One of the aims of this column is to open up new lines of enquiry for parapolitical specialists. It might seem very odd to start with the name of Reinhard Gehlen, long-since dead founder of the BND, the German Security Service. Reinhard Gehlen, to over-simplify a very complex tale, bought his way into the Western intelligence fraternity by handing over extensive files on anti-Soviet intelligence networks behind enemy lines in 1945/6. (1)
What brought Gehlen to mind was a mischievous little article in a recent edition of the French newsletter Intelligence Online (2) reminding us that the new Pope Benedict XVI was formerly of the Diocese of Munich (where Gehlen had his headquarters) and claiming that German security officials were not unhappy at his rise to the top of the Papacy. Gehlen’s brother, Johannes Gehlen, had been in charge of Station 114 (Rome) and the Vatican/BND link never looked back from that moment. Reinhard Gehlen, a Prussian Evangelical of the old school, spent much of his retirement supporting a Protestant Church-building programme in Catholic Bavaria but, by then, the BND was in the hands of a more modern generation of security officials who saw that German security depended on a restoration of good relations between the faiths, not excluding the Jews themselves. This was a view shared by many senior figures in a Church riddled with guilt at its implicit pact of tolerance with the Nazi devil and determined not to make the same mistake with communism, especially at a time when liberation theology was taking hold of its liberal wing.
Pope Benedict is clearly his own man but there is now good reason to take a much greater interest in the close liaison between the Vatican and the various anti-communist intelligence operations which developed in Europe under the wing of the United States and that are now coalescing into the pan-European security agency of a new state-in-the-making.
Conspiracy theorists who have managed to get past the idiocies of The Da Vinci Code will always point to Catholic involvement in the spiriting away of such nasty bits of work as Pavelic of the Croatian Ustase, whose wartime activities against Serbs and Jews shocked even hardened Waffen-SS men. But the operations of a few die-hard anti-communist clericals in the immediate aftermath of world war are really only a footnote to the mayhem of the time. Most conservative Catholics were absolutely horrified by the revelations of atrocity that appeared soon after the War and were equally determined to share, with liberals and Jews, a commitment to the slogan of ‘Never again!’
German interest in Croatia is, of course, notorious: the recognition of its sovereignty precipitated the collapse of the former Yugoslavia into vicious warfare. The BND also acted as liaison in providing logistical support for Solidarity that had originated from decisions made by both Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. (3) Much of this has been interpreted as some kind of Nazi-Catholic plot; but nothing could be further from the truth. The heirs of Admiral Canaris and Reinhard Gehlen and the rest of the caste that created the complex of European intelligence and security services that we see today were, and are, deeply conservative and, in many cases, explicit in contrasting Judaeo-Christian culture with the dark pagan or atheistic tendencies in both national socialism and communism.
The reason that these historical facts become interesting is that this culture of European universalism is becoming a dominant force in the new Europe, closely allied to much neo-conservative thinking, and has pushed the borders of the new Christendom far beyond the Polish–Soviet border out and on to the other side of Kiev. It is also a dominant factor in the Europeanisation of the Balkans. Parapolitical analysts are, as always, faced with an abyss of disinformation and lack of information. Nevertheless the stealth role of conservative catholic and evangelical forces in the creation and extension of the European project has been a neglected area of study.
The battle between strategies of integration and confront-ation with Islam, the historic construction of a conservative cultural and political alliance between Judaism and Christianity and the steady extension of Christendom’s boundaries to the edge of Belarus and Russia are stories yet to be told because they are stories whose unfolding has yet to be completed.
Is the European Third Way Fascist?
A common point in any Anglo-Saxon bar-room debate on the new Europe will be to announce that the European ideal is an old fascist dream and that the current Constitution is no more than Germany attempting to be ‘third time lucky’ in its aspirations.
The fascist vision of Oswald Mosley and of the surviving Strasser brother of a united Europe able to stand up to both the US and the Soviet Bloc is not unappealing in some respects. Even that clarion of Western liberalism, The Financial Times, presented us with a pre-election cartoon of our Prime Minister in the front pocket of the US President’s suit. But the truth is that these defeated ideologues of corporatist fascism have always been marginal players. The history is more complex. The great thinkers of European integration were a variety of socialists and conservatives whose prime horror was of one of totalitarianism; although it might be said that they have now unintentionally created the lineaments of a totalitarian structure of their own. But there is one vision of Europe that comes from the last days of the collapsing Nazi empire that may have had an influence far beyond its now forgotten status in world history.
