AGINTER PRESS was a Lisbon-based, neo-fascist-controlled, pseudo news agency that serviced the Cold War interests of various Western secret service agencies working to neutralize African and Asian anti-colonial liberation movements. At the time, a principal concern in western strategic thinking was the need to counter nascent national liberation movements in Africa and Asia in such a way that while it might not be possible to prevent the emergence into sovereign statehood of the old colonies and dependencies it should be possible to keep them within the western “sphere of influence” by securing the eclipse or demise of the more virulently nationalist or socialist leaders and their replacement by “friends of the west,” avowed champions of private enterprise and staunch anticommunists who would take whatever steps were necessary within their countries to prevent the colonialist interests being replaced by Russian and Chinese ones.
The principal vehicle used to this end was the “plausibly deniable” intelligence front, Aginter Press, whose declared aims were “to focus the attention of an anxious elite upon the perils of insidious subversion which slowly infiltrates through everyday reports, to denounce its methods and the mechanics of its manoeuvres…” It was not until many years later, however, following Portugal’s “Revolution of the Flowers” in May 1974, that investigators from the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement discovered Aginter Press’s true function.
Its founder and chief was ex French army officer Captain Yves Guillou, better known by his adopted name Yves Guerin-Serac, a veteran of the Korean war (1950-53) and the Indochina war (1945-54), in which he had served as French liaison officer with the newly formed CIA. In 1962, he commanded the 1st Battalion Parachutist de Choc (an elite parachute unit that worked with the French intelligence service, the SDECE) in Algeria. A founder member of the OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète) in 1962 he fled to Lisbon following the defeat of the Generals’ putsch and the Évian Accords that ended the Algerian War. He later claimed, in a November 1974 interview with Paris Match, that he came to Portugal to offer his services to the last remaining colonial empire which could provide the final bulwark against communism and atheism: “The others have laid down their weapons, but not I. After the OAS I fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its proper dimensions– which is to say, a planetary dimension.” (more...)
Aginter Press and the Strategy of Tension
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