Grand Monarch

After World War II, many of the Non-Conformists, such Robert Aron and Alexandre Marc— protégées of Otto Abetz, SS officer and German ambassador to France around whom gathered a circle of collaborationist intellectuals—who founded Ordre Nouveau with de Rougemont, became activists of European federalist movements, participating in the European Movement, which contributed to the fulfilment of the synarchist dream, the creation of a European Union. Indeed, several of the same Europeans who had helped launch the EM were also present at the creation of Bilderberg, including that “eminence grise of Europe,” Joseph Retinger (1888 – 1960).[1] With the support of former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Retinger originated the idea for the founding of the infamous Bilderberg Group, who every year gather to discuss the world’s fate, in utter secrecy. A preparatory meeting was held on September 25, 1952, at Baron François de Nervo’s mansion in Paris, in the presence of Retinger, Van Zeeland, Prince Bernhard, Antoine Pinay and Guy Mollet and several foreign personalities.[2] When the original promoters of the Mouvement synarchique d’empire (MSE), the conspiracy behind the Vichy Regime, were named, they numbered seven, three of whom were identified as Baron François de Nervo, Maxime Renaudin, and Jean Coutrot.[3] Baron de Nervo (1912 – 1977) was a friend of Antoine Pinay (1891 – 1994), would go on to found Le Cercle, which would become the umbrella organization of the Fascist International.

And it was through a synarchist organization known as the Pan-European Union (PEU) that Nietzsche, Mazzini and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s vision of a European Union achieved serious political force. The first practical attempt to establish European unity was the failed conquests of Napoleon, who achieved special veneration among the underground secret societies. Thus, Hegel regarded Napoleon as embodying the “world-soul,” meaning, that in him was fulfilled the process of history. Speaking of Napoleon, Hegel said, “It is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such an individual who, here concentrated into a single point, reaches out over the world and dominates it.”[4]

Nietzsche cited Napoleon frequently as an example of the Superman, being included in his lists of “the more profound and comprehensive men of this century.”[5] In the unification of Europe, Nietzsche saw the means to overcome the nation-state system and democracy. The Europe of the nation-states, according to Nietzsche, inherited democratic ideals from the false egalitarianism and slave-morality of Christianity. “Moraline,” a term which he uses to mock all traditional morality, must make way for the “dominance of the winner.” Nietzsche reckoned that the democratic movement in Europe will first lead to the creation of a human type prepared for the new slavery, and then a “strong man,” the Superman, a “tyrant.” In Nietzsche’s mind, the closest to his idea of a Superman was Giuseppe Mazzini, whom he referred to as “the man I venerate most,” and with whom he shared a dream of European unification.[6]

The term “United States of Europe” was used by Saint-Yves’ friend Victor Hugo, during a speech at the International Peace Congress held in Paris in 1849, to which he had been invited by Giuseppe Mazzini.[7] Hugo proclaimed: “A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood… A day will come when we shall see ... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas.”[8] In 1867, Giuseppe Garibaldi and John Stuart Mill joined Hugo at a congress of the League for Peace and Freedom in Geneva. There, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin stated: “That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples who make up the European family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of Europe.”[9]

After the World War I, there appeared a large number of movements dedicated to the economic and political union of European. One example was the fascist-leaning Verband für kulturelle Zusammenarbeit founded in Vienna in 1921 which cooperated closely with its sister organization, the Fédération des Unions intellectuelles, with which it later united as the Association for Cultural Cooperation (“Kulturbund”).[10] The Kulturbund, which was the Austrian counterpart of the Herrenclub of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, was founded by Prince Karl Anton von Rohan. However, among the cultural, economic, and political organizations, the Pan-European Union (PEU), co-founded in 1923 by Otto von Habsburg (1912 – 2011) and Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894 – 1972)—Austrian politician and philosopher, pioneer of European integration—had the greatest significance and influence.

ALCHEMICAL WEDDING: Elizabeth Stuart (d. of King James of England) + Frederick IV of the Palatinate (nephew of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange)

• Charles Louis, (1617 – 1680)

  • Charles II (1651 – 1685) + Princess Wilhelmine Ernestine of Denmark

  • Elizabeth Charlotte, Madame Palatine + Louis Philippe, Duke d'Orleans

    • Élisabeth Charlotte d’Orléans + Leopold, Duke of Lorraine (1679 – 1729)

      • Leopold, Duke of Lorraine (Grand Master of the Priory of Sion) + Archduchess Maria Anna of Austria

      • Francis I (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece) + Empress Maria-Theresa (supported Jacob Frank)

        • Joseph II (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Had affair with Eva, daughter of Jacob Frank)

        • Archduke Maximilian Francis of Austria (Grand Master of the Priory of Sion)

        • Marie Antoinette + Louis XVI of France

        • Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece) + Maria Luisa of Spain

          • Francis II (last) Holy Roman Emperor (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece) + Princess Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily

            • Ferdinand I of Austria (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece) + Maria Anna of Savoy

            • Archduke Franz Karl of Austria + Princess Sophie of Bavaria

              • Franz Joseph I of Austria (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece)

              • Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria + Princess Maria Annunciata of Bourbon-Two Sicilies

                • Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria + Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg

                  • Archduke Otto Franz of Austria + Princess Maria Josepha of Saxony

                    • Charles I of Austria (last monarch of the Austo-Hungarian Empire, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece) + Zita of Bourbon-Parma

                      • OTTO VON HABSBURG (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, co-founder of the PAN-EUROPEAN UNION)

    • Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1674 – 1723, friend of Chevalier Michael Ramsay) + Françoise Marie de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Blois (d. of Louis XIV + Madame de Montespan (1640 – 1707), close to Philippe I, and accused of Black Mass)

      • Louis, Duke of Orléans (1703–1752)

        • Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (1725 – 1785)

          • Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1747 – 1793), aka Philippe Égalité, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France

• Sophia of Hannover + Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover (1629 – 1698)

  • Sophia Charlotte (1668–1705) + Frederick I of Prussia (1657 – 1713)

    • Frederick William I of Prussia (1720 – 1785) + Sophia Dorothea of Hanover

  • George I of England (1660 – 1727)

    • Sophia Dorothea of Hanover + Frederick William I of Prussia (s. of Sophia Charlotte + Frederick I of Prussia)

      • Frederick the Great (1712 – 1786)

      • Prince Augustus William of Prussia (1722 – 1758)

        • Frederick William II of Prussia (1744 – 1797, member of Gold and Rosy Cross)

      • Louisa Ulrika of Prussia + Louisa Ulrika of Prussia (1710 – 1771)

        • Charles XIII (1748 – 1818, Grand Master of the Swedish Order of Freemasons) + Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte of Holstein-Gottorp (Hesse-Kassel)

        • Gustav III (1746 – 1792, patron of Swedenborg and Grand Master of Swedish Rite of Freemasonry) + Sophia Magdalena of Denmark

    • George II of England (1683 – 1760)

      • Princess Louise of Great Britain (1724 – 1751 + King Frederick V of Denmark (1723 – 1766)

        • Sophia Magdalena of Denmark + Gustav III (1746 – 1792)

        • Christian VII of Denmark (1749 – 1808) + Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (d. of Frederick, Prince of Wales, by Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha)

          • Frederick VI of Denmark (1768 – 1839)

        • Princess Louise of Denmark (1750–1831)

