Friday, November 20, 2015

Friday the 13th Paris Terror, the Assassination of JFK, Operation Gladio...and the Knights Templar?

Looking back on my entries here over the past eight years, while there are very few conspiracy-related subjects that I have an aversion to writing about, there is one area that I have avoided doing in-depth analysis on.  That would be the subject of secret societies.  Sure, if you run a search on this blog, you'll find entries where I'll either make a passing comment on Bilderberg or Skull and Bones, or I'll quote some other source that does.  But I've never made an effort to seriously research a secret society inside and out.  My reason, or excuse depending on your perspective, is that such an undertaking is beyond what I can verify to my own sense of satisfaction because - they're secret!  So usually I only feel comfortable talking about secret societies obliquely, rather than digging deeper into their history.

I'm not about to spell out a full history, but I'm going to dig a little deeper into the history of a secret society than usual on this post.  The reason is that there are two separate incidents I've been researching that, for different reasons, have bizarre connections with a secret society.  These incidents, both monumental historical events, are the assassination of JFK and the terror attacks in Paris last Friday.  The connections are due more to geography than any grand master plan: I've been researching aspects of the 'French Connection' theory regarding the JFK assassination and the November 13 Paris attacks, of course, took place in France.  But the secret society is one that has a very ancient history in France that beguiles the imagination - the Knights Templar.

Now for the brief history lesson, courtesy of The Temple and the Lodge by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, pages 41-55.  The Knights Templar began in 1118, supposedly to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land.  There may have been more ambitious designs from the beginning.  The Templars were said to have consisted of only nine knights until 1128, though their records show such prestigious additional recruits as Count Hugues de Champagne (whose vassal, Hugues de Payens, was the Templars first Grand Master) and Fulk, Comte d' Anjou, father of Geoffrey Plantagenet and grandfather of Henry II of England.  1128 was when the Council of Troyes gave them monastic rule, which essentially made them soldiers living as monks.  To quote page 43 directly:

From 1128 on, the Order expanded at an extraordinary pace, receiving not just a massive influx of recruits, but also immense donations of both money and property.  Within a year, they owned lands in France, England, Scotland, Spain and Portugal.  Within a decade, their possessions would extend into Italy, Austria, Germany, Hungary and Constantinople.  In 1131, the king of Aragon bequeathed to them a third of his domains.  By the mid-twelfth century, the Temple had already begun to establish itself as the single most wealthy and powerful institution in Christendom, with the sole exception of the Papacy.

While their power had significant influence in the realm of the military and politics during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, their most lasting influence was probably in the realm of finance.  To quote pages 47-48:

In effect, the origins of modern banking can be attributed to the Order of the Temple.  At the peak of their power, the Templars handled much, if not most, of the available capital in Western Europe.  They pioneered the concept of credit facilities, as well as the allocation of credit for commercial development and expansion.  They performed, in fact, virtually all the functions of a twentieth-century merchant bank.

It was because of their wealth and resources that the Templars became a target in the beginning of the fourteenth century, at a time they had grown militarily weak, to a monarch of exceeding greed and ambition, King Philippe IV of France.  After compiling a catalog of charges from infiltrators and renegades, he conducted the equivalent of a secret police raid at dawn on October 13, 1307 to seize and place under arrest all Templars in France, place their preceptories under royal sequestration, and confiscate their goods.  It's possible many were tipped off; the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay burned many of their books and extant rules before escaping and Philippe never did find the 'treasure of the Templars' that was the main plot point of the movie National Treasure.  But there were numerous arrests and the wild confessions extracted from Templars through hideous torture included infanticide, abortion, homosexuality, spitting and ritualistically trampling on the cross and worship of a demonic power called 'Baphomet.'  They were officially dissolved by papal decree on March 22, 1312, without an official verdict on their guilt or innocence.  Jacques de Molay was captured and roasted to death over a slow fire on March 18, 1314 in Paris, France.

