RIM: London's
narco-terrorist
international
by Jeffrey Steinberg
In parts I and II of this series, EIR presented a detailed profile of two major components of the new terrorist international:
- The "afghansi" mujahideen apparatus of nominally Islamist mercenaries for hire, spawned by the Afghanistan War (1979-89), now engaged in an irregular warfare offensive stretching from North Africa into France and reaching the streets of America;
- The São Paulo Forum, operationally headed by Cuba's Fidel Castro, but actually run out of London by the British Crown and its secret intelligence services, now conducting a war against every nation-state of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States.
The third, and concluding, part of this series, deals with the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), an organization that could be called the "narco-terrorist international." We also provide a dossier on the Basque separatist-terrorist group ETA (Euskadi and Freedom), the model for the new brand of terrorism that is now emerging.
RIM has strong ties to both the "afghansis" and the São Paulo Forum. An amalgam of nominally Maoist terrorist organizations and guerrilla movements, it was founded in London in 1984. For years, its headquarters and publishing operations were located in the Russell House in Nottingham, England, named for the late Lord Bertrand Russell. RIM's journal, A World to Win, was published for years by Russell Press, an affiliate of the one-worldist Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.
To this day, RIM enjoys the protection of the British Crown. Its current offices are located in London, which French government officials have recently labeled the "headquarters for world terrorism."
Mazzini revisited
The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement can be understood as a revival of the mid-nineteenth-century Young Europe movement of British agent Giuseppe Mazzini, which was personally steered by British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston (see EIR, April 15, 1994, "Lord Palmerston's Multicultural Human Zoo"). Mazzini and Palmerston manipulated radical ethnic movements of every stripe imaginable, to further the divide-and-conquer strategy of the British Empire.
Today, among the dozen or so organizations that formally belong to RIM, one finds some of the most brutal narco-terrorist gangs in the world, beginning with Peru's Shining Path.
Closely allied to RIM are the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA)—both ruthless killer gangs that finance their activities by trafficking in Anatolian and Central Asian opium, in partnership with the "afghansis" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both the PKK and ASALA are important pawns in London's geopolitical destabilizations along the southern tier of the former Soviet Union. ASALA is ostensibly fighting for a "Greater Armenia," to be carved out of sections of Turkey and Azerbaijan; while the PKK pushes a separatist Kurdistan, cut from Iranian, Turkish, and Iraqi territory. Some of these disputed territories overlap, and often these gangs can be pitted one against the other—if it serves London's strategy.
At the same time, the PKK, ASALA, the Greek terrorist EOKA-B, and the Turkish Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist (a formal member of RIM that has engaged in a campaign of terror against London's number one geopolitical target in Europe: Germany) share training camps, weapons supplies, and narcotics-smuggling and money-laundering routes.
Sikh separatists who assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on Oct. 31, 1984, are among the leading RIM allies in South Asia. The Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were behind the assassination of her son, former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and are another crucial component of the region's burgeoning guns-for-drugs trade, are also allied to RIM. These groups are also part of the "afghansi" apparatus, as we documented in Part I (EIR, Oct. 13), and both groups attended the founding conference of RIM in London in March 1984.
London's 'Mao' card
This worldwide association of killer gangs is tied together by the insane ideology of Maoism. One of the most brutal episodes in the history of the twentieth century was Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966-76), which resulted in the decimation of China's scientific and intellectual elites, the depopulation of urban centers, and the enslavement and murder of tens of millions of people at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards. It was perhaps the most shocking instance of self-imposed malthusianism in modern history, and it spawned even more hideous rates of mass murder in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Mao's Cultural Revolution also set the stage for British pawn Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran, with its own murderous Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) and its axiomatic rejection of all things western.
This assault against all expressions of modern civil society and scientific and technological progress, and this clinical case of mass suicide and mass brainwashing, also formed the model for the 1980s rise of Peru's Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). As the dossier below shows, Shining Path was synthetically created by a collection of Sorbonne-trained radical social engineers, out to brutalize and dehumanize the very Peruvian peasants they "recruited" to the revolution. Abimael Guzmán, Shining Path's "Chairman Gonzalo," was in China during the Cultural Revolution, along with fellow Sorbonne graduate Pol Pot, and much of the leadership of the Revolutionary Union (later, the Revolutionary Communist Party USA), the initiating agency of RIM.
