One should not underestimate occultism's influence on Hitler. His subsequent rejection of Free Masons and esoteric movements, of Theosophy, of Anthrosophy, does not necessarily mean otherwise.

Occult circles have long been known as covers for espionage and influence peddling.

Hitler's spy apparatus under Canaris and Heydrich were well aware of these conduits, particularly from the direction of Britain which had within its MI5 intelligence agency a department known as the Occult Bureau. That these potential sources of trouble were purged from Nazi life should not be taken to mean that Hitler and the Nazi secret societies were not influenced by mystical and occult writers such as Madame Blavatsky, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Guido Von List, Lanz Von Liebenfels, Rudolf Steiner, George Gurdjieff, Karl Haushofer and Theodor Fritsch. Although Hitler later denounced and ridiculed many of them, he did dedicate his book Mein Kampf to his teacher Dietrich Eckart.

A frequent visitor to Landsberg Prison where Hitler was writing Mein Kampf with the help of Rudolf Hess, was General Karl Haushofer, a university professor and director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics.

Haushofer, Hitler, and Hess had long conversations together. Hess also kept records of these conversations. Hitler's demands for German "Living Space" in the east at the expense of the Slavic nations were based on the geopolitical theories of the learned professor.

Haushofer was also inclined toward the esoteric. as military attache in Japan, he had studied Zen-Buddhism. He had also gone through initiations at the hands of Tibetan Lamas. He became Hitler's second "esoteric mentor", replacing Dietrich Eckart.

In Berlin, Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the Vril Society. The lodge's objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to awaken the forces of "Vril".

Haushofer was a student of the Russian magician and metaphysician Gregor Ivanovich Gurdyev (George Gurdjieff).

Both Gurdjeiff and Haushofer maintained that they had contacts with secret Tibetan Lodges that possessed the secret of the "Superman". The lodge included Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Himmler, Goring, and Hitler's subsequent personal physician Dr. Morell.

It is also known that Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler. Hitler's unusual powers of suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the "secret" psychological techniques of the esoteric lodges. Haushofer taught him the techniques of Gurdjieff which, in turn, were based on the teachings of the Sufis and the Tibetan Lamas- and familiarized him with the Zen teaching of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon.
sumeria

This was the age of European expansion, and numerous theories provided ideological justification for imperialism and colonialism. In Germany the idea of an Aryan or "master" race found resonance with rabid nationalism, the idea of the German superman distilled from the philosophy of friedrich Nietzsche, and Wagner's operatic celebrations of Nordic sagas and Teutonic mythology.

Long before the 1939 mission to Tibet, the Nazis had borrowed Asian symbols and language and used them for their own ends. A number of prominent articles of Nazi rhetoric and symbolism originated in the language and religions of Asia.

The term "Aryan", for example, comes from the Sanskrit word arya, meaning noble. In the Vedas, the most ancient Hindu scriptures, the term describes a race of light-skinned people from Central Asia who conquered and subjugated the darker-skinned (or Dravidian) peoples of the Indian subcontinent.

Linguistic evidence does support the multidirectional migration of a central Asian people, now referred to as Indo-Europeans, into much of India and Europe at some point between 2000 and 1500 B.C.E., although it is unclear whether these Indo-Europeans were identical with the Aryans of the Vedas.

So much for responsible scholarship. In the hands of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European jingoists and occultists such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, these ideas about Indo-Europeans and light-skinned Aryans were transformed into a twisted myth of Nordic and later exclusively German racial superiority.

The German identification with the Indo-Europeans and Aryans of the second millennium B.C.E. gave historical precedence to Germany's imperial "place in the sun" and the idea that ethnic Germans were racially entitled to conquest and mastery. It also aided in fomenting anti-Semitism and xenophobia, as Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities did not share in the Aryan German's perceived heritage as members of a dominant race.

Ideas about an Aryan or master race began to appear in the popular media in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, E. B. Lytton, a Rosicrucian, wrote a best-selling novel around the idea of a cosmic energy (particularly strong in the female sex), which he called "Vril." Later he wrote of a Vril society, consisting of a race of super-beings that would emerge from their underground hiding-places to rule the world. His fantasies coincided with a great interest in the occult, particularly among the upper classes, with numerous secret societies founded to propagate these ideas. They ranged from those devoted to the Holy Grail to those who followed the sex and drugs mysticism of Alastair Crowley, and many seem to have had a vague affinity for Buddhist and Hindu beliefs.

