Rogue Agents - Postscript - The Garnier-Lançon Papers

Rogue Agents: The Cercle and the 6I in the Private Cold War 1951 - 1991 is a book by David Teacher. It is reproduced here by permission of the author.
==Rogue Agents - Postscript - The Garnier-Lançon Papers==
*Rogue Agents: Contents 
*Previous section: 1981-1991 - Forward to Victory
It is rare that the membership and concerns of confidential discussion groups
of powerbrokers should become documented public knowledge. Indeed, the only
instance so far of a voluntary - if paltry - release of such information has been by the
Bilderberg Group, founded at the same time as the Cercle Pinay, which reacted to its
growing notoriety a decade or so ago by publishing since then a bare list of the
delegates and topics for its annual conferences. Not so for the Cercle which continues
to meet in the same anonymity that it has enjoyed for the last sixty years.
Despite its crucial significance for the genesis of the European Union and its
far-reaching covert influence in both domestic and international politics since then,
the Cercle still remains almost completely unknown today. For six decades, in spite
of the eminence of its members and the notoriety of its allies in the intelligence
community, the Cercle has stayed "under the radar", its existence unexposed except
by the 1982 publication of the Langemann papers, and by Péan's groundbreaking
1984 book V on Violet and the AESP, neither of which were investigated further by
the English-speaking international Press. Not even the publication in 1993 of
Crozier's firsthand memoirs revealing the existence of the 6I – in his words, an
international "Private Sector Operational Intelligence agency" closely linked to the
Cercle – led to any further journalistic or academic examination of its activities. This
study over the past twenty-five years has patiently pieced together the jigsaw of scant
print references to Cercle operations by previous investigative journalists, extended
their research to include verified online resources and published some of the AESP
internal documents that circulated amongst Belgian journalists at the time and were
later reviewed by Schrijvers. However, no internal documents from the Cercle itself
had emerged or were known even to exist.
All of this has changed however in the last three years, as the private papers of
Cercle participants became available after their deaths, shedding light both on the
Cercle's membership and on their meetings. The watershed came in October 2011
with the first-ever public release by Joël van der Reijden of primary sources from Le
Cercle itself: internal Cercle meeting attendance lists from the Hoover Institution
archive of papers from Monique Garnier-Lançon, a security advisor to Paris Mayor
Jacques Chirac and one of his Deputy Mayors of Paris from 1977 to 1989 who served
in the early 1980s as the post-Violet/Dubois convenor of the French Cercle
delegation. Van der Reijden's 2011 publication of the Cercle attendance lists has been
followed in August 2015 by a fuller release of the Garnier-Lançon archive by Belgian
researcher Hervé Beghinselen. These primary sources considerably extend the
available information about membership of the Cercle and the 6I at a critical point in
their covert anti-disarmament campaign, confirming many of the links previously
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detailed in this investigation, clarifying several issues and identifying new paths of
enquiry for later researchers.
The Cercle described in the 1982-85 participants' lists had changed markedly
since the 1970s following the withdrawal of its co-founders Pinay and Violet and the
eclipse of its longstanding financial backer Pesenti, then embroiled in the collapse of
the Banco Ambrosiano. The loss of these original pillars of the Cercle was
compounded in May 1981 by the electoral victory of Socialist François Mitterrand, a
political sea-change which ejected the Cercle's natural allies from power and left them
in disarray. By contrast, in Germany, whilst Strauß's Cercle-backed election bid in
October 1980 had failed to unseat SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a constructive
vote of no confidence in the Bundestag brought the CDU's Helmut Kohl to power in
October 1982, marking the beginning of sixteen years of uninterrupted conservative
rule. Whilst the German axis to the Cercle continued under the leadership of Huyn
and Bach, French participation in the Cercle would be further undermined by Pierre
Péan's 1983 revelation of the sniffer plane scandal which led to a parliamentary
inquiry and implicated Pinay and Violet, both old men in ill health. As the influence of
the French waned and the Cercle struggled to find credible partners in that country,
the Anglo-American and intelligence dimensions to the Cercle expanded considerably.
Under the Chairmanship of SOE veteran Julian Amery, the post-Violet Cercle shifted
focus, coming under the sway of Brian Crozier and his covert network, the 6I.
THE CERCLE AND THE 6I
The interaction between the Cercle and the 6I went far beyond the "minor
overlapping" mentioned by Crozier; not only did senior figures from the British and
American intelligence communities attend Cercle meetings, but also almost entire
national delegations of the Cercle – most notably the post-Damman MAUE from
Belgium – were recruited to the 6I cause, soon setting up front groups to assist
Crozier's anti-unilateralist propaganda campaign. This process had been ongoing
since the previous two meetings of Cercle allies for which we have full participants'
lists - the February 1976 AESP Chapter Assembly and the November 1976 CEDI
Congress – but the launch in February 1977 of the 6I accelerated the pace of
integration. Indeed, the CEDI Congress in particular appears to have heralded the
creation of the 6I which came only three months later; three key CEDI participants in
November 1976 - Violet, Crozier and Huyn, the triumvirate then running the Cercle -
were all, according to Crozier, core founding members of the 6I 'Politburo' in February
1977. Whilst Crozier's memoirs preferred to downplay the overlap between the Cercle
and the 6I, noting that "some members of the 6I's 'Politburo' also attended the Cercle
meetings; others did not" (525), the Cercle participants' lists between 1982 and 1985
belie the impression of separation that Crozier wished to give, as they record the
frequent presence at Cercle meetings of most of the members of the 6I 'Politburo' and
many of their operatives.
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At the June 1982 Cercle meeting held at the HSS conference centre in Wildbad-
Kreuth, the first meeting covered by the Cercle documents in the Garnier-Lançon
archive, the 6I 'Politburo' was represented by Crozier, Elliott, Huyn and Jameson, the
latter having acted as American coordinator of the Cercle since at least 1977. Other
6I contacts attending the Cercle meeting in Bavaria included General Alan Fraser, the
6I's close South African ally and previous channel to the Shah, and the London
financier Sir Peter Tennant who, at the time, was acting Chairman of the Wilton Park
Academic Council, resigning in 1983 over budget cuts to the centre; he would later
help provide funding for one of Crozier's UK 6I front groups, CAMACC, as detailed
above.
Also attending the 1982 Cercle meeting in Bavaria were most of the 6I's
Belgian partners - Close, Jonet, de Kerchove and de Bonvoisin. The presence at this
1982 Cercle meeting of almost the entire top membership of MAUE demonstrates
that Belgian cooperation with Brian Crozier had continued uninterrupted despite the
sudden death in July 1979 of Florimond Damman and the subsequent implosion of
the AESP, an upheaval followed in October 1979 by the end of Paul Vanden
Boeynants' seven-year reign as Defence Minister and the 1980 'removal from the
Army hierarchy' of the controversial counter-subversion unit, PIO.
This new evidence about Belgian membership of the Cercle also underscores
the continuity and personnel overlap that had long existed between the public AESP
and CEDI, the 'semi-public' Belgian PIO, the confidential Cercle and the covert 6I. To
focus on but one figure, Benoît de Bonvoisin, the Baron Noir had previously attended
the February 1976 AESP Chapter Assembly and the November 1976 CEDI Congress,
both times accompanied by the PIO's Major Bougerol and by Belgian Cercle convenor
Jacques Jonet, and both times meeting Crozier. The MAUE group were active
partners of the 6I in its virulent campaign against the nuclear disarmament
movement; shortly before this June 1982 Cercle meeting, they had set up the Belgian
6I front groups RAPPEL and the IEPS in March and April respectively.
It is highly significant that the two former political controllers of Vanden
Boeynants' PIO, de Bonvoisin and de Kerchove, both attended various Cercle
meetings throughout the Brabant Wallon killings. At this time, de Bonvoisin had
long been the main financial backer and patron of both the PIO and the fascist
groups linked to the killings, whilst de Kerchove was the key aide to the Justice
Minister in charge of the sidetracked and fruitless first investigation.
Whilst no evidence has emerged to demonstrate a foreign hand in either the
planning or the execution of the Brabant Wallon killings, the new primary source
on Belgian membership of the Cercle further strengthens the probability that the
LIL/AESP/MAUE/PIO complex is the most promising path of investigation for
elucidating the crimes, still unresolved after thirty years. Belgium's statute of
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limitations was due to formally close the case on 10th November 2015; although this
has now been extended in extremis to forty years to allow continued enquiry, the
sixth official investigation failed to shed any further light on this dark affair, lost in
the futile search for the mere exécutants rather than the real commanditaires.
Returning to RAPPEL and the IEPS, despite excellent progress in setting up
the Belgian 6I front groups in early 1982, a storm of disagreement would soon
cloud the relationship between the Belgian team and the European Institute for
Security founded in 1980, of which Monique Garnier-Lançon was Vice-Chairman.
At first, all seemed to bode well: at an EIS Board meeting held on 9th June 1982 –
two days before the beginning of this Cercle meeting - the EIS appointed Close as
Chairman of the EIS Board of Directors and de Kerchove as EIS Treasurer-General.
Both men and EIS Vice-Chairman Garnier-Lançon then travelled to Bavaria to
attend the Cercle meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth.
Shortly afterwards, however, Close was replaced by the Board as Chairman
by Major-General Jochen Löser, and de Kerchove was removed as Treasurer. This
alleged abuse of the EIS Statutes was only one bone of contention; another was the
acceptance by the EIS Board of several more powerful German members, again
allegedly in violation of the Statutes. In an eight-page letter to the EIS Board of 14th
September 1982 (also copied to "Maître Jonet, member of the EIS"), Close furiously
denounced this German domination of the EIS:
"a) the Board of Administration includes, as of 15th March 1982, 4 German
members … plus five coopted German members, illegally included as not in
accordance with the Statutes, making in total 9 out of 16 members i. e. more
than an absolute majority; b) the Presidium includes 7 German members out
of 13 i. e. more than an absolute majority; c) the Curatorium includes 23
German members out of 33, i. e. nearly one and a half times an absolute
majority" (emphasis in the original).
The EIS remained unswayed, and Close, de Kerchove and Jonet decamped
from the EIS, with Close writing to Löser on 18th October 1982 saying that, failing
remedial action: "I am afraid I cannot afford the luxury of associating with an
Institute whose Board of Directors continuously disregards the Statutes of its
Institute and decides upon new rules and regulations whenever it conveniently fits
the occasion and desires of seemingly the majority of the members of the Board"
(526). As described below, the rift between the EIS and its former Belgian members
would not be resolved, and Close and his team would concentrate their efforts on
RAPPEL, the IEPS and WACL.
To turn to others present at the 1982 Wildbad-Kreuth Cercle meeting, the
participants' list also reveals the attendance of three top British and American
intelligence figures - and no doubt 'senior advisors' to the 6I – whom we have not yet
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met and whose involvement in the Cercle was concealed in Crozier's later memoirs.
