Neoconservatism 

Henry Regnery, ASC member and founder of Regnery Publishing, along with Knight of Malta and Skull and Bones member William F. Buckley, established the Philadelphia Society in 1964, to which belonged many members who have exercised considerable influence over the development of the neoconservative movement in the United States. Also contributing to its founding were M. Stanton Evans and Milton Friedman. Former Presidents of the Society include Edwin Meese, Midge Decter and George H. Nash. Philadelphia Society meetings attracted hardline conservatives and neoconservatives such as Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich, neo-Nazi Roger Pearson who was affiliated with the Pioneer Fund and who founded the neo-Nazi Northern League, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, William Casey, Richard V. Allen, Richard Pipes, Ernest W. Lefever and Frank Shakespeare. Notable speakers at past meetings of the Society have included Vladimir Bukovsky, Friedrich von Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, George J. Stigler, George Gilder, Victor Davis Hanson, Eric Voegelin and Paul Ryan.

Led by Buckley’s National Review, the New Right conservatives eventually marginalized groups like the John Birch Society, and pushed out white supremacists and anti-Semites. Buckley’s redefinition of conservatism through his divorce from the denizens of the Old Right created a schism that opened the opportunity for the ascent of the neoconservatives.[1] The Neoconservative movement, as it rose in the 1970s, articulated a different vision from the Old Right. While Neoconservatives were not opposed to the New Deal as were the Old Right, they thought the subsequent developments in the Great Society and the New Left went too far. Neoconservatism was a movement of anti-Soviet liberals who embraced an interventionist foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. They espoused especially strong support for Israel and believed the United States should help ensure the security of the Jewish state.

Although they were mostly defended by the National Review, the neoconservatives represented a faction which was not part of the tradition of the American Jewish League Against Communism (AJLAC) or the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the traditional enemies of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which was founded in 1906 with the assistance of Jacob Schiff.[2] The neoconservatives instead had their intellectual roots in the AJC’s monthly review magazine Commentary. Historian Richard Pells concludes, that “no other journal of the past half century has been so consistently influential, or so central to the major debates that have transformed the political and intellectual life of the United States.”[3]

Effectively, neoconservatism was triggered by the repudiation of the politics of the American New Left. As noted by Robert Lind in The New Statesman, “Many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history.”[4]

The leader of the neoconservatives was Irving Kristol, who founded Encounter magazine, which like Commentary was closely associated with the CIA’s front in the cultural Cold War, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Explaining the flip-flop to the opposite side of the political spectrum, Kristol said: “a neoconservative is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality.”[5]As Commentary’s editor Norman Podhoretz explained, neoconservatism “came into the world to combat the dangerous lies that were spread by the radicalism of the 1960s and that were being accepted as truth by the established liberal institutions of the day.”[6] Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter were among the original champions of the neoconservative movement. Decter was educated at the Sabbatean-influenced Jewish Theological Seminary of America, founded by students of Rabbi Zecharias Frankel. She was secretary to the then-editor of Commentary, Robert Warshow, and was the executive editor of Harper's under Willie Morris. She has also been a member of the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation.

Neoconservatives organized in the neoliberal American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation to counter the liberal establishment.[7] The Heritage Foundation is part of a network of right-wing and neoliberal think tanks funded by charitable foundations and known CIA fronts, who in turn are funded primarily by ExxonMobil.[8] These included a number of other Rockefeller-affiliated foundations like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation and John M. Olin Foundation, who are also responsible for funding the Heritage Foundation and the AEI.

Following Ramparts’ publication of information exposing the CCF as a CIA front, Kristol left in the late 1960s and became affiliated with AEI. The stated mission AEI, created in 1938, and which included Milton Friedman among its early advisors, follows an economic doctrine of neoliberalism. AEI’s founders included executives from Eli Lilly, General Mills, Bristol-Myers, Chemical Bank, Chrysler, and Paine Webber. To this day, AEI’s board is composed of top leaders from major business and financial firms.[9]

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their controversial bestseller, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, list the AEI as a principle aspect of America’s powerful Zionist lobby, which is dominated by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US.[10] AIPAC was founded in 1951 by Isaiah L. “Si” Kenen. Kenen originally ran the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs as a lobbying division of the American Zionist Council (AZC), an umbrella organization of American Jewish groups, which focused on Israel and included the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which was initially founded in 1897 as the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ). Former ZOA presidents during the period included the Sabbateans Brandeis and Stephen Samuel Wise.

Sarah Scaife Foundation was endowed and chaired by Richard Mellon Scaife (1932 – 2014), an American billionaire, a principal heir to the Mellon empire. The Mellons were key participants in the fascist coup of the American Liberty League and later in the Black Eagle Trust. According to George Seldes, the Mellons were among the thirteen most powerful families in the United States, along with Ford, du Pont, Rockefeller, Mellon, McCormick, Hartford, Harkness, Duke, Pew, Pitcairn, Clark, Reynolds and Kress.[11] Scaife’s mother Sarah was the niece of former United States Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, an important supporter of the Liberty League and a supporter of Hitler.[12] Andrew’s son was Paul Mellon, who served with the OSS in Europe during the war, and who was co-heir to one of America’s greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank. Paul Mellon and his wife created the Bollingen Foundation, with the collaboration of Joseph Cambell, to promote the work of Carl Jung, and Traditionalists like René Guénon’s leading disciple Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Ur Group member Mircea Eliade.[13] Bollingen also funded Gershom Scholem’s writing of Sabbatai Zevi the Mystical Messiah.[14]

