And the White Knight is Talking Backwards
iv: Guerrillas by night…
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
As Eisenhower delivered his farewell address on January 17th 1961, covered in part iii, where he warned of the “unwarranted influence” of the “military–industrial complex”, it is tragically apt that democracy itself was murdered on that very day in the person of Patrice Lumumba.
The year before, 1960, the Belgians in the Congo had been set to leave after generations of brutal colonial control. Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, first of his kind in Africa, faced a deep state puppet in the form of Moise Tshombe, governor of Katanga, the Congolese state with the lion’s share of mineral wealth.
Had the Belgians ever intended to leave?
Of course not, not really. Their abrupt departure was a ruse to implode the nation with a power vacuum. They planned to return to restore “order” (protect their assets). The Belgian and the British Deep States along with their giant mining conglomerate Union Miniere and, later, the French Deep State, backed Tshombe, promising him military support and mercenaries if he would break away. Notable amongst the investors in copper and uranium in the region were the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims and C. Douglas Dillon.
Lumumba sought help from the US, the USSR and the UN. The US under Eisenhower refused, the USSR offered arms, but he found kindred spirits in John F Kennedy (JFK) and Dag Hammarskjold, the UN Secretary-General.
JFK, on the side of the struggle for self-determination and ending colonialism had continually criticised the Eisenhower administration for neglecting “the needs and aspirations of the African people”.
Hammarskjold, who JFK described as “the greatest statesman of the 20th century” had been told by his predecessor “You are about to take over the most impossible job on earth.” He had gone onto throw J Edgar Hoover’s FBI out of the UN building during the witch hunts, secure a temporary but vital resolution to the conflict arising during the Suez crisis and insist on UN oversight of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Now he was sending in an expeditionary force to the Congo.
The CIA, headed by Allen Dulles, distant cousin and former lawyer to the Rockefellers, portrayed Lumumba as a communist on the grounds that he had appealed for help to the Russians. This was the flimsy pretext that they used to justify the “replacement” of Lumumba with a pro-Western candidate. They chose Colonel Josef Mobutu to lead a coup and arrest him. However, the UN prevented the arrest by surrounding Lumumba’s house with troops. Whilst the UN battled with Mobuto’s forces, Lumumba, unwisely, escaped but was captured by Mobutu with the help of the CIA, who also sent two assassins to finish their work. At this point, Russian planes started to arrive with supplies and arms. As JFK, in sympathy with Lumumba, was about to be inaugurated, the decision was made to move him to Tshombe in Katanga where certain torture and death awaited him.
Lumumba, a true White Knight, had previously said…
“Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets… a history of glory and dignity.”
The CIA kept the murder of Lumumba away from President Kennedy for a month before he learned of it from the UN ambassador.
He was devastated but he didn’t have much time to grieve, as a couple of months later the Bay of Pigs invasion took place. The Cuban exiles were pawns in the game played by Grey Bishop Allen Dulles. We will return to this move made on the 4D chessboard after setting the context and appraising some more of the pieces.
Meanwhile in the Congo, Hammarskjold, undeterred, stepped up the UN presence and authorized the use of force to expel all foreign troops. While England and France supported the UN effort with their lips, they subverted it with sleight of hand deployment of third-party agents. The British funnelled mercenaries, arms and supplies from Rhodesia to Tshombe, whilst the French Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a terrorist group of army veterans who had split off from Charles De Gaulle due to his negotiation for Algerian independence, also made their way to Katanga.
In 1961, after flying into the Congo, Hammarskjold was asked to meet with Tshombe to agree on a cease-fire, in the midst of a battle between Irish UN troops and the mercenaries. The meeting was to take place on the 18th September, with no reporters alerted, in Ndola, a city in British-controlled Rhodesia.
In his diaries Hammarskjöld, another of the few genuine White Knights, had previously written prophetically…
“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. He who wills adventure will experience it – according to the measure of his courage. He who wills sacrifice will be sacrificed – according to the measure of his purity of heart.”
As Hammarskjold’s plane approached the airport and descended from 16,000 feet to 6,000 feet, it vanished…
It was found the next day, a burnt wreck about 10 miles away. All aboard save one were discovered dead. Harold Julien would pass away in 6 days’ time, but not before revealing that the plane was in flames before it crashed.
When the bodies were recovered from the wreckage, 6 of them were found to have bullets in them. The British-controlled Rhodesian authorities made the remarkable claim that the ammunition onboard had exploded in the heat and managed to penetrate the bodies, contrary to the statement made by the authority on ballistics, Major C. F. Westell:
“I can certainly describe as sheer nonsense the statement that cartridges of machine guns or pistols detonated in a fire can penetrate a human body.”
