03-06-2009, 01:47 AM
Le Cercle is a secretive, privately-funded and transnational discussion group which regularly meets in different parts of the world. It is attended by a mixture of politicians, ambassadors, bankers, shady businessmen, oil experts, editors, publishers, military officers and intelligence agents, which may or may not have retired from their official functions. The participants come from western or western-oriented countries. Many important members tend to be affiliated with the aristocratic circles in London or obscure elements within the Vatican, and accusations of links to fascism and Synarchism are anything but uncommon in this milieu. The greatest enemy of the Cercle has been the Soviet Union and members have been crusading against communist subversion for many decades. During this process, Cercle members unfortunately have accused almost every nationalist and socialist government, every labour union, every terrorist, and every serious investigator of western intelligence of being in bed with the KGB. In addition, the Cercle is also strongly focused on European integration, going back to the efforts of its early members to bring about Franco-German rapprochement. The significant presence of Paneuropa-affiliated Opus Dei members and Knights of Malta, together with statements of the Vatican and Otto von Habsburg, clearly indicate there's an agenda in the background to some day bring about a new Holy Roman Empire with its borders stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea and from the Baltic Sea to North Africa. Interestingly, the latest generation of British Cercle members, whose predecessors were keen on joining the European Union, now do everything in their power to keep Britain out of the emerging European superstate, having lost faith they can become a significant force within Europe. Their American associates, however, would like for them to continue the effort of breaking into the Franco-German alliance and possibly to establish a new Anglo-German alliance.
It seems like a cold war is raging in Europe. One that doesn't directly involve the Soviets.
Origins
Le Cercle used be known as the Pinay Circle, or Cercle Pinay by its original French founders. Although the group was named after a French statesman who was prime minister from March to December 1952, the real organizer of this group was a person named Jean Violet, a close associate of Pinay since 1951 (1).
Jean Violet has a murky past to say the least. In French and later English literature, Violet is named as a pre-WWII member of the Comite Secret pour l'Action Revolutionnaire (CSAR), a secretive fascist group which, like Freemasonry, had its own initiation rites (2). Some authors have suggested that CSAR, popularly known at the time as the Cagoule, or "hooded ones", was one of the most important branches of the legendary Synarchist Movement of Empire and worked to undermine the French Republic in preparation for the coming Nazi invasion (3). Whatever truth can be found in this claim, it is known that Jean Violet was arrested after the war for having collaborated with the enemy. He was released however "on orders from above" (4), went to work as a lawyer in Paris, and decided to become a member of Opus Dei (or, possibly, he became a member first, which resulted in his release). In 1951, Violet came into contact with Antoine Pinay, a Catholic also said to have been in bed with Opus Dei, who asked him to solve a problem with a Geneva-based firm that had been sieged by the Nazis during WWII. As the story goes, Pinay was so impressed with the way Violet handled his assignment that he recommended him to French intelligence, the SDECE (5). Also, Violet soon managed to hook up with Opus Dei luminaries as Alfredo Sanchez Bella and Otto von Habsburg (6), who had founded the European Centre of Documentation and Information (CEDI) in 1949 (7). Habsburg was chairman for life of CEDI and later also of the Paneuropa Union. Sanchez Bella was the Spanish ambassador to Rome under Franco in the 1960s while his brother was head of Opus Dei in Spain (8). Violet also became an associate of Father Yves-Marc Dubois, a senior member of Vatican intelligence and possibly its head (9).
CEDI was one of the first in a long line of hard-right, often aristocratic institutions part of the Vatican-Paneuropa network. One of these institutions, founded by Antoine Pinay and Jean Violet, became Cercle Pinay, and besides that it was set up "somewhere in the 1950s" (10), the exact date remains unknown. The claim that Cercle Pinay was put together in 1969 (11) is wrong and has probably been a mix-up with the Belgian Cercle des Nations, which was founded that year by a secretary general of CEDI (12). Violet was one of the few French members of this Cercle des Nations (13) that was part of the same Opusian Vatican-Paneuropa network. The crowd of Cercle des Nations has featured in a number of Belgian conspiracies and some were involved with the "Dutroux network" that allegedly didn't exist. Bit more about that later.
Like many others, Pinay and Violet understood that the basis for a stable united Europe would be a Franco-German reconciliation. Therefore they recruited in their Cercle the most important individuals that were working towards this aim.
From Germany they invited the long time chancellor and foreign minister Konrad Adenauer, and two of his closest associates, Franz Joseph Bach, who ran Adenauer's office; and Franz Joseph Strauss, the controversial hard-right political figure from Bavaria who was a defense minister in Adenauer's second cabinet.
Early Cercle members representing the Paneuropa Union, the European Coal and Steel Community, France, Germany and Italy. Andreotti was not a founding member; the others were.
Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, in addition to Pinay, were recruited from France. Schuman had been French prime minister from 1947 to 1948 and French foreign minister from 1948 to 1953. Jean Monnet, as Planning Commissioner of the National Economic Council from 1945 to 1952, and appointed by De Gaulle, carried out essential work for the reconstruction of the French economy. He was connected to the highest financial and political circles in North America, the UK, and western Europe, and was one of the major players in the push for an integrated Europe in the aftermath of WWII. As founding vice-chairman of the Committee for European Economic Co-operation (CEEC), which oversaw the Marshall Plan aid, he was the most influential player in this organization. This short description doesn't even begin to describe the life of this extraordinary Frenchman, so lets take a more in depth look at him.
Pinay and especially Violet were the official founders of Le Cercle, with Habsburg, vice president of the Paneuropa Union under Coudenhove-Kalergi, acting as Violet's patron. These men initially brought together Schuman, Monnet, Adenauer and a number of other individuals. All of these men, except Monnet, were either members or sympathizers of Opus Dei. The financial empire of Pesenti, who has no known direct ties to Opus Dei, was funded by the Vatican Bank and he turned out to be Banco Ambrosiano's largest minority shareholder when it collapsed in 1982. Monnet, as the only one among these names, was connected to leading bankers in London and New York, and used to be secretary general of the League of Nations. N.b. Pesenti might not have been a founding member, but used to be a top level player in the 1960s, chairing meetings and inviting David Rockefeller. He later also financed some of the work of Violet and Crozier.