A forlorn meeting of Slavic losers took place in Prague on 14 November, 1944. A Manifesto of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia was drafted which could, if stripped of its contingent allegiance to the German war effort, pass as a neo-conservative or even New Labour manifesto sixty years later. (4) It was naive in its time and it slipped through the Nazi system of ideological control in the chaos of those days; (5) but its vision of the future was not dissimilar in many ways to that of the old Atlanticist Labour Right that fought off the Left in all its transformations once the Iron Curtain had fallen.
This movement of unity for Russian and other East European anti-Stalinists hated communism so much that it made its own pact with the Nazi devil (even though a few Jews could still be found in its ranks even at this late stage) but it was the authentic voice of a workerist and intellectual resistance to Bolshevism. Its trajectory parallels in many ways that of the contemporary neo-conservative movement.
The National Labour Council [Narodni Trudovoy Soyuz, commonly and incorrectly known as Solidarists] had been founded by Socialist and Mensheviks in Belgrade as a movement of resistance to Bolshevism in the late 1920s. It was a classic anti-communist movement of the Left that became sponsored by the Right; much as Democrat and Trotskyist intellectuals of neo-conservatism of the immediate post-war period have become tools of preemptive war and national Republicanism today.
In addition to the well-told story of the intellectual trajectory of East Coast neo-conservatism from ‘Scoop’ Jackson to Wolfowitz, there is a more interesting story about electoral transformation. It is probable that this involved a strategic commitment to mobilising domestic ethnic votes within the US in the 1970s in order to ensure the return of a Republican administration prepared to give a free hand to the political warriors. Republican political strategy has been consistent since the late 1970s in mimicking the traditional Democrat model of including waves of new voter groups into its coalition.
The triumph of Nixon appears to have been to capture the Democrat South abandoned in this process of national inclusion. The triumph of the Reagan-Bush Republicans was to include important elements of a multiplicity of ethnic communities whose outlook was based on the experience of their homelands under the ‘Soviet yoke’ or whose traditional conservative cultures, thriving under the US Constitution, were threatened overseas by militant communism or Third World nationalism.
The subsequent use, post-1980, of a Republican ‘enabling’ State constructed an opportunity for practical alliances with conservative elements overseas with political power reaching far beyond their material base – including elements in Catholicism, Islam (insofar as there has been an implicit Republican-Saudi alliance throughout this period) and Zionism – with ‘world-historical’ consequences. What went on in the United States between approximately 1975 and 1983 may hold the key to our understanding of the world we live in today.
But there is another aspect to this case. There has been much talk of ‘blow-back’ insofar as one component of the covert network that emerged from this key phase of strategic redirection away from conventional warfare to political warfare then became the centre of the terrorist attack on the United States itself. Is it not equally possible that we are moving into a new phase with a different form of blow-back from the faith-based, democratic and liberal elements in the coalition? Is it not possible that the vast complex of alliances constructed to defeat communism have not only fragmented into loose networks of increasingly well capitalised organised crime and terror operations, but also fragmented into the political basis for non-state political operations by faith groups (such as the Catholic Church) and by heavily funded US political foundations of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’? If this is so, then the mainstream news media are now merely reporting the results of a hundred disconnected operations in which idealism and interest are managed very much by the few at the expense of the many.
The first reaction of many may be to see conspiracy. It is more likely that we are seeing a new form of politics in which soft power manipulation is now seen as far more effective than military force in destabilising regimes and that the techniques being used are becoming ‘cheaper’ (within the means of foundations rather than states) and ‘for hire’. In fact, if the West fears weapons of mass destruction, the rest of the world fears the West’s weapons of mass deception.
