The Splendid Blond Beast (Excerpt, pp 32-37)

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Importantly, Britain, France, and the United States were at that time vying with one another to divide up the vast oil and mineral wealth of Turkey's Ottoman Empire. Kemal skillfully played the three powers against each other and insisted on amnesty for the Ittihadists as part of the price for his support in the division of the defunct empire.12

Though often overlooked today, the Ottoman holdings were of extraordinary value, perhaps the richest imperial treasure since the European seizure of the New World four centuries earlier. The empire had been eroding for decades, but by the time of the Turkish defeat in World War I, it still included most of what is today Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf. The European governments sensed that the time had come to seize this rich prize.

The British had been the dominant foreign power in the Middle East prior to World War I. Their Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later known as British Petroleum, or BP) and the Turkish Petroleum Company effectively controlled most of the oil reserves in the region. But the French acquired an important mandate in the area during the war, and by 1919 they were seeking substantial concessions from the British. Both countries preferred to keep the U.S.-backed Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (today known as Exxon) out of the area.13 The U.S. government meanwhile opposed many aspects of the European colonial rule in the Middle East, preferring instead what it termed "open-door" policies—those that facilitated U.S. penetration of new markets and acquisition of new sources of supply.

Senior officials of all three Western powers became preoccupied with oil politics in the Middle East. It even led to an awkward new term, "oleaginous diplomacy," that was used for years to refer to government initiatives on behalf of oil companies. "Oil," said French Premier Georges Clemenceau, "is as necessary as blood."14

For a short time after the war, the three allies pressed the new Turkish government on two fronts: First, they supported tough punishment for Ittihadist criminals, payment of damages to Armenians and Greeks for the lives and property lost during the massacres, establishment of an independent Armenian republic in northeastern Turkey, and transfer to Greece of the port city of Smyrna. Second, they demanded that the Turks surrender all claims to the resources of the former Ottoman territories outside of Turkey proper, particularly the Mosul oilfields in what is today northern Iraq. Although many Turks saw these terms as humiliatingly onerous, the first postwar Turkish government agreed to them in the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920. That agreement was hailed at the time as the formal conclusion of World War I.15

But the Associated Powers could not agree among themselves on the terms of the division of the Mosul oilfields, and new fighting broke out between the Armenian nationalists, who sought to establish the republic they believed they had been guaranteed at Sevres, and the Turkish Kemalists, who still regarded Armenia as a part of Turkey. Kemal's embrace of the Ittihadists contributed to an escalating cycle of revenge killings and renewed massacres in Turkey.

By the end of 1920, the Kemalists were clearly in the ascendance, having established a rival government at Ankara, in the center of the country. The increasingly shaky Turkish government at Istanbul, under intense Kemalist pressure to abrogate the Treaty of Sevres, abruptly shut down the criminal trials of Ittihadists. The Western allies then stepped up their jockeying for influence in the Kemalist camp.

The U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey was Admiral Mark L. Bristol, a man with a reputation as a bigot and a determined advocate of U.S. alliance with Mustafa Kemal. "The Armenians," Bristol wrote, "are a race like the Jews—they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character."16 It was better for the United States, he contended, to jettison support for the Armenian republic as soon as possible, stabilize U.S. relations with the emerging Turkish government, and to enlist Kemal's support in gaining access to the oilfields of the former Ottoman Empire. Bristol's argument found a receptive audience in the new Harding administration in Washington, whose affinity for oil interests eventually blossomed into the famous Teapot Dome bribery scandal.17

As High Commissioner to Turkey, Bristol had considerably more power than might be enjoyed by any conventional ambassador. As the civil war unfolded inside Turkey, Bristol barred newspaper reporters from access to areas where renewed massacres of Armenians were taking place, purportedly to avoid inciting further atrocities against civilians.

His correspondent at the State Department in Washington was Allen Dulles. After the Paris conference, Dulles had served briefly as chief of staff to Bristol, then moved on to Washington to become chief of the State Department's Near East desk just as "oleaginous diplomacy" was reaching its heyday.

Dulles supported Bristol's initiatives. "Confidentially the State Department is in a bind. Our task would be simple if the reports of the atrocities could be declared untrue or even exaggerated but the evidence, alas, is irrefutable," Dulles wrote in reply to Bristol's requests for State Department intervention with U.S. publishers to shift the tone of news reports still dribbling out of Turkey and Armenia. "[Tlhe Secretary of State wants to avoid giving the impression that while the United States is willing to intervene actively to protect its commercial interests, it is not willing to move on behalf of the Christian minorities." Dulles went on to complain about the agitation in the U.S. on behalf of Armenians, Greeks, and Palestinian Jews. "I've been kept busy trying to ward off congressional resolutions of sympathy for these groups."18

The change in the U.S. government's response to the Armenian massacres presents an acute example of the conflicts that often shape U.S. foreign policy. From 1914 to 1919, the U.S. government and public opinion sharply condemned the Turkish massacres. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau repeatedly intervened with the Turkish government to protest the killings, raised funds for refugee relief, and mobilized opposition to the genocide. A close review of the declassified State Department archives of the period shows that much of the government's internal reporting on Turkey was strongly sympathetic to the Armenians throughout the war and the first months after the war.19

The Western press, too, was overwhelmingly favorable to the Armenians and hostile to the Turkish government. One recent study by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin found that between April and December of 1915, the New York Times published more than 100 articles concerning the massacres when the killings were at their height. All of the Times coverage was sympathetic to the Armenians, and most of the news stories appeared on the front page or the first three pages of the newspaper. A roughly similar pattern can be found in publications such as the New York Herald Tribune, Boston Herald, and Atlantic Monthly and in the journals of various Christian missionary so~ieties.~~ The volume of news coverage rose and fell with events over the next five years, but on the whole it remained strongly sympathetic to the Armenians.21

Yet a remarkable shift in U.S. media content and government behavior took place as the new Harding administration established itself in 1921. "Those who underestimate the power of commerce in the history of the Middle East cannot have studied the postwar situation in Turkey between 1918 and 1923," Dobkin writes. "There were, of course, other political factors that proved disastrous for the Armenians . . . but the systematic effort (chiefly by the Harding administration) to turn U.S. public opinion towards Turkey was purely and simply motivated by the desire to beat the [rival Associated] Powers to what were thought of as the vast, untapped resources of that country, and chiefly the oil."22

"It was not possible to bring about the desired change in public opinion without denigrating what the Armenians had suffered," she continues. Retired U.S. Admiral William Colby Chester joined Admiral Mark Bristol as a leading public spokesman for reconciliation with Turkey. Chester was not a disinterested party. The Turkish government had granted him an oil concession in Iraq that was potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Writing in the influential journal Current History, Chester contended that the Armenians had been deported not to deserts, but to "the most delightful and fertile parts of Syria . . . at great expense of money and effortu-a claim that went well beyond even what the Kemal government was willing to arg~e.2~ Dobkin reports that missionary leaders such as Cleveland Dodge and George Plimpton, who had once been instrumental in documenting the genocide, began to lend their names to publicity insisting that the reported Turkish excesses had been "greatly exaggerated."24