SOE and MI6 veteran Neil 'Billy' McLean was an old comrade-in-arms of
Cercle Chairman Julian Amery – indeed almost forty years earlier, during the war,
Lieutenant-Colonel McLean had been Captain Julian Amery's Commanding Officer
in M. O. 4 or "the Musketeers", the SOE unit supporting the Albanian royalist
resistance under Ihsan Bey Toptani in 1944 (527). After leaving the SOE at the end
of the war, McLean like Amery had worked for MI6 as a Middle Eastern expert before
being elected as Conservative MP for Inverness in 1952, remaining MP until 1964
and working for MI6 throughout the post-war period. In late 1962, McLean accepted
an Israeli request passed on by recently-retired MI6 Deputy Chief G. K. Young to
intervene in Yemen to support the royal family overthrown by republicans with
backing from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Together with then Colonial
Secretary Duncan Sandys, then Air Minister Julian Amery, SAS founder David
Stirling and Major David Smiley (McLean's second-in-command in the SOE
Albanian unit), McLean conducted a private guerrilla war covertly supported by the
British, Saudis and Israelis which finally brought down the republican Yemeni
government and drove Nasser's forces back to Egypt in June 1967 (528).
McLean would remain in touch with Amery over the years, attending all but
one of the Cercle meetings between June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth and February 1985
in Washington DC; he died in November 1986. McLean's presence in the Cercle was
revealed in 1990 by his erstwhile comrade-in-arms Xan Fielding who had served
together with McLean, Amery and later CEDI stalwart Rowland Winn (Lord St
Oswald) in SOE in Albania and/or Siam. The relevant passage of Fielding's
biography of McLean reads:
"There was another institution which gave Billy particular pleasure. It was
called Le Cercle, and outside the circle nothing was known about it but the
name. Its origins and membership were (and still are) as deeply cocooned in
mystery as those of the most exclusive Masonic lodge. It appears to have been
founded by the French statesman, Antoine Pinay, and when he retired,
Julian Amery took over the chairmanship. It seems to have been a small
assembly of European and American Conservatives meeting on an ad hoc
basis once or twice a year, for two or three days at a time, to exchange views
on world affairs. Because of his knowledge and understanding of the Middle
East and North Africa, Billy was a most acceptable candidate for
membership, which, in due course, he acquired. He had already attended
several meetings – in Bonn, Munich, Washington and elsewhere – and looked
forward to attending more" (529).
McLean was not the only veteran covert operator from MI6 to attend the 1982
Cercle meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth ; the participants' list also records the presence of a
certain Frank Steele, according to the documents, a "banker". Steele, who would
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attend four Cercle meetings between 1982 and 1985, was far more than that; he had
been one of MI6's most senior frontline officers whose career, both in the Service and
in later life, was intimately connected with George Kennedy Young and Nicholas
Elliott.
Having joined MI6 in 1951, Steele was posted to Basra in Iraq; in 1953, he
helped prepare for a southern invasion of Iran after the temporary flight of the Shah
before the ultimate success of the joint CIA/MI6 coup against Iranian Prime Minister
Mossadegh, an operation that was run from Cyprus by Young, MI6 Director of Middle
Eastern operations. Steele would then serve under Young in Cyprus, Cairo and Tripoli
before being posted home in 1956. During this period, Young had been working
closely with Nigel Clive's Special Political Action section in London to plan the failed
Israeli/British/French invasion of the Suez Canal Zone following its nationalisation
by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in July 1956. Steele would not however
find his return to headquarters any quieter than the Middle East; since April 1956,
MI6 had been embroiled at home in public scandal (and a clandestine turf war with
MI5) over the disasterous 'Buster' Crabb operation. The ill-fated and unauthorised
attempt to use a frogman to examine a Soviet warship in a British harbour had been
run by MI6 London station chief Nicholas Elliott who nonetheless survived the uproar
unscathed. Steele spent two years in London before being posted abroad from 1958
to 1961 to the MI6 Beirut station, serving for his last year under a new station chief -
Nicholas Elliott, also present at this 1982 Cercle meeting.
Steele returned to London in 1961, the year that Young retired as Deputy
Director of MI6 and joined Sir Frederic Bennett as a Senior Director of the newly
created investment bankers Kleinwort Benson. Meanwhile, Steele served at MI6
headquarters until 1965 when he was posted to Jordan and then in 1968 to Kenya
where he conducted secret negotiations with Jomo Kenyatta. This presaged the
highpoint of Steele's MI6 career which came in early 1971 when he was posted to the
MI6 station in Northern Ireland "as a member of the small FCO team there, and in
May of the following year succeeded to its senior position". It is interesting to note
that from November 1972 until Heath's defeat by Wilson in February 1974, the
Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs at the FCO, the cover
department for MI6, was Julian Amery.
Steele's Northern Irish tour of duty came at a particularly violent period of the
Troubles: Operation Demetrius, the internment without trial of over 300 IRA
suspects, was conducted in August 1971, the Bloody Sunday killing of fourteen
unarmed civilians by the British Army occurred in January 1972 (530), and in March
1972, Edward Heath suspended the Stormont Parliament and introduced Direct Rule
from Westminster. Now the senior MI6 officer in Northern Ireland, Steele was given
the politically explosive task of contacting the IRA leadership to discuss a ceasefire,
leading to the highly secret meeting in London on 7th July 1972 between Northern
Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw and an IRA delegation including Provisional Army
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Council chief of staff Seán Mac Stiofáin, IRA Derry second-in-command Martin
McGuinness and Gerry Adams, released from internment to attend the meeting.
The negotiations however came to nothing, and the province would soon be riven by
a savage clandestine struggle for control between MI6 and MI5, two of the many
victims being Ulster headquarters InfPol/IRD propaganda officer Colin Wallace and
MIU/MI6 cross-border operative Captain Fred Holroyd.
Steele however escaped the worst of it, being posted back to MI6
headquarters in May 1973 to assume "a senior position connected with the Middle
East in London [probably Young's old post as MI6 Director of Middle Eastern
operations] but he took premature retirement in 1975, frustrated by the constraints
placed on his freedom of action". Immediately after his retirement from MI6, Steele
started a career in the City – at Kleinwort Benson alongside his old MI6 boss,
George Kennedy Young. Young would retire the following year and soon set up the
Unison Committee for Action with fellow Kleinwort Benson Senior Director Sir
Frederic Bennett. Steele meanwhile remained with the bank until his own retirement
in 1987. At the time of this Cercle meeting in 1982, Steele was Director of Export
Financing at Kleinwort Benson as well as Chairman of Network Television from
1981 to 1987, a useful position (531).
Another former senior intelligence officer and probable 6I 'senior advisor' at
the June 1982 Cercle meeting was Arnold M. Silver, like Elliott coyly referred to in
the Cercle participants' lists as a "Security Advisor". Silver had started his
intelligence career in 1945 as a US Army Intelligence Sergeant debriefing Soviet and
Nazi intelligence operatives at Camp King in Oberursel, Germany (532). During his
tour at Camp King, Silver had notably interrogated Nazi commando Colonel Otto
Skorzeny, recommending that he be exculpated and resettled. Skorzeny would
however eventually be tried and acquitted at the 1947 Dachau Trials before
escaping from American military custody to reach Madrid where he became a
veteran hero and rallying point for re-emergent European fascism in Spain,
Portugal, Italy and Greece in the 1960s and a major inspiration for the formation of
Aginter Presse, the Greek coup and the stragi until his death in 1975.
As for Silver, with firsthand knowledge of Soviet intelligence networks from
Camp King, he joined the CIA in 1948 and served in Austria, Luxembourg (Chief of
Station from 1957 to 1960), Germany, Turkey and the US, rising to become a "very
senior Agency man in charge of counter-subversion in Western Europe", "a former
senior CIA officer who had long specialised in German and Soviet affairs. He had
joined the 6I after being made redundant by President Carter's DCI, Admiral Turner,
in his purge of specialists on Communism" (533). Silver returned to Luxembourg
after retirement from the CIA in 1978. In 1981, he wrote a report on the Socialist
International for the Heritage Foundation - alongside him at this 1982 Cercle
meeting were Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul M. Weyrich and the Foundation's
organiser amongst Republican senators, Margo Carlisle, as detailed below. Silver
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would later attend a further Cercle meeting held in Bonn in July 1984 (534).
Also at the 1982 Cercle meeting was another figure with wartime service in the
OSS, although poles apart from CIA veteran Silver: the American-born Aline Griffith
who had married the Conde de Quintanilla in 1947 and inherited the title of
Condessa de Romanones in 1963. A former model who socialised widely with
European aristocracy, she would later exaggerate her minor part as a lowly OSS
cipher clerk in Madrid from 1943 on in a trio of bestselling memoirs of derring-do
(535). Nonetheless, her social connections were of great service to the 6I; as Crozier
records, it was Romanones who, via her friendship with Nancy Reagan, arranged
Crozier's meeting with Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in July
1980 and Reagan's subsequent appointment of William A. Wilson as his backchannel
to both the Cercle and the 6I (536).
The significant presence of the 6I at the 1982 Cercle meeting would be
repeated, indeed intensified, a year later at the Cercle meeting held in Bonn in July
1983 which was attended by 6I 'Politburo' members Crozier, Elliott, Huyn,
Stauffenberg, Shackley and Jameson alongside all of the key 6I operatives from the
four British and Belgian outlets involved in the 6I's ongoing anti-disarmament
campaign: the London duo of Lewis and Leigh from the Coalition for Peace through
Security together with their fundraiser Sir Peter Tennant, the Editor of Soviet Analyst
and member of the IEDSS Board Iain Elliot, and Close, Jonet and de Kerchove from
RAPPEL and the IEPS.
Although these three Belgians had left the German-dominated EIS in the
autumn of 1982, Close was still prepared, at least on paper, to offer collaboration
between the IEPS and the EIS, writing on 25th March 1983 to the Acting Chairman of
the EIS Board, Captain T. Sleeswijk Visser: "During our last meeting, I promised to
give you more details about our newly created European Institute for Peace and
Security in Brussels. As you well know, I formed the Institute because I was quite
disappointed with the practical approach of the EIS … I would like to underline that
we are willing to work in close cooperation with the EIS because our aims are exactly
the same, even if our methods of approach differ … Of course, this offer of
cooperation is left to your discretion … In other words, whilst keeping our full
autonomy, we will be associated with you as we are with the Institut International de
Géopolitique of Mme Marie-France Garaud and the Foreign Affairs Research Institute
of Mr. Geoffrey Stewart-Smith" (537).
