Antoine Pinay, the former French prime minister, was not satisfied with his Bilderberg experience.
He wanted something a little smaller; something more conspiratorial in nature; something that would engage in a spot of direct-action.
So he created a hush-hush band of like-minded rightists.
It was Pinay's perception that Soviet subversion was everywhere. He wished to counter this pervasive threat.
Although the Circle bears Pinay's name, its chief architect was Jean Violet, a shady French lawyer in the employ of both the French SDECE and German BND during the 1960s.
Violet cultivated numerous contacts in the spook world, then attached himself to the former French premier.
As Pinay went senile, Violet took command of the rogue Circle.
At the Circle's core, Violet assembled....
* Florimand Damman, Belgian Secretary-General of the Academie Europeene de Science Politique in Brussels, which took the view that Europe was already under attack by a new Soviet imperialism.
* Archduke Otto de Habsbourg, founder of an anti-communist think-tank called Centre Europeene de Documentation et d'Information. Hapsbourg's family once owned an empire in Europe so this guy knew imperialism when he saw it -- and lamented the good old days, when it was engineered by his own ancestors.
* Manuel Fraga Iribarne, fomer Franco minister in Spain, later president of the right-wing Alianza Popular party.
* Franz Josef Strauss, defense minister, later, president of Germany.
* Count Alexandre de Marenches, former director of SDECE, the French intelligence service.
* Nicholas Elliot, a senior British Intelligence officer who never got over Philby's "betrayal" and henceforth saw subversion everywhere.
* Didier Franks, a British Intelligence chief.
* A one-time Italian minister of finance named Pandolphi.
* A General Fraser of South Africa.
* Brian Crozier, a pompous stooge who credits himself for winning the Cold War single-handedly. CIA foolishly funded Crozier's (London-based) Institute for the Study of Conflict. When no one took Crozier seriously (for good reason), he leaked CIA's sponsorship to bolster his own self-importance and gain undeserved recognition.
* Julian Amery, British minister for aviation.
* Edwin Feulner, head of the Heritage Foundation. (Egghead playing super-spook.)
* Donald "Jamie" Jamieson, a former CIA official who never forgave the KGB for infecting him with polio.
* General Richard Stilwell, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The ubiquitous David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger put in cameos but resolved, sensibly, that it wasn't their cup of tea. (This pair prefers a more decorous approach to global manipulation.)
Toss in at least one right-wing general from Portugal (Spinola), and a couple of Swiss Intelligence types (Richard Lowenthal and the ominous-sounding Dr. Kux).
At a meeting in Washington DC's Madison Hotel on December 1st, 1979, the Circle tried to engage former CIA director William Colby and Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.
The Pinay Circlers were the (self) chosen few, whose job it was to fight the Cold War because nobody else was doing it well enough by their standards.
As rogue cold warriors, these guys designed a program not dissimilar from CIA's that included:
* Planting stories in the media by well-known journalists to champion their various campaigns. (Crozier was one of their "well-known" journalists. So much for that element of their plan.)
* Lobbying decision-makers. (Crozier's report on European Security and the Soviet Problem was personally presented to French President Georges Pompidou by Antoine Pinay.)
* Organizing mass demonstrations.
* Creating slush-funds and using them to elect like-minded politicians. (Franz Strauss, Fraga Iribarne, and Margaret Thatcher benefited from such funds.)
* Organize under-cover offices in London, Washington, Paris, Madrid and Munich to coordinate the above activities.
They created, by design, their own intelligence service, and used it for the purpose of swapping information with the established secret services of Europe and the US.
Surprisingly, they were quite active during their heyday in the 1970s.
Through Flammand Damman's academy, the Circle sponsored a Freedom of Movement campaign, aimed at embarrassing the Soviets at the first SALT talks in Helsinki.
This was followed by a Freedom for Political Prisoners campaign in 1976.
The Circle helped elect Thatcher in Britain (1979) and Strauss in Germany (1980).
Through Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki, the Circle constructed a powerful radio transmitter in Saudi that emitted radio programs promoting Islam in Soviet Russia.
(A humdinger of an idea. Yes, the anti-Soviets of yester-year attempted to cure a mild headache by helping create what has become a migraine for the world.)
(A humdinger of an idea. Yes, the anti-Soviets of yester-year attempted to cure a mild headache by helping create what has become a migraine for the world.)
The Circle deplored the way CIA handled Soviet defectors, believing that CIA did not taking seriously their always invariable message that the sky was falling; that perestroika was just a big trap designed to suck us in, then nuke us into oblivion.
Since CIA wasn't buying it, the Circle created the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. whose aim, under Jamie Jamieson's direction, was to debrief defectors independent of CIA then disseminate their gospel to the media.
The Pinay Circle continues to meet, probably for bridge tournaments.
Jean Violet retired to the Cote d'Azur to tell his grandchildren how he and Brian Crozier saved the West.