Le Cercle

[Magda Hassan]

More on the American Cercle members
In the late 1980s Iran-Contra whistleblower Gene Wheaton expanded on what General Walters and his associates had been doing since the the 1960s. Wheaton had been a former police officer, military criminal investigator, and security contractor. He also used to be a counter-terrorism consultant for the Rockwell Corporation, the Saudi Royal Family, and the Shah of Iran, among other things. All this was before he was brought into the "inner circle", which turned out to consist of people he didn't want anything to do with. In 2002 Wheaton recalled: "In the late 70s, in fact, after Gerry Ford lost the election in ’76 to Jimmy Carter, and then these guys became exposed by Stansfield Turner and crowd for whatever reason ... there were different factions involved in all this stuff, and power plays ... Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear their conversations. They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush..." (109)
We've already seen that Shackley and especially Walters had become associated with Cercle activities around this same time. Carlucci also, who stands accused of involvement in the 1975 "anti-communosocialist" coup in Portugal of General Antonio de Spinola. He reportedly acted as an intermediary between Henry Kissinger and de Spinola, both members of Le Cercle, and gave the go-ahead for de Spinola's March 1975 coup (which ultimately failed) (110). Although usually very much understated, Spinola was a wealthy aristocratic fascist connected to the most powerful business monopolies in Portugal and its colonies. Through the CIA he worked with the Portuguese Stay Behind units, set up by fascist terrorists, and had begun implementing a regional strategy of tension (111).
When Crozier visited the CIA and the White House he met with some of the people that were part of the rogue group described above by Wheaton. In the Carter administration, of which he obviously was extremely critical, he was received by national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and secretary of defense James Schlesinger. In the Reagan administration he met with General Walters, Robert McFarlane, Richard Pipes, Richard V. Allen, Kenneth deGraffenreid, William Casey, and Oliver North. He regularly met with Sven Kraemer, the son of Fritz Kraemer, and really liked Admiral John Poindexter, who recently became notorious for heading DARPA's Total Information Awareness Office (the organization with the charming logo of a pyramid and eye watching over the world) (112). Furthermore, Crozier has worked with Cercle member Donald Jameson (113), a top CIA specialist on the Soviet Union who set up the neocon Jamestown Foundation that handled Soviet Bloc intelligence defectors. Donald, who in his earlier career had crossed paths with Col. Philip Corso (114) and the remote viewing projects (115), became a business associate of Ted Shackley (116), probably around the time he became involved with one of Crozier's research projects. Crozier also counted Cercle member General Richard Stilwell among his personal friends (117).
Oliver North and Richard Stilwell have been named as insiders to the CIA drug trade to fund covert operations. Crozier's Cercle associates William Colby and William Casey were others (118). During the time Crozier visited these Reagan officials (except Colby), Stilwell was part of the secretive Special Operations Planning and Advisory Group (SOPAG), which included among its 11 members Air Force Generals Richard Secord and Leroy Manor (119), both named as insiders of CIA drug trade (120). Stilwell's group had full access to Top Secret materials and quietly advised secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger (soon a Pilgrims Society executive) and assistant secretary of defense Richard Armitage, who was named as a partner of Ted Shackley in CIA drugs from the Golden Triangle (121). SOPAG was the Pentagon's top group in worldwide counterinsurgency and special operations.
In his biography Crozier was "sorry to say" that North did not take him into his confidence about Casey's Iran Contra scheme (122). Of course, as the mainstream media, Crozier only refers to the hostage and arms aspects of the affair. The many accusations that Contras were paying for their guns with disproportionate amounts of cocaine, which were shipped to the United States, is conveniently left out. But one is left to wonder if Crozier really was that naive, judging by an almost hilarious article he wrote in January of 1990.
"Estevez revealed that Cuba had built up a multi-million-dollar drug trafficking network, with thousands of agents in the United States. He said Fidel Castro was personally involved in drug trafficking, with the aim of promoting violent crime, addiction and corruption in North America, while simultaneously financing terrorism in Latin America: a perfect definition of "narco-terrorism''... Escobar was living in Cuba with the full assistance of Fidel Castro. Another fugitive, the American financier Robert Vesco [1001 Club], was believed to be Escobar's number two... On February 10, 1988, Blandon [Medellin cartel baron] testified before a Senate sub-committee that Castro and Noriega were working together to promote "drug-financed guerrilla movements throughout Latin America''..." (123)
What Crozier did here, right after the Iran Contra investigations, is to take the largely unreported accusations against his US associates and blame them solely on communist Cuba. It is entirely possible that Crozier's accusations are true, but the few million dollars of Castro pales in comparison with the hundreds of billions we're talking about in CIA (and other agencies) drug money. In fact, in the court papers Crozier is using to blame Castro, there also are plenty of testimonies about Noriega being CIA during the 1970s and 1980s, and that he had several meetings with George Bush, Cercle member William Casey, and other CIA directors (124). Noriega, a product of the School of the Americas, actually was the middle-man between Escobar's Medellin Cartel and the CIA. Later affidavits from people involved in these operations tell the same story, and an awful lot of them had to pay with their lives for their courage to come forward. The death and general persecution rate among these whistleblowers has been truly astonishing. So, Crozier's press reports not only seems to be one sided, at times they act as pure disinformation.

Some known US Cercle participants. Colby was Opus Dei; Casey and Feulner Knights of Malta. Brzezinski worked closely with the Knights in Americares, and like Kissinger, is close to the Rockefeller interests.

Speaking of disinformation (or cooking information), one of Crozier's best friends since the 1980s is Richard Perle (125), who is largely responsible for selling the public the 2003 invasion of Iraq. To accomplish this he even promoted the alleged meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi agents as a "well-documented" fact, which absolutely wasn't the case. If confirmed, which is probably never going to happen, that would be the only link between the 9/11 hijackers and Saddam Hussein. Ironically, this questionable intelligence report was received (and later disputed) through Czech intelligence, earlier used by the anti-Wilson and pro-Strauss crowd in the 1970s and early 1980s. Neoconservatives as William Safire, James Woolsey and William Kristol also used the Czech intelligence report to promote a war against Iraq (126).
