The African Wildlife Foundation:
Study In British Counterinsurgency

On June 11, 1997, as the horrors of Laurent Kabila's mass genocide in Congo/Zaire were first being reported in the establishment media, the Washington, D.C.-based African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) issued a press release bemoaning the killing of four mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park, Zaire as a ``tragedy.''

The animals had been caught in a cross fire during fighting that had taken place three weeks earlier between Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo and rebel militias. AWF representative Annette Lanjouw stated,

``They [the gorillas] were unfortunate victims of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody was targetting the gorillas.''

For the AWF, the World Wildife Fund (WWF), and Fauna and Flora International (FFI), which together run the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP), the real victims of the tragedy in the Great Lakes region of Africa have always been the fauna and flora, not the human population.

In 1994, while up to 3,000 displaced Rwandan Hutus were dying each day from starvation and disease in refugee camps in Zaire, the AWF complained that the camps, located at the foot of Virunga National Forest, ``placed great pressures on the environment.'' In an attempt to stay alive, refugees had entered the forest and were foraging for food and taking wood to use as fuel. To the AWF, such human activity threatened the destruction of the natural habitat of the gorilla and other indigenous plant and animal species.

In fact, the so-called conservation programs to save the African gorillas, which were begun by the AWF, always pitted the gorilla against human concerns. During the late 1970s, when the government of Rwanda began to cut down sections of the Virunga forest for agricultural production, the AWF organized the government to halt its activities, by offering instead to make the forest into a game park and to promote tourism to view the gorillas. The AWF argued that the resulting eco-tourist dollars would be a boon to government revenues. The AWF's plan was adopted in 1978 when the Mountain Gorilla Project, the first of its kind, was established. Today, Rwanda's leading income generator is gorilla tourism.

Colonialist Subversive Corps

For over three and a half decades, AWF has played an insidious counterinsurgency role for British colonial policy. AWF recruited and built a cadre force of thousands of black Africans who were carefully selected and sent to the AWF's College of Wildlife Management, in Moshi, Tanzania, for ideological training in environmentalism. Deployed back to their home countries, the cadre were placed in key government institutions and educational systems to brainwash local indigenous populations into accepting and overseeing their own economic backwardness in the name of wildlife management, conservation, and appropriate technology.

In addition, key AWF-trained cadre were placed to manage British-created game and national parks, which the British used for two crucial purposes. The parks, as quasi-autonomous geographical areas, were each strategically placed to bridge national borders, so that clandestine military training and incursions could be carried out to overthrow governments not in agreement with British policy. Second, the parks often contained strategic raw materials and precious metals, whose access could be ensured for British-run international cartels (see ``The Coming Fall of the House of Windsor,'' EIR, Oct. 28, 1994).

JFK Opposed British Colonialism in Africa

To understand why the AWF was created, it is necessary to look at Africa during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when new governments and independence movements threatened to end British colonial rule on the continent.

The chairman of the newly created U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Africa was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who shocked everyone by endorsing Algeria's independence and who personally put himself forward as a friend of Africa's new leaders. Many of them sought private audiences with the young senator.

In 1959 and 1960, Kennedy delivered 13 speeches on Africa:

``Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will ... Africa is going through a revolution. The word is out--and spreading like wildfire in nearly 1,000 languages and dialects--that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.''

During his campaign for President, Kennedy proposed the African Education Development Fund to ``plan the long-range educational needs of Africa.'' The fund would finance the sending of Western agronomists, engineers, and technicians to assist in African development. African students, whom Kennedy called ``the future leaders of Africa,'' would be provided scholarships to come to the United States to study. As President, Kennedy would create the Peace Corps, which sent young college graduates to Africa to teach academic subjects in high schools. Through tax incentives and tax penalties, Kennedy would try to force American corporations to invest in Africa's industrialization.

When Kennedy upset Nixon in the 1960 Presidential election, the British immediately deployed to prevent the successful implementation of Kennedy's policy.

While the newly independent African nations were asking the British to leave, the British deployed their allies from elite Anglo-American families to work on the continent on their behalf, under the cover of American friendliness that had been established by Kennedy! These allies, specialists in counterinsurgency, created the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (AWLF, a name they would soon change to AWF).

A Who's Who of Elite Intelligence Hands

Roosevelt was a leading counterinsurgency expert who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Cairo, during World War II. In 1953, working for CIA director Allen Dulles, he was responsible for running the coup that overthrew Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, whose fate had been sealed when he nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

Roosevelt's family had worked closely with the British for generations. In 1903, his grandfather, President Teddy Roosevelt, became a founding member of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the (British) Empire. (The oldest organization of its kind, its leading members founded many of Africa's original national parks. In 1954, it spun off the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, whose U.S. representative was Harold J. Coolidge, the key individual behind the creation of the AWLF. Today it is known as Fauna and Flora International, AWF's partner in the IGCP.)