By mid-1923, the complex and interlocking challenges created by the demands for justice in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, on the one hand, and U.S. political and commercial interests in Turkey, on the other, had been settled in favor of a de facto U.S. alliance with the new Kemalist government. The day-to-day details of the U.S. diplomatic shift in favor of Kemal were handled by Ambassador Joseph Grew (who will reappear later in this narrative as acting secretary of state during a pivotal moment in World War 11) and the chief of the Near East desk at State, Allen Dulles. The U.S., which had been the principal international supporter of the nascent Armenian Republic, withdrew its promises of aid and protection. Mustafa Kemal soon succeeded through force of arms in suppressing Armenia and in establishing a new Turkish government at Ankara. In July 1923, the Turks and the European allies signed a new agreement, replacing the aborted Treaty of Shvres with the Treaty of La~sanne.25 Western governments agreed to new Turkish borders, officially recognized Kemal's government, abandoned any claim on behalf of an Armenian republic, and specifically agreed to an amnesty for all Ittihadists who had been convicted in the earlier trials.26

As things turned out, many of the top Ittihadists who fled Turkey in 1918 were assassinated by Armenian commandos. Talaat, the minister of internal affairs and grand vizier of the Ittihad state, was shot in Berlin on March 15,1921. Behaeddin Sakir (Chakir), a senior member of the "Commission of Supply," which had coordinated much of the extermination campaign, and Djemal Army, military governor during the height of the killings in Trebizond, were killed in Berlin on April 17,1922. Enver, the former minister of war, is said to have been killed by the Soviet army in Bukhara in 1922, though many of the details of his death remain uncertain. Djemal, who with Talaat and Enver had constituted the ruling triumvirate of the Ittihad state, was gunned down in July 1922 in Tiflis. He was on his way to a trade conference in Berlin, where he was to buy weapons for the Afghan army.27

Armenians lost a great deal under the terms of the Lausanne treaty while Western commercial interests prospered. The new Turkish leader Kemal agreed to relinquish all claims on the territories of the old Ottoman Empire outside Turkish borders, thus formally opening the door to the Anglo-American control of Middle East oil that was to continue with minimal change for the next fifty years. This was not a simple quid pro quo, of course. The agreement also involved other important elements, notably a settlement of most reparation claims against Turkey and an agreement between Greece and Turkey to repatriate thousands of ethnic Greeks and Turks to their respective countries of origin. There were to be several more years of squabbles before the U.S.-European disputes over the Mosul oilfields were finally settled.

The point was nonetheless clear. Western governments had discarded wartime promises of action against the Ittihadists who had murdered about a million people in order to help their political maneuvering over oil concessions in the Middle East. The dominant faction in Turkish society never accepted Armenian claims as legitimate, despite the strong evidence of genocide established by Turkey's own courts. In fact, the Turkish government even today continues to refuse to acknowledge Jttihadist responsibility for the Armenian massacres, and has instead in recent years financed a large and sophisticated publicity campaign aimed at rewriting the history of the war years.28

The Splendid Blond Beast (Excerpt, pp 76-77)

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Hitler was well aware of Turkey's genocide of Armenians and of the failure of the international community to respond adequately to it. As early as June 1931, Hitler commented in an interview that the "extermination of the Armenians" had led him to "the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological plasticine" over which Aryans would eventually triumph.5 He returned to this theme in a formal talk to his commanding generals on the eve of their invasion of Poland in 1939: "Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality," he exclaimed. "Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder. . . . Thus for the time being I have sent to the East . . . my Death's Head Units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenian?"6 On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of Turkey's regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a worthy model for his own government.7

A new and more terrible wave of slaughter began when the Germans invaded the USSR during June of 1941. Special SS troops dedicated to mass murder now followed close behind the advancing German army. Within thirty-six months, these Einsatzgruppen and their subunits, the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, shot about two million people, according to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. The large majority of the dead were Jews, although the Einsatzgruppen's net also caught hundreds of thousands of Communists, Slavs, Romanis, Poles, homosexuals, hospital patients, unarmed prisoners of war, and even orphan children. These two million murders, moreover, do not include the gassings at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death factories that began in the wake of the invasion.8

A 1942 report on the fate of Jews in eastern Poland smuggled out of Warsaw by the Jewish Labor Bund provided remarkably detailed and accurate early documentation of the work of the Einsatzkommandos.

From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Germans embarked on the physical extermination of the Jewish population on Polish soil, using the Ukrainians and Lithuanian fascists for this job. It began in Eastern Galicia in the summer months of 1941. The following system was applied everywhere: men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place—a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered, or shot by machine-guns, or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, sick in hospitals were shot, women were killed on the streets. In many towns Jews were carried off to an "unknown destination" and killed in the adjacent woods. Thirty thousand Jews were killed in L'wow [Lvov], 15,000 in Stanislawow, 5,000 in Tarnopol, 2,000 in Zloczow, 4,000 in Brzezany (there were 18,000 Jews in this town, now only 1,700 are left). The same has happened in Zborow, Kolomyja, Sambor, Stryj , Drohobycz, Zbaraz, Przemyslany, Kuty, Sniatyn, Zaleszczyki, Brody, Przemysl, Rawa Ruska, and other places. . . . The number of the Jews murdered in a beastly fashion in the Wilno [Vilna] area and in Lithuania is put at 300,000.9

The extermination campaign gathered momentum by integrating itself with the day-to-day activities of Hitler's government and German society. In January 1942, fourteen senior German government bureaucrats met at SS offices at Lake Wannsee, in the suburbs of Berlin, to coordinate efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Up to that point, the various German ministries had often worked at cross-purposes in their approach to the "Jewish Question." Officials in charge of the economic exploitation of the Nazi-occupied territories in the East had sometimes advocated retention of able-bodied Jews as slave laborers, while Reinhard Heydrich of the SS had pushed for mass execution by the Einsatzgruppen. Still other ministries had favored a variety of deportation and resettlement schemes, though they were unable to agree on exactly where to relocate the refugees and the extent of terror to wreak upon them.

The Splendid Blond Beast (Excerpt, pp 154-155)

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By 1943, important changes were also under way among the German economic elite, and these had an indirect but nonetheless important effect on political debate in the U.S. Up until the German defeat at Stalingrad in late 1942, Adolf Hitler remained the best thing that had ever happened to the German financial elite from a strictly business point of view—notwithstanding the Nazi party's occasional flourishes of anticapitalist rhetoric. The sophisticated conservatives that dominated German business made the most of National Socialism. Virtually all major German enterprises adopted elements of Nazi ideology in their day-to-day operations, including the purging of Jews, decimation of labor unions, and exploitation of forced labor. Along the way, they invented a variety of triumph-of-the-will rationalizations for corporate brutality and theft.

