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CESNUR at the scene of the crime
In October 1994, 48 followers of the Order of the Solar Temple were found dead in the villages of Cheiry and Salvan in Switzerland. When the bodies were discovered, a self-appointed ‘religious affairs adviser from the Central Defence Office’ appeared at the scene of the crime and collaborated with the investigators by questioning the witnesses alone, ignoring all procedural rules.
He was Jean-François Mayer, a former far-right activist in Lyon. Mayer was responsible for the distribution of the Holocaust denial newspaper Défense de l'Occident, a member of the Nouvel Ordre Social (a national-revolutionary movement based in Geneva), a contributor to the magazine Panorama des idees actuelles, a publication of the GRECE, the Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne, a right-wing, neo-pagan think tank. By 1976, however, he had converted to orthodox Christianity. The most interesting thing, however, is that this person was a leading member of CESNUR, the Centre for the Study of ‘New Religious Movements', which grew out of an Alleanza Cattolica offshoot. In a BBC documentary on the Solar Temple suicides case, Mayer is portrayed as a representative of Swiss military intelligence.
After the discovery of the bodies of 16 other followers of the Solar Temple in December 1995 in Vercors, France, Jean-François Mayer was one of the 300 privileged people who received a cult file containing the posthumous writings of the sacrificed.
In her book ‘Ordre du Temple Solaire, en quête de vérité’, Rosemarie Jaton reports on the content of an interview with J.F. Mayer, in which he admits to having been in contact with Luc Jouret, one of the two leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple. Luc Jouret was a former Belgian far-right military officer who was associated with Gladio, a branch of the secret anti-communist NATO organisation known as Stay Behind.
The supposed ‘mass suicides’ of the Solar Temple still remain shrouded in mystery. Certainly, the facts recounted suggest a connection between intelligence, the far right and cults.
Spirituality and covert operations
Neither the connection between Western intelligence and the far right nor that between secret services and minority spiritual cults is strange. The alliance between Western security services and neo-fascism was the subject of the a previous chapter of this report (Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network). The matter of the Order of the Solar Temple now gives us the opportunity to assess the influence of the secret services on spiritual and esoteric groups.
It should be said at the outset that the preference for "cults" in no way excludes mainstream religions. In fact, Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA in its early years, had already used the Catholic Church as a cover for intelligence operations when he was in charge of the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner organisation of the CIA. In his book ‘Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors’, Michael Graziano writes about the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War: ‘American analysts often assumed that Catholic interests - and those of the Vatican more specifically- were perfectly aligned with US objectives’. The agency also worked with the Catholic international press through the Belgian priest Felix Morlion in what it called ‘Operation Pilgrim's Progress’.
When the agency encountered other world religions during the Cold War - Shintoism in Japan, Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and especially Islam in Iran - it took it for granted that "the United States and world religions [were] natural allies" in the fight against atheistic communism. After the end of the war, former OSS agents joined the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), bringing with them the experience and networks needed to use religion as a tool for clandestine activities.
In the early years of the Cold War, James Angleton organised an elaborate spy network that enabled the CIA to receive intelligence reports sent to the Vatican from papal nuncios stationed behind the Iron Curtain and other "closed" areas. At the time, this was one of the few means available to the CIA to penetrate the Eastern Bloc.
CIA officials such as Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, Miles Copeland, William Eddy and James Jesus Angleton did not hesitate to use religion as a transactional tool. American clergymen, missionaries and the evangelical Billy Graham worked secretly with the CIA. In 1975, a US Senate report revealed the use of various American priests and missionaries for counterintelligence in various countries.
a) mobilize blocs of voters and influence public influence
The Moral Majority was an American political organisation and conservative evangelical lobby founded by Jerry L. Falwell in 1979. The movement sought to enshrine what it believed to be the fundamentals of Christianity in the nation's politics and campaigned against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and the easing of relations with the USSR. It found its advocate in Ronald Reagan. So, it played a key role in mobilising conservative Christians as a political force and, in particular, in the Republican victories in the presidential elections of the 1980s.
If well organized, churches can become decisive voting blocs during the usually light turnout of primary elections in the USA. We already saw this in the 80s, when many fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches were organized as blocs. Falwell's Moral Majority helped organize the fundamentalists, while other groups, like Christian Voice, helped organize the Pentecostals and charismatics. In 1984 Christian Voice, a political action group made up largely of Pentecostal Christians, trained local ministers in registering, educating their flocks about the "right" political choices, and getting their congregations out to the polls on election day. Many churches voted in blocs for candidates identified by Christian Voice as "moral." Christian Voice supplied churches with congressional "Report Cards" and a "Presidential Biblical Scoreboard" that rated the candidates. Their rating system was heavily slanted in favor of the "pro-family" Republicans who favored increased defense spending and an aggressive anti-communist foreign policy. The Democratic candidates in 1984 were portrayed in the "Presidential Biblical Scoreboard" as pro-abortion ''baby-killers" who favored "kiddie-porn," and were mired in the moral relativism of "New Age Globalism." A headline in the Christian Voice "Presidential Scoreboard" stated that "Mans "serial killers are homosexuals." The "Scoreboard" blasted the Democrats for favoring bills to protect gays' civil rights.