In 1957, when Fortune prepared its first list of the wealthiest Americans, it estimated that Sarah Cordelia Mellon, her brother Richard King Mellon, and her cousins Ailsa Mellon-Bruce and Paul Mellon were all amongst the richest eight people in the United States.[15] Paul’s sister Ailsa was married to David Bruce, also a former OSS officer and later US ambassador to Great Britain. Sarah Cordelia’s cousin, William Larimer Mellon Sr., the founder of Gulf Oil, was the grandfather of William Mellon Hitchcock, who funded Leary’s LSD projects at the family’s Millbrook Estate.[16] Hitchcock was sent by his uncle by marriage, David Bruce, to meet with Dr. Stephen Ward to investigate the rumors of Masonically-themed “black magic” parties connected to the Profumo Affair.[17]

Genealogy of Mellon Family

• Thomas Mellon (patriarch and founder of Mellon Bank) + Sarah Jane Negley

  • Andrew W. Mellon (Secretary of State, backer of Liberty League)

    • Paul Mellon (OSS) + Mary Mellon (patron of Eranos Conferences and Bollingen Foundation)

    • Ailsa Mellon Bruce (established the Avalon Foundation) + David Bruce (OSS, ambassador to England. Sent William Mellon Hitchcock to meet with Dr. Stephen Ward of Profumo Affair)

  • James Ross Mellon

    • William Larimer Mellon Sr. (founder of Gulf Oil) + Mary Hill Taylor

    • Rachel Mellon Walton

      • Margaret Mellon + Tommy Hitchcock Jr. (inspired the Great Gatsby)

        • William Mellon Hitchcock (owner of Millbrook Estate, funded Timothy Leary’s IFIF)

        • Margaret Mellon "Peggy" Hitchcock

      • William Larimer Mellon, Jr.

  • Richard B. Mellon + Jennie Taylor King

    • Sarah Cordelia Mellon + Alan Magee Scaife

      • Richard Mellon Scaife (controlled the Sarah Scaife Foundation)

    • Richard King Mellon

In 1964, Scaife had supported Senator Barry Goldwater campaign for president. Following his nomination, he escorted Goldwater on the Scaife family airplane to attend the infamous Bohemian Grove retreat in Northern California. Disappointed by Goldwater’s devastating defeat that November, many conservatives concluded that they could only win an election in the future by mimicking the efforts of the Democrats. Former conservative congressman Vin Weber recalled that “people on the right were absolutely convinced that there was a vast, left-wing conspiracy.”[18] Scaife provided support for conservative and libertarian causes in the United States, mostly through the private, nonprofit foundations he controlled: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and Allegheny Foundation, and the Scaife Family Foundation. Scaife has supported the Public Interest and the National Interest, both associated with neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol. Scaife has been subsidizing publications and broadcasts supporting conservative positions since his first grant to the American Spectator in 1970; the New Criterion, a cultural review edited by Hilton Kramer, former New York Times art critic; Reason, the organ of the libertarian Reason Foundation; and Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee, edited for years by Norman Podhoretz. Scaife also gave money to Encounter magazine, once supported indirectly by the CIA.[19]

In addition to the AEI and the Heritage Foundation, Scaife also supported such conservative and libertarian organizations as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and Freedom House. However, Scaife also supported certain policy research groups which are not explicitly conservative, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He was also a major donor to abortion rights advocates, including Planned Parenthood.[20]

Universal Fascism

Michael Ledeen, who would go on to become a leader of the American neoconservative movement, lived in Italy into the late 1970s, where he had been consulting for Italian military intelligence and cultivating strong connections to the right-wing in Italy, including the Propaganda Due (P2), and its Venerable Master, Licio Gelli.[21] An avid proponent of Machiavelli, Ledeen was actively involved orchestrating the black terror, having been involved in what has been called the Strategy of Tension in the 1970s. On the orders of the White House, Frank Wisner, Director of the CIA covert action department Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), set up “stay-behind” secret armies across Western Europe in cooperation with MI6 and NATO. They made use of a fascist network of terrorists, to carry out false-flag terror operations that could be blamed on the communists, to undermine their influence in those countries.[22]

Ledeen’s fascist views had been shaped by George Mosse, a German Jewish émigré, best-known for his books and articles that redefined the discussion and interpretation of Nazism and fascism. In 1966, he and Walter Laqueur founded The Journal of Contemporary History, which they co-edited. Mosse directed Ledeen to Italy in 1965, where he was adopted by two senior figures, Renzo De Felice and Count Vittorio Cini, former Minister of Communications in Mussolini’s wartime cabinet, who provided him access to the Masonic archives in Rome and Venice. De Felice is best known for a massive biography of Mussolini, where he argued that Mussolini was a revolutionary modernizer in domestic issues, but a pragmatist in foreign policy who continued the Realpolitik policies of liberal Italy, 1861-1922.[23] In The Illuminati and Revolutionary Mysticism, 1789-1900, De Felice traced fascism to the Masonic and Martinist lodges that organized the Jacobins in the French Revolution of 1789. “I have always had a certain taste,” wrote de Felice, “a psychological and human interest in a particular kind of personality that is both cold-blooded and Luciferian. There is something in common between my Jacobins and a certain kind of Fascism.”[24]

