The Pilgrims Society: A study of the Anglo- American Establishment

"There are several curious things about these Pilgrims functions. In the first place there is present at these dinners an array of notables such as it would be difficult to bring together under one roof for any other purpose and by any other society... Among the guests were John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and other members of the House of Morgan... We are entitled to know what the Pilgrim Society is, what it stands for, and who these powerful Pilgrims are that can call out the great to hear a British Ambassador expound to Americans the virtues of a united democratic front."

Sources for membership identification only appear in the membership list.

Pilgrims of Great Britain dinner, January 9, 1951. Logo and flags in background.

"[The aim of the international bankers was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

Professor Carroll Quigley, 'Tragedy & Hope', p. 324. Can the Pilgrims Society, which the famous Quigley never mentioned, verify his story of an Anglo-American Establishment?

"[Senator Goldwater] was a new ideological force in the Republican Party. Until then, the Eastern Establishment view based on historic models of European history was the dominant view of foreign policy. This new foreign-policy view was more missionary; it emphasized that America had a mission to bring about democracy—if necessary, by the use of force."

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Notes beforehand

To avoid confusion in the future, this is the first article ever that has done a complete analysis of the Pilgrims Society and made photocopies of membership lists available. The story that comes out here is one that is infinitely more detailed than anything that has been written in the past.

As with numerous other ISGP articles, basic Wikipedia entries were created soon after this article was published. Just a couple of years ago, one wouldn't be able to find 10 percent of the information on the Pilgrims that is provided here. That's important to know, because it's only a matter of time before a person or media outlet raises the questions: "The Pilgrims are mentioned on Wikipedia, so what's the secret?".

The secret is probably that a complete analysis will prove that:

1. yes, an Anglo-American establishment, including an Eastern Establishment, has existed for well over a century;
2. a truly amazing amount of influence is concentrated within the Pilgrims;
3. and most leading members have supported or sponsored domestic and foreign fascism at one point or another.

January 2013: Additional photocopies of membership lists have been made available for download. None of them were used to write this article. The names in these lists only provide additional confirmation of what has already been discussed in this article: more Pilgrims are found that can be tied to the Rockefeller interests, to the financing of fascist regimes in the years before World War II, and to various leading media, mineral and financial corporations.

Equally important: at the time that this article was written I had not yet developed my four establishment model - or three establishment if one merges the American (mixed religion) and European (Vatican-Paneuropa) conservative establishments. In this article we are discussing the core of the liberal establishment. The basic differences between the liberal and conservative establishment are along the following lines:

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Intro

Most people have at least vaguely heard of the term "Eastern Establishment". This is a reference to a group of people in the northeast of the United States which to many appears to wield a disproportionate amount of influence over the nation's politics. This influence, which goes back even further than the days of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and J. P. Morgan, Sr., has been illustrated by the fact that a great number of individuals working in the senior positions of government have come from a select number of universities, banks, insurance companies, law firms, think tanks and foundations, only to return to this network after their public term came to an end. Often these individuals served as political appointees or "independent" advisors to a number of presidents, with proteges at universities and think tanks continually showing up in later administrations. Together with a number of other peculiarities - think of controversial policies, suspected cover ups, ignored conflicts of interest, lack of media attention, etc. - some people have become suspicious of what at times appears to be a kind of permanent establishment controlling the machinations of government, no matter who the public is allowed to vote for. A 1962 newspaper column voiced these suspicions in the following manner:

We will be getting back to the person who wrote this column later in this article.

The WASP elite

The origin of the Eastern Establishment is hardly part of accepted, official history. When not ignored, authors writing about this subject have generally been criticized; sometimes for seeing things that aren't there; other times for cherry picking evidence and ignoring the complexities of government and society as a whole. While to a degree there is some merit to these arguments, at the same time it appears these discussions exist because there really exist powerful political and business elites which like the way their system of private, behind-the-scenes conference meetings and policy-influencing is working for them.

What sets an elite apart from the regular population is influence: influence in domestic politics and economy, and influence in foreign politics and the world economy. This influence in many cases is hereditary, because within establishment circles it's as much about who you know - and who your parents know - as it is about what you know. In the modern age education is crucial, and in case of the Eastern Establishment of the United States, the vast majority of members send their children to Yale, Harvard, or Princeton to get a law degree or MBA. Members of the British establishment usually go to Oxford, with Cambridge coming in second. As soon as these young students graduate they are free to join the family bank, an establishment business, or key think tank or NGO. Outsiders can join "the club" by going to the right universities and allowing themselves to be groomed by members of the establishment.

The London Bush house, built in 1919 with funds provided by U.S. Pilgrim Irving T. Bush. Inscribed above the door is the text, "To the friendship of English Speaking Peoples". The two men represent the United States and Great Britain, holding a torch to symbolize their everlasting friendship.

The Eastern Establishment is a so-called "WASP" establishment - meaning "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant". The term specifically refers to Americans of British descent, even though there's a similar WASP establishment in Great Britain surrounding the royal family, which is closely associated with its American counterpart.

The term WASP when applied to America's elite is somewhat inadequate. Usually its Anglo-Saxon descent and Protestant values are emphasized, followed by a general description of the historic influence of this group. Whenever the question comes up if this establishment still has great influence today few, if any, scholars come up with clear and definitive answers. Much further than throwing around terms like "Ivy League" and "old boys networks" they usually won't go.

Now, anno 2008, let's change this and write down a detailed list of characteristics which fully describes the traditional Eastern Establishment (or WASP elite):

The reader has probably heard some of these points before and may or may not agree with them. So how can ISGP prove that this list is correct? To do that we need to begin our discussion of the Pilgrims Society.

Pilgrims history

At the turn of 20th century a number of influential persons were interested in bringing the establishments of the United States and Great Britain closer together. The St. George's Society in New York, the American Society in London, and the growing network of Anglo-American League branches in England (founded by a good number of later Pilgrims Society members), were seen as inadequate, so the idea arose to form a new, elitist society with branches in both London and New York. This became the Pilgrims Society, which organized regular meetings in such prestigious hotels as the Victoria, the Waldorf Astoria, the Carlton Ritz, and the Savoy.

The idea of setting up what ultimately became the Pilgrims Society was first discussed by a number of Americans working in London. One of them was Lindsay Russell, a well-connected lawyer from New York, who regularly visited London in those days to set up his law firm Alexander and Colby. It was Russell who got together with General Joseph Wheeler (on a visit in London), General Lord Roberts, and Sir Harry Brittain. Together they organized the original meeting of the Pilgrims of Great Britain at the Carlton Hotel on July 11, 1902. The meeting was a success and two weeks later Lord Roberts was elected president of the Pilgrims. Lord Grenfell and Admiral Hedworth Lambton became vice presidents. Two other vice presidents were the Americans Senator Chauncey M. Depew (Yale Skull & Bones 1856; lawyer to Cornelius Vanderbilt; member of J.P. Morgan's elite Corsair Club, together with William Rockefeller) and General Joseph Wheeler. Sir Harry Brittain became secretary and the Archdeacon of London, William MacDonald Sinclair, was elected chairman of the executive committee. [2]

At the July 11 meeting the attendants also discussed their plans of setting up a branch in New York. Lindsay Russell and Chauncey Depew went back to the United States and approached such men as Bishop of New York Henry Codman Potter, J. P. Morgan, Sr., and Morgan family friend and former U.S. president Grover Cleveland. Under the leadership of Bishop Potter, the Pilgrims of the United States organized their first formal diner on February 4, 1903. The two societies have been organizing meetings ever since. [3]

The Pilgrims network

Over the years more and more influential persons joined the Pilgrims Society, including virtually all the well known bankers, robber barons and their associates. Going through membership lists of the Pilgrims of the United States one will find some of the following families:

Within the ranks of the British Pilgrims one comes across a great many Barons, Viscounts, Earls, Marquisses, and Dukes. Members of the British royal family have been patrons of the Pilgrims Society since its inception and regularly attend meetings. Here also well known banking families as Baring, Hambro, Harcourt, Keswick, Rothschild, Kleinwort, Loeb, and Warburg can be found, just as the heads of Barclays and the British managers of U.S. banks as Chase Manhattan and J. P. Morgan - banks that later merged into JPMorgan Chase.

At the moment of this writing the membership list compiled by ISGP contains 1496 names, the vast majority of them from the United States (rough estimate: about 82% or 1227). Analyzing the biographies of these members doesn't just show that the Pilgrims are part of the WASP elite - they are the WASP elite. The following banks, law firms, and insurance companies have been headed by Pilgrims Society members - usually for generations:

Banks

Law firms and insurance companies

Looking at these tables, it is clear that the major banks of New York and London have been very prominent in the Pilgrims Society, closely followed by a group of influential law firms and insurance companies. A number of corporations have also maintained a considerable presence in the Pilgrims, comparable to some of the law firms and smaller banks. The most prominent of these might well be IBM, of the Watson family - but the founders and owners of Chrysler, Dodge, Jardine Matheson, W.R. Grace & Co., Reynolds, Corning Glass, and Forbes have all been Pilgrims. A vast range of other corporations have been represented by Pilgrims, but do not appear to have been part of the core of the Anglo-American establishment.

U.S. media I: print and television

Except for Forbes, we deliberately left out large media companies in this last section, as their presence in the Pilgrims Society and influence on society deserves to be discussed separately.

The New York Times and Time magazine have been the news publications most intimately tied to the Pilgrims of the United States over the years. Since 1896 the New York Times has been owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, members of which have been generational members of the Pilgrims since the very beginning. Orvil E. Dryfoos, who married a daughter of Arthur Sulzberger and rose to president of the New York Times in 1957 and publisher in 1961, was another member of the Pilgrims. A number of outside Pilgrims held senior positions in the New York Times too over the years. Among them were John William Harding, George McAneny, Philip Du Val, Cyrus Vance and Charles H. Price II.

Pilgrims-dominated U.S. publications. Some outside media are still very much in line with the Anglo-American Establishment. In case of CNN it seems that billionaire country boy Ted Turner, with his one billion dollar grant to United Nations causes, really wants to be part of an establishment for which he doesn't have the background.

Time magazine was founded in 1923 by Henry Luce, whose name featured on Pilgrims Society membership lists in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Key co-founders and financiers of his magazine were also Pilgrims: J.P. Morgan partners Thomas W. Lamont and Dwight Morrow, as well as the Harriman and Harkness families. Among the Pilgrims that have held senior positions in Time Magazine are Paul Gray Hoffman (OSS-CIA), Philip G. Howlett, William J. Cross, Hedley Donovan, Donald M. Elliman, Jr., George A. Heard, Roy E. Larsen, Samuel W. Meek and Frank Pace, Jr. To top things off, Henry Luce III became president of the U.S. Pilgrims in 1997.

Another important Pilgrims-affiliated publication used to be the New York Herald Tribune, owned by the Reid family and dissolved in 1966. Whitelaw Reid, Whitelaw Reid II, Ogden Mills Reid, Ogden Rogers Reid and several other family members have all been members of the Pilgrims Society. In 1958, John Hay Whitney, a vice president of the U.S. Pilgrims, took over the newspaper from the Reids.

Although not extremely prominent within the Pilgrims Society, some of Reader's Digest most senior and long term managers have been Pilgrims, spanning the period from the 1940s all the way to the early 2000s. Among them have been William John Cross, C. Robert Devine, Walter Wood Hitesman, Kent Rhodes and Russell Twisk.

News stations are considerably less prominent in the Pilgrims Society. One of the exceptions has been the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), located in Rockefeller Center and one of the most dominant broadcasting companies from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Morgan banker Owen D. Young founded the RCA in 1919. Young was chairman of General Electric, which took a controlling interest in the RCA. For the next fifty years, until 1970, the company was headed by James Harbord, Frank Folsom, and David Sarnoff. All these men, including Young, were members of the Pilgrims Society. In 1970, Sarnoff's son, Robert, took over the chairmanship of the RCA, but couldn't prevent the company from going into a permanent decline. Robert was ousted in 1975 and in the years after the RCA was taken over by other media conglomerates not particularly tied to the Pilgrims.

RCA, in cooperation with General Electric and Westinghouse, formed NBC in 1926, which became its main broadcasting arm. By the late 1930s, NBC had become so dominant on the airwaves that the FCC forced it to split into two companies, one becoming the significantly less influential ABC. At this moment it appears that successive heads of NBC and ABC weren't invited to the Pilgrims anymore. In 1985 a minor bit of controversy arose, however, about ABC when Cap Cities bought it. Cap Cities was controlled by a group of Pilgrims Society members as Lowell Thomas, Thomas Dewey and Alger Chapman who were decades-long partners of CIA director William Casey and very close as well to former CIA director Allen Dulles, another Pilgrim.

As for NBC, the Pilgrims of RCA obviously continued to exert their influence over NBC for many years. Influence has also always been maintained through stock ownership and executive and advisory boards. One relevant person in this respect is John Brademas, a director of RCA/NBC. Brademas is a perfect example of a WASP elitist: a member of both the American and British Pilgrims, a Rhodes Scholar, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, an advisory board member of the David Rockefeller Fellowships, a director of the Aspen Institute, a governor of the American Ditchley Foundation, a member of the CFR and a member of the Trilateral Commission. Brademas also served on a number of Carnegie commissions.

In 1986 NBC was bought by General Electric, another company dominated by Pilgrims. More than a dozen Pilgrims, both executives and ordinary members, are known to have been directors, presidents, CEOs and chairmen of General Electric on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 20th century. Names include Lord Carrington, Harry Morgan, a son of J.P. Morgan, Jr.; 1st Baron McGowan, Sir Ronald Grierson, Owen D. Young, Philip D. Reed, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Raymond Seitz, Clarence Woolley, Walter Wriston and more.

The other exception of a broadcasting company that has been represented in the Pilgrims Society is CBS. Over the years several Pilgrims have been directors of this New York-based company, among them Henry Kissinger and Marietta Peabody Tree (vice chair Pilgrims; great-granddaughter of George E. Peabody, the famous Morgan partner). William S. Paley, the founder and continuous owner of CBS until his death in 1990, was a member of the Pilgrims Society. So was "the most trusted man in America", Walter Cronkite, the famous anchorman for CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1982.

U.S. media II: CIA Mockingbird and Washington ties

In the 1970s, after a number of scandals in which the CIA was implicated, several reports emerged about a working relationship between the CIA and a number of major media outlets. One source was the 1979 book Katherine the Great, written by investigative author Deborah Davis, who for her book interviewed numerous individuals in Washington over the course of three years, right when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was looking into the death of President John F. Kennedy. Davis described the Washington Post's relationship with the CIA and even gave a name to the CIA's effort to establish contacts with the major media: Operation Mockingbird. Unfortunately, virtually no one was able to read the book at the time, because it was immediately forced off the market, only to be republished in 1991. About Paley and Cronkite at CBS, Davis wrote:

Like Paley and Cronkite, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, was a Pilgrims Society member. In fact, he was an executive member until his death in 1969. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was a member until his own death in 1959. An uncle of the brothers, William Dulles, was also a member of the Pilgrims Society. Membership definitely ran in the family, which isn't too unexpected considering the family's life-long close association with the Rockefellers.

In contrast to the Pilgrims, the Alibi Club was part of the "Georgetown Set" in Washington, D.C., an elite, liberal social group with strong anti-communist feelings and close connections to the New York WASP establishment. Members of the Georgetown Set included many senior CIA officers: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, James Angleton, Cord Meyer, Frank Wisner, and others. Washington Post owners Philip and Katherine Graham were part of this group, and so was their long-time editor Benjamin Bradlee. CIA-employed journalist and Katherine Graham and Henry Kissinger friend Joseph Alsop is another well known example. Walter Cronkite clearly belongs in the same category. [5]

Davis and investigative reporters like Carl Bernstein have mentioned the names of important newspaper men who cooperated with the CIA. The CIA rated reporters among the best spies, because they could go almost anywhere and ask questions without raising suspicions. At the same time reporters could be used to disseminate anti-communist propaganda, something which the major media outlets were only too happy to support the CIA with. As Newsweek's foreign editor, Harry F. Kern, a decades-long member of the Pilgrims Society, stated to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein in October 1977: "The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department.... When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on. ... We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side." [6] In the same Rolling Stone magazine article, Bernstein unveiled a number of other interesting facts involving CIA cooperation with the media:

Many of the above media owners have appeared in the membership lists of the Pilgrims Society. In addition to the earlier-mentioned owners of the New York Times, Time magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, RCA/NBC, and CBS who were involved with this prestigious Anglo-American society, Barry Bingham, Sr. of the Louisville Courier­Journal, Jack R. Howard of Scripps-Howard, and the Muir family of Newsweek were also Pilgrims.

This last publication, Newsweek, from 1937 to 1961 was dominated by Pilgrims Society members. Besides the Muir and Harry Kern influence, Newsweek was owned by the Astor Foundation, named after a family with whole generations of members in both the British as the American Pilgrims. Among the directors of the Astor Foundation also was Pilgrims Society member Gates W. McGarrah. [8] McGarrah had been chairman of the Rockefellers' Chase National Bank, a U.S. member of the General Council of the German Reichsbank, chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, and the first president of the Bank for International Settlements. He also was a grandfather of CIA director Richard Helms, whose older brother could also be found in the Pilgrims.

In 1961, Newsweek was taken over by the Washington Post, the establishment newspaper from Washington, D.C. whose owners and editors we just described as being part of the Georgetown CIA clique. The only reason no Washington Post men can be found among the U.S. Pilgrims is because the society primarily is centered around New York high society. There actually were plans in the early years to open other Pilgrims clubs in cities as Washington and Paris, but these ideas never materialized. [9] Interestingly, once considered one of the most "reliable" Mockingbird newspapers, in 1992 the Washington Post revealed to its readers the contents of an internal CIA memorandum, written the year before. In part it read:

In a practical example of that, at one point CIA director Richard Helms provided one of his subordinates, Howard Hunt, with information gathered on Soviet spying and told him "I've got a couple of files here. I want you to do a story, about 800 words, and I'll try it out on Cy Sulzberger." [11] Sulzberger, of course, was the owner of the New York Times and, like Helms' family, a member of the Pilgrims Society.

It appears indeed that with Mockingbird we were mainly dealing with an informal relationship between the top of the CIA and the top of various media corporations. Because the CIA essentially was not infiltrating and subverting the existing national media, it is often pretended that there was no problem here. But what if one of these top people would come out and say: "We hate socialism. We hate labor unions - certainly when they get too influential. We're all like-minded corporate fascists. We like to have our independence, so we're not going to do everything the CIA wants us to do (we're a free capitalist society after all!), but at the same time we're all on the same side. We're friends and acquaintences, we socialize, we do favors for each other, and certainly in areas of mutual interest - our own big business interests - we band together." Would that get people thinking? One would hope so.

The fact is, there have never been any truly independent major news outlets. All of them were financed by major business tycoons with their own interests tightly locked into the national establishment and often the government. If a truly independent media outlet were to arise, or one that is a little too rebellious, the CIA and major media outlets wouldn't hesitate to band together and undermine it.

A good example of this has been incorporated in an ISGP article that discusses the Dutch establishment surrounding Prince Bernhard and some of his 1001 Club members, which overseas has included David and Laurance Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Robert McNamara, the British and French Rothschilds, Paul Mellon and other major names, many of them Pilgrims. Back in the 1960s consternation arose among Dutch conservative and liberal elites about a certain major newspaper drifting too far to the left. Instantly conspiracies were organized to halt this course:

We can also look at the left-wing Ramparts magazine of the 1960s, which supported anti-Vietnam War protestors, took a skeptical stance on the John F. Kennedy assassination, and exposed the role of the CIA in the National Student Association. What did the CIA do? It ran a covert operation against the magazine that included blackmail and successfully undermined it. The details are mentioned in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article/oversight, which also lists numerous modern "new left" media outlets that are supported by big Pilgrims-ran foundations as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, MacArthur, Soros and others. Harper's, The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, PBS and other outlets all belong to this elite-backed "new left" network. As explained in the same article, ISGP suspects these foundations are coordinating their efforts and effectively act as a branch of the CIA - but only if this liberal establishment gets along with the CIA director and the White House. Essentially these foundations and their private networks form the "above government" network conspiracy theorists have been talking about since the beginning of time.

For the most part it appears that the Eastern Establishment, and really the international Liberal Establishment, is acting like one big family. Sometimes family members agree, sometimes they don't, and almost on a continuous basis they manipulate public opinion to have things go their way as much as possible. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the conservative establishment - which happens to be much more primitive in its thinking than its liberal counterpart - has been doing the exact same thing. Despite that, it's important to realize the establishment warfare aspect and the establishment influence in general in domains as the progressive media, weed and psychedelics legalization, spirituality, the green movement and even exposes as the Pentagon Papers, MKULTRA, Watergate, Iran Contra, Occupy Wall Street and the Edward Snowden NSA spying affair. However, until we have modern post-1980 full membership lists of the Pilgrims, it is not too productive to discuss many of these affairs. For the time being ISGP has been developing the "liberal CIA" article for that. Rest assured though that the "new left" movement to a large extent falls under the Pilgrims umbrella as the most liberal aspect of an already liberal establishment. It will just take a little more time to prove that.

British media and MI5/MI6 infiltration

In the earlier-discussed 1977 Rolling Stone article of Carl Bernstein, he mentioned one British-based news agency (with an important New York department) that has been significantly influenced by Pilgrims: Reuters. Among the Pilgrims who have held senior positions in Reuters are Sir Christopher Chancellor, general manager from 1944 to 1959; Lord William Barnetson, chairman from 1968 to 1979; Sir Denis Hamilton, chairman from 1979 to 1985; and directors Lord Thomson of Fleet and Sir David Walker. Information on British Pilgrims is still quite scarce compared to its American counterpart, so this list of senior executives will undoubtedly grow as more biographies of historical members are analyzed.

Among the British news outlets that have been influenced by the Pilgrims are The Observer, for a long time a rather "new left" newspaper of the Astor family; The Financial Times, The Economist, and especially The Times and the Commonwealth Press Union. The press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the widely circulated Daily Express, is known to have visited the Pilgrims at least once in 1941, but is not very likely to have been a member of the Pilgrims as he was not particularly interested in an Anglo-American partnership. Pilgrims have also headed the world famous Encyclopedia Britannica. Examples are Senator William Benton, Philip M. Kaiser and Elmo Roper.