Yet the influence of the Knights Templar was so strong that even after the Order was abolished, they seemed to live on.  The Temple and the Lodge explores the historical links between the Templars and the Freemasons, but it goes beyond that.  To quote page 41:

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as we shall see, certain rites of Freemasonry assiduously sought to establish a pedigree dating back to the Templars.  At the same time, other, neo-Templar, organisations began to appear, similarly claiming a pedigree derived from the original Order.  Today, there are no fewer than five organisations in existence alleging one or another species of direct descent form the white-mantled warrior-monks of the Middle Ages.

It is through this neo-Templar lens that I recently found a connection with the assassination of JFK.  I had heard several months ago that there was a new book coming out by David Talbot titled The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government.  I was somewhat curious, any examination of the dark deeds of Allen Dulles requires a serious analysis of his role in the JFK assassination.  But the excerpts from that book on the WhoWhatWhy website that seemslikeadream on RI brought to my attention really piqued my interest.  It's worth reading the entire three part series of excerpts on the failed coup against French President Charles de Gaulle titled "JFK Assassination Plot Mirrored in 1961 France," but there were a couple sections in Part One that I found particularly revealing.

In panic-gripped Paris, reports of US involvement in the coup filled newspapers across the political spectrum. Geneviève Tabouis, a columnist for Paris-Jour, zeroed in directly on Dulles as the main culprit in an article headlined “The Strategy of Allen Dulles.”

Other news reports revealed that Jacques Soustelle — a former governor-general of Algeria who joined the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS), a notorious anti-de Gaulle terrorist group — had a luncheon meeting with Richard Bissell in Washington the previous December.


That name Soustelle was familiar to me. I ran a search through my blog and found that I had previously written about him in The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Operation Gladio and the Assassination of JFK. Apparently De Gaulle discovered that one of Sostelle's largest contributors was Ferenc Nagy, longtime asset of CIA Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner and President of Centro Mondiale Commerciale, who had on their board of directors another CIA asset (sorry, agent): Clay Shaw, indicted for the murder of JFK by Jim Garrison.

A couple other important points to remember: First, Richard Bissell, who replaced Wisner as the CIA's DDP when Wisner had a nervous breakdown in 1958, was one of three CIA bigwigs fired by President Kennedy for the failure at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the other two being Deputy Director Charles Cabell and Director Allen Dulles.  Second, OAS, the terrorist group Jacques Soustelle had joined, was directly involved, according to Jonathan Kwitny and Daniele Ganser, with the French stay-behind army that was part of a scheme concocted by Allen Dulles and carried out by NATO known as Operation Gladio.

Since Operation Gladio is the brainchild of Allen Dulles, I really hope Talbot details as much of this as possible.  In the WhoWhatWhy excerpt, Talbot doesn't call out Gladio by name but refers to its alignment with the failed coup and names a supporter of particular interest:

De Gaulle was particularly determined to shut down the secret “stay-behind army” that Dulles had organized in France — a network of anti-Communist militants with access to buried arms caches who were originally recruited to resist a potential Soviet invasion but were now aligned with the rebellious generals and other groups plotting to overthrow French democracy.

De Gaulle ordered his young security adviser, Constantin Melnik, to shut down the murky, stay-behind network of fascists, spooks, and criminals, which Melnik agreed was “very dan- gerous for the security of France.”

But Melnik, who was trained at the RAND Corporation, a leading think tank for the US national security complex, was another admirer of Dulles, and the stay-behind under-ground continued to operate in France. Melnik — who was the son of a White Russian general and the grandson of Czar Nicolas II’s personal physician, who was executed along with the imperial family — was as passionately anti-Soviet as his US security colleagues.


Melnik has a much darker and fascinating history than what is indicated above. In addition to his Gladio ties, there is his connection with the Knights Templar of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple (OSTS). I'm highlighting the part pertaining to Melnik, but the whole article is great:

Constantin Melnik

Observers have noted that there are many parallels between the OTS and the original “Templar Order” in France, the OSTS. A leading member of the OSTS was Constantin Melnik, head of the then French external intelligence agency SDECE. Melnik conceived the so-called La Main Rouge (“the Red Hand”), a group of state-sponsored terrorists that specifically operated in the Algerian War in the 1950s. Several terrorist attacks were attributed to this organisation and seen as attacks against the French state, whereas they were actually committed by the state—a so-called false-flag operation.