In 1974, Ledeen moved to Rome to study the history of Italian fascism. Two years earlier, he authored a doctoral dissertation titled Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936. Like Mosse, the work denounces the popular notion that fascism succeeded in gaining the support of millions “solely because they had been hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skillful propagandists.” “It seems more plausible,” Ledeen counters, “to attempt to explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.” For Ledeen, as for the fascist theoretician, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal laid in the fact that fascism was “the Revolution of the 20th century.” For the first time, maintained Ledeen, there was an attempt to mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the country,” describing the fascist state as “a generator of energy and creativity.”[25] According to Ledeen:

In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to ‘enter into evil.’ This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired and challenging… we are rotten… It’s true that we can achieve greatness if, and only if, we are properly led.[26]

In “What Machiavelli (A Secret Jew?) Learned From Moses,” Ledeen lists the precedents of Columbus and his crew likely being Jews, and the Jesuits being founded by Marranos to suggest that it is plausible that Machiavelli was a secret Jew. More specifically, Ledeen believes that Machiavelli’s philosophy was characteristically un-Christian, and concludes that he was “at least kinda Jewish, and maybe even very Jewish.” According to Ledeen:

Machiavelli tirelessly denounced the soft, forgiving, turn-the-other-cheek themes of Christianity, and called instead for a return to older, pre-Christian values of manly virtue, courage and a willingness to do the hard, sometimes even evil things that are required of great leaders, a theme that is found explicitly in several Mishnaic lessons, as well as implicitly in the Torah.[27]

According to Ledeen, Machiavelli praises ancient Roman and Spartan kings, generals and Caesars, and a few contemporaries, but history’s great leader in his estimation was the leader of both a new religion and a new state: Moses. Ledeen explains that the example of Moses’ slaughter of the worshippers of the Golden Calf makes him the greatest example of the most successful kind of leader: one who is willing to use force to accomplish his mission. By Ledeen’s interpretation, the commandments revealed to Moses included the prohibition against murder, so he knew that the means he employed were “evil,” but he recognized that they were necessary. Likewise, explained Ledeen, “Machiavelli is not telling you to be evil, he is simply stating the facts: If you lead, there will be occasions when you will have to do unpleasant, even evil things, or be destroyed.”[28]

Team B

The neoconservatives distinguished themselves by allying with the Nixon administration with respect to foreign policy, especially by their endorsement of the Vietnam War and opposition to the Soviet Union. The neoconservatives’ new strategy towards the Soviet Union was shaped by another former Trotskyist, Albert Wohlstetter, an influential though controversial nuclear strategist of the Cold War, who along with Henry Kissinger was one of the inspirations for the film Dr. Strangelove. Wohlstetter was listed in an American Security Council document among its founders, benefactors and strategists.[29] Wohlstetter was the dominant figure at the RAND Corporation, the defense and information think tank in the Los Angeles area. Wohlstetter ended up at the University of Chicago where he joined Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss, where he became his protégé. As reported in a book review of Alex Abella’s Soldiers of Reason in the Washington Post, “It was not so much Wohlstetter himself as his acolytes… who had a major impact in Washington.”[30] These included Le Cercle members Richard Perle (who once dated Wohlstetter’s daughter) and Paul Wolfowitz, as well as Andrew Marshall, formerly a RAND economist in the Defense Department of Donald Rumsfeld.

Wohlstetter, who evolved into an expert in game theory and systems analysis, was able to add a “veneer of scientific analysis” that could be “very misleading,” explained Fred Kaplan author of Wizards of Armageddon. “At times,” however, explained Kaplan, “his numbers were based on extremely inaccurate intelligence, so it could be much less accurate than thought.”[31] Wohlstetter’s 1958 “The Delicate Balance of Terror” was highly influential in shaping the thinking of the Washington foreign policy establishment, particularly in its emphasis on the looming threat of Soviet attack. In 1974, Wohlstetter wrote a publication which accused the CIA of chronically underestimating Soviet military capability.

After Nixon was forced to resign in 1974, the neoconservatives allied themselves with two right-wingers in the administration of his successor Gerald Ford, who used the escalation of terrorism as a pretext to adopt a hard line against Soviet communism. They were Le Cercle member Donald Rumsfeld, the new secretary of defense, and Dick Cheney, Ford’s Chief of Staff. While Nixon and Kissinger had initiated a period of détente with the Soviet Union, Rumsfeld resuscitated the old paranoia by now giving speeches about the Soviet’s “steadiness of purpose” in building up their military defenses relative to those of the United States. The CIA denied the allegations, confirming that they were a complete fiction. But Rumsfeld used his position to persuade Ford to set up an independent inquiry, which he insisted would prove that there was a hidden threat to America. That inquiry would be run by a group of neoconservatives, one of whom was Paul Wolfowitz.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wanted more power over the CIA, and so the neoconservatives chose as the inquiry chairman a well-known critic and historian of the Soviet Union Richard Pipes, an ally of Le Cercle chairman Brian Crozier.[32] Known as Team B, it was begun by President Ford in May 1976, and invited a group of outside experts lead by Wolfowitz to evaluate classified intelligence on the Soviet Union who would have access to the same evidence as the CIA, but to see if they could come up with different conclusions. CIA Director William Colby was asked to approve the initiative, but refused, stating it was hard “to envisage how an ad hoc independent group of analysts could prepare a more thorough, comprehensive assessment of Soviet strategic capabilities than could the intelligence community.”[33] Colby was removed from his position in the “Halloween Massacre,” referring to the major reorganization of Ford’s Cabinet in 1975, when several prominent moderate Republicans in the administration were replaced by more conservative figures. And although his top analysts argued against the inquiry, Bush checked with the White House, obtained a go-ahead, and by May 26 signed off on the experiment.[34]

