THE WEEKEND THEY INVENTED TERRORISM
PART 2A: THE PRINCES AND THE FROG
This article is dedicated to the memory of gallant Hossam Shabat, who spent eighteen months begging the world to care.
.إِنَّا لِلَّٰهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ
Like we said last time on The JCIT Files...
JCIT created a new-fangled Frankenstein. French JFK conspirators. Cecil Rhodes wannabes IRL James Bonds. America’s evilest spymaster. And the Isra*lis. They weren’t natural allies. All four groups shared a subjugate and expropriate Arabs je ne sais quoi, but they fought over the spoils almost as hard as they fought the PLO.
JCIT changed that. The imperial powers’ respective Gray Men came together, hammered out an Isra*li-conceived plot, and seeded it through every medium known to man - the counterstrike to Carter’s ‘human rights’ reformism, and then some. It went off without a hitch. You might not know what JCIT is, but you’re living its ramifications: no USSR. No PLO worth the name. Gaza turned into Auschwitz. When we examine the crime scene and dig into the perps’ CVs, the why comes into focus:
They’re all criminals.
Desperate young mothers flirt with the Walgreen’s clerk for an extra can of Ensure. Our rogues’ gallery muscles her out of the way with a Gordon Gecko power elbow and demands the keys to the store.
The JCIT cabal wanted the world. They got it by staging a coordinated coup from Australia to Tel Aviv because their résumés make the devil blush. That’s why they picked each other: nothing binds people closer together than the commission of a crime.
MAPQUEST
No one should have to futz over as many European noble titles as we did investigating JCIT. We’ll spare you the agony. The cabal’s mapped out from weirdest to normie-est: British nonces first, pédophiles Français après, American Mengeles third. Pole position goes to the Zionists. It was their show, after all. For the pièce de résistance - Isra*l cashed in on a cadre they’d been nurturing for twenty years, a cabal within the cabal. JCIT was their star-crossed twenty-first.
A. THE PRINCES...
It’s always too early in the morning to talk about Pedophile Island.
Vile as they are, the Buggery-‘n-Mash Boys are JCIT’s Rosetta Stone. Britain in ’79 was Jeff Bezos circa 2022: not owned. Definitely not desperate. Certainly not compensating for fading to irrelevance. Case our roid-face and open-throated shirt didn’t make it clear, we’re thriving.
In less-bullshit terms, the UK was a decadent glass Howitzer. Britannia didn’t Rule anymore, but she stashed away a few jewels from her colonial crown prior to the downturn. Still had the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. And – natch – kept a proto-Blackwater War-Crimes-R-Us on retainer.1 If those consolation prizes couldn’t do the trick, jolly old England had one last trump card:
Newspapers.
In 1979 when consent needed manufacturing, the state didn’t fire up a VPN; they turned on the ol’ printing press.
Same was true for para-states. Once the JCIT cabal ironed out its lies du conférence, they didn’t restrict publication to the stateside MOCKINGBIRD apparatus;2 too obvious. And too narrow - for this Big Lie to play, they had to saturate Atlanticist media all over the world.
That’s where John Bull’s far-flung op-ed network3 came in. British media assets befouled the broadsheets with dozens of histrionic screeds ghostwritten by the Jonathan Institute between JCIT’s closing bell and September 1980, but just two penned the lion’s share: crown prince of spook propaganda Brian Crozier and Robert Moss, his heir apparent.4
I. HEAVY LIES THE HEAD
“A further expansion [of the covert European alliance to fight communism]to include the UK came in 1959 following Bonnemaison's chance encounter the previous year with the then Editor of the Economist Foreign Report, a man who would later become undoubtedly the most prominent propagandist for several Western intelligence services and the key character in the UK counter-subversion complex - Brian Crozier."
- David Teacher, Rogue Agents: The Cercle and the 6I in the Private Cold War 1951-1991, p. 23
Right around the time Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway sexed up the silver screen, the New York Times decided to try the whole “journalism” thing on for size. They outed Crozier’s intel-ness back in ’77:5
See that? Contract employee. Like Crozier’s a seasonal jeans-folder at the Gap. Classic CIA weasel word, meant to imply Crozier was a part-timer.
Bullshit, of course. Paull has Crozier’s number:
Crozier is not merely a “contract employee” and Moss is much more than a propaganda “asset” of the CIA...Crozier may, in fact, have been one of the inventors of the word “terrorism” as applied to anti-colonial insurrections and rebellions which erupted in the aftermath of World War II. Since [then] Crozier seems to have changed employers a number of times but he remains, not simply an agent, but a principal as ideologue and theoretician for those...who view accommodation to the forces of change in the forces of change in the Third World as a betrayal of their fundamental interests.6
Hell of a contract. Crozier wasn’t some rando; he’d been sharpening his skills as a utilityman in the spook farm system for decades before hitting free agency. After a three-year MI-6 apprenticeship7 Bri-Bri manned England’s Reuters desk from 1945-48. Then he followed the propagandist’s cursus honorum halfway around the world to sunny Sydney, Britain’s preferred eavesdrop for surveilling the ongoing Malayan insurrection,8 as a “feature writer” for the Syndey Morning Herald. In ‘51 he was traded back to Reuters, this time as a war correspondent covering - get this - terrorism and insurgency in Indonesia, Malaya, and Vietnam.9
Terrorism. Same descriptor for the same phenomenon JCIT came together to destroy: Third World anti-colonial struggle against an intransigent imperial power. Coined by one of JCIT’s chief propagandists. Twenty-eight years before.
Small world indeed.