Melnik has since admitted his responsibility in the creation of the fiction of the Red Hand, but he has denied any involvement in the Templar story. Instead, he has pointed the finger at the KGB! He claims that, in 1958, it sent over people to the area he lived in, dressed up as Templars, in an effort to discredit him! As he was later repeatedly seen at the OSTS headquarters in Villié Morgon, near Lyon, his claims regarding the KGB, even if true, do not change his personal and extensive involvement in the OSTS.

What Constantin Melnik does not dispute either is that he received his training from the Rand Corporation, a company whose principal customer is the Pentagon. He also accepts that it was François de Grossouvre who was instrumental in his return to France in 1983. De Grossouvre was the person in charge of Gladio in the Lyons region. Geoffroy d’Aumale and Jean-Pierre Faure, in their Guide de l’espionnage et du contre-espionnage (“Espionage and Counter-espionage Guide”), claim the same. De Grossouvre would later commit suicide inside his office in the Elysée Palace, the residence of the French president, though many believe that he was “suicided”.

Former members of the OSTS have noted that there definitely was a military aspect to the OSTS. Though there were mass gatherings of members in which apparently esoteric if not magical rituals were performed, there were also weekends of a slightly different nature. One member stated that on one such weekend, a group was taken to a secluded valley in which their guides began to show them extremely high-tech machine guns which definitely came from a military arsenal. They were asked to begin target practice, an offer which some of the OSTS members immediately declined and then most annulled their membership or let it expire. It therefore seems clear that the OSTS had always been, or at some point became, exposed to Gladio, and members were often unknowingly invited to begin to train as resistance fighters in the Gladio network.

Within the Gladio framework, the OTS begins to make more sense. If the OTS was part of the Gladio network, it would explain why it was led by Luc Jouret, a Belgian ex-military official with ties to Gladio. It explains the enormous sums of money that were transferred, and it explains what happened in the final days of the OTS. If the OTS was a Gladio cell, it seems that the French Ministry of the Interior had indeed infiltrated this cell and may have been responsible for neutralising it (for Gladio was controlled by the CIA and NATO, not the governments of the countries in which it operated). One means of neutralisation is to kill all members…


Gladio terror has morphed considerably over the decades.  I've previously detailed the evolution of Operation Gladio to Gladio Plan B; that the War on Terror is the next stage of the Gladio Strategy of Tension, which would make 9/11 an Operation Gladio false-flag operation on steroids.  Should the same designation be automatically bestowed on the Friday the 13th Paris terror attacks?  Before doing that, I think it's imperative to clarify just how I believe the relationship between Gladio B and terror facades such as al-Qaeda and ISIS works.  I don't believe that every single act of terror that ISIS takes credit for is a Gladio op.  Remember that ISIS operative in Garland, Texas who tried to ambush a draw-a-cartoon-of-Mohammed event with his roommate earlier this May that the police ended up killing?  Amateur hour.  No trace of Gladio coordination by my assessment.  I don't believe the vast majority of rank-and-file members of these terror groups comprehend whose pawn in which game they actually serve.  You've got the grunts enticed and/or coerced into helping their poor families by doing the true believers jihadi shit, which Lydia Wilson for The Nation did an excellent job of detailing interviewing ISIS prisoners.  Above them is the mid-level hardcore fundamentalist jihadis, who use whatever tactics are necessary to keep the grunts doing their job.  The top-level may be true believers or not, but that's where Gladio infiltration is essential for manipulating terrorist operations for maximum exploitation.  That's what's important to remember about their relationship: it's not about Gladio B operatives controlling everything ISIS does, it's about manipulating and facilitating the big terror attacks for the media to saturate and coerce your perception so that the Military-Industrial Complex can achieve whatever objective the terror attack was coordinated to obtain.