      • Princess Mary of Great Britain (1723 – 1772) + Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (direct descendants of Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, from the circle of the first Rosicrucians, a friend of Frederick V)

        • William I, Elector of Hesse (1743 – 1821)
          (hired Mayer Amschel Rothschild who founded Rothschild dynasty)

        • Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (Member of Illuminati and Asiatic Brethren, friend of Comte St. Germain)

      • Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707 – 1751)

        • King George III (1738 – 1820) + Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

In 1990, Pierre Plantard—who formulated the Priory of Sion hoax, whose purpose is to install Nostradamus’ Grand Monarch—revised his assertions, claiming he was only descended from a cadet branch of the line of the Merovingian king Dagobert II, while arguing that the direct descendant was really Otto von Habsburg, the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary, and claimant to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.[11] Otto’s father was Charles I of Austria, the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the nephew to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 precipitated World War I. Otto, also known by his royal name as Archduke Otto of Austria, was the last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary from 1916 until the dissolution of the empire in 1918. He subsequently became the pretender to the former thrones, Head of the Imperial House of Habsburg, a member of the Knights of Malta, and Sovereign of the Order of the Golden Fleece. The full list of Otto von Habsburg’s titles included:

By the Grace of God Emperor of Austria; Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia and Lodomeria; King of Jerusalem etc.; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Lorraine, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Bukowina; Grand Prince of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Silesia, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Guastalla, Auschwitz and Zator, Teschen, Friuli, Dubrovnik and Zadar; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trent and Brixen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and Istria; Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenburg etc.; Lord of Trieste, Kotor and the Windic March, Grand Voivod of the Voivodeship of Serbia etc.

Otto von Habsburg, his nephew Prince Vincenz of Liechtenstein (1950 – 2008), and his son Archduke Karl von Habsburg (b. 1961), were significantly involved in 2008 in the reorganization of the Ancient Order of St. George, a dynastic order of chivalry of the House of Habsburg. The origins of today’s Order of St. George, a European order of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, date back to 1308. Emperor Henry VII donated the Order of the Old Nobility (or later Order of the Four Roman Emperors), which can be regarded as the predecessor of today’s order. A hundred years later, Henry VII’s descendant Sigismund of Luxembourg, then King of Hungary, established the Order of the Dragon. The Order of St. George also has traditional roots in the Austrian Order of St. George, which was founded by Emperor Frederick III of Habsburg and Pope Paul II in Rome in 1469. Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, was a particular patron of the order. It is believed that the Order of St. George by founded by Frederick III was connected to another previous order, the Austrian Dragon Society founded in 1409 in Ödenburg, which in turn was directly connected to the Order of the Dragon. When in 1769, Count Philipp Ferdinand (1734 – 1794) re-established the community as a dynastic order of the House of Limburg-Stirum, he also wished to honour the four emperors from the Luxembourg dynasty, namely Henry VII, Charles IV, Wenceslas and Sigismund.

Aside from its Sovereignty, which is reserved for the Head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, knighthood in the Order of the Golden Fleece is not hereditary. The Grand Master does not divulge how he makes his nominations.[12] Only about thirteen of the knights are Habsburgs. Non-hereditary Golden Fleece backgrounds include Duke of Braganza; Prince Kubrat of Bulgaria. Recent knights of the Golden Fleece include the current Sovereign, Otto’s son Karl von Habsburg; King Albert II of the Belgians, Prince Lorenz of Belgium; Archduke Andreas Salvator; Duke Georg von Hohenberg; Prince Albrecht von Hohenberg, grandson of assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Jean and Henri, Grand Dukes of Luxembourg; Archduke Joseph Árpád of Austria; Hans-Adam II, the reigning prince of Liechtenstein; and Prince Hugo zu Windisch-Graetz, the ambassador of the Knights of Malta to Slovenia. In 1987, Pope John Paul II appointed Windisch-Graetz a Gentleman of His Holiness, a role which entails meeting visiting heads of state and ambassadors and escorting them to meet the pope. Albert II was the son of Leopold III, Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, originally founded by René of Anjou, purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion.[13]

According to Glen Covert, in “The Habsburg Most Illustrious Order of the Golden Fleece: Its potential relevance on modern culture in the European Union,” a number of Habsburgs and Spanish Knights of the Golden Fleece are Members of the European Council, a collegiate body that defines the overall political directions and priorities of the European Union, have the position to affect EU cultural policy. Placing the European Union within the context of the Statutes of the Order, Windisch-Graetz explained: “The Order’s inspirations couldn’t be more appropriate in the time we are living. For example, Europe is trying to achieve something that the Order mostly succeeded [in doing] 600 years ago. Unfortunately, up to now, the European Union hasn’t [yet succeeded].”[14] What Windisch-Graetz was referring to was the dynastic alliances of the Habsburgs’ Holy Roman Empire with Spain and Portugal, which produced Emperor Charles V, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, who ruled over “the empire on which the Sun never sets.”

Pan-European Union

The cause of the PEU was initially supported by Tomáš Masaryk, who had been involved in Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement.[15] In December 1921, Coudenhove-Kalergi joined the Masonic lodge Humanitas in Vienna, whose membership supported his movement.[16] In mid-1925, the master of the Viennese lodge, Richard Schlesinger, sent a circular to the masters of the great lodges of the world asking them to support Coudenhove-Kalergi’s political projects.[17] The Masonic newspaper The Beacon stated in March, 1925:

Freemasonry, especially Austrian Freemasonry, may be eminently satisfied to have Coudenhove-Kalergi among its members. Austrian Freemasonry can rightly report that Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi fights for his Pan European beliefs: political honesty, social insight, the struggle against lies, striving for the recognition and cooperation of all those of good will. In this higher sense, Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi’s program is a Masonic work of the highest order, and to be able to work on it together is a lofty task for all brother Masons.[18]

In their 1968 Synarchy and Power, André Ulmann and Henri Azeau interviewed one of the members of Jean Coutrot’s Mouvement Synarchique d’Empire (MSE), who claimed it had inspired the action of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi and his pan-Europeanism.[19] Coudenhove-Kalergi was also involved a group called Les Veilleurs (“the Watchers”), founded by a French occultist René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz, and which also included MSE founder Postel du Mas.[20]  In conversation with Maurice Girodias, the founder of the Olympia Press, Postel du Mas named Coudenhove-Kalergi as one of the two major promoters of his and Canudo’s plans. Girodias said of Postel du Mas and Canudo’s magical salons: “I saw at his feet men of science, company directors, and bankers.”[21] Girodias was told they were “schismatic theosophists with political designs, and they are linked to Count Coudenhove-Kalergi… who is a champion of the United States of Europe… Their aim is to launch a pan-European political party and to institute in the entire world, commencing with Europe, a society obedient to a spiritualist idea.”[22]

Postel du Mas and Canudo both pursued the aims of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre for France and a united Europe. Canudo began in 1933 by founding the journal Terre d’Europe (“Land of Europe”), subtitled the Review of the Builders of the United Europe, and setting up the European Team to produce the journal and to create a network of other pro-European organizations. A leading investigator of synarchism, Raoul Hussan, related that, “the majority were found, after July 1940, either in the corridors of power in Vichy, or in the collaborationist circles of Paris.”[23] In 1934, Canudo also founded what later expanded into the Estates General of European Youth, to mobilize European youth in support of a United States of Europe, made possible largely through Coudenhove-Kalergi’s backing.[24]