"Europe's founder" Jean Monnet
Right before and after WWI Monnet hooked up with leading figures in the Anglo-American establishment. One of the first was Lord Kindersley, who during his life was a partner in Lazard Brothers, a chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company, and a director of the Bank of England. Kindersley's son is known to have become a Pilgrims Society executive (14).
Another very important person was Arthur Salter, whom he first met in 1914 (15). Salter and Monnet would become involved in setting up the Inter-Allied Maritime Transport Council, the Supreme Economic Council at Versailles, and the League of Nations. In 1931, Salter wrote 'The United States of Europe', which favored a federal Europe within the framework of the League of Nations. Probably not by coincidence, Monnet's post-WWII proposal for a political structure of a united Europe was almost exactly the same. Three years after writing 'The United States of Europe', Salter became a professor at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, named by Quigley as the center of the Round Table Group. In fact, Quigley identified Salter as a member of the Milner Group (16), and it is known that Salter shared a few boards with Lord Astor, a prominent Pilgrims Society family, and the Viscount Cecil of Chelwood of that time, a member of the family that is said to have coordinated the Round Table group (and appears in both Le Cercle and the Pilgrims). Salter also became a member of the Privy Council in 1941.
Others Monnet became a close associate of were Sir Eric Drummond, the 16th Earl of Perth, who was a member of a very aristocratic family in Britain; John Foster Dulles; Douglas Dillon; a Lazard Brothers' banker whose sister-in-law was Lady Nancy Astor; and John J. McCloy. He also was a long time business associate of Elisha Walker (American International Corporation; Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; CFR), with whom he clandestinely tried to take over A. P. Giannini's Transamerica Corporation and its Bank of America network. It failed after a lawsuit in which Giannini vowed to fight the "Wall Street domination" on the board of his company. In February 1932, Walker and Monnet were ousted as chair and vice chair respectively (17).
He then went into business with the leaders of the Chinese Green Gang Triad, Tse-Ven Soong and Chiang Kai-shek. He took his assistant, David Drummond (the future 17th Lord Perth; from a catholic Hungarian family which emigrated to Scotland in the 11th century; two members of this family were among the eight original founders of the Order of the Thistle; raised by the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, a very old catholic aristocratic family; later Privy Councillor; later chair of the Ditchley Foundation for 3 years; later representative of the Queen to the Vatican; became a member of the extremely elite Roxburghe Club, together with members of the Cecil, Cavendish, Howard (Dukes of Norfolk), Mellon, Rothschild, and Oppenheimer families), the son of Monnet's superior at the League of Nations, to China where he lived until 1936.
In 1935, when Monnet was still in Shanghai, he became a business partner of George Murnane in Monnet, Murnane & Co. Murnane was connected to the Wallenbergs in Sweden, the Bosch family in Germany, the Solvays and Boëls in Belgium, and John Foster Dulles, André Meyer, and the Rockefellers in the United States. He was considered among the most connected persons of his time (18). John Dulles of Sullivan & Cromwell provided the financial backing for the partnership. After Monnet got back to the United States, he was briefly investigated for tax evasion. Then, in 1938, Monnet, Murnane & Co. was briefly investigated by the FBI, who suspected it of having laundered Nazi money (19). Nothing came of this investigation, but the Nazi-cooperation of some of Monnet's close friends, like Douglas Dillon and John Dulles, or Murnane's earlier firm, Lee, Higginson & Co., is well documented (20).
When WWII broke out, Monnet was one of the most important individuals in contact with both the French resistance and the Churchill government. While in London at the time that France was overrun, Monnet proposed to General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French government in exile, the creation of a Franco-British Union; a plan to completely unite France and Britain. The Churchill government accepted, even a desperate de Gaulle accepted, but eventually the (supposedly Synarchist) opposition in France, headed by Marshall Petain, killed the plan. They saw it as an attempt of Britain to wrestle control over France. Petain subsequently became the leader of Vichy France.
After the war, Monnet was appointed by de Gaulle to reorganize the French economy. But Monnet also began to reorganize the whole of Europe.
Together with an equally mysterious Joseph Retinger (connected to both MI6 and the Vatican; founder of Bilderberg), who was raised by European nobility (21), Monnet organized the May 1948 Congress of Europe, which met under the auspices of the United Europe Movement in The Hague. Chairman was Winston Churchill, whose son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, worked closely with Joseph Retinger and CIA heads Allen Dulles and Bill Donovan. Later Cercle members as Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer were in attendance, just as Alcide de Gasperi and Paul Henri Spaak. The CIA would become the primary source of funding for the United European Movement in the following decades (22).
In 1949, with the support of Adenauer, Robert Schuman proposed the so called "Schuman Plan", which became the basis for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). It was established in 1952 and is usually seen as the birth of the European Union. In reality, Monnet, who became the first chairman of the ECSC's High Authority, had entirely written the "Schuman Plan". And interestingly, even this might only partially be true, as Monnet's structure for Europe turned out to be a slightly adapted version of Arthur Salter's 1931 paper 'The United States of Europe', which originally advocated a federal Europe within the framework of the League of Nations (23). Both men worked high up in the League of Nations and had a close relationship to the leading Anglo-American families, as has already been discussed.
One year later, on 24 October 1950, the French prime minister René Pleven introduced his "Pleven Plan". As happened earlier with Schuman, who didn't support this latest proposal, this document too had been written entirely by Jean Monnet (although he might have discussed it with his friend Arthur Salter). It proposed the creation of the European Defence Community (EDC): a Paneuropean defense force. Eventually this proposal was defeated by the Gaullist nationalists in France, and Europe's defense forces remained part of the newly-established NATO, which was (and is) mostly international, instead of supranational.