Hammarskjold’s briefcase, not found in the plane, was later to turn up in the hands of Baron Alport, the British High Commissioner to Rhodesia and UK Privy Councillor (Deep Politician). It was Alport, along with his colleague Roy Welensky, who had been covertly funnelling mercenaries from Rhodesia to Katanga.
All the passengers were severely burned save one, Dag Hammarskjold.
Mysteriously, there was a playing card, the ace of spades placed in his tie.
In folklore, the ace of spades is the death card.
The bullets in the bodies, the ace of spades, and the missing briefcase all suggest that the crash scene had been visited before the official first responders arrived.
However, the “ace in the hole” was the literal bullet hole in Hammarskjold’s forehead as testified by Major General Bjorn Egge, the head of the UN military information mission. This hole did not appear in the autopsy photos, but two forensic experts claimed that they had been retouched.
In poker, when a card is dealt face down and kept hidden it is called a “hole card”, the most propitious card being an ace. Was this the “ace in the hole” of the assassins or of the case against them?
Before the UN passengers met their end, there had been “underhand things going on” at the airport according to a Rhodesian air squadron leader. Baron Alport was situated below the control tower and 18 Rhodesian planes and 2 American planes were on the airfield with engines running. When the plane did not land, Alport sent the airport staff home and the search and rescue did not occur until the following morning.
Several witnesses later reported a second plane and a flash in the sky. These reports were omitted by the Rhodesian authorities but the UN also received such accounts of a second plane, above and behind a larger plane, presumably Hammarskjold’s.
The Rhodesian’s report concluded that the crash was down to pilot error, the UN did not blame the pilot, but remained undecided, whilst the Swedish government and others, held that the plane had been shot down or blown up. Indeed, Chief Engineer Bo Vivring of Transair had noted damage to the window frame of the cockpit and to the radar nosecone and concluded they were likely bullet holes.
Hammarskjöld himself had received various threats before the flight, and his head of UN forces, Conor Cruise O’Brien had even been subjected to several previous assassination attempts.
Hammarskjöld had switched planes just before the flight to Ndola with Lord Lansdowne of the British Foreign Office.
This implicates the British Deep State, who would have had access to such secure intelligence and may have even engineered the switch themselves.
O’Brien was adamant that Lansdowne had also chosen Ndola as the meeting site although the British government has always vigorously denied this. What else would you expect?
Further evidence would turn up in 1997 when the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered documents indicating a conspiracy named Operation Celeste, between the CIA, MI6 and the para-military force the South Africa Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR). The most damning of these outlined meetings between the CIA, SAIMR and the British MI6 and Special Operations Executive (SOE). Allen Dulles himself was quoted as agreeing that “Dag is becoming troublesome…and should be removed”, promised “full cooperation from his people” and insisted “I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice [Lumumba].”
This evidence was of course dismissed by the British government as Soviet disinformation and admittedly, it does seem rather too convenient for all this damning evidence to be compiled in one place like a movie script. However, it is important to remember that the CIA has already admitted its role in the murder of Patrice Lumumba. As we have seen, the American and British interests worked together to bring down Mossadegh in Iran.
Particularly curious though, is the reference to the SOE which was officially disbanded in 1946. This implies that the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, as its nickname suggests, had continued its existence unofficially.
It is to the origins of the SOE and its US counterpart that we will now turn in order to glean further insight into the modus operandi of the Deep State.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
The SOE, also nicknamed The Baker Street Irregulars, due to its London HQ on Baker street, was formed in 1940 under the Ministry of Economic Warfare for “espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and later, also in occupied Southeast Asia) against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements.”
UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill had ordered a secret army to “set Europe ablaze.”
Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare stressed “We have to organise movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, to the Chinese Guerrillas now operating against Japan, to the Spanish Irregulars who played a notable part in Wellington’s campaign or – one might as well admit it – to the organisations which the Nazis themselves have developed so remarkably in almost every country in the world. This ‘democratic international’ must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots”.
This required the installation of a secret resistance network … “What is needed is a new organisation to co-ordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, complete political reliability.”