A publication covering the PEU congress of 1926 featured a portrait of Krishnamurthi, alongside a photograph of the pantheon who inspired its founding, including Kant, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Napoleon, Dante, and others.[25] At its founding convention in Vienna in 1922, the PEU called for the creation of a single European state, modeled on the Roman and Napoleonic empires. At the opening of the first PEU Congress in 1924, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s wife, the Jewish actress Ida Roland, recited Victor Hugo’s speech on European unification “in the service of propaganda for the Paneuropean idea.” The PEU congresses were decorated by large portraits of great Europeans: Kant, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Napoleon, Dante, and others.[26] Coudenhove-Kalergi believed that “Nietzsche’s Will to Power is where the foundational thoughts of fascist and Paneuropean politics stand side by side.”[27] Nietzsche’s Will to Power manuscripts were part of a reading list Coudenhove-Kalergi set for future Pan-Europeans, which also included Napoleon’s Political Testament,[28] as well as about a dozen or so other works by Dante, Comenius, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini.[29] Drawing on Mazzini’s Europe: Its Conditions and Prospects, Coudenhove-Kalergi picked up on the traditions of the Young Europe movement, which bridged nationalism and cosmopolitanism.[30]

Coudenhove-Kalergi’s father was also a close friend of Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism. Coudenhove-Kalergi writes in his Memoirs:

At the beginning of 1924, we received a call from Baron Louis de Rothschild; one of his friends, Max Warburg from Hamburg, had read my book and wanted to get to know us. To my great surprise, Warburg spontaneously offered us 60,000 gold marks, to tide the movement over for its first three years… Max Warburg, who was one of the most distinguished and wisest men that I have ever come into contact with, had a principle of financing these movements. He remained sincerely interested in Pan-Europe for his entire life. Max Warburg arranged his 1925 trip to the United States to introduce me to Paul Warburg and financier Bernard Baruch.[31]

After the Anschluß of Austria to Nazi Germany in March 1938, Baron Louis de Rothschild was arrested and taken into custody by the Nazis because he was a distinguished member of the Jewish oligarchy. While in prison, he was visited by Heinrich Himmler. Louis apparently impressed the SS leader, who subsequently ordered that Louis’s prison conditions be improved.[32] Louis was released only after lengthy negotiations between the family and the Nazis and upon payment of $21,000,000, believed to have been the largest ransom payment in history for any individual.[33]

Personalities attending included: Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Konrad Adenauer and Georges Pompidou.[34] In 1927, Aristide Briand, who served eleven terms as Prime Minister of France during the French Third Republic, was elected honorary president. The first person to join the PEU was Hjalmar Schacht. Carl Haushofer was a guest lecturer at PEU events. When they met in Vienna, Haushofer suggested to Coudenhove-Kalergi that if they had met sooner, Hess would have been a supporter of Pan Europe instead of National Socialism. Coudenhove-Kalergi described Haushofer as, “A man of rare knowledge and culture.”[35] Coudenhove-Kalergi also collaborated with such politicians as Engelbert Dollfuss, Kurt Schuschnigg, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. Coudenhove-Kalergi strove to replace the nationalist German ideal of racial community with the goal of an ethnically heterogeneous and inclusive European nation based on a communality of culture, a nation whose geniuses were, in Nietzschean terms, the “great Europeans,” such as Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Kant, Napoleon, Giuseppe Mazzini, Victor Hugo, and Nietzsche himself.[36] In addition to Nietzsche, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s intellectual influences included Oswald Spengler. In politics, he was an enthusiastic supporter of “fourteen points” made by Woodrow Wilson.

The foreword to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s 1926 book Pan-Europa was written by the American synarchist Nicholas Murray Butler, Director of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CFIT), President of the Pilgrims Society, who was associated with Sergei Chakhotin of Jean Coutrot and Aldous Huxley’s CSHP.[37] Like Coudenhove-Kalergi, Butler was a longtime admirer of Benito Mussolini. Coudenhove-Kalergi also sought out the support of fascists such as Benito Mussolini in Italy and Kurt Schuschnigg and Engelbert Dollfuß in Austria. Coudenhove-Kalergi reported proudly that in 1923 he wrote an open letter to Mussolini, pleading with him to “save Europe” by encouraging the reconciliation of Germany and France as the first step towards a European Federation.[38] Coudenhove-Kalergi turned to Mussolini, believing he saw in him a new Mazzini who could make the cause of a political Europe triumph. Following Mussolini’s March on Rome, he wrote:

It is with great interest that I follow events in Italy, because I see in fascism the first political realization of the impulses given by Nietzsche: Mussolini, a disciple of D’Annunzio, himself a Nietzschean discipline, draws the spiritual forces of his movement from Nietzschean ethics. If the success of the movement was so surprising, it was because it brought a completely new factor into European politics, and no one suspected its origin.[39]

In Crusade for Pan-Europe: Autobiography of a Man and a Movement, Coudenhove-Kalergi suggested that Hitler might have realized Pan-Europe at the time of the fall of France if he had been more “statesmanlike.” “Immediately after the Armistice,” he writes, “Hitler would have concluded a generous and definite peace with the fascist government of France, a peace without any territorial concessions, based on a military, political, and economic alliance. He would then have established a supreme council for Europe, composed of himself, Mussolini, Pétain, and Franco, with himself as its chairman. This European council, based on legal equality, but on a de facto hegemony of Germany, would have achieved the economic union of Europe and assured throughout the entire continent social reforms by authoritarian means. Based on such a federation, he might have done his best to ensure good relations with Russia and with America, until Britain would finally have accepted some compromise with the united Continent.”[40]

Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)

C.D. Jackson and Georgetown Set member and OSS veteran Tom Braden collaborated on coordinating the efforts of the CIA’s front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which according to Frances Stoner Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, was a plot to contain the influence of the Soviet Union through the recruitment of intellectuals from the “Non-Communist Left.”[41] For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin show trial marked their final break with communism and even turned the first three into passionate anti-Communists eventually.[42] As communist or left-leaning intellectuals who were nevertheless opposed to the Stalinism of the Soviet Union, they could be used to steer the political debate away from support for the Soviets.

