David Teacher: Pioneering Cercle and Paneuropa researcher
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- Rogue Agents: The Cercle and the 6I in the Private Cold War 1951-1991 (6th ed., 2021, 7 MB)
- Rogue Agents: 6th edition with additional photocopy documentation (6th ed., 2021, 43 MB)
As a former translator for the European Union in Brussels and an international administrator in Geneva, author David Teacher is able to speak English, French, German and Spanish. This knowledge of different languages greatly aided him in his research into Le Cercle and the Cold War Paneuropa network.
Along with authors as Pierre Pean from France, Jurgen Roth from Germany, and Hugo Gijssels from Flanders, Teacher should be counted as one of the major pioneers on documenting the conservative Paneuropa elite of mainland Europe. Without his writings for Lobster magazine in the late 1980s, almost none of this type of information would be available in the English-language world today.
In fact, when Teacher's book Rogue Agents was finally published through ISGP in 2008, 15 years after various publishers refused to put it on the market, it still instantly became the premier English-language source on the Paneuropa elite, the NGOs it was working through, as well as its interactions with roughly similar conservative and very anti-communist elites in Great Britain and the United States.
In contrast to other works, which are focused on various scandals or hard-to-define Opus Dei activity, Teacher's book is specifically aimed at identifying all the different NGOs in the Paneuropa network and figuring out who its members were. In that sense it has a very practical approach and simply is the most detailed book on the subject. On top of that, having information easily accessible in English is absolutely crucial in pushing research forward.
Teacher's book is a great example of this. Within two years of publication various more mainstream scholars began to use his research, as well as that of the other earlier-mentioned authors, as a guide to find additional primary documentation on the Paneuropa network. These include Dr. Giles Scott-Smith of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, Dr. Adrian Hanni of the University of Zurich, and Dr. Johannes Grossmann of the University of Tubingen. Other scholars have privately expressed interest in the work of Teacher to ISGP and may produce their own works in the future.
While mainstream investigative journalists and scholars have great trouble dealing with the numerous "intrigues" that can rather easily be attached to the Paneuropa network and Le Cercle in particular, at this point we can at least say that research into "supranational" or "transnational" conservative elites and their involvement in anti-communist propaganda has become part of the mainstream discourse. And to a large extent we have to thank David Teacher for this.
~ Joel van der Reijden
August 2, 2015 (updated: Feb. 20, 2021)