Le Cercle

The branches of American fascism, like the National States Rights Party, the Liberty Lobby, the American Nazi Party (ANP), the National Renaissance Party (NRP) along with their counterparts in Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world, including the WACL, the Italian Social Movement (MSI) and the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), were part of a broader global network, headed by the famous Nazi commando and then agent of the CIA, Otto Skorzeny, the leading architect of the Fascist International, who coordinated an international brigade of ex-Nazis through the ODESSA network. By the early 1960s, connections between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Adenauer and the German secret service, the BND, had become significantly closer than would be generally known until many years later.[1] Reinhard Gehlen also hired the services of his friend Otto Skorzeny. According to Skorzeny’s biographer, Infield:

From his office in Madrid, Skorzeny’s influence in the Federal Republic of Germany was duly noted by every chancellor from Adenauer on and the West German government used his worldwide fame and his commando experience to reestablish German prestige and power in other parts of the world.[2]

It was in 1974 that Licio Gelli—an Italian financier who had served as a liaison officer between the Italian government and Nazi Germany, a former member of the MSI and Venerable Master the rogue P2 Masonic Lodge—met secretly at the US Embassy in Rome with Knight of Malta Alexander Haig, formerly the NATO Supreme Commander, who had meanwhile become President Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff. After graduating from West Point in 1947, Haig had served as an aide to General MacArthur in Tokyo until 1951, working with General Willoughby. While in Japan, Haig married the daughter of General Alonzo Patrick Fox, MacArthur’s deputy chief of staff. Receiving the blessing of Henry Kissinger, the US National Security Adviser, Gelli left the meeting with a promise of continued financial support for the CIA’s Gladio network and its plan for the “internal subversion.”[3]

Kissinger was a member of Le Cercle, the synarchist organization founded Antoine Pinay, in 1952-1954, a year before his participation in the founding of the Bilderberg Group. Le Cercle came to serve for much of the century as the umbrella organization of the Fascist International. Le Cercle has been described as “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.”[4] Also included in Le Cercle were the founding fathers of the European Union: Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. The Germans and Frenchmen were soon joined by government members from Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands—the other founding countries of the European Economic Community (EEC) created in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome. Among the prominent politicians associated with the Le Cercle were Giulio Andreotti, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Paul Vanden Boeynants, John Vorster, General Antonio de Spínola, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Le Cercle was derived directly from the Mouvement synarchique d’empire (MSE), the conspiracy behind the Vichy regime. Michael Sordet, in “The Secret League of Monopoly Capitalism,” published in the academic Swiss review Schweiner Annalen, described the synarchists as “the representatives of international high finance,” who not only helped to bring fascism to power in Germany and to provoke World War II, but contributed to the defeat of France and the rise of Petain’s Vichy Regime. Sordet reported that the MSE’s original promoters numbered seven, three of whom had been identified as Baron Leo de Nervo, Maxime Renaudin, a financier known to represent international Catholic interests, and Jean Coutrot, a friend of Aldous Huxley. Baron de Nervo was a friend of former French Prime Minister Antoine Pinay, who together helped found the infamous Bilderberg Group with Joseph Retinger and former SS officer, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.[5]

In 1952-1953, Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, along with Franz Josef Strauss, the prominent Bavarian politician and federal minister, acted as co-founders of the Cercle. Pinay and Adenauer, the first chairmen, appointed former Cagoule member and SDECE and BND agent Jean Violet, who founded Le Cercle.[6] Pinay had collaborated with Raymond Abellio, head of the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), the successor organization of La Cagoule, a member of GRECE, and one of the primary contributors to the Priory of Sion mythos.[7] Pinay was a vice-president of the Comité International pour la Défense de la Civilisation Chrétienne (CIDCC), a largely French body created in 1948, and whose first President was Belgian Paul Van Zeeland. A further CIDCC Presidium meeting was held in Paris in December 1962, for the first time including an American representative, ASC member and Shickshinny Knight of Malta, Major-General Charles Willoughby. Earlier in 1962, Willoughby had founded an American section of the CIDCC, that was funded by Willoughby’s close associate, H.L. Hunt.[8]

Serving as Violet’s patron was Knight of Malta Otto von Habsburg, who was elected Vice President of the Pan-European Union in 1957 and became its International President in 1973, after Coudenhove’s death.[9] Pinay and Violet were staunch supporters of Opus Dei, and Otto von Habsburg was its candidate as monarch to rule over a united Catholic Europe. Sociologists Peter Berger and Samuel Huntington suggest that Opus Dei is involved in “a deliberate attempt to construct an alternative modernity,” one that engages modern culture while at the same time is resolutely loyal to Catholic traditions.[10] Opus Dei, explained Betty Clermont is:

… an official institution of the Catholic Church, at the top is a secret society of international bankers, financiers, businessmen and their supporters. Their goal is the same as other plutocrats—unbridled power—except they use the influence of the Catholic Church and its worldwide network of institutions exempt from both taxes and financial reporting requirements to advance rightwing parties and governments.[11]

According to Jonathan Marshall, writing for Lobster Magazine, Opus Dei “was said to have influenced Robert Schumann, Antoine Pinay and Paul Baudoin, former President of the Banque de L’Indochine and Vichy Foreign Minister.[12] Baudoin, a major figure in Opus Dei, was identified as one of the original members of the MSE.[13] According to Adrian Hanni, “The Christian democratic and often Catholic background of its early members left a long-standing mark on Le Cercle’s identity, an affinity reflected in the high number of members from Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta among its ranks.”[14] Prime Minister of Italy, and Knight of Malta Giulio was good friends Gelli, whose P2 Masonic lodge had extensive ties with Opus Dei.[15] Robert Schuman as well was a member of Opus Dei.[16] By 1984, Opus Dei would become a $3 billion enterprise, controlling six hundred newspapers, fifty-two radio and television stations, twelve film companies, and thirty-eight news agencies. Prominent Americans who became affiliated with the movement included CIA director William Casey, William Simon of Citicorp, Francis X. Stankard of Chase Manhattan, and Sargent Shriver, a former Democratic candidate for vice president.

The intelligence community has been represented by SIS Chief from 1978-82 Arthur “Dickie” 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 fellow-founder of Le Cercle, who took over the running of the organization from Antoine Pinay, Jean Violet, who worked for the SDECE from 1957-70. Le Cercle member Alan Clark, a British Conservative MP and close friend to former Le Cercle chairman Jonathan Aitkens, stated in his diaries that the secretive group was funded by the CIA.[17] John E. Lewis writes in his book The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups that Le Cercle was funded, amongst others, by the CIA for its “militant anti-leftism as it wars against it enemies more than jaws about them.”[18] Leaked documents suggest that Le Cercle’s activities included political subversion, false-flag Gladio-style terrorism, assassination and arms dealing.

In 1969, Le Cercle’s founding Franco-German axis was weakened when the political tide reversed direction in Europe. Willy Brandt of the Social Democratic Party became chancellor in Germany, and General de Gaulle lost power in France. The new climate forced Le Cercle to reinvent itself and to expand to include conservative leaders from Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Britain and the United States.[19] In the 1970s, Le Cercle became an Atlanticist organization, pursuing the objective of a strong alliance between Europe and the United States. High-ranking American personalities thus began attending Le Cercle meetings, such as Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, CIA-directors Knight of Malta Bill Casey and William Colby, who was also a member of Opus Dei.[20]

Casey, a former member of the OSS, was closely involved with the Black Eagle Fund conspirators. Casey was John Singlaub’s case officer in World War I, while Paul Helliwell was Singlaub’s direct superior. According to Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, authors of Gold Warriors, “This put Casey in a position to know a great deal about the Black Eagle Trust, and one source insists that Casey’s financial skills made him one of the key players, along with Paul Helliwell and Edwin Pauley, in implementing the Black Eagle Trust under the guidance of Robert B. Anderson and John J. McCloy.”[21] Casey also was a close friend of Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, worked with Ray Cline, and became involved with Edward Lansdale in the hunt for the Golden Lily treasure. Cline was CIA Chief of Station in Taipei from 1958 to 1962. During this period, he was also a channel for financial and logistical support for the founding meeting of WACL in 1958. Cline would become CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence from 1962 to 1966, and, after resigning from the CIA in 1969, would serve as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department, where he contributed to the coup against Allende in 1973.

Le Cercle had a wide range of contacts with rightwing intelligence and propaganda agencies, including the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), Heritage Foundation, Western Goals, Institute for the Study of Conflict (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. Amongst Le Cercle’s intelligence contacts were former operatives from the American CIA, DIA, United State’s INR, Britain’s MI5, MI6 and France’s SDECE, Germany’s BND, BfV and MAD, Holland’s BVD, Belgium’s Sûreté de l’Etat, SDRA and PIO, apartheid South Africa’s BOSS, and the Swiss and Saudi intelligence services.[22] Le Cercle maintained very close links with the WACL. Numerous groups participated in the WACL, including the Unification Church, also known as the Moonies, founded by Sun Myung Moon, Knight of Malta, self-professed “messiah” and founder the conservative Washington Times newspaper. In 1964, Moon founded the Korean Culture and Freedom Foundation, a public diplomacy agency which promoted the interests of South Korea and sponsored Radio Free Asia. Former US Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon were honorary presidents or directors at various times.[23]

Le Cercle also included Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. William A. Wilson, a friend of Reagan and a Knight of Malta, was appointed first Ambassador to the Holy See and to serve as Reagan’s personal link to Le Cercle.[24] At a June 1980 meeting of Le Cercle, “attention was turned towards the American Presidential election that was to bring Reagan to power.” Meeting minutes also reported positive contact had been made with George H.W. Bush as well.[25] Le Cercle has even been blamed for the death of Lady Diana, whose anti-landmine campaign would have interfered with their defense contracts.[26]

Propaganda Due

The P2 Masonic lodge, or Propaganda Due, was deeply implicated in the Strategy of Tension and its operation of Gladio.[27] Adhering to a fascist ideology, P2 was headed by Licio Gelli, a former member of the MSI, known as the “Puppet-master.”[28] Gelli was a member of the Memphis-Misraim Masonic Lodge, the synarchist branch of Freemasonry, prior to his founding of P2. During the war, Gelli had been a member of Mussolini’s notorious “Blackshirts” and later acted as liaison officer to the Hermann Göring SS division. Gelli also fought for Franco with Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and at the end of World War II was arrested and faced possible execution, but was rescued by joining the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps.[29]

P2 operated illegally, in contravention of the Italian constitution banning secret lodges and membership of government officials in secret membership organizations. P2 operated under the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy from 1945 to 1976 as a pseudo-Masonic or “black” or “covert” lodge. The Grand Orient of Italy was founded in 1805, for which both Garibaldi and Mazzini had been Grand Masters.[30] According to John Michael Greer, in The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, P2 was a “textbook example” of an attempt to establish a synarchy, as it united politicians, the Catholic Church, and the Mafia-controlled tax-free drug economy guaranteed by the historically falsified prohibition of psychotropic substances.[31] Along with the mafia—which was also purportedly founded by Mazzini[32]—P2 also involved Opus Dei in the scandals of the Banco Ambrosiano and the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), commonly referred to as the Vatican Bank.[33]

As head of P2, Gelli became chief intermediary between the CIA and the SID.[34] In 1969, Gelli developed close ties with General Alexander Haig who was then Assistant to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. As an internal report of the Italian anti-terrorism unit confirmed, it was Ted Shackley, founder of the Secret Team, and then director of all covert operations of the CIA in Italy in the 1970s, who introduced Gelli to Haig. The links between the US and Italian Masons were established through the activity of Frank Gigliotti, agent of the OSS with close ties to the Sicilian Mafia. Gigliotti personally recruited Gelli and instructed him to set up an anti-Communist parallel government in Italy in close cooperation with the CIA station in Rome.[35] Gelli and Haig were joined together as members of the Knights of Malta, which has close associations with the CIA. P2 was sometimes referred to as a “state within a state” or a “shadow government.” During a fraud investigation, a search of Gelli’s villa discovered a list of 953 members of P2. The coded list mentioned three cabinet ministers, thirty generals, eight admirals, including the head of the armed forces, the heads of two intelligence services as well as the civilian collator of intelligence, 43 MPs, police chiefs of Italy’s four main cities, the mayors of Brescia and Pavia and the editor of the influential Milan daily Corriere della Sera.[36] P2 also included eventual Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.[37]