But in early 1943, the German financial and industrial elite began to split on the future of Hitler. Increasingly, the very forces that they had helped set in motion were now dragging the whole of Germany toward catastrophe. Hitler had irrevocably blundered and, it was rumored, might even be mentally unbalanced. The banker Hjalmar Schacht-long the quintessential German establishment banker who had backed the Nazis since before Hitler came to power-left Hitler's government. Even Oscar Henschel, whose weapons companies made extensive use of forced labor, claimed to have concluded as early as December 1942 that the military situation was hopeless.12

The economic elite turned their attention to self-preservation. But such planning, regarded by Hitler's government as defeatist or even treasonous, could be carried out only under a thick veil of secrecy. Intriguingly, the existing social networks used by the economic elite to coordinate their actions and to secure influence within Hitler's government provided some of the most effective "covers" for German corporate efforts to prepare for the postwar world.

The notorious Himmlerkreis, the Circle of Friends of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, is a good example of the dynamics of Germany's high-level business networks during the decline of the Third Reich. The Nazis and leading German businessmen had jointly created the Himmlerkreis in the early 1930s as an informal communication link between the financial and industrial elite and the SS. Himmler sought the political and economic support of the business elite, and the elite in turn sought influence outside of official channels with the increasingly powerful police leader. Senior business leaders active in the Himmlerkreis included Siemens' general director Rudolf Bingel, Unilever and Kontinentale Öl director Karl Blessing, steel industrialist Friedrich Flick, Dresdner Bank's Karl Rache and Emil Meyer, shipping and oil executive Karl Lindemann, and board members or senior managers from the Deutsche Bank, RKG, IG Farben, Krupp, and a dozen other companies central to the German economy.13 As the SS grew as an economic power, the SS members of the Himmlerkreis often migrated to new positions on corporate boards, where they could secure government contracts and embody corporate loyalty to the regime. SS men and Nazi party activists who made this transition included Wilhelm Keppler (of the BRABAG brown coal combine and SS enterprises), Fritz Kranefuss (BRABAG, Dresdner Bank), and Ritter von Halt, who joined the Deutsche Bank board.14

Officially, the Himmlerkreis meetings were not for conducting business, because that would have suggested corruption in National Socialist circles. As a practical matter, however, the encounters served as an informal coordinating point for German industry's negotiations with the SS on policy matters. IG Farben appears to have used Himmlerkreis meetings to seek support for the company's vast forced-labor complex at Auschwitz, for example. The companies represented in Himmler's circle became pacesetters in Aryanization, exploitation of concentration camp labor, seizure of foreign companies in the occupied territories, and similar business ventures that depended on SS cooperation.15

The Splendid Blond Beast (Excerpt, pp 186-187)

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Padover's team conducted in-depth psychological and sociological interviews with dozens of people in Aachen, including most of the "notables" identified there. "Their strong point, especially in dealing with Americans, is that they are 'anti-Nazi' or 'non-Nazi,' " Padover wrote. During the war, most had held senior positions at the Veltrup works, Aachen's leading war production plant. "A striking fact about this new Aachen elite is its comparative youth. Their ages run from thirty-three to fifty. They all represent the upper middle class. . . . The leading men in this group had spent their working life and grew prosperous under the Nazi system and they knew little else. They had an antidemocratic conception of government and a 'leadership' [i.e., Fuhrerprinzip] view of business."

Aachen's new leadership clique had a fairly clear-cut, long-range political-economic plan. The plan, "about which MG [U.S. Military Government] knew little and cared less, was a significant index of what one may expect from similar business groups in Germany," Padover contended. Their vision, he said, was "an authoritarian corporate state," somewhat similar to the Austrian model of the 1930s. Economically, they favored a tightly knit community of owners and managers of small enterprises supported by a limited "labor aristocracy" of foremen and artisans. The new leaders were said to be "violently opposed to popular elections, political parties, and trade unions.

"Under the nose of the MG," Padover concluded, the new administration was "setting up the framework of an authoritarian, hierarchical, bureaucratic, corporate fascism—a type of Staendestaat that even the Nazis had rejected."36

This group entrenched itself in the city administration by placing insiders in control of local ministries, Padover continued. The new administration's chief building contractor and leader of its 'Industrial Bureau," for example, had been Aachen's largest contractor under the Nazis and had made extensive use of forced labor. The executive officer and personnel director, Opt de Hipt, had been the Gestapo's liaison inside the city's most important war production plant, with responsibility for enforcing loyalty among the factory's employees.37

In short, the postwar leaders who emerged at Aachen were not ideological Nazis from the mold of Himmler or Hitler. They were instead the political, economic, and social technocrats who had actually run Germany during Hitler's regime under the watchful eye of Nazi party activists.

There was an alternative for the administration of occupied German cities, though it could have been implemented only in the face of resistance of the existing elites. At Aachen the town and its surroundings had been in the hands of a coalition government made up of left-centrists, Social Democrats, and Communists for most of the decade prior to Hitler's assumption of power. One of the first public opinion surveys conducted by U.S. forces in Germany found that 70 percent of the women and 83 percent of the men interviewed at random said that they would vote for Social Democrat or Communist candidates if elections were held.38 Theoretically, at least, the citizens of Aachen would have elected a more democratic and anti-Nazi administration had the military government permitted elections to be held.

The American response to the emerging leadership clique foreshadowed what was to unfold in the U.S. occupation zone over the next year. This was months before Germany's surrender, at a time when Roosevelt was still in the White House, U.S. unity with the Soviets was still ostensibly strong, and anti-Nazi sentiment among U.S. forces was at a high tide. "Behind the scenes in the MG offices a storm was raging. It revolved around the basic question of retention of Nazis and other undesirable characters in office," according to Padover. "MG itself was split into three wings, Right, Left, and Center. A majority of MG officers were on the extreme Right and supported the [new] administration; their business, they said coldly, was 'efficiency,' and not politics. A minority, consisting of the deputy [military governor] and two lieutenants, were more or less on the Left and urged the elimination of Nazis. In the Center was Major J., the Military Government Officer. Major J., an affable officer who knew little about Germany and nothing of the German language, was perfectly neutral on the subject of Nazis." There were fifty-five Nazis in middle- and high-level posts in the local administration at that point, Padover reports. "Major J. said that one must go slowly in getting rid of them, because they were indispensable. 'Where,' he asked, 'would you find competent people who are not Nazis?' "39

The Splendid Blond Beast (Excerpt, pp 262-268)

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By December 1945, the publicly mandated denazification program sharply collided with the unofficial (but actual) political and economic objectives of the U.S. occupation government. That month, the U.S. Denazification Policy Board confidentially recommended that existing policies and practices be shifted to better fit the "longer term" goals of the occupation. Publicly, the orientation of the denazification program was to remain the same as it had been under JCS 1067. "Every person who exercised leadership and power in support of the Nazi regime should be deprived of influence or power," the board recommended, "whether or not he was formally affiliated with the Party or any other Nazi organization." At the same time, however, the board introduced a new consideration that would fundamentally alter the program in the U.S. zone of Germany: "Denazification . . . should not be carried so far as to prevent the building of a stable democratic society in Germany. . . we must avoid the creation of a huge mass of outcasts who will provide fertile soil for agitators and a source of social instability."18

This turned an important corner. Up to then, the continuation of Nazi influence within German social structures—business, education, the arts, etc.—had been seen as the most dangerous source of potential instability in Germany. But at least as early as December 1945, the opposite formulation came to the fore, even in official documents. Now, it was the denazification effort that was seen as the source of disaffection.

