OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee 1948-60

Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol.8, No.l (March 1997), pp. 184-227PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON


OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on United Europe, 1948-60
RICHARD J. ALDRICH

During the last ten years, diplomatic historians have attached
growing significance to intelligence, and the related subject of covert
operations, as increasingly important to an understanding of the early
Cold War. 1 After 1945, a variety of Western organizations, not just
intelligence agencies, drew up programmes of covert operations
designed both to undermine Communist influence in Europe and to
ensure a welcome for the Marshall Plan. Examples have been
documented in the fields of electoral politics, organized labour and
cultural affairs. US officials trying to rebuild and stabilize postwar
Europe worked from the assumption that it required rapid
unification, perhaps leading to a United States of Europe. The
encouragement of European unification, one of the most consistent
components of Harry S. Truman's foreign policy, was even more
strongly emphasized under his successor General Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Moreover, under both Truman and Eisenhower, US
policymakers conceived of European unification not only as an
important end in itself, but also as a way to solve the German
problem. 2 The use of covert operations for the specific promotion of
European unity has attracted little scholarly attention and remains
poorly understood.
One of the most interesting US covert operations in postwar
Europe was the funding of the European Movement. The European
Movement was an umbrella organization which led a prestigious, if
disparate, group of organizations urging rapid unification in Europe,
focusing their efforts upon the Council of Europe, and counting
Winston Churchill, Paul-Henri Spaak, Konrad Adenauer, Leon Blum
and Alcide de Gasperi as its five Presidents of Honour. In 1948, its
main handicap was the scarcity of funds. It will be argued here that
the discreet injection of over three million dollars between 1949 and
1960, mostly from US government sources, was central to efforts to
drum up mass support for the Schuman Plan, the European Defence
Community and a European Assembly with sovereign powers. This
covert contribution never formed less than half the European
Movement's budget and, after 1952, probably two-thirds. Simultaneously
they sought to undermine the staunch resistance of the British Labour
government to federalist ideas. 3
This essay concentrates on the US dimension of these activities. 4
The conduit for American assistance was the American Committee on
United Europe (ACUE), directed by senior figures from the American
intelligence community. This body was organized in the early Summer
of 1948 by Allen Welsh Dulles, then heading a committee reviewing
the organization of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of
the National Security Council (NSC), and also by William J. Donovan,
former head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). They
were responding to separate requests for assistance from Count
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, a veteran Pan-European campaigner
from Austria, and from Churchill. ACUE worked closely with US
government officials, particularly those in the Economic Cooperation
Administration (ECA) and also with the National Committee for a
Free Europe.
The propositions advanced in this essay draw primarily upon
collections of private papers deposited in Britain and the United
States, including the records of ACUE itself. However, they receive
crucial support from a doctoral thesis on the early European
Movement completed by EX. Rebattet at the University of Oxford in
1962, but only opened to public inspection in the early 1990s. F.X.
Rebattet was the son of the Secretary-General of the European
Movement, and his study was conducted with full access to the
internal papers of the European Movement and the cooperation of its
senior figures. While based on archives located in Belgium rather
than Britain and the United States, Rebattet's work confirms the
findings of this essay, and is remarkable for its frankness on the issue
of covert American funding. 5
Although the work of ACUE prompts immediate and specific
questions about the role of US aid in stimulating popular federalism
in postwar Europe, it is important not to lose sight of the broader
conclusions concerning the nature of American intervention in
Europe that can be drawn from this episode. The origins of this
programme lay less in the formal provisions of NSC directives, to
which intelligence historians have attached much importance, and
more in an informal and personal transatlantic network created by
members of the intelligence and resistance community during the
Second World War. Much US aid to non-Communist groups in
Europe was sent until 1950 through unofficial channels, though with
government approval and support. 6
ACUE typifies the philosophy underpinning many such covert
operations. It made no attempt to manipulate organizations or
individuals. Instead, it sought genuinely independent vehicles that
seemed complementary to American policy, and tried to speed them
up. The history of ACUE shows us prominent European politicians in
search of discreet American assistance, rather than the CIA in search
of proxies. This, together with the common observation that many
Europeans in receipt of covert assistance belonged to the non-
Communist left, confirms Peter Coleman's adept characterization of
these activities in Europe as a 'Liberal Conspiracy'. 7
Many Americans working for ACUE were either themselves
determined federalists with an interest in the United Nations or else
viewed American federalism as an ideal political model which could
be deployed elsewhere. ACUE believed that the United States had a
wealth of experience to offer in the field of cultural assimilation.
Accordingly, the history of ACUE can also be interpreted as part of
what the late Christopher Thome termed America as an 'idea nation',
exporting its values and political culture. It is also particularly
striking that the same small band of senior officials, many of them
from the Western intelligence community, were central in supporting
the three most important transnational elite groups emerging in the
1950s: the European Movement, the Bilderberg Group and Jean
Monnet's Action Committee for a United States of Europe. Finally, at
a time when some British antifederalists saw a continued 'special
relationship' with the United States as an alternative to (perhaps even
a refuge from) European federalism, it is ironic that some European
federalist initiatives should have been sustained with American
support. 8

US Covert Operations in Europe

Any analysis of the ACUE must be set in the context of a broader
programme of US covert operations in Europe. Between 1948 and
1950 this expanded rapidly, partly in response to pressure from
senior State Department officials such as George Kennan, Head of
the Policy Planning Staff. On 6 January 1949, Kennan wrote to Frank
Wisner of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the official
responsible, that the operations planned for 1949-50 met only the
minimum requirement. 'As the international situation develops, every
day makes more evident the importance of the role which will have
to be played by covert operations if our national interests are to be
adequately protected' 9 Responsibility for the direction of US covert
operations before 1950 is difficult to locate and was problematic at
the time. Immediately after the war such activities were carried out
by a curious array of private bodies and also military organizations
that had absorbed some remnants of the wartime OSS. After June
1948, however, such activities were theoretically superintended by
Frank Wisner's OPC, set up as a result of directive NSC 10/2, which
called for covert operations which 'if uncovered the United States
Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them'. 10
Although OPC came under the administrative umbrella of the CIA, it
took its orders from the State Department and the NSC, because
NSC 10/2 had laid down that although the State Department would
take no responsibility for OPC operations, nevertheless, State should
'maintain a firm guiding hand'. 11 Here was a recipe for infighting and
confusion, as one OPC official remarked: 'Divided or part authority
never works. No person or agency can at the same time serve God
(NSC), Mammon (State) and an Administrative and Financial
Overlord (only), which the Director of CIA now is.' In 1950, the new
director of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith, insisted that OPC be fully
integrated with the CIA, a process that turned out to be slow and
awkward. 12
Coordination was further impeded by the small number of State
Department officials who were told about covert operations. Even
some divisional chiefs lacked a full picture of US activities within
their region of responsibility. At one point George Kennan and two
other members of the Policy Planning Staff, Maynard Barnes and
John Davies were the only State Department officials permitted 'full
knowledge of OPC operations'. When Kennan wished to assign more
State Department personnel to the task of coordinating covert
operations, he was thwarted at first because he was not allowed to
tell the chiefs of the personnel divisions chiefs, who lacked adequate
security clearance, what he was doing. 13
Despite this initial administrative confusion the broad objectives
of American operations in postwar Europe are now clear. They fall
into five categories. First, political parties, often of the non-
Communist left and centre, were subsidized. During the Italian
election of 1948, for example, various political groups were paid
millions of dollars, which helped to revitalize the hitherto listless
campaign of the future Prime Minister, de Gasperi. 14 Second, in the
struggle for control of international labour organizations and for the
unions of Italy and France, American and European trade unionists
helped to undermine the Soviet-controlled World Federation of
Trade Unions. Staunchly anti-Communist members of the American
Federation of Labour (AFL), led by David Dubinsky, Jay Lovestone
and Irving Brown, were often more zealous than government agencies
thought wise.15
Third, the United States attempted to influence cultural and
intellectual trends in Europe, funding a variety of groups,
conferences and publications. This reflected the presumption that
intellectuals were significant opinion formers in continental Europe.
This was undertaken in direct competition with Soviet funding,
developing into a 'battle of the festivals'. The best documented
examples are the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the magazine
Encounter, to which luminaries such as Raymond Aron, Stephen
Spender and Arthur Koestler contributed.
In an important change of policy, many cultural activities were
placed in the Spring of 1951 under a new department of the CIA, the
International Organizations Division. 16 The use of private
organizations had been gathering pace since 1947, encouraged by
Allen Dulles, a keen enthusiast for covert operations, who had also
employed his position as Chairman of the Council of Foreign
Relations to seek the help of US foundations with projects such as a
proposed 'beachhead' university for European exiles at Strasbourg.
However, by late 1950, when Dulles exchanged his informal NSC
consultancy role for a senior post within the CIA, he discovered that
operations with youth groups, trade unions and cultural organizations
lacked coherence and were fragmented, being dispersed untidily
across geographically organized sections. In the words of one CIA
official, this area was an 'operational junk heap'. The International
Organizations Division was proposed by Dulles's Special Assistant,
Thomas W. Braden, to superintend all such work. Though
controversial, with Bedell Smith's support the proposal was pushed
through and Braden headed this division until replaced by Cord
Meyer in 1954. The work done by Braden, Dulles and Bedell Smith
as Directors of ACUE went hand-in-hand with their administrative
reorganization of the CIA and the development of controversial new
programmes that would eventually have repercussions inside the
United States as well as in Europe. 17
Braden's International Organizations Division was also involved
in the fourth type of US covert operation - provoking dissonance in
the satellite states. This effort was channelled through the National
Committee for a Free Europe, later known as the Free Europe
Committee, which controlled Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
Much of the work, done with the help of irascible exile groups under
the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), was coordinated
by the CIA's burgeoning Munich station, which also gave aid to
resistance groups within eastern Europe. Lastly, OPC and then the
CIA, created stay-behind or GLADIO networks designed to offer
resistance, and trained displaced persons from eastern Europe as
special forces, against the possibility of a Soviet incursion into
western Europe. This programme was very active in the period
1948—49, when some in the US intelligence community believed that
war might be only six months away. 18 Of these complementary
programmes, the attempt to promote European federalism remains
the least fully explored.

Churchill, Donovan and Dulles

The origins of covert aid to European federalists may be traced back
to Coudenhove-Kalergi. Like other prominent pan-Europeanists of
the interwar period, typically Aristide Briand the French Foreign
Minister, his ideas owed much to disillusionment caused by the First
World War. Exiled to the United States in 1943, in March 1947, on
the eve of the Marshall Plan address, he was successfully lobbying US
Senators J.W Fulbright and E.D. Thomas for congressional support
for the idea of European unity and succeeded in having motions
passed in favour of a 'United States of Europe' in the Senate and in
the House of Representatives. Allen Dulles and William J. Donovan,
who had joined Coudenhove-Kalergi's campaign for American
support in 1947, 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 the William Bullitt, former
ambassador to France, as its vice-chairman. But this committee was
to enjoy little more than a paper existence."19
Also in the summer of 1948 a rival group, the more prestigious
International Executive of the European Movement, closely
associated with Winston Churchill, arrived in New York to urge the
formation of an American committee to support their own efforts for
unification. This mission was led by the president of the European
Movement's international executive, Duncan Sandys, and included
its Secretary-General, Joseph H. Retinger and the head of the
European Movement's finance sub-committee, Major Edward
Berrington-Behrens. 20 To avoid the embarrassment of two American
committees supporting rival groups, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi,
who had revealed himself as a rather prickly and awkward character,
was sidelined amid much bitter recrimination. A new body, the
American Committee on United Europe (ACUE) was formed to
support Churchill and the European Movement. Although Churchill
was now only leader of the opposition in Britain, he remained the
most prestigious of European statesmen. 21
Moreover, Churchill was effectively the founder of the European
Movement. As early as 21 March 1943 he offered his vision of a
United Europe in a broadcast speech:
One can imagine that under a world institution embodying or
representing the United Nations, and some day all nations,
there should come into being a Council of Europe and a
Council of Asia ... We must try to make the Council of Europe
... into a really effective League with all the strongest forces
concerned woven into its texture, with a High Court to adjust
disputes and with forces, armed forces, national or international
or both, held ready to impose these decisions and prevent
renewed aggression and the preparation of future wars. 22
By November 1945, Churchill was speaking of a 'United States of
Europe'. 23 Although personally more enthusiastic about Franco-
German reconciliation than European unity, nevertheless he had been
the central figure at a major congress of federalist groups held at the
Hague in May 1948 which called for a European parliament with
effective powers over political union. Free of governmental
responsibilities, Churchill had more time for such work and there
was no doubt that his group was the more promising candidate for
US support.
The European Movement tried, somewhat uncertainly, to focus and
coordinate the efforts of prounity groups throughout Europe. Though
numerous, their approaches were so diverse that it remains difficult to
gauge the extent of their popular support. It was probably strongest in
France where, by 1949, the Quai d'Orsay, which initially had no
interest in European unity, was forced to pay more it attention 'partly
as a response to growing public demand'. The French Prime Minister,
George Bidault, and senior French officials decided that the idea of a
European Assembly was 'growing in popularity' partly because
federalism seemed to offer a solution to the German problem. By
contrast, federalism enjoyed little popular support in Britain. Although
the ideas of interwar 'British Federal Union', supported by prominent
figures such as Lord Lothian, influenced an entire generation of
Europeans, its membership was small. Meanwhile the new Labour
government remained wary of federalist initiatives.
The European Movement focused its hopes upon the European
Assembly at Strasbourg, which grew out of the Brussels Treaty of 17
March 1948. In late October 1948 the Brussels Treaty powers
decided to establish a Council of Europe, consisting of a Council of
Ministers and an advisory European Assembly which, in practice,
served as an irregular conference of national delegations. This
decision was confirmed at a meeting of foreign ministers in London
where the Statute of the Council of Europe was signed as the Treaty
of Westminster on 5 May 1949. In August 1949 the Assembly of the
Council of Europe held its first session at Strasbourg. 24
The ACUE and its short-lived predecessor were only two of many
'American' and 'Free' committees established during 1948 and 1949.
Well-documented examples include the National Committee for a
Free Europe (later the Free Europe Committee) and the Free Asia
Committee (later the Asia Foundation). The Free Europe Committee,
formed in 1948 by the retired diplomat Joseph E. Grew at Kennan's
request, worked closely with the CIA to maintain contact between
exile groups in the West and the Eastern bloc. Their campaign 'to
keep alive the hope of liberation in Eastern Europe', was launched
publicly in 1949 by the recently retired American military governor
in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay. 25 The initial membership
included many senior government figures such as the former
Assistant Secretary of State, Adolphe Berle, Allen Dulles and ex-OSS
personnel such as Frederic R. Dolbeare. The Free Europe Committee
purported to draw its resources from private subscriptions and
various foundations, but in reality the majority of its funds came from
the US government through channels managed by the CIA. 26 Parallel
committees were simultaneously formed to address Cold War or
reconstruction themes. Donovan had already joined with Berle to
found the Committee for Social and Economic Development in Italy,
to combine aid to the poorer south with a pro-American stance and
support for the government. Meanwhile, Dulles had founded the
American Committee on Germany. Both he and Donovan were
worried by the accelerating European Cold War and as early as 1947
Donovan toured Europe to examine Communist penetration of
labour movements, while Allen Dulles wrote a detailed study in
support of the Marshall Plan. 27
Senior figures from the US intelligence community provided the
leadership of ACUE during its first three years. The chairman was
Donovan who, despite the demise of OSS, was not in retirement, and
continued to work for the CIA as late as 1955. 28 The vice-chairman
was Allen Dulles and day-to-day ACUE administration was controlled
by Thomas W Braden, the executive director, who had also served in
OSS. Braden formally joined the CIA as special assistant to Allen
Dulles in late 1950. Donovan and Allen Dulles were well known for
their work in espionage, which was likely to prompt awkward
questions about the nature of ACUE. Accordingly, in turn, during the
early 1950s, Dulles, Braden and finally Donovan were succeeded by
less well known figures. 29
The structure of the ACUE resembled that of the Free Europe
Committee, with which it shared members. Officially incorporated in
February 1949, the ACUE Board of Directors was drawn from four
main groups: senior figures from government, such as Clay, Bedell
Smith, the Secretary of State for War Robert T. Paterson, and the
Director of the Budget James E. Webb; ECA personnel and other
officials responsible for formulating US policy in Europe, including the
ECA administrator Paul Hoffman, deputy ECA administrators Howard
Bruce and William C. Foster, and the US representative on the North
Atlantic Council Charles M. Spofford; prominent politicians,
financiers and lawyers including Herbert H. Lehman, Charles R. Hook
and Conrad N. Hilton; and AFL-CIO figures already involved in the
politics of labour movements, notably Arthur Goldberg, now chief
counsel for the CIO, who had run the OSS Labour Desk, and the
prominent unionists, David Dubinsky and Jay Lovestone. 30
The ACUE's primary function was to fund unofficial groups
working for unity, many of which originated in, or drew their
members from, wartime resistance groups with whom Donovan and
Dulles had worked previously. Its directors emphasized the recent
achievements of the Organization for European Economic Co-
operation (OEEC), they saw this and future political unity as
providing 'the sinews of real strength' for a NATO organization. By
1950 they claimed (with some hyperbole) that recent proposals for a
European Defence Community were 'at the heart of NATO military
arrangements'. 31 The assumption which underpinned much ACUE
thinking was that unification would resolve the old problems of
European nationalism, reconciling the French and others to the
harnessing of German military power. Donovan, in particular,
favoured the Schuman Plan, a scheme to integrate heavy industry in
France and Germany, for these reasons. 32 Strict criteria were set out
for the receipt of subsidies: programmes had to be 'concrete' and the
groups supported had to believe in a rapid rather than a gradual
approach to western European integration; including support for: (a)
the strengthening of the Council of Europe by gaining greater
political authority, (b) the early realization of the basic aims of the
Marshall Plan, the Mutual Security Act and the North Atlantic
Security Organization. Programmes receiving support also had to
favour the inclusion of Western Germany within a unified Europe
and have the potential to influence a substantial segment of opinion
in Europe. Lastly, their work 'must not be in opposition to the
foreign policy of the United States'. The ACUE's secondary
objectives, entirely overt, included publicizing European unity within
the United States, lobbying Congress on European issues and
sponsoring scholarly research on federalism. This open work allowed
ACUE to maintain a public existence with offices in New York. 33
Despite the existence of this well-organized US apparatus, it was
competing groups of Europeans actively seeking discreet American
support, who set its agenda. The European Movement had told the
ACUE in no uncertain terms that it wanted 'moral support and
money'. In March 1949 Churchill visited New York to discuss final
details with Donovan and Dulles and also to attend the formal launch
of ACUE which took the form of a public lunch in his honour. He
followed this up by writing to ask him on 4 June what short-term
funds ACUE could provide. 34 In practice, control of the money soon
passed to Duncan Sandys, Churchill's son-in-law and president of the
international executive of the European Movement. On 24 June,
Sandys wrote to Donovan confidentially setting out its requirements.
The European Movement, nearly bankrupt, needed £80,000 to
survive the next six months.
Cord Meyer, who joined Braden's International Organizations
Division in 1951, recalls that the
European political and cultural leaders who solicited our aid ...
made it a condition that their be no publicity, since the
Communist propaganda machine could exploit any overt
evidence of official American support as proof that they were
puppets of the American imperialists.
Therefore, while Sandys pleaded for 'a really large contribution from
America', at the same time he was 'very anxious that American
financial support for the European Movement should not be known',
even to the International Council of the Movement, to avoid charges
of 'American intervention'. 35 Sandys and the ACUE feared Soviet
charges of US capitalist imperialism.

