Eric Zuesse -- How the CIA Created the EU

How the CIA Created the EU

Eric Zuesse, November 11, 2020

The details are supplied in an exhaustive 1,000-page biography of Jean Monnet by Éric Roussel, which was published only in France in 1996, and which seems to have been successfully suppressed. It has never been translated, and has no reviews even at Amazon. However, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of UK’s Telegraph newspaper has provided some of the core information from it. Furthermore, Richard J. Aldrich’s 2003 The Hidden Hand also provides key details, such as by Aldrich’s saying, on page 366, about the American Committee for a United Europe:

ACUE, more than any other American front organization of the Cold War, was a direct creature of the leading lights of the CIA. Indeed, it was so replete with famous CIA figures that its ‘front’ was very thin. Its early years seemed to have formed something of a laboratory for figures such as [Bill] Donovan, [Allen] Dulles, [Walter] Bedell Smith and [Tom] Braden, before they moved on to other projects in the mid-1950s. Over its first three years of operations, 1949-51, ACUE received $384,650, the majority being dispersed to Europe. This was a large sum, but from 1952 ACUE began to spend such sums annually. The total budget for the period 1949-60 amounted to approximately $4 million. As the quantity of money flowing across the Atlantic began to increase, ACUE opened a local Paris office to monitor more closely groups that had received grants. By 1956, the flood of increased funding was prompting fears among the Directors of ACUE that its work would be publicly exposed. …

The emerging European Economic Community (EEC) and the growing Western intelligence community overlapped to a considerable degree. This is underlined by the creation of the Bilderberg Group, an informal and secretive transatlantic council of key decision-makers [representatives of the billionaires who controlled U.S. and U.S.-allied international corporations]. Bilderberg was founded by Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952 in response to the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe. … Retinger secured support from Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller and Walter Bedell Smith. The formation of the American wing of Bilderberg was entrusted to Eisenhower’s psychological warfare chief, C.D. Jackson, and the funding for the first meeting, held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland in 1954, was provided by the CIA.

Funds for these CIA operations came not only from the U.S. Treasury but from private sources, America’s super-rich, and, also from organized gangsters, as was revealed in the 1998 classic by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. This off-the-books funding comes from narcotics kingpins throughout the world, as protection-money, which is essential to keep them in business. So, the EU was financially fueled from all of these sources, and, basically, was a bribing-operation (to end up getting the ‘right’ people into the EU’s Parliament, etc.), in addition to be receiving funds from what might be considered idealistic philanthropic donors (because the dream of a united Europe had long preceded the grubby version of it that the CIA created for Europeans). The EU was a Cold War operation, from the very start. Though the Cold War was allegedly ideological, it was actually the result of a decision that U.S. President Harry S. Truman made on 26 July 1945, for the post-WW-II U.S. to achieve, ultimately, the world’s first all-encompassing global empire. The EU was designed to serve the political aspects of that, and NATO the military aspects, for America’s European ‘allies’ (America’s European vassal nations). The aim was for the Soviet Union (subsequently only Russia) to become surrounded by enemies, so that, in the final analysis, the U.S. and its ‘allies’ would be offering the U.S.S.R. “a deal they can’t refuse.” This deal (quite fitting to come from an international gangland operation such as America’s Deep State) would be inclusion in the U.S. empire, on terms that are set solely by the U.S. Government — either this, or else conquest. Then, the same thing would be done to China. 

Pritchard issued two important articles about this, the first being his 19 September 2000 “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs”:

DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement. … One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.

The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington. The Belgian director, Baron Boel, received monthly payments into a special account. When the head of the European Movement, Polish-born Joseph Retinger, bridled at this degree of American control and tried to raise money in Europe, he was quickly reprimanded.

The leaders of the European Movement — Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak — were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE's funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.

