Welcome to the third installment in my examination of the mysterious body referred to at times as Le Cercle, Pinay Cercle/Circle or the Pinay Group (in some accounts the Pinay Group is held to be an inner body of Le Cercle). Rarely addressed in English, the group has existed in one form or another since the early 1950s. During its formative years there were close contacts between Le Cercle and the similar Bilderberger Group, but it would be a mistaken to dismiss Le Cercle as a mere auxiliary of the more well known group as many have done.
As was noted in the first installment, much of Le Cercle's leadership seems to have been dominated by the most reactionary elements of the Vatican as personified by groups such as Opus Dei and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (both groups were heavily represented within Le Cercle). In the early days there was a consensus concerning a united Europe between the Bilderbergers and these Catholic groups, but as the years went on their interests diverged more and more. Likely by the late 1970s David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezenski (all of them major figures in the Bilderberger network) had all broken with Le Cercle, which by then was following a far more radical agenda.
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| the Bilderberg Hotel where the namesake group first met in 1954 |
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| the aftermath of a terror attack carried out by La Cagoule in 1930s France |
The Academy
Let us begin with the Academy as it predated the 6I and has also been covered before on this blog in some detail. The Academy was a Brussels-based organization founded by Florimond Damman in 1969. Damman was the brother-in-law of Alain de Villegas, one of the eccentric "inventors" who had conceived of the "sniffer plane" that occupied so much of Jean Violet's time in 1970s (noted in part two). The Academy was born out of the CEPI/PEU network that Archduke Otto von Habsburg was the leading figure in (addressed before here and here). Damman had been active in such circles for several years before founding the Academy. Not long after its inception, it drew the attention of Jean Violet.
"... Damman would soon overcome the internal struggle within the AESP and expand its activities. At a symposium organised by Habsburg in Vienna in May 1969, Damman met Jean Violet (98)*. By October, Violet was looking for a group that could provide an operational framework for the Cercle Pinay, and thought of Damman and his AESP. On 21st October 1969, Violet wrote to Damman saying that he would like to meet him, having been 'mandated by President Pinay to carry out a study of European perspectives after the German elections' i.e. Willy Brandt's September election victory.
"The meeting took place one week later on 28th October in Brussels, where Violet was accompanied by two of his contacts, the first of whom was Marcel Collet, who had just retired as a director of Euratom. Violet's second companion was certain to ensure a favourable reception from Damman - none other than the International Secretary-General of the Paneuropean Union Vittorio Pons. Over lunch, Violet, Damman, Collet and Pons agreed on a new role for the AESP to act as a forum linking the PEU and CEDI under Habsburg and Sánchez Bella to the Bilderberg Group and Cercle Pinay, represented by Pinay and Violet. The revamped Academy would be run by Damman directed from behind the scenes by Violet and his trio of associates Collet, Father Dubois and François Vallet, an industrialist in pharmaceuticals. Violet announced that he would go to Pöcking, Habsburg's seat just outside Munich, to confer with the Archduke and Strauß about the financing of the AESP."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pgs. 50-51)
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| Academy member Alfredo Sanchez Bella |
So yes, there were certainly some figures with rather deep ties involved with the international leadership of the Academy from very early on. This trend would only get stronger once the Belgian section had been formalized.
"The operational core of the AESP, the Permanent Delegation, brought together the Belgian sections of the PEU, CEDI and WACL - the duo of Damman and de Marcken represented the PEU Central Council and the Belgian PEU section MAUE, whereas Vankerkhoven was Secretary of both the Belgian LIL chapter within WACL and the Belgian section of CEDI. CEDI's Belgian section was also represented within the AESP by its President, the Chevalier Marcel de Roover, a veteran anticommunist who had played a major part in the early post-war creation of two private anti-communist intelligence services linked to the Belgian Gladio network, Milpol and the Delcourt network. From the late 1950s on, de Roover had represented Belgium in various anti-communist networks that would later become formalised within WACL. He was also one of the earliest Belgians to frequent CEDI: he was appointed CEDI International Treasurer in January 1960 and founded its Belgian section in 1961, serving as its President until his death in 1971. Following de Roover's death, Vankerkhoven would take over Belgian representation within WACL and CEDI, being appointed Secretary-General of CEDI and moving its Belgian office into his Cercle des Nations (100)*.
"The most prominent Belgian members of the AESP however were Gaston Eyskens, the serving Belgian Prime Minister from 1968 to 1973, and his immediate predecessor as Prime Minister from 1966 to 1968, Paul Vanden Boeynants from the Parti Social Chrétien (PSC). Vanden Boeynants, or VdB as he is known, would become a national institution in Belgian politics - the Belgian Andreotti, going on to serve as Belgian Defence Minister from 1972 to 1979 and as Prime Minister in 1978- 79. He first entered politics at the age of 29 in the ranks of Retinger's European Movement. Before being elected to Parliament, he was one of the five Belgian representatives at the second conference of the Union of European Federalists, the most powerful group within the European Movement, held in Rome in November 1948 shortly after massive intervention by the CIA to ward off an electoral victory by the Socialist-Communist Popular Democratic Front in the April 1948 elections. As we will see below, one key Italian politician in this anti-communist propaganda effort would also figure amongst the AESP's members in 1970...
