Rogue Agents - Postscript - The Garnier-Lançon Papers

From Powerbase
Revision as of 20:51, 21 May 2016 by Tom Griffin (talk | contribs) (started a page)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

Rogue Agents: The Cercle and the 6I in the Private Cold War 1951 - 1991 is a book by David Teacher. It is reproduced here by permission of the author.

Rogue Agents - Postscript - The Garnier-Lançon Papers

It is rare that the membership and concerns of confidential discussion groups of powerbrokers should become documented public knowledge. Indeed, the only instance so far of a voluntary - if paltry - release of such information has been by the Bilderberg Group, founded at the same time as the Cercle Pinay, which reacted to its growing notoriety a decade or so ago by publishing since then a bare list of the delegates and topics for its annual conferences. Not so for the Cercle which continues to meet in the same anonymity that it has enjoyed for the last sixty years. Despite its crucial significance for the genesis of the European Union and its far-reaching covert influence in both domestic and international politics since then, the Cercle still remains almost completely unknown today. For six decades, in spite of the eminence of its members and the notoriety of its allies in the intelligence community, the Cercle has stayed "under the radar", its existence unexposed except by the 1982 publication of the Langemann papers, and by Péan's groundbreaking 1984 book V on Violet and the AESP, neither of which were investigated further by the English-speaking international Press. Not even the publication in 1993 of Crozier's firsthand memoirs revealing the existence of the 6I – in his words, an international "Private Sector Operational Intelligence agency" closely linked to the Cercle – led to any further journalistic or academic examination of its activities. This study over the past twenty-five years has patiently pieced together the jigsaw of scant print references to Cercle operations by previous investigative journalists, extended their research to include verified online resources and published some of the AESP internal documents that circulated amongst Belgian journalists at the time and were later reviewed by Schrijvers. However, no internal documents from the Cercle itself had emerged or were known even to exist. All of this has changed however in the last three years, as the private papers of Cercle participants became available after their deaths, shedding light both on the Cercle's membership and on their meetings. The watershed came in October 2011 with the first-ever public release by Joël van der Reijden of primary sources from Le Cercle itself: internal Cercle meeting attendance lists from the Hoover Institution archive of papers from Monique Garnier-Lançon, a security advisor to Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac and one of his Deputy Mayors of Paris from 1977 to 1989 who served in the early 1980s as the post-Violet/Dubois convenor of the French Cercle delegation. Van der Reijden's 2011 publication of the Cercle attendance lists has been followed in August 2015 by a fuller release of the Garnier-Lançon archive by Belgian researcher Hervé Beghinselen. These primary sources considerably extend the available information about membership of the Cercle and the 6I at a critical point in their covert anti-disarmament campaign, confirming many of the links previously ROGUE AGENTS 244 detailed in this investigation, clarifying several issues and identifying new paths of enquiry for later researchers. The Cercle described in the 1982-85 participants' lists had changed markedly since the 1970s following the withdrawal of its co-founders Pinay and Violet and the eclipse of its longstanding financial backer Pesenti, then embroiled in the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano. The loss of these original pillars of the Cercle was compounded in May 1981 by the electoral victory of Socialist François Mitterrand, a political sea-change which ejected the Cercle's natural allies from power and left them in disarray. By contrast, in Germany, whilst Strauß's Cercle-backed election bid in October 1980 had failed to unseat SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a constructive vote of no confidence in the Bundestag brought the CDU's Helmut Kohl to power in October 1982, marking the beginning of sixteen years of uninterrupted conservative rule. Whilst the German axis to the Cercle continued under the leadership of Huyn and Bach, French participation in the Cercle would be further undermined by Pierre Péan's 1983 revelation of the sniffer plane scandal which led to a parliamentary inquiry and implicated Pinay and Violet, both old men in ill health. As the influence of the French waned and the Cercle struggled to find credible partners in that country, the Anglo-American and intelligence dimensions to the Cercle expanded considerably. Under the Chairmanship of SOE veteran Julian Amery, the post-Violet Cercle shifted focus, coming under the sway of Brian Crozier and his covert network, the 6I. THE CERCLE AND THE 6I The interaction between the Cercle and the 6I went far beyond the "minor overlapping" mentioned by Crozier; not only did senior figures from the British and American intelligence communities attend Cercle meetings, but also almost entire national delegations of the Cercle – most notably the post-Damman MAUE from Belgium – were recruited to the 6I cause, soon setting up front groups to assist Crozier's anti-unilateralist propaganda campaign. This process had been ongoing since the previous two meetings of Cercle allies for which we have full participants' lists - the February 1976 AESP Chapter Assembly and the November 1976 CEDI Congress – but the launch in February 1977 of the 6I accelerated the pace of integration. Indeed, the CEDI Congress in particular appears to have heralded the creation of the 6I which came only three months later; three key CEDI participants in November 1976 - Violet, Crozier and Huyn, the triumvirate then running the Cercle - were all, according to Crozier, core founding members of the 6I 'Politburo' in February 1977. Whilst Crozier's memoirs preferred to downplay the overlap between the Cercle and the 6I, noting that "some members of the 6I's 'Politburo' also attended the Cercle meetings; others did not" (525), the Cercle participants' lists between 1982 and 1985 belie the impression of separation that Crozier wished to give, as they record the frequent presence at Cercle meetings of most of the members of the 6I 'Politburo' and many of their operatives. ROGUE AGENTS 245 At the June 1982 Cercle meeting held at the HSS conference centre in Wildbad- Kreuth, the first meeting covered by the Cercle documents in the Garnier-Lançon archive, the 6I 'Politburo' was represented by Crozier, Elliott, Huyn and Jameson, the latter having acted as American coordinator of the Cercle since at least 1977. Other 6I contacts attending the Cercle meeting in Bavaria included General Alan Fraser, the 6I's close South African ally and previous channel to the Shah, and the London financier Sir Peter Tennant who, at the time, was acting Chairman of the Wilton Park Academic Council, resigning in 1983 over budget cuts to the centre; he would later help provide funding for one of Crozier's UK 6I front groups, CAMACC, as detailed above. Also attending the 1982 Cercle meeting in Bavaria were most of the 6I's Belgian partners - Close, Jonet, de Kerchove and de Bonvoisin. The presence at this 1982 Cercle meeting of almost the entire top membership of MAUE demonstrates that Belgian cooperation with Brian Crozier had continued uninterrupted despite the sudden death in July 1979 of Florimond Damman and the subsequent implosion of the AESP, an upheaval followed in October 1979 by the end of Paul Vanden Boeynants' seven-year reign as Defence Minister and the 1980 'removal from the Army hierarchy' of the controversial counter-subversion unit, PIO. This new evidence about Belgian membership of the Cercle also underscores the continuity and personnel overlap that had long existed between the public AESP and CEDI, the 'semi-public' Belgian PIO, the confidential Cercle and the covert 6I. To focus on but one figure, Benoît de Bonvoisin, the Baron Noir had previously attended the February 1976 AESP Chapter Assembly and the November 1976 CEDI Congress, both times accompanied by the PIO's Major Bougerol and by Belgian Cercle convenor Jacques Jonet, and both times meeting Crozier. The MAUE group were active partners of the 6I in its virulent campaign against the nuclear disarmament movement; shortly before this June 1982 Cercle meeting, they had set up the Belgian 6I front groups RAPPEL and the IEPS in March and April respectively. It is highly significant that the two former political controllers of Vanden Boeynants' PIO, de Bonvoisin and de Kerchove, both attended various Cercle meetings throughout the Brabant Wallon killings. At this time, de Bonvoisin had long been the main financial backer and patron of both the PIO and the fascist groups linked to the killings, whilst de Kerchove was the key aide to the Justice Minister in charge of the sidetracked and fruitless first investigation. Whilst no evidence has emerged to demonstrate a foreign hand in either the planning or the execution of the Brabant Wallon killings, the new primary source on Belgian membership of the Cercle further strengthens the probability that the LIL/AESP/MAUE/PIO complex is the most promising path of investigation for elucidating the crimes, still unresolved after thirty years. Belgium's statute of ROGUE AGENTS 246 limitations was due to formally close the case on 10th November 2015; although this has now been extended in extremis to forty years to allow continued enquiry, the sixth official investigation failed to shed any further light on this dark affair, lost in the futile search for the mere exécutants rather than the real commanditaires. Returning to RAPPEL and the IEPS, despite excellent progress in setting up the Belgian 6I front groups in early 1982, a storm of disagreement would soon cloud the relationship between the Belgian team and the European Institute for Security founded in 1980, of which Monique Garnier-Lançon was Vice-Chairman. At first, all seemed to bode well: at an EIS Board meeting held on 9th June 1982 – two days before the beginning of this Cercle meeting - the EIS appointed Close as Chairman of the EIS Board of Directors and de Kerchove as EIS Treasurer-General. Both men and EIS Vice-Chairman Garnier-Lançon then travelled to Bavaria to attend the Cercle meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth. Shortly afterwards, however, Close was replaced by the Board as Chairman by Major-General Jochen Löser, and de Kerchove was removed as Treasurer. This alleged abuse of the EIS Statutes was only one bone of contention; another was the acceptance by the EIS Board of several more powerful German members, again allegedly in violation of the Statutes. In an eight-page letter to the EIS Board of 14th September 1982 (also copied to "Maître Jonet, member of the EIS"), Close furiously denounced this German domination of the EIS: "a) the Board of Administration includes, as of 15th March 1982, 4 German members … plus five coopted German members, illegally included as not in accordance with the Statutes, making in total 9 out of 16 members i. e. more than an absolute majority; b) the Presidium includes 7 German members out of 13 i. e. more than an absolute majority; c) the Curatorium includes 23 German members out of 33, i. e. nearly one and a half times an absolute majority" (emphasis in the original). The EIS remained unswayed, and Close, de Kerchove and Jonet decamped from the EIS, with Close writing to Löser on 18th October 1982 saying that, failing remedial action: "I am afraid I cannot afford the luxury of associating with an Institute whose Board of Directors continuously disregards the Statutes of its Institute and decides upon new rules and regulations whenever it conveniently fits the occasion and desires of seemingly the majority of the members of the Board" (526). As described below, the rift between the EIS and its former Belgian members would not be resolved, and Close and his team would concentrate their efforts on RAPPEL, the IEPS and WACL. To turn to others present at the 1982 Wildbad-Kreuth Cercle meeting, the participants' list also reveals the attendance of three top British and American intelligence figures - and no doubt 'senior advisors' to the 6I – whom we have not yet ROGUE AGENTS 247 