FTR-233 Kevin Coogan's Conceptualization of the Order (One 30-minute segment) (Sources are noted in parentheses.)

1. Drawing on material from Kevin's seminal work Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and The Postwar Fascist International (soft cover, Autonomedia, copyright 1999, ISBN I-57027-039-2), this program sets forth a hypothetical construct advanced in the book. Hypothesizing an international fascist milieu originating from (though not coterminous with) the ideological orientation of the Waffen SS, Kevin terms this milieu “The Order.” (As explained in the program, this entity is not to be confused with the 1980's American Nazi organization of the same name.)

2. Beginning with analysis of Kevin's discussion of the work of fascist occultist Julius Evola in Vienna during the conclusion of World War II, the program documents Evola's operations on behalf of the SD (the SS intelligence service.) “Evola’s SD work at the end of the war is shrouded in mystery. Historian Richard Drake says that while he was in Vienna, ‘Evola performed vital liaisons for the SS as Nazi Germany sought to recruit a European army for the defense of the Continent against the Soviet Union and the United States.’ According to his own account, Evola spent his time living incognito while doing ‘intellectual’ research. But what kind of research?” (Dreamer of the Day, pp. 319-20.)

3. “While Evola was in Vienna, the SD supplied him with a series of arcane texts plundered from private libraries and rare book collections. The SD bureau that provided him with these documents was Amt VII, an obscure branch that served as an RSHA research library. With this precious archive, Evola closely studied Masonic rituals and translated certain ‘esoteric texts’ for a book called Historie Secrete des Societes Secretes. It never appeared because Evola claimed that all his documents were lost during the Russian bombardment.” (Ibid.; p. 320.)

4. “But why would the SD actively involve itself in Evola’s arcane research at a time when hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were sweeping into the Reich? And why would Evola choose to live in Vienna under a false name and devote his time to such a strange project? Could the answer to this question be found in the cryptic reference to Evola’s ‘efforts to establish a secret international order’ in the 1938 SS report?” (Idem.)

5. “I believe that Evola’s Vienna project was intimately linked to the development of what I will call ‘the Order,’ a new kind of Knights Templar designed to successfully function sub-rosa. Well before the end of World War II, the intelligence and financial networks of the Third Reich were hard at work preparing underground networks to survive the coming Allied occupation. Escape lines to South America and the Middle East were organized. Bank accounts were created in Switzerland and other neutral nations to finance the underground with plunder the Nazis had looted from occupied Europe. But how was this secret empire to be managed, except by a virtually invisible ‘government in exile’?” (Idem.)

6. Like SS chief Himmler, Evola saw the SS as the successors to the Kshatriya class (the Hindu warrior caste.) Seeing Germany and Europe as succumbing to “barbarian invasion,” Evola saw a pagan, anti-Christian mysticism as necessarily antithetical to the Judeo-Christian culture which, he felt, had led the West to decline before the “Bolshevik hordes” of the Soviet Union and the "chewing gum imperialism" of the United States. “For years, Evola had been fascinated by knightly orders as expressions of the Kshatriya caste of warrior aristocrats. In the formal structure of the SS, he saw the precursor to a new Ordenstaat, a State ruled by an Order. He also understood the great advantages provided by medieval orders of chivalry due to their transnational composition. Crusading orders, like the Knights Templar and the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, were pan-European, with separate ‘national’ sections (‘langues,’ or tongues) unified through a Council presided over by a Grand Master. After the collapse of fascist state power, a new Order, an ‘invisible college’ of sorts, was needed not only to manipulate bank accounts and travel schedules but to have policy-making functions. Nor could it simply be run under the auspices of the Vatican, since Evola believed that Rome’s downfall had been caused by the acceptance of Christianity by the dominant faction of the Roman elite. The Emperor Constantine’s official embrace of the ‘gentle Nazarene’ in 313 A.D. had culminated, a hundred years later, in Alaric’s sack of Rome. With the American chewing-gum imperialists threatening in the West, and the new Huns sweeping in from the East, was the situation in1945 really so different? The Order was a vessel for those ‘Hermetic’ elements of the conservative Revolution, old ruling class, and new Nazi elite not entirely beholden to the political, cultural, and religious ‘Guelf’ wing of the European aristocracy which remained ideologically to the continued propagation of the ruling Christian mythology.” (Ibid., pp. 320-1.)