The aims of activists and of liberal states in particular are becoming increasingly aligned, with information and soft power support from the latter becoming more important even than cash. The integration of activist, state and business interests with minimal democratic accountability becomes the driver for attacks on any states and parties that the dominant ideology does not like. The only hope for public accountability then becomes that the new media, instead of becoming the basis for political manipulation by wealthy interests, becomes the prime network for the exposure of covert warfare.(6)
Vote-Fixing: Old Habits Die Hard
The European Project is a strangely old-fashioned political project: the ideals of the few are being imposed directly and openly on the many without much apology. Still, it claims to work within the liberal democratic ideal and it is fair to judge it by those standards.
Assuming that the European Constitution is not kicked into touch by an overwhelming ‘no’ in France or Holland, the planned referendum could well be dogged by allegations of malpractice similar to those that have accompanied the recent General Election campaign on postal votes.
While there is no single area in which the rules for the referendum give a major advantage to one side, the Government has already worked to write in a number of small advantages to the ‘yes’ side that could add up to make a real difference.
The first referendum on the EU Constitution was carried out in Spain where it soon became clear that EU institutions and governments were willing to push the boundaries of what constitutes fair conduct. The Spanish ‘yes’ campaign included a 7.5m euro information campaign called First with Europe.(7) There were also campaigns from third parties such as the Government and EU funded Youth Council’s Referendum Plus.(8)
The British Government also plans to spend ‘serious money’ (in the words of the Europe Minister, Denis MacShane).(9) McShane, of course, like his predecessor, Keith Vaz, is an absolutist in his enthusiasm for the European Project and often lets his tongue surge ahead of brain but his statement is still the statement of a Minister of the Crown.
In November 2004, the Government tripled the Foreign Office’s EU communications budget. MacShane stated that Government information would be ‘objective, explanatory and is in line with and supports Government policy’. (10) Government policy is, of course, in favour of a ‘yes’ vote so, taken with the ‘serious money’ statement, we see here a probable predisposition towards government funding of support for a ‘yes’ vote which is to be presented as ‘objective’ and ‘explanatory’.
The government have since set up the EU Constitution Team, a dedicated unit of fifteen full-time officials working to promote the Constitution, with an annual budget of over a million pounds – to be reviewed as the campaign takes off. (11) Already, contracts have been issued for PR, partnership marketing and e-communications activities to promote the Constitution.(12) The UK Presidency of the EU will be a further opportunity for the Government to promote the Constitution, with £350,000 allocated to ‘public information’.(13)
Nor do the rules laid out in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act and the European Union Bill, which will enact the referendum, ensure a level playing field. Quite the opposite: government spending and ‘information’ is not regulated until the final 28 days of the campaign, while the official ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns are regulated for six months before polling.
Let us spell this out: state resources are unregulated in the direction of a ‘yes’ vote for five months while the ‘official’ independent campaigns are forced on to a level-playing field only between themselves. In short, there is a de facto taxpayer subsidy for one side in the debate.
The Government has also devised a measure specifically for the European Constitution. This would break Electoral Commission recommendations by allowing the referendum to be held at the same time as other elections. The Electoral Commission has said:
‘We believe that referendums on fundamental issues of national importance should be considered in isolation. Cross-party campaigning on a fundamental referendum could cause significant confusion amongst the electorate if combined with normal party election campaigning. There is a danger that the dominance of the referendum issue would influence other polls to an extent that may compromise the electorate’s will in those other polls.'(14)
Of course, this could cut both ways if an unpopular government is associated with the Referendum but it is interesting to see the government’s determination to give itself tactical advantage regardless of independent expert opinion.
The UK government has very recently refused to allow the EU to open 40 planned Information Centres in the UK. The Government is now said to be nervous about a reaction to the EU spending over £500,000 promoting itself in the UK in the run up to the Referendum. Margot Wallström, the EU Commissioner for Communications has said, ‘Of course we would have preferred a system that covers the whole of the European Union’, adding ‘[but] we cannot go in with tanks’. (15)
The Electoral Commission have admitted that although they have
‘the general function of monitoring compliance with the restrictions in relation to referendums to which the Act applies, this does not give the [Electoral] Commission power to intervene to prevent either donations or spending in connection with such referendums, including any referendum on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe.’ (16)
These flaws are unlikely to be the result of coincidence or even negligence. The Government is determined to win the referendum and is applying its resources at the margin to do so. Whatever their concerns, ensuring a fair process that reflects the national opinion is unlikely to be one of them. (17)
It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It
Ah, Lebanon! Think of all our extremely effective and terribly brave Western broadcast reporters who struggle out of their hotels to report on the massive demonstrations of people power (notably, pictures of pretty girls wrapped in flags) all over the world. Orange is the ‘in’ colour. But why will our press not investigate the fact everyone knows but no-one reports – that ‘people power’ is actively being manufactured. Is it because there is a rule in contemporary journalism that, when reporting a magic show, you do not report how the trick is performed?