"Baron Benoît de Bonvoisin – "the Black Baron" - was at the time the most notorious patron of Belgian fascism and a key international linkman for the far Right. Perhaps because of his controversial connections, de Bonvoisin would not figure on any formal AESP or MAUE membership lists until after Damman’s death in 1979, however attending CEDI and AESP events from 1976 on..."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pgs. 51-52)
WACL stands for World Anti-Communist League. Officially established in 1966 (though regional branches had been around since the 1950s), the WACL brought together a rogue's gallery of US military and intelligence officers, international arms and drug traffickers, assorted terrorists and religious fanatics of various stripes and the inevitable unreconstructed Nazi war criminals. It has been linked to a host of crimes and assassinations on multiple continents. Much more information on the WACL can be found here.
Also of note are the figures of Paul Vanden Boeynants (PvB) and Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin. As I noted in my examination of the Belgian deep state, PvB and the Baron were extensively linked to fascist militias alleged to have committed acts of terrorism in Belgium. In the 1990s, during the Dutroux affair, both men were also accused of being arch pedophiles. PvB had already had this charged levied against him in the 1980s due to the "Pinot file." Members of the fascist militias PvB and the Baron funded were also linked to pedophile rings involving these two Academy fellows.
Beyond the ties the Academy had to the WACL and the PvB/Bonvoisin nexus in Belgium, David Teacher reports in Rogue Agents that Damman also had ties to Yves Guerin-Serac and the Aginter Press terror network, As I noted before here and here, Aginter Press has been linked to Operation Gladio and multiple acts of terrorism across Western Europe.
As noted above, the Academy had several indirect links to Propaganda Due from the alleged P7 organization. There was, however, at least one P2 initiate active in the Academy since the early 1970s:
"However, it is the Italian connections of the AESP that are the most fascinating. The former high-ranking P2 member Giancarlo Elia Valori attended both the Charlemagne Grand Dinner and the AESP Chapter Assembly; he would become a member of the AESP's organising core, the Permanent Delegation, the following year. His presence is particularly interesting in the light of the allegations concerning P7 - two of the Academy members allegedly involved in P7, Pons and Töttösy, were also at these meetings with Valori. Valori's attendance at Academy events from 1972 on also points to possible connections between the sniffer plane scandal and P2. Most of the key members in the sniffer plane negotiations were present at the 1976 Grand Dîner and Chapter Assembly with Valori: de Villegas, Father Dubois and Vallet. Vallet and de Villegas would join Valori on the AESP Permanent Delegation by 1977..."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pg. 130)
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| Valori |
Besides links to the P2, long time Academy patron Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin also had close ties to the MSI, the Italian fascist party, and numerous far right militias there such as Ordine Nuovo. The Baron was also reportedly on close terms with the notorious terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie. These ties were addressed before briefly here.
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| Delle Chiaie |
Crozier and the ISC
And that brings us to the 6I and its controversial founder, Brain Crozier. Crozier provided the world with the first full length account of the Cercle network via his 1991 autobiography Free Agent. This work was heavily sanitized, generally depicting Le Cercle as inept and Crozier as a mere journalist fighting the good fight against the forces of Godless Communism. Crozier concedes to having a few intelligence ties, but he largely depicts these individuals and organizations as powerless. Indeed, one can't help but feel truly baffled as to how the West won the Cold War after finishing with Free Agent if even a fraction of Crozier's claims concerning "Communist subversion" were true.
As we shall see, Crozier took more than a few liberties with these claims, especially in regards to his ties to US and British intelligence. In point of fact, Crozier had extensive ties to these intelligence networks long before he hooked up with Le Cercle. These links date back to at least the 1950s.
"Born in 1918, Brian Rossiter Crozier started his career in journalism in 1936. Having worked in aeronautical inspection in 1941, he was hired by the news agency Reuters, which had links to MI6, in 1943. After a spell at the News Chronicle in 1944 and the Sydney Morning Herald in 1948, he returned to Reuters in 1951. From 1952 to 1954, Crozier toured the South-East Asian conflicts in Vietnam and Malaya for Reuters and the New Straits Times, which was used during the Malayan emergency as a channel for British disinformation prepared by the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD). It was in Saigon that Crozier started his long partnership with MI6 by meeting "Ronald Lincoln", a friendship renewed back in London when both men had returned home in 1954. Crozier would then also meet a second MI6 officer "Ronald Franks" who would act as his link for several years. Thanks to the fruitful exchange of information with his MI6 contacts, 'Lincoln' and 'Franks', Crozier joined the staff of the Economist in September 1954 as Editor of their prestigious Economist Foreign Report, a post he filled until 1964 (26)*."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pg. 24)Things really took off for Crozier, however, when he hooked up with an offshoot of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a notorious CIA front.
"In 1965, the International Organisations Division of the CIA decided to use its intellectual front group, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to create a new propaganda outlet, a press agency called Forum World Features. This CIA features service, which at its peak supplied over 150 newspapers worldwide, would be run - from its launch in 1966 until its exposure in 1974 - by Brian Crozier. Whilst still Editor of the Economist Foreign Report, Crozier had already provided articles for the CCF journal Encounter as well as working on commission for the IRD for who he "transformed a thick folder of IRD documents into a short book" later published under the title Neo-Colonialism as part of a series called Background Books. After his departure from the Economist in February 1964, Crozier accepted a part-time consultancy for the IRD, advising departments and writing research papers. A few weeks later, Crozier was contacted by the CCF who offered him the job of taking over the CCF's features service and commercialising its output. Tied up with the IRD consultancy and other contracts, Crozier refused but accepted a second more limited commission: to tour South America and report on how the CCF could improve the distribution of the Spanish-language version of their magazine, Encounter. Concerned by Crozier's involvement with a CIA front, his MI6 contacts invited Crozier to MI6 headquarters upon his return in November 1964 and commissioned him to write an extensive background report on Sino-Soviet subversion in the Third World; a sanitised version of the report would be published in 1966 as part of the Background Books series under the title The Struggle for the Third World (54).