Strategy of Tension

The name “Gladio” was derived from the short sword used by Roman legionnaires, in line with the Italian Fascists’ fascination with Roman paganism, which was inspired by Evola. Gladio were part an international network of fascist thugs coordinated by the CIA, MI6 and NATO, known as “stay-behind” units, with the purported purpose of resisting a Soviet invasion from within. Instead, they were mainly employed in carrying out violent acts of terrorism, which were falsely blamed on communist groups to undermine the influence of communism in various parts of Europe. The codename for the NATO “stay-behind” units in Europe was Operation Gladio, sometimes called “Super NATO.” In the words of Daniel Ganser, author of Nato’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe:

Dulles during his time as Director of CIA had been the brain behind the secret anti-Communist armies. When the Gladio secret armies were discovered across Western Europe in 1990, an unnamed former NATO intelligence official explained that “though the Stay Behind operation was officially started only in 1952, the whole exercise had been in existence for a long time, in fact ever since it was born in the head of Allen Dulles.”[38]

The Gladio operation was initially codified under the umbrella of the Clandestine Co-Ordinating Committee of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the military arm of NATO, and operated by the secret services and initially funded by the CIA. In addition to the CIA, they also operated under the patronage of MI6 and the Mafia, and consisted of numerous ex-Nazis and other neo-fascist terrorists. According to US journalist Arthur Rowse, a secret clause exists in the North Atlantic Treaty requiring candidate countries, before joining NATO, to establish clandestine citizen cadres, controlled by the country’s respective security services, standing ready to eliminate communist cells during any national emergency.[39]

The pretext of the U.S. involvement in Gladio’s Strategy of Tension was revealed in a Pentagon document, titled Field Manual FM 30-31B, detailing the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that “do not react with sufficient effectiveness” against “communist subversion.” The manual states that of particular concern is when leftist groups “renounce the use of force” and embrace the democratic process. It is then that “U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger.”[40]

The various stay-behind networks, composed of former Nazis and other fascists of various stripes who served as the shock troops of America’s covert war on communism, would be responsible for much of the brutality perpetrated by various dictatorial regimes around the world. In Germany, they had as a central focus the Gehlen Org, also involved in ODESSA “ratlines.” In France the unit was called “Glaive,” again named after a Gladiatorial sword. Austria‘s unit was named “Schwert,” also meaning sword. In Turkey they were known as the Counter-Guerrilla, and in Greece as “Sheepskin.” Sweden’s unit was called “Sveaborg.” In Switzerland it went by the title P26. Other units in Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark and Holland remain unnamed. In the U.K., the unit was simply known as “Stay-behind.”[41]

In 1947, Interior Minister Édouard Depreux had revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed “Plan Bleu.” The next year, the Western Union Clandestine Committee (WUCC) was integrated with NATO to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. The network was supported with elements from SDECE, and had military support from the 11th Choc regiment, a section of which split and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS).[42] The OAS attempted to prevent Algerian independence by acts of sabotage and assassination in both France and French Algerian territories. This included several attempts to assassinate president Charles de Gaulle, one of these being featured in a fictionalized version recreated in the 1971 book by Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal, and in the 1973 film of the same name.

As reported in 1967 by the Italian newspaper Paese Sera, the OAS was funded by Permindex, the company widely suspected of being behind the JFK assassination. Among the members of its board of directors was JFK conspirator Clay Shaw from New Orleans, a close friend of Schacht. Shaw’s address book contained the private number of Principessa Marcelle Borghese, now Duchessa de Bomartao, who was related to Prince Valerio Borghese, the so-called “Black Prince” and friend of Julius Evola, rescued after the war by CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton.[43] Paese Sera described Permindex founder Louis Bloomfield as “an American agent who now plays the role of a businessman from Canada (who) established secret ties in Rome with Deputies of the Christian Democrats and neo-Fascist parties.”[44] The Permindex subsidiary, Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), a CIA front with extensive links to the Mossad, had initially been formed in Montreal but then moved to Rome in 1961. Permindex was forced to leave Switzerland after its ties were discovered with J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, founded by Nazi banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder, who was closely associated with Allen Dulles. The president of Permindex was Prince Gutierez de Spadafora, a former Mussolini undersecretary, whose son had married the daughter of Hjalmar Schacht, whose niece Ilse von Finckenstein was married to Otto Skorzeny.[45]

Michele Metta, author of CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK, revealed that numerous connections existed between CMC and Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic Lodge. Metta has also documented a Masonic plot between American and Italian Freemasons to “influence Italian immigrants in the USA to vote against Kennedy,” in the words of Enzo Milone, Grand Master of the Freemasons, to the Christian Democratic Member of Parliament, Elio Rosati, dated September 24, 1960. The plot was hatched by CIA agent Frank Gigliotti and organized by Giuseppe Pièche, a member of the CMC. In Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, Philip Willan reveals that Gigliotti played an important role in the Masonic activities of Lucio Gelli.[46]

Guy Banister operative Tommy Baumler remarked that “those who killed John F. Kennedy were those who wanted to kill de Gaulle.”[47] In New Orleans, Banister had been a supporter of the OAS.[48] Permindex secretly financed the OAS’s opposition to de Gaulle’s support for Independence for Algeria, including its reputed assassination attempts on de Gaulle. Ferenc Nagy, director of CMC and president of Permindex, was a friend of OAS leader and former governor general of Algeria, Jacques Soustelle. According to French news reports, a few months before the Generals’ Putsch against de Gaulle in 1961, Soustelle had met with the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, in Washington. In 1960, Soustelle had met in Washington, DC, with Richard Bissell, then heading the CIA’s clandestine services. A year later, Soustelle went into exile to avoid being arrested by de Gaulle’s police. Soustelle would be accused two years later of conspiring with OAS in the attempted assassination of de Gaulle.[49]

In Les Echos newspaper, de Gaulle named Permindex as having been involved in the attempt on his life.[50] As reported by William Torbitt, the French Intelligence Agency traced the assassination attempt through Permindex, the Solidarists, the Fascist White Russian emigre intelligence organization and J. Edgar Hoover’s Division Five, the espionage section of the FBI, into the headquarters of NATO in Brussels, Belgium, who were using the remnants the Gehlen Org in West Germany. There also was an expectation that a successful coup d’etat de Gaulle would result in a reversal of his policies against NATO. As reported in Pravda, “The war in Algeria is a war of NATO.”[51]

In Italy, where it was known as Gladio, the stay-behind network was responsible for the infamous “Strategy of Tension” during the 1970’s to destabilize the country.[52] The intent of the Strategy of Tension was to discredit the political left, as the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was very close to entering government. Le Cercle member and chief Gladio operator Stefano Delle Chiaie was a principal organizer for three of the most infamous incidents of the Strategy of Tension, the 1969 bomb in the crowded Piazza Fontana of Milan (16 deaths, 90 injuries), the 1970 coup attempt of “Black Prince” Prince Valerio Borghese (who wrote an introduction to Evola’s Men Among the Ruins), and the Bologna station bombing of August 2, 1980 (85 deaths, 200 injuries).

Pino Rauti, one of Evola’s closest disciples, who served as editor of his journal Imperium, and others broke away from the MSI in 1956 and founded the Ordine Nuovo, while Stefano Delle Chiaie, a friend of Licio Gelli, founded the Avanguardia Nazionale (“National Vanguard”). While in hiding following an attack, Rauti met with GRECE founder Alain de Benoist.[53] Fellow GRECE member Jean-Francois Thiriart was linked to Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale.[54] Thiriart’s Jeune Europe trained with members of Ordine Nuovo and the OAS.[55]

According to one leader of the Gladio affiliated Ordine Nuovo, “our work since 1953 has been to transpose Evola’s teachings into direct political action.”[56] As stated in sworn testimony by Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a former member of the Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo, who is currently serving a life-sentence for the murder of three policemen by a car bomb in Peteano in 1972, and who quoted Evola and Guénon in justification of his actions:

You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.[57]

Avanguardia Nazionale was funded by Carlo Pesenti, a prominent industrialist and banker, close friend to Pinay, and a major source of funds for Le Cercle throughout the early 1970s.[58] In his autobiography, David Rockefeller states that he first learned of Le Cercle in October 1967 when he and Henry Kissinger were invited to join by Pesenti.[59] Pesenti had also funded the Academie Européenne des Sciences Politiques (AESP), whose founder was Florimond Damman, who represented the Belgian end of almost all the international right-wing networks such as the Pan-European Union (PEU), Centre Européen de Documentation et d’Information (CEDI), and World Anti-Communist League (WACL). CEDI was the transnational Catholic network created by Otto von Habsburg in 1949 with Alfredo Sanchez Bella, the Spanish ambassador to Rome under Franco during the 1960s, later member of the Cercle and devotee of Opus Dei.[60] His brother was the head of Opus Dei in Spain. CEDI had close ties to the BND.[61] Damman had been a close associate of Otto von Habsburg’s since at least 1962, when he served as Secretary of the Belgian PEU section.

Closely associated with CEDI and the AESP was Benoît de Bonvoisin, nicknamed “the Black Baron,” the notorious patron of Belgian fascism and a key figure of the Fascist International.[62] De Bonvoisin’s father, Pierre de Bonvoisin, was one of the original founding member of the Bilderberg Group. Benoît as well was close to Archduke Otto von Habsburg, Jean Violet, Antoine Pinay and David Rockefeller.[63] De Bonvoisin controlled the Public Information Office (PIO), a controversial military counter-subversion and propaganda unit of the Belgian Ministry of Defence, founded in 1974. PIO’s other official mission was to expose Soviet disinformation in the media, largely through the publication of a press review called Inforep. In 1978, PIO was disbanded by the General Staff of the army for its connections with the far right.

De Bonvoisin was also closely connected to Delle Chiaie. In 1975, de Bonvoisin hosted a gathering of European fascists at his castle at Maizeret, attended by the heads of Ordine Nuovo, the MSI, the National Front, Fuerza Nueva and the French Forces Nouvelles.[64] PIO was later connected, by the Belgian Parliamentary Special Inquiry Committee, to the Belgian part of the Operation Gladio.[65] In 1978, PIO was disbanded by the General Staff of the army for its connections with the far right.

P2 was also implicated in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978, by the Red Brigades, a pro-Soviet terrorist group.[66] Recognizing their growing support for the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Moro wished to reach an accommodation with them, and offer their leaders Cabinet posts in a new centrist ruling party. During a meeting with Henry Kissinger, Moro was told that such a move would be viewed by the Americans as “profoundly dangerous and mistaken.” In a later meeting with an unnamed intelligence official, Moro was told he must abandon any idea of cooperating with the communists “or you will pay dearly for it,” and that “groups on the fringes of the official secret services might be brought into operation” if he didn’t desist in his plans.[67] Another theory proposes that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by the CIA or Gladio.[68] The Red Brigades, or Brigate Rosse in Italian, had also been simultaneously infiltrated by Mossad since 1974.[69]

Vatican Bank

Gelli was involved in most of Italy’s scandals in the last three decades of the twentieth century. P2 was outlawed and disbanded in 1981 in the wake of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, which was linked to the Mafia and to the Vatican Bank. Carlo Pesenti was the most senior of a trio of Vatican financial backers, as vice-president of the Banco Ambrosiano when it collapsed in 1982. The other two being Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, both members the rogue Masonic lodge known as Propaganda Due, or P2, which intricately linked with Le Cercle and right-wing elements in the Vatican.

When Gelli required additional funds to support P2 and Operation Gladio, he turned to P2 member Roberto Calvi, Chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, the largest non-state-owned bank in Italy. Calvi began to illegally siphon money from his bank, using the Vatican bank, the Istituto per de Religione (IOR) to launder it. Calvi thus bankrupted his bank in the process making it one of modern Italy’s biggest political scandals. A source of enduring controversy, his Masonically-symbolic death by hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge near the City of London, was first ruled as suicide before being reinvestigated under pressure from Calvi’s family.