Opposition within the U.S. to denazification and decartelization in Germany was led almost exclusively by the corporate and foreign policy elite that had been most active in U.S.-German financial relations during the 1920s and 1930s. The disproportionate political leverage of this group, its ability to shape media coverage of foreign policy issues, to influence government policy, and eventually to shift public opinion was dramatically manifested in the realignment of U.S. policy concerning denazification and decartelization in the brief period between 1945 and 1947.

One of this group's most effective lobbying tactics was sponsorship of junkets to Europe by American politicians and businessmen, financed by U.S. multinationals, to "study the problem of German recovery." Draper paid close attention to these visits, staging elaborate briefings intended to shape public opinion at home concerning the professed realities of business in Europe. These events were almost ceremonial: The attendees and the briefers had selected one another largely through their existing social networks based in powerful U.S. companies with investments in Europe. The men on both sides of Draper's briefing table were receptive to his message and usually knew pretty well what it would be.

A stream of U.S. experts visited the headquarters of the Economics Division during the first two years after the war, and Draper provided them with privileged access to the inside thinking on U.S. policy concerning German business. "The reports of these visitors echoed the conclusion that German recovery demanded greatly increased emphasis on heavy industries," decartelization chief James S. Martin (a Draper rival) remembered later. "In their reports the visitors frequently referred to the 'proven impossibility' of something that no one had yet tried to do [i.e., actually break up German banking and industrial oligopolies]. With equal frequency they reported the 'mounting chaos' that was supposed to have resulted from the ruthless 'Morgenthau Plan of deindustrialization.'" Similar problems were alleged to have been caused by drastic reforms that had not actually been carried out. "It became customary to refer to the urgent necessity for 'reversing the former policy of destroying German industries,' " Martin wrote, and of reversing a decartelization policy that in fact had not yet been implemented.19

A popular example of Martin's point can be found in Lewis H. Brown's A Report on Germany, a 1947 bestseller that had substantial influence in Washington at the time and remains quoted to this day.20 Brown was chairman of the Johns-Manville Corporation, a major military contractor and international mining company that held a near-monopoly on the U.S. market for asbestos. The company has frequently been accused in U.S. courts of corporate crimes, including antitrust violations.21

Brown toured Germany during 1946 and 1947 and returned to the U.S. with detailed arguments against economic reform in Germany that had been prepared mainly by Draper's staff. Brown's preconceptions clearly shaped the conclusions he drew from the visits. He wrote quite frankly that he approached Germany "from the standpoint of an industrialist's attempt to analyze the problem of a bankrupt company [seeking] to determine the simple common-sense fundamentals necessary to get the wheels of production turning."22

His acknowledgments of the experts he consulted concerning Germany read like the guest list of a dinner sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations: AT&T's Frederick Devereux, Sullivan & Cromwell's John Foster Dulles, former president Herbert Hoover (who had been enlisted by Truman to cement Republican party support for his administration's emerging policy on Germany), General Lucius Clay, William Draper, Sears, Roebuck president A. S. Barrows (who was then serving as U.S. Comptroller in Germany), British and Swiss banking and industry officials, and twenty-five unnamed German industrialists. In more than five pages of Brown's detailed acknowledgments of those he interviewed, there appears no speaker for German labor, no small businessman of any nationality, no female, none of the then-well-known public advocates of denazification and decartelization of German industry (including those still in government posts inside Germany), no Social Democrats, and no known veterans of European Resistance movements of any political persuasion.23

Brown's argument was simple and in some ways convincing. He said that the Morgenthau Plan had shaped JCS 1067—as was true enough—and that JCS 1067 was a disaster. The economic and denazification commitments that the U.S. made at Potsdam should be unilaterally disavowed as quickly as possible, Brown contended. The U.S. should block further German reparations to the USSR, because German uncertainty over which equipment might be shipped to the Soviets had "helped destroy the incentive to put plants in Germany back into operation." The postwar punishment of Nazis by France and the USSR had been indiscriminate and brutal, Brown said. The U.S. and British system of trying accused criminals before courts and administrative commissions was better, he argued, but "many of the industrial and technical leaders of the economic life of Germany, who had climbed on the Nazi bandwagon much as people climb on any new and apparently successful bandwagon, were permitted to do only common labor pending the years required to go through the denazification courts." The Potsdam agreements had "deprived the economic machine of Germany of the very leadership necessary for its revival . . . [and was now] fatally slowing down the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the industrial machine of Germany and Western Europe."24

Brown said he expected no support for his proposals from '(the enemies of the American Way of Life." But "from our friends who abhor all forms of totalitarianism . . . I hope for tolerance and ultimate understanding of the imperative need for getting together on a plan of action under which we may minimize the [Soviet] threat to Western civilization . . ,"25

Brown's lobbying trips to Germany were underwritten mainly by General Electric's chairman Philip D. Reed, who was one of the single most influential U.S. corporate leaders on postwar U.S.-German issues. In addition to his role in Brown's project, Reed and the business organizations he led organized a series of similar conferences in 1946 and 1947. Typical U.S. delegations included the chairman of the executive committee of the National Association of Manufacturers, the chairman of the (U.S.) National Foreign Trade Council, and senior executives of the National City Bank of New York and the Chase Bank, among others. On some occasions, Reed traveled as a representative of General Electric; on others, he came as head of the U.S. delegation to the International Chamber of Commerce; or as the personal envoy of Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman.26

Like Brown's book, Reed's report to Harriman lambasted the denazification and decartelization policy the U.S. had approved at Potsdam as the work of FDR-era "extremists" (Reed's term) at the Department of Justice. The U.S. policy was harmful and unnecessary, he said, and was interfering with Germany's economic recovery. 27

Reed's company was not an entirely disinterested party. General Electric was among the most important U.S. investors in Germany, owning about 25 percent of its German counterpart, the electrical giant AEG, plus factories and dozens of smaller interests.28 At the time Reed was lobbying the U.S. government against antitrust policy in Germany, GE was facing no fewer than thirteen criminal antitrust prosecutions in U.S. courts for price fixing, gouging consumers and the U.S. government through its monopoly on electrical equipment manufacturing, conspiracy, Sherman Act violations, and similar corporate crimes. (GE settled most of these cases out of court in 1949, then went on to a series of remarkably similar abuses that in time led to still another round of criminal convictions for senior General Electric executives about a decade later.)29


As Morgenthau, Pell, James S. Martin, and other reformers saw things, the arguments of General Electric and Johns-Manville had become the dominant point of view in Western policy circles and in the media. They had become "standard fare" in US. newspapers within a year after the occupation began, Martin commented,30 even though in reality only two steps had been undertaken to implement U.S. antitrust efforts in Germany by the time Brown's denunciation of the program appeared: the seizure of plants and assets of IG Farben; and the appointment of a trustee to administer coal wholesaling firms in the U.S. zone.