The chief agent in the CIA strategy was Koestler. A paragraph from Anne Applebaum’s review of Koestler’s biography is worth quoting in full, to understand the breadth of Koestler’s connections:

[Koestler] began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Travelling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists [and fellow-travellers] of the era, including Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but he did not die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940 Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s he helped to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Melvin Lasky and Sidney Hook.[43]

As reported by Saunders, in 1948, aboard ship crossing to America on his way to a lecture tour, Arthur Koestler met with John Foster and Allen Dulles and discussed how best to counter the Soviet propaganda.[44] Once in America, Koestler then met with Bill Donovan, one of the chief architects of the CIA, to discuss the same. Koestler established a working relationship with the CIA, and together they targeted what the State Department called the “Non-Communist Left.” In Europe they would target the Democratic Socialist movement, while in the US their focus of attack included many of the supporters of President Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In August 1949, Arthur Koestler, Ruth Fischer, Franz Borkenau and Melvin Lasky met in Frankfurt to develop a plan to persuade the CIA to fund a left-wing but anti-communist organization. The plan was then passed onto Michael Josselson, who worked for the Intelligence Section of the Psychological Warfare Division during World War II. Wisner accepted the proposal in April and put Josselson in charge. Lasky had received Marshall Plan funding to create the German-language journal Der Monat, which was airlifted into Berlin during the 1948 Soviet blockade. Its purpose was to support US foreign policy and win over German intellectuals’ views that were socially progressive but anti-communist.[45] Der Monat continued as a prestigious journal, incorporating essays and articles from many Western European and North American intellectuals as well as dissidents from the Eastern Bloc. Contributors included Frankfurt Schooler Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, Arthur Koestler, T.S. Eliot and Saul Bellow. The journal also received funding from the Ford Foundation and the CIA.[46]

Funding for the CCF was provided by Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, both of which, explained Stonor Saunders, “were conscious instruments of covert US foreign policy, with directors and officers who were closely connected to, or even themselves, members of American intelligence.”[47] John Foster Dulles was a president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and his brother Allen was a close friend to David Rockefeller, whose grandfather John D. Rockefeller along with David’s father John D. Rockefeller, Jr. founded the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. As Stonor Saunders noted, “At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects.”[48] Richard Bissell, a Marshall Planner and Georgetown Set member, became president in 1952, and met often with Dulles and other CIA officials. Bissell became a special assistant to Allen Dulles in 1954. Under Bissell, the Ford Foundation was the “vanguard of Cold War thinking.” John McCloy, who had been a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1946-1949, also became president of the Ford Foundation, and created an administrative unit within it specifically to deal with the CIA. By that time, McCloy had already been Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank and High Commissioner of Germany. At the time, McCloy was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), to be succeeded by David Rockefeller, who had worked closely with him at the Chase Bank.

Believing that postwar Europe was favorable toward left-wing views, though the establishment of Western Allies were conservative, it was determined that American supremacy would be best served by supporting the Democratic left. Thus, the program was begun to support more moderate and especially anti-Stalinist leftists, in an effort to offset Soviet influence. Arthur Schlesinger later recalled that the Non-Communist Left was supported by leading establishment figures such as Georgetown Set members, Chip Bohlen, Isaiah Berlin, Averell Harriman and George Kennan: “We all felt that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism. This became an undercurrent - or even undercover - theme of American foreign policy during the period.”[49]

Stonor Saunders revealed a broad list of intellectuals also on the CIA payroll, including Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, John Dewey, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel and Diana Trilling, Julian Huxley, Arthur Koestler, Robert Lowell, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Melvin J. Lasky, Tennessee Williams and Sidney Hook. The British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of Darkness at Noon, Koestler’s anti-Communist classic.[50] The president of the CCF’s Executive Committee was Swiss national Denis de Rougemont, a leader of the College of Sociology co-founded by George Bataille.

In 1933, along with Sidney Hook, CCF member James Burnham had helped to organize the American Workers Party. During this period, Burnham had become a friend to Leon Trotsky. Burnham had extensive contacts in Europe and as a former Trotskyite was an authority on Communist parties and front organizations. Burnham allied with the Trotskyist wing of that party who were expelled, an action which led to the formation of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the end of the year. Inside the SWP, Burnham came to contend that the USSR was a new form of imperialistic class society and was thus not worthy of even critical support from the socialist movement. During World War II, Burnham had worked for the OSS, and eventually turned to the right and came to be regarded as a public intellectual of the American conservative movement.

Burnham was referred to as a “very articulate expounder of the dirty tricks department.”[51] Under recommendation from George F. Kennan, Burnham was invited to lead the “Political and Psychological Warfare” division of the OPC. Burnham was later appointed to the steering committee of the CCF, and was a vital connection to Wisner. When Wisner decided the plan for Operation Ajax was too crude and needed “a touch of Machiavelli,” he turned to James Burnham to give a history lesson. In his 1943 book The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom, which became a manual for CIA strategists, he used, in addition to Machiavelli, the ideas of the founders of fascist terrorism like Mosca, Pereto, Michels and Sorel to “challenge egalitarian political theory and to show the persistence and inevitability of elite rule, even in an age of equality.”[52]

Braden, who was placed in charge of the CCF, was the head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), a division of the CIA set up in 1950 to promote anti-communism by manipulating international psychological warfare operations.[53] Braden oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student Association, Communications Workers of America, the American Newspaper Guild, the United Auto Workers, National Council of Churches, the African-American Institute and the National Education Association.

Braden also supported the work of Jay Lovestone, who had served as leader of the Communist Party USA and then as foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO. According to CIA agent and later Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, “the Communist Party of the United States, in fact, at the moment, was practically a branch of the Justice Department.”[54] Lovestone was feeding information about Communist labor-union activities to James Jesus Angleton in order to undermine Communist influence in the international union movement and provide intelligence to the US government.[55] Lovestone was also boss to CIA agent Irving Brown at the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Brown was described as a “one-man OSS.”[56] In 1948, George Kennan had considered him to head the OPC, before he gave the job to Frank Wisner. Wisner then placed Brown on the steering committee of the CCF. As European Representative of the AFL, Brown was the conduit to transfer vast sums of government money and Marshall Plan funds into covert operations, using the cover that the money came from labor unions.

The chief activities of the CCF also involved festivals featuring American entertainers, as well as the promotion of the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock, in order to confront Soviet influence by countering prevailing impressions about the quality of American culture. In April of 1952, CCF held a month-long festival in Paris entitled Masterpieces of the 20th Century. To convince the world of the superiority of America’s culture to that of the Soviets, the CIA sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals and European tours of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The CIA also sponsored tours of African-American opera star Leontyne Price, who referred to herself as the Wisners’ “chocolate sister.”[57]

In early 1951, Wisner travelled to London to meet with his counterparts in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Over a series of meetings it was decided to create a flagship intellectual journal for CCF, which became known as Encounter, the London-based literary magazine. Encounter was founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and journalist Irving Kristol, the godfather of the neoconservatives. At College, Kristol was a friend and classmate of Melvin Lasky and known as a “Lovestonite.”[58] Encounter was located in the office of the British Society for Cultural Freedom (BSCF), whose founding members included T.S. Eliot, Isaiah Berlin, Lord David Cecil, and Richard Crossman, the Secretary General of the British Labour Party.

The treasurer of the BSCF was Frederic Warburg, whose publishing company Secker & Warburg published Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and works by other leading figures such as Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. One of the heads of Secker & Warburg was Roger Senhouse, who had a sado-masochistic homosexual relationship Lytton Strachey of the Bloomsbury Group, which featured a mock crucifixion.[59] Secker & Warburg served as a conduit for funding to Encounter from the Information Research Department (IRD), a department of the British Foreign Office, which was overseen by MI6. IRD, known informally as “the dirty tricks department,” was set up to counter Soviet propaganda and infiltration, particularly amongst the western labor movement.[60] One of the IRD’s most important early advisors was Arthur Koestler.[61] Working for the IRD was Lord Bertrand Russell, one of five honorary chairmen of the CCF. IRD subsidized the publication of three books by Bertrand Russell: Why Communism Must Fail, What Is Freedom? and What Is Democracy?. Animal Farm was a core project of the IRD. It broadcast the novel on Voice of America, produced an animated version that it distributed in multiple languages, and sponsored translated editions of the work around the world. Orwell himself helped the IRD strategize circulation.[62]

