Meet Le Cercle – Making Bilderberg Look Like Amateurs

4th November 2017 / United Kingdom

By Rob Woodward – TruePublica: The Bildeberg group comically describe themselves as “a diverse group of political leaders and experts.” We are led to believe they are the world’s most secretive organisation. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping the press away from their sacred agenda and discussions. It has spent decades lying and obfuscating about itself. And yet, the activities of the Bilderberg group genuinely sit in the shade to an even more secretive and dangerous geo-political influencer called – Le Cercle.

Le Cercle originally set up as a Franco-German alliance, is a deep state milieu – an environment where powerful figures can secretly meet. They are careful to commit as little as possible to paper or p.c. – making them hard to hack, leak or track – and for good reason. It is smaller and considerably more secretive than Bilderberg.

Its purpose is to subvert the democratic principles and processes of individual countries and are by nature ideologically ‘hawkish’ – distributing propaganda, stoking fear of communist plots from Russia, vote rigging and hacking the accounts of politicians and prominent global figures. Promoting the ‘war on terror’ has been a major factor in their activities of recent years and in so doing broker weapons deals and setting up false flag operations the world over to suit its own agenda. It is reported that ‘Gladio‘ style attacks, much like the clandestine NATO “stay-behind” sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassination operations in Europe have been conducted along with illegal business operations, financial fraud and arms dealing – all attributed to this group.

Characters such as Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle (the original neo-con architects of the Iraq War and subsequent attacks across the Middle East) are all or have been members. Margaret Becket (Labour MP, previously Britain’s Foriegn Secretary, chair of the Intelligence Select Committee, sought to subvert the democratic election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the party), Alan Duncan (Minister of State at the Department for International Development), Norman Lamont (an ex Rothschild banker, former Tory MP and became UK Minister for Defence Procurement just in time to sign the Al-Yamamah arms deal.‎ He was Chancellor of the Exchequer when Black Wednesday transferred around £3,000,000,000 from UK taxpayers to currency traders. He was also European chair of Le Cercle). William Hague, (Baron Hague of Richmond PC FRSL is a British Conservative politician and life peer. MP from 1989 and was the Leader of the Opposition from 1997 to 2001).

Jonathan Aitken (British Tory politician, Le Cercle Chairman 1993-96), Michael Ancram (ex-chairman Conservative party, shadow foreign secretary, and Chairman of Le Cercle). Ancram was formerly a Member of Parliament (MP) and a member of the Shadow Cabinet. Since 2010 a member of the House of Lords, he is the only marquess in the House of Lords. All are known British contingent Le Cercle members.

In 2000, a single webpage at www.atlanticcircle.com (web-archive doc) described Le Cercle as “an informal group of European and American professionals – politicians, retired Ambassadors, former Generals, lawyers and active participants in banking, oil, shipping, publishing and trading companies – who are interested in preserving a positive Atlantic dialogue.”

To the UK House of Lords, this group has been described as an “informal group meeting to discuss world affairs.” William Hague once described it as “a political group which organises conferences.” In 2007 the Washington Post (archive-doc) termed it a “foreign policy think tank established during the Cold War that reportedly included senior politicians, diplomats and intelligence agents worldwide.”

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David Teacher, Le Cercle and paneuropa researcher, writes that “the Cercle complex can be seen to be an international coalition of right-wing intelligence veterans, working internationally to promote top conservative politicians who would shape the world.”

The group has two HQ’s – one in the US and one in Europe. The US is more secretive, to the extent it is not known who the current chairman is. In Europe, past Chairs have been high profile figures such as Jonathan Aitken (1993-1996), Norman Lamont (over 10 years) and most recently, Michael Ancram. The Independent reported in 1997 that Jonathan Aiken had been dropped by Le Circle due to the political scandal that surrounded him with his libel and perjury case that ended with a prison sentence.

According to ‘Powerbase.info” Le Circle British regulars number about 15, drawn mostly from the rich Tory right. Leading political lights are Paul Channon and Alan Duncan. David Burnside, the former British Airways public affairs chief, is a member – not for his BA work but for his passionate espousal of Ulster Unionism. Viscount Cranborne, John Major’s former senior aide, has attended Cercle gatherings. Brian Crozier, the author and well-known Cold-Warrior with close ties to MI6 and the CIA, is a senior member. Anthony Cavendish, the former senior MI5 man, is an old Cercle hand. Nicholas Elliot, the ex-MI6 officer, used to go to their meetings.