Shortly after Ronald Reagan became President of the United States, the nation’s capital got a second morning newspaper. Eventually, Dr Ronald Goodwin, the Rev Jerry Falwell’s former lieutenant in the Moral Majority, became its editor. The strange thing is that the owner was the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ, the true Messiah who would unite Eastern and Western civilisation under his South Korea-based Unification Church. Fundamentalist Christians who associate themselves with a church that claims that the only family is the community of Moonies and that its leader is the new Messiah. Although it seems anomalous, when the ends converge, religious fanatics prove to be very unfussy. Moon was keen to found a conservative newspaper to promote his cause and raise his profile. The American neoconservatives needed a medium to promote their rigid ideological orthodoxy. The neocons already controlled several magazines and right-leaning foundations, but they needed a daily newspaper that would help them set the agenda on Capitol Hill.
The newspaper was called the Washington Times and was primarily a platform for a movement that included the Christian right, conservative Jews and the radical right wing of the Republican Party. The paper was staffed by ambitious and talented young writers, many of whom knowingly ignored the basic conventions of American journalism and instead followed the party line established at Wednesday night meetings of neocons under 30 at the Heritage Foundation. So we have an odd aggregate: Christian right, conservative Jews, Moonies, right-wing Republicans and US pro-free market foundations.
b) New religious movements and minority religions
If majority churches are in some cases useful for espionage purposes and clandestine operations, minority cults - especially if they have their own intelligence structures, such as Scientology - are even more useful, especially in countries where majority religions are difficult to infiltrate or are closely linked to governments. This is the case in Russia or China.
For example, when in 1985 the Reagan administration's Congress cancelled funding for support of the Nicaraguan ‘Contras' terrorists against the Sandinista regime, effectively funding for an anti-communist proxy war in Latin America, the Reverend Moon's Unification Church participated in providing food and money for the guerrillas. The facts are well presented by John Gorenfeld in his book ‘Bad Moon Rising’. "In the Central American hinterlands, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the CIA’s operatives from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s disciples. They appear to be working in harness against the communist-tainted Sandinista regime in Nicaragua" - wrote Jack Anderson on the Indiana Gazette of August, 16 1984.
CAUSA is the most important political arm of the Unification Church. It was founded in 1980 following an exploratory tour of Latin American countries, during which Bo Hi Pak met with important right-wing and military leaders. CAUSA's main activities in 1980-1982 consisted of organising ideological indoctrination seminars for political, military and other leadership groups throughout the continent. In 1983, CAUSA North America was founded and began organising similar seminars in the USA. Originally known as the Confederation of the Associations for the Unification of the Societies of the Americas, at this point the "Unification" was renamed "Unity," apparently in an effort to distance CAUSA from the church. Whatever the name, the Unification Church has controlled the organisation throughout. The directors of CAUSA International are all serious members of the church.
Once limited to the western hemisphere, CAUSA has developed into a global project with significant activities on all continents since 1983. The general orientation of CAUSA is anti-communist education from a historical perspective. CAUSA's antidote to communism is the " Godism", i.e. the philosophy of the Unification Church without Moonist mythology.
In 1978, the Fraser Commission, a subcommittee of the US Congress, investigated the political influence of the South Korean government on US policy, the so-called Koreagate. The commission published a report that also listed Moon's involvement in these activities. This 80-page report covered the efforts of Moon's movement to influence US institutions and US foreign policy, partly in its own interests, partly in the service of the South Korean government and partly, of course, on its direct orders. Lobbying activities to obtain the renewal of an arms production licence for one of Moon's companies and many other things were also investigated."Koreagate" was an American political scandal in 1976 involving South Korean politicians who wanted to be influenced by 10 Democratic members of Congress. The scandal involved the uncovering of evidence that the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) was allegedly distributing bribes and favours through South Korean businessman Tongsun Park in order to secure favour and influence in American politics. The Unification church was involved. In the period immediately after his coup, the Korean president Kim Jong Pil founded the KCIA, the Korean Intelligence Agency, and oversaw the establishment of a political base for the new regime. An unanalysed CIA report from February 1963 stated that Kim Jong Pil "organised" the Unification Church while he was director of the KCIA and used the Unification Church "as a political tool" Although the report stated that "organized" is not to be confused with "founded"," as the Unification Church was founded in 1954, ".. there was ample evidence in this and later intelligence reports to suggest that Kim Jong Pil and the Moon organization had a mutually supportive relationship and to suggest that Kim was using the Unification Church for political purposes".