It is not as if these are very new techniques; nor that if we knew what went on we would necessarily be entirely negative towards them. Our American friends fail to understand that many of us British do not object to the aims but only to the methods – it is why so many of us get hot under the collar about being lied to over the Iraq War even if some of us might have applauded the intent (though admittedly not this writer). It is a cultural rift that costs America a great deal of good will and keeps conspiracy theorists in business.
From the Philippines to Venezuela and from the Ukraine to Kyrgyzstan, the process of ‘liberating’ people (well, the comfortable urban middle classes, anyway) without firing a shot is attempted and increasingly succeeds. One common pattern is the sudden emergence of local advertising agencies funded by wealthy local families or international foundations as campaign advisers.
The money, training and manpower for these projects of guided paternalism often goes through foundations that collaborate in the US interest internationally – even when they compete as Democrats or Republicans domestically. And if you see waving and cheering crowds, and the colour orange some where…… of course, Macavity the Foundation is then nowhere to be seen!
Is this reluctance of journalists to investigate these things nothing more than implicit recognition that ordinary people are proud and do not like being manipulated rather than persuaded or paid into doing things in their own interest? If the magic is exposed, perhaps the liberal journalist will be unintentionally giving succour to the tyrant? In other words, it is not so much that we should lie but not seek the truth too assiduously. We just need to know that there are good guys and bad guys and that we will support the good guys.
Of course, there is often some serious local enthusiasm for change so it is often no more than a case of financing an infrastructure to effect some naive and simple popular end, leaving worry about the consequences to the end. However, there are also cases where ambitious oligarchs are simply the lesser evil to the American or European empires and are taught the necessary compromises to appear democratic and liberal. After all, Berlusconi is preferable to Mussolini…… so perhaps reform is always going to be only a matter of degree.
In the case of Lebanon, the aim of the organisers was to get Syrian influence out of Lebanon to ensure one less threat to the Peace Process and a marker that, if Syria continued to support, indirectly, Sunni insurgency in Iraq, it might be next to go down. The aim of the whole shebang was linked to the ‘democratic market’ aspirations of our friends in the State Department. This sounds good enough but not quite as good as it sounds in a Western editorial where knickers wet in excitement at relatively small changes in the total picture.
The game is ostensibly about removing corrupt gangsters who exploit their peoples. But it is also about putting in a liberal civil society that has the intended effect of atomising and taming any native collective organisation concerned with redistribution or defending the interests of the very poor or disadvantaged. This is the ‘creative destruction’ of enthusiastic supporters of modernisation and the reason why Vladimir Putin is President of the Russian Federation after several years of brutal kleptocratic oligarchical capitalism. The people had had enough of shock treatment.
The aim is always to ensure the full integration of a country and its middle class with the global economy and to break the back of any residual collectivism that distorts markets in favour of the weakest or (admittedly) special interests. To be fair, there are signs that free trades unions are going to be included in the package of liberalisation measures; but the main thrust of events has been to emphasise free markets and constitutional liberalism rather than the preservation of welfare systems and any national control of assets.
Unfortunately, for anti-Americans or anti-capitalists, this residual collectivism, which should have been a protector of the weak and an equaliser, has tended to become the degraded plaything of ‘economic gangsters’ so that, in most but not all cases, no collectivist alternative of any moral worth that is not tainted with inefficiency and corruption can be presented by critics of America to America. America has grabbed the moral high ground because that ground was abandoned long ago by Arab socialists and nationalists. The bad has beaten the worse.
So, thanks to the incompetence of the communists and nationalists since 1989, socialism, nationalism and (of course) national socialism are being consigned to history. Whether poverty, preventable disease and exploitation are going to be equally consigned by neo-conservatives and progressive liberals to history is something that we may have to wait years to discover.