"In May 1965, Crozier finally accepted the post of Director of the CCF features service, Forum World Features, and Crozier started at FWF that July. Initial control of FWF ran via two CIA officers, CCF President Michael Josselson, and FWF auditor "Charles Johnson". The legal and financial infrastructure for FWF was provided by one of the CIA's "quiet channels", millionaire John Hay Whitney, a wartime member of the OSS (55), former US Ambassador to Britain during Crozier's time at the Economist and future publisher of the International Herald Tribune. Whitney obligingly registered FWF under his own name as a Delaware corporation with offices in London (56); CIA funding for FWF was channelled through Kern House Enterprises, a publishing firm run by Whitney. For a while, wrangles between Crozier and the CCF continued about FWF's independence from the CCF; Crozier eventually ensured complete separation of FWF from the CCF and direct control via a CIA case officer he calls "Ray Walters". Walters brought in an office manager, Cecil Eprile, and FWF opened its doors on 1st January 1966."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pgs. 33-34)
It was through these contacts that in 1962 Crozier would become involved with the America Frank Barnett and several organizations Barnett had ties to, most notably the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). Barnett had co-founded the NCIS with William Casey, a former OSS officer and Knight of Malta who would go onto become the director of the CIA under Reagan. Much more will be said about Barnett, Casey and the NCIS and other organizations affiliated with this clique in a future installment.
For now the main thing to keep in mind is that the intelligence-connected Barnett would assist Crozier in his next major endeavor: the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC).
"... Crozier therefore set up a low-key features service within FWF called the Current Affairs Research Services Centre in 1968. CARSC started publication of a series of monthly monographs on conflict, the first one appearing in December 1969. Crozier records that 'the Agency had permitted me to produce the first five Conflict Studies under CARSC as a commercial imprint' using the FWF address; the sixth would go out in January 1970 under the name of Crozier's new venture, the Institute for the Study of Conflict (63).
"Kern House provided the start-up capital for the ISC, and Crozier functioned as Director of both FWF and the ISC. Several of FWF's research staff and the FWF library were absorbed into the ISC; FWF then paid the ISC the sum of £2,000 for use of the library it had once owned. Oil companies put up seed capital: first was Shell, who put up £5,000 a year for three years, and British Petroleum £4,000 for two years (64)*. Then the real money came in, thanks to the Agency and via an old American friend: Frank Barnett of the NSIC (65)*. Having met Barnett in Madrid in 1966, Crozier visited him in New York in 1968. When the ISC was then set up in 1969-70, the NSIC provided substantial assistance. Apart from a guaranteed regular purchase of each issue of the Conflict Studies, Barnett's NSIC also provided the salary for one of the ISC researchers and footed the printing and publicity bill for the ISC's annual publication, the Annual of Power and Conflict (66).
"Above all, beyond NSIC funding, Barnett could provide contacts, arranging a meeting with Dan McMichael, who would remain a true friend to Barnett's NSIC for more than fifteen years, serving on its Advisory Council until at least 1985. McMichael was administrator of the trust funds of the Scaife family, major shareholders in Gulf Oil. Barnett persuaded Richard Mellon Scaife ("Dick Scaife as he liked to be called – a tall, fair-haired man with film-star good looks", as Crozier puts it) to provide $100,000 a year for the ISC as well as taking over the FWF subsidies from Jock Whitney. According to Crozier: "From that moment on, the ISC took off" (67). Between 1973 and 1981, Dick Scaife would donate a total of $6 million to the NSIC and their London friends at the ISC."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pgs. 36-37)
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| Richard Mellon Scaife, Crozier's long time patron |
Lord Amery
It was around the time that ISC was just beginning to take off (i.e. 1970) that Crozier made one of his most important contacts. The Monday Club, a political pressure group within the Conservative Party that at this time was especially concerned with preserving White rule in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), found that many of their policies were closely aligned with the ISC. The two organizations began to collaborate and Crozier presumably came into contact with the man who would ultimately succeed him as chairman of Le Cercle through that joint venture. This individual was none other than Lord Julian Amery.
Unsurprisingly, Amery had quite a deep background:
"Another Monday Club member with links to the Cercle complex – indeed a future Chairman of the Cercle Pinay itself - was Julian Amery. Amery was a prominent MP on the Conservative Right with a long history of extensive intelligence contacts. Having served in the Balkans with MI6's Section D and the SOE during the war, he was one of the major figures who pushed MI6 in the immediate post-war period to adopt its disastrous plan "to liberate the countries within the Soviet orbit by any means short of war", notably the catastrophic attempts to "set the Soviet Union ablaze" by landing armed bands of émigrés in Albania, Latvia, the Caucasus and the Ukraine. In June 1950, Amery attended the founding conference in Berlin of the CIA funded CCF and served on its International Steering Committee; at the time, Amery was also one of the leading members of the Central and Eastern Europe Commission of Retinger's CIA-funded European Movement. Amery would also sit in the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly from 1950 to 1957 and on the Central Committee of the Paneuropean Union in the mid-1950s (78)*.
