Historians, who are mostly not versed in secret intelligence matters, tell us that before the 20th century spy services were small, ad-hoc and rather amateurish. Only when World War I was approaching did the British, the Americans, the French, the Germans and the Russians hastily improvise “real” services and staffed it with adventurers, lawyers, police officers, bookkeepers, businessmen, military officers and some Freemasons. If you had a degree from an ivy league university like your fathers before you and preferably came from “old money”, you had a chance of getting in. Frequent international travel for business and foreign languages were a big plus. As was paramilitary training such as from the British SOE. And that was all, historians say, because that is what’s on paper. If there aren’t convenient boxes full of documents for us to study in the public sphere, the default position is to assume no spy structures and operations existed.
Because of this silly civilian academic paradigm, political science and history are not real sciences comparable to chemistry or physics or medicine. There has never been a true breakthrough in political science or history.
The “enlightenment” ideas of democratic republics are very basic and harken back to some early attempts during antiquity. Socialism has never been an actual concept of how to run a country and its economy, but rather a simple gimmick aimed at radicalizing peasants. Fascism is just a continuation of Roman style rule. If you live in an enlightened democracy there is a 90% chance you don’t own any significant assets and never will. Whatever you vote for does not change this. People are getting dumber by the minute and most are no longer needed due to robotics and AI. Something is rotten about the enlightenment but neither the academics nor the ideological fanatics can really explain what, why and how.
Even in the ancient world empires ran on information to distribute limited resources and prevent a collapse: How do the peasant serfs feel? Are they inclined to rebel any time soon? How do the soldiers and officers feel? How do the elites feel? Is anybody plotting something? Are foreign empires running covert operations on your soil? What are the weak points of those foreign empires? What would be a good time to attack them or for them to attack you? It is inconceivable that spying didn’t grow and professionalize on a grand scale in the ancient world. Much later the British Empire “ruled the waves”, controlled vast colonies with minimal staff and left competitors such as the French behind. All without massive spying? No chance.
How do we really measure the quality of “political science” and works of historical sciences? Ideally these two fields would give us some meaningful power of prediction but that is clearly not the case. We can’t use mathematical or chemical formulas and devise lab experiments. The level of quality is really determined by how much an investigation fits the logic of intelligence services and classic, focused imperial leadership. The academics claim however that the criteria for quality are how closely they have read sanitized public paper files and how much they please the universities or whoever pays their salaries. One can compare this travesty to a medical doctor nowadays who preaches medieval and ancient ideas of how magical fumes cause diseases. He may insist that he has carefully read every old book and treatise. But he would still be a joke.
Western powers pretended to have abandoned classic imperialism and denied having any serious spy services until the course of the 20th century. Thus, political scientists and historians do not consider the two central attributes for the quality of their work. They can’t explain the how and the why. They go by paper files and assume the leadership of classic empires was ultimately behind the times and swept away by the new political movements.
Early mainstream conspiracy nonsense
A very long time ago, powerful governments launched a pseudo-science that promised to shed light on secret spy operations: The Vatican with France behind it actually tried conspiracy propaganda against Britain and the Anglo church about Freemasons doing the devil’s work and destabilizing traditional structures. The British retaliated with conspiracy propaganda about the Jesuit order and French Freemasons. This was a mainstream affair.
In the early 1800s the socialist movement propagated modern antisemitism because it was an easier way to get the anti-capitalist message through government censorship: Profits and trade were declared Jewish, parasitic, hellish and unnatural. In many countries traditional peasant serfdom had just ended a short while ago but the socialist authors made it sound as if modern capitalism could only ever be exploitation and greed in a Jewish spirit.
The socialists eventually dropped the antisemitic element, but kept everything else intact in their lore about “evil” parasitic capitalism. The main enemy was still a caricature: The capitalist-imperialist “pig”.
The extreme rightwing picked up the antisemitic conspiracy lore around the year 1850 and even copied older leftist texts verbatim. Today we are compelled to choose between the mainstream view that no massive professional spying existed before the 20th century and the “conspiracy” view that a few jews managed to take over the British Empire with some basic loans and simple techniques. More than a 100 years after the emergence of the Nazi party many people in the world still believe that Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a smalltime trader form a German ghetto, stole a fortune from the mighty aristocratic House of Hessen, and that Nathan Rothschild later fooled the British stock market after the Battle of Waterloo, enabling his family to take over the banking district “City of London” and the central bank “Bank of England”. All lies. In reality the House of Hessen recruited the little Rothschild family to perform tasks for Britain and likely spy against the Austrians and the French.
According to typical conspiracy history, the aristocrats were stupid while a few jews had massive success using the most basic spy techniques.
How the game was played
After the end of the Western Roman Empire scattered elites established themselves in what is today Italy, Germany, France, Spain etc.
The only model of running an empire was the Roman model and thus clans continued using it. You needed to secure territory where crops would grow and you needed peasant serfs to work on the fields. And you needed a lot of espionage and counter-espionage.
