Rogue Agents - 1981-1991 - Forward to Victory

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 - 1981-1991 - Forward to Victory==
*Rogue Agents: Contents 
*Previous section: 1977-1980 - Election Fever
A TIME OF CHANGE: THE CERCLE IN THE 1980s
Whilst the Cercle had been focusing in 1979-80 on its three campaigns to elect
Thatcher, Reagan and Strauß, and had seen success in the first two, time had been
taking its toll. The 1980s would see the disappearance of several of the key
personalities and groups who had previously formed the core of the Cercle complex in
France, Belgium and Germany. Whilst some figures would die discretely, others would
find themselves the unwelcome focus of official investigations and press headlines in
three countries. The Cercle itself would also face devastating exposure; after thirty
years in the shadows, the very existence of the Cercle and some details of its activities
would be uncovered by journalists. The publication of the Langemann papers by the
Spiegel in September 1982 was the first serious breach in Cercle security, a leak
which soon spread to other countries; Crozier records being confronted with the
Langemann papers in French translation during a visit to a Belgian Atlantic
Association meeting in October 1984, "an example of the damage done" (415). The
Spiegel scoop was however only the first in a series of exposures about the Cercle and
its extensive operations.
To turn first to the original French heart of the Cercle, 1980 saw the
withdrawal from the Cercle of both its founder Antoine Pinay, now nearly 90, and of
his right-hand man Jean Violet who was suffering deteriorating health. The focus of
the Cercle made a decisive shift towards a more Anglo-American orientation; the new
Cercle Chairman, serving for the next fourteen years, was Julian Amery, whilst
transatlantic representation was bolstered by the rise within the Reagan
Administration of many of the Cercle's American allies. Crozier's considerable
involvement in the Cercle over the previous decade was further boosted, not least
because of the 1977 creation with Violet and Huyn of the private sector intelligence
service, the 6I, whose members and operations would increasingly influence the
Cercle. After Violet's withdrawal, the practical organisation of Cercle meetings would
be ensured throughout the 1980s by Cercle secretary Bach and the team of Crozier,
Huyn and Jonet, heir to Damman's complex of Brussels-based groups following the
latter's death in July 1979.
However, Violet's eclipse was only the calm before the storm both for the
French lawyer and for the Cercle and AESP. In June and then December 1983,
distinguished French journalist Pierre Péan revealed the sniffer plane scandal in
articles in Le Canard Enchainé, followed in July 1984 by his groundbreaking book V
(V for Violet, Villegas, Vatican, Vorster and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing), a
ROGUE AGENTS
198
comprehensive exposure of Violet's activities which were then further highlighted by a
French Court of Auditors inquiry into the sniffer plane scandal (416). Violet tried to
salvage his reputation after the savaging inflicted by de Marenches and Péan by
obtaining testimonials from his former SDECE employers Generals Grossin,
Jacquier and Guibaud and from Strauß, but to no avail (417).
The withdrawal of Violet in 1980 – and the earlier death of his veteran
SDECE/Vatican partner Father Dubois in February 1979 – were not however the only
losses suffered by the French core of the Cercle. March 1983 would see the death of
Georges Albertini, the longstanding French ally of Crozier's London ISC and a
founding member of the 6I in 1977. The disappearance of these four major figures –
Dubois, Pinay, Violet and Albertini – would permanently weaken French
representation within the Cercle which came increasingly to depend on its British,
American, German and Belgian contacts.
The French were not the only veteran Cercle members to run into trouble in
the early 1980s. Both in Italy and in Germany, the major pillars of the Cercle/AESP
also faced official investigation and would die soon after - both Carlo Pesenti and Karl
Friedrich Grau. Even before the exposure of his involvement in the sniffer plane
scandal and the AESP revealed by Péan in 1983-84, Pesenti had already courted
controversy due to the central part he played in Banco Ambrosiano, the "P2 bank"
which collapsed in June-July 1982. Under a permanent threat of take-over by
Michele Sindona, Pesenti had shored up his indebted Italmobiliare group by
substantial borrowings from Banco Ambrosiano and its various Italian subsidiaries,
secured by large blocks of shares in companies controlled by Pesenti.
The relationship between Banco Ambrosiano, Pesenti and the Cercle complex
became more explicit in the final months before the bank's crash. In late 1981, the
Vatican, concerned about the growing scandal surrounding Roberto Calvi, canvassed
support for a successor. Their favoured candidate was another prominent Catholic
banker, Orazio Bagnasco, active in property-based mutual funds and by 1980 the
owner of the CIGA group of hotels. Bagnasco was known to be very close to Giulio
Andreotti; what is less known is that both Andreotti and Bagnasco had links to the
AESP and the Cercle Pinay complex. Andreotti had attended Cercle and AESP events
from 1970 on, becoming a Life Member of the AESP in 1977; Bagnasco was a
participant at the 1976 CEDI Congress along with the main Cercle/AESP members
involved in the sniffer plane scandal - Pesenti, Pinay, Violet, Damman and Sánchez
Bella.
Despite Calvi's objections, Bagnasco was appointed Vice-President of Banco
Ambrosiano on 26th January 1982. Shortly afterwards, the bank secretly underwrote
a loan of 100 billion lire to Pesenti to allow him to buy into Banco Ambrosiano. On
10th March 1982, Pesenti's Italmobiliare became the largest declared shareholder in
Banco Ambrosiano, and Pesenti was appointed an Ambrosiano director. When the
ROGUE AGENTS
199
bank finally collapsed three months later, Pesenti lost 100 billion lire on his
Ambrosiano shareholding alone, and was forced to sell off another of his banks six
weeks after Calvi died. Already in poor health, Pesenti did not long survive the
Ambrosiano fiasco; he died on 20th September 1984 (418)*.
Another major pillar of the Cercle and the AESP would also be lost in the mid-
1980s following the death on 5th September 1984 of Karl Friedrich Grau who met an
end that matched his conspiratorial nature. After Grau's 1981 prosecution for the
underhand tactics adopted during the 1980 pro-Strauß campaign, the German police
had become interested in his involvement in providing covert funding for a variety of
political initiatives. As part of a fraud investigation into movements of millions of
Marks deposited with Luxembourg banks, the police arrested Grau during one of his
trips to Luxembourg; he was carrying a list of bank accounts and an unauthorized
and loaded pistol. Resourceful as ever, Grau faked a medical emergency and was
transferred under police guard to a hospital; he broke his neck jumping out of an
upper-storey window in an attempt to escape (419). Grau's death seriously
handicapped the network of groups he had established in Germany and Switzerland.
Whilst the SWG would continue, both the Frankfurt Study Group and the Swiss ISP
would cease operations.
The loss of Grau and his network in 1984 had been preceded by that of
another key German partner of the Cercle and the 6I, Hans Christoph von
Stauffenberg and the private intelligence service he ran for the CDU/CSU. As we have
seen, Stauffenberg was the source for Langemann's secret reports on Crozier, the
Cercle and the 6I which were published by the Spiegel in September 1982. Despite the
high quality of political intelligence provided by Stauffenberg's network, not just on
Eastern Europe but also on France where the Cercle/6I now had few resources of its
own, Crozier regretfully severed contact with Stauffenberg sometime in autumn 1983;
the last recorded attendance of Stauffenberg at a Cercle meeting was that held in
Bonn in July 1983, as detailed in the Postscript.
Two other German associates of the Cercle/6I, Löwenthal and Pachmann, also
ran into difficulties in the 1980s. Although the campaign to promote Strauß for
Chancellor had failed and the Bürgeraktion Demokraten für Strauß had disbanded, it
was revived in June 1981 as a political pressure group called Konservative Aktion.
The KA President was Ludek Pachmann; Löwenthal was Chairman of the Board,
which also included Dr. Lothar Bossle. KA also had excellent contacts with the
German security and intelligence services: the advisor for KA's Internal Security
Working Group was Crozier's old ISC friend and 6I colleague Horchem, who had just
retired as head of the Hamburg BfV. KA's speaker on German and East European
policy was Prof. Hans Werner Bracht, a professor of international law who served
from 1961 to 1972 as a senior lecturer at the German Army School for Psychological
Warfare in Euskirchen, with a spell from 1969 to 1970 in the Political Division at
NATO headquarters in Brussels. One further KA member was former BrigadierROGUE
AGENTS
200
General Heinz Karst, a speaker for Grau's ISP, Chairman of the Deutschland-Stiftung
from 1973 to 1977 and a member of the Brüsewitz Centre.
Whilst marginal, KA would draw headlines due to its uncompromising hardright
slant and the frequent violence shown by younger militants at KA antiimmigration
demonstrations and during attempts to storm squatted houses. In 1983,
KA would pierce a hole in the Berlin Wall; it would also circulate letters in Turkish
urging Turkish immigrants to return home. In 1986, a KA demonstration calling for
the release of Rudolf Hess and a KA circular insulting Willy Brandt would lead to
dissension amongst KA's leading members. Several prominent conservatives
including Karst resigned from KA, and despite a purge of the Board by Pachmann
and Löwenthal, the group would file for bankruptcy in September 1986 (420). The
following year, Löwenthal's unrivalled media access as moderator of ZDF Magazin
also came to an end; long uncomfortable with the controversy generated by his
programme, the ZDF management took the opportunity of Löwenthal's 65th birthday
to force him into retirement and to discontinue ZDF Magazin in December 1987.
Löwenthal, previously a regular Cercle participant, withdrew from Cercle meetings,
an absence soon followed by the death in October 1988 of the Cercle's political
mainstay Franz Josef Strauß. The Cercle, and particularly the 6I, would increasingly
rely on Huyn and Horchem for their German outreach in the 1980s.
This atrophying of contacts in France, Italy and Germany was not however
echoed across the Channel; under the leadership of Amery and Crozier, the British
axis of the Cercle/6I complex blossomed. With funding provided first by Casey's CIA
and then by the Heritage Foundation, Crozier was able to rejuvenate the 6I network
by hiring several young British activists to run the 6I's London end, notably assisted
on the Continent by a dynamic 6I component in Belgium. This was, as Crozier
reports, the 6I's peak period of operations; due to the intense activity of the 6I
network, Crozier withdrew from the Cercle in 1985, leaving it to continue as a
biannual discussion forum. Despite the surge in 6I operations, Britain was not
however spared some thinning of the ranks in the 1980s, notably due to the
withdrawal of veteran anti-communist activist and key Crozier partner Geoffrey
Stewart-Smith. Both his Foreign Affairs Publishing Company and the South Africanfunded
FARI would be wound down in 1986, and Stewart-Smith himself declared
bankruptcy in 1987 (421). At that time, according to Crozier, the 6I was also going
through a funding crisis; although new sources of funds would be found, Crozier,
now seventy, decided that "it was time to pull back and hand over". Having "paid off
all the 6I's agents, mainly in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Spain,
Portugal and the United States", Crozier records shutting down the 6I in the late
summer of 1987, a claim which must be treated with some scepticism (422).
Before then, however, the 6I would run a series of operations in Britain,
Europe and America that would have a significant impact on domestic and
international politics throughout the 1980s, as detailed in later chapters. Whilst the
ROGUE AGENTS
201
6I could thrive in the UK and the US with the benevolent support of the Reagan and
Thatcher governments, other 6I components would face more turbulent times on the
domestic front, notably in Belgium.
THE BELGIAN STRATEGY OF TENSION
As we have already seen in the early 1970s, the Belgian members of the Cercle
complex often had more robust plans than influencing elections in mind. A 1981
report by the Sûreté de l'Etat makes it clear that the Belgian AESP/MAUE members
implicated in the rumours of a planned coup d'état in 1973 were again involved in
the mid-1980s in funding fascists planning a coup together with a group of extreme
right-wing sympathisers in the Gendarmerie (423).
The Sûreté report dated 11th May 1981 was submitted by the Justice Minister,
Socialist Philippe Moureaux, to the Wyninckx Committee, a Senate committee
investigating the extreme Right and their private armies (424)*. The report revealed
that leading members of CEPIC, including Paul Vankerkhoven, Bernard Mercier and
Benoît de Bonvoisin, had been funding two extreme right-wing groups also implicated
in the 1973 coup plans: the Front de la Jeunesse, a major Belgian fascist group run
by Francis Dossogne and Paul Latinus, and the Nouvel Europe Magazine, edited by
Emile Lecerf. Lecerf and Dossogne had represented Belgium at the 1975 gathering
of European fascists at de Bonvoisin's castle. The Sûreté report further revealed de
Bonvoisin's continued financial support for Bougerol and the PIO publication Inforep,
Bougerol's role as a speaker at NEM Club events and his close links with Bernard
Mercier of the CEPIC Board.
The NEM Clubs, composed of readers of Lecerf's Nouvel Europe Magazine, had
been implicated with Major Bougerol in the 1973 coup plans by the de Cock and
Tratsaert reports; the de Cock report had already alluded to the financing of the NEM
by VdB and de Bonvoisin in the early 1970s. By the 1980s, the NEM Clubs were also
the recruiting pool for the most notorious of the fascist private armies, Westland New
Post, headed by former Front chief Paul Latinus. The WNP was far more than a
group of rowdies: it appeared to run a full-blown parallel intelligence service with
links to the Sûreté; Latinus himself was a major Sûreté informant. The links between
the WNP, the Front de la Jeunesse and CEPIC were multiple: besides the funding of
the Front and the NEM Clubs disclosed in the 1981 Sûreté report, 1976 CEPIC
election candidate Joseph Franz had joined CEPIC straight from the Front. Former
CEPIC President Jean-Pierre Grafé appealed directly to the Front for help with his
election campaign. Front billstickers ensured CEPIC's election poster coverage - when
they couldn't cope, the WNP's poster team filled the gap. Lecerf published appeals to
vote for CEPIC in his Nouvel Europe Magazine. A 1983 Sûreté report repeated
allegations by WNP members that Mercier of the CEPIC Board was also a regional
representative/inspector of the WNP.
ROGUE AGENTS
202
The WNP had been infiltrated by Commissioner Christian Smets of the
Surêté, after Smets's superior, Chief Commissioner Victor Massart, had recruited
WNP leader Latinus as a Sûreté informant (425)*. Massart appointed Smets as
Latinus's case officer, and Latinus duly introduced Smets into the group as "the
Duck", a sympathiser from the Sûreté. To prove his good faith, after checking with
headquarters, Smets gave the WNP lessons in surveillance and counter-surveillance.
In February 1982, in the middle of Smets's training course, WNP militants used their
newly-gained knowledge to stalk and then kill two people. The arrest of the WNP
militants and the confession of the killer, Latinus's lieutenant Marcel Barbier,
brought Smets's "membership" of the WNP to light by 1983, whereupon the
establishment and left-wing Press had a field day.