Calvi’s mentor was Michele Sindona, the Sicilian banker who exploited his ties to the Vatican Bank to bilk investors out of millions of dollars. Sindona appeared to have “a direct line to the [Nixon] White House.”[70] According to Penny Lernoux, “the P-2 crowd obtained money from the kidnappings of well-to-do businessmen in Europe and from the drug traffic in South America. Sindona’s bank laundered money from the notorious [Italian] Mafia kidnappers of Anonima Sequestri, who worked with… Ordine Nuovo.”[71]

Sindona was chosen by Pope Paul VI to serve as financial advisor to the Vatican. Known in banking circles as “The Shark,” Sindona was a member of the P2 Masonic lodge, and had clear connections to the Sicilian Mafia.[72] By 1957 Sindona was chosen by the Gambino family to manage their profits from heroin sales. By 1970, he was the most successful tax lawyer and the most powerful banker in Italy. His political contacts included Knight of Malta Giulio Andreotti, who served as Prime Minster of Italy implicated in many of the scandals that shook Italy during his terms of office from 1989 to 1992, as well as Richard Nixon, and through his membership in P2 he maintained close links with South American dictators. He was also able to establish intimate contacts with the banks Hambros of London, Rothschilds of Paris and Continental of Chicago.[73]

On August 2, 1979, while under indictment, Michele Sindona disappeared and was believed to have been kidnapped by left-wing terrorists. He reappeared on October 16, 1979, was later convicted of bank fraud, and sentenced to 25 years in prison by a US court. Italian investigations of Sindona led to Licio Gelli. In a letter from September 1, 1981, in which Sindona petitioned President Reagan for a presidential pardon, he reminded Reagan that he had served as a central figure in the “Western anti-communist struggle” and had purchased the Rome Daily American on behalf of the CIA, “to prevent it from falling into the hands of the left.” Sindona further reminded Reagan that he had worked with Graham Martin, the US ambassador to Italy, to create a media center for the purpose of producing anti-communist propaganda. As a result, P2 gained control of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, and the entire Rizzoli publishing group.[74]

Many believe that Pope Paul VI’s successor, Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978, just 33 days after his election, was assassinated because he wanted to break the links between Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican.[75] The central claim of David Yallop’s 1984 book In God’s Name was that when the body of the pope was discovered, his contorted hand gripped a piece of paper that was later destroyed because it named high-ranking members of the curia who were Freemasons and others who had a role in numerous corruption scandals and the laundering of mafia drug money. As a possible accomplice, Yallop named Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank, who was involved with Ambrosiano’s chairman, financier Roberto Calvi.

Theologian Abbé Georges de Nantes, founder of the traditionalist Catholic League for Catholic Counter-Reformation, spent years building a case against the Vatican for murder, collecting statements from people who knew the Pope before and after his election. De Nantes criticized the Second Vatican Council for encouraging ecumenism and accused Pope Paul VI of heresy and of turning the Church into a movement for advancing democracy, a system of government that de Nantes abhorred. De Nantes’ writings go into detail about the banks and about John Paul I’s supposed discovery of a number of Freemason priests in the Vatican, along with a number of his proposed reforms and devotion to Our Lady of Fatima.[76]

Aginter Press

Della Chiaie had taken part in Aginter Press, founded in Portugal in 1966, a front organization directed by Captain Yves Guérin-Sérac, a veteran of the OAS and a close friend of Damman.[77] In an 1974 interview, Aginter Press’ key Italian representative, Guido Giannettini, alluded to the contacts between the AESP and Aginter Press’s international fascist contact network, Ordre et Tradition, an international fascist contact network with a clandestine paramilitary wing, the Organisation Armée contre le Communisme International (OACI), set up by Guérin-Sérac and Otto Skorzeny.[78] Aginter press operations were designed to contribute to the “Strategy of Tension,” training its members in covert action techniques, including bombings, assassinations, subversion, infiltration and counter-insurgency. The idea, explains Stuart Christie, was “to bring about, apparently because of labor and left-wing activity, such social disruption and uncertainty that the populace would favor the installation of a strong-arm government pledged to restore ‘order’.”[79] According to a report by the post-1974 Portuguese intelligence service, Aginter Press provided a front for an espionage bureau run by the Portuguese secret police and, through them, the CIA and the West German BND or Gehlen Organisation.[80]

In 1970, Skorzeny created the Paladin Group, ostensibly a legitimate security consultancy, the group’s real purpose was to recruit and operate mercenaries for right-wing regimes worldwide. Skorzeny’s operation was based in Albufera, Spain, and lodged in the same building as the Spanish intelligence agency SCOE, which was also an office of the CIA.[81] Paladin was intended to serve as the military arm of the anti-communist struggle during the Cold War. In addition to hiring many former SS members, the group also recruited from the ranks of various right-wing and nationalist organizations, including the OAS, the Gaullist militia SAC (Civic Action Service), and the French Foreign Legion.

The group’s cover was a Madrid export-import firm M.C. Inc., managed by Dr. Gerhard von Schubert, formerly of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry.[82] After the war von Schubert had been security adviser to the Peron dictatorship in Argentina, and after that a principal agent in Skorzeny’s construction of the Gestapo-style Egyptian security services under President Gamal Nasser of Egypt.[83] Under his guidance, Paladin provided support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-EO), a terrorist organization led by Wadie Haddad. The Paladin Group’s other clients included the South African Bureau of State Security and Muammar al Gaddafi. They also worked for the Greek military junta of 1967–1974, and the Spanish Direccion General de Seguridad, who recruited some Paladin operatives to wage clandestine war against Basque separatists.

Otto Skorzeny’s Paladin hired the services of Delle Chiaie, whose leadership qualities were immediately recognized by Skorzeny who took him under his wing as his protégé.[84] Skorzeny was employed by Franco’s secret service as a “security consultant” and hired Delle Chiaie to target opponents of Franco in both Spain and abroad. With the advent of a new regime in Spain, neo-fascist groups formerly hosted by Franco ceased to be welcome and many of them fled to South America, in particular to Pinochet’s Chile and Argentina.

The original pro-Nazi network in Latin America maintained by Skorzeny, Luftwaffe hero Hans Ulrich Rudel, ex-Goebbels employee Johannes von Leers and Klaus Barbie, had been established in the late sixties by recruits of Aginter Press director Yves Guerin-Serac and his network of OAS exiles. Aginter Press was also sponsored by the WACL. When delle Chiaie was asked if he was ever a member of the WACL, he replied that he was not because he believed that the WACL “operated as a CIA front.”[85] During a 1997 hearing before the Commission on terrorism, Chiaie talked about the WACL and spoke about a “black fascist International” and his hopes of creating the conditions of an “international revolution.”[86]

Operation Condor

The WACL were also behind the death squads in South America, and in league with P2 members of Operation Condor. The ties between the legal political organizations, death squads, the ASC and WACL can be found in several countries including El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina. Such was the case in the 1970’s with the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA), founded by a friend of Gelli, P2 member Jose Lopez Rega. It was an organization of right-wing murder, terror, and propaganda whose activity was coordinated with the military regime. It was also the Argentine branch of the WACL.[87]

The Gladio network extended to South America where it provided for the brutal activities of Operation Condor to protect American economic interests and bolster their neoliberal agenda. According to Paul. L. Williams, Operation Condor, created to suppress communist influence in South America, got underway in the early 1970s, when Opus Dei gained the support of Chilean bishops for the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of president Salvador Allende. Because Opus Dei was vehemently anticommunist, the CIA began to funnel it millions to thwart the growth in Latin America of liberation theology, which emphasizes a concern for the liberation of the oppressed. The CIA had begun funneling millions of dollars in 1971 to the Chilean Institute for General Studies (IGS), an Opus Dei think-tank, for the planning of the revolution.[88] Opus Dei was represented in the government of dictator Augusto Pinochet by Hernan Cubillos, an Opus Dei member and Pinochet’s foreign minister.[89]

Opus Dei worked closely with CIA-funded organizations, such as the Fatherland and Liberty, which subsequently evolved into the Chilean secret police, Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA).[90] Officially launched in 1975 at a meeting in Santiago, Chile, between the chief of the political police, the Chilean secret police, DINA and representatives of the CIA, Condor was a secret operation whereby the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America united their “services” against activists and progressive opponents to military regimes.[91] The goal of Operation Condor was eradicating “Marxist subversion and terrorist activities,” to eliminate the principal obstacles to the neoliberal economic policies Washington sought to impose on Latin America, in collusion with the World Bank and the IMF.[92] Condor’s key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States provided support, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles.

Delle Chiaie and Skorzeny’s Paladin Group contributed personnel to Rega’s AAA, which was involved in that country’s Dirty War of 1973 to 1981.[93] Rega was known as El Brujo (the Warlock) and the Argentine Evola.[94] As evidence of the deep connection between Gladio and the occult tradition, Rega was also the leader of the Umbanda, an African voodoo cult which was strong in Argentina in the 1970s.[95] This would make his very likely the model for a character in Umberto Eco’s international bestseller Foucault’s Pendulum, published in 1988, which inspired the genre followed by Dan Brow’s Da Vinci Code. The plot of Eco’s novel revolves around three friends Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon who invent their own conspiracy theory for fun, which they call “The Plan.” But when other conspiracy theorists learn about The Plan they take it seriously, and Belbo finds himself the target of a very real secret society with ties to the SS that believes he possesses the key to the Holy Grail of the Knights Templar. To explain the unlikely connection with Umbanda, Eco writes of Casaubon having a romance with a Brazilian woman named Amparo, whom he follows to Brazil. While living there, he learns about South American and Caribbean spiritualism and meets Agliè, who could be based on Jose Lopez Rega. Agliè is an elderly man extensively knowledgeable about the occult, who implies that he is the mystical Comte de Saint-Germain. Casaubon and Amparo also attend an occult event in Brazil, an Umbanda rite.

Rega was also a member of P2, which also had branches in France, Switzerland, the US and South America, and included among its members several Argentinian leaders, including Rega’s son-in-law Raul Alberto Lastiri who was interim president of Argentina in 1973. Lastiri organized new elections in 1973 and delivered Argentina’s government to Juan Peron, who had just returned to the country after twenty years of exile since a coup in 1955. When Juan Peron died of a heart attack in 1974, he was succeeded by his third wife and vice-president Isabel Peron. Rega was her Minister of Social Welfare.

In The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger disclosed that the Fascist International created by Skorzeny was:

 …not only the first step toward fulfilling the dream of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid, exile Jose Lopez Rega, Juan Peron’s grey eminence, and prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the Italian fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton.[96]

Triple A became part of Operation Condor, which has been linked to Gladio. Operation Condor was officially launched in 1975 at a meeting in Santiago, Chile, between the chief of the political police, the Chilean secret police, Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) and representatives of the CIA, as a secret operation whereby the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America united their “services” against activists and progressive opponents to military regimes.[97] In 1976, Isabel Peron was overthrown by a coup instigated by Jorge Rafael Videla, the senior commander in the Argentine Army, and another P2 member, initiating the National Reorganization. Videla’s personal confessor was Georges Grasset, the key figure of the Cité catholique Cité catholique. Grasset had been the spiritual guide of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS). Following the dismantlement of the OAS and execution of some of its members, the OAS chaplain, Fr. Georges Grasset, organized the flight of OAS members, from a route going from Paris to Franquoist Spain and finally to Argentina.[98] Grasset arrived in 1962 in Buenos Aires to take charge of the Argentine branch of the Cité Catholique, and maintained links with Lefebvre.[99]

Cité catholique’s founder Jean Ousset wrote Le Marxisme-Léninisme in which he developed the new concept of “subversion” and argued that Marxists could only be combatted by “a profound faith, an unlimited obedience to the Holy Father, and a thorough knowledge of the Church’s doctrines.” Its Spanish translation was prefaced by Antonio Caggiano, the archbishop of Buenos Aires and military chaplain, who played a part in helping Nazi sympathizers and war criminals escape prosecution in Europe by easing their passage to South America. Caggiano would theorize about counter-revolutionary warfare in Argentina which was then implemented by the military during the so-called “Dirty War.”