The CIA obtained the film rights to Animal Farm from Orwell’s widow, Sonia, after his death and covertly funded the production to the animated version of the book. The head of the CIA operation to obtain the film rights was none other than E. Howard Hunt, later famous as Nixon’s Watergate burglar. A large portion of the budget was supplied by the Office of Policy Coordination through one of its shell corporations, Touchstone Inc. Some sources assert that the ending of the story was altered by the CIA, where only the pigs remain, instead of joining forces with the humans, to emphasize an anti-communist message.[63]

Warburg collaborated with Malcolm Muggeridge, a member of the CCF steering committee, and a liaison to British MI6. CIA case officers referred to the two of them as “The Cousins.”[64] As funding conduits to CCF, Muggeridge made use of Sir Alexander Korda, the film director, and Lord Victor Rothschild, who channeled funds to Encounter.[65] Victor Rothschild was a member of the prominent Rothschild family, and was a senior executive with Royal Dutch Shell and N.M. Rothschild & Sons. He joined the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society, which at that time was predominantly Marxist. He became friends with Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby, members of the Cambridge Spy Ring. Rothschild was recruited to work for MI5 during World War II.

On May 20, 1967, Braden wrote an article that was published in the Saturday Evening Post entitled, “I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral,” where boasted that for more than ten years the CIA had subsidized progressive magazines such as the London-based Encounter literary magazine through the CCF. At the outset, Encounter ran articles by Julian Huxley, Mircea Eliade, Andre Malraux and Guido Piovene. Melvin Lasky succeeded Kristol in 1958 and helped turn the young magazine into one of the most highly regarded periodicals in Europe. Lasky argued that magazines like Der Monat and Encounter must express some dissent against the American government or risk being perceived as propaganda.[66]

European Movement

The CIA used the CCF to support the cause for the creation of a united Europe. The principal group advocating for a united Europe in partnership with the United States was the European Movement, an umbrella organization focusing their efforts upon the Council of Europe, and counting the “founding fathers” of the European Union, Winston Churchill, Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak, Konrad Adenauer, Leon Blum and Italian president Alcide de Gasperi, as its five Presidents of Honour. The cultural arm of the European Movement was the Centre européen de la culture, whose director was the CCF’s Denis de Rougemont.[67] De Rougemont and Alexandre Marc had both members of the Sohlbeg Circle headed by SS member Otto Abetz, later German Ambassador to Vichy France, and a key proponent of the “European Idea.” Jean Luchaire, a co-founder of the Sohlbeg Circle, attended Coudenhove-Kalergi’s first Pan-European Congress.[68] Abetz’ key disciples were Alfred Fabre-Luce and Bertand de Jouveval, who both subscribed to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of a United Europe. Coudenhove-Kalergi even asked Fabre-Luce to head his movement’s French section, an offer he declined while assuring Coudenhove of his complete agreement on the need for propaganda for the European idea.[69]

Alexandre Marc was the founder with Robert Aron of the Non-Conformist Ordre Nouveau and its journal, whose contributors included de Rougemont and Jean Coutrot, the author of the Synarchist Pact. After World War II, many of the Non-Conformists became activists of European federalist movements. Marc, in particular, is recognized by some scholars as one of the most renowned founding fathers of European Federalism.[70] Marc became in 1946 the first secretary of the Union of European Federalists (UEF). Marc was also a long-time associate of Altiero Spinelli (1907 – 1986), an Italian communist politician, referred to as one of the founding fathers of the European Union.

Marc and Spinelli took part in The Hague Congress or the Congress of Europe, which considered by many as the first federal moment in European history. It was held in The Hague in 1948, with 750 delegates participating from around Europe as well as observers from Canada and the United States of America. Important political figures involved included Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, Pierre-Henri Teitgen, François Mitterrand, three former French prime ministers, Paul Reynaud, Édouard Daladier, Paul Ramadier, Paul van Zeeland, and Albert Coppé.

The congress was organized by Knight of Malta, Jozef Retinger. From an early age, Retinger, who was born in Poland to a Catholic family, was intended for the priesthood, and due to the influence of Cardinal Rampolla—who Aleister Crowley’s OTO claim as one of their own—was admitted to the Academie dei nobili ecclesistici.[71] Known as the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, it is dedicated to training priests to serve in the diplomatic corps and the Secretariat of State of the Holy See, which had also been attended by Rampolla. Many leaders of the church have been alumni of the academy, including Popes Clement XIII, Leo XII, Leo XIII, Benedict XV, and Paul VI.[72]

Retinger described his family as “ardent patriots and very ardent Catholics,” with “a very strong anti-Russian and anti-German complex… maybe reactionary… and not without an anti-Jewish bias.”[73] According to his grandson, rumors of Retinger’s Jewish origins were merely anti-Semitic fabrications. However, Retinger’s biographer Bogdan Podgorski uncovered documents proving that Resigner’s great-grandfather was Jewish, but converted to Catholicism in 1827—a pattern that fits a Sabbatean ancestry.[74] In Retinger’s papers, a French-language notation describes him as being from “a good Jewish bourgeoisie family, Polish by facade.” His own bodyguard referred to Retinger’s father as a convert to Roman Catholicism from Judaism.[75]

Retinger’s father, Jozef Stanislaw Retinger, was the personal legal counsel and advisor to Count Wladyslaw Zamoyski. Retinger called the Zamoyski family as his “link to the legitimate tradition of European aristocracy from the era of Napoleon III… the living example of the famous encyclical of Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum.”[76] Leo XIII, who’s secretary of state was Cardinal Rampolla, had requested the publication of Mazzini’s Alta Vendita, detailing a Masonic plot to infiltrate the Catholic Church and ultimately install a Masonic pope.[77] When Retinger’s father died, Count Zamoyski took Jozef into his household. In the years before World War I, Retinger established contacts with an extensive network of influential aristocrats and intellectuals. In the world of arts, he became acquainted with Andre Gide, among many others. Financed by Count Zamoyski, Retinger studied economics in London and became acquainted with Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, who recruited him into MI6.[78]

After the World War II, Retinger explained his concern for European unification in a meeting at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, commonly known as Chatham House: “The end of the period during which the white man spread his activities over the whole globe saw the Continent itself undergoing a process of internal disruption.” After two World Wars, “there are no big powers left in continental Europe, [whose] inhabitants after all, represents the most valuable human element in the world.” While Europeans had rejected Hitler’s fascism as well as communism, Retinger explained, a permanent solution to Europe’s weakness was to move towards a federation of European countries, in which the participating countries would “relinquish part of their sovereignty.”[79]

Guided by Winston Churchill, Averell Harriman and Paul-Henri Spaak, the European Movement was supervised and almost entirely funded by the CIA through a front called the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), whose executive director was Tom Braden. ACUE’s funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, both of which served as conduits for CIA covert activities, as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.”[80] ACUE’s Chairman was Bill Donavan, and Allen Dulles its vice-chairman. A board member was Walter Bedell Smith, then head of the CIA.[81]