It was clear that a serving Sûreté officer had been caught red-handed training
a fascist private army guilty of a double murder. The uproar was enormous, leaving
the Sûreté compromised and Smets accused of being a fascist sympathiser colluding
with the WNP through political conviction. Fired on by the Press and by de Bonvoisin,
Smets could only weakly claim to have been following orders from his Sûreté superior
Massart who was in the front ranks of his attackers, proclaiming Smets had acted
totally without authority. Smets was condemned on all sides; even the NEM and other
fascist publications vociferously joined in, covering Brussels with posters reading
"Sûreté assassin!"
With hindsight and later information, the situation looks radically different: it
now appears that the WNP scandal was the successful culmination of an operation to
sabotage Sûreté investigations into de Bonvoisin's patronage of fascist groups. The
operation was as effective as it was ingenious: Smets, whose investigations posed a
real threat to de Bonvoisin, Bougerol and the extreme Right, was tarred with the
fascist brush and publicly vilified. With Smets disgraced and his team closed down as
a result of the WNP scandal, the investigations into the links between de Bonvoisin,
Bougerol and the fascist militias came to an end.
If collusion there was between the Sûreté and the WNP, it was between
Massart and Latinus with the aim of compromising Smets. Later investigations into
Gladio and PIO revealed that Massart, Smets's superior, had been the principal
contact in the Sûreté for VdB/de Bonvoisin's intelligence chief, Bougerol. Massart
gave open access to Sûreté files for Bougerol and his team. Smets's enquiries were a
threat not only to CEPIC and the NEM Clubs, but also to Massart. Bougerol's visits
were no secret at the Square de Meeûs (Sûreté headquarters); after it could no longer
be overlooked that PIO had officially been closed down, Massart's cooperation with
Bougerol continued via Bougerol's secretary, Mirèze Legon, who regularly visited
Massart to view Sûreté files. To deflect criticism, Massart had informed his colleagues
that Legon no longer worked with Bougerol; Smets, though, working on the de
Bonvoisin/Bougerol/NEM triangle, had Legon followed from Massart's office to [...]
ROGUE AGENTS
203
the PIO military branch office. With the discovery of Massart's ongoing illegal
cooperation with PIO, Smets was simply getting too close for comfort.
It will come as no surprise to learn that the WNP leader Paul Latinus
"committed suicide" in April 1984 as the WNP scandal gathered pace. Opinions
remain divided about whether the suicide was arranged or not. Latinus could have
been a key witness not just in the WNP case but also in a vice scandal that hit the
headlines at the same time as the May 1981 Sûreté report on CEPIC's links to the
NEM. Shortly before dying, Latinus had referred to a file that was his "insurance
policy" - a dossier compromising top politicians in a vice ring: the Pinon file. Dr.
Pinon's wife ran a child vice ring in which VdB and other right-wing notables were
allegedly compromised. In early 1981, details of the ring reached Lecerf who wrote an
article; perhaps unsurprisingly in view of his connections, Lecerf never published the
piece. Lecerf may have been the source for Latinus’s file.
In mid-June 1981, Dr. Pinon gave details of the ring to the left-wing magazine
Pour, which had originally exposed de Bonvoisin's fascist connections. Pour's editor,
Jean-Claude Garot, was preparing to go into print when he received a phone call
from a lawyer attempting to prevent publication: Garot refused. Ten days later, the
premises of Pour were burnt to the ground by a joint commando group from the Front
de la Jeunesse/WNP and the Flemish fascist group VMO. Garot never identified the
lawyer who phoned him by name, but did reveal that it was "a lawyer from the
extreme Right, a member of MAUE". A subsequent detailed study of the Pour case
stated that the lawyer was Vincent van den Bosch, a close associate of the late
Florimond Damman's and longstanding member of the Permanent Delegation of the
AESP who served with de Bonvoisin as a Board member of MAUE in the 1980s (426).
Van den Bosch would later figure in the WNP trials as counsel for WNP killer Michel
Barbier.
THE BRABANT WALLON KILLERS
The involvement of AESP/MAUE/LIL/CEPIC members with the extreme Right
may tie into the most notorious of Belgian parapolitical affairs - the "Brabant Wallon
killers", a gang of alleged "bandits" who specialised in holding up supermarkets with
maximum violence and minimum loot, killing 28 people between 1982 and 1985. The
theory that the killers were motivated by criminal gain - an idea pushed hard by the
Belgian Justice Minister (and AESP patron) Jean Gol - was demolished by the wanton
killing of unarmed and unresisting shoppers, the highly professional and military
approach taken to the attacks, and the provocative tactics employed: on one
occasion, having needlessly gunned down several people and seized takings of only
several thousand Euros, the killers sat in the supermarket car-park to calmly await
the arrival of the police before making good their getaway. Such provocation, together
with the concentration of their attacks in one limited area (the Brabant Wallon), even
ROGUE AGENTS
204
to the extent of driving directly from one attack to hit another supermarket only ten
miles away, all pointed to a strategy of tension with political motivations rather than
to organised crime.
The multiple investigations into the Brabant Wallon killings have thrown up
considerable evidence that points to the authors of the attacks being extreme rightwing
sympathisers within the ranks of the Gendarmerie. One of the actions of the
killers was to break into a warehouse and steal prototype bulletproof vests, whose
existence was only known to the Gendarmerie and a handful of ballistic experts. It
also became clear that those carrying out the supermarket attacks must have had
intimate knowledge of the tactics called "Practical Shooting", a preserve shared by the
Diane group, the Gendarmerie's anti-terrorist unit, and a series of private "Practical
Shooting Clubs" dominated by the extreme Right. Some of the weapons used in
connected attacks had been "stolen" from the barracks of the Diane group on New
Year's Eve, 1981-82.
In 1989, sensational allegations about Gendarmerie involvement in the killings
were made by Martial Lekeu, a former member of the Diane Group and also of the
Gendarmerie's political intelligence section, the BSR. Lekeu alleged that in the mid-
1970s he was recruited into a secret neo-nazi organisation within the Gendarmerie,
Group G. The Gendarmerie officer who recruited him was Didier Mievis, a BSR
member and recruiter for the Front de la Jeunesse within the Gendarmerie (427)*.
Lekeu claimed that the two external controllers of Group G were Francis Dossogne
and Paul Latinus, heads of the Front. Lekeu's first contact with Group G was during
a Front meeting held in Latinus's house; Latinus was Lekeu's next-door neighbour.
From 1975 onwards, the Front and Group G, together with a corresponding group in
the Army, Group M, planned a coup d'état to bring CEPIC to power. At this time,
Vanden Boeynants was President of CEPIC and Belgian Defence Minister, the
supervisory authority for the Gendarmerie. The 1981 Sûreté report reveals that
during this period VdB and de Bonvoisin were giving substantial funding to Dossogne
and Latinus for the Front. Lekeu alleged:
"When I joined the Gendarmerie, I was a convinced fascist. I got to know
people in the Diane group who shared my opinions. We used to exchange the
Nazi salute. Every time we smacked our heels together in the canteen or in the
corridors of the BSR headquarters, we heard others doing the same. It was a
sign of brotherhood [...] during the Front meetings, a plan was developed to
destabilise Belgium and prepare for an authoritarian regime. This plan was
divided into two stages: a phase of political terrorism and a phase of
gangsterism. I worked on the second phase. I was one of the specialists who
would train the young people in extreme Right ideology; we had to turn them
into a group of individuals that were ready for anything. Then, I should break
off all contact with them so that they would become a completely autonomous
group who would commit armed raids without being aware that they were part
ROGUE AGENTS
205
of a perfectly planned plot".
The Intelligence section of the BSR were well aware of Group G's activities:
according to a BSR report drawn up by Chief Adjutant Tratsaert in October 1976, the
BSR had several of Group G's documents, and had infiltrated some of their meetings,
photographing the group's members. The 1976 report confirms Lekeu's claim that
Dossogne was a member of the group. Lekeu stated that he left Group G when they
started committing the Brabant killings; a 1985 BSR report by Agent Bihay declared
that Group G included at least one other gendarme closely linked to the killings:
Madani Bouhouche, who was also a member of the WNP. Lekeu further claimed that
Group G was behind the 1981 theft of Group Diane's weapons: certainly, Bouhouche
was seen in the Diane barracks on the day of the robbery and used one of the
Gendarmerie's vans taken later that night by the thieves.
According to Lekeu, Group G was not only responsible for carrying out the
Brabant killings, but also for launching earlier attempted assassinations which
targeted Gendarmerie colleagues whose investigations into fraud scandals linked to
VdB were getting too close to the truth. Lekeu specifically mentioned the 1981 attack
on Gendarmerie Major Herman Vernaillen as a Group G operation. Vernaillen had
certainly been treading on toes: besides investigating VdB's links to financial and
drug scandals, Vernaillen had been following up indications of VdB's involvement in
coup plots. In May 1989, Vernaillen declared that in 1980 the Brussels banker and
CEPIC member, Leo Finné, had informed him of a planned coup d'état in the 1980s
which involved several senior figures in Opus Dei and a former Minister. Finné was in
a position to know: it has subsequently emerged that he was involved with VdB in
one of the planned coups in 1973.
In a confidential report, Vernaillen gave further details and named participants
in the 1980s plot as CEPIC President VdB, former Deputy Prime Minister and CEPIC
member José Desmarets (in 1986-87, President of WACL, working closely with
Vankerkhoven within the Belgian WACL chapter, LIL), State Prosecutor Raymond
Charles, former Gendarmerie General Fernand Beaurir, ex-Chief of the Army General
Staff Lieutenant-General Georges Vivario (428)* and CEPIC member Jean Militis, a
paratroop colonel implicated in the rumours of a planned coup in 1973. Vernaillen's
allegations were corroborated in November 1989 by the testimony before the
Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry from another Gendarmerie officer, Chief Adjutant
Dussart, who confirmed the names of the participants in the 1980s plot and stated
that several of the 1980s plotters had also been involved in the 1973 plans for a
coup: the de Cock and Tratsaert reports had detailed the NEM Clubs' involvement in
the 1973 plans and named CEPIC members VdB and de Bonvoisin.
Whilst some figures in CEPIC appear to have been the beneficiaries of the
strategy of tension, others were definitely its victims. As Hugo Gijsels points out,
closer examination of some of the people murdered by the Brabant killers during
ROGUE AGENTS
206
their attacks throws up a remarkable series of coincidences. Several people were
coldly executed with bullets to the head, in contrast to the shooting in the
supermarkets that claimed most victims. Amongst those executed in September-
October 1983 were three CEPIC members: Elise Dewit and Jacques Fourez, a
business contact of VdB's, and Jacques van Camp, innkeeper of the "Auberge des
Trois Canards", a favourite haunt for VdB, General Beaurir, Dewit and Fourez. In
October 1985, the killers claimed an even more significant victim amongst the ranks
of CEPIC: banker Leo Finné, Vernaillen's informant, the first person killed in the raid
on the Delhaize supermarket in Overijse.
This is a very brief summary of an extremely complex series of events, and
although much remains unknown, it is clear that those who gravitated in the
AESP/Cercle Pinay environment were closely linked both to the rumoured plans for a
coup in 1973 and to the Belgian strategy of tension in the 1980s. Certain parallels
can be drawn to two previous cases of a strategy of tension: Italy from 1969 onwards
and Portugal in 1975-76. In all three countries, the beneficiary of the strategy of
tension was a Cercle Pinay contact - Andreotti, Spínola and Vanden Boeynants. In all
three cases, the operational experience in running a strategy of tension came from
Aginter Presse, Stefano Delle Chiaie and fascist militants in the ranks of the local
police and Army.
The most promising avenue for investigation to understand the coup plots and
strategy of tension in Belgium in the 1970s and 1980s lies no doubt in exploring
contacts between Aginter Presse, the Belgian extreme Right, the AESP, MAUE, LIL
and the PIO. It is significant that Damman, Lecerf and Guérin-Sérac met only two
years before Lecerf's NEM made its first appeal for a coup d'état - at the beginning of
its long and close relationship with de Bonvoisin and VdB. Official investigations of
the case have been notably timid, although Belgium's thirty-year statute of
limitations, due to close the case in November 2015, has now been extended to forty
years to allow continued enquiry. A full exposure of those behind these events will
probably never come, but as one of the top police investigators working on the
Brabant killings said about the sniffer plane scandal:
"If you're looking for the motives behind the killings in the Brabant, start by
understanding the motives behind that gigantic swindle" (429).
PEACE PROPAGANDA
A major factor in 1980s politics was the intensified nuclear confrontation in
the European theatre following Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles from 1977 on.
Besides continuing to run the post-Helsinki human rights campaign in the late
1970s, the Cercle complex also acted to highlight the Soviet nuclear build-up. After a
glowing recommendation by Violet, Crozier's ISC commissioned French nuclear
ROGUE AGENTS
207
strategy expert General Pierre M. Gallois, formerly of SHAPE, to produce a Conflict
Study on the SS-20 threat, published in June 1978 under the title Soviet Military
Doctrine and European Defence. Gallois was an old friend of the Cercle complex; he
had attended the 1963, 1964 and allegedly also the 1965 Bilderberg conferences
along with Pinay, and also had attended CEDI Congresses in 1961, 1968 and 1974,
sitting since at least 1972 on CEDI's International Council alongside Habsburg,
Sánchez Bella, Merkatz, Vankerkhoven, Huyn and Agnew – by 1978, all AESP
members. In parallel to liaison through CEDI, Gallois also attended meetings of the
Cercle itself; five years after his ISC SS-20 study, he would again be of service to the
Cercle and the 6I in the nuclear missile debate (430).
In December 1979, after considerable internal debate, NATO responded to the
SS-20 threat by adopting its Double-Track Decision which foresaw offering the
Soviet Union negotiations for the elimination of all Intermediate Nuclear Forces in
the European theatre whilst pursuing the stationing of new American GLCM
(Cruise) and Pershing II nuclear missiles in Britain, Italy, Belgium, Germany and
Holland. These deployments provoked a wave of protest from the previously
moribund peace movement unseen since the Vietnam demonstrations of the early
1970s. The European Right and the intelligence services reacted in the early eighties
much as they had done a decade earlier: by a wave of aggressive counter-intelligence,
agents provocateurs and smear campaigns to discredit peace activists as potentially
violent KGB dupes or stooges.
The Cercle and particularly Crozier's London-based 6I would play a key part in
these anti-disarmament campaigns throughout the 1980s; indeed, the chapter of
Crozier's memoirs covering this period starts with the words:
"The best thing the 6I ever did was to penetrate and defeat the Soviet 'peace'
fronts and the Western campaign groups [...] in the absence of government
reaction in any of the affected countries [sic, see below], it was left to private
groups to counter the Soviet campaigns. At the 6I, we took a decision to create
new peace counter-groups wherever necessary, and to assist such groups
where they already existed, both financially and with ideas. It was a
considerable international coordinating effort which paid off in the end" (431).