The Fraser Report revealed that the KCIA was using the UC as a front for its clandestine operations in the US (Fraser Report 1978, 311–39; Bale 2017, 66). The KCIA was eager to cultivate Nixon by proxy because they wanted him to overturn a troop drawdown in Vietnam he had announced as a goodwill gesture towards China at a time when the White House was eager to promote normalization of ties with Beijing (Fraser Report 1978). The KCIA shared the anticommunist ideology of the UC and developed strong personal connections during the Park Chung Hee era (1961–79).
CAUSA financed Le Pen's ‘National Front’ in France, whose member of the European parliament Pierre Ceyrac was also head of the French section of CAUSA. In Germany, CAUSA board member Ursula Saniewski was personal assistant to Franz Schönhuber of the far-right ‘Republicans’.
The relationship between the Church of Moon and the family of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was killed in July 2022, is of particular importance. The relationship goes back to Shinzo's grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi.
Nobusuke Kishi's post-war political agenda led him to work closely with Ryoichi Sasakawa, a businessman and nationalist politician who was suspected of war crimes during the Second World War. Sasakawa helped found the UC in Japan in 1963 and took on the role of both patron and president of the church's political wing, the International Federation for Victory Over Communism (IFVOC, 国際勝共連合), which forged close ties with Japan's conservative politicians (Andrew Marshall and Michiko Toyama, In The Name of The Godfather, Tokyo Journal, October, 1994, pages 29-35). Moon's organisations, including the Unification Church and the overtly political IFVOC, were financially supported by Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, an ultranationalist and exponent of organised crime.
In the early 1970s, members of the Unification Church were used by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as campaign workers without compensation. LDP politicians were also required to visit the Unification Church headquarters in South Korea and attend Moon's theological lectures, regardless of their religious views or membership. In return, the Japanese authorities protected the Unification Church from legal sanctions for its often deceptive and aggressive practises. As a result, the Unification Church gained strong influence in Japan.
Such a relationship was passed on to Kishi's son-in-law, former Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, Shinzo Abe's father. The latter continued this relationship. On 8 July 2022, Shinzo Abe was shot down by Tetsuya Yamagami, a 41-year-old who was immediately arrested. Yamagami stated that he killed Abe because this latter was connected with the Unification Church. Yamagami said he resented the fact that his mother was brain-washed by the religious group, and had gone bankrupt as a result. The killer believed the former prime minister had spread the religion to Japan.
Massimo Introvigne wrote in an article in the 'Journal of CESNUR' that the real victim was the Unification Church, while the real killer would be the anti-cult movement that excited the weak mind of the assassin with their anti-Unification Church campaigns (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. Attack on secularism).
It has been revealed that Donald Trump received around $2.5 million from the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), the new denomination of the Unification Church, to make video appearances on three occasions between 2021 and 2022, while former Vice President Mike Pence received $550,000 to speak at a UPF event. This was confirmed by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper by obtaining official US documents and comparing them with court documents in Japan. The event took place in 2022, and the director of CESNUR Massimo Introvigne, who gave a talk at the meeting, was also funded by the UPF (figure 50 bis).
The relationship between Moon's church and the LDP requires a look at another spiritual phenomenon that is also linked to Japanese politics, has even founded a party and is just as powerful internationally , but enjoys a much better public image. It is the Soka Gakkai. It is a Japanese Buddhist religious movement based on the teachings of the 13th century Japanese priest Nichiren, whose third chairman Daisaku Ikeda is the subject of a veritable personality cult. The organisation bases its teachings on an interpretation of Nichiren's Lotus Sutra that is not shared by other Buddhist movements and places the mantra of Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō at the centre of devotional practise. The beliefs of Soka Gakkai are based on the realisation that all life has a dignity with an infinite inherent potential. This immanent Buddhahood exists in every human being and can be awakened through Buddhist practise. According to other Buddhist schools, the Soka Gakkai is not really a form of Buddhism, because instead of aiming to eliminate desires, which according to the Buddha are the cause of attachment and suffering, they are actually encouraged, with the promise that reciting a certain mantra will realise one's goals in every area, including financial, professional and sexual.