The structure of the ACUE was outlined in early summer of 1948 by Donovan and Allen Welsh Dulles in response to assistance requests by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi and Churchill. Coudenhove-Kalergi was exiled to the United States since 1943, and in 1947 he was successfully lobbying US Senators J.W Fulbright and E.D. Thomas for congressional support and succeeded in having motions passed in favor of a “United States of Europe” in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. Allen Dulles and Bill Donovan, who had joined Coudenhove-Kalergi’s campaign for American support, now came together to create the short-lived Committee for a Free and United Europe designed to publicize European unity in the United States, and to offer support to federalist groups in Europe. This was formally founded on 19 April 1948 with Senator Fulbright as its chairman and William Bullitt, former ambassador to France, as its vice-chairman.[82]

During the war, Coudenhove-Kalergi had continued his call for the unification of Europe along the Paris-London axis, activities that served as the real-life basis for fictional Resistance hero Victor Laszlo in the movie Casablanca. His appeal for the unification of Europe enjoyed support from Allen Dulles, “Wild Bill” Donovan, former head of the OSS, and Winston Churchill, who began promoting European unity from 1930 and presided over the Congress of Europe. Churchill wrote a foreword to the Count’s book, An Idea Conquers the World. In 1947, Coudenhove-Kalergi had set up the European Parliamentary Union (EPU), which played a prominent role in the Congress of Europe at The Hague. The EPU later merged with the European Movement and Coudenhove-Kalergi was elected its honorary president in 1952.

Billderberg Group

One of Retinger’s key German partners in his efforts to set up the CIA-funded European Movement and the Bilderberg group was Hermann Abs, a leading figure in pursuing the preservation of Nazi power after the war, who had been a been a comrade of Walter Benjamin before joining the Nazis. The most powerful commercial banker of the Third Reich, Abs had joined the board of Deutsche Bank during the rise of the Nazis and also sat on the supervisory board of IG Farben. It was Abs who was put in charge of allocating Marshall Aid to German industry and by 1948 was effectively managing Germany’s economic recovery. When Konrad Adenauer took power in 1949, Abs was his most important financial adviser. Adenauer was considered one of the three “founding fathers of the European Union,” along with Robert Schuman and Henri Spaak. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reporting from declassified American government documents, “The leaders of the European Movement—Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian Prime Minister Henri Spaak—were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation.”[83]

In 1952-53, a year before the founding of Bilderberg, Pinay founded Le Cercle with Konrad Adenauer Franz Josef Strauss, under the name Cercle Pinay. In 1940, Pinay had voted to give the Marshall Pétain’s regime full authority to draw up a new constitution, effectively ending the French Third Republic and establishing Vichy France. In 1941, Pinay was appointed to the Conseil National of the Vichy Regime, and also awarded the Order of the Francisque, an order and medal which was awarded by the Vichy Regime. However, Pinay later resigned from the Conseil National and refused any official position with the Vichy regime, and an official commission in 1946 recognized his opposition to the Nazis and help to the Résistance and absolved him of blame. Pinay and Adenauer, the first chairmen, appointed former Cagoule member and SDECE and BND agent Jean Violet, who founded Le Cercle.[84] Violet was arrested after World War II for having collaborated with the Nazis, but was released “on orders from above.”[85] He helped create a conservative party, the National Center of Independents and Peasants (CNIP). He acquired the reputation as one of France’s more spirited politicians and in 1952 became prime minister by virtue of being the most popular elected CNIP official. Serving as Violet’s patron was Otto von Habsburg.[86]

Also included in Le Cercle were the founding fathers of the European Union: Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. Robert Shumann, a supernumerary member of Opus Dei.[87] 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.[88] Baudoin, a major figure in Opus Dei, was identified as one of the original members of the MSE.[89] In 1955, Pinay was one of the participants of the Messina Conference, which would lead to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which brought about the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), the best known of the European Communities (EC). The original idea was conceived by Jean Monnet, and was announced by Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, in a declaration in 1950.

Schuman became the first president of the European Parliament in 1958. But it was Jean Monnet who became president of the new body, called the High Authority and who was the primary influence behind the movement. According to Vivien Postel du Mas, a purported author of the Synarchist Pact, along with Coudenhove-Kalergi, Monnet was an influential promoter of the synarchist agenda.[90] Another of Ulmann and Azeau’s MSE informants described Monnet as a “true synarch… whose membership of the movement was never in doubt for the true initiates.”[91] Monnet encouraged the creation of an international European bank to finance Third World projects by Hippolyte Worms—founder of Banque Worms that financed the MSE—and Jean-Pierre Francois, who had been introduced to Pinay by MSR leader Raymond Abellio.[92] Francois, whose real name was Joachim Pick Felberbaum, the son of a Romanian Jew, was inspired by Coudenhove-Kalergi’s PEU.[93] Monnet was at the time the most influential businessman and economist in post-war Europe. Monnet has been called “The Father of Europe” as the key to establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of the European Union.[94]

Billderberg Group

Retinger was also one of the founding members of the super-secret Bilderberg Group, an annual private conference of the world’s political, intellectual and industrial elite, including many members from the Round Table, RIIA and the CFR. In 1952, Retinger expressed his concern over the growth of anti-Americanism in Western Europe, and proposed an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism. Retinger approached former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Van Zeeland, and the then leader of the Unilever consumer goods group, the Dutch Paul Rijkens. Prince Bernhard in turn contacted his friend Walter Bedell Smith, the then-head of the CIA, who asked C.D. Jackson to execute the recommendation.[95]

Although Bernhard stated, “I was never a Nazi,” according to Stephen Dando-Collins, “He was lying. It was the convenient lie of many Germans who had joined the Nazi Party and Nazi organizations to further their careers in the 1930s.”[96] However, Bernhard’s membership in the Nazi Party, to SA, to the Reiter-SS (SS Cavalry Corps), and to the NSKK, are now well-documented. In 1936, while working for the German chemical concern IG Farben in Paris. A 1976 Newsweek article reported that, during the Nuremberg Trial, it came out that Bernhard was a member a special secret Nazi overseas intelligence set up within IG Farben, in which he worked as a spy for the German government in Paris. In 1936, Bernhard paid a farewell visit to Hitler before setting off to Holland for the official announcement of his engagement to Princess Juliana of the Netherlands. Although Hitler later described Berhnard as “In the fuehrer’s opinion, the prince was “an absolute imbecile oaf,” Hitler gave his blessing, and the German Government would even claim the marriage cemented an alliance between Holland’s House of Orange and Germany, a claim that Queen Wilhelmina did not hesitate to publicly deny.[97]

On January 7, 1937, Berhnard Juliana and were married. Bernhard, who took Dutch citizenship and received the title of prince of the Netherlands, opposed German invasion of the country. Shortly after taking his family to safety in England in 1940, Bernhard had asked the British government to permit him to join its intelligence services. However, due to his German background, his request was received with suspicion. Nevertheless, he became friends with Ian Fleming, who would later base some features of his fictional James Bond character on Bernhard. Fleming had the rank a commander with Britain’s Royal Navy, which served to cover his real work as a spy as well. After being appointed a captain in the Dutch navy and a colonel in the army in 1940, Bernhard assumed increased responsibilities and, by 1944, as commander of the Netherlands Forces of the Interior, he directed all Dutch armed forces. The appointment was approved by Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, after he was personally screened by Fleming at Churchill’s behest.[98]

By early 1945, the situation was growing desperate for the Dutch were starving under German occupation. Bernhard got permission from Churchill and U.S. President Roosevelt, to have Eisenhower plan Operation Manna and Operation Chowhound, humanitarian food drops undertaken by Allied bombers in the final days of World War II. Among the participants were the Canadian future writer Farley Mowat and the German commander-in-chief, General Johannes Blaskowitz. Bernhard personally led the Dutch troops during the Allied offensive in the Netherlands and after the liberation of the Netherlands, he returned to the Netherlands with his family and became active in the negotiations for the German surrender on May 5, 1945. On the 4th of September 1948, his mother in law Queen Wilhelmina abdicated the throne and Juliana became Queen of the Netherlands and Bernhard became Prince Consort of the Netherlands.

