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AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1996 Perhaps more sinister and certainly more shadowy ,than the Bilderbergers, the Pinay Cirdc is an 'Avlanticist' righl-wing organisation of se.rving and ret,ired intelligence operatives, military officers and politicians who have conspired to "effect" changes in government. Amongst other things, it claims credit for engineering the election of Margaret Thatcher in !the UK and may have been behind the ousting of Australia's Gough Whitlam. Now almost forgotten, !the decade of the '70s was 11 time of immense political upheaval, dirty tricks and incessant rumours oj right-wing military coup d'etats in leading Western democracies. Amol)gst the long list (If resulting casualties of this 'decade of tension' were Britain's Prime Mini.sters Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, Australia's Gough Whitlam, Sweden's Olaf Pa!me, America's Jimmy Carter and France's Franyois Mitterand. The more southern flants of NATO's European axis-Po'flmgaI, Spain, Turkey and Greece= converted rumour into chilling fact via the steel-blue glaze of gun-barrels. Italy, home of Pizza, the Pope and Propaganda Due (P2), came in for its own brand of political fixit, courtesy of Uncle Sam's very own CIA. As t!tc d'ecade of the '80s slowjy slipped above the now Iless-than-pink eastern horizon, right-wing beneficiaries of a coordinated international destabilisation programme gave their heartfelt thanks. Among them were Britain's Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher Madonna of the armaments industry-and America's less brittle, and considerably less acute Ronald Reagan-humble originator of the mega-tax-buck-swall'owing SDI "Star Wars" programme and also, thus, a valued friend of the boys at Guns-R-Us International. These two decades saw a ptOliferation of right-wing, quasi-official and secretive' groups that coordinated intelUgence and prop,!ganda and undertook covert 'black' operations around the globe~ One of tbe most shadowy of all is the Pinay Circle, named after its founder, Antoine Pinay, Premier of France in 1951. Known more simply as Le Cercle ('The Circle"), it is recognised as a more clandestine sister organisation to the already very secretive Bilderbcrg Group'-a "bebjnd-the-scenes 'invisible' 'influence" network.2 Both groups share a familiar membership which includes Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller. Each of these three luminaries of the internatioQal power network is, in addition to the foregoing, an influential member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations as well as being a regular attendee al Britain's Chatham House-the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RlIA)-shadowy twin to America's CFR. Antoine Pinay was extremely influential in Europe and in the United States where he mad forged links with President Nixon. Pinay attended the inaugural Bilderberg meeting in Oosterbeek, Holland, in May 1954. By 1969, Pinay, together with Jean Violet, a· lawyer wOFking fOF the French intelligence service SDECE, and Archduke Otto von Hapsburg, heir to the Austrian throne, formed Le Cercle and secretly began recruiting men of influence as members.! The intention was to shift the politica] climate of Europe to the far right via a secretly financed campaign of propaganda and to establisn a private intelli gence service that would work, unofficially, with the existing security ap,paratus of the West. Auth0r Stephen Dorri! believes there are ser;pentine interconnections between Le Cercle and the Gladio network, a "stay-behind anti-Communist'" military guerriHa force' set up by NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) during the '50s and whiC:h was largely composed of ex-Nazis. Le Cercle has a different flavour to Bilderberg, however. The latter is an importanl link to the 'over't in-fiuGnce' organisations cited ab0ve and almosl certainly focusses its efforts NEXUS • 11