illicit narcotics other than heroin.

Effects

Between 1974 and 1975, heroin began to appear in large quantities on Italy’s drug market. During this period, heroin use was primarily concentrated among the country’s counterculture; groups who were firmly against the political establishment and who rejected consumerism. A British Journal of Addiction report estimate that in 1977 there were 28,000 opiate users; by 1982, this had jumped to 92,000.

Similar operations

The 1960s counterculture was subverted by the promotion and the CIA'ś massive supplies of LSD.

The huge spread of heroin in 1970s the black ghettos was among the main causes of the defeat and subsequent dissolution of African American revolutionary movements such as the Black Panthers. The CIA-Contra cocaine trafficking in the 1980s chose crack cocaine rather than heroin but had an analagous purpose.

Perpetrators

A 1996 police report mentioned that the following people and groups would be worth following up on: James Eatinger, Patrick Thyraud Devosjoli, Guido Giannettini, Yves Guérin-Sérac, Richard Helms, [[Thomas Karamessines], Richard Ober, Jean Parvulescu, Costantine Kostas Plevris, Eliodoro Pomar, Jay Simon Salby, Jean René Marie Souetre, Aginter Press, and the French right-wing extremist group La Chaine.

Cover up

An Italian Wikipedia page has been created several times for this operation, but was deleted again as of August 2026.