To quote Crozier again, this time from his address to the Cercle meeting held
in Wildbad Kreuth in June 1982:
"Even before the [NATO] meeting of December 1979, the Soviets had shown
that they understood what was at stake and proposed to act. The vast
propaganda and subversion apparatus, controlled by the International
Department of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) was mobilized and
unleashed in the autumn of 1979. The key role is played by the World Peace
Council, and through it by innumerable subsidiary bodies in all the Western
ROGUE AGENTS
208
countries. The objective is clear and simple: to make it psychologically
unthinkable and politically impossible to deploy the new American missiles. If
the "peace" campaign succeeds, the Soviets will be the victors: a Finlandised
Europe will break away from America, or alternatively a disillusioned America
will abandon Europe. … Against this background, the Soviet-supported
"peace" movement in Western Europe made rapid headway in 1981 –
particularly in West Germany, Britain, Holland and Belgium. It is encouraging
to note, however, that in all these countries, and in France as well, countermovements
or groups have been created, which weaken the impact of the
unilateralist organizations by calling for multilateral disarmament" (432).
The most intense of these 6I anti-unilateralist campaigns targeted the British
peace movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Although the 6I
was also notably active against proponents of nuclear disarmament in two further
'problematic' countries, Belgium and Holland, there were several good reasons why
the British CND should have been singled out as the prime focus for 6I disruption.
CND was not only the largest of the European peace movements with a third of a
million active members in the early 1980s, but also the oldest. At the time of the
1979 NATO Double-Track Decision, CND could look back on a twenty-year history of
protest, having been founded in 1957 amidst growing opposition to recent British
hydrogen bomb tests in Australia and the Pacific. Between 1958 and 1965, annual
marches were held from the Atomic Weapons Establishment near Aldermaston to
Trafalgar Square - 150,000 protestors attended the 1961 and 1962 Aldermaston
marches, unprecedented numbers for the day. After the 1963 Test Ban Treaty,
peace protestors' focus shifted from nuclear weapons to opposition to the Vietnam
War, but peace activism dwindled following American withdrawal from Vietnam in
1975.
However, uniquely, the British peace movement was reinvigorated well before
the December 1979 NATO decision by two domestic upheavals, the first cultural,
the second political. From 1976 on, the explosion of punk music ripped through
Britain and revived anti-establishment opinion against the backdrop of the Queen's
Silver Jubilee in 1977 when the BBC Top of the Pops televised charts had to omit
the banned Number One single which screamed: "God Save the Queen, and her
fascist regime, she married a moron, potential H-bomb". Politically, after three years
of social and industrial conflict following the resignation of Harold Wilson in 1976,
the May 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher hardened the cultural divide. The
Conservatives won 44% of the votes cast, compared to 37% for Labour and 14% for
the Liberals, leaving a nation riven by conflict about many areas of policy adopted
by the new Thatcher government. Coming barely six months after the election, the
NATO Double-Track Decision sparked a renaissance of the peace movement which
exceeded even its previous peak in the early 1960s - in October 1981 and again in
October 1983, more than 250,000 people rallied at CND demonstrations in London.
ROGUE AGENTS
209
A further contributing factor to the scale of British protests was both the
schedule and the scale of deployment of Cruise missiles in Europe – Britain was to
be both the first and also the largest base for Cruise missiles. The European Cruise
deployment programme began in July 1982 with 96 missiles installed at Greenham
Common, soon publicly surrounded by a Women's Peace Camp. Although more
missiles - 112 in all - would later be based at the remote location of Comiso in Italy
from June 1983 on, Britain – "Airstrip One" to quote George Orwell's novel, 1984 –
was the only one of the five NATO deployment countries to host two Cruise missile
bases; a further 64 missiles were stationed at Molesworth in December 1986,
ensuring that the nuclear missile issue did not fade in the news.
The British peace movement was therefore the primary 6I target, and between
1979 and 1987, CND was subjected to an unprecedented propaganda and
harassment campaign run by an alliance of three complexes: firstly, several privatesector
groups closely linked to the Cercle Pinay, the 6I and their backers in the
Heritage Foundation; secondly, DS19 (Defence Secretariat 19), an official but covert
anti-CND propaganda unit within the Ministry of Defence; and last but certainly not
least, MI5's Internal Subversion division, F Branch.
As we will see below, these State and private initiatives interlocked on several
levels. One notable link was MI5's Charles Elwell who would later work with Brian
Crozier throughout the 1980s to produce a smear bulletin targeting the Labour Party,
progressive charities and church groups, described in a later chapter. From April
1974 to May 1979, Elwell had been an Assistant Director of MI5 and the head of F1
Branch (CPGB and other subversive groups), playing a major part in MI5's shift in
operations away from counter-espionage towards counter-subversion and
strengthening the Security Service's role as a political police.
In the mid-1970s, Elwell set up a special unit within MI5 to produce a report
on "subversion and left-wing bias in the media". The unit investigated journalists
judged to hold anti-establishment views as well as those appointed to what MI5
considered politically sensitive or influential posts – from 1937 until 1985, MI5 vetted
all BBC News and Drama staff from an office in the BBC's Broadcasting House,
stamping suspect journalists' personnel files with a Christmas tree symbol (433).
Although Elwell's MI5 media monitoring unit was later disbanded, MI5 held on to its
files – maybe not too tightly, bearing in mind the ISC Study Group on subversion in
the media which met from May 1977 to April 1978 and which published its findings
as an ISC Special Report, Television and Conflict, in November 1978.
In Elwell's capacity as a senior MI5 counter-subversion officer, he designated
prominent figures in CND and the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) as
persons having "Communist contacts", allowing undercover surveillance that
provoked a media furore in 1985 following revelations made by former MI5 F Branch
ROGUE AGENTS
210
officer Cathy Massiter. Massiter, an MI5 officer from 1971 on who had worked
fulltime on the monitoring of CND from 1981 to 1983, testified that the telephone
lines of CND and NCCL leaders were being tapped, and that information on CND
personalities taken from MI5 files had been provided to the MoD's covert anti-CND
unit, DS19 (434)*.
This official but covert harassment of the peace movement was echoed by the
private-sector groups centred around Crozier. FARI fired one of the first shots in the
UK anti-unilateralist campaign in the form of a 1980 brochure by Crozier entitled The
Price of Peace - a Plain Man's Guide to Current Defence Issues; the cover of the FARI
brochure illustrated the launch of an SS-20. Published by Stewart-Smith's FAPC and
also distributed by the Monday Club, the brochure's tables of the East-West nuclear
balance in the brochure were produced by the ISC, and the defence expenditure table
came from NATO Review. Having conceded that many peace campaigners were
sincere, Crozier then went on to ask: "But how many realize that the campaign
against nuclear arms modernisation, in which they are involved, is manipulated by
Moscow?" Crozier later revealed in his memoirs that the basic research had been
done by "a Dutch friend"; the brochure was published in Dutch in 1981, and an
updated and expanded edition would be published in the US by the Heritage
Foundation in 1983 (435)*.
In 1981, with continued if reduced South African funding (436)*, FARI
organised the first Annual World Balance of Power Conference which brought
together many of the Cercle's American contacts: Feulner of the Heritage Foundation,
General Graham of the ASC, Barnett of the NSIC and also of the Committee on the
Present Danger (437), and Cline of CSIS. The conference, which aimed "to consider
the need of the entire non-communist world to respond to the Soviet global political
and military threat", started with a message of goodwill from President Reagan. A
Second Annual World Balance of Power Conference was held in July 1982.
Beyond FARI's efforts, the Cercle/6I also created several new British groups
specialising in anti-disarmament propaganda, thanks to American funding from
three main sources, of which the first was the CIA - in his memoirs, Crozier records
that, after initial hesitation, Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey
provided £50,000 in 1981 and $100,000 in 1982 (438).
Another official but covert American source of funding for the UK campaigns
against pacifist sentiment was the US Information Agency. "On September 9, 1982,
President Ronald Reagan designated the United States Information Agency to lead
an inter-departmental effort to counter Soviet propaganda and disinformation. For
an advisory body, the Administration created the Active Measures Working Group
in 1981 to bring together the information the various agencies held to counter
Soviet disinformation and forgery. It served as a clearing-house to expose such
information and it had permission to use classified documents and any other
ROGUE AGENTS
211
resources that were required to meet this goal. The Working Group was chaired by
the State Department with representatives from State, Central Intelligence Agency,
Defense Intelligence Agency, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, United States
Information Agency, and the Defense and Justice Departments. The Working Group
ended in 1991, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union" (439).
One of the first actions of the USIA was to create a special unit to lead this
campaign, the Office to Counter Soviet Active Measures and Disinformation; its
Director from 1983 to his retirement in 1989 was Crozier's longstanding contact
and probable 6I founding member, Herb Romerstein. Within months of his
appointment, Romerstein would ensure USIA funding for anti-disarmament
propaganda by another old Crozier friend, USCISC member Ernest W. Lefever. As
Director of the Ethics and Public Policy Program at Georgetown University, ""Ernest
Lefever used the $200,000 given by USIA to help "highly placed and influential
leaders in Western Europe to gain a solid understanding of US defence and arms
control policies, with special reference to their religious and moral implications."
One conference was organised in Britain in May [1983] with church leaders in
attendance. It was sponsored by the British Atlantic Committee (BAC) and the
Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies [IEDSS, see below]."" The
conference organised by Lefever was also attended by another regular Crozier
contact and probable 6I founding member, Sven Kraemer, then Program Director of
Barnett's NSIC and Director of Arms Control at the NSC (440)*.
Major private-sector funding for the Cercle/6I campaigns would also be
provided by the American Heritage Foundation, whose President since 1977 Edwin
Feulner had attended the December 1979 Cercle meeting. The Heritage Foundation,
whose role is concealed in Crozier's memoirs, provided the infrastructure and funding
for three Cercle/6I groups active in anti-peace movement propaganda in Britain.
Whilst some of the funding was direct and therefore public, the Heritage Foundation
also created an intermediary to act as a conduit for covert funding for the Cercle/6I
campaign: the International Freedom Fund Establishment, which was run by
Brian Crozier, who thus became the Heritage Foundation's bag-man in Britain. IRS
tax returns for the Heritage Foundation show that it donated a total of $140,000 to
the IFFE for the three years 1982, 1983 and 1985. In an interview, Heritage
Foundation Vice-President Herb Berkowitz described the IFFE as "a networking
operation [...] we support them, and he [Crozier] does the work" and admitted to a
further Heritage donation to Crozier of $50,000 in 1986. Crozier himself conceded
that the IFFE received a total of £200,000 from the Heritage Foundation between
1982 and 1986, whilst declining to identify the ultimate beneficiaries of such largesse
(441).
The main beneficiary of Heritage Foundation funds - receiving an estimated
half a million dollars from 1982 to 1985 - was the Institute for European Defence
and Strategic Studies (IEDSS). Founded in 1979, the IEDSS set as its goal "to
ROGUE AGENTS
212
assess the impact of political change in Europe and North America on defence and
strategic issues, in particular, to study the domestic political situation in NATO
countries and how this affects the NATO posture". The IEDSS Chairman was Heritage
President Feulner; the IEDSS Council included Heritage Fellow Richard V. Allen,
Reagan's chief foreign policy advisor from 1977 to 1980 and later appointed as his
first but short-lived National Security Advisor, in which post Allen would be a
recipient of the 6I's confidential bulletin, Transnational Security (442). Serving on the
IEDSS Council with him was an old ISC stalwart: Leonard Schapiro.
The IEDSS was closely linked to the ISC from its inception on; the IEDSS
initially shared the ISC's Golden Square address before moving to new premises - two
doors away. Several ISC associates also wrote reports for the IEDSS - Brian Crozier
(Communism - why prolong its death throes?), the ISC's Turkey expert Kenneth
Mackenzie, Richard Pipes of the USCISC and Lord Chalfont, the latter serving as a
Council member of IEDSS and as a Board member of FARI with Crozier, Moss and
Amery. Heritage Foundation control over the IEDSS was eloquently illustrated by US
Internal Revenue Service figures for the year 1985: Heritage contributed $151,273 of
a total IEDSS budget of $185,611. According to IRS figures, the Heritage Foundation
donated $427,809 to the IEDSS for the three years 1982, 1983 and 1985 (443).
Besides its Heritage Foundation/ISC links to the "private sector" for antidisarmament
propaganda, the IEDSS was also directly tied in to the British State's
anti-CND campaign through two IEDSS Council members: Conservative MP Ray
Whitney and senior Tory Sir Peter Blaker - an old friend of Crozier's from
Cambodian days (444). As Under-Secretary of the Army, Blaker had worked with
Amery when the latter was Minister of State at the FCO from 1972 to 1974; Blaker
would join the FCO briefly in 1974. After Thatcher's election victory, Blaker would
take Amery's old job as Minister of State at the FCO from 1979 to 1981 and then
serve as a junior Minister in the Ministry of Defence from 1981 to 1983 when Defence
Minister Michael Heseltine appointed him to head a secret Ministerial Group on
Nuclear Weapons and Public Opinion. This Ministerial Group led to the creation in
February 1983 of DS19, an MoD unit which received information on CND from MI5
and which generated films and literature attacking the peace movement. This official
but clandestine campaign by Heseltine and Blaker was assisted by Conservative MP
Ray Whitney, who served with Blaker on the IEDSS Board from 1979 to 1984.
Whitney had previously had considerable experience in black propaganda.
Prior to being elected to Parliament and becoming a junior Minister under Mrs
Thatcher, Whitney was the last head of the IRD before it was officially "closed down"
in April 1977; like many other IRD staff, he would then transfer to the IRD's "purged"
successor, the Overseas Information Department. After releasing a letter purporting
to prove communist domination of CND and the Labour Party, Heseltine commented:
"Our colleague Ray Whitney has added a valuable contribution to our knowledge of
the political motivations of CND". The IEDSS allowed Blaker, Whitney and the MoD
ROGUE AGENTS
213
team to recycle their anti-unilateralist propaganda under the guise of "academic
respectability"; one such IEDSS publication was Perception and Reality - An Opinion
Poll on Defence and Disarmament, published in 1986 and written by Blaker together
with Sir Clive Rose, former Deputy Secretary in the Cabinet Office from 1976 to
1979 and then UK Permanent Representative on the North Atlantic Council from
1979 to 1982. Rose, another old ISC friend, had previously written the 1985 book
Campaigns against Western defence: NATO's adversaries and critics and in 1988
would produce The Soviet propaganda network: a directory of organisations serving
Soviet foreign policy.