When Team B’s desired conclusions turned out to be completely unsubstantiated, they instead fabricated the assumption that the Soviets had developed systems that were so sophisticated that they were undetectable. According to Dr. Anne Cahn, who served with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, between 1977 and 1980, Team B’s numerous assessments of secret Soviet capabilities were all “fantasy.” “If you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one,” she wrote, “they were all wrong.”[35] She notes, for example, that they proposed, absurdly, that radars were laser beam weapons. Nevertheless, the neoconservatives set up a lobby group to publicize Team B’s findings. It was called the Committee on the Present Danger, which a growing number of politicians joined, including a presidential hopeful, Ronald Reagan.

Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC)

Le Cercle’s Brian Crozier created his intelligence network The 61 with funding from both the CIA and the Heritage Foundation.[36] According to David Teacher, the “co-organisers” of the Cercle were “dissident veterans of the Anglo-American intelligence community – rogue agents”: Ted Shackley; Nicholas Elliott, ex-senior man in MI6 whose close friends included James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby and Miles Copeland; Donald Jameson a veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations; and the leader of the group, Brian Crozier, a British intelligence agent and journalist who succeeded Jean Violet as chairman of Le Cercle in 1980.[37]

Crozier wrote for Reuters and The Economist, was an editor for The Sunday Times and a commentator for the BBC. He also contributed articles to the CIA front Council for Cultural Freedom’s (CCF) Encounter and wrote a column for National Review. A veteran of the cold war, Crozier advised the British ISI, MI6, the Information Research Department (IRD) of the British Foreign Office and the CIA. He successfully courted Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and praised the dictators Pinochet and Franco. Crozier also founded propaganda groups including the Institute for the Study of Conflict, and Shield which succeeded in getting Thatcher elected.

In 1977, Crozier would found The 61, to serve as Le Cercle’s own internal intelligence service separate from any single nation’s government.[38] In his book Free Agent, Crozier described 6I as “a private sector operational intelligence agency” to “provide intelligence in areas which governments were barred from investigating” and “to conduct secret counter-subversion operations in any country in which such actions were deemed feasible.”[39] 6I included four-star Army General Richard G. “Dick” Stilwell, formerly of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). Stilwell had worked closely with the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s to develop US counterinsurgency policy, which laid the groundwork for the American pacification program for Vietnam. After serving in the DIA, Stilwell was appointed Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defence in charge of administration, and joined the board of the ASC.

In 1970, Crozier had established the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), a right-wing propaganda group backed by the CIA. Crozier also had links to the Conservative Monday Club, the main political group echoing the ISC’s concerns on communist subversion.[40] The Monday Club was set up within the Conservative party in 1961 to bring together defenders of South African Apartheid and White Rhodesia, in opposition to the decolonization and immigration policies of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

A member and later patron of the Conservative Monday Club was Julian Amery, prominent MP on the Conservative Right with a long history of extensive intelligence, who would succeed Crozier as president of Le Cercle. His father Leo Amery, who was of Hungarian Jewish descent, and also an active Freemason,[41] was designated by Lord Alfred Milner to succeed him in guiding the Round Table group.[42] Leo Amery also helped draft the Balfour Declaration. Julian’s brother, John Amery, British Free Corps (BFC), a unit of the Waffen-SS made up of British and Dominion prisoners of war who had been recruited by Germany. John also became a close associate of Jacques Doriot, founder of the Parti Populaire Français (PPF). John was eventually hanged for treason for his recruitment efforts and propaganda broadcasts for Nazi Germany. Julian Amery attended the founding conference organized by Arthur Koestler in Berlin of the CIA-front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and served on its International Steering Committee. At the time, Amery was also one of the leading members of the Central and Eastern Europe Commission of the European Movement.[43]

Another Monday Club associate was Amery’s Private Secretary as Housing Minister, Sir Winston Churchill. One of the club’s earliest members was Sir John Biggs-Davison, a Conservative MP who had served on the PEU Central Council with Otto von Habsburg and Florimond Damman, founder of the Academie Européenne des Sciences Politiques (AESP) funded by Carlo Pesenti, a close friend of Le Cercle founder Antoine Pinay. Also included was George Kennedy Young, a Deputy Chief of MI6 who was involved with the CIA’s Project Ajax, the coup against Mossadeq in Iran in 1953. Another early member was Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, later a Conservative MP from 1970 to 1974, who had founded the Foreign Affairs Circle, the British section of WACL.[44]

Almost all the key ISC staff were former MI6, IRD, CCF or FWF personnel.[45] The ISC was part of a London-based CIA propaganda operation called Forum World Features (FWF). In 1965, the CIA decided to use the CCF to create a new propaganda outlet, the FWF, chaired by Crozier, which would become one of the CIA’s main covert propaganda outlets. Initial control of FWF ran via two CIA officers, one of whom was CCF President Michael Josselson. The legal and financial infrastructure for FWF was provided by one of the CIA’s “quiet channels,” millionaire John Hay Whitney, former member of the OSS, former US Ambassador to Britain and future publisher of the International Herald Tribune.