Crozier capitalized on a 1954 British counteroffensive to mosey on back to London. The minor league seasoning paid off: he landed a job editing the illustrious Economist Foreign Report.10
EFR glows like Mr. Burns in Treehouse of Horror, and not just because Crozier edited it.11 The “far right, conspiratorial” Report’s exclusively-intel-agency-source’d ‘analyses’ put the red menace under a madman’s electron microscope: future JCIT Bibles Soviet Strategy of Terror and The Terror Network cite it four and seventeen times, and editor emeritus Crozier sixteen and thirty-six times, respectively.12 Crozier didn’t physically pen the post-JCIT tracts, but he was there in spirit.
Not that he tried to hide any of that influence. Quite the opposite. As homeboy crowed in 1969
For [two-thirds of this book], I have drawn heavily on the files of Economist’s Foreign Report...this is, I believe, the first time this important source material has been tapped [because]...each [Foreign Reports] subscriber has to sign an undertaking that he will not reproduce its contents or attribute them to Foreign Report. Moreover, the average reader, however well informed, cannot possibly know how reliable the original sources he reads in Foreign Reports are. Only the editor of the publication and his immediate colleagues have this knowledge.13
A double-secret-handshake bulletin we have no way of verifying, edited by terrorism invoker Crozier, that just so happened to give casus belli for Cold War 2: The Coldening. It’s all legit, though. Promise!
Crozier did a bangup Nolan Ryan impersonation during his decade at EIU, turning his flamethrower pen against liberation movements (“violent situations,” as he called them) the world over: Cyprus, Algeria,14 the Congo, most of Latin America. Violent situation’s the same verbal magic trick as Crozier’s Malay terrorism, just in reverse. Pretty obvious when you apply it to his beats: violent situation in Congo spirals sounds a helluva lot better than we murdered Lumumba - not with the Fort Detrick botulinum. Didn’t need it - and melted his body in acid.1516
The antiseptic language is geopolitical camouflage - neocolonialism on the sly. Paull diagnoses Crozier’s verbal pathology as a rhetorical sleight of hand
depoliticiz[ing] the reality of insurrection and revolution. This depoliticization...lies at the very heart of the notion of “international terrorism.” ...Violence is first emphasized, then abstracted from its political, social, and economic context and substituted for the complex reality of revolutionary movements.17
See the trick? Playing up the slaughter, then sucking out the marrow so it comes across as anarchy serious countries have an obligation to profit off of stop. Lumumba wasn’t sore Allen Dulles owned Congolese mines.18 The whole affair (including US-Isra*li agent Joseph Mobutu’s reign of terror19) was just a violent situation aching to be remedied.
Quite the rabbit to pull out of your hat. Crozier definitely thought so. He said as much in 1960:
“I pioneered the systematic study of political violence; this work became mandatory reading at Fort Bragg,20 the US Army War College, the Israel Defense College, and many other military institutions.”21
Bragging about his in with the Isra*li war machine in 1960. Wonder if that ever came back up...
II. HANDOFF
Four years after giving Green Berets inspiration for the Phoenix Program, Crozier bowed out. Passed the EIU baton to Moss and rode off into the sunset.
Coxey winks insufferably
Just kidding. Malaysia was Crozier’s AAA stint and EIU his rookie contract. ‘64 was his splashy free-agent signing. The hometown hero officially got paid to write propaganda:22
Forum [World Features] was in the propaganda business. An internal CIA memo to the then Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, noted as part of its progress report: “In its first two years Forum World Features has provided the US with a significant means to counter Communist propaganda and has become a respected features service well on the way to a position of prestige in the journalism world.
...The chairman of FWF and Director of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, which acquired the library of FWF, was Mr Brian Crozier, who had preceded Mr Robert Moss, author of Chile’s Marxist Experiment, at The Economist.
The Institute [for the Study of Conflict], in the course of 1973, received 75 per cent of its funds from the CIA, according to the US Senate Committee, and was staffed by what the Committee called “CIA collaborators.”
Forum World Features, the cutout Crozier headed from 1964-1976, was bigtime. By Paull’s count it wrote talking points for over three hundred papers, thirty of ‘em in the States, including WaPo.23 FWF wasn’t spooky, exactly; that implies doubt. FWF was a propaganda mill with Anglo and American branches, both owned by Kern House Enterprises. Kern served two functions:
bukkake enough dough on FWF to keep it financially viable
provide a sinecure for spooks on R&R
Spooks on R&R like board director Robert Gene Gately. After FWF closed up shop Robbie moved on to the CIA station in Bangkok.24
FWF earned her daily bread seeding CIA propaganda a column inch at a time, but that didn’t stop her and Crozier from indulging in frequent cheat meals: books. Spooky ones.
From about 1964 to 1969 FWF commandeered an English publishing house to turn out its three-book World Realities series (sounds weighty, right?).25 One, on the finer points of putting down colonial rebellions, was penned by mass murderer guerrilla warfare expert and future Vietnam adviser Sir Robert Thompson. Three years before teaming back up with Crozier and FWF, Thompson cranked out his first counterinsurgency how-to guide, drawing on his time in - wait for it - Malaysia.26
Small world.
FWF’s publisher dropped her in 1969. Not out of any newfound sense of morality; counterinsurgency manuals just don’t sell so well. No harm done, though. By ‘71 Crozier wrangled another publisher to carry on World Realities’ sacred mission. The next round of authors (Moss included) were as carefully curated as the first - all FWF “news” correspondents and/or writers for the Institute for the Study of Conflict’s Conflict Studies. Business was good. FWF enticed the Taiwanese government into buying their book about Taiwan without even seeing a synopsis.