Watching the Watchers
The State Department’s National Intelligence Council is drawing up a ‘secret’ watch-list of 25 countries ‘where instability might precipitate US intervention’. The intentions were announced at a conference organised by the US Institute of Peace, full of its complement of Deweys, Rostows, Lipsets, Crockers and other masters of the intellectual universe. (18) This list will apparently be drawn up and revised on a six monthly cycle. It remains the case (it is said) that regime change [in countries such as Iran] would be brought about ‘by opposition groups rather than by direct US military intervention’ which is tantamount to recognition that covert political warfare is ‘in’ and country invasion is ‘out’. Post-conflict work will focus on creating the laws and institutions of a ‘market democracy’ – an attractive proposition to those who see the global extension of the Western side of the 1945/47 settlement as the core purpose of foreign policy. There would, they say, be a ‘reserve corps’ of specialist civilian teams and advance reconstruction contract arrangements with private companies and NGOs.
What is going on here? It suggests that particular businesses and NGOs are to be included in a strategy of regime change in advance. The consequent danger is that such businesses and NGOs risk becoming a political lobby for such change. Their future revenue stream will depend on the future success of political policies rather than getting grants to help resolve problems arising from the implementation of such policies. Will they then come to have a material interest in subversion or even in direct military intervention?
Of course, few NGO leaders, if presented with such a possibility in stark terms, would agree to being implicated; but, in the real world, NGOs struggle on a daily basis for cash and sincerely believe that the world is a much better place if they exist (don’t we all) than if they do not.
NGOs are the new battleground for the political warriors and it is indicative that the neo-conservatives have suddenly gone silent on their demand for accountability because they now see state subsidy in a market context as a much more effective means of bringing these organisations into the grand plan. However, before we all get too excited, the NIC has only a small budget ($124m in 2006) by the standards of its ambitions (though a well placed $500,000 could certainly buy into most hard-pressed opposition groups in most countries).
There is not a lot I hold in common with hard-line neo-conservatives but concern at the lack of transparency of NGOs is one item of policy where the forces of darkness (them) and the forces of light (me) start to converge. Here we have vast sums of money from rich men, Western governments and the public affairs departments of corporations entrusted into the hands of do-gooder, unelected liberals who are easily persuaded to interfere where no diplomats would dare go. The naive guided by the sinister.
The NIC is a unit of the State Department. Other parts of the US system may not yet have fully bought into its model of policy but the current (April 2005) British Government is very likely to be supportive (indeed, to want a slice of the action for its own businesses and its own favoured NGOs).
But what does this all mean for international relations?
In essence, where a country is not too big or too integrated (Russia, China, Brazil, India, EU), it is to be treated solely as a trading partner or challenged on equal terms through diplomacy. If it does not fall into this category, it will be classified along a descending order of concern:
- an ally or client state (often indistinguishable) will be left alone contingently if it is either a market democracy or appears to be moving in the direction of a market democracy or at least has a market economy – both the UK and Saudi Arabia currently fall into this category;
- a country that has not got a market economy or a central authority capable of building a market democracy is on the watch list and will be dealt with: i) initially as a subject of subversion through the promotion of favoured opposition groups; and then ii) through pre-planned direct military intervention: in most cases, the threat will be enough;
- some naughty countries (such as Cuba and North Korea) who might put up a bit of a fight will now just be by-passed, contained or left at the subversion stage until nature takes its course with the current dictator.
We do not know, at this stage, who is on the list and who is not. If Saudi Arabia is not on the watch list, Egypt is being pressured to get off it by putting in some rules for its presidential elections that show at least a willingness to accept the principle of rule of law. Intense political discussion will surround countries such as Venezuela but Syria has clearly been marked out for subversive activity.
This is clearly a case where a column can be ended: ‘watch this space’.
Notes
[1] Reinhard Gehlen is not short of commentary in the literature or on the web but the reader could do worse than go back to E. H.Cookridge’s early and flawed but detailed, Gehlen: Spy of the Century (London, 1971). Written when Gehlen was still alive and in retirement, and with that flavour of Cold War realpolitik of the day, it manages to include the early revelations of the exposure of the ‘Nazi origins’ of the Gehlen organisation in the 1960s without the subsequent accretions of speculative conspiracy theory.