"As for his parliamentary career, Amery was elected as a Conservative MP in 1950, marrying Harold Macmillan's daughter the same year. He went on to hold several government posts under his father-in-law, firstly as Under-Secretary of State at the War Office in 1957 and the Colonial Office in 1958, before being promoted to the post of Secretary of State for Air from 1960 to 1962; he would then serve in the Cabinet as Minister for Air until the Conservatives' electoral defeat by Labour's Harold Wilson in 1964. Amery had joined the Monday Club soon after its creation in 1961; he was the guest of honour at the Club's annual dinner in 1963. In 1966, he would lose his parliamentary seat but regain it in 1969, remaining MP until 1992, when he was created a life peer. By the time of the ISC's creation in 1970, the political pendulum had just swung back to the Right. New Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath appointed Amery Housing Minister, where he served until 1972 when he became Minister for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (the cover department for MI6), holding the post for a crucial two years until Heath's defeat by Wilson in 1974 (79)*."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pgs. 41-42)
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| Lord Julian Amery |
"... The Round Table Group, and came later to be called, somewhat inaccurately, the Cliveden set, after the country estate of Lord and Lady Astor. It included Lord Milner, Leopold Amery, and Edward Grigg... as well as Lord Lothian, Smuts, Lord Astor, Lord Brand (brother-in-law of Lady Astor and managing director of Lazard Brothers, the international bankers), Lionel Curtis, Geoffrey Dawson (editor of The Times), and their associates. This group wielded great influence because it controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London, The Observer, the influential and highly anonymous quarterly review known as The Round Table (founded in 1910 with money supply by Sir Abe Bailey and the Rhodes Trust, and with Lothian as editor), and it dominated the Royal Institute of International Affairs, called 'Chatham House' (of which Sir Abe Bailey and the Astors were the chief financial supporters, while Lionel Curtis was the actual founder), the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and All Souls College, Oxford. The Round Table group formed the core of the three-bloc-world supporters, and differed from the anti-Bolsheviks... in that they sought to contain the Soviet Union between a German-dominated Europe and an English-speaking bloc rather than to destroy it as the anti-Bolsheviks wanted. Relationships between the two groups were very close and friendly, and some people, like Smuts, were in both."
(Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley, pg. 581)Passages such as the one above are typically held up by conspiracy theorists as definitive proof that the Round Table group was engaged in an all encompassing conspiracy to impose a Communist world government on the unsuspecting masses. The truth is a bit more complex, however. While no doubt the Cliveden Set's policies during this period may have been more moderate than the far-right anti-Bolshevik faction, the actualities of their policies was to destroy the League of Nations (and with it, any semblance of world government) while building up Nazi Germany as a counter weight to the Soviets:
"The more moderate Round Table group, including Lionel Curtis, Leopold Amery (who was the shadow of Lord Milner), Lord Lothian, Lord Brand, and Lord Astor, sought to weaken the League of Nations and destroy all possibility of collective security in order to strengthen Germany in respect to both France and Soviet Union, and above all to free Britain from Europe in order to build up an 'Atlantic bloc' of Great Britain, the British Dominions, and the United States... This influential group sought to change the League of Nations from an instrument of collective security to an international conference center for 'non-political' matters like drug control or international postal services, to rebuild Germany as a buffer against the Soviet Union and a counterpoise to France, and to build up an Atlantic bloc of Britain, the Dominions, the United States, and, if possible, the Scandinavian countries."
(Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley, pg. 582)
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| Lord Leopold Amery |
Crozier himself was quite contemptuous of these polices:
"The decade of the 1970s was dominated by the concept of 'detente', meaning a slackening of international tensions. The concept was misleading. Throughout my period as Director, the Institute for the Study of Conflict was involved in exposing the fallacies of 'detente' and warning the West of the dangers inherent in a policy of illusion.
" 'Detente' meant different things on each side of the Iron Curtain. In the West, advocates of 'detente' (some of whom believed in it) hoped it would lead to a general reduction in the burden of armaments, by reducing the fear of war. Many even hoped, against all evidence, that in time 'detente' could persuade the Soviet leadership that the USSR should now abandon its ideological war against the West and indeed all countries not already in the Soviet orbit. A period of peace was envisaged, during which trade would make the Soviet Union more prosperous and therefore more ready to stop it subversion of other countries.
"On the Soviet side, the aspirations were strikingly different. The Soviets hoped the West would unilaterally reduce defense budgets and remove any obstacles to Soviet acquisition of high technology, with which to build up the already excessive military strength of the USSR. They hoped the West would give permanent – that is, de jure – recognition to the post-war frontiers of Europe: in other words, to Stalin's conquests and annexations. Their ultimate hope was that a European Security Treaty would be concluded, leading to the dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Once NATO was dissolved, the Americans would withdraw their forces from Europe and the Soviet forces would be free to intimidate and if necessary occupy Western Europe. To see things this way in any West European country in 1970 was to court unpopularity and such labels as 'right-wing' or better still 'extreme right-wing'; whereas the analysis was simply a recognition of realities."
(Free Agent, Brian Crozier, pgs. 96-97)
And here was Lord Amery, the descendant of one of the chief figures behind the Cliveden Set and its policies toward the Soviet Union, throwing in with Crozier, a man whose entirely life revolved around destroying the Soviet Union. Nor was Amery the only Cliveden Set descendant to join the ranks of Le Cercle. The organization's current chairman, Michael Ancram, Lord Lothian, is a distant relative of the Lord Lothian involved with the Cliveden Set during the 1930s. But I digress.
The 6I
It wasn't just the policy of detente that was radicalizing the Right during the 1970s, however. Watergate, the Church Committee and the Committee on Assassinations had brought intense scrutiny on the CIA in the United States. This led to several efforts to reform it during the 1970s, most notably during Jimmy Carter's administration. Le Cerlce saw these policies and similar ones in Western Europe as totally crippling the West's intelligence services and effectively rendering them powerless.