In reality, cooperation between the EIS and the RAPPEL/IEPS team would
never take off – the Belgian group was at the time busy preparing for the first
International Congress of RAPPEL, held in September 1983 in Luxembourg in
conjunction with the WACL Annual Conference. As well as leading RAPPEL and the
IEPS, Close was also the President of the WACL Preparatory Committee and then
Chairman of the conference, also attended by Vankerkhoven and de Kerchove.
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Despite the failure to overcome the rift between the Belgian 6I team and the EIS, one
British 6I operative present at this July 1983 Cercle meeting would continue to work
with the EIS: an EIS press release from 1985 states: "An Anglo-French delegation
from the European Institute for Security is in Geneva and is available for interview by
the press, radio or television until 12 noon on Wednesday, 20 November. It consists
of 1) Madame Monique Garnier-Lançon – Vice-Chairman and Foreign Affairs Director
of the European Institute for Security; and 2) Dr. Julian Lewis – Director of the
British Coalition for Peace through Security, and a member of the EIS Board of
Directors" (538). This July 1983 Cercle meeting would however be the last one
attended by Stauffenberg – Langemann's disasterous exposé of Stauffenberg's
reporting on the Cercle and the 6I had been published in the Spiegel in September
1982.
The domination of the Cercle by Crozier's 6I would continue in the two Cercle
meetings held in 1984, the first of which ventured further afield to South Africa. Held
in January, the meeting included 6I 'Politburo' members Crozier, Elliott, Huyn and
Jameson, 6I contacts Steele, Fraser and Romanones, and Philippe Malaud whose
Comité Français contre le Neutralisme et pour la Paix had been working closely with
Crozier and the Belgian 6I front group IEPS (539). Although Crozier was absent for
health reasons at the second 1984 Cercle meeting, held in Bonn in July, the 6I
attended in force: Elliott and Huyn of the 'Politburo' were supported by their advisors
McLean and Silver, and the 6I anti-disarmament campaign was represented by their
French and Belgian allies: Malaud and a full delegation from MAUE/RAPPEL/IEPS –
Jonet, Vankerkhoven, Close, de Decker and Beyer de Ryke.
At the July 1984 meeting, Habsburg (in a rare late attendance at the Cercle)
could congratulate some of the other participants: following the European
Parliament elections held three weeks earlier, Habsburg and Beyer de Ryke had
been re-elected as MEPs, whereas Malaud had been elected for the first time.
Vankerkhoven meanwhile had decided not to stand again after replacing a deceased
MEP from 1982 until 1984. After the EP elections, the International Council of
Presidency of the PEU would be reconstituted in September; joining President
Habsburg, Deputy Secretary-General Jonet and Council member Beyer de Ryke was
Malaud as PEU Vice-President.
A later Washington meeting of the Cercle held in February 1985 also included
senior 6I figures: although Crozier himself was again absent, the conference brought
together 6I 'Politburo' members Elliott, Huyn, Jameson and Stilwell alongside 6I
partner General Fraser and probable 6I founding member Sven Kraemer. Also
present were Stilwell's superior as Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy from 1981 to
1987 Fred C. Iklé, and Herbert E. Meyer, from 1981 on Special Assistant to CIA
Director Bill Casey and Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council; both Iklé
and Meyer are presented below.
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THE POLITICAL OUTREACH OF THE CERCLE
Besides documenting the considerable contingent from Crozier's 6I, the Cercle
meeting records also highlight changes in the political representation within the
Cercle. After some thirty years of cooperation both in Catholic conservative groups
and in the Cercle, the older founding generation of Pinay, Violet, Pesenti and, largely,
Habsburg had ceased attending Cercle meetings - although Alfredo Sánchez Bella
and Sir John Biggs-Davison participated in several Cercle meetings in the period
1982-1985, they were the last members with links to CEDI going back to the 1950s
(540).
As could be expected of a Cercle now chaired by Julian Amery supported by 6I
head Crozier, the British group within the Cercle swelled to include several of their
Conservative Party allies. One such was the former Grenadier Guards officer John
Browne, the MP for Winchester from 1979 to 1992 who attended three Cercle
meetings in June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth, in July 1983 in Bonn and in February
1985 in Washington DC. Browne served as Secretary of the Conservative Backbench
Finance Committee in 1981–83, Secretary of the Conservative Backbench Defence
Committee in 1982–83, and a Member of the Treasury Select Committee from 1982
to 1987; he would later sit as a Delegate to the North Atlantic Assembly from 1986
to 1992 and act as its Rapporteur on Human Rights from 1989 to 1992.
Another former Grenadier Guards officer and parliamentary friend of Amery
who would attend the June 1982 Cercle meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth and the July
1984 meeting in Bonn was Lord Cranborne or Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 6th Marquess
of Salisbury. Having served as a Conservative MP from 1950 to 1954, Cranborne
inherited his title and entered the House of Lords in 1972. His late father, the 5th
Marquess, had been the first President of the Monday Club, serving from 1961 to his
death in 1972; Lord Cranborne would succeed him in the post, serving from 1974 to
1981. Unsurprisingly, he was also President of the Anglo-Rhodesian Society; the
family had longstanding links with Rhodesia whose colonial capital Salisbury had
been named after them. His eldest son, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Viscount Cranborne,
spoke against Rhodesian sanctions at the Conservative Party conference in October
1978 before being elected as an MP in 1979 and serving until 1987, during which
time he was a firm friend of former Rhodesian minister and Cercle member P. K.
Van der Byl with whom he shared membership at the Turf Club and White's (541).
Another member of the House of Lords to attend Cercle meetings – three, in
January 1984 in Stellenbosch, in July 1984 in Bonn, and in February 1985 in
Washington - was Lord Kimberley or John Wodehouse, 4th Earl of Kimberley, listed
in 1984 as the Chairman of the House of Lords Defence Committee. A former Liberal
peer who had been Honorary Secretary of the House of Lords All-Party Defence
Group since 1978, he was fired as the Liberal Party spokesman in the Lords after
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recommending that electors vote for Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 elections. After
being persuaded to join the Conservative Party by Monday Club President Lord
Cranborne, he sat as a Tory peer until 1999, acting as a British delegate to the North
Atlantic Assembly from 1981 to 1993 and also serving as a member of the British
Atlantic Committee. In 1982, he joined the Monday Club and in 1983 was
appointed as a member of its Executive Council as well as Chairman of the Club's
Foreign Affairs Committee, a post previously held by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. In
June of the same year, in his capacity as Monday Club Foreign Affairs Chairman,
Kimberley also addressed the NATO Plenary Session supporting the deployment
of Cruise missiles. By 1985 he would be the House of Lords Speaker for European
Affairs (542).
A further participant at the January 1984 Cercle meeting in Stellenbosch was
Sir John Killick, a veteran Cold War diplomat who had worked in the Western
Europe Department of the Foreign Office from 1958 to 1962 before being posted to
Washington as Counsellor and Head of Chancery at the British Embassy from 1963 to
1968. Following another spell in London as Assistant Under-Secretary at the FO, he
then served as British Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1973. After
returning home and, as Deputy Under-Secretary, acting as senior advisor to the
Foreign Secretary (first Sir Alec Douglas-Home and then James Callaghan), in 1975
Killick was appointed Permanent Representative to NATO, serving until 1979 when he
retired to South Africa. A few months after the 1984 Cercle meeting in Stellenbosch,
he returned to the UK following the death of his South African-born wife and took up
the post of President of the British Atlantic Council which he filled from 1985 to 1992
(543).
At the July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn, one very influential British
participant was Conservative MP Sir Philip Carter Goodhart, a scion of the American
Lehman banking family. Goodhart had worked from 1950 on as a leader writer and
foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times, notably covering
the British invasion of the Suez Canal from Port Said in 1956, before being elected
to the Commons in 1957. A hawk on defence and foreign policy, particularly on
Rhodesia, Vietnam and Northern Ireland, he was a member of the North Atlantic
Assembly for twenty-four years and at various times chaired the Conservative
backbench Defence and Northern Ireland committees as well as having briefly
served as a shadow defence spokesman under Leader of the Opposition Sir Alec
Douglas-Home in late 1964 before being dismissed by Edward Heath in 1965.
Goodhart's influence however came from his role as joint secretary of the
1922 Committee (the Conservative backbench caucas), a post he held for a record
nineteen years from 1960 to 1979, putting him at the heart of two Conservative
leadership contests that both followed Labour election victories under Harold
Wilson: the 1965 contest when Edward Heath replaced Sir Alec Douglas-Home as
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Conservative Leader, and, more crucially, the 1975 leadership election that pitted
Edward Heath against challenger Margaret Thatcher (544). It was at this time that
Goodhart, who strongly supported Thatcher, drew close to the counter-subversion
lobby, producing The Climate of Collapse – the terrorist threat to Britain and her
allies, published by the FAPC in 1975, and The death of the Cambodian nation,
published by FARI in 1976. After Thatcher's election victory, he was rewarded by
being appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Northern Ireland in 1979 before
becoming Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Army in January 1981. Goodhart
however left ministerial office (with a compensatory knighthood) that September
after disagreement with cuts to the armed forces, and returned to the backbenches
where he would sit until leaving Parliament in 1992 (545).
Another Conservative MP and junior minister who had started his career in
journalism was Sir Eldon Griffiths, who attended the Cercle meeting held in
Washington in February 1985. From 1949 to 1960, Griffiths had been a US-based
foreign correspondent and foreign editor for Time-Life before returning to the UK to
work both as a journalist for Newsweek and as chief European correspondent of the
Washington Post from 1961 to 1963. That year, he joined the Conservative Research
Department as a speech writer to Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and was
elected to Parliament in the 1964 election that saw Douglas-Home defeated by
Labour's Harold Wilson. In 1968, he was voted onto the 1922 Committee executive
and, at the 1969 Conservative Party conference, proposed the successful resolution
on Britain's membership of the then Common Market, also chairing the
Conservative Group for Europe.
A robust supporter of continued sporting links with South Africa, Griffiths
served in Edward Heath's government from 1970 to 1974 as Parliamentary Secretary
for Housing, Local Government and Sport in the Department of the Environment;
Amery was the Housing Minister from 1970 to 1972. Although a junior position, the
Sports portfolio was a sensitive post at the time in the light of widespread protests
against South African cricket and rugby tours of the UK, protests which were being
combated by both SIF (Young, Rodgers, Biggs-Davison, Howarth and Sir Frederic
Bennett) and by BOSS. After Heath's electoral defeat by Wilson in 1974, Griffiths
became Shadow Industry Minister, and then, after Thatcher replaced Heath as
Conservative Leader, her frontbench spokesman on foreign and commonwealth
affairs in 1975-76, notably including the referendum on EEC membership. After
Thatcher's victory in the May 1979 elections, Griffiths was however not included in
her government, remaining on the backbenches until his retirement in 1992, but
was an enthusiastic proponent of the stationing of Cruise missiles in Britain, and
would be knighted in June 1985, a few months after this Cercle meeting (546).