met and whose involvement in the Cercle was concealed in Crozier's later memoirs. SOE and MI6 veteran Neil 'Billy' McLean was an old comrade-in-arms of Cercle Chairman Julian Amery – indeed almost forty years earlier, during the war, Lieutenant-Colonel McLean had been Captain Julian Amery's Commanding Officer in M. O. 4 or "the Musketeers", the SOE unit supporting the Albanian royalist resistance under Ihsan Bey Toptani in 1944 (527). After leaving the SOE at the end of the war, McLean like Amery had worked for MI6 as a Middle Eastern expert before being elected as Conservative MP for Inverness in 1952, remaining MP until 1964 and working for MI6 throughout the post-war period. In late 1962, McLean accepted an Israeli request passed on by recently-retired MI6 Deputy Chief G. K. Young to intervene in Yemen to support the royal family overthrown by republicans with backing from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Together with then Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys, then Air Minister Julian Amery, SAS founder David Stirling and Major David Smiley (McLean's second-in-command in the SOE Albanian unit), McLean conducted a private guerrilla war covertly supported by the British, Saudis and Israelis which finally brought down the republican Yemeni government and drove Nasser's forces back to Egypt in June 1967 (528). McLean would remain in touch with Amery over the years, attending all but one of the Cercle meetings between June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth and February 1985 in Washington DC; he died in November 1986. McLean's presence in the Cercle was revealed in 1990 by his erstwhile comrade-in-arms Xan Fielding who had served together with McLean, Amery and later CEDI stalwart Rowland Winn (Lord St Oswald) in SOE in Albania and/or Siam. The relevant passage of Fielding's biography of McLean reads: "There was another institution which gave Billy particular pleasure. It was called Le Cercle, and outside the circle nothing was known about it but the name. Its origins and membership were (and still are) as deeply cocooned in mystery as those of the most exclusive Masonic lodge. It appears to have been founded by the French statesman, Antoine Pinay, and when he retired, Julian Amery took over the chairmanship. It seems to have been a small assembly of European and American Conservatives meeting on an ad hoc basis once or twice a year, for two or three days at a time, to exchange views on world affairs. Because of his knowledge and understanding of the Middle East and North Africa, Billy was a most acceptable candidate for membership, which, in due course, he acquired. He had already attended several meetings – in Bonn, Munich, Washington and elsewhere – and looked forward to attending more" (529). McLean was not the only veteran covert operator from MI6 to attend the 1982 Cercle meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth ; the participants' list also records the presence of a certain Frank Steele, according to the documents, a "banker". Steele, who would ROGUE AGENTS 248 attend four Cercle meetings between 1982 and 1985, was far more than that; he had been one of MI6's most senior frontline officers whose career, both in the Service and in later life, was intimately connected with George Kennedy Young and Nicholas Elliott. Having joined MI6 in 1951, Steele was posted to Basra in Iraq; in 1953, he helped prepare for a southern invasion of Iran after the temporary flight of the Shah before the ultimate success of the joint CIA/MI6 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh, an operation that was run from Cyprus by Young, MI6 Director of Middle Eastern operations. Steele would then serve under Young in Cyprus, Cairo and Tripoli before being posted home in 1956. During this period, Young had been working closely with Nigel Clive's Special Political Action section in London to plan the failed Israeli/British/French invasion of the Suez Canal Zone following its nationalisation by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in July 1956. Steele would not however find his return to headquarters any quieter than the Middle East; since April 1956, MI6 had been embroiled at home in public scandal (and a clandestine turf war with MI5) over the disasterous 'Buster' Crabb operation. The ill-fated and unauthorised attempt to use a frogman to examine a Soviet warship in a British harbour had been run by MI6 London station chief Nicholas Elliott who nonetheless survived the uproar unscathed. Steele spent two years in London before being posted abroad from 1958 to 1961 to the MI6 Beirut station, serving for his last year under a new station chief - Nicholas Elliott, also present at this 1982 Cercle meeting. Steele returned to London in 1961, the year that Young retired as Deputy Director of MI6 and joined Sir Frederic Bennett as a Senior Director of the newly created investment bankers Kleinwort Benson. Meanwhile, Steele served at MI6 headquarters until 1965 when he was posted to Jordan and then in 1968 to Kenya where he conducted secret negotiations with Jomo Kenyatta. This presaged the highpoint of Steele's MI6 career which came in early 1971 when he was posted to the MI6 station in Northern Ireland "as a member of the small FCO team there, and in May of the following year succeeded to its senior position". It is interesting to note that from November 1972 until Heath's defeat by Wilson in February 1974, the Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs at the FCO, the cover department for MI6, was Julian Amery. Steele's Northern Irish tour of duty came at a particularly violent period of the Troubles: Operation Demetrius, the internment without trial of over 300 IRA suspects, was conducted in August 1971, the Bloody Sunday killing of fourteen unarmed civilians by the British Army occurred in January 1972 (530), and in March 1972, Edward Heath suspended the Stormont Parliament and introduced Direct Rule from Westminster. Now the senior MI6 officer in Northern Ireland, Steele was given the politically explosive task of contacting the IRA leadership to discuss a ceasefire, leading to the highly secret meeting in London on 7th July 1972 between Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw and an IRA delegation including Provisional Army ROGUE AGENTS 249 Council chief of staff Seán Mac Stiofáin, IRA Derry second-in-command Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, released from internment to attend the meeting. The negotiations however came to nothing, and the province would soon be riven by a savage clandestine struggle for control between MI6 and MI5, two of the many victims being Ulster headquarters InfPol/IRD propaganda officer Colin Wallace and MIU/MI6 cross-border operative Captain Fred Holroyd. Steele however escaped the worst of it, being posted back to MI6 headquarters in May 1973 to assume "a senior position connected with the Middle East in London [probably Young's old post as MI6 Director of Middle Eastern operations] but he took premature retirement in 1975, frustrated by the constraints placed on his freedom of action". Immediately after his retirement from MI6, Steele started a career in the City – at Kleinwort Benson alongside his old MI6 boss, George Kennedy Young. Young would retire the following year and soon set up the Unison Committee for Action with fellow Kleinwort Benson Senior Director Sir Frederic Bennett. Steele meanwhile remained with the bank until his own retirement in 1987. At the time of this Cercle meeting in 1982, Steele was Director of Export Financing at Kleinwort Benson as well as Chairman of Network Television from 1981 to 1987, a useful position (531). Another former senior intelligence officer and probable 6I 'senior advisor' at the June 1982 Cercle meeting was Arnold M. Silver, like Elliott coyly referred to in the Cercle participants' lists as a "Security Advisor". Silver had started his intelligence career in 1945 as a US Army Intelligence Sergeant debriefing Soviet and Nazi intelligence operatives at Camp King in Oberursel, Germany (532). During his tour at Camp King, Silver had notably interrogated Nazi commando Colonel Otto Skorzeny, recommending that he be exculpated and resettled. Skorzeny would however eventually be tried and acquitted at the 1947 Dachau Trials before escaping from American military custody to reach Madrid where he became a veteran hero and rallying point for re-emergent European fascism in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece in the 1960s and a major inspiration for the formation of Aginter Presse, the Greek coup and the stragi until his death in 1975. As for Silver, with firsthand knowledge of Soviet intelligence networks from Camp King, he joined the CIA in 1948 and served in Austria, Luxembourg (Chief of Station from 1957 to 1960), Germany, Turkey and the US, rising to become a "very senior Agency man in charge of counter-subversion in Western Europe", "a former senior CIA officer who had long specialised in German and Soviet affairs. He had joined the 6I after being made redundant by President Carter's DCI, Admiral Turner, in his purge of specialists on Communism" (533). Silver returned to Luxembourg after retirement from the CIA in 1978. In 1981, he wrote a report on the Socialist International for the Heritage Foundation - alongside him at this 1982 Cercle meeting were Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul M. Weyrich and the Foundation's organiser amongst Republican senators, Margo Carlisle, as detailed below. Silver ROGUE AGENTS 250 would later attend a further Cercle meeting held in Bonn in July 1984 (534). Also at the 1982 Cercle meeting was another figure with wartime service in the OSS, although poles apart from CIA veteran Silver: the American-born Aline Griffith who had married the Conde de Quintanilla in 1947 and inherited the title of Condessa de Romanones in 1963. A former model who socialised widely with European aristocracy, she would later exaggerate her minor part as a lowly OSS cipher clerk in Madrid from 1943 on in a trio of bestselling memoirs of derring-do (535). Nonetheless, her social connections were of great service to the 6I; as Crozier records, it was Romanones who, via her friendship with Nancy Reagan, arranged Crozier's meeting with Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in July 1980 and Reagan's subsequent appointment of William A. Wilson as his backchannel to both the Cercle and the 6I (536). The significant presence of the 6I at the 1982 Cercle meeting would be repeated, indeed intensified, a year later at the Cercle meeting held in Bonn in July 1983 which was attended by 6I 'Politburo' members Crozier, Elliott, Huyn, Stauffenberg, Shackley and Jameson alongside all of the key 6I operatives from the four British and Belgian outlets involved in the 6I's ongoing anti-disarmament campaign: the London duo of Lewis and Leigh from the Coalition for Peace through Security together with their fundraiser Sir Peter Tennant, the Editor of Soviet Analyst and member of the IEDSS Board Iain Elliot, and Close, Jonet and de Kerchove from RAPPEL and the IEPS. Although these three Belgians had left the German-dominated EIS in the autumn of 1982, Close was still prepared, at least on paper, to offer collaboration between the IEPS and the EIS, writing on 25th March 1983 to the Acting Chairman of the EIS Board, Captain T. Sleeswijk Visser: "During our last meeting, I promised to give you more details about our newly created European Institute for Peace and Security in Brussels. As you well know, I formed the Institute because I was quite disappointed with the practical approach of the EIS … I would like to underline that we are willing to work in close cooperation with the EIS because our aims are exactly the same, even if our methods of approach differ … Of course, this offer of cooperation is left to your discretion … In other words, whilst keeping our full autonomy, we will be associated with you as we are with the Institut International de Géopolitique of Mme Marie-France Garaud and the Foreign Affairs Research Institute of Mr. Geoffrey Stewart-Smith" (537). In reality, cooperation between the EIS and the RAPPEL/IEPS team would never take off – the Belgian group was at the time busy preparing for the first International Congress of RAPPEL, held in September 1983 in Luxembourg in conjunction with the WACL Annual Conference. As well as leading RAPPEL and the IEPS, Close was also the President of the WACL Preparatory Committee and then Chairman of the conference, also attended by Vankerkhoven and de Kerchove. ROGUE