Crozier decided that something needed to be done to fill the gap. Thus was born the concept of the private intelligence services dubbed "6I" (though commonly referred to as the "61"). It had its origins with a previous group Crozier dubbed "Shield." Shield emerged some time during 1976 to assist Margaret Thatcher's rise to prime minister. It specialized in disinformation against the Labour Party and even former Conservative prime minister Edward Heath.
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| the much despised Jimmy Carter |
After the success with Thatcher's election (more on that later) Crozier became more ambitious and began to plot a private intelligence network with an international reach.
"The question was whether something can be done in the private sector – not only in Britain, but in the United States and other countries of the Western Alliance. A few of us had been exchanging views, and decided that action was indeed possible. I took the initiative by convening a very small and very secret meeting in London. We met in the luxurious executive suite of a leading City of London bank on the morning of Sunday 13 February 1977. Our host, a leading figure in the bank, took the chair. Three of us were British, four were American, with one German. Ill health prevented a French associate from attending; Jean Violet was with us in spirit.
"Apart from the banker and myself, the other Briton was Nicholas Elliott. The German was a very active member of the Bundestag, whose career had started in diplomacy. He had a very wide understanding of Soviet strategy, in which he wrote several first-rate books.
"The Americans included two able and diligent congressional staffers, and the Viennese-born representative of a big Belgian company. Also there was the remarkable General Vernon ('Dick') Walters, recently retired as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, and later to re-emerge in public life as President Reagan's ambassador, first to the UN, and later to the German Federal Republic...
"I proposed the creation of a Private Sector Operational Intelligence agency, beholden to no government, but at the disposal of allied or friendly governments for certain tasks which, for one reason or another, they were no longer able to tackle. I must make it clear that these task did not include any acts of armed force or physical coercion.
"Our main concerns would be:
- To provide reliable intelligence in areas which governments were barred from investigating, either through recent legislation (as in the US) or because political circumstances made such inquiries difficult or potentially embarrassing.
- To conduct secret counter-subversion operations in any country in which such actions were deemed feasible.
"There were no dissenting voices, although there was much discussion about the areas for action: the requirements, in intelligence jargon.
"It was agreed that no outsider should be made aware of the existence of the organisation, except if, in the judgment of one of us, the person was deemed a suitable candidate for recruitment..."
(Free Agent, Brian Crozier, pg. 135-136)
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| General Vernon Walters |
"As for the Americans, the most notable participant at the 6I meeting was Lieutenant-General Vernon 'Dick' Walters, who served as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (under William Colby, himself a Cercle guest) from May 1972 to July 1976, retiring six months before this first 6I meeting. Fluent in six European languages as a result of his childhood in the UK and France, Walters would become a veteran coupmaster involved in most of the CIA's dirtiest operations – Iran, Italy, Vietnam, Chile, Angola, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Fiji, often working with other Cercle contacts. As American Military Attaché in Teheran, Walters had worked with Kermit Roosevelt and G. K. Young in the 1953 Operation Ajax to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh. From 1967 to 1972, when the Cercle's Belgian base of the AESP was being set up, Walters was Military Attaché in Paris responsible for the Benelux region."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pgs. 150-151)
Like Casey and many others associated with Le Cercle, Walters was also a member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) according Robert Hutchison in Their Kingdom Come. Nor was Walters the only Maltese knight with connections to the group. In Free Agent Crozier states that Edward Leigh, a young Thatcherite MP, was engaged in the opposition movement to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) with a leading figure 6I, Julian Lewis. Leigh would go onto become a member of SMOM. And then there was future US ambassador to the Vatican, William A. Wilson, who Corzier described as Reagan's "... liaise both with the Pinay Cercle... and with The 61" (Free Agent, pg. 186) during the early 1980s. Wilson was already a Maltese knight by this point.
And let us not forget about our old friend Jean Violet. Crozier noted that Violet was present "in spirit" at the 6I founding and later notes that he attempted to pay funds to Violet on behalf of his work for the 6I. David Teacher suggests that Violet was likely a high ranking figure in the 6I. He has also been long suspected of being a member of Opus Dei. But moving along.
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| William A .Wilson |
Later on in his autobiography, Crozier makes it clear that 6I's primary purpose as to conduct operations in host or allied countries, typically related to counter-subversion.
"... We planned both to initiate secret operations in our various countries, and to coordinate the existing overt auctions of the many private groups involved in the resistance to Soviet propaganda and Active Measures. At that time, we had no plans to operate as an espionage agency in the Soviet bloc countries. We felt that this was still a task that could be entrusted to our existing intelligence services, including the CIA. Our main mission was in the field of counter-subversion. Inevitably, we expected to pick up occasional items of secret intelligence. These we would pass on, at our discretion, to interested Allied agencies. We intended also to supplement the analysis made available to the American, British and other Allied governments by the official secret agencies. In many cases, these analyses would prove different. To this extent, they would provide an alternative assessment of current dangers for the special benefit of presidents and prime ministers.
"Unlike existing agencies, we would not be hampered by prohibitions on functioning in our own or Allied countries. Security would be rigorously observed. In no particular, the media, with whatever they might guess or speculate upon, would never be told of our existence, or of the work we were doing. We would be concerned equally with home-grown subversion and the other kind..."
(Free Agent, Brian Crozier, pgs. 180-181)
The CIA, in theory, is prohibited from conducting covert operations on American soil by US law The same is true of most Western intelligence services. The 6I then was geared towards subverting these laws by running a private network heavily staffed by "former" Western intelligence assets. At the same time similar networks were being formed in the US to make up for the nurturing of the CIA. It has long been reputed that these networks played a key role in the elections of Margret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, respectively.