The Allies and the Germans both kpew that German manufacturing, including war production, had survived the war surprisingly intact, despite the massive Allied bombing campaign. Senator Kilgore publicized a congressional study based mainly on U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey data that concluded that Germany's production of armored cars, fighter bombers, and several categories of strategic supplies had actually increased under U.S. and British bombing, in some cases expanding eightfold over 1942 production figures. True, the air attacks had crippled the German transportation network and oil production during the final months of the war—a telling blow. But that damage was repaired relatively easily once the fighting stopped. From the point of view of production, at least, Germany was already "better prepared for war than it was at the end of World War I," Kilgore contended.31

Kilgore stressed that a distinct drift toward postwar accommodation with German business had already set in. "There is a natural inclination on the part of many of our [U.S.] administrators to take over in order to get things running again, and there is a natural inclination on the part of many Germans to lie back and let them do it. . . . [In] the desire for efficiency our military administrators may keep in positions of power the Nazi plant managers," Kilgore said. "In Italy, I heard certain American Army officers deplore the fact that Italian partisans had killed many of the Fascist plant managers, which made more difficult the reorganization of Italian productive capacity. In Germany there has been no such [partisan] revolt. The Nazi industrial hierarchy remains intact."32

The reports of Brown and Reed were in reality briefs for the European Recovery Program-the Marshall Plan. They illustrate the extent to which that enormously popular and respected program became entangled with the revival of German businessmen who had participated in Nazi crimes. Particularly important in this effort was the "Committee for the Marshall Plan," founded in September 1947. It labeled itself a citizens' organization but was in reality funded and administered by the same economic and foreign policy elite that has been discussed thus far. Its initial sponsors included Averell Harriman and Robert Lovett (who will be remembered from the Brown Brothers, Harriman bank). Allen Dulles, Dean Acheson, Winthrop Aldrich (chairman of the Chase Bank), Philip Reed (of GE), and others of similar stature, most of whom had been active in U.S.-German finance since the 1920s. Labor was represented by hard-line anti-Communists active in the CIA-sponsored penetration of European trade unions, such as James Carey and David Dubinsky.33


This Marshall Plan lobby operated as a "distinguished propaganda committee," as AT&T executive Arthur Page described it.34 Its goal was never described as the revitalization of the German business elite but, rather, as "saving Europe" and "providing American jobs" through implementation of the Marshall Plan. But whatever one may think of the plan, the restoration of much of the prewar German corporate elite was an integral part of the package.

General Clay used the case of Deutsche Bank director Hermann Abs to explain this concept. "We were never able to make Hermann Abs the financial minister [of Germany] as we would have," Clay remembered in the same interview quoted earlier, because of the German and American public's refusal to accept a man who had been so deeply compromised during the Hitler years. But not to worry, Clay continued. "We were able to finally put him in charge of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was somewhat outside of government," and which was instrumental in distribution of Marshall Plan funds for Germany.35

Sponsors of the Committee for the Marshall Plan were simultaneously at the cutting edge of renewed efforts to invest in German industry. "If you have been trying unsuccessfully to get to Germany to reestablish prewar business contacts, don't be discouraged," Business Week told its readers early in 1947. "YOU can expect [a] program for reviving business in western Germany to be pushed by all U.S. factions.. . Republican backing was assured when John Foster Dulles, Republican spokesman, recently called for the revival of business in Germany and western Europe whatever the price. German goods are already trickling into the U.S. market. Anticipating some consumer resistance [in the U.S.], Military Government authorities have shrewdly met customs requirements by marking them: 'Made in Germany, U.S.. Zone.' . . . Before large-scale arrivals of German goods begin, Washington is likely to release a press barrage explaining that German exports help pay [U.S.] occupation costs in Germany."36

Shortly after its founding, the Committee for the Marshall Plan placed full-page advertisements in the most influential U.S. newspapers; sent thousands of personally addressed telegrams signed by the former secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, to businessmen asking for their donations and political support; and made a mass mailing to hundreds of thousands of U.S. "opinion leaders" in the upper strata of business, media, labor, and social organizations. The group chartered Marshall Plan clubs in a dozen cities, opened business offices in New York and Washington, and initiated a series of heavily publicized meetings between President Truman and business leaders designed to convey the impression of broad popular support for the Marshall Plan. As Congressman Charles Plumley (a Republican from Vermont) put it, "There has never been so much propaganda in the whole history of the nation as there has been for the Marshall Plan." The campaign created an "overwhelming conviction among the American people and among members of Congress that we must have the Marshall Plan right now," he continued.37

The claim of "overwhelming support" was, in fact, overblown. Public opinion polls of the period indicate that about 65 percent of the U.S. population either opposed the Marshall Plan or did not know what it was.38 Even so, the Marshall Plan passed the Congress by a large margin. The plan's sponsors used the relatively broad, popular support for doing something constructive about Europe as a means of putting through the distinctly unpopular idea of reestablishing the German economic elite.

These factors—insiders' opposition to reform, the passive resistance of German business, Allied suppression of indigenous Antifa radicals, the sheer magnitude of the task of denazification, the self-mobilization of U.S. and international business elites, and an often paranoid geopolitical competition with the USSR—combined with other factors to stall denazification and reform of the German business structure by the summer of 1945. Within three years they had shut it down altogether.

The Splendid Blond Beast (Excerpt, pp 269-271)

See For The Record Reading List for more about The Splendid Blond Beast.

Chapter 19
The End of War Crimes Commissions

Originally, a second international trial at Nuremberg was to focus primarily on the activities of German finance and industry during the Third Reich. The "industrialists trial," as it was called at the time, was widely regarded as of equal importance to the prosecution of the Nazi and SS high command. Hermann Abs and other major bankers were important targets, at least judging from the recommendations made by U.S. war crimes investigators at the time.1

But Justice Jackson vetoed this plan, declaring in the autumn of 1945 that the United States would refuse to participate in any further international trials of German defendants and would instead hold separate prosecutions on its own. These trials became the "Subsequent Proceedings" organized under the leadership of General Telford Taylor. His group brought twelve cases against a total of 182 defendants; these were the famous trials that judged Einsatzgruppen murder squads, concentration camp doctors, business executives from Krupp and IG Farben, Nazi judges, and similar defendants.2 U.S. military commissions tried additional 950 war crimes defendants, though that figure includes cases in the Far East in addition to Europe. The majority of cases tried before U.S. military commissions involved German civilians who had murdered downed U.S. pilots.3

Yet these trials, as important as they were, were very much "symbolic measures," as Taylor commented in a recent interview, and were designed to teach Germany and the world a lesson about the crimes of the Hitler dictatorship.4 They succeeded brilliantly in that mission. The record of Nazi crimes compiled by Taylor's team remains to this day the single most important source of information and documentation ever assembled.