Churchill, at once the most prominent advocate of European
unity and the best known transatlantic evangelist, was the vital link
between ACUE and the European Movement. He enjoyed unrivalled
personal contacts with American and European leaders; his
fascination with intelligence and subversion kept him in touch with
practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic; and he shared the view of
Allen Dulles and Donovan that the promotion of European unity
through ACUE was the 'unofficial counterpart' to the Marshall
Plan. 36 In 1949, Churchill also subscribed to the wider objectives of
the various freedom committees in eastern Europe. ACUE and the
European Movement should join hands with the Free Europe
Committee because European unity implied nothing less than the
liberation of eastern Europe. In his speech at the formal launch of
ACUE in New York on 29 March 1949, Churchill stated:
There can be no permanent peace while ten capitals of Eastern
Europe are in the hands of the Soviet Communist Government.
We have our relations with these nations behind the iron
curtain. They send their delegates to our meetings and we know
their feelings and how gladly they would be incorporated in the
new United Europe ... We therefore take in our aim and ideal,
nothing less than the union of Europe as a whole. 37
The delegates to whom Churchill referred were primarily from the
Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), seen in 1949 as
expressing a link between European unity and liberation, however
distant. 38 During conversation in 1949 with William Hayter, the
chairman of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee in London, Kennan
stated that although neither eastern Europe, nor indeed Britain,
might join a federal Europe in the short term, nevertheless, in the
long term Europe could only move towards federalism, or unification
'Phase Two', once an over-extended Soviet Union had withdrawn to
her own borders. 39

Stabilizing the European Movement

Paradoxically, while the scale of ACUE support for activities in
Europe only reached its zenith after 1952, it had its greatest influence
three years earlier. In 1949 and 1950, it saved the European
Movement from financial collapse during the first meetings of the
Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe at Strasbourg.
Despite the substantial financial aid given by the ACUE in 1949,
Braden returned from Europe in early 1950 to report that, once
again, 'the Movement is very low on funds'. The ACUE had
supported conferences held at Brussels in February 1949 and at
Westminster in April 1949 which had laid the foundations for the
Council of Europe, and was paying part of the costs of the European
Movement's secretariat and administration. This strained the ACUE's
resources at a time when it was relying partly on private donations. 40
In 1950 ACUE also helped to resolve awkward leadership
problems in Europe. In the early summer, following talks with leaders
of the European Movement, including Spaak and the Belgian Foreign
Minister Paul van Zeeland, Braden and Donovan concluded, rather
prematurely, that Europe was on the brink of federation. They
believed that if those who were taking the lead received substantial
support immediately, enormous progress would be made during the
next year. At the same time, they perceived a seemingly immovable
obstacle, the growing resistance of the British to a federal Europe.
The British Labour government, while not anti-Europe, preferred
intergovernmental cooperation by independent states and fiercely
resisted any diminution of sovereignty. The British Foreign Secretary,
Ernest Bevin, had played a key role in emasculating the Council of
Europe at Strasbourg. 41
British resistance increased in late 1949 and early 1950 as the
president of the European Movement itself, Duncan Sandys, working
closely with Churchill, sensed that the European Movement was
moving much faster than they, the British Conservative Party, wished.
Although Sandys had previously made speeches with strong federalist
overtones, calling for 'a United States of Europe' at Brussels as early
as November 1945, neither had clearly thought out the implications
for British foreign policy. The Sandys leadership was now
uncomfortable and dragged its feet. The resulting dissonance had
material effects upon the fortunes of the European Movement, for it
was these increasingly open disputes that had dissuaded the Swiss
from providing further funding as early as 1948. By early 1950 the
European Movement, always a somewhat fragmented body, was close
to disintegration, with the influential French-based European Union
of Federalists withdrawing from the international executive of the
European Movement in protest. 42
In June 1950, the ACUE had abruptly refused to continue funding
the discordant European Movement, sending Donovan and Braden
back to Europe on a mission to find out what was going on. 43 Braden
confirmed that the European Movement was torn between its British
and continental leadership: increasingly anti-federalist statements by
the British government had forced the hand of Spaak and the
continental federalists. Spaak confided that he had been reluctant to
pursue rapid continental federalism in the absence of British support
on account of the close relationship between London and
Washington. If the US would back him, however, he would press
ahead without Britain, knowing that 'Britain will be forced sooner or
later and in a greater or lesser degree to come along'. Braden warned
the directors of ACUE unless they backed the continental federalists
then inevitably 'leadership on the continent will go to British Labour'
with dire consequences for unification. Once promised more ACUE
support by Braden in June, Spaak was willing to take over the
leadership of the European Movement. 44
In the event Sandys offered little resistance. During late 1949 and
early 1950 Sandys had struggled with increasing difficulty to find a
compromise formula that would embrace both the reticence of the
British and Scandinavian elements and the federalist position taken by
the likes of Henry Frenay, chairman of the European Union of
Federalists. Matters had reached a clear impasse as early as 16 December
1949 at an ad hoc meeting of the leadership of the European
Movement when two compromise declarations had been discussed at
length but eventually rejected. The Secretary-General of the European
Movement, Joseph Retinger had been suggesting that Sandys resign
since March 1950, but in the months that followed increasing pressure
made this development inevitable. In a letter to Sandys, Retinger put
the case for his departure frankly: 'The various Movements composing
the European Movement are looking with increasing suspicion on your
activities; our American friends do not agree with your tactics.' In July
1950, shortly after the Braden-Donovan mission, Sandys departed and
Spaak's federalist element now took control. 45 Although not overtly
addressed in the correspondence relating to the departure of Sandys,
financial matters had clearly constituted an additional area of
confrontation amongst leading members of the European Movement.
Rebattet's remarkable study suggests that the whole financial structure
under Sandys was 'very unorthodox'. Throughout 1949, strong attacks
were made against Sandys on the nature of some of the expenses
incurred and 'a certain squandering of funds'. In 1950, 'a very bad
financial situation' was bequeathed to Spaak and arguments developed
as to the distribution of new tranches of funding that were beginning
to arrive from the United States. 46 The ACUE now played a significant
role. Under Spaak, with the support of the European Union of
Federalists and finance from ACUE, the international secretariat of the
European Movement was transferred from London and Paris to
Brussels. 47
The reorganization of the European Movement fitted in with the
State Department's unsuccessful bid of October 1949 to install Spaak
as director-general at the helm of the OEEC. In John Gillingham's
words, the 'American choice for "Mr Europe" was ... Paul-Henri
Spaak', but British 'foot-dragging' and hostility prevented his
appointment. 48 Spaak's leadership was expected to transform the
nature of the European Movement. An 'efficient and adequately
staffed secretariat' was set up in Brussels, with experienced national
representatives, including George Rebattet, former secretary of the
French Maquis and Leon Radfoux, Spaak's former Chef de Cabinet.
The primary objective of this new secretariat was to generate a
popular groundswell of support for federalism through the 'initiation
of major propaganda campaigns in all countries' including a united
Europe week, punctuated by speeches from Bidault, Spaak and van
Zeeland. Braden reported that the goals were a free trade area with
a single currency and free movement of labour, and agreement that
recommendations adopted by the consultative assembly of the
Council of Europe at Strasbourg should have to be debated in
national parliaments. 49

ACUE and American Foreign Policy

How closely did the ACUE follow mainstream American policy during
the period 1949-51? Two problems immediately arise: first, while
ACUE records are open to public inspection, the minutes of the
committees that coordinated the overt and covert aspects of American
policy remain closed. 50 Second, although the US administration agreed
that a federal Europe was its goal, it was divided over how much
pressure to apply. Some parts of the Truman administration were closer
to the ACUE than others.
The ACUE followed American policy most closely in its attempts
to tie European unity to the cause of east European exile groups and
with political warfare designed to create unrest within the satellite
states. In May 1950, during the London Tripartite Foreign Ministers
Conference, the United States persuaded Britain and France to give
the exile groups associate membership of the Council of Europe. A
year later the White House endorsed State Department plans to
accelerate these efforts. Outlining their proposals in a special
guidance paper entitled 'The Concept of Europe', they admitted their
concern that the main propaganda effort in the East lacked the
'positive qualities which are necessary to arouse nations'. Several
studies had been made in an attempt to find a positive concept and
the themes of 'European Unity' and 'Return to Europe' might rectify
this problem. Its 'solely European' nature ensured that it could not be
'dismissed as another manoeuvre of "American imperialism"'. Nor
could the Soviets appropriate the European idea in the same manner
as themes such as 'freedom', 'democracy' and 'peace'. As the Council
of Europe had recently adopted a Charter of Human Rights, this
offered a particularly choice instrument with which to highlight the
more unpleasant aspects of Soviet rule. All this, the State Department
hoped, would encourage Eastern bloc populations to stiffen their
resistance to Communist domination - 'retard the Sovietization of
their minds, especially the minds of their youth' - to which the White
House agreed. George M. Elsey, a member of Truman's staff, noted
that this was 'going in the right direction ... a good contribution
toward the goal we were discussing at noon, namely, a subverting of
Iron Curtain countries'. 51
European unity was more divisive, however, when applied to west
Europe. While unification was officially a central component of US
policy - Congress had stipulated it as a condition of further Marshall
Plan aid - senior State Department officials showed, as early as policy
planning staff (PPS) meetings in July 1949, a wish to avoid alienating
an anti-federalist Britain and the Commonwealth with whom the
United States sought to collaborate in other areas of the world.
Kennan was himself sceptical of the value of immediate British
participation in a federal Europe, and was anxious to reassure British
officials, speaking instead of a long period characterized by some
kind of loose 'Atlantic Community'. Kennan added that British
objections to any merger of sovereignty with western Europe 'were
of such strength that they must be accepted', and that Washington
ought not to push her further than she wished to go.
Looking to the long term, however, Kennan was firmly in favour
of a federal Europe that would absorb Britain, drawing his inspiration
for a future Europe from the American federal model. It 'was clear
that eventual union was in his mind' noted one wary British official.
Kennan pointed to the painful economic adjustments which Britain
would have to make, comparable to those which New England
underwent during the expansion of the United States and the
probable need for transfers of population. Notwithstanding these
long-term federalist speculations, Kennan returned from Europe with
a fuller appreciation of the complex problems of the Commonwealth,
of sterling and the reluctance of Britain to submerge her identity in a
federal Europe. 52
ECA officials and indeed Spaak himself constantly urged
Washington to apply greater pressure upon Bevin to change his mind
about an integrated western Europe. On 19 January 1950, Spaak
complained bitterly to Kennan and the Secretary of State, Dean
Acheson, of what he saw as Britain's attempts to obstruct both OEEC
and the Council of Europe. When Kennan, Paul Nitze of the PPS and
Charles Bohlen from the Paris embassy attended a PPS meeting on
western Europe a few days later, Nitze summed up the dilemma:
although Britain's Commonwealth ties and her fears over sovereignty
inclined her against federalism, would a continental federation be
strong enough without Britain? The PPS agreed that Bevin had been
'back-sliding' over commitments to OEEC and that this now required
action, but there was no agreement on the merger of sovereignty or
on Germany. Bohlen, representing American officials based in Paris,
including ECA, complained that the United States was reluctant to
apply real pressure in London, as they habitually did in Paris, because
of the close wartime relationship: the Empire-Commonwealth should
be broken up, he argued, allowing Britain to merge with a federal
Europe. Kennan replied that the Commonwealth was valuable; in
any case, he could not envisage Britain and Germany working
together in the short term. The United States should do no more than
try gently to persuade Britain to move towards Europe.53
Thus, in the autumn of 1950, when Donovan, too, attempted to
persuade Acheson to push Britain into joining the Schuman Plan,
Acheson only agreed to 'appropriately urge' Britain down the
federalist road: 'the British themselves must be the judge of whether
a step as far as genuine federation with Western Europe would be
consistent with their Commonwealth commitments and in the best
interests of their people'. Acheson viewed overt pressure for
federalism as counterproductive, a view that not only reflected PPS
discussions during 1949 and 1950, but also prefigured the problems
encountered in 1953 when the United States lobbied hard for the
proposed European Defence Community. 54
Acheson's approach dismayed US officials in Europe who had the
task of carrying out the agreements on European economic
cooperation. The ambassador in Paris, David K. Bruce; the special
ECA representative, Averell Harriman; the ECA's counsel, Samuel
Katz; and the ambassador in London, Lewis Douglas, all agreed that
Britain was their 'big problem'. Harriman was the most vociferous,
and meeting with Bruce and John J. McCloy, the US High
Commissioner in Germany in January 1950, he explained that he had
enough of Bevin and of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir
Stafford Cripps, whom he found 'petulant and arrogant'. 'Harriman
was extremely perturbed.' He explained that hitherto he 'had been
firm believer in U.S. attitude of persuasion against coercion'. But now
he 'felt the US should no longer tolerate interference and sabotage of
Western European integration by the United Kingdom ... the
Marshall Plan is breaking down because of British opposition'. He
added a warning that if British Labour won the forthcoming election
of 1950, as seemed likely, they would 'be even more cocky'. 'The U.S
would not stand for this much longer.' At a meeting in March 1950,
senior American officials in Europe called for a study of the degree
and timing of pressure to be brought to bear on Britain. Nevertheless,
Douglas, despite his sceptical view of Labour's programme of social
expenditure, warned against acting during the forthcoming British
election, noting that Labour might derive advantage from posing as a
defender of the Commonwealth against American pressure. 55

Accordingly, ACUE appears not to have challenged the State
Department policy of avoiding open pressure on Britain or indeed on
other countries in support of federalism. Nevertheless, Donovan and
Braden shared the enthusiasm of the ECA for the ideas of Spaak and
rapid federalism, and they decided to work with it more closely. A
good example is their 'crisis mission' to Europe in June 1950.
Frustrated by Acheson, Donovan met the leadership of ECA in Paris,
including Harriman and Katz. Personal connections were important
here, as Katz had previously served as a senior officer in the Secret
Intelligence branch of OSS, overseeing operations in wartime
Europe. Meanwhile David Bruce, the OSS chief of station in wartime
London, had been head of ECA in Paris before becoming
ambassador. 56 Nor were these the only ex-OSS officials involved in
the promotion of a federalist solution in postwar Europe. They were
following in the footsteps of Charles P. Kindleberger and Walt W.
Rostow, two OSS economists who, in 1946, had persuaded James
Byrnes and Jean Monnet to launch the ill-fated idea of a UN-backed
Economic Commission for Europe. 57 The ECA, delighted to learn of
Spaak's forthcoming leadership of the European Movement, offered
its own discreet assistance to the European Movement, which had
been 'previously withheld because of concern over the leadership'. 58
The Braden-Donovan mission of June 1950 also helped to
confirm the ACUE's view of Britain's Labour Party as the biggest
barrier to rapid European federalism in Europe. 59 This analysis was
confirmed by the remarkable attack the British delegation launched
upon the French federalists at Strasbourg in the summer of 1950. 60
ACUE were not mere passive observers of British antifederalism and
sought to support federalist dissenters within the British Labour
Party, such as the Member of Parliament for Hull North-West, R.W.
Mackay, who devised a compromise route to federalism, which
became known as the 'Mackay Plan'. These activities were resented
by the Labour leadership. 61 From January 1950, much of Mackay's
activity was dependent on ACUE funding. However, in 1951, the
British and Scandinavians vetoed the presentation of the Mackay Plan
to the full Assembly. 62
After a year of ACUE activities, the British Foreign Office seem to
have been aware only of its overt publicity campaign in the USA,
which had caused some irritation in London. In early February 1950,
Joseph Retinger, Secretary-General of the European Movement,
wrote to Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer,
asking if Attlee and Bevin would state publicly their support for
European unification. Donovan desired these statements from all
European leaders, intending to publish them together as part of efforts
to persuade Congress to continue Marshall Plan aid. The Foreign
Office concluded that, as most of the statesmen of western Europe had
complied, Bevin would have to say something. But Bevin's message of
support was so equivocal that ACUE asked the Foreign Office whether
there had been some mistake, only to be told that Bevin had
personally insisted upon the insertion of the more offensive
sentences.63 ACUE were further disappointed when Churchill and
Eden, returning to power in 1951, increasingly set their face against
federalist ideas. Accordingly, by November 1951, both Spaak in
Europe and ACUE in the United States, increasingly despaired of the
elite route to federalism and turned to mass agitation. 64

ACUE in the United States

It is possible to detect this increasing emphasis upon publicity and
propaganda as early as 1950, particularly in the overt work that
ACUE conducted within the United States from its offices at 537
Fifth Avenue, New York. ACUE tried to persuade elite opinion to
support European federalism. To this end it organized and paid for a
stream of visits and lecture tours by prominent European figures,
including Churchill, Spaak and Paul van Zeeland. Robert Schuman,
Paul Reynaud, Konrad Adenauer and Guy Mollet followed in their
wake. 65 Spaak's visit during January and February 1951 attracted a
great deal of press and radio attention and during his six-week tour
he addressed audiences in 13 cities including New York, Palm Beach,
Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. There was rarely a moment
when ACUE did not have a major speaker in circulation around the
United States and increasingly it was to ACUE that student groups,
colleges, radio and television in the United States turned to for
speakers on European issues. 66 Steps were also taken to ensure that
the AFL-CIO actively supported European unification, particularly
the Schuman Plan, and US observers were continually despatched to
the Council of Europe. 67
Congress received considerable attention during the crucial first
hearings on the new Marshall Plan appropriations of February and
March 1950. Donovan testified before the House of Representatives'
Foreign Affairs Committee on the Marshall Plan in his capacity as
chairman of the ACUE and Congress were continually bombarded
with federalist literature. More importantly, Donovan in New York
and Spaak in Brussels held simultaneous press conferences in which
they released the text of prounity statements carefully gathered by
Retinger from 50 prominent European statesmen, effectively dispelling
lingering doubts about European commitment to progress and
creating a very favourable atmosphere for the renewal of Marshall
Aid by the legislature. In June of the same year the French embassy
in Washington thanked Donovan for organizing an open message to
Prime Minister Schuman in favour of the Schuman Plan signed by
'118 American big names', including former secretaries of state
Marshall and Stimson, and released at a press conference in New
York by Allen Dulles. By 1951 the ACUE had produced 17 publications
and was publishing a regular fortnightly newsletter for circulation in
the USA. It also distributed material produced in Europe, including
the international bulletin of the European Movement, Europe Today
and Tommorow.68 Thereafter, in response to critics of assistance to
Europe, the ACUE shifted their American focus away from elites
towards a wider audience, arranging for radio broadcasts by
Donovan and for his articles to be published in Atlantic Monthly and
the San Francisco Chronicle. In April 1952, ACUE took out a full-
page advert in the New York Times entitled 'The Survival of Europe'
advocating European union. 69
ACUE also commissioned American academics to undertake
research projects into the problems of federalism. As early as 1950,
Braden was trying to organize a major study of the most effective
routes to unity, co-funded by ACUE and the Economic League for
European Co-operation, to be undertaken by a team led by Richard
Bissell Jr. of the ECA. Perhaps the most interesting ACUE project was
launched at Harvard University in 1952. 70 This project was managed
by the leading European historian and propaganda expert, Carl
Friedrich, who was himself deeply committed the federalist cause.
For Friedrich, European unity was not only valuable in itself, but was
a stepping-stone to world federalism, ideas that he developed in work
published during the 1950s and 1960s. 71 In 1952, the ACUE
commissioned Friedrich to undertake a major comparative study of
the constitutional problems of federalism in Australia, Canada,
Germany, Switzerland and the United States. The study, including
seven volumes of accompanying documents, was widely disseminated
and, by 1953, despite acrimony about the spiralling costs, continued
work on this project was accompanied by work on a French edition.
By 1956 an Italian edition was also in preparation. 72
Friedrich's work is also noteworthy because it illustrates the
complex links between ACUE and the Free Europe Committee.
Throughout the 1950s, Friedrich also worked for the Free Europe
Committee as a consultant on the Soviet zone of Germany. In 1951,
he urged a forward policy upon Allen Dulles and upon the President
of Radio Free Europe, CD. Jackson, describing Berlin as a base from
which the United States could support and expand a resistance
network which he claimed was already 'effectively harassing the
Soviet authorities and their German Communist stooges'. 73 Although
Dulles and Jackson agreed, other US officials in Germany harboured
growing doubts about the value of this sort of work. 74
American academics played an important part in expanding the
activities of ACUE. In 1950 a cultural section of ACUE was launched,
directed by two American historians who had served in OSS, the
president of Bennington College Frederick H. Burkhardt and William
L. Langer of Harvard University. The grants they distributed helped
to establish the European Cultural Centre in Geneva and assisted the
Inter-University Union of Federalists. 75 ACUE also took an interest in
the College of Europe at Bruges, designed to provide a training for
future European officials. One of the attractions of the college was its
leadership who had played an active part in the wartime resistance.
One of its principals, Dr H. Brugman, was an important influence
upon the federalist ideas circulating within the European resistance
movements, as expressed in clandestine newspapers such as the
Dutch Het Parool and the French Combat and Resistance. 76 In June
1951, ACUE offered scholarships for American students to attend the
college. 77 American cultural leaders and academics, they asserted,
could offer a federalizing Europe the benefit of 'our experience -
good and bad - in the fields of mass communication and intercultural
assimilation'. 78

