8. Private Club and Secret Service Armageddon

By the mid-1970s, the Cercle Pinay had succeeded in creating an international contact network of groups working on anti-communist and counter-subversion propaganda. But despite such wide-ranging contacts, the various components of the Cercle network, brought together to defend the conservative cause, felt their vision of the world to be threatened as never before. Between 1974 and 1976, a paranoid feeling of apocalypse, of imminent Armageddon spread through the private clubs, the lobby rooms and the secret services throughout Europe: the Left was on the rise! In Germany, despite a barrage of smears and attack ads, Willy Brandt had triumphed in the 1972 elections; after his resignation in 1974, the new Chancellor Helmut Schmidt led the SPD towards a strong showing in the 1976 elections. In Britain, humiliated by the unions, the Conservative government fell, and Labour’s Harold Wilson won the two 1974 elections. In France and in Belgium, the Left seemed well-placed to break the electoral monopoly of the conservatives. In the Iberian Peninsula, the longstanding geopolitical stability was soon overturned: in Portugal, Marcelo Caetano’s dictatorship crumbled before the left-wing soldiers of the Armed Forces Movement; in Spain, the Generalissimo died, and democratic elections were called. This chapter documents the efforts of the ‘International Right’ to defend apartheid and the Shah of Iran and to assist the election efforts of Franz Josef Strauss and Ronald Reagan.