Britain appears to have had some sort of Mockingbird program similar to the United States. In 1994 Private Eye magazine reported how in 1976 John Snow, a well known newscaster, had been approached by a representative of British intelligence. Snow was asked if he would provide the security services with information on the political activities of his colleagues. His salary of 3,600 pound sterling would be matched and there wouldn't be any problems with Inland Revenue. Snow refused, but Private Eye suspected that most large newspapers and media stations employed persons who had been more susceptible to this kind of approach. The magazine also wondered aloud if a recent story about the Guardian's owner, Richard Gott, falsely tying him to the KGB, had been written by journalists on the payroll of British Intelligence. At the time Gott's newspaper was digging into the affairs of Jonathan Aitken, a person with numerous ties to hard right national and international intelligence people. [13]

Additionally, in 1995 a person named Gerald James published his rather controversial book 'In the Public Interest'. James had been a banker at Barings Brothers (a Pilgrims bank) and a member of the aristocratic Monday Club. He knew many people in intelligence, including the former deputy head of MI6, George Kennedy Young (who became a banker at Kleinwort). James was also chairman of the arms company Astra Holdings. In his biography/expose James wrote how a cabal of City bankers and intelligence men were running the major illegal arms deals, had infiltrated and corrupted smaller companies, and collapsed a number of them after fearing exposure in the wake of the Iraqgate scandal. James's Astra Holdings was among these "front companies" that had been collapsed, prompting James to write a book in an effort to clear his name. This turned out to be not entirely without risk: journalists he talked to were intimidated and several important witnesses died under suspicious circumstances. Relevant here is page 138 of his book, in which James describes his experiences with the British media:

British Pilgrims can hardly be tied to this British "Mockingbird" program, probably because there's too little information available on the collusion between British intelligence and the press. The exception might be some of the more reactionary aristocrats in the British Pilgrims, like Sir Frederick Bennett, Lord Chalfont, Lord William Rees-Mogg and their ally in the United States, John Train, though a discussion of these people will have to wait a good number of chapters.

Universities and fraternities

Education is the key to success, and this is no different for Pilgrims. The majority of U.S. Pilgrims have studied at Harvard, Princeton or Yale and majored in either law or economics - if not both. It might not be a surprise then that at any time the boards of these three universities are filled with Pilgrims Society members. There are a few other universities from which Pilgrims have graduated. They include New York University, Columbia University, Dartmouth and a few prestigious European universities. Believe it or not, the prestigious Wharton School of Business is almost non-existent in the biographies of Pilgrims Society members. MIT, on the other hand, is popular among the small number of scientists that have joined the Pilgrims. Additionally, a good number of Pilgrims have been on the board of the American Academy in Rome, a New York-based school for artists. Of course, this is not a mainstay of the average Pilgrims education. It is more a reflection of the Pilgrims influence on aspects of New York social life.

In England the situation is even simpler: the vast majority of future Pilgrims go to Oxford and to a lesser extent, Cambridge University - or they come to the United States to study at Harvard, Princeton or Yale. It's incredible, but it really seems to be mandatory to have studied at one of these universities in order to be handed some of the absolute top positions in government, especially in the State Department. It is at these universities that the leaders of the country are being groomed at many different levels of society.

We see a similar trend in mainland Europe. France, for example, has the INSEAD Executive School, where many leading bankers in Europe are educated, as well as the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) for politics. In 2014 it was reported that "nearly every French high ranking politician or diplomat has attended Sciences Po since its inception [in 1872 and houses] 14 of the current CEOs of France's 40 largest companies." [15] The remaining portion of these CEOs largely went to INSEAD or the earlier-mentioned universities in the United States and England.

In another example, in 2010 it was reported in the Netherlands that "at least two-thirds of influential Holland has been a member of a fraternity... ten percent [comes from] Minerva, one of the foundations of our ruling elite." [16] We see the same trend among American elites, with Yale fraternities as Book and Snake, Scroll & Key, and especially Skull & Bones sticking out as fraternities that have produced quite a few leaders of society. However, overall of absolute prime importance is the university a person graduated from - not the fraternity they have been accepted into. Don't be fooled by all the propaganda surrounding Skull & Bones. It's just a fraternity for children of well-to-do families. Essentially it can be seen as a small aspect of the much more elderly Pilgrims Society network.

In fact, many of the leading Skull & Bonesmen have also been Pilgrims. Vanderbilt lawyer and Pilgrims Society co-founder Chauncey Depew is one of them. Daniel Coit Gilman, who incorporated Skull & Bones into the Russell Trust and co-founded the Carnegie Institution, is another. Former U.S. president William Howard Taft, a son of a key Skull & Bones founder and himself Skull & Bones, is known to have visited the Pilgrims, with his brother, Henry, another Skull & Bones member, having been a full member of the Pilgrims. Then there's John Beckwith Madden, a Brown Brothers Harriman banker from 1946 to 1988 who managed the Russell Trust Association for the bank, who is another. There are many other examples, also for Scroll & Key.

Recently I actually ran into the story of Charlotte Iserbyt, a rather nutty old right conservative McCartyite popular on the Alex Jones Show, but one who is actually responsible for leaking the Skull & Bones lists to author Antony Sutton for his famous 1983 book America's Secret Establishment on Skull & Bones. Iserbyt's father and grandfather were Skull & Bones and looking at her father's two most influential Bones' classmates, Charles D. Hilles, Jr. and General Charles M. Spofford, they and a number of family members later were invited to the Pilgrims Society as well.

Cultural, scientific and revolutionary societies

October 26, 2007, Pilgrims headquarters. Entrance behind cars on the right.

Next to the influence the Pilgrims have over the major East Coast universities, the Pilgrims are also involved in a wide range of cultural and educational institutes in New York. They include the Museum of Modern Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Society of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Zoological Society (renamed Wildlife Conservation Society), the National Institute of Social Sciences, the Smithsonian, the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Many American Pilgrims are members of societies commemorating the revolutionary wars and the founding fathers, and since membership is usually based on achievements of ancestors, genealogical societies are not far behind. The Society of the Cincinnati is extremely popular among Pilgrims; so is the Society of Colonial Wars or the Sons of the American Revolution. The Pilgrims headquarter in New York is actually home to a whole range of societies, even though the sign at the door only reads "New York Genealogical and Biographical Society", which is generally also headed by a Pilgrim. Following is a full list of other societies located at 122 East 58th Street:

• Daughters of the Cincinnati
• Huguenot Society of America
• Military Order of Foreign Wars
• New England Society
• St Nicholas Society
• Holland Society
• Society of Mayflower Descendants
• Society of Colonial Wars
• New York Genealogical Society
• New York Genealogical & Biological Library [17].

Religion

Ever since the 16th century reformation movement began, the countries of Europe have mainly been divided between Catholicism and different branches of Protestantism. In Great Britain the Protestant branch became known as the Anglican Church. The church came under the patronage of successive Protestant royal families, a tradition that was interrupted now and then, but managed to survive until the present day. Since the British aristocracy to a large extent still is a "cradle to grave dependence on and relationship with the monarchy," as Lord Weidenfeld - a Pilgrim - put it [18], it shouldn't come as a surprise that members of the British royal family are patrons of the Pilgrims of Great Britain while most of these Pilgrims belong to the Anglican Church.

At the time of the American Revolution and the wars against the British Empire, the Anglican Church in the United States was separated from its British counterpart, forming the Episcopal Church. This change had been necessary, as all the Anglican clergy had to swear allegiance to the British monarch. The Episcopal Church did retain its classical Anglican theology. Today, both branches have almost the same tolerance for Darwinism, explaining why the Pilgrims also dominate the American Museum of Natural History and related science-oriented groups.

The ranks of the Pilgrims are filled with members of the Episcopal Church, among them the Morgans and Vanderbilts. Neil Vanderbilt once gave a brief description of these two families' weekly Sunday visits to St. Thomas's, the Episcopal church at Fifth Avenue, New York:

Canterbury Cathedral in London and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, both staffed by Pilgrims Society members.

Although the Episcopal Church of the United States officially is independent from the Anglican Church and the British Royal family, this shouldn't be taken too strictly. There has been a long tradition of inviting the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, and the Episcopal Bishops of New York, to senior positions in the Pilgrims Society. As discussed before, one of the primary founders of the Pilgrims of the United States was Bishop Henry C. Potter. This was the Bishop of New York from 1887 to 1908 who regularly went to England to preach at Canterbury Cathedral, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the Chapel Royal. Having many important friends at both sides of the Atlantic, in 1895 Bishop Potter officiated at the wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt and the 9th Duke of Marlborough. Potter was also president of the Pilgrims of the United States from 1903 to 1907.

Next to the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterians are also well established in the Pilgrims. The Presbyterian Church is descended from the Scottish branch of the reformation.

A few of the Pilgrims have been of French descent which explains the fact that the Huguenot Society sometimes shows up in the biographies of members. The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France.

Catholics have formed a small minority within the Pilgrims. They include a number of Knights of Malta. Examples of the latter are Myron C. Taylor, Joseph Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Elmer Bobst, J. Peter Grace, Alexander Haig, Lord Lothian and Lord Mowbray. Haig is on the executive committee of the Pilgrims since 1983. The Dukes of Norfolk, probably the most distinguished Catholic family in England and representatives to the Vatican for centuries, have also been occasional visitors of Pilgrims gatherings.

Why would Catholics be allowed in such a strong Protestant milieu as the Pilgrims? One obvious reason would be to avoid accusations of discrimination; another to maintain good relations with the Vatican. For a group so tightly linked to diplomacy and the State Department, it would make little sense to ban Catholics altogether. This is not the 16th century anymore or even the early or mid 20th century. However, traditionally the Anglo-American establishment has not been fond of Catholics holding high office. In the following example Neil Vanderbilt describes the reaction of the Anglo-American establishment when FDR appointed Joseph Kennedy as U.S. Ambassador to England, a position traditionally held by a Pilgrim:

Although both FDR and the Anglo-American establishment were extremely wary of Catholic influence, Joseph Kennedy was treated with respect during his visits to the British Pilgrims while Roosevelt tried to maintain a good relationship with the Vatican by appointing Knight of Malta Myron C. Taylor as his personal representative to the Vatican. The Catholic Taylor, a Pilgrim and J. P. Morgan man, had already established a working relationship with the Holy See. At one point Cardinal Pacelli (Pope Pius XII from 1939 to 1958) stayed at Taylor's home, and for dinner Taylor invited some of his most influential friends. These included the Rockefellers, the widow of Andrew Carnegie, the Bakers (Morgan partners) and members of the Ogden Mills family - all Pilgrims by the way [21]. Roosevelt at one point explained to his friend Neil Vanderbilt why he was reaching out to the Vatican. It is likely that the Pilgrims allow a small number of Catholics and Knights of Malta for similar diplomatic reasons:

Templar and Masonic orders

Apart from membership in the regular Protestant churches or membership in honorary Templar orders as the Knights of the Garter, the Knights of the Thistle (Scotland) and the Order of St. John, a good number of Pilgrims have also been Freemasons. More interestingly, a small percentage of Pilgrims have been involved in rather exotic royalist Templar orders. We aren't talking here about highly irregular and esoteric lodges as Memphis Misraim or the Synarchist and Martinist Order, but more about symbolic and historical societies as the Order of the Holy Royal Arch Knight Templar Priest and the Order of the Merovingian Dynasty. These still sound very mystical though. Here is a longer list of the orders different Pilgrims have been involved in:

Among the literally hundreds of institutes the British royal family are patrons of is the United Grand Lodge. The legend is that Freemasonry has descended from the rituals of the Knights Templar, which had a peculiar obsession with Solomon's Temple and were said to be involved in certain occult or ritualistic practices. The Knights Templar were active in France until their persecution by the Papacy in 1307. Some of these Templars allegedly fled to Scotland where they were accepted by fellow crusaders Robert de Bruce and the Sinclair family. Connected or not, some time after these Templars arrived, the Sinclair family began to build Rosslyn Chapel, which is supposed to be a replica of Solomon's Temple; accounts of Rosicrucian initiations began to surface, and an apparently Rosicrucian-connected Martin Luther set off the reformation against the Vatican [23].

As for Freemasonry, is it really linked to Templarism and Rosicrucianism? To a degree they are all intertwined, but this is a whole different subject which descends into mystery and obscurity the further one looks back. For this article it is sufficient to note that all the traditional secret societies in the West ultimately have taken their inspiration from the Middle-East, particularly Egypt, and that the men heading these different societies today seem to have a pretty good idea of that. The average Freemasonry lodge makes a person feel as if he or she went back in time to Ancient Egypt. As for Templars, the highest level of the York Rite of Freemasonry is a Knights Templar order, which is a layer above the Royal Arch Masons and the Cryptic Masons. The Scottish Rite has a similar system. The following excerpt comes from the text Masonry Beyond the Third Degree, written by the Supreme Council, 33° in the United States:

It appears that these romantic Templar stories have become part of the history and culture of Britain. They are essentially part of the Arthurian legends, like King Arthur, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, and even the Holy Grail. Knights, royalty, and ancient "secret" knowledge have always combined well, and this should especially be the case in the British upper classes whose direct ancestors have often been the source for these legends. In other words, British aristocrats involved in royalist, Freemasonic and Templar organizations appear to be doing nothing more than upholding their heritage, even if this heritage to some extent is a romantic fairy tale. The "pagan" Celtic groves, in which even senior members of the Anglican Church have become members, is a similar example. [25] Another example of the influence of Arthurian legends is a club named the Society of Knights of the Round Table which is filled with aristocrats and top military figures. This society regularly meets at the prestigious Army and Navy Club. [26]

Interestingly, besides membership in a number of templar organizations, among the Pilgrims have been the 20th century descendants of the two most legendary templar-related families. These are David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce, who was a vice president of the society, his brother, and William MacDonald Sinclair, a member of the executive committee of the Pilgrims who played a significant role in setting up the American branch of the society. This may well be one more example of the British upper classes' interest in keeping the Arthurian legends alive.

The big interests and major think tanks

We have taken a little bit of a detour here. From banking, business and media we soon ended up discussing revolutionary societies and templar orders. This is all part of who the Pilgrims are, but many of the most important institutes and interests haven't been discussed yet. So let's get back to the core issues: politics and business.

There are a lot of private institutes and a number of big interests which repeatedly show up in the biographies of Pilgrims. The following table lists these institutes and interests, together with how many persons in ISGP's expanded membership list of 1,800 have been involved with them. Keep in mind that there have been at least 2,500 additional Pilgrims which we either don't know about or haven't written a biography of. Also, there are many other political institutes Pilgrims have been involved with that have been left out for practical reasons. The IISS, the Atlantic Councils, the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs and the Aspen Institute are all examples of this.

None of these institutes and big interests should really come as a surprise, as they have been talked about for decades; and not only in more recent conspiracy and patriotic circles. The Morgans' all-powerful influence on the U.S. economy in the late 19th and early 20th century was known everywhere. During World War I the bank was accused of war profiteering. In the late 1930s, just before World War II, the Morgans were continually attacked for being in league with the British, because they were part of the campaign to bring the United States into the war on the side of England. Not only the public, but also officials in FDR's administration, including FDR himself, kept a close eye on the Morgan bank, trying to make sure it would not profit from the war as it had done in the first World War. [27] FDR fully realized that the Morgans, Rockefellers and New York high society in general "often represented important forces or areas of influence". [28]

The Pilgrims also reckoned the Morgans and Rockefellers as major interests which shouldn't be carelessly tossed aside. Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, chairman of the Pilgrims of the United States in 1920, wrote a letter on February 8, 1924 in which he clearly identified the influence of the Morgans and Rockefellers:

The influence of the Morgan family largely ceased to exist with the death of Jack Morgan in 1943. Jack's son, Henry S. Morgan, did remain a partner in the investment branch, Morgan Stanley, until his death in 1982, but by that time the influence of the Morgan Bank had little do anymore with the family.

The Rockefeller influence continued to exist after their huge Standard Oil monopoly was broken up in 1911. It actually made John D. Rockefeller, Sr. the richest man on the planet, leaving the family free to maintain a significant interest in several of the new companies. Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey) was the most important of these and was dominated by the Rockefellers until at least the late 1980s. [30] John D. Rockefeller, Jr. continued to oversee his father's business and philanthropic interests, but it was his oldest son, Nelson Rockefeller, who rose to some of the most important posts in the U.S. government. Nelson was the de facto ruler of Latin America during World War II, was influential in setting up the United Nations, briefly oversaw some of the most classified special operations under Eisenhower and was vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford from 1974 to 1977. After Nelson died, his younger brother David became the most visible face of the Rockefeller family. Instead of being active in regular politics, David has been an important player in some of the most important private NGOs the world has seen; from the CFR and Bilderberg to the Trilateral Commission, the Americas Society and the Atlantic Institute; you name it. Nelson's main focus was anti-communism while David has been more concerned with the globalization process.

There are many other aspects of the Rockefeller family that can be discussed, but the main purpose here is to show that these Rockefeller family interests and the Morgan bank have continued to be dominant forces in the Anglo-American Establishment. The table above which lists the Rockefeller and Morgan interests within the Pilgrims Society already makes a strong cases along these lines, but just to be sure it might be helpful to focus on the Morgan and Rockefeller ties of the more recent Pilgrims Society leadership.

For this analysis ISGP has used nineteen annual Pilgrims of the United States officers list dating from 1973 to 1995. There are a total of 54 different people on these lists. Added to this list is Thomas L. Pulling, whom we know was an executive officer in the late 1990s. Also added are 9 more presidents, vice presidents and secretaries listed on 2004 and 2006 tax returns of the Pilgrims. This brings us to a total of 64 Pilgrims of the United States officers since 1973 that we know about. The table below shows 24 officers among these 64 with rather obvious connections to the Rockefeller interests or the Morgan bank. That comes down to 38 percent.

At any one time from the 1970s to the early 2000s there was a dominant presence of Morgan and Rockefeller men on the board of the Pilgrims of the United States, leading to the obvious conclusion that these interests - the Rockefellers, at least - still represent the cornerstone of the Anglo-American Establishment. The old Carnegie foundations are also quite strongly represented among the recent Pilgrims leadership, just as most of the other think tanks listed earlier in this paragraph.

Rockefeller, Morgan and other big interests in Great Britain

It is also possible to spot the Rockefeller and the older Morgan interests in the mid to late 20th century leadership of the Pilgrims of Great Britain. Viscount William Harcourt, for example, who was an executive member of the Pilgrims of Great Britain until his death in 1979, was the great-grandson of Junius S. Morgan and the great-nephew of J.P. Morgan. After having been educated at Oxford, Harcourt spent two months at J.P. Morgan & Co. and Morgan Stanley in New York. Eventually, in 1968, he became chairman of Morgan Grenfell, the British branch of J.P. Morgan.

Lord Carrington, president of the Pilgrims of Great Britain since 1983, used to be a member of the international council of the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank.

There are a few other, less important examples of British Pilgrims representing Morgan and Rockefeller interests. Sir Evelyn Baring, a British executive member, had his traineeship at J.P. Morgan in New York. Pilgrim Bill Mackworth-Young was head of Morgan Grenfell from 1980 until his death in 1984. Pilgrim John M. Wallace was head of Chase National Bank's London offices while also vice president of Equitable Trust Company. More examples will probably surface when more British Pilgrims are analyzed.

We also find British Pilgrims representing U.S. corporations, mainly in Great Britain, as IBM (Watson family), General Electric, Blackstone and a few others.

The officers and regular members of the Pilgrims of Great Britain have represented a greater variety of key banks than their friends on the other side of the ocean. The most important English banks in the Pilgrims of Great Britain, next to Morgan Grenfell and to some extent Chase, have been Lazard, Barings, Barclays, Hambros, J. Henry Schroder, S. G. Warburg and probably also National Westminster. The families and individuals heading these banks at the same time have dominated the Bank of England for generation after generation. To illustrate, the following 18 Bank of England governors/directors are known to have been members of the Pilgrims of Great Britain:

Even though ISGP's membership list only contains about 350 British members as of this writing, it's already obvious that not only the Bank of England, but also institutes as the Foreign Office and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) are strongly represented. This might have been expected, because they are the British counterparts of the Federal Reserve, the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations.

As for the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA or Chatham House), at this point it is impossible to do as thorough an analysis as has been done with its U.S. counterpart, the CFR, simply because there's not that much information on membership. However, the following Pilgrims have played a significant role in the Royal Institute of International Affairs:

Like their American colleagues the British Pilgrims also tend to support the United Nations, NATO, liberal globalist institutions as the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD and a host of transatlantic foundations and think tanks. In that sense the Pilgrims Society is the complete opposite of groups as the American Security Council, Le Cercle and Council for National Policy.

State Department

For American Pilgrims the most important government department has always been the Department of State. No less than 17 of the 28 secretaries of state of the 20th century appear in Pilgrims lists compiled by ISGP. In case of the British Pilgrims, the link with the Foreign Office is less strong. While there are a good amount of foreign service officers to be found, not exactly a lot of foreign affairs ministers have appeared on Pilgrims Society lists it appears. However, ISGP only has analyzed one-fifth of the British names compared to the American ones, so it's hard to make any sweeping conclusions here. There are tons of ambassadors, leading bankers, industrialists, aristocrats and people with ties to business groups and the royal family, but top cabinet officials? Not a whole lot relative speaking.

The link between the Pilgrims and the State Department is additionally confirmed through the close ties between the CFR, whose leadership mostly consists of Pilgrims, and the State Department. Hillary Clinton perfectly demonstrated this in recent years when she quipped:

Early Pentagon ties

In the early days the Defense Department, founded in 1947 as part of the national security state, was regularly headed by a Pilgrim or someone very close to the Pilgrims elite. The first secretary of defense, James Forrestal (1947-1949), came out of Dillon, Read & Co. He committed suicide while still in office, but all his friends from big banking, including the Dillons, William Draper Jr., Averell Harriman and Ferdinand Eberstadt, were Pilgrims. So was his son, Michael Forrestal.

The next defense secretary, General George Marshall (1950-1951), was a former secretary of state. While almost certainly never a member of the Pilgrims, he was well-respected by the Eastern Establishment. Pilgrim David Rockefeller, for example, invited him to the board of trustees of International House. The German Marshall Fund, named after him and his Marshall Plan, has also been stacked with liberal elites ever since its inception in 1972. These include Pilgrims as David Rockefeller, John McCloy and C. Douglas Dillon.

Robert Lovett, the son of a prominent railroad tycoon and himself a well-known member of Skull & Bones, was secretary of defense from 1951 to 1953. He is not known to have been a Pilgrim himself, but his son Edward definitely was. Lovett certainly mingled in elite circles through the Alibi Club, Links Club and the Century Association, all of them stacked with Pilgrims. The bank he worked for in the pre-World War II era, Brown Brothers Harriman, was another major bastion of Pilgrims Society influence. And thus, like Marshall, it is hard to imagine that Lovett never attended any meetings of the Pilgrims.