But these proceedings were not, and were not intended to be, an effort to prosecute the power structure of Nazi Germany as such; nor were they an effort to remove the German "ruling class" (to use Kennan's phrase) that had operated during the Hitler years from its position in postwar society. The Subsequent Proceedings were in many respects a rear-guard action by the hard-line anti-Nazi wing of the U.S. government, which was already in retreat. Washington hobbled the prosecutions with budgetary restrictions, and some U.S. agencies in Berlin tacitly refused cooperation, particularly during trials of German industrialists. Taylor's three U.S. triads of industrialists lasted slightly more than a year altogether, resulting in nineteen convictions and fourteen acquittals. The U.S. judges tended to be hostile to the prosecution, particularly in the Friedrich Flick case. The court "was apparently unable to feel that offenses by industrialists fell into as severe a category as when committed by a common man," as noted legal historian John Alan Appleman put it.5

Flick's successful defense depended directly on the social dynamic; of international law and of genocide. Flick beat all but one of the slave labor and plunder charges, because three prominent U.S. judges concluded that the director and owner of a corporation should not be held accountable for slavery and looting by his companies, unless the prosecution could prove that he personally ordered each particular crime to be carried out. Without proof of that type, every bit of ambiguous evidence had to be interpreted by the court in favor of the individual defendants, namely Flick and his circle of executives.

Worse, the Flick case established a legal precedent for a corporate defense of "necessity"—a close cousin to the defense of acting under orders—that went beyond even what Flick had argued on his own behalf and that contradicted many aspects of the earlier ruling on this issue by the International Military Tribunal.6 Amazingly, the legal precedent left by this series of trials seems to be that a nineteen-year-old draftee accused of war crimes cannot successfully plead that he was acting under orders, but the owners and directors of multi-billion-dollar companies can.

The U.S. government cut off funding for the prosecution staff at Nuremberg in mid-1948, bringing the Subsequent Proceedings to an abrupt end. The staff abandoned pending investigations and potential prosecutions, sometimes with little more than a note to the files indicating the case had been closed. Less than two and a half years after that, the new U.S. high commissioner for Germany, John McCloy, granted clemency to every single industrialist who had been convicted at Nuremberg.7

The Splendid Blond Beast (Excerpt, pp 286-287)

See For The Record Reading List for more about The Splendid Blond Beast.

Who then, or what, is the splendid blond beast? It is the destruction inherent in any system of order, the institutionalized brutality whose existence is denied by cheerleaders of the status quo at the very moment they feed its appetite for blood.

The present world order supplies stability and rationality of a sort for human society, while its day-to-day operations chew up the weak, the scapegoats, and almost anyone else in its way. This is not necessarily an evil conspiracy of insiders; it is a structural dilemma that generates itself more or less consistently from place to place and from generation to generation.

Much of modern society has been built upon genocide. This crime was integral to the emergence of the United States, of czarist Russia and later the USSR, of European empires, and of many other states. Today, modern governments continue extermination of indigenous peoples throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, mainly as a means of stealing land and natural resources. Equally pernicious, though often less obvious, the present world order has institutionalized persecution and deprivation of hundreds of millions of children, particularly in the Third World, and in this way kills countless innocents each years7 These systemic atrocities are for the most part not even regarded as crimes, but instead are written off by most of the world's media and intellectual leadership as acts of God or of nature whose origin remains a mystery.

It is individual human beings who make the day-to-day decisions that create genocide, reward mass murder, and ease the escape of the guilty. But social systems usually protect these individuals from responsibility for "authorized" acts, in part by providing rationalizations that present systemic brutality as a necessary evil. Some observers may claim that men such as Allen Dulles, Robert Murphy, et al. were gripped by an ideal of a higher good when they preserved the power of the German business elite as a hedge against revolution in Europe. But in the long run, their intentions have little to do with the real issue, which is the character of social systems that permit decisions institutionalizing murder to take on the appearance of wisdom, reason, or even justice among the men and women who lead society.

Progress in the control of genocide depends in part on confronting those who would legitimize and legalize the act. The cycle of genocide can be broken through relatively simple—but politically difficult—reforms in the international legal system. It is essential to identify and condemn the deeds that contribute to genocide, particularly when such deeds have assumed a mantle of respectability, and to ensure just and evenhanded punishment for those responsible. But the temptation will be to accept the inducements and rationalizations society offers in exchange for keeping one's mouth shut. The choice is in our hands.

Special Reception for Consul General and Marco Ponti

Midweek.com

A special reception was held recently to welcome Consul General Roberto Falaschi from the San Francisco Consulate and film director Marco Ponti. Ponti recently opened “The Best of N.I.C.E.” (New Italian Cinema Events) film festival at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in September.

Photos by Nathalie Walker.

Islamism and world conquest / L'islamisme à la conquête du monde

Translation from the Swiss paper Le Temps. BabelFish has been used to obtain a rough and ready translation. The original French language version follows.

The article cites a book published recently by the journalist Sylvain Besson, titled The conquest of the Occident, about the contents of a document found at the villa of the Al-Qaeda financier Yousef Nada in Lugano, titled "The Project", which outlines a long-term plan for Muslim dominance over all the world by infiltrating existing structures, especially in the West.

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LE TEMPS - 6 October 2005

Islamism and world conquest

REVELATIONS.

In November 2001, Swiss investigators discovered the "Project": an ambitious strategy intended "to establish the Kingdom of God" over the whole world.

Is it possible that the development of Islamism in the world over the past twenty years has been, at least partly, the product of a secret strategy, a deliberate plan of conquest?

This politically incorrect question arises from the astonishing discovery made by Swiss and Italian police officers during a raid carried out close to Lugano, in November 2001.

In the villa of Youssef Nada, an Egyptian banker that the American authorities have shown to have supported terrorism, the investigators seized an astonishing document that has remained secret for almost two decades, entitled "The Project": a strategic plan whose ultimate ambition is "to establish the Kingdom of God everywhere in the world".

The open criminal investigation against Youssef Nada, which directed Islamic bank Al-Taqwa of Lugano since its creation in 1988, was classified last May. However Nada, who has denied any ties with terrorism, has admitted being in the past one of the principal leaders of the international branch of the Moslem Brothers, one of the most important contemporary islamist groups. Founded in Egypt in 1928, the organization of the Moslem Brothers gave rise to a vast " Islamic Movement" inspired by its ideas, which represents the principal force today claiming Islamism in the world.