AGENTS 251 Despite the failure to overcome the rift between the Belgian 6I team and the EIS, one British 6I operative present at this July 1983 Cercle meeting would continue to work with the EIS: an EIS press release from 1985 states: "An Anglo-French delegation from the European Institute for Security is in Geneva and is available for interview by the press, radio or television until 12 noon on Wednesday, 20 November. It consists of 1) Madame Monique Garnier-Lançon – Vice-Chairman and Foreign Affairs Director of the European Institute for Security; and 2) Dr. Julian Lewis – Director of the British Coalition for Peace through Security, and a member of the EIS Board of Directors" (538). This July 1983 Cercle meeting would however be the last one attended by Stauffenberg – Langemann's disasterous exposé of Stauffenberg's reporting on the Cercle and the 6I had been published in the Spiegel in September 1982. The domination of the Cercle by Crozier's 6I would continue in the two Cercle meetings held in 1984, the first of which ventured further afield to South Africa. Held in January, the meeting included 6I 'Politburo' members Crozier, Elliott, Huyn and Jameson, 6I contacts Steele, Fraser and Romanones, and Philippe Malaud whose Comité Français contre le Neutralisme et pour la Paix had been working closely with Crozier and the Belgian 6I front group IEPS (539). Although Crozier was absent for health reasons at the second 1984 Cercle meeting, held in Bonn in July, the 6I attended in force: Elliott and Huyn of the 'Politburo' were supported by their advisors McLean and Silver, and the 6I anti-disarmament campaign was represented by their French and Belgian allies: Malaud and a full delegation from MAUE/RAPPEL/IEPS – Jonet, Vankerkhoven, Close, de Decker and Beyer de Ryke. At the July 1984 meeting, Habsburg (in a rare late attendance at the Cercle) could congratulate some of the other participants: following the European Parliament elections held three weeks earlier, Habsburg and Beyer de Ryke had been re-elected as MEPs, whereas Malaud had been elected for the first time. Vankerkhoven meanwhile had decided not to stand again after replacing a deceased MEP from 1982 until 1984. After the EP elections, the International Council of Presidency of the PEU would be reconstituted in September; joining President Habsburg, Deputy Secretary-General Jonet and Council member Beyer de Ryke was Malaud as PEU Vice-President. A later Washington meeting of the Cercle held in February 1985 also included senior 6I figures: although Crozier himself was again absent, the conference brought together 6I 'Politburo' members Elliott, Huyn, Jameson and Stilwell alongside 6I partner General Fraser and probable 6I founding member Sven Kraemer. Also present were Stilwell's superior as Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy from 1981 to 1987 Fred C. Iklé, and Herbert E. Meyer, from 1981 on Special Assistant to CIA Director Bill Casey and Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council; both Iklé and Meyer are presented below. ROGUE AGENTS 252 THE POLITICAL OUTREACH OF THE CERCLE Besides documenting the considerable contingent from Crozier's 6I, the Cercle meeting records also highlight changes in the political representation within the Cercle. After some thirty years of cooperation both in Catholic conservative groups and in the Cercle, the older founding generation of Pinay, Violet, Pesenti and, largely, Habsburg had ceased attending Cercle meetings - although Alfredo Sánchez Bella and Sir John Biggs-Davison participated in several Cercle meetings in the period 1982-1985, they were the last members with links to CEDI going back to the 1950s (540). As could be expected of a Cercle now chaired by Julian Amery supported by 6I head Crozier, the British group within the Cercle swelled to include several of their Conservative Party allies. One such was the former Grenadier Guards officer John Browne, the MP for Winchester from 1979 to 1992 who attended three Cercle meetings in June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth, in July 1983 in Bonn and in February 1985 in Washington DC. Browne served as Secretary of the Conservative Backbench Finance Committee in 1981–83, Secretary of the Conservative Backbench Defence Committee in 1982–83, and a Member of the Treasury Select Committee from 1982 to 1987; he would later sit as a Delegate to the North Atlantic Assembly from 1986 to 1992 and act as its Rapporteur on Human Rights from 1989 to 1992. Another former Grenadier Guards officer and parliamentary friend of Amery who would attend the June 1982 Cercle meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth and the July 1984 meeting in Bonn was Lord Cranborne or Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 6th Marquess of Salisbury. Having served as a Conservative MP from 1950 to 1954, Cranborne inherited his title and entered the House of Lords in 1972. His late father, the 5th Marquess, had been the first President of the Monday Club, serving from 1961 to his death in 1972; Lord Cranborne would succeed him in the post, serving from 1974 to 1981. Unsurprisingly, he was also President of the Anglo-Rhodesian Society; the family had longstanding links with Rhodesia whose colonial capital Salisbury had been named after them. His eldest son, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, spoke against Rhodesian sanctions at the Conservative Party conference in October 1978 before being elected as an MP in 1979 and serving until 1987, during which time he was a firm friend of former Rhodesian minister and Cercle member P. K. Van der Byl with whom he shared membership at the Turf Club and White's (541). Another member of the House of Lords to attend Cercle meetings – three, in January 1984 in Stellenbosch, in July 1984 in Bonn, and in February 1985 in Washington - was Lord Kimberley or John Wodehouse, 4th Earl of Kimberley, listed in 1984 as the Chairman of the House of Lords Defence Committee. A former Liberal peer who had been Honorary Secretary of the House of Lords All-Party Defence Group since 1978, he was fired as the Liberal Party spokesman in the Lords after ROGUE AGENTS 253 recommending that electors vote for Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 elections. After being persuaded to join the Conservative Party by Monday Club President Lord Cranborne, he sat as a Tory peer until 1999, acting as a British delegate to the North Atlantic Assembly from 1981 to 1993 and also serving as a member of the British Atlantic Committee. In 1982, he joined the Monday Club and in 1983 was appointed as a member of its Executive Council as well as Chairman of the Club's Foreign Affairs Committee, a post previously held by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. In June of the same year, in his capacity as Monday Club Foreign Affairs Chairman, Kimberley also addressed the NATO Plenary Session supporting the deployment of Cruise missiles. By 1985 he would be the House of Lords Speaker for European Affairs (542). A further participant at the January 1984 Cercle meeting in Stellenbosch was Sir John Killick, a veteran Cold War diplomat who had worked in the Western Europe Department of the Foreign Office from 1958 to 1962 before being posted to Washington as Counsellor and Head of Chancery at the British Embassy from 1963 to 1968. Following another spell in London as Assistant Under-Secretary at the FO, he then served as British Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1973. After returning home and, as Deputy Under-Secretary, acting as senior advisor to the Foreign Secretary (first Sir Alec Douglas-Home and then James Callaghan), in 1975 Killick was appointed Permanent Representative to NATO, serving until 1979 when he retired to South Africa. A few months after the 1984 Cercle meeting in Stellenbosch, he returned to the UK following the death of his South African-born wife and took up the post of President of the British Atlantic Council which he filled from 1985 to 1992 (543). At the July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn, one very influential British participant was Conservative MP Sir Philip Carter Goodhart, a scion of the American Lehman banking family. Goodhart had worked from 1950 on as a leader writer and foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times, notably covering the British invasion of the Suez Canal from Port Said in 1956, before being elected to the Commons in 1957. A hawk on defence and foreign policy, particularly on Rhodesia, Vietnam and Northern Ireland, he was a member of the North Atlantic Assembly for twenty-four years and at various times chaired the Conservative backbench Defence and Northern Ireland committees as well as having briefly served as a shadow defence spokesman under Leader of the Opposition Sir Alec Douglas-Home in late 1964 before being dismissed by Edward Heath in 1965. Goodhart's influence however came from his role as joint secretary of the 1922 Committee (the Conservative backbench caucas), a post he held for a record nineteen years from 1960 to 1979, putting him at the heart of two Conservative leadership contests that both followed Labour election victories under Harold Wilson: the 1965 contest when Edward Heath replaced Sir Alec Douglas-Home as ROGUE AGENTS 254 Conservative Leader, and, more crucially, the 1975 leadership election that pitted Edward Heath against challenger Margaret Thatcher (544). It was at this time that Goodhart, who strongly supported Thatcher, drew close to the counter-subversion lobby, producing The Climate of Collapse – the terrorist threat to Britain and her allies, published by the FAPC in 1975, and The death of the Cambodian nation, published by FARI in 1976. After Thatcher's election victory, he was rewarded by being appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Northern Ireland in 1979 before becoming Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Army in January 1981. Goodhart however left ministerial office (with a compensatory knighthood) that September after disagreement with cuts to the armed forces, and returned to the backbenches where he would sit until leaving Parliament in 1992 (545). Another Conservative MP and junior minister who had started his career in journalism was Sir Eldon Griffiths, who attended the Cercle meeting held in Washington in February 1985. From 1949 to 1960, Griffiths had been a US-based foreign correspondent and foreign editor for Time-Life before returning to the UK to work both as a journalist for Newsweek and as chief European correspondent of the Washington Post from 1961 to 1963. That year, he joined the Conservative Research Department as a speech writer to Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and was elected to Parliament in the 1964 election that saw Douglas-Home defeated by Labour's Harold Wilson. In 1968, he was voted onto the 1922 Committee executive and, at the 1969 Conservative Party conference, proposed the successful resolution on Britain's membership of the then Common Market, also chairing the Conservative Group for Europe. A robust supporter of continued sporting links with South Africa, Griffiths served in Edward Heath's government from 1970 to 1974 as Parliamentary Secretary for Housing, Local Government and Sport in the Department of the Environment; Amery was the Housing Minister from 1970 to 1972. Although a junior position, the Sports portfolio was a sensitive post at the time in the light of widespread protests against South African cricket and rugby tours of the UK, protests which were being combated by both SIF (Young, Rodgers, Biggs-Davison, Howarth and Sir Frederic Bennett) and by BOSS. After Heath's electoral defeat by Wilson in 1974, Griffiths became Shadow Industry Minister, and then, after Thatcher replaced Heath as Conservative Leader, her frontbench spokesman on foreign and commonwealth affairs in 1975-76, notably including the referendum on EEC membership. After Thatcher's victory in the May 1979 elections, Griffiths was however not included in her government, remaining on the backbenches until his retirement in 1992, but was an enthusiastic proponent of the stationing of Cruise missiles in Britain, and would be knighted in June 1985, a few months after this Cercle meeting (546). Besides Griffiths, another Conservative MP to attend the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington was John Wilkinson, a former RAF pilot and Conservative Research Department aviation expert, who sat as a Conservative MP from 1970 to ROGUE AGENTS 255 1974 and then from 1979 until 2005, making him one