But it would be a mistake to presume that any of these so-called revolutionaries were principally agents of the Chinese Communists, despite the Beijing training and the intimate ties to sections of the Chinese leadership. The use of Maoism as a "paradigm-shifting" ideology in the West was orchestrated top-down from London. The Chinese Communist leadership was itself greatly influenced during the 1920s by the work of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, who traveled together through China for two years, left a hideous, lasting impact on the Chinese educational system, and trained the entire first generation of the Chinese Communist Party leadership (see article, p. 7).
The intelligence community controllers
During the mid-1960s, a group of London-trained agents and agents-of-influence propagandized for the "Cultural Revolution" among drug-infested student radicals in the West, creating groups like the Revolutionary Union (RU) and the October League in the United States and scores of Maoist sects in Europe.
Henry Kissinger, who as President Nixon's national security adviser, initiated the opening to China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, had a personal hand in this effort, through his collaboration with William Hinton, the sponsor of the RU (and, later, of RIM), and the leading propagandist of Maoism in the United States.
Hinton had spent much of World War II in China as a propaganda analyst with the Office of War Information. He stayed on with the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration until 1953, during which time he wrote a laudatory account of life in a Chinese farming village during the consolidation of the Maoist Revolution. Hinton's notes were seized by U.S. Customs upon his return to the United States; he was placed under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee; and the stage was set for him to emerge as a radical hero in 1967, when the first of his books propagandizing the Cultural Revolution, Fanshen, was published.
The entire Oxford and Cambridge University Orientalist apparatus mobilized to build up Hinton as the leading popular scholar on life in Maoist China. Cambridge University's Joseph Needham, perhaps the senior British intelligence officer for China, boosted Fanshen as "absolute necessity" reading; Oxford don Felix Greene (who trained RU founder and retired Air Force intelligence officer Capt. H. Bruce Franklin) blessed it as "the most important book that has yet been written about China at the time of the Communist Revolution"; and Edgar Snow, Britain's leading propagandist of the Maoist cause, labeled it the greatest sociological profile of rural China ever compiled.
Another pivotal figure in building up a synthetic Maoist ideology among western 1960s and '70s radicals was the Australian socialist Wilfred Burchett. He became the leading Asia correspondent for the U.S. National Guardian, a weekly radical newspaper that was originally launched by the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe (SHAEF) as a propaganda organ for the immediate postwar "de-Nazification" program. Lord Russell played a prominent role in that effort, through a British intelligence "re-education" center at Wilton Park, England, which brainwashed a whole stratum of future German leaders. Burchett's British intelligence sponsor in this early phase was Cedric Belfrage.
In 1971, Burchett moved to Paris, where he served as a secret back channel for Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam peace talks. As a reward for his efforts, Kissinger lifted a longstanding U.S. travel ban on Burchett, and, in 1976, Burchett toured 25 college campuses all across the United States, adding his voice to the propaganda outpouring on the glories of Mao's "anti-bourgeois" Cultural Revolution.
The third patron of the RU was another leading Russellite, Paul Jacobs, the right-hand man of British ideologue Robert Maynard Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago, the founder of the Aspin Institute for Humanistic Studies, and the head of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a training ground for future American radicals. Jacobs, a self-described "professional revolutionary," trained early RU cadre in labor insurgency, and arranged for the nascent Maoist group to get splashy news coverage for their role in a strike by workers at an oil refinery in Richmond, California.
During this formative period, Hinton and Kissinger also drew upon the sevices of some senior figures within the Canadian intelligence establishment, including Chester Ronning, Rev. James Endicott, and Paul Lin—all leading figures in Canada's extensive China lobby. RU members were brought to Canada and let in on the creation of a phony "Black September" Arab terrorist cell, operating under the cover of the Montreal offices of Middle East Airlines. They amassed a large cache of explosives, and planned to carry out terrorist attacks against Jewish-American targets, according to government files and eyewitness accounts provided in court proceedings. Kissinger apparently planned to use such "bloody shirt" terrorist incidents to bolster U.S. support for Israel at the same time that he was manipulating events toward a new Middle East war.
This was one of the first instances in which the Maoist networks were set loose on behalf of a British geopolitical game. As the accompanying report details, it was by no means the last.