Roosevelt's father, Kermit Sr., too, was a British lackey. He joined the British Army during World War|I, and, during World War II, became a British citizen in order to be placed in England's Ministry of Shipping by Sir Winston Churchill, a close family friend. In 1955, Roosevelt's mother was granted knighthood in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Russell Train, a member of a Boston Brahmin banking family, served as the AWLF's first president. Train was one of the leading figures who created the U.S. environmentalist movement. In 1970, he became the chairman of Jimmy Carter's new federal Environmental Protection Agency, the regulatory body which oversaw the dismantling of the U.S. industrial economy. Train later chaired Prince Philip's World Wildlife Fund, U.S.A.

The founding vice president at the AWLF was Arthur ``Nicky'' Arundel. Also tasked to Allen Dulles's CIA in 1953, while a Marine colonel, Arundel was chosen as the propaganda expert for an elite counterinsurgency team that was deployed into Vietnam to destabilize the country at the time of the 1954 Geneva Accords. Arundel became the president of the AWF in 1968, and served in that position for ten years. He currrently is a board member emeritus.

The mentor of both Train and Arundel was Harvard zoologist Harold J. Coolidge, who died in 1986. Coolidge was the chairman emeritus of the AWF and the real power behind its activities. Educated as a zoologist at Harvard University, he served in the OSS in Washington, D.C. during World War II.

The British gave Coolidge the task of running the U.S. branch of the British-created international conservation and environmental movements. From 1930 to 1950, he was a member of the Second Commission on International Wild Life Protection, and from 1951 to 1971 served as its chairman. After World War II, he helped create the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), and served as the chairman of the U.S. branch. He became the president of the international IUCN in 1966, and served in various capacities until his death. He was a founding board member of the U.S. branch of Prince Philip's WWF, and joined the international board in 1966, where he also served until his death.

The Coolidge family, one of Boston's most prominent Brahmin families, has been aiding British geopolitical efforts for more than a century, and seems to specialize in the international drug trade.

In 1836, Harold Coolidge's great-grandfather, Joseph Coolidge, took over the opium trade to China from the British Jardine Matheson Company. The Chinese forbade Jardine Matheson ships from docking in Chinese ports, in an effort to stop the British from flooding China with opium. Instead, Coolidge clipper ships from Boston were hired to do the job, amassing a $10 million fortune.

In 1899, Coolidge's great-uncle, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, founded the United Fruit Company. Coolidge family members have maintained a controlling interest in the firm to the present day. EIR's best-seller, Dope Inc., exposed United Fruit for importing drugs into the United States in the early 1970s, from their fruit plantations in Ibero-America.

Coolidge's uncle, Archibald Cary Coolidge, an intimate of young Allen Dulles, was a leading member of the American Institute of International Affairs, the sister organization of the British Royal Institute for International Affairs located in Chatham House, the home office for British foreign intelligence. In 1921, Coolidge merged the AIAA with the New York Council on Foreign Relations, becoming the first editor of their new journal, Foreign Affairs.

AWF In The Field

With the assassinations of President Kennedy and key anti-British African leaders in the mid-1960s, the immediate threat to London was gone. To maintain their position in Africa, the British chose to bring to prominence African heads of state who would be satisfied with British and World Bank forms of ``economic development,'' i.e, appropriate technology, eco-tourism, and financial looting. One such leader was leftist Julius Nyerere, the President of Tanzania, who nurtured the present decade's genocidal warlords, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and Laurent Kabila of Congo/Zaire.

Nyerere whole-heartedly embraced British policies. In fact, in 1981, he invited the AWF as special guests to attend the 60th birthday party of Serengeti National Park, one of the oldest colonial game parks on the continent. At the head table with Nyerere sat former SS man Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the chairman of Prince Philip's 1001 Club (see EIR, Oct. 28, 1994, p.|25).

Later that year, Prince Philip celebrated the 20th anniversary of the WWF by becoming its president. His Highness's first official act was to establish a new International Conservation Merit Award which he immediately bestowed upon Dr. Felix Nyahozama, the principal of the AWF's counterinsurgency school in Moshi. Also receiving the award was Sandra Price, the AWLF's director of African operations.

Today, as in Rwanda, Museveni's government of Uganda is a major supporter of AWF programs, and takes pride in promoting eco-tourism of the gorillas. The government is also hosting a World Bank environmentalism program for the Great Lakes. According to sources, Museveni himself is a big promoter of these programs.

Since its inception, the AWF's school at Moshi has graduated over 2,000 cadre from 23 African countries. The AWF's local conservation programs, which it pioneered, are too numerous to review here. According to a spokesman for the AWF, the core philosophy of all their programs is ``institution building'' or ``capacity building.'' The AWF's combined efforts have successfully reached into the pores of everyday African life. British colonial policy has once again been successful in pacifying whole nations.