Rogue Agents - 1981-1991 - Forward to Victory

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

Rogue Agents - 1981-1991 - Forward to Victory

• Rogue Agents: Contents
• Previous section: 1977-1980 - Election Fever

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