General Haushofer, a follower of Gurdjieff and later one of Hitler's main patrons, founded one such society. Its aim was to explore the origins of the Aryan race, and Haushofer named it the Vril Society, after Lytton's fictional creation. Its members practiced meditation to awaken the powers of Vril, the feminine cosmic energy.

The Vril Society claimed to have links to Tibetan masters, apparently drawing on the ideas of Madame Blavatsky, the Theosophist who claimed to be in telepathic contact with spiritual masters in Tibet. In Germany, this blend of ancient myths and nineteenth-century scientific theories began to evolve into a belief that the Germans were the purest manifestation of the inherently superior Aryan race, whose destiny was to rule the world. These ideas were given scientific weight by ill-founded theories of eugenics and racist ethnography.

Around 1919, the Vril Society gave way to the Thule Society (Thule Gesellschaft), which was founded in Munich by Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, a follower of Blavatsky. The Thule Society drew on the traditions of various orders such as the Jesuits, the Knights Templar, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Sufis. It promoted the myth of Thule, a legendary island in the frozen northlands that had been the home of a master race, the original Aryans. As in the legend of Atlantis (with which it is sometimes identified), the inhabitants of Thule were forced to flee from some catastrophe that destroyed their world. But the survivors had retained their magical powers and were hidden from the world, perhaps in secret tunnels in Tibet, where they might be contacted and subsequently bestow their powers on their Aryan descendants.
Source

"...the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing."
The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics by Edwin Black

"Prescott Bush ran into a completely unexpected problem. At that time, the old Harriman eugenics movement was centered at Yale University. Prescott Bush was a Yale trustee, and his former Brown Brothers Harriman partner, Lawrence Tighe, was Yale's treasurer. In that connection, a slight glimmer of the truth about the Bush-Harriman firm's Nazi activities now made its way into the campaign."
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography --- by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin
source

"The First International Congress of Eugenics was held in London in 1912 and was attended by a certain Winston Churchill. By 1917, fifteen US states had eugenics laws to sterilize epileptics, the mentally ill and regular criminals. On the agenda of the Third International Congress in 1932 was the 'problem' of African-Americans, which, according to the delegates, revealed a need to sterilize to 'cut off bad stock'. At this meeting were several Nazis, including Dr. Ernst Rudin, who had been enabled to attend by the Hamburg-America Shipping Line, owned by the Harriman and Bush families. On returning to Germany, Rudin, who was funded by the Rockefellers, supervised the policy of sterilizing those who were retarded, deaf, blind or alcoholics."
Eugenics and Engineered Wars, the harsh reality...Bank index

The modern world begins,[...] at the end of World War I, when British diplomat/adventurers Jack Philby (father of Soviet spy Kim Philby and legendary Arabist) and Lawrence of Arabia endeavour to unify a bunch of warring Bedouin tribes into nationhood, best represented by Saudi Arabia. Aware that black gold (oil) lies underneath the desert sands, Philby gingerly befriends Ibn Saud, and makes him the first Saudi king. But Philby is not solely interested in empire, even his own British one; he is interested in making money, and forges an alliance with an American intelligence agent in charge of Middle Eastern affairs, Allen Dulles.

By the 1930s, Ibn Saud and Philby are secret supporters of the Nazi rise to political power in Germany, and bring Dulles, a NYC-based corporate lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell, in on their scheme.

It is a triple game driven by their hatred of Zionism and the Jews, motivated by their obsessive seeking of profits, and designed to completely transform the landscape of the Middle East. Philby and Dulles convince Ibn Saud to allow limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, assuring him that the numbers will never challenge or upset his control.

When Jews leave Germany, their assets are confiscated by Hitler, who shares a percentage of these with dummy corporations established by Philby, Dulles, and their allies. Some of this money is used to arm Ibn Saud, and intelligence disclosures to him by Philby enable Ibn Saud to become king of Saudi Arabia over other Arab leaders supported by the British government.