Major General Sir Colin Gubbins was placed in command of SOE “The problem and the plan was to encourage and enable the peoples of the occupied countries to harass the German war effort at every possible point by sabotage, subversion, go-slow practices, coup de main raids etc. and at the same time to build up secret forces therein, organised, armed and trained to take their part only when the final assault began. In its simplest terms, this plan involved the ultimate delivery to occupied territory of large numbers of personnel and quantities of arms and explosives.“
In 1941 another infamous elite military organisation of the UK had its origin conducting raids behind enemy lines in the North African desert against Rommel’s supply planes and fuel dumps. The Special Air Service (SAS), founded by Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling, overlapped with the SOE in unconventional warfare operations behind enemy lines, working with resistance groups, gathering intelligence, carrying out hit-and-run attacks and sabotage. On several occasions the SAS actively collaborated with the SOE on missions. Both organizations contributed to the evolution of special operations doctrine during the war. The SAS became the model for modern special forces around the world.
The US had its own version of the SOE, formed in 1942, called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), led by William (Wild Bill) Donovan with Allen Dulles as head of Europe. The OSS, modelled on the SOE, would later evolve into the CIA, modelled on MI6. Donovan and Dulles were the founding fathers of the CIA, Dulles becoming the head.
These two deep state agencies were responsible for special operations including psychological warfare, assassinations, and paramilitary activities. They played crucial roles in supporting and coordinating with various partisan groups across occupied Europe during World War II. Their efforts involved supplying, training, and organizing these resistance movements to carry out acts of sabotage, gather intelligence, and disrupt enemy operations.
Many countries and regions across Europe and Asia had partisan movements that resisted Axis occupation and collaborated with the Allies. Partisan movements were particularly prevalent in countries under Nazi Germany’s control or under Axis influence.
These local resistance movements were of a genuine grassroots nature and sprung up notably in Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, Poland, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. They were diverse and composed of varying ideological and ethnic groups united in their opposition to the occupying forces.
A significant portion, especially in countries under Nazi occupation, had strong left-wing or communist influences, such groups being already well-established with a history of resistance to authoritarian regimes. They already had networks, members, and organizational structures in place, making it easier for them to mobilize resistance during the war.
However, there were also other groups, including nationalist, liberal, and conservative factions opposed to the occupying forces. Some were even affiliated with fascist, or far-right ideologies opposed to foreign occupation. The Venn diagram of everyone except oppressors, converges on freedom.
The collaboration between the SOE, OSS, and the partisan groups was a vital component of the Allied effort in Europe. By supporting and empowering the resistance movements, the Allies were able to weaken Axis control, divert enemy resources, and contribute significantly to the liberation of occupied territories.
After the war had been won and the dissolution of the SOE in 1946, key members either moved into financial services in the City of London or were absorbed into MI6. However, the networks of resistance remained essentially in place. Individuals who had served as partisans during the war or had experience in resistance activities were recruited. The CIA, MI6, ex-members of the SOE, and the SAS under a new name – Special Operation (SO), continued to train and equip these secret armies. Arms caches were hidden and escape routes prepared. These clandestine “Stay behind networks”, were ostensibly put in place to remain behind in the event of a Red Army invasion to disrupt Soviet control through intelligence gathering, guerrilla warfare and sabotage.
Special Forces “Advisors” from Britain and the US – the Grey Knights of SO, trained and ran these undercover organizations in secret training establishments throughout Europe to the extent that the US and UK Deep States knew more about each secret army than its respective government.
The networks would span across all NATO member countries. In addition to the first unit to be unmasked – the infamous Italian Gladio, the others were…
“…code-named SDRA8, in Denmark Absalon, in Germany TD BDJ, in Greece LOK, in Luxemburg Stay-Behind, in the Netherlands I&O, in Norway ROC, in Portugal Aginter Press, in Spain Red Quantum, in Switzerland P26, in Turkey Özel Harp Dairesi, In Sweden AGAG (Aktions Gruppen Arla Gryning), in France ‘Plan Bleu’, and in Austria OWSGV; however, the code name of the stay-behind unit in Finland remains unknown.”
Now, the astute reader will have wondered how these networks were supposed to oppose Soviet occupation if they were significantly composed of strongly left-leaning and communist groups.
The answer is they weren’t.