ROC wasn’t the only government chomping at the bit for FWF’s jeremiads. In ‘71 Forum pitched a book on the evils of Allende’s Chile, but held off - no publisher. The book, Chile’s Marxist Experiment, finally shipped in late ‘73, after the coup, written by none other than Robert Moss, Crozier’s EIU successor.
Perfect tee-up for Moss. Point of order before we clobber it to left field, though. If one man’s responsible for terrorism’s ghoulish modern definition - no-cause violence by barbarians who must be treated barbarously - it’s Crozier. He coined it in ‘51 and built up its dubious counterinsurgency corpus for twenty years, even cemented it as US and Isra*li SOP along the way. Without Crozier, JCIT and its demonic brainchildren in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Gaza would never have gotten off the ground.
Crozier wasn’t done birthing abominations yet. After FWF’s forced closure in 1975 he turned his ISC job into a fulltime gig as Director-General (don’t laugh). ISC’s an even bigger deal than FWF, the
...virtual nerve center of a conspiracy to explain contemporary history as a [left-wing] conspiracy.
The ISC was founded in 1970, using funds channeled through the National Strategy Information Center based at [NYU], whose founding director was William Casey, who became CIA director in 1981.27
The inventor of terrorism, Joel Osteen of counterinsurgency, go-to citation for future JCIT propagandists, also helmed the cutout funded by Mister “twenty thousand isn’t that bad” himself.28 Brian Crozier, ladies and gentlemen.29
High time we turn to the sorcerer’s infamous apprentice: Robert Moss, the man who made Pinochet.
III. THE CROWN
Crozier was JCIT’s Nolan Ryan, fanning both sides of the plate with high heat long after his arm should’ve turned into a wet noodle. Bob Moss was more of a Roger Clemens type. After the Conference he went on a Cy Young tear, battering the USSR with “international terrorism” accusations in France-Sur, Buenos Aires’s Conviccion, the Melbourne Review, and the Daily Telegraph.30 Robbie the Rocket did such a bang-up job the Jonathan Institute trotted him back to the mound to close out the show. Sunday before the 1980 election, NYT Magazine ran this hit piece:
Credit where it’s due, Moss had chutzpah. So much other reporters called him a bullshit artist to his face.31 He didn’t acquire it all at once. Just like Crozier, Moss followed a well-trod propagandist’s path in the two decades prior to JCIT.
Naturally, that path’s riddled with inconsistencies. Moss says he started out as Australia’s youngest ancient history professor...two years after he took over for Crozier at EIU.32 (Also neglected to mention his dad was an intel officer. Whomst amongst us, right?)33
The timeline might be bullshit, but the bloodthirst’s real. Remember the ISC? Cutout established in 1970, gave Crozier that laughable title? ISC gave Moss his big break the year it opened, publishing his scare-mongering ‘urban guerrillas’ exposé in its Conflict Studies journal.34 Moss followed that up in ‘71 with another Conflict Studies article, “Uruguay: Terrorism versus Democracy.” (See the pattern?)
1971 was a three-fer for young Moss. After Uruguay, he set his sights on the Emerald Isle with “The Security of Ulster” for ISC’s macro-project The Spreading Irish Conflict.35 Judging from its recommendations the damn thing should’ve been called “The Butchery of Ulster:”
And again [Moss wrote]: ‘The first condition for a settlement is that the IRA should be met with the necessary force.’
Moss did not seem at all interested in reforms, settlements or solutions: only in the first condition of any of them — the adoption of the toughest possible military line.36
In a word, Moss was demanding a blood n’ guts counterinsurgency campaign that would turn the Troubles into an Irish abattoir.37 And Robbie wasn’t through baying for blood.
He closed out the year focusing on Brazil. The report - Urban Guerrilla Warfare - appended Brazilian Marxists’ guerrilla warfare Bible.38 The scripture (written by a Brazilian Leninist leader) was legit, but its adherents were few. Moss depicted the opposite: the junta really was fighting a wide-ranging Marxist insurgency.
Total bullshit? Yes. Did it matter? Not even a little.
ISC took Mark Twain’s old adage and ran with it - there ISN’T a global red menace? Drag. Our lie’s already halfway around the world, though. Just seized the presidential palace. Point’s moot. In one country after the other, the ISC/FWF complex manufactured consent for counterinsurgency by pretending mostly nonexistent39 left-wing ‘terror’ was tearing society apart. JCIT in miniature.
Good phrase, manufacturing consent. Someone should really flesh that out.
Those of you keeping score at home know what came next:
Another book.
In 1972 English publisher Maurice Temple Smith expanded Moss’s Brazil essay into Urban Guerrillas: The New Face of Political Violence, a full-length collection of war porn.40 For once we encourage - nay, demand - you judge a book by its cover:
Cyprus, Algeria, Russia, Ulster, Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala: all past (and some future!) targets of the NATO revanchists. Half of ‘em even have terrorism shoehorned into their chapter titles. How bout that?
Moss picked up building the legend JCIT would take worldwide where Crozier left off. He had a real knack for Latin America. FWF even sent him there twice:
In March 1972, Mr. Brian Crozier told [publisher] David and Charles that Moss was just back from a special trip he had made to Chile “in connection with his forthcoming World Realities book.” There was no explanation of who had paid for this special trip, nor for a subsequent refresher trip he took that July.41
Same as the FWF-ISC collabs, Moss’s sojourns were a US-UK team effort. Using asset journos as vectors for Chilean counterrevolution actually originated in Langley the year before. Step 1: pretend Chile’s massing a communist army on Argentina’s border. Step 2: Have our guy echo the lie in prominent media. Step 3: Frame some poor sap...
Et voilà. Counterrevolution accomplished!42
Tall order. Requires a skilled executioner. As luck would have it, the spooks had a hired pen purpose-built for the job.
