Whence Came 'European Union'? It's an OSS/CIA Front

As per the published academic literature, we'll talk about the American Committee on United Europe, which funnelled money to the likes of Churchill, Adenauer, de Gasperi et al. after WW2

And I shall quote, ever so poignantly’ ‘from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia’:

The American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), founded in 1948, was a publicly funded “private” [sic] American organization that sought to counter communism in Europe by promoting European federalism. Its first chairman was former head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) William Joseph Donovan, who had formally left the government after the war and was in private [why no scare quotes?] law practice.^[1] The vice-chairman was Allen Welsh Dulles, who also had left the government and was in private practice. He later joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1951.^[1] Other board members were Walter Bedell Smith,^[1] who would later become the CIA’s first director and Tom Braden,^[2] who was recruited by the OSS when the US entered the war.

So, how ‘bout that?

That Wikipedia entry—of all places—is quite something, and it deserves to be more widely known. Hence I’ll quote there remaining paragraphs without any ado, albeit with emphases and [snark] added, as above and throughout the following piece.

The structure of the organization was outlined in early summer of 1948 by Donovan and Dulles in response to assistance requests by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, then Joseph Retinger and Winston Churchill,^[3] and resembled that of the Free Europe Committee.^[2] [if you never heard of that one, here’s the first lines from its dedicated Wikipedia entry: ‘The National Committee for a Free Europe, later known as Free Europe Committee, was an anti-communistCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) front organization,^[1] founded on June 1, 1949, in New York City, which worked for the spreading of NATO influence in Eastern Europe and to covertly destabilize Soviet Bloc countries.’]

Declassified American government documents have shown that the ACUE received foundation money it used to help fund of both the European Movement and the European Youth Campaign. The ACUE itself received funding from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations.^[1] [you’re no longer surprised, aren’t you? Note that the Rockefellers also helped get the UN launched in NYC at the same time¹]

American policy was to slowly pursue a United States of Europe [by virtue of this factoid alone, every European politico™, journo™, expert™ pushing the same aim is—a traitor, for that’s what one calls the pursuit of another nation’s interest]. The committee was later used as a discreet way to funnel CIA funds (by the mid-1950s, ACUE was receiving roughly US$1,000,000 per year) to organizations supporting European federalism such as the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the proposed European Defence Community.^[4] [that’s literally all the Pan-European institutions, with the latter morphing into NATO eventually]

An article in The Daily Telegraph in September 2000 noted, “The State Department also played a role. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin, to pursue monetary union by stealth. It recommends suppressing debate until the point at which ‘adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable’.”^[1] [looks like Foggy Bottom got into that ‘game’ a tad later, but there’s surely still money to be made by joining]

Now, are you surprised?

‘An American Intelligence Connection’

Needless to say, and as long-time readers know, I never merely cite from that spook-infested repository of common knowledge—which I do to indicate that these snippets are ‘conventional wisdom’—but I try to buttress whatever snark I’m adding by citing from the published academic literature (which, let’s be frank about this, isn’t per se better than Wikipedia but comes with footnotes; for the record, as of 1 Dec. 2025, Grokipedia has no entry on the subject).

Hence, I shall quote from Richard J. Aldrich’s quite telling chapter entitled, European Integration: An American Intelligence Connection’, which appeared in Anna Deighton (ed.), Building Postwar Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 159-79; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24052-4_10.

Funny enough, it’s a title that’s never talked about when we teach™ the history of European integration at my university (and neither is Bernard Connolly’s excellent The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe’s Money (New York: Faber & Faber, 1996).

It’s a heavily paywalled volume, hence I’ll cite a few lines, but if you’d like the entire piece, I do have a PDF copy: reply to this email!

Hence, without much further ado, let’s read a bit from Aldrich’s piece (but I’ve removed the endnotes here for readability).