The Project is a text of 14 pages, going back to December 1982, which opens by the following passage: "This report presents a global vision of an international strategy for the Islamic policy"

According to its hot lines, and in agreement with them, the local Islamic policies are elaborated in the various areas." The document recommends to "study the local and world centers authority, and the possibilities of placing them under influence", to "entering in contact with all new movements engaged in jiihad where that it is on planet", to "create cells of the Djihad in Palestine" and "to nourish the feeling of enmity towards the Jews".

All that with an aim "of coordinating Islamic work in only one direction for [... ] applying the capacity of God on the earth".

The Swiss investigators who studied file Al-Taqwa devoted several analyses to the Project and so that it represents.

A confidential document of the antiterrorist "Task force" set-up after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it evokes "a fundamental text thus to include/understand the long-term goals of the Brothers [ Moslem ]": "Entitled the Project, this document describes by the menu, the strategy planned to ensure a the growing influence of the Brotherhood on the Moslem world.

It is stipulated there that they [ Moslem Brothers ] do not have to act in the name of the Brotherhood but to infiltrate in the existing organizations. They cannot thus be located then neutralized."

A second report of the Swiss investigators affirms that the Project, and the other documents discovered at Youssef Nada, "confirm the part played by the Moslem Brothers at the same time in the inspiration and the support, direct or indirect, of radical Islam in the whole world".

Accordingly, the Project could play a part in creation by the Moslem Brothers and their heirs to a network of religious, educational and charitable institutions in Europe and in the United States.

The Project indeed recommends "to build institutions social, economic, scientific and medical, and to penetrate the field of the social services to be in liaison with the people".

To this end, it is necessary "to study the various political environments and the probabilities of success in each country". A Western person in charge who studied it described the Project as "a totalitarian ideology of infiltration which represents, in the long term, the greatest danger to the European companies": "the Project, it will be a danger in ten years, says it: one will see emerging in Europe the claim of a parallel system, the creation of "Moslem Parliaments", which already exists in Great Britain... The slow destruction of our institutions, our structures will start then." For this civil servant, who asked not to be quoted by name, the Project is not simply a text of reflexion, but a "passenger waybill" whose certain elements were implemented in the real world: it anticipates in particular the beginning of the guerrilla war against Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories, and the support given these last years by the Moslem Brothers to various armed islamist groups, of Bosnia in the Philippines.

The discovery of the Project raises also many questions which, for the time being, remain unanswered. The identity of its author, for example, remains unknown.

Youssef Nada, the custodian of the Project lasting nearly twenty years, simply said to the Swiss investigators that he did not write this text. Approached very often by Temps, he ended up explaining why the document was compiled by "Islamic researchers" but that it does not represent an official position of the Moslem Brothers. "I agree only with 15 or 20% of this text", he asserts. Why, in this case, to have preserved it at his place? "I do not know. I should have thrown it out."

The importance of the Project is due as much to its history, and that of the men who surround it, that with his contents. Its intellectual origins go up at the years 1960, when the "theorist as a chief" of the Moslem Brothers, Ramadan, finds refuge in Geneva. In September 1964, its newspaper El Muslimoun publishes a text inviting to launch a "ideological war" against the Occident. It was then a question of answering the creation of the State of Israel, considered by the islamist ones an element of a vast plot against the Islamic religion and its faithful: "This is why we are convinced that this elaborate ideological plan must be countered by an ideological plan quite as elaborate, and that it is necessary to answer its ideological attacks, with its ideological war, by an ideological war." The article explicitly refers to the "Protocol of Elders of Zion", a document manufactured by the Tsarist police force which describes an alleged Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Although it is a forgery, this text's anti-semitism is taken seriously in the Islamist media.

Last August, Wall Street Journal revealed that the "Protocol" was quoted during a recent meeting of the "European Council of the fatwas and research" (CEFR), an organization intended to advise the Moslems of Europe in their everyday life. According to a participant in the meeting, the Protocol shows the existence of a Jewish plot intended to destroy the values morals of the Moslem families. It is understood that animated such ideas, the islamist ones wanted to react by developing their own Project.

The intellectual guide of the Council of the fatwas, Yousouf Al-Qaradawi, was one of the principal shareholders of bank Al-Taqwa of Lugano. He is undoubtedly the islamist preacher most popular of Europe and the Arab world, and some of its ideas fall under the line line of the Project. Thus, in a text published in 1990, it proposed to develop the presence of the Islamic Movement within the "groups of Jihad", in order to eliminate "all the foreign influences" from the grounds of Islam, of Morocco in Indonesia. In spite of these obvious ideological resemblances, and the historical bonds of large thinkers of the Moslem Brothers with this document, the recent history of Islamism is not summarized with the only Project. And the expansion of Islam in Occident during last decades was planned by nobody: it results from the progressive installation of Moslem immigrants in Europe and in the United States. But the heirs to the Moslem Brothers knew how to benefit from this evolution to open a new space with their action and their ideas. Their declared objective always was "to protect" the Moslem communities, according to the expression of the sheik Qaradawi, from the "swirl of the ideas materialists which prevail in the West". Far from confirming this claim, the Project offers an important testimony of what could be the ulterior motives and the hidden objectives of the Islamic Movement, at the moment when the latter planned to reinforce its influence on the Moslem communities of Occident. The "Project" is published for the first time in the book of Sylvain Besson, "The conquest of the Occident", which will be available in bookshops from October 7.

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LE TEMPS - 6 Octobre 2005

L'islamisme à la conquête du monde

REVELATIONS.
En novembre 2001, lors d'une perquisition, des enquêteurs suisses découvrent le «Projet»: une ambitieuse stratégie destinée à «établir le règne de Dieu» sur toute la terre.

Est-il possible que le développement de l'islamisme dans le monde depuis vingt ans soit, au moins en partie, le produit d'une stratégie occulte, d'un plan délibéré de conquête du pouvoir? C'est la question politiquement incorrecte que pose l'étonnante découverte faite par des policiers suisses et italiens durant une perquisition menée près de Lugano, en novembre 2001.

Dans la villa de Youssef Nada, un banquier égyptien que les autorités américaines accusent d'avoir soutenu le terrorisme, les enquêteurs saisissent alors un document étonnant, demeuré secret depuis presque deux décennies: le «Projet», texte stratégique dont l'ambition suprême est «d'établir le règne de Dieu partout dans le monde».

L'enquête criminelle ouverte contre Youssef Nada, qui dirigeait la banque islamique Al-Taqwa de Lugano depuis sa création en 1988, a été classée en mai dernier. Mais le financier arabe, qui a démenti tout lien avec le terrorisme, a reconnu avoir été durant des années l'un des principaux dirigeants de la branche internationale des Frères musulmans, l'un des plus importants groupes islamistes contemporains. Fondée en Egypte en 1928, l'organisation des Frères musulmans a donné naissance à un vaste «Mouvement islamique» inspiré par ses idées, qui représente aujourd'hui la principale force se réclamant de l'islamisme dans le monde.