After the failure of his European Defence Community (EDC), Monnet doubled his efforts and founded the very low-profile Action Committee for the United States of Europe (ACUSE). It brought together leading international members of governments and labour unions, mainly to discuss European economic integration. ACUSE, together with the US State Department, lobbied and pressured a great deal behind the scenes in the run up to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which created the actual European Economic Community (EEC; "Economic" was dropped in '91). All of Monnet's most important associates in this process were members of the Pilgrims Society: David K.E. Bruce, the Dulles brothers, John J. McCloy, George Ball, C. Douglas Dillon, and president Eisenhower. Cercle member Konrad Adenauer was among the signers of the treaty, just as Paul Henri Spaak. Also, the founding vice president of the ACUSE was Max Kohnstamm, who became the initial 1973 European chairman of the Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission. Kohnstamm used to be private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Antoine Pinay was another important member of ACUSE, the organization that Time Magazine dubbed a "European shadow government" in 1969 (24).
In 1961, Monnet managed to replace the OEEC, initially established to oversee the Marshall Plan, with the broader Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (25). The OECD since then has been one of the most influential institutions promoting globalization and free trade, today working in partnership with the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization. Mainland European governors of the Atlantic Institute of International Affairs, which also was founded in 1961, have had a relatively strong presence in these institutions, especially in the OECD. Pilgrims Society members have been dominant in the other institutions while the Vatican-connected Paneuropa members have always played a minor role in the institutions above and tend to criticize the Anglo-American Liberal establishment.
Around the same time Monnet replaced the OEEC with the OECD, he met with Edward Heath (As Lord Privy Seal 1960-1963 responsible for the initial talks to bring Britain into the European Common Market; head Conservative party 1965-1975; Conservative prime minister UK 1970-1974; very committed to the EU; a close Sun Myung Moon associate) at the house of his good friend David Drummond, the 17th Lord Perth (26), a member of an old aristocratic family with very good connections to both the Vatican and the highest levels in British society, including the Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, Mellons, Cecils, and Howards (27). Lord Perth was a chairman of the Ditchley Foundation and his father was the initial secretary-general of the League of Nations while Monnet was his deputy. Heath became a member of Monnet's Action Committee and in 1973 he signed Britain into the European Economic Community. This only became possible after De Gaulle had ceased to be president of France.
Monnet was an early supporter of de Gaulle, as he was of the opinion that this legendary general was the only person who might be able to reunite the French people after WWII. However, in later years some friction developed between these two men. De Gaulle was a nationalist who supported a strong intergovernmental Europe, preferably with France being the major influence. Monnet, on the other hand, was a no holds barred supranationalist.
Franco-German rapprochement
Jean Monnet clearly was among the most influential and secretive of the Cercle members that pushed for a united Europe. However, according to Brian Crozier, a former chairman of Le Cercle, Jean Violet himself also played an important behind the scenes role several years after the European Economic Community (EEC) had been founded:
"By far the dominant theme in de Gaulle's foreign policy (as Violet interpreted it) was Franco-German reconciliation. A genius at (non-violent) operations of influence, Violet played an historically key role between 1957 and 1961 in bringing about this rapprochement, which is the real core of the European Community. He had developed a close friendship with Antoine Pinay, who had served as French Premier in 1951 under the unstable Fourth Republic. At a lower level, a complementary role was played by his SDECE colleague Antoine Bonnemaison. Violet was the go-between in secret meetings between Pinay and the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and his coalition partner Franz Josef Strauss. These paved the way for Charles de Gaulle's own encounters with Adenauer, which culminated in the Franco-German Treaty of January 1963. [Treaty of Elysée]" (28)
The Treaty of Elysée is a relatively unknown agreement (for the average person) between France and Germany in which both countries agreed to consult with each other on important foreign policy and economic issues, ahead of time of general EEC meetings. It is the core of the often-discussed Franco-German alliance, which has had great influence on the European project ever since. Some say, too much.
The Elysée agreement was made at the time that de Gaulle first vetoed the accession of Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC). The decision was quietly backed by Adenauer. De Gaulle argued that Britain's economy was based on trade with its Commonwealth and did not have a large agricultural economy, like France and most other countries in mainland Europe. This, together with Britain's historical "special relationship" with the United States, convinced de Gaulle that Britain would never be fully committed to the interests of Europe (29). Of course, it's far from unreasonable to think that de Gaulle's primary reason was that he saw Britain and its ally the United States as a threat to France's influence within the European Union. A few years later de Gaulle also withdrew from NATO, expelled all Allied forces from France, and tried to get on good terms with the Soviet Union. In addition to the enemies he had made when he withdrew from Algeria, he now also angered people like Brian Crozier and his French intelligence associate Colonel Antoine Bonnemaison. Bonnemaison ran a Cercle-like operation (let's shorten it to Le Centre), of which Crozier had become a member (30). Members of the Centre had already labeled de Gaulle "the enemy" in 1965, and were looking for ways to evict him from office (31). Within four years they got what they wanted, although it's not known if they had any active involvement in ousting de Gaulle, besides spying on him. But they certainly had the connections to do that.
It would still be several years before the Opusian Jean Violet and Anglo-Saxon Brian Crozier would meet and join hands. Ironically, at this time, when Crozier was involved in spying on de Gaulle, Violet was carrying out de Gaulle's defense and foreign policy objectives, and possibly was the French president's most important intelligence agent. Even when Crozier was head of Le Cercle from 1980 to 1985, he did not know Jean Violet's full background:
"It was not until the spring of 1993 that I learned the details of Jean Violet's real secret service role when General de Gaulle was in power. A background document was given to me by one of Violet's ex-colleagues. Ironically, a few years before Gabriel Decazes and I started spying on de Gaulle, Violet was masterminding a Service Spécial to promote the General's objectives in defence and foreign policy.
The document began with a paragraph of wistful praise for Britain's remarkable achievements in intelligence and clandestine action. But France, too, offered a precedent: Louis XV had set up a special service known to the few who were aware of it as the Secret du Roi. This service reported directly to the King, bypassing the Foreign Ministry of the day.
Only two people were aware of de Gaulle's latter-day model: General Grossin, the then head of the SDECE, and a certain 'Monsieur X'. It required no great deductive powers to assume that Monsieur X had to be Maître Violet, but Jean refused to comment when I asked him. My other source, however, confirmed my supposition. No wonder, in retrospect, that Violet's shadowy role and apparently bottomless purse stirred resentful envy among his colleagues and poisoned Alexandre de Marenches's mind against Violet, whom he had never met." (32)
Violet saw Franco-German rapprochement as de Gaulle's most important foreign policy objective, but judging by his association with people who wanted Britain in the European Union as a "third pillar" it is doubtful he supported all of de Gaulle's later decisions. In 1980, Violet picked Crozier as his follow-up to the presidency/chairmanship of Le Cercle (33). Crozier had been recruited by the Frenchman nine years earlier, and introduced by a person who had been a close assistant to Cercle member Jean Monnet (who struggled for a long time to get Britain into the EEC).