The group meets biannually. Every autumn it meets in Washington DC and earlier in the year it meets in an “overseas” venue, usually in Europe. Approx 70 guests attend over a period of 3-4 days, the vast majority are male and universally classed as extreme right-wing. Bilderberg meetings usually end with mass protests, arrests and ample media coverage, Le Cercle meetings go unreported.

Attendees of Le Cercle are generally found to be part of the deep state – i.e. mostly made up of politicians, spooks, bankers, diplomats, military officers, editors and publishers or experts in geopolitical products such as energy. All are deep political actors with real influence. Members are almost exclusively from western or western-oriented countries. It is noteworthy that many important members tend to be affiliated with aristocratic circles in London and accusations of links to fascism and synarchist (rule by a secret elite) are anything but uncommon in this milieu.

The earliest known public reference to Le Cercle was probably in Time Out magazine’s 1975 leaked documents from the Institute for the Study of Conflict. To date there have been no American commercially-controlled media sources known to have mentioned the group.

Le Cercle was mentioned in 1980 in Der Spiegel (which also published the first article on the Bilderberg group). Le Cercle received more attention after a scandal broke out involving Jonathan Aitken and his libel case involving the Guardian and a Granada TV documentary that involved shady dealings with Middle Eastern elites, when he was European chairman. Members who were contacted by newspapers at the time all refused to answer any questions about the group.

A research proposal by Adrian Hänni noted that “the Cercle is virtually nonexistent in academic research to this day. There are, as of yet, very few studies of the Cercle that are based on primary sources and meet basic academic standards.”

The 1982 Langemann Papers were the first significant leak to expose the activities of Le Cercle, confirming that the group was actively involved in influencing Western European elections.

There are reports that “throughout the 1970s Le Cercle was actively influencing elections in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Belgium.”

Earlier documents in the Langemann Papers from November 1979 quote a planning paper by Brian Crozier about a Cercle complex operation “to affect a change of government in the United Kingdom that saw Margaret Thatcher into No10 Downing Street. The operation was set up three years earlier known as “Shield Group.”

In his Diaries, Jonathan Aitken’s close friend, Alan Clark, relates how he went with Mr Aitken and similarly right-thinking friends to a gathering in Muscat, Oman. He describes it as “an Atlanticist society of right- wing dignitaries” and, later, as “a right-wing think-tank, funded by the CIA, which churns Cold War concepts around”.

It is noteworthy, although unconnected to Le Circle from this research that David Cameron sold three nuclear weapons (with the sanction of Margaret Thatcher), of a foreign state (south Africa’s collapsed apartheid regime), put them in unsafe hands (Oman) resulting in the Conservative party banking of nearly £19 million which then sets the pretext for a conflict that kills a million people in Iraq. All these events are highly likely to be linked one way or another to the activities of members of Le Circle.

Le Cercle has also been accused of actively destabilizing governments which opposed a conservative economic agenda, such as the conservative Monday Club which prepared a coup against Labour government of Harold Wilson. Wilson’s resignation has never been fully explained and was reported by the Guardian as: “Prompted by CIA fears that Wilson was a Soviet agent – put in place after the KGB had, the spooks believed, poisoned Hugh Gaitskell, the previous Labour leader. These MI5 men burgled the homes of the prime minister’s aides, bugged their phones and spread black, anti-Wilson propaganda throughout the media. They tried to pin all kinds of nonsense on him: that his devoted political secretary, Marcia Williams, posed a threat to national security; that he was a closet IRA sympathiser.”

The stage was set for a coup. The article continues – “Retired intelligence officers gathered with military brass and plotted a coup d’etat. They would seize Heathrow airport, the BBC and Buckingham Palace. Lord Mountbatten would be the strongman, acting as interim prime minister. The Queen would read a statement urging the public to support the armed forces, because the government was no longer able to keep order.”

Although this sounds somewhat far-fetched it was only September 2015 when it was reported that if Jeremy Corbyn did seize power in Downing Street, the military would conduct a ‘mutiny’.