CIA funding for the FWF was provided via Crozier’s old American friend Frank Barnett of the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC).[46] Barnett had had long experience in Cold War propaganda, having served from 1958 to 1962 as Program Director of the Institute for American Strategy (IAS). The IAS had its origins in the American Security Council (ASC). Barnett’s colleagues in the IAS were IAS Administrative Director and Air Force Major-General Edward Lansdale. Barnett left the IAS in 1962 to found the NSIC together with wartime OSS veteran William Casey, Reagan’s future campaign manager and his first Director of the CIA.[47]

Barnett persuaded Richard Mellon Scaife, who funded the Heritage Foundation, to also fund the ISC and the FWF.[48] The American Security Council (ASC) and the Heritage Foundation had links to the Cercle through five ASC Board Members Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, senior member of Crozier’s 6I; Team B and Le Cercle member Gen. Daniel O. Graham, and Gen. Robert Richardson of the Heritage Foundation; Gen. Lewis Walt, a founding member of Western Goals Germany; and ASC board member and eventual US Senator Adm. John S. McCain, who was the Republican nominee for the 2008 US presidential election.[49] McCain, a former Commander in Chief of US Pacific Forces (CINCPAC) from 1968 to 1972, was a board member of the ASC, and worked closely with Le Cercle’s Brian Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC).[50] In 1997, Time magazine named McCain as one of the “25 Most Influential People in America.”[51]

Another important staff member of the ISC was Robert Moss, who would become Crozier’s close collaborator throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Moss would become editor of Economist Foreign Report from 1974 to 1980 and would serve as one of the CIA’s main disinformation assets, particularly in the campaign to destabilize Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973.[52] In a paper presented to the International Institute of Strategic Studies in 1971, Moss was one of the first to identify the emergence of international terrorism. He edited The Economist’s weekly Foreign Report from 1974-1980, and wrote for many other publications, including The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Commentary. Moss drafted a speech for Margaret Thatcher in January 1976 warning about the Soviet military build-up, in response to which she was labeled the “Iron Lady” by the Soviet Army newspaper Red Star.[53]

The US Committee of the ISC (USCISC), which was formally launched in 1975, USCISC was the parent body for the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict (WISC). The USCISC was chaired by George Ball, former Under-Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. One of the founding members of the Bilderberg Group, Ball was the third son of Amos Ball Jr., a vice-president of Standard Oil of Indiana. During 1945, Ball had collaborated with Jean Monnet and the French government in its negotiations regarding the Marshall Plan. During 1950, he helped draft the Schuman Plan and the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty. Ball was a member of the CFR and on the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group, attending every meeting except for one before his death.[54] Ball also served as American Ambassador to the United Nations in 1968, after which he was employed by Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, until his retirement in 1982. The USCISC also included former senior CIA officers, the most famous of whom was Kermit Roosevelt, a veteran CIA coup-master of Project Ajax, the 1953 coup against Mossadegh in Iran.[55]

Another former senior CIA officer on the USCISC was Robert W. Komer, who together with his deputy William Colby, was the main architect of the notorious Phoenix Program.[56] The Phoenix program was inspired by the American students of General Paul Aussaresses, after they had sent a copy of Cité catholique member Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare to Komer, who together with his deputy William Colby, was the main architect of the program.[57] In 1968, Komer was appointed Ambassador to Turkey, but after local riots about his presence, he left public service in 1969 and joined the RAND Corporation, producing their February 1972 study “The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: Organization of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort.”[58] Komer was eventually brought back into the Carter Administration, whose national security policy was coordinated by fellow USCISC member Zbigniew Brzezinski.[59]

The ISC supported Le Cercle’s propaganda efforts against the Soviet Union by producing professional and authoritative-sounding analyses, both for the general public and for more specialized audiences of academics, policy makers, police officials, and military commanders. They also pushed a revival of Cold War thinking in the face of detente, and offered training on measures to combat “subversion” to police and the military. Seed capital was provided by the CIA and oil companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP). Antoine Pinay, who had a privileged relationship with Nixon and Kissinger, personally handed them the ISC Special Report European Security and the Soviet Problem in 1972.[60] Richard Pipes had been working with Crozier’s ISC since late 1973, when he served on an ISC Middle East Study Group whose findings would be published in March 1974 as the Special Report Soviet Objectives in the Middle East.[61]

CSIS

In 1979, the NSIC created the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence to organize a series of conferences in Washington whose proceedings would have considerable influence on the defense policy of the Reagan Administration. The conferences brought together many of the American allies of Le Cercle and Crozier’s 6I. The first conference was a Colloquium on Analysis and Estimates, attended amongst others by Richard V. Allen, chief foreign policy advisor to Governor Reagan and a 6I contact, Barnett, Trager and Godson of the NSIC, Ray S. Cline and his close friend and associate Michael Ledeen, Professor Richard Pipes of the USCISC, and the then Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.[62]