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‘newspapers, radio stations, magazines, airlines, ships, businesses, and voluntary organizations had been bought, subsidized, penetrated or invented as assets for the cold war’ .¹

After 1945, many in Europe and the United States presumed rapid European unification to be a key precondition of stabilisation and reconstruction in postwar Europe. The encouragement of European unification constituted a central and consistent component of American President Harry Truman’s policy, and received even greater emphasis under his successor Dwight Eisenhower. This chapter suggests that one of the central achievements of political elites associated with the European Movement was to secure substantial covert financial assistance from senior figures in the American intelligence community, notably General William J. Donovan and Allen Welsh Dulles.² The European Movement led a prestigious group of national public organisations pressing for rapid unification, focusing their efforts on the Council of Europe. This prominent body counted Winston Churchill, Paul-Henri Spaak, Konrad Adenauer, Leon Blum and Alcide de Gasperi as its five Presidents of honour. But the Movement had extreme difficulty in raising substantial campaign funds to promote the message of unity in Europe [may that be, perhaps, because everybody knew it was a more or less malign foreign power behind that messaging?]

It will be argued here that the injection of $3-4 million from American sources between 1949 and 1960 was significant in determining the fortunes of organised European federalist activity [see what I mean about the ‘grand men’ who ‘led Europe’ after WW2?]. Public pressure was to be brought to bear upon governments [in Maoist terms, this is called a ‘mass line’ (Wikipedia), that is, the creation of the appearance of grassroots support for whatever policy by those in power, which provides ‘air cover’ for otherwise dithering™ politicos™ to push through unpopular (sic) policies, such as…], pressing them to adopt the Schuman Plan, the European Defence Community and a European Assembly with sovereign powers. At the same time, continental federalists, notably Paul-Henri Spaak, cooperated with American organisations to try to undermine the staunch resistance to federalism offered by the British and Scandinavian governments. Later, extensive funding was given to Jean Monnet’s Action Committee. [line break added]

The primary vehicle for this American assistance was the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), set up in response to somewhat uncoordinated European requests in 1948 and 1949. Its Chairman was Donovan, former head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who was continuing to undertake work for the CIA. Its Vice-Chairman was Allen Dulles, who had been head of the OSS wartime station in Switzerland [which hints at Dulles’ double-dealing with both German actors and the Bank of Int’l Settlement], and in 1948-9 was directing the Dulles Committee, charged with recommending reform of the CIA, on behalf of the National Security Council. In late 1950, with this task completed, he accepted a senior post within the CIA. During the late 1940s Dulles was also Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and later became head of the CIA.

The ACUE project had its origins in an informal personal transatlantic network of elites generated by the intelligence and resistances effort of the Second World War. This is also the story of intervention by invitation, of prominent European politicians in search of American assistance for objectives defined in their own terms rather than an example of the CIA in search of proxies. This is significant for it typifies the philosophy underpinning much American covert intervention during this period: it sought to find genuinely independent groups that were travelling in the right direction [that would be one’s ‘fellow travellers’, eh?], and then to accelerate their momentum. Many of these groups belonged to the non-communist left [you’re not surprised at this point, are you?].

It also is worth considering why the Europeans found it easy to capture the imagination of their American patrons. Certainly, Donovan and Dulles envisaged their assistance as self-evidently part of a wider cold war effort. But in addition, a number of those Americans working for ACUE were either themselves determined world federalists [that would be your dyed-in-the-wool New World Order crowd] or else viewed American federalism as an ideal political model which could be deployed elsewhere [in case you thought that ‘making the world safe for democracy’ (WW1) had ever gone away…]. Finally, it is of course very difficult to quantify with any precision the American impact upon European unification. Although this programme was set in train by a transatlantic elite, the mass public campaigns it sponsored were highly diffuse and are hard to evaluate.

The ACUE complemented a covert American effort in Europe after 1948, the scale and diverse nature of which is only now receiving detailed consideration from historians [that would be the infamous ‘Operation Gladio’ (Wikipedia)]. Between 1948 and 1950 covert operations expanded rapidly, partly in response to pressure from senior State Department officials including George Kennan.” Prior to 1950, however, one of the abiding characteristics of this expansion was the confusion that surrounded its higher direction and control. Only in 1950, with the advent of a new Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, were organisational issues clarified.” Nevertheless, the broad objectives of these American operations in postwar Europe are increasingly clear, falling into five broad categories [for readability, I’m rending the rest of this paragraph into bullet points].