The IEDSS's anti-CND campaign was supported on an altogether more vicious
level by another Heritage beneficiary, the Coalition for Peace through Security. The
CPS was founded in the autumn of 1981 after Crozier had secured initial 6I funding
from the CIA in March. The Heritage Foundation's tax returns recorded a 1982
donation of $10,000 to the CPS, and a letter from the CPS to the Foundation thanked
it for a further contribution of $50,000 in October of the same year. The general
coordinator appointed by Thatcher for the Government's attack on CND was Winston
Churchill MP, a FARI member alongside Chalfont and the Cercle trio of Crozier, Moss
and Amery; the CPS initially shared offices with FARI. The CPS enjoyed close links to
the Conservative Party Central Office - the three Directors of the CPS (Tony Kerpel,
Julian Lewis and Edward Leigh) were all prospective Conservative parliamentary
candidates. Immediately after its foundation in 1981, the CPS obtained the list of
Conservative Party agents around the country and was given free access to the
Party's mainframe computer. One of its earliest actions was to set about infiltrating
CND so as to gain access to its 1982 annual conference; this was the beginning of a
savage smear campaign, running slogans such as "CND = KGB" and "Communists
Neutralists Defeatists". In one typical action in August 1986, CPS activists disrupted
a two minute silence commemorating Hiroshima in Trafalgar Square by playing the
national anthem full-blast over a loudspeaker system.
The main CPS activist was, according to Crozier, "a gifted young man named
Julian Lewis. Introduced to me by Norris McWhirter, Dr. Lewis became the 6I's
leading activist in Britain, notably as the scourge of [CND leader] Monsignor Bruce
Kent and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [...] in Britain, the energetic Julian
Lewis and his young assistants wrote letters to the press, hired light aircraft trailing
anti-CND slogans, organised counter-demonstrations, and challenged Bruce Kent
and other speakers at CND rallies. Books, pamphlets, folders, posters were produced,
all of them pithy and telling" (445). Lewis had been active in student politics before
graduating from Oxford in 1977; in 1976, with secret funding from NAFF, he posed
as a Labour moderate to join the Newham North-East Constituency Labour Party in a
failed attempt to reverse the deselection of Labour right-wing MP and former minister
Reg Prentice, later to become the highest-ranking Labour figure to defect to the
Conservative party (446)*.
ROGUE AGENTS
214
In 1981, Lewis completed his studies, receiving a D. Phil. in Strategic Studies
from St Antony's College, Oxford, and went straight to work for Crozier - from 1981
to early 1985, he served as Research Director of the CPS, working alongside CPS
Director Edward Leigh, Thatcher's private correspondence secretary in 1976-77
when she was Leader of the Opposition being briefed by Crozier and Shield. After
working for Thatcher, Leigh served as Chairman of the National Council for Civil
Defence from 1980 to 1983 when he was elected to Parliament, acting as Joint
Secretary of the Conservative Parliamentary Defence Committee from 1983 to 1985
and sitting on the Commons Select Committee for Defence until 1987. Lewis, who
also stood as a candidate in 1983, was not successful, remaining outside
Parliament until elected in 1997. He would spend the 1980s as the 6I's director of
operations in Britain, running the CPS and a host of other 6I front groups. The tone
of the CPS attack on CND can be judged from a later press interview given by Lewis:
"I am not surprised that the Stasi [East German security service] were
worried about those of us who were working for the vital deployment of NATO
Cruise missiles in Britain in 1983, and for the retention of our own nuclear
deterrent. However, I am increasingly alarmed at the determination of the
Labour government [in 2000] to take no action whatever to expose the
identity of these despicable hacks and traitors who were spying for our
potential enemies at a crucial turning-point of the Cold War. Three-quarters
of Labour MPs at that time were committed to one-sided nuclear
disarmament, and several were fellow-travellers of the Soviet system, so it is
not surprising that the Government wishes to hush the matter up. What is
more worrying is that MI5 – our domestic security service – is colluding in
this or was so incompetent that it failed to discover what was going on in the
first place" (447)*.
In 1985, Lewis set up his own organisation to run 6I campaigns in several
fields; the new group, Policy Research Associates, "successfully campaigned for
changes in the law on Educational Indoctrination, Media Bias, Propaganda on the
Rates [local taxes], and Trade Union Democracy" (448). The mention of "Propaganda
on the Rates" referred to another 6I action to undermine support for the peace
movement - the Campaign against Council Corruption (CAMACC). The CAMACC
was run by Tony Kerpel as its Director and Edward Leigh as its main parliamentary
activist, both Directors of the CPS; CAMACC and the CPS were both run from PRA's
address. The CAMACC aimed to prevent local councils from publicly opposing
American missile deployment by declaring their areas nuclear-free zones. As Crozier
alleges,
ROGUE AGENTS
215
"in military terms, the 'nuclear-free zones' in various council areas were of no
significance. The point was that £10 million or more had gone to CND and
other like-minded bodies, thus building up further support for the peace
movement. The net effect was that the 'loony Left' councils, as they were
increasingly called in the press, were spending millions to make the West safe
for the Soviet SS-20s" (449).
Another campaign undertaken by Lewis targeted alleged "Media Bias"; in
1985, with the support of the Conservative Central Office, Lewis founded the Media
Monitoring Unit, a repeat of the ISC's 1970s actions against perceived leftist
influence in the media. To raise funds for the MMU, Lewis would call on Cercle
member Sir Peter Tennant:
"The Media Monitoring Unit was conceived and created last year by a small group of
self-described Right-of-centre political activists. The driving force is Julian Lewis [...]
He runs a political pressure group called Policy Research Associates which pops up
now and again in debates on such matters as council corruption, trade union law
and CND. Lord Chalfont is a patron as is Norris McWhirter, who founded the
Freedom Association, and Edward Leigh, MP [...] The increasing activity of the PRA
and the decision to form the monitoring unit is indicative of a more aggressive
approach in Right-of-centre circles to getting across its message [...] To get the unit
off the ground, he approached Sir Peter Tennant, 75, a senior City businessman and
advisor to the CBI. Tennant in turn drew together a nucleus of sympathisers, mostly
from the City, who put up the £25,000-or-so to hire a director, buy a video recorder
and publish the report" (450).
Crozier recounts:
"We produced several occasional issues of the Monitoring Report, an
impressively researched survey of the political attitudes in the media, which
showed, in my view beyond doubt, that there was a predominantly left-wing
bias, especially in television. The first yearly report, at the end of 1986,
attracted much press attention, most of it favourable" (451).
Besides monitoring the media, the 6I was also prolific in producing its own
publications attacking the peace movement, both in the UK and abroad. In 1982, the
post-Crozier ISC brought out a Conflict Study entitled Political Violence and Civil
Disobedience in Western Europe, whilst Crozier's London 6I outfit CPS followed suit
with The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union by former Soviet dissident and vocal
right-winger Vladimir Bukovsky; co-published by the Committee for a Free World
with an introduction by Winston Churchill, the booklet's scarlet cover portrayed a
Soviet nuclear bomb dropping on silhouetted demonstrators waving CND signs.
ROGUE AGENTS
216
The same year, Bukovsky's contribution appeared in the US and in France (as
Les pacifistes contre la paix); it was reviewed by General Close as the lead article in
the November 1982 issue of the LIL bulletin, Damoclès. In 1983, Bukovsky's book
was published in German by the Swiss SOI which, the same year, also produced
Hans Graf Huyn's Frieden in Freiheit: Wege zum Ziel [Peace in Freedom: Paths to the
Goal]. Crozier himself then put together a 1984 anthology, This War Called Peace,
published by his Sherwood Press.
The major anti-CND publication by the Cercle/6I complex would however be
"Peace" of the Dead by Paul Mercer, "one of the best of our activists" according to
Crozier (452)*. The massive 465-page book, "an exhaustive and authoritative analysis
of the CND and its affiliates", was published in 1986 by Lewis's Policy Research
Publications. The book's tone was set by the cover illustration of the CND symbol
combined with a hammer and sickle cutting through a map of the UK; joining Mercer
in his exhaustive efforts to prove Moscow's domination of CND were the Coalition for
Peace through Security, the Freedom Association, Brian Crozier, Lord Chalfont (who
contributed the foreword), John Rees and Peter Shipley, whose ISC Conflict Study,
Patterns of Protest in Western Europe, would also be published in 1986.
Whilst Crozier and the London-based groups kept up the propaganda barrage
against CND, they would also be active in giving practical assistance to pro-Cruise
groups in Holland. When the 6I operation was launched in 1982, Holland was still
holding out against the new NATO missiles and would end up never actually
deploying them. Whilst 48 missiles were assigned to the Woensdrecht base by the
USAF in 1983, it was only in 1985 that the Dutch government reluctantly accepted to
host Cruise, and deployment itself would be aborted by the December 1987
conclusion of the INF treaty. A number of groups were set up in Holland to support
deployment, using the same tactic as in the UK of accusing the largely Church-based
Dutch peace movement of being Soviet-controlled. Crozier states that the Dutch
group "that was proving the most useful in countering the Soviet-led campaign was
the Stichting Vrijheid, Vrede en Verdediging [Freedom, Peace and Defence
Foundation]" (453)*.
According to a Guardian report in 1987, the ISC acted as a channel for covert
American funding to certain Dutch pro-Cruise groups. Frank Brenchley, a former
Chairman of the ISC Council (454)*, told the Guardian that the ISC produced a
private, unpublished report on the Dutch peace movement. Sir Clive Rose
acknowledged using ISC information on Holland when writing his book, Campaigns
against Western Defence. The research was carried out, he said, by two ISC members,
Professor Leonard Schapiro and Nigel Clive, the latter a former MI6 coupmaster and
head of the IRD. Michael Goodwin, ISC Director since Crozier's departure in 1979
and also a former IRD member, confirmed that Holland was of particular interest to
the ISC in 1983 (455).
ROGUE AGENTS
217
The Dutch peace movement was evidently a focus for the CIA as well; besides
the ISC propaganda operation to counter the Dutch peace movement in 1980-83, the
BVD and CIA infiltrated an agent provocateur amongst Dutch and Belgian peacecampers
in early 1984 in an attempt to compromise them in the theft of live
ammunition from the Belgian Cruise base at Florennes; some of the ammunition was
later recovered near the peace-camp at the Dutch Cruise base of Woensdrecht (456)*.
However, the main 6I focus in Europe was Belgium, where deployment of
Cruise missiles at the Florennes airbase was delayed by public and parliamentary
protest until August 1984. The leading figure for anti-pacifist propaganda was the
controversial former senior military officer General Robert Close. As described above,
within months of his resignation from military service in 1980, Close had joined
WACL and the post-Damman MAUE, serving with Jonet and Vankerkhoven as one of
MAUE's Vice-Presidents; in 1981, Close and MAUE Board member Nicolas de
Kerchove published Encore un effort et nous aurons définitivement perdu la Troisième
Guerre mondiale [Another effort and we will have definitively lost the Third World
War]. Close would be prominent in several 1980s anti-disarmament groups linked to
the Cercle and the 6I.
The first of these was the Europäisches Institut für Sicherheitsfragen [EIS,
European Institute for Security Matters], officially founded under Habsburg's
patronage in Luxembourg in December 1981, although a preliminary conference
seems to have been held in Paris in June 1980 (457). The intent underlying the
foundation of the EIS appears to have been to overcome the EEC's lack of
competence in the defence field by creating an external high-level European forum -
a political showboat – to promote hawkish defence policies and combat pacifist
sentiment, its main target audience being the EEC institutions:
"By its structure, the Institute will be able to debate problems relating to the
defence and security of Europe, even if these are not explicitly covered by the
terms of the Treaty of Rome, for the benefit of the European institutions and
particularly the [European] Parliament" (458)*.
The German-language title of the EIS reflected the preponderance of German
members, many of whom were previous associates of Karl Friedrich Grau in his
various political action groups. Alongside Habsburg and the Belgian duo of Close
and de Kerchove, other founding members of the EIS included:
Martin Bangemann - German MP from 1972 to 1980 and from 1987 to 1989;
appointed MEP from 1973 to 1979; elected MEP from 1979 to 1984; Minister for the
Economy from 1984 to 1988; Chairman of Liberal FDP Party from 1985 to 1988; EEC
Commissioner for the Internal Market from 1989 to 1993 and for Industrial Policy
from 1993 to 1999.
ROGUE AGENTS
218
Hans Filbinger - CDU former Regional Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg; PEU
Council; SWG; Brüsewitz Centre; Ludwig-Frank-Stiftung.
former Major-General Jochen Löser - founding member of Western Goals Europe.
former General Wolfgang Schall – CDU MEP from 1979 to 1984; SWG; leader of
German WACL delegation from 1981 on.
former General Johann Kielmannsegg – from 1963 to 1967 NATO Commander
Allied Land Forces Central Europe, then from 1967 until his retirement in 1968
Commander in Chief Allied Forces Central Europe; Board of the magazine Beiträge
zur Konfliktforschung – Psychopolitische Aspekte [Contributions to the Study of
Conflict – Psychopolitical Aspects], founded in 1971 and funded by the Federal
Defence Ministry. Took free trips to South Africa in 1971 and 1975.
Lieutenant-Colonel Gerhard Hubatschek - speaker for Grau's SWG; appointed to
the German Army Planning Staff by Defence Minister Manfred Wörner in 1983;
author for Western Goals Europe in 1984.
Wolfgang Reineke - Heidelberg-based business advisor; Chairman of the television
viewers' lobby AFF which had worked with Grau since the early 1970s; speaker for
Grau's Swiss ISP in 1975-76; member of the International Institute for Strategic
Studies in London.
Kai-Uwe von Hassel - CDU former Regional Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein;
former Defence Minister; CDU MP in 1953-54 and from 1965 to 1979; former
President and Vice-President of the Bundestag until 1976. Attended AESP Grand
Dîner Charlemagne in January 1976. Vice-President of the CoE Parliamentary
Assembly in 1977. President of the WEU Assembly from 1977 to 1979. CDU MEP
from 1979 to 1984. Resistance International signatory, visited US to lobby Congress
to support Contras as part of RI delegation. Participant with Huyn and Graf von
Stauffenberg at secret Berlin meeting on 8-10/6/87 on "The Future of German-
American Relations", organised by International Security Council, a group within the
Moonies' political arm, CAUSA.
Leo Tindemans - former Belgian Prime Minister in 1974-78 (when VdB was Defence
Minister and latterly Deputy Prime Minister); Foreign Minister in 1981-89; MEP from
1979 to 1981 and 1989 to 1999.
Pierre Pflimlin - Bilderberg Group; appointed MEP from 1962 to 1967; elected MEP
from 1979 to 1989; Vice-President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1984
and President from 1984 to 1987.
ROGUE AGENTS
219
The first official conference of the EIS, held in 1981 in the Belgian Foreign
Ministry's Egmont Palace, concentrated on how to promote NATO against peace
movement opposition. Its first General Assembly was then held in April 1982 in
Brussels in the presence of NATO Secretary-General Joseph Luns (whose Deputy
Chef de Cabinet was Robert Nieuwenhuys, then President of MAUE) and European
Commissioner Karl-Heinz Narjes, at the time a prominent member of the Cercle Pinay
according to Hans Langemann's 1980 intelligence report on the Cercle.