Ledeen, explains Fred Landis, “was transmogrified from a petty propagandist into a national security expert through his post at CSIS. When Reagan took office, Ledeen was one of over 30 CSIS staffers to join the new administration.”[63] Ledeen was senior researcher and editor of the Washington Quarterly published by the CIA-affiliated think-tank CSIS, founded in 1962, which had close links with Le Cercle’s Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Ledeen was brought to CSIS by David Abshire and Walter (Ze’ev) Laqueur. Laqueur is part of the Israel lobby at CSIS, together with Yonah Alexander and Edward Luttwak.[64]

As indicated by Landis, in the wake of the Church Committee investigations, the CIA had been forced to back off from its recruiting of agents from within the media. Therefore, as an alternative, the CIA made use of intellectuals at think tanks like CSIS, whose work was made public in publications like the National Review, Commentary, New Republic, and Harper’s.[65] CSIS’s funding is provided in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, and major funders from Big Oil and the Military-Industrial Complex, including ExxonMobil, Bank of America, Boeing, Chevron, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Saudi Aramco.[66] CSIS is formally a branch of Georgetown University, but its offices are all independent of the administration or faculty of the university. It conducts policy studies and strategic analyses with a specific focus on issues concerning international relations, trade, technology, finance, energy and geostrategy.

Members of CSIS subsequently made their way to the pinnacles of American policymaking, particularly during the Nixon, Ford and Reagan]] administrations. The CSIS board of trustees included many former senior government officials including Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William Cohen, George Argyros and Brent Scowcroft. Within the intelligence community, CSIS is known for having “some of the most insightful analysis and innovative ideas for strengthening our national security,” according to former CIA Director John Brennan.[67] In the University of Pennsylvania’s 2013 Global Go To Think Tanks Report, CSIS is ranked the number one think tank in the world for “Top Defense and National Security Think Tanks.”[68]

CSIS provided propaganda materials used by the CIA to destabilize the government of Chile in the run up to the 1973 Kissinger-instigated coup against Allende. CSIS’s director of Latin American studies James Theberge provided reports that were published in a CIA-funded Chilean newspaper, El Mercurio.[69] That same year, CSIS jointly published with Crozier’s ISC The Stability of the Caribbean, edited by Robert Moss, and with contributions from Theberge, which discussed purported Soviet influence in the region.

A CSIS-sponsored conference on the Communist threat to Italy, was held three months before the 1976 Italian election of Giulio Andreotti, whose Christian Democratic party received the bulk of the $75 million in covert funds the CIA sent to Italy from 1948 to 1976, in addition to the $6 million spent specifically for the 1976 elections. Panel members included William E. Colby, Ray Cline, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce, and Claire Sterling. Cline, a member of Shackley’s Secret Team, was also a senior associate at CSIS. Clare Luce, the wife of Skull and Bones member and owner of Time-Life Henry Luce, had been US ambassador to Italy when Colby was CIA Station Chief in Rome. Connally was then a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the CIA’s oversight panel. All the panelists agreed on the need for US action to prevent a communist victory in Italy, frequently citing the Chilean example as a “successful” precedent. They discussed the Italian Communist Party (FCI) as a “national security” threat to the United States and NATO. One of the CIA’s favorite propaganda themes, according to Colby, was the charge that the FCI received secret Russian funding through a complex of party-controlled import-export firms that engaged in trade with Soviet-bloc countries.[70]

The day after the CSIS conference, the New Republic published an article by Claire Sterling and Ledeen claiming that the Italian Communist Party had received secret funding from the Soviets. The New Republic was at that time published by Robert J. Myers, a friend of Ray Cline, and former assistant to Colby at the CIA. Myers testified with Cline in January 1978 at congressional hearings on the CIA and the media, where he stated, “The reciprocal relationship between the CIA and the American press has been of value to both parties and often to the individuals themselves whose careers may have mutually benefited by such connections.”[71] Similarly, in a study of CIA reorganization sponsored by the CSIS, Cline wrote, “I think links between our best intelligence analysts and the academic research people with expertise on subjects under study in Washington should be built up far more than has been possible because of fears that exchanging information and views with CIA is somehow a corrupting process.”[72]

Terror Network

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called Ledeen a “neoconservative activist and disinformationist.”[73] The phony stories Ledeen was involved in concocting was were that there was a KGB Mole in the Carter administration, who was the cause of the loss of Iran and Nicaragua; that the Soviet Union was behind an International Terror Network, and tried to kill the Pope; that the Libyans as well as Iranians tried to kill President Reagan; and that Fidel Castro and Tomas Borge are major narcotics dealers. The first four of these hoaxes, explains Landis, were the “Mossad Party Platform” for the 1980 US elections. To peddle its expertise in the area of combating terrorism and to dupe American conservatives, pitched a Soviet threat. It tried to gain favor with the CIA and to further discredit the American foreign policy establishment by launching a witch-hunt against purported “moles.”[74]

In 1980, while working as Rome correspondent of the New Republic, Ledeen allegedly collaborated with right-wing Italian intelligence officers on a series of black propaganda operations. Just two weeks before the October 1980 election, the New Republic published a widely publicized story co-authored by Ledeen and de Borchgrave that helped Ronald Reagan unseat President Jimmy Carter. Headlined “Gaddafi, Arafat and Billy Carter,” they asserted the president’s brother borrowed money from Gaddafi of Libya, and had met secretly with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. The new charges were disputed by Billy Carter and many others, and were never corroborated. A 1985 investigation by Jonathan Kwitny in the Wall Street Journal reported that the New Republic article was part of a larger disinformation plot run by Ledeen and Francesco Pazienza, a P2 operative at the highest levels of SISMI, Italy’s Military Information and Security Service, to influence the election.[75]