Besides Griffiths, another Conservative MP to attend the February 1985 Cercle
meeting in Washington was John Wilkinson, a former RAF pilot and Conservative
Research Department aviation expert, who sat as a Conservative MP from 1970 to
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1974 and then from 1979 until 2005, making him one of the longest-serving Members
of Parliament. Besides his time on the backbenches, Wilkinson had briefly served after
1979 as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Industry Minister Adam Butler before
becoming Parliamentary Private Secretary to Defence Minister John Nott in 1981,
serving during the 1982 Falklands War. He also sat as a member of the Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe from 1979 to 2005, and as a member of the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Western European Union from 1979 to 1990. Apart
from this parliamentary career, Wilkinson also had longstanding links to the
European Freedom Council and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. A participant at
EFC meetings from 1971 on, Wilkinson was elected Chairman of the EFC Executive
Committee at the joint EFC/ABN 1982 conference (where he spoke alongside
American WACL chapter founder Major-General John Singlaub), serving until the
EFC's 20th anniversary in 1987; he also attended the 1983 Congress of the National
Captive Nations Committee (547).
After the British delegation led by Amery and Crozier, the next most powerful
European country represented within the Cercle was Germany under its convenor and
6I 'Politburo' member Hans Huyn who would attend all of the meetings held between
June 1982 and February 1985; with him at each meeting was the Cercle's overall
coordinator, former Ambassador and MP Franz Josef Bach. Under their leadership,
the German delegation included powerful Cercle friends, one of the most prominent
of which was undoubtedly Huyn's old colleague from the German diplomatic service,
the veteran EEC official Karl-Heinz Narjes. In 1980, Langemann reported that the
then Bundestag MP had attended a Cercle meeting held in Washington in December
1979 together with Huyn and Heritage Foundation head Edwin Feulner, soon to
begin funding Crozier's 6I anti-unilateralist campaign. Since then, Narjes had left the
Bundestag, returning to the EEC in January 1981 as European Commissioner for
the Internal Market before serving in 1985-88 as Vice-President of the European
Commission in charge of Industry and Research. He would nonetheless continue to
frequent the Cercle whenever he could - the Garnier-Lançon papers record his
presence at the Cercle meetings held in June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth, in early 1983
probably in Washington, in July 1983 in Bonn, and in July 1984 in Bonn. In April
1982, Narjes had been an honoured guest at the inaugural General Assembly of the
EIS; the EIS Chairman General Close, the EIS Treasurer de Kerchove and prominent
EIS member Jonet would then meet Narjes again at the 1982 Wildbad-Kreuth meeting
held three months later.
Narjes was not the only eminent Cercle friend to attend the July 1982 meeting
in Bavaria; another participant was one of the most senior conservative politicians in
Germany, Dr. Bruno Heck. A former Federal Minister for Family and Youth from
1962 to 1968, Heck also served as CDU General Secretary from 1967 to 1971,
coordinating Kiesinger's campaign in the 1969 elections won by the SPD candidate,
Willy Brandt. In 1968, Heck had also taken over as Chairman of the CDU party
foundation, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a post he would fill for over twenty years
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until 1989, during which time the KAS was a leading German backer of the Cercle.
As Hänni notes, "whenever the meetings were held in West Germany (roughly one in
every three), the Cercle was the guest of either the CDU party foundation, the
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, or its Bavarian CSU counterpart, the Hanns-Seidel-
Stiftung. The two foundations sponsored Cercle meetings – including meals and
accommodation – no less than seven times between 1977 and 1986" (548). Heck, for
example, would be the host for the Cercle meeting held in Bonn in July 1983.
Alongside Heck at the 1982 meeting in the HSS conference centre in Wildbad-Kreuth
was the HSS's Dieter A. Schmidt, who would also attend the Cercle meeting in early
1983. The two foundation representatives could count on military advice from a
recently retired senior German Army officer, General Franz Joseph Schulze, NATO
Commander Central Europe (AFCENT) from 1977 until his retirement in 1979.
Schulze would be a frequent participant at Cercle meetings, attending not only this
1982 meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth, but also those held in early 1983, July 1983 in
Bonn, and July 1984 in Bonn.
Alongside the CSU foreign policy spokesman Huyn, his CDU counterpart and
fellow German representative in CEDI, Dr. Werner Marx, Chairman of the Bundestag
Foreign Affairs Committee, would attend the Cercle meetings held in early 1983 and in
July 1983 in Bonn. At the first of the two 1983 meetings, Marx brought along a
member of his committee, Peter Petersen, a CDU MP in 1965-72 and 1976-1990,
who would later attend the January 1984 Cercle meeting in South Africa. At the
Cercle meeting in early 1983, the CSU would be represented not just by Huyn but
also by two senior CSU politicians, the first of which was Dr. Franz Heubl, a founding
member of the CSU. A Bavarian regional MP from 1953 to 1990, he served as
Bavarian Minister of State for Federal Affairs from 1962 to 1978 when he became
President of the Bavarian Parliament, a post he filled until 1990. Heubl was
accompanied at the Cercle meeting in early 1983 by his successor as Bavarian
Minister of State for Federal and European Affairs Peter Schmidhuber, who sat in the
Bundestag for the CSU in 1965-69 and 1972-78 before being elected to the regional
Bavarian Parliament and serving as minister under Strauß from 1978 to 1987; at this
time, he was also a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Schmidhuber
would later serve as an EEC/EU Commissioner in Brussels from 1987 to 1995.
Besides these friends from the world of politics, the Cercle would also be supported by
German industry, notably by Peter Jungen, the Chairman of the mechanical
engineering firm Pohlig, Heckel, Bleichert/PHB Weserhütte AG and Vice-Chairman of
the CDU Economic Council who attended all five Cercle meetings held from early 1983
until February 1985 (549).
The July 1983 Cercle meeting hosted in Bonn by Heck and the KAS would also
be attended by top figures from the CDU and the KAS, the most senior of whom was
Alois Mertes, like fellow participants Huyn and Narjes a veteran of the German
diplomatic service which Mertes had joined in 1952. He served as General Consul in
Marseille and at the German Embassy in Paris from 1958 to 1963 at a time when
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Pinay was at the peak of his power as de Gaulle's Minister of Finance charged with
the introduction of the new French franc in 1960. Mertes was then posted to the
Moscow Embassy from 1963 to 1966, studied under Kissinger at Harvard in 1968-69
and became the Foreign Office's Director of European Security and Regional
Disarmament in 1969. He had been an AESP contact since at least 1973 and was
made a Life Member of the AESP in 1977 (550). From 1980 to 1982, Mertes served as
Chairman of the CDU Foreign Policy Working Group in the Bundestag and CDU
foreign policy spokesman before being appointed Minister of State in the Foreign
Office in October 1982, the position he held at the time of the Cercle meetings he
attended in July 1983 and July 1984; he died in office in June 1985.
At the July 1983 Cercle meeting, Mertes was accompanied by another
longstanding German AESP contact, Dr. Philipp Jenninger, a CDU MP from 1969
until 1990, who had served as the press spokesman at the Ministry of Defence from
1964 to 1966 and then as political advisor to Finance Minister Strauß until 1969.
From 1973 until 1982 Jenninger was the First Parliamentary Secretary of the
CDU/CSU fraction in the Bundestag, attending the 1974 XXIII CEDI Congress
alongside Huyn, Sánchez Bella and Jonet, all of whom were also present at the July
1983 Cercle meeting (551). The year before this 1983 Cercle meeting, Jenninger had
been appointed Minister of State in the Federal Chancellor's Office, serving until 1984
when he became President of the Bundestag until 1988.
Alongside Mertes and Jenninger at the Cercle meeting in July 1983 were two
senior figures from the KAS, the first of whom was KAS backer Alphons Horten. An
industrialist born in East Germany and Managing Director of the J. Weck preserving
jar manufacturer, Horten had been a co-founder of the CDU Economic Council in
1963, and later its Vice-President and Treasurer. In 1964, he acted as Treasurer of
the KAS's registered charity for political education which supported its study centre.
In 1965, Horten was elected as a CDU MP, serving seven years until 1972; from 1968
to 1972, he was the Treasurer of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung under its new
Chairman Bruno Heck, the host of this 1983 Cercle meeting. From the mid-1970s
on, Horten was also a contact of the AESP, having met the full AESP team at their
Grand Dîner Charlemagne and Chapter Assembly held in February 1976 (552).
Another top KAS member at the July 1983 Cercle meeting was the German
expert on weapons of mass destruction and nuclear proliferation Dr. Hans Rühle, a
prominent figure in the KAS Institute for Social Sciences, having served as its Head of
Research for Foreign and Defence Policy from 1974 to 1978 and then heading the
Institute from 1978 to 1982. That year, Rühle was appointed Head of the Planning
Staff in the Defence Ministry, the position he held when attending two Cercle meetings
in July 1983 and July 1984. In 1987, Chancellor Kohl would block his promotion to
the post of Secretary of State at the Defence Ministry; Rühle then left the CDU (553).
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The July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn welcomed not only Habsburg but also
the serving Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation, CSU politician Jürgen
Warnke, whose 1958 law doctorate (on democracy and the French political parties)
had been supervised by Professor von der Heydte. A Bavarian regional MP from 1962
on, Warnke was elected to the Bundestag in 1969 and sat there until 1988. From
1982 to 1987, he was the Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation in charge of
German development aid; after a brief stint as Federal Minister of Transport until
1989, he resumed his post as German development minister until 1991. A year after
attending this Cercle meeting, Warnke approved a 1985 grant of five million Marks
from his ministry to the HSS for its Spanish partner organisation, the Fundación
Cánovas del Castillo - run by fellow Cercle member Carlos Robles Piquer who had
attended both 1983 Cercle meetings. Alongside Warnke, another participant at the
July 1984 Cercle meeting was the retired Rear-Admiral Günter Poser, a former Head
of the NATO Intelligence Center from 1970 till his retirement in 1973; in 1981, he and
Huyn had been founding members of Western Goals' German anti-disarmament
group, AESRI. A final – and very powerful – German participant at Cercle meetings
was the veteran television presenter, Strauß promoter and Deutschland-Stiftung
President Gerhard Löwenthal who attended the February 1985 Cercle meeting in
Washington (554).