Since about the time that Crozier became a leading member in the mid to late 1970s, Le Cercle seems to have forged closer links with the more hard-right elements in the US government (127). Besides the Reagan and Nixon administrations, Cercle members were involved with institutions as the Jamestown Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the United States Global Strategy Council, the Committee on Present Danger, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Committee on Present Danger, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Americares, and the Israeli-US Jonathan Institute. All these groups were interwoven with the World Anti-Communist League and religious organizations as the Knights of Malta and the Moonies.
Seemingly one of the closest associates of mainly the British Cercle members was CIA officer Ray Cline (OSS 1943-1946 and worked in the Far-East with Paul Helliwell and Gen. Singlaub; good friend of Chiang Kai-shek's son; set up the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (APACL) in Taiwan and South Korea in 1955-1956; CIA station chief in Taiwan 1958-1962; deputy director CIA 1962-1966; CIA station chief in Bonn 1966-1969 where he oversaw the local Gladio forces; confirmed the authenticity of FM 30-31A & B, instruction manuals of the DIA which included false flag terrorist actions that were to be blamed on the USSR; director Department of State's Bureau Intelligence and Research 1969-1973; director world power studies at Georgetown's CSIS 1973-1986; co-founder of the WACL with Gen. Singlaub; representative of CAUSA, founded by Moonie Col. Bo Hi Pak). Cline is never mentioned in Crozier's biography even though both were involved in two very important organizations: the Jonathan Institute and the Foreign Affairs Research Institute (FARI), of which, interestingly, Crozier also forgets to mention his involvement. He also does not discuss the United States Global Strategy Council (USGSC), which was founded in the same period and headed by Ray Cline for most of its existence. The USGSC counted Cercle members General Richard Stilwell (128) and William Colby among the earliest members and there's probably more overlap (129). Let's take a look at these three institutions.
The Washington-based U.S. Global Strategy Council (USGSC) existed from 1981 to about 1995 and was a think tank focused on setting coherent long range strategic goals for the United States. Clearly a bastion of America's permanent government, it mainly focused on worldwide anti-communist subversion. It also pushed for the development of non-lethal weaponry (130) and the costly Stars Wars program. Star Wars was later accused of having served as a bogus front operation through which vast amounts of funds were diverted (131) into a variety of black programs. Interestingly, electromagnetic and psychotronic weapons are the top suspects these black programs allegedly dealt with (132).
The USGSC was part of the whole hawkish (or "total war") neoconservative movement that came to the forefront with Reagan and remained prominent with Bush, Sr. It temporarily left the White House with the election of Clinton and then came back in full force with the Bush, Jr. administration in 2000. The whole idea of a global war on terror, including the use of pre-emptive strikes, goes back to ideas that were proposed by this neocon group in the late 1970s and early 1980s. George Shultz is the most crucial player from the American side, which obviously is the most important. However, he had allies in other parts of the world, including leading Israeli politicians from both Likud and Labour, fascist terrorists from France, and also Cercle president Brian Crozier and his clique in Britain. They came together at two conferences about international terrorism sponsored by the Jonathan Institute, an Israeli think tank named after the brother of Netanyahu. It was a Mossad front, according to former SAS/MI5 agent Colin Wallace (133).
The first meeting was in June 1979. Crozier and his Cercle sidekick Robert Moss were two of the speakers at this conference of which the purpose was to blame all international terrorism on the USSR. Richard Pipes, the later associate of Crozier at the White House, also spoke at the conference. Ray Cline and George H.W. Bush of the CIA were there, just as retired General George J. Keegan who had recently stepped down as head of Air Force Intelligence. OAS terrorist Jacques Soustelle attended, together with Benjamin Netanyahu, Jack Kemp, and a whole range of international journalists who promoted the view that the USSR was behind worldwide terrorism (134).
The second Jonathan Institute's conference on terrorism, held in 1984, was even more influential as Reagan was now in power. Netanyahu, George Shultz, and Douglas Feith were said to have organized this second conference (135). Feith worked under Crozier's friend Richard Perle at the time. The policies set then, re-emerged stronger than ever almost 20 years later, after 9/11. George Shultz (Bechtel executive; secretary of state at the time; Bohemian Grove camp Mandalay; National Security Planning Group; chair advisory council J.P. Morgan Chase; ran Reagan's election campaign; largely put together the George Bush Jr. administration), one of the biggest movers and shakers in the neoconservative movement, gave the opening speech in which he claimed that "pre- emptive actions by Western democracies may be necessary to counter the Soviet Union and other nations that... have banded together in an international "league of terror."" (136) Caspar Weinberger (also from Bechtel; Defense Secretary at that time; National Security Planning Group; later Pilgrims Executive; member Bohemian Grove camp Mandalay), Jeane Kirkpatrick (co-chair USGSC), and Yitzhak Rabin (Labour prime minister) also spoke at the conference backing the claim that terrorism had spun out of control and that the Soviet Union was the cause of that. The only thing that was disagreed upon was if this movement supporting a global war on both terror and the USSR should be incorporated within the United Nations or not (137). Jacques Soustelle had become a board member of the Jonathan Institute by then (138), together with Shimon Peres (Labour prime minister) and Menachem Begin (Likud prime minister) (139). Crozier's close associate Lord Alun Chalfont (minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office 1964-1970; Privy Council since 1964; Pilgrims Society executive since 1979; Conservative Monday Club; pro-apartheid; director pro-junta British-Chilean Council; council member of FARI with Cercle members/presidents Brian Crozier, Julian Amery, and Robert Moss, just as the aristocrat Sir Frederic M. Bennett; chair Institute for the Study of Terrorism, a clone of Crozier's anti-communist Institute for the Study of Conflict; member Committee for a Free Britain, which spent more than Pounds 200,000 on press advertisements attacking Labour during the 1987 election; member Committee for a Free World, an American neo-conservative group; member Media Monitoring Unit, which attempted to "expose" left-wing bias in television news and current affairs programmes; consultant to private security firm Zeus Security Consultants (did high level government contract work), owned by Major Peter Hamilton, a close friend of Stephan Kock, the MI5, MI6, SAS agent who allegedly once headed a government assassination team, Group 13; director at the security firm Securipol; close friend of the extremely influential neoconservative John Lehman, apparently a top player in the military-industrial complex; chairman second neoconservative Jonathan conference; deputy chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority), together with intelligence connected religious extremists as Michael Ledeen and Arnaud de Borchgrave, were among the contributors to papers read at the conference (140).