"On 1 March 1971, a long interview I had given to Joseph Fromm appeared in US News and World Report. The theme was terrorist and Communist intentions. On reading this interview, a Frenchman named Maitre Jean Violet came to see me in my Piccadilly office, with an introduction from Francois Duchene, my former Economist colleague and Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.... Violet impressed me with the clarity and precision of his arguments - Gallic logic at its best - and with the breath of his intellectual grasp of world problems." (34)
Duchene had met Monnet in exactly the same way as Crozier met Violet. In 1950, Duchene wrote a series of articles for the Manchester Guardian which came to the attention of Jean Monnet. In response, Monnet invited Duchene to become one of his assistants in building a united Europe. Duchene followed Monnet when the latter became head of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). He then followed Monnet to Paris and became an editor of the Economist. In 1958, Duchene became a director of Monnet's Action Committee for the United States of Europe (ACUSE), which struggled to get Britain in the EEC under the dictations of the Treaty of Rome. He remained on the board until 1963. During this time, he suffered a nervous breakdown for some unknown reason. In 1963, he went on to become leader writer for the Economist and from 1967 to 1969 he was a Ford Foundation fellow (a huge US intelligence-connected foundation). From 1969 to 1974 he was a director of the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a think tank on international affairs with directors linked to intelligence and the high financial circles. In 1974 or 1975, Duchene became the European deputy chairman of the Trilateral Commission, working under Max Kohnstamm, Monnet's partner at the Action Committee (35).
So, as can be concluded from the above text, during Duchene's time as a director of the IISS, he approached Brian Crozier on behalf of Jean Violet, and very likely on behalf of the Cercle in general, as Crozier mentioned that his involvement with the Cercle started that same year (36). Interestingly, Duchene not only introduced Violet as a person who worked for French intelligence, but also as a person who "represented a powerful consortium of French business interests." (37)
It seems there's no end to the interests Cercle-founder Jean Violet represented during his lifetime: the fascist CSAR group, Opus Dei, Paneuropa, the French government, French business, French intelligence, and even German intelligence, as former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen recruited him at one point for his involvement with Le Cercle (38). Whereas Jean Violet is tightly locked into the Paneuropa-Vatican network, his associates Jean Monnet, Francois Duchene, Brian Crozier and several other (Duchene is not confirmed as a Cercle member) British Cercle members seem to be more connected to the Anglo-American interests.
Crozier's anti-communist propaganda network
In the 1950s and early 1960s Crozier worked as a journalist and editor for the Sunday Times, the Economist, and the BBC. During this time he made his first intelligence contacts
Brian Crozier: "[Reagan] shared my view that Nel- son was more intelligent than his banker brother, David. He was critical of the role of David Rocke- feller's Chase Manhattan Bank in easing technology transfers to the Soviet Union. Reagan also men- tioned, with mild distaste, the role of the Trilateral Commission in sponsoring Jimmy Carter." (Free Agent, p. 182) and used them for scoops. When John Hay "Jock" Whitney was ambassador to Great Britain from 1957 to 1961, Crozier was invited to his inner circle (39). Whitney was a Rockefeller associate, a friend of the British royal family, a CIA associate, and a Pilgrims Society vice president until the day he died (40). A few years later, Crozier went to work for the IRD, doing studies (some prefer to call it "disseminate propaganda") on KGB subversion. He also started to work with the CIA, MI6, and the intelligence agencies of France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Morocco, Iran, Argentina, Chile, and Taiwan. The CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) also approached him to reconstruct and commercialize their organization. Crozier, however, turned down this offer as he was too busy with his other undertakings. He later did a study for the CCF, investigating its South American network. Some time after that study, in 1965-1966, he reconstructed the CCFs Forum Service, turning it into Forum World Features (FWF). John Hay Whitney was the one who took over the financial burden of FWF from the CIA when it was commercialized. Another billionaire CIA associate, Richard Mellon Scaife, later took over funding of FWF from Whitney. Scaife also funded Crozier's Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), which he founded in 1970, and showed up at gatherings of the Foreign Affairs Research Institute, an anti-communist and anti-terrorist propaganda group headed by several British Cercle members, including Crozier (41). In his book 'Free Agent' Crozier summarized the purpose of his ISC: "Throughout my period as Director, the Institute for the Study of Conflict was involved in exposing the fallacies of 'détente' and warning the West of the dangers inherent a policy of illusion." (42)
Crozier and associates rejected Kissinger's Détente, aimed at reducing tensions between the superpowers, because, this group claimed, the Soviets continued to infiltrate and significantly influence Western Labour and Green parties, trade unions, media, and intelligence agencies. Also, they were of the opinion that the initial post-WWII policy of Containment (the Truman doctrine) was flawed. Instead, they argued that the West not only should resist a further communist encroachment, but also that it had to liberate countries that had fallen under the control of the Soviet empire. Every piece of territory that the Soviets conquered had to be taken back.
A noble and intelligent idea you would think. Unfortunately, many people who headed this lobby from behind the scenes just happen to be so far to the right they could actually be labeled as fascists. And in between these left and right wing extremists you had the Rockefeller clique, seemingly with their own agenda, encouraging technology to be sold to the Soviets (43). Even Crozier and some of his associates criticized that, probably never entertaining the idea that these people might know a thing or two they didn't (44).
In his book Crozier claims that the people who exposed his Forum World Services, The 61, and his Cercle were mostly manipulated or working for the KGB. He also presents information in such a way that will lead you to conclude that people like Mohammed Mossadeq and Harold Wilson were KGB paws, and that Pope John Paul I & II were both targeted by the KGB for assassination (only John Paul I died of that, allegedly). The KGB is basically behind everything. Crozier even repeated a 1978 claim by Time Magazine that the most effective KGB propaganda was that of discrediting the CIA (45). He also likes to state that "neo-colonialism" was a term invented by the Soviets, etc. Many of his accusations are based on statements from anonymous intelligence officers. At times, although he normally focuses on his own connections, he has used or referred to such reliable sources as the CIA sponsored Encounter magazine, the CIA sponsored Reader's Digest, his own CIA sponsored ISC think tank, the CIA sponsored journalist Claire Sterling, or to the CIA connected Zionist extremist Michael Ledeen.