of the longest-serving Members of Parliament. Besides his time on the backbenches, Wilkinson had briefly served after 1979 as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Industry Minister Adam Butler before becoming Parliamentary Private Secretary to Defence Minister John Nott in 1981, serving during the 1982 Falklands War. He also sat as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 1979 to 2005, and as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Western European Union from 1979 to 1990. Apart from this parliamentary career, Wilkinson also had longstanding links to the European Freedom Council and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. A participant at EFC meetings from 1971 on, Wilkinson was elected Chairman of the EFC Executive Committee at the joint EFC/ABN 1982 conference (where he spoke alongside American WACL chapter founder Major-General John Singlaub), serving until the EFC's 20th anniversary in 1987; he also attended the 1983 Congress of the National Captive Nations Committee (547). After the British delegation led by Amery and Crozier, the next most powerful European country represented within the Cercle was Germany under its convenor and 6I 'Politburo' member Hans Huyn who would attend all of the meetings held between June 1982 and February 1985; with him at each meeting was the Cercle's overall coordinator, former Ambassador and MP Franz Josef Bach. Under their leadership, the German delegation included powerful Cercle friends, one of the most prominent of which was undoubtedly Huyn's old colleague from the German diplomatic service, the veteran EEC official Karl-Heinz Narjes. In 1980, Langemann reported that the then Bundestag MP had attended a Cercle meeting held in Washington in December 1979 together with Huyn and Heritage Foundation head Edwin Feulner, soon to begin funding Crozier's 6I anti-unilateralist campaign. Since then, Narjes had left the Bundestag, returning to the EEC in January 1981 as European Commissioner for the Internal Market before serving in 1985-88 as Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of Industry and Research. He would nonetheless continue to frequent the Cercle whenever he could - the Garnier-Lançon papers record his presence at the Cercle meetings held in June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth, in early 1983 probably in Washington, in July 1983 in Bonn, and in July 1984 in Bonn. In April 1982, Narjes had been an honoured guest at the inaugural General Assembly of the EIS; the EIS Chairman General Close, the EIS Treasurer de Kerchove and prominent EIS member Jonet would then meet Narjes again at the 1982 Wildbad-Kreuth meeting held three months later. Narjes was not the only eminent Cercle friend to attend the July 1982 meeting in Bavaria; another participant was one of the most senior conservative politicians in Germany, Dr. Bruno Heck. A former Federal Minister for Family and Youth from 1962 to 1968, Heck also served as CDU General Secretary from 1967 to 1971, coordinating Kiesinger's campaign in the 1969 elections won by the SPD candidate, Willy Brandt. In 1968, Heck had also taken over as Chairman of the CDU party foundation, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a post he would fill for over twenty years ROGUE AGENTS 256 until 1989, during which time the KAS was a leading German backer of the Cercle. As Hänni notes, "whenever the meetings were held in West Germany (roughly one in every three), the Cercle was the guest of either the CDU party foundation, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, or its Bavarian CSU counterpart, the Hanns-Seidel- Stiftung. The two foundations sponsored Cercle meetings – including meals and accommodation – no less than seven times between 1977 and 1986" (548). Heck, for example, would be the host for the Cercle meeting held in Bonn in July 1983. Alongside Heck at the 1982 meeting in the HSS conference centre in Wildbad-Kreuth was the HSS's Dieter A. Schmidt, who would also attend the Cercle meeting in early 1983. The two foundation representatives could count on military advice from a recently retired senior German Army officer, General Franz Joseph Schulze, NATO Commander Central Europe (AFCENT) from 1977 until his retirement in 1979. Schulze would be a frequent participant at Cercle meetings, attending not only this 1982 meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth, but also those held in early 1983, July 1983 in Bonn, and July 1984 in Bonn. Alongside the CSU foreign policy spokesman Huyn, his CDU counterpart and fellow German representative in CEDI, Dr. Werner Marx, Chairman of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee, would attend the Cercle meetings held in early 1983 and in July 1983 in Bonn. At the first of the two 1983 meetings, Marx brought along a member of his committee, Peter Petersen, a CDU MP in 1965-72 and 1976-1990, who would later attend the January 1984 Cercle meeting in South Africa. At the Cercle meeting in early 1983, the CSU would be represented not just by Huyn but also by two senior CSU politicians, the first of which was Dr. Franz Heubl, a founding member of the CSU. A Bavarian regional MP from 1953 to 1990, he served as Bavarian Minister of State for Federal Affairs from 1962 to 1978 when he became President of the Bavarian Parliament, a post he filled until 1990. Heubl was accompanied at the Cercle meeting in early 1983 by his successor as Bavarian Minister of State for Federal and European Affairs Peter Schmidhuber, who sat in the Bundestag for the CSU in 1965-69 and 1972-78 before being elected to the regional Bavarian Parliament and serving as minister under Strauß from 1978 to 1987; at this time, he was also a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Schmidhuber would later serve as an EEC/EU Commissioner in Brussels from 1987 to 1995. Besides these friends from the world of politics, the Cercle would also be supported by German industry, notably by Peter Jungen, the Chairman of the mechanical engineering firm Pohlig, Heckel, Bleichert/PHB Weserhütte AG and Vice-Chairman of the CDU Economic Council who attended all five Cercle meetings held from early 1983 until February 1985 (549). The July 1983 Cercle meeting hosted in Bonn by Heck and the KAS would also be attended by top figures from the CDU and the KAS, the most senior of whom was Alois Mertes, like fellow participants Huyn and Narjes a veteran of the German diplomatic service which Mertes had joined in 1952. He served as General Consul in Marseille and at the German Embassy in Paris from 1958 to 1963 at a time when ROGUE AGENTS 257 Pinay was at the peak of his power as de Gaulle's Minister of Finance charged with the introduction of the new French franc in 1960. Mertes was then posted to the Moscow Embassy from 1963 to 1966, studied under Kissinger at Harvard in 1968-69 and became the Foreign Office's Director of European Security and Regional Disarmament in 1969. He had been an AESP contact since at least 1973 and was made a Life Member of the AESP in 1977 (550). From 1980 to 1982, Mertes served as Chairman of the CDU Foreign Policy Working Group in the Bundestag and CDU foreign policy spokesman before being appointed Minister of State in the Foreign Office in October 1982, the position he held at the time of the Cercle meetings he attended in July 1983 and July 1984; he died in office in June 1985. At the July 1983 Cercle meeting, Mertes was accompanied by another longstanding German AESP contact, Dr. Philipp Jenninger, a CDU MP from 1969 until 1990, who had served as the press spokesman at the Ministry of Defence from 1964 to 1966 and then as political advisor to Finance Minister Strauß until 1969. From 1973 until 1982 Jenninger was the First Parliamentary Secretary of the CDU/CSU fraction in the Bundestag, attending the 1974 XXIII CEDI Congress alongside Huyn, Sánchez Bella and Jonet, all of whom were also present at the July 1983 Cercle meeting (551). The year before this 1983 Cercle meeting, Jenninger had been appointed Minister of State in the Federal Chancellor's Office, serving until 1984 when he became President of the Bundestag until 1988. Alongside Mertes and Jenninger at the Cercle meeting in July 1983 were two senior figures from the KAS, the first of whom was KAS backer Alphons Horten. An industrialist born in East Germany and Managing Director of the J. Weck preserving jar manufacturer, Horten had been a co-founder of the CDU Economic Council in 1963, and later its Vice-President and Treasurer. In 1964, he acted as Treasurer of the KAS's registered charity for political education which supported its study centre. In 1965, Horten was elected as a CDU MP, serving seven years until 1972; from 1968 to 1972, he was the Treasurer of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung under its new Chairman Bruno Heck, the host of this 1983 Cercle meeting. From the mid-1970s on, Horten was also a contact of the AESP, having met the full AESP team at their Grand Dîner Charlemagne and Chapter Assembly held in February 1976 (552). Another top KAS member at the July 1983 Cercle meeting was the German expert on weapons of mass destruction and nuclear proliferation Dr. Hans Rühle, a prominent figure in the KAS Institute for Social Sciences, having served as its Head of Research for Foreign and Defence Policy from 1974 to 1978 and then heading the Institute from 1978 to 1982. That year, Rühle was appointed Head of the Planning Staff in the Defence Ministry, the position he held when attending two Cercle meetings in July 1983 and July 1984. In 1987, Chancellor Kohl would block his promotion to the post of Secretary of State at the Defence Ministry; Rühle then left the CDU (553). ROGUE AGENTS 258 The July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn welcomed not only Habsburg but also the serving Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation, CSU politician Jürgen Warnke, whose 1958 law doctorate (on democracy and the French political parties) had been supervised by Professor von der Heydte. A Bavarian regional MP from 1962 on, Warnke was elected to the Bundestag in 1969 and sat there until 1988. From 1982 to 1987, he was the Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation in charge of German development aid; after a brief stint as Federal Minister of Transport until 1989, he resumed his post as German development minister until 1991. A year after attending this Cercle meeting, Warnke approved a 1985 grant of five million Marks from his ministry to the HSS for its Spanish partner organisation, the Fundación Cánovas del Castillo - run by fellow Cercle member Carlos Robles Piquer who had attended both 1983 Cercle meetings. Alongside Warnke, another participant at the July 1984 Cercle meeting was the retired Rear-Admiral Günter Poser, a former Head of the NATO Intelligence Center from 1970 till his retirement in 1973; in 1981, he and Huyn had been founding members of Western Goals' German anti-disarmament group, AESRI. A final – and very powerful – German participant at Cercle meetings was the veteran television presenter, Strauß promoter and Deutschland-Stiftung President Gerhard Löwenthal who attended the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington (554). As described above, the French delegation to the Cercle in 1982-85 was left in disarray by the withdrawal of Cercle co-founders Pinay and Violet; their absence was further compounded by the fierce infighting that had rent French conservatism since mid-1976, a savage battle for dominance pitting President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing against his former Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac. Having resigned as Prime Minister in August 1976, Chirac had created the RPR in December 1976 and decisively defeated Giscard's candidate to become Mayor of Paris in March 1977. The struggle would carry through into the first round of the presidential elections in April 1981 when Giscard d'Estaing easily beat off the two right-wing challenges from Chirac and RPR co-founder Marie-France Garaud to stand as the conservative candidate against the Socialist François Mitterrand in the second round. However, Giscard's initial victory would be pyrrhic; unlike Britain, America and Germany, France would be dominated by the Left throughout the 1980s. In the second round in May 1981, twenty-three years of unbroken conservative rule were abruptly terminated when Mitterrand vanquished Giscard to become the first Socialist President of the Fifth Republic, a defeat which deprived the Right of access to government and the