One Circle to link them all. Bit cheesy? Ow well, don't forget the Jonathan Institute or the Foreign Affairs Research Institute.

Chalfont had already been working with Cercle presidents Brian Crozier and Julian Amery (advisor to the BCCI in the 1980s) in their Foreign Affairs Research Institute (FARI), together with Sir Frederic M. Bennett (owned a Rolls-Royce and four homes, one of them in the Cayman Islands; director Kleinwort Benson Europe (his mother was a Kleinwort); long time Lloyds underwriter; influential member of Parliament from the 1950s to the 1980s; member Monday Club; always warning people about the KGB threat and supported every regime that opposed the USSR; chair FARI in 1978; vice-president of the European-Atlantic Group; leading official in the private group Council of Europe in the late 1970s and 1980s; honorary director of the BCCI in Hong Kong until 1986; Member of the Privy Council since 1985; ridiculed his party (Conservatives) for their Euroscepticism after his retirement in 1987; supported Pinochet; Freeman of the City of London; visited Bilderberg) and Cercle member Robert Moss (141). Like Chalfont, Crozier and Moss were involved with the Jonathan Institute. FARI was set up in 1976 with funds coming from the pro-apartheid government in South-Africa (142) and reportedly also from Lockheed (143). Reports that it was linked to the CIA are rather obvious today (144). FARI gathered several anti-communist authors which spread their stories in the international press. Members spoke about terrorism being out of control while implying this was all organized from Moscow in an effort to destabilize the West. Many of the examples they mention in reality were the result of CIA, MI6, and Gladio special operations, most notably those in Italy. Some other acts of terrorism seem to have had little to do with the Soviet Union and instead were probably the result of extremist nationalism or freedom fighters. These alternative possibilities were however carefully ignored.
Conferences of FARI were attended by Crozier's money man Richard Mellon Scaife and Cercle members William Casey and Edwin Feulner (roommate of neocon warhawk and military-industrial complex insider John F. Lehman; president Heritage Foundation; Knight of Malta; trustee Mont Pelerin Society; IMF & World Bank insider; chairman Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies in London; Bohemian Grove). Ray Cline of the CIA and the Jonathan Institute has been in attendance, just as General Daniel O. Graham of the CIA and DIA (145). Like Stilwell, both Graham and Cline were involved with the US Global Strategy Council. Cline was among the founders of the USGSC and chairman of the institute from 1986 to 1994.
The members of the USGSC (initially 70 or so) had close ties to the Military Industrial complex, including highest level (often retired) representatives of the Navy, the Air Force, the Army, the intelligence agencies, shady defense corporations as SAIC, private business groups, and unusual religious interests as the Moonies and Knights of Malta. Over the years, known members have included Cercle member William Colby (CIA director 1973-1976; deep insider of many black programs, including CIA drug trafficking; Opus Dei), Henry Luce III (of Time Magazine; president of the Pilgrims of the United States since 1997; grandfather bought and held on to the JFK Zapruder film), Clare Booth Luce (Dame of Malta), Ray Cline, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman (director ONI; director DIA; director NSA; deputy director CIA; director Wackenhut; director SAIC; Trilateral Commission; chairman of the "JPL Oversight Committee", which is not supposed to exist), Michael Alan Daniels (Special assistant for political science research at the Office of Naval Research 1969-1971; president USGSC 1986-1994; section vice president SAIC since 1986; chairman of SAIC's Network Solutions since 1995), General Brent Scowcroft (chair Presidential Commission on the MX Peacekeeper ICBM; co-founder and vice-chairman of Kissinger Associates from 1982 to 1989; American Ditchley Foundation; Atlantic Institute; CFR; Trilateral Commission; visited Bilderberg), General Daniel O. Graham (deputy director CIA under Colby 1973-1974; director DIA 1974-1976; one of the most important pushers of the Star Wars program; founding chair of High Frontier, Inc.; member advisory board CAUSA and member of the Moon-linked American Freedom Coalition), Edward Teller (seen as the father of the Hydrogen Bomb; hardliner and suspected of involvement in many black projects; major pusher of Star Wars; member Council for National Policy and the Committee on the Present Danger), Arnaud De Borchgrave (intelligence-connected hard-right journalist; good friend of Sun Myung Moon), Lynn Francis Bouchey (organizer of CAUSA operations in Central and South America), General E. David Woellner (chairman of the Sixth CAUSA-USA Foundation Conference and a defender of the Moon Cult), Lev Eugene Dobriansky (president of the Moonie-sponsored Global Economic Action Institute from 1987 to 1992. Head of the British branch of Global Economic was Cercle president Julian Amery; chair Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation 1994-2003, in which Cercle participants Edwin Feulner and Zbigniew Brzezinski were involved, just as Cercle president Brian Crozier), Jeane Kirkpatrick (co-chair USGSC; member President's Foreign Intelligence and Advisory Board and Defense Policy Review Board; member Council for National Policy and the Committee on the Present Danger; chair of Moon's Nicaraguan Freedom Fund; member National Advisory Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has close leadership links to the Moonies and Le Cercle), General Maxwell Taylor (former chair Joint Chiefs; IDA), General Albert Wedemeyer (chief of staff to Lord Mountbatten in South-East Asia in 1944; chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, head of the KMT and later founder of Taiwan who was in bed with one of the major Chinese Triads), General Robert Schweitzer (served under Alexander Haig at NATO; served under Haig, Kissinger and Richard Allen at the NSC; chair Inter-American Defense Board 1982-1987; national strategy program director USGSC since 1987; friend of General Singlaub; publicly supported Oliver North after Iran Contra), Christopher Morris (chair and vice-president of M2 Technologies, which focuses on non-lethal weapons; research director at the USGSC, working directly under Cline, and later heading the council's Non-Lethality Policy Review Group; member of the 1995 CFR's Task Force on Non-Lethal Technologies, of which Dov Zakheim and Jason scholar Richard Garwin also were members), and Janet Morris (president & CEO of of M2 Technologies; also member of the 1995 CFR's Task Force on Non-Lethal Technologies; research director on non-lethal technologies at the USGSC 1993-1994; consultant at Los Alamos and close associate of Col. John Alexander).
General Stilwell, the Cercle member involved with the USGSC, deserves some more attention. It has already been discussed that he was a member of The 61 and the Special Operations Planning and Advisory Group (SOPAG), and seemingly an insider to the CIA drug trade in the 1980s. His involvement with CIA drugs might well go back to WWII and the early 1950s when he was involved in South-East Asia, including Burma, as a commander of Army forces and later regional CIA/OPC chief (146). More about Stilwell's history before he turned 65 can be read in his biography in the Cercle membership list. We'll focus on the last six years of his life, some time after he had been introduced to Le Cercle and The 61.
After Stilwell left the Defense Department in 1985, he set up Stilwell Associates, a private consulting firm that specialized in national security affairs. It had the CIA and the Defense Department among its clients (147). Because of this outside independent role Stilwell was able to claim in September 1987 he "was traveling at the request of no one" when Philippine authorities were worried about his presence in their country (148). Several months earlier his friend and SOPAG colleague General Jack Singlaub had also been peeking around on his own, allegedly searching for "sunken treasure" (149). In November 1986, Ray Cline and General Robert Schweitzer, like Stilwell both of the US Global Strategy Council, had also paid a visit to the Philippines. When the visit of Cline and Schweitzer was reported in the press, Cline stated that they were not official U.S. representatives and that they did not discuss the trip with the White House. But for some reason they did talk to former Marcos' defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, allegedly to persuade him not to mount a coup against the new sitting president Cory Aquino (150). However, in August 1987 Enrile was arrested (and later released) with alleged CIA agent Colonel Gringo Honasan for attempting to overthrow Aquino. Accusations of CIA involvement were widespread and were the result of decades long US support for Marcos.
Presidents like LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush (vice-president at the time) have strongly supported Marcos' severe dictatorship. The main reason was his strong anti-communist stance while allowing the US to operate Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base on the island. In the early 1980s, as Marcos became older and his grip on the nation waned something typical happened. Reagan withdrew US support for his friend Marcos and key officials in Marcos' regime, mainly defense minister Enrile and police force head General Fidel Ramos, switched sides to the growing opposition. Marcos was driven out and evacuated by the United States to Hawaii. Cory Aquino came to power, but immediately it were individuals like Ramos and Enrile who were forcing, even threatening, Aquino to embrace the (partially new) ruling business and political oligarchy (151). A month after the failed August 1987 coup, Stilwell added that "unless Aquino acted decisively on military and political fronts - and embraced the right-of-center leaders in the private and public sector - there could be "a political breakdown" resulting in a coalition government with the communists within the next two years." (152) Philippine government officials were openly speculating that the "CIA guys in town" were part of a rogue group, "maneuvering outside the normal channels of operations", which played a role in the August 28 coup by the military. It was also openly alleged that the U.S. valued its Navy and Air Force bases in the country more than the freedom of the Philippine people (153).
Whatever role the US exactly played during the 1980s in the Philippines, what was going on here were private intelligence and likely direct intervention operations. Like The 61 charter said: "a Private Sector Operational Intelligence agency, beholden to no government, but at the disposal of allied or friendly governments." (154) The same group that was involved in creating and running The 61 was involved here in the Philippines, not to mention in all other parts of the world. The British had been doing these things since at least 1963 when a group consisting of Julian Amery (Cercle), David Stirling, George Kennedy Young, unknown Mossad agents, Billy McLean (Cercle), the House of Al-Faisal (Cercle) and Hussein bin Talal of Jordan (Cercle) were running a largely private war in the Yemens. (155) As for the US, these private operations exploded in the 1970s and got another boost right after 9/11. In both cases, the same anti-communist, radical Zionist, neoconservative group was involved in expanding these operations.
Around the time Stilwell left government service and set up Stilwell Associates he joined the Advisory Board of Americares, a large relief organization with heavy duty links to the pharmaceutical industry, the intelligence community, right wing politicians, and the religious fringe. Americares used the Knights of Malta to distribute supplies and to more easily move across international borders. In 1991, the year Stilwell would pass away, J. Peter Grace (Knights of Malta leader; CNP; 1001 Club; Pilgrims Society; AIFLD; W.R. Grace & Co.; Citibank), a long time colleague of Stilwell, was chairman of the advisory board while Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Cercle participant like Stilwell, was its honorary chair. The Moonie-connected Knight of Malta William E. Simon was another member of the advisory board. Robert C. Macauley is the founder and head of Americares, not to mention a childhood friend of George H.W. Bush, the son of a Knight of Malta. Although Macauley is not a Catholic, he did have pictures of President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa on his office walls (156).
In the early 1970s, Macauley had joined hands with Bruce Ritter, a Catholic priest who took care of runaway children in New York. Both were invited for an audience with the Pope in 1982, who gave the newly-established Americares the opportunity to give aid to Poland (157). This was purely a geopolitical move as the Vatican, for several years, had been funding a Catholic underground in Poland, and now that an economic crisis had broken out, Americares was chosen to bolster the image of both the Vatican and Reagan's Catholic Conservatives even more. At the same time, the Vatican began supporting Solidarnosc (Solidarity), a large group of dissident workers, with funds and a printing press. Roberto Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano was among the banks that had bankrolled these operations and the Vatican was coordinating their actions with officials from the Reagan administration, including General Alexander Haig, General Walters, and William Casey, all three members of the Knights of Malta (158). Reagan's representative to the Vatican, Le Cercle and The 61, William Wilson, who also was a Knight of Malta, was another one (159). Georges Albertini of the Cercle, a major French fascist with a series of Synarchist links, provided crucial intelligence gathered by The 61 on Poland to the Pope during this time (160).
Unfortunately for Macauley, in 1990, he was forced to break his association with the Catholic priest after this person was accused of sexual misconduct with some of the male runaways he was sheltering (161); a very common accusation in the Catholic Republican Paneuropa circles that is being dealt with in this article.

Some more Cercle members. King Hussein of Jordan used to receive millions from the CIA. Sultan Qaboos from Oman overthrew his father in 1970 (which was a good thing) with help from "British advisors" and privatized the oil economy. He is rumored to be gay by almost his entire population, which is quite a sin in an Islamic country. Both Hussein and Qaboos were advised by Cercle member Air Marshal Sir Erik Bennett. Turki from Saudi-Arabia is reported to have met his old protege Osama Bin Laden as late as July 2001, together with the CIA, and resigned 10 days before 9/11 as head of Saudi intelligence. Auchi was part of Saddam Hussein's inner circle and is standing here next to Prince Andrew at the Anglo-Arab Organization. Actually, it isn't known if former Nazi spy chief General Reinhard Gehlen attended Cercle meetings, only that he was very interested in the Cercle and that he recruited its founder, Jean Violet, as an intelligence agent. Details can be found in the membership list, which features very detailed biographies often with a number of newspaper excerpts.

The Vatican-Paneuropa network
Even though its members have been involved in intrigues around the world, the Cercle's main purpose has always been to discuss issues and possible action relating to European integration. The vision of the original French and German founders, as representatives of the Paneuropa movement, seems to have been a strong Catholic-dominated Europe, led by a Franco-German axis. Historically, you'll find a close cooperation between the Vatican-Paneuropa network (from which the Cercle emerged) and the right wing Christian Democratic parties in countries as Germany, Italy, France, and Belgium. It went the same way in Spain, although a democratic system did not exist there until after the death of Franco.
IN GERMANY the main players were CSU members Otto von Habsburg, Franz Joseph Strauss, Count Hans Huyn, and several of their aristocratic friends like the Thurn und Taxis and Thyssen-Bornemisza families. Their connections to Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta have already been discussed. Let's also not forget Paneuropa member Konrad Adenauer, the long time Chancellor of Germany who signed the 1957 Treaty of Rome for Germany. Adenauer, a co-founder of the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) - the national party of the Bavarian CSU - received the Magistral Grand Cross from the Knights of Malta and the Charlemagne award from the Paneuropa Union. Franz Josef Bach, the personal assistant of Adenauer, is likely to have played an important behind the scenes role as a long time organizer of Cercle meetings. Adenauer was a founding member of Le Cercle.
IN ITALY the Opusian Cercle member Giulio Andreotti was one of the main behind the scenes players from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. He started his career under Paneuropa supporter Alcide de Gasperi, one of the early builders of Europe and likely someone who was recruited into the Cercle. Statements from Roberto Calvi that Andreotti was the real head of the P2, with Francesco Cosentino and Umberto Ortolani just beneath him, are entirely possible (162). Although Licio Gelli, nicknamed "Italy's puppet master" for heading the P2, was a member of the Knights of Malta, like Andreotti and Ortolani, Gelli did not have the background to have been any kind of top man. Gelli's foreign puppet masters were Cercle member Henry Kissinger from the White House, NATO official Alexander Haig, and rogue CIA official Ted Shackley. Frank Gigliotti, a ranking US Mason and former OSS agent, was another one of Gelli's immediate instructors (163). Andreotti has numerous accusations against him that he worked with the mafia (and the CIA) to keep his Christian Democrat Party in power. There's also an accusation that he personally ordered an assassination to keep some personal secrets from leaking out. Andreotti was the first to acknowledge the existence of a European Stay-Behind army, named Gladio in case of Italy.
As for Italy's nobility, the earlier-mentioned Prince Carlo della Torre e Tasso is a board member of the Coudenhove-Kalergi Foundation and Prince Carlo de Bourbon, the Duke of Calabria, is head of the Vatican-recognized Italian branch of the the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St George. It's a Catholic chivalric order, but has recently also invited a small number of non-Catholics, including Cercle chairman Lord Norman Lamont (Privy Council; Rothschild; chair Oil Club) and Cercle member Anthony Cavendish (MI6; not of the Dukes of Devonshire). The controversial Cercle member Nadhmi Auchi (did illegal arms transfers for Saddam) has been awarded by the order. The Catholic Duke of Norfolk (together with the Cecils the most influential family in the history of Britain; British liaisons to the Vatican for centuries; Roxburghe Club member with the Cecils, Cavendishes, Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, and formerly Paul Mellon) and Lord Guthrie (SAS commander; Gold Stick to the Queen; Pilgrims Society; Knights of Malta; Rothschild) can also be found among the British members of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order (164). The controversial Duke of Savoy is another important family in Italy, but has not been tied directly to Paneuropa or Le Cercle.
CERCLE MEMBERS FROM BELGIUM have yet to be identified, but the group they must have come from is rather limited. Take former defense and prime minister Paul Vanden Boeynants and his sidekick Baron Benoît de Bonvoisin, whose father had been a director at Société Générale (still the major pillar of the Belgian economy and the Vatican-linked aristocracy) and an initial Bilderberg participant. Both were reportedly members of Opus Dei. Vanden Boeynants and Benoît de Bonvoisin were two of the founders of Cercle des Nations in 1969, an aristocratic Belgian club with Jean Violet as one of the few foreign members. Cercle des Nations was another hard-right offshoot of Paneuropa activities and had about 80 members when it first opened. Vanden Boeynants is also said to have been involved with Violet's Académie Européenne des Sciences Politiques while the headquarters of the Paneuropean Institut Europeen de Developpement was located in Baron de Bonvoisin's castle (165). Co-founder and vice-chairman of this institute was Paul Vankerkhoven, a side-kick of Otto van Habsburg who founded the Belgian branch of the World Anti-Communist League. Vankerkhoven was a co-founder of CEPIC in 1972, a secretive hard-right inner group of the Social Christian Party (PSC) of vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin. To keep things short, this group, which includes the Belgian royal family of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and many high nobility figures, has at times tried to undermine Belgium's democratic process. One of these attempts was in the early 1970s. Another one in the early 1980s.
There's more going on in Belgium. According to victim-witnesses since the early 1980s, and especially testimonies made in the aftermath of the Dutroux affair, this group (see PEHI's 'Beyond the Dutroux affair' for details) is involved in different pedophile rings. Some of these rings are set up to compromise politicians and businessmen; others seem to be just for "fun" and include child hunts at different domains and some very disturbing forms of mental and physical torture. Reports of involvement of Opus Dei and Knights of Malta figures are quite common. One report that might be relevant here involves a former PSC treasurer of the youth division, Jacques Thoma. He claimed that at some point he was invited to mass orgies by his superior (a CEPIC member and an associate of both Nihoul and suspected Gang of Nijvel members), which were explained to him as an Opus Dei initiation test, to which these people were trying to direct him. Later on, he was drugged and taken to a meeting where everyone was dressed in black robes and masks. The purpose of this meeting was "to be initiated into higher circles". A young girl had been sacrificed and participants drank her blood. Other girls from eastern Europe were also present. He tried to leave, but was drugged again. The next morning he woke up in his car. Still heavily traumatized ten years later, he did not dare to give an official testimony, because he had been intimidated (166).
Another case from Belgium involving the Vatican-Paneuropa network: Paul vanden Boeynants and Prince Albert (now King) was among the names mentioned in the Pinon Affair that began in 1979 (167). It involved parties at which minors were sexually abused. In June 1981 the editor of Pour Magazine was brought into contact with one of the participants in these parties and started an investigation. Within days he receives a telephone call from an attorney in Brussels who advises him to stop his investigation, because "panic has broken out in a certain political milieu". Ten days later the headquarters of Pour are destroyed by a fire (168).
Two individuals have been named as the person that threatened the editor. One is Jacques G. Jonet, formerly a political secretary of Otto von Habsburg and a leading figure in a whole string of Paneuropa-associated groups, including the Habsburg-founded Centre of Documentation and Information and Cercle des Nations. He co-founded several of these institutions and is reported to have been a close associate of Baron de Bonvoisin (169). A quick background check anno 2006 turns up that Jonet is the representative of the Belgian Order of Malta, while his wife is a member of its administrative council (170) (together with a few interesting family names). Both were present at the wedding of Prince Philip (son of King Albert II and Princess Paola Ruffo di Calabria) and Mathilde d'Udekem d'Acoz (Dame of Malta) in 1999 (171). It also turns out that Jonet is still involved with the Wilton Park conferences, together with the Grand Chancellor of the Order of Malta (172).
The other possibility at the time was Vincent vanden Bossche, a lawyer of numerous hard-right individuals who was part of the same milieu as Jonet. Like Jonet, he was a member of Cercle des Nations and Ordre du Rouvre, although his credentials are less impressive (173). It is entirely possible that both men were involved in trying to stop the editor of Pour from publishing the results of his investigation.
Keep in mind that in the first case mentioned (the alleged Opus Dei initiation) we were talking about secretive parallel cells within existing organizations, like those that had been created by this same group in Belgium's gendarmerie, and reportedly also in the military, political parties, and at one or more universities. Even though these reports of extreme child "abuse" initially seem farfetched, they come from more than half a dozen (known) witnesses. They also bear a remarkable similarity to the Franklin and Craig Spence cases, which revolved around the highest level Republican circles in the US. For a quick oversight of these cases you might want to take a look at the biography of Cercle member and Knight of Malta William Casey, who had an awfully close relationship with Larry King and Craig J. Spence. A separate article will appear on this Belgian group and its similarities to other cases.
SPAIN WAS headed by Franco until 1975, which was only partially approved by the reactionary Vatican-Paneuropa network. On the one hand, Franco was a good Catholic boy, treating the non-Catholics in his country as sub-human. On the other hand, because of Franco's totalitarian tendencies Spain remained isolated from the European integration process. That has been a major reason for the pressure on Franco to make reforms, allowing for a more democratic and pro-European Spain to emerge after his death (174). It is said that Franco initially contacted the head of the Paneuropa movement, Otto von Habsburg, to become his follow-up, as the Habsburgs had ruled the country in the past for nearly 200 years. After a long discussion Otto declined, instead suggesting that Prince Juan Carlos should become Franco's successor (175). And so it happened. Franco, Habsburg, and Carlos have all been named as members of the Knights of Malta. They also supported Opus Dei.
There's only one known Cercle member from Spain at the moment, Federico Silva Munoz. In 1967, Munoz, as Franco's Minister of the Interior, had blocked a bill that would have recognized the existence of Spain's small non-Catholic community. Most Opus Dei figures in government voted in favor of the bill, as part of the overall reform process (176). In October 1969, there was an almost complete overhaul of Franco's cabinet with only four members of the old cabinet remaining. One of the four cabinet members that was allowed to stay was Munoz (177), although he resigned five months later, allegedly because of a difference of opinion with the now dominant Opus Dei clique, headed by Franco's eminence grise Admiral Carrero Blanco and several others (178). Munoz remained a member of the Spanish Congress and became head of Campsa, the oil concern which had a monopoly on oil distribution in Spain (179). The struggle between the Falangists and Opusians continued in the years following, with the latter losing a lot of influence after Admiral Blanco had been assassinated in December 1973, allegedly by the ETA. This was the view of the newspapers at the time; not something later put forward by alternative researchers.
Franco passed away in 1975 and King Juan Carlos became the new head of government. After Carlos dismissed the fascist prime minister Carlos Arias Navarro in 1976, Munoz was among the few who were recommended by Carlos' highest advisory body, the Council of the Realm, to be made prime minister of Spain (180). However, Carlos picked the right wing, but far less reactionary, Adolfo Suarez, who reportedly was a member of Opus Dei (181). Munoz, in the mean time, had become head of the hard-right Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD) and in October 1976 he incorporated this party into the newly-created Alianza Popular (AP). The AP was a federation of several parties, which were all fascist or borderline fascist. It opted for a "more gradual" change to democracy than Suarez and his allies had planned for. Some co-founders with Munoz were former Franco ministers Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora, Lopez Rodo (influential minister in the 1960s and early 1970s, who is said to have engineered the Opus Dei takeover of the Spanish government), and Manuel Fraga Iribarne (182). When the new constitution was approved in 1978, turning Spain into a parliamentary democracy, most members of the AP, as totalitarian as they were, decided to accept the constitution. Not Munoz and Fernandez de la Mora, who withdrew from the AP to continue with their Unión de Centro Democrático party, renaming it in January 1979 to Derecha Democrática Española (DDE). That same month they established a coalition with Fuerza Nueva of Blas Pinar and other ultrafascists; probably the most reactionary and dangerous political faction in Spain at the time (183). Munoz spoke out a few times against the new Spanish constitution in the months and years following (184), but soon disappeared in political obscurity. At some point he did become involved with Le Cercle, and that shows.
In 1983, Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora, Munoz's political partner and good friend since they first met at a gathering of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas in the 1940s (185), founded the fascist magazine Razon Espanola (Spanish Reason) and became its president. Munoz would regularly write articles for the magazine. Razon Espanola was founded on October 1, 1983 as an outgrowth of the Balmes Foundation, in turn established a few months earlier by a grant of the German Hanns Seidel Foundation (186), which has already been mentioned before. It is the political trust attached to the Christian Social Union of such Opus Dei and Cercle luminaries as Otto von Habsburg and Franz Josef Strauss. There have been accusations that the Foundation has supported the Contras in Latin America and Mobutu (a 1001 Club member like Herbert Batliner, King Juan Carlos and Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis) in Zaire (187). In case of Razon Espanola, it funded the magazine over a number of years until it was able to operate on its own. As you can read above, Fernandez and Munoz were friends of Strauss and when the BBC highlighted this in a panorama on Strauss in 1980, Brian Crozier, outgoing chairman of Le Cercle (which no reader of The Times knew) felt compelled to defend his associates (188). However, Crozier himself was a great supporter of the Franco regime and like Munoz, Fernandez de la Mora, or Blas Pinar, he deemed Spain's new constitution unworkable (189). In short, all these people are fascists, even though they always deny that. In 1989, Cercle investigator David Teacher claimed that Munoz was a "senior Opus Dei member" (190). Judging by most of his career, Munoz was not in the camp that, at least in Spain, has traditionally been identified with Opus Dei. However, this religious group transcends political parties and Munoz's later involvement with Le Cercle, Strauss and the Hanns Seidel Foundation certainly made him a close associate of what has often been termed "God's Octopus".
THE PANEUROPA UNION and the Vatican never had to complain about France. Whether a president was Gaullist or socialist, at the very least they favored a strong Europe as a political and military counterweight to the United States; and even though Great Britain was accepted into the European Union, it was never able to wedge itself into the dominant Franco-German alliance. This mainly had to do with the French. All French presidents were staunch Roman Catholics, some even connected to Opus Dei, like Robert Schuman, Antoine Pinay, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, with probably a few others we don't know it about.
The French have been the primary motor behind the European Union. Paneuropa member Robert Schuman, through Monnet, laid the foundation for the European Union with the 1949 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). In the 1950s, Antoine Pinay founded Le Cercle with the Opusian Jean Violet and Otto von Habsburg. They immediately invited Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. Monnet, although mainly connected to Anglo-American banking and political interests, was the Frenchman who organized the 1948 Congress of Europe with Joseph Retinger, came up with the idea of the ECSC, played an important role in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, and later set up his influential action committee.
The decade after the ECSC, Bilderberg, Le Cercle and the European Economic Community (EEC) had been created, Violet and Pinay arranged for the Franco-German alliance between de Gaulle and Adenauer. This was in January 1963 and just in time for a possible acceptance of Britain into the EEC. De Gaulle, however, vetoed Britain's entry anyway, which guaranteed Franco-German dominance of the EEC for the years to come.
Coudenhove and Habsburg adored de Gaulle not only for giving France a strong military and even its own nuclear arsenal, but also for his leadership role in furthering European integration (191). In 1969, however, after de Gaulle had steered Europe too much in an anti-NATO, anti-Anglo-American, and domestically too Conservative course, he had built up so much opposition against himself that he was forced (or forced himself) to resign. His more moderate right hand man, Georges Pompidou, a person in close contact with the Cercle and a long time employee of the Rothschild Bank, took over.
Pompidou's éminence grise became nazi-collaborator Georges Albertini, who worked at Banque Worms, coincidentally said to have been a major Synarchie front. Albertini worked with Jean Violet and Brian Crozier in both The 61 and the Cercle. He also briefed the Pope on several occasions. In 1973, at the recommendation of Georges Pompidou, Otto von Habsburg became the new president of the Paneuropa Union, as Coudenhove-Kalergi had died the year before (192). Pompidou himself suddenly died in 1974 and the interim president became Alain Poher, a member of Le Cercle who was president of the French Senate from 1968 to 1992. He had earlier served as acting president when Charles de Gaulle died, but lost the election to Pompidou. This time Poher lost the election to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a Knight of Malta and good friend of Jean Violet, who became the next president of France until 1981. Giscard, his father Edmond, together with associates as Prince Jean de Broglie, Robert Leclerc and members of Le Cercle are said to have introduced Opus Dei to France (193). More on Giscard in a minute.
Things changed in 1981, when the socialist Mitterrand became president of France. One family who couldn't appreciate the new socialist policies were the Rothschilds, who saw their family bank nationalized. They had to shift attention to New Court, their securities firm in New York at Rockefeller Center with stakes in corporations as TRW and Hughes Aircraft (194). But even though Mitterrand was a socialist, he also was a an ardent Catholic who favored European integration. Also, Georges Albertini already anticipated the victory of the socialists and brought Mitterrand's closest friend and confidant, Francois de Grossouvre, into the Cercle six months before the elections. When Mitterrand was elected in 1981, he appointed de Grossouvre as coordinator of security and intelligence (195). Four years later de Grossouvre and Admiral Pierre Lacoste, two leading officers in the French stay-behind networks (196), were among a small group that decided to sink the Rainbow Warrior in reaction to the protests of Greenpeace against French nuclear testing at Mururoa (197).
Mitterrand, known to have been greatly interested in Machiavelli, stayed a long time in office. Only in 1995 the more Liberal Jacques Chirac took over. Besides being the usual opportunist, Chirac has become a great supporter of European integration and of the failed 2005 European constitution. Before the voting process for the new constitution began, Chirac brought up the old issue of Britain's loyalty to the European Union, saying that if its citizens voted against, it would be clear that Britain felt more strongly about cooperation with the Commonwealth and the US. He then promoted the idea that any country who voted against the constitution could better leave the European Union (198). In April 2005, Chirac went on TV and openly stated that a no to the European Constitution "would halt the European project in its tracks, and pave the way to an unregulated, uncontrolled free-market world, dominated by the United States." (199)
Even after these strong statements, the person who oversaw the writing of the European constitution blamed Chirac for France's rejection of it. This person was Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a long time political rival of Chirac, and claimed it was a mistake of Chirac to hand out the third part of the European Constitution to the French people for reviewing, because part III had already been ratified in previous treaties. Giscard literally begged Chirac not to do this (200). However, since the people of France had to revote on this section as part of the overall constitution, Chirac decided to include it in the mailings, possibly to avoid any accusations of conspiracy that would undermine his chances in the 2007 elections. This third part, which dealt with the major EU policies - the internal market, the economic and monetary union, employment, social policies, consumer protection, environment, agriculture, energy, research, etc. - was severely criticized by the French people, who always leaned to socialism and communism quite severely (which in no small part had to do with France's Vichy and neocolonial past). Back in 1957, at the time of the Treaty of Rome when a lot of these very liberal policies were agreed upon, the socialists had nothing to bring in, as the CIA, MI6, the SDECE and French Gladio units made sure that leftist elements, however strong they were, did not get any executive positions in government. The same thing happened in other countries.
As a good Opusian and Malteser Knight, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing already proposed a solution to the problem of getting the European constitution ratified.
"Let's be clear about this: the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in France was a mistake, which will have to be corrected... the Constitutional Treaty will have to be given its second chance. When? When France has completed her great electoral debate, with the presidential and parliamentary elections which are due to be held 14 months' time, in spring 2007. How? By refocusing the debate on the only genuinely constitutional parts, that is to say, the first part, and the Charter of Fundamental Rights demanded by the European Left, neither of which have given rise to much protest. Then the third part could follow a parliamentary route, which is far better suited to its legal nature." (201)
Giscard enjoys the full support of his friend Otto von Habsburg, who agrees that the constitution should be reintroduced, albeit the more "comprehensible" early version of Giscard (202). Discussions about this have already been underway between Chirac and Merkel (of the CDU in Germany). Chirac is a Catholic, but seems to be less influenced by his fate than some of the politicians surrounding him. For example, Giscard and Habsburg strongly oppose any possibility of Turkish membership in the European Union, probably because that will interfere with their vision of a new Holy Roman Empire [update: in late November 2006, Pope Ratzinger all of a sudden saw no objections to Turkey joining the EU. It would be really interesting to know the reason behind this sudden and complete 180 degrees reversal. However, one thing seems to be certain: the reactionary Ultramontanists aren't getting what they want]. Chirac on the other hand is open to the idea that Turkey would eventually be allowed to join. Merkel agrees on this issue with Otto and Giscard, but is not part of their Opusian Bavarian clique. Edmund Stoiber, a protege of Strauss, tried to compete with her for the German chancellorship in 2005.
Franco-German vs. US-supported Anglo-German alliance
Besides individual politicians there's a very distinct group out there that supports the idea of Turkey becoming a full member of the European Union. That is the neoconservative crowd that rose to power in the early 1980s, was involved with the Jonathan Institute conferences and is now supporting the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), founded in 2005, is an extension of PNAC, and includes some of the European partners of what is supposed to become the "New American Century". The Henry Jacksons work towards what they call "global liberal democracy"and favor an Anglo-German alliance for Europe, especially after the failed constitution in June 2005 (203). The society's principles are:

• Liberal democracy should be spread across the world
  
• The US and the EU – under British leadership – must shape the world more actively
  
• Maintenance of a strong military with global expeditionary reach
  

Both William Kristol and Robert Ka...