The Rise of Thatcher
It has been alleged by researchers such as David Teacher and Richard Cottrell that Thatcher's election constituted a kind of silent coup. Crozier and his earlier Shield network would have been idea candidates to participate in the psychological aspects of such a coup.
"The Cercle complex's UK connections lead us into the heart of a major manipulation of British domestic politics, 'the Thatcher coup' concentrating in the period from Harold Wilson's two election victories in 1974 to Margaret Thatcher's election as Conservative Leader on 11th February 1975 and culminating with her election as Prime Minister on 4th May 1979 (165). A substantial body of verified information confirms the existence of a conspiracy to undermine the Labour Government of Harold Wilson, to discredit Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe and to have Conservative leader Edward Heath replaced by someone of a 'more resolute approach'. Colin Wallace - a former psy-ops officer within the IRD-founded Information Policy Unit in Northern Ireland and a key witness on MI5 intervention in domestic British politics in the 1970s - writes:
'Various key members of the Intelligence community - past and present - assisted by influential figures in the public service, politics and commerce produced a series of political and psychological warfare projects which were designed to:
a) prevent the election and re-election of a Labour Government;
b) prevent any coalition between the Labour and Liberal parties;
c) discredit key figures in both parties;
d) collate and disseminate 'black' information which could be used to discredit or 'control' various politicians who were deemed to hold power behind the scenes in all three major political parties;
e) have Mr Edward Heath removed as leader of the Conservative party and replaced by someone of a more resolute approach to the political and industrial unrest" (166)*.'
"It is possible to divide the conspirators roughly into two groups, the first of which centred on serving MI5 officers including Spycatcher author Peter Wright and others who had transferred from MI5's K Branch (counter-espionage) to F Branch (counter-subversion) when MI5 strengthened its role as a political police in the mid- 1970s. This was notably the case of Charles Elwell who transferred from running K2 (Soviet satellite states) counter-espionage to heading F1 (CPGB and other groups) counter-subversion in April 1974 and who would work closely with Brian Crozier after his retirement from MI5 in May 1979.
"The second group was a powerful private-sector coalition of retired MI6 officers, IRD disinformation assets and prominent members of the Tory Right, several of whom would later serve as Ministers under Thatcher. Whilst the Fleet Street Press has concentrated on Peter Wright and his MI5 faction in their late-1980s reports of the Wilson destabilisation, the ex-MI6/IRD/Tory MP coalition and their partners in the industry-funded anti-union outfits were also major actors in the psychological warfare campaign being waged against all three party leaders, a contribution that has been largely underestimated. It is this coalition - the 'counter-subversion lobby' - that was closely connected with the Cercle Pinay complex, not only through the ISC but also through two future groups, NAFF and FARI."
(Free Agent, David Teacher, pgs. 85-86)
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| Thatcher |
"... The Pinay Circle in the 1970s was actively engaged in trying to elect right-wing governments (most notoriously Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom). Crozier himself appeared to claim the credit for Thatcher's election at a meeting of the Pinay Circle."
(The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 98)Unfortunately an in depth examination of the mechanisms that brought Thatcher to power are beyond the scope of this present series. The curious reader is strongly advised to reader David Teacher's full analysis in Rogue Agents.
I would like to briefly note, however, certain accusations that were made by this above-mentioned network of various "former" MI5/6 men that Crozier and his network were close too:
"... When the small MI5/MI6 black ops team working up the Wilson and Heath plots got down to work in the early '70s, they made a subliminally curious choice of 'Clockwork Orange' as the in-house codename. Stanley Kubrick's disturbing and controversial film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's story of deranged misfits plaguing the streets was widely regarded at the time as a 'queer' exercise in sexual debauchery if not an actual motif, as many saw it, for blatant homosexuality. Was it merely a co-incidence that Heath was smeared all over London as a closet gay, or that the bombastic Ulster Protestant, the Rev. Ian Paisley, another victim of the same hit list, would be dragged into a scandal concerning pedophilia in the Kincaid children's home? The implication of a dirty tricks sting against Wilson on the grounds of sexual skeletons rattling in his cupboard could hardly have been more obvious to future investigators..."
(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pg. 252)
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| Edward Heath |
The 6I and the Academy
There were ties between the Academy and the 6I from very early on. As I noted before here, both Crozier and Jean Violet had been involved with the Academy since 1969, shortly after the organization's founding. It was still going strong by the time Crozier founded the 6I in early 1977, but that was about to change.
Upon Florimond Damman's death in 1979 the Academy became riddled with infighting. The organization dissolved not long after. Many of the more curious and intelligence connected members ended up joining 6I, which effectively merged Cercle's two primary intelligence networks.
"The interaction between the Cercle and the 6I went far beyond the "minor overlapping" mentioned by Crozier; not only did senior figures from the British and American intelligence communities attend Cercle meetings, but also almost entire national delegations of the Cercle – most notably the post-Damman MAUE from Belgium – were recruited to the 6I cause, soon setting up front groups to assist Crozier's anti-unilateralist propaganda campaign. This process had been ongoing since the previous two meetings of Cercle allies for which we have full participants' lists - the February 1976 AESP Chapter Assembly and the November 1976 CEDI Congress – but the launch in February 1977 of the 6I accelerated the pace of integration. Indeed, the CEDI Congress in particular appears to have heralded the creation of the 6I which came only three months later; three key CEDI participants in November 1976 - Violet, Crozier and Huyn, the triumvirate then running the Cercle - were all, according to Crozier, core founding members of the 6I 'Politburo' in February 1977. Whilst Crozier's memoirs preferred to downplay the overlap between the Cercle and the 6I, noting that "some members of the 6I's 'Politburo' also attended the Cercle meetings; others did not" (525), the Cercle participants' lists between 1982 and 1985 belie the impression of separation that Crozier wished to give, as they record the frequent presence at Cercle meetings of most of the members of the 6I 'Politburo' and many of their operatives...
