The plans revealed are more or less the same as described a few years earlier, in 1880, by the Revue des Etudes Juives, which publishes two letters attributed to Jews of the fifteenth century. The Jews of Arles ask the help of the Jews of Constantinople, because in France they are being persecuted, and the latter reply: “Well-beloved brothers in Moses, if the king of France forces you to become Christian, do so, because you cannot do otherwise, but preserve the law of Moses in your hearts. If they strip you of your possessions, raise your sons to be merchants, so that eventually they can strip Christians of their possessions.
If they threaten your lives, raise your sons to be physicians and pharmacists, so that they can take the lives of Christians. If they destroy your synagogues, raise your sons to be canons and clerics, so that they can destroy the churches of the Christians. If they inflict other tribulations on you, raise your sons to be lawyers and notaries and have them mingle in the business of every state, so that putting the Christians under your yoke, you will rule the world and can then take your revenge.”
It was, again, the Plan of the Jesuits and, before that, of the Ordonation of the Templars. Few variations, few changes: the Protocols were self-generating; a blueprint that migrated from one conspiracy to another.
And when we racked our brains to find the missing link that connected this whole fine story to Nilus, we encountered Rachkovsky, the head of the tsar’s secret police, the terrible Okhrana.
A cover is always necessary. In concealment lies a great part of our strength. Hence we must always hide ourselves under the name of another society.
—Die neuesten Arbeiten des Spartacus und Philo in dem Illuminatenorden, 1794, p. 165
At that same time, reading some pages of our Diabolicals, we found that the Comte de Saint-Germain, among his numerous disguises, had assumed the identity Rackoczi, at least according to the ambassador of Frederick II in Dresden. And the landgrave of Hesse, at whose residence Saint-Germain was supposed to have died, said that he was of Transylvanian origin and his name was Ragozki. We had also to consider that Comenius dedicated his Pansophiae (a work surely born in the odor of Rosicrucianism) to a landgrave (another landgrave) named Ragovsky.
A final touch to the mosaic: browsing at a bookstall in Piazza Castello, I found a German work on Masonry, anonymous, in which an unknown hand had added, on the flyleaf, a note to the effect that the text was the work of one Karl Aug. Ragotgky. Bearing in mind that Rakosky was the name of the mysterious individual who had perhaps killed Colonel Ardenti, we now could include in the Plan our Comte de Saint-Germain.
“Aren’t we giving that scoundrel too much power?” Diotallevi asked, concerned.
“No, no,” Belbo replied, “we need him. Like soy sauce in Chinese dishes. If it’s not there, it’s not Chinese. Look at Agliè, who knows a thing or two: did he take Cagliostro as his model? Or Willermoz? No. Saint-Germain is the quintessence of Homo Hermeticus.”
Pierre Ivanovitch Rachkovsky: jovial, sly, feline, intelligent, and astute, a counterfeiter of genius. First a petty bureaucrat, later in contact with revolutionary groups, in 1879 he is arrested by the secret police and charged with having given refuge to terrorist companions after their attempted assassination of General Drentel. He becomes a police informer and (here we go!) joins the ranks of the Black Hundreds. In 1890 he discovers in Paris an organization that makes bombs for demonstrations in Russia; he arranges the arrest, back home, of seventy-three terrorists. Ten years later, it is discovered that the bombs were made by his own men.
In 1887 he circulates a letter by a certain Ivanov, a repentant revolutionary, who declares that the majority of the terrorists are Jews; in 1890, a “confession par un veillard ancien révolutionnaire,” in which the exiled revolutionaries in London are accused of being British agents; and in 1892, a bogus text of Plekhanov, which accuses the leaders of the Narodnaya Volya party of having had that confession published.
In 1902 he forms a Franco-Russian anti-Semitic league. To ensure its success he uses a technique similar to that of the Rosicrucians: he declares that the league exists, so that people will then create it. But he uses another tactic, too: he cleverly mixes truth with falsehood, the truth apparently damaging to him, so that nobody will doubt the falsehood.