influence that went with it. The only French participant to regularly attend the Cercle gatherings held between 1982 and 1985, missing only the early 1983 meeting, was the French convenor and security advisor to Chirac, Monique Garnier-Lançon, who was unable to attract to the Cercle suitable attendees who would come to more than one or two meetings. Several of the participants were also past their prime, as was shown at the July 1983 Cercle meeting hosted by the KAS in Bonn; the top two French guests were ROGUE AGENTS 259 both eminent diplomats and no doubt of a like mind with the Cercle, but one was a colleague of Pinay from 1955, whereas the second had retired twenty years earlier. The first was the veteran French EEC official Jean-François Deniau, who had been one of the delegates with Antoine Pinay at the 1955 Messina conference that had created the ECSC. After working as Permanent Secretary-General of the French delegation in Brussels in 1956, Deniau had drafted the preamble to the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and served as EEC Director and then Director-General in charge of negotiations with the UK from 1958 to 1963. After four years as French Ambassador to Mauritania, Deniau came back to Brussels to work at the EEC again, first as Commissioner for Foreign Trade in charge of membership negotiations with the UK, Denmark and Ireland from 1967 until 1970 and then as Commissioner for Foreign Affairs until 1973. Returning to French national politics, he served as Secretary of State for Cooperation in 1973 and Secretary of State for Agriculture and Rural Development in 1974-75 before becoming heavily involved with the Spanish transition to democracy as French Ambassador in Madrid in 1976. In 1977, he was appointed Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, switching to Minister for Foreign Trade in 1978 and finally serving as Minister for Administrative Reform in early 1981. An MP from 1978 to 1981, Deniau later sat in the European Parliament for the UDF from 1984 to 1986 when he was again elected to the National Assembly, serving as an MP until 1997 (555). The second former senior French diplomat at the July 1983 Cercle meeting, later also attending the January 1984 meeting in South Africa, was Francis Lacoste who had started his diplomatic career in 1929, serving as Plenipotentiary Minister and Deputy Delegate to the UN Security Council in 1950-54, and French Ambassador in Canada from 1955 to 1962 and then in Belgium until his retirement in 1963. The UN High Commissioner in Bangladesh in 1973, Lacoste was a Life Member of the AESP from at least 1976 on, attending its February 1976 Dinner and Assembly (556). At the two Cercle meetings held in 1984 – in January in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and in July in Bonn – France was further represented by another veteran member whom we have met before: the former minister Philippe Malaud, who chaired Pinay's old party, the Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans (CNIP), from 1980 to 1987. In July 1984, Malaud was elected to the European Parliament and, from that September on, would sit on the the PEU International Council alongside Habsburg and Jonet, two of the other participants at the second 1984 Cercle meeting. As noted above, over the previous year, Malaud's Comité Français contre le Neutralisme et pour la Paix had been working with Paul Vankerkhoven, the Belgian IEPS and Garaud's Institut International de Géopolitique within the 6I's antidisarmament campaign (557). The July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn would also attract another Cercle supporter, this time from the media rather than the world of politics or diplomacy: ROGUE AGENTS 260 François d'Orcival, Chairman of the Editorial Committee of the conservative news magazineValeurs Actuelles, for which he is still an editorial writer today. Back in the 1950s, d'Orcival had been one of the leaders of Jeune Nation, a right-wing extremist group banned in 1958 after bombing the French National Assembly; in 1960, he was one of the founders of the Fédération des Etudiants Nationalistes (FEN) which was involved in the attacks carried out by the OAS to defend l'Algérie française – d'Orcival would interned for four weeks in 1962 as a result. It was whilst editing the FEN journal, Les cahiers universitaires, that he met his future employer and fellow Cercle member Raymond Bourgine, founder in 1957 of the Compagnie française de journaux (Valmonde Group) whose main titles are Valeurs actuelles et Le Spectacle du monde, for which d'Orcival started work in 1966 (558). Bourgine, who was close to Pinay and Pompidou, had been introduced to Chirac by the latter and became a firm supporter of Chirac from his successful 1977 bid for the Mayoralty of Paris through to the 1988 presidential elections in which Chirac, Prime Minister in the first cohabitation government formed in 1986, was decisively defeated by the sitting President Mitterrand. Bourgine served as a Senator for Paris from 1977 to his death in 1990, latterly for the RPR; he was present at the next Cercle meeting after that attended by d'Orcival, held in Washington in February 1985 (559). Also attending the Washington Cercle meeting alongside Bourgine was one of the most significant – and, many would argue, sinister - figures of the French hard Right since the 1960s: Charles Pasqua. A founder in 1959 of the Gaullist parallel police, the Service d'Action Civique (SAC), he would remain a member until 1969. In December 1976, he was a co-founder of the RPR with Chirac and Marie-France Garaud, becoming its Deputy Secretary-General. He was elected to the Senate for the RPR in 1977 and led the unsuccessful Chirac campaign to replace Giscard d'Estaing as the conservative candidate in the 1981 presidential elections. Between 1981 and 1986, he was then President of the RPR in the Senate; his attendance at the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington falls in this period. Disappointed with the failure of Garnier-Lançon to find suitable members (she would relinquish the post of French convenor in 1986), it would seem that the Cercle turned for help to Pasqua, a formidable networker and conservative éminence grise. He would certainly be a more powerful friend, leaving the Senate in March 1986 to serve as the controversial Interior Minister under Prime Minister Chirac during the first cohabitation government which held office until May 1988 - Pasqua's closest cabinet colleague was the Justice Minister, Albin Chalandon, the former head of ELF from 1977 to 1983 during the sniffer plane scandal. In 1988, Pasqua would return to the Senate, serving there, apart from two interludes, until 2011 (560). At the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington, Pasqua was accompanied by a key assistant from the RPR, Jean-François Probst, who had been the chargé de mission for Chirac when the latter was Prime Minister under Giscard d'Estaing in 1974-76. From 1976 to 1978, Probst served as directeur du cabinet for Jérôme Monod, Secretary-General of the RPR; the Deputy Secretary-General was Pasqua. ROGUE AGENTS 261 After a spell in the Foreign Ministry from 1979 to 1981, Probst then worked as Secretary-General of the RPR group in the Senate whose President was Pasqua. As a member of the RPR Central Committee, Probst was, with Pasqua, one of Chirac's closest advisors and would play a considerable part in Chirac's unsuccessful presidential bid in 1988 (561). A final member of the French delegation at the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington was Air Force General Etienne Copel, who was a French nuclear tactical expert, in many ways the tactical counterpart to the French nuclear strategist, fellow Cercle member and CEDI stalwart General Pierre Gallois. In 1969, Copel had been put in charge of the first French nuclear tactical squadron; in 1973, he was the first pilot to carry out a solo drop of a tactical nuclear bomb at the French nuclear testing facility at Mururoa atoll. From 1981 on, Copel commanded the Air Defence Operations Centre before being promoted in 1983 to the post of Deputy Head of the Air General Staff for Operations. He would however resign in March 1984, nearly a year before this Cercle meeting, so as to be able to publicly express his opposition to government defence policy, a move similar to the 1980 resignation of General Close in Belgium. He would go on to be the Vice-President of the High Council for Civil Defence in 1987 (562). The Spanish delegation to the Cercle may have been small but it included several prominent figures. Romanones, Crozier's channel to Ronald Reagan in July 1980, attended five of the six Cercle meetings held between June 1982 and February 1985, missing only the July 1984 meeting in Bonn. Veteran Opus Dei and CEDI luminary Alfredo Sánchez Bella was also a regular participant, attending the Wildbad-Kreuth meeting in June 1982, both meetings in 1983 and the February 1985 meeting in Washington. At the Cercle meeting held in early 1983, the delegation also included the two top figures from Alianza Popular: the party's President, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, and his brother-in-law, Carlos Robles Piquer, since 1982 the General Coordinator of Alianza Popular. Having scored only 6% of the vote in the March 1979 elections, the first to be held under the December 1978 Constitution that Fraga had co-written, Alianza Popular had gained strength following the collapse of the centrist UCD government under Adolfo Suárez, and in the October 1982 elections won 26% of the vote, becoming the main opposition party to the Socialist government under Felipe González which had won a landslide victory with 48% of the vote. Robles Piquer would also attend the next Cercle meeting held in July 1983 in Bonn; he had been elected as a Senator a month previously and would serve until 1987 when he was elected as an MEP in the first direct Spanish elections to the European Parliament, sitting there until 1999 (563). The American delegation would however almost outweigh all of these European participants, making up nearly half of those attending Cercle meetings between 1982 ROGUE AGENTS 262 and 1985, a reflection of the fact that, since the arrival of Rockefeller, Kissinger and Nixon in the Cercle in the late 1960s, Cercle meetings had been held once a year in Washington. Unsurprisingly, the most regular American attendee was Donald Jameson, the Cercle's transatlantic coordinator since at least 1977 and a 6I Politburo member, who attended all of the Cercle meetings between June 1982 and February 1985 except the meeting in Bonn in July 1984. At the various Cercle meetings, he would be accompanied by senior members of the Reagan Administration, Congress and the American military. One such military figure who attended four Cercle meetings during this period (June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth, early 1983, July 1984 in Bonn and February 1985 in Washington DC) was Rear Admiral Robert J. Hanks, who had commanded the American naval forces in the Near East in the early 1970s before serving as Director of the Security Assistance Division in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations until his retirement in 1977 (564). Powerful figures in the Reagan Administration also attended this 1982 Wildbad-Kreuth meeting, the first of which was Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs from 1982 to 1985, Richard McCormack, who would later attend the Cercle meetings held in July 1983 in Bonn and in February 1985 in Washington. Before being appointed by Reagan in 1982, McCormack had served from 1979 to 1981 as Legislative Assistant to Senator Jesse Helms, the senior Republican from North Carolina first elected to the Senate in 1972 who, for nearly thirty years, was a key hardline influence on American foreign and domestic policy, earning the nickname "Senator No" (565). Six months after the last Cercle meeting covered by the Garnier-Lançon papers, that of February 1985, McCormack was appointed as Permanent Representative of the US to the Organisation of American States, serving until 1989 when he became Under-Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment. During his term of office until 1991, McCormack served as President Bush's personal representative at the 1989 economic summit in Paris and at the 1990 summit in Houston, Texas (566). Senator Helms himself would also be represented at several Cercle meetings by his two top aides, the first of whom was his Chief Legislative Assistant, James P. Lucier, who attended