The European Parliament which celebrates its 51st anniversary this year would never have come into being were it not for an Irish-American spymaster named ‘Wild’ Bill Donovan.

Recently declassified US State Department documents reveal that the entire EU project from the very beginning was a covert intelligence campaign run by William J. Donovan.
With a taste for fast women and Bourbon, Donovan was the head of the O.S.S. otherwise known as the Office Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA.
Under the guise of the American Committee for a United Europe, spy chiefs in Washington invented the whole idea of an EU, and secretly funded the project from as far back as 1948.
The astonishing declassified American Government documents include a vast number of files released from the US National Archives.
In 1948, the United States set up the American Committee for a United Europe to pursue the agenda of a European Union. The high-ranking committee was chaired by Donovan, a fiery World War I hero credited with saving Eamonn De Valera from execution by the British.
According to the documents, US Intelligence directed and funded the European Federalist Movement, and recruited promising upcoming leaders such as French politician Robert Schumann, former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Henri Spaak and Jean Monet.
British historian Alan Franklin, who has made a study of the intriguing documents, takes up the story: “One memorandum, dated July 16th 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully integrated European Parliament, much as now exists in Brussels and Strasbourg. The document was signed by General William J. Donovan, Head of American wartime OSS. The role of the Americans was strictly covert; the funds came from the Ford Foundation and business groups with close ties to the US Government. The State Department also played a role.”
Eventually in 1950, the European Coal & Steel Community, which consisted of France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and Luxembourg came into being. Later, in 1957, the Treaty of Rome was signed and the six-nation group changed its name to the European Economic Community. The following year, the European Parliament sat for the first time.
Dr Frank Falconer, Director of Irish Studies at Hollyoak University, Massachusetts, who lives part of the year in Dingle, has made a study of Donovan’s life and times.
“Donovan was a pretty creative guy,” he proffers. “He was very powerful and a close friend of President Roosevelt. Back in the ‘40s he was even paid out of a special White House account. Donovan was a Colonel but he was also a Wall Street lawyer for the Rothschilds. He knew everyone and met Hitler and had dinner with him. He was also a friend of the head of German Intelligence, Herr Canaris, and supposedly had an affair with Jean Harlow.”
William J. Donovan was born in Buffalo, upstate New York in 1883. The son of a diehard Fenian, William became a lawyer and enlisted in the famous New York Fighting Irish 69th infantry regiment.
He later fought in World War One, during which time he became known as ‘Wild Bill’ and rose to the rank of Colonel. A legendary character, he won a Medal of Honour and three Purple Hearts. Known as the ‘Father of American Intelligence,’ in 1942 Bill Donovan set up the the O.S.S., which boasted 16,000 operatives. In 1947, the organisation became the CIA.
At President Roosevelt’s behest, he travelled around Europe as his personal envoy. Such was the global reach of Donovan’s influence that the Japanese Navy sent out ships to rescue his wife when she became ill on board a vessel in the Far East before the two countries went to war.
“He was bitter that he wasn’t considered to run the CIA, but when Roosevelt went and Truman came in, he was frozen out,” Falconer explains.
Donovan always considered himself Irish first and foremost, and was a frequent visitor to the country. During the War of Independence, he secured Eamonn De Valera’s reprieve from the death penalty.
“He was sent to Ireland, and was the one who delivered the message to the British personally about America’s interest in De Valera. It was before the US entry into the First World War and that’s what saved him. There was a lot of political pressure exerted in America to save DeValera,” Falconer continues.
When Ireland opted to stay out of World War II and Britain famously threatened to invade Ireland, William Donovan again came to the rescue.
Desperate for intelligence on the Far East after the Pearl Harbour attack, Donovan approached De Valera and asked him for help from the Irish Catholic Church, which had amassed a vast amount of first-hand information about the Far East from the huge number of Irish missionaries based there.
“America knew absolutely nothing about Japan and the Far East. The Irish missionaries knew everything. In return for the information, pressure was put on Churchill to back off, and he did,” Falconer concludes.
Although we’ll never know for sure, there’s compelling evidence that Bill Donovan kept his friend Eamon De Valera in the loop over American plans for the creation of a centralised European Superstate.
Evidence of this can be gleaned from an almost-prophetic speech to Dáil Eireann which De Valera made on July 12th 1955, when he returned from a meeting of the embryonic EU in Strasbourg.
In a lengthy address, Dev warned that Ireland would end up losing its freedom and independence if it joined any European Federation.
Incredibly, De Valera’s stark message also warned about the dangers of a European Constitution and getting entangled in European-led military adventures, over which, ultimately we would have no control.