7. “This account of the origins of the Order is obviously speculative, and I advance it as hypothesis, not fact. Yet if I am correct the SD really did have a need for Evola’s unique talents. With his extensive knowledge of matters esoteric and occult; his fascination with secret societies and knightly Orders; his Waffen SS transnationalism; his ties to some of the highest figures in fascism, Nazism, and movements like the Iron guard; and his loyal service to the SD, Baron Evola was a perfect candidate to help theorize a new under ground Order. As the SD’s equivalent of Albert Pike, the former Confederate Army general who designed the rituals for the Scottish Rite Masons in the late 1800’s, Evola’s task was to help create the inner organizational and ritual structure for the Grand Masters of a secret Shamballah whose financial nerve center was carefully hidden away in Swiss bank accounts.” (Ibid.; p. 321.)

8. Kevin felt that this organization (reflecting the ideological stance of an element of the Waffen SS) would be pan-European in scope and orientation, and not necessarily entirely chauvinistic from a Nordic or Germanic racial and national standpoint. Nourished by bank accounts secreted abroad, this hypothetical organization functions in an underground fashion. (The funds that nourished this institution would necessarily have derived from the Bormann Organization, discussed by Mr. Emory in numerous programs, including FTR 's 87, 90, 99, 102, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127, 134, 145, 152, 155, 158, 177, 179, 180, 187, 189, 193, 194, 195, 215, 216, 218, 219, 224, 226, 232.)

9. The Order appears to have established ostensibly friendly relations with the West. “With the war rapidly coming to an end, however, the Order lacked the time to implement its plans. With support from the top RSHA leadership, a deception game was begun with both Allied intelligence and the Catholic Church. Utilizing Wall Street and Vatican fears of communism, some of Himmler’s top cronies, like SS General Karl Wolff, became Damascus-road converts to a ‘kinder, gentler’ SS eager to establish friendly relations with both the Americans and the Holy See.” (Idem.)

10. This organization may very well have begun working with the U.S. intelligence apparat after the war, as evidenced by, among other things, the collaboration between post-war SS elements and the CIA. Coogan hypothesizes that CIA director Allen Dulles may have played a primary role in such an accord. “Behind the strategy of tension there lurked what appears to have been a devil’s pact between the Order and Allen Dulles. Until Dulles was named CIA director by President Eisenhower (and his brother, John Foster Dulles, became director by President Eisenhower (and his brother, John Foster Dulles, became secretary of state), operational links to the Nazi underground came primarily from the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), headed by Dulles protégé Frank Wisner, the former chief of OSS operations in Bucharest, Romania. After the war, Dulles, Wisner, Angleton, and OPC’s Carmel Offie virtually ran covert operations in Italy as their own private affair.” (Ibid., p. 334.)

11. “The OPC’s budget was $4.7 million in 1949. Three years later, when Dulles was still only CIA deputy director, it had reached $82 million. OPC personnel had humped from 302 to 6,954. OPC was officially incorporated into the CIA in 1952 as the Agency’s directorate of Plans. In1956, after President Eisenhower established the Killian Commission to investigate the Agency, it was discovered that more than half of the CIA’s personnel and 80 percent of its budget had been devoted not to intelligence-gathering but to psychological and political warfare programs. Throughout this entire time, the Dulles network was intimately involved in complex deals with factions inside the postwar SS.” (Idem.)

12. Another influence on a Dulles/Order collaborative relationship may have been psychologist Carl Jung, who was connected to Dulles and to the Third Reich. “Did Dulles offer to protect elements of the SS in return for its support for CIA-backed anti-Soviet operations in Europe and the Third World? Did he think that granting the Order a certain amount of autonomy was a small price to pay for bringing it into the American camp? Might he even have been personally compromised in some way, or manipulated by the Dulles family psychiatrist, Carl Jung? Men Among the Ruins, then, may have been less a concession by Evola to American power than a signal that some sort of understanding reached by Dulles and Wolff at the end of the war was now fully operational.” (Ibid., p. 334.)