As described above, the French delegation to the Cercle in 1982-85 was left in
disarray by the withdrawal of Cercle co-founders Pinay and Violet; their absence was
further compounded by the fierce infighting that had rent French conservatism since
mid-1976, a savage battle for dominance pitting President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
against his former Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac. Having resigned as Prime Minister
in August 1976, Chirac had created the RPR in December 1976 and decisively
defeated Giscard's candidate to become Mayor of Paris in March 1977. The struggle
would carry through into the first round of the presidential elections in April 1981
when Giscard d'Estaing easily beat off the two right-wing challenges from Chirac and
RPR co-founder Marie-France Garaud to stand as the conservative candidate against
the Socialist François Mitterrand in the second round. However, Giscard's initial
victory would be pyrrhic; unlike Britain, America and Germany, France would be
dominated by the Left throughout the 1980s. In the second round in May 1981,
twenty-three years of unbroken conservative rule were abruptly terminated when
Mitterrand vanquished Giscard to become the first Socialist President of the Fifth
Republic, a defeat which deprived the Right of access to government and the influence
that went with it.
The only French participant to regularly attend the Cercle gatherings held
between 1982 and 1985, missing only the early 1983 meeting, was the French
convenor and security advisor to Chirac, Monique Garnier-Lançon, who was unable to
attract to the Cercle suitable attendees who would come to more than one or two
meetings. Several of the participants were also past their prime, as was shown at the
July 1983 Cercle meeting hosted by the KAS in Bonn; the top two French guests were
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both eminent diplomats and no doubt of a like mind with the Cercle, but one was a
colleague of Pinay from 1955, whereas the second had retired twenty years earlier.
The first was the veteran French EEC official Jean-François Deniau, who had
been one of the delegates with Antoine Pinay at the 1955 Messina conference that had
created the ECSC. After working as Permanent Secretary-General of the French
delegation in Brussels in 1956, Deniau had drafted the preamble to the Treaty of
Rome in 1957 and served as EEC Director and then Director-General in charge of
negotiations with the UK from 1958 to 1963. After four years as French Ambassador
to Mauritania, Deniau came back to Brussels to work at the EEC again, first as
Commissioner for Foreign Trade in charge of membership negotiations with the UK,
Denmark and Ireland from 1967 until 1970 and then as Commissioner for Foreign
Affairs until 1973. Returning to French national politics, he served as Secretary of
State for Cooperation in 1973 and Secretary of State for Agriculture and Rural
Development in 1974-75 before becoming heavily involved with the Spanish transition
to democracy as French Ambassador in Madrid in 1976. In 1977, he was appointed
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, switching to Minister for Foreign Trade in 1978
and finally serving as Minister for Administrative Reform in early 1981. An MP from
1978 to 1981, Deniau later sat in the European Parliament for the UDF from 1984 to
1986 when he was again elected to the National Assembly, serving as an MP until
1997 (555).
The second former senior French diplomat at the July 1983 Cercle meeting,
later also attending the January 1984 meeting in South Africa, was Francis Lacoste
who had started his diplomatic career in 1929, serving as Plenipotentiary Minister and
Deputy Delegate to the UN Security Council in 1950-54, and French Ambassador in
Canada from 1955 to 1962 and then in Belgium until his retirement in 1963. The UN
High Commissioner in Bangladesh in 1973, Lacoste was a Life Member of the AESP
from at least 1976 on, attending its February 1976 Dinner and Assembly (556).
At the two Cercle meetings held in 1984 – in January in Stellenbosch, South
Africa, and in July in Bonn – France was further represented by another veteran
member whom we have met before: the former minister Philippe Malaud, who chaired
Pinay's old party, the Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans (CNIP), from
1980 to 1987. In July 1984, Malaud was elected to the European Parliament and,
from that September on, would sit on the the PEU International Council alongside
Habsburg and Jonet, two of the other participants at the second 1984 Cercle
meeting. As noted above, over the previous year, Malaud's Comité Français contre le
Neutralisme et pour la Paix had been working with Paul Vankerkhoven, the Belgian
IEPS and Garaud's Institut International de Géopolitique within the 6I's antidisarmament
campaign (557).
The July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn would also attract another Cercle
supporter, this time from the media rather than the world of politics or diplomacy:
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François d'Orcival, Chairman of the Editorial Committee of the conservative news
magazineValeurs Actuelles, for which he is still an editorial writer today. Back in the
1950s, d'Orcival had been one of the leaders of Jeune Nation, a right-wing extremist
group banned in 1958 after bombing the French National Assembly; in 1960, he was
one of the founders of the Fédération des Etudiants Nationalistes (FEN) which was
involved in the attacks carried out by the OAS to defend l'Algérie française –
d'Orcival would interned for four weeks in 1962 as a result. It was whilst editing the
FEN journal, Les cahiers universitaires, that he met his future employer and fellow
Cercle member Raymond Bourgine, founder in 1957 of the Compagnie française de
journaux (Valmonde Group) whose main titles are Valeurs actuelles et Le Spectacle
du monde, for which d'Orcival started work in 1966 (558). Bourgine, who was close to
Pinay and Pompidou, had been introduced to Chirac by the latter and became a firm
supporter of Chirac from his successful 1977 bid for the Mayoralty of Paris through to
the 1988 presidential elections in which Chirac, Prime Minister in the first
cohabitation government formed in 1986, was decisively defeated by the sitting
President Mitterrand. Bourgine served as a Senator for Paris from 1977 to his death in
1990, latterly for the RPR; he was present at the next Cercle meeting after that
attended by d'Orcival, held in Washington in February 1985 (559).
Also attending the Washington Cercle meeting alongside Bourgine was one of
the most significant – and, many would argue, sinister - figures of the French hard
Right since the 1960s: Charles Pasqua. A founder in 1959 of the Gaullist parallel
police, the Service d'Action Civique (SAC), he would remain a member until 1969. In
December 1976, he was a co-founder of the RPR with Chirac and Marie-France
Garaud, becoming its Deputy Secretary-General. He was elected to the Senate for
the RPR in 1977 and led the unsuccessful Chirac campaign to replace Giscard
d'Estaing as the conservative candidate in the 1981 presidential elections. Between
1981 and 1986, he was then President of the RPR in the Senate; his attendance at
the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington falls in this period. Disappointed
with the failure of Garnier-Lançon to find suitable members (she would relinquish the
post of French convenor in 1986), it would seem that the Cercle turned for help to
Pasqua, a formidable networker and conservative éminence grise. He would certainly
be a more powerful friend, leaving the Senate in March 1986 to serve as the
controversial Interior Minister under Prime Minister Chirac during the first
cohabitation government which held office until May 1988 - Pasqua's closest cabinet
colleague was the Justice Minister, Albin Chalandon, the former head of ELF from
1977 to 1983 during the sniffer plane scandal. In 1988, Pasqua would return to the
Senate, serving there, apart from two interludes, until 2011 (560).
At the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington, Pasqua was accompanied
by a key assistant from the RPR, Jean-François Probst, who had been the chargé de
mission for Chirac when the latter was Prime Minister under Giscard d'Estaing in
1974-76. From 1976 to 1978, Probst served as directeur du cabinet for Jérôme
Monod, Secretary-General of the RPR; the Deputy Secretary-General was Pasqua.
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After a spell in the Foreign Ministry from 1979 to 1981, Probst then worked as
Secretary-General of the RPR group in the Senate whose President was Pasqua. As
a member of the RPR Central Committee, Probst was, with Pasqua, one of Chirac's
closest advisors and would play a considerable part in Chirac's unsuccessful
presidential bid in 1988 (561).
A final member of the French delegation at the February 1985 Cercle meeting
in Washington was Air Force General Etienne Copel, who was a French nuclear
tactical expert, in many ways the tactical counterpart to the French nuclear strategist,
fellow Cercle member and CEDI stalwart General Pierre Gallois. In 1969, Copel had
been put in charge of the first French nuclear tactical squadron; in 1973, he was
the first pilot to carry out a solo drop of a tactical nuclear bomb at the French
nuclear testing facility at Mururoa atoll. From 1981 on, Copel commanded the Air
Defence Operations Centre before being promoted in 1983 to the post of Deputy
Head of the Air General Staff for Operations. He would however resign in March
1984, nearly a year before this Cercle meeting, so as to be able to publicly express
his opposition to government defence policy, a move similar to the 1980 resignation
of General Close in Belgium. He would go on to be the Vice-President of the High
Council for Civil Defence in 1987 (562).
The Spanish delegation to the Cercle may have been small but it included
several prominent figures. Romanones, Crozier's channel to Ronald Reagan in July
1980, attended five of the six Cercle meetings held between June 1982 and February
1985, missing only the July 1984 meeting in Bonn. Veteran Opus Dei and CEDI
luminary Alfredo Sánchez Bella was also a regular participant, attending the
Wildbad-Kreuth meeting in June 1982, both meetings in 1983 and the February 1985
meeting in Washington. At the Cercle meeting held in early 1983, the delegation also
included the two top figures from Alianza Popular: the party's President, Manuel Fraga
Iribarne, and his brother-in-law, Carlos Robles Piquer, since 1982 the General
Coordinator of Alianza Popular.
Having scored only 6% of the vote in the March 1979 elections, the first to be
held under the December 1978 Constitution that Fraga had co-written, Alianza
Popular had gained strength following the collapse of the centrist UCD government
under Adolfo Suárez, and in the October 1982 elections won 26% of the vote,
becoming the main opposition party to the Socialist government under Felipe
González which had won a landslide victory with 48% of the vote. Robles Piquer would
also attend the next Cercle meeting held in July 1983 in Bonn; he had been elected as
a Senator a month previously and would serve until 1987 when he was elected as an
MEP in the first direct Spanish elections to the European Parliament, sitting there
until 1999 (563).
The American delegation would however almost outweigh all of these European
participants, making up nearly half of those attending Cercle meetings between 1982
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and 1985, a reflection of the fact that, since the arrival of Rockefeller, Kissinger and
Nixon in the Cercle in the late 1960s, Cercle meetings had been held once a year in
Washington. Unsurprisingly, the most regular American attendee was Donald
Jameson, the Cercle's transatlantic coordinator since at least 1977 and a 6I Politburo
member, who attended all of the Cercle meetings between June 1982 and February
1985 except the meeting in Bonn in July 1984. At the various Cercle meetings, he
would be accompanied by senior members of the Reagan Administration, Congress
and the American military. One such military figure who attended four Cercle
meetings during this period (June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth, early 1983, July 1984 in
Bonn and February 1985 in Washington DC) was Rear Admiral Robert J. Hanks,
who had commanded the American naval forces in the Near East in the early 1970s
before serving as Director of the Security Assistance Division in the Office of the
Chief of Naval Operations until his retirement in 1977 (564).
Powerful figures in the Reagan Administration also attended this 1982
Wildbad-Kreuth meeting, the first of which was Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State
for Economic and Business Affairs from 1982 to 1985, Richard McCormack, who
would later attend the Cercle meetings held in July 1983 in Bonn and in February
1985 in Washington. Before being appointed by Reagan in 1982, McCormack had
served from 1979 to 1981 as Legislative Assistant to Senator Jesse Helms, the
senior Republican from North Carolina first elected to the Senate in 1972 who, for
nearly thirty years, was a key hardline influence on American foreign and domestic
policy, earning the nickname "Senator No" (565). Six months after the last Cercle
meeting covered by the Garnier-Lançon papers, that of February 1985, McCormack
was appointed as Permanent Representative of the US to the Organisation of
American States, serving until 1989 when he became Under-Secretary of State for
Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment. During his term of office until
1991, McCormack served as President Bush's personal representative at the 1989
economic summit in Paris and at the 1990 summit in Houston, Texas (566).