That said, the evidence that has been accrued within the last week is really starting to make the Friday the 13th Paris terror attacks look more and more like France's 9/11.  Just like 9/11, there were multiple warnings from intelligence agencies of various countries (Israel and Iraq, so far) that an attack was imminent.  Just as there were multiple-site terror exercises planned for New York City and Washington D.C. on or around 9/11, there was a multi-site exercise planned for the morning of November 13, 2015 in Paris, according to EMT and Charlie Hebdo chronicler Patrick Pelloux.  In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act (which was actually drafted prior to 9/11) was passed to increase surveillance on everyone and the military was given carte blanche.  France is reacting the same way to their 9/11, recently extending their state of emergency to three months, which basically makes France a police state until the end of February next year.

But there are three things in particular that from my perspective look like Gladio B fingerprints.  First, the phony passports.  Just as with 9/11, where a terrorist passport was magically found among the wreckage of the World Trade Center (not to mention the exploding plane that crashed into the WTC) completely intact, this time we have two Syrian passports found on the bodies of two of the Paris attackers.  Despite the uncritical acceptance by the Radical Establishment Media (REM) of this story at face value, there are multiple sources confirming these passports are fake.  One source makes an accurate assessment as to the reason why: to stigmatize Syrian refugees (that objective, among the American right-wing, is working like gangbusters).  The second source narrows down the where: most likely these phony passports were made in Turkey.  I've written multiple entries on the importance of Turkey in Gladio B operations.  Second, there is the bizarre story of "Sébastien" (no last name necessary, like some prima donna rock star) who claims he was ISIS's guide in the Bataclan, yet is an acclaimed hero in European REM who uncritically accept that story as well as his claim to have saved a pregnant woman hanging outside the building.  MacCruiskeen on RI has done a great job documenting the suspicious details and outright bullshit on display in this story.  The entire account reeks of psy-op, which is the hallmark of Gladio's Strategy of Tension.  Third, the claim that the Friday the 13th Paris terror attacks were planned in Belgium.  It's interesting to note that in addition to being "the capital of political Islam in continental Europe," Brussels, Belgium is also where NATO headquarters are located.  It's too bad that instead of focusing on the NATO aspect, as Gearoid O Colmain so brilliantly did, the REM focus on Belgium consists of calling Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the chief patsy of the Paris attacks the "chief architect."  Like the patsy before him whose pose he mimics, (thanks Joao), Abaaoud was conveniently killed.



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So what's the connection with the Knight's Templar?  There isn't a direct connection so much as an esoteric connection.  The dates of most significant terror attacks are chosen deliberately in commemoration of some other significant event.  (The Oklahoma bombing on April 19, 1995 was chosen to coincide with the Waco siege of 1993, for example.)  I've yet to find major significance with the date of November 13 prior to this year.  I suppose it's possible the date was chosen to commemorate the truck bombing in Riyadh in 1995 that killed five Americans and two Indians, but I doubt it.   Perhaps the significance of the choice isn't rooted in November the 13th, but Friday the 13th.  The association of this date with terror is something rooted deeply in our culture.  It goes beyond the umpteen returns of Jason Voorhees in the popular Friday the 13th film franchise.  One of the earliest historical examples where this date had a significant impact is one of the darkest days in Templar history.  To quote page 54 from The Temple and the Lodge:

The Temple, it must be remembered, was, with the sole exception of the Papacy, the most important, most powerful, most prestigious, most apparently unshakable institution of its age.  At the time of Philippe's attack, it was nearly two centuries old and was regarded as one of the central pillars of Western Christendom.  For most of its contemporaries, it seemed as immutable, as durable, as permanent as the Church herself.  That such an edifice should be so summarily demolished rocked the foundation upon which rested the assumptions and beliefs of an epoch.  Thus, for example, Dante, in The Divine Comedy, expresses his shock and his sympathy for the persecuted 'White Mantles'.  Indeed, the superstition which holds Friday the 13th to be a day of misfortune is believed to stem from Philippe's initial raids on Friday, 13 October 1307.


It remains to be seen just how bad the current Friday the 13th attack will rock the foundation upon which the assumptions and beliefs of our epoch rest.