The Search for Popular Federalism

The ACUE's work in continental Europe during the early 1950s also
focused increasingly upon propaganda and mass action. During the
upheaval while the European Movement was being reorganized in
1950, they turned to the European Movement's member organizations
to promote federalism; in practice this meant the French-dominated
European Union of Federalists, which Donovan considered to be the
more effective group. The French proposed to stir Strasbourg into
action by launching a grassroots populist movement, the European
Council of Vigilance, under the wartime French resistance leader
Henri Frenay, which would meet in a building adjacent to the
Council of Europe, and shower it with local petitions supporting
federalism. ACUE gave the Council of Vigilance an initial grant of
$42,000. 79
By the spring of 1951, with Spaak's new leadership, the European
Movement as a whole was again an effective organization. ACUE,
Spaak and Frenay threw themselves into the attempt to generate mass
support for federalism. In the short term they hoped to create support
for the Schuman Plan, for more authority for the Council of Europe
and for the idea of a European army, later the EDC. After 'extensive
talks' between Donovan and Eisenhower in the spring of 1951, ACUE
placed increasing emphasis upon integrating Germany into western
Europe, to quieten fears over rearmament and US worries about a
German drift towards neutrality. Although Donovan knew that a
federal Europe was not 'immediately imminent', he concluded that 'a
pattern of specialized authorities will create the unified military force
and free economic trade area in Europe that are necessary if Europe is
to obtain maximum strength and assure the success of General
Eisenhower's mission'. As examples, Donovan pointed to proposals
for a European Transport Authority and a European Agricultural
Organization, modelled on the Schuman Plan. 80
The joint conviction of Spaak and Donovan that European unity
could best be driven forward by a mass propaganda campaign
coincided neatly with deep American concerns about the success of
Eastern bloc propaganda efforts in the area of youth movements and
international organizations generally. In the summer of 1951, a
growing crescendo of organized Communist youth activity was
highlighted by a gigantic youth rally organized by the 'Freie Deutche
Jugend' and attended by about 2,000,000 youth representatives from
all over the world. This single rally was estimated to have cost the
Soviets over £20,000,000. British intelligence obtained film of the
rally and its scale alarmed senior Western policymakers, including
John J. McCloy, the American High Commissioner for Germany.
McCloy, already heavily involved in American psychological and
covert warfare, immediately recognized the importance of this
development and decided that counteraction was imperative.
Shepard Stone, a member of his staff, contacted Joseph Retinger, the
Secretary-General of the European Movement and asked if they
would be willing to organize a similar demonstration in western
Europe. Considerable additional funds would be provided by the
American government and funnelled through the ACUE, provided
they were used specifically for youth work. Retinger accepted and,
together with Spaak and Andre Phillip, he formed a three-man special
committee to map out the profile of the European youth campaign. 81
Accordingly, in 1951, the majority of ACUE funds for Europe were
employed on a new venture - a unity campaign amongst European
youth. Between 1951 and 1956 the European Movement organized
over 2,000 rallies and festivals on the continent, particularly in
Germany where they received the help of the US army. One of the
additional advantages of deploying American funds on the large youth
programmes was that it helped to disguise the extent to which the
European Movement was dependent upon American funds. In May
1952 Spaak decided that funds from American sources that had
previously been used in the ordinary budget of the European
Movement would now be diverted for use in the 'Special Budgets' used
to support their growing range of new programmes. This disguised
their source and avoided any accusations of American dependency.
Again, in November 1953, Baron Boel, the treasurer of the European
Movement, explained that it was essential to avoid a situation where
opponents of European unity could accuse them of being an American
creation. For this reason 'American money, quite acceptable for the
European Youth Campaign and certain restricted activities, could not
be used for the normal running of the Movement'. Through the use of
'Special Budgets', the large sums from American sources did not show
up in the ordinary budget of the European Movement. 82
By the end of 1951, an International Youth Secretariat had been
established in Paris, with smaller offices throughout western Europe
and a campaign youth newspaper in five languages. In 1952,
representatives were elected to a European Parliament of Youth who
were to help the European Movement 'to inform the masses of
European youth of their obligations to themselves and the free
world'. By the end of 1953, the campaign was costing ACUE
$200,000 a year." Although it is difficult to identify the extent to
which these activities had an impact on mass opinion, senior
Europeans, eager for more funds, attributed their successes to the
mass campaign. Monnet's letter to Donovan in October 1952 was
typical, asserting: 'Your continued support, now more crucial then
ever, will help us greatly toward the full realisation of our plans.' 84
During 1953 and 1954, ACUE strengthened its ties with US
government. Allen Dulles replaced Walter Bedell Smith as director of
the CIA and the State Department concluded that open attempts at
propelling European states into the EDC during 1953-54 had
backfired badly, being seen as 'undue US intervention' and arousing
'more public antagonism than support'. The wisdom of less direct
methods seemed to be confirmed. 85 The biggest problem now facing
ACUE was the German question, and the most interesting example of
this was the attempt to associate Strasbourg with the efforts of the
Free Europe Committee and ACEN. As early as 1953, German and
east European groups were making conflicting irredentist claims
against each others territory. ACEN and Radio Free Europe, not only
anti-Soviet but also anti-German, published documents and maps
that revealed ambitions against the territory of postwar Germany and
areas inhabited by Germans. The German government repeatedly
pressed the US High Commission 'to stop the dissemination of such
anti-German Propaganda'. 86 These tensions threatened to disrupt
relations between ACEN and the various west European delegations
at Strasbourg. Efforts to improve coordination between Strasbourg
and the Free Europe Committee led, in early 1957, to an extensive
study of Radio Free Europe's activities by the special political
committee of the Council of Europe. After a three-day visit to its
Munich headquarters, they concluded that Radio Free Europe was
'performing an extremely useful political task' and recommended
greater European participation in what was still a largely American-
managed programme. In 1959, the Free Europe Committee
responded by forming a west European advisory group and by
encouraging leaders of Eastern bloc exile groups to join in discussions
on European integration. 87
Two further developments characterized ACUE strategy in the
mid-1950s. Firstly, there was revived interest in elite politics, focused
upon Jean Monnet's Action Committee for a United States of
Europe. 88 Monnet stressed small meeting and serious publications
'rather than large manifestations and polemics'. Monnet's strategy
was not entirely welcomed by ACUE, who complained that he had
'concentrated deliberately on labour and socialist elements' at the
expense of the participation of French industrialists and the right. 89
Although Monnet's activities are specifically identified in ACUE
reports on supported programmes, the documentation linking
Monnet and ACUE is limited. This is not surprising since Monnet
was even more cautious than the European Movement concerning
the potential political damage that might be caused by revelations
about American funding. The only precisely quantifiable American
funds passed to Monnet during this period came through the Ford
Foundation to support his immediate secretariat.' 0
The case of Monnet and the Ford Foundation usefully highlights
the extreme difficulties that confront any historian attempting to
disentangle covert American government funding from the overt
funding provided by those American private organizations and public
foundations which worked closely with the US government. As early
as 1949, at the behest of Allen Dulles, the Ford Foundation was
cooperating with the CIA on a number of European programmes. 91
By 1950, the ACUE and the Ford Foundation were coordinating their
efforts to support federalism.' 2 Moreover, by the mid-1950s, the
senior figures who directed both overt and covert American support
were increasingly synonymous. By 1953 both John J. McCloy and
Shepard Stone, who had been instrumental in arranging for
substantial covert government funds for the European Youth
Campaign, were both on the board of trustees of the Ford
Foundation. McCloy was also a director of the Rockefeller
Foundation. By 1955, McCloy had become chairman of the Ford
Foundation, while serving as chairman of the Council on Foreign
Relations. Simultaneously, the same circle, including Retinger,
McCloy, Allen Dulles, Harriman, David Rockefeller, Jackson and
Bedell Smith were busy creating the Bilderberg Group, yet another
organization that bridged the narrowing gaps between government,
private and public organizations and between overt and covert on
both sides of the Atlantic." Monnet's Action Committee and the
European Youth Campaign seem to have been flagship European
activities receiving support from these overlapping American groups
and organizations in the mid-1950s.
The second development was increased ACUE attention to
NATO, which was developing its own programme of political
warfare, and to Atlanticist ideas.' 4 In contrast to the early 1950s,
when ACUE had refused to work with the Atlantic Union, by the end
of the decade ACUE were increasingly cooperating with Atlanticist
groups that conceived of European unity in a NATO framework.
ACUE supported youth programmes such as the Atlantic Political
Youth Conferences between 1957 and 1960 and declared that it 'had
long felt that European Unity and Atlantic solidarity are mutually
supporting objectives'.' 5 Although, like the American Committee on
NATO, by 1959 a greater proportion of its activities were conducted
within the USA, nevertheless ACUE was still trying to encourage a
stronger British interest in Europe and commissioned a study by the
Economist intelligence unit of economic relations between Britain
and Europe, hoping to persuade British industrialists to take a more
'realistic' view.' 6 The Economist staff included a number of figures
who were prominent in European organizations, for example its
deputy editor, Barbara Ward.
In May 1960 the ACUE voted itself out of existence. Its directors
argued that, while European unity was an 'unfinished business',
continued ACUE activity could only be justified by a 'serious reversal
of present trends' towards integration. Moreover, with the recovery
of European economies, European federalists were able to find their
own funds. Thus, during the spring of 1960 the ACUE was gradually
wound down, as the executive director administered the last eight
European grants, totalling $105,000. With many African states
sweeping towards independence, the ACUE toyed briefly with a
Europe-Africa programme designed to tie the two continents
together, but residual ACUE funds were transferred to the American
Committee on NATO. It then deactivated rather than dissolved itself
at the request of Monnet and Schuman, who wished to ensure its
'coming back into the picture if and when necessary'. 97

The Impact of ACUE

Although ACUE's records are open to public inspection, the precise
nature of its work and the source of all its funds remains somewhat
obscure. For some unknown reason the resources available to ACUE
effectively tripled from the end of 1951. Over their first three years
of operations, 1949-51, ACUE received $384,650, the majority
being dispersed to Europe. This was a large sum, but from 1952 the
ACUE began to spend such a sum annually. The total budget for the
period 1949-60 amounted to between $3 and $4 million.' 8 As the
amount of money flowing across the Atlantic began to increase, the
ACUE opened a local Paris office to monitor closely groups that had
received grants. By 1956 the flood of increased funding was
prompting fears amongst the directors of the ACUE that their work
would be made public, arousing criticism of the European groups
they supported. Although their European representative, William
Fuggit, explained that ACUE was 'able to avoid embarrassing our
friends by staying in the background', he conceded that the danger of
discovery 'was real'."
Although the record of ACUE expenditure reveals nothing about
the source of income, the available evidence points firmly to growing
US government subventions. As the historians Trevor Barnes and
Wilson D. Miscamble have shown, in 1948 the US government
attempted to run these sorts of projects on the basis of private
donations only, but this was soon abandoned. 100 As late as 1951,
ACUE were still soliciting some donations from private American
citizens, but, thereafter, ACUE ceased to employ a professional
fundraiser. 101 This shift coincides with McCloy's intervention,
funnelled via ACUE, to boost campaigns amongst European youth
and a tripling of resources available to ACUE. Braden, in an interview
given in the 1980s, asserted that ACUE funds originated with the CIA
and in memoirs published after his death, Retinger, the Secretary-
General of the European Movement, recounted the receipt of
American government funds and dwelt on periodic accusations that
he was working for American intelligence. But it is the remarkable
work of Rebattet, with unparalleled access to European Movement
documentation, that confirms that most ACUE funds originated with
the CIA. Drawing on interviews with George Rabattet, Secretary-
General of the European Movement, and the European Representative
of ACUE, EX. Rabattet concluded:
There were no less than four members of the Central
Intelligence Agency among the Officers and Directors of ACUE
... The vast majority of the American funds devoted to the
campaign for European unity, and practically all the money
received for the European Youth Campaign came from State
Department secret funds. This was of course kept very secret.
ACUE thus played the part of a legal covering organisation.
Donations from business made up a maximum of one sixth of
the total sums during the period under study.
Rebattet demonstrates that by 1952 these American funds were being
hidden by the procedure of keeping most of them out of the ordinary
budget of the European Movement. Instead American funds were
used for innumerable special projects including the European Youth
Campaign, the Action Committee and the budgets of the National
Councils of the European Movements. 102
Not all the ACUE's funds came from the CIA; it attracted
substantial private donations. Equally, not all covert American
assistance to European federalist groups was distributed by the
ACUE. For example, in Italy a senior official of the Vatican, Luigi
Gedda, created an organization of Catholic activists which helped to
defeat of the Communists in the elections of 1948. Gedda was
supported by US officials in the US embassy in Rome and in the CIA,
and the support increased when he began to promote the idea of
'Western Union', explaining that the Pope had now agreed that 'the
Church should carry the banner for a federation of western European
states'. After the US embassy in Rome concluded that Gedda needed
about $500,000, US officials debated whether the funding should be
channelled through the Marshall Plan (ERP) publicity fund or the
CIA. 103 Mutual Security Agency funds were also used to support the
European Movement, indeed the Mutual Security Act of 1951
explicitly stated that its resources were to be used 'to further encourage
the economic and political federation of Europe'. 104 Use was certainly
made of counterpart funds - European currencies transferred from
Marshall Plan governments to the American government to cover
American administrative costs in Europe - for political purposes. 105
It is difficult to measure the proportion the numerous American
publicity and propaganda budgets, both overt and covert, that was
spent on promoting European unity over this period. 106 Nevertheless,
in the specific case of ACUE, a rough measurement can be made by
comparing its total budget of $3-$4 million with those of
contemporaneous programmes mounted by the CIA. The ACUE
clearly cost less than was spent to ensure the defeat of the
Communists in the Italian elections of 1948, probably the CIA's
biggest operation in this period and thought by Christopher Simpson
to have cost approximately $10 million. 107 At the same time, the
ACUE spent more than the $3 million spent by the CIA during the
Chilean elections of 1964, and more than the sum of $ 3.3 million
channelled to the American National Student Association between
1952 and 1967. That spending on ACUE was broadly typical of an
important OPC/CIA covert operation in this period is confirmed by
Geoffrey Treverton, who suggested that, under Truman, 81 covert
actions were authorized, and that the total sum authorized grew
dramatically from $4.7 million in 1949 to $82 million in 1952.
ACUE resources also grew dramatically over this same period. 108
Nor is it easy to cast up a balanced assessment of what ACUE's
covert operations in Europe achieved between 1949 and 1960.
Clearly, appropriate funding was not available within western Europe
for sorts of initiatives that the European Movement wished to
pursue. Indeed much of the scarce funds available prior to American
involvement came not from western Europe, but from Swiss
industrialists, notably the firm of Nestle's. 109 There can be no doubt
that, between 1949 and 1951, ACUE funds propped up the executive
of the European Movement, which seemed terminally split and was
approaching bankruptcy. One-third of the European Movement's
office staff had been laid off, the publication programme had been
halted and bills were not being paid. As the ACUE noted ruefully in
late 1949 'Sandys urgently requests more money from us by the end
of January'. 110 Once the core of European Movement had been
stabilized, its expensive public campaigns of the 1950s relied almost
entirely on ACUE funds. When a French delegate from the European
Union of Federalists arrived in New York in 1950 to deliver a
presentation to ACUE on its plans for the European Council of
Vigilance, he conceded that 'it is simply impossible for us to carry out
the enterprise without your help'." 1 Federalists had outlined the mass
European Youth Campaign on paper as early as 1947, but the means
were not at hand and the project had been 'indefinitely postponed'. 112
That European Movement was itself federal, consisting of many
national and international groups, together with the creation of
special budgets to render the American contribution opaque, makes
it awkward to quantify the proportion of its funds arriving from
Europe and the United States respectively. Rebattet's figures for the
period 1945-53, based on complete access to European Movement
financial records, suggest that, of the approximately £1,000,000
spent from 1945 to the beginning of 1953, 'about £440,000' (44 per
cent) came from the United States. If we discount European funds
received prior to that start of American financial involvement in late
1948 (about £100,000), it appears that ACUE provided almost
exactly half the European Movement funds from late 1948 through
to early 1953. It is clear from ACUE financial records that 1949-52
was a period of modest contributions and thereafter these more than
doubled. There are no precise figures for European Movement
budgets between 1953 and 1960, but it would be surprising if ACUE
subventions did not constitute two-thirds of European Movement
funds during this latter period. 113
The impact of ACUE upon the European Movement is
undeniable. But the impact of ACUE-supported activities upon
European populations is hard to determine, partly because the
existence of popular European federalism in postwar Europe has
itself become a controversial question. Although the work of the
various federalist organizations, which coalesced under the umbrella
of the European Movement by 1947, is massively documented by
Walter Lipgens, they had almost no influence on the negotiations that
led to the Schuman Plan or to any other landmark event in the
process of unification.114 Spaak, Count Sforza, the Italian Foreign
Minister, and other European leaders who advocated popularism
expected this to create indirect pressure upon officials and ministers,
but overestimated the influence of public opinion. Outside France,
Europeans were not roused to enthusiasm by the federalist cause.