This double-dealing by British and American corporations continues throughout World War II, and incredibly is never halted by the Western allies, who would rather that Dulles stay in place andround up German intelligence agents after World War II's end for the upcoming Cold War against a previous ally, the USSR. One of the reasons that Jews are so hated by this clique, which includes Rockefeller's Standard Oil, is that many Jews were supporters of the left, anathema to corporate internationalists. - John Loftus

Renegades of the Middle East

Ratlines:The CIA &The Nazis

Islamism, or fascism with an Islamic face, was born with and of the Muslim Brotherhood. It proved (and improved) its fascist core convictions and practices through collaboration with the Nazis in the run-up to and during World War II. It proved it during the same period through its collaboration with the overtly fascist "Young Egypt" (Misr al-Fatah) movement, founded in October 1933 by lawyer Ahmed Hussein and modeled directly on the Hitler party, complete with paramilitary Green Shirts aping the Nazi Brown Shirts, Nazi salute and literal translations of Nazi slogans. Among its members, Young Egypt counted two promising youngsters and later presidents, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat.

In later years, the Brotherhood had serious fallings-out with Nasser, whom it attempted to assassinate on several different occasions, and with Sadat, whom it did assassinate in 1981. But up until at least the time of Nasser's 1952 coup d'etat, all was sweetness and light between Hassan al-Banna's brethren and Nasser's "free officers". In his personal diary, Sadat wrote in the summer of 1940:

"One day I invited Hassan al-Banna, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the army camp where I served, in the Egyptian Communication Corps, so that he might lecture before my soldiers on various religious topics. A few days before his scheduled appearance it was reported to me from army Intelligence that his coming was forbidden and canceled by the order of General Headquarters, and I myself was summoned for interrogation. After a short while I went secretly to El Bana's office and participated in a few seminars he organized. I like the man and admired him."

Whether al-Banna, who had already been in contact with German agents since the 1936-39 Palestine uprising against the British, or someone else introduced Sadat and his free officer comrades to German military intelligence is not known. But in the summer of 1942, when Rommel's Afrikakorps stood just over 100 kilometers from Alexandria and were poised to march into Cairo, Sadat, Nasser and their buddies were in close touch with the German attacking force and - with Brotherhood help - preparing an anti-British uprising in Egypt's capital. A treaty with Germany including provisions for German recognition of an independent, but pro-Axis Egypt had been drafted by Sadat, guaranteeing that "no British soldier would leave Cairo alive". When Rommel's push east failed at El Alamein in the fall of 1942, Sadat and several of his co-conspirators were arrested by the British and sat out much of the remainder of the war in jail.

Islamist-fascist collaboration did not cease with war's end. King Farouk brought large numbers of German military and intelligence personnel as well as ranking (ex-) Nazis into Egypt as advisors. It was a bad move. Several of the Germans, recognizing Farouk's political weakness, soon began conspiring with Nasser and his free officers (who, in turn, were working closely with the Brotherhood) to overthrow the king. On July 23, 1952, the deed was done and Newsweek marveled that, "The most intriguing aspect [of] the revolt ... was the role played in the coup by the large group of German advisors serving with the Egyptian army ... The young officers who did the actual planning consulted the German advisors as to 'tactics' ... This accounted for the smoothness of the operation."

And yet another player fond of playing all sides against the middle had entered the game prior to Farouk's ouster: In 1951, the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of president Teddy, who in 1953 would organize the overthrow of elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh and install Reza Pahlavi as Shah) opened secret negotiations with Nasser. Agreement was soon reached that the US, post-coup, would assist in building up Egypt's intelligence and security forces - in the obvious manner, by reinforcing Nasser's existing Germans with additional, "more capable", ones. For that, CIA head Allen Dulles turned to Reinhard Gehlen, one-time head of eastern front German military intelligence and by the early 1950s in charge of developing a new German foreign intelligence service. Gehlen hired the best man he knew for the job - former SS colonel Otto Skorzeny, who at the end of the war had organized the infamous ODESSA network to facilitate the escape of high-ranking Nazis to Latin America (mainly Peron's Argentina) and Egypt. With Skorzeny now on the job of assisting Nasser, Egypt became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals galore. The CIA officer in charge of the Egypt assistance program was Miles Copeland, soon a Nasser intimate.