Charles E. Wilson was the first secretary of defense (1953-1957) who was not part of the Anglo-American establishment. It must be said, however, that the General Electric Company he came from has been dominated by Pilgrims Society members and that the president he served under, Eisenhower, used to be a Pilgrims Society executive himself. Eisenhower's CIA director and secretary of state, the Dulles brothers, were Pilgrims too. Eisenhower maintained a very pro-Saudi oil stance from which Wilson did not deviate. Certainly it is clear that the geopolitical convictions of an early secretary of defense as Charles Wilson was much more in line with the Anglo-American establishment than some of his neoconservative successors, most notably Donald Rumsfeld (1975-1977; 2001-2006) and also Cheney (1989-1993), although neither went full anti-Arab, pro-Israel neocon until the Bush 43 administration.

Secretaries of defense Thomas Gates (1959-1961), Robert McNamara (1961-1968) and Elliot Richardson (January-May 1973) were, in fact, Pilgrims. Gates, a Pilgrims executive, represented the old Drexel and Morgan banking interests and was close to Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and the Bechtels. [32] McNamara represented the Ford Motor and Rockefeller interests before and after his rather long tenure as secretary of defense. Pilgrims vice president Elliot Richardson, a former attorney general and more of a career politician, became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations and a founding executive of the Trilateral Commission.

Somewhat surprisingly, Reagan's secretary of defense from 1981 to 1987, Caspar Weinberger, was a Pilgrims Society executive. Then again, despite not having a traditional Eastern Establishment background, Weinberger was very much devoted to the Anglo-American cause. He also came from Bechtel, where he served under Reagan's secretary of state and fellow-Pilgrim, George Shultz.

The Reagan administration is an interesting one in that sense. Supposedly a Barry Goldwater (ultra)conservative, Reagan was definitely surrounded by "New World Order" type individuals: vice president George H. W. Bush (allegedly a Pilgrim, but no proper sources and most likely honorary), chief of staff James Baker (allegedly a Pilgrim, but no proper sources), early secretary of state Alexander Haig (Pilgrims executive), secretary of state George Shultz (Pilgrims), Shultz' deputy John Whitehead (Pilgrims) and Caspar Weinberger (Pilgrims executive) as secretary of defense. It certainly makes sense that the John Birch Society and Council for National Policy were crying wolf. While it's arguably less worrisome than having a fully conservative or neoconservative establishment running the show, it definitely seems mighty hard for any elected president to shake off Eastern Establishment influences, especially when it comes to the State Department - a subject actually already discussed in ISGP's intro article. Individuals as General John Poindexter, General John Singlaub, Colonel Oliver North and CIA director William Casey actually tried to implement their own little foreign policy scheme by primarily isolating Reagan from Shultz, Whitehead and Weinberger [33] and look where it got them: a nice expose of Iran Contra in all the major Eastern Establishment newspapers, part of it generated by Rockefeller and Shultz friend Daniel Sheehan and his Christic Institute. [34] It could be a coincidence, but the ties are there and definitely a correction in foreign policy was made.

National security advisors and elite grooming

Together with the secretary of state and secretary of defense, the position of national security advisor, which has existed since 1953, is another crucial one within the U.S. administration. With daily access to the president and as head of his National Security Council and - at least historically - as chairman of the 40 committee and predecessor groups, which sanctioned and monitored CIA covert operations, the national security advisor has been a very influential force in U.S. politics. It can be debated how influential the position actually is, but ultimately it largely comes down to which top official the president prefers to put the most faith in. This dynamic differs per administration.

Trying to tie the position of national security advisor to the Pilgrims Society doesn't work very well, at least with the present known membership. Only national security advisors Henry Kissinger from 1969 to 1975 and Zbigniew Brzezinski from 1977 to 1981 are known to have become members of the Pilgrims Society. That's it. Of course, both men are deeply tied to the globalist Rockefeller interests, more so than any other historical national security advisor. Kissinger has ran the Bilderberg meetings with David Rockefeller for many decades, among many other endeavors; and Brzezinski founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller. So when it comes to the Pilgrims, the Rockefellers might be a more important direction to look into than an official government position.

This does not exactly mean that other national security advisors were nobodies. Far from it. From the beginning the position has been limited to Harvard, Yale and Princeton graduates and over time the road to the office of the national security advisor more and more lay through a variety of think tanks, most of them ran by Pilgrims Society members. Like secretaries of state, defense secretaries and CIA directors, national security advisors are solidly part of the establishment and generally grow to be ranking members of the superclass network after their retirement from official government service. All this indicates they keep some of the nation's biggest secrets.

We can't say much about national security advisors from the 1980s on, simply because we don't have the Pilgrims Society membership lists available for cross-referencing. One assumes that Henry Kissinger protege Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell and George Shultz-protege Condoleezza Rice are past national security advisors with the biggest chance of receiving an invitation to the Pilgrims Society, but nothing is certain, especially not with most national security advisors building their careers in Washington, D.C.'s national security structure.

Readers should never forget though that it's impossible to become national security advisor without affiliation to (Pilgrims-linked) think tanks and other related establishment groups. Let's illustrate this by looking at the latest national security advisor as of this writing: Susan Rice.

Susan Rice's father, Emmett Rice, was the second black governor of the Federal Reserve System and from 1992 until this day her mother, Lois Dickson Rice, has been a scholar at the Brookings Institution. Rice herself received a BA from Stanford on a Truman fellowship, followed by a doctorate in philosophy on an Oxford Rhodes scholarship in 1990. Clinton's secretary of state Madeleine Albright was a close family friend and a virtual godmother to Rice. This clearly paid off for Rice. She was invited to Clinton's national security council in 1993 and from 1997 to 2001, at the recommendation of Albright, she served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

When Bush came into office, Rice sought refuge in the private enterprise and think tank world. In 2001 and 2002 she was a managing director of IntelliBridge, a firm founded by David Rothkopf, the former Kissinger Associates managing director who introduced the term "superclass" to the world. In the same period she joined the CFR, the Aspen Strategy Group, and the boards of the Atlantic Council and Madeleine Albright's National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). In 2002 she also became a scholar at the Brookings Institution, similar to her mother.

Rice went on leave at the Brookings Institution in 2008 to become a leading foreign policy advisor to then-presential candidate Barack Obama. Once elected president, Obama appointed her ambassador to the United Nations, a position in which she successfully pushed for the overthrow of Gaddafi (with disastrous immigration consequences to the European Union) and secured tough sanctions against Iran and North Korea. Subsequent to that, in July 2013, she was appointed Obama's national security advisor. She was considered for the position of secretary of state, but this appointment was handed to John Kerry, a person who married into the family of Bilderberg co-founder and Pilgrims Society member H.J. Heinz II.

Of course, through all of this, Rice's lifelong mentor Madeleine Albright kept chairing the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), a major think tank and pressure group involved in "spreading democracy" to all corners of the world with financing coming from private foundations and the U.S. government. There's a good chance that Rice will return to the NDI after her time in government once again is over and help groom future top government officials.

As the reader can see, discussing the history of every national security advisor will be a little cumbersome, but it should be clear that just about every national security advisor, defense secretary, or secretary of state has a similar story: they were all groomed by members of the superclass at an early stage in their career, sometimes because of family ties and other times because they went to the right universities and were considered capable proteges. What should also be very clear is that proteges have to be very, very dependable and need to conform to certain rules of either a conservative or liberal establishment. You can't be a loose cannon that tries to shake things up by asking questions about the Zapruder film showing the John F. Kennedy assassination or why above 2,800 °F / 1,540 °C temperatures were measured underneath the World Trade Center towers. This is going to upset the mentors big time, because they, or the persons they associate with, (should) actually have the answers. Or the mentors carry secrets of their own that they don't want exposed in a potential chain reaction. Thus a culture of silence and secrecy is maintained at the highest levels of government, while the masses are indoctrinated not to believe in "conspiracy theories".

The security services play an important role, of course, in maintaining secrecy. Certainly these days they have the ability to spy on everything and everyone, and in any case have to do background checks in order to authorize security clearances, which all high-level National Security Council, Defense Department and State Department personnel need.

Founding of the NSA

With this last segment we finally end up with the security services. Despite the fact that the CIA was founded earlier than the NSA, it might be better to discuss the NSA first, as it is a much shorter story with regard to the Pilgrims.

The immediate precursor of the NSA was the 1949-founded Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), an agency focused on code breaking that fell under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As usual, the authorities were reluctant to share crucial information with their sister agencies and higher level civilian authorities. Thus, in December 1951, Truman ordered key members of his administration - secretary of state Dean Acheson, defense secretary Robert Lovett and General Walter Bedell Smith - to set up the Brownell Commission in order to figure out a way to remedy these intelligence failures. This study led to the obvious recommendation to create a similar agency as AFSA, but have it fall directly under the control of the civilian authorities. In October 1952 this became the National Security Agency. [35]

Important to mention here is that Dean Acheson, General Walter Bedell Smith and Brownell Committee head General George A. Brownell, a major New York lawyer, all became members of the Pilgrims Society. In addition, Robert Lovett's son, Edward, also became a member of the Pilgrims. The elder Lovett is primarily known in alternative circles for his membership in Skull & Bones (and Dean Acheson for Scroll & Key).

Apart from these founding influences on the NSA, the military chiefs of this agency have hardly - if ever - been invited to the Pilgrims Society. They are career Pentagon officials who have little to no business in New York high society or Washington State Department circles.

If we look today at the post-9/11 situation around the NSA, we find that whistleblowers as William Binney and Edward Snowden are backed by the Rockefellers and a number of their closest allies, some of them undoubtedly involved in the Pilgrims Society. It's an interesting contrast. Back in the 1950s the liberal Eastern Establishment played a key role in establishing the NSA to prevent a power struggle with the (much more hardline and conservative) military and today the most liberal wing of the Eastern Establishment is concerned that primarily neocon influencies tied to the Pentagon and military-industrial complex who had the ear of George W. Bush, have been using the NSA to spy on American citizens, including journalists. Of course, as long as the truth on 9/11 is kept hidden, the War on Terror is allowed to continue, and the liberal establishment is practicing an open-borders policy with regard to the Middle East, it's unlikely that domestic spying will be curbed any time soon.

One area of investigation that goes beyond the scope of this article without reliable information being available is to what extent the NSA has worked with private industry in implementing some of its semi-legal spy operations - apart from covert requests to media and IT communications to hand over all user data [36] - and what this might mean for private members of the superclass being aware of these operations. To single out a possibility, the reader can go through ISGP's combined membership plus biography list for the Pilgrims Society and find numerous directors, chairs and CEOs of AT&T that have controlled the company for over a century. In addition, AT&T's Bell Labs ran the government's super-secret Sandia National Laboratories from 1949 to 1993, after which Lockheed Martin took over. One assumes CEOs of corporations like these must at least have a vague idea of what the NSA has been up to, but, as said, without reliable data being available (a number of rumors do exist), there's nothing to add to the subject here.

Early CIA ties, the "Company" and corporate coups

While the Pilgrims Society doesn't have particularly strong ties to the intelligence community, it does have somewhat stronger and longer-lasting ties to the CIA as compared to the NSA. In fact, it is possible to describe the founding and early decades of the CIA simply based on Pilgrims Society membership.

Pilgrim Allen Dulles played a major role in the creation of the CIA. He was a major Wall Street power broker who, along with his brother and future Pilgrim and OSS chief David Bruce, was involved in the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference concerning World War I. As still needs to be discussed in this article, through Sullivan & Cromwell, Standard Oil, Brown Brothers Harriman and J. Henry Schroder, Dulles subsequently played an important role in rebuilding what soon became Nazi Germany. It wasn't until it was far too late, when he and others finally realized that Hitler was as grave a threat to the West as to the Soviet Union, that they began to lobby for U.S. intervention in World War II on the side of the British.

In July 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, FDR confidant William Donovan asked Dulles to head the newly-established Coordinator of Information (COI) headquarters at Rockefeller Center, one floor above the U.S. headquarters of MI6. The difficult task these two men had was to integrate the intelligence services of the Navy, Army, FBI and State Department to prepare for war with the Nazis. In 1942 the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which famously carried out successful espionage and sabotage operations during the latter part of World War II. Dulles was sent to head OSS headquarters in neutral Switzerland, where it is rumored in intelligence circles that he helped the Nazis launder and stash their war loot and also became involved with the Knights of Malta. Certainly the COI/OSS positions Allen Dulles was handed are very curious in light of his role as one the chief liaisons between the Nazi establishment and Eastern Establishment. Reportedly FDR and the British were spying on him relentslessly, trying to find solid evidence of his whealing and dealing. [37] Incredibly, even Dulles' son used to say, "My father was Nazi spy" until he received his "anti-paranoia medication". [38]

Nevertheless, at the end of the war, Dulles was brought in as a consultant on how to reorganize the OSS into the peace-time Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and subsequently "was asked to chair an early reform study of the organization." [39] In 1951-1952 he served as the deputy of CIA director General Walter Bedell Smith, a future Pilgrims Society executive. In 1953 Eisenhower picked Dulles as CIA director, with his brother becoming secretary of state. He held the position until late 1961, when the Kennedys forced him to resign over the Bay of Pigs debacle.

John McCone became Kennedy's new pick for CIA director in late 1961. Clearly the fact that McCone was a Catholic and Knights of Malta played a major role in his election, as Kennedy himself was a Catholic. One is tempted to suspect that McCone's appoinment is what brought the Sovereign Military Order of Malta into the CIA, but the fact is that various top level career CIA officers also were Knights of Malta or Opus Dei: James Angleton, Ted Shackley, William Colby, William Casey and General Vernon Walters all come to mind. McCone was far from an independent pick of Kennedy, however, which becomes obvious when we realize that Allen Dulles first struck up a friendship with McCone in 1948 during an evening in which both hoped and expected Pilgrims Society member Thomas Dewey to be elected U.S. president. In that period Dulles served as Dewey's political advisor. Unfortunately for Dulles and McCone, Harry Truman went home with the prize.

Soon after their first meeting, McCone introduced Dulles to his business partner Stephen Bechtel. Subsequently Dulles introduced Bechtel to key members of the Eastern Establishment, most notably the Rockefellers. In 1955 Bechtel became a partner in J.P. Morgan. By that time he and David Rockefeller were working hand in glove with the CIA at the highest level through their close friendship with Allen Dulles, who by then had become head of the CIA. It is Dulles and Rockefeller who provided Bechtel with extremely lucrative contracts in Saudi Arabia to build pipelines, refineries, airports and military bases, a lot of it in partnership with the Bin Laden family, to which it has remained close even in the post-9/11 world. Bechtel also provided logistical support for the CIA coup against Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 and the 1965 coup against Indonesia's Sukarno. As a result of these coups the Shah was installed in Iran and the Suharto in Indonesia, both of them extremely brutal dictators. [40]

Through their initial contact with Allen Dulles, the Bechtels essentially became the Rockefellers of the West Coast. The Bechtels have been particularly well-known for their prominence in the Bohemian Grove, which has also been visited by Eastern Establishmentarians as the Rockefellers, Morgans, President Dwight Eisenhower and other Pilgrims. Of course, McCone was another Bohemian Grove visitor. We also find the Bechtels in the elite 1001 Club, alongside the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Prince Berhard, Prince Philip and other mainly liberal elites.

With these individuals we are basically zooming in on the origins of who runs our modern security state. Pilgrims executive General Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles largely built the CIA and turned it into what soon also became known as "the Company". One of the reasons why the CIA has been called "the Company" is because it has been protecting U.S. corporate interests around the world. Let's take a look at some of the most well-known examples and see in addition if we can find additional Pilgrims Society ties:

• In 1953 the CIA and MI6, with the backing of President Eisenhower, British prime minister Winston Churchill and foreign secretary Sir Anthony Eden, overthrew Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), today known as BP [41], a company whose leadership is quite strongly represented in the Pilgrims Society and 1001 Club. At the time, Anglo-Iranian's general manager, Sir Eric Drake, flew to London to plead for a coup. [42] Drake eventually rose to chairman of BP and joined both the Pilgrims Society and 1001 Club, where representatives of the Shah of Iran were also invited to. As mentioned, Bechtel - of the 1001 Club - also aided the Iranian coup.
• Soon after leaving the CIA directorship to fellow-Pilgrim Allen Dulles in 1953, General Walter Bedell Smith joined United Fruit, the company through which he supervised the 1954 Guatemalan coup on behalf of the CIA. The Dulles brothers, John J. McCloy, a Rockefeller man and fellow-Pilgrim; the Lodge family of the Pilgrims; and other local Louisiana elites were all involved in United Fruit. In case of the Dulles brothers, their law firm Sullivan & Cromwell had written the statutes of United Fruit. The others were board members. [43]
• In 1960 President Eisenhower authorized CIA director and fellow-Pilgrim Allen Dulles to help the Belgian colonialist establishment in killing Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist president of Zaire / The Congo. [44] In the wake of Lumumba's death, the brutal anti-communist dictator Mobutu Sese Seko rose to power. Subsequently Mobutu was invited to join the elite 1001 Club, together with the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Bechtels and members of the Belgian establishment.
• In 1964 LBJ authorized the overthrow of Joao Goulart in Brazil, a directive carried out by CIA director John McCone - the old Bechtel partner - who had plotted the coup in advance with the ITT Corporation. [45] Soon after, McCone joined ITT, headed by his friend Harold Geneen. Coincidentally, a key player in the Brazilian coup, Paulo Ayres Filho, found his way to the international advisory board of the Bechtel-dominated Stanford Research Institute. At the time of the coup Ayres also was an "intimate" of leading Pilgrim David Rockefeller. [46] In contrast to AT&T, the board of ITT was not particularly tied to the Pilgrims Society it appears.
• In April 1965 John McCone was replaced as CIA director by Richard Helms, whose younger brother and grandfather, a major Rockefeller banker, were Pilgrims. Later that year the CIA, Bechtel, the Rockefellers, Freeport Minerals, Dutch colonialist and Indonesian elements - who soon coincidentally all gathered in the 1001 Club - organized a conspiracy that removed Sukarno of Indonesia from power and replaced him with the brutal General Suharto. After rising to power, Suharto immediately implemented an enormous genocide against suspected communists and other leftists. The shift in power away from the Kennedy-supported nationalist Sukarno, also resulted in Bechtel and Freeport being able to explore the huge Ertsberg and Grasberg mines, which contained enormous amounts of copper, iron, silver and gold.
  
  It's important to note here that Freeport was owned and ran by two Pilgrims Society members: Langbourne Williams and John Hay Whitney, both known CIA assets. In addition, Williams was a member of the elite President's Intelligence Advisory Board while Whitney, in the early 1950s, served on the Psychological Strategy Board. Both groups played an important role in overseeing CIA covert operations. A number of other Pilgrims were also involved in Freeport, as was Godfrey Stillman Rockefeller, a director from 1931 to 1980 whose son joined the 1001 Club. [47]
• After John McCone's CIA term came to an end in April 1965, he joined the board of ITT where he helped CEO Harold Geneen and CIA director Richard Helms foment a coup in Chile in 1971, this time authorized by President Nixon, who earlier served as Eisenhower's vice president. Another company deeply involved in the push for the Chilean coup was Anaconda Copper, whose top chiefs at the time - Charles M. Brinckerhoff, John B. M. Place and Clyde E. Weed - all belonged to the Pilgrims Society. In addition, at the time of the coup, Place was just in the process of stepping down as vice chairman of the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, where he had climbed the ranks for 25 years. Brinckerhoff and Weed actually represented a number of mining corporations active in Chile, with Brinckerhoff also serving as "mining advisor" to the Shah of Iran. A few other senior officers of Anaconda Copper have belonged to the Pilgrims, most notably Percy Avery Rockefeller, who died back in 1934.
  
  Just as important, the primary lobby group for CIA intervention in Chile was the David Rockefeller-founded Council of the Americas (Americas Society), on whose executive board Harold Geneen sat at the time. In fact, David Rockefeller headed the lobbying committee. [48]
  
  To make David Rockefeller's dedication to human rights in his younger days just a little clearer, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, President Jimmy Carter had no intention of providing the dictator with asylum in the United States, even if only for surgery. Carter only caved in after a campaign headed by David Rockefeller, with support of other Pilgrims as Henry Kissinger and Senator Claiborne Pell, portraying the Shah as a long-time ally of the United States. [49] The same Rockefeller clique had also been able to temporarily dump the Shah in the Bahamas at Resorts International, a gambling and tourism resort. [50] The Rockefeller clique claimed the decision for the resort was not their idea, but the fact remains that the chairman of Resorts International, James Crosby, was close to Nixon and Pilgrims Allen Dulles - the former CIA director - and Thomas Dewey. The resort was said to have had ties to Meyer Lansky's crime syndicate as well. Crosby also was chairman of Intertel, making him an even easier-to-spot CIA asset. Intertel was the primary security contractor of the Howard Hughes Corporation [51], the CIA's largest defense-related contractor in the 1960s and 1970s. [52] It seems clear that some elite Rockefeller networking was going on with regard to finding a new home for the Shah - and that this network extended to the CIA.
  
  What should always be remembered is that while the Shah may have been an ally of the elite, he ran a vicious secret policy and extensive torture operation to keep his country under control. [53]
  
• In ISGP's article A History of CIA Drug Trafficking we also find examples, including proper sources, that Nixon, Kissinger and Helms conspired to aid the overthrow of a socialist president in Bolivia in 1971, the same year Allende was removed in Chile. Bolivia's new dictator, General Hugo Banzer, stood at the base of the rise of South America's cocaine cartels in the mid-1970s by greatly expanding Bolivia's coca plantations. Two of his top aides in this effort include notorious CIA assets Klaus Barbie and Stefano Della Chiaie.
  
  In the same article we find plenty of evidence that all presidents, except Kennedy and Carter, pretty much allowed the CIA to do whatever it pleased. For Latin America this meant numerous military dictatorships being installed that repressed leftist elements and prevented any nationalizations or loss in profits of U.S. corporations.

Many additional coups have been fomented around the world by the CIA with the aid of corporate interests or at the very least to protect these interests. In most cases not enough information is available to even attempt to describe them, but the examples mentioned here clearly reveal the core group of conspirators that formed "the Company" in the early days. Before we summarize that core group, we first need to discuss a number of individuals in more detail.

