Rarely spoken of in the context of CIA-funded secret operations, the IRD served as a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit from 1946 until 1977. According to Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain's Secret Propaganda War , "the vast IRD enterprise had one sole aim: To spread its ceaseless propaganda output (i.e. a mixture of outright lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists who worked for major agencies and magazines, including Reuters and the BBC, as well as every other available channel. It worked abroad to discredit communist parties in Western Europe which might gain a share of power by entirely democratic means, and at home to discredit the British Left".
IRD was to become a self-fulfilling disinformation machine for the far-right-wing of the international intelligence elite, at once offering fabricated and distorted information to "independent" news outlets and then using the laundered story as "proof" of the false story's validity. One such front enterprise established with CIA money was Forum World Features, operated at one time by Burnham acolyte Brian Rossiter Crozier. Described by Burnham's biographer Daniel Kelly as a "British political analyst" in reality the legendary Brian Crozier functioned for over fifty years as one of Britain's top propagandists and secret agents.
If anyone today is shocked by the biased, one-sided, xenophobic rush to judgement alleging Russian influence over the 2016 presidential election, they need look no further than to Brian Crozier's closet for the blueprints. As we were told outright by an American military officer during the first war in Afghanistan in 1982, the U.S. didn't need "proof the Soviets used poison gas" and they don't need proof against Russia now. Crozier might best be described as a daydream believer, a dangerous imperialist who acts out his dreams with open eyes. From the beginning of the Cold War until his death in 2012 Crozier and his prote'ge' Robert Moss propagandized on behalf of military dictators Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, organized private intelligence organizations to destabilize governments in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa and worked to delegitimize politicians in Europe and Britain viewed as insufficiently anti-Communist. The mandate of his Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) set up in 1970 was to expose the supposed KGB campaign of worldwide subversion and put out stories smearing anyone who questioned it as a dupe, a traitor or Communist spy. Crozier regarded The Machiavellians as a major formative influence in his own intellectual development, and wrote in 1976 "indeed it was this book above all others that first taught me how [emphasis Crozier] to think about politics". The key to Crozier's thinking was Burnham's distinction between the "formal" meaning of political speech and the "real", a concept which was of course grasped only by elites. In a 1976 article Crozier marveled at how Burnham's understanding of politics had spanned 600 years and how the use of "the formal" to conceal "the real" was no different today than when used by Dante Alighieri's "presumably enlightened Medieval mind." "The point is as valid now as it was in ancient times and in the Florentine Middle Ages, or in 1943. Overwhelmingly, political writers and speakers still use Dante's method. Depending on the degree of obfuscation required (either by circumstances or the person's character), the divorce between formal and real meaning is more of less absolute."
But Crozier was more than just a strategic thinker. Crozier was a high level covert political agent who put Burnham's talent for obfuscation and his Fourth International experience to use to undermine de'tente and set the stage for rolling back the Soviet Union.
In a secret meeting at a City of London bank in February 1977 he even patented a private sector operational intelligence organization known at the 6th International (6I) to pick up where Burnham left off; politicizing and of course privatizing many of the dirty tricks the CIA and other intelligence services could no longer be caught doing. As he explained in his memoir Free Agent, the name 6I was chosen "Because the Fourth International split. The Fourth International was the Trotskyist one, and when it split, this meant that, on paper there were five Internationals. In the numbers game, we would constitute the Sixth International, or '6I'".
Croziers cooperation with numerous "able and diligent Congressional staffers" as well as "the remarkable General Vernon ('Dick') Walters, recently retired as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence..." cemented the rise of the neo-conservatives. When Carter caved in to the Team B and his neoconservative National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's plot to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam in Afghanistan it fulfilled Burnham's mission and delivered the world to the Machiavellians without anyone being the wiser. As George Orwell wrote in his Second Thoughts on James Burnham, "What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud." Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud."
Today Burnham's use of Dante's political Treatise, De Monarchia to explain his Medieval understanding of politics might best be swapped for Dante's Divine Comedy, a paranoid comedy of errors in which the door to hell swings open to one and all, including the elites regardless of their status. Or as they say in Hell, Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Copyright 2017 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Part 1 - Abandon hope all ye who enter here -- Dante's Divine Comedy
Part 2 - How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books
Part 3 - How CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for 'Unconventional Warfare'
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire andThe Voice . Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk
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