• First, clandestine funding was offered to political parties, often of the non-communist left and centre, for example during the Italian election of 1948.

• Second, a struggle was under way for control of international labour organisations and for major unions in Italy, France and Germany. Staunchly anti-communist members of the American Federation of Labor led the way here from 1945.

• Third were attempts to influence cultural and intellectual trends in Europe by the funding of a variety of groups, conferences and publications in competition with Soviet funding, developing into what became known as the ‘battle of the festivals’. Both labour and cultural activities were eventually sponsored by a specialist department of CIA, the International Organisations Division. From its formation in the spring of 1951 through to 1954 this controversial division was headed by Thomas W. Braden, an ex-OSS officer, who assumed the appointment at the request of Allen Dulles.

• The International Organisations Division also held some responsibilities for the fourth area of activity: promoting dissent in the East. Central to this effort was the National Committee for a Free Europe, later known as the Free Europe Committee, embracing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

• Finally, the CIA was responsible for organising stay-behind or GLADIO networks that would offer resistance in the event of a Soviet incursion into Western Europe.

As we shall see, the promotion of European unity offered a natural complement to these other activities, and this aspect of US covert activity forms the basis of this chapter.

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Bottom Lines

I’ll interrupt the flow here—do read, and re-read, if necessary, the above five points and ask yourself: has anything really changed after spring 1945?

Instead, I’ll offer you a few lines from an April 2022 posting:

Whatever name you’d like to give to the rulers in Bonn and (East) Berlin, neither of the two Germanies was sovereign: both W and E ‘Germany’ were occupied by the victors of WWII, with the United States being quite adamant about their crowning achievement: total victory in this conflict, with world hegemony as the most coveted prize, on which you may look at Stephen Wertheim’s recent Ph.D. dissertation-turned-monograph, Tomorrow, the World, which came out with Harvard U Press in 2020.

Funnily, it’s actually a quite good read, and, if I’d daresay, it’s a marvellous achievement for one particular reason: the planning behind US global supremacy, which Wertheim meticulously reconstructs over 250+ pages, was quite anathema to anything resembling mainstream scholarship.

Yet, in the autumn of the first year of ‘Corona’, it suddenly became o.k.-ish to call out the careful planning conducted by US officials, which kinda ‘reveals’—to Western audiences, if only they read anymore—what once-leftish ‘dissidents’ such as Noam Chomsky had been saying for decades. (You may check out his 1991 lecture ‘Year 501’ over at Eviltube or his book-length publication with the same title, ch. 3, section 2 ‘Logical Illogicality’, from which the below passages are taken; if you’d like a copy of my PDF of the latter, please feel free to email me and I’ll share it for research purposes; as always, emphases mine)

In an important study of July 1945, transmitted by Secretary of War Stimson to the Secretary of State, military planners tried to put a satisfactory gloss on the US intention to take control of the world and surround Russia with military force, while denying the adversary any rights beyond its borders. ‘To argue that it is necessary to preserve a unilateral military control by the U.S. or Britain over Panama or Gibraltar and yet deny a similar control to Russia at the Dardanelles may seem open to the criticism of being illogical’, they worried, particularly since the Dardanelles provided Russia with its only warm water access and was, in fact, to be kept firmly under unilateral US-British control. But the criticism is only superficially plausible, the planners concluded: the US design is ‘a logical illogicality’. By no ‘stretch of the imagination’ could the US and Britain be thought to have ‘expansionist or aggressive ambition’. But Russia

‘has not as yet proven that she is entirely without expansionist ambitions…She is inextricably, almost mystically, related to the ideology of Communism which superficially at least can be associated with a rising tide all over the world wherein the common man aspires to higher and wider horizons. Russia must be sorely tempted to combine her strength with her ideology to expand her influence over the earth. Her actions in the past few years give us no assured bases for supposing she has not flirted with the thought.’