A preparatory meeting was held on September 25, 1952, at MSE founder Baron François de Nervo’s mansion in Paris, in the presence of Retinger, Van Zeeland, Prince Bernhard, then French prime minister Antoine Pinay, and Guy Mollet, patron of the SFIO, and several foreign personalities. The inaugural meeting was held from May 29 to 31, 1954, at the Bilderberg Hotel, located in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands. Fifty delegates from eleven Western European countries attended, along with eleven Americans including David Rockefeller. [99] The founding group also included important European politicians like Alcide De Gasperi of ACUE, French Socialist politician Guy Mollet and later Prime Minster of France, and British Labour Party members Lord Denis Healy and Hugh Gaitskell, who were both associated with the CCF. In 2001, Healey, who remained a steering committee member of Bilderberg for 30 years, confessed, “To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”[100]

End of History

It was mainly due to the efforts of Jean Monnet, along with Alexandre Kojève (1902 – 1968), a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman, that the synarchist project of the European Union took on its current form.[101] Kojève,  a nephew of abstract artist and Theosophist Wassily Kandinsky, was a participant in George Bataille’s College of Sociology, and in contact with Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. After receiving a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1932, Strauss left his position at the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin for Paris, where he established a life-long friendship with Kojève. Kojève and Strauss both played a major role in Schmitt’s postwar “rehabilitation.” In 1955, Kojève addressed a group of Düsseldorf businessmen at Schmitt’s invitation, and Schmitt attempted to arrange a private meeting between Kojève and Hjalmar Schacht.[102]

Kojève’s philosophical seminars on Hegel are believed to have “dramatically shaped the French intellectual landscape of this century.”[103] Schmitt edited Kojève’s Introduction to a Reading of Hegel, by College of Sociology [104] Kojève’s lectures were attended by a small but influential group of intellectuals including Georges Bataille, André Breton, Henry Corbin and Jacques Lacan. In Alexander Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics, historian Shadia Drury describes Kojève’s historicism, “At the ‘end of history,’ man recognizes God as his own creation, and is no longer alienated from himself because he has become one with himself, or his own idealized view of himself. So understood, history is man’s own self-making project.”[105] In a lecture he presented at the College of Sociology, Kojève claimed that Hegel was off by a hundred years when he named Napoleon as the man who marked the “End of History,” because that man was instead Stalin.[106]

For Kojève, the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) gave concrete form to the Hegelian dream of forging Europe into an example of a world state, based on a combination of both Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger’s thought.[107] Kojève was the eminence grise at the French Ministry Economic Affairs, and one of the earliest architects of the European Union and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He exerted a great deal of influence over Olivier Wormser, who played a key role in negotiating the Treaty of Rome, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who became president of France in 1974, and who throughout his political career had consistently been a proponent of greater European union. Long after he left Russia, Kojève had continued to call himself a communist and Stalinist. In 1999, Le Monde published an article reporting that a French intelligence document showed that Kojève had spied for the KGB for over 30 years.[108]

[1] Hugh Wilford. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (Routledge, 2013), p. 242.

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

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

[4] Hegel to Friedrich Niethammer (October 13, 1806)

[5] Beyond Good and Evil, 256

[6] Julian Young. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) p. 307

[7] Michel Viegnes. “The French Vision of Europe from Victor Hugo’s United States of Europe to the No to the Constitution.”  Centre de Recherche sur l’Imaginaire. Retrieved from https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/376/html

[8] Cited in Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha. “NationEUrope and the Challenges of the European Narrative: Introductory Remarks,” in NationEUrope: The Polarised Solidarity Community edited by Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha (Nomos, 2018), p. 9.

[9] Cited in Colin Ward. “The Anarchist Sociology of Federalism.” Freedom (June-July, 1992). Retrieved from http://library.nothingness.org/articles/anar/en/display/334

[10] E. Kövics and Mary Boros-Kazai. “Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europe Movement on the Questions of International Politicsduring the 1920s.” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 25, No. 3/4 (1979), pp. 233.

[11] Pierre Jarnac. “Le Cercle: Rennes-le-Château et le Prieuré de Sion,” (December 2007) Pégase, No 5 hors série, Le Prieuré de Sion - Les Archives de Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair - Rennes-le-Chateau - Gisors - Stenay.

[12] Glen Covert. “The Habsburg Most Illustrious Order of the Golden Fleece: Its potential relevance on modern culture in the European Union” Retrieved from http://hs.zrc-sazu.si/Portals/0/sp/hs7_n/7_Covert_HS7.pdf

[13] “Past Sovereign and Grand Commanders.” The Order of the Fleur de Lys. Retrieved from https://www.orderofthefleurdelys.org.uk/order-history/past-sovereign-and-grand-commanders/

[14] Glen Covert. “The Habsburg Most Illustrious Order of the Golden Fleece: Its potential relevance on modern culture in the European Union” Retrieved from http://hs.zrc-sazu.si/Portals/0/sp/hs7_n/7_Covert_HS7.pdf

[15] Guido Müller. “France and Germany After the Great War.” Culture and International History. Ed. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Frank Schumacher (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), p. 103.

[16] Anita Ziegerhofer. Botschafter Europas: Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi und die Paneuropa-Bewegung in den zwanziger und dreissiger Jahren (Böhlau, 2004), chap. v – 3.

[17] circular by Dr. Richard Schlesinger. Grossmeister der Grosslogen, 1925, Freimauerlogen, 1412.1.244, in OA; as cited in Dina Gusejnova. European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 85.

[18] Dieter Schwarz. “Freemasonry: Ideology, Organisation, And Policy.” Retrieved from http://thecensureofdemocracy.150m.com/masonry.htm

[19] Ibid., p. 64.

[20] Fr. L, “Esotericism and Espionage.”

[21] Maurice Girodias. Une journée sur le terre (Éditions de la Différence, 1990), vol. I, p. 411.

[22] Picknett & Prince. The Sion Revelation, p. 149.

[23] Ibid., p. 370.

[24] Ibid., p. 370.

[25] Photograph by Fritz Cesanek. Österreichische Illistrierte Zeitung, 36:41 (October 10, 1926) 1080.

[26] Ignaz Seipel opening the first Paneuropa Congress of 1926, Fond 554.7.470.343–416, Coudenhove-Kalergi papers, RGVA, Moscow; cited in Dina Gusejnova. European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 78.

[27] Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Antieuropa,” Paneuropa, 3 (1930), 92.

[28] Reprinted in Paneuropa, 5 (1929), 18–22.

[29] Dina Gusejnova. European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 81.

[30] Ibid.

[31] R. Coudenhove-Kalergi. Eine Idee erobert Europa. Meine Lebenserinnerungen (Wien, 1958), p. 118.

[32] G. MacDonogh. 1938: Hitler’s Gamble (New York: Basic Books, 2009). p 61.