Senator Helms himself would also be represented at several Cercle meetings
by his two top aides, the first of whom was his Chief Legislative Assistant, James P.
Lucier, who attended the Cercle meetings held in June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth, in
January 1984 in Stellenbosch, and in February 1985 in Washington. As well as
acting as Helms's Chief Legislative Assistant, Lucier also served as the Minority Staff
Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms's stamping ground, but
would be fired by Helms in January 1992. The second top aide was Helms's foreign
policy advisor from 1974 to 1982, lawyer John E. Carbaugh, who attended the
Cercle meeting in Bonn in July 1984. Carbaugh had been recommended to Helms in
1973 by longstanding Senator from South Carolina Strom Thurmond, a member of
the Senate Armed Services Committee; Lucier was a former aide to Thurmond.
Between them, Lucier and Carbaugh would act as Helms's éminences grises,
representing or accompanying him on many of his foreign trips and lobbying for his
positions in Washington.
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The pair would also play a considerable part in facilitating discreet
conservative funding for domestic or foreign allies, as is evidenced by declassified
State Department cable 1977STATE134962 which referred to a "sensitive IRS
investigation" of an American corporation, Analysis And Research Association, Inc.,
and detailed the text of an Inland Revenue Service letter agreed with the State
Department that had been sent out to "each of the former officials they were
interested in interviewing (Strauss, Barzel, Marx, Von Bismark, Rinsche, Bahner)".
The letter stated that "the principal officers of the corporation were Paul Weyrich,
Victor Fediay and James Lucier. Certain records of the corporation indicate that
you may have had dealings with the corporation or its officers during the years
1971 and 1972". The 1977 State Department cable noted that Marx had replied
that he had no information to offer to the IRS, whereas Strauß could not remember
and might need his memory jogged (567). Of the corporation's officers, Lucier was not
the only one to attend the 1982 Cercle meeting hosted by Strauß in Wildbad-Kreuth;
another participant was Paul M. Weyrich, co-founder with Edwin Feulner of the
Heritage Foundation in February 1973 and co-founder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral
Majority in June 1979 (568).
This would not be the only time that Lucier or Carbaugh would be implicated
in dodgy political funding of interest to the IRS; the New York Times reported in
June 1982 that "Mr. Carbaugh and James P. Lucier, another Helms aide, are,
respectively, the vice president and secretary-treasurer of the Institute of American
Relations and the Institute of American Relations Foreign Affairs Council which
were set up in 1975 as tax-exempt educational organisations [...] Several Senate
aides and friends of Mr. Carbaugh, however, are convinced that a key reason for his
leaving the job [of foreign policy advisor to Helms in 1982] was a series of news
reports and events involving a network of conservative support groups, in which Mr.
Carbaugh played a central role, that threatened to embarrass Senator Helms
because of their controversial tax-exempt status [...] although Mr. Carbaugh was
employed full time by the Senator, tax returns showed that the aide had spent
about half his time on institute business and received more than $70,000 from
between 1977 and 1980 from one of the groups, the Institute of American Relations.
The group's largest supporter was the oil billionaire, Nelson Bunker Hunt,
according to Congressional Quarterly" (569).
Carbaugh and Lucier were certainly active for Senator Helms; in September
1979, the pair had stirred up a diplomatic storm when visiting London to urge
Rhodesian Premier Ian Smith not to give any ground in the ongoing Lancaster
House talks with the British, bluntly stating that "we don't want to see this
conference succeed". Whilst in London, Lucier and Carbaugh had also met with the
leading Tory hardliner on Rhodesia – Julian Amery. Although Thatcher had been in
contact with Helms since her days in opposition, had met him in London in July
1979 and had accepted to meet Carbaugh during his September visit, she was
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infuriated at what she saw as unwelcome and offensive meddling by Helms and his
aides in a thorny issue which had long split the Conservative Party with Monday
Clubbers such as Amery, Hastings, Biggs-Davison, Churchill and Lord and
Viscount Cranborne in open rebellion against the government line.
Edward Lanpher, the American diplomat in London charged with shadowing
the talks, sent an urgent cable to the then American Secretary of State, Cyrus R.
Vance, later recalling: "I had a call that evening or early the next morning from Dick
Moose, the Assistant Secretary, saying, "When your cable on Carbaugh and Lucier
hit Mr. Vance's desk, he had to be scraped off the ceiling. He was hopping mad." He
was following the negotiations very closely, reading every cable out of London and
everywhere else. Vance had had problems with Carbaugh and Lucier on the
Panama Canal treaties, on SALT, on Central America policy, and other things. And
here they were, screwing up Rhodesia. But according to Moose, and I don't have
this except by heresay [sic], apparently, Vance just went ballistic. He went up to the
Hill [...] and got the Senate to get to Jesse Helms and order his aides out of London"
(570).
Carbaugh would also wield considerable influence on other continents,
attending the September 1980 conference of CAL, the Latin American chapter of
WACL, alongside Stefano Delle Chiaie and El Salvadorean ARENA leader Roberto
d'Aubuisson; Carbaugh would later play an important part in the promotion of
d'Aubuisson in the US in 1982 (571). According to the New York Times, Carbaugh
"was a major force in the decision of the State Department and the White House last
month [March 1981] to cut off aid to Nicaragua, despite concerns among policy
makers that termination of aid might alienate Nicaragua from the United States,
according to White House and State Department officials. He persistently lobbied
the White House and the State and Defense Departments to win appointments to
key policy posts for conservatives, including Fred C. Iklé, former chief of the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency under Presidents Ford and Nixon, who has been
named Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, according to the same officials [...]
After Mr. Reagan's election, Mr. Carbaugh served on the State Department
transition team. Mr. Carbaugh was known to have sought a high-ranking job in the
Administration and was said to be disappointed when the position he was offered
was Ambassador to Paraguay. After rejecting the job, Mr. Carbaugh told friends, I
have more power where I am now" (572). Pride however came before a fall and, as
the New York Times and possibly the IRS closed in, Carbaugh resigned as foreign
policy advisor to Helms, joining a Washington law firm in June 1982 and attending
the July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn (573).
After leaving Republican Congressional politics, Carbaugh would still have
occasion to meet his old colleagues, amongst them veteran Republican Senate
organiser Margaret D. B. Carlisle, who would meet Lucier at the June 1982 Cercle
meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth and Carbaugh at the July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn.
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Margo Carlisle had worked with Feulner and Weyrich of the Heritage Foundation since
1975; in January 1979, she wrote "Changing the Rules of the Game in the US
Senate" for the Heritage Foundation journal, Policy Review. From 1979 on, she was
the Executive Director of the Republican Senate Steering Committee and Staff
Director of the Senate Republican Conference. Along with Carbaugh, Delle Chiaie and
d’Aubuisson, she attended the 1980 conference of the Latin American chapter of
WACL, CAL. From 1982 to 1985, Carlisle was a trustee of the Philadelphia Society,
on which see below; Feulner, its co-founder, was its President in 1982-83.
In March 1983, in between the two known Cercle meetings she attended,
Carlisle was one of the participants at the fourth conference organised by the
NSIC's Consortium for the Study of Intelligence; its "Symposium on the Role of
Special Operations in US Strategy for the 1980s" was also attended by the NSIC's
Barnett and Godson, Senate Intelligence Committee staffer Angelo Codevilla (a codrafter
of the Heritage Foundation's January 1981 intelligence policy
recommendations and later NSIC and IEDSS author), journalist Arnaud de
Borchgrave, and a trio of core 6I and Cercle members – Shackley, Jameson and
General Stilwell, then Iklé's Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy - as well
as Major Oliver North of the NSC, and the British counter-insurgency veterans
Maurice Tugwell, a Canadian-based NSIC partner, and General Sir Walter Walker, a
speaker at Close's 1983 WACL conference held in Luxembourg six months later. In
1984, Carlisle worked for the Republican Senate Election Committee before serving
from 1986 to 1989 as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs,
"in essence the Defense Department's chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill". After leaving
public service in 1989, she was the Vice President for governmental relations at the
Heritage Foundation until 1991, and later a member of the Board of Directors of the
Center for Security Policy (574).
Another Reagan Administration official at the June 1982 Cercle meeting hosted
by Strauß and the HSS in Wildbad-Kreuth was the variously named Pat
Ballestreri/Bellestreri/Balestreri, who would attend this and two further Cercle
meetings in early 1983 and in South Africa in January 1984 as the Assistant for
International Affairs to Richard Perle, the "Prince of Darkness". From 1981 to 1987,
Perle was Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy;
at the time, he was a member of the ASC's lobbying arm, the Coalition for Peace
through Strength. Perle would be confirmed in 2014 as having been a Cercle member
himself since the late 1970s. In 1982, soon after Perle's appointment to the Reagan
Administration, he hired NSC Middle East expert Douglas J. Feith as his Special
Counsel; Feith would go on to serve as Reagan's Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Negotiations Policy from 1984 to 1986 (575).
A final American participant at the June 1982 Cercle meeting in Wildbad-
Kreuth was Miles M. Costick, an expert on Soviet trade who had coined the phrase
"resource war" to describe the battle between the US and the Soviet Union for raw
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materials and Third World spheres of influence. For several years, Costick had been
an active contributor to the US WACL chapter, the American Council of World
Freedom (ACWF). He addressed their annual meeting in 1976 and, the following year,
was a speaker with Crozier, Cline, Allen, Helms, Lefever and Colby at an ACWF antidétente
conference. In 1978, Costick produced the report The Strategic Dimension of
East-West Trade for the ACWF Task Force on Strategic Trade. In 1979, Costick worked
alongside Durbrow and Richardson as speakers at the triennial convention of the
National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups; "Lt. General Daniel O. Graham
USA (Ret.), national со-chairman of the Coalition for Peace through Strength, served
as the banquet speaker". From 1978 on, Costick was the President of the Institute
for Strategic Trade which denounced American technology transfer to the Soviet
Union during the Carter Administration; in September 1980, Costick gave
testimony on the subject to the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. In
November 1981, Costick 'testified' alongside US WACL notables General Singlaub
and Professor David Rowe before the National Committee to Restore Internal
Security; the Committee Chairman, also present, was Robert Morris, the
former Chief Counsel of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and a Director
of the USCWF, the refounded American WACL chapter run by Generals Singlaub and
Graham. Two months before this 1982 Cercle meeting in Bavaria where Costick met
Close, Jonet, de Kerchove and de Bonvoisin, he was quoted in Damoclès, the
newsletter of the Belgian WACL chapter (576).