Then, on 27 April 2016, he bannered “The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover” and reported:

It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. … The US has relied on the EU ever since as the anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO. …

It is odd that this magisterial 1000-page study found only a French-language publisher. [That’s the book by Eric Roussel, Jean Monnet. The French Wikipedia’s article on Roussel says “En 1995, il écrit une biographie consacrée à Jean Monnet2 qui reçoit le prix de l'Essai de l'Académie française, le prix Guizot, et le prix européen de l’histoire.” Despite all of those awards, the work is little-known, even in France.] Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project. …

[The CIA] treated some of the EU’s ‘founding fathers’ as hired hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding that would have broken reliance on Washington. … The American ‘deep state’ was in up to its neck. …

Since that newspaper (like all major news-media in the U.S. and in its vassal-nations are) is both neoliberal and neoconservative, Pritchard approved of all this. He did it by saying: “There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a roaring success.” However, obviously, no authentic democracy can exist in a nation that’s governed by means of deceiving its public; nor can any democracy be an empire, either the imperialistic nation itself, or one of its vassal-nations, because that is merely a “Deep State” rule, behind the scenes, by its billionaires — it’s an aristocracy, and not a democracy, which reigns there. Though all of the country’s major news-media will support the aristocracy — since they’ll all be owned by the aristocracy — anyone who calls it a ‘democracy’ is transparently either a fool or a liar, because such a nation is the exact opposite of a democracy: it is an aristocracy.

Furthermore, that “roaring success” which was praised by Pritchard, depended upon the U.S. bribing West-European leaders with Marshall Plan reconstruction aid money for their countries, conditional upon their allying with the U.S. against the Soviet Union. U.S. taxpayers funded those countries’ reconstruction; and the owners of Lockheed, Exxon, and other U.S. international corporations, also benefited enormously from their expanded markets; but all allies of Russia were barred from receiving any U.S. reconstruction aid, though the Soviet Union was the nation chiefly responsible for defeating Hitler and which suffered vastly the most casualties and destruction in World War II. So: the U.S. Government was squeezing-out the very country that had done the most to defeat Hitler.

Here is how the EU has thanked Russia for that: by blaming Russia, right along with Nazi Germany, as having been their enemy during WW II. The U.S.-regime-created EU’s European Parliament voted on 19 September 2019 for a resolution condemning both Hitler and Stalin for having started World War II, which is a lie — and an especially outrageous one, considering that the Soviet Union did more than any other country to defeat Hitler and to enable all of those countries to not now be controlled by a Nazi regime. (Shortly after I published that article, another, by Max Parry, independently came to the same conclusion: that the EU is fascist.) That Big-Lie Resolution, which the EU’s Parliament passed on 19 September 2019, said that 

whereas it has become commonplace for Russia to deny responsibility and blame hostilities on the West in its official rhetoric, creating a reliable propaganda base upon which it can rely to justify its disregard of international law and continue its aggression against Eastern Partnership countries; [the EU]

1. Stresses that the Second World War, the most devastating war in Europe’s history, was caused by the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939, also called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, which allowed two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest to divide Europe into two zones of influence.  

The actual history is: Stalin had been begging the UK to ally with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler; and, after being snubbed each time, joined with Hitler in order to prevent an expected invasion by Hitler against the Soviet Union. It was an act of desperation by Stalin, which was forced upon him by the UK. And, now, the U.S. and its allies rewrite ‘history’ to make the Soviet Union their enemy during WW II, instead of their savior — as they actually were.

The U.S., in a sense, has adopted not only many ‘former’ Nazis, but the mantle of German Nazism — not as regards Jews, but as regards Russia and world-conquest in general: America is the world’s leading aggressive and imperialist nation. The EU is an important part of that operation and thus now equates Russia with Nazism instead of with having conquered the Nazis. Authentic European democrats will therefore abandon alliances with the imperialistic U.S., and will recognize — and honor the fact — that Russia is an important part of Europe, and was the main source of the victory against Nazism. Only then will the Cold War, which Truman started, and which George Herbert Walker Bush and his successors continue, finally end. And, by abandoning the fascist U.S. empire, Europeans will finally break the back of imperialism; and, maybe, ultimately establish what had been FDR’s dream, of a truly meaningful U.N.

All of this goes back to the plan which was first stated in the 1877 version of the Will that was written by the racistly English aristocrat and champion of English imperialism, Cecil Rhodes. The plan was for England to retake the U.S. through subversive means and then use U.S. power in order to expand the U.S.-UK empire throughout the world. Taking control of Europe would be an important step. There is a good summary presentation, on the Web, of this Deep State background to Monnet, which is titled “The New World Order And the European Union”. In at least a general sense, Rhodes seems to have seen it all coming, and he very skillfully set up the Rhodes Trust and (less directly) other organizations, so as to bring it about. It’s as if he was a super-master chess-player on the global political chessboard, and the public are mere pawns to the global aristocracy that he organized during the late 1800s.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.