Moss ran to and fro all over Chile fine-tuning its CIA propaganda network from 1971-1973.43 Officially he was the Economist’s in-country correspondent; unofficially, he was framing students and egging on the impending coup.44 Feast your eyes on his cover story for the CIA-funded mag SEPA’s45 3/20/1973 issue and decide for yourself:
An English Recipe for Chile — Military Control.
Moss helped pull down Allende’s temple, but managed to skedaddle before the rafters came a-tumblin’. We’ll stick with the Chub-Lord of Counterrevolution to keep the narrative tight, but just in case there’s any doubt - Pinochet’s Chile was a nightmare reminiscent of WW2, perpetrated for similar reasons.46 The general’s victims have Moss to thank.
IV. M’IRON LADY
Moss pumped out propaganda in every medium known to man, but he broke new ground in book-length bullshit. His first FWF book, Chile’s Marxist Experiment, hit newsstands late ‘73. Complete dud.47 Its polemic was as prosaic as the sales numbers: Communism doesn’t work. Left-wing conspiracy lurks around every corner. Freedom? Ha!
Experiment was a taste of things to come. Moss wrote books like Catholic make kids. Every couple years he put out another potboiler: ‘75, ‘76, ‘80, ‘82, ‘85. After the second book48 Moss pivoted from nonfiction to dollar store John le Carré. Each outing, spy hero Robert Hockney Assembled Teams of CIA, MI-6, and Mossadniks49 to foil various KGB plots: take over the USA. Then the world. (Turns out Cuba and the USSR were financing a black revolutionary takeover of the US.50)
The books are totally forgettable, except for one wrinkle: they all accuse communists of the actions the future JCIT conspirators used. Moss took the thesis of Chile’s Communist Experiment (they’re trying to take over every country!) and recycled it - Cuba, USSR, didn’t matter. All were aping the Chilean model of looming leftist takeover.
Horseshit, but more importantly textbook execution of the accuse the enemy of that which you’re guilty covert-ops dictum. CIA critic John Landis pins the tail on the donkey:
...In a review of [Moss’s book] The Spike, I stated that the communists, “charges Moss, are actually following the blueprints for the seizure of power based on the Chilean model, ‘blueprints for Communist takeovers that have been issued from Moscow.’” ...exactly the opposite is the case: Moss and his friends in the CIA, MI-6, and Mossad have been using bogus KGB plots as a cover for domestic covert support of the political right, following the blueprint used by Moss in Chile.51
Then as now, the point was flooding the zone with anticommunist noise. Who cares about a signal?
Moss never let his bookwriting cramp his journalistic stylings. He was a very busy boy - found time in ‘74 to warn the world about rampant Trotskyist recruiting52 as FWF’s Belgium correspondent, and break bread with arch-racist Enoch Powell.53 Moss even entered the political cutout lobbying arena as director of the National Association for Freedom (NAFF), a Swiss Army knife of British reaction:
NAFF was also active in preventing the post office workers’ union from boycotting mail and telecommunications with South Africa in March 1977 as part of the international trade union Week Of Action Against Apartheid. Moss’s leadership of NAFF was probably one of the greatest contributors to its success and in its heyday, he was part of Margaret Thatcher’s speech-writing team, and helped write her famous speech two years ago which led the Russians to dub her the “Iron Maiden.”54
All while attacking Jamaica’s social-democratic government in his Telegraph column. And giving speeches to neo-Nazi Argentine air force cadets. Cherry on top: Moss edited a Spanish magazine owned by Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.55
We’d be here all night enumerating Moss’s misdeeds. Covert Action caps it off nicely:
Moss wreaked bookoo havoc on the disco decade, but fear not - Robbie the Rocket also lobbed enough high heat to put 80s batters down for the count, glorious mustaches and all. Mostly covertly, through JCIT.
Recall Claire Sterling and Sam Francis?56 (Don’t feel bad. They’re the post-JCIT hit team who referenced Crozier and Economist Foreign Report a double-digit number of times in their respective USSR-Did-It missives.) Believe it or not, they actually cited Moss more than Crozier. Seventeen and eighteen times apiece.57
Robert Moss: second-generation intelligence. Legend in his own mind. Architect extraordinaire of neoliberal woe...but also a fleshy little imp who’s hawking active dreaming in his twilight years.58 Hamdullah we’re done with him.
At long last, high time we turned our sights on Jacques Soustelle, the gentile philosemite who gave Isra*l the bomb.59
B. …AND THE FROG
We can’t talk Soustelle without talking the eight-hundred pound gorilla he helped make real:
The bomb.
The US gets a ton of play for foisting Isra*l’s nuclear trump card on the world, and for good reason,60 but we were the fallback. Zion’s initial nuclear patrons were decidedly more baguette-shaped.
Quelle surprise, non? France’s Fourth Republic and what became Isra*l go back to the forties.61 France was fending off so many anticolonial fusillades after WW2 she needed fissile help and didn’t care where it came from.62 Isra*l just so happened to have an in. The road to Dimona cuts through DC, but it started in the Paris suburbs.
First de Gaulle tried using France’s coterie of Jewish nuclear scientists63 to wrangle big guns like Oppenheimer and Teller into kickstarting A-bomb development. Didn’t pay off, but no harm drone - France’s atomic energy commissioner visited Tel Aviv in ‘49 anyway. By ‘53 they had a full-blown exchange program. Isra*li scientists were given exclusive access to newly-completed French nuclear reactors outside Paris, even trained on the reactors themselves. France threw in access to their technical data on bomb research as a sweetener.64
Lot to give without some kind of take, right? True to form, Isra*l’s quid to France’s munificent quo was another mutually-beneficial human rights violation: guns.65
The USA cleared Isra*l to buy twelve NATO bombers in 1956, but that wasn’t nearly enough for Ben-Gurion. (Especially not after Suez.66) That fall Shimon Peres and French defense minister Koenig turned Paris into a one-stop shop for tanks and artillery, officially to check Nasser.