Cité catholique recruited many former members of the OAS and opened a subsidiary in Argentina near the end of the 1950s. It had an important role in teaching Argentine ESMA Navy officers counter-insurgency techniques, including the systematic use of torture and ideological support.[100] Marie-Monique Robin made a 2003 film documentary titled Escadrons de la mort, l’école française (“The Death Squads: The French School”) that investigated the little-known ties between the French secret services and their Argentine and Chilean counterparts. Robin revealed that a member of Cité catholique, Roger Trinquier, a French theorist of counter-insurgency who legitimized the use of torture, whose book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, had a strong influence in South America and elsewhere, including in the infamous School of the Americas.[101]

Trinquier’s methods were taught by General Paul Aussaresses to the Americans at Fort Bragg who used torture and interrogation during the Vietnam War in the Phoenix Program, through which an estimated 20,000 civilians were killed.[102] Aussaresses was a French Army general, who fought during World War II, the First Indochina War and Algerian War, where his use of torture later caused considerable controversy.[103] Aussaresses moved to Brazil in 1973 during the military dictatorship, where he maintained very close links with the military. According to General Manuel Contreras, former head of the Chilean DINA, Chilean officers trained in Brazil under Aussaresses’ orders and advised the South American juntas on counter-insurrection warfare and the use of torture that was widely used against leftist opponents of the military regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay.[104]

Henry Kissinger gave the green light to Videla’s dictatorship to “eliminate subversion within ten months.”[105] The first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups and Rega’s Triple A death squads. The Triple A’s were responsible for the death of 1,500 left-wing activists and militants, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers. From 1976 onwards, DINA and the Secretaría de Inteligencia (SIDE), the premier intelligence agency of the Argentine Republic, were its front-line troops. DINA had also been involved in Skorzeny’s Paladin organization,[106] and also assisted Bolivian general Luis Garcia Meza Tejada’s Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, with the help of Delle Chiaie and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.[107] The coup involved the Latin American branch of the WACL, the Anti-Communist Conference (CAL).[108]

Colonia Dignidad

In 1991, Chile’s National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation concluded that a number of people apprehended by the DINA were really taken to the bizarre Nazi community of ex-Nazis in Chile known as Colonia Dignidad. Located in an isolated area of central Chile, Colonia Dignidad, later known as Villa Baviera, was founded by a group of German emigrants in 1961. The cult-like community was led by ex-Nazi Paul Schaefer (“Permanent Uncle”), a former Luftwaffe paramedic who had left Germany after being accused of sexually abusing two boys. During the 1950s, Schäfer became a follower and promoter of the teachings of American preacher and faith-healer, William M. Branham (1909 – 1965), who initiated the post–World War II healing revival.[109] Branham was the first American deliverance minister to successfully campaign in Europe, reaching international audiences in North America, Europe, Africa, and India. Branham claimed to be a prophet with the anointing of Elijah, who had come to herald the second coming of Christ. Branham, whose fame grew rapidly as crowds were drawn to his stories of angelic visitations and reports of miracles happening at his gatherings, “advocated a strict adherence to the Bible, a woman’s duty to obey her husband and apocalyptic visions, such as Los Angeles sinking beneath the ocean.”[110]

Branham had links to the Klan, whose national Ku Klux Klan Office was once located in Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana, where Branham lived.[111] Branham was baptized and ordained into the Pentecostal faith in 1929 by Roy E. Davis (1890 – 1966), who would later become National Imperial Grand Dragon of the Klan.[112] As part of his teachings, known collectively as “The Message,” Branham taught the doctrine of the serpent seed, which the Klan has promoted as part of Christian Identity Theology since the 1910s. The doctrine of the serpent seed, also known as the dual-seed or the two-seedline doctrine, traces the origins of non-whites to the mating of Eve with the Serpent in the Garden of Eden and through their offspring of Cain. It was also in Indianapolis that Branham helped launch and popularize the ministry of Jim Jones, the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple.[113]

According to John Collins, Jones and Schaefer were influenced to move to South America by Branham’s 1961 prophecy concerning the destruction of the United States in a nuclear Armageddon.[114] In January of that year, Schaefer surfaced in Chile, where the government, led by President Jorge Alessandri, granted him permission to create the “Dignidad Beneficent Society” on a farm outside of Parral, where Schaefer purchased a 4400-acre ranch. In return, former members of the SS and Gestapo, who had joined Schaefer to escape post-World War II war crime investigations, had the job of demonstrating Nazi torture methods to DINA.[115] At Colonia Dignidad, it was discovered that those apprehended were “held prisoner there for some time, and that some of them were subjected to torture, and that besides DINA agents, some of the residents there were involved in these actions.”[116]

Utilizing a database of intelligence files from the FBI, CIA, MI6, and other international authorities, Hunting Hitler, a History Channel television series hosted by CIA veteran Bob Baer and war crimes investigator John Cencich, proposes that after Hitler fled to South America, he may have been hidden in Colonia Dignidad, from where the Nazis were plotting the Fourth Reich. Schaefer was also close to Pinochet and various members of the military, though according to Luis Peebles, a former DINA prisoner at the colony, who later worked as psychiatrist at a public hospital in Santiago, “Paul Shaefer was a man far superior to the military. He was the one who was in charge.”[117]

There is also evidence that Shaeffer was in contact with pro-Nazi groups around the world and that large amounts of money were sent by such groups to the colony each year.[118] The colony was secretive, surrounded by barbed wire fences, searchlights and a watchtower. Called “El Lavadero,” the colony, which disguised as a “cultural and welfare society,” served as a refuge for Martin Bormann and Josef Mengele according to Ladislas Farago.[119] Both the CIA and Simon Wiesenthal have presented evidence of the presence at the colony Josef Mengele.[120] Interestingly, Mengele was among hundreds of fleeing Nazi war criminals who had found safe haven in Paraguay, South America called Nueva Germania, founded in 1886 by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth and her husband.[121] The idea of such an Aryan colony had been conceived of by composer Richard Wagner, who was greatly admired by Nietzsche and his sister. All that was left of the colony when it was visited by a Vice Magazine reporter in 2008 were two strange in-bred brothers living in utter filth and decrepitude, who were rumored by the locals to be cannibals.[122]

The colony was the main point of entry for shipments of arms in support of the coup against Allende and repressions that followed afterwards under Pinochet. The chief intermediary was Gerhard Mertins (1919 – 1993), a well-known member of the Waffen-SS who attained the rank of major during the war, carried out through Merex AG with the assistance of the German BND and other intelligence agencies. During the war, Mertins served under Otto Skorzeny and was one of the officers of the SS commando involved in the daring mission that freed Mussolini from his prison in Gran Sasso Italy in 1943. After the war he accepted a position at Volkswagen, but his specialty was weapons trading, and he became one of the most important exporters of munitions from West Germany. For that purpose, Mertins established Merex AG in Bonn, which specialized in selling Bundeswehr surplus materials worldwide. In 1965, Merex was named the West German representative for the International Amarment Corporation (also known as Interarms or Interarmco), a company founded by American small arms dealer Sam Cummings (1927 – 1998) in 1953, and which came to dominate the market in private arms sales in the free world.[123] Cummings also worked together with the CIA, including supplying arms for the coup in Guatemala in 1954. Mertens and Cummings were also involved in deals involving Pakistan and India which went sour, effecting his reputation.[124] Mertins also ran Mondialexport which was in fact involved in international arms  smuggling  and a  source of laundered funds for a section of the BND known as BND II, for operations in Italy and elsewhere.[125]

But it was in South America where Mertens was able to secure most of his new deals, working with Skorzeny, Klaus Barbie, Hans Rudel and Friedrich Schwend (1906 – 1980, an SS-Sturmbannführer who reported directly to Himmler, and a master forger who was part of the counterfeiting of Operation Bernhard. Reinhard Gehlen hired Barbie as a BND agent and put him to work with Mertins. Mertins also had close ties with the Chilean military, especially Pinochet, and after Pinochet took power, Mertens and Barbie often visited Colonia Dignidad. One of Barbie’s friends, Walter Rauff (1906 – 1984), a former SS commander, also had close ties to the colony.[126] Rauff had been an aide in the SD of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command, who was of Frankist descent from his mother’s side.[127] Rauff is thought to have been responsible during World War II for the deaths of nearly 100,000 Communists, Jews, Roma and people with disabilities.[128] Rauff was arrested in 1945, but escaped and was never brought to trial. Rauff was then employed for penetration in the Arab countries by the Israeli secret service, knowing that his Nazi sympathies would prevent him from being suspected of being a Jewish agent. With the assistance of Israeli and British intelligence, Rauff sailed for South America in 1949.[129] Between 1958 and 1962, after he moved to Chile, Rauff worked for the BND.[130] A few months after the overthrow of Allende in 1973, the French paper Le Monde reported that Rauff was appointed head of DINA, though the report was denied by the Chilean government.[131]

The colony was connected to Rauff’s closest friend, Franz Pfeiffer (1937 – 1997), a Chilean politician and professor of German descent, who was the leader of the National Socialist Workers Party of Chile (PNSO), which he founded in 1961. Pfeiffer completed his primary studies at the German School of Santiago, where he claims to have met a professor who had been part of the SS. During his years of political activism, he was Grand Wizard of Chilean branch of Ku Klux Klan, carried out attacks against synagogues and established contact with José López Rega’s Triple A and other Italian, Spanish and North American fascist groups.[132] In 1963, Pfeiffer founded the Partido Nacional Socialista Obrero de Chile (National Socialist Workers Party of Chile), a year after he had participated as representative of Chile in George Lincoln Rockwell’s WUNS (World Union of National Socialists). Pfeiffer impressed Rockwell who suggested to Colin Jordan that he would be suitable as the WUNS continental commander for all of South America.[133] It was through WUNS that Pfeiffer came into contact with Savitri Devi, with whom he corresponded and received several copies of her books.[134]

Jack Anderson provided some of the gruesome details of the torture methods employed at Colonia Dignidad, in his column “Operation Condor, An Unholy Alliance” of August 3, 1979:

Assassination teams are centered in Chile. This international consortium is located in Colonia Dignidad, Chile. Founded by Nazis from Hitler’s SS, headed by Franz Pfeiffer Richter, Adolf Hitler’s 1000-year Reich may not have perished. Children are cut up in front of their parents, suspects are asphyxiated in piles of excrement or rotated to death over barbecue pits.[135]

As Peter Levenda concluded:

As the Colony is known for child-snatching, child sexual abuse, and weird religious observances, it gets the author’s vote as the only real, verifiable, satanic cult fitting the profile, a cult from which “satanic cult survivor syndrome” is more than today’s psychological fad.[136]

Schaeffer collaborated with Contreras by allowing DINA to use the site of Colonia Dignidad for detentions and torture. From 1973 to 1977, Contreras led DINA on an international manhunt to track down and kill the political opponents of the regime. On November 25, 1975, leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with Contreras, in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor.[137] According to the declassified “CIA activities in Chile” released in 2000, in 1974, in its contact with Contreras, the CIA directed him to conform with the Geneva Convention in his handling of prisoners. But by 1975, intelligence reporting had concluded that Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Pinochet government, but an interagency committee directed the CIA to continue its relationship with him.[138]

Contreras supervised the apprehension of thousands of suspected leftists after the coup as Santiago’s national soccer stadium was transformed into a detention center where hundreds were held and tortured. According to an official report, 40,018 people were imprisoned, tortured or slain between 1973 and 1990. Chile’s government estimates that of those, 3,095 were killed, including about 1,200 who were forcibly “disappeared.” Contreras also claimed that 12,000 foreign rebels were in Chile at the time of coup against Allende, and that numerous missing political prisoners were in fact still alive, living under new identities. In later years, Contreras also alleged that Pinochet employed an army chemical plant to produce cocaine that was sold abroad and he that drugs and arms trafficking were the main source of the $27 million he hid in foreign secret bank accounts.[139]

Colonia Dignidad was turned into a brutal detention center by DINA agent Michael Vernon Townley.[140] A friend of Pinochet, Townley had been active in the coup against Allende. Townley had already met Pinochet in the company of Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had brought his friend, Prince Valerio Borghese, with him.[141] Townley, who is currently living under terms of the US federal witness protection program, was convicted for the 1976 assassination in Washington DC of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States, and a leading opponent of Pinochet. The assassination was carried out by agents of DINA, and was one among many carried out as part of Operation Condor. A US State Department document released in 2010 reveals that a démarche protesting Pinochet’s Operation Condor assassination program was proposed in 1976 to US diplomatic missions in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, but was later rescinded by Henry Kissinger. Letelier was assassinated five days later.[142]

The Supreme Court of Chile decided to extradite Contreras for his role in Letelier assassination in 1976. He was dismissed as head of DINA and disappeared for a long time from public life, finding refuge in Colonia Dignidad. In the same year, Contreras traveled with Mertins and Schaefer to Tehran to offer the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi help in killing Carlos the Jackal.[143] By the 1980s, Mertins would become implicated with US intelligence in the Iran-Contra Operation involving arms deals with Oliver North.[144] In 1995, Contreras was sentenced to seven years in prison for Letelier’s murder, which he served until 2001. In 1997, Shaefer fled Chile, pursued by authorities investigating charges that he had molested 26 children of the colony, and in 2004, Contreras and other leaders of Colonia Dignidad were convicted by the government of Chile of illicit association to commit human rights violations, sexual crimes and arms trafficking.[145] Contreras once threatened to open a trove of documents he said would incriminate military officials from Pinochet down, but never fulfilled the promise.[146]

New Swabia

Miguel Serrano (1917 – 2009), a Chilean diplomat and the next leading proponent of “Esoteric Hitlerlism” after Savitri Devi, claimed that Colonia Dignidad was actually a UFO base in contact with the Nazi base in Antarctica.[147] According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, it was probably Franz Pfeiffer who introduced Serrano, his fellow countryman, to the works of Savitri Devi.[148] Both Devi and Evola were important sources of inspiration to Serrano whose works are now circulating among neo-pagans, Satanists, skinheads, and Nazi metal music fans in the US, Scandinavia, and Western Europe. Serrano, a Chilean ambassador and a member of a Chilean Nazi party, synthesized interpretations of Hindu and Nordic traditions, both of which he considered to be of ancient Aryan-Hyperborean origin. He was especially indebted to the Jungian theory of collective racial archetypes, and borrowed heavily from Evola in supporting a spiritual consideration of race as opposed to a solely biological one.