the Cercle meetings held in June 1982 in Wildbad-Kreuth, in January 1984 in Stellenbosch, and in February 1985 in Washington. As well as acting as Helms's Chief Legislative Assistant, Lucier also served as the Minority Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms's stamping ground, but would be fired by Helms in January 1992. The second top aide was Helms's foreign policy advisor from 1974 to 1982, lawyer John E. Carbaugh, who attended the Cercle meeting in Bonn in July 1984. Carbaugh had been recommended to Helms in 1973 by longstanding Senator from South Carolina Strom Thurmond, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Lucier was a former aide to Thurmond. Between them, Lucier and Carbaugh would act as Helms's éminences grises, representing or accompanying him on many of his foreign trips and lobbying for his positions in Washington. ROGUE AGENTS 263 The pair would also play a considerable part in facilitating discreet conservative funding for domestic or foreign allies, as is evidenced by declassified State Department cable 1977STATE134962 which referred to a "sensitive IRS investigation" of an American corporation, Analysis And Research Association, Inc., and detailed the text of an Inland Revenue Service letter agreed with the State Department that had been sent out to "each of the former officials they were interested in interviewing (Strauss, Barzel, Marx, Von Bismark, Rinsche, Bahner)". The letter stated that "the principal officers of the corporation were Paul Weyrich, Victor Fediay and James Lucier. Certain records of the corporation indicate that you may have had dealings with the corporation or its officers during the years 1971 and 1972". The 1977 State Department cable noted that Marx had replied that he had no information to offer to the IRS, whereas Strauß could not remember and might need his memory jogged (567). Of the corporation's officers, Lucier was not the only one to attend the 1982 Cercle meeting hosted by Strauß in Wildbad-Kreuth; another participant was Paul M. Weyrich, co-founder with Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation in February 1973 and co-founder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority in June 1979 (568). This would not be the only time that Lucier or Carbaugh would be implicated in dodgy political funding of interest to the IRS; the New York Times reported in June 1982 that "Mr. Carbaugh and James P. Lucier, another Helms aide, are, respectively, the vice president and secretary-treasurer of the Institute of American Relations and the Institute of American Relations Foreign Affairs Council which were set up in 1975 as tax-exempt educational organisations [...] Several Senate aides and friends of Mr. Carbaugh, however, are convinced that a key reason for his leaving the job [of foreign policy advisor to Helms in 1982] was a series of news reports and events involving a network of conservative support groups, in which Mr. Carbaugh played a central role, that threatened to embarrass Senator Helms because of their controversial tax-exempt status [...] although Mr. Carbaugh was employed full time by the Senator, tax returns showed that the aide had spent about half his time on institute business and received more than $70,000 from between 1977 and 1980 from one of the groups, the Institute of American Relations. The group's largest supporter was the oil billionaire, Nelson Bunker Hunt, according to Congressional Quarterly" (569). Carbaugh and Lucier were certainly active for Senator Helms; in September 1979, the pair had stirred up a diplomatic storm when visiting London to urge Rhodesian Premier Ian Smith not to give any ground in the ongoing Lancaster House talks with the British, bluntly stating that "we don't want to see this conference succeed". Whilst in London, Lucier and Carbaugh had also met with the leading Tory hardliner on Rhodesia – Julian Amery. Although Thatcher had been in contact with Helms since her days in opposition, had met him in London in July 1979 and had accepted to meet Carbaugh during his September visit, she was ROGUE AGENTS 264 infuriated at what she saw as unwelcome and offensive meddling by Helms and his aides in a thorny issue which had long split the Conservative Party with Monday Clubbers such as Amery, Hastings, Biggs-Davison, Churchill and Lord and Viscount Cranborne in open rebellion against the government line. Edward Lanpher, the American diplomat in London charged with shadowing the talks, sent an urgent cable to the then American Secretary of State, Cyrus R. Vance, later recalling: "I had a call that evening or early the next morning from Dick Moose, the Assistant Secretary, saying, "When your cable on Carbaugh and Lucier hit Mr. Vance's desk, he had to be scraped off the ceiling. He was hopping mad." He was following the negotiations very closely, reading every cable out of London and everywhere else. Vance had had problems with Carbaugh and Lucier on the Panama Canal treaties, on SALT, on Central America policy, and other things. And here they were, screwing up Rhodesia. But according to Moose, and I don't have this except by heresay [sic], apparently, Vance just went ballistic. He went up to the Hill [...] and got the Senate to get to Jesse Helms and order his aides out of London" (570). Carbaugh would also wield considerable influence on other continents, attending the September 1980 conference of CAL, the Latin American chapter of WACL, alongside Stefano Delle Chiaie and El Salvadorean ARENA leader Roberto d'Aubuisson; Carbaugh would later play an important part in the promotion of d'Aubuisson in the US in 1982 (571). According to the New York Times, Carbaugh "was a major force in the decision of the State Department and the White House last month [March 1981] to cut off aid to Nicaragua, despite concerns among policy makers that termination of aid might alienate Nicaragua from the United States, according to White House and State Department officials. He persistently lobbied the White House and the State and Defense Departments to win appointments to key policy posts for conservatives, including Fred C. Iklé, former chief of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Presidents Ford and Nixon, who has been named Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, according to the same officials [...] After Mr. Reagan's election, Mr. Carbaugh served on the State Department transition team. Mr. Carbaugh was known to have sought a high-ranking job in the Administration and was said to be disappointed when the position he was offered was Ambassador to Paraguay. After rejecting the job, Mr. Carbaugh told friends, I have more power where I am now" (572). Pride however came before a fall and, as the New York Times and possibly the IRS closed in, Carbaugh resigned as foreign policy advisor to Helms, joining a Washington law firm in June 1982 and attending the July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn (573). After leaving Republican Congressional politics, Carbaugh would still have occasion to meet his old colleagues, amongst them veteran Republican Senate organiser Margaret D. B. Carlisle, who would meet Lucier at the June 1982 Cercle meeting in Wildbad-Kreuth and Carbaugh at the July 1984 Cercle meeting in Bonn. ROGUE AGENTS 265 Margo Carlisle had worked with Feulner and Weyrich of the Heritage Foundation since 1975; in January 1979, she wrote "Changing the Rules of the Game in the US Senate" for the Heritage Foundation journal, Policy Review. From 1979 on, she was the Executive Director of the Republican Senate Steering Committee and Staff Director of the Senate Republican Conference. Along with Carbaugh, Delle Chiaie and d’Aubuisson, she attended the 1980 conference of the Latin American chapter of WACL, CAL. From 1982 to 1985, Carlisle was a trustee of the Philadelphia Society, on which see below; Feulner, its co-founder, was its President in 1982-83. In March 1983, in between the two known Cercle meetings she attended, Carlisle was one of the participants at the fourth conference organised by the NSIC's Consortium for the Study of Intelligence; its "Symposium on the Role of Special Operations in US Strategy for the 1980s" was also attended by the NSIC's Barnett and Godson, Senate Intelligence Committee staffer Angelo Codevilla (a codrafter of the Heritage Foundation's January 1981 intelligence policy recommendations and later NSIC and IEDSS author), journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, and a trio of core 6I and Cercle members – Shackley, Jameson and General Stilwell, then Iklé's Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy - as well as Major Oliver North of the NSC, and the British counter-insurgency veterans Maurice Tugwell, a Canadian-based NSIC partner, and General Sir Walter Walker, a speaker at Close's 1983 WACL conference held in Luxembourg six months later. In 1984, Carlisle worked for the Republican Senate Election Committee before serving from 1986 to 1989 as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs, "in essence the Defense Department's chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill". After leaving public service in 1989, she was the Vice President for governmental relations at the Heritage Foundation until 1991, and later a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Security Policy (574). Another Reagan Administration official at the June 1982 Cercle meeting hosted by Strauß and the HSS in Wildbad-Kreuth was the variously named Pat Ballestreri/Bellestreri/Balestreri, who would attend this and two further Cercle meetings in early 1983 and in South Africa in January 1984 as the Assistant for International Affairs to Richard Perle, the "Prince of Darkness". From 1981 to 1987, Perle was Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy; at the time, he was a member of the ASC's lobbying arm, the Coalition for Peace through Strength. Perle would be confirmed in 2014 as having been a Cercle member himself since the late 1970s. In 1982, soon after Perle's appointment to the Reagan Administration, he hired NSC Middle East expert Douglas J. Feith as his Special Counsel; Feith would go on to serve as Reagan's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy from 1984 to 1986 (575). A final American participant at the June 1982 Cercle meeting in Wildbad- Kreuth was Miles M. Costick, an expert on Soviet trade who had coined the phrase "resource war" to describe the battle between the US and the Soviet Union for raw ROGUE AGENTS 266 materials and Third World spheres of influence. For several years, Costick had been an active contributor to the US WACL chapter, the American Council of World Freedom (ACWF). He addressed their annual meeting in 1976 and, the following year, was a speaker with Crozier, Cline, Allen, Helms, Lefever and Colby at an ACWF antidétente conference. In 1978, Costick produced the report The Strategic Dimension of East-West Trade for the ACWF Task Force on Strategic Trade. In 1979, Costick worked alongside Durbrow and Richardson as speakers at the triennial convention of the National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups; "Lt. General Daniel O. Graham USA (Ret.), national со-chairman of the Coalition for Peace through Strength, served as the banquet speaker". From 1978 on, Costick was the President of the Institute for Strategic Trade which denounced American technology transfer to the Soviet Union during the Carter Administration; in September 1980, Costick gave testimony on the subject to the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. In November 1981, Costick 'testified' alongside US WACL notables General Singlaub and Professor David Rowe before the National Committee to Restore Internal Security; the Committee Chairman, also present, was Robert Morris, the former Chief Counsel of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and a Director of the USCWF, the refounded American WACL chapter run by Generals Singlaub and Graham. Two months before this 1982 Cercle meeting in Bavaria where Costick met Close, Jonet, de Kerchove and de Bonvoisin, he was quoted in Damoclès, the newsletter of the Belgian WACL chapter (576). The following Cercle meeting in early 1983, almost certainly held in Washington, also evidenced the Cercle's contacts at the highest level of American politics – one of the guests was the former President, Richard Nixon. At the meeting, Nixon was accompanied by his former foreign policy coordinator from 1968 on, Richard V. Allen. From 1977 to 1980, Allen had worked as Governor Ronald Reagan's chief foreign policy advisor, sitting on the