Foreign Affairs Research Institute

Foreign Affairs Research Institute was associated with the former Tory MP and committed anti-Communist, Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. It was a front for the South African Apartheid regime until at least 1981.

According to the analysis of David Teacher:

Shortly after attending the Academy's Grand Dinner and Chapter Assembly in Brussels in February 1976, Brian Crozier launched a regrouping of British Cercle friends, the Foreign Affairs Research Institute (279)*. The new South African- funded geopolitical institute brought together under one roof the disinformation assets of the ISC and top Conservative politicians in the Thatcherite NAFF and SIF who had worked with BOSS to oppose demonstrations against sporting links with South Africa. FARI was the British-based counterpart to the Centre d'Etudes du Monde Moderne, the Cercle's Parisian pro-Pretoria outfit. As had been the case with the Centre d'Etudes du Monde Moderne, it was the South Africans who footed the bill for FARI, providing £85,000 a year for several years; South Africa continued to finance FARI until at least 1981 (280)*. Funding for FARI was reportedly also forthcoming from the Lockheed and General Dynamics corporations.

In terms of personalities, FARI represented a coming together of Crozier's NAFF and ISC with Stewart-Smith's Foreign Affairs Circle and Foreign Affairs Publishing Company; FARI continued publication of Stewart-Smith's previous fortnightly bulletin East-West Digest, distributed free to all British MPs, and cooperation with the FAPC's foreign associates, notably Interdoc and Dr. Peter Sager's Swiss SOI (281).

The President of FARI was veteran Bilderberger Sir Frederic Bennett, a member of SIF and NAFF. The FARI Director was Geoffrey Stewart-Smith; the Deputy Director was Ian Greig, co-founder of the Monday Club, Chairman of its Subversion Committee and probable contact of Damman since 1973. On the Council of FARI we find the inseparable duo of Crozier and Moss of the ISC, NAFF and Shield, who brought along Air Vice-Marshal Stewart Menaul, an ISC Council member who would become a FARI mainstay. Having served as Senior Air Staff Officer, HQ Bomber Command (then in charge of British nuclear weapons) from 1961 to 1965, Menaul would go on to become the Commandant of the Joint Services Staff College and Director General of the influential thinktank, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), from 1968 to 1976 – a critical timespan in British politics. Besides joining the ISC Council, Menaul had also provided the ISC with their first registered address in the premises of the RUSI. Another member of the FARI Council alongside the ISC team of Crozier, Moss and Menaul was Michael Ivens of Aims, SIF and NAFF.

The political support FARI enjoyed is illustrated by the Council membership of four top Conservatives whom we have met before – Thatcher's leadership campaign manager and Shadow Minister for Northern Ireland Airey Neave and his deputy John Biggs-Davison of SIF and NAFF, at this time Chairman of the Monday Club, as well as future Cercle Chairman Julian Amery and Lord Chalfont. Another member of the FARI Council was Colonel Ronnie Waring, lecturer in counter-insurgency at the Royal Defence College and an associate of G. K. Young within Unison (282)*.

Major propaganda themes for FARI were to be the West's dependence on strategic minerals from South Africa and the country's significance for defence of the Cape oil route in the face of rising Soviet naval power in the Indian Ocean and Soviet encroachment in Mozambique, Angola and Namibia. In June 1976, Peter Janke visited Swaziland to speak at a mining conference organised by a South African Department of Information front group, the Foreign Affairs Association. At the conference, "Janke of the Institute of the Study of Conflict in London stressed the importance of South Africa's minerals to the West and dangers of the Soviet threat"; on his return to London, Janke prepared an edited version of the conference speeches for distribution to "persons of influence", published by FARI as The West cannot survive without minerals from Southern Africa (283). The same theme was echoed by Grau's Frankfurt Study Group, which published a brochure called Südafrikas strategische Bedeutung für die Rohstoffversorgung des Westens [South Africa's Strategic Significance for the West's Supply of Commodities], stating:

"The cutting-off of contacts between South Africa and the industrialised countries of the West as the result of a Soviet Navy blockade or as a result of the fall of the current South African government and its replacement by a Communist or Communist-influenced government would leave the West entirely defenceless" (284).