Serrano made his first visit to Europe in 1951 when he explored the ruins of the Berlin bunker, Spandau Prison and the ruins of Hitler’s Berghof in Bavaria. In Switzerland, he met and befriended Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung. These encounters with Hesse and Jung culminated in Serrano’s most famous and prestigious book, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships. Tellingly, the original title was El círculo hermético, de Hermann Hesse a C. G. Jung (“The Hermetic Circle of Hermann Hesse C. G. Jung”). Jung’s suggestion that Hitler personified the collective Aryan unconscious deeply interested and influenced Serrano.[149]

Serrano discovered and began to publish The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in late 1941, and would interpret the Jewish world conspiracy according to a Gnostic interpretation, by identifying Yahweh, the God of the Bible, as the evil principle, the Demiurge as ruler over our corrupt planet.[150] Based on his readings of Jung, Serrano claimed the archetypes are the gods who dwell at a remote place or even beyond our galaxy, illuminated by the Black Sun, and gain their power through their possession of Vril and the Third Eye. According to Serrano, these beings are the divine ancestors of the Hyperborean, Nordic or Aryan races on earth. In an account which he identified with the Sons of God of Genesis, Serrano proposed a cataclysm involving a pole-shift caused a great flood, when the pure-blooded Hyperboreans fled to the South Pole, and then settled into the hollow earth, and established the secret cities of Agartha and Shambhala.

In support of his claims, Serrano cites Bal Gangadhar Tilak on the Arctic home of the Indo-Aryans, their migrations and subsequent preservation of the purity of their blood through the Hindu caste system. Of all the races on earth, claims Serrano, only the Aryans preserve the memory of their divine ancestors in their noble blood, which is still mingled with the light of the Black Sun. All other races are natives to the planet—beast-men—the progeny of the Demiurge.[151] According to Serrano:

Thus the submerged Agarthi and Shambhala are to be found there, which the Tibetans and Mongolians speak of as the seat of the king of the world, and also the symbolic orient of the [Knights] Templar and the true Rosicrucians. Thus the unknown leaders of these two orders, as well the organization of esoteric Hitlerism [the SS], betook themselves there. And from there Hitler clearly received instructions.[152]

In Adolf Hitler, the Last Avatar (1984) Serrano proposed that Hitler was the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu, the Kalki Avatar, who has incarnated to end the Kali Yuga and usher in a New Age. Serrano believed that after the defeat of the Third Reich, Hitler had escaped from the ruins of Berlin and found a refuge in Antarctica. Serrano shared the ufologists’ belief that U.S. Navy’s Operation Highjump (1946-47) was not launched for the purposes of mapping and training, as was officially claimed, but to destroy the Nazi base. In The Golden Thread: Esoteric Hitlerism (1978), Serrano claimed that Hitler was in Shambhala, formerly at the North Pole and Tibet, but which had been relocated to an Antarctic base in New Swabia. There, Hitler was in contact with the Hyperborean gods, and he would someday emerge with a fleet of UFOs to lead the forces of light over the forces of darkness in a last battle and to inaugurate a Fourth Reich.

Serrano became Chile’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Commission and United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNUDI). During his ambassadorial postings in Vienna and subsequently in Switzerland, before he was dismissed from the Chilean diplomatic service in 1970s by President Salvador Allende, Serrano cultivated ties of friendship with Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Koestler, Aldous Huxley and leading former Nazis and international fascists like, among many others, Otto Skorzeny, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Hanna Reitsch, Herman Wirth (ex-director of the Ahnenerbe), Ezra Pound and Wilhelm Landig.[153]

Wilhelm Landig (1909 – 1997), a former SS member, was the leader of the Landig Group, also known as the Vienna Lodge, formed in 1950 to revive the Aryan mythology of Thule. The focus of the group’s discussions was a secret center in the Arctic known as the Blue Island, which could serve as a source point for a renaissance of Traditional life. This idea was taken from Julius Evola, whose Revolt Against the Modern World became the bible of the Landig group.[154] Landig coined the term Black Sun, a mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race. Landig and other occult-fascist also circulated stories of German Nazi colonies living in secret bases beneath the polar ice caps, where they developed flying saucers and miracle weapons (Die Glocke) after the demise of the Third Reich, and from which the Nazis hoped to conquer the world.[155]

Through his diplomatic appointments, Serrano met many leading Indian personalities, becoming a personal friend of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s closest collaborator, who became the first Prime Minister of independent India (1947 – 64), was recruited by Besant at the age of only thirteen, herself presiding at his initiation ceremony.[156] Serrano also boasts of being “good friends” with the Dalai Lama XIV, and provides his explanation of the curious relationship as follows:

I also met the Dalai Lama at the moment he escaped from Tibet during the Communist Chinese invasion. He was very young, 25 years old. I went to meet him at the Himalayas. He never forgets that. And when we met again during the funeral of Indira Gandhi in Delhi. He invited me to go to Dharmasala, where he lives now. We had a very interesting talk. It is good to know that before Buddhism was introduced in Tibet, Tibetans were a warrior’s race and their religion, the Bo, used also the same swastika of Hitlerism. Until today Intelligence Services of England and United States have been unable to discover the real mysterious links that existed between Tibet and Hitlerist Germany.[157]

As was the case with most Nazi assets, the Dalai Lama passed into the hands of the CIA after World War II. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, the CIA began training Tibetan resistance fighters against the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China. A CIA-financed front, the American Society for a Free Asia, publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama's eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in the organization. The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951.[158] In October 1998, the Dalai Lama's administration acknowledged that it received $1.7 million a year in the 1960s from the US government through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[159]

For over more than 25 years, many hundreds of thousands have been “initiated” by the Dalai Lama XIV through the mysteries of the Kalachakra Tantra and Shambhala, which have become central pillars in the mythology of religious neo-Nazism.[160] Serrano incorporated the Fourteenth Dalai Lama into the formulation of his esoteric myths around Hitler. His “skill,” he said of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is “closely linked with that of Hitler’s Germany… on the basis of not yet discovered connections.”[161] The Dalai Lama has never distanced himself from Serrano. Instead of opposing fascism, he recently called for the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to be spared a trial, making reference to the need for “forgiveness.”[162]

Renewed Order of the Temple

The Gladio network was also connected with the neo-Templar UFO cult called the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS), created by former members of AMORC, most notorious for being associated with a series of murders and mass suicides in 1994 and 1995 that claimed several dozen lives in France, Switzerland and Canada. All but two of the purported Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion are also found on lists of alleged “Imperators” and “distinguished members” of AMORC, and most of the names found in the fictitious List of Priory of Sion Grand Masters originate from a document compiled by Raymond Bernard, a friend of Pierre Plantard, and Grand Master of AMORC and the organization’s leading figure in France in the 1970s.[163] French journalist Serge Hutin reported links between AMORC, the CIA, P2, the Corsican Mafia, the SAC (Service d’Action Civique), France’s Civic Action Service, and various other knightly orders, and their involvement in international terrorism. Hutin cited a report by his former partner Marie-Rose Baleron de Brauwer, AMORC’s representative for the Puyde-Dôme region, that had been able to show that the knights of the SAC, a parallel French police force, had links with Bernard and right-wing political activist Julien Origas, of whom some reports have claimed he was a Nazi SS member during WWII.[164]

The Solar Temple evolved from the Templar Order of Fabré-Palaprat, based on the Charter of Larmenius, whose “regency” passed to Josephin Péladan, who founded with Papus the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (OKR+C).[165] In 1932, the Order of the Temple was legally incorporated by the Belgian group under the name of the Sovereign and Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (OSMTJ), which was linked with Origas’ Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT).[166] In 1948, Origas appeared before the Military Court in Rennes, accused of active collaboration with Lieutenant Georg Roeder of the Nazi SS, chief of the SD in Brest and was jailed for four years. Origas became a member of numerous neo-Templar and other orders, including AMORC, where he had the degree of Chevalier de la Rose+Croix, and the Ordre Martiniste Traditionnel (OMT), whose teachings are those which its officers obtained when they were initiated into the Ordre Martiniste et Synarchique (OMS) in the 1930s by Victor Blanchard, the Grand Master of the Brotherhood Polaires.[167]

Bernard was initiated into Chaboseau’s Traditional Martinist Order (OMT) by J. Duane Freeman, in San Jose in 1959.[168] In 1939, the Ordre Martiniste et Synarchique (OSM), founded by Victor Blanchard, Grand Master of the Polaires Brotherhood, was replaced at the fourth convention of the FUDOSI by the OMT. Many members, including such high dignitaries as George Lagrèze, left the OMS and went over to the OMT. Two other high dignitaries of the federation, Imperators Emille Dantinne, another Polaires member, and Ralph Maxwell Lewis, the son of AMORC founder Harvey Spencer Lewis, also left Blanchard’s OMS. Ralph’s father had received a charter from Blanchard for the OMS in the United States. The first Martinist temple which was established in California by Lewis was called “Louis Claude de Saint-Martin.” In 1939, his son Ralph Maxwell Lewis was appointed Sovereign delegate and Regional Grand Master of the OMT by Lagrèze for California and the United States. This way the Regional Supreme Council of the United States founded. The council consisted of 5 members: R.M. Lewis, Cecil A. Poole, Orlando T. Perrotta, James R. Whitcomb and J. Duane Freeman.[169] Ralph M. Lewis then conferred upon Bernard the responsibility of developing the Order in France.[170]

Due to the FUDOSI Supreme Council’s refusal to confirm Jean Chaboseau as Grand Master in 1948, many members left the OMT. Among them was the Grand Secretary of the order, Jules Boucher (1902 – 1955), who had been initiated by Ambelain in 1942. In 1922, Boucher started his occult career with Jean-Julliet Champagne, who took Boucher and Eugene Canseliet, a former member of the Brotherhood of the Polaires, as his student, forming a group known as the Brotherhood of Heliopolis. According to Paul Le Cour, who inspired Pierre Plantard in the formulation of the Priory of Sion myth, Canseliet was also the true author of Fulcanelli’s The Mystery of the Cathedrals, which claimed to explore the alchemical symbolism of Templar architecture.[171] Another group Boucher was involved with, was a group called Grande Lunaire. According to Ambelain the group was also involved in black magic.[172] Besides Boucher, members included Champagne and Rene Schwaller de Lubicz, founder of Les Veilleurs, to which belonged Rudolf Hess and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-European Union with Otto von Habsburg.[173]

Bernard integrated the French lineage in the OMT and was initiated in Toulouse by Marcel Laperruque, a person close to Robert Ambelain.[174] R.M. Lewis appointed Bernard as administrator of AMORC in 1956 and then Grand Master for the French speaking countries, a position he held until 1977. Bernard created the Interior Order of AMORC based on the OMT, which was accepted by Papus’ son Philippe Encausse who, in 1958, was able to bring together the various Martinist orders including Ambelain’s Order of the Élus-Cohens.[175] Bernard was elected to the Supreme Council of AMORC and became Supreme Legate in 1967.[176]