And then things got truly complicated and messy. Having played a large role in Nasser's power grab, the Muslim Brotherhood, after the 1949 assassination of Hassan al-Banna by government agents [see part 1] under new leadership and (since 1951) under the radical ideological guidance of Sayyid Qutb, demanded its due - imposition of Sharia (Islamic religious) law. When Nasser demurred, he became a Brotherhood assassination target, but with CIA and the German mercenaries' help he prevailed. In February 1954, the Brotherhood was banned. An October 1954 assassination attempt failed. Four thousand brothers were arrested, six were executed, and thousands fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon.

Within short order, things got more tangled still: As Nasser in his brewing fight with Britain and France over control of the Suez Canal turned to the Soviet Union for assistance and arms purchases, the CIA approached and began collaboration with the Brotherhood against their ex-ally, the now pro-Soviet Nasser.

We leave that twisted tale at this stage. A leading Brotherhood member arrested in 1954 was Sayyid Qutb. He spent the next 10 years in Jarah prison near Cairo and there wrote the tracts that subsequently became (and till this day remain) must-reading and guidance for Islamists everywhere. (The main translations into Farsi were made by the Rahbar of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.)

But while brother number one went to jail, other leading members who had escaped were given jobs in Saudi universities and provided with royal funding. They included Sayyid's brother Muhammad and Abdullah al-Azzam, the radical Palestinian preacher (the "Emir of Jihad") who later in Peshawar, Pakistan, founded the Maktab al-Khidamat, or Office of Services, which became the core of the al-Qaeda network. As a student at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Osama bin Laden, son of Muhammad bin Laden, the kingdom's wealthiest contractor and close friend of King Faisal, became a disciple of Muhammad Qutb and al-Azzam.
asia times

1949 The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwaan al-Muslimoon ) by 1949 had grown to an estimated 2,000 branches with almost half a million members. On February 12, the movement's founder, Hasan al-Banna, was gunned down in the streets of Cairo. The assailants, some alleged, were security agents of King Farouk's government which had become worried about the growing strength of the Brotherhood. The king's government had outlawed the Brotherhood in December, 1948, and the Brotherhood had responded by assassinating Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi the following month (January, 1949).

A New York Times special report on the Iran coup was published on April 4, 2000. The report summarizes a history of the affair written by the CIA itself, and, claims that:

1. The idea for the coup was hatched by the British who, angered by Iran's nationalization of British oil interests in Iran in 1951, pressed the United States to join them in an operation to remove Iran's Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh.

2. The CIA and the British Intelligence Service handpicked General Fazollah Zahedi to take over as Prime Minister, funneling $5 million to Zahedi's regime two days after the coup.

3. Iranian CIA operatives posing as Communists harassed Iranian religious leaders and staged a bombing of a cleric's house in a campaign to turn Iran's Muslims against the Mossadegh government.

4. The shah's cowardice nearly ruined the CIA operation. He refused to sign CIA-written "royal" decrees to alter his government. The CIA arranged for his twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlevi along with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the 1991 Desert Storm commander, to try to keep him from buckling under. He ended up fleeing the country anyway, although he was back within a week.

In 1953 in Morocco, Sultan Sidi Muhammad was exiled.

Also in 1953, in Jordan and Saudi Arabia a new revivalist movement appeared: Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami ("The Islamic Liberation Party"). The party's founders were refugee Palestinians led by Sheikh Taqiuddin an-Nabhani Filastini.
M.E. history database

the Americans had headed off a crisis in the Gulf. A radical, populist Iranian government had seized control of the Abadan oilfield from a British company. Britain's response was to prepare the Paras for a drop on Abadan to recover the oil by force. Warned off by President Truman, the British were obliged to watch the deadly dollar do its work. The CIA orchestrated riots to bring down the Teheran government of Moussadeq and install the Shah in his place.