Those elements were not recruited back into the Stay Behinds. Instead, recruitment was concentrated on those other groups, the nationalist, liberal, and conservative factions. These had opposed Nazi occupation and control but would also be opposed to Communist occupation and control. Particular emphasis was placed on those with fascist, or far-right ideologies. Most insidiously of all, they recruited actual Nazis…
Werwolves
The Axis powers had had their own units operating in a similar fashion to the partisan and stay-behind networks. The Nazis named their secret guerrilla organization Werwolf. Recruited from the SS and the Hitler Youth, their role had been to carry out clandestine guerrilla attacks as the Wehrmacht were losing the battle at the front. Nazi SS officers Hans-Adolf Prützmann and Otto Skorzeny were leaders of this paramilitary group. Prützmann had studied the guerrilla tactics used by Soviet partisans while he was stationed in the Nazi occupied territories of Ukraine, and he taught these tactics to the members of Operation Werwolf. Hitler, who used “Wolf” as a pseudonym for himself, named his eastern front headquarters at Vinnytsia in Ukraine, “Werwolf“. There was also a second group of ad hoc partisan fighters – civilians that Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had urged to join the movement to harass Allied forces after the defeat of Germany and carry out reprisals on German collaborators.
Just as those half-feral denizens of the wild woods, the Black Knights, lurked on the edge of society, masking their identity and that of their liege lords, so it was with Werwolf operatives. Goebbel’s propaganda ensured that this terror was amplified in the haunted imaginations of the occupying soldiers.
Allied propaganda via Armed Forces Radio also stoked the mutually antipathetic enemy images.
“Every friendly German civilian is a disguised soldier of hate. Armed with the inner conviction that the Germans are still superior … [they believe] that one day it will be their destiny to destroy you. Their hatred and their anger … are deeply buried in their blood. A smile is their weapon by which to disarm you … In heart, body and spirit every German is Hitler.”
Local acts of terror continued through 1947 but trailed off afterwards as the units were tracked down and defeated leaving no more than a fearful memory. In US culture the image of werewolves and Nazis merged, later to be also applied to Iraqi insurgents and ISIS fighters.
Historian Christina von Hodenberg had this to say about Operation Werwolf:
“It stoked fears, lied about the situation and lured many to fight for a lost cause,”
These words will no doubt resonate with the perceptive reader when regarding the current conflict in the Ukraine…
After these surviving secret Axis units had been tracked down and defeated, some of them were recruited into the new anti-Soviet stay-behind networks. The distorted logic being that much of the original covert infrastructure was already in place.
Grey Bishop Allen Dulles had made a deal with the aptly named SS General Karl Wolff who commanded the SS and Gestapo contingents in Italy. Amnesty was to be afforded to a select group of SS-Gestapo forces in exchange for allegiance to the West in the projected covert conflict against the Soviet communists – the Cold War.
Amidst the enemy image propaganda of the Nazi Werwolves, the OSS proceeded to covertly relocate Nazi intelligence operatives, engineers, military strategists, scientists and doctors. The scientists responsible for murder, torture, and human experimentation were to work on the US space program, weaponry, chemical/bio warfare agents, eugenics, and mind control programs.
Otto Skorzeny, who had also been training prospective Werwolves, discovered early on that the number of cells had been greatly exaggerated and like many other Nazi leaders, knew the war was lost. He decided to shift the Werwolves’ focus towards the Nazi “underground railroad” – the infamous ratlines enabling thousands of Nazis to escape. These deep state milieux were unofficial, criminal enterprises run in a decentralised fashion with no one in charge. They were part of the Dulles-Wolff arrangements. Figures in charge of death camps were enabled to escape. Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust himself, eluded capture in this manner, although he was to be later apprehended by Israeli operatives. Dr Joseph Mengele escaped to Argentina and died an old man.
Skorzeny himself was initially unsuccessful in this endeavour, being captured and tried as a war criminal at Dachau in 1947. He had been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross by Hitler for his numerous operations carried out commanding the Special Forces unit of the Waffen-SS including the rescue of Benito Mussolini and the kidnapping of Miklós Horthy, Jr., the son of Hungary’s Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, to force his resignation.
However, in Dachau he was charged with breaching the 1907 Hague Convention. This was for leading Operation Greif (Griffin) in which he and his soldiers infiltrated Allied lines by using their opponents’ uniforms, equipment, language, and customs. Black Knights disguised as White Knights. They sowed discord by issuing false orders, upsetting communications, destroying field telephone wires and radio stations, and misdirecting troops. They reversed road signs, removed minefield warnings, and set up false cordons with warnings of non-existent mines. The US army saw spies and saboteurs everywhere.
Skorzeny, labelled “the most dangerous man in Europe”, was only acquitted when a former British SOE agent F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas testified that he and his operatives had also deployed the same strategy, wearing German uniforms behind enemy lines. White Knights disguised as Black Knights.