Arginy Renaissance

Canseliet was also involved in the founding of the Ordre Souverain du Temple Solaire (OSTS), which was closely related to the Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT), founded by Raymond Bernard in 1968, after he embraced Origas’ idea of creating the order.[177] The OSTS was founded at the chateau of Arginy in the Beaujolais region of France in 1952. The castle was once owned by Guillaume de Beaujeu (c. 1230 – 1291), the 21st Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who died at the siege of Acre in 1291, and was the last Grand Master to preside in Palestine. Beaujeu was a central figure in the foundation legends of Freemasonry. During his last days, Jacques de Molay supposedly transmitted the treasure of the Templars to Beaujeu’s nephew, whom he named as his successor as Grand Master of the order. After Beaujeu’s death, the seat of the order fell to Pierre d’Aumont, one of the dispersed Templars who had taken refuge in Scotland.[178] The castle has apparently continued to attract much interest because of its Templar connections and occult activity.[179]

OSTS’ origins date back to the so called “Arginy Renaissance,” a mystical experience of June 12, 1952, when French esoteric author Jacques Breyer (1922 – 1996) and two companions were contacted by secret “Masters of the Temple” and asked to establish a “Templar Renaissance.” Breyer identified Arginy as the original location where Hughes de Payens and nine original knights founded the Order of the Temple in 1118.[180] According to Philip Coppens, in the same year that Puharich made contact with the Council of Nine at his Round Table Foundation, Breyer began to communicate with The Nine at Arginy, identifying them with the souls of the nine founding knights of the Knights Templar.[181] Likewise, within the Brotherhood Polaires, “The Nine” referred to the nine hidden masters of Agartha, the “Rosicrucian Initiatory Centre of Mysterious Asia” who directed the Fate of humanity from a secret monastery somewhere in the Himalayas.[182]

The concept of the “Nine Unknown Men” was further popularized by the synarchist authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. The Nine Unknown was a 1923 novel by Talbot Mundy, about a secret society founded by the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka of India around 270 BC, were entrusted with guarding nine books of secret knowledge that would be dangerous to humanity if it fell into the wrong hands. In The Morning of the Magicians, Pauwels and Bergier claimed that the Nine Unknown were real and that Pope Silvester II had met them and that nineteenth-century French occult writer Louis Jacolliot confirmed their existence. The Nine Unknown were also the final dedicatees mentioned in the dedication of the first edition of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible in 1969.

After these experiences, Breyer came into contact with Maxime de Roquemaure, who claimed to be a descendant of a branch of the medieval Order of the Temple which had survived through the centuries in Ethiopia. Breyer and de Roquemaure subsequently founded the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple (OSTS) in 1966, which was incorporated under Monaco law in 1967. Monaco was selected because the Grand Master hand-picked by Breyer for the OSTS was Jean-Louis Marsan (1923 – 1982), a Monaco socialite and a friend of P2 member Prince Rainier III (1923 – 2005), the husband of actress Grace Kelly.[183]

Also involved in the founding of the OSTS was Constantin Melnik, who was the head of the SDECE.[184] Melnik, who was trained by the RAND Corporation, conceived of La Main Rouge (“the Red Hand”), a group of state-sponsored terrorists who operated in the Algerian War. Melnik, who had been in exile in the US, was called to return to activity by François de Grossouvre, who headed Arc-en-ciel, the regional branch of Gladio of Lyon. In 1981, de Grossouvre became the adviser of former Cagoule member, President Francois Mitterrand, for secret operations. Mitterrand was a key advocate of a United Europe. Together with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl he fathered the Maastricht Treaty, which was signed in 1992, and transformed the EEC into the EU.

Both OSTS and ORT recognized the “Arginy Renaissance” as genuine and kept in contact with Breyer. Bernard supposedly met a mysterious White Cardinal, representative of the True Masters of the Earth, who ordered him to revive the Order of the Templars,, and prepare the world for the coming of the Age of Aquarius. The ORT was and integrated into AMORC and Bernard became Grand Master of both orders. Some time later, in the crypt of Chartres Cathedral, Bernard solemnly knighted Origas and gave him the title of title of bailiff, and crowned him King of Jerusalem.[185] Bernard had asked Origas to replace him as president in 1971, though he continued to report to Bernard as Secret Grand Master.[186] In a letter, Origas wrote:

I am the central point of all the forces, of all the light that descends from the Hierarchy and the Great Brotherhood of the White Lodges, who directs our Order through Agartha and the King of the World [Origas also called himself King of the World]… The Grand Master must be obeyed, not only because of his wisdom, but because he represents God he represents God, because he is the living sign of Christ in the Order…[187]

Origas also reconstructed the ORT’s teachings based on the I AM Religious Activity, founded by Guy Ballard in the 1930s, after his meeting with the Ascended Master Saint Germain on Mount Shasta. The Comte de Saint-Germain is featured largely as an Ascended Master in AMORC, as well as several other occult societies influenced by it.[188] AMORC Rosicrucian founder Harvey Spencer Lewis also published Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific (1931), which in addition to a frontispiece depicting Mount Shasta included detailed information linking the Mount Shasta to the lost continent of Lemuria and the survival of Masters supposedly still living there. Origas first received these teachings from a splinter group led in southern France by Angela von Bast. Angela, who was the leader of the French Saint Germain Foundation, claimed to be a reincarnation of Socrates and Elizabeth I of England, and the mother of the Comte Saint-Germain and to have direct contact with Agartha.[189] Angela’s teachings included racist, anti-communist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, including the claim that Blacks and Jews had too low a vibration.[190]

Luciferian International

Several journalists noticed Origas relations with neo-Nazi and White supremacist groups.[191] Both Angela and Origas made contact with the neo-Nazi L’Ordre Vert (“Green Order”) in Brussels, and Origas also claimed that Angela had been sent by the Thule Society.[192] Andre Wautier, a French author and Theosophist, claimed that in 1945 members of the Thule Society and the Brotherhood Polaires founded a new Order, the Green Order, whose adherents honor Lucifer, Mithra, Kali, and Lilith.[193] According to Marcel Roggemans, the L’Ordre Vert Celtique (“Celtic Green Order) was founded in 1970 by René Lixon under the pseudonym Lug, which is Celtic for “fire.” The order also makes itself known under the name L’Eglise Européenne de Mithras (“European Church of Mithras”).[194]

In 1975 in Brussels, in what Origas regarded as the beginning of a new era, there was a gathering of numerous extreme right-wing Orders, who had international connections with Lopez Rega.[195] They all made a pact with Lug to prepare the advent of a “Luciferian International,” when the Green Order made the following announcement:

The time has come for a SOLID UNION of all our societies, it is high time that the sons and daughters of Hyperborea raise the flame of the new times and of the divine superman, heir of the Grail and of the boreal crown. From Shambhala, the holy city of Agartha, comes this polar message: UNITE![196]

On May 14, 1975, the representatives of the various Luciferian associations were present in Brussels, at the temple of the Green Order, in order to seal the charter of unification of the Legions of Mithras. A charter proclaimed the unification of the most important Luciferian societies: the Green Order, the Grand Lodge of the Dragon, the Celtic Brotherhood, the Aryan Order, the Sons of Fire, and the Luzifer Gesellschaft (“Lucifer Society”) based in Cologne. According to the Green Order:

It is indispensable to unite all the polar and solar forces before the Age of Aquarius, and the new man—the superman—must be ready to take the destiny of humanity into his own hands, because when the most critical moment of the Black Age comes, there will be only one people left to carry the flame: US. An Aryan order of chivalry must be created, and an elite of superiors must be formed who hold the secrets possessed by our ancestors in the Polar Empire.[197]

Origas was well known in far-right circles in the 1970s and also had connections with neo-fascist movements in Italy. In addition to the Green Order, Origas was also a member the Internationale Luciferienne (“Luciferian International”), and the Centre Templier d’Etudes Historique, Philosophiques et Esoteriques founded by Alfred Zappelli, the Grand Master of the Swiss Branch of the OSMTJ.[198] The OSMTJ was dominated by members of the SAC, and even after the OSMTJ’s official dissolution in 1973, SAC members had kept alive the order’s activities, which included an international traffic of weapons in connection with P2 headed by Licio Gelli.[199] Raids carried out by the Italian authorities at Gelli’s villa in Arezzo discovered a file on the OSMTJ. Many “fringe” and “irregular” Masons belonged to an Italian Grand Priory of the OSMTJ, which had as bailli (local leader) P2 member Pasquale Gugliotta and also comprised of, among others, Pietro Muscolo of Genoa and Luigi Savona of Turin, both leaders of “clandestine” Masonic fraternities and, according to the Parliamentary Commission, Masonic allies of Gelli.[200]

Order of the Solar Temple

In 1981, Origas became acquainted with Luc Jouret, a Belgian ex-military official with ties to Gladio.[201] Jouret was a friend another Italian fascist linked to Gladio, Claudio Mutti.[202] Mutti was a follower of Franco Freda, one of the leading neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist intellectuals of the post-war Italian far-right. Freda belonged to the MSI, but began to criticize its leadership, taking on a “Nazi-Maoist” inclination. In 1963, Freda founded the Group of Ar, based on the philosophy of Julius Evola, and managed a far-right library. Freda also described himself as an admirer of Hitler. After contacts with Pino Rauti, he participated in the activities of Ordine Nuovo, and was convicted but later acquitted for lack of evidence for involvement in the Piazza Fontana bombing.

From a very young age, Mutti joined the MSI but was expelled, and then joined GRECE member Jean-Francois Thiriart’s Young Europe. In 1975, after turning towards to Libyan socialism, he published Gaddafi Templare di Allah (“Gaddafi Templar of Allah”). Mutti, converted to Islam through the influence of Guénon, whom he discovered through his study of Evola. Mutti had taught Romanian and Hungarian at the University of Bologna, before losing that job when he had to serve a prison term for his terrorist activities. Mutti founded the publishing house Edizioni all’Insegna del Veltro, which published the works of Evola, Johann von Leers, Savitri Devi and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. When he converted to Islam, Mutti took the name of Omar Amin, in honor of Johann von Leers, who had taken the same name before him on his own conversion.[203]

Thiriart, together with Jouret and Joseph di Mambro—a member of AMORC and associate of Jacques Breyer—had helped organize a split in the Communist Party of Belgium (PCB) in the 1970s, creating the Parti Communautaire Européen, a “Nazi-Maoist” party which succeeded to Jeune Europe. The group was allegedly controlled by the SDRA-8, Belgium’s branch of Gladio.[204] Jouret with Di Mambro founded the Solar Temple in 1984 in Geneva as l’Ordre International Chevaleresque de Tradition Solaire (OICTS) and later renamed Ordre du Temple Solaire (OTS). According to the literature of the OTS, the central authority was the Synarchy of the Temple, whose membership was secret. Its top 33 members were known as the Elder Brothers of the Rosy Cross, and were headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland. The Lodges had altars, rituals and costumes. During ceremonies, members wore Crusader-type robes and were to hold in awe a sword, which Di Mambro said was an authentic Templar artifact, given to him a thousand years ago in a previous life. Jouret claimed to be a reincarnation of St Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Templars.