Richard Helms, the CIA director after McCone from 1965 to 1973, is one of these persons who deserves much more attention. As mentioned earlier, Helms' grandfather and older brother were members of the Pilgrims Society. Helms' grandfather, Gates White McGarrah, was a very influential pre-World War II banker. Apart from being a Pilgrims Society executive, McGarrah was chairman and CEO of the Rockefeller's Chase National Bank in 1926 and 1927, followed by a position as chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 1927 to 1930. Subsequently, from 1930 to 1933, McGarrah was the first president of the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Before this last appointment, he had already served on the general council of the German Reichsbank from 1924 to 1927, dealing with reparations for World War I. Apart from aiding the rearmament of Nazi Germany, McGarrah was also involved alongside the Morgans in financing the fascist regime of Mussolini (to be discussed later). He died in 1940, right when World War II started.

There's less to say about Richard Helms' younger brother, Pilgrims Society member Gates McGarrah. He was a vice president of Bowne & Company, the largest and oldest financial printing firm in New York (it was founded in 1775). That appears to be it. It seems obvious that Richard Helms, despite being a more elevated individual than his brother, wasn't a member of the Pilgrims because he worked in Washington, D.C. throughout his CIA career, instead of New York. Despite that, Helms most certainly remained close friends with the leaders of the Eastern Establishment throughout his life. For example, when Henry Kissinger threw his birthday party in 1983, Peter Peterson, David Rockefeller, George Shultz, the widows of LBJ and Nelson Rockefeller, Helmut Schmidt and Jihan Sadat were all present. [54] To this day Kissinger, Peterson, Shultz and the Rockefellers are leading members of the Pilgrims Society, a group Helms is also close to. While Shultz was president of Bechtel in the 1975-1982 period (and director 1989-2006 after his term as Reagan's secretary of state), Helms was hired by the CIA-tied company as a Middle East "consultant". [55] Vice president of Bechtel in this period was future Pilgrims executive Caspar Weinberger, who happened to become Reagan's secretary of defense. Later on, in 2002, Henry Kissinger wrote the foreword of Richard Helms' biography A Look Over My Shoulder, in which Helms basically revealed nothing of importance with regard to the JFK assassination, CIA drug trafficking, or MKULTRA, all projects he's considered a chief suspect in.

As the reader can see, there were extremely close ties between Helms and the leaders of the Eastern Establishment. Therefore Helms' appointment as CIA director can be interpreted as a continued Wall Street domination of the Agency. The first clear example of this influence was OSS founder and Wall Street lawyer William Donovan. While not a member of the Pilgrims Society, in 2002 the William J. Donovan Foundation merged into the Pilgrims Foundation. Looking at the board at the time, we not only spot leading Pilgrims Society members, but also individuals as the daughter of former CIA director William Casey, CIA special operations veteran General John Singlaub, and Prince Michel de Bourbon, a notorious Cold War arms dealer for Opus Dei.

Going back to the early days, we find Pilgrims Society members General Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA in the 1951-1962 period - apart from the fact that Dulles, as a Donovan recruit, helped set up the CIA. This is followed by John McCone, a very close "Western Establishment" friend of Allen Dulles, the Rockefellers and the Bechtels, who headed the CIA from 1962 to 1965. Subsequently Richard Helms, with close family in the Pilgrims Society, is appointed head of the CIA. This means that certainly from Bedell Smith's appointment in 1951 to Helms' retirement in 1973, the CIA essentially was working hand-in-glove with America's leading corporate interests. We're not just talking about an ideological anti-communist and pro-capitalist alliance. We're talking about close personal relationships and members of the Eastern Establishment setting up and directly running the CIA.

While the Pilgrims connection, and even the Wall Street one, to the CIA directorship gets a little fuzzy after Helms, the Eastern Establishment connection always continued. The clearest example is George H. W. Bush in the January 1976 to January 1977 period. Appointed under Gerald Ford, Bush left as CIA head when the rather left-wing Jimmy Carter came into office. It has been reported that Bush was a Pilgrim in the 1990s, but this seems to be a honorary mentioning as president of the United States. Despite that, the New York banking history of the Bush clan through Pilgrims-dominated banks as Brown Brothers Harriman, Dillion, Read & Co. and the Union Banking Corporation is well-known, as well as the family's close ties to Yale and Skull & Bones.

Another interesting example is William Casey, the CIA director from 1981 to 1987 under President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. It is generally suspected in conspiracy circles that Bush, Casey and a number of other CIA veterans got together to undermine the presidency of Jimmy Carter, whose old friend, Admiral Stansfield Turner, fired some of the closest friends of the Bush-Helms clique during his term as CIA director from 1977 to 1981, most notably Ted Shackley and his "secret team". Like Bush, there are hints that Casey always kept working for the CIA after he resigned as the European chief of the OSS after 1945. Apart from that, Casey is strongly linked to the Pilgrims Society as a rumored asset and later business partner of CIA director Allen Dulles and his decades-long partners in Capital Cities Communications (Cap Cities): suspected fellow-spooks Lowell Thomas, Alger Chapman and Thomas Dewey. This closely-knit network of Pilgrims- (except Casey) and apparent CIA-assets played an important role in politics and reportedly maintained ties with the mafia. In February 1987 L.A. Weekly magazine raised some of these questions about Cap Cities and more:

It has been confirmed to ISGP by the Pilgrims Society secretary that James Woolsey, the CIA director from 1993 to 1995, has given a speech to the Pilgrims on at least one occasion. Despite being the most influential neocon on the planet, bigger even than Richard Perle ever was, Woolsey has a solid Eastern Establishment background as well. And one can argue that most likely he was already recruited by the CIA by the time he became the founder and president of Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for President in 1967 and 1968.

This Eastern Establishment background goes for every CIA director, William Webster (1987-1991) being about the only exception (he was appointed under the conservative Reagan, who also had a strong support base among anti-Eastern Establishmnent John Birchers). Just to provide a more complete discussion of the CIA here, here are the biographies of the remaining CIA directors:

The above-CIA network

As should be clear from the previous section in particular, there's little evidence that the CIA ever went "rogue". In fact, the "rogue CIA" idea is a myth that has been purposely perpetuated to shield the president in particular from any wrongdoing when it comes to controversial operations. Throughout the decades presidents, national security advisors and often also secretaries of state have authorized just about every major CIA operation ever devised. This most certainly includes pro-big business coups that brought "anti-communist" dictators and drug-dealing death squad leaders to power. These operations have been documented reasonably well over the years by various parliamentary investigations, such as the Church Committee into CIA abuses, the Hamilton and Inouye-led committees into Iran Contra and the closely-related Kerry Committee looking into Contra drug trafficking. A present-day, liberal elite-backed NGO as the National Security Archive has continued the work of these committees by filing FOIA requests and writing additional reports.

The only Cold War presidents who really did their best to not authorize such operations that involved replacing moderate governments with violent dictators and death squads have been John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, although both continually were under significant pressure by top cabinet members, advisors, and Eastern Establishment and Christian conservative pressure groups to sail more hardline routes. Kennedy was by far the most stubborn in this sense.

We could go into the so-called "Special Groups". Successively known as the 5412/2 Special Group (1954-1963), the 303 Committee (1963-1969), the 40 Committee (1969-1976), the Operations Advisory Group (1976-1977), the NSC Special Coordination Committee (1977-1981) and the National Security Planning Group (1981-), they provide us with additional evidence that the CIA director does not implement his own major covert operations all by himself. The national security advisor always acted as chairman of the Special Group, with members generally involving the CIA director, the deputy secretary of defense, the deputy secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the United States Information Agency and sometimes one or two close advisors of the president.

The fact that the president himself, or even the secretary of state and secretary of defense generally were not directly involved in the Special Group tells one that the Special Group never was the highest decision-making body. The highest decision-making is done by those individuals who have the president's ear, which varies per administration and can include the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the defense secretary, the CIA director, or maybe sometimes even the vice president. That's also why certainly during the Nixon-Kissinger-Helms era, immediately before the congressional investigations, all other 40 Committee members were kept out of the loop on the most sensitive operations.

Pilgrims domination of the Democrat vs. Republican system?

It's time to start putting things together. In the previous section we looked at the correlation between Pilgrims Society members and various specific top government positions, namely the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security advisor and the CIA director. In this section we look at all Democrat and Republican administrations of the Cold War. We not only pay attention to Pilgrims Society membership, but also to the big interest, most notably the Rockefeller family.

While ISGP has done this in the introduction article to this website, there's little point here in analyzing post-Cold War administrations, because the last complete Pilgrims Society membership list ISGP has been able to acquire dates to 1980. This oversight might be updated as newer lists will become available in the future.

It should be quite obvious at this point that the Rockefeller group and their primary protege, Henry Kissinger, together with a little help from George Shultz and Bechtel, have dominated U.S. politics from Eisenhower to to George H. W. Bush.

The Reagan administration possibly stands out the most, because it was considered ultraconservative and ultrahawkish, the complete contrast of Jimmy Carter, a first-rate Trilateral Commission and Rockefeller protege (albeit most definitely to the left once in office). Yet, almost all key Reagan appointments had elite Rockefeller ties as well, either directly or otherwise slightly more indirectly through Bechtel and the Pilgrims Society. We also shouldn't forget that Reagan's CIA director William Casey was about the only long-time Cap Cities partner who hadn't joined the Pilgrims Society.

The Cold War Rockefeller CIA network

Whenever we study the most sensitive covert operations of the 20th and early 21st century, what we bump into again and again is that the real decision-makers within any administration are the individuals with the deepest connections to banking and big business, as well as to the NGO world of elite think tanks, private conference, and billion dollar foundations. Can there be any doubt that certainly during the Cold War, the most influential government officials all had close Rockefeller ties? No, there can't be, not after the previous chapter. In it we find indisputable evidence of Rockefeller domination of the Cold War Democrat vs Republican voting system.

"Rockefeller domination", of course, is a reference to the Rockefeller family and their network of closest friends and associates, most notably the Dulles brothers, John McCone, the Bechtels, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bechtel employees as George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, all of whom have already been mentioned or discussed to an extent. We should recap these ties and even dig a little deeper, because especially with regard to the Rockefeller family the CIA ties are still somewhat informal and indirect. We're about to change that.

Of course, the Rockefeller history goes back to the late 19th century, but for practical reasons here we'll only be discussing the Cold War era, the period that coincided with the blooming of the "Rockefeller Five", the five sons of Pilgrims Society member John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960). The most important of these sons to discuss here in relation to the CIA and covert operations are Nelson, David and Laurance Rockefeller - the first two certainly belonging to the Pilgrims Society.

Under President Harry Truman, Nelson Rockefeller set up and ran the foreign aid programs, which he advocated should be used as a tool for political manipulation by the U.S. government. When President Dwight Eisenhower came along in 1953, Nelson was instrumental in reorganizing the Department of Defense and the Office of Defense Mobilization and also in creating the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). Then, while serving as Eisenhower's advisor on foreign affairs and psychological warfare in 1954 and 1955, he was vice chairman of the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) and chairman of the (short-lived) Planning Coordination Group, both involved in overseeing and coordinating presidentially-approved covert operations. [68] By this time the CIA had started up the MKULTRA mind control programs, with Rockefeller reportedly fully aware that the CIA was using the HEW's National Institute of Mental Health as a front to conduct some of these covert programs. [69]

Nelson Rockefeller's worldly connections and somewhat unorthodox wheeling and dealing at the highest levels of government eventually made him Gerald Ford's vice president, but on more than a few occasions he drew the ire of presidents and chief cabinet members. These include FDR's secretary of state Cordell Hull [70] and even the Dulles brothers when they served as Eisenhower's secretary of state and CIA director. [71] As Ford's vice president, Rockefeller also caused plenty of trouble, in particular for ordinary Ford administration staffers and its chief of staff Dick Cheney. [72]

Another very prominent political position of Nelson, apart from the vice presidency, was that of governor of New York state in the 1959-1971 period, which he managed to get elected to by beating fellow-Pilgrims Society member Averell Harriman. Nelson's good friend LBJ tried to convince the New York governor to run for president in the 1968 elections against candidates as Richard Nixon and Robert Kennedy, thinking he stood a better chance than LBJ's vice president Hubert Humphrey at winning. Rockefeller declined, Kennedy was assassinated, and eventually Nixon beat Humphrey by a hair. [73] Rockefeller influence on foreign policy remained extremely strong though in the otherwise conservative Nixon administration through Nelson's close friend Henry Kissinger.

Meanwhile, in the shadows, Nelson's younger brother David, another close friend of LBJ and Kissinger, kept building a global network of economic and political think tanks, among them Bilderberg and the Americas Society. As we've seen in a previous chapter, on occasion David would lobby the government a little for the overthrow of an emerging Third World democracy such as Chile. These activities make all the sense in the world when we consider the words of high-level CIA official and reported Richard Helms friend Thomas Braden [74], who explained that David's ties to the CIA were "much, much, much closer" than Nelson's:

One of these other division chiefs alluded to by Braden undoubtedly was David's close friend William Bundy, an elite high-level CIA analyst who was married to a daughter of Truman's secretary of state Dean Acheson. Bundy and Rockefeller met each other at a party in 1953 organized by Charles Cremeans, another high-level CIA officer who already was a friend of Rockefeller. [76]

In relation to ISGP's writings on "liberal CIA", it is interesting to note that Bundy's brother, McGeorge Bundy, was national security advisor from 1961 to 1966, after which, from 1966 to 1979, he presided over the "new left" Ford Foundation. While national security advisor, Bundy arranged a deal that CIA-financing of Africa-America Institute (AAI) would be fully taken over by Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and USAID. At that point the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund had been serving as chairman of the AAI for some time. [77]

In the same period, in 1963, one of Bundy's aides, Marcus Raskin, together with John McCloy (a Pilgrim who chaired the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation) at the State Department, "dissented" from the government's perspective and founded the Institute for Policy Studies, an instant nexus of anti-Vietnam War activism, anti-CIA "imperialism" and "new left" politics which soon came to be financed with millions from foundations as Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, MacArthur, Turner and Soros. In the early 2000s IPS attracted Noam Chomsky and Richard Falk as senior scholars, the latter a soon-to-be 9/11 skeptic of the no-757-at-Pentagon kind.

The more one looks at it, the more one is forced to conclude that the Rockefeller and Ford foundations were one with the CIA. For example, immediately post World War II, the Ford Foundation helped sponsor CIA-backed magazines as Perspectives USA and Der Monat. In the same period, its senior (or prospective) leadership had more than a few ties to the CIA. In January 1953, with the election of President Eisenhower, Allen Dulles wasn't sure if he was going to be appointed Eisenhower's CIA director. This prompted Allen to set up a meeting with his friend David Rockefeller, who promised him the presidency of the Ford Foundation in case Eisenhower would pick someone else for the job. Two days later Eisenhower povided Dulles with the directorship, so that was that. [78]

At the time, Richard Bissell, who would eventually become Dulles' deputy director for operations, had only just stepped down from a senior position in the Ford Foundation. Then there was John J. McCloy, a key Rockefeller family operative who at various times chaired Chase Manhattan Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. McCloy served as Ford Foundation trustee from 1953 to 1958, at which point he was elected chairman, a position he held until 1965. In the years after World War II, as high commissioner in Berlin, McCloy already had provided cover for CIA agents and during his term at the Ford Foundation he established a close working relationship with the Agency. To critics within the foundation of the relationship with the CIA, McCloy simply argued "that if they failed to cooperate, the CIA would simply penetrate the foundation quietly by recruiting or inserting staff at the lower levels." [79] Considering Dulles, Rockefeller and McCloy all were close associates and Pilgrims, one can only assume this was little more than an excuse of an otherwise very supportive McCloy.

The same basic story of CIA involvement goes for other key friends of David Rockefeller. Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, with whom David founded the Trilateral Commission, used to be on the CIA payroll in the late 1950s and early 1960s. [80] George S. Franklin, Jr., another key co-founder of the Trilateral Commission and in the 1950s a trustee of the CIA-financed American Committee on a United Europe (ACUE), used to be David's roommate at Harvard. [81]

Another very close David Rockefeller associate in later life, George Shultz, through the Rockefeller- and CIA-allied Bechtel Corporation, of which he was president, basically can be seen as CIA. As discussed in a previous section, Bechtel partner and future CIA director John McCone was first brought into the CIA through a 1948 meeting with Allen Dulles, after which a relationship between the Bechtels and Rockefellers also began to flourish. While Shultz was president of Bechtel from 1974 to 1982, he hired as a consultant retired CIA director Richard Helms, a member of a Pilgrims Society family who by that time also had become a friend of Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller. [82]

As for Kissinger, David's seven-decade partner-in-crime Henry Kissinger, he too was a favorite of CIA director Allen Dulles in the early 1950s, right out of Harvard and before becoming a chief assistant to the Rockefellers. From that time on, Kissinger has held extremely sensitive and very high level intelligence posts. [83] In the 1973-1975 period he even managed to serve as national security advisor, secretary of state and chairman of the 40 Committee, which oversaw CIA operations, all at the same time. Kissinger is known to have ran the 40 Committee by himself for the most part, dictating worldwide CIA operations and sometimes even giving direct orders to CIA deputy director of operations Thomas Karamessines without going through CIA director Richard Helms. [84] He is known to have been in the loop of the CIA-ran fascist-terrorist P2 Lodge [85], which makes one wonder to what other dark CIA secrets he was privy. Most likely all. Unsurprisingly, in the 1973-1975 period, when Helms was dismissed, Kissinger tried to establish himself as the top intelligence chief of the U.S. government, more important even than the CIA director. [86] The 1972 Watergate affair, Nixon's forced resignation over this in August 1974, Seymour Hersh's initial December 1974 expose on CIA domestic spying against Vietnam War protestors, followed by numerous congressional investigations, effecitively put a stop to the Kissinger power grab.

When controversy about the CIA began to mount in late 1974 and early 1975, president Ford and vice president Nelson Rockefeller tried to scapegoat the CIA by advising various congressional and senatorial investigations to limit their inquiries simply to potential CIA wrongdoing. With that they attempted to hide the fact that key decisions as coups and assassinations always came down from their friend Henry Kissinger - who actually had secretly recommended the founding of the Rockefeller Commission - and then-president Nixon. [87] While rumors about this were already floating, this strategy fully fell apart by January 19, 1975 when Colby not only confirmed to the Senate that the 40 Committee indeed existed, but also that Kissinger chaired it. [88]

Also, since at least February 1967, the president, national security advisor, the entire 40 Committee (then called 303 Committee), and almost certainly the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) under the chairmanship of Clark Clifford had already been aware of internal reports of a "CIA connection with ... youth and student groups" that needed further investigation. These reports went back all the way to 1959 and 1964. [89] Interestingly, on December 26, 1974, two days after the initial New York Times expose on CIA domestic spying, Clifford claimed to the media that "he had never been briefed on any domestic activities by the CIA during his service from 1961 to 1968 as a member and later chairman of the president's foreign intelligence advisory board." He strongly hinted that the CIA had gone rogue during the Nixon administration, hiding its activities from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the administration. [90] He later repeated to the Rockefeller Commission to have never heard anything about CIA assassination plots during his term at the PIAB, as foreign policy and national security counselor to a variety of presidents since Truman, and as Nixon's defense secretary in 1968 and 1969. [91] Are we to believe this? On the one hand, while Clifford was involved in the creation of the National Security Act and the CIA in 1947, he already expressed worries about the CIA getting out of hand in this period. [92] On the other, he was very close to Pilgrims establishmentarians as James Forrestal, Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, David Rockefeller, Averell Harriman and Douglas Dillon throughout the 1950s and 1960s [93], was invited to the Trilateral Commission [94], ran a successful law firm that represented numerous establishment corporations, more than a few with CIA ties [95]; used Saudi money to get the Pilgrims-tied former CIA director Richard Helms off the hook for perjury in the 1970s [96], and, alongside Helms and arguably elites as the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, became deeply involved in the CIA-Mossad-ISI-linked BCCI network of the 1980s. [97]

Going back to Kissinger, he was hardly affected by the Watergate affair, despite the fact that it was widely assumed he knew every dirty secret of the Nixon administration. [98] When finally forced to give up the position of national security advisor in November 1975, and with that the chairmanship of the 40 Committee, the position was simply handed to his staffer and protege Brent Scowcroft [99], with Kissinger continuing as secretary of state until Carter - another Rockefeller protege, albeit a much briefer and more moderate one - came into office in January 1977. In the 1980s Scowcroft served as vice chairman of Kissinger Associates, only to resurface as George H. W. Bush's full term national security advisor. Another protege of Kissinger in the Nixon administration, Lawrence Eagleburger, became president of Kissinger Associates in the 1980s, and then was invited to become Bush's deputy secretary of state and then secretary of state.

By the mid 1990s we see Scowcroft and Eagleburger coalescing with George Shultz-protege Condoleezza Rice [100] and General Colin Powell, an old associate of the Bush family and Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Knights of Malta-affiliated NGO AmeriCares [101], at the Forum For International Policy (FFIP), along with former CIA directors John Deutch and Robert Gates. [102] Subsequently we see Powell and Rice surface in the George W. Bush administration of 2001-2009 as secretaries of state and national security advisors and Robert Gates as secretary of defense. Former Kissinger Associates managing director Paul Bremer is sent to Iraq as its first ambassador. In later years, Kissinger Associates vice chairman and former CIA deputy director of intelligence Jami Miscik is appointed chairman of the PIAB. [103] Meanwhile, Rockefeller men as Kissinger, Brzezinski and Shultz continued to serve various administrations, including Bush, in independent advisory roles. [104] Again we ask the question: where does the CIA begin and where does it end?

We are actually somewhat forced to conclude that with individuals as David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Shultz one hardly talks about CIA anymore, because they are so tightly connected to an even higher level of government: the presidency, the secretary of state and the national security advisor. However, the fact remains that they all emerged from a security state structure that is predominantly managed by the CIA.

We haven't just yet discussed all Rockefeller associates with CIA ties. CBS chairman and Pilgrims Society member William Paley, discussed in the media section of this article as an important CIA asset in the Mockingbird program, used to sit on the International Programme board of the Museum for Modern Art (MoMa) - founded and headed generation after generation by the Rockefeller family. [105] Executive secretary of MoMa in 1949 was Tom Braden, who later headed the CIA's International Organisations Division with resposibility for Mockingbird. [106] We met him earlier as the Richard Helms friend and the person who explained that David Rockefeller was provided with full briefings by him and most likely other CIA division chiefs, apart from his close personal relationship with CIA director Allen Dulles (and McCone, and Helms).