As the Soka Gakkai was able to send 76 representatives to the local administrations in the 1959 elections in Japan, the CIA conducted a study on the movement and its political views in 1963. They wrote "The amorphous character of the Gakkai's political stand, suggests that it could go either to right or left". It is a good description of populism. In fact, just one year after the CIA report, Ikeda founded a party that was also populist in name: Komeito (Clean Government Party). Soka Gakkai is not the only religious organization that has built close relationships with political parties and lawmakers. However, there is no religious group comparable to Soka Gakkai in terms of influence and vote-gathering power. The group says they have a following of 8.27 million households in Japan. Komeito and Soka Gakkai came under concerted attack in the Diet, accused of violating the separation of religion and the state required by article 20 of the Constitution.
In 1970, there was a controversy over freedom of expression because the publication of Hirotatsu Fujiwara's polemical book 'I Denounce Soka Gakkai', which severely criticised Ikeda, Soka Gakkai and the Komeito, was to be prevented. In his speech of 3 May 1970, in which he addressed Soka Gakkai members, guests and the media, among others, Ikeda responded to the controversy by apologising to the nation "for the inconvenience caused by the incident"," reaffirming the Soka Gakkai's commitment to freedom of speech and religion, and announcing a new policy of formal separation between the Soka Gakkai religious movement and the Komeito. The Komeito severed its organizational ties to Soka Gakkai, but has nonetheless remained the political arm of Sokka Gakkai in Japan.
The Komeito was then re-established in 1998 as the New Komeito (NKM) and has been allied with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the party close to the Unification Church, since 1999.
So, the LDP is linked to both Soka Gakkai and Unification Church.
2.6 terabytes of data, 210,000 offshore companies, 11.5 million documents. These are the figures from the "Panama Papers", data stolen by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca from an anonymous source, who passed them on to the editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In view of the huge amount of data, the German newspaper was forced to ask the ICIJ (The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists), an international network of journalists from all over the world, for help. The Panama Papers are confidential documents that show how the firm Mossack Fonseca set up offshore companies in tax havens for people of all stripes, from politicians to common criminals, as well as international branches of credit institutions.
Panama's history as a tax haven began in 1919 when it started registering foreign ships to help the American oil giant Standard Oil evade US taxes and regulations. Standard Oil led the way, and other US ship owners followed suit because they wanted to avoid higher wages and better working conditions imposed by US law. Within a few years, Panama recognised the opportunity to extend the principles it had applied to shipping, namely minimal taxes, regulations and disclosure requirements, to offshore finance. These laws attracted a long line of 'scumbags" and dictators who used Panama to hide their stolen loot, including Ferdinand Marcos, 'Baby Doc' Duvalier and Augusto Pinochet.
When Manuel Noriega, the commander of the Panamanian armed forces, took power in 1983, he essentially nationalised the money laundering business by entering into a partnership with the Medellin drug cartel and giving it a free hand to operate in the country.
The book edited by Trine Brox and Elisabeth Williams-Oerberg Buddhism and Business reports on page 87 that Soka Gakkai was on Panama Papers list (see the figure above).
If the relationship between the Soka and Panama had stopped at this, it would only have been gross dishonesty. This is not the case.
In 1994, the well-known economist Yoshi Tsurumi wrote a book, never translated from Japanese, entitled Americagoroshi no chohasso. On pages 206 one can read:
When President George Bush Sr. was director of the CIA, Noriega supported him as his agent and was involved in an operation to overthrow Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro; he was also supposed to corner anti-government groups in Central America, e.g. in Nicaragua. In return, Noriega was allowed to import cocaine from Colombia to the USA, even using CIA aeroplanes (...) However, Bush senior was so astute that in 1989, as soon as he became President of the United States of America, he launched a surprise attack on Noriega. Noriega was captured and taken as a prisoner to Florida, where he was tried in secret, convicted and imprisoned in a special prison.
In Noriega's confession, there was a story about Japan. It was the story that Daisaku Ikeda invested the money donated to him by his supporters in the cocaine trade in collaboration with Noriega. Ikeda continuously donated large sums of the profits to Ozawa of the Japanese LDP.
(bold mine)
In July 2018, Toni Occhiello, a former adherent of the Soka Gakkai, reached Prof. Yoshi Tsurumi by phone to have confirm what was in the text and received the reply that Tsurumi ‘stood by his statements’. A month later, Occhiello also reached the then US ambassador to Tokyo, Michael H. Armacost, a former CIA official. Asked about the circumstances reported Tsurumi in his book, the former ambassador replied: "Yes, I remember hearing about this matter at the time; and that I certainly, in my position, dealt with it".
It would therefore seem to be an established story. Bush senior then silenced Noriega and was able to use this as a stick to control Ozawa and other LDP politicians.