In short, the burden is upon the Russians to prove that they have no intention of associating with the rascal multitude who ‘aspire to higher and wider horizons’, with the ‘poor who have always wanted to plunder the rich’ (Dulles). Until they do so convincingly, it is only logical for responsible men who do not consort with criminal elements bent on plunder, and flirt with no such subversive thoughts as higher aspirations, to establish their unilateral control over the world. Russia must demonstrate that it is not a potential threat to ‘the very survival of the capitalist order’ (Gaddis).

I’ll spare you the rest of this, but it is worth pointing out that Mr. Chomsky (and let’s disregard his more recent association with the Phascists for a moment) said and wrote these things more than thirty years ago. The momentous change now is that, as per Mr. Wertheim’s book, it is apparently now o.k.-ish to also say so ‘in polite society’. Talk about a sea change.

And here’s the posting, just for the record:

Woe to the Vanquished: Germany 'hasn't been sovereign since 8 May 1945', is a full-blown satrapy of the Washington--a call for high treason proceedings

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—‘the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing’—has been, since 1945, the mantra of US domination.

Coda: A Heretic’s Tale

I used to teach in my university’s ‘European Studies’ graduate program for a few years; I don’t any longer, as my ‘original sin’ was to offer students insights into how things work (which made one of them launch a formal complaint as my recess chat with some of the students ‘wasn’t related to the course as spelled out in the description’; I got into a formal meeting with the dept. chair who, when I asked, had to admit that there’s literally nothing, zero, zilch, nada there that would warrant the convening of such a meeting).

I also made the mistake™ of noting, while grading, that the EU Parliament isn’t a real legislature as the EU Parliament™ lacks the right to initiate legislation (thinking, of course, that this right is the very foundation of what makes an assembly a legislature, but I digress). The dept. chair also chastised me for doing so, and he did so in the most stupid manner possible: he alleged that my judgement was ‘clouded by personal opinions’ (about the EU, that is, I’d add: guilty as charged) and ‘splained™ that the EU Parliament would be, in fact, a legislature ‘because the literature says so’.

Needless to say, I no longer teach in that course (I’m glad, tho I’d add I would have cherished a debate, which was never to be had: the dept. chair quietly removed me from the instructors’ staff and never told me, adding his cowardice to the gaslighting). I’m not unhappy about this, for these colleagues™ had lied to me both in writing and in my face, and I’m happier for not having to talk or teach with them.

If there is a lesson here, it’s that this is merely one more piece of evidence that confirms, once again, how utterly useless and corrupt(ed) academia has become.

There’s no more debate going on, merely affirmation of stuff (virtually) everybody considers ‘the right thing to do’.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still holdouts (colleagues) who dissent, but we are more and more pushed into silence, removed from teaching rosters, and sidelined.

I consider it more important than ever not to be quiet.

So, spread the word about the above content, and if you’d like a copy, please drop me a line via email.

1. And I quote from this Wikipedia piece of ‘conventional wisdom’:

In 1946, Zeckendorf purchased the land with the intention to create a futuristic, self-contained city called “X City” on the site.^[10] This complex was to contain an office building and a hotel, each 57 stories tall, and an entertainment complex between them. X City would have also had smaller apartment and office towers.^[11]However, the US$8.5 million ($88 million in 2024) for X City never materialized, and Nelson Rockefeller purchased an option for Zeckendorf’s waterfront land in Turtle Bay. The purchase was funded by Nelson’s father, John D. Rockefeller Jr.^[12][13] The Rockefeller family owned the Tudor City Apartments across First Avenue from the Zeckendorf site.^[10] The city, in turn, spent $5 million ($52 million in 2024) on clearing the land.^[9] Rockefeller donated the site to the UN in December 1946.^[13][14][15] The UN accepted this donation, despite the objections of several prominent architects such as Le Corbusier.^[13][14]