Eamon De Valera’s Speech
“We realise that, small as were our physical resources, there were spiritual ones which were of great value; and we never doubted that our nation, though a small one, in the material sense, could play a very important part in international affairs.”
“It was for that reason that, from the very start, back even in 1919, we made it clear that we were willing to co-operate in a real League of Nations. It was with that view also that we wished to join the United Nations Organization.”
“I might point out, that, on the economic side for instance, in the Council of Europe it would have been most unwise for our people to enter into a political federation which would mean that you had a European Parliament deciding the economic circumstances, for example, of our life here.”
“For economic and other reasons we had refused to be satisfied with a representative of, say, one in six, as was our representation in the British Parliament.”
“Our representation in the European Assembly was, I think, something like four out of 120 or some number of that magnitude.”
“That is, instead of being out-voted on matters that we would have regarded as of important interest to us by five or six to one, we would have been out-voted by 30 or 40 to one.”
“We did not strive to get out of that domination (British) of our affairs by outside force, or we did not get out of that position to get into a worse one.”
“One of the things that made me unhappy at Strasbourg was that I saw that at the first meeting of the Assembly, instead of trying to get co-operation and to provide organs for co-operation, there was an attempt to provide a full-blooded Political Constitution, there were members there who were actually dividing themselves into socialist parties, and so on, as they might do in a national parliament.”
“As far as we are concerned, whilst we wish well to all those who think that it is in their interest to do that, we certainly felt that we should not be committed as a nation to do it.”
“A nation much more powerful, with her associated states than we, were chary (wary) of that, and I, for one, felt that we would not be wise as a nation in entering into a full-blooded political federation.”
On the issue of Ireland getting involved in military alliances, Eamon De Valera added in the same speech:
“In every war fought, those who are fighting will always find good and moral causes for the fight… if the world does not learn wisdom and if there are to be future wars, there will be no dearth of good causes which the war will be supposed to further.”
“A small nation has to be extremely cautious when it enters into alliances which bring it, willy nilly, into those wars…we would not be consulted in how a war would be started –the great powers would do that- and when it ended, no matter who won… we would not be consulted as to the terms on which it should end.”

The New World Order
Apart from the creation of the EU, the US Government had much bigger plans and wanted to bring about a whole New World Order, minus Ireland, which would remain totally independent.
In an astonishing world map commissioned by the US State Department in 1941, titled Post-War New World Map, they planned to redraw the entire map of the world and proposed a whole raft of radical far-reaching plans, many of which have since come to pass.
The documents and accompanying map grandiosely proclaim: “The United States of America, with the cooperation of the British Commonwealth of Nations and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, assumes world leadership for the establishment of a New World Moral Order for permanent peace, freedom, justice, security and world reconstruction.”
The state of Israel, which did not exist in 1941, is marked on the map and called Hebrew Land, which is telling considering that Israel didn’t come into being until 1948.
Even more remarkable, Eastern bloc countries such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and several others are colour coded as part of communist U.S.S.R.
These countries weren’t invaded and occupied by the Soviets until 1945, which suggests that the American Government was quite happy to allow the U.S.S.R. to take over half of Europe and erect an Iron Curtain down the middle. Historically, Roosevelt and Churchill handed over all of Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta in 1945.
Other radical proposals included a North American Union comprising the USA, Canada and Mexico. Such an entity already exists in theory under NAFTA, which stands for North America Free Trade Area.
Another project which was also mooted was an African Union compromising of all of the continent’s individual countries. There now exists an African Union, although it’s nothing like the European Union-type political entity envisaged by the US Government.
Ireland’s nearest neighbour Britain is dispossessed of Northern Ireland and all its former African colonial possessions and instead becomes part of a new territory – ruled from London – which also comprises far-away Australia and New Zealand. Historically, Britain relinquished all of its African colonies in the aftermath of World War II.
Elsewhere, the Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark become part of a Nordic Federation similar to the modern day EU.The accompanying map notes for Ireland propose: “The area known as Eire and Northern Ireland shall be unified as a demilitarised independent republic of ‘Eire’.”
The US Government also proposed a United Nations-style assembly and a “World Court.” It describes the latter as possessing “punitive powers of absolute boycott, quarantine, blockade and occupation by international police (UN peacekeepers) against lawbreakers of international morality.”
Shortly after the map was published, President Roosevelt, in a State of the Union address to the 77th Congress, said: “The World Order which we seek is the co-operation of free countries, working together in a friendly civilized society.”
Either the US State Department had someone who could see into the future, or else they meticulously planned to redraw the entire map of the world. The latter is the most likely explanation.
The Post-War New World Map was drafted by US State Department cartographer Maurice Gomberg. Copies are available in the United States Library of Congress.