France had other ideas, though. The Frogs and the tribe had deep ties in Algeria - imperial France gave Algerian Jews full citizenship in 1870, part of a divide et impera strategy to turn them into comprador spies.67 The investment paid off in 1954, when Algeria rose up in all-out revolt against French rule. Instead of standing pat, Isra*l immediately offered its services.
That’s not static between your fingers. It’s the third rail charging up to zap you with a warning shot. Buckle up. To track Soustelle’s path to JCIT, we have to pass through the Algerian heart of darkness.
I. THE HORROR
Algeria was a Franco-Isra*li collab from soup to nuts. Soustelle drove a lot of it himself.
Isra*l may have been thirty years France’s junior, but she still managed to show hardened Dienbienphu vets a thing or two about state terror.68 After all, pacifying FLN required the same skillset as perpetrating the Nakba.69 But don’t take our word for it:
Against the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa, fighting for their independence, Israel and France presented a united front of European domination. "According to [French commander in chief of Algeria] General Maurice Challe, the Israelis were ‘consummate artists' at dealing with the Arabs. General Challe hoped, moreover, to use the Israeli [kibbutz] as a model for his pacification program in Algeria.”70
[Shimon Peres] succinctly put it in June 1955, “Every Frenchman killed in Algeria, like every Egyptian killed in the Gaza Strip, is a step toward strengthening the ties between France and Israel.”71
Challe’s grotesque admiration didn’t come out of nowhere. From 1956 to 1961 France and Isra*l exchanged counterinsurgency notes galore: Isra*li ‘study mission’ learns helicopter-slaughter techniques in Oran. Frogs successfully convoy-bomb FLN using techniques observed at Qalqilya.72 Only thing Isra*l and France could abide less than each other was another Arab republic.73
We said third rail, and we meant it. Copping to the depth of Jewish collaboration with imperial France will probably warrant a knock on our door from the Justice Department, but what the hell. The LORD hates a lying tongue:
...[the Organisation armée secrète/OAS] attracted hotheads including some Jews who belonged to Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Israeli underground military organization. They were recruited by the OAS as specialists in clandestine warfare. The best-known was Jean Ghanassia, a teacher who had fought in Palestine.
In Oran...Haganah Magen (Shield of Defense) were established clandestinely among young Jews. They received training in small-arms use and guerrilla tactics, and fought alongside the OAS collines.74
It goes on and on, but you get the idea. Without Isra*l, France wouldn’t have held onto Algeria nearly as long as it did. Without France, Isra*l probably wouldn’t have made it out of the 50s. As far as the one million-plus killed in the Algerian War are concerned, Isra*l and France were one entity.
While it’s fresh in your mind, jot down that acronym OAS. Soustelle was in it. Once the war went south, he and a select group of OAS cadre tried to coup de Gaulle over his perceived betrayal of l'Algérie française. OAS may even have ponied up the personnel that killed JFK.75
Fuckin’ maelstrom, right?
From the mid-50s on Soustelle was the gale driving it. He finished out WW2 as head of the Free French Secret Service76 and parlayed that cachet for plum gigs: first, minister of defense. Then colonies. 1955, ta-da! Guess who’s Governor-General of Algeria.
Soustelle presided over the My Lai savagery above, and then some.77 The new socialist government recalled him thirteen months later. Soustelle kept the grift alive even while down and out. He started the Alliance France-Israel lobbying group in 1956.78 Once de Gaulle returned to power in ‘58, Soustelle was in like Flynt: deputy foreign minister, baby. Isra*l was overjoyed.
Next two years were laissez les bons temps roule for Jacques and Shlomo Isra*l. First part in particular’s money: early 1959 Soustelle was appointed minister for nuclear energy, well into Dimona’s joint Franco-Isra*li buildout. He immediately shit on not one, but two direct orders from the prime minister to shelve the nuclear accords. Soustelle hung tough until he resigned from the government in early 1960. Thanks to him, Isra*l’s nuclear future was assured.79
II. COUP-ER? I HARDLY KNOW HER!
Soustelle denied it ‘til the day he died, but he probably joined OAS in 1960.
OAS were right-wing freaks. They kept a stay-behind network of Isra*li-backed terrorists in Algeria,80 but that was a rearguard action. In 1961 OAS decided to take the fight to de Gaulle. The Algiers Putsch failed,81 but at one of the many trials, something interesting came out: there were others.
Georges Bidault, Raoul Salan, and Soustelle’s old boss Challe led the coup. Challe’s subordinates apparently
made informal, and highly tentative, soundings with representatives of various countries that might be considered sympathetic, among them Portugal, Spain, Israel and South Africa.82
A coterie of countries coming together as potential spoilers against an incipient left leader. Isra*l was keeping its ear to the ground on any right-wing coups that might blow its way. Where have we heard that before?
OAS was so pissed at their own failure they tried to kill de Gaulle.83 Soustelle was onboard but uninvolved: not his skillset. Besides, de Gaulle wanted him hanged. He spent most of 1962 in and out of safehouses, including an Irgun one.
Smallest world we ever heard of.
Soustelle spent the next six years in exile. Before you kid that he spent it working on his memoirs or something, well...
Soustelle was a deep political actor extraordinaire. Secret agent, colonial butcher, nuclear proliferator, failed revolutionary. After being allowed back on French soil in ‘68, he had one more role to play:
Propagandist extraordinaire.