This does not appear to be the only smuggling the Soka Gakkai is involved in. Former Soka Gakkai High Leader Steve Gore told how he left the organisation after stumbling through an airport checkpoint with a suitcase full of gems, which his bosses had told him they were uncut gems. Gore was arrested for smuggling, while the high-ranking Sokians calmly walked through airport security with ‘clean’ suitcases. However, the trafficking with Noriega is particularly relevant because it is set in the context of geopolitical tactics.
Of particular interest, therefore, is the fact that one of the highest international officials of the Soka Gakkai is Nydia Bertran, wife of Roger Stone, a Republican political consultant. Basically the man who politically invented Donald Trump.
As mentioned in a previous chapter (Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists) , in 1989 the memoirs of Miles Copeland, a former CIA officer were published. In his book 'The Game Player', Copeland revealed that the Agency used many religious groups as means of influence and espionage. Among the was Scientology. Unsurprisingly, the church founded by Ron L. Hubbard was seen as an excellent means of influencing people who were themselves influential. Copeland claims that a pact was also made between the CIA and Scientology, but without providing evidence or revealing the content.
The use of the Mormons also seems to have been remarkable, as Alain Gillette points out in his book ‘Les mormons. De la théocratie a Internet’. In the early 1980s, the Nicaraguan government accused the Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses of being involved in a CIA plot to overthrow the Sandinista government.
It has been proven that many Mormons in Finland have been connected to the CIA since the 1950s. In 1978, two journalists, Jorraa Lindfors and Jukka Rislakki, wrote in a book about the CIA's alleged links to the Mormon Church. According to the authors, "many of the young missionaries in Finland had been trained as military officers and the head of the Mormons’ international missionary work, Apostle Neal A. Maxwell, was a former CIA agent'.
c) cults as external contractors
Jeffrey M. Bale, renowned scholar on violent political and religious extremists and covert political operations at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, in the May 1991 issue of "Lobster", clearly outlined the problem that when it comes to ‘sects’, the public's attention is focused on their power of manipulation and the abuses committed on their followers. Even when it comes to their political activities, such as support for certain parties or attempts to infiltrate administrations, the public views this with the perplexity owed to fanatical madmen and fails to realise that cults often have a genuine political agenda. This, says Baele, is exactly the case with the Unification Church. Bale then produced a dense analysis of the moonies phenomenon, concluding that
In the wake of Contragate, a theme which has been constantly reiterated in the press is that of the so-called ‘privatisation’ of U.S. foreign policy. (...) At the very least, the process is better described as the ‘contracting out’ of specific tasks by government agencies to sympathetic non-governmental organizations, which should therefore be viewed as subcontractors rather than independents. Nor should one overlook the possibility that certain ostensibly private organizations are nothing more than front groups for intelligence agencies.
This leads us to reflections on the role of cult apologists on the same chessboard. The same author suggested elsewhere that CESNUR pursued a sub rosa agenda disguised as a defence of civil rights, but instead aimed to push them back in line with their own political and religious views (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network)
d) Intermezzo: a few words about Freemasonry and Gnosticism
For a long time, people have sought elevation or enlightenment through knowledge. Access is gradual, from an outer to an inner circle, through a series of ritual initiations. This approach, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is characterised by esotericism. It refers to a series of spiritual teachings of a secret nature whose occult meanings are only accessible to followers who proceed according to different degrees of initiation.
The best known and most influential esoteric society is Freemasonry. Modern Freemasonry, also known as speculative Freemasonry, originated in Great Britain in the 17th century and in France and other European countries in the 18th century. It sees itself as the heir to the ‘operative’ Freemasonry of the Middle Ages, i.e. the guilds of journeymen that built cathedrals. Its aim is to build the ‘Temple of humanity’. This perfection of humanity goes beyond individual perfection (in Masonic symbolism, this process is compared to the smoothing of the ‘rough stone’ until the ‘cubic stone’ useful for the construction of the temple is achieved). This process involves an initiation and a journey in stages that follow precise rites. The first three degrees (blue Freemasonry) are those of ‘Entered Apprentice', ‘Journeyman' and ‘Master Mason' and are under the control of various ‘grand lodges'. In Italy, for example, these are the ‘Grand Orient of Italy (GOI)’ or the ‘Grand Lodge of Italy of the ALAMs’. Then there are the ‘perfection rites’, which are not regulated by the various obediences, but by special international organisations. The Scottish Rite, for example, provides for 33 degrees.
Soon many grand lodges in the Latin countries diverged from the main British organisation, mainly because of the obligatory Christian reference (which was rejected by the more secular, if not anti-clerical, Latin obediences). But this so-called liberal Latin Freemasonry carries far less weight than Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry. The Anglo-Saxon denominations are dominant. Of the approximately seven million Freemasons in the world, four are American.