He circulates in Paris a mysterious appeal to support the Russian Patriotic League, headquarters in Kharkov. In the appeal he attacks himself as the man who wants to make the league fail, and he expresses the hope that he, Rachkovsky, will change his mind. He accuses himself of relying on discredited characters like Nilus, and this is true.
Why can the Protocols be attributed to Rachkovsky?
Rachkovsky’s sponsor is Count Sergei Witte, a minister who desires to turn Russia into a modern country. Why the progressive Witte makes use of the reactionary Rachkovsky, God only knows; but at this point the three of us would have been surprised by nothing. Witte has a political opponent, Elie de Cyon, who has already attacked him publicly, making assertions that recall certain passages in the Protocols, except that in Cyon’s writings there are no references to the Jews, since he is of Jewish origin himself.
In 1897, at Witte’s orders, Rachkovsky has Cyon’s villa at Territat searched, and he finds a pamphlet by Cyon drawn from Joly’s book (or Sue’s), in which the ideas of Machiavelli-Napoleon III are attributed to Witte.
With his genius for falsification, Rachkovsky substitutes the Jews for Witte and has the text circulated. The name Cyon is perfect, suggesting Zion, and now everybody sees that an eminent Jewish figure is denouncing a Jewish plot. This is how the Protocols are born. The text falls into the hands of Juliana or Justine Glinka, who in Paris frequents Madame Blavatsky’s Parisian circle, and in her free time she spies on and denounces Russian revolutionaries in exile.
This Glinka woman is undoubtedly an agent of the Paulicians, who are allied to the agrarians and therefore want to convince the tsar that Witte’s programs are part of the international Jewish plot. Glinka sends the document to General Orgeievsky, and he, through the commander of the imperial guard, sees that it reaches the tsar. Witte is in trouble.
So Rachkovsky, driven by his anti-Semitism, contributes to the downfall of his sponsor. And probably to his own. Because from that moment on we lose all trace of him. But Saint-Germain perhaps donned new disguises, moved on to new reincarnations. Nevertheless, our story was plausible, rational, because it was backed by facts, it was true—as Belbo said, true as the Bible.
Which reminded me of what De Angelis had told me about the synarchy. The fine thing about the whole story—our story, and perhaps also History itself, as Belbo hinted, with feverish eyes, as he handed me his file cards—was that groups locked in mortal combat were slaughtering one another, each in turn using the other’s weapons. “The first duty of a good spy,” I remarked, “is to denounce as spies those whom he has infiltrated.”
Belbo said: “I remember an incident in ***. At sunset, along a shady avenue, I always ran into this guy named Remo—or something like that—in a little black Balilla. Black mustache, curly black hair, black shirt, and black teeth, horribly rotten. And he would be kissing a girl. I was revolted by those black teeth kissing that beautiful blonde. I don’t even remember what her face was like, but for me she was virgin and prostitute, the eternal feminine.
And great was my revulsion.” Instinctively he adopted a lofty tone to show irony, aware that he had allowed himself to be carried away by the innocent tenderness of the memory. “I asked myself why this Remo, who belonged to the Black Brigades, dared allow himself to be seen around like that, even in the periods when *** was not occupied by the Fascists.
Someone whispered to me that he was a Fascist spy. However it was, one evening I saw him in the same black Balilla, with the same black teeth, kissing the same blonde, but now with a red kerchief around his neck and a khaki shirt. He had shifted to the Garibaldi Brigades. Everybody made a fuss over him, and he actually gave himself a nom de guerre: X9, like the Alex Raymond character whom I had read about in the Avventuroso comics. Bravo, X9, they said to him…. And I hated him more than ever, because he possessed the girl by popular consent. Those who said he was a Fascist spy among the partisans were probably men who wanted the girl themselves, so they cast suspicion on X9….”
“And then what happened?”
“See here, Casaubon, why are you so interested in my life?”
“Because you make it sound like a folktale, and folktales are part of the collective imagination.”
“Good point. One morning, X9 was driving along, out of his territory; maybe he had a date to