[2] Intelligence Online, 29 April 2005 (Subscription Only)
[3] The late Pope seems to have considered that the Universal Church had been placed at his personal disposal to liberate his homeland. This might be said to make him guilty of the sin of pride.
[4] The Prague Manifesto of 1944 in its entirety is one of those embarrassing documents that is pregnant with historical meaning yet not what any of the victors of 1945 liked to see hawked around in the years to come. The full Manifesto can be found as Appendix IV of Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt’s mildly self-serving memoir of his time as German liaison officer with the Vlasov Movement during the war, Against Stalin & Hitler, 1941-1945 (translated from the German and appearing in English in the same year, 1970). The context of the Prague Manifesto is recounted on pages 215221.
[5] There are signs in a variety of sources that Nazi strategists, faced with impending collapse in late 1944, became concerned that they had been too dismissive of anti-Soviet and anti-imperialist movements, treating them as canon fodder in the War in the East and not as forces for political mobilisation against both of their opponents. This is a complex story to be told another time but its historical interest lies in the last minute encouragement given by senior Nazi officials to anti-semitic Muslims and to Slavic anti-communist nationalists whose children and students were to provide much of the grunt labour in various phases of the war on communism. It should be noted here that while many Slavic ‘Solidarist’ nationalists began to see through the Nazis in 1943 and were consigned to concentration camps for their trouble, this did not stop the Solidarists as an organised force from regrouping in the anti-communist struggle with conservative Germans later and after the war. This may help to explain the emotional commitment of many neo-conservatives in trying to demonstrate that Stalin and Hitler were equally evil or that Stalin was more evil an exercise accepted as futile by most historians of the Nazi experiment
[6] The argument here is that the new model of a multiplicity of informally linked covert operations to ‘manage’ globalisation still depends on a traditional model of media in which information continues to be managed by ‘editors’ who select data, often on guidance from ‘reliable sources’. The cultural predisposition of most mainstream political media is towards liberalism because it is in its fundamental interest. The tendency of the new media is to break editorial control of opinion in favour of established fact (the Wikipedia model) and to have opinion and breaking news re-emerge through ‘blogs’ (where authority lies in smaller groups who compete on the grounds that they best represent the views of their fickle readers or have access to specialised knowledge that is not edited down to mass acceptability).
Power thus lies in the editorial function filtering multiple sources of information and seeking out its meaning rather than with one person commissioning an analytical story based on a few expert sources from one person. Covert operations can, therefore, be ‘exposed’, either by providing an opinion on them direct to the public or by having persons on the ground leaking documents, revealing sources of funding, exposing manipulative activity and so on.
[7] <www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1479153,00.html There is a good account of the Spanish Constitutional Referendum with many links at <www.unizar.es/euroconstitucion/Treaties/Treaty_Const_Rat_spain.htm>
[8] BBC online, 28 January 2005 < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ europe/4215391.stm>
[9] The Independent, 31 May 2004
[10] Hansard 19 January 2005, column 1020W
[11] Hansard 5 April 2005, column 1323W
[12] The Financial Times 20 January 2005
[13] Hansard 5 April 2005, column 1323W
[14] Electoral Commission Statement, July 2002. The Electoral Commission’s position on Referenda can be found at <www.electoral commission.org.uk/referendums/> There are references to its opinion at <www.no-euro.com/mediacentre/archive.asp?ID=156> and Hansard 7 February 1279W.
[15] What is interesting about this is that the Government is still very worried about public opinion and so has drawn a line on official EU spending. What we might watch out for now is unofficial spending through various foundations, special interest groups and the public diplomacy arms of the main European Embassies.
[16] Hansard 5 April, column 1371W
[17] A recommended source for news on European political developments (the news is provided objectively but the context is from a Leftist eurosceptic orientation) is the Centre for a Social Europe which can be accessed at <www.social-europe.org.uk/> I am grateful for their help in accessing the facts on which this part of the column is based.
[18] The Financial Times 30 March 2005. The US Institute of Peace is at <www.usip.org/>.