Le Projet est un texte de 14 pages, daté de décembre 1982, qui s'ouvre par le passage suivant: «Ce rapport présente une vision globale d'une stratégie internationale pour la politique islamique. Selon ses lignes directrices, et en accord avec elles, les politiques islamiques locales sont élaborées dans les différentes régions.»

Le document préconise d'«étudier les centres de pouvoir locaux et mondiaux, et les possibilités de les placer sous influence», d'«entrer en contact avec tout nouveau mouvement engagé dans le djihad où qu'il soit sur la planète», de «créer des cellules du djihad en Palestine» et de «nourrir le sentiment de ranc?ur à l'égard des juifs». Tout cela dans le but de «coordonner le travail islamique dans une seule direction pour […] consacrer le pouvoir de Dieu sur terre».

Les enquêteurs suisses qui ont étudié le dossier Al-Taqwa ont consacré plusieurs analyses au Projet et à ce qu'il représente. Un document confidentiel de la «Task Force» antiterroriste mise sur pied après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001 évoque ainsi «un texte fondamental pour comprendre les buts à long terme des Frères [musulmans]»: «Intitulé Le Projet, ce document décrit par le menu la stratégie envisagée pour assurer une prise d'influence grandissante de la Confrérie sur le monde musulman. Il y est stipulé que les [Frères musulmans] ne doivent pas agir au nom de la Confrérie mais s'infiltrer dans les organismes existants. Ils ne peuvent ainsi être repérés puis neutralisés.»

Un second rapport des enquêteurs suisses affirme que le Projet, et les autres documents découverts chez Youssef Nada, «confirment le rôle joué par les Frères musulmans à la fois dans l'inspiration et dans le soutien, direct ou indirect, à l'islam radical dans le monde entier».

Dans cette optique, le Projet a pu jouer un rôle dans la création par les Frères musulmans et leurs héritiers d'un réseau d'institutions religieuses, éducatives et caritatives en Europe et aux Etats-Unis. Le Projet préconise en effet de «construire des institutions sociales, économiques, scientifiques et médicales, et pénétrer le domaine des services sociaux pour être en contact avec le peuple».

Dans ce but, il faut «étudier les environnements politiques divers et les probabilités de réussite dans chaque pays».

Un responsable occidental qui l'a étudié décrit le Projet comme «une idéologie totalitaire d'infiltration qui représente, à terme, le plus grand danger pour les sociétés européennes»: «Le Projet, ce sera un danger dans dix ans, dit-il: on va voir émerger en Europe la revendication d'un système parallèle, la création de «parlements musulmans», ce qui existe déjà en Grande-Bretagne… Commencera alors la lente destruction de nos institutions, de nos structures.» Pour ce fonctionnaire, qui a demandé à ne pas être cité nommément, le Projet n'est pas un simple texte de réflexion, mais une «feuille de route» dont certains éléments ont été mis en ?uvre dans le monde réel: il préfigure notamment le début de la guérilla contre Israël dans les territoires palestiniens occupés, et le soutien apporté ces dernières années par les Frères musulmans à divers groupes islamistes armés, de la Bosnie aux Philippines.

La découverte du Projet soulève aussi beaucoup de questions qui, pour l'heure, demeurent sans réponse. L'identité de son auteur, par exemple, reste inconnue. Youssef Nada, le gardien du Projet durant près de vingt ans, a simplement dit aux enquêteurs suisses qu'il n'a pas écrit ce texte. Approché à de multiples reprises par Le Temps, il a fini par expliquer que le document a été rédigé par des «chercheurs islamiques» mais qu'il ne représente pas une position officielle des Frères musulmans. «Je ne suis d'accord qu'avec 15 ou 20% de ce texte», affirme-t-il. Pourquoi, dans ce cas, l'avoir conservé chez lui? «Je ne sais pas. J'aurais dû le jeter.»

L'importance du Projet tient autant à son histoire, et celle des hommes qui l'environnent, qu'à son contenu. Ses origines intellectuelles remontent aux années 1960, lorsque le «théoricien en chef» des Frères musulmans, Saïd Ramadan, trouve refuge à Genève. En septembre 1964, son journal El Muslimoun publie un texte appelant à lancer une «guerre idéologique» contre l'Occident. Il s'agissait alors de répondre à la création de l'Etat d'Israël, considérée par les islamistes comme un élément d'un vaste complot contre la religion musulmane et ses fidèles: «C'est pourquoi nous sommes convaincus que ce plan idéologique élaboré doit être contré par un plan idéologique tout aussi élaboré, et qu'il faut répondre à ses attaques idéologiques, à sa guerre idéologique, par une guerre idéologique.»

L'article fait explicitement référence au «Protocole des Sages de Sion», un document fabriqué par la police tsariste et qui décrit une conspiration juive pour dominer le monde. Bien qu'il s'agisse d'un faux, ce texte antisémite continue d'être pris au sérieux dans les milieux islamistes.

En août dernier, le Wall Street Journal révélait que le «Protocole» a été cité durant une récente séance du «Conseil européen des fatwas et de la recherche» (CEFR), un organisme destiné à conseiller les musulmans d'Europe dans leur vie quotidienne. Selon un participant à la réunion, le Protocole démontre l'existence d'un complot juif destiné à détruire les valeurs morales des familles musulmanes. On comprend qu'animés de telles idées, les islamistes aient voulu réagir en développant leur propre Projet.

Le maître à penser du Conseil des fatwas, Yousouf al-Qaradawi, était l'un des principaux actionnaires de la banque Al-Taqwa de Lugano. Il est sans doute le prédicateur islamiste le plus populaire d'Europe et du monde arabe, et certaines de ses idées s'inscrivent dans la droite ligne du Projet. Ainsi, dans un texte publié en 1990, il proposait de développer la présence du Mouvement islamique au sein des «groupes du djihad», afin d'éliminer «toutes les influences étrangères» des terres d'islam, du Maroc à l'Indonésie.

Malgré ces ressemblances idéologiques évidentes, et les liens historiques de grands penseurs des Frères musulmans avec ce document, l'histoire récente de l'islamisme ne se résume pas au seul Projet. Et l'expansion de l'islam en Occident au cours des dernières décennies n'a été planifiée par personne: elle résulte de l'installation progressive d'immigrés musulmans en Europe et aux Etats-Unis. Mais les héritiers des Frères musulmans ont su profiter de cette évolution pour ouvrir un nouvel espace à leur action et à leurs idées. Leur objectif déclaré a toujours été de «protéger» les communautés musulmanes, selon l'expression du cheikh Qaradawi, du «tourbillon des idées matérialistes qui prévalent à l'Ouest».

Loin de ce discours convenu, le Projet offre un témoignage important de ce que peuvent être les arrière-pensées et les objectifs cachés du Mouvement islamique, au moment où ce dernier tente de renforcer son emprise sur les communautés musulmanes d'Occident.

Le «Projet» est publié pour la première fois dans le livre de Sylvain Besson, «La conquête de l'Occident», qui sera disponible en librairie dès le 7 octobre.