Even the European Youth Campaign, which had held 2,000 youth
meetings across Europe by 1956, was dependent upon the
participation of organized European youth, through the affiliation of
their leadership. Their well-attended meetings may offer little more
evidence of popular sentiment than contemporaneous rallies of
'democratic' youth held in eastern Europe, which they were expressly
designed to counter. 115
All this activity did create enough semblance of public pressure,
however, to bother federalism's most implacable opponents. As early
as April 1950, Labour Party leaders complained of 'a lot of pressure
from European and US public opinion'. At the same time, seemingly
convinced that popular sentiment had no place in the making of
foreign policy, they were adamantly ignoring it. In November 1950,
the British Labour Party delegation returned from Strasbourg and
reported with satisfaction that the federalists had been defeated, 'and
their attempts to upset the Assembly's work through Committees of
Vigilance, proved a lamentable failure'. 116
The faith of ACUE in the role of public pressure is not difficult to
understand, given the more populist traditions of American foreign
policymaking. ACUE's misplaced confidence in the ease with which
Europe could be propelled down the road to federalism mirrors the
expectations of US officials within ERP and ECA, who would find
European institutions and society less permeable to American ideas
and practices than they had hoped. 117 But the firm faith in the role of
populism expressed by Spaak, Sforza and periodically Monnet is
harder to explain. Monnet's extraordinary claim in 1952 that the
European Coal and Steel Community was a sovereign power, responsible
not to the states that had created it, but only to the European
Assembly at Strasbourg and to the European Court of Justice is but
one example. 118 The idea that a few million dollars of covert US funds
might release a wave of irresistible mass pressure for federalism in
Europe was misconceived and, with hindsight, ludicrous. That a
number of prominent figures on both sides of the Atlantic believed it
to be possible is significant in itself.
Viewed from Europe, the most striking aspect of the ACUE's work
is the extent to which officials working for European reconstruction
and unification shared the experience of wartime intelligence, special
operations and resistance. European unity had taken root in wartime
resistance movements. 119 These links with clandestine organizations
continue into the postwar period. The emerging European
Community and the growing Western intelligence community
overlapped to a considerable degree. This is firmly underlined by the
creation of Retinger's Bilderberg Group, an informal secretive
transatlantic council of key decisionmakers developed between 1952
and 1954. The Bilderberg Group grew out of the same overlapping
networks of drawn from the European Community and the Western
intelligence community. Bilderberg was founded by Joseph Retinger
and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952 in response to the
rise of anti-Americanism in western Europe and was designed to
define some sort of Atlantic consensus amid diverging European and
American outlooks. It brought leading European and American
personalities together once a year for an informal discussion of their
differences. Retinger secured support from Averell Harriman, David
Rockefeller and Bedell Smith. The formation of the American wing
of Bilderberg was entrusted to Eisenhower's psychological warfare
coordinator, C D . Jackson, and the funding for the first meeting, held
at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland in 1954, was provided by the
CIA. Thereafter, much of its funding came from the Ford
Foundation. By 1958, those attending Bilderberg included McCloy,
Dean Acheson, George Ball and Paul Nitze. It is striking that three
important transnational elite groups emerging in the 1950s: the
European Movement, the Bilderberg Group and Jean Monnet's
Action Committee for a United States of Europe all shared the
broadly the same origins and sources of support. 120
Although Bilderberg and ACUE-European Movement shared
broadly the same founders, members and objectives, arguably
Bilderberg constituted the more effective mechanism of transatlantic
dialogue, developing into what some have regarded as the most
significant discreet forum for Western elites. Unlike ACUE-European
Movement, it was not constrained by subject, nor was it divided into
separate European and American bodies, linked by the activities of
scurrying envoys. The subjects over which the annual meetings
ranged were too wide, even in the formal sessions, to permit detailed
analysis here, but it is clear that the Rome Treaty was nurtured by
discussions at Bilderberg in the preceding year. In the mid-1950s the
European delegates were most concerned to use Bilderberg to
underline the damage being done to the standing of the United States
by McCarthyism in general and the Rosenberg trial in particular. In
1954, C D . Jackson went out of his way to assure the European
delegates that McCarthy would be gone by the time of the next
meeting - and he was. In the 1960s the focus shifted to the Third
World and development issues. The value of Bilderberg is impossible
to assess, but there has been consistent top-level attendance,
including every British Prime Minister over three decades. This,
together with its eventual development in the 1970s into the
Trilateral Commission with the incorporation of Japan, suggests that
the participants have considered it worthwhile. 121
Seen from the United States, ACUE's history reveals the style of
early covert action, not least the reliance on private organizations,
albeit coordinated by a close circle of officials. Allen Dulles, Braden
and Bedell Smith all played a prominent role in ACUE before moving
to formal positions within the CIA in the early 1950s. The precise
nature of the linkage between groups like ACUE and the CIA will not
be known until the full records of the CIA's International
Organizations Division is released, and that may not be for some
considerable time.122 Nevertheless, the work of Allen Dulles and
Braden with ACUE and the Free Europe Committee clearly
prompted them to set up the International Organizations Division in
1951. From the point of view of the development of CIA doctrine
and structure this was an important moment.
The most interesting links between ACUE and International
Organizations Division relate not to the work they conducted in
Europe, but instead to their work conducted by ACUE inside the
United States which, though limited, may well have been illegal. It
was the International Organizations Division that continued this
domestic theme in the work of the CIA through the 1950s, typified
by the funding of the American National Student Association from
1952. This controversial penchant for international operations which
took place in the United States as well as overseas would have long-
term significance for the American intelligence community. It was,
above all, revelations in 1967 about these activities inside the United
States that initiated the wave of enquiries and restrictions that would
descend upon the CIA by the mid-1970s. Eventually, the reverberations
of ACUE, International Organizations Division and the associated concepts they developed were felt as strongly in Washington as they were in Europe. 123

University of Nottingham


NOTES
The author would like to acknowledge the support of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Fulbright Commission in conducting research for this article. Thanks are due to several individuals who kindly commented on earlier drafts including: Mark Deavin, Edward Ingram, Rhodri Jeffreys- Jones, W. Scott Lucas, Geoffrey Warner and John W Young. Errors remain the responsibility of the author.


1. On intelligence and the Cold War see John L. Gaddis, 'Intelligence, Espionage and Cold War Origins', Diplomatic History, xiii (1989), pp.191-213; Sheila Kerr,
'NATO's First Spies: The Case of the Disappearing Diplomats - Guy Burgess and
Donald Maclean', in Beatrice Heuser and Robert O'Neill (eds.), Securing the Peace in Europe, 194S-62 (London, 1991), pp.118-24; Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, 1992), pp. 183-92; Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London, 1992), pp.1-17.

2. John Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945-1955: The Germans and French from the Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community (Cambridge, 1992), pp.148-78; Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-51 (Berkeley, 1984), pp.56-84; Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (Edinburgh, 1991), pp.34-58; Geoffrey Warner, 'Eisenhower, Dulles and the Unity of Western Europe, 1955-1957', International Affairs, lxix (1993), p.320.

3. OSS-CIA efforts to promote European unification have not received sustained
analysis. Nevertheless, brief references have continued to surface over the years: Trevor Barnes, 'The Secret Cold War: The CIA and American Foreign Policy in Europe, 1945-1956, Part II', The Historical Journal, XXV (1982), pp.666-7; Robert Eringer, The Global Manipulators : The Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, Covert Power Groups of the West (Bristol, 1980), pp.19-20; Richard Fletcher, Who Were They Travelling With? (Nottingham, 1977), p.71; Pierre Melandri, Les Etats XJnis face a I'unification de I'Europe, 1945-54 (Paris, 1980), pp.320, 354-5; Peter Thompson, 'Bilderberg and the West', in Holly Sklar (ed.), Trilateralism, The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Boston, 1980), p.184; Arnold Zurcher, The Struggle to Unite Europe, 1940-58 (New York, 1977), p.71.

4. For a discussion of the European and particularly the British aspects of this issue see, Richard J. Aldrich, 'European Integration: An American Intelligence Connection', in Anne Deighton (ed.), Building European Unity: National Decision-Makers and European Institutions, 1948-63 (London, 1995), pp.159-79.

5. F.X. Rebattet, 'The "European Movement" 1945-53: A Study in National and
International Non-Governmental Organisations working for European Unity'
(D.Phil., St Antony's, Oxford, 1962). F.X. Rebattet was the son of George Rebattet, Deputy Secretary General of the European Movement, 1948-52 and Secretary-General, 1952-5.

6. The independent-minded efforts of the AFL-CIO are the most obvious example,
Irwin M. Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954
(Cambridge, 1991), pp.99-104, 151-3, 211-15; Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall
Plan, pp.99-100, 119, 145; Frederico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944-51 (Chapel Hill, 1993), pp.12-17, 88-95.

7. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York, 1990), p.xi. See also William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York, 1978), pp.51-107.

8. Christopher Thorne, 'American Political Culture and the End of the Cold War',
Journal of American Studies xxvi (1992), pp.316-20; Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-52 (Cambridge, 1987), pp.213-14, 332-3.

9. Kennan was responding to a document entitled 'OPC Projects Fiscal 1949-1950'. Kennan to Wisner, 6 Jan. 1949, Political and Psychological Warfare file, box 12, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, 1947-53, Lot Files 64 D 563, RG 59, NA.

10. NSC 10/2, 'National Security Directive on Office of Special Projects', 18 June 1948, reprinted in Thomas H. Etzold and John L. Gaddis (eds.), Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-50 (New York, 1978), pp. 125-8. For a short period OPC was known as Office of Special Projects.

11. Lovett to Kennan, 29 Oct. 1948, Political and Psychological Warfare file, box 12, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, 1947-53, Lot Files 64 D 563, RG 59, NA.

12. Geo L. King (OPC) to Bedell Smith, 25 Aug. 1950, Personal Correspondence file K, box 14, Walter Bedell Smith Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter DDE). The fullest account of the tangled CIA-OPC relations in the late 1940s is given in A.B. Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government to 1950 (Pennsylvania, 1990), pp.273-81, 303-11. CIA planning during the 1950s is described in David Attlee Phillips, The Nightwatch: 25 years Inside the CIA (London, 1977), pp.56-60.

13. 'List of State and Foreign Service Personnel having knowledge of political warfare operations', undated, Political and Psychological Warfare 1948-50 file, box 11A, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, 1947-53, Lot Files 64 D 563, RG 59, NA; Kennan to Lovett, 29 Oct. 1948, Political and Psychological Warfare file, box 12, ibid.

14. On this see James E. Miller, 'Taking off the Gloves: The United States and the Italian Elections of 1948', Diplomatic History, vii (1983), 35-46; David W. Ellwood, 'The 1948 Elections in Italy: A Cold War Propaganda Battle', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, xiii (1993), pp.19-35.

15. Romero has argued that while 'operations to support non-communist union in Italy and France 'were financed in large measure by the CIA', the role of intelligence agencies should not be exaggerated, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, pp.94-6; Ronald L. Filippelli, American Labour and Postwar Italy: A Study in Cold War Politics (Stanford, 1989); Dennis MacShane, International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford, 1992); Lutz Niethammer, 'Structural Reform and a Compact for Growth; Conditions for a United Labour Union in West Europe after the Collapse of Fascism', in Charles S. Maier (ed.), The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe (New York, 1978), pp.216-28; Ronald Radosh, American Labour and United States Foreign Policy (New York, 1969); Carol Eisenberg, 'Working Class Politics and the Cold War: American Intervention in the German Labour Movement, 1945-9', Diplomatic History, vii (1983), pp.283-306.

16. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy; Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York, 1982), pp.66-7.

17. Braden's own recollections are recounted in Barnes, 'The Secret Cold War',
pp.666-7, and in Thomas W Braden, 'The Birth of the CIA', American Heritage,
xxviii (1977), pp.4-13. See also Miles Copeland, The Real Spy World (London,220
1974), p.230. By 1954 the International Organisations Division, was 'one of the
major operating divisions of the Directorate of Plans', Meyer, Facing Reality, p.85.


18. Meyer, Facing Reality, pp. 110-39; John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (London, 1986), pp.133-8; Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War (London, 1988), pp.138-56; Aaron Bank, From OSS to the Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (Novato CA, 1986), pp.138-89. One of the most reliable accounts of the establishment of stay-behind networks is given in Colby, Honorable Men, pp.51-107.

19. Zurcher, The Struggle to Unite Europe, p.24; Rebattet, 'European Movement',
pp.294-6; R.B. Manderson-Jones, The Special Relationship, Anglo-American
Relations and Western European Unity, 1947-S6 (London, 1972), p.13.

20.Letter from Duncan Sandys to Beddington-Behrens, 11 Oct. 1948; 'Report by
Chairman of Finance Sub-Committee', 8 Dec. 1948, EX/P/53, European Movement Archives, cited in Rebattet, 'European Movement', p.195. It appears that Retinger has undertaken a previous unsuccessful search for support in the United States in November 1946, meeting Adolfe Berle and George S. Franklin, but nothing came of this, ibid, p.299.

21. Coudenhove-Kalergi to Donovan, 24 Nov. 1949, box 38, Allen W Dulles Papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University; minutes of the Second Meeting of the Executive Committee, 1 July 1949, folder 90, ACUE records, Special Collections, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington DC (hereafter ACUE records, LL); Churchill to Donovan, private, 4 June 1949, ibid. For an example of Coudenhove-Kalergi's inter-war work see his Pan-Europa (London, 1926).

22. WS. Churchill, War Speeches, Vol.11 (London, 1951), pp.427-8.

23. WS. Churchill, The Sinews of Peace (London, 1956) p.44

24. John W. Young, France, the Cold War and the Western Alliance, 1945-9 (Leicester, 1990), pp.210-14; John W. Young, Britain and European Unity, 1945-93 (Leicester, 1993), pp.4-6, 22-3; John Pinder, 'Prophet Not Without Honour: Lothian and the Federal Idea', in John Turner (ed.), The Larger Idea: Lord Lothian and the Problem of National Sovereignty (London, 1988), pp.144-7.

25. Memorandum by Robert Joyce to Frank Wisner, 'National Committee for Free
Europe', 19 Oct. 1950, Political and Psychological Warfare file, box 12, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, 1947-53, Lot Files 64 D 563, RG 59, NA. On the origins of the Free Europe Committee see Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and The Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 (New Jersey, 1992), pp.203-5.

26. Meyer, Facing Reality, pp.110-11. Dolbeare had joined OSS in 1940 and had
become a senior officer in the secret intelligence branch of OSS. On Free Europe
Committee funding see Meyer, Facing Reality, pp.110, 116, and the iconoclastic
memorandum by General Crittenberger, 21 April 1958, Free Europe Committee
1958 file, box 44, CD. Jackson Papers, DDE.

27. Filippelli, American Labour, p.134. Other committees included the American
Committee to Aid the Survivors of the German Resistance. Allen W. Dulles, The
Marshall Plan (2nd edn., Oxford, 1992); Ben Pimlott (ed.), The Political Diary of
Hugh Dalton: 1918-40, 1945-60 (London, 1986), entry for Tuesday 29 July 1947,
p.401.

28. Donovan worked as a consultant to the State Department on a number of political warfare projects, handled the legal negotiations over Chinese airliners stranded in Hong Kong in 1949 that were then transferred to the CIA, and ran a special operations project while simultaneously serving as Ambassador to Thailand. NSC 5430, 'Status of US Program for National Security as of 30 June 1954, Part 7, USIA Program', 18 Aug. 1954, FRUS, 1952-4, II, p.1780; Banks, From OSS to the Green Berets, pp. 186-7.

29. Darling, CIA, pp.267-8, 301-45. Allen Dulles had also exercised influence over
labour affairs in the American zone of Germany in the period 1945-6, Eisenberg,
'Working Class Politics and the Cold War', p.288. Thomas W Braden appears to have ceased to Executive Director in the spring of 1951. He was succeeded by William P. Durkee and then by Alan Hovey in 1953. Durkee had served in OSS with Braden and later became vice-president of Free Europe Inc. with special responsibility for Radio Free Europe. On Braden's departure see Braden to Sandys, 30 March 1951, and Sandys to Braden, 17 April 1951, 9/1/10, Duncan Sandys Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge (hereafter CCC).

30. List of ACUE Directors attached to details of a visit by Robert Schuman, 20 Sept. 1950, folder 5, ACUE records, LL; Filippelli, American Labour, pp.112, 134-5, 211.

31. 'Report to the Executive Directors of the American Committee on United Europe', by William P.Durkee, May 1952, ACUE file 2, box 4, Walter Bedell Smith Papers, DDE (All subsequent references to WBS, DDE, are to this single voluminous file on ACUE.)

32. William J. Donovan, 'The Schuman Plan', Feb. 1952, ibid.

33. 'Report to the Executive Directors of the American Committee on United Europe' by William E Durkee, May 1952, WBS, DDE.

34. Churchill to Donovan, private, 4 June 1949, folder 90, ACUE records, LL.

35. Meyer, Facing Reality, pp.63-66; John Pomian (ed.), Joseph Retinger: The Memoirs of an Eminence Grise (Sussex, 1972), p.237; Aldrich, 'European Integration', pp.163-4.

36. Churchill to Donovan, private, 4 June 1949, folder 90, ACUE records, LL. Churchill maintained his intelligence connections after 1945, on this see for example Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill, Vol III: Never Despair (London, 1988), p.424.

37. Address by Churchill to the ACUE, New York, 29 March 1949, folder 2, ACUE records, LL.

38. These ideas were reflected in the title of ACUE's earlier manifestation, see minutes of the American Committee for a Free and United Europe, 5 Jan. 1949, folder 90, ACUE records, LL.

39. Minutes of a discussion between Kennan by Hayter (UK JIC chairman), 26 July 1949, W627/2/500G, FO 371/76383, PRO. American intelligence estimates and British PUSC Papers were also exchanged.

40. Braden to Bedell Smith, 28 Dec. 1949, WBS, DDE. Initial funding in 1949 appears to have come from private sources: at the incorporation of the ACUE the luncheon in honour of Winston Churchill raised $75,000. 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P Durkee, May 1952, pp.7-8, WBS, DDE.

41. Donovan went on to attend a Paris meeting on the Schuman Plan, Confidential Memorandum enclosed in Braden to Bedell Smith, 27 June 1950, WBS, DDE. On Labour's changing attitude to Europe, see John W. Young, Britain, France and the Unity of Europe, 1945-51 (Leicester, 1984).

42. 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P. Durkee, May 1952, pp.7-8,
WBS, DDE; Rebattet, 'European Movement', pp.49, 186; Aldrich, 'European
Integration', p.165. On Sandys in 1945 see Young, Britain and European Unity,
pp. 19-20.

43. 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P. Durkee, May 1952, pp.9-10, WBS, DDE.

44. Confidential Memorandum enclosed in Braden to Bedell Smith, 27 June 1950, WBS, DDE.

45. Retinger to Sandys, 31 March 1950, European Movement Archives, quoted in
Rebattet, 'European Movement', p.408.

46. Rebattet, 'European Movement', pp.198-9. Hitherto the ACUE had offered little specific direction as to precise use of the funds, remarking in January 1950, 'up to now all funds have been sent to the European Movement to use as it sees fit', minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee, ACUE, 20 Jan. 1950, WBS, DDE.

47. 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P. Durkee, May 1952, pp.7-8, WBS, DDE. Subsequently, Braden sent a highly confidential report to Walter Bedell Smith, relating the discovery that during early 1950, 'Sandys [had] attempted to disband the European Movement'. He added that 'Spaak and Retinger together have handled the Sandys situation ... and kept the whole fracas from reaching the public', Braden, confidential memorandum on ACUE to Bedell Smith, 6 July 1950, WBS, DDE..

48. Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the rebirth of Europe, p.147. Another historian has identified a 'long American intrigue to make him "director-general" of the OEEC, Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London, 1992), p.324.

49. Confidential memorandum enclosed in Braden to Bedell Smith, 27 June 1950, WBS, DDE.

50. Nevertheless, see the excellent account of OPC-PPS linkage based on interviews in Miscamble, George F. Kennan, pp.199-205.

51. Memorandum of the tripartite preliminary meetings on Items 5 and 8, MIN/TR/P/4, 9 May 1950, FRUS, 1950, III, p.1081; Elsey to Lloyd, 16 May 1951, enclosing special guidance memorandum by policy advisory staff, 'The Concept of Europe', 8 May 1951, Declassified Document Reference System, 1, 3 (1975), p. l76D. Lloyd noted 'I agree, it sounds very good'.

52. Miscamble, George F. Kennan, pp.284-5; minutes of a discussion between Kennan and Hayter(JIC chairman), 26 July 1949, W627/2/500G, FO 371/76383, PRO.

53. Memorandum of a conversation between Acheson, Kennan, Spaak and Silvercruys, 19 Jan. 1950, FRUS, 1950, III, pp.613-14; minutes of the 7th meeting of the policy planning staff, ibid., pp.617-20. See also Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, pp.134-7, 147-8.

54. Acting Secretary of State to Donovan, 29 Sept. 1950, Exhibit 6, Appendix IV, May 1952, WBS, DDE. On British policy during this period see also Edmund Dell, The Schuman Plan and the British Abdication of Leadership in Europe (Oxford, 1995), pp.90-109.

55. Meetings of US ambassadors in Paris, 21 Oct. 1949, FRUS 1949, IV, pp.490-93; memorandum of a conversation between Harriman, Bruce and McCloy, 20 Jan. 1950, FRUS, 1950, III, pp.1608-9; meetings of US ambassadors in Rome, 22-24 Mar. 1950, FRUS, 1950, III, p.809.

56. Braden, confidential memorandum on the ACUE, to Bedell Smith, 6 July 1950, WBS, DDE. In his memoirs Spaak praises Harriman as a man who was both 'discreet' and shared the 'vision of a united Europe', The Continuing Battle: The Memoirs of a European 1936-66 (London, 1971), p.194. Katz subsequently became a Professor of International Law at Harvard University, R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, 1972), p.104.

57. Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, p.109.

58. Braden, confidential memorandum on the ACUE, to Bedell Smith, 6 July 1950, WBS, DDE.

59. Report to the Directors of the ACUE, by William P. Durkee, May 1952, pp.6-7,
WBS, DDE, Aldrich, 'European Integration, pp.168-9.

60. Braden to Bedell Smith, 28 Dec. 1949, WBS, DDE. On Britain's 'obstructionism' at Strasbourg in the summer of 1950 see Anderson to State Department, 31 July 1950, FRUS, 1950, III, pp.777-80.

61. A copy of the Mackay Plan is available at fo. 7, file 2, group 7, Mackay Papers, British Library of Economic and Political Science (hereafter BLPES); 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P. Durkee, May 1952, pp.6-7, 10-11, 14-15, WBS, DDE; minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee, ACUE, 20 Jan. 1950, WBS, DDE. Diary entry for 11 Sept. 1948, Dalton Diary, ed. Pimlott, p.440.

62. Aldrich, 'European integration', pp.168-8. The ACUE agreed on a sum of $10,000 for Mackay to pay expenses specifically in support of getting the plan accepted, minutes of annual meeting, 24 April 1951, WBS, DDE.

63. Retinger to Cripps, 7 Feb. 1950, UP3117/2, FO 371/88643, PRO; Hooper minutes, 8 and 10 Feb. 1950, Makins and Jebb minutes 9 Feb. 1950, ibid. See also Curtins to Retinger, 1 Jan. 1950, 9/1/10, Duncan Sandys Papers, CCC. The letters were eventually published by ACUE in a booklet The Union of Europe: Declarations of European Statesmen (New York, 1950), ibid.

64. Donovan, report from Strasbourg, 5 Dec. 1951, folder 58, ACUE records, LL;
'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P Durkee, May 1952, pp.6-7,
14-15, WBS, DDE.

65. Address by Paul-Henri Spaak, 1 April 1952, New York, folder 9, ACUE records, LL; Address by Paul van Zeeland to ACUE, New York, 4 Oct. 1949, folder 4, ACUE records, LL; Address by Paul-Henri Spaak to World Affairs Council, Seattle and the University of Washington, 26 Jan. 1951, folder 7, ibid. Address by Robert Schuman to ACUE, New York, 20 Sept. 1950, folder 5, ibid.; Address by Konrad Adenauer to ACUE, 16 April 1953, folder 11, ibid.; address by Guy Mollet to ACUE, 6 Sept. 1955, folder 13, ibid.

66. Rebattet, 'European Movement', p.308.

67. Publications produced by the ACUE in 1950 and 'given wide distribution to editors, educators, labour leaders, industry and government' included: Why the United States Needs a United Europe and Britain's Problem in European Union, see 'Program and Budget for 1950', p.5, WBS, DDE.

68. 'Statement of General William J. Donovan, ACUE to Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives', 3 March 1950, folder 56, ACUE records, LL; Bonnet to Donovan, 26 June 1950, and attached note to Bedell Smith, WBS, DDE; ACUE newsletter, nos. 1-20, folder 64, ACUE records, LL.

69. 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William E Durkee, May 1952, p.19, WBS, DDE, ibid.; Appendix IV exhibit 4, 'material published by the ACUE and
Publications Distributed', ibid.

70. Braden, 'Activities of the ACUE', p.13, April 1950, folder 20, ACUE records, LL; 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P. Durkee, May 1952, p. 19, WBS, DDE, ibid.; The ACUE planned to allocate $62,500 to research on federalism at Harvard Law School in 1952.

71. See, for example, his studies, Federalism: Trends in Theory and Practice (New York, 1968); Europe: An Emergent Nation? (New York, 1969). On Friedrich's ideas, see in particular Simon F. Tormey, Making Sense of Tyranny (Manchester, 1995).

72. Hovey to Radox, 10 July 1953, Hovey file, box 19, Friedrich Papers, HUG (FP) -17, 12, Harvard University Archives (hereafter HUA); Hovey to Friedrich, 13 July 1953, Hovey file, box 19, Friedrich Papers, HUG (FP) - 17, 12, HUA; Friedrich to Hovey, 20 July 1953, ibid.; Friedrich to Hovey, 24 May 1956, ibid.

73. Carl Friedrich (ed.), The Soviet Zone of Germany (Subcontractor's monograph, HRAF-34, Harvard-1, 1956); Friedrich to Altschud, 1 Jan. 1951, NCFE file, box 28, Friedrich Papers, HUG (FP) - 17, 12, HUA.

74. Allen Dulles to Friedrich, 11 Jan. 1951, NCFE file, box 28, Friedrich Papers, HUG (FP) - 17, 12, HUA; Clay to Friedrich, 15 Jan. 1951, ibid.; Jackson to Friedrich, 31 Jan. 1951, ibid.

75. Braden to Langer, 12 Jan. 1950, file: ACUE, box 9, Langer papers, HUA; Langer to Braden, 20 Jan. 1950, ibid.; Burkhardt to Langer, 24 July 1950, file; B-General, box 9, Langer papers, HUA. On Langer's career in OSS and subsequently CIA see Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in America's Secret War (London, 1987), pp.79-82, 495-6.

76. Rebattet, 'European Movement', p.34. See also Thierry Grosbois, Lidée europeenne en temps de guerre 1940-1944 (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1995).

77. 'Report on the College of Europe' by RC. Dodd, ACUE Scholar, June 1951, folder 1, ACUE records, LL.

78. 'Program and Budget for 1950', p.6, WBS, DDE.

79. Minutes of the meeting of the Executive Committee, ACUE, 11 Oct. 1950, WBS, DDE; memorandum concerning the International Campaign for the Creation of a European Council of Vigilance, 1950, ibid.; minutes of the meeting of the Executive Committee, ACUE, 11 Oct. 1950, ibid.; 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P. Durkee, May 1952, pp.11-12, ibid.

80. Donovan to Bedell Smith, 25 July 1951, WBS, DDE. German activities included an
ACUE-sponsored German-Europe conference at Hamburg in November 1951,
minutes of the meeting of the Executive Committee, ACUE, 11 Oct. 1950, WBS,
DDE, pp.12, 17-18. On worries over Germany, see Leffler, A Preponderance of
Power, pp.318-19, 323.

81. 'Report by M. Moreau, Secretary General of the European Youth Campaign, to the International Executive Bureau of the European Movement', BE/P/60, European Movement Archives and interview with G. Rebattet, cited in Rebattet, 'European Movement', pp.449-50. On McCloy's interest in covert activities, see Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCIoy, The Making of the American Establishment (New York, 1992), Chapter 17, 'McCloy and US Intelligence Operations in Germany', pp.345-58.

82. BE/M/8, Luxemburg, 21 May 1948, p.2, European Movement Archives, and
BE/M/14, Paris, 23 November 1953, p.3, ibid., quoted in Rebattet, 'European
Movement', p.201.

83. European Youth Campaign, 1953, CCS/P/2, box 1, ACUE collection, Hoover
Institute on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford (hereafter HIWRP). Much of the
youth campaign material has survived in the archives at Stanford, see, for example, Bulletin d'Information des Jeunesses Europeenes Federalistes, Dec. 1951, box 2; Europa-Union, 3 Jahrgang 1952, and Jugend Europas, May 1954, box 3, ibid.. Monnet to Donovan, 3 Oct. 1952, folder 61, ACUE records, LL.

84. 'Reports to the Directors of ACUE', by William P. Durkee, July 1951 and May 1952, WBS, DDE. Rebattet suggest that all the resources for the European Youth Campaign cam from the ACUE which acted as 'a covering organisation' for the United States government and that £444,080, was transferred for this purpose between 1 May 1951 and 31 May 1953. On this see FIN/P/6, 'European Movement: European Youth Campaign, Treasurer's Report', 1 Sept. 1953, European Movement Archives cited in, Rebattet, 'European Movement', pp.206-7.

85. Warner, 'Eisenhower, Dulles and the Unity of Western Europe', pp.320-23, Allen Dulles succeeded Bedell Smith on 26 Feb. 1953.

86. Chipman (HICOG) to State Department, 'Eastern Propaganda of the National
Committee for a Free Europe', 15 Jan. 1953, 540.40/1-1953, RG 59, NA.

87. Vilis Mosens (Chairman ACEN) to Philips, 13 March 1956, File: Eastern
Europe/Nationalism in Europe, Labour Party International Department records (post 1947), National Museum of Labour History (hereafter NMLH); 'Proposed West European Advisory Committee', 1 Feb. 1959, Free Europe Committee file, Box 44, C.D. Jackson papers, DDE.

88. For an example of associated publicity materials see, L'Action Federaliste europeene, June 1957, box 6, ACUE collection, HIWRP.

90. Meeting of the Board of Directors, 6 June 1956, folder 91, ACUE records, LL.

90. One of his closest assistants, his principal private secretary, recalls that: 'He made it plain on many occasions that CIA or quasi-CIA funds must be avoided because of the political risks to his prestige', correspondence from François Duchene to the author, 3 Feb. 1995. I am most grateful to François Duchene for sharing his recollections with me.

91. Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan, pp.47-52.

92. Rebattet, 'European Movement', p.315.

93. Bird, The Chairman, pp.416-17; 471-2; François Duchene, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York, 1994), p.339.

94. Kuhn memorandum, 'Non-military Activities of NATO', 9 July 1950, File: TS, Box 4, Records of the Office of European Regional Affairs (1946-53), J. Graham Parsons, Lot Files 55 D 115, RG 59, NA.

95. Ibid.; Foster to Hughes, 6 March 1959, folder 89, ACUE records, LL; ACUE was the largest financial contributor to the costs of the 1960 conference ($32,707), Karp to Franklin, 2 Sept. 1960, enclosing Report on Second Atlantic Conference of Young Political Leaders, folder 87, ACUE records, LL.

96. White (American Committee on NATO) to Karp, 17 Sept. 1959, folder 89, ACUE records, LL. The Economist study cost $11,200 to commission, 'Report to the Directors' by Foster, p.13, Oct. 1959, folder 100, ACUE records, LL.

97. 'Memorandum to the Board of Directors' by Alex Hovey, 6 April 1960, folder 94, ACUE records, LL.

98. ACUE statement of Receipts and Disbursements, 16 Feb. 1949 through 31 Jan. 1952, WBS, DDE. ACUE's budget for 1952 was $400,000. Appendix IV, Exhibit 1, 'Report to the Directors of the ACUE', by William P. Durkee, May 1952, WBS, DDE; Bedell Smith to Donovan, 12 Jan. 1953, ibid. See also Alex Hovey, memorandum to the Board of Directors, 6 April 1960, folder 94, ACUE records, LL.

99. Minutes of Annual Meeting, 24 April 1951, WBS, DDE; minutes of a meeting of the Board of Directors, 6 June 1956, folder 91, ACUE records, LL.

100. Barnes, 'The Secret Cold War', pp.666-7; Pomian (ed.), Memoirs of an Eminence Grise, pp.216, 228, 237; Miscamble, George F. Kennan, p.204.

101. Connely to Bedell Smith, 16 Feb. 1952, WBS, DDE; minutes of a meeting of the Board of Directors, 6 June 1956, folder 91, ACUE records, LL.

102. Rebattet, 'European Movement', pp.314-15. Rebattet's review of documentation in the European Movement's archives shows that these contain the minutes of the ACUE Board of Directors meetings discussing funding.

103. Page to Kennan, 11 Oct. 1948, 865.00/10/1148, RG 59, NA; American Ambassador to Robert Lovett, 11 Oct. 1948, 865.00/10/1148, RG 59, NA, all quoted in Filippelli, American Labour, pp.150-51. Nevertheless, Gedda also appears to have had ACUE associations, see, for example, The Union of Europe: Declarations of European Statesmen, p.57, 9/1/10, Duncan Sandys Papers, CCC.

104. Rebattet reports that European Movement's international review, Europe Today and Tommorrow, was 'almost completely financed by subscriptions form the Mutual Security Agency and ACUE', 'European Unity', pp.201, 302.

105. Pomian (ed.), The Memoirs of Eminence Grise, p.237; retired American official in correspondence with the author, 15 July 1993.

106. On propaganda see, 'Psychological Action to Counter Totalitarian Propaganda', in record of a meeting between Acheson and de Gasperi, 24 Sept. 1951, FRUS, 1951, IV pt.1, pp.685-6.

107. The figure of $10 million is given in Simpson, Blowback, p.92. The most
authoritative account of the elections by Miller, 'Taking off the Gloves', p.36, merely refers to 'millions of dollars'. Colby, in his memoir Honorable Men, pp.108-40, asserts that the 1948 elections constituted the largest OPC operation.

108. On Chile and on overall spending under Truman, see Gregory F. Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Post War World (New York, 1987), pp.14, 18, 41. On the funding of the American National Student Association, see Harry Howe Ransom, 'Secret Intelligence in the United States, 1947-82: The CIA's Search for Legitimacy', in Christopher M. Andrew and David N. Dilks (eds.), The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London, 1984), p.212.

109. Rebattet, 'European Movement', p.48.

110. Braden to Bedell Smith, 28 Dec. 1949, WBS, DDE.

111. Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee, ACUE, 11 Oct. 1950, WBS, DDE.

112. 'European Youth Campaign', CCS/P/2 1953, box 1, ACUE collection, HIWRP.

113. Rebattet, 'European Movement', pp.208-10.

114. Walter Lipgens, A History of European Integration, 1945-1947, Vol.1, The
Formation of the European Unity Movement (Oxford, 1982); Walter Lipgens and
Wilfried Loth (eds.), Documents on the History of European Integration, Vol. 3, The Struggle for European Union by Political Parties and Pressure Groups in West European Countries, 1945-50 (Berlin, 1988); Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State, pp.14-17.

115. Marion S. Miller, 'Approaches to European Institution Building of Carlo Sforza', in Deighton (ed.), Building Postwar Europe, pp.55-70; minutes of the Board of Directors, 6 June 1956, folder 91, ACUE records, LL.

116. Ernest Davies memorandum, 'The Labour Party and European Co-operation', 25 April 1950, fol.31, 9/9, Hugh Dalton Papers, BLPES; 'Supplementary Report on the Second Session of the Consultative Assembly, Strasbourg', 18-24 Nov. 1950, p.20, file: United Europe 1950, box: European Unity, Labour Party International Department records, NMLH.

117. Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, pp.221-2; Hogan, Marshall Plan, p.436.

118. Gillingam, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, p.313. Spaak's attempt to associate a European Political Community with the EDC proposals of the early 1950s constitutes another example, ibid., p.349.

119. Charles F. Delzell, 'The European Federalist Movement in Italy: The First Phase, 1918-1947', The Journal of Modern History, Sept. 1960, pp.241-50; A. Bosco, 'Federal Union, Chatham House and the Anglo -- French Union', in A. Bosco (ed.), The Federal Idea: The History of Enlightenment to 1945 (London, 1991), pp.237-62; M.L. Smith and P.M.R. Stirk (eds.), Making the New Europe: European Unity in the Second World War (London, 1990).

120. Bird, The Chairman, pp.471-2; Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, (Cambridge, 1990), pp.125, 129, 151. Gill remarks upon 'the strong connections' between Bilderberg and the European Movement, adding that two prominent Bilderberg's were former principal private secretaries to Monnet, namely François Duchene and Georges Berthoin. For an unsympathetic analysis of Bilderberg see Eringer, The Global Manipulators.

121. Eringer, Global Manipulators, pp.22-54; Pomian, Eminence Grise, pp.250-59; Gill, Trilateral Commission, pp. 151-5; Philip M. Williams, The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, 1945-1956 (London: Cape, 1983) pp.542, 585. Former members of the British clandestine services who had worked with the Americans were well represented at Bilderberg in the 1950s and included Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, Christopher Foster, Hugh Gaitskell, Sir Colin Gubbins and H. Montgomery Hyde.

122. Despite the recent commendable decision to release CIA material relating to some post-war covert actions, this will not extend to ACUE material. In a response to a request by the author the CIA's Centre for the Study of Intelligence searched their archives for further material and replied that they had 'nothing unclassified available', David D. Gries, Director CSI, to author, 2 March 1994.

123. Questions about operations inside the United States were initially raised by Sol Stern, 'NSA and the CIA', Ramparts, V (1967), 29-38. See a!so Treverton, Covert Action, pp.237-8; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven, 1989), pp.156-63; Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York, 1989), pp.102-3. On the question of legality, see Ranelagh, The Agency, pp.270-71.

Corruption, criminality and the privatised state: The implications for accounting

Corruption, criminality and the privatised state: The implications for accounting
Glen Lehman ∗ , Kym Thorne
University of South Australia, School of Commerce, Adelaide, 5001, SA, Australia
a r t i c l e
Available online xxx
Keywords: Corruption - State crimes - Accountability - theatre - Levinas - Roberts
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.accfor.2015.10.002


∗ Corresponding author at: University of South Australia, School of Commerce, Adelaide 5001, SA, Australia.
E-mail addresses: Glen.Lehman@unisa.edu.au (G. Lehman), kym.thorne@unisa.edu.au (K. Thorne).

a b s t r a c t

This article introduces concepts of corruption and how they translate into state crimes against democracy and economic state crimes against democracy. This article argues for an approach to corruption that goes beyond individual psychology to consider the systemic purposeful actions of dominant elites to protect and advance their interests. This article also contends that contemporary accounting is enveloped within a corroding political, economic and financial system that advances the interests of neoliberal elites.

[All rights reversed]

1. Introduction

Corruption can be defined as the misuse or abuse of power for private gain. This present paper uses Roberts (2015) and Sikka (2014) to argue that ‘corruption typically involves something like a whole theatre of appearances; public smiles and private threats’ (Roberts, 2015, p.87). This article uses Roberts (2015) approach to examine how the privatised state has become embroiled in what can be referred to as state crimes against democracy (SCADS) and economic crimes against democracy (e-SCADS).
Corruption often seems to involve a benign image of power—here the work of Roberts (2015) is helpful in exposing how corruption is a deeply uncomfortable phenomenon. He emphasises Levinas’ assignation of responsibility to vulnerable neighbours to create ethical relations. Roberts (2015) argument is used to deepen Sikka’s (2014) investigation into the causal factors behind the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) suggesting the existence of a corrosive systemic corruption between politicians, economists, regulators, bankers, ratings agencies and accountants and auditors that favours the interests of dominant elites. All too often the most distinctive goal of corporations, governments and the state is simply to maximise financial gain for dominant elites. deHaven-Smith (2006, p. 333) defines SCADS involving the connections between ‘corruption’ and ‘state crimes’ as:

actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and popular sovereignty.’
They differ from graft, bid-rigging, voting fraud, and other, more mundane, forms of political criminality in their potential to subvert political institutions and entire governments or branches of government. They are practices that attack core principles of democracy itself (deHaven-Smith, 2006, p. 333).

deHaven-Smith (2006) makes the argument that these ‘state crimes’ can take a variety of forms and can occur at any level of government. However, deHaven-Smith’s (2006) analysis of SCADS focused almost entirely on state crimes in the United States (Kouzmin, Johnston, & Thorne, 2011). These SCADS have at times involved conspiracies among top officials to subvert democratic processes for political advantage or to further ideological agendas (Kouzmin et al., 2011). Kouzmin et al. (2011) identify examples such as Watergate, Iran–Contra, and Plame-gate. Weiner (2008) documents the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) anti-democratic, nominally illegal obsession with national and international covert action and regime change. Later, Weiner (2012) also documents the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) anti-democratic and nominally illegal obsession with national and international intelligence activities. The Wikileaks exposures and the ‘whistleblowing’ actions of Assange, Manning and Snowden have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the seemingly questionable, if not illegal, actions of some United States government agencies, nationally and internationally, singularly or in concert with other governments or private interests that impinge on the rights of its own citizens and citizens of other nations and reduce the possibility of democratic praxis.

deHaven-Smith’s (2006) approach to SCADS may be too restrictive. According to Kouzmin et al. (2011), there is a direct connection between Representative Government and New Public Management’s quest for efficient operational and managements frameworks that if unregulated, provides opportunities for the state to favour elites and other interests to act against its citizens. Examples of such developments include increasing processes of deregulation and the growing use of outsourcing, privatisation, no-bid contracts, and public-private partnerships (PPPs) (Kouzmin et al., 2011). Addressing the economic sphere (Kouzmin et al., 2011) in association with the social/psychological sphere (Roberts, 2015) it is evident that a much more expansive and higher-level series of ‘state crimes’ may be possible. Evidence for this proposal may be found in those policy contexts where the provision of public goods have been contracted to the private sector leaving a largely unregulated and hollowed-out state open to elite manipulation (Kouzmin et al., 2011).