Gnosticism is the main variant of this search for enlightenment and meaning and was carried on by Christian movements in the first three centuries, which were branded as heresies. It was a very sophisticated and complex system of thought that has often been simplified and vulgarised in recent times. One of the central themes of this modern Gnosticism is that salvation is achieved through a higher form of knowledge (Gnosis) and that the material world is not the work of God, but of a demiurge, a sub-god. Man could escape the imperfection of the material world by rediscovering the divine spark within himself through the enlightenment of esoteric knowledge.
These scattered movements gave rise to a very complex family tree, including the Knights Templar, certain orders of chivalry and even Freemasonry. Hence the constant references to the Temple, the Orders and the Knights, and to the Sun of Enlightenment in modern Western esotericism.
As they use the same vocabulary, the boundaries between Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and the numerous Templar and solar orders are not always entirely clear. In the 18th century, some streams of Freemasonry invented a connection to the Knights Templar. The Rosicrucians inspired the highest degrees of the Grand Lodge of France (GLF). The most widely practised Masonic rite in the world is called Rosicrucian in England.
The organisation known as Scientology, which was founded by a representative of the Ancient and Mystical Rosicrucian Order (AMORC), the science fiction author Ron L. Hubbard, is no stranger to this lineage. According to journalists Ottenheimer and Lecadre, the Grand Orient de France (GOF) and the Grande Loge Nationale Francaise (GLNF) are "notoriously infiltrated by Scientology".
e) Neo-templarism
Numerous journalistic and judicial investigations in both Italy and France have highlighted the frequent links between certain Masonic ‘lodges, parts of the NATO secret services and far-right movements, which have often influenced each other at different times in the political life of the two countries. The best example is the strategy of tension in Italy. For their part, the French journalists Ottenheimer and Lecadre, in their book ‘Les Fréres Invisible’, have well described the situation in France, where all the obediences, especially the GLNF, seem to be infiltrated by both the extreme right and members of the secret services involved in Stay Behind, the anti-communist paramilitary organisation created by the US secret services. The French authors are very helpful when it comes to understanding the colourful panorama painted by the nebula of neo-templarian and paramilitary movements, which are predominantly French-speaking and have proved very useful to the intelligence services.
The case of the Order of the Solar Temple shows how useful chivalric and neo-templar groups are. These are associations that, generally without having any title or authority - invoke a form of direct derivation from religious orders of chivalry that existed during the Crusades, particularly from the Knights Templar.
Today, there are thousands of official and unofficial chivalric organisations. Of the official ones, the Knights of Malta are the best known. Martin A. Lee writes that the American branch of the Order is one of the most important channels of communication between the CIA and the Vatican. In fact, the Order of Malta is able to transfer money to and from countries to which neither the CIA nor the Vatican have access. Among other things, the Order is authorised to issue diplomatic passports and, although it has no territorial connection, has diplomatic representations or its own embassies in 112 countries.
The Order is full of military and intelligence agents. The head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA's predecessor, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, was a member of the Order of Malta, as was James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's head of counterintelligence. Among others, William Casey, Director of the CIA during the Reagan administration, who is considered the main organiser of the Gladio network in Italy, i.e. the network to which the members of the Order of the Solar Temple belonged and which maintained close relations with the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, was also a Knight of Malta.
If this is the nature of an official organisation such as the Knights of Malta, the contours of the countless unofficial or sideline orders of Masonic obediences, which are often ‘spurious’, seem even more obscure. The link between neo-Masonic orders and Freemasonry is due to the fact that the legend has spread in Freemasonry, especially in France and Germany, that the Knights Templar, who were officially suppressed in 1307, continued their activities until the 18th century. The persecuted knights allegedly ‘hid’ in the English and Scottish guilds of Freemasons, from whose ‘guilds‘ 'speculative’ Freemasonry would later emerge. In other words, Freemasonry would be the Order of the Temple continuing in disguise. This is also the origin of the so-called ‘Templar degrees’ of the York Rite, a classic American rite of "perfection" as well as various neo-templar associations open only to Freemasons.