From this triumph the CIA turned its attention to Cairo. There, the agency's Arab expert Kermit Roosevelt established a friendly, first-name relationship with Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, a hero of the inglorious defeat of the Egyptian Army at Israeli hands in 1948. Nasser was also a veteran of the dissident Young Officers group. In July 1952 the group seized power and forced Britain's client ruler, King Farouk, into exile. He sailed away from Alexandria aboard his yacht, having looted his country's gold reserves. The British had no idea of what was happening until the Americans told them.

Later, as Cold War politics obtruded upon this relationship, there was a long estrangement between the US and Egypt, still the powerhouse of Arab identity. Nasser was perceived to be a client of Soviet Russia. But with the arrival of Anwar Sadat, Cairo again came under the influence of Washington, to a remarkable degree. Sadat's personal protection was run by the CIA.

Sadat came to power in 1970 and within two years, had evicted the country's Russian advisers. The CIA then took over Egypt's intelligence service as well as the president's bodyguard. As Bob Woodward confirms in his history of the agency, the CIA became addicted to the intimate gossip of political Cairo.

On 6 October 1981 some of Sadat's own troops turned their guns on him at a public parade. The Brotherhood had struck again. Bill Casey, head of the CIA, was appalled. Concerned for the Camp David accord with Israel, and other political assets, including the protection of Sadat's protégé, Hosni Mubarak, he ordered: "Get some people out in the fucking street to see if someone's going to shoot Mubarak."
Source

The story starts well before he launched his own career. It goes back to the 1920s, when the Dulles brothers and the other pirates of Wall Street were first making their deals with he Nazis. To understand Bush's role as a senior official of the Republican Party, as head of the CIA, as US vice president and then ultimately in White House it is important to trace the Bush Family s right back to the beginning of the secret espionage war against the Jews. George Bush's problems were inherited from his namesake and maternal grandfather, George Herbert "Bert" Walker, (Note the W. in George W. Bush stands for Walker, George W. Bush is named for George Herbert "Bert" Walker, as is his father, the former US President George Herbert Walker Bush.) a native of St. Louis, who founded the banking and investment firm of G.H.Walker and Company in 1900.

Later the company shifted from St.Louis to the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street."

Grandfather Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States.

The relationship went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party. Some Americans made their connections to Germany through Allen Dulles's firm of Sullivan and Cromwell because they supported fascism. The Dulles brothers arranged American investments in Nazi Germany in the 1930s to ensure that their clients did well out of the German economic recovery. "Dulles clearly emphasized projects for Germany and for Mussolini's fascist state. All told, these and more than a dozen similar transactions had a combined value in excess of a billion dollars.
tribal messenger

The Large-scale Money Laundering for the Nazis by President Bush's Grandfather and Maternal Great-Grandfather
Documents presented by John Buchanan

Operation paperclip - US hires the important Nazis

While the Operation Paperclip scientists were setting up shop in the U.S., General Reinhard Gehlen began re-establishing his presence in West Germany. His organization, the Gehlen Org, quickly regained control of the majority of his former agents inside the Iron Curtain, and with the help of many of his former staff, put them back to work. Though he agreed not to hire any former Gestapo, SS or SD members, he sought them out and put them on the payroll - the CIA's payroll - regardless of his promise. And the CIA did not stop him.

Among his recruits were Dr. Franz Six and Emil Augsburg. Six and Augsburg had been members of an SS mobile Death's Head killing squad that hunted down and killed Soviet Jews, intellectuals and partisans wherever they could be found. Six was known as a Streber, or Eager Beaver, for the enthusiastic manner in which he pursued his job. Gehlen also recruited the former Gestapo chiefs of Paris, France, and Kiel, Germany. Then, that not being enough, he hired Willi Krichbaum, the former senior Gestapo leader for southeastern Europe.

Gehlen was pleasantly surprised by what happened next. His new employer, the OSS, not only encouraged but financed an escape mechanism set up by Gehlen for former Nazis. The Gehlen Org established, with OSS help, "rat lines" to provide an underground escape network to be used by former war criminals to escape prosecution by German war crimes tribunals. By way of this organization, over 5,000 Nazis secretly made their way out of Europe to relocate around the globe.