In contrast to deHaven-Smith (2006) and Roberts (2015) this article conceptualises and studies ‘corruption’ and ‘state crimes’ by focusing on the social forces involved in the accumulation of capital that are responsible for unrestrained economic growth and financial gain—which has the potential to give rise to economic ‘state crimes’ (e-SCADS). According to Kouzmin et al. (2011) e-SCADS can be explained as:

[conjoined actions] among political insiders to manipulate bid processes, overcharge or overpay for public goods, weaken or evade contractual obligations, or in other ways [bypass] democratically accountable agencies. They differ from ordinary graft, embezzlement, and cronyism in several important respects. ‘State crimes’ involve collusion among public officials and outsiders rather than one or two individuals operating in isolation; they are organised and carried out under the code of laws; and they have the potential to grow in scale and complexity over time. In some cases, ‘state crimes’ are the government side of what Black (2005) refers to as control frauds; that is, financial frauds such as the pillaging of the United States savings and loan industry in the 1980s, the 2001 Enron fraud, the 2002 Tyco and World Com frauds, and the 2008/2009 global financial crisis carried out by corporate CEOs and investment/banking executives enabled by changes in regulatory policies and enforcement (Calavita, Pontell, & Tillman, 1999; , p. 222).

Arguments similar to these have been evident in the work of Chwastiak (2013, 2015) who delineates how the United States neoliberal agenda is responsible for the development of an illegal environment in Iraq where private contractors profit from what normally should have been considered corruption if not malfeasance. Chwastiak (2015, p. 2) uses an example of subcontractors that were hired by the CIA after 9/11 to transport supposed al Qaeda operatives to countries where ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ are sanctioned. Not only did these firms aid and abet state crime, but they also profited from it. Furthermore, when two of these subcontractors went to court over a contract dispute, their court documents escaped the attention of the Federal Government entirely. Chwastiak (2015, p.1) argues that state crimes are transformed into commodities by accounting, thereby rendering ‘profit, performance, minutia and normal business routines as important and kidnapping and torture as irrelevant’.

The present article is structured in two sections. The first section following this Introduction examines the relationships between corruption, subjection and state crimes. The second section explores how the state is immersed in corrupt practices leaving itself open to elite manipulation. The third section focuses on state economic crimes and the privatised state. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of reforms concerning corruption, SCADS and e-SCADS prevention and detection specifically related to accounting.

2. Corruption, subjection and ‘state crimes’

The idea that corruption poses is that ‘corruption is the norm and effective subjection, the exception’ (Roberts, 2015). If we can face up to corruption, then we can be freed from the assumption that authorities are good and will protect us. He suggests that the dominant discourse operates with an idealised conception of corruption. Following Roberts (2015) we argue that dialectic emerges which suggests that corruption is the inevitable companion of all attempts to abolish it.

Corruption, according to Roberts (2015), involves facing the other which involves how power itself is involved in this process. Taking a lead from Roberts (2015) examination of Neu, Everett, and Rahaman (2015)Neu et al.’s (2015) discussion of the remedies of corruption in disciplinary processes of subjection it is possible to develop the outlines of an analysis of the subjectivity of corruption. Neu et al. (2015) base their paper on how to prevent corruption in Government procurement processes—the supply side phenomenon. This is not because of the potential for well-designed forms to produce a disciplined and ethical subjectivity, but because ‘corruption itself has much deeper origins and might still be possible within such processes’ (Roberts, 2015, p. 87). The hope of the corrupt, of course, is that their conduct will remain invisible behind the appearances of due process and inspection; that it will be impossible to disentangle their deceit from their legitimate exercise of authority. Roberts continues:

The discipline of due process that is fully inscribed on well-designed forms, and the traces this creates for subsequent audit, at least leaves the outcome uncertain, and thereby forces a certain caution and discretion on the corrupt. Subjection and corruption, however, are clearly not opposites or mutually exclusive. Rather corruption is better viewed as a sort of mirror image of subjection—a contemptuous parody perhaps. The two images are almost identical; both involve the exercise of power, both have the power to normalise and individualise, and yet corruption, unlike subjection, is emptied of the substance of ethics; the will of the Other no longer has internal force. Instead the corrupt have, in effect, slipped back into the illusions of a ruthless autonomy (Roberts, 2015, p. 87).

Roberts argues that the corrupt are spoilt and act much like a child who is yet to attain maturity. He argues that the unfortunate issue is that the corrupt impact on others and have the potential to utilise organisational resources to further their own ends. These ideas are traced back to processes of subjectivity through a Lacanian analysis where the spoilt child reflects ‘their own need for subjection’, this seems to be the cure for their desire (Roberts, 2015, p. 87).

Importantly, the reality of the formally and informally powerful in society is often similarly characterised by an intense dependence on others to realise the objectives against which they themselves are judged. As noted by Roberts ‘[i]n mature institutions, organisations and individuals, such dependence and its associated anxieties can perhaps be consciously recognised and openly acknowledged’ (Roberts, 2015, p. 87). Neu et al. (2015) explores the possibility of form based subjection and, at the same time, points to how such processes are so easily subverted. Neu et al. (2015) has served to reinforce the need to go beyond the prevalent view that corruption is best understood in relation to the psychological make-up of individuals. As Lukes (2005, p.86) in his seminal study of power suggests, understanding corruption requires searching ‘behind appearances for the hidden, least visible forms of power . . . the power of the powerful is to be viewed as ranging across issues and contexts, as extending to some unintended consequences and as capable of being effective even without active intervention’.

3. State vulnerabilities to SCADS and e-SCADS

Roberts (2015) and Sikka (2014) consider some of the broader factors which give rise to corruption. This section focuses on how the state itself has the potential to perpetuate corrupt practices. It should be obvious that corruption and crimes of the state often have major economic dimensions but this present article aims to explain how corruption also envelops democracy and democratic institutions. This observation gives rise to the primary difference between SCADS and e-SCADS revolving around the motivations of those who are involved in the process. For those who are not motivated for financial or pecuniary gains the process of corruption becomes one associated with the manipulation of democratic accountability and democratic governing institutions Lehman (2011) and Thorne (2010).

deHaven-Smith (2006) and Kouzmin et al. (2011) identifies that the increasing frequency and sophistication of SCADS and the propensity of towards e-SCADS within the American context since the middle of the Twentieth-Century has occurred due to:

America’s growing reliance on covert paramilitary operations in domestic (Weiner, 2012) and international affairs (Weiner, 2008). Witt and Kouzmin (2010) demonstrate that the United States government has organised coups and regime change across the globe (see also Blum, 2004; Chossudovsky, 2003; Juhasz, 2006).

Skills developed in the intelligence community for manipulating the politics of other nations have migrated to United States domestic politics (Weiner, 2008, 2012).

Tactics which have been developed in one country or setting and have been copied by political elites elsewhere, known as oligarchic isomorphism’ (Kouzmin et al., 2011, p. 223).

The increase of centralisation and interdependence of organisations in industrial societies (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2012).

This places dominant elites in a position ‘to both initiate and manipulate crises and to exploit the opportunities created by the social disorder and destruction they bring’ (Kouzmin et al., 2011, p. 223).

Following Roberts (2015, p.87) ‘the infantile phantasies of omnipotence/dominance which are the genesis of corruption are properly seen as nothing more than a defence against an unbearable anxiety associated with the reality of a child’s vulnerability and complete dependence’. However, crisis as a political and economic opportunity is apparent in many cases of SCADS and e-SCADS and normalises corruption as part of the visible and invisible actions of dominant elites. Our recommendation to address not only the psychological but the macro social and economic forces involved in corruption, SCADs and E-SCADS is to reinvigorate norms of professionalism and ethical behaviour within routine processes of public administration, notwithstanding the heavy cloak of anonymity imposed upon public officials in many governance systems.

4. State crimes and the privatised state

This article questions the too prevalent notion of corruption as a consequence of a flawed individual psychology that is too often portrayed as being without any systemic dimension. This article does not consider power to be benign but concurs with Lukes (2005) view that power is all pervasive and visible and invisible corruption is part of the ‘normalised’ apparatus by which elites seek to advance their interests and ‘secure the compliance (unwilling or willing) of those they dominate’.

This domination stretches into economics and accounting. Graham and Neu (2003) suggest that the internationalisation of accounting movements often start from the presumption of market efficiency that, in turn, encourages certain accounting solutions. They ask:

What is the dynamic among the ways in which accounting technologies make visible certain problems, suggest certain solutions, operationalise these solutions, and encourage certain consequences? (Graham & Neu, 2003).

An obvious adverse outcome is that these solutions favour the interests of dominant elites and fail to adequately interpret, or explore the impacts of accounting on different communities. In addition, these solutions also fail to allow other voices to be given an explicit means to articulate their needs and values that shape their lives. Implicit within this line of argument is a questioning of whether neoliberal globalisation processes including accounting processes perpetuate a means-end culture of control. For example, outsourcing and PPP’s and other such arrangements needs to be construed as asset-stripping, a form of fiscal corruption in the hands of oligarchs within the private sector who remain prime beneficiaries of such arrangements.

As Klein (2007, p. 12) documents, dominant political and economic elites used the ideas developed by Friedman and the Chicago school of economics to methodically exploit moments of shock and contrived crises in other countries for three decades—starting with Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile. Friedman’s free-market assumptions became a rationale for drastic tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, gutting of social services, and privatisation of formally civic functions and duties. More recently this ‘crisis’ driven approach has migrated from austerity economics to ‘advanced’ Western economic multinational agreements such as the European Union. It was no accident that the ongoing Greek financial crisis had the falsification of financial documents used to join the European Union in its genesis, nor was it an accident that the privations diminished public goods and disproportionally impacted on the most vulnerable.

Traditional accounting, as a subset of economics, has been premised on the assumption that economic growth promises a better world and that this world would be characterised by greater material prosperity and equality within and between nations. Even more recently, economic growth, especially through free-market liberalisation, has been advocated as a path to solving environmental problems as well. As this dream is unlikely to be realised within the current system it is therefore important that we begin to re-consider the role of accounting in creating practices which perpetuate corruption and are captured by the interests of dominant elites. Indeed, this need is now more important than ever before given the ideological hegemony of global capital and the increasing disharmony between nation-states. For example, a need exists to consider the impact on local communities associated with initiatives such as multi-lateral trade agreements, free-market liberalisation and processes of harmonisation. These trends have created a climate whereby our lives are governed by these trends rather than the other way around Graham & Neu, 2003; Lehman (2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b)).

5. Conclusion

What is required is an environment where government based economic actions or outsourcing or PPP’s could be used without jeopardizing the public interest. This article calls for an end to neoliberal capitalism’s penchant for disaster capitalism (Klein, 2007), the purposeful inducement of crises and the ‘crucifixion economics’ (Saul, 2005) that actively weaken government and forces deregulation. Roberts and Scapens (1995) emphasise that ‘transparency’ is too often treated as a neutral component of accountability and as the natural corrective for ‘corruption’ and any other form of criminality. Roberts (2009) points out that making something visible changes what is rendered transparent, shapes organisational reality and individual and group identities and may lead to purposely misrepresenting accountability structures without addressing underlying corruption or criminality.

This involves preventing dominant elites from combining the best and the worst aspects of both the public and private spheres and moving between them in a self-interested manner. The aim of accounting research might be to prevent elites from disguising their interests and mystifying the political dimensions of societal/organisational life while camouflaging corruption and criminality. Corruption must not continue to be conceptualised as isolated, unconnected incidences of individual psychology or organisational ineptitude or some manifestation of organisational ‘evil’ (Adams, 2011) but as an arena for dominant elites. This is a challenging task. As Johnson (2011) conveys in his review of Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2012) book, ‘the relationship between power, prosperity and poverty and the relative success or failure of nations the United States [and elsewhere] is now ‘in the grip of an oligarchy that is determined to protect its position at the expense of spending for the public good . . . Nations frequently fall when powerful interest blocks change . . . [this] situation is more serious than any ratings company’s view on the debt level’.

What should be of central concern to accounting research and to accounting practice is creating concepts and techniques that allow us to establish whether the interaction between the public and private spheres are symbiotic, parasitical, destructive or criminogenic in relation to citizenship and democracy. Combatting SCADS and e-SCADS will require a forensic accounting approach attuned to the purposive misuse of governments, markets and our social/intellectual commons by hegemonic interests fluxing visible and invisible power whilst decrying ‘corruption’ by individuals and demanding ‘transparency’.

The challenge will be to recover the arena of norms/values from the deadening embrace of dominant elites, technocratic neoliberals, ‘free-marketers’, technology pundits and the conservative dogma of religious and other fundamentalists resistant to conflict and democratic participation.


References

Acemoglu, Daron, & Robinson, James. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity and poverty. New York, NY: Crown Publishing.

Adams, Guy B. (2011). The problem of administrative evil in a culture of technical rationality. Public Integrity, 13(3), 275–286.

Black, William K. (2005). The best way to rob a bank is to own one. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Blum, William. (2004). Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. interventions since World War II. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press.

Calavita, Kitty, Pontell, Henry N., & Tillman, Robert. (1999). Big money crime: Fraud and politics in the savings and loan crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chwastiak, M. (2013). Profiting from destruction: The Iraq reconstruction, auditing and the management of fraud. Crit. Perspect. Acc., 24(I1), 32–43.

Chwastiak, M. (2015). Commodifying state crime: Accounting and ‘extraordinary rendition’. Crit. Perspect. Acc., 28(11), 1–12.

Chossudovsky, Michel. (2003). The globalization of poverty and the New World order (2nd ed.). Pincourt, PQ: Centre for Research on Globalization.

deHaven-Smith, Lance. (2006). When political crimes are inside jobs: Detecting state crimes against democracy. Admin. Theory Prax., 28(3), 330–355.

Graham, C., & Neu, D. (2003). Accounting for globalization’ (with Cameron Graham). Acc. Forum, 27(4), 449–465.

Johnson, Simon. (2011). The real U.S. Crisis is not a debt downgrade: Commentary by Simion Johnson. Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-15/the-real-u-s-crisis-is-not-a-debt-downgrade-commentary-by-simon-johnson.html (accessed 14 August 2011).

Juhasz, Antonia. (2006). The bush agenda: Invading the world, one economy at a time. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Klein, Naomi. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York, NY: Allen Lane/Penguin Books.

Kouzmin, Alexander, Johnston, Judy, & Thorne, Kym. (2011). Economic-SCADs: The dark underbelly of neoliberalism. Public Integrity, 13(3), 221–237.

Lehman, G. (2009). Globalisation and the Internationalisation of accounting: New technologies, instrumentalism and harmonisation. Crit. Perspect. Acct.,
20(4), 445–447.

Lehman, G. (2010). Perspectives on accounting, commonalities & the public sphere Original Research Article. Crit. Perspect. Acct., 21(8), 724–738.

Lehman, G. (2011a). The Management of Sustainability: The Art of Interpretation. J. Appl. Manage. Acct. Res., 9(1), 75–88.

Lehman, G. (2011b). Interpretativism, postmodernism and the natural environment. Philos. Soc. Critic., 37(7), 795–821.

Lukes, L. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Neu, Dean, Everett, Jeff, & Rahaman, Abu Shiraz. (2015). Preventing corruption within government procurement: Constructing the disciplined and ethical
subject. Crit. Perspect. Acc., 28(1), 49–61.

Roberts, J. (2015). The ‘subject’ of corruption’. Crit. Perspect. Acc., 28, 82–88.

Roberts, John. (2009). No one is perfect: The limits of transparency and an ethic for ‘intelligent’ accountability. Acc., Organ. Soc., 34(8), 957–970.

Roberts, John, & Scapens, Robert. (1995). Accounting systems and systems of accountability—Understanding practices in their organizational contexts. Acc.,
Organ. Soc., 10(4), 443–456.

Saul, John Ralston. (2005). The collapse of globalism and the reinvention of the world. New York, NY: Viking.

Sikka, P. (2014). The corrosive effects of neoliberalism on the UK financial crises and auditing practices: A dead-end for reforms. Acc. Forum, 39(1), 1–18.
March 2015.

Thorne, K., & Kouzmin, A. (2012). Ideal typing (in)visible power in the context of oligarchic isomorphisms. In A. Kouzmin, M. Witt, & A. Kakabadse (Eds.),
State crimes against democracy: Political forensics in public affairs (pp. 107–134). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Witt, Matthew, & Kouzmin, Alexander. (2010). Sense making under ‘Holographic ‘conditions: Framing research into SCADs. Am. Behav. Sci., 53(6.).

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Further Reading

Bernstein, Carl, & Bob, Woodward. (1974). All the President’s Men. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Dean, John. (1976). Blind ambition: The white house years. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Frederickson, H. George. (2007). Filling up the Hollow State: The ‘state of agents’ project. PA Times, December, 11.

Friedman, Milton. (1982). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Giroux, Henry. (2011). Zombie, politics and culture in the age of casino capitalism. New York, NY: PeterLang Publishing.

Johnston, Judy, & Alexander, Kouzmin. (1998). Who are the Rent Seekers? From the ideological attack on public officials to the pork barrel par
excellence—Privatization and out-sourcing as oligarchic corruption. Admin. Theory Prax., 20(4), 491–507.

Kakabadse, A., Kouzmin, A., Kakabadse, N., & Mouraviev, N. (2012). Auditing moral hazards for the post-global financial crisis leadership. In A. Kakabadse,
& M. Witt (Eds.), State crimes against democracy: Political forensics in public affairs (pp. 79–106). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Korten, David C. (1995). When corporations rule the world. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.

Kouzmin, Alexander, & Dixon, John. (2006). Neo-liberal economics, public do-mains and organizations: Is there any organizational design after privatization?
In Thomas D. Lynch, & Peter L. Cruise (Eds.), In handbook of organizational theory and management: The philosophical approach (pp. 667–728). Boca Raton,
FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis.

Kouzmin, Alexander. (2008). Crisis management in crisis? Admin. Theory Prax., 30(2), 155–183.

Kutler, Stanley I. (1990). The wars of watergate: The last crisis of Richard Nixon. New York, NY: Norton.

Mehra, J. (2009). From Wall Street to crawl street: Markets punish greedy manipulators. Corp. Governance, 9(1), 6–17 (International Journal of Enhancing
Board Performance).

Royrvik, E. (2009). The sociability of securitization: Symbolic weapons of mass deception. iNtergraph, 2(2). At http://www.intergraph-journal.com/enhanced/vol2issue2/8.html (viewed 5 March 2010). (The Journal of Dialogic Anthropology).

Selznick, Philip. (1952). The organizational weapon: A study of Bolshevik strategy and tactics. Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe.

Shane, Scott, & Ron, Nixon. (February 4, 2007). In Washington, contractors take on biggest role ever. New York Times: Washington. Available at
www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/Washington/04contract.html (accessed February 20, 2007).

Thorne, Kym. (2010). Does history repeat?: The multiple faces of Keynesianism, monetarism and the global financial crisis. Admin. Theory Prax., 32 (September
(3)), 304–326.

Tregidga, H., Milne, M., & Lehman, G. (2012). Analyzing the quality, meaning and accountability of organizational reporting and communication: An
Introduction. Acc. Forum, 36(3), 150–153.

Walsh, Lawrence E. (1997). Firewall: The iran–contra conspiracy and cover-up. New York, NY: Norton.