Another such individual was John Hay Whitney, an OSS veteran and friend of David Rockefeller who used to serve as chairman of MoMa in the early days of the Cold War. [107] After the war he also set up J. H. Whitney & Co., in which a partner was his friend William H. Jackson, who served as deputy director of the CIA under Truman and national security advisor under Eisenhower. In between, as vice chairman of the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) under Nelson Rockefeller, Jackson similarly played an important role in overseeing CIA operations. Whitney himself had served on the OCB's predecessor, the Psychological Strategy Board, during the Truman years. Similar to the Rockefeller family, Whitney ran his own museum - the Whitney Museum - which, like himself [108], was equally linked to the CIA. [109] Whitney also ran the elite, Pilgrims-dominated Freeport Minerals corporation and was involved in lobbying the U.S. government to overthrow the overly socialist and nationalist Suharto in Indonesia in order to gain access to Papua's mineral wealth. [110]

Whitney served as a long-time vice president of the Pilgrims Society. Another Pilgrims vice president was William Burden, a chairman of the advisory board of the Whitney Museum since 1940 who in 1943 was also elected a trustee of the Rockefeller's MoMa. In 1953 he followed up Nelson Rockefeller as MoMa's president and later was elected chairman. Burden's father had married a Vanderbilt, a family that also intermarried with the Whitneys. A one-time secretary of state for air, Burden came to serve as a director of the CFR, CBS, Lockheed and the Aerospace Corporation. Apart from the Whitney relationship, Burden's chairmanship of the Farfield Foundation [111] most clearly gives him away as yet another CIA asset within the Rockefeller clique, as in 1967 this foundation was exposed as a key financial conduit of the CIA for funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The revelation was part of a wider expose on foundations and NGOs being used by the CIA. These included the John Hay Whitney Trust for Charitable Purposes and better known examples as the National Student Association, the African American Institute, the Asia Foundation and the J. M. Kaplan Fund. [112]

This brings us to another very important Rockefeller secret, which at this point should hardly come as a surprise: the Rockefeller's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), stacked with Eastern Establishmentarians decade after decade, itself served as a CIA front. The museum cooperated with the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom, its board overlapping with the CIA's Farfield Foundation. [113] William Burden wasn't the only tie between the Farfield Foundation and MoMa - or the Whitney Museum and the Pilgrims Society for that matter. The Farfield Foundation's founder and president was Julius Fleischmann, also to be found on the International Programme board of the Rockefeller's MoMa. Another Farfield trustee was Godfrey Stillman Rockefeller (1899-1983), an older cousin of the "Rockefeller Five" whose son joined the 1001 Club with David and Laurance Rockefeller. Milton C. Rose, a director of the William C. Whitney Foundation, was a trustee. So was Whitelaw Reid II, whose New York Herald Tribune in 1958 was bought by John Hay Whitney. Reid II was a Pilgrim, along with various other family members of his. When Whitelaw married his wife in 1959, she served as the executive secretary of the Farfield Foundation. Harper & Row publishing executive (HarperCollins since 1990) Cass Canfield was a trustee of the Farfield Foundation, as well as a Pilgrim. The same went for Gardner Cowles, a newspaper publisher and bitter rival of Henry Luce with his Look magazine. He was both a Pilgrim and a Farfield Foundation trustee. He also sat on board of the Rockefeller's MoMa. [114]

Some of these names of the Farfield Foundation give new meaning to the words of CIA division Tom Braden, the earlier-discussed CIA briefer of David Rockefeller, when he explained how the CIA established foundations as Farfield:

At least one socialist source has suggested that the CIA and the Rockefellers have been pushing Abstract Expressionism simply because it is completely a-political and thus there was less danger of the public being confronted with prominent paintings portraying capitalism or our political system in a less than favorable light. [116] The fact that Nelson Rockefeller used to refer to Abstract Expressionism as "free-enterprise painting" doesn't really help either in that regard.

This is making the most sinister interpretation, however. Abstract Expressionism simply was a new art form developed in the United States immediately post-World War II, in part because so many artists had fled Europe immediately pre-World War II. The fact that it turned out to be ideal to counter Soviet Realism - which has been described as "a glorified depiction of communist values, such as the emancipation of the proletariat, by means of realistic imagery." - in the coming Cold War most likely is little more than a coincidence. Because Abstract Expressionism has been a uniquely American creation, it would have been picked up anyway by elites as the Rockefellers to establish themselves in the international art world.

Yes, there most certainly was a CIA and Rockefeller and Ford Foundation agenda to suppress communism and socialism and to promote American values in Europe and to the world. The idea actually was to do this subtlely by targeting the non-communist left of primarily Europe with American cultural values of a more intellectual type; thus something else than movies, cars, comic books, and out-of-control advertizing. [117] Abstract Expressionist art fit right into this agenda, because a) it was new, refreshing, exciting and popular (to elites at least); and b) it allowed for the reasoning that the West is above forcing a political agenda upon its citizens, including its artists.

Of course, considering that this elite network of art supporters never allowed media attention to descent on art critical of capitalism or the limits to our democratic system, makes the logic of Abstract Expressionism representing "free speech" as questioble as the claim of today's establishment-backed new atheist movement to have grown "beyond" religion. This movement simply has introduced us to a new set of rigid dogma.

It should also not be forgotten that the "cultural Cold War" encompassed more than just Abstract Expressionist Art. CIA-backed magazines as Perspectives USA, Der Monat, Encounter, the Partisan Review, the New Leader, and others were all were all promoting capitalism and liberal democracy to the non-communist left of the United States and Europe, similar to what the "liberal CIA" network is doing today.

While a discussion of the "Cultural Cold War" can be very entertaining, the most important thing to remember here is that David Rockefeller and most of his Pilgrims Society friends should be regarded CIA, or more likely "above CIA" as they are similarly connected to the CIA director, national security advisor, secretary of state and the presidency through a network of think tanks and foundations. As for David Rockefeller and Nelson Rockefeller's Pilgrims Society friends with clear CIA ties, we have:

• Allen Dulles
• John McCloy
• Richard Helms (through his brother and father)
• Henry Kissinger
• Zbigniew Brzezinski
• George Franklin
• George Shultz
• John Hay Whitney
• William Burden
• Senator Claiborne Pell (to be discussed)

And some of the additional non-Pilgrims Society friends of David Rockefeller with high-level CIA involvement that we discussed here, include:

• the Bechtels
• William Bundy
• Charles Cremeans
• Tom Braden
• Julius Fleischmann
• William H. Jackson
• Godfrey S. Rockefeller

Rockefeller CIA and fringe networks

The only Rockefeller not yet discussed in the previous chapter is Laurance Rockefeller, who kind of serves as a coup de grace, the icing on the cake. As discussed extensively in ISGP's Cult of National Security Trolls: Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM, from the 1980s until his death in 2004 Laurance Rockefeller was deeply involved in financing the most prominent aspects of the UFO movement: Roswell, alien abductions and crop circles - always pushing very positive, super new agy viewpoints. However, all, or certainly virtually all, of the work he has financed is complete and utter disinformation. We're talking about the work of Lauraunce Rockefeller "researchers" as Daniel Sheehan, Colin Andrews, John Mack, and Steven Greer, all individuals who became superstars of the Art Bell radio show starting in the mid to late 1990s.

Then one looks at an individual as Prince Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein who has similarly been financing the alien abduction movement, the only difference being that this person has taken a much more negative view of the phenomenon. The primary "researcher" Hans Adam used to finance over the years was Budd Hopkins, another Coast to Coast AM favorite. Bizarrely, before he became a fraudulent alien abduction researcher, Hopkins, a psycholigist, was also known as a painter whose works were picked up by the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art. Such as small world, as always.

This was hardly the only tie that existed between Laurance Rockefeller and Hans Adam. The Liechtenstein family has been very close friends with the Pell family of the Pilgrims Society. The closest was the Pilgrim Senator Claiborne Pell, who also was deeply involved in this fraudulent Rockefeller-Liechtenstein-dominated UFO network and on top of that was a close ally of the Rockefeller family. Both Laurance Rockefeller and Hans Adam also were members of the 1001 Club, along with David Rockefeller, Godfrey A. Rockefeller, the British and French Rothschilds and the Bechtels.

The Bechtels and their Bohemian Grove friends, of course, dominated Stanford Research Institute / SRI International where the equally fraudulent remote viewing group was located for the most part, along with a number of other individuals with tall tales of pyramids on Mars and the like who made their way to the Art Bell / Coast to Coast AM network. Meanwhile, from the 1960s on, Laurance Rockefeller was a major player in the new age Esalen Institute, which overlapped witht he SRI network and also featured quite a few persons who later ended up in at Coast to Coast AM.

Another important financier of UFO cultism was Joe Firmage was very close to the Rockefellers through the State of World Forum and also hung out on occasion with the Rockefeller and Rothschild-backed new age 1001 Club member Maurice Strong.

This article is not the right location to be discussing these fringe networks. ISGP has the Cult of National Security Trolls article for that. But rest assured that both liberal and conservative elites have played key roles in so-called UFO and new age-related "myth making", apparently in an order to distract the masses from any genuine material in the conspiracy and even spiritual domain. There are also major overlaps between the superclass and CIA, DIA and Air Force Intelligence / AFOSI elements involved in the creation and maintenance of this type of disinformation, so once again here we have the Rockefeller-CIA link - and in this case really involving secrets that nobody on the planet is aware of. Because, let's fact it, who else besides ISGP has rationally and structurally been raising questions about these super-extensive disinformation networks the alternative media consists of? That's right, no one.

Work in progress.

PART II

The conservative and neocon struggle for the Pentagon

Maybe we should talk a little more about this rift between conservative and more liberal Eastern Establishment forces, because control over the State Department and Pentagon plays an important role in this struggle. There's some history here that is relevant to discuss.

Basically since World War II the State Department's monopoly over foreign affairs received significant competition from the CIA and Pentagon. President Truman had to stop General Douglas MacArthur from nuking North Korea and invading China. General Curtis LeMay and his "Project Control" friends tried to initiate nuclear war with the Soviet Union behind the back of Pilgrims Society executive and U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who, before leaving office warned the nation about the danger of the "Military-Industrial Complex". This was a direct reference to the National Military-Industrial Conferences ran by the American Security Council, headed by LeMay and his hawkish military, CIA and FBI colleagues.

Subsequently, President John F. Kennedy barely prevented a full-scale invasion of Cuba (with disastrous consequences) as plotted by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs - once again with the vocal input from General Curtis LeMay. He also allowed the assassination of South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem over the protest of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. Once again, Kennedy had the State Department on his side. Weeks before the death of Kennedy, Vietnam ambassador and Pilgrims Society executive Henry Cabot Lodge plays a role in leaking a report to the newspapers that everyone at the State Department and the military is concerned that the power of the CIA is completely getting out of hand. In case of Lodge, they blatantly refused to implement policies he brought from Washington, requiring the intervention of Kennedy himself.

John F. Kennedy is assassinated and subsequently LBJ may have prevented World War III by suppressing rumors that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a pawn of the Soviet Union and Cuba, a card which elements of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs were ready to play. LBJ, more hawkish and less concerned with public welfare than Kennedy, then micromanaged the Vietnam War from his office with defense secretary Robert McNamara (Pilgrim), refusing almost all input from the much more hawkish Joint Chiefs. In case of LBJ, his strategy may not have been too rational or effective, but at least open conflict with China and Russia was prevented. Meanwhile, the CIA was feeling useful with its heroin trafficking and Phoenix interrogation and torture program.

The struggle between hawkish conservatives and more diplomatic liberals continued over the decades. In some cases, like the conduct of the Vietnam War, this lack of cooperation resulted in extremely ineffective policies that primarily impacted the commen man. In case of the conservatives, they were never really content with a president until Ronald Reagan was elected. Barry Goldwater never made it to the White House and Nixon "betrayed" them when he, David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger initiated diplomatic ties with communist China. Then again, as already mentioned, extreme isolationists as John Birchers and the Council for National Policy also found plenty to complain about with Reagan, but for the most part conservatives loved how money for social programs was transferred into huge military projects to fight the communists.

The interventionist-oriented new right was replaced in the late 1970s by the equally interventionist-oriented but much more Israel-friendly neoconservative movement. To a large extent this meant that many new right conservatives simply dropped their association with any old Nazi elements and began to work with the Mossad in covert operations. The Israel Lobby played a key role in this. The U.S. neocon superclass itself was largely born in the 1970s in the office of Senator Henry Jackson, where his staff included future neocon leaders as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Edward Luttwak, Frank Gaffney, Richard Pipes and Elliot Abrams. Now with the power of a foreign state behind it, a powerful domestic lobby and many extremely wealthy donors from various countries, this new neocon superclass has become a real competitor to the more diplomatic traditional Eastern Establishment. One of the first clear articles on the rise of this new neocon movement was already written in 1977 by Washington Post editor and columnist Robert G. Kaiser, the son of Pilgrim Philip M. Kaiser:

The conflict between State and Defense about foreign policy centers around U.S. policy towards Israel. Right after World War II certain elements in the CIA and the Defense establishment, largely represented by General Walter Bedell Smith, head of the CIA from 1950 to 1953, began a covert relationship with the Israelis. [119] The State Department's aristocrats, who after the retirement of Bedell Smith also controlled the CIA through Allen Dulles and Wisner, didn't want that much to do with Israel for a variety of reasons. [120] This attitude remained on or near the surface for decades to come and reports in the early 1990s describing both the State Department's and James Baker's (a reported Pilgrim) antagonist relationship with Israel and the Zionist movement should hardly come as a surprise. [121]

As the following report summarizes, it is this Defense Department which increasingly has grown to become a major competitor of the State Department.

In line with the long tradition of the State Department, Rice never completely submitted to the policies of the neoconservatives dominating Washington politics. In June 2008, Rice spoke out forcefully against Israel's policies on the West Bank, something which other officials in the Bush administration didn't prefer to do. [123]

By the 1930s it had become clear that the Arabs, and especially the extremely anti-semitic Ibn Saud, were floating on a sea of oil. FDR, Churchill and even Clement Attlee's Labour Party had always been quite sympathetic to the Jews, but the oil made the Arabs such an important strategic asset that all these political leaders decided that the Arabs should not be agitated too much over the Jewish-Palestinian question. [124]

Over the years virtually every member of the Pilgrims Society appears to have favored Arab oil and anti-communism over good relations with Israel. Going through the biographies of Pilgrims you'll find that many did not like the way the Israelis handled the Palestinian question. [125] At the same time, in the roughly 1,500 biographies gathered before writing this article there are only one or two past members of the Anti-Defamation League; members of AIPAC, CPMAJO, or any other ultra-radical branch of the radical Israel Lobby are completely absent. This is not particularly surprising for a number of reasons.

Anglo-American high society, represented by the Pilgrims, has historically been quite anti-semitic. Only a small amount of Jews have been made members of the Pilgrims, and quite possibly only because they couldn't be ignored. These Jews tended to be members of the major Jewish banking houses and, except for the Rothschilds, they were only moderately Zionist at best. The Rothschilds can't be compared to today's radical Zionist lobby, however.

The Rothschilds were primarily British imperialists who wanted to see Israel as a part of the British Empire and up until the late 1950s James de Rothschild argued for Israel's incorporation within the British Commonwealth. [126] The family never supported the anti-communist alliance with the Nazis (generally known as "appeasement") as envisioned by Chamberlain, the Duke of Windsor clique, and the British aristocrats dominating the Bank of England. This same group of ruthless appeasers severely restricted immigration to British-controlled Palestine, wouldn't allow Jews to buy land in 95 percent of Palestine, and came up with 1939 White Paper, which called for the assimilation of a relatively small group of Jews into a Palestinian-dominated state. The Rothschilds didn't support any of these policies, but they were caught between the increasingly violent actions of the Zionist resistance against the British and their own government's policies of handing the Jews over to Hitler and his Arabian allies, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Ibn Saud. [127]

After World War II and the holocaust anti-semitism became very unfashionable. This didn't mean that the aristocrats of the Pilgrims Society all of sudden became great supporters of the Zionist cause. Most Jews which had survived the death camps remained stuck in the "displaced persons" camps with no place to go. Most of them had absolutely nothing to return to - no home, no possessions, no family; many wanted to emigrate to England, the United States or Palestine. Unfortunately this proved to be very difficult. Britain and the United States continued to enforce their strict pre-WWII immigration laws while the British kept blocking the Jews from entering Palestine. In fact, Britain tried to put a full stop to Jewish emigration to Palestine by secretly encouraging the Arabs to invade the region. [128] However, because of the long anti-Zionist activities of the British in Palestine, the Zionist participation on the side of the Allies in World War II, and large Jewish communities in the United States, Britain and the USSR, the Zionists had a very well organized intelligence network: the Haganah. Over several years they smuggled a great number of weapons into Palestine, helped many thousands of Jews circumvent the British blockades, thoroughly penetrated the British administration, and ran a successful guerilla war against the British administration in Palestine. The result was that in the spring of 1947 the British were forced to hand over the question of Palestine's future to the United Nations. The United States and the Soviet Union wrote a plan which would give both the Palestinians and the Israelis a country of their own. The countries in the United Nations had to vote on the partition plan in late November 1947, and if approved, an independent Israel would be created in May 1948.

Key to the approval of the partition plan was the support of the United States, but even though President Truman was sympathetic to the Jewish problem, he faced serious opposition from his State Department (controlled by Pilgrims) and wasn't prepared to pressure other countries over the issue. [129] This changed when American Zionists as Abe Feinberg (a close associate of David Ben-Gurion) informed Truman they would financially back him in the upcoming elections against his main Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. Dewey, a Pilgrim, was supported by all the big interests, which had grown very tired of FDR's pro-New Deal and anti-fascist policies (Truman was FDR's vice president). After the agreement with the Zionists, Truman successfully pressured countries as France, the Philippines, Haiti and Liberia with economic sanctions and managed to get the partitioning of Palestine approved by a comfortable majority. The Zionists kept their promise and early on raised enough money for Truman to make his crucial coast to coast election campaign trip. [130] Stephen Smith, a brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy with a lot of experience in the Democratic Party, later stated: "Two million dollars went aboard the Truman train in a paper bag, and that's what paid for the State of Israel." [131]

However, there appears to be more to the story of Zionist activity in the United States at the time Israel was created. Many Israelis, including the senior leadership, had first hand experience with the German concentration camps and had lost their entire families in the holocaust. This makes it very hard to understand why the Israelis, well known for their tendency towards retaliatory operations, never tried to get all the Western industrialists and bankers prosecuted for having worked so closely with the Nazis. Equally puzzling is the fact that the Israelis, apart from the Adolf Einchman affair, never used their excellent intelligence network to track down all the surviving Nazis. U.S. intelligence and General Reinhard Gehlen certainly had no trouble finding and employing a good number of them. Why did the Israelis keep quiet all these years?

The person who might have explained these questions to some extent is John Loftus. The emphasis here is on might, because Loftus is not a particularly reliable writer. Taking a look at the biography provided with his books will satisfy most people: consultant to CBS's 60 Minutes and ABC's Prime Time and former prosecutor with the Justice Department's Nazi hunting unit with access to top secret national security archives. Unfortunately, Loftus is also an ultra-radical Neoconservative with ties to rather notorious people in the CIA, Army Intelligence, Special Forces, British Intelligence and the Mossad. [132] As a result his books are a combination of anti-communist and anti-Arab propaganda, and at the same time a total whitewash of Israel's policies and its intelligence associates in the United States. This having been said, Loftus's claim that James Forrestal, Allen Dulles and Nelson Rockefeller were working with the Nazis before and during World War II is accurate. And in this light Loftus gave an interesting account of the 1947 United Nations conference on the partitioning of Palestine.

According to Loftus, the Zionist intelligence network had gathered a lot of information on Nelson Rockefeller's treasonous activities during World War II. But instead of handing this information over to the newspapers or the judges in Nuremberg they confronted Nelson with the information several days before the final vote on the United Nations partition plan. At the time everyone was still very uncertain if the Zionists would be able to gather the needed two-third majority vote. The Zionists decided not only to pressure Truman over this issue, but also his long time representative to Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller. [133]

According to Loftus's intelligence sources, Nelson was ultimately able to make a deal with the Zionists: he would muscle the reluctant South American dictators into supporting the partition plan; in return the Zionists wouldn't leak their information to the outside world and wouldn't hunt down all the Nazis that the bankers of the Eastern Establishment and the intelligence agencies were protecting. Nelson kept his word: within a matter of days Argentina, Colombia and El Salvador switched from a "no" to abstaining to vote; Brazil and Haiti went from a "no" to a "yes"; and Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador went from abstaining to a "yes". This, in combination with U.S. pressure on the rest of the world, resulted in the partition plan being adopted with a comfortable majority. [134]

The events described by Loftus in this case could very well have happened. He named Reuven Shiloah as the man who led the blackmail operation. [135] This would have been an ideal person for this kind of work. Shiloah was David Ben-Gurion's intelligence chief who attended all the United Nations conferences that were important to Israel. In 1949, he founded the Mossad and was the intelligence agencies' director from 1950 to 1953. From 1953 until his death in 1959 Shiloah was a minister of Israel to the United States where he built contacts with the Jewish community and its increasingly influential Zionist Lobby. [136] As for Nelson Rockefeller, if the Zionists would have convinced Truman (they did) to pressure countries into supporting the partition plan, it would have made all the sense in the world for Truman to work through Nelson Rockefeller when it came to pressuring South American countries. Nelson had been chairman of the Inter-American Development Commission and Corporation from October 1940 to May 1947, an organization that was established at the outbreak of World War II to reorganize the Latin American economies to compensate for the loss of the European markets. In addition, Nelson had been coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs from 1940 to 1944. This office was responsible for the civilian side of the strategic defense of Latin America. In 1945, Nelson led some of the #5negotiations with the South American leaders to bring all their countries into the United Nations. FDR and Truman reluctantly allowed even the continent's most fascist nation - Argentina - to join. Nelson, however, had been all for it from the beginning: "Asked why Argentina was admitted to the United Nations, he [Nelson Rockefeller] replied that it was the most anti-communist state in South America and was needed as a spearhead against Russia." [137]

Without a doubt Nelson would have been the person to talk to if anyone wanted something from the Latin American countries. But did the Zionists really blackmail Rockefeller? That's a question impossible to answer at this point, but it is certainly possible; maybe even likely. It may also explain in part why the Zionists did so little to expose Nazi collaboration and the post-war fascist undergrounds, which were sponsored by Western intelligence agencies. It was only in the 1980s and early 1990s that intelligence-connected authors as Russ Bellant and John Loftus exposed some of these stories.

PART III

"Conservative people often fail to see what they are doing when they ignore the evident perils of the Fascist state on the ground that it is after all preferable to Communism... If the Fascist state wins out, the cleavages [between a small group of leaders and all the rest] will be extraordinarily great..."