The following Cercle meeting in early 1983, almost certainly held in
Washington, also evidenced the Cercle's contacts at the highest level of American
politics – one of the guests was the former President, Richard Nixon. At the meeting,
Nixon was accompanied by his former foreign policy coordinator from 1968 on,
Richard V. Allen. From 1977 to 1980, Allen had worked as Governor Ronald
Reagan's chief foreign policy advisor, sitting on the IEDSS Council from 1979 on.
Allen was then appointed President Reagan's first National Security Advisor, serving
from January 1981 until his forced resignation in a scandal about paid access in
January 1982. Whilst National Security Advisor, Allen had helped to ensure initial CIA
funding for the 6I and was one of the recipients of the 6I bulletin, Transnational
Security. Following his resignation, Allen became a Fellow of the Hoover Institution in
1983 and served as Senior Counsellor for Foreign Policy and National Security for the
Republican National Committee (577).
Not all those at the early 1983 Cercle meeting had however been forced to leave
public service; one such was William Schneider Jnr, from 1982 to 1986 Reagan's
Assistant Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology – the
man in charge of coordinating all American foreign military aid who would also
attend the Cercle meetings held in July 1983 and July 1984 in Bonn.
From 1971 on, Schneider had been a staff member of the Hudson Institute,
also serving as an advisor to James L. Buckley, a New York Senator from 1971 to
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1977 and member of the Senate Budget Committee for Defense and International
Affairs. In 1972, Schneider joined Buckley's staff and worked from 1974 to 1976 as
his Legislative Assistant, visiting Vietnam with him in 1974 and 1975, accompanied
on the latter visit by Jeffrey B. Gayner of the Heritage Foundation, described below.
In 1976, Schneider would make another trip abroad, this time to Zaire along with
Edwin Feulner, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and Executive Director of the
House Republican Study Committee. Between 1976 and 1978, Schneider
contributed articles to several publications by the Council for American Affairs, an
American chapter of WACL run by racist and anti-Semitic anthropologist Roger
Pearson; Schneider's co-authors were Feulner, Gayner, Cline and Graham.
From 1975 to 1978, Schneider was also a trustee of the Philadelphia Society, a
dinner discussion group which had been set up in 1964 by Feulner, M. Stanton
Evans, Milton Friedman, conservative publisher Henry Regnery and National
Review founder William F. Buckley, Senator Buckley's younger brother.
Philadelphia Society meetings attracted hardline conservatives such as Weyrich,
Pearson, Harrigan, Casey, Carlisle, Allen, Pipes, Lefever and Shakespeare. At one
Philadelphia Society meeting Schneider addressed in April 1977, one of his fellow
speakers was Robert Moss; at another Schneider attended in November 1980, the
keynote speaker was Arnaud de Borchgrave.
After Ronald Reagan's election victory that month, Schneider was first
appointed as Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs at
the Office of Management and Budget, serving from 1981 to 1982; his former boss
Senator Buckley meanwhile became Reagan's Under-Secretary of State for Security
Assistance. In 1982, Schneider took over from Buckley at the State Department as
Under-Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology, serving
until 1986; Buckley filled the post of President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,
Inc. until 1985 (578).
A neoconservative academic who attended the Cercle meeting in early 1983
was Prof. Dr. Robert Pfaltzgraff, Professor of International Security Studies at the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, and co-founder in 1976 of
the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA), of which he has been the
longstanding President. Also present at the same 1983 Cercle meeting were one of the
IFPA's frequent authors in the 1980s, Rear Admiral Robert J. Hanks, and an old
acquaintance of Pfaltzgraff from the early 1970s – William Schneider (579).
A further figure of interest at the early 1983 Cercle meeting was John Barron,
listed as the Chief Editor of the Reader's Digest and a lead author for the magazine in
1974 and 1977. Long renowned as a disinformation outlet, the Reader's Digest was at
this time promoting the now thoroughly discredited "Bulgarian Connection" theory
espoused by its contributor Claire Sterling, according to which the Bulgarian secret
service under KGB direction had hired the Turkish ultra-nationalist gunman Mehmet
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Ali Ağca to kill Pope John Paul II in May 1981 because of his support for the
Solidarność trades union in Poland. As her obituary in the Independent put it, "Claire
Sterling, a self-proclaimed terrorism expert, was one of three journalists responsible
for fabricating and divulging the details of the theory. The others were Paul Henze, a
propaganda expert and former CIA station chief in Turkey, and Michael Leeden [sic]
[...] under Ronald Reagan's administration, the US was involved in a massive rearmament
programme and the Bulgarian Connection served effectively to counter
the pacifist movement, and the Allies were persuaded to accept the deployment of
Cruise and Pershing missiles". Sterling's vehicle of choice for launching the theory
was a September 1982 article in the Reader's Digest, "The Plot to Kill the Pope",
which she would later expand into a book, The Time of the Assassins, published in
1983; the disinformation would also be recycled in Frederick Forsyth's 1984 novel
The Fourth Protocol (580).
The Cercle's strong transatlantic connections to the American section of WACL
and the Heritage Foundation would continue at its July 1983 meeting in Bonn in the
person of veteran right-wing multi-functionary Lee Edwards, credited as President of
the Center for International Relations. Throughout the 1970s, Edwards had been the
Secretary of the American Council for World Freedom, the first US WACL chapter
whose President was John M. Fisher of the IAS and ASC; both men had attended the
4th WACL Conference held in Tokyo in September 1970. As well as serving as the
Executive Secretary of the National Captive Nations Committee (whose Congress in
1983 included future British Cercle member John Wilkinson, detailed above) and
writing a regular column for the Ukrainian Weekly, Edwards was also Senior Editor of
the Moonies' magazine The World & I and a contributor to their Washington Times,
whose 20th anniversary Edwards commemorated with the book Our times: the
Washington Times, 1982-2002.
A Distinguished Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, Edwards would be the
author of the 1997 book The power of ideas: the Heritage Foundation at 25 years and
the 2013 definitive history of the Foundation, Leading the Way: The Story of Ed
Feulner and the Heritage Foundation, as well as the author of biographies of Walter
Judd, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Needless to say, Edwards was also a
Distinguished Member of Feulner's Philadelphia Society, having been at various
times its President or its trustee. He would later be an Adjunct Professor at
the Institute of World Politics, serving on the faculty alongside Herb Romerstein,
Kenneth deGraffenreid, J. Michael Waller and fellow Cercle members Sven Kraemer
and Norman A. Bailey, presented below. Edwards has also served as Chairman of
the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, whose National Advisory Council
includes Feulner, Pipes and Singlaub and whose International Advisory Council
includes Bukovsky and the late Brian Crozier (581).
A year later, in July 1984 again in Bonn, the Heritage Foundation would be
represented by their stalwart policy analyst Jeffrey B. Gayner, who would also attend
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the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington. Gayner had worked for the Heritage
Foundation since at least 1974, visiting Vietnam with Schneider in 1975 as Director of
the Heritage Foundation Foreign Policies Study Center, a post he filled until at least
1982. From 1976 to 1978, he co-wrote several books for the US WACL affiliate, the
Council on American Affairs; Feulner, Schneider, Cline and Graham would be his coauthors.
In 1979, Gayner chaired the Heritage Foundation Transition Team for the
State Department. He would continue to work for the Heritage Foundation throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, acting as the Director of its Moscow Office in 1993 and serving
as a Senior Fellow in 1995; he would also be a trustee of the Philadelphia Society
from 1995 to 1998 (582).
However, it was at the February 1985 meeting on home turf in Washington
that the Cercle would best show the level of its contacts within the Reagan
Administration including leading figures from the Department of Defense, the
intelligence community and the National Security Council. The most senior of the
Cercle attendees from the Pentagon was Fred C. Iklé, the serving Under-Secretary of
Defense for Policy; his Deputy Under-Secretary of Defence for Policy was the 6I's
General Richard Stilwell who accompanied Iklé to this Cercle meeting. Iklé was a
veteran nuclear defence analyst who had written reports for the RAND Corporation
from 1957 to 1971. After Iklé had met Nixon at Harvard, Kissinger appointed him as
Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973, a post he filled
under Presidents Nixon and Ford until 1977. In 1979-80, Iklé was coordinator of
the team of foreign policy advisors to Governor Reagan and then served in both
Reagan Administrations as Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy from 1981 to 1987.
In March 1985, one month after this Cercle meeting, Reagan signed Iklé's proposal to
arm the Afghan mujaheddin with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, a policy implemented
after initial CIA objections in February 1986 (583).
As well as the Iklé/Stilwell team, the Cercle could also count on other
powerful friends within Reagan's national security apparatus, as noted above - both
Richard Perle, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy
from 1981 to 1987, and William Schneider Jnr, the Under-Secretary of State for
Security Assistance from 1982 to 1986, were also members of the Cercle at the time.
Besides its contacts in the Pentagon and the State Department, the Cercle
enjoyed top-level access to the intelligence community – a further participant at the
February 1985 Cercle meeting was Herbert E. Meyer, an economist and associate
editor of Fortune magazine who was brought into the CIA in 1981 by Director Casey to
act as his Special Assistant and Vice-Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence
Council, the body which manages production of the National Intelligence Estimates
giving the consensus view of the sixteen American intelligence agencies.
One of the most senior intelligence officials in the Reagan Administration,
Meyer would hold the position on the NIC until at least 1985, gaining considerable
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notoriety in November 1983 for a report he submitted to Casey and CIA Deputy
Director John McMahon entitled "Why the World Is So Dangerous". The report, which
forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union eight years before the event, was also read
and appreciated by Reagan who later awarded Meyer the National Intelligence
Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community's highest honour. The
report however stirred up resistance in the CIA and was subsequently leaked to the
Press. "There was subsequent uproar throughout Washington, which made Meyer
very nervous. He was summoned to his boss's office. "Herb, right now you’ve got the
smallest fan club in Washington," Bill Casey told him grimly. As Meyer turned pale,
Casey laughed: "Relax. It’s me and the president"".
After his period at the CIA, Meyer went on to found the business consultancy
Real-World Intelligence, Inc. and work in 1988 with the 6I's David Hart to set up a
press agency on Soviet dissidents whose main source of information was Vladimir
Bukovsky. True to form, nearly twenty years later, Meyer would recycle two notorious
disinformation stories in the Wall Street Journal in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion
of Iraq, claiming the CIA had refused to countenance "a persuasive case that Iraq and
al Qaeda worked closely together in the months and years leading up to 9/11 […]
an eerie replay of what happened in the early 1980s, when the CIA bureaucracy
insisted - in the face of all experience and common sense - that the Soviet Union
had nothing to do with the attempted assassination of the Pope" (584)*.