IEDSS Council from 1979 on. Allen was then appointed President Reagan's first National Security Advisor, serving from January 1981 until his forced resignation in a scandal about paid access in January 1982. Whilst National Security Advisor, Allen had helped to ensure initial CIA funding for the 6I and was one of the recipients of the 6I bulletin, Transnational Security. Following his resignation, Allen became a Fellow of the Hoover Institution in 1983 and served as Senior Counsellor for Foreign Policy and National Security for the Republican National Committee (577). Not all those at the early 1983 Cercle meeting had however been forced to leave public service; one such was William Schneider Jnr, from 1982 to 1986 Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology – the man in charge of coordinating all American foreign military aid who would also attend the Cercle meetings held in July 1983 and July 1984 in Bonn. From 1971 on, Schneider had been a staff member of the Hudson Institute, also serving as an advisor to James L. Buckley, a New York Senator from 1971 to ROGUE AGENTS 267 1977 and member of the Senate Budget Committee for Defense and International Affairs. In 1972, Schneider joined Buckley's staff and worked from 1974 to 1976 as his Legislative Assistant, visiting Vietnam with him in 1974 and 1975, accompanied on the latter visit by Jeffrey B. Gayner of the Heritage Foundation, described below. In 1976, Schneider would make another trip abroad, this time to Zaire along with Edwin Feulner, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and Executive Director of the House Republican Study Committee. Between 1976 and 1978, Schneider contributed articles to several publications by the Council for American Affairs, an American chapter of WACL run by racist and anti-Semitic anthropologist Roger Pearson; Schneider's co-authors were Feulner, Gayner, Cline and Graham. From 1975 to 1978, Schneider was also a trustee of the Philadelphia Society, a dinner discussion group which had been set up in 1964 by Feulner, M. Stanton Evans, Milton Friedman, conservative publisher Henry Regnery and National Review founder William F. Buckley, Senator Buckley's younger brother. Philadelphia Society meetings attracted hardline conservatives such as Weyrich, Pearson, Harrigan, Casey, Carlisle, Allen, Pipes, Lefever and Shakespeare. At one Philadelphia Society meeting Schneider addressed in April 1977, one of his fellow speakers was Robert Moss; at another Schneider attended in November 1980, the keynote speaker was Arnaud de Borchgrave. After Ronald Reagan's election victory that month, Schneider was first appointed as Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget, serving from 1981 to 1982; his former boss Senator Buckley meanwhile became Reagan's Under-Secretary of State for Security Assistance. In 1982, Schneider took over from Buckley at the State Department as Under-Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology, serving until 1986; Buckley filled the post of President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc. until 1985 (578). A neoconservative academic who attended the Cercle meeting in early 1983 was Prof. Dr. Robert Pfaltzgraff, Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, and co-founder in 1976 of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA), of which he has been the longstanding President. Also present at the same 1983 Cercle meeting were one of the IFPA's frequent authors in the 1980s, Rear Admiral Robert J. Hanks, and an old acquaintance of Pfaltzgraff from the early 1970s – William Schneider (579). A further figure of interest at the early 1983 Cercle meeting was John Barron, listed as the Chief Editor of the Reader's Digest and a lead author for the magazine in 1974 and 1977. Long renowned as a disinformation outlet, the Reader's Digest was at this time promoting the now thoroughly discredited "Bulgarian Connection" theory espoused by its contributor Claire Sterling, according to which the Bulgarian secret service under KGB direction had hired the Turkish ultra-nationalist gunman Mehmet ROGUE AGENTS 268 Ali Ağca to kill Pope John Paul II in May 1981 because of his support for the Solidarność trades union in Poland. As her obituary in the Independent put it, "Claire Sterling, a self-proclaimed terrorism expert, was one of three journalists responsible for fabricating and divulging the details of the theory. The others were Paul Henze, a propaganda expert and former CIA station chief in Turkey, and Michael Leeden [sic] [...] under Ronald Reagan's administration, the US was involved in a massive rearmament programme and the Bulgarian Connection served effectively to counter the pacifist movement, and the Allies were persuaded to accept the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles". Sterling's vehicle of choice for launching the theory was a September 1982 article in the Reader's Digest, "The Plot to Kill the Pope", which she would later expand into a book, The Time of the Assassins, published in 1983; the disinformation would also be recycled in Frederick Forsyth's 1984 novel The Fourth Protocol (580). The Cercle's strong transatlantic connections to the American section of WACL and the Heritage Foundation would continue at its July 1983 meeting in Bonn in the person of veteran right-wing multi-functionary Lee Edwards, credited as President of the Center for International Relations. Throughout the 1970s, Edwards had been the Secretary of the American Council for World Freedom, the first US WACL chapter whose President was John M. Fisher of the IAS and ASC; both men had attended the 4th WACL Conference held in Tokyo in September 1970. As well as serving as the Executive Secretary of the National Captive Nations Committee (whose Congress in 1983 included future British Cercle member John Wilkinson, detailed above) and writing a regular column for the Ukrainian Weekly, Edwards was also Senior Editor of the Moonies' magazine The World & I and a contributor to their Washington Times, whose 20th anniversary Edwards commemorated with the book Our times: the Washington Times, 1982-2002. A Distinguished Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, Edwards would be the author of the 1997 book The power of ideas: the Heritage Foundation at 25 years and the 2013 definitive history of the Foundation, Leading the Way: The Story of Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation, as well as the author of biographies of Walter Judd, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Needless to say, Edwards was also a Distinguished Member of Feulner's Philadelphia Society, having been at various times its President or its trustee. He would later be an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics, serving on the faculty alongside Herb Romerstein, Kenneth deGraffenreid, J. Michael Waller and fellow Cercle members Sven Kraemer and Norman A. Bailey, presented below. Edwards has also served as Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, whose National Advisory Council includes Feulner, Pipes and Singlaub and whose International Advisory Council includes Bukovsky and the late Brian Crozier (581). A year later, in July 1984 again in Bonn, the Heritage Foundation would be represented by their stalwart policy analyst Jeffrey B. Gayner, who would also attend ROGUE AGENTS 269 the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington. Gayner had worked for the Heritage Foundation since at least 1974, visiting Vietnam with Schneider in 1975 as Director of the Heritage Foundation Foreign Policies Study Center, a post he filled until at least 1982. From 1976 to 1978, he co-wrote several books for the US WACL affiliate, the Council on American Affairs; Feulner, Schneider, Cline and Graham would be his coauthors. In 1979, Gayner chaired the Heritage Foundation Transition Team for the State Department. He would continue to work for the Heritage Foundation throughout the 1980s and 1990s, acting as the Director of its Moscow Office in 1993 and serving as a Senior Fellow in 1995; he would also be a trustee of the Philadelphia Society from 1995 to 1998 (582). However, it was at the February 1985 meeting on home turf in Washington that the Cercle would best show the level of its contacts within the Reagan Administration including leading figures from the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and the National Security Council. The most senior of the Cercle attendees from the Pentagon was Fred C. Iklé, the serving Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; his Deputy Under-Secretary of Defence for Policy was the 6I's General Richard Stilwell who accompanied Iklé to this Cercle meeting. Iklé was a veteran nuclear defence analyst who had written reports for the RAND Corporation from 1957 to 1971. After Iklé had met Nixon at Harvard, Kissinger appointed him as Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973, a post he filled under Presidents Nixon and Ford until 1977. In 1979-80, Iklé was coordinator of the team of foreign policy advisors to Governor Reagan and then served in both Reagan Administrations as Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy from 1981 to 1987. In March 1985, one month after this Cercle meeting, Reagan signed Iklé's proposal to arm the Afghan mujaheddin with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, a policy implemented after initial CIA objections in February 1986 (583). As well as the Iklé/Stilwell team, the Cercle could also count on other powerful friends within Reagan's national security apparatus, as noted above - both Richard Perle, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1981 to 1987, and William Schneider Jnr, the Under-Secretary of State for Security Assistance from 1982 to 1986, were also members of the Cercle at the time. Besides its contacts in the Pentagon and the State Department, the Cercle enjoyed top-level access to the intelligence community – a further participant at the February 1985 Cercle meeting was Herbert E. Meyer, an economist and associate editor of Fortune magazine who was brought into the CIA in 1981 by Director Casey to act as his Special Assistant and Vice-Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, the body which manages production of the National Intelligence Estimates giving the consensus view of the sixteen American intelligence agencies. One of the most senior intelligence officials in the Reagan Administration, Meyer would hold the position on the NIC until at least 1985, gaining considerable ROGUE AGENTS 270 notoriety in November 1983 for a report he submitted to Casey and CIA Deputy Director John McMahon entitled "Why the World Is So Dangerous". The report, which forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union eight years before the event, was also read and appreciated by Reagan who later awarded Meyer the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community's highest honour. The report however stirred up resistance in the CIA and was subsequently leaked to the Press. "There was subsequent uproar throughout Washington, which made Meyer very nervous. He was summoned to his boss's office. "Herb, right now you’ve got the smallest fan club in Washington," Bill Casey told him grimly. As Meyer turned pale, Casey laughed: "Relax. It’s me and the president"". After his period at the CIA, Meyer went on to found the business consultancy Real-World Intelligence, Inc. and work in 1988 with the 6I's David Hart to set up a press agency on Soviet dissidents whose main source of information was Vladimir Bukovsky. True to form, nearly twenty years later, Meyer would recycle two notorious disinformation stories in the Wall Street Journal in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, claiming the CIA had refused to countenance "a persuasive case that Iraq and al Qaeda worked closely together in the months and years leading up to 9/11 […] an eerie replay of what happened in the early 1980s, when the CIA bureaucracy insisted - in the face of all experience and common sense - that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the attempted assassination of the Pope" (584)*. Another Casey appointee to the CIA in 1981 who attended the 1985 Washington Cercle meeting was Constantine C. Menges, at the time of the meeting a Latin America expert on the National Security Council and Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Whilst completing graduate studies at Columbia under Carter's future National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Menges started the first of what would be three