Rome at its height could mobilize hundreds of thousands of professional soldiers and those were often better than a bigger opposing force. Still, the outer borders of the Empire were too large and expensive to defend. After Rome, the Carolingian dynasty in Europe used armies that were estimated to be only in the thousands or low tens of thousands. Over-leveraging a struggling new empire was just as dangerous as underestimating competitors: The new Islamic caliphate managed to expand into North Africa and even into what is today Spain and Portugal. However, the Muslims suffered from infighting and some of the same problems that Rome had with overly large borders and supplying endless military campaigns. The later Ottoman Muslim Empire had lost the Spanish and Portuguese lands, but included parts of today’s Ukraine, the Balkans and Hungary.
European dynasties often fought each other and had a hard time maintaining consistency. The House Anjou Plantagenet managed to control what is now Britain and a large part of what is now France, before disintegrating due to inner tensions and lack of suitable heirs. At times the Portuguese Empire was a big deal, and the Spanish. There was no truly unified German Empire for the longest time.
Every empire was facing the same problems: Too little unity. The suitable personnel just wasn’t large enough and trained well enough.
The anomaly
There was one notable exception: A super-cluster consisting of three family clusters form the high nobility: Welfs, Wettins and Reginars. Each of the three individual clusters included lineages and sub-lineages with names that correspond with (mostly German) places: The Houses of Hessen, Sachsen, Schleswig-Holstein, Hannover etc.
Historians know that this super-cluster exists and they have mapped it, but never bothered to reconstruct its actual cohesiveness, systematic behavior and spy capabilities. This group was becoming sufficiently large and organized to have an overwhelming spy service, not just with legitimate offspring but also through many illegitimate children using different names.
Welfs, Wettins and Reginars infiltrated Denmark, Scotland and finally England in multiple stages. Especially the “British Empire” brought an element of seclusion with itself that was missing from mainland places like Schleswig-Holstein or Hessen which were under constant threats from the French.
Outwardly, the new monarchy in Britain was supposed to look weakened and limited: King George I. was a Welf from the German territory of Hannover (Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel). Peasant serfdom ended early in Britain and the new era seemed about political parties and corporations.
For about ten thousand years all empires virtually functioned the same: They occupied and defended a territory on which peasant serfs grew crops to pay for everything. The singular ideology was obedience to the leadership. Modern science however changed the fundamental calculations. The size of the territory and number of serfs would not be the deciding factors of the future. Scientific innovations made the food production much easier, requiring far less people to work the fields. Instead these people could be used in mass armies, factories and research institutions to create better ships, guns and supply chains. Welfs, Wettins and Reginars had built secret structures within universities, the leading scientific organization “Royal Society”, the legal system, political parties and corporate structures. British Freemasonry was initiated in 1717, just three years after the accession of King George I. as a sister organization of the Royal Society. The super-cluster had the money, the personnel and the spy capabilities to take control over “enlightenment” ideas and carefully shape the movement. Spy services create front organizations and nothing would have stopped the supercluster from running politicians and corporations.
It was possible to spread militant strains of revolutionary enlightenment within the borders of the arch enemy France. Radicalism was also used on German territories. Controlled, surveilled change meanwhile was cultivated in Britain and the 13 American colonies.
American Revolution
The 13 colonies were a rather small band on the East Coast, yet had a high significance. Further West the French held vast territories and collaborated with natives. It was essential for Britain (and the super-cluster) to establish reliable secret intelligence structures in America and prevent a break-up or full-blown rebellion or at least have a degree of infiltration should a rebellion happen. George Washington had no real navy, money, arms production or number of troops. The French financed him while Britain held back noticeably in their reaction. Multiple opportunities were not seized to capture him and destroy his small, underfunded army. If the supercluster had meaningful spy networks in America it could have decided to let the American Revolution go forward and aimed to fully take it over later. The massive benefits in this hypothetical scenario were the French nearly bankrupting themselves with their help for Washington and regarding him as a partner rather than a competitor.
French Revolution
It is virtually guaranteed that Britain tried to support the opposing sides of the French Revolution simply for the sake of chaos. The supercluster still had control over its older German territories and used those as a staging ground for operations against France. It was a stroke of bad luck and some bad tradecraft that led to the exposure of the Bavarian order of the Illuminati, an aristocratic front group. Internal writings were plastered all over European newspapers and people were talking about espionage which could have led to the exposure of more networks.
The supercluster launched the new generation of popular conspiracy literature such as John Robison’s “Proofs of a Conspiracy” and Barruel’s four-volume series. In a nutshell the books protected the most powerful aristocratic members of the Illuminati and Britain’s monarchy. The “conspiracy” of the Illuminati was pinned on Adam Weishaupt and some murky, shadowy and never really documented forces behind him. Robison described British Freemasonry as orderly and patriotic, while claiming French Masonry and German lodges of various kinds were suspect and revolutionary.