In 1805, Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat, a freemason of the Parisian lodge ‘Knights of the Cross’, decided to rebuild the Order of the Knights Templar and had himself proclaimed its Grand Master. In practise, the idea was born that the Knights Templar should be independent of Freemasonry. Neo-Templarism's estrangement from Freemasonry was finalised in 1811, when the Order officially distanced itself from the Grand Orient de France and at the same time abolished religious freedom by refusing membership to Protestants. in 1814, Fabré-Palaprat finally decided to merge the order with a new church with esoteric characteristics, the Johannite Church. The Gnostic creed of this new church was based on the idea - which Palaprat would have discovered in some texts that had come into his possession - that Jesus Christ would choose St John the Evangelist as his earthly successor and not St Peter; therefore the Catholic Church would be illegitimate. This led to various schisms, such as the Grand Priory of Italy, which decided not to follow Palprat‘s 'new positions’ and declared its independence and continuity with the Catholic tradition. After Palprat's death in 1838, such splits became more frequent and countless new orders emerged, claiming direct descent from the original mediaeval order. Towards the end of the century, the various orders were attracted by the revival of occultism that characterised this period. Templar-like concepts, symbolism and rituals were incorporated into various organisations of magic and occultism, the most important of which was the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), founded by the Austrian industrialist Carl Kellner, but whose fame was mainly due to the English magician Aleister Crowley, an agent of the British services who also founded an Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica.
in 1932, the Order of the Temple, which had been "sleeping" according to Masonic terminology, was revived in Belgium under the name Sovereign and Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (OSMTJ). In 1970, General Antoine Zdrojewski, former leader of the Polish resistance and now a French citizen, was elected Grand Prior of the OSMTJ. He was responsible for the mass admission of representatives of the Service d'Action Civique (SAC) to the Order. The SAC began as the security guard of the Rassemblement du Peuple Francais (RPF), the right-wing party founded by General de Gaulle in the immediate post-war years. This type of private police force was made up of former members of the Resistance and soldiers who had been active in the Algerian War, police officers and secret service agents, all loyal to the General, and its main task was to protect Gaullist candidates and provide security at RPF meetings and rallies. Over time, the SAC began to lead an autonomous life, forging links with organised crime and engaging in obscure trafficking. in 1970, the SAC created an even more clandestine organisation to be used for tasks that required greater secrecy and to make it easy to deny their involvement if something went wrong. This new organisation was named Études Techniques et Commecials (ETEC).
The head of the ETEC was Charly Lascorz, a right-wing extremist. The ETEC worked closely with various police departments, the Ministry of the Interior and the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST).
The reasons for the infiltration of the self-proclaimed Templars were manifold. As the order generally appealed to the highest levels of society, it could be used to infiltrate the police, the army, the media and so on. According to Francois Audiger, author of a study on the SAC, the OSMTJ already had links to various secret services. Moreover, the new Templars were wealthy contributors to ETEC's activities, as they paid substantial membership fees and donations. The main objective of this operation, which does not exclude personal financial gains for its main actors, was to use the order to create an international neo-fascist network through neo-Templar connections around the world.
In 1971, Lascorz founded the Union pour la Défence des Libertés e de Doits, which Audiger described as "a kind of explosive mixture of an extreme right-wing party and Templar Freemasonry" and which used the existing OSMTJ network to forge links with other right-wing groups throughout Europe, particularly in Germany.
The OSMTJ issued diplomatic passports to SAC figures without any legitimisation.
In 1972, the police raided the ETEC because it was involved in drug and arms trafficking with the organised underworld. in 1973, Zdrojewski had the French priory OSMTJ ‘put to sleep’. With the election of Giscard d'Esteing in 1974, the power of the SAC diminished considerably. On the night of 17-18 June 1981, a former SAC member and police inspector, Jacque Massié (probably also an OSMTJ Templar), was murdered in an internal feud with his wife, his eight-year-old son and three other people at his home in Auriol in Provence. This led to a commission of enquiry, which led to the closure of the SAC the following year on the orders of Mitterrand. The subsequent trial revealed that Zdrojewski had continued his activities even after the official dissolution in 1973, issuing passports in the name of the OSMTJ and - according to journalistic sources - maintaining relations between the neo-Templars associated with the SAC and the P2.
It must be said that the opaque intertwining of neo-templarism, far right and the intelligence did not begin with the takeover of the OSMTJ by the SAC in 1970. In fact, Gèrard de Sède notes in his book ‘L'Occultisme dans la politique’ (1994) that in the 1950s, a very important figure in French intelligence, Constantin Menlik, was part of the original Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple (SOTS), the forerunner of the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS).
In 1960, the news leaked out and ‘France Observatoire’ wrote on 17 March (quoted in Enquête sur les extrémistes de l'occulte : de la loge P2 à l'ordre du temple solaire by Renaud Marhic, pages 201-202) that the group's activity consisted of coordinating Franco's fundamentalist Catholics in an anti-communist capacity, together with the psychological warfare department of George Sauyers' army.
Melnik was the mastermind of La Main Rouge (‘the Red Hand’), a state-sponsored terrorist group that operated in particular during the Algerian War in the 1950s. Several terrorist attacks were attributed to this organisation, which operated under ‘false flags’, i.e. attacks that appeared to be directed against France but were actually carried out by the French state itself.