Most went to South and Central America. The countries of choice were Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Within a few years after their arrival in these particular countries, the infamous right-wing government "death squads" made their first appearances. Of note in the expatriate community were such characters as Dr. Joseph Mengele, who specialized in crude genetic experiments on Jewish concentration camp inmates, and mass murderer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyons."

According to some sources, former OSS officer James Jesus Angleton, who later became CIA Chief of Intelligence, was the man responsible for providing the Nazis with new identities before their departure from the detainment camps. Angleton worked directly for Dulles.
freemasonry watch

Turning to Germany, the ex-intelligence man had further dramatic revelations. He avowed that the US Office of Policy Co-ordination, which fronted for the CIA, had "incorporated lock, stock and barrel the espionage outfit run by Hitler's spy chief Reinhard Gehlen

"This is well known", he commented, "because Gehlen was the spiritual father of Stay Behind in Germany and his role was known to the West German leader, Konrad Adenauer, from the outset. Adenauer signed a secret protocol with the US on West Germany's entry into NATO in May 1955 in which it was agreed that the West German authorities would refrain from active legal pursuit of known right-wing extremists.

"What is not so well-known", he went on, "is that other top German politicians were privy to the existence of secret resistance plans. One of these was the then German State Secretary and former high-ranking nazi, Hans Globke".

Elaborating on this, our source said that the operation drew its main personnel from former SS and Waffen SS men during the early post-war years and that these were trained by officers of the British SIS. Later the operation was taken over by a secret wing of the Federal German Intelligence Service, the BND.

Some of the objectives of the German Stay Behind conspiracy were highlighted in a German Stern TV programme last month in which it was reported that the assassination of left-wing politicians was planned by the German wing of Stay Behind in the event of a Soviet invasion.

High on the death list were two top Social Democrats, Herbert Wehner, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party in the West German Parliament, and the former Mayor of Bremen, Wilhelm Kaisen.

"Amongst those who were recruited and did some recruiting for the scheme in the first years were an ex-SS Obersturmfijhrer, Hans Otto, and other smaller fish. But the prize catch was Klaus Barbie who functioned as a recruiter for ex-nazis and members of the fascist Bund Deutscher Jugend".

Documentary evidence in the hands of the British All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group, established in 1986 to bring nazi fugitives in Britain to justice, shows that Barbie, now in a French jail for crimes against humanity during his war-time reign of terror as Gestapo chief in Lyons, was indeed in close contact with the US secret services.
searchlight magazine

Operation Gladio

After the Cold War had ended, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed to the Italian Senate in August 1990 that Italy had had a secret stay-behind army codenamed Gladio the sword.

A document dated 1 June 1959 from the Italian military secret service, SIFAR, revealed that SIFAR had been running the secret army with the support of NATO and in close collaboration with the US secret service, the CIA.

Suggesting that the secret army might have linked up with right-wing organizations such as Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale to engage in domestic terror, the Italian Senate, amid public protests, decided that Gladio was beyond democratic control and therefore had to be closed down.

During the 1990s, research into stay-behind armies has progressed only very slowly, due to very limited access to primary documents. It was revealed, however, that stay-behind armies covered all of Western Europe and operated under different code names, such as

Absalon in Denmark,

P26 in Switzerland,

ROC in Norway and

SDRA8 in Belgium.

The so-called Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), linked to NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), coordinated the stay-behind networks on an international level.

The last confirmed ACC meeting took place on 24 October 1990 in Brussels, chaired by the Belgian military secret service, the SGR.

If there had been a Soviet invasion, the secret anti-communist soldiers would have operated behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy held territory, evacuating shot down pilots, and sabotaging the supply lines and production centers of occupation forces.

It remains open to investigation whether or not, in the absence of an invasion, the secret armies in some countries became active against the national communist parties, who were believed to weaken NATO from within.

Evidence suggests that recruitment and operations differed greatly from country to country.
gladio

An Italian government was brought down following a 1981 investigation of the (former) P2 Masonic lodge. Consecrated in 1895, the P2 lodge included elite members from the Italian government, military and intelligence services and bankers serving the Vatican and mafia. The P2 Grand Master, an Italian named Licio Gelli joined the CIA and worked in league with mafia banker Michele Sindona and president Roberto Calvi of the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in the Vatican banking scandal. Gelli himself was expelled from Masonry in 1976. As a result of the scandal, the Italian government banned secret societies.

