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.

Thatcher Wanted to Block Anti-AIDS Adverts to Stop People Knowing about Anal Sex

Sorry about the sexual explicitness of this article, but it shows how bizarre and prudish Thatcher’s attitude to sexual awareness was.

Amongst the documents released under the thirty year rule yesterday were a number that revealed the battle between Norman Fowler and Maggie over how much the general public should be told about the transmission of HIV. There was a serious fear in Britain and the rest of the world that unless action was taken, AIDS would become a massive epidemic that would carry off millions of lives. It has, it is true, done so, and continues to do so, especially in Africa. The fear in Britain and other parts of the western world was that the contagion would be far more severe, perhaps even comparable with the Black Death which destroyed between a third and a half of the European population in the late 14th century.

Governments in Britain, America, New Zealand and Australia rushed out public information films to inform people of the dangers of this terrifying new disease. The one shown in Australia/NZ was particularly horrifying, as it showed Death knocking down people like bowling pins. In America, the approach was rather more subtle. All governments were urging their peoples to use condoms during sex to prevent the spread of the infection. American prudishness and sensitivity meant that in their films, contraception couldn’t be explicitly mentioned. The film therefore showed someone putting on a sock to protect his feet, while giving a little speech urging people to put similar items on if they wanted to protect themselves while having sex. A number of comedians made jokes about how ridiculous and spectacularly uninformative this was at the time.

But Maggie Thatcher seems to have shared some of those prudish attitudes. Fowler wished to publish a string of adverts in newspapers and magazines pointing out the particular dangers of anal sex. At the time this accounted for 85% of all cases. Thatcher, however, wanted to block this, as she was afraid that if the great British public found out about it, they’d start doing it.

At which point, you begin to wonder precisely where Thatcher got her ideas on sex from, and how much she really understood the people over whom she ruled. Perhaps well brought up ‘gels’ of her class and generation weren’t supposed to know about such things, rather like the massive sexual ignorance that plagued 19th century England. Unfortunately, even my grandparents’ time, such basic biological facts as menstruation weren’t taught in schools, so that many girls were frightened and bewildered by the changes that their bodies underwent at puberty.

And in the first half of the 20th century, when homosexuality was illegal, a number of people really didn’t know it even existed until they were in the early adulthood. I can remember a friend of mine telling me about one writer or actor, I’ve forgotten quite who, who said that he was in the 20s when he found out that there were such things as gays. And even then, his first reaction was that the person who told him was pulling his leg.

But by the time Thatcher got into power in the 1980s, people knew about gays and anal sex all right. All Thatcher needed to do to find out about this was to have one of her cabinet ministers tell her some of the coarse jokes being bandied around bars and pubs. Or school playgrounds. I found out about it all in secondary school, where there were some very crude jokes. Many of the circumlocutions used for gay men also referred obliquely to anal sex. In 19th century England one of such euphemisms was ‘gentleman of the back door’. Lenny Henry had a section on his TV show at the time, sending up the contemporary vogue for screen adaptations of novels set in pre-independence India. These were The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India. Henry spoofed them and the racial attitudes behind them as ‘The Jewel in India’s Passage’, which is surely a double entendre on the back passage, the human rectum. Just a few years ago Julian Clary made the same double entendre in the title of his autobiography, A Young Man’s Passage.

Or Thatcher could simply have turned the TV on. The 1980s saw a number of dramas, which included gay characters, or dealt with gay relationships. Gay sex could not be shown on TV, along with masturbation and bestiality, but even so there was a new sexual frankness there. And some of the comedies could be extremely explicit and very coarse, despite the traditional constraints on what was fit for broadcast. One of the programmes I remember on ITV at the time was Spooner’s Patch’, a police comedy about a particularly coarse and boorish police captain and his unit. It was written by Galton and Simpson, the pair responsible for the classic Steptoe and Son, who really should have known better. One episode included homosexuality, and had Spooner making a number of very coarse and bigoted comments about ‘brown hatters’. These were very clear in describing homosexuality in terms of anal sex, even if they didn’t describe it in those exact terms. It was all a very long way away from the 1950s, when comics and comedy writers were told they could not makes jokes about ‘effeminacy in men’, along with other taboo subjects such as religion, the monarchy, disability or the colour question.

What made Thatcher’s views even more anachronistic and misplaced is that a few years previously there had been the massive scandal surrounding the gay affair Jeremy Thorpe had with a male model, leading blackmail demands and a hitman allegedly being hired to shoot the man’s dog. This was so notorious that it led to schoolchildren using ‘Jeremy’ as a term of abuse.

All this shows just out of touch and petit bourgeois Thatcher and her sexual attitudes actually were. Now there are genuine issues about how much children should be taught about sex in schools, including homosexuality. Children do need some, if only to understand their bodies, the physical changes that go with puberty, and the need to protect themselves against STDs, and not just AIDS. There are those, who would prevent them knowing even about that. Peter Hitchens, the Conservative journalist and writer for the Mail on Sunday, opposes sex education on the grounds that it was started in Hungary in order to break the power of conservative Christian parental attitudes. He believes it encourages promiscuity. This is news to me. I remember the sex education we had at school, how awkward some of out teachers looked talking about it. And despite raging teenage hormones, the dry descriptions of the act were quite enough to put you off it. In the same way, Thatcher must have been out of her tiny little mind to think that knowing about anal sex would make the rest of British society want to try it. Anyone already interested in experimenting with gay sex was far more likely to be influenced by David Bowie and the sexual ambiguity of his Ziggy Stardust persona than get even remotely turned on by an advert warning of the dangers of a terrible and debilitating disease.

There are reasonable limits to how much children should be taught about sex and when. But adults reading newspapers and magazines are different. People need to be informed. And, to paraphrase the slogan used about the disease at the time, it’s not just AIDS which will kill you due to ignorance.