The collaboration of U.S., British and French companies and banks with the fascist regimes, especially Germany, goes back to the birth of Communist Russia in 1917 and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Simply put, fascism is the antithesis to everything communism is supposed to have stood for. Working conditions have never been particularly uplifting for the average citizen, but the industrial revolution during the late 19th century and early 20th century rapidly began to change things. As a result of technological advances leading to more wealth and better education, the suppressed workers class slowly began to organize itself against the ruling class of industrialists and land barons. This led to the creation of political movements as socialism and communism, which promoted the idea of a class struggle. The industrialists resisted by firing, intimidating, and-or murdering workers who tried to organize labor unions. [138] Politicians sponsored by this same ruling class also had by far the biggest chance of getting elected to public office, not only due to funds donated to their electoral campaigns but also by having the press on their sides. William E. Dodd, FDR's ambassador to Nazi Germany from 1933-1938, characterized fascism in the following way:

The biggest fear of the great industrialists and land barons has always been communism and socialism. If the working classes would manage to stage revolutions, as happened in the Soviet Union in 1917 (which soon turned into a banal dictatorship), they would not only demand higher wages, social security and a reduced work week, but would also attempt to break up monopolies and redistribute great land holdings. The ruling class was not about to let this happen and sponsored leaders that would suppress these labor movements. Some of these leaders became known as fascist dictators.

Mussolini, who rose to power in October 1922 with his "March on Rome", was sponsored by the Lega Industriale of Turin, the Confederazione Generale dell'Industria, the Associazione fra Industriali Metallurgici Mecannici ed Affini, the Landowners Association, the Societa Ansaldo (shipbuilders), Fiat, of the Agnelli family that later helped run Bilderberg; the Banca Commerciale of Milan and a whole range of other banks and corporations. [140] This makes sense, considering Mussolini and his "blackshirts" essentially were glorified, violent union busters for Italian industry.

Leading Wall Street bankers were also very supportive of Mussolini's regime. Among the most prominent backers were Thomas W. Lamont and his boss J. P. Morgan, Jr. Both were members of the Pilgrims, with Lamont serving as chairman of the Pilgrims from 1939 to 1945. On his return from Italy, Morgan stated to a friend, "We had the great satisfaction of seeing Mr. Mussolini's [fascist] Revolution." Lamont expounded similar praise. The two were primarily competing with Dillon, Read & Co., another major Pilgrims-dominated bank, for exclusive business with the fascist dictator. [141]

From England we have Harry Brittain, a co-founder, secretary and long time chairman of the Pilgrims of Great Britain, who was honorary president of the (obviously) pro-facist Friends of Italy from 1936 to 1939. Pilgrims Walter Runciman is another good example of a British Mussolini supporter. As a Jew, he was critical of the persecution of the Jews by the Germans, but he adored fascism itself. [142] This stance was not unsual at all at the time, or even after World War II.

Among the industrialists and bankers who provided crucial financial support to Hitler's party were Fritz Thyssen, Hjalmar Schacht, Friedrich Frick and Baron Kurt von Schroder.

The Wall Street and industrialist allies of these Nazi financiers included Henry Ford, the du Ponts, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, Joseph Kennedy, the Watson family of IBM, the Dillons, Harrimans, Rockefellers, and Dulles brothers. [143: all names discussed plus full sources] Except Ford, all these families had representatives in the Pilgrims, with the Ford interests always strongly represented in the society. Also not unimportant, post-World War II, Henry Ford II could be found in the 1001 Club with the Rockefellers, Bechtels, Rothschilds, Agnellis, Thyssens and other elites.

British bankers and industrialists cooperated closely with their American and German counterparts. Leading representatives of the Bank of England, National Westminster, Lloyds Bank, J. Henry Schroder, Lazard, Unilever, British Imperial Airways, and Imperial Chemical Industries were all lining up to do business with Hitler. [144] Many of these interests were organized in the Federation of British Industries, the equivalent of the fascist National Association of Manufacturers in the U.S. [145]

Of particular interest in Great Britain is Neville Chamberlain, prime minister from May 1937 until World War II broke out in May 1940. There are various theories about Chamberlain's appeasement policy: a lack of foresight, fear of a potential new war with Germany, or, at its most daring, indifference towards events on the European mainland. In all cases he is portrayed as a well-intentioned man. That wasn't Quigley's opinion, however, who made the case that Chamberlain and his group were looking to give Hitler a free hand in destroying the communist Soviet Union. This is also ISGP's position and will be explained later in this article.

As Quigley already reported (without sources), indeed Chamberlain was a shareholder in Imperial Chemical Industries. But there is more than that His son Francis was employed as a staffer at ICI. [146] And his first cousin, Arthur Chamberlain [147], was a close long-term business associate of 1st Baron McGowan, a Pilgrim who was the founding president of Imperial Chemical Industries in 1926 and ICI's chairman from 1930 to 1950. Arthur Chamberlain and McGowan both sat on the board of U.S. companies DuPont and General Motors, along with numerous Pilgrims. [148] Probably not by coincidence, Arthur was another fervent supporter of appeasement [149], a total reversal of policy before his cousin became British prime minister. [150]

That's not all. McGowan was a director of the Anti-Socialist and Communist Union (known as the Economic League during the Cold War), as well as the Anglo-German Friendship Society. Both groups also counted the deep involvement of the earlier-mentioned Mussolini supporters and Pilgrims Lord Walter Runciman and Sir Harry Brittain. In 1939 Runciman played a key role on Chamberlain's behalf of handing over Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. At home it was Pilgrim and former MI5 officer Sir Joseph Ball who ran Chamberlain's PR campaign to promote the appeasement policy. Ball became notorious for undermining communist and socialist undercurrents in British society and later for having recruited the controversial Tiny Rowland to Lonrho. [151]

Also not unimportant, until World War II Pilgrims Society families as Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Osborn, Harriman, Whitney, Dodge, Pyne, Roosevelt, Baker, Mills and Schiff, who dominated the New York Zoological Society [152] and the Museum of Natural History (Darwinism) [153], inspired and financed the eugenics movement [154], originally founded in 1883 by Charles Darwin's cousin and disciple, Sir Francis Galton. In later decades Leonard Darwin (1850-1943) and Charles Galton Darwin (1887-1962) continued to play important roles in the Eugenics movement, coming up with such wonderfully subtle claims as: "some Americans are born to be a burden on the rest" and stating that sexual sterilization would be necessary for the "insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic". [155]

Madison Grant, as long-time chairman of the Zoological Society, is among the more notorious examples. In 1916 he and Henry F. Osborn (the Zoological Society chair before Grant; with half his family in the Pilgrims, all major conservationists close to the Rockefellers) wrote The Passing of the Great Race. In the book Osborn warned of "the gradual dying out among our [white] people of those hereditary traits ... and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character." [156] In later years Grant received a thank-you note for the book from Hitler [157], who replaced the terms "Anglo-Saxon" and "Nordic" with "Aryan" and began to specifically target the Jews for elimination from the gene pool. That's not to say that the Pilgrims families agreed with this policy - some of them were Jewish - but, as key financiers of the eugenics movement, they are known to have played a role in shaping Hitler's thinking.

Just to be thorough: After World War II Pilgrim Fairfield Osborn, president of the Zoological Society from 1940 to 1968, cooperated closely with Laurance Rockefeller, Zoological Society trustee since at least 1941 [158], to set up the core of the modern conservation moment [159]: birth control, natural resources (above and below ground), and since the 1980s, the rise of CO2.

Sponsors of Franco during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War included individuals as the Duke of Alba, a major landowner; tobacco monopolist Juan March; Rio Tinto Spain and the Society of Jesus. The latter had suffered great loss of land holdings with the ouster of King Alfonso XIII in 1931 by the democratically-elected republican-socialists. [160] Incredibly, even Britain supported the fascist takeover of Franco over the more moderate republican-socialists. [161]

Even after World War II Franco remained popular in the network of the World Anti-Communist League, American Security Council and Le Cercle, all groups with deep involvement of conservative members of the Anglo-American elite. Franco remained in place as the fascist ruler of Spain until his death in 1975.

The situation in Japan concerning corporate elites having had a hand in the country's militant expansions, differs a little from the West. True, in the decades before World War II, Japan was controlled by a financial oligarchy surrounding emperor Hirohoto. The major "Zaibatsu" in this oligarchy were Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda. [162] Some of them had cartel agreements with companies as Standard Oil and I.G. Farben. [163]

However, leading up to World War II, the Zaibatsu were increasingly pushed aside by more radical tennoist/shintoist militants of the Black Dragon Society, a situation one could compare to an extent with a (potential) neocon take-over of the White House and State Department. The Black Dragon Society's network still revolved around the emperor, but established its own corporate monopolies.

After the war, many of the traditional Zaibatsu reemerged as corporate elites, although the Black Dragon Society, with CIA and Rockefeller support, remained in place as well. Key Black Dragon/Yakuza men as Yoshio Kodama and Riochy Sasakawa were used to keep tight control over Japan's political establishment even beyond the Cold War.

More information about the Black Dragon Society can be found ISGP's American Security Council article.

Key bastions of French/Vichy fascism included Banque Worms, Banque Nationale pour Le Commerce et l'Industrie, the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, and the Banque de l'Indochine. [164] Chase Paris was equally pro-fascist [165], while the pro-fascist British branch of Lazard closely cooperated with its French counterpart. [166]

One of the French versions of fascism centered around reports of a "Synarchist Movement of Empire" which, together with sympathetic elements in the United States, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and likely other countries, reportedly was interested in carving up the world in monopolistic cartels, followed by political integration. Coincidentally, among the American interests said to be sympathetic to the Synarchy were known pro-fascist industrialists as Ford and Du Pont. A WWII U.S. intelligence document reportedly read:

The Synarchy is generally dismissed by historians these days, even though there's overwhelming evidence that big business supported international fascism in the years before World War II. It is also ignored that American diplomats and French judges took reports of the Synarchy very serious. Promising reports on the Synarchy went away in the months after World War II, and most of the big financiers and industrialists (who were said to be behind the Synarchy) were released. Reports that this Synarchy had been behind fascist groups like the Cagoule, which tried to undermine French democracy the Germans rolled in, were never thoroughly investigated. [168]

Before and during World War II there was a large group of aristocrats, bankers, and industrialists which sought to cooperate with the new fascist regimes in Europe. Prime minister Chamberlain, the Duke of Windsor clique, Imperial Chemical Industries and the Federation of British Industries, press barons as Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook, the major banking families dominating the Bank of England--they all supported "Anglo-German peace" while promoting domestic groups as the British Union of Fascists, the Link, the Nordic League and the secretive Right Club. These groups will be discussed in a minute.

As already reported, and as will be detailed later on this article, the industrialists and Wall Street bankers that supported the fascist regimes in Europe, also promoted domestic fascism within the United States through the American Liberty League, the National Association of Manufacturers and other groups. The names behind this network included the largest family fortunes in the United States of the time, including Ford, du Pont, Rockefeller, Dulles, Harriman, Dillon, Mellon, McCormick, Hartford, Harkness, Duke, Pew, Pitcairn, Clark, Reynolds, and Kress. [169] To this list of promoters of fascism can be added: Morgan, Watson, Aldrich, Dillon, Dulles, etc. Many of these families belonged to the Pilgrims.

As is well-known, Germany only paid about 12 percent of total reparations initially demanded at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, even after two revisions: the 1924 Dawes Plan and the 1929 Young Plan. Numerous Pilgrims had been involved in Versailles: David and James Bruce (a Templar family married into the Mellons), Lord Robert Cecil, a member of one of Britain's oldest families; and Lord Arthur Salter from Britain; Morgan's chief attorney John Davis, Morgan partner Russell Leffingwell, Vanderbilt lawyer Frank Polk and the Rockefeller-allied Dulles brothers from the United States. The Dawes and Young plans were named after other leading members of the Pilgrims Society: Charles Dawes and Rockefeller man Owen Young.

There actually was disagreement within the international establishment about what to do with Germany. The French wanted to tear it down militarily, financially and politically and take control of Germany's huge coal and iron ore reserves. Even at the 1932 Lausanne Conference, the French were the only ones who refused to make any concessions and wanted Germany to continue to pay the reparations in full. Britain and the United States disagreed, and the reparations were canceled altogether, ironically months before Hitler was appointed chancellor.

Influential elements in the British establishment - among them a number of Pilgrims-involved men as Lord Esher, Lord D'Abernon, General Jan Smuts, H.A.L. Fisher and Lord Curzon - had always been apprehensive of enslaving Germany through reparations, as historically France had been a great opponent of Britain. They didn't want to witness the rise of an all-powerful France that would be in a position to challenge the worldwide interests of the British Commonwealth. So, instead, they advocated to cancel reparations, provide loans, and revitalize Germany's economy, an agenda that, with the aid of Wall Street, went into full swing with the cancellation of reparations in June 1932 and the emergence of Hitler as Germany's chancellor in January 1933. [170]

Hitler understood Britain's position very well. Already in 1924, in his book Mein Kampf, he wrote:

British bankers as Montagu Norman, Lord Kindersley and Charles Hambro - the last two members of the Pilgrims - saw Germany, even after the Nazis had taken over, as "a great stabilizing force" [172], a reference to both French and communist influence being reined in. They encouraged large loans to be made to Germany.

The same attitude dominated at Wall Street. The Morgan bank extended large loans to Germany and Mussolini's Italy. In the mid 1920s Dillon, Read & Company, another major Pilgrims firm, set up Vereinigte Stahlwerke (German Steel Trust) and the German Credit and Investment Corp. with Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen would become one of the most important financiers of Hitler. The Harriman family, Pilgrims and good friends of the Dillons, set up the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) with this same Fritz Thyssen. Other Nazi financiers, the Rockefellers and Schroders, joined forces in 1936, setting up Schroder Rockefeller & Co. The Watsons of IBM (Pilgrims) provided the Nazis with identification and cataloging technology that would make the holocaust so brutally effective. The prominent Pilgrims-dominated law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, headed at the time by the Dulles brothers (Pilgrims), put together a lot of the contracts between Wall Street and the Nazi industrialists. One of the Dulles brothers, Allen, was on the board of the Schroder Bank and was closely associated with Baron Kurt von Schroder, who together with Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen was a crucial supporter of Hitler. (By the 1970s, Baron Bruno L. Schroder belonged to the Pilgrims.) Sources for all these connections have already been provided in a previous section of this article.

Support for the Nazis in certain British aristocratic circles was just as strong. This might be confusing to a lot of people as it is still generally believed that Hitler was looking to conquer Great Britain. It appears that this wasn't the case at all. Hitler's primary concern had always been a "drang nach Osten" to expand Germany's "Lebensraum" into eastern Europe and Russia. Although he may have had plans from the beginning to secure the Atlantic border at some point, the British Empire was to be left alone. In fact, Hitler believed an alliance with Great Britain was desirable:

October 1936: Hitler with the Duke of Windsor, an old Pilgrim, and his wife Wallis Simpson, the reason the duke abdicated as King Edward VIII. Notoriously pro-Nazi, the duke continued to party with friends as the Drexels, Astors and Rockefellers in later life. [175]

Hitler repeated his desire for an Anglo-German alliance on many occasions. [174] Certain aristocratic circles in both Britain and Germany responded to this call by setting up a number of private Anglo-German societies. The Imperial Policy Group was organized in 1934; the Anglo-German Fellowship in 1935. The Anglo-German Association, which had existed since 1929, was equally filled with aristocratic supporters of a militant German regime.

A number of groups which sought to promote domestic fascism were also set up. The British Union of Fascists is the most well known, but there also were the Link, the Nordic League, and the more secretive and extremely anti-Semitic Right Club, organized in 1939. Following is a brief description of these societies and some of the peculiar people that could be found in them.

As can be indicated from the societies just described, appeasement was not at all unique to the Chamberlain government; it was a policy supported by many people. There was a great difference, however, between the public's idea of appeasement, which was simply focused on the avoidance of a new war, and the idea of the ruling class to use appeasement as a tool to reorganize Europe in a way to their liking.

These differences in attitude are quite obvious considering the almost total lack of sympathy for the people having to live under fascist rule. Not only did the appeasers sell out the Czechoslovakians, they also left Poland in the cold when it was attacked by Germany, and had earlier supported Franco's takeover of Spain. As early as 1933, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Zionist-oriented families as the Cecils and Rothschilds described in-depth the persecutions against the Jews. [210] To the appeasers this didn't matter at all. They set up harsh immigration laws preventing the Jews from entering England and through the 1939 White Paper even made sure that immigration to Palestine was almost impossible. The reason for this last move was simple: Chamberlain and associates were also appeasing the anti-semite, fascist Arabs of the Middle-East, like Ibn Saud and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

The appeasers' approach to Europe was entirely geopolitical. An example of this attitude is a 1936 speech of Arthur Salter (Pilgrims), a person who largely devised the structure on which today's European Union is based:

A co-appeaser of Sir Arthur Salter, Sir Ernest Bennett, as a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship and the Right Club arguably a total fascist, defended Chamberlain's policies as follows in 1939:

An ally on the other side of the ocean, the earlier-mentioned Thomas W. Lamont, the Morgan banker and Pilgrims chairman who was a great supporter of Mussolini, was quoted saying almost exactly the same thing:

It's just really hard for the average person to understand mindsets like these, and it's no surprise then that the British people were completely done with appeasement when even after the 1938 Munich Agreement - which many people already were very uncomfortable with - Hitler continued to demand new territory.

The British public has actually been the reason that Chamberlain and his associates were never able to negotiate an alliance with Nazi Germany [214], something which Hitler desperately wanted. Because of this, Hitler was forced to attack the West first, cripple both France and England, and secure the entire Atlantic coast, from Hammerfest down to the Pyrenees.

Already after the Dunkirk victory Hitler concluded that the "English won't show up again in this war" [215], but nevertheless continued an air and sea campaign against Great Britain, trying to force a surrender. Hitler had many reasons to prevent a prolonged war against Great Britain, including:

For about a year Hitler continued his campaign against Great Britain. Besides regular warfare, Hitler also dropped numerous leaflets of his July 1940 speech 'A last appeal to reason' over Britain, trying to up the pressure on Churchill to negotiate a peace settlement. [216] None of this worked, Hitler gave up, and the last great German bombardment on British soil was on May 10, 1941. The following month Hitler began his attack on the Soviet Union.

The same day as the last German bombardment on Britain, one of the more peculiar events of World War II transpired: Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, flew to Scotland in an effort to reach the Duke of Hamilton. Unfortunately for Hess, his self-imposed [217] mission failed, and he was put in jail. Initially Hess wouldn't say a word about what he had come to do in Britain. It was only after a visit from Lord Beaverbrook, an old friend, that he explained Hitler's desire for an Anglo-German military alliance against the Soviet Union. [218] Hess was a rather curious mysticist who apparently didn't realize his own irrationality. Hitler's idea of an anti-communist alliance was already known in the anti-communist, pro-German upper class he tried to reach, but they had not been able to circumvent Churchill or public opinion. Hess somehow assumed that his visit would have made a difference. As Churchill recounted:

At this point there still are more questions than answers when it comes to the extent of the collaboration between Western politicians, bankers and industrialists with their Nazi counterparts. The role of leading Wall Street bankers is quite well known, but details about Great Britain and especially France are still lacking. The same is true for the reasons behind this cooperation. Although the appeasers and isolationists were all allied in anti-communism, many of them appear to have had slightly varying reasons for supporting a soft-line approach toward Nazi Germany. The reasons that have been mentioned include:

The ideas of these groups overlap to such an extent and so many members have been hiding their true reasons for supporting appeasement and isolation that it is almost impossible to tell who were only interested in making money, who were solely defending the interests of their class or their country, and who truly were international fascist conspirators.

An example is the Rockefeller family. It has often been claimed that the Rockefellers were only interested in making money. However, they were also very anti-communist and close to the British aristocracy, which makes them candidates for category two or three. They might also fit in category four, as their Standard Oil company was part of an international cartel network that included DuPont, General Motors and Ford in the United States, Imperial Chemical Industries in England, Kuhlmann in France, I.G. Farben in Germany, and Mitsui in Japan. Standard Oil's openly pro-Nazi and pro-American fascism policies before and during World War II are additional evidence that the claim that they were only interested in making money is too simplistic.

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the father of appeasement, is another good example. He is often portrayed as a well-intentioned man who desperately desired to avoid another war. However, on the other hand he was rabidly anti-communist and never cared one bit for the Jews in either Nazi Germany or Palestine. As already reported, the Chamberlain family had significant stockholdings and top-level ties to Pilgrims-linked multinationals Imperial Chemical Industries, Du Pont and General Motors [220], facts that may help explain why Neville encouraged investment in Nazi Germany. He also had no problem with agitating the Soviets. [221]

What makes the question of Nazi collaboration with the West even more confusing is the fact that many members of the same establishment that worked with the Nazi regime at the same time tried to get rid of Hitler. The anti-Hitler resistance in Germany largely centered around Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and his associates, who worked together with British Intelligence since 1938 in an effort to overthrow the German dictator. Prince Berhard's younger brother, Aschwin, was among the intermediaries between the German conspirators and British Intelligence. These conspirators were not so much against authoritarian regimes, as their support for Franco and Mussolini demonstrates, or their early support for Hitler, but they did consider Hitler a loose cannon who in the end would destroy Germany and possibly take the entire West with him.

The whole problem with Hitler was that he could not be controlled by the establishments of the time. For centuries Germany had been divided by monarchist Protestant (mainly Prussian) and Catholic (mainly Bavarian) interests. Except for his anti-communism and anti-socialism, Hitler had little in common with these monarchist aristocrats, which he made painfully clear when marginalizing the influence of Franz von Papen in both 1933 and 1934. Von Papen was a reactionary Catholic nobleman and Knight of Malta who had earlier boasted to his associates that he would be able to control Hitler. He made the same mistake as Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's early crucial supporters, and the British appeasers. All of them were looking for a strong, anti-communist leader, but at the same time one that the Vatican or the Anglo-American interests could reason with.

Hitler, on the other hand, once he didn't need his patrons anymore, set off on his own Germanic paganist agenda of Eurasian domination, which ultimately was anti-Prostestant, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, or even anti-Masonic for that matter. Many high society people would have been fine with this as long as the Nazis wipied out communism, or if the Nazis at the very least kept Soviet communism away from Europe. Unfortunately for these aristocrats, public opinion wouldn't allow Britain to go fascist, which would have been necessary to prevent Hitler from securing the Atlantic coast first; and as soon as Hitler did this, public opinion in Britain demanded that the appeasers had to go and war be declared.

