By Karl Bernd Esser.
Recently, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas demanded more transparency from China regarding the Wuhan Institute, but avoided public accusations concerning Corona. He obtains some of his information through the “Club de Berne”, the secret alliance of all European domestic intelligence services.
The “Club de Berne”, in which directors of domestic intelligence services of the EU member states as well as Norway and Switzerland are organized, has meanwhile grown into a worldwide network. Accordingly, the “Club de Berne” is involved in an international exchange of information with secret services of the other club, called “Five Eyes” and from Israel. European support for the “Five Eyes – Intelligence Cooperation” is in a grey area, because according to its treaties the European Union has no mandate to coordinate its intelligence services.
Although the Lisbon Treaty excludes intelligence cooperation, European domestic services such as the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution cooperate with Europol and a joint situation centre in The Hague called “INTCEN”. The Dutch secret service AIVD, which is responsible for the operational situation center, stonewalls. “We never comment on Club de Berne.“
The national contact points of the intelligence group communicate through a computer network called “Poseidon”. In addition to sending messages, it allows phone calls and video conferencing. The “Club de Berne” makes other Internet services available in a network called “Neptune”, and they share a database called „Phoenix”.
The Club de Berne employees of various intelligence services are bundled together to complete tasks. This raises further questions: for example, how many resources Germany provides for the Club de Berne – and whether infrastructure in Berlin is used for the Club’s tasks. There have been no answers to these questions either.
The Swiss WOZ describes the activities of the intelligence services in the Club de Berne as a “room without supervision” – this is probably also true of its German counterpart. “There is no legal legitimation for the activities of the Berne Club, nor do the supervisory bodies from the member states have the possibility to control the use of data,” says an insider.
As early as the mid-1990s, comprehensive surveillance of communications networks was secretly developed in the European Union under the title ENFOPOL. The ENFOPOL papers are based on the work of a working group of the FBI and are produced by working group K4 “Police Cooperation”. They were adopted by the European Parliament on 3 May 1999. The ENFOPOL policy paper corresponds to a large extent to the German Telecommunications Surveillance Ordinance (TKÜV) and provides for eavesdropping on satellite communications, the Internet, paging services, mobile and landline telephones and mobile phone cards. A simple court order in the state of the intercepting office should be sufficient to eavesdrop in the entire territory of the ENFOPOL contracting states – without the US NSA. Additional bilateral agreements would allow automated retrievals within a few seconds.
The informal “Club de Berne” was founded in 1969 by nine heads of secret services. Even then, the European services cooperated with the Israeli partners Shin Bet and Mossad and the US FBI. At that time, networking was carried out via a telegram system called „Kilowatt”.
Currently, 30 services are participating in the cooperation, from Germany for example the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), from Switzerland the Federal Intelligence Service (NDB), from Austria the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism (BVT). Numerous non-European intelligence services are connected to the networks of the “Club de Berne“.
In any case, almost ten years ago, the distribution list of the communication network of the “Club de Berne” called “Capriccio” for the exchange on Islamic extremism included 27 EU services as well as the services from Switzerland (listed as code number 10) and Norway, and several non-European secret services in the following code number order 06 Mossad (Tel Aviv), 12 CSIS (Ottawa), 19 FBI (Washington), 22 ASIO (Canberra), 25 NZSIS (Wellington), 28 CIA (Brussels) and 94 ISA (Tel Aviv). The big question is whether information fed into the database from Paris or Berlin, for example, has been used for illegal intelligence operations by the USA or Israel – for example, for drone attacks. Indeed, there are indications that the USA likes to access the data of the “Club de Berne” for its German base in Ramstein.
Together with Great Britain, which with MI5 itself participates in the “Club de Berne”, another four states such as the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia form the other well-known intelligence alliance “Five Eyes”, which has extensive espionage facilities. The European “Club de Berne” is apparently much more than an “informal body” of European secret services – for the USA and Israel also have uncontrolled access to data.