Russian Revolution
The supercluster, over time, had taken over the Russian throne. The tsars belonged to Houses such as Hessen and Schleswig-Holstein. Their control was limited though and constantly challenged by the regular Slavic aristocracy. Failing was not an option but failure seemed very close as the empire was comically backwards and unsustainable. Ideas of copying the British system or the American one for Russia were dismissed by the Slavic aristocrats who wanted to continue the old, Roman style rule for eternity.
The German House of Hohenzollern wired large sums to the Communist movement in the hopes of making peace in the East during WWI. That movement was already infiltrated by the supercluster though which was not hard to do. Officially, Britain and the US dropped the ball by not evacuating the last tsar and his family in time, hesitating to start a larger involvement in Russian affairs. Why send exhausted forces to Russia at the end of WWI? Why spend the money? To benefit the hated slavic aristocrats (the “Whites”) against the Communists (the “Reds”)? Certainly not. It was said that the Russians would have to decide their own fate. Britain and the US even bungled promising intelligence missions against the Communists.
The source material describing the killing of the last tsar and his family is practically worthless, as was shown by multiple investigations, yet it is still the narrative in the history books. It is highly likely the Romanov family was sold to their British or Danish relatives by the Communists. Four grand dukes were also allegedly murdered but we have no credible bodies or other significant evidence. Many other Romanovs simply left Russia on British boats.
The supercluster had the opportunity to smash Russia into more pieces after WWI, kill millions more and finally oust the Slavic aristocrats, then rebuild. Did this go wrong or according to plan?
The deciding questions of our time
Soviet Russia was in many ways a traditional empire: It controlled ever more territory with an iron fist, the peasants and workers were under de facto serfdom, and a single ideology was hammered into people’s heads: Total obedience to authority. Christianity was replaced by the glorification of the ideology. Refusal was persecuted like in the times of the inquisition.
Britain started trading with the USSR early on and the US built entire soviet industries through Ford, Koch and other vast players. Why? Normal political science and the historical sciences will say: Misplaced optimism, seeking to make sales, the wish to see a societal “experiment” happen. Some rare folks will even say that Soviet intelligence had infiltrated the West enough to influence this. All of these answers are based on the assumption that the Anglo sphere is not an empire and improvised rather amateurish and small spy services during the time of the two World Wars, ill equipped to deal with the threat of Soviet espionage which was inexplicably super-professional.
If we think of the Anglo sphere as a proper empire pretending not to be one, and with a very long tradition of professional family-based intelligence services, the answers are different and have massive consequences.
If the supercluster had enough control over the Communists, we logically would be dealing with a single superpower structure almost nobody is supposed to know about. It would have been elegant to outmaneuver regular countries and ensure they will never be able to compete. The Chinese Revolution would then have been another ploy. At the right moment, the US withdrew support for the Chinese nationalists who subsequently lost.
Another scenario is the derailing and attempt of salvaging the operation: The supercluster became compromised by Communists through aristocrats like Lord Louis Mountbatten who made his trusted fellow Lord Hastings Ismay the first NATO secretary general, causing many failures that benefitted the USSR. Mountbatten had had the task of collecting secret files from Welfs, Wettins and Reginars on German soil from the WWII era. These relatives of Mountbatten had most likely spied on the Nazis and likely became complicit to a degree. Mountbatten sent the confirmed Soviet spy Anthony Blunt to get the files who, it appears, subsequently sent copies to Moscow.
The supercluster could not risk exposure and the USSR could not risk losing Western technological support, thereby making an agreement. The aristocrats protected the Atomic spies and outmaneuvered James Angleton at the CIA who tried nailing high-level communist spies. This agreement may still hold in that form or may have been subverted by the supercluster.
Any serious person should have known early on that the Russians staged their hostilities with the Chinese during the 1960s and created the ability to reveal themselves as one single power at a moment of their choosing. What else were they going to do? Yet still, the topic of this deception was mostly avoided and brushed off in public and even in higher levels of Western governments. Angleton at the CIA was painted as a paranoid kook just for doing his job.
In 1991 the USSR officially ended and every serious person should have anticipated the usual brief contraction and later re-expansion of the Russian empire just like during the 1000+ years before. But again, this topic was avoided and brushed off. All the subsequent trade with the Russians and the appeasement kept Russia in the state of a drug addict unwilling to change. Why modernize the empire? Why copy the arduous Anglo ways? Decade after decade Russia relied on exporting oil and gas while importing tech, falling behind to an almost comical degree. The expectation of the Kremlin was to run over Ukraine and gain its 40 million people to fix Russia’s demographic, as well as steal Ukraine’s arms-related industries and specialized industry workers. One thorough blitzkrieg could have solved Russia’s major problems and set the stage for the next attacks. But the Soviet era tanks and strategies failed just like Putin’s economy.
The moment Russia is thoroughly discredited as pathological liars, when everybody got used to AI generated fakes, when the control over the Western internet is complete and the tech exists to counter Russia’s and China’s NBC weaponry, the supercluster may ultimately win.