It is important to consider that Crozier perfectly fits the profile of someone like Colin Wallace, the British intelligence agent who was handed all kinds of forged material to be put into circulation (46). And just recently, a Belgian associate of Jean Violet, Crozier's closest colleague for years, was caught forging KGB documents that had to prove a vast left wing conspiracy against this person (47). Crozier's good friend Richard Perle (48), and some of the other people he is associated with, would also know a thing or two about cooking or inventing evidence to sway public opinion. Crozier himself has been very influential in the late 1970s and early 1980s in setting up the war on terrorism. His friend Perle would take it to the next level after 9/11. More about that later, as Crozier's bio is a lot longer.
It seems like a cold war is raging in Europe. One that doesn't directly involve the Soviets.
Origins
Le Cercle used be known as the Pinay Circle, or Cercle Pinay by its original French founders. Although the group was named after a French statesman who was prime minister from March to December 1952, the real organizer of this group was a person named Jean Violet, a close associate of Pinay since 1951 (1).
Jean Violet has a murky past to say the least. In French and later English literature, Violet is named as a pre-WWII member of the Comite Secret pour l'Action Revolutionnaire (CSAR), a secretive fascist group which, like Freemasonry, had its own initiation rites (2). Some authors have suggested that CSAR, popularly known at the time as the Cagoule, or "hooded ones", was one of the most important branches of the legendary Synarchist Movement of Empire and worked to undermine the French Republic in preparation for the coming Nazi invasion (3). Whatever truth can be found in this claim, it is known that Jean Violet was arrested after the war for having collaborated with the enemy. He was released however "on orders from above" (4), went to work as a lawyer in Paris, and decided to become a member of Opus Dei (or, possibly, he became a member first, which resulted in his release). In 1951, Violet came into contact with Antoine Pinay, a Catholic also said to have been in bed with Opus Dei, who asked him to solve a problem with a Geneva-based firm that had been sieged by the Nazis during WWII. As the story goes, Pinay was so impressed with the way Violet handled his assignment that he recommended him to French intelligence, the SDECE (5). Also, Violet soon managed to hook up with Opus Dei luminaries as Alfredo Sanchez Bella and Otto von Habsburg (6), who had founded the European Centre of Documentation and Information (CEDI) in 1949 (7). Habsburg was chairman for life of CEDI and later also of the Paneuropa Union. Sanchez Bella was the Spanish ambassador to Rome under Franco in the 1960s while his brother was head of Opus Dei in Spain (8). Violet also became an associate of Father Yves-Marc Dubois, a senior member of Vatican intelligence and possibly its head (9).
CEDI was one of the first in a long line of hard-right, often aristocratic institutions part of the Vatican-Paneuropa network. One of these institutions, founded by Antoine Pinay and Jean Violet, became Cercle Pinay, and besides that it was set up "somewhere in the 1950s" (10), the exact date remains unknown. The claim that Cercle Pinay was put together in 1969 (11) is wrong and has probably been a mix-up with the Belgian Cercle des Nations, which was founded that year by a secretary general of CEDI (12). Violet was one of the few French members of this Cercle des Nations (13) that was part of the same Opusian Vatican-Paneuropa network. The crowd of Cercle des Nations has featured in a number of Belgian conspiracies and some were involved with the "Dutroux network" that allegedly didn't exist. Bit more about that later.
Like many others, Pinay and Violet understood that the basis for a stable united Europe would be a Franco-German reconciliation. Therefore they recruited in their Cercle the most important individuals that were working towards this aim.
From Germany they invited the long time chancellor and foreign minister Konrad Adenauer, and two of his closest associates, Franz Joseph Bach, who ran Adenauer's office; and Franz Joseph Strauss, the controversial hard-right political figure from Bavaria who was a defense minister in Adenauer's second cabinet.
Early Cercle members representing the Paneuropa Union, the European Coal and Steel Community, France, Germany and Italy. Andreotti was not a founding member; the others were.
Pinay and especially Violet were the official founders of Le Cercle, with Habsburg, vice president of the Paneuropa Union under Coudenhove-Kalergi, acting as Violet's patron. These men initially brought together Schuman, Monnet, Adenauer and a number of other individuals. All of these men, except Monnet, were either members or sympathizers of Opus Dei. The financial empire of Pesenti, who has no known direct ties to Opus Dei, was funded by the Vatican Bank and he turned out to be Banco Ambrosiano's largest minority shareholder when it collapsed in 1982. Monnet, as the only one among these names, was connected to leading bankers in London and New York, and used to be secretary general of the League of Nations. N.b. Pesenti might not have been a founding member, but used to be a top level player in the 1960s, chairing meetings and inviting David Rockefeller. He later also financed some of the work of Violet and Crozier.
Right before and after WWI Monnet hooked up with leading figures in the Anglo-American establishment. One of the first was Lord Kindersley, who during his life was a partner in Lazard Brothers, a chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company, and a director of the Bank of England. Kindersley's son is known to have become a Pilgrims Society executive (14).
Another very important person was Arthur Salter, whom he first met in 1914 (15). Salter and Monnet would become involved in setting up the Inter-Allied Maritime Transport Council, the Supreme Economic Council at Versailles, and the League of Nations. In 1931, Salter wrote 'The United States of Europe', which favored a federal Europe within the framework of the League of Nations. Probably not by coincidence, Monnet's post-WWII proposal for a political structure of a united Europe was almost exactly the same. Three years after writing 'The United States of Europe', Salter became a professor at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, named by Quigley as the center of the Round Table Group. In fact, Quigley identified Salter as a member of the Milner Group (16), and it is known that Salter shared a few boards with Lord Astor, a prominent Pilgrims Society family, and the Viscount Cecil of Chelwood of that time, a member of the family that is said to have coordinated the Round Table group (and appears in both Le Cercle and the Pilgrims). Salter also became a member of the Privy Council in 1941.