Witt, Matthew, & Lance, deHaven-Smith. (2008). Conjuring the ‘Holographic State’: Scripting security doctrine for a (New) world of disorder. Admin. Soc.,
40(6), 547–585.

Understanding False Flag Operations In Our Time

Understanding False Flag Operations In Our Time

By Bonnie Faulkner

Global Research, February 06, 2016

Guns and Butter 20 January 2016

Region: USA

Theme: Intelligence

http://www.globalresearch.ca/understanding-false-flag-operations-in-our-time

Richard Dolan covers false flag operations analyzed as a distinctively modern phenomena, post WWI; the planet being stolen by a transnational corporate financial class; ideological false flags including religions and nationalism; the propaganda spectrum including cultural values, educational system and news media; a war of corporate cultural control and imposition of a global police state; US Psychological Operations Manual; white, grey and black PSYOPs; regime change and color revolutions; NGOs; characteristics of a false flag.
False flag operations analyzed as a distinctively modern phenomena, post WWI; the planet being stolen by a transnational corporate financial class; ideological false flags including religions and nationalism; the propaganda spectrum including cultural values, educational system and news media; a war of corporate cultural control and imposition of a global police state; US Psychological Operations Manual; white, grey and black PSYOPs; regime change and color revolutions; NGOs; characteristics of a false flag.

This is Guns and Butter.