By 1982, the EIS Board had also expanded to include a number of new
members, several of whom would attend the second EIS conference in Luxembourg in
April 1982:
Franz Josef Strauß
Gerhard Löwenthal - ZDF; President of the Deutschland-Stiftung from 1977 to
1994; Brüsewitz Centre; Bürgeraktion Demokraten für Strauß; Konservative Aktion;
SWG; Resistance International; WACL; CAUSA.
Dr. Heinrich Aigner - CSU MP from 1957 to 1980; appointed MEP from 1961 to
1979; elected MEP from 1979 to 1988; Vice-President of the German PEU section;
Brüsewitz Centre; Ludwig-Frank-Stiftung.
former Brigadier-General Heinz Karst - SWG; ISP; Chairman of the Deutschland-
Stiftung from 1973 to 1977; Brüsewitz Centre; Konservative Aktion.
Alfons Goppel – member of Hitler's SA from 1933 on and NSDAP from 1937 on; from
1962 to 1978 Regional Prime Minister of Bavaria, succeeded by Franz Josef Strauß;
CSU MEP from 1979 to 1984; Board member of PEU.
former Lieutenant-General Günther Rall – Air Force Staff project officer for the
introduction of the nuclear-capable Lockheed F-104 Starfighter in the mid-1960s,
Inspector of the German Air Force in 1971-74, then Chief of Air Staff and German
representative to the Military Council of NATO. In October 1974, under the false
name of Ball, took a three-week free trip to South Africa sponsored by the South
Africa Foundation, touring the Pelindaba nuclear research site. Exposure of the visit
in September 1975 led to great public controversy and his dismissal from the Air
Force. Shortly thereafter, Rall was interviewed by the US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee's Sub-Committee on Multinational Corporations that was investigating
the Lockheed bribery scandal (459).
Dr. Ludwig Bölkow - Bilderberg Group, Managing Director of Messerschmitt
Bölkow Blohn, the major military aviation contractor (Strauß sat on the Board),
prominent CSU member and linked to the Starfighter scandal with Strauß, named
President of NATO arms standardisation committee in 1976.
ROGUE AGENTS
220
Nicolas Estgen – Luxembourg; MEP from 1979 to 1994, former Vice-President of the
European Parliament, member of Bureau of the EP conservative fraction EPP with
Habsburg, served on PEU International Council from 1984 on.
However, this 1982 enlargement of the EIS to include many powerful Germans
would cost it several of its influential members, notably the Belgian team of Close,
Jonet and de Kerchove, their departure being attributed by the EIS to 'policy
differences'. According to further statements made by Close, the split in the EIS was
partly triggered by a shift from its initial focus of attacking perceived Communist
subversion of the European peace movement (i. e. a psy-ops or 'Political Action' outfit)
towards becoming a lobby group for European arms contractors - no doubt Close was
referring to the recent arrival of the Starfighter-tainted Strauß, Rall and Bölkow.
Undaunted but reduced in ranks, the EIS continued under its Vice-Chairman
from 1983 to 1988 and Chairman thereafter Monique Garnier-Lançon, who would
remain involved with the EIS until 1995. Her participation in the Cercle Pinay as
convenor of the French delegation from 1982 to 1986, detailed in the Postscript,
reflected a change of generation in French representation from Pinay and Violet's
contacts to those of Jacques Chirac, the rising star of the French Right who had
served as Prime Minister under President Giscard d'Estaing from 1974 to 1976.
Under the banner of the Rassemblement Pour la République (RPR) which he
founded in December 1976, Chirac was elected in March 1977 to the newly recreated
ancient post of Mayor of Paris, serving for eighteen years until elected as French
President in 1995. Chirac's power base as Mayor of Paris - a position of national
prominence outside of government, similar to that of the Labour Leader of the
Greater London Council from 1981 to 1986, Ken Livingstone - was crucial for the
French Right, particularly after Socialist François Mitterrand's unprecedented
presidential election victory over Giscard d'Estaing in May 1981. At the Paris Town
Hall, Garnier-Lançon was one of Chirac's closest advisors on security policy and
served under him from 1977 until 1989 as one of the thirty-six (later reduced to
twenty-eight) Deputy Mayors of Paris.
The departure of Close, Jonet and de Kerchove from the EIS did not however
disrupt the 6I anti-pacifist campaign, as the MAUE team of Close, Jonet,
Vankerkhoven and de Kerchove had already set up their own Belgian antidisarmament
group with 6I help - the Rassemblement pour la Paix dans la
Liberté/Vereniging voor Vrede en Vrijheid [RAPPEL, Rally for Peace in Freedom]
set up by Jonet, "our man in Brussels", a group whose "influence spread not only
through the Belgian Parliament, but into the schools, with the distribution of
officially approved booklets on defence", as Crozier noted (460). RAPPEL's inaugural
meeting was held in March 1982 and chaired by Close; speakers included Count
Yves du Monceau de Bergendal, a PSC senator from 1971 on and supporter of Opus
ROGUE AGENTS
221
Dei (461)*, and Armand De Decker, the founding Deputy Secretary-General of the
PRL from 1979 to 1981 who would serve as a PRL Member of Parliament from 1981
on and as President of the Liberal group within the Western European Union
Assembly from 1982 on (462)*.
Crozier however makes no mention in his memoirs of a second Brussels-based
6I front group, this time international in both agenda and membership: the Institut
Européen pour la Paix et la Sécurité (IEPS), created as a parallel organisation to
the EIS: whilst the EIS is usually referred to by its German/English acronym, its
French acronym had also been IEPS - the Institut Européen pour les Problèmes de
Sécurité (463). The new Belgian-based IEPS, which would run until at least 1993,
held its first General Assembly in April 1982, attended by Strauß and Habsburg.
After their august presence at the IEPS inaugural ceremony, the German dignitaries
were swiftly sidelined - the IEPS operational base was the core Brussels
MAUE/RAPPEL team, and the London command centre was under 6I chief Crozier
who then liaised with the 6I's American allies in the ASC/NSIC complex. The new
Belgian group would focus on 'Political Action' (propaganda) operations against
Communist subversion of Western protest movements, along the lines of the 6I
operations in Holland and in the UK, the latter run by the London 6I/CPS core of
Crozier, Lewis, Leigh, Kerpel and Mercer.
Close was President of the IEPS. His fellow MAUE Vice-President and Belgian
Cercle coordinator Jonet was one of the IEPS Administrators, as was MAUE Board
member de Kerchove. A third IEPS Administrator was Belgian Colonel Henri
Bernard, wartime veteran of the SOE and emeritus Professor of History at the
Belgian Military College. Bernard had been one of the earliest partners of Damman
and Vankerkhoven, serving as a speaker for AENA in the early 1960s and as a
member of the Committee of Patronage of the Ligue Internationale de la Liberté from
its foundation in 1966 onwards; he was also a longstanding CEDI member (464)*.
The IEPS Vice-Presidents were RAPPEL members Yves du Monceau de
Bergendal and Armand De Decker; other IEPS luminaries included 1976 AESP
patron Jean Gol, who had been the founding President of the PRL in 1979 and who
served as Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister from 1981 to 1987
(throughout the Brabant Wallon killings) when his chef de cabinet was de Kerchove
(465)*. Other Belgian prominenti included Louis Michel, Gol's successor as PRL
President, and Willy Declercq, Belgian Finance Minister in 1973-77 and again in
1981-85 before serving as Belgian EEC Commissioner for External Relations and
Trade until 1989, and then sitting in the European Parliament until 2004.
As for the non-Belgian members, the 6I Politburo was represented in the IEPS
by Crozier and Huyn. Other European members of the IEPS included two further
Cercle members - Chairman Julian Amery and IEDSS mainstay Lord Chalfont - as
well as Viscount Cranborne, 6I author Vladimir Bukovsky and French 6I contact
ROGUE AGENTS
222
Marie-France Garaud, the latter being introduced below. The US was represented by
Lieutenant-General Daniel O. Graham and Brigadier-General Robert C. Richardson
III, both members of the Political Action Committee of the ASC involved in the anti-
Carter campaign of 1980. Following Reagan's election victory, Generals Graham and
Richardson had been Founder and Founding Vice-President respectively of High
Frontier, a group created in September 1981 to lobby for space-based missile
defence, a project adopted by Reagan in 1983 as the Strategic Defense Initiative,
commonly known as Stars Wars (466)*. Reportedly, a further Vice-President of the
IEPS was German business consultant Wolfgang Reineke, an ally of Grau's since
the 1970s and a founding member of the EIS who joined Close, Jonet and de
Kerchove in the new group (467)*.
The IEPS held monthly lectures where the speakers were introduced by De
Decker or Vankerkhoven, the latter having been elected to the European Parliament
for the PSC in November 1982, where he sat until July 1984. The first International
Congress of RAPPEL was held from 19th to 23rd September 1983 in Luxembourg in
conjunction with the 16th Annual Conference of WACL; the opening ceremony was
held in the European Parliament. There was considerable overlap between MAUE,
RAPPEL, the IEPS and WACL at the 1983 Luxembourg WACL meeting; the President
of the WACL Preparatory Committee was Close, who was appointed WACL Chairman
at the conference, one of the conference speakers was his fellow MAUE Vice-President
Vankerkhoven, and also in attendance as a 'journalist' was MAUE Board member de
Kerchove. One of the resolutions proposed by the Belgian WACL chapter was entitled
"Beware of Camouflaged Red Peace Moves".
The other European components of the 6I's anti-disarmament campaign were
represented by three further speakers at the WACL conference: Vladimir Bukovsky
("The Illusions of the West: Pacifists against Peace"), General Sir Walter Walker
("Either We Hang Together – or We Hang Separately") and Marie-France Garaud
("Détente or Defence?"). Garaud, who served from 1967 to 1974 as an advisor to
Georges Pompidou and a close associate of 6I stalwart Georges Albertini, had cofounded
the RPR with Jacques Chirac in 1976 before creating the Institut
International de Géopolitique - another French 6I outlet – in 1982 with the support
of FARI, the USCISC, the NSIC and the CSIS (468)*.
The cooperation between WACL and the Belgian 6I members in the IEPS was
to become even more explicit after the Luxembourg conference; on 28th October 1983,
the new WACL Chairman Close sent out an English-language "Circular to all National
Chapters and Associated Organizations of the World Anti-Communist League" in
which he wrote:
"In order to follow up concretely the precious work accomplished by the
participants of the 16th Annual Conference, the European Institute for Peace
and Security (EIPS) offers the following programme in collaboration with the
ROGUE AGENTS
223
World Anti-Communist League:
- Awaken public opinion at all political levels and create systems and
instruments of information capable of efficiently countering the
destabilization methods used by the Soviet Union, not only in the
European context but also throughout the rest of [the] world. […]
The EIPS envisages:
a) The production and distribution of video-cassettes containing
presentations and informative exposés (in French and English)
by experts on East/West relations. The following are already
recorded and are awaiting the "production" process, but many
more are planned: [there follows a list of presentations filmed at
the Luxembourg WACL conference, including those given by
Close, Vankerkhoven, Garaud, Walker and Bukovsky].
b) The organization of a series of lectures by experts in the field of
security as well as writers, university professors and members of
the mass media and [sic] examine the most current and
important problems of the various aspects of the Soviet threat.
Needless to say, this ambitious programme of video-cassettes, which is
only part of an even greater global action, requires substantial funds. Our
present target is approximately $300,000, which we hope to raise through
combined efforts of the various organizations, i.e. members of the EIPS, the
delegates of WACL and possibly other affiliated organizations pursuing
identical aims. WE APPEAL TO ALL FOR SUPPORT.
It might be worthwhile to mention that we have been able to collaborate
with the NATO Information Service for distribution of copies of the film
"Barriers", produced by NATO in 1982 [and screened at the WACL conference],
to more than 20 non-NATO nations. This film depicts eloquently the historical
background and the contrast between freedom in the West and slavery in the
subjugated nations" (469).
Apart from these Dutch and Belgian anti-disarmament operations, Crozier
records in his memoirs that the Cercle/6I also cooperated with two existing groups in
France and Germany, the Comité Français contre le Neutralisme et pour la Paix
run by former Minister and French Cercle member Philippe Malaud and the
Bonner Friedensforum [Bonn Peace Forum] (470)*.
Besides this minor German student group, the Cercle/6I also had a more
important presence in another German anti-disarmament outfit: Huyn, one of the
ROGUE AGENTS
224
Cercle/6I triumvirate, was a Board member of the American European Strategy
Research Institute (AESRI), an offshoot of the German section of Western Goals.
The founding meeting of the Munich-based Western Goals Europe was held on 17th
May 1981, attended by Huyn, Hans Klein of the Brüsewitz Centre and the
Deutschland-Stiftung, former Rear-Admiral and Cercle member Günter Poser – from
1964 to 1969 Head of Military Intelligence at the Defence Ministry, then head of the
NATO Intelligence Center until his resignation over Brandt's Ostpolitik in 1973,
former Major-General Jochen Löser - Chairman of the EIS Board of Directors, Carl-
Gustav Ströhm - Eastern European correspondent for the newspaper Die Welt and
speaker for Grau's SWG, Larry McDonald - co-founder of the Western Goals
Foundation in 1979 and member of the John Birch Society, and former Generals
George Patton and Lewis Walt. McDonald put up $131,982 of initial funds, at the
time about a third of Western Goals' operating capital. AESRI was then founded in
Munich on 8th July 1981 by Huyn, Klein, McDonald, Patton, CDU MP and Program
Director for Western Goals Europe Helmut Sauer, BND agent Stefan Marinoff and
American industrialist Robert Stoodard. AESRI had branches in Heidelberg, Bonn
and Munich (471)*.
In May 1982, AESRI member Huyn aroused a media storm with a publication
entitled Für Frieden in Freiheit (For Peace in Freedom), which accused a prominent
German Christian peace group of communist sympathies and returned to an old
theme, Soviet subversion in the Churches via the Christian Peace Conference. Huyn's
conclusions would also be reported in the Dutch daily, De Telegraaf, as well as in
other European and American newspapers. Another frequent writer for AESRI and
Western Goals Europe was Professor Hans Werner Bracht, the former senior lecturer
at the German Army School for Psychological Warfare who had worked with
Löwenthal in the Deutschland-Stiftung, the Brüsewitz Centre and Konservative
Aktion; Bracht would take over as President of Western Goals Europe in March 1983.
AESRI and Western Goals Europe would again court controversy in 1985 by
publishing allegations of communist agitation at Bielefeld University, having
infiltrated it (472).
THE 6I'S AMERICAN OUTREACH
A major transatlantic relay in the propaganda chorus was of course the NSIC
who in 1979 created the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence to organise a
series of conferences in Washington whose proceedings, published by the NSIC as the
series Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s, would have considerable influence on
the defence policy of the Reagan Administration (473). The conferences brought
together many of the American allies of the Cercle/6I, most of whom we have already
met.