Others Monnet became a close associate of were Sir Eric Drummond, the 16th Earl of Perth, who was a member of a very aristocratic family in Britain; John Foster Dulles; Douglas Dillon; a Lazard Brothers' banker whose sister-in-law was Lady Nancy Astor; and John J. McCloy. He also was a long time business associate of Elisha Walker (American International Corporation; Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; CFR), with whom he clandestinely tried to take over A. P. Giannini's Transamerica Corporation and its Bank of America network. It failed after a lawsuit in which Giannini vowed to fight the "Wall Street domination" on the board of his company. In February 1932, Walker and Monnet were ousted as chair and vice chair respectively (17).
He then went into business with the leaders of the Chinese Green Gang Triad, Tse-Ven Soong and Chiang Kai-shek. He took his assistant, David Drummond (the future 17th Lord Perth; from a catholic Hungarian family which emigrated to Scotland in the 11th century; two members of this family were among the eight original founders of the Order of the Thistle; raised by the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, a very old catholic aristocratic family; later Privy Councillor; later chair of the Ditchley Foundation for 3 years; later representative of the Queen to the Vatican; became a member of the extremely elite Roxburghe Club, together with members of the Cecil, Cavendish, Howard (Dukes of Norfolk), Mellon, Rothschild, and Oppenheimer families), the son of Monnet's superior at the League of Nations, to China where he lived until 1936.
In 1935, when Monnet was still in Shanghai, he became a business partner of George Murnane in Monnet, Murnane & Co. Murnane was connected to the Wallenbergs in Sweden, the Bosch family in Germany, the Solvays and Boëls in Belgium, and John Foster Dulles, André Meyer, and the Rockefellers in the United States. He was considered among the most connected persons of his time (18). John Dulles of Sullivan & Cromwell provided the financial backing for the partnership. After Monnet got back to the United States, he was briefly investigated for tax evasion. Then, in 1938, Monnet, Murnane & Co. was briefly investigated by the FBI, who suspected it of having laundered Nazi money (19). Nothing came of this investigation, but the Nazi-cooperation of some of Monnet's close friends, like Douglas Dillon and John Dulles, or Murnane's earlier firm, Lee, Higginson & Co., is well documented (20).
When WWII broke out, Monnet was one of the most important individuals in contact with both the French resistance and the Churchill government. While in London at the time that France was overrun, Monnet proposed to General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French government in exile, the creation of a Franco-British Union; a plan to completely unite France and Britain. The Churchill government accepted, even a desperate de Gaulle accepted, but eventually the (supposedly Synarchist) opposition in France, headed by Marshall Petain, killed the plan. They saw it as an attempt of Britain to wrestle control over France. Petain subsequently became the leader of Vichy France.
After the war, Monnet was appointed by de Gaulle to reorganize the French economy. But Monnet also began to reorganize the whole of Europe.
Together with an equally mysterious Joseph Retinger (connected to both MI6 and the Vatican; founder of Bilderberg), who was raised by European nobility (21), Monnet organized the May 1948 Congress of Europe, which met under the auspices of the United Europe Movement in The Hague. Chairman was Winston Churchill, whose son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, worked closely with Joseph Retinger and CIA heads Allen Dulles and Bill Donovan. Later Cercle members as Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer were in attendance, just as Alcide de Gasperi and Paul Henri Spaak. The CIA would become the primary source of funding for the United European Movement in the following decades (22).
In 1949, with the support of Adenauer, Robert Schuman proposed the so called "Schuman Plan", which became the basis for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). It was established in 1952 and is usually seen as the birth of the European Union. In reality, Monnet, who became the first chairman of the ECSC's High Authority, had entirely written the "Schuman Plan". And interestingly, even this might only partially be true, as Monnet's structure for Europe turned out to be a slightly adapted version of Arthur Salter's 1931 paper 'The United States of Europe', which originally advocated a federal Europe within the framework of the League of Nations (23). Both men worked high up in the League of Nations and had a close relationship to the leading Anglo-American families, as has already been discussed.
One year later, on 24 October 1950, the French prime minister René Pleven introduced his "Pleven Plan". As happened earlier with Schuman, who didn't support this latest proposal, this document too had been written entirely by Jean Monnet (although he might have discussed it with his friend Arthur Salter). It proposed the creation of the European Defence Community (EDC): a Paneuropean defense force. Eventually this proposal was defeated by the Gaullist nationalists in France, and Europe's defense forces remained part of the newly-established NATO, which was (and is) mostly international, instead of supranational.
After the failure of his European Defence Community (EDC), Monnet doubled his efforts and founded the very low-profile Action Committee for the United States of Europe (ACUSE). It brought together leading international members of governments and labour unions, mainly to discuss European economic integration. ACUSE, together with the US State Department, lobbied and pressured a great deal behind the scenes in the run up to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which created the actual European Economic Community (EEC; "Economic" was dropped in '91). All of Monnet's most important associates in this process were members of the Pilgrims Society: David K.E. Bruce, the Dulles brothers, John J. McCloy, George Ball, C. Douglas Dillon, and president Eisenhower. Cercle member Konrad Adenauer was among the signers of the treaty, just as Paul Henri Spaak. Also, the founding vice president of the ACUSE was Max Kohnstamm, who became the initial 1973 European chairman of the Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission. Kohnstamm used to be private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Antoine Pinay was another important member of ACUSE, the organization that Time Magazine dubbed a "European shadow government" in 1969 (24).
In 1961, Monnet managed to replace the OEEC, initially established to oversee the Marshall Plan, with the broader Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (25). The OECD since then has been one of the most influential institutions promoting globalization and free trade, today working in partnership with the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization. Mainland European governors of the Atlantic Institute of International Affairs, which also was founded in 1961, have had a relatively strong presence in these institutions, especially in the OECD. Pilgrims Society members have been dominant in the other institutions while the Vatican-connected Paneuropa members have always played a minor role in the institutions above and tend to criticize the Anglo-American Liberal establishment.