13. “Jung also treated Dulles’s wife, clover, for years. One of Jung’s assistants, Mary Bancroft, was an OSS operative in Switzerland as well as Allen Dulles’s mistress. Like Evola, Jung was an expert in myth, symbol, and psyche with a complex and ambiguous relationship to the Third Reich.” (Ibid.; p. 340.)

14. Significantly, the Order appears to have overlapped, and also worked with, elements of the East Bloc, including former Soviet and East German national security officials. The organization also maintained contacts with “anti-imperialist,” Third World liberation movements. “[Jan] Paulus then reported that the British had uncovered the fact that two Russian generals, Bulganin and Kubalov, were working closely with the Nazis; they also found that the Russians had set up a counterpart to General Matthew Ridgeway’s SHAPE, headed by a Generl Shugaev, in East Germany. The British had ‘conclusive evidence.’ That the [Werner] Naumann circle maintained close ties to General Vincenz Muller, the brains behind the East German police. Paulus thought that Churchill wanted to use this information both to warn Washington that Germany was unreliable and to gain leverage over Adenauer, even to the point of being able to topple his government if necessary. (Ibid., p. 369.)

15. “He said that ‘Britain has an extremely extensive dossier about the Nazi activities which she will reveal later in case Eisenhower decides to push his broad German policy too far. For instance, the British have conclusive evidence that the Nazi activities have been financed by the Ruhr industrialists . . . Additional evidence that the Ruhr industrialists have been collaborating very extensively with the Nazis is the fact when [former Nazi finance minister] Dr. Schacht opened his bank in Dusseldorf, the minister of interior and the minister of economics were present.’” (Idem.)

16. “The British particularly feared the Naumann circle’s astonishing influence in the Middle East. According to a March 1953 report by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League (NSANL), Dr. Gustav Scheel, a Bruderschaft leader arrested with Naumann, maintained excellent ties to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. German corporations wishing to do business in the Middle East and Africa first had to approach Naumann, Scheel, Skorzeny, and the Grand Mufti. Scheel was especially close to Iran’s nationalist leader, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, and supported Iranian efforts to nationalize Western oil companies.” (Idem.) (For more about the Naumann circle, see FTR#180, RFA37. For more about the Grand Mufti, see the long series about the events in, and around, 9/11.)

17. In addition, the Order appears to have exploited its contacts within both East and West blocs to further its own fascistic and elitist agenda, playing both sides against the middle during the Cold War. “Any purely secular interpretation of the divisions in the far right between the ‘pro-Russian’ and the ‘pro-American’ factions of the Black International that avoids the ‘occult’ would conclude that political differences divided the two tendencies. An Order, however, is not structured along conventional political lines. Such an organization can dictate sharp turns and reversals in seemingly fixed political logics because the ‘political,’ crudely understood, is not the motivating force.” (Ibid. p. 360.)

18. “Whether Yockey or anyone else tilted East or West, and at what time, and to what degree, and for how long, and under what conditions, was essentially a tactical question. The Order, like any intelligence agency, was a kind of octopus with many tentacles, not jus a ‘left’ and ‘right’ one. While I believe that there were legitimate policy arguments inside the postwar underground, as might be expected, I am not at all sure that it is meaningful to conceptualize a split inside the Order along rigid ‘East’/ ‘West’ lines. An organization like the Order was necessary precisely to prevent the total domination of postwar Europe by either the Americans or the Russians. By playing off the U.S. and USSR against one another, the Order equally ensured its own ability to survive and prosper. In music, the basic theme can sometimes be quite simple. The real test is how well you play the complex variations.” (Idem.)

It should also be remembered that Francis Parker Yockey, Julius Evola and “the Order” considered the United States to be the greater threat. “There was, in fact, little ideological difference between Evola and Yockey. Like Yockey, Evola believed that the American cultural threat to Europe was far greater than anything the Russians could come up with.” (Ibid.; pp. 359-60.) (See also: FTR #'s 185, 188, 213, 221, 231 as well as RFA #'s 4, 22, M19, M21 the various Archive Shows and FTR programs referenced in those broadcasts.) (Recorded on 7/2/2000.)