[33] “Baron Louis De Rothschild Dead: Paid $21,000,000 Ransom to Nazis.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (January 17, 1955). www.jta.org. Retrieved 2018-10-26.

[34] “Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.” Spartacus Educational. Retrived from http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SPRINGcoudenhove.htm

[35] Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. An Idea Conquers the World, p. 1894-185.

[36] Beyond Good and Evil, 256.

[37] Moncomble. Du viol des foules à la synarchie, p. 28.

[38] Europa erwacht! (Paris/Zurich, 1934), pp. 94-96; cited in Lionel Gossman. “The Idea of Europe.” Text of the opening lecture for an alumni course taught in 1997.

[39] In a letter to Rudolf Pannwitz (November 17, 1922); cited in Anne-Marie Saint-Gille. La “Paneurope”: un débat d’idées dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Presses Paris Sorbonne, 2003), p. 65.

[40] Crusade for Pan-Europe: Autobiography of a Man and a Movement (New York, 1943), pp. 230-31.

[41] Frances Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, (London: Granta Books, 2000).

[42] Bertram David Wolfe. “Breaking with communism,” p. 10; Arthur Koestler. Darkness of Noon, p. 258.

[43] Anne Applebaum. “Did The Death Of Communism Take Koestler And Other Literary Figures With It?” New York Review of Books (Huffington Post, March 28, 2010).

[44] Frances Stonor Saunders. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 51.

[45] Stonor Saunders. The Cultural Cold War, p. 30.

[46] Ibid., p. 182.

[47] Ibid., p. 116.

[48] Ibid., p. 116.

[49] Ibid., p. 55.

[50] Laurence Zuckerman. “How the C.I.A. Played Dirty Tricks With Culture.” New York Times (March 18, 2000).

[51] Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper, p. 88

[52] The Machiavellians, defenders of freedom (Gateway Editions, 1987).

[53] Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper.

[54] Ibid., p. 191.

[55] Ted Morgan. A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999) pp. 350-351.

[56] Stonor Saunders. Cultural Cold War (1999), p. 73.

[57] Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper, p. 118.

[58] Andrew Roth. “Obituary: Melvin Lasky: Cold warrior who edited the CIA-funded Encounter magazine,” The Guardian (May 22, 2004).

[59] Paul Levy. “Bloomsbury’s final secret.” Telegraph (March 14, 2005).

[60] John Reed. “Animal Farm Timeline.” Paris Review (April 12, 2013).

[61] Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper.

[62] John Reed. “Animal Farm Timeline.” Paris Review (April 12, 2013).

[63] Laurence Zuckerman. “How the C.I.A. Played Dirty Tricks With Culture.” New York Times (March 18, 2000).

[64] Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper, p. 175.

[65] Stonor Saunders. The Cultural Cold War, p. 146.

[66] Ibid., p. 218.

[67] Ibid., p. 226.

[68] Elana Passman. “The Cultivation of Friendship: French and German Cultural Cooperation, 1925-1954.” A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008)..

[69] Daniel Knegt. Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce (Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017), p. 56.

[70] “In Memoriam: Alexandre Marc.” The Journal of Federalism, 30:4 (Fall 2000), p.169.

[71] M. B. B. Biskupski. War and Diplomacy in East and West: A Biography of Józef Retinger (New York; Routledge, 2017), p. 6.

[72] “Pontefici ex-alunni (Italian).” Holy See. Retrieved from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdeccles/documents/pontefici-ex.htm

[73] Biskupski. War and Diplomacy in East and West, p. 6.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Ibid. 7.

[77] George F. Dillon. War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization (M.H. Gill & Son, 1885).

[78] “Joseph Retinger.” Wikipedia (Finnish version), accessed August 6, 2012.

[79] Holly Sklar. Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980) p. 161.

[80] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs.” Telegraph (September 19, 2000).

[81] Ibid.

[82] Richard Aldrich. “OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on United Europe 1948-60.” Diplomacy & Statecraft (March 1, 1997).

[83] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs.” The Telegraph (September 19, 2000).

[84] 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.

[85] Joël van der Heijden. “Le Cercle and the Struggle for the European Continent: Private Bridge Between Opus Dei and Anglo-American Intelligence.” Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (November 18, 2016).

[86] 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.

[87] Thierry Meyssan. “The European Union’s Secret History.” VoltaireNet.org (June 28, 2004).

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

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

[90] Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince. “Synarchy: The Hidden Hand Behind the European Union.” New Dawn (Special Issue 18).

[91] André Ulmann and Henri Azeau. Synarchie et pouvoir (Julliard, 1968), p. 63.

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

[93] Guy Patton. “Jean-Pierre Francois (J-PF) Connections.” Retrieved from http://www.arcadia7.com/jpfcontactsdiag.pdf; Marie-Dominique Lelièvre. “Jean-Pierre François, 75 ans. Résident suisse aux identités multiples, il passe, sans preuve, pour le banquier occulte de Mitterrand. L’argent double.” Libération (December 3, 1998). Retrieved from https://www.liberation.fr/portrait/1998/12/03/jean-pierre-francois-75-ans-resident-suisse-aux-identites-multiples-il-passe-sans-preuve-pour-le-ban_255048/

[94] University of Denver, Educational Technology, Sturm College of Law. “Jean Monnet: Father of Europe - Sturm College of Law.” Retrieved from https://www.law.du.edu/index.php/jean-monnet-father-of-europe

[95] Valerie Aubourg. “Organizing Atlanticism: the Bilderberg Group and the Atlantic Institute 1952–63.” Intelligence & National Security. June 2003, 18 (2): 92–105.

[96] Stephen Dando-Collins. Operation Chowhound: The Most Risky, Most Glorious US Bomber Mission of WWII (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

[97] Ibid.

[98] Ibid.

[99] Madeline Bunting. “Weekend break for the global elite.” The Guardian (May 25, 2001).

[100] Jon Ronson. “Who pulls the strings? (part 3).” The Guardian (March 10, 2001).

[101] “Synarchy: The Hidden Hand Behind the European Union,” New Dawn, (March 15, 2012).

[102] Jeffrey Steinberg, Tony Papert & Barbara Boyd. “Dick Cheney Has a French Connection—To Fascism.” Executive Intelligence Review (May 9, 2003).

[103] Mark Lilla, “The End of Philosophy: How a Russian émigré brought Hegel to the French.” Times Literary Supplement, (April 5, 1991) p. 3.

[104] Allan Bloom. Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) pp. 235-273.

[105] Shadia Drury. Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 14

[106] Denis Hollier. Les Dipossidks (Paris: Minuit, 1993). p. 86.

[107] Roger Griffin. “Europe For The Europeans.”

[108] Keith Patchen. “Alexandre Kojeve: Moscow's Mandarin Marxist Mole in France.” National Observer (No. 58 , Spring 2003). 

Volume Three

1. Synarchy

2. Ariosophy

3. Zionism

4. Eugenics & Sexology

5. The Round Table

6. The League of Nations

7. avant-Garde

8. Black Gold

9. Secrets of Fatima

10. Polaires Brotherhood

11. Operation Trust

12. Aryan Christ

13. Aufbau

14. Brotherhood of Death

15. The Cliveden Set

16. Conservative Revolution

17. Eranos Conferences

18. Frankfurt School

19. Vichy Regime

20. Shangri-La

21. The Final Solution

22. Cold War

23. European Union