Around the same time Monnet replaced the OEEC with the OECD, he met with Edward Heath (As Lord Privy Seal 1960-1963 responsible for the initial talks to bring Britain into the European Common Market; head Conservative party 1965-1975; Conservative prime minister UK 1970-1974; very committed to the EU; a close Sun Myung Moon associate) at the house of his good friend David Drummond, the 17th Lord Perth (26), a member of an old aristocratic family with very good connections to both the Vatican and the highest levels in British society, including the Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, Mellons, Cecils, and Howards (27). Lord Perth was a chairman of the Ditchley Foundation and his father was the initial secretary-general of the League of Nations while Monnet was his deputy. Heath became a member of Monnet's Action Committee and in 1973 he signed Britain into the European Economic Community. This only became possible after De Gaulle had ceased to be president of France.
Monnet was an early supporter of de Gaulle, as he was of the opinion that this legendary general was the only person who might be able to reunite the French people after WWII. However, in later years some friction developed between these two men. De Gaulle was a nationalist who supported a strong intergovernmental Europe, preferably with France being the major influence. Monnet, on the other hand, was a no holds barred supranationalist.
Franco-German rapprochement
Jean Monnet clearly was among the most influential and secretive of the Cercle members that pushed for a united Europe. However, according to Brian Crozier, a former chairman of Le Cercle, Jean Violet himself also played an important behind the scenes role several years after the European Economic Community (EEC) had been founded:
"By far the dominant theme in de Gaulle's foreign policy (as Violet interpreted it) was Franco-German reconciliation. A genius at (non-violent) operations of influence, Violet played an historically key role between 1957 and 1961 in bringing about this rapprochement, which is the real core of the European Community. He had developed a close friendship with Antoine Pinay, who had served as French Premier in 1951 under the unstable Fourth Republic. At a lower level, a complementary role was played by his SDECE colleague Antoine Bonnemaison. Violet was the go-between in secret meetings between Pinay and the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and his coalition partner Franz Josef Strauss. These paved the way for Charles de Gaulle's own encounters with Adenauer, which culminated in the Franco-German Treaty of January 1963. [Treaty of Elysée]" (28)
The Treaty of Elysée is a relatively unknown agreement (for the average person) between France and Germany in which both countries agreed to consult with each other on important foreign policy and economic issues, ahead of time of general EEC meetings. It is the core of the often-discussed Franco-German alliance, which has had great influence on the European project ever since. Some say, too much.
The Elysée agreement was made at the time that de Gaulle first vetoed the accession of Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC). The decision was quietly backed by Adenauer. De Gaulle argued that Britain's economy was based on trade with its Commonwealth and did not have a large agricultural economy, like France and most other countries in mainland Europe. This, together with Britain's historical "special relationship" with the United States, convinced de Gaulle that Britain would never be fully committed to the interests of Europe (29). Of course, it's far from unreasonable to think that de Gaulle's primary reason was that he saw Britain and its ally the United States as a threat to France's influence within the European Union. A few years later de Gaulle also withdrew from NATO, expelled all Allied forces from France, and tried to get on good terms with the Soviet Union. In addition to the enemies he had made when he withdrew from Algeria, he now also angered people like Brian Crozier and his French intelligence associate Colonel Antoine Bonnemaison. Bonnemaison ran a Cercle-like operation (let's shorten it to Le Centre), of which Crozier had become a member (30). Members of the Centre had already labeled de Gaulle "the enemy" in 1965, and were looking for ways to evict him from office (31). Within four years they got what they wanted, although it's not known if they had any active involvement in ousting de Gaulle, besides spying on him. But they certainly had the connections to do that.
It would still be several years before the Opusian Jean Violet and Anglo-Saxon Brian Crozier would meet and join hands. Ironically, at this time, when Crozier was involved in spying on de Gaulle, Violet was carrying out de Gaulle's defense and foreign policy objectives, and possibly was the French president's most important intelligence agent. Even when Crozier was head of Le Cercle from 1980 to 1985, he did not know Jean Violet's full background:
"It was not until the spring of 1993 that I learned the details of Jean Violet's real secret service role when General de Gaulle was in power. A background document was given to me by one of Violet's ex-colleagues. Ironically, a few years before Gabriel Decazes and I started spying on de Gaulle, Violet was masterminding a Service Spécial to promote the General's objectives in defence and foreign policy.
The document began with a paragraph of wistful praise for Britain's remarkable achievements in intelligence and clandestine action. But France, too, offered a precedent: Louis XV had set up a special service known to the few who were aware of it as the Secret du Roi. This service reported directly to the King, bypassing the Foreign Ministry of the day.
Only two people were aware of de Gaulle's latter-day model: General Grossin, the then head of the SDECE, and a certain 'Monsieur X'. It required no great deductive powers to assume that Monsieur X had to be Maître Violet, but Jean refused to comment when I asked him. My other source, however, confirmed my supposition. No wonder, in retrospect, that Violet's shadowy role and apparently bottomless purse stirred resentful envy among his colleagues and poisoned Alexandre de Marenches's mind against Violet, whom he had never met." (32)
Violet saw Franco-German rapprochement as de Gaulle's most important foreign policy objective, but judging by his association with people who wanted Britain in the European Union as a "third pillar" it is doubtful he supported all of de Gaulle's later decisions. In 1980, Violet picked Crozier as his follow-up to the presidency/chairmanship of Le Cercle (33). Crozier had been recruited by the Frenchman nine years earlier, and introduced by a person who had been a close assistant to Cercle member Jean Monnet (who struggled for a long time to get Britain into the EEC).