In the early 1980s, Ledeen also appeared before the newly established Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, alongside former CIA director William Colby, author Claire Sterling and former Newsweek editor Arnaud de Borchgrave. Both Ledeen and de Borchgrave worked for the CSIS at the time. All four testified that they believed the Soviet Union had provided for material support, training and inspiration for various terrorist groupings.[76] Ledeen was influenced by Sterling’s best-selling 1981 book, The Terror Network, which alleged that all terrorist groups, from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany and the IRA were secretly operated by the Soviet Union. According to Melvin Goodman, the Head of Office of Soviet Affairs at the CIA from 1976-1987, the claims of a terror network were in fact black propaganda created by the CIA.[77]

ISC member Robert Moss and de Borchgrave, who was a senior adviser at CSIS and director of the Global Organized Crime Project, worked on two notorious disinformation novels, The Spike (1980) and Monimbo (1983), both heavily influenced by James Jesus Angleton and filled with plots of Soviet subversion launched with the assistance of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the complicity of left-wing journalists in Europe.[78] Moss and de Borchgrave also worked together in a “risk analysis” company, Mid-Atlantic Research Associates (MARA) with John Rees of the John Birch Society. Moss was later the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism.

Nevertheless, to recruit President Reagan to their objectives, the neoconservatives had set out to prove that the Soviet threat was far greater than what Team B had initially proposed. They would demonstrate that the majority of terrorism and revolutionary movements around the world were part of a secret Soviet conspiracy. As explained by Joseph Trento, with the Team B experiment:

…Bush allowed the conservatives a foot in the CIA door and at the same time discredited the liberals and their work inside the Agency. These conservatives would one day control the policy and practices of the intelligence community under presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They would report in the early 1980s that America was falling behind the Soviet Union militarily and would encourage the massive buildup of American military hardware that occurred under Reagan. Under the elder Bush, they would encourage the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and under the younger Bush support the unproven missile defence system and another war in Iraq.[79]

Though the CIA initially denounced all such allegations as mere neoconservative fantasy, William Casey, who was the new head of the CIA, was a powerful ally of the neoconservatives. As reported by Barbara Honegger, who was present for the discussion, when Reagan asked Casey to explain his goal as CIA director, he responded, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”[80] Casey was convinced of the plot outlined in the Terror Network and called a meeting of the CIA’s Soviet analysts and told them to produce a report for the President that proved the network existed. But the analysts informed him that much of the information in the book came from black propaganda the CIA deliberately invented to impugn the Soviet Union. All the analysts were therefore dismissed.

However, at the State Department, then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig and his director of policy planning Paul Wolfowitz also believed these charges and asked the CIA to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on Soviet sponsorship of international terrorism. The draft estimate concluded that Moscow provided arms and training to such groups as the PLO and that Moscow’s East European allies provided support to terrorist groups. It has been noted that there was no evidence of such Soviet involvement, nor is there any evidence of Soviet links to such groups as the Red Brigades in Italy, Baader-Meinhof in West Germany or the IRA. In fact, the draft explained that the bulk of the evidence pointed to the contrary and the intelligence organizations of Italy, West Germany and the United Kingdom agreed.[81]

[1] John F. McManus. “The Pied Pipers of Neoconservatism.” New American (August 13, 2001).

[2] Murray Friedman. The neoconservative revolution: Jewish intellectuals and the shaping of public policy (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[3] Quoted from Murray Friedman (ed.), Commentary in American Life, (Philadelphia 2005, Temple UP).

[4] Joseph Roddy. “How the Jews Changed Catholic Thinking.” Look Magazine, 30, 2 (January 25, 1966).

[5] Michael Lind. “The weird men behind George W Bush's war.” The New Stateman (April 7, 2003).

[6] cited in Gilles Kepel. The War for Muslim Minds (Harvard: Belknap, 2004) p. 59.

[7] Sidney Blumenthal. “Mugged by reality.” Salon (December 14, 2006).

[8] Kubilay Yado Arin. Think Tanks, the Brain Trusts of US Foreign Policy (Wiesbaden: VS Springer 2013).

[9] ExxonSecrets.org. Retrieved from http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/listorganizations.php

[10] “Leadership – About – AEI.” AEI (Retrieved 2012-10-04).

[11] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 226.

[12] Ibid., p. 80.

[13] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao. Volume Four, Chapter 15: The Esalen Institute.

[14] Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 49.

[15] “Obituary: Cordelia Scaife May / Reclusive Mellon heiress known for her generosity.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (January 27, 2005). Retrieved from http://www.post-gazette.com/news/obituaries/2005/01/27/Obituary-Cordelia-Scaife-May-Reclusive-Mellon-heiress-known-for-her-generosity/stories/200501270185

[16] See Chapter 9: JFK Assassination; Chapter 13: Counterculture.

[17] See David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao, Volume Four, Chapter 13: Counterculture.