"Also attending the 1982 Cercle meeting in Bavaria were most of the 6I's Belgian partners - Close, Jonet, de Kerchove and de Bonvoisin. The presence at this 1982 Cercle meeting of almost the entire top membership of MAUE demonstrates that Belgian cooperation with Brian Crozier had continued uninterrupted despite the sudden death in July 1979 of Florimond Damman and the subsequent implosion of the AESP, an upheaval followed in October 1979 by the end of Paul Vanden Boeynants' seven-year reign as Defence Minister and the 1980 'removal from the Army hierarchy' of the controversial counter-subversion unit, PIO.
"This new evidence about Belgian membership of the Cercle also underscores the continuity and personnel overlap that had long existed between the public AESP and CEDI, the 'semi-public' Belgian PIO, the confidential Cercle and the covert 6I. To focus on but one figure, Benoît de Bonvoisin, the Baron Noir had previously attended the February 1976 AESP Chapter Assembly and the November 1976 CEDI Congress, both times accompanied by the PIO's Major Bougerol and by Belgian Cercle convenor Jacques Jonet, and both times meeting Crozier. The MAUE group were active partners of the 6I in its virulent campaign against the nuclear disarmament movement; shortly before this June 1982 Cercle meeting, they had set up the Belgian 6I front groups RAPPEL and the IEPS in March and April respectively.
"It is highly significant that the two former political controllers of Vanden Boeynants' PIO, de Bonvoisin and de Kerchove, both attended various Cercle meetings throughout the Brabant Wallon killings. At this time, de Bonvoisin had long been the main financial backer and patron of both the PIO and the fascist groups linked to the killings, whilst de Kerchove was the key aide to the Justice Minister in charge of the sidetracked and fruitless first investigation.
"Whilst no evidence has emerged to demonstrate a foreign hand in either the planning or the execution of the Brabant Wallon killings, the new primary source on Belgian membership of the Cercle further strengthens the probability that the LIL/AESP/MAUE/PIO complex is the most promising path of investigation for elucidating the crimes, still unresolved after thirty years. Belgium's statute of limitations was due to formally close the case on 10th November 2015; although this has now been extended in extremis to forty years to allow continued enquiry, the sixth official investigation failed to shed any further light on this dark affair, lost in the futile search for the mere exécutants rather than the real commanditaires."
(Rogue Agents, David Teacher, pgs. 244-245)
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| Paul Vanden Boeynants (left) and Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin (right) |
The British Cercle Ties to Accused Pedophiles
For many, Britain's pedophile scandals began in earnest with the revelations concerning Jimmy Savile in 2012. Shortly thereafter nine Pakistani men were arrested in the town of Rochdale amidst allegations that they there were abducting and "grooming" young children to be used in a pedophile ring in that area. Soon more allegations came out, linking several beloved British entertainers to these networks.
Both the mainstream and "alternative" media had a field day with these claims. Xenophobia was subtly promoted by the MSM after revelations of the Pakistani gang while "alternative" sources have written at great length about the Illuminati, Project Monarch and how Savile "proves" that the entertainment industry is nothing but an elaborate occult ritual.
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| Savile |
"In 2012, allegations against the late TV host and bizarre British icon Jimmy Savile surfaced; the list of potential victims stretches into the hundreds, and other well-known BBC names have since been convicted of similar crimes. Last month John Allen, a care home proprietor who has been convicted of 33 sex offenses against children in his charge, was accused of providing boys to sex parties frequented by political figures, and the late former MI6 deputy Sir Peter Hayman has been accused of attending such parties. Just last week John Mann, a Labour MP, handed a dossier to Scotland Yard with 22 names of individuals, including former MPs from the country's two major parties, who he thinks should be questioned over alleged child abuse in the 1970s and 80s. Mann even suggested that two would-be whistleblowers may have been murdered.
"The Westminster story became headline news the way a dam breaks—first through almost unnoticeable cracks in the façade, then with a sudden flood. One of the first cracks was when a whistleblower from the social work world passed a tip off to Labour MP Tom Watson, who in 2012 asked Prime Minister David Cameron if an evidence file linked to the conviction of pedophile Peter Righton—who advised the government on child care policy in the 1970s—could be looked at again. That file, which was initially sent to home secretary Leon Brittan by campaigning Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983, supposedly linked senior cabinet members in the Thatcher administration, as well as Smith, to a pedophile ring. In July it was revealed that the dossier was among 114 files relating to child sex abuse that had disappeared from 1979 to 1999. Brittan himself was questioned by police that same month over allegations of rape—the victim was over the age of 18, but the event just added to public suspicion, stoked by the suggestion of Lord Norman Tebbit that there "may well have been" an establishment cover-up under Brittan´s watch.
"After that, both the press and the police began investigating these claims more carefully. The publications most involved in pushing the Westminster pedophile scandal out to the public have been the Sunday People and the investigative website Exaro.
"The further the media and the cops went down the rabbit hole, the more they found. 'A key turning point was we ran a story on two abuse survivors who talked about being sexually abused as boys by MPs and other VIPs at Dolphin Square [a luxury apartment complex] and other locations,' says Mark Watts, the editor of Exaro. 'That led the police again to contact us and ask to speak to these two survivors and again we passed on the request.'
