Hilaire du Berrier: Spy From North Dakota

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 4, 1999 | by James P. Lucier

Nov. 1, 1942, was my birthday, and a friend had a birthday party for me. I was thinking, Cool! Perfectly secure! But not five days later I was heating steps coming up the stairway just before dawn -- heavy boots -- and I knew the game was up. I was taken to a POW camp and, after about six months the men from the Kampeitai, the secret police, came and took me away to the torture house. I was in a cage. And day after day, between sessions, I would sit on the concrete floor and look at my shoes -- they had taken my shoelaces -- and I would ask my feet how they brought me there.

Insight: Your unique experience has given you a deep power of analysis. What do you see as the future of Europe?

HduB: Well, on the first of January Europeans are supposed to get the euro, and lose their national currencies. When the proponents of European integration first set up that European movement at the end of World War II, they told Europeans it was just a common market in order to drop trade barriers and eliminate customs duties. Then when they got the European countries in so far they couldn't back out, they told them it was to form a Republic of Europe -- a country, a supernation, with a parliament in Strasbourg and Brussels and a central bank in Germany. Now they have gone so far that 11 nations are committed to this new money -- and are being told that it is a political move and they are going to be governed by a central parliament.

The men who set it up did so in secret meetings in the U.S. Embassy in Pads shortly after the war. David K. Bruce was the American ambassador then, and his wife, Evangeline, in her memoirs said that she saw the European movement take shape before her eyes. She said, "It could have been done elsewhere, but it was done there, and one could actually see the idea crystallizing. The talks went on daily, and in the end they beat out what was really the original plan for the Common Market."

Dean Acheson from the United States and Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman from France did the planning. George Ball, an American, was a lawyer for Monnet. John Foster Dulles was part of it, too.

Insight: Will this supernation be a stronger entity or a weaker entity?

HduB: Well, these countries that have gone into it will see that their sovereignty is being taken over because the Parliament of Europe, this superstate Europe, is to take precedence over their native parliaments, laws and constitutions. So the once-independent countries are becoming provinces.

The U.S. had its first example of what this will mean about two weeks ago when you had the trouble over the banana trade. The Europeans threatened to bring the United States before a European court if it insisted on letting South American bananas compete on equal footing with bananas coming from countries in the European Union's sphere of influence. So what you are going to see now is, after it gets tough, that the euro becomes the reserve currency for Europe as the dollar is the reserve currency now. Well, that's going to have an effect on the dollar. People will unload it. The European Union's trade rules and regulations are biased against America. In time you will hear voices raised that the United States must come in, too.