"On 1 March 1971, a long interview I had given to Joseph Fromm appeared in US News and World Report. The theme was terrorist and Communist intentions. On reading this interview, a Frenchman named Maitre Jean Violet came to see me in my Piccadilly office, with an introduction from Francois Duchene, my former Economist colleague and Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.... Violet impressed me with the clarity and precision of his arguments - Gallic logic at its best - and with the breath of his intellectual grasp of world problems." (34)
Duchene had met Monnet in exactly the same way as Crozier met Violet. In 1950, Duchene wrote a series of articles for the Manchester Guardian which came to the attention of Jean Monnet. In response, Monnet invited Duchene to become one of his assistants in building a united Europe. Duchene followed Monnet when the latter became head of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). He then followed Monnet to Paris and became an editor of the Economist. In 1958, Duchene became a director of Monnet's Action Committee for the United States of Europe (ACUSE), which struggled to get Britain in the EEC under the dictations of the Treaty of Rome. He remained on the board until 1963. During this time, he suffered a nervous breakdown for some unknown reason. In 1963, he went on to become leader writer for the Economist and from 1967 to 1969 he was a Ford Foundation fellow (a huge US intelligence-connected foundation). From 1969 to 1974 he was a director of the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a think tank on international affairs with directors linked to intelligence and the high financial circles. In 1974 or 1975, Duchene became the European deputy chairman of the Trilateral Commission, working under Max Kohnstamm, Monnet's partner at the Action Committee (35).
So, as can be concluded from the above text, during Duchene's time as a director of the IISS, he approached Brian Crozier on behalf of Jean Violet, and very likely on behalf of the Cercle in general, as Crozier mentioned that his involvement with the Cercle started that same year (36). Interestingly, Duchene not only introduced Violet as a person who worked for French intelligence, but also as a person who "represented a powerful consortium of French business interests." (37)
It seems there's no end to the interests Cercle-founder Jean Violet represented during his lifetime: the fascist CSAR group, Opus Dei, Paneuropa, the French government, French business, French intelligence, and even German intelligence, as former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen recruited him at one point for his involvement with Le Cercle (38). Whereas Jean Violet is tightly locked into the Paneuropa-Vatican network, his associates Jean Monnet, Francois Duchene, Brian Crozier and several other (Duchene is not confirmed as a Cercle member) British Cercle members seem to be more connected to the Anglo-American interests.
Crozier's anti-communist propaganda network
In the 1950s and early 1960s Crozier worked as a journalist and editor for the Sunday Times, the Economist, and the BBC. During this time he made his first intelligence contacts
Brian Crozier: "[Reagan] shared my view that Nel- son was more intelligent than his banker brother, David. He was critical of the role of David Rocke- feller's Chase Manhattan Bank in easing technology transfers to the Soviet Union. Reagan also men- tioned, with mild distaste, the role of the Trilateral Commission in sponsoring Jimmy Carter." (Free Agent, p. 182) and used them for scoops. When John Hay "Jock" Whitney was ambassador to Great Britain from 1957 to 1961, Crozier was invited to his inner circle (39). Whitney was a Rockefeller associate, a friend of the British royal family, a CIA associate, and a Pilgrims Society vice president until the day he died (40). A few years later, Crozier went to work for the IRD, doing studies (some prefer to call it "disseminate propaganda") on KGB subversion. He also started to work with the CIA, MI6, and the intelligence agencies of France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Morocco, Iran, Argentina, Chile, and Taiwan. The CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) also approached him to reconstruct and commercialize their organization. Crozier, however, turned down this offer as he was too busy with his other undertakings. He later did a study for the CCF, investigating its South American network. Some time after that study, in 1965-1966, he reconstructed the CCFs Forum Service, turning it into Forum World Features (FWF). John Hay Whitney was the one who took over the financial burden of FWF from the CIA when it was commercialized. Another billionaire CIA associate, Richard Mellon Scaife, later took over funding of FWF from Whitney. Scaife also funded Crozier's Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), which he founded in 1970, and showed up at gatherings of the Foreign Affairs Research Institute, an anti-communist and anti-terrorist propaganda group headed by several British Cercle members, including Crozier (41). In his book 'Free Agent' Crozier summarized the purpose of his ISC: "Throughout my period as Director, the Institute for the Study of Conflict was involved in exposing the fallacies of 'détente' and warning the West of the dangers inherent a policy of illusion." (42)
Crozier and associates rejected Kissinger's Détente, aimed at reducing tensions between the superpowers, because, this group claimed, the Soviets continued to infiltrate and significantly influence Western Labour and Green parties, trade unions, media, and intelligence agencies. Also, they were of the opinion that the initial post-WWII policy of Containment (the Truman doctrine) was flawed. Instead, they argued that the West not only should resist a further communist encroachment, but also that it had to liberate countries that had fallen under the control of the Soviet empire. Every piece of territory that the Soviets conquered had to be taken back.
A noble and intelligent idea you would think. Unfortunately, many people who headed this lobby from behind the scenes just happen to be so far to the right they could actually be labeled as fascists. And in between these left and right wing extremists you had the Rockefeller clique, seemingly with their own agenda, encouraging technology to be sold to the Soviets (43). Even Crozier and some of his associates criticized that, probably never entertaining the idea that these people might know a thing or two they didn't (44).
In his book Crozier claims that the people who exposed his Forum World Services, The 61, and his Cercle were mostly manipulated or working for the KGB. He also presents information in such a way that will lead you to conclude that people like Mohammed Mossadeq and Harold Wilson were KGB paws, and that Pope John Paul I & II were both targeted by the KGB for assassination (only John Paul I died of that, allegedly). The KGB is basically behind everything. Crozier even repeated a 1978 claim by Time Magazine that the most effective KGB propaganda was that of discrediting the CIA (45). He also likes to state that "neo-colonialism" was a term invented by the Soviets, etc. Many of his accusations are based on statements from anonymous intelligence officers. At times, although he normally focuses on his own connections, he has used or referred to such reliable sources as the CIA sponsored Encounter magazine, the CIA sponsored Reader's Digest, his own CIA sponsored ISC think tank, the CIA sponsored journalist Claire Sterling, or to the CIA connected Zionist extremist Michael Ledeen.
It is important to consider that Crozier perfectly fits the profile of someone like Colin Wallace, the British intelligence agent who was handed all kinds of forged material to be put into circulation (46). And just recently, a Belgian associate of Jean Violet, Crozier's closest colleague for years, was caught forging KGB documents that had to prove a vast left wing conspiracy against this person (47). Crozier's good friend Richard Perle (48), and some of the other people he is associated with, would also know a thing or two about cooking or inventing evidence to sway public opinion. Crozier himself has been very influential in the late 1970s and early 1980s in setting up the war on terrorism. His friend Perle would take it to the next level after 9/11. More about that later, as Crozier's bio is a lot longer.