Working in partnership with FARI, the ISC continued their campaign in favour of South Africa with a total ISC budget for 1976 of over £30,000. July 1976 saw the publication of a Conflict Study by Janke, Southern Africa: New Horizons, followed in November by another Conflict Study, Soviet Strategic Penetration of Africa by David Rees. Further projects to support South Africa included a June 1976 interview with FARI Council member Lord Chalfont on the Cape oil route in the Pretoria-funded Dutch magazine To The Point and a 1976 South African television "documentary", The Angolan File, which attacked the Americans for pulling out of Angola. The programme, broadcast on South African television, had been produced by the South African Military Intelligence Division (MID), who had commissioned Crozier of the ISC/FARI to write the script (285).

Besides its defence of apartheid, FARI was also active in domestic politics in the UK, one of the major propaganda themes being the laxity of the Labour government in dealing with a "Soviet-dominated" IRA. On three occasions between August and September 1976, the two Conservative spokesmen for Northern Ireland, Neave and Biggs-Davison, both FARI Council members, used IRD disinformation to attack the "failure" of the Labour government to combat the "Czech and Cuban agents stoking revolution in Northern Ireland". The source of this disinformation was Colin Wallace of the Information Policy Unit in Northern Ireland. In 1974-75, Infpol was being pressured by MI5, rival to MI6 for control of the province, to go beyond black propaganda against the IRA and to turn its disinformation capability to the themes of KGB penetration of the Labour Party and Soviet manipulation of the IRA.

As mentioned above, in 1974 Wallace was tasked by MI5 to produce defamatory documents for press release on the basis of smears and analyses of political, sexual and financial vulnerabilities of several dozen Westminster MPs. When Wallace refused to participate in this operation codenamed Clockwork Orange 2 without guarantees of ministerial approval, MI5 arranged for his removal from the province and his dismissal from the Civil Service, a fate that befell other actors in the secret war who would not toe the MI5 line. With a broken career behind him, Wallace did not refuse when in 1976 Neave, Shadow Minister for Northern Ireland, proposed that Wallace work for him as a consultant. Part of Wallace's work consisted in providing the Neave-Biggs-Davison team with the information that Wallace had collated on Soviet subversion in Northern Ireland. Wallace has given the Press a letter addressed to him from Neave, written in August 1976, in which Neave asked specifically for a report that Wallace had prepared for Infpol, Ulster - a State of Subversion. This document by Wallace was based on a unattributable IRD Press briefing called Soviets Increase Control Over British Communists. Neave then recycled the report's main allegations of Soviet subversion in Northern Ireland and KGB penetration of the Parliamentary Labour Party in a speech given in August. A few days later, FARI published a brochure written by Neave's deputy Biggs-Davison entitled The strategic implications for the West of the international links of the IRA in Ireland. The brochure was also based on the unattributable IRD briefing and made the same references to the alleged laxity of the Labour government in dealing with Soviet subversion in Northern Ireland. Neave would repeat the allegations in a second speech on 11th September, and the same theme of Soviet manipulation of the IRA would be featured in a Conservative Party Position Paper on Northern Ireland published later the same month (286).

David Teacher writes:

Crozier makes no mention at all of FARI or of BOSS in his memoirs, no doubt because of the sensitive issues of covert South African funding of FARI and BOSS involvement in the operations against prominent Liberals Jeremy Thorpe and Peter Hain. Rhoodie gives details of the South African role in FARI: "From June 1, 1975 [Geoffrey Stewart-]Smith was linked by written contract with the [South African Department of Information front group] Foreign Affairs Association (FAA) of Cas de Villiers in Pretoria through which he received his general instructions [...] Our general instructions to the Foreign Affairs Research Institute in London included a note that they should continuously spotlight political double standards, emphasize South Africa's role as a staunch ally in times of need, its strategic importance in a military and economic sense, the oil route around the Cape and that the country was being subject to terrorism and violence [... Information Minister] Conny Mulder therefore decided to have his [Stewart-Smith's] organisation linked to the Southern African Freedom Foundation (SAFF) in Johannesburg, a full-time front organisation of the Department of Information headed by R. F. Metrowich. Its main task was to act as an anti-communist organisation in South Africa under the pretext of promoting free enterprise. The SAFF was also to be South Africa's representative in the Taiwanese- based World Anti-Communist League [...] As of 1st August, 1977, the Foreign Affairs Research Institute in London therefore came under the direction of Red Metrowich's SAFF".