periods at the Hudson Institute. From 1966 to 1968, he worked for the RAND Corporation; whilst there, he wrote a key study: "While many take credit after the fact for what became known as the "Reagan Doctrine", it was Constantine who, in 1968, wrote the original RAND paper that became the Reagan Doctrine, "Democratic Revolutionary Insurgency as an Alternative Strategy", arguing that "Communist regimes are very vulnerable to a democratic national revolution that is conducted with skill and the determination to succeed"" (585). Menges then served in the Nixon and Ford Administrations as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and, in 1975-76, as Director of the Bureau of International Affairs of the Civil Aeronautics Board. In 1978, he rejoined the Washington office of the Hudson Institute until 1981 when he was hired to work first for the CIA and then for the NSC: ROGUE AGENTS 271 "An academic by training, Mr. Menges was recruited by new CIA Director William Casey in May 1981 to be National Intelligence Officer for Latin America [...] Just before joining the CIA, Menges proposed the U.S. government establish a "National Foundation for Democracy", to promote nascent democratic movements in countries under communism and other forms of tyranny. President Reagan embraced the idea, and two years later convinced Congress to fund the National Endowment for Democracy [...] When he moved to the White House in 1983 to become a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs [until 1986], his first assignment was to draw up plans to restore democracy in Grenada after a communist coup. It was this part of the Grenada mission, more than the military intervention alone, that marked the definitive end of the Carter era and demonstrated it was possible to "roll back" communism, surely Ronald Reagan's greatest legacy" (586). "In President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, author Lou Cannon described Dr. Menges as one of a cadre of National Security Council aides who believed, as did Casey, "that the West should be mobilized to fight Communists with their own methods". Cannon described Dr. Menges "as one of the most forceful of these polemicists" and "a principled conservative." White House and State Department pragmatists, according to Cannon, dubbed him "Constant Menace," a play on his name, for his ardent support of action, covert and otherwise, against Nicaraguan Sandinistas and Salvadoran rebels [...] Dr. Menges contended that the invasion of Grenada helped avert a possible Grenada nuclear deployment crisis and strengthened President Ronald Reagan's hand in deploying intermediate-range missiles in Europe in late 1983" (587). After leaving the NSC in 1986, Menges would become a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in November 1987, giving a lecture that December with AEI Resident Fellow and Cercle member Richard Perle on "The Purpose of American Power". In May 1989, alongside fellow Cercle member Herb Meyer and Michael Ledeen, he spoke at a seminar on "The Role of Intelligence in a Free Society" (588). Menges was one of three National Security Council staffers to attend the 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington; another was a veteran NSC official whom we have met before - Sven Kraemer, who had served on the NSC as an arms control expert from 1967 to 1976 under Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Ford and had then spent the Carter Presidency working as Senior Staff Member for Defense and Foreign Policy for the Senate. In 1979, he chaired the Heritage Foundation's Transition Team for the Defense Department before returning to the NSC after Reagan's election as the Director of Arms Control from 1981 to 1987. ROGUE AGENTS 272 Kraemer was also the Program Director of Barnett's NSIC whose Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, created in 1979 as detailed above, involved several of the Cercle's American members listed here. Amongst the participants at five CSI conferences held between November 1979 and November 1984 were the Cercle members Richard V. Allen, Margo Carlisle, William Colby, Fred Iklé, Donald Jameson, Sven Kraemer, Ted Shackley and General Richard Stilwell. In the new millennium, another body with similar overlap would be the Institute of World Politics where Kraemer would serve on the faculty alongside fellow Cercle members Edwards and Bailey (presented below) as well as Romerstein, deGraffenreid and Waller. A third NSC staffer – who by this time had left the NSC to become an international economic consultant – was Norman A. Bailey, whose US Army service had been spent in Strategic Intelligence and Joint Operational Planning. From 1981 to 1983, Bailey worked for Reagan's NSC, successively filling the posts of Director of Planning and Evaluation, Senior Director of National Security Planning and International Economic Affairs, and Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs - Menges's predecessor. During his period of government service as an expert in tracking international financial flows, Bailey was a central character in "President Reagan's strategy to accelerate the demise of the Soviet Union [... and] to run economic warfare against the USSR", as is explained by William P. Clark, Reagan's second National Security Advisor, in his Foreword to Bailey's 1998 monograph, The Strategic Plan that won the Cold War: "The president worked closely with his National Security Council (NSC) team to configure a security-minded economic strategy that would constrict financial and other forms of Western life-support being tapped by the Kremlin. National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 66 and the economic section of NSDD 75 (prepared in November 1982 and January 1983, respectively) provide the best illustrations of this critically important dimension" (589). "According to Bailey […] the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early 1980s. From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President Reagan's National Security Council, called "Follow the Money", that used NSA signals intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union and its allies. […] According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a significant shift in resources from human spying to electronic surveillance, as a way to track money flows to suspected criminals and American enemies. "That was the beginning of the whole process", he said" (590). ROGUE AGENTS 273 In 2002, Bailey would co-found the Institute for Global Economic Growth, later serving as Professor of Economics and National Security on the faculty of the Institute of World Politics alongside fellow Cercle members Kraemer and Edwards (591). From 2006 to 2007, he headed a special unit within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela (592). Another Special Assistant to the President who attended the 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington was Walter John Raymond, a Polish-born Professor of Political Science and Chairman of the Department of Social Sciences at Saint Paul's College until his retirement in 1986 (593). The military would also be represented at the Cercle meeting by USAF Lieutenant-General James Alan Abrahamson, who, from 1981 to 1984 had been seconded to NASA to run the space shuttle programme. From 1984 until his retirement in 1989, Abrahamson served as the first Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization set up by Reagan with vociferous backing from the High Frontier lobby group run by Generals Graham and Richardson, as detailed above (594). Another significant military figure to attend the 1985 Cercle meeting was Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the Vietnam-era Chief of Naval Operations and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been a member of Team B in 1975- 76. A Board member of the ASC and Western Goals, Moorer was a co-chairman alongside Fisher and Graham of the ASC's Coalition for Peace Through Strength launched in August 1978, which, by 1981, could count on the support of 271 members of Congress and over 2,500 generals and admirals. From 1980 until at least 1989, Moorer was also Director of the NSIC (595). One prominent foreign guest at the February 1985 Cercle meeting was the Ukrainian-born former Soviet diplomat Arkady Shevchenko, who had served as the advisor to Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko from 1970 on before being appointed Under Secretary-General of the UN in 1973. "Second only to Kurt Waldheim at the United Nations [...] Mr. Shevchenko was considered the C.I.A.'s top trophy of the 1970s", reporting to the CIA from late 1975 on and defecting in April 1978 as the highest-ranking Soviet official ever to claim political asylum. With the help of William Geimer, the founder of the Jamestown Foundation in 1984, Shevchenko wrote his bestselling memoirs, Breaking With Moscow, which were published in March 1985, one month after this Cercle meeting; Shevchenko became an American citizen in February 1986 (596)*. A final national delegation at the Cercle meetings from 1982 to 1985 was that from South Africa, whose longstanding links with the Cercle have been documented above. The Cercle would take the opportunity to examine the situation on the ground by meeting three times in South Africa before the downfall of the apartheid regime – in the Afrikaner heartland of Stellenbosch in January 1984, and ROGUE AGENTS 274 in Capetown in March 1988 and March 1991 (597). The most frequent South African Cercle participant was General Alan Fraser, the former Chief of the Army Staff and Consul-General in Iran who had been working with the 6I since 1978; Fraser attended the Cercle meetings in June 1982 in Wildbad- Kreuth, in early 1983 most probably in Washington, in January 1984 in Stellenbosch and in February 1985 in Washington DC. However, most of the South African Cercle members – the only country to be represented by an official government delegation – were senior diplomats from the Department of Foreign Affairs, a major source of funding for the Cercle in the 1980s (598). One such was Robert Abraham du Plooy, who attended the Cercle meetings in early 1983, in July 1983 in Bonn, and in January 1984 in Stellenbosch. Having worked as the chargé d'affaires at the South African Embassy in Bonn from 1955 to 1960 (at a time when Strauß was Nuclear Power Minister, then Defence Minister), du Plooy served as ambassador in Latin America in the late 1960s and 1970s before representing South Africa in Paris as Ambassador to the Mitterrand government from December 1981 to May 1985 (599). Another very important diplomat who attended the January 1984 Cercle meeting in Stellenbosch was D. C. B. H. (Charles) Fincham, listed as a "former Ambassador, S.A. Institute for International Affairs". This mention underplays Fincham's significance as the first direct representative of South Africa in Israel. Previous cooperation between the two countries (such as the sale of uranium from South Africa to Israel from 1962 on) had been channelled through the South African mission in Athens, but by the spring of 1972, formal diplomatic relations could be established via the appointment of a South African Consul-General in Tel Aviv - Charles Fincham. The Consulate-General would be upgraded to full Embassy status in 1976; Fincham would serve as Ambassador until at least 1977 (600). A key concern of the South African government was to try and overcome the international sanctions on the country by promoting business opportunities, hence the presence at the January 1984 Stellenbosch meeting of a trio of high-powered industry representatives - Gavin Relly, Chairman of the Anglo American Corporation, Dirk Hertzog, Deputy Chairman of the Stellenbosch-based tobacco and industrial conglomerate Rembrandt Group and Basil Hersov, Chairman of the Anglovaal mining and industrial group (601). The concern to encourage business ventures was supported by the South African Ambassador to the US from 1982 to 1985, Brand Fourie, whose Embassy organised an annual business seminar in Washington (602). Fourie, formerly the South African Secretary/Director-General of Foreign Affairs from 1966 to 1982, attended the February 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington. ROGUE AGENTS 275 Fourie was certainly no stranger to the veteran members of the Cercle, having attended the 1976 CEDI meeting in Madrid along with Amery, Huyn, Bach and Sánchez Bella, all of whom he met again at the 1985 Cercle meeting in Washington (603). Once again, in new times, there's nothing like old friends.

Notes