But even before Chamberlain was ousted by the public in May 1940, the less-hardline members of the Anglo-American establishment already understood their mistake of having tried to work with Hitler. Arthur Salter, the appeaser who earlier had agreed to Germany's "need" for living space and raw materials, had been urging the Chamberlain government since the summer of 1939 to form an anti-German alliance with the Soviet Union. Other members of the Astor's Cliveden Set (and the Anglo-American Establishment) also changed their opinion. In early 1937 the Pilgrims of the United States had still been interested in inviting members of the pro-appeasement Imperial Policy Group, but by October 1939, when England had officially declared war on Germany, Lord Lothian was invited to give a speech on how England would appreciate it if the United States would stand by its side when the real fighting would break out. Lothian received the full support of his friend Thomas W. Lamont, the Morgan banker and Pilgrims Society chairman, who arranged for Lothian to speak to a number of New York-based groups. In May 1940, Lamont became one of the members of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the most visible of the pro-interventionist lobby and pressure groups. Among the Pilgrims who were members of this committee were Nicholas Murray Butler, John W. Davis, James W. Gerard, Frank L. Polk, Bishop James de Wolf Perry and Adlai Stevenson. [222] In December 1941, with the Pearl Harbor attack, followed a few days later with a declaration of war by Germany, these establishment figures got what they needed.

It is clear that by the middle of 1939 members of the Anglo-American Establishment were on the same page as Franklin Delano Roosevelt when it came to his pro-interventionist policies, but still they couldn't help intensely disliking the man. For years they had tried to get rid of him, mainly for reasons having to do with the New Deal.

"At a garden party at the British embassy in Washington [in 1939], the king and queen sat up on a porch in remote splendor with several private citizens--Jack Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. Only two New Dealers [working under President Franklin Roosevelt], James Farley and Cordell Hull, were allowed to join them. ... It didn't help the House of Morgan, for it reinforced the old stereotype of the firm's being in league with the British Crown. ... In late August 1939, Jack Morgan and King George VI were shooting together at Balmoral in Scotland, complaining about the bird shortage, when Europe suddenly mobilized for war. Like sovereigns retreating to their respective capitals, the king returned to London and Jack to Wall Street."

FDR had been elected president of the United States in 1933 when the Great Depression was at its worst. About 25 percent of the population was out of work with millions living on the streets. Roosevelt immediately introduced his far reaching New Deal program, which included the crippling of stock speculation, the setting up watch dog agencies for banks, and the introduction of large scale construction projects for the unemployed. The New Deal further established a national minimum wage, limited a regular workweek to 40 hours, abolished child labor, introduced social security, supported the homeless, and prevented employers from hindering unionization. To finance these projects Roosevelt had to take the United States off the gold standard.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1933 to 1945. FDR fought Wall Street and the big industrialists over the New Deal, their policy of isolationism and the attempts to implement an American form of fascism.
Conspiracy literature often tries to point out that FDR brought the U.S. into World War II, first by cutting off the Japanese from American oil and steel; then by allowing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. However, it might be prudent to contemplate what may have happened if the United States would not have entered World War II. There wouldn't have been a D-Day; Germany and Japan may well have taken over half of Asia, and with the support of the Arabs (which they had) received unlimited amounts of oil; the British Empire - with no U.S. support - would likely either have turned fascist or would have gone down, while the American bankers and industrialists would likely have been a lot more successful at establishing their own form of fascism (a total suppression of the labor force and of democratic rights). Latin America already was largely fascist and Africa would have been plundered for its resources.
No, although he may have had his flaws, FDR's policy of intervention was the right one. It was only at the last moment that he received support from a significant portion of the Anglo-American Establishment, after they had come to realize that the British public wouldn't tolerate an Anglo-German peace and that Hitler could not be counted on to leave Britain alone forever. Needless to say, the big interests were horrified with this New Deal program. Almost immediately they began to make plans to get rid of Roosevelt; plans which were exposed in detail by General Smedley Butler before the 1934 McCormack-Dickstein Committee. Butler detailed how in July 1933 he had been approached by Gerald C. MacGuire, a Wall Street bond salesman with a position in the American Legion. MacGuire and his financiers had devised a whole scheme through which Butler would be able to make a speech to the American Legion in favor of the gold standard. The excuse MacGuire gave was that he and his associates didn't want the veterans of World War I to receive the bonus they had been promised by Congress to be handed to them in devaluated currency at some point in the future. Butler knew that something was wrong here, but tried to play along for a while, leading to MacGuire giving him certain details of who were behind the scheme. It turned out that behind MacGuire were men as Grayson M. P. Murphy, head of the family's brokerage firm at which MacGuire was employed and also director of the Guarantee Trust; Robert S. Clark, a wealthy banker whom Butler had known in the past; James H. Perkins, chairman of the Rockefeller's National City Bank; men from the Morgan Bank; and John W. Davis, chair of Davis, Polk and Wardwell, chief attorney of J. P. Morgan & Co. and founding president of the Council on Foreign Relations. [223] And important for this article: Murphy's son was a Pilgrim, Davis was president of the Pilgrims, the men heading the Morgan Bank were Pilgrims, and Perkins almost certainly was another Pilgrim.

In the end Butler refused to make one or more speeches in favor of the gold standard, but by flooding a meeting with telegrams the bankers still managed to have the American Legion adopt a formal resolution in favor of returning to the gold standard. Roosevelt would not allow himself to be pressured by the legion however; the United States remained off the gold standard.

During late 1933 and early 1934 Butler didn't hear anything from MacGuire, who until then had regularly contacted him. In the spring and summer of 1934 Butler did receive two cards from MacGuire: one from France; the other from Berlin, making Butler wonder what MacGuire was up to this time. In August 1934 MacGuire approached Butler in person again, the reason being that "his group" still considered the general the only person who effectively could rally hundreds of thousands of veterans behind him towards a common goal. The "Morgan group" had reluctantly agreed, even though they really preferred the less-popular Douglas MacArthur. During this latest conversation MacGuire explained to Butler what he had been doing in the past year. It turned out that by this time more was in the planning than just the return of the gold standard. According to MacGuire, after the American Legion's gold standard resolution had been rejected by Roosevelt, his financial backers had sent him to Europe to study the veterans paramilitary organizations of France, Germany and Italy. MacGuire appeared to be quite fond of Mussolini's Blackshirts and Hitler's SA and SS, but stated that he instead had recommended to his backers that the model of the French far-right league the Croix de Feu be adopted for an American version of these paramilitary veterans' forces. According to MacGuire, the press would announce the creation of this "superorganization" in two or three weeks. He further hinted that its founders would include some of the most important men in the United States and that former New York Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith - who had become an employee of the Du Pont family - would be among these founders

At that point Butler had already concluded that a lot of what MacGuire had told him was true, not the least because the many predictions MacGuire made had a tendency to come true. This latest prediction was no exception. Two weeks after his discussion with MacGuire, newspapers reported on the founding of the American Liberty League. Investigative author Jules Archer, who documented the whole affair in great detail, wrote:

After reading about the founding of the American Liberty League, Butler decided to have someone come in and confirm his story. He contacted an old friend, Paul Comly French, an investigative journalist for the Philadelphia Record whose articles also appeared in the New York Post. After the blessing of Philadelphia Record city editor Tom O'Neil, French began his effort to confirm Butler's story. Butler at some point introduced French to MacGuire, leading to a two hour discussion between the latter two without Butler being present.

Butler and French were invited to testify to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee on November 20, 1934. Judging from French's testimony, MacGuire had been more forthcoming to French than he had ever dared to be to Butler. French testified:

Butler and French were also supported by the testimony of James Van Zandt, head of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. After having been given information by MacGuire, Butler had warned Van Zandt that he too would probably be approached by the fascist plotters. At the hearing Van Zandt testified that this had indeed been the case, and that he had seen some of the data on fascist organizations MacGuire had taken back with him from Europe. Van Zandt further testified that not only he himself, Douglas MacArthur and Hanford MacNider had been approached (as Butler had stated), but also Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., a founder of the American Legion. MacArthur and Roosevelt would vehemently deny that they had been approached by any coup plotters, but this actually means very little. MacArthur would later become a close associate of the anti-communist cult leader Sun Myung Moon, while his cousin - another Moon associate - would become deeply involved in the darkest aspects of the fascist international. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.'s family were also extreme right wing anti-communist crusaders who supported the post war Nazi networks and rose to top positions in the CIA. For more information about MacArthur and his cousin MacArthur II, read ISGP's Beyond the Dutroux Affair article. For more information on the descendants of Theodore Roosevelt, read on.

When questioning Gerald MacGuire in front of their committee, John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein found out he couldn't present an alibi on numerous occasions. The committee additionally found evidence that MacGuire had written detailed reports on Mussolini's Blackshirts, Hitler's Brownshirts, the French Croix de Feu and a related fascist group from the Netherlands to Robert Clark and Clark's attorney, Albert G. Christmas. But even though the initial hearings and investigation clearly showed their had been a fascist coup in the making in the United States, the committee would fail to subpoena the powerful bankers and industrialists mentioned during the hearings. In the weeks following the testimonies of Butler, French, Van Zandt and MacGuire, the committee asked to be renewed in order to continue the investigation. The House of Representatives decided to let the committee expire instead, shutting it down in January 1935. The whole affair would soon be forgotten. Many years later, during an interview with Jules Archer on September 17, 1971, John McCormack would summarize the view of the committee at the time:

n line with some of the rumors in the days of the committee, McCormack stated in his biography that he suspected that President Roosevelt himself had supported the cover-up. A public prosecution of the nation's most powerful men would have added tremendous burdens to Roosevelt's already overcrowded schedule (not to mention the doom it may have spelled to the nation's economy). The affair could also have split Roosevelt's own party, as a number of leading Democrats were allied with the fascists. McCormack reasoned that it may have been enough for Roosevelt to thwart the plot and keep the suspects under surveillance. This is actually a strategy that has also been attributed to Roosevelt by John Loftus.

There is evidence that the big interests were not deterred by the Butler affair and that they continued their intrigues against Roosevelt. Cornelius "Neil" Vanderbilt, Jr., the son of a Pilgrims Society executive who has been named on several occasions in this article, published his biography in 1959. In this biography Neil described how he had decided to become a reporter - a career move his parents did not support - and how by 1932 he had become an unofficial informer to his good friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this capacity Neil traveled around the country, listening to the word on the street, and regularly met with world leaders (his association with the U.S. president was a great way to get interviews). Vanderbilt further described how the entire "old 400" and their associates absolutely despised the president and did everything they could to get rid of him.

In 1936, for example, Neil was told over dinner how Ogden Mills and Andrew Mellon - respectively a member and an executive member of the Pilgrims Society - were planning to tie "tie [Roosevelt's] hands financially, very, very soon". An excerpt of Neil's account to the private secretary of President Roosevelt:

Much more damning was Neil's account of a plot being hatched to oust Roosevelt which counted the involvement of his mother's associates. Neil placed the hatching of this plot around 1940, a full six to seven years after the testimonies of Butler, French and Van Zandt. Neil didn't give names, but it is known that his mother knew virtually everyone in the Anglo-American establishment, including the Morgans, Rockefellers and Harrimans--so it appears that some of the same interests were involved as those mentioned to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in late 1933. Neil:

Since it was funded by the largest banking and industrial fortunes, fascism in the United States had many heads. Next to the American Liberty League, there was the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Industrial Information Committee, and the National Economy League. These organizations were all funded and headed by the same interests. Smaller groupings of almost exclusively anti-semitic fascists included the Crusaders, the Sentinels of the Republic, the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, the Order of '76, the Ku Klux Klan, and the KKK's Black Legion. Like the much larger and more respectable American Legion, these groups were often used to break labor strikes with the argument that the laborers were part of a communist takeover of the United States. George Seldes in his 1943 book 'Facts and Fascism' detailed a lot of these organizations. He also covered the terrible repression of labor unions by the major industrialists who at the same time funded and promoted fascism.

PART IV

Near the beginning of this article we cited a column written in 1962 which very articulately described the political, business and educational network of the Eastern Establishment. It appeared in a good number of newspapers. To refresh everyone's memory, here is the excerpt again:

This column was written by Edith Kermit Roosevelt. You are forgiven if you assumed this Edith was a relative of former President Franklin Roosevelt, who has been described in the previous paragraphs as the biggest opponent of the Eastern Establishment. Edith was a granddaughter of another former U.S. president: Theodore Roosevelt, and this Theodore Roosevelt is not be to be confused with his distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Theodore and his son, Jr., were allied with the bankers and industrialist that promoted American fascism. Reading the rest of Edith's column it immediately becomes clear that she had followed in her family's footsteps:

This section about criticism on the Eastern Establishment has been moved to the article on Alex Jones, who is an ultraright propagandist along McCarthyite and Barry Goldwater lines. On his radio show Jones has gathered ultraright forces from such groups as the John Birch Society and the Council for National Policy, which at a higher level are allied with the American Security Council and Le Cercle, groups ISGP has also produced articles on.

Executive Intelligence Review, Lyndon Larouche's major political organization, has stated on numerous occasions their belief that British aristocrats have been manipulating both the traditional Eastern Establishment as well as the pro-Zionist Neoconservatives. It must be said that EIR has the tendency to bring up very interesting information, but always discredits itself by not giving enough sources for sensational claims. Saying they have a membership list of the 1001 Club or government documents on the Synarchy, but not publishing photocopies are just two major examples (after a long search I did find one partial photocopy of a government file in an Australian EIR publication, but this is not near enough).

All in all, it's obvious that the authors of EIR have some kind of agenda and certainly have provided little evidence for their theory that British aristocrats are in control of both the Eastern Establishment and the neoconservatives. The same goes for the influential John Birch Society, which has been making similar claims. However, a few anomalies in the Pilgrims Society membership suggest that the British do have a degree of influence in Neoconservative networks.

In recent years, EIR published a report on New York banker John Train. In it EIR related how in 1983 a group of journalists and wealthy men had organized a number of meetings at the home of John Train in Manhattan. Among the attendants were John Rees, mentioned earlier as a person involved in Western Goals; Sol Sanders, a writer for Business Week; NBC-TV producer Pat Lynch; Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Hume; Reader's Digest editor Eugene Methvin, who also sat on the advisory board of American Family Foundation from 1982 to 1995; Peter Spiro of The New Republic; Chip Berlet, a onetime Washington bureau chief of High Times magazine; Dennis King, an investigative journalist who focuses on sects; Roy M. Cohn, on the advisory board of Western Goals and a rabid anti-communist with ties to the fascist underground; and Russ Bellant, a hard-right Zionist propagandist similar to author John Loftus, president of the Intelligence Summit.

During these meetings a strategy was devised to discredit Larouche by promoting the idea he was communist sympathizer. Train was described as an agent of the Anglo-American aristocracy and a close associate of the James Jesus Angleton, a top CIA officer who later served as co-chairman of the ultra-right American Security Council. [230]

The claims made in this article by EIR about the anti-communist smear campaigns are very recognizable, and we have already discussed Rees's anti-communist propaganda activities on behalf of the Western Goals Foundation. EIR went on to detail some of Train's connections to Britain and a number of aristocratic spooks. What EIR apparently didn't know was that John Train has been a member of the Pilgrims of the United States since at least the early 1980s, and that as a newly-appointed executive member in 1996 he was highly influential in the 1996-1997 period in reorganizing the U.S. Pilgrims, assuring the society's continued existence after Hugh Bullock had been heading it for 43 years. [231] What EIR apparently also didn't know, but which additionally confirms his intelligence connections, is that Train was a financial advisor to John Hay Whitney during the 1960s and 1970s. [232] Whitney, a vice president of the Pilgrims Society, was one of the businessmen the CIA turned to when they wanted an institute to be financed by private funds. [233] Whitney was a friend of the British royal family, a close associate of the Rockefellers and a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation. In other words, Train's credentials as "a proud member of the Anglophile oligarchy", as EIR put it, are quite well-established.

The reason Train is important enough to be mentioned separately in this article is not only because of his intelligence connections, but the fact that his Train Foundation has counted the involvement of leading Neoconservatives.

Train has not been the only prominent Pilgrim in the Train Foundation. Chairman of the Train Foundation since 2004 is the Pilgrims executive Edward J. Streator, a long time U.S. representative to various NATO bodies, a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, and a long time executive member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Pilgrim Anne B. Sloane is president of the Train Foundation. She was executive vice president of the International Development Foundation and a director of the Inter American Foundation. Additionally, Pilgrims executive John R. Drexel IV used to be director of sales and marketing at Train, Smith Counsel from 1991 to 1993.

As for the Neoconservative ties, founding treasurer of the Northcote Parkinson Fund, as the Train Foundation used to be called, was the prominent Neoconservative Midge Decter. [234] In 1981 Decter was one of the organizers of the Committee for the Free World, which was funded by the Scaife Foundations, John M. Olin Foundation (named after a Pilgrim), and the Smith Richardson Foundation. She shared responsibility with Donald Rumsfeld, about whom she wrote a biography. Decter is a trustee of the Heritage Foundation and one of the signatories to Statement of Principles for the PNAC. She is married to Norman Podhoretz (served in the United States Army (1953-1955) as an enlistee with the U.S. Army Security Agency; editor in chief of the Neoconservative Commentary magazine 1960-1995 and often referred to as one of the "Godfathers of Neoconservatism"; one of the original signatories of PNAC; senior foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani in his presidential campaign). John Podhoretz and Rachel Decter are among her children. John served as speechwriter to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan as well as former President George H.W. Bush. He also served in the capacity of special assistant to White House [anti-] Drug Czar William Bennett. Rachel Decter married Elliott Abrams, another ultra right wing PNAC supporter, in 1980.

Midge Decter's involvement in such a dominant Pilgrims institute is rather strange, as the Pilgrims in general are not great supporters of the state of Israel. Let's take a look at some of these other anomalies.

Probably the most notorious British Pilgrim is Lord Alun Chalfont. Since the mid 1960s he has been coming to Pilgrims meetings, and sat on the executive board since 1979. Chalfont is different from most Pilgrims. Instead of being primarily a banker, he has been making a name for himself as an hard-right, anti-communist crusader who on the side sat on the board of Lazards and IBM UK. Among his credits he has listed "various... intelligence appointments", but this is not a particularly satisfying description of his career. We already met Chalfont in ISGP's Cercle article where he was described as close associate of the Cercle leadership. Today ISGP has documents showing Chalfont was actually an important member of Le Cercle, which, of course, revolved around Otto von Habsburg's Opus Dei clique, MI6 and the CIA. A partial recap of Chalfont's Cercle bio reads:

Excerpts of a 1991 officers list of the Pilgrims of Great Britain. Lord Chalfont is listed.

Chalfont used to chair Zeus Security Consultants in the early 1980s with Major Peter Hamilton, a former Military Intelligence officer, as managing director. Both used to run anti-communist operations in Malaya and Cyprus. At Zeus they received assignments from British Intelligence which they in turn delegated to subcontractors. One of these subcontractors was Sapphire Investigation Bureau Ltd., headed by Barrie Peachman. Peachman was recruited by Hamilton in January 1983 to ascertain the identities of protestors against the Sizewell atomic power station. In turn, Peachman recruited Victor Norris, alias Adrian Hampson, for this job. In the following weeks and months Norris infiltrated the nuclear protestors by setting up dummy action groups which pretended to be friendly to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the protestors at the Sizewell nuclear powerplant. At one point Norris wrote to Sapphire he "could put a stop on CND if required." The infiltrations of Norris were part of a broader operation of Britain's hard-right against nuclear protestors. Some of these protesters died, like Hilda Murrell and William McRae; others were severely beaten up. After the Sizewell operation was threatened with exposure, Peachman's behavior became increasingly erratic. He finally committed suicide with a shotgun after repeatedly stating "he'd got his back to wall" and that "people were out to get him". Another interesting fact is that Norris had been convicted in 1973 for pimping out his daughter to pedophile friends. Norris also was head of the Anglican Satanic Church, and founder of the Nazi Phoenix Society and the 5000 Group. In 1986 Chalfont and several other directors of Zeus set up Securipol, another security firm with largely the same purpose as Zeus. Securipol shared offices with Ensec Limited, a company specialized in the undersea dumping of nuclear waste. If this isn't enough, Peter Hamilton has been named as a close associate of Stephen Kock, the MI6 and SAS officer who is said to have headed a top secret government assassination team, Group 13 (the son of Pilgrims Society member the 1st Viscount Monckton once acted as Kock's patron). [235]

Add to all this Chalfont's association with the Cercle leadership, his directorship in the Committee for a Free World (alongside Decter), him chairing the second Jonathan Institute, and his reported friendship with John F. Lehman (Neocon; Secretary of the Navy; 9/11 Commission), and it becomes clear that Chalfont's reputation as a darkly figure is quite justified.

Among Chalfont's associates is Sir Frederick Bennett, who is known to have visited a luncheon of the Pilgrims of Great Britain on February 23, 1982. Bennett was among the directors of the Foreign Affairs Research Institute (FARI), together with Chalfont, Brian Crozier (Cercle), Julian Amery (Cercle) and Robert Moss (Cercle). CIA and DIA officers and associates like Richard Mellon Scaife, William Casey (Cercle), Ed Feulner (Cercle), Ray Cline and General Daniel O. Graham came to the conferences of FARI. Like Chalfont, Bennett was a first rate aristocrat: his mother was a Kleinwort; director Kleinwort Benson Europe; Lloyds underwriter; honorary director of the BCCI in Hong Kong; Privy Council; Bilderberg; owned a Rolls-Royce and four homes, one of them in the Cayman Islands; etc. Bennet's hard-right and anti-communist convictions are likely to have stemmed from his father, who has already been discussed in this article: Sir Ernest Bennett, once a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship and the secretive pro-Nazi group, the Right Club. All of a sudden, Bennett's support for Pinochet sounds not that strange at all.