ROGUE AGENTS
225
The first conference was a Colloquium on Analysis and Estimates, held in
Washington on 30th November – 1st December 1979, attended amongst others by
Richard V. Allen, chief foreign policy advisor to Governor Reagan and a 6I contact,
Barnett, Trager and Godson of the NSIC, Cline, Senate Intelligence Committee Staff
Member Angelo Codevilla (an IEDSS author in 1982 and 1988), Colby, former Arms
Control and Disarmament Director Fred Iklé who as future Under-Secretary of
Defense would later play a significant part in covert anti-pacifist propaganda
operations, Sven Kraemer (then of the Senate Republican Policy Committee and
Heritage Foundation Transition Team Chair for Defense), Ledeen, stalwart NSIC and
ISC supporter Morris Leibman of the ABA, Professor Richard Pipes of the US
Committee for the ISC, James Jesus Angleton's former Deputy in CIA Counter-
Intelligence Raymond Rocca who had resigned from the CIA shortly after Angleton's
enforced retirement in December 1974 (see below), House Intelligence Committee
staffer Romerstein, former Czech General and defector Jan Sejna, and the then
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
This was followed by a Colloquium on Counter-Intelligence, held on 24th-26th
April 1980, whose participants included Barnett, Godson and Mott from the NSIC,
Cline, Senate Intelligence Committee staffers deGraffenreid and Codevilla,
Romerstein, Angleton's former colleagues in CIA Counter-Intelligence Raymond Rocca
and Newton S. Miler, Pipes, Shackley and Wannall.
A third conference was held on Clandestine Collection on 30th-31st December
1981 and brought together Cline, Codevilla, deGraffenreid (now on the National
Security Council), Godson, General Graham, Leibman, McNamara of the Hale
Foundation (on whom see below), Pipes, Rocca, Romerstein and Shackley.
A fourth conference, a Symposium on the Role of Special Operations in US
Strategy for the 1980s, took place on 4th-5th March 1983 and involved amongst
others Barnett and Godson from the NSIC, the Staff Director of the Senate
Republican Conference Committee Margo Carlisle (whom we shall return to later),
Codevilla, de Borchgrave, 6I members Jameson and Shackley of Research
Associates International, Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and 6I
founding member General Stilwell, Tanham of the RAND Corporation and the US
Committee for the ISC, Major Oliver North of the NSC, and Maurice Tugwell and
General Sir Walter Walker, both British counter-insurgency veterans.
A fifth colloquium on Intelligence and Policy was then held on 9th-10th
November 1984; its participants included Codevilla, Colby, de Graffenreid (now
Senior Director of Intelligence Programs at the NSC), his NSC colleague and
Director of Arms Control Sven Kraemer, Crozier's former CIA controller Cord Meyer,
Pipes, Rocca, Romerstein (now at the USIA) and Shackley.
ROGUE AGENTS
226
Another significant US strategy group with links to the Cercle was the ASC
and its main operational arm, the Coalition for Peace Through Strength (CPTS),
one of the most vocal anti-disarmament groups in the 1980s, several of whose
members held prominent positions in the Reagan Administration (474). The ASC had
links to the Cercle complex through five serving or retired senior military officers on
the ASC Board:
Gen. Richard G. Stilwell senior 6I member whilst Deputy Under-Secretary of
Defense for Policy from February 1981 to February 1985;
Gen. Daniel O. Graham CPTS Co-Chairman from 1978 on, ASC/High Frontier
representative on IEPS Board in 1983;
Gen. Robert Richardson ASC/High Frontier representative on IEPS Board in 1983;
Gen. Lewis Walt founding member of Western Goals Germany in 1981;
Adm. John S. McCain 1974 launch of Centre du Monde Moderne, Board
member of US Committee for the ISC.
Generals Stilwell and Graham also ensured Cercle access to the Moonies'
CAUSA and their American geostrategic propaganda outlet, the US Global Strategy
Council (USGSC), the two Generals serving on the Board with Pipes under the
Chairmanship of Ray Cline in the late 1980s. Graham was also Vice-President of the
United States Council for World Freedom, the American branch of WACL, which
strongly supported the anti-pacifist campaign; in April 1982, USCWF founder
General Singlaub asserted at the North American Regional WACL conference that
"the so-called "Ground Zero" movement and anti-nuclear demonstrations in the
United States and Western Europe are Moscow-inspired and directed against the
United States and the rest of the free world" (475).
The involvement of ASC stalwart General Richardson in the 6I Belgian front
group IEPS also leads us back to the late 1970s and a complex of American-based
groups in which Richardson figured prominently. The complex of groups had
originally been formed around James Jesus Angleton who, as veteran CIA Counter-
Intelligence chief from 1954 on, had played a major part in CHAOS, the CIA's illegal
domestic intelligence-gathering programme which targeted over seven thousand
American anti-war protestors.
ANGLETON IN EXILE
After CIA Director Colby forced his resignation in December 1974, Angleton
launched a campaign in 1977 to defend two senior FBI officers indicted for illegal acts
ROGUE AGENTS
227
committed as part of the FBI's COINTELPRO programme. The two FBI agents charged
in 1978 and convicted in November 1980 of supervising illegal break-ins at the
homes of Weather Underground sympathisers in 1972-73 were W. Mark Felt (of
Deepthroat fame), then the Acting Associate Director of the FBI, and Edward S.
Miller, the Assistant Director of the Domestic Intelligence Division. Their convictions
would however not stand for long, unconditional presidential pardons being granted
five months later by Ronald Reagan in March 1981 (476).
To quote from the official but mostly still classified eleven-volume official CIA
report by Cleveland Cram into Angleton's previous activities:
"In the summer of 1977, Angleton developed a new forum for his ideas. He and
like-minded associates organized the Security and Intelligence Fund [here
ASIF] to defend US security and intelligence organizations and to raise money
for the defense of two FBI officers then under indictment by the Carter
administration. Here, Angleton was on surer ground. He had the support of a
large number of FBI retirees as well as many former CIA officers. This was the
period when the Pike and Church Congressional committees were in full cry
investigating and exposing CIA operations and numerous ex-intelligence
people believed they had gone too far. ASIF raised more than $600,000 and
within six months was reported to have more than 17,000 members. Angleton
was chairman, and his friends held senior positions" (477)*.
ASIF was registered as the Security and Intelligence Fund, Inc. in Washington
D.C. in April 1977, and was chaired by Angleton; General Richardson served as its
Director and Secretary-Treasurer (478). Whilst Angleton and his alliance of CIA and
FBI veterans chose to confront the courts and Congress, two months earlier Crozier
had taken a different path, creating the 6I in February 1977 as a "Private Sector
Operational Intelligence agency" designed to sidestep any public investigation of or
legal restriction on intelligence and counter-subversion work.
To return to ASIF, following the presidential pardon of the two FBI men in
1981, "the purpose for which ASIF was created more or less evaporated. Angleton
then converted it into a forum for spreading information about Soviet deception. The
Fund remained in effect into the 1980s until, after Angleton's death and the coming
of glasnost, it withered away" (479). This account of ASIF by the author of the
definitive CIA report on Angleton's record is however not entirely accurate. In
February 1985, ASIF was re-registered under the name of the Security and
Intelligence Foundation, Inc. (SIFI), which published the journal Nightwatch. As
before in ASIF, Richardson would serve in Angleton's new group SIFI as Secretary-
Treasurer, hiring a young and energetic Executive Director, Charles S. Viar,
presented below. After Angleton's death in May 1987, far from withering away, SIFI
continued under Viar, now SIFI President, assisted by SIFI Chairman W. Raymond
Wannall, former Assistant Director of the FBI in charge of the Intelligence Division
ROGUE AGENTS
228
and then mainstay of the Nathan Hale Institute, which with ASIF had defended the
indicted FBI men (480)*. By March 1988, SIFI would spawn a sister organisation, the
Center For Intelligence Studies (CFIS) with Viar as Chairman and General
Richardson on the Board (481)*.
With offices on Washington's K Street, "the Center For Intelligence Studies and
its diverse activities are dedicated to the memory of James J. Angleton, my friend,
mentor, and guide" wrote CFIS Chairman Charles S. Viar. Viar's web biography
records that, as
"a top expert in the fields of intelligence and counterintelligence, Charles Viar
first became involved in intelligence during his service in the United States
Marine Corps Reserve (1971-1973). He has been continuously involved in
intelligence or intelligence-related matters ever since … After working at the
American Security Council and the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Viar became
Executive Director and later President of the Security and Intelligence
Foundation [SIFI]. Between 1985 and 1987, he had the unique privilege of
studying under the late James J. Angleton, the legendary former chief of CIA
Counterintelligence. Since 1989, he has been Chairman and CEO of the
Center For Intelligence Studies in Washington, DC" (482).
Viar's autobiography From Whence the Darkness records that ASIF, SIFI and
CFIS had strong links to the ASC, and particularly to ASC Board members Generals
Graham and Richardson. Viar had worked at the ASC as research assistant to
Graham from spring 1979 to late 1980; whilst at the ASC, he also liaised with
Richardson and Angleton, both active in ASIF and the ASC – Angleton sat on the ASC
National Strategy Committee and acted alongside Richardson as an Associate Editor
of the ASC's Journal of International Relations. ASIF itself was housed in the ASC
offices until 1984 before being briefly hosted by the Heritage Foundation. Following
its refoundation in 1985, SIFI moved into the premises of High Frontier, run by
Graham and Richardson (483).
Besides Viar and Richardson, there was further overlap between the personnel
of SIFI and CFIS; a close colleague of theirs in both organisations was former wartime
Army Intelligence Major Francis John McNamara who saw service during World War
II in Asia before working in China after the war for the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration.
"Returning to the US in 1948, McNamara went to work as a researcher for
American Business Consultants, Inc., in New York City, a security firm and
publisher of the anti-communist newsletter Counterattack. In January of 1950
he became editor of Counterattack where he remained until May of 1954. He
then moved to Washington, D.C., to head the National Security Program of the
Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). In 1958 he left the VFW to serve as a
ROGUE AGENTS
229
research analyst and consultant to the House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC). In 1961 he became director of research at HUAC, and in
1962, its staff director [until 1969]. In 1970 he went to work for the Subversive
Activities Control Board (SACB) where he served as executive secretary [until
1973]. In 1981 he became executive director of the Nathan Hale Foundation.
He served as Vice-Chairman of the Security and Intelligence Foundation [SIFI]
from 1987-90 and is a Senior Fellow at the Center For Intelligence Studies in
Arlington, Virginia" (484)*.
Another person who held positions in both organisations was lawyer Dr. Scott
S. Powell, a Senior Fellow at CFIS and also a Senior Fellow at SIFI from 1990 to
2005 (485).
RED COCAINE
Besides General Richardson, another associate of Crozier's 6I on the CFIS
Board was Joseph D. Douglass, Jr, "a national security analyst and author with
expertise in defence policy, threat assessment, deception, intelligence and political
warfare, nuclear strategy, terrorism, advanced chemical and biological warfare agents
and applications, and international narcotics trafficking … He has worked in and for
the national laboratories (Sandia Corporation), the US Government, where he was
Deputy and Acting Director, Tactical Technology Office, [Defense] Advanced Research
Projects Agency [DARPA] and with various defence contractors" - a background in Air
Force political warfare and weapons testing shared with Richardson. A member of the
Committee on the Present Danger, Douglass would be appointed Assistant Director of
the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency by President Reagan in 1981. In the early
1980s, Douglass would also be an author for the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis
and the NSIC (486)*.
Before joining the CFIS Board with Viar and Richardson in 1988, Douglass
would lead a 6I propaganda campaign in December 1986 accusing the Soviet Union
and Fidel Castro of controlling and directing the world drugs trade. The research
team under Douglass was coordinated by Crozier, producing a report which was
given wide publicity just before Christmas in Europe, being published in full in
France by L'Express and then in Spain by ABC – a major media coup for the 6I. The
same message was covered for the American market by a December 1986 article by
Douglass and Jan Sejna entitled International Narcotics Trafficking: the Soviet
Connection, echoed in Washington by the Heritage Foundation in their 1987 booklet
Narco-Terrorism: the Kremlin Connection followed in 1988 by Narco-terrorism and the
Cuban connection. The Freedom Association ensured British circulation for the
campaign in February 1987 via an article The Soviet Drug War Against the West in its
bulletin, The Free Nation (487)*. In 1990, Douglass returned to the drugs theme in
his major work, Red Cocaine: the Drugging of America and the West (with a foreword
ROGUE AGENTS
230
by Ray S. Cline), whose red cover dramatically portrayed Lenin and a syringe
superimposed on a hammer and sickle (488)*.
SMEAR!
As we have seen, the Cercle/6I complex could use its international links to
intelligence-backed private disinformation outlets not only to circulate anti-
Communist propaganda themes but also to intervene in each country's domestic
politics by promoting their favoured political candidate and by accusing politicians or
movements of the Left or Centre of being Soviet dupes or stooges. Crozier's 1979
Transnational Security planning paper bluntly stated that one of the functions of the
group was to "conduct international campaigns aiming to discredit hostile
personalities and/or events".
A major example of this was a 6I campaign targeting the Left in Britain
throughout the 1980s. After Thatcher's election victory in May 1979 and her
subsequent working meeting at Chequers with MI6 chief Franks and the 6I team of
Crozier and Elliott, the UK counter-subversion lobby's smear campaign against the
Labour Party continued with scarcely an interruption. In 1988, it emerged that Brian
Crozier had been working for nearly a decade with Charles Elwell, the former Head
of MI5 F1 counter-subversion branch from 1974 to 1979, who together with Peter
Wright had been one of the MI5 officers most closely connected with the Frolik
allegations central to the anti-Labour campaigns of 1974-76 (489)*. Immediately after
his retirement from MI5 in May 1979, Elwell started working with Crozier in
Shield/6I to reconstitute a press cuttings archive and to produce a secret smear
bulletin called Background Briefing on Subversion, whose title echoed that of the
now-closed IRD's regular confidential report, Background Briefing. The newsletter
targeted many of the same politicians and reproduced many of the same smears as
MI5's previous Clockwork Orange 2 operation (490). Exposed by the Guardian in late
1989, it was not until late 1990 that further details of the smear bulletin, later called
British Briefing, were published in the Observer; the bulletin closed down the same
year (491).
Available only to a select few, and containing strict warnings not to reveal its
existence, the bulletin accused many prominent Labour politicians of Communist or
Stalinist affiliations. Amongst the targets were Neil Kinnock, shadow health secretary
Robin Cook, social services spokesman Michael Meacher, and Labour MPs Harriet
Harman (a previous MI5 target during her spell at the NCCL), Harry Cohen, Chris
Mullin, Harry Barnes and David Blunkett. Several progressive organisations were
also tarred with the Communist brush, notably the housing charity Shelter, the
Institute for Race Relations and the World Council of Churches. All were smeared by
association using quotations from left-wing newspapers such as the Morning Star –
exactly the tactic that the ISC and 6I used, thanks to their research libraries.
