Reply #75: To get a sense of what Safari Club was

[DrDebug]

The Safari Club actually existed as an extraordinary and very exclusive Afro-French club in Paris. It had a ground floor restaurant and bar, but there was a proper club underneath which was very exclusive. By chance in London I met a man who, when he was a student, had worked there as a bus boy. The club itself no longer exists, but then it was decked out exotically with such things as elephant feet as stools. The whole place resembled a safari tent and people met by the flickering light of kerosene lamps.

My friend worked mainly in the restaurant above, but also sometimes acted as a relief in the club itself. He said: "It was entirely eccentric in a sinister sort of way. I knew for sure that it was ultra-right wing, and it was always heavily conspiratorial. I was told never to recognise any of the patrons and they would literally huddle and talk in whispers. They always stopped talking if I was in earshot. It was an eerie place but at the time I needed the money. I didn’t really know the significance of it all until much later when I read that Chirac had had it closed down. I didn’t really actually recognise anyone, but some of them looked familiar and they were multi-national".

(...)

In the seventies, when all this was being formulated under the auspices of the Safari Club, Marwan and co. were most active. The club had originated as a consortium formed between the secret police forces of the Shah of Iran (SAVAK), Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Anwar Sadat of Egypt (The Marwan connection), and the Saudi Intelligence Service headed by Kamal Adham (later of BCCI fame). It was expressly formed to support regimes that were actively anti-Communist and to try and put down regimes that were not. In this second category it arranged coup d’etats in Central Africa, Congo, Nigeria and Mali. Because of its nature, the group was heavily into the supply of arms. When billion dollar contracts for arms are floating about, the Establishment is amazingly tolerant and it was during this time that Marwan became a very rich young man.

"Le Cercle" eventually spread its tentacles throughout the Western World, but it started in France, as a cogent force, during the Premiership of Antoine Pinay in 1951. Pinay attended the notorious Bilderberg meeting in Oosterbeek, Holland in May 1954. Here he identified others of his extreme political ilk and with the active co-operation of Jean Violet of the then SDECE and Otto von Hapsburg, heir to the Austrian throne, he formed the club. By the sixties their covert membership was truly astonishing. The "inner circle" included, among many others, Nicholas Elliot, a department head at MI6; William Colby, former controversial director of the CIA; Colonel Botta, of Swiss Military Intelligence; Stefano Della Chiaie, a leading member of the Italian Secret Service; Giullo Andreotti, former Italian Prime Minister and member of P2, who, it was later proved, gave the Italian Mafia presidential protection; General Antonio de Spinola, leader of the Portuguese Putschists; Silva Munoz, former Franco minister and a senior member of Opus Dei; Franz Josef Strauss, the German Defence Minister, and Monsignor Brunello, BNG agent in the Vatican.

While the Circle itself was clandestine, they soon formed open and genuine fronts. In America it was the Washington-based, CIA-backed, Heritage Foundation ** which was to eventually donate some £5 million to the Conservative Party coffers in support of the Thatcher government, on condition that they put some of their own people into the CCO HQ. This included Dr. Julian Lewis, an arch enemy of Scallywag’s for some years now. In turn, these people were sponsored by the British Freedom Association, run by Norris McWhirter, scourge of the CND, who is also founding editor of the Guinness Book of Records. Fringe members were The World anti-Communist League; Western Goals, the Bilderbergers, the Opus Dei; Propaganda Duo (P2) and the Jonathan Institute. Attaching themselves somewhere along the line was also the Moonies.

http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/organisations/Cercle/Si...

** See Paul Bremer

Who says they closed it down? Maybe it changed names and locations and reopened again...