Calvi, twenty years ago, was found hanging from a bridge over the Thames River in what was thought to be a suicide. However British authorities have reopened the case and are now calling it murder and may prosecute three men and a woman for the crime. The motives conjectured include his mishandling of mafia money and/or potentially blackmailing P2 members.

The timing of the reopening of the Calvi case could be more than a coincidence considering the civil trial due to begin next month against the Bank of England for its role in the supervision and closing of BCCI. The mafia, CIA, British intelligence, the Mossad an assorted terrorist and drug trafficking organizations used BCCI for laundering money.
MediumRare

London Bombings 2005 - Military Intelligence Steered Nazis?

Secret wars pt 2:

Co-founded by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, the MAK was the precursor to bin Ladens global terrorist network, Al Qaeda. It sent money and fighters to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, and set up recruitment centers in over fifty countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and even the United States to bring thousands of warriors to fight the Soviet Union. The MAK was later linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York through an office in Brooklyn known as the Al-Kifah Refugee Center. It is not clear how much contact he had with bin Laden, but Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheikh, was masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, also appeared in Peshawar on occasion.

Returning to Loftus address, we examine how the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan led to the formation of al Qaeda: Azzam and his assistant, Osama bin Laden, rose to some prominence from 1979 to ?89, and they won the war. They drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Our CIA said, We won, let?s go home! and we left this army of Arab fascists in the fields of Afghanistan.

In order to prevent the MAK/Brotherhood from returning to Saudi Arabia, that country?s power elite began paying bribes in essence protection money--to al Qaeda. This development and a schism in the MAK spawned al Qaeda in its present form. The Saudis didnt want them to come back. Saudis started paying bribes to Osama bin Laden and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. Now the MAK split in half. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated, apparently by Osama bin Laden himself. The radical group?the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists?Osama called that al Qaeda. But to this day there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden?s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the residue of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

There are many flavors and branches, but they are all Muslim Brotherhoods. There is one in Israel. The organization you know as ?Hamas? is actually a secret chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Israel assassinated Sheik Yassin a month ago, the Muslim Brotherhood published his obituary in a Cairo newspaper in Arabic and revealed that he was actually the secret leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. So the Muslim Brotherhood became this poison that spread throughout the Middle East and on 911, it began to spread around the world.? - John Loftus Via David Emory

In 1979, the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We had to rename them. We couldn?t call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi cast was too known. So we called them the Maktab al Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK. And the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn?t know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis. But it was not true. A small section of the CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars. - John Loftus via Spitfire

In Saudi Arabia during the early 1970s, the thriving Brotherhood had reached out to the prodigal son of one of the kingdom's leading families. Osama bin Laden had beenliving the life of a dissolute Saudi prince, clubbing in Europe and consorting with loose women, when he was introduced to the Brotherhood's strict tenets and, in particular, the philosophies of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brother who penned virulently anti-American texts after a trip to the States in the early 1950s.

bin Laden went to fight (and fund others fighting) the Soviets in Afghanistan, with CIA support, in the early 1980s, as well as the Muslim Brothers running the anti-Soviet jihad, including Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.

Azzam set up the Services Office, a CIA- and Saudi-sponsored support organization for the mujahideen, providing a network infrastructure based in Peshawar, Pakistan, that would later form the basis for al Qaeda. Rahman and Zawahiri were also supporting the jihad from Peshawar.

