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The Pinay Circle An Invisible Power Network This clandestine circle may have ousted several democratic governments since the early 1970s. What's on its agenda now? erhaps more sinister and certainly more shadowy than the Bilderbergers, the Pinay Circle is an 'Atlanticist' right-wing organisation of serving and retired 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 Margarct 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 a time of immense political upheaval, dirty tricks and incessant rumours of right-wing military coup d’états in leading Western democracies. Amongst the long list of resulting casualties of this ‘decade of tension’ were Britain's Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, Australia's Gough Whitlam, Sweden's Olaf Palme, America's Jimmy Carter and France's Francois Mitterand. The more southern flanks of NATO's European axis—Portugal, 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 the decade of the '80s slowly slipped above the now less-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-swallowing SDI "Star Wars" programme and also, thus, a valued friend of the boys at Guns-R-Us International. These two decades saw a proliferation of right-wing, quasi-official and secretive groups that coordinated intelligence and propaganda and undertook covert ‘black’ operations around the globe. One of the 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 Bilderberg Group'—a "behind-the-scenes ‘invisible’ influence" network.? Both groups share a familiar membership which includes Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller. Each of these three luminaries of the international 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 at Britain's Chatham House—the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RILA)—shadowy twin to America's CFR. Antoine Pinay was extremely influential in Europe and in the United States where he had 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 working for 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 political climate of Europe to the far right via a secretly financed campaign of propaganda and to establish a private intelli- gence service that would work, unofficially, with the existing security apparatus of the West. Author Stephen Dorril believes there are serpentine interconnections between Le Cercle and the Gladio network, a "stay-behind anti-Communist" military guerrilla force set up by NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) during the 'SOs and which was largely composed of ex-Nazis. Le Cercle has a different flavour to Bilderberg, however. The latter is an important link to the ‘overt influence! organisations cited above and almost certainly focusses its efforts This clandestine circle may have ousted several democratic What's on its agenda now? by David G. Guyatt © 1996 5 Mucking Hall Cottages Mucking Hall Road Barling Magna, Essex SS3 ONJ England, UK Phone/Fax +44 (0)1702 21 7523 NEXUS © 11 AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1996