France didn’t have many representatives at JCIT. Could be French hauteur, but we like to think the cabal opted for quality over quantity. On 7/14, seven days after the Jerusalem Hilton issued its final marching orders, Soustelle penned a histrionic cri de coeur in right-wing rag L’Aurore. The Soviets, he shrieked, “pulled all the strings behind international terrorism.” Soustelle was so sure of it A-1 above the fold ran with this title:84
TOUJOURS LE KGB
What’s that saying again? Something about lies getting around the world mighty fast...
Join us next time when we dive into the other JCIT power blocs’ nooks and crannies, from ISC also-rans to the neocons who invaded Iraq. ‘til then ——
Stay golden, Ponyboy. من النهر إلى البحر.
In order:
They held onto Hong Kong, Elizabeth’s fave, until 1997. At that point it reverted to China...but only because Bank of England crasher George Soros shit the bed trying to take over the People’s Republic a few years earlier.
~520 warheads in the mid-70s.
With classic English understatement, Albion named its pioneering PMC Keenie Meenie Services. Shocker - they collected most of their scalps in Britain’s vanishing colonial periphery. Think Oman, Uganda, and Sri Lanka.
Despite what the Wikipedia entry tells you, MOCKINGBIRD was not alleged. We’ll delve into some of its fibs below, but for a general introduction, start here.
There were several. Standout cutout Focus World Features earned its spurs with a Moss screed propping up the fledgling Pinochet dictatorship. More on FWF in a moment.
Depends how you count, but it’s six of one, half-dozen of the other. Moss did most of the verbal heavy lifting. Crozier was more of a godfather in JCIT’s propaganda mill, but that church would’ve been sans gospel without him.
12/26/1977 New York Times, “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built By The CIA.”
Paull, pgs. 81-82.
ibid., p. 93 fn13:
Two mixed-up stories given by Crozier...provide the clue to his possible SIS [Secret Intelligence Service; same as MI-6] affiliation. Crozier had been educated in France, was multilingual, and was therefore a prime candidate for SIS. Who’s Who gives “aeronautical inspection” as his occupation for 1941-1943, whereas Contemporary Authors states “free-lance art and music critic” for the same period.
In spook parlance, the latter job’s known as a cover. Paull would be off base inferring Crozier was on the take that early, if the rest of Bri-Bri’s résumé weren’t exactly what it was.
Officially 1948-1957, but there were multiple lulls.
Contemporary Authors, New Rev. Series, vol. 3, p. 146.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, the Foreign Report’s publisher, is spooked to fuck. (Those stupid ‘Democracy’ Indexes ranking USA way too high are their handiwork.) Besides regularly hiring mockingbirds like Crozier and Moss, in 1986 EIU rolled Business International Corporation into its forecasting services. BIC’s spooked to fuck squared: founded 1954 by Elbridge Haynes (who miraculously finagled a help-us-oligarchs-help-you meeting with Brezhnev a month after Khrushchev’s ouster), BIC was outed as a cover for four jet-setting CIA agents in 1977. Lest we forget: BIC was also the very first job of future political superstar Barry Soetoro, later known as Barack Obama.
Used the posting as his entrée into the spook Major Leagues, too. As he put it:
...during my Economist years, and I had been among the privileged few journalists invited to [New York Herald-Tribune proprietor and US ambassador to London John Hay Whitney’s] lunches at the Connaught Hotel, and to the more formal receptions at his residence in Regent’s Park. In these new conditions, [Executive Secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom John] Hunt wanted to know, would I be prepared to take over the whole operation and supervise it?
Crozier was tag-teamed by David Rockefeller’s OSS veteran BFF and the Congress for Cultural Freedom to run the whole shebang, while editing EFR. Fill in the blank: small _____.
Paull, pgs. 64, 65, 73.
Brian Crozier, The Masters of Power, p. 11.
About which more in a moment.
Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, p. 175-180.
David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, pgs. 385-386:
Lumumba suffered a terrible martyrdom during his final hours on earth. He was beaten bloody during the flight to Katanga...[he was then] driven to a remote farmhouse, where a group of men connected to US and Belgian intelligence beat him to death. ...”Eventually he was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who had agency cryptonyms and received agency salaries,” [CIA officer John] Stockwell concluded.
Paull, p. 83.
Talbot, p. 377: “Dulles’s old law firm [Sullivan & Cromwell] represented the American Metal Company (later AMAX), a mining giant with holdings in the Congo, and Dulles was friendly with the company’s chairman, Harold Hochschild, and his brother and successor, Walter.”
Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Relationship, p. 123: “Thus Israel helped Mobutu in Washington, Mobutu helped Israel with the recognition it wanted, and, of course, Israel worked with the Americans to further mutual interests.”
Home to an ongoing child prostitution narco-ring run by the unit initially trained by Nazis. See EH Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century, p. 241:
...about five thousand [Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians] were enlisted,...and trained by American officers and former German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS NCO's. These units became the nucleus of CIA 's private army, later better known as the "Green Berets" in Vietnam. Some of them are today [1971] still stationed in West Germany: the 5th Special Reconnaissance Group, now entirely airborne, at Oberursel, and the 10th Special Group in Bavaria.
Paull p. 83, quoting from Contemporary Authors, p. 146.
Peter Chippindale and Martin Walker, The Guardian 12/20/1976, “Only the views we want you to read.”
Paull p. 84; John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster, 12/25/-12/27/1977 New York Times, "The CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mo1d the Wor1d's Views.”