From the Independent: A senior serving general has reportedly warned that a Jeremy Corbyn government could face “a mutiny” from the Army if it tried to downgrade them. The unnamed general said members of the armed forces would begin directly and publicly challenging the labour leader if he tried to scrap Trident, pull out of Nato or announce “any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.” He told the Sunday Times: “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it.

This 2015 story is an extraordinary story appearing in national newspapers and has MI5/6 and deep state actors stamped all over it.

Interestingly, the latest generation of British Cercle members, whose predecessors were collectively very keen on joining the European Union, now want to keep Britain out of the emerging European superstate, perhaps having lost faith they can become a significant force within Europe. This would explain how they acted with American billionaires to subvert democracy and illegally swung the EU referendum in favour of a full exit. Carole Cadwalladr wrote about this in The Observer article “The Great British Brexit Robbery.” The paper is now being sued for publishing this scandal.

Le Cercle’s interest in “terrorism” and arms dealing lends support to the suggestion that it may have been important in devising the “War on Terror”.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that at least three members of this group (Brian Crozier, Robert Moss, Gerhard Lowenthal) gave presentations at the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, the seminal event in the development of the establishment’s “War on Terror” narrative. Many of the other speakers were closely connected to known members.

Many members set up “terrorism research” organisations, which sheds new light on the “anti-communist” think tanks that they also set up, such as Interdoc.

Joël van der Reijden (Dutch investigative reporter specialising in the Deep State) infers that Le Cercle may be connected to the Strategy of Tension that the world has been experiencing in recent decades.

Noting the presence of Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin (banker, right wing-activist) in the group, remarks are made that “That’s major news, because Baron de Bonvoisin, besides a key Belgian figure in the Strategy of Tension, is the most key name in the Belgian X-Dossiers” (wikileaks Nov 2009) . This was a huge sex slave, peadophile scandal that broke into mainstream media causing widespread social discontent which ended with the complete reorganisation of Belgium’s law enforcement agencies.

Following a Nasserite coup in Yemen (NewYorkTimes report 1964) in September 1962, Julian Amery (later Cercle chairman) met with King Hussein of Jordan and agreed to send Cercle attendee Neil McLean to report on the situation after which Amery met with McLean, David Stirling, Col Brian Franks and UK Prime Minister Alex Douglas-Home to organise an unofficial covert mercenary operation that led to crises in the Middle East—in Syria, Yemen and Kuwait.

Le Cercle – “Iran-Contra”, Arms-to-Iraq, Al-Yamamah arms deal

Wikispooks reports that: “Circle visitor John Carbaugh worked for GeoMiliTech Consultants Corporation, an arms dealing group directly involved in Iran-Contra (history Commons Doc). Others such as Margaret Carlisle were aides to Iran-Contra insiders. Cercle members Paul Channon and Alan Clark (British Conservative MP – served as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s governments) are connected through their involvement in the Arms-to-Iraq affair ( The Independent report Dec 1992), also to the later chairman Jonathan Aitken, who himself was involved in the Al-Yamamah arms deal as well, as was another later chairman, Norman Lamont. Nadhmi Yuchi (wikileaks) is widely reported as having made a lot of money from arms deals to Saddam Hussein, amongst others. Lacking documents or testimony from Cercle members, inferences about Cercle activities remain unconfirmed.

An extract of John E Lewis’s book regarding Le Cercle funding

Ted Shackley was involved in oil deals after he left the CIA in 1979, facilitated by his close friend and fellow Cercle member, Conrad Gerber and oil smuggler John Deuss.

Funding for the group has changed over the years. The group states that it is “privately funded”. Multinational companies including Philips, Shell, the Ford Foundation and Standard Elektrik Lorenz have given the group money.

Robin Ramsay, editor of Lobster Magazine believes the CIA funds (Globalisation and Covert Politics Report) the group, a claim that Alan Clark also makes in his diaries. In the 1980s, the South African government was a major source of funds.

John E Lewis writes in his book The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups (extract page) that Le Cercle was funded, amongst others, by the CIA for its “militant anti-leftism as it wars against it enemies more than jaws about them.”

In the last few years Le Cercle has become even more secretive with its activities largely unknown.