Talk:Hubertus Hoffmann
I haven't a clue what all this means or how it relates to what has gone before. I tested it on an intelligent reader, who was also completely mystified. Have made some sort of sense of the article up to this point but this defeats me. --Claire Robinson 15:33, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
Revelations about Helmut Kohl's dirty money overwhelmed those of "a vast Cold War slush fund set up to tilt the political balance in the West's favour in target countries at crucial moments in history." The 'secret network' came to (not very much) light because its methods and key personalities were identical to those being investigated in Germany's biggest scandal since the war. It was Adenauer who established the channels.[1]
The overlooked article on the affair also told us that the system was revamped in 1974 after the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, warned that newly democratic Spain and Portugal were facing the Communist peril. Germany's democratic forces were asked to help.
The four parties in the Bundestag of the day agreed to set up "Operation Octopus". Their leaders, Willy Brandt, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Franz Josef Strauss and Helmut Kohl, were sworn to secrecy. The CIA also sent money via Central America, using the conduits that came to light during the Iran-Contra affair others funded Poland's Solidarity trade union.
According to the report Walther Kiep managed the Octopus cash:
- Now he heads the think tank Atlantik-Brucke (Atlantic Bridge) set up in 1952 to foster German-American friendship. Its membership list reads like a Who's Who in the arms business and contemporary funding scandals.[...] A former German defence minister, Volker Ruhe, and Nato general- secretary, Manfred Worner, who was forced to resign amid allegations of kickbacks from arms manufacturers, both attended a famously expensive 1994 dinner in Bonn hosted by Atlantik-Brucke.[2]
Worner was caught up in several scandals, but Dieter Farwick, Global Editor-in-Chief World Security Network Foundation, states he was "a close aid [sic]to former German Defense Minister Manfred Woerner"[3]
Kiep is Chairman of the German Advisory Committee for the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Trilateral Commission.