In a 1992 BBC documentary on NATO operations in Italy, high-ranking Italian intelligence member Federico D’Amato says that the “Club de Berne” was founded in response to the “Revolution of 68” in France. Research by the German journalist Regine Igel in the book “Terrorjahre – Die dunkle Seite der CIA in Italien” confirms this. According to the information she has from the minutes of a meeting of the “Club de Berne” in Cologne in 1973, “a new type of confidants [i.e. informers] in insurgent organizations is needed, who will also become active, who will have to become the motor of violence, in order to reach the leadership of the organizations, for example, the extreme left or right.“
In November 2018 Hans-Georg Maassen gave his farewell speech to the “Club de Bern” in Warsaw. Shortly before that, the government had decided to remove him as head of the German domestic secret service. Maassen had publicly described the right-wing extremist hunts in Chemnitz in August 2018 as “targeted misinformation”. He repeated this statement in his speech. Even more: He criticized that “left-wing radical forces in the SPD” had instrumentalized his statements in order to “provoke a break in this governing coalition“.
The Bernese secret organization has grown steadily, with an operational platform in The Hague, joint operation teams and an exchange of information that still includes non-European services. The founder and head of the US secret service OSS in World War II (forerunner of the CIA in the USA), WALL-STREET lawyer Alan Dulles, also operated from the tranquil Bern until 1946 and would have a real pleasure in the “Club of Bern” of today.
A few weeks ago it became known that the company Crypto AG was owned by the secret services of the USA and Germany and that the CIA and the BND had manipulated the cipher machines sold worldwide. The bourgeois majority in the office of the Swiss National Council has now spoken out against an investigation of this affair by a Parliamentary Investigation Commission (PUK).
ZDF has exclusively received documents on the CIA with the title “MINERVA. A History” as well as the BND elaboration on “Operation Thesaurus/Rubicon”. One is astonished that employees of the ZDF television station from the magazine FRONTAL 21 receive explosive documents from the CIA and the BND simply so exclusively for publication. “In addition, for its documentary “Geheimoperation Rubikon”, ZDF was able to view MfS documents and Swiss papers confirming the Rubicon papers on March 18, 2020,” said a ZDF employee. However, the core theses of this “revelation” have been coursing through the media world for three decades and are nothing new. What the CIA and the BND have been counting on since 1993 after the CRYPTO withdrawal was left unanswered by ZDF and the “secret service experts” interviewed. In any case, they did not say a word about operations of the “Club de Berne” in their report.
The “Deep State” is clearly visible in Europe through the illegal merger of all domestic intelligence services in this uncontrollable “Club de Berne”. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is unfortunately bitter reality. The Club de Berne is the big black box in European security policy.
Sources:
1 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berner_Club
2 https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENFOPOL
3 http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9113-2017-INIT/de/pdf
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUvrPvV-KQo
5 https://www.wz.de/politik/inland/linksradikale-kraefte-in-der-spd-die-maassen-rede_aid-34287703
6 https://www.saechsdsb.de/datenschutzkonferenzen-oeb/83-datenschutzkonferenzen/dsk-57/259-entwurf-einer-ratsentschliessung-zur-ueberwachung-der-telekommunikation-enfopol-98
7 https://www.fedpol.admin.ch/fedpol/de/home/aktuell/news/2004/2004-04-28.html
8 http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/19/164/1916497.pdf
9 https://www.andrej-hunko.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/4772-bundesinnenministerium-nennt-europaeische-geheimdienste-herren-der-information-das-ist-genauso-richtig-wie-problematisch
10 https://digit.site36.net/tag/club-de-berne/
+++
Thanks to the author for the right to publish.
+++
KenFM strives for a broad spectrum of opinions. Opinion articles and guest contributions do not have to reflect the views of the editorial staff.
+++
KenFM now also available as a free app for Android and iOS devices! Via our homepage you can visit the stores of Apple and Google. Here is the link: https://kenfm.de/kenfm-app/
+++
Support us with a subscription: https://www.patreon.com/KenFMde
+++
You like our program? Information about further support possibilities here: https://kenfm.de/support/kenfm-unterstuetzen/
+++
Now you can also support us with Bitcoins.
BitCoin address: 18FpEnH1Dh83GXXGpRNqSoW5TL1z1PZgZK
Kommentare (0)