As reported in the Belgian cult report of April 28, 1997, according to Roger Facon, a former police officer:

We are dealing here with an extremely dangerous ideology: it finds its expression in secrets and rituals and maintains that the Grand Master is always right. The Grand Master recognizes that his actions are prompted by orders that are clandestinely taught by a secret hierarchy called the “Supreme Council,” “Agartha,” or “les Compagnons de Maha.” This terminology is also found in the Order of the Solar Temple.[205]

By their own admission, the aims of the Solar Temple included establishing “correct notions of authority and power in the world,” preparing for the Second Coming of Jesus as a solar god-king and furthering a unification of all Christian churches and Islam.[206] In common with the New Age movement, the OTS held that the earth was on the cusp between the Age of Pisces and the dawning Age of Aquarius, which would herald an apocalypse, in which the Earth would be destroyed by fire. In order to survive the coming cataclysm, the group’s aim was to produce a communion of souls through the practice of sex magic.[207] The group reportedly drew some inspiration for its teachings from Aleister Crowley’s OTO and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[208] George D. Chryssides of the University of Wolverhampton, cited the influence of Alice Bailey’s ideas on the Order of the Solar Temple and related UFO organizations.[209] Breyer drew substantially on Bailey’s ideas, and Di Mambro himself used Bailey’s Great Invocation to commence OTS ceremonies.[210] According to the Solar Temple, the star Sirius was the home of a number of Ascended Masters, also known as the Great White Brotherhood, who came to earth and inhabited Agartha.[211] According to AMORC the Great White Brotherhood is the “school or fraternity” of the Great White Lodge.[212] Aleister Crowley identified the Great White Brotherhood with the A∴A∴, his magical secret society.[213] As well, the Solar Temple stressed the importance of the Great Pyramid, which they claimed would be the focus for some momentous event in the coming years.[214]

As noted by Massimo Introvigne, “In the 1980s, Geneva and Montreal were perhaps the two cities with the greatest number of esoteric groups in the world.”[215] Between 1994 and 1997, a number of Solar Temple members were murdered in ritualistic fashion or committed mass suicide. The reason of the suicide of the members of the Solar Temple was ostensibly to return “home” to the Sirius system. Documents posted to the media by the leaders of the cult stated: “The Great White Lodge of Sirius has decreed the Recall of the last authentic Bearers of an Ancestral Wisdom.”[216] The deaths occurred in Cheiry and Salvan, in western Switzerland; Vercors, France; and Morin Heights and Saint-Casimir, north of Montreal. The Solar Temple in Canada was specifically linked with the electricity corporation Hydro-Québec. French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau investigated the sect for two years. A few days after the mass murder, he reported that the sect was financed by the proceeds of gun-running to Europe and South America. Simultaneously, Radio Canada announced that the group earned hundreds of millions of dollars laundering the profits through the infamous CIA-linked bank, BCCI. Montreal’s La Presse observed: “each new piece of information only thickens the mystery.”[217]

The Solar Temple was officially sponsored by Prince Rainier III of Monaco, with his wife Princess Grace Kelly becoming a member.[218] Kelly, who apparently well-known to her peers for a voracious sexual appetite, was appointed a High Priestess by Di Mambro.[219] But Kelly died in a car accident in 1982, after she became disillusioned with Di Mambro and threatened to expose him, according to Di Mambro’s former driver. Rumors about the cause of her death persist to this day. Two weeks before Kelly died, Italian newspapers published a list of members of the P2 Lodge, which included Prince Rainier as its chairman. The Italian government collapsed soon afterwards and some of its leaders were sent to jail. Prince Rainier was quoted as saying: “When the press makes up a story about the Mafia wanting to kill Grace, though I can’t for a moment see why the Mafia would want to kill her…”[220]

[1] “Spionage für die CDU.” Zeitgeschichte. Der Spiegel. 18/2017 (reference is also made to a more detailed article in volume 15/2017): 23.

[2] Infield. Skorzeny, n. 6. p. 190.

[3] Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of America (Joshua Tree, Calif: Progressive Press, 2008), p. 412.

[4] David Teacher. “The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe,” Lobster (October 18, 1989).

[5] Hugh Wilford. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (Routledge, 2013), p. 243.

[6] Adrian Hänni. “A Global Crusade against Communism: The Cercle in the ‘Second Cold War’.” In Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War. ed. Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin and Giles Scott-Smith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 161.

[7] Guy Patton. Masters of Deception: murder intrigue in the world of occult politics (Amsterdam: Frontier Publishing, 2009), p. 174.

[8] David Teacher. Rogue Agents: The Cercle Pinay complex 1951-1991 (2015), pp. 472-475.

[9] Adrian Hänni. “A Global Crusade against Communism: The Cercle in the ‘Second Cold War’.” In Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War. ed. Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin and Giles Scott-Smith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 161.

[10] Peter Berger & Samuel Huntington. Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2002).

[11] Betty Clermont. “Opus Dei Influence Rises to the Top in the Vatican.” The Daily Kos (April 06, 2014)

[12] Jonathan Marshall. “Brief Notes On The Political Importance Of Secret Societies.” Lobster Magazine (August 1984, Issue 5).

[13] “The People’s Front.” The Nation (November 16, 1946). 

[14] Hanni. “A Global Crusade against Communism,” pp. 162.

[15] Joël van der Reijden. “Le Circle and the Struggle for the Eurasian Continent; Notorious CIA ‘Ghost’ Owned ‘The Atlantic Cercle Inc.’ from 1994 to 2002.” Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (June 20, 2010); Lucien Gregoire. Murder in the Vatican, pp. 319-320.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Chris Blackhurst. “Aitken dropped by the Right’s secret club.” Independent (June 28, 1997).

[18] Jon E. Lewis. The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2008).

[19] Hanni. “A Global Crusade against Communism,” pp. 162.

[20] Chris Blackhurst. “Aitken dropped by the Right’s secret club.” Independent (June 28, 1997); Stéphanie Roulin, Giles Scott-Smith. Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), p. 162.

[21] Sterling & Peggy Seagrave. Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold (Bowstring, 2010), pp. 94-96.

[22] Teacher. Rogue Agents.

[23] “Korean denies influence peddling.” Bangor Daily News (November 2, 1976).

[24] Hanni. “A Global Crusade against Communism,’” pp. 164.

[25] Teacher. “The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe.”

[26] Jon E. Lewis. The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2008).

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

[28] Philip Willan. The Last Supper: the Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi (Constable & Robinson, 2007), pp. 229–30.

[29] Philip Coppens. “Knights of the Extreme Right.” Nexus Magazine, Volume 18, Number 2 (February - March 2011).

[30] Entry “Giuseppe Mazzini” in , William R. Denslow, Volume III K – P, 10,000 Famous Freemasons, (Macoy Publishing & Masonic Supply Co., Inc., 1957); Garibaldi—the mason Translated from Giuseppe Garibaldi Massone by the Grand Orient of Italy.

[31] John Michael Greer. The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (HarperElement, London, 2006)

[32] Diego Gambetta. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 261 n. 18.

[33] Christian Terras. Opus Dei: Enquête au cœur d’un pouvoir occulte (Golias, 2006) chap. 7.

[34] Arthur E. Rowse, “Gladio: The Secret U.S. War to Subvert Italian Democracy,” Covert Action Quarterly (December 1994).

[35] Daniele Ganser. Nato’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 73.

[36] Stuart Christie. Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, (London: Black Papers No.. 1, 1984), p. 74.

[37] Ibid., p. 10.

[38] Daniele Ganser. Nato’s Secret Armies, p. 59.

[39] Daniele Ganser, “Terrorism in Western Europe: An Approach to NATO’s Secret Stay-Behind Armies,” Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, South Orange NJ, Winter/Spring 2005, Vol. 6, No. 1.

[40] Chris Floyd. “Sword Play: Attacking Civilians to Justify ‘Greater Security’,” Global Research, (February 20, 2005).

[41] David Guyatt. “Operation Gladio.” Retrieved from http://www.copi.com/articles/guyatt/gladio.html

[42] Jonathan Kwitny. “The C.I.A.’s Secret Armies in Europe.” The Nation (April 6, 1992). pp. 446–447, cited in Ganser’s “Terrorism in Western Europe.”; Charles Cogan (2007). “‘Stay-Behind’ in France: Much ado about nothing?" Journal of Strategic Studies. 30 (6): 937–954.

[43] Brussell. “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.”

[44] Steve Dorril. "PERMINDEX: The International Trade in Disinformation.” Lobster (November, 1983).

[45] Brussell. “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.”

[46] Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (Lincoln, NE: Author’s Choice Books, 1991).

[47] Joan Mellon. A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).

[48] Joan Mellon. A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).

[49] Joan Mellon. A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).

[50] Joan Mellon. A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).

[51] William Torbitt. Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970).

[52] Timewatch: Operation Gladio—Behind False Flag Terrorism & 9/11 (parts 1, 2 and 3) BBC.

[53] Alexander Reid Ross. Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press, 2017).

[54] Marlene Laruelle. “Dangerous Liaisons: Eurasianism, The European Far Right, and Putin’s Russia.” Eurasianism and the European Far Right (Lexington Books, 2015), p. 13.

[55] Ross. Against the Fascist Creep.

[56] Franco Ferraresi. “The Radical Right in Postwar Italy,” Politics and Society, 16(1), (1988), p. 84.

[57] Ganser. Nato’s Secret Armies, p. 20.

[58] Stéphanie Roulin & Giles Scott-Smith. Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), p. 162.

[59] David Rockefeller. Memoirs (2002), pp. 412-413.

[60] Patton. Masters of Deception, p. 175.

[61] Giles Scott-Smith. Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). p. 127.

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

[63] Ibid., p. 77.

[64] Ibid., p. 76.

[65] Hugo Gijsels. Netwerk Gladio (Leuven: Kritak, 1991). p. 124.

[66] Sergio Flamigni. La tela del ragno (2nd ed.). Edizioni Caos (2003).

[67] Philip P. Willan. Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (Authors Choice Press, 2002) p. 220.

[68] Richard Drake. The Aldo Moro Murder Case (Harvard University Press, 1995) p. 104.

[69] Sergio Zavoli. “La notte della repubblica,” Nuova ERI/Edizioni RAI (1990).

[70] Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 71.

[71] Penny Lernoux. In Banks We Trust (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1984), p. 217; cited in Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 71.

[72] “Web of scandal entangles P2.” The Times (May 27, 1981).

[73] Patton. Masters of Deception, p. 190.

[74] Paul. L. Williams. Operation Gladio: The Untold Story of the Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia (Prometheus Books, 2015).

[75] Nick Mathieson. “Who killed Calvi?” The Guardian (December 7, 2003).

[76] John Paul I at Catholic Counter-Reformation, Abbé de Nantes’ website, in English.

[77] “La CAGOULE, organisation fasciste française.” Partie de Gauche, (vendredi 15 juin 2012), retrieve from http://www.gauchemip.org/spip.php?article1337; Pierre Beaudry, “Will Bush or Kerry Learn a Lesson from Charles de Gaulle?” Executive Intelligence Review (June 18, 2004).

[78] Stuart Christie. General Franco Made Me a ‘terrorist’: The Christie File: Part 2, 1964-1967 (Stuart Christie: 2003) p. 238.

[79] Christie. Stefano Delle Chiaie, p. 16

[80] Ganser. Nato’s Secret Armies, p. 106

[81] Mae Brussell. “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination,” The Rebel, (January 1984).

[82] Ibid.

[83] Christie. Stefano Delle Chiaie, p. 34

[84] Ibid., p. 33

[85] Peter Dale Scott. American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, Maryland: Rownan & Littlefield, 2010). p. 271 n. 84.

[86] Hearing of Stefano Delle Chiaie on 22 July 1997 before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism headed by senator Giovanni Pellegrino.

[87] Russ Bellant. The Coors Connection, (South End Press, 1988), p. 85.

[88] Williams. Operation Gladio.

[89] Penny Lernoux. People of God (New York: Viking Penguin Publishing Inc.) p. 318.

[90] Martin A. Lee. “Their Will Be Done,” Mother Jones (July/August 1983).

[91] Gérard Devienne. “Latin America in the 1970s: “Operation Condor,” an International Organization for Kidnapping Opponents,” L’Humanite in English, Translated Monday 1 January 2007.

[92] Ibid.

[93] Christie. “General Franco Made Me a “terrorist,” p. 132.

[94] (Spanish) En el mismo barco, Pagina 12, (December 14, 1998).

[95] Coppens. “Knights of the Extreme Right.”

[96] Brussell. “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.”

[97] Gérard Devienne. “Latin America in the 1970s: “Operation Condor,” an International Organization for Kidnapping Opponents.” L’Humanite in English, Translated Monday 1 January 2007.

[98] Horacio Verbitsky. The Silence, extract transl. in English made available by OpenDemocracy: Breaking the silence: the Catholic Church in Argentina and the “dirty war”, (July 28, 2005).

[99] Argentine – “Escadrons de la mort : l’école française”, interview with Marie-Monique Robin published by RISAL, 22 October 2004 available in French & Spanish (“Los métodos de Argel se aplicaron aquí”), Página/12, 13 October 2004

[100] “L’exportation de la torture”: interview with Marie-Monique Robin, L’Humanité, (August 30, 2003) (in French).

[101] Verbitsky. The Silence.

[102] J. Patrice McSherry. Review: Death Squadrons: The French School. Directed by Marie-Monique Robin., The Americas 61.3 (2005) 555-556, via Project MUSE, accessed 30 April 2016.

[103] “Algeria torture: French general Paul Aussaresses dies.” BBC News (December 4, 2013).

[104] Marie-Monique Robin. Escadrons de la mort - l’école française (starting at 27 min).

[105] Gérard Devienne. “Latin America in the 1970s: “Operation Condor,” an International Organization for Kidnapping Opponents,” L’Humanite in English, Translated Monday 1 January 2007.

[106] Christie. Stefano Della Chiaie, p. 34.

[107] Hearing of Stefano Delle Chiaie on before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism headed by President Giovanni.

[108] Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott & Jane Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection (Black Rose Books Ltd., 1987), p. 24.

[109] Peter M.Duyzer. Legend of the Fall, An Evaluation of William Branham and His Message (Independent Scholar’s Press, 2014), pp. 65–66.