[18] Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy. “Scaife: Funding Father of the Right.” Washington Post (May 2, 1999).

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Jim Lobe. “Veteran neo-con advisor moves on Iran,” Asia Times, (June 26, 2003).

[22] Ganser. Nato’s Secret Armies, p. 55.

[23] James Burgwyn. “Renzo De Felice and Mussolini’s Foreign Policy: Pragmatism vs. Ideology,” Italian Quarterly (1999), Vol. 36 Issue 141/142, pp. 93-103.

[24] The Illuminati and Revolutionary Mysticism, 1789-1900, quoted from Allen Douglas and Rachel Berthoff Douglas, “Ledeen’s Beloved ‘Universal Fascism’: Venetian War Against the Nation-State” EIR (November 4, 2005).

[25] John Laughland. “Flirting with Fascism.” The American Conservative (June 30, 2003).

[26] Michael A. Ledeen. Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As Timely And Important Today As Five Centuries Ago (St. Martin's Press, 2007), p. 90.

[27] Michael Ledeen. “What Machiavelli (A Secret Jew?) Learned From Moses.” Jewish World Review (June 7, 1999 / 23 Sivan), 5759.

[28] Ibid.

[29] American Security Council, The Founders, Benefactors and Strategists of the American Security Council (undated).

[30] Gregg Herken. “Dr. Strangelove’s Workplace.” Washington Post (July 6, 2008).

[31] Cited in Craig Unger. The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America’s Future (New York: Scribner, 2008). p. 43.

[32] Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 195.

[33] Guy Caron. “Anatomy of a Neo-Conservative White House.” Canadian Dimension (May 1, 2005) 39 (03): 46.

[34] Anne Hessing Cahn. “Team B: The trillion-dollar experiment.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc (April 1993) 49 (03): 22–27.

[35] Thom Hartmann. “Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power.” Commondreams.org (December 7, 2004).

[36] Teacher. Rogue Agents.

[37] Ibid., p. 283.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Joseph C. Goulden. “Crozier, covert acts, CIA and Cold War.” The Washington Times, (May 15, 1994).

[40] Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 41.

[41] “Famous Freemasons.” Blackpool Group of Lodges and Chapters. (December 10, 2015). Retrieved from http://blackpool.westlancsfreemasons.org.uk/about-freemasonry/famous-masons/

[42] Quigley. Tragedy and Hope, pg. 581.

[43] Teacher. Rogue Agents.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid., p. 37.

[46] Ibid., p. 37.

[47] Ibid., p. 35-36.

[48] Ibid., p. 37.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid.

[51] “Bio: Sen. John McCain” Fox News (January 23, 2003).

[52] Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 39.

[53] John Campbell. Margaret Thatcher: The grocer’s daughter (volume 1), (Jonathan Cape, London, 2000), p. 353.

[54] “George W. Ball Papers, 1880s–1994: Finding Aid.” Princeton University Library.

[55] Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 98.

[56] Ibid., p. 432 n. 497.

[57] Marie-Monique Robin. Escadrons de la mort - l’école française (starting at 27 min); David Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 432 n. 497.

[58] Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 98.

[59] Ibid., p. 432 n. 497.

[60] Ibid., p. 100.

[61] Ibid., p. 99.

[62] Ibid., p. 224-225.

[63] C. Mohr. “Hearing on terror opens with warning on Soviet.” The New York Times (April 25, 1981).

[64] Fred Landis. “Disinformationgate.” Covert Action Information Bulletin (Number 27, Spring 1987).

[65] Fred Landis. “Georgetown’s Ivory Tower for Old Spooks.” Inquiry (September 30, 1979).

[66] “Building Support.” CSIS. Retrieved from https://www.csis.org/support-csis/building-support

[67] “ORemarks by John O. Brennan.” The White House. [Retrieved October 7, 2013].

[68] “Global Go To Think Tanks Report” (PDF). University of Pennsylvania. p. 51.

[69] Fred Landis. “Georgetown’s Ivory Tower for Old Spooks.”

[70] Ibid.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Ibid.

[73] Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), p. 161.

[74] Fred Landis. “Disinformationgate.” Covert Action Information Bulletin (Number 27, Spring 1987), p. 69.

[75] Craig Unger. “The War They Wanted, the Lies They Needed.” Vanity Fair (October 17, 2006).

[76] C. Mohr. “Hearing on terror opens with warning on Soviet.” The New York Times (April 25, 1981).

[77] Adam Curtis (Director). “The Power of Nightmares: Part 1.” BBC (54:20).

[78] Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 126.

[79] Joseph Trento. Prelude to Terror: Edwin P. Wilson and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005) p. 98.

[80] Barbara Honegger. “Did CIA Director William Casey really say, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”?” Quora (November 25, 2014).

[81] Melvin A. Goodman. “As a CIA analyst, I’ve seen distortions of intelligence before,” The Progressive (July 23, 2003).

Volume Five

1. Team B

2. Secret Team

3. The Reagan Doctrine

4. Reaganomics

5. Second New Right

6. Project Monarch

7. Down Under

8. Sex, Lies and Wiretaps

9. Noosphere

10. Project Stargate

11. New Age

12. Psychic Warriors

13. Disclosure

14. Christofascism

15. The Clash of Civilizations

16. Black Order

17. Sacred Geopolitics

18. Third Secret of Fatima

19. Order of Eurasia