Another Casey appointee to the CIA in 1981 who attended the 1985
Washington Cercle meeting was Constantine C. Menges, at the time of the meeting a
Latin America expert on the National Security Council and Special Assistant to the
President for National Security Affairs. Whilst completing graduate studies at
Columbia under Carter's future National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Menges started the first of what would be three periods at the Hudson Institute.
From 1966 to 1968, he worked for the RAND Corporation; whilst there, he wrote a
key study:
"While many take credit after the fact for what became known as the "Reagan
Doctrine", it was Constantine who, in 1968, wrote the original RAND paper
that became the Reagan Doctrine, "Democratic Revolutionary Insurgency as
an Alternative Strategy", arguing that "Communist regimes are very vulnerable
to a democratic national revolution that is conducted with skill and the
determination to succeed"" (585).
Menges then served in the Nixon and Ford Administrations as Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Education in the Department of Health, Education and
Welfare, and, in 1975-76, as Director of the Bureau of International Affairs of the
Civil Aeronautics Board. In 1978, he rejoined the Washington office of the Hudson
Institute until 1981 when he was hired to work first for the CIA and then for the
NSC:
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"An academic by training, Mr. Menges was recruited by new CIA Director
William Casey in May 1981 to be National Intelligence Officer for Latin
America [...] Just before joining the CIA, Menges proposed the U.S.
government establish a "National Foundation for Democracy", to promote
nascent democratic movements in countries under communism and other
forms of tyranny. President Reagan embraced the idea, and two years later
convinced Congress to fund the National Endowment for Democracy [...]
When he moved to the White House in 1983 to become a Special Assistant to
the President for National Security Affairs [until 1986], his first assignment
was to draw up plans to restore democracy in Grenada after a communist
coup. It was this part of the Grenada mission, more than the military
intervention alone, that marked the definitive end of the Carter era and
demonstrated it was possible to "roll back" communism, surely Ronald
Reagan's greatest legacy" (586).
"In President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, author Lou Cannon described
Dr. Menges as one of a cadre of National Security Council aides who believed,
as did Casey, "that the West should be mobilized to fight Communists with
their own methods". Cannon described Dr. Menges "as one of the most
forceful of these polemicists" and "a principled conservative." White House
and State Department pragmatists, according to Cannon, dubbed him
"Constant Menace," a play on his name, for his ardent support of action,
covert and otherwise, against Nicaraguan Sandinistas and Salvadoran rebels
[...] Dr. Menges contended that the invasion of Grenada helped avert a
possible Grenada nuclear deployment crisis and strengthened President
Ronald Reagan's hand in deploying intermediate-range missiles in Europe in
late 1983" (587).
After leaving the NSC in 1986, Menges would become a Resident Scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute in November 1987, giving a lecture that
December with AEI Resident Fellow and Cercle member Richard Perle on "The
Purpose of American Power". In May 1989, alongside fellow Cercle member Herb
Meyer and Michael Ledeen, he spoke at a seminar on "The Role of Intelligence in a
Free Society" (588).
Menges was one of three National Security Council staffers to attend the 1985
Cercle meeting in Washington; another was a veteran NSC official whom we have met
before - Sven Kraemer, who had served on the NSC as an arms control expert from
1967 to 1976 under Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Ford and had then spent the
Carter Presidency working as Senior Staff Member for Defense and Foreign Policy for
the Senate. In 1979, he chaired the Heritage Foundation's Transition Team for the
Defense Department before returning to the NSC after Reagan's election as the
Director of Arms Control from 1981 to 1987.
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Kraemer was also the Program Director of Barnett's NSIC whose Consortium
for the Study of Intelligence, created in 1979 as detailed above, involved several of
the Cercle's American members listed here. Amongst the participants at five CSI
conferences held between November 1979 and November 1984 were the Cercle
members Richard V. Allen, Margo Carlisle, William Colby, Fred Iklé, Donald
Jameson, Sven Kraemer, Ted Shackley and General Richard Stilwell. In the new
millennium, another body with similar overlap would be the Institute of World
Politics where Kraemer would serve on the faculty alongside fellow Cercle members
Edwards and Bailey (presented below) as well as Romerstein, deGraffenreid and
Waller.
A third NSC staffer – who by this time had left the NSC to become an
international economic consultant – was Norman A. Bailey, whose US Army service
had been spent in Strategic Intelligence and Joint Operational Planning. From
1981 to 1983, Bailey worked for Reagan's NSC, successively filling the posts of
Director of Planning and Evaluation, Senior Director of National Security Planning
and International Economic Affairs, and Special Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs - Menges's predecessor. During his period of government
service as an expert in tracking international financial flows, Bailey was a central
character in "President Reagan's strategy to accelerate the demise of the Soviet
Union [... and] to run economic warfare against the USSR", as is explained by
William P. Clark, Reagan's second National Security Advisor, in his Foreword to
Bailey's 1998 monograph, The Strategic Plan that won the Cold War:
"The president worked closely with his National Security Council (NSC) team
to configure a security-minded economic strategy that would constrict
financial and other forms of Western life-support being tapped by the
Kremlin. National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 66 and the economic
section of NSDD 75 (prepared in November 1982 and January 1983,
respectively) provide the best illustrations of this critically important
dimension" (589).
"According to Bailey […] the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals
intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early
1980s. From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President
Reagan's National Security Council, called "Follow the Money", that used NSA
signals intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union
and its allies. […] According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a
significant shift in resources from human spying to electronic surveillance,
as a way to track money flows to suspected criminals and American enemies.
"That was the beginning of the whole process", he said" (590).
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In 2002, Bailey would co-found the Institute for Global Economic Growth,
later serving as Professor of Economics and National Security on the faculty of
the Institute of World Politics alongside fellow Cercle members Kraemer and
Edwards (591). From 2006 to 2007, he headed a special unit within the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and
Venezuela (592).
Another Special Assistant to the President who attended the 1985 Cercle
meeting in Washington was Walter John Raymond, a Polish-born Professor of
Political Science and Chairman of the Department of Social Sciences at Saint Paul's
College until his retirement in 1986 (593).
The military would also be represented at the Cercle meeting by USAF
Lieutenant-General James Alan Abrahamson, who, from 1981 to 1984 had been
seconded to NASA to run the space shuttle programme. From 1984 until his
retirement in 1989, Abrahamson served as the first Director of the Strategic Defense
Initiative Organization set up by Reagan with vociferous backing from the High
Frontier lobby group run by Generals Graham and Richardson, as detailed above
(594). Another significant military figure to attend the 1985 Cercle meeting was
Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the Vietnam-era Chief of Naval Operations and then
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been a member of Team B in 1975-
76. A Board member of the ASC and Western Goals, Moorer was a co-chairman
alongside Fisher and Graham of the ASC's Coalition for Peace Through Strength
launched in August 1978, which, by 1981, could count on the support of 271
members of Congress and over 2,500 generals and admirals. From 1980 until at
least 1989, Moorer was also Director of the NSIC (595).
One prominent foreign guest at the February 1985 Cercle meeting was the
Ukrainian-born former Soviet diplomat Arkady Shevchenko, who had served as the
advisor to Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko from 1970 on before being appointed
Under Secretary-General of the UN in 1973. "Second only to Kurt Waldheim at the
United Nations [...] Mr. Shevchenko was considered the C.I.A.'s top trophy of the
1970s", reporting to the CIA from late 1975 on and defecting in April 1978 as the
highest-ranking Soviet official ever to claim political asylum. With the help of William
Geimer, the founder of the Jamestown Foundation in 1984, Shevchenko wrote his
bestselling memoirs, Breaking With Moscow, which were published in March 1985,
one month after this Cercle meeting; Shevchenko became an American citizen in
February 1986 (596)*.
A final national delegation at the Cercle meetings from 1982 to 1985 was
that from South Africa, whose longstanding links with the Cercle have been
documented above. The Cercle would take the opportunity to examine the situation
on the ground by meeting three times in South Africa before the downfall of the
apartheid regime – in the Afrikaner heartland of Stellenbosch in January 1984, and
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in Capetown in March 1988 and March 1991 (597).
The most frequent South African Cercle participant was General Alan Fraser,
the former Chief of the Army Staff and Consul-General in Iran who had been working
with the 6I since 1978; Fraser attended the Cercle meetings in June 1982 in Wildbad-
Kreuth, in early 1983 most probably in Washington, in January 1984 in Stellenbosch
and in February 1985 in Washington DC.
However, most of the South African Cercle members – the only country to be
represented by an official government delegation – were senior diplomats from the
Department of Foreign Affairs, a major source of funding for the Cercle in the 1980s
(598). One such was Robert Abraham du Plooy, who attended the Cercle meetings in
early 1983, in July 1983 in Bonn, and in January 1984 in Stellenbosch. Having
worked as the chargé d'affaires at the South African Embassy in Bonn from 1955 to
1960 (at a time when Strauß was Nuclear Power Minister, then Defence Minister), du
Plooy served as ambassador in Latin America in the late 1960s and 1970s before
representing South Africa in Paris as Ambassador to the Mitterrand government from
December 1981 to May 1985 (599).
Another very important diplomat who attended the January 1984 Cercle
meeting in Stellenbosch was D. C. B. H. (Charles) Fincham, listed as a "former
Ambassador, S.A. Institute for International Affairs". This mention underplays
Fincham's significance as the first direct representative of South Africa in Israel.
Previous cooperation between the two countries (such as the sale of uranium from
South Africa to Israel from 1962 on) had been channelled through the South African
mission in Athens, but by the spring of 1972, formal diplomatic relations could be
established via the appointment of a South African Consul-General in Tel Aviv -
Charles Fincham. The Consulate-General would be upgraded to full Embassy status
in 1976; Fincham would serve as Ambassador until at least 1977 (600).
A key concern of the South African government was to try and overcome the
international sanctions on the country by promoting business opportunities, hence
the presence at the January 1984 Stellenbosch meeting of a trio of high-powered
industry representatives - Gavin Relly, Chairman of the Anglo American Corporation,
Dirk Hertzog, Deputy Chairman of the Stellenbosch-based tobacco and industrial
conglomerate Rembrandt Group and Basil Hersov, Chairman of the Anglovaal mining
and industrial group (601).
The concern to encourage business ventures was supported by the South
African Ambassador to the US from 1982 to 1985, Brand Fourie, whose Embassy
organised an annual business seminar in Washington (602). Fourie, formerly the
South African Secretary/Director-General of Foreign Affairs from 1966 to 1982,
attended the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington.
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Fourie was certainly no stranger to the veteran members of the Cercle, having
attended the 1976 CEDI meeting in Madrid along with Amery, Huyn, Bach and
Sánchez Bella, all of whom he met again at the 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington
(603). Once again, in new times, there's nothing like old friends.
==Notes==
Category:Rogue Agents