Phil Agee and Louis Wolf, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, p. 206:
Control, of course, remained with the Americans, who had at least one “case officer” in the Forum office — a career CIA man named Robert Gene Gately, who was last seen as a member of the CIA station in the American Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.
Chippindale and Walker, “Views” and The Guardian 12/20/1976 “Tory's book funded by CIA.”
Malaysia’s chilling, and instructive. The US reprised Thompson’s Malaysia tactics in Vietnam to a T. Remember strategic hamlets? His idea. No wonder Tricky Dick loved him.
Paull, p. 87.
PBS, Vietnam: A Television History, Part 7:
WILLIAM COLBY: Now, I'm not going to say that there was nobody wrongfully killed in all of Vietnam during all the years of the Phoenix program, but I do say that the purpose and the effect of the Phoenix program was to reduce and eliminate as far as possible the abuses on the government, although not on the enemy side.
Believe it or not, we’re tip-of-the-iceberg territory on Crozier. His spook CV’s a mile long: Le Cercle member, coup’er for Thatcher in the ‘79 elections, and cofounder of the 61/6I. See Teacher for the full story.
Paull, p. 22.
Suzanne Weaver, 7/26/1979 Wall Street Journal, ""The Political Uses of Terror:"
A considerable number in the press corps covering the Conference were most annoyed by Mr. Moss’s charges and told him so. ...Was he really asking people to believe he had respectable evidence of a Soviet-led conspiracy in these matters? [our emphasis]
Robert Moss interview with Don Swaim, 6/16/1987.
“CIA and the Media,” Covert Action Information Bulletin #7, 12/1979, p. 13.
Get this: pride of place on The Spreading Irish Conflict’s masthead went to ISC admin director Iain Hamilton. Hamilton was also FWF’s managing director. He and Crozier worked together on the daily. Dabbing on us.
Paul Foot, Who Framed Colin Wallace?, p. 80.
One of Moss’s justifications for the hardline approach was - wait for it — his unsubstantiated insistence the IRA was collaborating with the KGB. What can we say, the boy knew his lines.
Unlike Uruguay and Ulster, Urban wasn’t an ISC joint. It was commissioned by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Only difference between ISC and IISC (ugh) was the seed money: first ultimately traced back to Colby and Scaife at NYU. Second came out of the UK Foreign Office. USA and the UK, baby - the Coke and Pepsi of counterrevolution.
Or synthetic, as ninety percent of Red European ‘terrorists’ turned out to be. See Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe.
Naturally it got reviewed in the Times by Chris Hitchens. The young Trotskyist apparently found it “intelligent and useful.” Not sure whether that says more about him or them.
Chippindale and Walker.
“Spies in the Movement,” Covert Action Information Bulletin #24, Summer 1985, p. 37.
He had plenty of help. In ‘71 and ‘72 alone, CIA funneled $9.3 million* just to one right-wing paper, the Santiago daily El Mercurio. (All dollar amounts 2025.)
We teed Moss up as a dandy, but that’s not entirely true. The boyish affect was a cover. Scratch a little and you’ll see his vicious streak: to stick the “looming left-wing invasion of Argentina” landing, Moss framed a random agronomy student on the Argentinian border as the future Chilean Che Guevara, then scored an aprés-execution interview with the poor lad before Pinochet’s boys put a bullet in him. Even put the transcript in his FWF book. See CAIB #24, p. 37.
SEPA editor Raphael Otero became Pinochet’s spokesman in Washington after the coup. Think they call that a lateral transfer.
See Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, p. 40:
David Rockefeller’s hidden instigation of the Allende overthrow is amply acknowledged in his own Memoirs. His two pages on Chile reveal the limitations of this overworld mind, in some ways gentle and benevolent but concerned first and foremost for US corporate property in Latin America’s “miasma of confrontation and suspicion.” He wrote: “The Andean Pact, for example, formed in 1970 by Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia . . . severely restricted the operations of foreign corporations, and there were a number of outright expropriations. I was so concerned about the situation that I met with Secretary of State William P. Rogers and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.”
Officially a bestseller, but only because Pinochet bought up the entire 10,000 book run and gave them away as Chilean Pravda. See Chippindale and Walker, “Tory’s.”
1976’s The Collapse of Democracy, where Moss said with a straight face the USSR was trying to take over Europe. (We wish.)
Dabbing. On. Us.
We wish.
Fred Landis, “Moscow Rules Moss’s Mind,” Covert Action Information BUlletin #24, p. 37.
Hope the four of you who know Trots enjoyed the laugh. See Chippindale and Walker, “News.”
Same guy who gave this infmaous speech in response to the UK’s colonial chickens coming home to roost.
Andy Weir and Jonathan Bloch, “Robert Moss,” Covert Action Information Bulletin #7, p. 15.
ibid., p. 14 and Phil Agee, “Robert Moss’s Obsession,” in the same issue.
Both of whom we’ll cover in Part 2B. (Especially Claire.)
Paull, pgs. 73 and 79.
We actually found one source that claims Soustelle was a Jewish convert to Christianity, but it’s not substantiated anywhere else. Doesn’t really matter. Jewish or gentile, boy had that chien in him.
Without the assistance of a certain bespectacled counterintelligence chief, Isra*l would never have amassed enough fissile material to assemble a nuclear arsenal. Thanks to Angleton’s timely help, 1959-1968 they managed to siphon off 600 pounds of uranium from the Pennsylvania NUMEC plant (the same one Sy Hersh claims boiled off its uranium into the surrounding city of Apollo, sight unseen). One might ask why a legend like Hersh got it so wrong. See Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, p. 177 and Hersh, The Samson Option, p. 243.