Constantin Melnik had received his training at the Rand Corporation, a company whose main customer is the Pentagon. By his own admission, François de Grossouvre, a right-wing politician and SDECE agent (Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage), was decisive in his return to France in 1983. De Grossouvre was responsible for Gladio in the Lyon region. De Grossouvre later committed suicide in his office at the Elysée Palace, the residence of the French president, although many believe that he was ‘suicided’.
For the purposes of our discourse, the Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT) deserves a mention among other neo-Templar groups. It was founded by Julien Origas, a representative of the AMORC, the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, a magical movement founded in the United States but predominant in French-speaking countries, along with Raymond Bernard. Origas had neo-Nazi ideas and connections and was also in contact with the SAC. in 1981, Origas came into contact with Luc Jouret, a naturopath and neo-Hindu guru, a former paratrooper, right-wing extremist and former infiltrator of left-wing movements on behalf of the Belgian secret service. He joined the ORT in 1981. After the death of Julien Origas, Luc Jouret tried unsuccessfully to have himself recognised as the leader of the ORT. This led to a split in 1984, which resulted in the birth of the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS), which was founded together with Joseph Di Mambro, an occultist and close associate of the French secret service.
The story of the Order of the Solar Temple, which led to three massacres in Switzerland, France and Canada in 1994, 1995 and 1997 with a total of 74 deaths, remains opaque. The web, which includes the infiltration of the Canadian company Hydro-Québec, the arrest of two members for arms trafficking and even the connection to an alleged terrorist group called Q-37, which wanted to assassinate Québec Interior Minister Claude Ryan because he was too sympathetic to the Indians' demands, is too inextricable and it would go beyond the scope of this dossier to unravel it. What is interesting instead is that there is a broad consensus among those who have looked into the case that the OTS was controlled by Western intelligence services. Among others, Jean-Marie Abgrall, an expert involved in the investigation of the massacres, declared in statements to ‘Le Point’ and ‘Nice-Matin’ in February 2003 that the sect of the Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT), the forerunner of the OTS, had links to the Gladio network. Abgrall added that there were other links between AMORC and French networks in Africa, the so-called ‘Foccart network’. According to journalist Maurice Fusier, Abgrall concluded that "the Order of the Solar Temple as well as AMORC and ORT, was created and controlled by French and foreign intelligence services".
This position is also defended by François-Xavier Verschave, who claims that the ‘collective suicides’ are linked to Gladio.
Bruno Fouchereau, author of ‘La mafia des sectes’, wrote that Luc Jouret collaborated with the Belgian far-right activist Jean-François Thiriart. In the 1970s, the two founded an organisation whose aim was to organise a split from the Belgian Communist Party and found the Parti Communautaire Européen, which later became the Parti Communautaire National-Européen. Foucherau claimed that this Belgian "Nazi-Maoist group" was in fact controlled by the SDRA8, the Belgian branch of Gladio.
Based on its own investigations, Radio Canada claimed that Joseph Di Mambro used the Solar Temple for arms trading and money laundering activities via an Australian bank.
Also linked to the Order of the Solar Temple was a ‘mythical’ figure, Yves Guérin-Sérac, the grey eminence of black terrorism in Europe, one of the masterminds of the strategy of tension in Italy and founder of Aginter Presse, the fake Portuguese press agency that functioned as the organisational centre of the subversion of democracy on a planetary scale (see Fascists, spes and gurus. 4. The black network).
This mainly francophone excursus confirms that spiritual groups are a useful instrument of intelligence. Even before the social polarisation processes we have seen (in Fascists, spies and gurus. 6. CIA cults) and the use of these for strategies of shaping public opinion through disinformation (as we will see in Fascists, spies and gurus. 10. East Wind), these groups can serve the secret services as a transactional tool, i.e. for the mediation, a delegation of clandestine operations, espionage, money transfer and money laundering. Another element that this Francophone overview provides us with is the confirmation of a black lace that binds together minority cults, especially those of an esoteric nature, and the intelligence services, that of the political right. If we had focused on Italy, we would have found a stronger involvement of deviant Freemasonry in this right-wing network thanks to the CIA-P2 axis (via Frank Gigliotti, as in Fascists, Spies and Gurus. 7. CIA cults). In France, this network was mainly based on the orders of chivalry.
From the end of the Second World War until the 1990s, in the Atlantic Pact, these efforts seem to have been focused on fighting communism. Now that communism has collapsed, this covert work is being directed towards other goals, and these seem to include the defence of ‘religious freedom’, not as an ultimate goal, but as a goal that serves to achieve other geopolitical objectives. Indeed, "religious freedom" enables new tools of psychological warfare.
Next chapter: Fascists, spies and gurus. 9. The double truth
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