Muslim Brothers bin Laden, Zawahiri and Rahman all played crucial roles in defining the ideology that fuels al Qaeda with a steady stream of recruits. Azzam provided the infrastructure, and al-Turabi later provided bin Laden with safe haven in the Sudan for several years.
rotten.com

Saudi refers to the Al Saud family, the royal house of Saudi Arabia, whose eponym is Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Mughrin. Saud himself was not a significant figure, but his son, Muhammad ibn Saud (literally, Muhammad, the son of Saud), conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula in the early eighteenth century. In almost two centuries since then, Muhammad ibn Saud's family has grown tremendously and, in 1992, the ruling house of Saudi Arabia had more than 4,000 male members. - source

The city of Makkah in the Hejaz is a place of religious pilgrimage. Even here government could not always protect the pilgrims from bandits. The Red Sea coast became part of the Ottoman Empire which maintained garrisons in the main cities, Makkah, Madinah and Ta'if, and tried to police the roads. But they did not control the nomads. By the 16th century there were Ottoman garrisons on the eastern side in Hofuf and Qateef and along the shores of the Gulf, but again they did not control the interior. The Hejaz was ruled, under Turkish overlordship, by the hereditary Sharifs (Princes) of Makkah. These were Hashemites, descendants of Mohammed.

The north eastern part of Arabia was the location where one of the Muslim reformers arose, Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab (died 1787) who preached a return to what he regarded as fundamental Islam. He was followed by the Al Saud family.

The Sauds were based on Riyadh in the Nejd, from which they were expelled in the 19th century. Abdul Aziz recaptured the town in a daring desert raid in 1904. This made him King of Nejd. From this base he conquered the rest of the country.

In the period before and during the first world war some of the British had a plan to control the whole Arab world, first to weaken the Ottomans, secondly to improve their position in India and to control the oil which had been discovered in Iran. During the war the British intelligence officer T.E.Lawrence intended the proposed Arab dominion to be headed by the Sharif of Makkah. However, this plan failed when the French took Damascus and created a French colony in Syria. But probably it could never have succeeded as the British Empire was already much weaker than it had been at its peak and the Arabs would probably not have agreed to it. However, the British had at least two policies: that of the Foreign Office which tended to support the Hashemites; and that of the India Office which supported and financed Ibn Saud. In the long run it was the India Office policy which prevailed.

Following the end of the first world war and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the British government, which controlled the Red Sea and much of the southern coast of Arabia - Aden, Oman, Trucial States - saw no reason to oppose Ibn Saud's expansion into the Red Sea coast and the Hejaz. The British provided the Hashemites of Makkah with kingdoms in Iraq and Transjordan as a compensation for not being the kings of all Arabia. Ibn Saud was given arms.

The importance of Ibn Saud's conquest is that Saudi Arabia is the only Arab country which can claim to be the result of Arab conquest rather than colonialist arrangements. The British assisted by recognizing its existence rather than trying to bring it about. Before oil it was not considered worth further effort.

The province of Asir bordering Yemen was conquered in 1920. The most notable addition was the Hejaz, where the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah are to be found. They were conquered in 1924 after which Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud proclaimed himself king of the Hejaz and Nejd. The united Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was proclaimed by Abdul Aziz in 1932.

Until oil was found the main revenues were the fees paid by pilgrims to the Hejaz (and British subsidy). But now Saudi Arabia controls a large part of the world's oil reserves and is thus of world strategic interest, shown by the quick response of American and other troops during the Kuwait crisis beginning in August 1990. Much of the cost of this war was paid by Saudi funds.

The Saudis are also believed to have supported financially many other American interests including the Contras in Nicaragua, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and RENAMO in Mozambique. They do not support movements which intend democracy. Their funds also support fundamentalist Sunni Islam in many countries, including Egypt and Algeria. The exact form of the funding of Osama bin Laden, whether from private persons or members of the royal family, is unknown, though there are many suspicions.
e.g.matthews- worldinfo

Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception

By Jim Lobe, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2003.

What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?

A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.

The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.

Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.

Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.

Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."

Rule One: Deception

It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."

This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,"The people are told what they need to know and no more." While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right' (St. Martin's 1999).

Second Principle: Power of Religion

According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.

At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."

"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' Drury says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even taken on Darwin's theory of evolution.

Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism

Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."

Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign policy was distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury wrote in her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added)."

"Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in," says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars – not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny" – as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 – that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a " myopic national security."

As to what a Straussian world order might look like, the analogy was best captured by the philosopher himself in one of his – and student Allen Bloom's – many allusions to Gulliver's Travels. In Drury's words, "When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect."

The image encapsulates the neoconservative vision of the United States' relationship with the rest of the world – as well as the relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the masses. "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy," Drury says. Jim Lobe