ROGUE AGENTS
231
The bulletin, usually 35 pages long, brought out two special General Election
supplements in March and April 1987: the March supplement, 29 pages long,
contained smears on nearly 50 candidates. The tone of British Briefing can be judged
by the following declaration in the February 1987 issue:
"The march of communism through the trades unions, the Labour Party, local
government, religion, education, charity, the media under the leadership of
communists who may or may not be members of the Communist Party, is
what BB is all about. BB seeks to provide those who have the means to expose
the communist threat with clear evidence of its existence."
Funding for the smear operation was channelled through a registered charity,
the Industrial Trust, financed by many of the UK's leading companies (492)*.
Publishing was carried out at the address of IRIS, Industrial Research and
Information Services, one of the right-wing blacklisting services which published its
own newsletter, IRIS News, aimed at a trade-union audience. The Industrial Trust's
accounts showed that since 1985 the Industrial Trust also had given more than
£500,000 to IRIS, as well as £5,000 a year to Common Cause (493). The Trust would
later be investigated by the Charities Commission for possible breaches of the ban on
political activity by charities. Further funding for British Briefing came from media
magnate Rupert Murdoch, who provided some £40,000 a year for Elwell's smear
sheet. An old friend of Crozier's, Murdoch also bailed out Crozier's publishing
company, Sherwood Press, which by 1987 had accumulated a deficit of £65,000.
Murdoch's News International took a half-stake in the company and agreed to meet
losses then totalling over £90,000. Crozier also had legal costs to pay after losing a
libel case brought by Richard Barnet, director of the Institute for Policy Studies (494).
Perhaps because of this considerable financial strain, publication of British
Briefing was taken over in 1988 by David Hart, a close aide to Mrs Thatcher. From
1977 to 1981, Hart had been research assistant to Archie Hamilton, the man who, as
Minister of State for the Armed Forces, had to bear the fall-out from the Colin Wallace
case. In 1979, Hart worked as campaign organiser for the Corby and Kettering
election campaigns of Rupert Allason, later elected Tory MP for Torbay - alias Nigel
West, the spooks' favoured historian.
In 1984, during the strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, Hart made
media fame by setting up the Working Miners' Committee from a suite in Claridges.
Hart also set up the Committee for a Free Britain, funded by Rupert Murdoch,
which ran "virulent full-page anti-Labour advertisements in the national press
during the 1987 general election". In 1986, Hart applied to Tory Central Office to
become a candidate for the 1987 general election; despite having powerful sponsors
(Transport Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, later Tory Party chairman Lord Young, and Ian
Gow, Thatcher's private secretary for her first four years in office), he was turned
ROGUE AGENTS
232
down. Besides his intelligence links in Britain, Hart had contacts in the US: CIA
director Bill Casey used Hart to run a UK campaign in favour of Star Wars, supported
in the US by Generals Graham and Richardson. Hart was also an associate of
Reagan's Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Fred Iklé (495). Hart would later
finance anti-CND propaganda by Lady Olga Maitland to counter a demonstration
against the first Iraq War on 2nd February 1991.
THE "TERRORIST THREAT"
By the late 1980s, the focus for scare tactics by the disinformation institutes
had shifted from Moscow manipulation of the peace movement and Russian and
Cuban involvement in the drugs trade to Soviet backing for international terrorism.
The Cercle's London partner, the ISC, had carried out much of the early propaganda
work on terrorism, providing consultancy services in training for the police and
armed services. One of the right-wing academics who lectured at police colleges in
the early 1970s at the suggestion of the ISC was Professor Paul Wilkinson, who
went on to cut his propaganda teeth with ISC Conflict Study No. 67, Terrorism versus
Liberal Democracy: The Problem of Response, published in January 1976. Two
months later, in March 1976, with Crozier, Moss and Horchem, Wilkinson would be
one of four ISC speakers at a major international conference on terrorism in
Washington, chaired by Robert Fearey. In 1979, the same ISC team attended two
Israeli conferences on terrorism, the first organised by the Israeli Jaffee Centre for
Strategic Studies, where Wilkinson was accompanied by Moss and Horchem (496).
The second Israeli conference on "International terrorism, challenge and response"
was held in early July in Jerusalem and was the founding conference of the probable
Mossad front, the Jonathan Institute, a major gathering of Cercle assets. At the
Jonathan Institute's launch, contributors included not only the ISC team of Crozier,
Moss, Wilkinson and Horchem, but also ex-CIA chief George H. W. Bush, Ray Cline,
Lord Chalfont, Vladimir Bukovsky, Jacques Soustelle and Gerhard Löwenthal (497)*.
Wilkinson, later professor at Aberdeen and St. Andrew's universities, rose to
become a prominent advisor on terrorism to Margaret Thatcher; this is not surprising
when one looks at the Board members of Wilkinson's Research Foundation for the
Study of Terrorism, founded in late 1986 (498)*. The RFST, which operated from the
address of Aims of Industry, included on its Board many figures from SIF, NAFF,
FARI, the ISC and the Cercle complex:
Col. Ronnie Waring,
Duke de Valderano Chairman of the RFST Council, MI6, CEDI, Unison with G.
K. Young, FARI Council.
Michael Ivens Director of Aims, SIF National Executive with G. K. Young,
FARI Council, NAFF National Executive and inner core
ROGUE AGENTS
233
with Moss, Vice-President of the Freedom Association.
Norris McWhirter SIF, NAFF National Executive and inner core with Moss
and Ivens, Chairman of the Freedom Association.
Ian Greig Founding Monday Club member, Deputy Director of FARI,
Senior Executive of the ISC, probable early AESP contact.
John Biggs-Davison SIF National Executive with G. K. Young, FARI Council,
Monday Club President, longstanding PEU Council
member, AESP Life Member.
Nicholas Elliott MI6, 6I/Cercle with Crozier.
In 1989, the RFST merged with the rump of the post-Crozier ISC under the
title of the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism (RISCT).
Alongside RISCT Director Wilkinson was RISCT's Chairman Frank Brenchley, former
Chairman of the ISC Council, and RISCT Executive and Editorial Director Professor
William Gutteridge, an ISC author from 1971 onwards. RISCT offered for sale the
whole series of Conflict Studies from 1970 onwards, and proclaimed itself successor
to the ISC in its publication list:
"The Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism was
established in 1989, primarily to undertake research and publishing activities.
It continues to produce the well-established monthly series, Conflict Studies,
begun in 1970 by its predecessor, the Institute for the Study of Conflict".
Besides Wilkinson and his RFST and RISCT, the Cercle and 6I also had links
to several other 'terrorism research' outfits in the 1980s and 1990s, of which perhaps
the most prominent was Control Risks Information Services. After leaving the ISC,
the Institute's Senior Researcher and South Africa expert Peter Janke became chief
researcher at Control Risks, which also included Major-General Richard Clutterbuck,
a former Council member of the ISC, and Richard Sims, who had been the ISC's
librarian. Control Risks would continue the ISC's previous assistance to South Africa:
in 1986, it set up a syndicate for British companies trading with South Africa. For a
price of £1,500 per place, Control Risks informed the syndicate's members of "the
activities of anti-apartheid groups in Europe, their relationship to terrorist groups
and their intentions" (499).
FARI would also provide the Cercle and 6I with connections to another
terrorism disinformation outlet - besides serving on the Governing Council of FARI
with Crozier, Moss and Amery and supporting 6I operations as sponsor for Julian
Lewis's PRA, Lord Chalfont also chaired the London Institute for the Study of
Terrorism, founded in 1985 and run by Jillian Becker. Both Chalfont and Becker
ROGUE AGENTS
234
were authors for the IEDSS - Becker's contribution was typically entitled The Soviet
Connection - State Sponsorship of Terrorism. Moss himself then went on to run Mid-
Atlantic Research Associates, a "risk analysis firm" together with Arnaud de
Borchgrave and John Rees of the John Birch Society.
A German terrorism propaganda outlet intimately linked with the Cercle
complex and the 6I was the Bonn-based Institut für Terrorismusforschung
[Institute for Terrorism Research], created in 1986 by Hans Josef 'Jupp' Horchem,
former Director of the Hamburg BfV. In the mid-1970s, Horchem had been a prolific
author for the ISC, joining Crozier's 6I soon after its creation in 1977. Together with
Moss and Wilkinson, Horchem attended the two 1979 Israeli conferences on
terrorism organised by the Israeli Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies and the
Jonathan Institute. After taking early retirement in January 1981, Horchem became
a Research Fellow of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv and of the Institute
for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University. He would also sign
up with the Axel Springer Verlag, the newspaper group which publishes both Die Welt
and Bild, the newspaper with the largest circulation in Europe. Besides railing
against communists and peace campaigners in Die Welt, Horchem also served as
advisor to the "Internal Security Working Group" of Konservative Aktion, whose Vice-
Chair was Löwenthal, another participant at the Jonathan Institute's launch in 1979.
In the mid 1980s, Horchem produced his fourth ISC Conflict Study, Terrorism
in Germany, and also contributed sections on terrorism in Germany to publications
by Wilkinson and Ariel Merari (500). Horchem's views were evidently in favour with
his previous employers: Horchem, his deputy in the Bonn institute Rolf Tophoven
and Dr. J. Kurt Klein would all contribute to the German Interior Ministry
publication Der Terrorismus- eine akute Bedrohung der Menschenrechte [Terrorism –
an acute threat for human rights] published in 1985, and a thousand copies each of
two of Horchem's books were bought by the BfV in 1987 for purposes of "positive
protection of the constitution by information work", i.e. propaganda (501). In July
1988, Horchem was one of the former intelligence officers interviewed as part of the
BBC Radio programmes on the intelligence services, My Country, Right or Wrong?,
broadcast after the government's temporary injunction banning the programme was
lifted. The programmes also featured two ex-CIA officers, fellow 6I member Jamie
Jameson and Cercle guest William Colby.
A transatlantic outlet for Cercle output on terrorism would be provided by the
Canadian Centre for Conflict Studies (CCS), founded in 1979 by Brigadier Maurice
Tugwell, former head of the Northern Ireland black propaganda unit, Information
Policy, and a participant in ISC Study Groups. Although CCS was attached to the
University of New Brunswick, it gave no academic courses and its activities consisted
largely of contract work for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canadian Police
College, Canadian Department of National Defence, US Department of Defense, and
NATO. The CCS would work with both the ISC and its successor RISCT; the editorial
ROGUE AGENTS
235
advisory board for the CCS quarterly journal, Conflict Quarterly, included Professor
Paul Wilkinson. It would also collaborate with the American NSIC, contributing a
paper entitled Special Operations and the Threat to United States Interests in the 1980s
to a 1984 study entitled Special Operations in US Strategy compiled by the NSIC for
the US National Defense University.
In 1988, the publication of Combatting the Terrorists was announced, a book
sponsored by the ISC in London and the Washington office of the CCS. The book
brought together old friends: the editor, H.H. Tucker, was a former Deputy Head of the
IRD, and the book included a chapter by ex-IRD writer Peter Janke of the ISC. Tugwell
combined his anti-Soviet disinformation activities with pro-South African propaganda:
he served as a director of the Canada-South Africa Society, a pro-apartheid support
group funded by South African "businessmen". In the mid-1980s, Tugwell would also
found the Mackenzie Institute for the Study of Terrorism, Revolution and
Propaganda (502).
GUNNING FOR GORBACHEV
By mid-1988, Crozier was concentrating on a new campaign against Mikhail
Gorbachev
"as a necessary corrective to the wave of adulation about the Soviet leader at
that time sweeping the West. My prime discovery was that Gorbachev's first
concern was not [...] the 'restructuring' of the Soviet economy and Party
organisation, but of the entire apparatus of disinformation and other Active
Measures. My aim was to present, in factual detail, the Soviet involvement –
since Gorbachev's advent to supreme power – in 'peace' disinformation,
including forgeries, in international terrorism and drugs-running, in
penetration of the Western Churches, and in deliberate cheating in arms
control negotiations" (503).
The same anti-Gorbachev message was being echoed across the Atlantic by one
of Crozier's longstanding contacts, Herbert Romerstein. As Director of the US
Information Agency's Office to Counter Soviet Active Measures and Disinformation
from 1983 to 1989, Romerstein played a considerable part in a USIA official report
entitled Soviet Active Measures in the Era of Glasnost that was submitted to Congress
in 1988.
Crozier's claims to have withdrawn from the Cercle in 1985 and to have shut
down the 6I in late 1987 are belied by the minutes of a Cercle meeting held on 21st
February 1989 and continued in Washington on 10th April. The February meeting was
attended amongst others by Pinay, Crozier, Cercle Chairman Amery, Huyn and
Barnett of the NSIC/USCISC as well as Charles T. Mayer of the Foreign Policy
ROGUE AGENTS
236
Discussion Group, who had previously attended the November 1976 CEDI Congress.
The main theme on the agenda for the veteran operatives was "What can be done to
contain the pro-Gorbachev mood in the Federal Republic?" The minutes of the
meeting reveal that one item discussed was a campaign to discredit German Foreign
Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher from the Liberal FDP party.
"The problem:
Genscher's power is unbroken. He determines Bonn's foreign policy, even
though he has been responsible for it for 14 years and makes the Chancellor
dependent on the FDP.
- the weakness of Kohl, the great appeaser,
- the popularity of Gorbachev in public opinion in the Federal Republic,
- the media.
Possible methods:
- in the Federal Parliament? Support from Alfred Dregger [Leader of the
CDU/CSU group]? Support from Otto Lambsdorff?
- Can Genscher be discredited? Certainly there is enough 'dirt' available.
- Have we got any allies in the media? Horchem? Die Welt?
- Is all of West German television contaminated?
- Outside of Parliament (extra-parliamentary action). Can we use the Bonn
Peace Forum? (504)* Possible themes or slogans for demonstrations: Stop Rearmament
in the USSR; don't pay Gorbachev's bills,
- Diplomatic pressure, particularly through the new US Ambassador, Dick
Walters (505)*,
- A comment: the modernisation of weapons (Lance) is relatively insignificant.
The most important problem is the general atmosphere of a policy of
reconciliation" (506)*.
But even as the 6I was preparing to intensify its anti-Gorbachev campaign, it
would be overtaken by events on the ground; 1989 would bring the long-awaited
collapse of the Iron Curtain. The fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th-10th November 1989
was however only the final act in a process in which Habsburg and the PEU played a
ROGUE AGENTS
237
prominent part, working on bilateral contacts with Eastern European countries,
notably through the European Parliament where Habsburg and Pirkl held powerful
posts on the Delegations for Relations with both Austria and Hungary. The process
had started in July 1988 when Habsburg secretly visited Hungary, returning for his
first official post-war visit to the country as part of a European Parliament delegation
on the 28th February 1989, a week after the Cercle/6I meeting mentioned above. The
decisive step came on 2nd May 1989, when Hungarian border guards began
dismantling the watch-towers on the Austro-Hungarian border, an act officialised on
27th June when the Foreign Ministers of Austria and Hungary, Alois Mock and Gyula
Horn respectively, personally cut the border fence near the Hungarian town of Sopron.