1947, the year that Skorzeny was under trial, was also the year that the OSS morphed into the CIA and set about initiating paramilitary operations throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle-East, and Asia, ostensibly to quell the rise of the red menace.
During World War II, the OSS, like SOE, had been operating behind German lines carrying out unorthodox warfare. In Italy they cooperated with the Italian communist resistance networks in order to defeat Mussolini. After his death, they ceased this cooperation. The European communist parties had been growing in popularity and the concern was that the moderate government in Italy would suffer considerable losses to the communists in the 1948 election. One of the first actions of the CIA, was to rig those elections.
It should be no surprise then that same year, Skorzeny escaped from an internment camp at Darmstadt with the help of three former SS officers dressed, with supreme irony, in US Military Police uniforms. He was later to claim that this escape had been facilitated by US authorities. It seems that the CIA had further use for him and his Nazi comrades.
He hid at a farm in Bavaria rented by Countess Ilse Lüthje, niece of Nazi banker Hjalmar Schacht. During this period, he made contact with Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s spymaster, and head of the Gehlen Organisation – the intelligence agency co-opted by US occupation authorities in 1946 under the Dulles-Wolff pact. It was an anti-communist espionage network operated by Nazis, and it closely cooperated with the CIA. Skorzeny, together with the former deputy head of the Hitler Youth – Hartmann Lauterbacher, recruited for the Gehlen Organization.
Once again, the Werwolf was at the door. Its formations, initially recruited from the SS and Hitler Youth, were incorporated into these intelligence structures, the West German Gladio counterpart – Bund Deutscher Jugend (BDJ) being a central focus of the Gehlen Organization.
Dope Inc
Also in 1948, the US saw a sudden upsurge in heroin smuggled onto the streets via Havana. The smuggling networks were already in place and run by the National Syndicate headed by Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Were did the increased heroin supply come from? The answer was the CIA. We have seen that the Mob was in actuality a lower echelon of the Deep State and the CIA a higher echelon. The CIA had already recruited Luciano to use the Mob to monitor the US waterfronts and dockyards that it had control of against the threat of German submarines. Luciano was in prison at the time, but in exchange for his help, he received a reduced sentence and other perks.
Since the allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, crime had soared, inmates escaped from prison, bandits roamed free and the black market thrived. OSS officer Joseph Russo, whose father was born in Corleone, freed all the Mafioso that Mussolini had jailed during his purge and placed them in key positions of power within the local government set up by the allied military. These bosses reformed their clans and absorbed some of the marauding bandits into their organisation. Power was shifted from the countryside into urban regions. Here many land-owners employed them to harass and murder socialist reformers. All this ensured a close relationship between the CIA and the Mafia in Sicily and Italy and the Mob back in America.
Now, in order to fund the secret armies under their control, the CIA preferred the “dark” money proceeding from the sales of drugs. They supplied heroin, courtesy of Chiang Kai Shek, the Green Gang Syndicate and Air America, to the Mob which, in turn, smuggled and supplied it to the unfortunate populace of the US with the help of mob associates in the Teamsters, run by Jimmy Hoffa. All this money had to be laundered and the bank of choice to carry out this task on such a scale, free from scrutiny, was the Vatican Bank.
We noted earlier that the other dominant faction of the National Syndicate, the Jewish Mob, had established relations with the Green Gang in the 1920’s. Their smuggling channel for opium ran from Shanghai, Macao and Hong Kong in the Far East to the East Coast of the US. In 1931 they were producing seven-eighths of the world’s opium. The money was laundered by the bank that was created as the kingpin of the global drug trade in the 19th century by elements of the UK Deep State – the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC). Both the Jewish mob and the Green Gang, like the Italian mob and the CIA, had support and sponsorship from higher echelons. These higher echelons of the Deep State will be the subject of later articles.
With a Sword…
In 1949 the CIA inserted Italy, which had become an ideological battleground between left and right, into NATO. The CIA sided with a coalition of the Italian military secret service, neo-fascist organisationsand theMafia. Figures such as the “Black Prince” Valerio Borghese and Licio Gelli (both responsible for hundreds of communist deaths during the war),were saved from execution by the CIA. President Truman even signed a top-secret order in 1950 that included the invasion of Italy as option should the country turn red.
It was the anti-communist impetus from the late forties that morphed the stay-behind networks into their sinister right-wing terrorist configuration, as Operation Gladio would reveal. Paralleling events in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Indonesia throughout the period of the Cold War, secret armies, engineered into existence by the Anglo–American Deep State, would unleash a reign of orchestrated terror throughout Europe…