[110] Stephen Brown & Oliver Ellrodt. “Insight: German sect victims seek escape from Chilean nightmare past.” Reuters (May 9, 2012). Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-chile-sect-idUSBRE8480MN20120509

[111] John Collins. “Colonia Dignidad and Jonestown.” Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple (September 23, 2016). Retrieved from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=67352

[112] John Collins. “Colonia Dignidad and Jonestown.” Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple (September 23, 2016). Retrieved from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=67352

[113] Tom Reiterman & John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People (Dutton, 1982), pp. 50–52.

[114] John Collins. “Colonia Dignidad and Jonestown.” Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple (September 23, 2016). Retrieved from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=67352

[115] Glenn Infield. Secrets of the SS (New York, NY: Stein and Day, 1981), p. 206.

[116] Bruce Falconer. “The Torture Colony,” The American Scholar, (Autumn 2008).

[117] A Sinister Sect: Colonia Dignidad, Season I, Episode 4, “A pact with the Devil” (2021).

[118] Glenn Infield. Secrets of the SS (New York, NY: Stein and Day, 1981), p. 207.

[119] Peter Levenda. Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult (New York: Continuum, 2006).

[120] Glenn Infield. Secrets of the SS (Stein and Day, 1981), p. 207.

[121] Gerard L. Posner. Mengele: The Complete Story, (Cooper Square Press, 1986), pp. 123–124.

[122] Vice Guide to Travel, visit Nueva Germania (2008).

[123] George Thayer. The War Business – The International Trade in Arms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), p. 43.

[124] Peter McFarren & Fadrique Iglesias. The Devil's Agent: Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie (Xlibris Corporation, 2013).

[125] Christie. Stefano Delle Chiaie, p. 63.

[126] Peter McFarren & Fadrique Iglesias. The Devil's Agent: Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie (Xlibris Corporation, 2013).

[127] Shlomo Aronson. Reinhard Heydrich und die Anfänge des SD und der Gestapo 1931-1935 (Berlin, 1966); Cited in Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 187.

[128] Tony Paterson. “How the Nazis escaped justice.” The Independent (January, 27 2013)

[129] Shraga Elam & Dennis Whitehead.  “In the Service of the Jewish State.” Haaretz (March 29, 2007). Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/1.4813593

[130] Bodo Hechelhammer (BND). “Mitteilung der Forschungs- und Arbeitsgruppe "Geschichte des BND" (MFGBND) Nr. 2 - Walther Rauff und der Bundesnachrichtendienst” [Communication from the Research and Working Group “History of the BND” (MFGBND)-Walther Rauff and the BND]. Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany (Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND) ((23 September 2011)).

[131] Shraga Elam & Dennis Whitehead.  “In the Service of the Jewish State.” Haaretz (March 29, 2007). Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/1.4813593

[132] Carlos Basso. El último secreto de Colonia Dignidad (Mare Nostrum, 2002), p. 56

[133] Frederick James Simonelli. American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 90.

[134] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

[135] Brussell. “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.”

[136] Levenda. Unholy Alliance.

[137] Robert Plummer. “Condor legacy haunts South America.” BBC (June 8, 2005). Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3720724.stm

[138] “CIA Activities in Chile.” National Security. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20170719161607/https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/20000919/01-17.htm

[139] Luis Andres Henao. “Manuel Contreras, Pinochet confidant convicted for crimes against humanity, dead.” CBC (August 7, 2015). Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/manuel-contreras-pinochet-confidant-convicted-for-crimes-against-humanity-dead-1.3184143

[140] Levenda. Unholy Alliance.

[141] Ibid.

[142] “New Docs Show Kissinger Rescinded Warning on Assassinations Days Before Letelier Bombing in DC.” Democracy Now (April 12, 2010).

[143] Mónica González. “El día en que Manuel Contreras le ofreció al Sha de Irán matar a ‘Carlos, El Chacal’.” Ciper (June 8, 2009).

[144] Peter McFarren & Fadrique Iglesias. The Devil's Agent: Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie (Xlibris Corporation, 2013).

[145] Erik Lopez. “Condenan a Manuel Contreras y líderes de Colonia Dignidad por asociación ilícita y delitos sexuales.” Biobio Chile (April 23, 2014). Retrieved from https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/2014/04/23/condenan-a-manuel-contreras-y-lideres-de-colonia-dignidad-por-asociacion-ilicita-y-delitos-sexuales.shtml

[146] Luis Andres Henao. “Manuel Contreras, Pinochet confidant convicted for crimes against humanity, dead.” CBC (August 7, 2015). Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/manuel-contreras-pinochet-confidant-convicted-for-crimes-against-humanity-dead-1.3184143

[147] Gonzalo Leon. “Miguel Serrano, a writer and former Chilean ambassador to India: ‘Colonia Dignidad was a UFO base’,” Nation Sunday (Sunday April 3, 2005).

[148] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

[149] Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun, p. 179

[150] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. (New York: New York University Press, 2002). p. 175

[151] Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun, p. 181

[152] Miguel Serrano. Das goldene Band, p. 32.

[153] Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun, p. 177.

[154] Ibid.

[155] Martin A. Lee. SPLC report: “From UFOs to Yoga” (Summer 2002).

[156] Karl Ernest Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac. Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game And the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Basic Books, 2006), p. 459.

[157] “Dalai Lama’s Depressing Past, Disappointing Politics,” Foreign Confidential, (Monday, March 31, 2008).

[158] Loren Coleman. Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

[159] “World News Briefs; Dalai Lama Group Says It Got Money From C.I.A.” The New York Times, (2 October 1998).

[160] Victor & Victoria Trimondi. “The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Annex: Critical Forum Kalachakra.”

[161] Miguel Serrano. Das goldene Band, p. 366.

[162] “Forgive Pinochet, says Dalai Lama,” CBC News, (Friday, November 10, 2000).

[163] “Pierre Athanase Marie Plantard.” Biblioteca Pleyades. Retrieved from https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_priorysion06.htm

[164] Philip Coppens. “Knights of the Extreme Right.”

[165] Massimo Introvigne. “Ordeal by Fire: The Tragedy of the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 23.

[166] Massimo Introvigne. “Ordeal by Fire: The Tragedy of the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 22.

[167] Marcel Roggemans. History of Martinism and the F.U.D.O.S.I. (Lulu.com, 2008).

[168] “Raymond Bernard (1923-2006)” OSTI. Retrieved from https://www.osti.org/who9.html

[169] Milko Bogaard. “Manifestations of the Martinist Order.” (February 2005). Retrieved from http://omeganexusonline.net/rcmo/martinistorders.htm

[170] “Raymond Bernard (1923-2006)” OSTI. Retrieved from https://www.osti.org/who9.html

[171] Patrick Rivière. Fulcanelli: His True Identity Revealed (Red Pill Press, Ltd, 2006), p. 84.

[172] Milko Bogaard. “The Martinist Order.” (November 2000). Retrieved from https://www.hermetics.org/Martinism.html

[173] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao, Volume Three, Chapter 23: European Union.

[174] “Raymond Bernard (1923-2006)” OSTI. Retrieved from https://www.osti.org/who9.html

[175] Jean-Pierre Bayard. “Hommage à Raymond Bernard.” (January 11, 2006). Retrieved from http://www.bldt.net/Om/spip.php?article410

[176] “Raymond Bernard (1923-2006).” The Sovereign Order of the Initiatic Temple. Retrieved from https://www.osti.org/who9.html

[177] André Douzet. “The Treasure Trove of the Knights Templar,” Nexus, vol. 4, no. 3, April/May 1997; Massimo Introvigne. “Ordeal by Fire: The Tragedy of the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 27.

[178] See David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao, Volume Two, Chapter 11: The Grand Lodge.

[179] “Knights Templar treasure: d’Arginy Castle.” Knights Templar Vault. Retrieved from https://knightstemplarvault.com/darginy-castle-two-legends/

[180] George D. Chryssides. “Sources of Doctrine in the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 120.

[181] Philip Coppens. “The wooden book of Montségur.” Les Carnets Secrets, 10 (2008). Retrieved from https://www.eyeofthepsychic.com/woodenbook/

[182] Mike Bogard. In the Wake of the Astral Force ( Independently published, 2020).

[183] Massimo Introvigne. “Hoaxes and Misunderstandings on the Order of the Solar Temple - Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco and Dr. Heide Fittkau-Garthe.” CESNUR (January 1998). Retrieved from https://www.cesnur.org/testi/Grace.htm

[184] Ibid.

[185] André Van Bosbeke. Chevaliers d’aujourd'hui : A propos des sociétés occultes et des ordres de chevaliers au XXe siècle (Anvers, Berchem : Ed. EPO, 1988).

[186] Massimo Introvigne. “The Magic of Death.” In Catherine Wessinger (ed), Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases (Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 142.

[187] André Van Bosbeke. Chevaliers d’aujourd'hui : A propos des sociétés occultes et des ordres de chevaliers au XXe siècle (Anvers, Berchem : Ed. EPO, 1988).

[188] George D. Chryssides. “Sources of Doctrine in the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 124.

[189] Massimo Introvigne. “Ordeal by Fire: The Tragedy of the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 26.

[190] André Van Bosbeke. Chevaliers d’aujourd’hui : A propos des sociétés occultes et des ordres de chevaliers au XXe siècle (Anvers, Berchem : Ed. EPO, 1988).

[191] Massimo Introvigne. “Ordeal by Fire: The Tragedy of the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 27.

[192] Ibid.

[193] Andre Wautier. Dictionnaire des Gnostiques et des principaux inities (2004). Retrieved from http://www.livrespourtous.com/e-books/view/Dictionnaire-des-gnostiques-et-des-principaux-inities.html

[194] Marcel Roggemans. Geschiedenis Van de Occulte En Mystieke Broederschappen (Lulu.com, 2010), p. 238.

[195] Ibid.

[196] Jean-Paul Bourré. Les sectes Lucifériennes aujourd'hui (Belfond, 1978), p. 100.

[197] Ibid.

[198] Marcel Roggemans. Geschiedenis Van de Occulte En Mystieke Broederschappen (Lulu.com, 2010), p. 236.

[199] Ibid, p. 24.

[200] Ibid, p. 25.

[201] Introvigne. “Ordeal by Fire,” p. 25..

[202] Jim Keith. Mind-control, World Control (Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997), p. 193.

[203] “Neofascismo e Islam,” Online Gnosis: Rivista Italiana di Intelligence (n. 4/2005).

[204] Didier Daeninckx. “Du Temple Solaire au réseau Gladio, en passant par Politica Hermetica…” Enquêtes interdites n°13 (February 27, 2002).

[205] Cited in Marcel Roggemans. Geschiedenis Van de Occulte En Mystieke Broederschappen (Lulu.com, 2010), p. 236.

[206] “Peronnik,” Pourquoi la Résurgence de l'Ordre du Temple? Tome Premier: Le Corps (Monte-Carlo: Éditions de la Pensée solaire, 1975).

[207] George D. Chryssides. “Sources of Doctrine in the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 120.

[208] Israel Regardie. The Eye in the Triangle, (June, 1993).

[209] George D. Chryssides. An untitled paper presented at the CESNUR Conference held in Palermo, Sicily, 2005.

[210] George D. Chryssides. “Sources of Doctrine in the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 124.

[211] Ibid., p. 119.

[212] Harvey Spencer Lewis. Rosicrucian Manual (AMORC, 1938), pp. 139-140.

[213] Aleister Crowley. A. Liber ABA, book 4. part 3, appendix II.

[214] Picknett & Prince, Stargate Conspiracy (New York: Berkley, 1999), pp. 292-293.

[215] Introvigne. “Ordeal by Fire,” p. 25.

[216] “Appendix 1.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 178.

[217] “America’s Dog Star Days,” Rigorous Intuition, (June 14, 2005).

[218] David Carr-Brown & David Cohen. “Fall from Grace.” Sunday Times, News Review (December 21, 1997); cited in Picknett & Prince. The Stargate Conspiracy.

[219] Calum Brown. “Was Grace Kelly's Rover P6 Really Sabotaged?” Yahoo News (May 8, 2019). Retrieved from https://au.news.yahoo.com/grace-kelly-apos-rover-p6-221740186.html

[220] Gabe Mirkin. “Grace Kelly, death of a princess.” Villages-News (September 20, 2014). Retrieved from https://www.villages-news.com/2014/09/20/grace-kelly-death-princess/

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio