Private Eye and Lobster on the Pinay Circle

This fortnight’s Private Eye, for 25th January to 7th February 2019 also published a very interesting article for conspiracy watchers on the Pinay Circle, now simply known as ‘Le Cercle’. This is a secret organization of extreme right-wing politicians, intelligence agents and businessmen. The Eye’s article reports how two Tory MPs, Mark Garnier and Greg Hands, attended one of their meetings in Washington last June. The article, ‘Spooky Circles’ on page 11, runs

DESPITE the convulsions in the Tory party, two former trade ministers still found time before Christmas to attend a secretive conference in the US stuffed with spies and business people.

Wyre Forest MP Mark Garnier, sacked as international trade minister a year ago after calling his secretary “sugar tits” and asking her to buy sex toys, and Chelsea and Fulham MP Greg Hands, a minister in the same department until he resigned over Heathrow expansion last June, both attended a Washington meeting of Le Cercle, a hush-hush foreign affairs group with a strong interest in international security.

According to the latest parliamentary register, the MPs’ four-to-five day trips cost 4,000 pounds per MP. Hands says he spoke on “international trade”. Given their former ministerial posts, it seems likely both men discussed the UK’s prospects post-Brexit.

Le Cercle was founded in the 1950s by a former French prime minister and a former German chancellor as a pro-European body that would cement Franco-German relations and strengthen US-European alliances. Today it has strong links with the intelligence world and to hawkish US politicians. Former Tory minister Alan Clark claimed it was funded by the CIA.

As Wikileaks revealed via a letter from former Tory defence secretary Michael Ancram, who chaired Le Cercle in 2012, its meetings are “attended by about 80 to 100 people” who are “largely European and American – Members of Parliament, diplomats, members of the intelligence community, commentators and businessmen from over 25 countries”. Who they are and what they discuss is never fully disclosed as “there is no Press and everything that is said is off the record”.

Hawkish free marketer US politicians like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld have been notable Le Cercle attendees. There is widespread suspicion the group receives corporate as well as intelligence funding, but the source is also secret. What better way for Tories to explore possible new trade relations with the US and Europe than a secretive trip to DC to meet un-named spies, Republicans and business people?

Hands is particularly well placed to make sure multinationals influence new trade relations. In November, five months after resigning, he accepted a part-time job as a “political consultant/adviser” to giant French bank BNP Paribas which is reported paying him 108,000 pounds a year on top of his MP’s salary.

The long-running conspiracies/parapolitical magazine Lobster has published several articles on the Pinay Circle, as it used to be called, way back in issues 11, 17, and 18. Issue 17 contained two reports from the German intelligence agencies on the circle, analyzing a piece of correspondence which suggested that it was running plots in Britain, Germany and elsewhere to promote right-wing politicians – Thatcher over here, and the notorious Franz-Josef Strauss in the Bundesrepublik. David Teacher’s article, ‘The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe’ in Lobster 18, page 22, contains more information on the Circle itself, and its possible involvement in various plots to destabilize left-wing or opposition governments across the world. This contained the following passage briefly describing the organization and its activities.

The Pinacy Circle (also called the Cercle Violet) is an international right-wing propaganda group which brings together serving or retired intelligence officers and politicians with links to right-wing intelligence factions from most of the countries in Europe. The intelligence community has been represented by SIS Chief from 1978-82, Arthur ‘Dicke’ Franks, SIS Department Head Nicholas Elliott, CIA Director William Colby, Swiss Military Intelligence Chief of Provisions, Colonel Botta, SDECE chief from 1970-81 Alexandre de Marenches, and, last but not least, the man who took over the running of the Circle when Pinay got too old, Jean Violet, a Parisian Lawyer who worked for the SDECE from 1957-70. violet became so much an ’eminence grise’ in the SCESE that Alexandre de Marenches had to dispense with his services in order to assert his authority as new SDECE chief in 1970. This episode has however not prevented them from working together within the Circle. At the time the Langemann papers were written, both Franks and Marenches were serving heads of British and French intelligence respectively.

On the political side, Pinay – a former French Prime Minister – forged links with Nixon, Kissinger and Pompidou. The Circle’s present members include Giulio Andreotti, former Italian Prime Minister; Portuguese putschist General Antonio de Spinola; former Franco minister and senior Opus Dei member Silvio Munoz; and Vatican prelate and BND agent Monsignore Brunello. Paul violet, Jean Violet’s son, is one of Chirac’s closest advisors, nicknamed ‘the adjutant’ by Canard Enchaine. Langemann also reports that Sir Arthur Franks and Nicholas Elliott were invited to Chequers for a working meeting with Mrs Thatcher, after her election. But perhaps the key political figure was the late Franz Josef Strauss, Bavarian Premier and Langemann’s boss.

Strauss was a close friend of Alexandre de Marenches and was a frequ8ent visitor to the SDECE’s headquarters during Marenches’ time. The Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, the political trust attached to Strauss’ Christian Social Union party, is an important group in international parapolitical manipulation. Active in Latin America for the Contras, supporting Mobuto in Zaire, involved in the Fiji coup in 1987, it was caught diverting state development aid from Germany into right-wing party coffers in Ecuador in the same year. Strauss and CSU were the main beneficiaries of identified Pinay Circle activities; i.e. the promotion of right-wing European politicians through Brian Crozier, Robert Moss, Fred Luchsinger of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung and Gerhard Luwenthal, anchorman on current affairs programmes for ZDF television, the major German network.

The Pinacy Circle has a wide range of contacts and its members interlock with the whole panoply of right-wing/parallel intelligence and propaganda agencies – WACL, Heritage Foundation, Western Goals, ISC, Freedom Association, Interdoc, the Bilderberg Group, the Jonathan Institute, P2, Opus Dei, the Moonies’ front CAUSA, IGFM ((International Society for Human Rights), and Resistance International. Lowenthal, for instance, is a member of IGFM, Resistance International, WACL, CAUSA, the Jonathan Institute, Konservative Aktion and the European Institute on Security.

The Pinay Circle’s significance lies in the fact that it is a forum which brings together the international linkmen of the Right like Crozier, Moss and Lowenthal, with secret service chiefs like Franks and Marenches. Through such contacts it can intervene by media action or covert funding whenever and wherever a political friend is in need of support. (p. 22).

The minutes of the Pinay Circle’s meeting in Zurich in June 1980s discussed the possibilities of securing the election of Strauss in Germany and Ronald Reagan in the US. It also discussed the Saudis opening a radio transmitter to broadcast into Russia and supporting the Israeli intelligence unit. The evidence linking the Circle to attempts to remove left-wing politicians across the world was so strong that Teacher concluded that

It is becoming more and more apparent that the treatment reserved for Harold Wilson at the hands of the intelligence services was only the UK end of an international phenomenon. Around 1973-5 a surprising number of governments were targeted by their own 9or others’) intelligence agencies because of their radical policies. If the world political scene in the 1960’s was one of the decolonization, then the 1970’s was the decade of destabilization. Among those cases of destabilization we were already aware of are:

– the UK: the concerted effort by elements in the British intelligence and security services, with CIA and BOSS, to bring down Wilson, Thorpe and Heath.

– the USA: the CIA’s Operation Chaos, the FBI’s Cointelpro programme and, of course, Watergate

– Australia: the loans scandal and other destabilization of Gough Whitlam by the CIA and SIS.

– West Germany: the destabilization of Willi Brandt because of his overture to ‘the other Germany’ through Ostpolitik. The CIA and MI5 (5) suspected Brandt of being recruited by Moscow during his wartime service with the resistance in Scandinavia. (p. 23).

The article also pointed out that Nicholas Elliott was a member of the Wilkinson/McWhirter/Ivens group, the Research Foundation for the Study of Terrorism, and speculate whether the Pinay Circle was involved in attempts to destabilise Mitterand’s government in France in 1974, the murder of Olof Palme in Sweden, and a possible attempted Fascist coup in Belgium in 1973. Of this latter, Teacher writes

Issue 17 of Celsius devotes six pages to the study of a coup d’état planned by gendarmerie officers and extreme right-wing groups in 1973. The article – ‘The big bad look of the 1970’s: the destabilization of the State’ – is based on the confessions of Martial Lekeu, a former gendarme who fled to the USA when sought for questioning in the ‘Killers of the Brabant Wallon’ enquiry. The killers, who specialized in holding-up supermarkets with maximum violence and minimum loot, killed 28 people between 1982 and 1985, always attacking the same chain of supermarkets on the same day of th week with the same kind of car, needlessly gunning people down and then escaping with cash rarely more than a few thousand pounds. Leukeu stated what many suspected: the killers were part of a political psy ops campaign aimed at reinforcing the State structures. Whether there is a link between the 1973 coup plans and the 1980’s destabilization remains to be seen: various parliamentary enquiries and comm9issions have so far failed to get to the bottom of the affair. (p. 24.) Teacher regrets, however, that information on the group and its activities are very limited, consisting of the 1972 ISC memo and the minutes released by Langemann in the Bavarian parliament in 1979-80.

It’s clear from this that the Circle is a very sinister organization with connections to other extreme right-wing groups, like WACL, whose name stands for World Anti-Communist League, and whose members include real Fascists and Nazis. I’m not surprised that the Tories sent two of their MPs to its meeting last year. The Tories’ right wing has always overlapped with some deeply unpleasant groups and organisations. Western Goals, an American Republican organization, according to Lobster, had a British subsidiary, Western Goals UK, which was also linked to them.

What is also interesting is that Private Eye published its piece on the Pinay Circle at all, considering how it called Nisar Malik a conspiracy theorist for believing in the Zionist control of the media. It seems the Eye is open to discussing real conspiracies, so long as they don’t involve the real, documented subterfuge and plotting of the Israeli state.

German Journo Udo Ulfkotte on Europe’s ‘Bought Journalists’

In my last piece, I discussed an article in Counterpunch by Thomas Harrington about the corruption of the British, French, German, Spanish and Italian press, even serious, progressive left-wing newspapers, to reflect American foreign policy interests, neoliberal economics and aggressive American militarism, even at the expense of the interests of their own citizens. Harrington’s article follows a book published in Germany by Udo Ulfkotte, a journalist with the Franfurter Allgemeine, one of the country’s foremost papers, roughly equivalent to the Times or the Torygraph. Entitled Gekaufte Journalisten (‘Bought Journalists’) the book describes how German and other European newspapermen have been bought by the American secret state, to publish pro-American, anti-Russian articles. Despite being a bestseller on that side of the North Sea, an English translation is still awaiting publication. Harrington’s article links to an interview with Ulfkotte on RT on YouTube.

In it, Ulfkotte describes how he too was bribed and corrupted by the CIA and the Bundesnachrichtsdienst – the German secret service – to write pro-American propaganda pieces. He describes how he has become an honorary citizen of Oklahoma in the US, amongst other rewards for his services, and goes on to describe how very many journalists from across Europe, particularly Britain, have been similarly corrupted. Those that have been corrupted the least are the French. He states that no-one will come up to you saying that they’re from the CIA, but ultimately, these are the people journalists like himself served. They get taken on in a system of ‘plausible deniability’. If they becoming too embarrassing, the agencies deny that they ever had anything to do with them. Ulfkotte’s states that after writing anti-Russian articles for the secret services, he is sick and tired of doing so and especially fearful because of the push to war with Russia.

He describes his country as so much under American control that it is ‘an American colony’ and a ‘banana republic’. Most Germans, for example, are against nuclear power, but still the Americans have sited their nuclear missiles in the Bundesrepublik. One of the instances of journalistic corruption he describes is obviously particularly shocking to a German very much aware of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. He describes being sent to Zubaidat in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. There he saw how the Iranian soldiers had been gassed used mustard gas made in Germany. Ulfkotte states how horrifying this was, to see German poison gas used again four decades after the Nazis. But when tried to write an article about it, it was spiked.

He also describes how he was asked to write a piece by the BND, the German intelligence service, describing how Colonel Ghadafy was also building poison gas plants in Libya. He himself had no knowledge of this, and all the information about it was supplied by the German intelligence agency.

He also describes some of the consequences if you refuse to join the ranks of the corrupted. He discusses the case of a German civilian helicopter pilot. This chap was a member of the ‘Yellow Angels’, a group that assists with traffic accidents. The spooks approached him about joining them as one of their spies under the cover of the organisation. He refused. He was then sacked from his job as a pilot because he was ‘untrustworthy’. The judge presiding over the case concurred with the assessment, and so the gentleman lost his job. Ulfkotte himself states that he’s not afraid what the intelligence services will throw at him. He’s already had three heart attacks, and has no children.

Here’s the video:

I’ve no doubt that what Ulfkotte says is true. As I said in my last post, Lobster has published a number of piece over the years on the way the British press, and particular journalists, have served as an outlet for propaganda cooked up by the CIA and the British Secret State. Leading journalists, such as an editor of the Times, were also recruited by the British-American Project for the Successor Generation, a Reaganite programme to train up-and-coming British politicians, like Tony Blair, to support the Atlantic alliance. Which is why you definitely won’t read much about BAP in the papers. Private Eye has also published pieces about BAP, and the way journalists with connections to the British intelligence services have tried to intimidate other journos into revealing their sources or working for them on issues relating to domestic terrorism.

What Ulfkotte describes is just the German part of a nasty web of intrigue that has been spread all over the continent. I’m not surprise that the French are the least corrupted. Under De Gaulle France pursued a solidly independent line, retaining its own, genuinely independent nuclear deterrent – ours is effectively signed over to American control – and establishing cordial relations with the eastern bloc. De Gaul blocked our application to join the Common Market – as the EU then was – in the 1960s because he feared that we were a Trojan horse for American interests.

A war with Russia is definitely not in the interests of anyone in Europe. I can remember being shocked when I was growing up in the 1980s at the suggestions then by American generals that there could be a ‘limited’ nuclear war in Europe, and apparently this appallingly stupid notion has been revived under Shrillary. Such a conflict would leave the continent, including Britain, a burnt, radioactive cinder, if it didn’t lead to the total destruction of all life on Earth as the conflict escalated. And the anti-welfare policies peddled by these papers have resulted in hardship and misery across the Continent and promoted the rise of Fascist parties and organisations as peoples have turned against each other to fight for what’s left.