The PEU then obtained 'official permission' to hold a "Paneuropean Picnic" on
the same spot on 19th August under the combined patronage of Hungarian minister
Imre Pozsgay and Otto von Habsburg of the PEU, to open – for three hours - the
border gate sealing the old Pressburg (Bratislava) highway between Sankt
Margarethen in Austria and Sopronköhida in Hungary. The PEU ensured advance
publicity for this 'peace demonstration' as far as Poland, particularly targetting the
annual crowd of East German holiday-makers. On the day, Habsburg's daughter
Walburga symbolically cut the barbed wire fence, the gate was opened, and 661 East
Germans crossed into the West whilst the Hungarian border guards observed without
intervening. Despite an immediate crackdown on border security by the Hungarian
government, the writing was on the wall; the Austro-Hungarian border would be fully
opened for East Germans on 11th September, followed by the Czechoslovak-German
border in the first few days of November. Faced with massive numbers of East
Germans preparing to use these breaches, the East German government was
powerless to prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall. The PEU would celebrate the
momentous event at its 1990 International General Assembly, held for the first time in
an Eastern bloc capital, Prague.
The Cercle/6I group, however, continued to gun for the Soviet leader, trying
to dampen the West's enthusiasm for glasnost and perestroika. Despite Crozier's
claim to have wound down the 6I in late 1987, he was able to count on "old and new
outlets in New York, Washington, Paris, Madrid and other places" (507). Although not
all of these outlets have yet been identified, the mention of Paris referred to a
relaunch of the Cercle/6I's outreach in the French-speaking world. The new forum
was the Institut d'Etudes de la Désinformation (IED) with headquarters on the
Champs Elysées, founded in January 1987 by Radio France journalist and IED
President Daniel Trinquet and award-winning Russian novelist Vladimir Volkoff,
whose book La Désinformation, arme de guerre [Disinformation – weapon of war] was
published in 1986. The IED was reportedly at least partially funded by the UIMM, the
employers' federation of the metalworking industry, whose enormous cash slush fund
totalling 600 million Euros had been used for interventions in French domestic
politics since the early 1970s (508)*.
ROGUE AGENTS
238
The IED held its "First International Assizes on Disinformation" in Nice from
the 13th to 16th November 1989 – barely four days after the fall of the Wall. According
to the programme, the seminar was devoted to:
"Day One - The new methods of seduction of the Communist countries:
Gorbachevism, analysed from inside by true dissidents, a presentation of
countries generally targeted by Soviet disinformation, a study of all those who
contribute, voluntarily or otherwise, to this disinformation by acting as its
channels in the West;
Day Two - The role of the State: the omnipotent State which exerts an
ideological domination over its essential bodies such as the Army, the police or
the judiciary [...] analysis of disinformation which presents capitalism, and not
socialism, as a corrupting force and which wants social progress to be linked to
Statism and a government of the Left;
Day Three - Daily Disinformation: an analysis of the major fears which reject
the very idea of progress and cultural disinformation which [...] contributes to
the corruption of our society leading to the collapse of the pillars of the State;
Day Four - An insider's view of the French Press: having analysed different
examples of disinformation from the most varied fields, understanding the
mechanisms which make such a phenomenon possible so as to act more
efficiently at a later stage" (509)*.
Attended by numerous French academics and journalists, the seminar was
introduced by the IED top brass - IED President Daniel Trinquet and then the host as
Mayor of Nice since 1965 and editorial writer for the IED's weekly bulletin
Désinformation Hebdo, Jacques Médecin - an AESP member since 1977. Within a
year of this conference, Médecin would resign as Mayor and flee to Uruguay after
being placed under investigation for massive corruption; he would later be extradited
and condemned on several counts. Amongst the speakers at the IED conference were
three 6I Politburo members: Crozier, an "expert on international relations" who spoke
on "The myth of Gorbachevism: the difference between promises and reality. Does the
West want to be disinformed?", Huyn ("Soviet methods of destabilisation of Europe")
and Horchem, "Director of the Bonn Institute for the Study of Terrorism", who spoke
on "Terrorism: a weapon at the service of disinformation".
Of these three 6I speakers, Horchem had just produced the first contribution
to the 6I's anti-Gorbachev campaign, his 1989 book Pro pace - der zweite Weg
sowjetischer Außenpolitik. Der Kampf des Kremls um Herzen und Hirne [Pro pace - the
second path of Soviet foreign policy. The Kremlin's struggle for hearts and minds].
Alongside Horchem as co-authors were Dr. Iain Elliot of the IEDSS Board and Roy
Godson of the NSIC's Washington office. The same year would see the publication of
ROGUE AGENTS
239
Herbert Romerstein's Soviet Active Measures and Propaganda: Influence Activities in
the Gorbachev Era and Huyn’s Die Doppelfalle Glasnost für Perestrojka ; das Risiko
Gorbatschow [Double Trap Glasnost for Perestroika – the Gorbachev Risk]; these
books were then followed in 1990 by Huyn's Gorbachev's Operation: A Common
European House - Soviet Strategic Deception and Crozier's The Gorbachev Phenomenon:
Peace and Secret War (510).
At the IED Assizes, the 6I brought along three friends as fellow speakers, one
American and two English. The American guest was USAF Brigadier-General Robert
C. Richardson III of the ASC, ASIF/SIFI/CFIS and the pro-Star wars group High
Frontier, who served on the IEPS Board with Crozier, Huyn and General Graham,
founder of High Frontier. The first of the two British speakers was David Hart, "leader
writer at the Times" who the previous year had taken over from Crozier as backer of
Elwell's smear-sheet British Briefing and who had recently run a pro-Star Wars
campaign in Britain on behalf of CIA Director Bill Casey. The second British 6I friend
to address the IED conference was Cercle member Lord Robert Cranborne (on whom
see the Postscript) who spoke on "The proof that Socialism is not irreversible: Great
Britain". The French speakers at the IED Assizes included Prefect Roger Chaix, former
Director of the Renseignements Généraux from 1972 to 1975, Prefect Jean Rochet,
former head of the French DST internal security service from 1967 to 1972, and
longstanding intelligence author Pierre de Villemarest. With them was a trio of 6I
friends: Suzanne Labin, veteran leader of the French section of WACL, and two Senior
Fellows from the Viar/Richardson group CFIS - Dr. Françoise Thom and Joel-
François Dumont, the latter a senior journalist specialising in security and
intelligence issues at the French FR3 regional television network. Joel-François
Dumont de Vries, to give him his full name,
"has, over the last twenty-four years [i.e. since 1967], gained considerable
experience of international affairs: first as Brussels-based EC and NATO
correspondent, and more recently in his present capacity as a political and
diplomatic analyst in Paris. Mr. Dumont is a former Auditor [auditeur, external
pupil] of France's National Institute for Advanced Defence Studies [IHEDN,
whose Director from 1972 to 1974 was Cercle associate General Callet] and a
graduate of the Institute of Security Studies at Kiel University, Germany. He is
also currently Director of the Centre for Intelligence Studies (Europe). He has
published and contributed to a number of studies, among which: The Peace
Movements in Europe and America (London, 1985); Für ein Deutschland in der
Zukunft [For a Germany in the Future] (Berlin, 1985); and La Désinformation
Stratégique et les Mesures Actives Soviétiques [Strategic Disinformation and
Soviet Active Measures] (Paris, 1987)" (511).
Besides the French outlet provided by the IED, the Cercle would also benefit
from the creation in the late 1980s of three further groups involving the 6I's American
allies - the International Freedom Foundation (1986), the Center for Security
ROGUE AGENTS
240
Policy (1988) and the Institute of World Politics (1990).
To turn first to the International Freedom Foundation, according to a 1995
Newsday article (512), the IFF was founded in 1986 and fronted by notorious
American lobbyist Jack Abramoff, later to be jailed for his corrupt relationship with
several congressional legislators. With a staff of twenty under Chairman Duncan
Sellars and Executive Director Jeff Pandin, the IFF operated from prestigious offices in
Washington, lobbying Congress, organising high-profile conferences and award
ceremonies and publishing an extensive range of journals, reports and briefing
papers. With branches in London, Rome, Hamburg, Brussels and Johannesburg, the
IFF's stated aims were that it "works to foster individual freedom throughout the
world" and "encourages and mobilizes support of indigenous democratic movements".
In reality, the IFF's purpose was the exact opposite – to counteract pressure in
the US for sanctions on South Africa by denigrating Nelson Mandela and the ANC as
Soviet stooges (513)*. Over half the IFF's funding was provided by the South African
DMI – the Directorate of Military Intelligence - which gave at least $1.5 million a year
from 1986 on. Interestingly, the IFF's creation in 1986 coincided with the closure after
ten years of the London-based FARI, previous beneficiary of DoI/DMI funds. In 1992,
President de Klerk would end DMI funding of the IFF as part of a withdrawal from
'Third Force' operations negotiated with Mandela; the IFF would close down in 1993.
Prior to its closure, however, the IFF would afford the 6I its last appearance covered by
this investigation in a series of conferences in the US and in Germany in the autumn
of 1991.
Before detailing this swansong by the 6I, it is useful to examine the career and
other affiliations of one particular IFF officeholder – J. Michael Waller, listed by the
US Information Agency as Director of the IFF's International Security Affairs section
(514). Waller had been "a member of the staff of the US House of Representatives and
the US Senate, served on the White House Task Force on Central America, and has
served as a consultant to the US Information Agency, the US Agency for International
Development and the Office of the Secretary of Defense in support of operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006, he received a citation from the Director of the FBI for
"exceptional service in the public interest" … He is a frequent lecturer and instructor
in psychological and information operations for the US military and the intelligence
community" (515). Between 1984 and 1991, Waller was a key author for the anti-
Sandinista and anti-FMLN campaigns run by the Council on Inter-American
Security, and also produced Peace, Power and Protest: Eastern Europe in the
Gorbachev Era, published in March 1988 by Wilkinson's RISCT as Conflict Study
209.
In 1993, Waller would be a founding co-editor of the magazine
Demokratizatsiya – the Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization; a 2003 article
celebrating the magazine's tenth anniversary stated: "The policy approach of the
ROGUE AGENTS
241
journal was also covered by the International Freedom Foundation and later by the
American Foreign Policy Council, both of which assumed critical roles in editing
and financing the journal". Such support was not surprising: in 1994, Waller was a
Senior Fellow of the AFPC, later rising to become AFPC Vice-President and Editor of
its Russia Reform Monitor in 1997. Founded in 1982, the AFPC would be a major
forum for the Cercle complex's American friends; Kraemer and deGraffenreid have
been frequent participants on AFPC delegations (516)*.
Waller would also serve as Vice-President for Information Operations at the
Center for Security Policy, founded in Washington in 1988, another body which
involved several of Crozier's American contacts - the CSP "National Security Advisory
Council" included Kraemer, deGraffenreid and their future Pentagon bosses Douglas
J. Feith and Richard Perle, as well as Edwin Feulner, Midge Decter and former CIA
Director James Woolsey; Cercle member Margo Carlisle was a member of the Board
of Directors (517)*.
Waller and the trio of 6I friends Romerstein, Kraemer and deGraffenreid would
also provide overlap with another American group, the Institute of World Politics, a
"Graduate School of National Security and International Affairs" founded in
Washington in 1990. All four have served on the IWP Faculty, and IWP Guest
Lecturers have included three former CIA Directors – Schlesinger, Woolsey and Tenet
– as well as Douglas J. Feith and Caspar Weinberger (518)*.
To return to the IFF, before its closure in 1993 following the ending of South
African 'Third Force' operations, the IFF provided a platform for the 6I's American and
European members in the autumn of 1991. Three IFF conferences on intelligence
were held, the first two in Washington and the last in Germany; the proceedings
would be published the following year by the IFF's German branch under the title
Intelligence and the New World Order. The speakers at the first two Washington
seminars, Assessing US Intelligence Needs for the 1990s: Congressional Oversight of
the Intelligence Community – Finding the Proper Balance, included Romerstein,
Kraemer and Holliday as well as CIA veterans Theodore Shackley and George Carver
(519)*. Of greatest interest though was the third IFF intelligence conference, held in
November 1991 in Potsdam under the title National Intelligence Agencies in the period
of European Partnership.
Hard by the Berlin Wall breached almost exactly two years earlier, the IFF's
German venue symbolised the changes since the fall of the Iron Curtain and German
reunification, "closing the circle of the superpower era, at a conference in Schloss
Cecilienhof, Potsdam, where Stalin initiated the Cold War", as the IFF book put it. The
two keynote speakers in Potsdam also reflected the meeting of East and West: General
Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB Counter-Intelligence, and William Colby, ex-
Director of the CIA and a Cercle guest.
ROGUE AGENTS
242
Alongside them on the podium as speakers were the 6I core of Crozier (520)*,
Huyn (521)* and Horchem (522)* together with their companion from the 1989 IED
seminar, French security journalist Joel-François Dumont (523)*. Finally, amongst
the participants at the IFF conference was another familiar face, Cercle/6I member
Jamie Jameson. In new times, there's nothing like old friends (524)*.
A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
(1993)
In contrast to the public conception of "conspiracy theory", the links
uncovered by parapolitical research are rarely lines of command. Parapolitical activity
is not pyramidal like a government hierarchy; it is connective, a network of nodes like
a circle of friends. The links between the nodes are lines of support arising not from a
command structure, but from a community of interest, shared objectives and
interlocking memberships.
Individual groups do not so much set the agenda or run the show as act
within their own sphere of influence or speciality, occasionally supporting actions
taken by others. Many are isolated and have little impact outside their own country,
and here the Cercle came into its own as a group with a world-wide agenda,
connecting and, to some extent, coordinating the activities of groups in many
different countries. The Cercle complex stands almost alone as an active international
network linking intelligence veterans and their media manipulators to top right-wing
politicians. As to its significance, one can do no better than to quote Ramsay and
Dorril:
"One of the conclusions to be drawn from this essay is about networks. One
common response to the delineation of a network is to say, 'Yes, all that is
interesting, but where is the actual transmission of power?' To which we
would argue - and this is the only claim we make which might be called
theoretical - that the network is the power. A network of people who are,
elsewhere, powerful, is per se a powerful network."
Through its network of private-sector spies and their disinformation outlets,
the Cercle complex could promote or denigrate public figures not only in their own
country, but throughout Europe and America. Its activities during the Cold War -
covert funding, black propaganda, smear campaigns and, at least, connections to
planned coups d'état - were those of any intelligence agency, and, in many ways, that
is what the Cercle complex has been: the rogue agents of the international Right.
==Notes==
Category:Rogue Agents