That includes military collaboration. France was in on the settler colony scam from the jump. Sylvia K. Crosbie, A Tacit Alliance: France and Israel from Suez to the Six Day War, p. 31:
Arms destined for...the Irgun Zvai Leumi, were "obtained" with official concurrence from French arsenals, and a French military convoy delivered the weapons to the Altalena on June 11, 1948. French sources also helped the Haganah purchase airplanes and twenty light aircraft guns, which were used as anti-tank weapons during the independence war, albeit “not very effectively.”
As always, it’s a longer story. Short version: France wanted modest guardrails against what became NATO. For that impertinence the USA left them out in the cold, at risk of becoming a non-nuclear power in a newly nuclear age. For France to live, the A-bomb had to be acquired at all costs.
Bertrand Goldschmidt, Pierre Ogine, Jules Guéron, and Maurice Surdin. See Gadi Heiman, “Diverging Goals: The French and Israeli Pursuit of the Bomb, 1958-1962,” Israel Studies Vol. 15, #2, p. 108.
ibid., p. 108, and Cockburns, p. 86.
For Jacques’s sake we’ll stay on the straight and narrow, but credit where it’s due - early on Isra*l also patented distillation processes for heavy water and uranium. She sold both to France in ‘54 as fair trade for the nuclear skulduggery. Made a pretty penny off it: $700M in 2025 dollars.
The Tripartite Aggression was a strategic disaster. Ben-Gurion was so dead-set on obliterating Egypt he built chemical weapons he didn’t even get to use. See Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, p. 49: “Ben-Gurion ordered rush development of cheap...chemical weapons to be produced at EMET facilities.”
Joseph Massad, "Israel and the Politics of Boycott," 3/19/2013:
Israel would...enlist Algerian Jews (who were granted French citizenship in 1870 by France to separate them from their compatriot Algerian Muslims and grant them the privileges of White French colonists) to spy on the Algerian National movement that was seeking to end French colonialism and racism.
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why, p. 6: “Many of the military men who supported the French-Israeli alliance most avidly were ‘survivors of Dienbienphu who had also been involved in the Suez invasion and the North African campaigns.’”
Remember how Robert Thompson’s Malaysia model just so happened to wet Tricky Dick’s whistle on Vietnam? Same deal. Just sub in Arabs for Asians.
Beit-Hallahmi, p. 6.
Cockburns, pgs. 60-61.
Crosbie, p. 106: “In Algeria the French also adopted a method of convoy bombing that they had learned from Zahal [IDF] at Suez.”
Especially one under Nasser’s control, which they both assumed Algeria was. Ben-Gurion had long dreaded the arrival of an “Arab ruler like Ataturk...who turned [Turkey] into a fighting nation.” The Old Man averred “there was and still is a chance Nasser is this man.” The Frogs, on the other hand, presumed only Nasser’s braggadocio could have incited the FLN into full-blown insurgency. See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, p. 86:
...All sides alike were taken in [by Nasser]. Jacques Soustelle, writing as late as 1957, still insisted that the original impetus for the revolt came from Cairo, that the explosion was caused by the conjunction of "two inert chemicals...Egyptian pan-Arabism and Algerian terrorism."
Paul Henissart, Wolves in the City: The Death of French Algeria, p. 346-47.
We really would be here all day (and night. Actually, block out the whole week) arguing the JFK-OAS connection. All the same, let us know if this handsome devil suits your fancy:
Ever have a weekend to kill, pop his name (Jean-Rene Souetre) into the search bar over at maryferrell.org. He was probably a JFK triggerman.
8/9/1990 New York Times “Jacques Soustelle, Leader in Fight for French Algeria, Dies at 78."
Old boy actually wanted Algeria to be “more integrated” with Europe, which of course required killing anyone who said boo.
Crosbie, p. 96: “Support for Israel was confined to relatively ineffectual pro-Israel pressure groups such as the Alliance France-Israel, which had been organized in November 1956 under the presidency of Jacques Soustelle.”
Heiman, p. 112. Heiman names various actors who kept the nuclear football rolling before and after Soustelle. Far as we can tell they’re accurate, but Soustelle’s the only lifelong Isra*li partisan who waged a nine-month goal line defense of Isra*l’s right to bear nuclear arms.
Beit-Hallahmi, p. 45:
During 1961 and 1962, there were numerous reports of Israeli support for the French OAS movement in Algeria, the ultra-rightist organization of French settlers that was trying to maintain French control over Algeria. "When in 1961 the OAS was created, it was a natural development that Israel, as keen on Algerie-Frangaise as the OAS themselves, should lock themselves into the organization."
Skipping over the details only because it’s well-trod ground. Talbot hits all the major points dead-center.
Horne, p. 445.
Multiple times. They weren’t even shy about it:
Antoine Argoud was extremely frank: “Despite what may have been said or written, the physical elimination of the Head of State poses no moral problem for any of us. We are all convinced, Bidault the practising Catholic, Soustelle the liberal, like myself, or the pieds-noirs in the group, that de Gaulle has deserved the supreme punishment a hundred times over. [Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle the Ruler: 1945-1970, p. 324]
Paull, p. 21.
This is a great article (and series). It's a litmus test for me with brit lefties as to what they think of Brian Crozier. Most dismissed him as unimportant. I was often ridiculed for saying he played a key part in anti-communism and the rise of the right in post war politics. Same people thought there was no plot against then pm harold wilson. It's an amusing irony that crozier is at least partly responsible for me becoming a teenage communist in the 1970s. Despite my dad being a staunch labour voter, he always bout the rag 'the daily express' which I read when he came home from work. The articles by crozier and his ilk about the dangers of communism were so unhinged, I just thought there must be something good about it. Anyway, keep up the good work.