We have 9/11 in which the hammer comes down and beats you over the head for the rest of your life with a big national security stick so that people learn to duck their head and not speak up, because … bad idea now. You know, we now have, I think 20% of the American population is 15 or younger. I think that’s the number. These are people who grew up – they don’t know anything other than post-9/11 America. And actually, let’s say that anyone who’s under 25 doesn’t, really. They were kids. That’s probably, what, a third or more of the population. It’s all going away. The whole past of the United States, the whole idea of rule by the people, of privacy. We have an entire new generation who are growing up without any of that. It’s all gone.
I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Richard Dolan. Today’s show: Understanding False Flag Operations in Our Time. Richard Dolan is an author and historian. He is nearing completion of a groundbreaking book, A History of False Flag Operations, which will explain one of the most pernicious developments of our time: how clandestine agencies secretly engage in violence and destruction in order to promote their agendas. He has published four books and numerous articles on anomalous phenomena, suppressed science, secret space programs, breakaway civilizations, the intelligence community and similar subjects. He is best known as the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and The National Security State. He studied US Cold War strategy, Soviet history and international diplomacy. Today’s presentation, Understanding False Flag Operations In Our Time, is from the Architects of the New Paradigm Conference in San Rafael, California, January 16th, 2016. Richard Dolan.
* * * * *
In addition to writing books I’ve spent many, many years doing private consulting work. Basically I’m an independent writer and I would meet with individuals one on one, thousands and thousands of them. It was a great experience with me just to sit down and talk with someone about their life, about their career, about their anxieties and everything else.
What I’ve always noticed is that when you start scratching the surface of someone’s worldview you find very quickly that they, just as you, have an understanding that there’s something not right with the world around us. Not everyone has the motivation or the education or the background to kind of dive into this like a madman obsessed with getting to the truth, but they know. They feel it in their bones. There’s something wrong, desperately wrong, with the state of the world, and it involves a feeling that they’re not in control anymore.
In particular I think we can see this in the last 20 years in the United States where we’ve had severe economic dislocation. I live in the northeastern part of the United States and I’ve gotten to see really the obliteration of a company that informed the town that I live in. That’s Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, and I just watched Kodak go poof over the past decade and a half. But I think you can see this story everywhere, in many places of the US.
It accompanies a kind of loss of hope, a loss of confidence, a feeling like is the future really going to be worth something? In addition to that, those people who try to learn about their world by turning on the television and watching CNN, inevitably what they find is that they’re totally confused about what is happening. It just seems like one damn thing after another, one terrorist thing doing this and one national security thing doing that and these crazy people, why do they hate us… and there’s really no sense of understanding when you plug into the establishment news media. There doesn’t seem to be like how do we solve any of this, how do we fix this, how do we really get to a better world, why can’t these people just like freedom and democracy like we do? This is the kind of nonsense that … There doesn’t seem to be a way out of it.
I would say that all of that confusion, all of that hopelessness is by design. I believe this now. I don’t believe, as I might have years past, that the people on top, they’re trying to do their best but it’s a tough world out there. No. No. No. They want you to feel helpless. They want you to be confused. Let’s talk about why.
One reason why is that the whole planet is being stolen. You’ve got this many people who want to own every single thing that’s worth owning in this planet – all the water, all the genetically modified foods they want to shove down your throat, all the minerals in the ground. They want every single thing. And they’re getting it. They’ve got it, actually, and they just want more. That’s the way it’s happening.
It’s a transnational corporate financial theft of everything. It’s a war. When there’s a war, the people who are running that war really don’t want you to be able to react to it. They don’t want you to be cognizant of what is happening. And they want you to be quiet about it. They want you to obey and be compliant.
Therefore, they must rule by means of deception. Because if they were to out and out say to you, “Yeah, we’re going to steal all your stuff,” you might have a thing or two to say about it. So what must happen is a kind of ideological false flag or an ideological psych on you and me. This is exactly, I think, what we are seeing in the world.
Now, it’s certainly not true to say that this is a new development in a larger sense. Human history has always been informed by intense hierarchy. In that sense you could say mind control has always existed in the sense that elites have typically kind of created worldviews by which the great masses of humanity would look to the authority for guidance and for salvation. I think the obvious example of this we could see is various religions of the world but I would also include things like nationalism and other kinds of ideologies that let us say encourage and enforce compliance among the population.
I think we can agree that false problems have, since forever, since throughout human history, been kind of created in order to accommodate a pre-arranged solution to that problem, things that I would call an ideological false flag. What I mean by that is not an instance where a government or an intelligence agency in ancient times would kill people and blame it on another party and scare the heck out of people and enforce their rule. No, but by creating a mindset.
Think of something like the Inquisition. That’s a perfect example of an ideological false flag where back in, I think it was, 1487, a book called Malleus Maleficarum was published. This was a guidebook, really, on how to identify, prosecute and kill witches. That’s what that book really was. As a result of that, over the next century or so about 1 million European women were executed for witchcraft, about then. It did several things. One is it created a lot of fear among the population. “Oh, my God, witches. Get rid of those people!” It enforced the authority of the ecclesiastical Church at the time, at least for a certain while until there was a reaction against it. And it also got a lot of power and money for the Church. Families of witches would actually pay through indulgences to minimize the amount of time in Purgatory or get them out of Hell. This actually really happened. It also allowed for land grabs by the Church of the families of the witches, very much like the US government does today with people suspected – this is really the truth – of various crimes. They take your property. This is what the Church did. So that I call a false flag. The War on Terror is an ideological false flag.
That’s an old, old part of human history. I would say in our world today there is a manner in which they’re trying to get inside your head, and I call it a propaganda spectrum. There are all kind of forms of control but they get progressively more pernicious as you go down the list.
The most fundamental method by which society, that you are expected to conform to society, would be what we might call cultural values. That’s when you go to school and you learn to pledge allegiance with your hand over your heart and you go through the educational system. Even 100 years ago Bertrand Russell was talking about as a method of conformity. More recently we have really great visionaries like John Taylor Gatto who has talked very much along the same lines, of the educational system as a system of control over your head. Get inside your head and make you obey, make you an obedient worker.
So that’s the cultural values. Not all of it is necessarily evil. We can all recognize that a functioning society would require a kind of cultural consensus, but you can still see how the implementation of certain cultural values could at least provide a foundation of obedience.
Beyond that, though, I think what is a little bit more pernicious is what we might call cultural distractions. This is the phenomenon of the Kardashians and things like Dancing With The whatever they’ve got on this week or Monday Night Football, or all the stupid, meaningless stuff that is poured into everyone’s head every single day – truly, literally meaningless information that just goes right in. And we all like entertainment. I’m watching back episodes of “The Sopranos” so I’m just as guilty as anyone else. Those are my people. I’m from the Northeast. “You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.”
But I think when you get into a level of distraction that is so mindless as what we obviously see around us, this is a signal. It’s a signal for you to look over here, don’t look over there. There’s something important going on over here so look at this shiny little trinket. It goes on and on and on and on and it never stops, and it never will stop as long as this system is in place as it is.
Beyond that, though, there’s still always people even in what we would call the ordinary, out-there society, all the other people in this country, who still want to feel like they’re being informed, and that’s when they turn on the TV and they watch CNN or Fox or NPR. Hey, why not? Because look, NPR was run for years and years by a man who was running CIA propaganda, and that’s a fact, so NPR’s really no different. Yeah. It’s really true. People think, “Oh, I’m so educated. Fox sucks. I’m going to listen to NPR because they’re intelligent.
Well, you know, here’s the thing about that, I’ll just say as an aside. Our whole cultural narrative these days, our whole cultural discourse in politics seems to me to be on nothing more than cultural issues. Not that they don’t matter, but it’s like if you’re a liberal that means “I support transgender rights.” If you’re a conservative, “I don’t support transgender rights.” “I do support Black Lives Matter.” “I don’t support Black Lives Matter.” “I do support smoking weed in Colorado.” “I don’t support smoking” … If this is what we’ve come down to in our politics, we’re done. It’s over – over, over. Stick a fork in us, it’s done because, as I say, there’s a serious war happening. It is a war of corporate cultural control and imposition of a global police state over you and over your children, over your grandchildren, for all of time. That’s the war. If we’re not talking about that, then we’re just wasting our time. That’s my view.
Anyway, for that third level of control and spin there’s the news media, people who want to be informed, so they’ll turn on CNN and become confused forever, because really, that’s a system that is all about censorship, spin, propaganda, control. CNN … Why is it that CNN is on at every single gate at every single airport in the United States? Why? Is it like every airport manager in the country is like, “Oh, wow. I totally love CNN. I want to inform…” I don’t think so. They’re a private company owned by Time Warner – clearly there’s a nice sweetheart deal – and because they are the propaganda voice of the US State Department and CIA. That’s the only reason they’re on. That’s the only reason you see them at every gate. So that’s the third level. I would say those first three levels of propaganda account for probably 95% of the control mechanisms in place to keep you in your place. Most probably.
But then, every now and then you need a little bit more something, and that’s when we’re talking about psy-ops, psychological operations, covert ops, color revolutions, regime change down to the “Shock Doctrine” type of events, if anyone’s read Naomi Klein. I’m a big fan of that book. And then down to false flags, which I think is the most pernicious of those. I’ll talk a little bit about these in a little more detail.
With psy-ops, psychological operations, US military, this is in their playbook. This is an official thing that our military does, and other militaries do it, too. It’s not just us. It’s interesting that the Defense Department will have in this psychological operations manual three different types of ops. They call them white, grey and black psy-ops.
White psy-ops is pretty straightforward. It’s not really even a psych job on the world. It’s basically an official or a virtually official statement of the United States government just getting their message out to the world. And you know it’s from the US government and it’s relatively straightforward, even if you don’t agree with it.
Grey psy-ops is a little more interesting and very pervasive in our world today, as it’s always been. If you’re familiar with something like Operation Mockingbird, that would be a grey psy-op. That would be something like using journalists or using other voices that are not officially part of the US government but basically having them give the US government perspective, pretending it’s coming from some other voice. That’s a grey psy-op, and that’s a very, very widespread phenomenon.
The Pentagon, for example, which spends billions of dollars every single year managing their social image – they do – that includes things like not simply having close relationships with professional journalists who spin the news in their favor, but it also includes paid trolls, which I call sock puppets. This is true. Let’s say you read news articles and you look at all the comments below and you see these real whackjobs out there. Some of them really literally are sock puppets. That means you’d be a Pentagon employee and you’d be in charge of X number of profiles on the social media and on the message boards. That’s what you would do. You would disrupt, you would persuade, you would cajole, but in fact, you’re a paid employee. That would be a grey psy-op, as well.
Then there’s black psy-ops, and this is where we’re really getting into some serious stuff. This is according to the US Psychological Operations Manual: A black psy-op is something that comes from a US government source but “appears to emanate from a source hostile in nature. US government would deny responsibility.” That’s a false flag. I don’t know how else you can describe it. Something that the US government does but seems to come from one of the “bad guys.”
One of the things about black psy-ops in the manual is that – at least they state – this is not actually a function of the United States military but actually that black psy-ops are a function of the US intelligence community, and that kind of makes sense. I guess the point is that false flag black psy-ops are in the playbook of the United States. It’s just worth keeping in mind.
Something like regime change or the so-called color revolutions, these can include false flags, which I’m going to get into a false flag in just a moment in case you’re still wondering, “What the heck is a false flag?” Regime change is something that the United States has truly perfected to the extent possible over many decades. They did it back in 1953 in Iran. Essentially what that was was a CIA operation to overthrow an elected government that had the temerity to nationalize its oil, and you can’t do that, so the CIA, Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of T.R., ran an operation for the CIA to pay off people to pretend they were communists, to do horrible things to discredit that group, and to organize crowds that pushed for regime change. And it was quite successful. This was a model that has been followed ever since.
Primarily now what you find is the US does this through NGOs, non-governmental organizations, and this has been a very, very major topic of study. So again, it’s all ruled by indirection. There’s one group known as Avaaz – it’s called The Voice in many languages – and many others as well, but this one has been heavily involved in supporting efforts to destabilize and topple the governments of Libya. They were really gleeful about that one and calling for NATO intervention, which ended up essentially destroying that nation, which it is to this day, and they’re trying to do the same in Syria today.
So in other words, the US works through these and many other NGOs to push for regime change where ordinary citizens, people around the world that don’t know any better think, “Oh, well they’re a non-governmental organization. They’re obviously detached, objective, etc.” No. They’re not. They’re working for the United States government and intelligence community. And this is very, very common. That’s an image of the color revolution in Ukraine back in ’04 and it’s just a model that’s been done tried and true many times now.
Another aspect of the covert ops, getting toward false flag in cases we might call provocations, and this has happened everywhere, we’re talking about agents provocateur. We probably are all familiar with the old COINTELPRO operation from the FBI from the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s in which the FBI would infiltrate organizations that were pushing for positive social change, I would say – Students for Democratic Society, the Black Panthers. What they would do then is have their guys inside the organization fomenting violence and doing things to discredit those organizations. That’s provocation.
This is again, a highly effective tool used within the US, used in Canada, used in the UK. It’s used all through Europe. It was used very much in Ukraine in 2014, used in Iraq after the invasion in ’03, through ’04, ’05, ’06. There are a lot of provocations that we know about – I’ll be writing about them in my new book – in Syria, elsewhere. And it happened in the Occupy movement, without a doubt.
So you have covert operatives infiltrating movements for progressive change with a view to discredit it. I suspect most of you may be familiar with this or on board with it, but if you doubt it, this is a great deal of research and really excellent journalism that has gone into this and has, I think proven – not suggested, not hinted, but has proven that provocations are standard operating procedure. Some of these guys just get found out.
Another important means by which I think propaganda is used to dominate your mind and to kind of impose a corporate control kind of global revolution is what we might call the “Shock Doctrine” technique, and this was the contribution of Naomi Klein. Really, what she argues is that neoliberalism, or let’s call it globalism, as a fundamentally anti-human process, her argument is that it can only be imposed via trauma, I guess we could say. She came up with the phrase “shock doctrine” through the US military’s phrase of “shock and awe.” The military goes into a nation, we’re going to “shock and awe” them. Think about, oh, wow… what a thing to say about another group of people. You pound them into submission and traumatize them, and that’s precisely US military doctrine.
What occurred to her was that this is actually how they rule, not just abroad but they rule at home through shock. She was thinking of Katrina, she was thinking of 9/11. When some horrible, terrible thing happens in which people are just bereft and no one’s thinking clearly… Often after these horrific things happen, and that is exactly when, she says, contingency plans which had been in place since forever are rolled out and people just accept it because they’re looking for help – corporate control over New Orleans after Katrina or the whole national security apparatus rolled in after 9/11 and so on and so on.
What she suggests is that these catastrophes and the anxiety that comes about as a result of it that is played up by authorities results in what she calls learned helplessness. We’ve done science studies of rats and you create so much anxiety and loss of control, they learn helplessness, and it’s the same with people. And her argument is that this is a key method by which global control is achieved. I would totally agree with that, and I would say, let’s go one step further.
There are instances in which crises aren’t simply happening and then groups opportunistically take advantage of it. I would argue that there are a number of events in our contemporary world in which those catastrophes are intentionally created, and that is what we call a false flag – an instance in which a group, an intelligence agency usually, does something truly horrible – killing people, blowing up buildings, some other kind of horrific act that is then blamed on another party by which to justify things that could never otherwise be justified, whether it’s dastardly pernicious laws of control over a population or wars that could never have otherwise be justified to justify theft of natural resources of other countries and so on. That’s a false flag. There’s a lot of that going on around in the world these days.
I think it’s probably the single most powerful form of propaganda. I can’t think of anything that has more emotional impact than a false flag. And I also think there’s not much more that I can think of that’s more risky or audacious or bold to undertake than a true false flag. It’s not something for everyone. I think it’s something that only a very few organizations truly have the wherewithal and the power to implement. I’ll get into that in a moment.
If you scroll through the Web on the phenomenon of false flags you’ll find a lot of sites that will say that this is an ancient phenomenon going back. Some will site things like Nero burning down Rome and blaming it on the Christians to implement certain things. And when I started researching this about a year ago I was certainly inclined to accept that line of reasoning, but my own research has told me otherwise.
Actually, I would argue that false flags are not an ancient phenomenon. Now, I talked about the ideological false flags, a kind of mind control system in place, like the Inquisition and other things, but that’s different. I mean false flags as a covert op. I don’t think that’s an ancient phenomenon at all. I think it’s a distinctively modern phenomenon and, in fact, I think that’s an important thing to understand about them so that we realize why they are happening today, and I will be talking about that now.
I think to have a false flag what you need, because a false flag is a big psych job on the population, so one thing that is necessary is you have to have a kind of ostensibly – and I say ostensibly – democratic type of system. It doesn’t have to be truly democratic. The United States is not a truly democratic society. In fact, Yale university – I think it was Yale – did a study a couple of years ago that actually quantitatively I would say proved that what we have is an oligarchy. What they did is they looked at public policy and legislation that was implemented and looking at public opinion and the like, and really, I think, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that the wishes of the great masses of the population have zero impact on public policy, and that public policy is, on the contrary, put into place on the wishes of those who have power and money and influence. It’s no surprise. That’s an oligarchy, and that’s what we have.
But we also have an ostensive democratic system where people still believe and we still have the remnants, let’s say, of that kind of rule of the people. It’s not just the United States. It’s in much of the world now. Kim Jong Un of North Korea doesn’t need to do false flags. Really, why? Because he’s got the people terrified. He just controls them through fear – and lies, yes, but a lie is not the same as a false flag. In fact, he can’t really do easily, in my view, a false flag against South Korea, either, because he doesn’t have control over major media globally. That’s the next thing.
For false flag you need an ostensibly democratic system because you have to corral the people into a particular point of view, and then you need control over major media. You have to have the ability to effectively propagandize without competition from other narratives – at least significant competition of that. So you dominate the narrative.
On top of that, you need decent covert op teams, people who know what they’re doing. Again, this is not the type of thing that you would really find in the ancient world. You need a lot of money to do that, and there’s a few nations in the world today who have much more money and means than others to do this. And you need motive and the capability, obviously, for what I would call geopolitical, financial or national political change. There’s got to be groups that are pushing to revolutionize their society in ways that they believe it should be. They realize they can’t do it along legal means and so they use these other means.
The other one thing I would say why false flags are not a truly ancient phenomenon is in the ancient world – and I’m an avid student of ancient history, very much so. What you find in ancient history is lots of bloodshed. I mean massacres and horrific… We think it’s bad today but in the ancient world armies would go in and just completely kill every single inhabitant in a town, my God. So there’s no shortage of bloodshed. There’s no shortage of lies that nations would tell each other, absolutely. But the idea of doing something like a false flag in the ancient world, when you look at most of the cultural values that existed in most of the societies back then, it really would be pernicious to them. As bloody-minded as most of the ancient militaries were, there was a sort of code. Let’s call it a code among thieves or a code of honor, in which the deception really would be considered a pernicious and a horrible thing to do. Also, I think it would be much more difficult to do a true false flag for those reasons and due to the lack of communication, just a harder thing to do. I think a false flag is, again, a distinctively modern phenomenon.
To do a false flag internationally or even domestically and have it fly internationally, you need power in the world today. You’ve got to be able, especially for something international, to dominate global media, at least sufficiently so that you can sort of push aside alternative narratives and explanations. You also have to have the ability to intimidate other nations into silence if you’re going to do this, and there are very few nations that have that ability in the world today.
I’m going to do a little bit and there’s no way that I’m going to be able to go over every single thing that I think has been a false flag in the last 100 years – there’s a lot of things – but I do want to give a sense of how the phenomenon has evolved. False flags have evolved.
My own research at this point is telling me that the true phenomenon really takes off following the First World War. Again, there are isolated events possibly, maybe probably, from prior to World War I but not many. Even talking about the sinking of the Maine, I’ve looked into that and I’m not really sure that I would classify that as a true false flag. It can go either way. But we start seeing them now for sure in the 1930s and, really, the main nations that were doing them, Japan, Germany, Soviet Union. They did some very prominent ones and I think many of us are familiar with some of these.
Everyone’s heard of the Reichstag Fire. The German invasion of Poland is maybe one of the classic international false flags of all time. Essentially, Germans took a bunch of political prisoners who were rotting away in their prison system, dressed them in Polish military uniforms, took over a radio station at the border, shot all of the prisoners, posed one of them at a microphone and then went on the air and pretended that Poland had attacked Germany and was inciting Poles in Germany to resist Hitler. This was an absolute false flag. The German people, as far as we can tell, more or less accepted it. International politicians were not particularly impressed by it, to say the least, but it worked enough for the Germans to justify to themselves that they invaded. False flag. That’s the Reichstag, by the way, burning. That’s their 9/11.
The thing that they all have in common, those false flags of that decade, is that those were nations with state control over the media. That’s a very important thing to keep in mind. And they also had very sophisticated military intelligence groups for their time, without a doubt. So they had the control over the media and they had the teams. They were militarized and this is, I think, why after World War I we start seeing it. World War I militarized all of Europe and the United States, and really transformed those cultures to that extent so that there was a very strong militarization in the aftermath of that, and I think that was part of it.
What you find after the Cold War is that the United States wins the False Flag Olympics hands down, and it’s really been every since. I would say that the US and its vassal states essentially run the false flag universe. It’s basically US, Israel, the UK, I would say are the big three. There are certainly other nations that have been involved in this, without a doubt. Particularly since 9/11 a lot of nations have jumped on board.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a lot of them did it in order to get US terror funding. There was a case I think in ’02 that was found out, this one, the nation of Macedonia – found out that they had murdered seven illegal immigrants from Pakistan and said that these are al Qaeda terrorists. They were not al Qaeda terrorists. They were illegals but they were innocent people. They were killed and Macedonian authorities played it up as al Qaeda specifically in order to get US funding and they aren’t the only example of that type of shenanigans, kind of a piling-on effect after 9/11.
But back to the Cold War, what you see is a transformation of the false flags in the sense that they start becoming domestic. There are still international incidents that are false flags, absolutely. There was one that was found out by the Israelis in 1954 where Mossad was basically finding Egyptian Jews who were going to blow up certain buildings and blame it on the Muslim Brotherhood and it was found out. It was called the Lavon Affair, after the Israeli Defense Minister. The parties involved confessed and all that. That was an international type of false flag. They did that, incidentally, to encourage the British not to leave and abandon the Suez Canal.
But primarily what you see are domestic false flags specifically for political control. COINTELPRO in the US is maybe a classic example of that, the FBI doing what they call black-bag jobs and the like, to dirty tricks, smearing people, doing events and blaming it on other organizations and so on.
In Europe, probably the most pernicious was known as Operation Gladio, which was a NATO/CIA operation. Essentially, when World War II concluded there was the fear among Allied nations that the Russians would roll over Europe, and so there were teams put in place in Europe to act as kind of a resistance if this were to happen. Well, the Russians did not roll over Western Europe and these teams are still sitting there. In Italy, they got the bright idea of killing people and blowing up buildings and train stations and blaming it on the communists, which they did for years – years and years. This has been found out. And in fact, one of the Gladio operatives, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving life in prison for his part in Gladio, in an interview was very specific. He said, “The point of what we were doing was to force these people” the Italian people in this case, “to turn to the state and ask for greater security.” They’re very up-front about it. These were NATO operatives, with the knowledge of the higher-up authorities, and they were just doing this and blamed their murders on the Red Brigade and blamed them on other leftwing groups.
There’s a long proven history. This is another list of the ‘60s, and in the ‘70s and ‘80s and I’m not going to go over all of it. It includes the Gulf of Tonkin, it includes some really nasty Mossad operations, some of which looked exactly like Charlie Hebdo, one of which occurred in 1982, a bombing of a Jewish delicatessen in Paris. Sound familiar? But it was in 1982. When French intelligence investigated far enough they kind of ran into a brick wall and everything stopped, and it did get some very good international analysis at the time.
One of the more pernicious ones would be during the ramp-up to the Persian Gulf War. Do you remember this? I bet some of you do. The Incubator Hoax. This woman was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States but she was pretending to be a nurse on TV, and to Congress. What she said was that the Iraqi troops, once they had gone into Kuwait – remember that? – were looting incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital, leaving the premature babies to die on the floor. And it was such a horrific image, this went on all the news. Everyone promoted this from NPR to Fox and everyone in between. It was a total lie and she was a total lie, but this is how it works. In fact, by the ‘80s and ‘90s, the United States military was officially hiring public relations firms in a very effective way. The Persian Gulf War was kind of a watershed in that effort.
Let’s keep going here. Through the ‘90s you’ve got quite a few of these. The Oklahoma City bombing’s probably the most prominent one there. I’ll talk about some of the problems of how to identify these types of false flags when I close.
As we get to the 21st century I think we hit the era of true false flags. I’m not going to go into the specifics; there’s just too much. I want to talk about the geopolitics and help us understand why this is happening. I think one of the key things has to do with globalization. With globalization you get economic disruption and the loss of jobs. This is Seattle 1999. I think Seattle is a great indicator. These are the WTO riots, or protests, November 30th. This went for four days, into early December. This is significant.
Back in 1999 Americans still believed they had rights. I remember those days. The WTO, the World Trade organization, was convening in Seattle at that time, and for several months protestors planned this out, and when that convention happened these protestors, at minimum 40,000, probably much more – shut that city down. They shut it down. They were so effective the delegates were not able to enter the premises for the longest time. Police teargas didn’t work, pepper spray didn’t work. The police were overwhelmed by an incredibly powerful public reaction, and this is what happens when the public feels empowered. The WTO was really initiating some very nasty decisions that, in fact, they ended up doing, that just accelerated the process of the de-industrialization of the United States.
This is when people were saying, “No. Were not going to put up with it.” Of course, 18 months later we have 9/11, in which the hammer comes down and beats you over your head for the rest of your life with a big national security stick, so that people learn to duck their head and not speak up because … bad idea now. You know, we now have, I think, 20% of the American population is 15 or younger. I think that’s the number. These are people who grew up – they don’t know anything other than post-9/11 America. And actually, let’s say that anyone who’s under 25 really doesn’t. They were kids. So that’s, what, a third or more of the population. It’s all going away. The whole past of the United States, the whole idea of rule by the people, of privacy. We have an entire new generation who are growing up without any of that. It’s all gone.
For some of these young people, I hate to say it, but it almost seems meaningless. I have two brilliant young teenagers, 19 and 17, and I know a lot of their friends. They’re a little different; they’re kind of plugged in, but I know about a lot of young people and they just live, post their stuff on Facebook … They don’t care about privacy. They don’t expect it. It’s a different world. I think this type of thing is a threat to the globalist process and is a trigger for false flags.
The other major geopolitical thing behind false flags, I would suggest to you, is the petrodollar system. I can’t go over the whole thing here but essentially, this is the deal worked out between Henry Kissinger and the king of Saudi Arabia in the early-‘70s to keep the dollar in place as the world reserve currency. The dollar had just gone off the gold standard – whole story behind that – and now they wanted to hook the dollar to petroleum. And really, what Kissinger was able to agree was to have all the OPEC nations sell their oil only in dollars, and that’s the foundation of American policy to this day. All of the nations would get their oil pegged in dollars.
It’s great for the US because it allows that there’s a global demand for our currency, which allows for all kinds of things that the US can do printing up trillions of dollars and basically holding the world hostage as a result. No other nation could afford to do what the US is doing, to prosecute all of its wars and the like, because of the petrodollar system. And it is a foundation of America’s empire. It’s really never discussed, never, ever discussed in mainstream media. But the petrodollar system forces, these geopolitics force US neoconservatives – which is simply another world for empire-builder – neoconservative.
Think about that word. Old conservative. What would be an old conservative? Someone who I would think would want to conserve the traditional republican values and institutions of this country. That’s not the worst thing in the world. A neoconservative is the new conservative. They’re preserving not the republic, my friends; they’re conserving the empire. That’s what a neoconservative is. They are building and conserving empire. You can be a Republican like Dick Cheney, and you can be a Democrat like Hillary Clinton, and you can be a neoconservative. They’re twins. They’re brother and sister twins, politically, in my opinion. They both are as equally intent on domination and preservation of the United States empire, and that forces the neocons, the whole petrodollar system, to demonize any of these people who are not on board with that system. This is why Saddam went away, because he started selling his oil in euros in 2000. And Kaddafi, with the gold-based dinar system, he was about to introduce, which was a threat to the dollar. And Putin, of course, who is simply … Well, long story about Vlad. We’ll have to skip that for another time. I’m fascinated by Russian politics, always have been.
It forces the United States to feel the need to physically control the sources of energy that exist, basically the hydrocarbons that go from basically Western Africa across the continent to the Middle East and to western Asia. That’s two-thirds of the world’s oil and natural gas right there, and the US wants it all. They want to control it physically.
These are the geopolitical reasons, I would argue, that are directly behind 9/11. To steal, say, $30 trillion worth of oil under the ground in Iraq, which they did and then sold off to multinationals, and to steal all the nice mineral wealth under the ground in Afghanistan as a nice little bonus. So theft, of course, is always important for this, and then to control the population.
I would suggest, too, that the petrodollar and all of this is all part of a hierarchical-based and scarcity-driven system. That is, energy scarcity – Energy in our world today is based on physical control over a particular commodity, oil and natural gas primarily, and if you control those locations, you control the distribution, you have the power. That’s a strength and a power of the system, but it’s also the weakness of the system, because if we develop an alternative energy paradigm, this is very much in danger. And that’s a good thing. So this whole system is vulnerable to emerging technologies, and that means that the false flag phenomenon itself would be vulnerable to that.
I’m going to give you a quick profile. You know how we talk about racial profiling by the police; let’s talk about false flag profiling. There’s certain things that by themselves or even collectively don’t prove that something is a false flag but they give you an idea that you want to look carefully at it. The only way to prove one thing or another is through good investigative journalism but, nonetheless, let’s just take a quick look at some of these things.
One thing to look for is that it’s a sensational event that gets a lot of major media attention, boom, immediately. That’s pretty obvious. But what you really want to look for are changing narratives. In other words, particularly in the beginning, in the first day or two of an event, you will always find competing narratives of what exactly happened. You really want to look for that because after a few days, that goes away and the major media, particularly, are on board with, boom, this story, and this is the only story.
San Bernardino’s a great case. This happened not long ago and there were several witnesses – several – who said, “I saw three big white guys come in with guns.” Now, I don’t know if that’s the case or not but that’s a fact. These witnesses said this. That’s just one example. With 9/11 there’s all kinds of alternative narratives. You have the case of Rumsfeld talking about the plane that got shot down over Pennsylvania. Woops, maybe I didn’t mean to say that. And on and on and on. There’s all of these competing different statements that get leaked out and then just go away. You want to look for that.
You also want to look for the fact that the case is quickly closed, that a patsy or the “evil-doer” is quickly found and usually is either killed immediately or if he’s not killed, he just disappears and then the trial is always a kangaroo court and you’ll never even hear what’s going on. Boston was a great example of that.
Another thing you want to look for is that these suspects are connected to intelligence groups, whether US or non-US, but frequently US. I would say this. If you are approached by the FBI, ever in your life, and your skin color’s maybe a shade or two darker than mine, you’d better run far and fast. I’m not kidding. Because what they do, the FBI goes after foreign nationals who look foreign – that is, i.e., they’re a little darker – and they love to set these people up. More than have of all the terrorist arrests post-9/11 that have to do with federal terrorism charges, they’re FBI set-up jobs.
So the FBI will approach you, they’ll convince you, “Oh, yeah, the US government, they suck. Let’s go get them.” And in particular, if you’re not that bright, if you’re very easily impressionable … This happened in my town of Rochester just a couple weeks ago. They got another one there. They will bring you to the store to get your terrorist equipment, like a knife or a ski mask – I’m serious – and then they’ll arrest you and you’ll never see daylight ever again. These people on their own would almost never have committed any of these crimes, so this is provocation. This is what our government does to us. So if the FBI comes up to you, no matter what you look like, run. Go away from these people. What you find is that these suspects, there’s often a connection to intelligence organizations.
Typically the suspects that are promoted in the media have some kind of connection, sociologically, demographically, to whatever group is to be demonized. Back in the ‘90s it was typically rightwing militias, gun nuts, that type of thing. Timothy McVeigh comes to mind. In our century it’s more Muslims. They seem to be the group they’re going after, but there’s others. The LAX shooting was a so-called rightwing conspiracy theorist. That’s how he was portrayed in the media. And so on and so on, so look for these.
One thing you really want to look for are unanswered questions, and just problems associated with the official explanation of the event. There’s often gaping holes in these things, that the media – the establishment media, that is – never ask, how did these guys get out of Charlie Hebdo shooting so easily? There’s a car, no one bothered them. How is it they talked about a pristine passport being found after 9/11 and then also after the Paris murders just a few months ago. Really? A pristine passport? In the case of the Paris shooting, this perfect Syrian passport was left behind. What? Really? Then that story kind of went away and is not talked about … changing narratives. These are very suspicious things and whatever the truth is behind these – maybe we’ll never find the truth to some of these incidents because who knows why? But we certainly ought to be asking the questions.
Multiple drills is important. This is a key thing. When the events happen you typically find there are multiple drills happening that portray the exact same thing. With 9/11, there was a drill going on that day to protect America against the attack by terrorists using airplanes to crash into us. I’m not kidding. And there are a number of these multiple drills with the shootings and other things.
Why would that be? Here’s why. In the intelligence community, when you’re planning this thing out, there are always people who are not in with the in crowd. They’re not on board. The idea of the multiple drills is to provide cover, so if someone sees that this is happening the answer is, “Oh, no, no, no, no. We’re doing a drill. We’re doing a drill.” But then it happens. The other thing is that the existence of the drills also provides confusion during the day when the false flag occurs and that is very helpful for the operation.
The other thing you just see is a media narrative that jumps right on top because there’s intimate collaboration. The discussion’s inevitably focus on do we need more police protection, greater police state measures? What about our privacy? Yeah, but we have to have security. That whole discussion just goes on and on and so the public conversation inevitably creeps toward fascism, always does, and war – fascism and war.
Finally, you find the government taking action and doing things, again, that could never be justified, whether it’s invading Iraq or whether it’s rolling out the naked-body scanners owned by Michael Chertoff’s company after the Underwear Bomber – Ooh … Underwear! Bomber! – and sweetheart deals that happened that would never have happened otherwise.
Now, it’s true. Some of these events may not be always false flags. They might be devious, evil opportunism run amok. Would not rule that out, but a lot of these I think are indeed false flags absolutely, and we need to look at it.
Finally, in concluding, I would say that a lot of these false flags are not necessarily going to be military operations, especially moving forward. I think we need to look for corporate and financial false flags. In fact, there have been financial false flags in the past. I’ll write about the 1907 financial crisis that led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and I think that we have financial false flags that are going on in our own era. We have corporate false flags, if everyone remembers the Sony North Korea hack – absolute corporate/intel false flag – the flu scares, the pharmaceutical. All of these I think are a big part of our world today. Keep in mind, too, not every false flag – in fact, no false flag, likely, is going to be on the magnitude of something like 9/11. That’s the granddaddy, the big one. Most other false flags will have varying levels of impact on the world. Think of them as different types of different size weapons to target different types of things that they want to get done.
I just want to wrap up. I think there is a way out. What we’re seeing, the false flag phenomenon is important right now because you have groups that are trying right now to establish a global, totalitarian system, and they are trying very, very hard using false flags as a way to psych us out, terrify us, make us feel helpless so that we run to the state for protection. You can see it happening. This is exactly what they’re moving toward, and they’re being very successful at it right now.
In that war, we have to expect all forms of propaganda to be ramped up and to be in place, including the false flag but not exclusively false flags. All the tricks of the trade are coming out.
The way out for us, obviously, educate ourselves. Be unafraid to be an activist. I keep thinking, find out what you’re willing to go to jail for. Think about this. What are the things that you personally are willing, would be willing, to be arrested for? Because we’re getting to that point, what will we support? Organizations like WikiLeaks, which technically do things that are illegal but we need them because we’re not living in a democratic system. We’re living in an authoritarian system masking as a democratic system.
Fascism today is not going to look like Hitler. That was 80 years ago. This isn’t the world of the 1930s. Fascism’s not going to look like Brownshirts raising their right hand. That’s not how it is. Fascism’s going to look a lot sexier. It’ll look like Monday Night Football and it’ll look like Dancing With the Stars and it’ll look like all those nice things that people like to look at, the glitter. And it’ll call itself democracy. But it’s not going to call itself fascism. Of course it won’t. So we have to be aware.
The other thing that researchers should be doing, and they are doing this, we’re seeing this with the Web – is they’re calling out false flag opportunities now when they happen. This was not the case 20 years ago. It’s happening now. When any big event happens you see it. Now, sometimes people just jump on and say “False flag!” and maybe not always with evidence, but researchers are very, very aware now and so it’s becoming a little more difficult.
The main thing I feel we need to do, though, is to break out of this hierarchical control system. I was talking about energy earlier. I think there are ways for us moving forward technologically and in terms of our own thinking, to break ourselves out of this system of energy control. We’re talking about things like energy harvesting devices, free energy and the like. I think this is important.
The other thing, I do write about UFOs and let’s call it the ET phenomenon. I do consider that probably the greatest and most deep, dark secret that we have in our world today. It represents an infrastructure that is so vastly beyond the infrastructure we’re looking at here, and I do think that the opening of that secret as well as other secrets would cause an effect for people to be peering into the structures of power and allow them to take or at least begin the process of taking back the power, taking back our own sovereignty so that we can live actually as we always wanted to – as free, independent citizens of a society that believes in rule by the people.
You’ve been listening to Richard Dolan. Today’s show has been: Understanding False Flag Operations In Our Time.

Richard Dolan is an author and historian. He is nearing completion of a groundbreaking book, A History of False Flag Operations, which will explain one of the most pernicious developments of our time: how clandestine agencies secretly engage in violence and destruction in order to promote their agendas. He is best known as the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and the National Security State. He is widely regarded as a leading researcher and historian on the topic of the UFO cover-up. He studied US Cold War strategy, Soviet history and international diplomacy. Since 2012, he has hosted The Richard Dolan Show, airing on KGRA Radio every Monday evening, from 8-10 pm Eastern. In addition to his research, his company, Richard Dolan Press, actively publishes innovative books by authors from around the world. Visit his website at richarddolanpress.com.

Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. To leave comments or order copies of shows, email us at faulkner@gunsandbutter.org.

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