"The police in turn created Operation Midland, which investigated an alleged pedophile ring that operated at Dolphin Square between 1974 and 1984. It is in one of the apartments there that an anonymous source known in the media as 'Nick' alleges he saw a boy get strangled to death by a Conservative MP during a dark sex game.
"In July, before the Westminster story gained momentum, Home Secretary Theresa May announced an inquiry into organized child sex abuse dating back to the 1970s. But the two people she appointed to chair the inquiry were both found to have conflicts of interest, and panel members have reportedly sent abusive emails to alleged survivors. The (still chair-less) inquiry is now on the verge of collapse, though many see even that flawed effort as a step in the right direction."
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| Geoffrey Dickens, the Conservative MP who tried to blow the whistle on his own party |
Let us now consider some of the names linked to elite pedophile networks in Britain and Cercle:
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| Leon Brittan Held several posts under Thatcher including Home Secretary; Brittan allegedly suppressed a dossier outing a pedophile ring in Thatcher's cabinet (the original Westminster scandal); in 2014 and 2015 victims came forward to accuse Brittan of both homosexual rape and pedophilia; possibly a member of Le Cercle as Janus (a website that organizes the papers of Cambridge University) reports a letter from Julian Amery to Brittan concerning a recent Cercle meeting; close to Amery and also future Cercle chairman Norman Lamont; Lamont attended Cambridge with Brittan where they were a part of the "Cambridge Mafia" and was also present at Brittan's funeral. |
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| Keith Joseph Thatcher's Secretary of State for Education and Science; a very close adviser to Thatcher; name apparently turned up in the original 1984 Westminster dossier and more allegations have emerged since; In Free Agent, Crozier notes: "With Mrs. Thatcher's approval, I liaised with Keith Joseph in certain psychological actions in the election year, 1987" (pgs. 277-278). This researcher has not been able to link Joseph to the 6I or Cercle, but here clearly collaborated with Crozier at times |
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| Peter Morrison
The Parliamentary Private Secretary to Thatcher; linked extensively to elite pedophile rings in 2014 dating to his time serving with Thatcher; was a close friend of Julian Amery, who exchanged numerous letters with Morrison; Amery had also been close to Morrison's family; future Cercle chairman Jonathan Aitken also had relations with Morrison.
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| David Atkinson
Conservative MP from 1977 till 2005 who was close to the Thatcher regime; reputedly a closet homosexual as well as a pedophile; his son described him as a pedophile, but later recanted; was very close to Cercle chairman Jonathan Aitken, serving as vice-president of Aitken's Christian Solidarity Worldwide organization.
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| Julian Lewis
Conservative MP who became a key member of Crozier's 6I network in the 1980s; during the early '90s the now defunct Scallywag magazine was investigating a pedophile network centered around Wrexham that may have been linked to the Westminster group; Lewis was alleged to been involved in the cover-up
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"Subsequently, over a rent dispute which is still a matter of litigation, Dr. Julian Lewis, now Conservative MP for New Forest (East) but then deputy head of research at Conservative Central Office in Smith Square, managed to purchase the contents of our offices, which included all our files. It had been alleged that we owed rent, which we disputed, but under a court order the landlords were able to change the locks and seize our assets which included all our files, including those we had made on paedophiles. It was apparently quite legal, but it was most certainly a dirty trick.
"All of a sudden very private information, some of it even privileged between ourselves and our lawyer during the John Major libel action, was being published in selected, pro-Conservative sections of the media.
"Subsequently, during a court case initiated by Lewis, I was able in my defence to seek discovery of documents and asked to see the seized files. The paedophile papers were missing. This is a very great shame, because Sir Ronald Waterhouse certainly should have been aware of them."
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| Simon Regan |
And seemingly here is Lewis, a figure very close to Crozier, attempting to cover up a major pedophile scandal. It is interesting to note that both Lewis and Leigh have also been accused of pedophile. So have at least three British Cercle members who became chairmen of the group: Julian Amery, Jonathan Aitken (who apparently has been on multiple "retreats" organized by the Jesuits) and Norman Lamont (a member of the Catholic order known as the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George). The evidence is not as strong against these figures as those mentioned above, but none the less this would strongly indicate that the Cercle network was aware of the elite pedophile networks in England.
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| these three Britons who became chairman of Cercle, Julian Amery (top), Jonathan Aitken (middle) and Norman Lamont (bottom), have all been implicated in Britain's pedophile scandals |
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| Nicholas Elliott |
Gee, that sure sounds a lot like the scandals currently unfolding in Britain...
And here is this mysterious international body, Le Cercle, that seemingly had ties to both the pedophile rings in Britain and Belgium. Indeed, both Brian Crozier and Jean Violet (who both had served as Cercle chairman at different ties) may have been deeply involved with both networks via the 6I and the Academy, which were essentially intelligence networks for Cercle. And that would mean that Cerlce's intelligence wing would be well positioned to, say, blackmail prominent politicians in either country....
All of this is rather curious and yet has largely flown under the radar of both of mainstream media as well as the "alternative." No doubt the exposurer of Monarch programming amongst British performers took precedence among the latter, though such "researchers" would stand a much better chance of finding credible evidence of some type of cult (or possibly multiple ones) in the Cercle complex. Still, its hard to ignore the Machiavellian mastermind that is Gary Glitter....
The possibility of a cult(s) shall be explored in a future installment, but not before I finish examining several of the other curious organizations and networks with ties to Le Cerlce. Stay tuned.