Another rather darkly figure who has been invited to the Pilgrims in recent years is Lord William Rees-Mogg. As editor-in-chief of the Times of London from 1967 to 1981 he would be an obvious choice, even though he is Catholic. Rees-Mogg is a strange person. Senator John DeCamp, who once investigated the Franklin child abuse affair, had among his friends former CIA director and Cercle member William Colby. At one point Colby explained a few things about Rees-Mogg to DeCamp:

Rees-Mogg, as a member of the exclusive Other Club since 1973, is a close associate of the leading aristocratic families in Britain, including the Duke of Devonshire (Cavendish), Lord Carrington (Pilgrims president), Lord Rothschild and Prince Charles. Here they dine together with such individuals as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Sir Edward Heath, and Sir Denis Thatcher (husband of). Lord Richardson of Duntisbourne (J. Henry Schroder; Bank of England; Morgan Stanley; BIS; Chemical Bank; Chase Manhattan; Rolls Royce; Ditchley; Group of Thirty; presided over G-10 meetings; Privy Council; Order of the Garter; Pilgrims Society) and Winston Spencer-Churchill (grandson of the famous PM; son of Pamela Harriman; had an extra-marital affair with the former wife of famous arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi; MP; involved in some projects with Cercle members) are other members of the Other Club, just as Cercle participants Baron Kelvedon, Lord Julian Amery and the 7th Marquess of Salisbury. [237] The Rothschilds, Cecils, Drummonds, Dukes of Norfolk, Dukes of Devonshire, together with Harry Oppenheimer and Paul Mellon, could also be found in the same room with Rees-Mogg when the even more exclusive Roxburghe Club met. [238]

There's also one slight anomaly sitting on the board of the Pilgrims of the United States since 1983: Alexander M. Haig, Jr. Haig has always been a militant anti-communist crusader with many intelligence connections, but at the same time, as Kissinger's aide, he supported détente and was accepted as a member of the Trilateral Commission. He seems to be of the same breed of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington and Admiral Thomas Moorer, all of them staunch anti-communists who believed détente was possible, but at the same time were convinced that the communist nations would not cooperate if not faced with considerable political and military pressure (the carrot and stick method). But where Brzezinski, Huntington and Moorer have always been fierce critics of Israel and its lobby in the United States, Haig in more recent years has joined the advisory board of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, became a member of Benador Associates and served on the board of Newsmax--all of them pro-Zionist.

The right-wing intelligence connections of people like Train, Chalfont, Bennett, Rees-Mogg and Haig is what obviously stands out here among many of the other Pilgrims. There are a few other right-wing Pilgrims who fit in this category, among them Lord Guthrie, an SAS veteran and Chief of the Defence Staff who joined N.M. Rothschild & Sons; and John M. Olin, founder of the right-wing, intelligence-connected Olin Foundation. While the Pilgrims Society clearly proves the existence of a liberal Anglo-American Establishment, this small number of leading Pilgrims with connections to intelligence and the Neoconservatives raises questions as to what else might be going in the "high places"; at this point we just don't know. There are only a handful of people who have been talking about the connection between establishment and intelligence. The story of the "Georgetown Set" of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner as a Washington-based social group with many ties to the banking establishment in New York is somewhat known. It is also known that it was opposed by elements in the Army and Navy, like General George V. Strong, Admiral Leahy and General Walter Bedell Smith, who regarded it as an unwelcome and incompetent arm of Wall Street in foreign affairs and military conflicts. In London, during World War II, the connection between Hambros and the founding of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) is quite obvious. The person in question, Sir Charles Hambro (a Pilgrim), also was a director of the Bank of England and a close friend of both the Wallenbergs in Sweden and the Morgan family in New York. Other connections between intelligence and banking have been discussed in ISGP's article on Le Cercle, which also discusses The 61 and the Shield committee (the latter gave intelligence briefings to Margaret Thatcher before she was elected).

In more recent years it was Gerald James who exposed the connection between British intelligence and the leading banking houses of London. James's high-level banking and business background has already been discussed in the media section of this article, in which James's writings were quoted about infiltration of the media by British intelligence. As for the "intelligence-banking" cabal, James wrote:

Investigative journalists working for the Independent and the Observer on James's story received death threats; one of them was knocked to the ground by a car while walking on the pavement; another, a contact of one of the journalists, died under suspicious circumstances. [240] James himself received a number of threats from Stephen Kock, the alleged former head of Group 13, including that he would be "put down". [241] His home was broken into on a number of occasions.

This all goes to show that there's much about the world of intelligence we still don't know. How many people would have guessed, for example, that left-wing organizations as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the National Council for Civil Liberties, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth all were thoroughly penetrated by British intelligence; or more alarmingly, that people connected to intelligence and the SAS have been harassing, intimidating and even assassinating leftist activists and whistleblowers? [242] A small number of Pilgrims have been close to this circle of right-wing intelligence people, but how this group interacts with the overall more liberal (and more anti-Zionist) Anglo-American Establishment remains a bit of a mystery.

In the past paragraphs we have discussed how hard-right propaganda has largely been responsible for all the fuss about the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the United Nations. The most interesting aspect of this propaganda may actually be that it is largely true. The Morgans and their henchmen really were a dominant influence in American economic and political circles in the early part of the 20th century. The Morgans, Mellons, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Andrew Carnegie really were great Anglophiles, this in contrast to the general population which still remembered the wars of independence. These same families really were great supporters of the United Nations and continue to be so until this very day. This analysis of the Pilgrims Society has shown all these things. Leading Pilgrims have been among the founders and leaders of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Councils, Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Institute of International Affairs, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade and Economic Council, the U.S.-China Business Council, the America-China Society, the Americas Society, the OECD, the Institute for International Economics, Ditchley, Brookings, the British Invisibles, LOTIS, etc., etc. The absolute core of the globalist movement largely consists of Pilgrims. Examples are the membership of Lord Roll, Lord Carrington, Arthur Dean, Gabriel Hauge, Henry Heinz, Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, John J. McCloy, Lord Kerr, David Rockefeller, Robert V. Roosa, Cyrus Vance, Paul Volcker, and John Whitehead. Charles Savoie additionally listed Sir Peter Sutherland and George Ball as Pilgrims, both also important globalists.

Even the work of Carroll Quigley can be verified to some extent, although this author is of the opinion that Quigley's work on the Round Table groups could have been much better documented. Quigley wrote:

This analysis of the Pilgrims Society has confirmed the existence of a network as described by Quigley. The Rockefellers, Carnegie, Astor, Whitney, Lazard and Morgan interests have all been very influential within the Pilgrims. Even in the 1970s, on the executive board of the Pilgrims of Great Britain were the 2nd Viscount Harcourt, a great-grandson of Junius S. Morgan who headed the British branch of J. P. Morgan & Co., Morgan Grenfell; and the 2nd Lord Kindersley, who had taken over the Lazard bank from his father and Lord Brand in 1953. Although virtually all of the Round Table members described by Quigley have at least visited the Pilgrims on one or more occasions, not all have been confirmed members. However, some of the alleged organizers and leaders of the Round Table certainly were members. They include Lord Lothian (d. 1940), Lord Brand of Lazard (d. 1963) and Adam D. Marris of Lazard (d. 1983). Among the Pilgrims can further be found a good number of All Souls fellows and Rhodes Scholars. A number of officers of the Rhodes Trust have appeared in ISGP's membership list of the Pilgrims Society, while in other cases close relatives were on the board of the Rhodes Trust (including chairmen). In other words, without going into the specifics of his Round Table network, Quigley's Anglo-American Establishment certainly did exist and at least to some extent still exists today. It's actually quite surprising that Quigley never mentioned the Pilgrims Society in his works.

The founding of the Federal Reserve system in the United States in 1913, which is often portrayed as a banker's conspiracy, can also be traced to members of the Pilgrims. The conspiracy centered on a meeting at Jekyll Island in November 1910 in which leading bankers worked out the details of setting up a privately-owned central bank in the United States. Those that attended were Senator Nelson Aldrich, whose daughter married John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1901 and who was the person to introduce the banker's plan to Congress; Frank Vanderlip, president of the Rockefellers' National City Bank; Henry Davison, a partner of J.P. Morgan & Co. and a representative of the Astor interests; Charles Norton, president of the Morgan-dominated First National Bank of New York; Benjamin Strong, Jr. vice president of the Banker's Trust of New York, also controlled by the Morgans; and Paul Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Pilgrims researcher Charles Savoie has labeled virtually all of the Jekyll Island visitors as Pilgrims. This author has not seen the original sources in this case, but it is clear that many descendents, family members and business partners of the Jekyll Island conspirators have appeared in the Pilgrims. Among the descendants and families have been Benjamin Strong, Frank Vanderlip, Jr., the Warburg family and many Aldriches. The financial advisor to Senator Nelson Aldrich, Alfred L. Aiken, was a Pilgrim, and so was Aldrich's associate in Congress, Edward B. Vreeland. Paul Warburg's partners at Kuhn, Loeb, Jacob Schiff and Otto Kahn, were both Pilgrims, just as members of the Rockefeller, Morgan and Astor families. Since then Pilgrims have dominated the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and also had considerable presence on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the main body of the Federal Reserve that decides on monetary policy. In other words, the Pilgrims are very relevant to the history of the Federal Reserve and the financial history of the United States.

It is sometimes amazing to see how America's anti-globalist conspiracy community can twist words, turning them into quotes which have been taken completely out of context. One of the biggest of such manipulations is a widely-circulated quote from H. G. Wells from his 1940 pamphlet 'The New World Order'. The reader may have come across it:

The full text of Wells's pamphlet is readily available on the internet, so let's take a look at the full text. We read:

Quite a difference, don't you think? The "shortened" version of the quote will make people believe Wells is talking about suppressing the common man. The full quote, on the other hand, shows that Wells was actually talking about the elites of this world. It's impossible to look inside Wells's head to see his real motivations, but his pamphlets 'The Open Conspiracy and Other Writings' (1934) and 'The New World Order' (1940) come down to the following points:

Wells was somewhat of an establishment figure and is even known to have visited a dinner of the Pilgrims of Great Britain in November 1913. In the years before, he was a member of the Coefficients, a 14-member pro-Empire dining club consisting of rather notable figures. Among the members were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, leading Fabian socialists; Sir Edward Grey, of Quigley's Rhodes Secret Society and the Milner Group; Viscount Alfred Milner, of Quigley's Milner Group; Leopold James Maxse, brother of Violet Cecil, who was married to Lord Edward Cecil, the son of the 3rd Marquess, and from 1921 to Lord Milner; and Lord Leopold Amery, another member of Quigley's Round Table. The members of this group do not appear to have been particularly involved in the Pilgrims. The Webbs were prominent Fabian socialists, a group which has had considerable influence on the principles of the British Labour Party, including New Labour. Lord Amery and the Cecils were early supporters of Zionism, largely in contrast to the Pilgrims establishment and the more right-wing (read: fascist) Duke of Windsor-Chamberlain clique. Wells knew these men through the Webbs, but at some point severed his ties again with the Webbs because he came to consider them Machiavellian manipulators. Wells did remain prominent in Labour politics over the years and in 1932 - alongside Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell - became one of the founding vice presidents of the Federation of Progressive Society and Individuals (FPSI), a lobby and pressure group to boost overall support of Labour, which had suffered a crushing defeat in the elections of 1931 after a years-long economic depression. In their magazine 'Plan' the FPSI actually claimed the recent economic depression had been engineered by the large bankers. Alongside allied groups as the Council for Civil Liberties and the Socialist League, the FPSI also crusaded against what they saw was the increased "fascisation" of Britain, sponsored by the big banks, the Rothermere Press and the British Union of Fascists. [245] Among the material they wrote was the following text, which was published in 1934 and by now should contain some very recognizable accusations:

Friedrich Hayek's classic work The Road to Serfdom, first published in 1944. Besides promoting a return to a free- market economy, of which many people had become skeptical after the continuous economic depression of the 1930s, the book also tried to dispel the popular (and correct) notion that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism and that any form of planning or regulation in the post-war economy would only make it more liable to a new dictatorship. According to Hayek, it actually were communist and socialist theories which led to the rise of fascism. Although most intellectuals preferred Hayek's free- market theories over communism and severe socialism, 'The Road to Serfdom' was a book that served the big interests in the post-WWII world which less than a decade before had been sponsoring fascist politicians to suppress increasingly influential labor unions. Of course, not a word of these practices appeared in Hayek's book, which is undoubtedly why it was promoted by Reader's Digest and General Motors, two pre-WWII supporters of American fascism. "Reagonomics" en "Thatcherism" were inspired by Hayek. David Rockefeller used to be tutored by Hayek and really liked his ideas ('Memoirs', pp. 75-76). Hayek also inspired the Pilgrim Sir Anthony Fisher, who went on to "litter the world with free-market think-tanks." Together they visited meetings of the hugely influential Mont Pelerin Society, which Hayek organized in 1947.

Wells was a promoter of his own version of "world social democracy" through his writings and through his H. G. Wells Society (Cosmopolis), which merged with the FPSI in 1936. Wells's idea of world social democracy is today largely continued by organizations as the Socialist International, which, although seemingly not part of the big globalist think tanks sponsored by banks and multinationals, do not really seem to have any particularly original or independent ideas on how to organize the world.

World War II was the major turning point in history which prompted a rush towards globalization. Weapons and means of transport had become so advanced that a new war among Western powers would have to be prevented at all costs. Great Britain had to review its centuries-old Balance of Power policy, the Americans realized isolationism wasn't going to be in their best interest anymore, and on the continent a solution had to be found to the continuous strife between France and Germany over the minerals in the Ruhr area. At the same time the communists still had to be kept at bay in Europe. Members of the Anglo-American Establishment came up with a number of solutions. One of their main assets was the Frenchman Jean Monnet, who today is known as the "founder of Europe".

Since the 1920s Monnet had been close to the Lazard Bank of the Lords Kindersley, Lord Brand, Tommy Brand, and Adam Marris (all Pilgrims, except Tommy Brand). Monnet's firm Monnet, Murnane & Co., which he ran with George Murnane, was briefly under investigation in 1938 for allegedly having laundered Nazi money. This is interesting, because most of Monnet's associates, included those at the Lazard bank, were closely cooperating with the fascist regimes during this period. After World War II Monnet was among those who advocated European integration. He received the full support of former fascist collaborators as the Lazard bankers, C. Douglas Dillon, the Dulles brothers and John J. McCloy (all Pilgrims). Monnet's behind-the-scenes efforts were largely responsible for the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, centered around the mineral wealth of the Ruhr area and the basis for the later European Union; the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community; and the founding of the powerful globalist institution, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Monnet's framework for the European Union had actually been inspired by his old friend Lord Arthur Salter, a prominent fascist appeaser and a long-time member of the Pilgrims Society. [247]

Monnet's credentials as an "agent" (if we can use this term) of the Anglo-American Establishment are impeccable. Next to his friendship to the earlier-mentioned fascist appeasers, his efforts to integrate Europe also received the full support of President Eisenhower (a Pilgrims executive), David K.E. Bruce (a Pilgrims vice president), George Ball (said to have been a Pilgrim), John Tuthill (became head of the Atlantic Institute in the 1960s, which was mainly founded by Pilgrims), the U.S. State Department under John Foster Dulles, and the CIA under Allen Dulles. He also worked closely with the Dutch globalist Max Kohnstamm (private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands; frequent Bilderberg visitor; initial 1973 European chairman of the Trilateral Commission; today on the advisory council of the European Policy Centre, together with Pilgrims executive Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and alleged Pilgrim Peter Sutherland, not to mention alleged child abuser Karel van Miert). In 1963, Monnet was among the founding board members of the Per Jacobsson Foundation, named after a director the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) during World War II and a managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Among the directors of the Per Jacobsson Foundation in the 1960s to early 1970s have been Viscount Harcourt (Pilgrims executive; IMF; World Bank; chair Morgan Grenfell & Co.), Gabriel Hauge (Pilgrims; chair Manufacturers Hanover Trust; treasurer CFR; Bilderberg steering committee), Herman J. Abs (chair Deutsche Bank), Marinus W. Holtrop (chair BIS and the Nederlandse Bank); Lord Salter (Pilgrim; supposed Round Table member; associated with Oxford and All Souls; Privy Council; League of Nations; inspired Monnet's structure for the European Union), Lord Cobbeld (Pilgrim; Privy Council; Bank of England), David Rockefeller (chair Chase Manhattan Bank; Pilgrims), Allen Sproul (Pilgrims; New York Fed), Maurice Frère (BIS; Sofina; Banque Nationale de Belgique; family today owns Frère-Bourgeois Group), Albert E. Janssen (chair Société Belge de Banque), Samuel Schweizer (chair Swiss Bank Corporation), and others. Eugene R. Black (alleged Pilgrim; Chase; World Bank; Fed; Brookings; Bilderberg) and Marcus Wallenberg were among the chairmen of the foundation. Looking at all these names it's hard to doubt Monnet's loyalties.

Some time after a network had been created which involved the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, NATO, the European Economic Community, Bilderberg, the Atlantic Institute, and other institutions, a scholar named Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book titled 'Between to Ages', which was published in 1970. This book advocated a close political and economic cooperation between the most economically vital regions on the planet: North America, Western Europe and Japan. David Rockefeller read the book and invited Brzezinski to organize a private discussion forum to implement these ideas. This led to the creation of the Trilateral Commission in 1973. In his book Brzezinski gave a good description of the new, emerging globalist elite:

Brzezinski appears not to have been a member of the Pilgrims Society, which would not be surprising considering his Polish descent and rather militant anti-communism. Through the Trilateral Commission, Brzezinski's foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union initially was focused on a shift from Containment to Détente. But at the time of Jimmy Carter's election, who ran on a campaign set out by the Trilaterals, a hard-right, intelligence-connected group of politicians and military officials stepped forward to oppose the policies of both Containment and Détente, and instead proposed an all-out economic and guerrilla war against international communism. This right-wing group, also known as "Team B", was organized around the Committee on the Present Danger and included both traditional anti-communist hardliners as Paul Nitze and Richard Stilwell, as well as the upcoming pro-Zionist Neoconservatives around Senator Henry Jackson (see ISGP's Cercle article for more information). Without the support of Pilgrim Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State under Carter who had come from the Rockefeller Foundation, Brzezinski compromised with Team B and next to his Trilateral "interdependence" approach, Brzezinski also followed a hardline anti-communist policy in the Middle East, supporting the Shah in Iran and luring the Soviet Union into Afghanistan. [249] It were Brzezinski's establishment associates, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and John J. McCloy, who pushed a reluctant Carter in 1979 to allow the Shah asylum in the United States, a decision which led to the Iranian hostage crisis, an embarrassing rescue mission, and the October Surprise accusations. As a result Carter was out in 1980, but Brzezinski would continue as one of the most important anti-communist crusaders for decades to come. [250]

Brzezinski has always walked a fine line between the Eastern Establishment and the right-wing, anti-communist radicals in Le Cercle. Brzezinski's role as organizer of the Trilateral Commission and a fierce critic of radical Zionism, put him closer to the former group. In his book 'Between Two Ages' Brzezinski also gave an important warning that liberal democracy might some day be threatened by an elite abusing high technology.

A honest warning it seems, but also a bit chilling considering Brzezinski's obsession with student protests and the emerging of "Violent Left" at the time he wrote this book, not to mention his more recent observation that "democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization". [252] Brzezinski's close associate Samuel Huntington wrote something similar for the Trilateral Commission in 1975:

Whether the views of Brzezinski and Huntington entirely represent the ideas of the major globalists in the Pilgrims Society, especially David Rockefeller, is hard to say. They were not part of the Eastern Establishment by birth, but managed to reach some of the highest offices in the United States with the support of this establishment. Both Brzezinski and Huntington are globalists [254], but at the same time they are more outspokenly right-wing, anti-communist and anti-Zionist than the average globalist. Looking at Brzezinski's past CIA-involvement [255] he somewhat reminds us of the CIA officers of the Georgetown Set - their main purpose being to fight communism and securing America's foreign policy interests, but at the same time politically allied to the Pilgrims and CFR establishment.

A family which comes to light in this context are the Roosevelts. We discussed how these descendants of Theodore Roosevelt went from supporting fascism before World War II, to supporting the fascist underground after the war as senior officers in the CIA. While at least two members of this Roosevelt family publicly attacked the "pro-communist" Eastern Establishment, including the Rockefellers, a third, a senior CIA officer, would later become David Rockefeller's Middle-East advisor at Chase Manhattan Bank. What has not been discussed yet is that another member of this family, Theodore Roosevelt IV, a prominent New York banker at Lehman Brothers, is heading today's human-induced global warming scam alongside the more prominent Al Gore. Theodore IV is a director of the Alliance for Climate Protection, which is chaired by Al Gore. He is also chairman of the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, and on the board of both the World Resources Institute (again with Al Gore; also with Godrey family of the 1001 Club) and the Wilderness Society.

Both the World Resources Institute and the Wilderness Society sound a lot like the World Wilderness conferences of the late 1980s which worked in conjunction with the Pilgrims-dominated United Nations Association and were prominently attended by Maurice Strong, David Rockefeller, Edmund de Rothschild and James Baker (the latter three Pilgrims; the first a 1001 Club member). If the audio recordings and papers produced about these meetings are genuine, it is clear that Brzezinski's and Huntington's views on limiting freedom of expression in the West are shared with those of the most important globalists. In short, at these conferences the CO2 agenda is put on the map, and it is discussed how the United Nations should take possession of the world and severely decrease its population, "by military force, when required". These conferences have been discussed in detail in ISGP's 2006 introduction article.

The main point here is that the globalization process is run by the Anglo-American Establishment - the Pilgrims if you will - and many allied liberal-oriented businessmen in North America and Europe. What has not yet been understood, however, is the relationship between intelligence and the global establishment.

There's a lot more that can be written about globalization and European integration, and this is something that has been done in some of ISGP's other articles.

The initial purpose of this article was to show whether or not there really existed an Anglo-American Establishment that has been influential on domestic and international politics. Although this is something that has already been established to a large extent by a number of authors, there never was one single society to identify "its members" and link them all together in an easy and convenient way. The advantages of this article over previous writings about the Anglo-American aristocracy include:

What might be good to know is that the Anglo-American Establishment is not all powerful. Within the United States they have had some rivalry from the military and intelligence establishments, just as industrialists and businessmen from other parts of the country. Other opposing forces have been the Vatican-Paneuropa network in Europe and Zionism, especially the radical revisionist branch. Unfortunately, the leading figures in all these opposing groups appear to be more reactionary than those of the liberal Anglo-American Establishment. This doesn't mean that the globalists of the Anglo-American Establishment are necessarily decent, upstanding citizens; it just means that they speak more articulately and plan things better. Just remember how Morgan banker Thomas Lamont tried to educate a reactionary fascist murderer named Benito Mussolini on how to appeal to the Anglo-American public. [256]

Now that we know that there is an Anglo-American Establishment, should we all oppose globalization and withdraw behind our own borders? This might be tempting, but at the same time this would merely be an unintellectual reactionary response to big business taking charge of the globalization process. With all the advanced and affordable means of transport (ignoring the coming oil crisis), the 24-hour news reports from around the world, and the internet, it will not be possible to stop globalization, nor would it be wise. The known history of the human race goes back almost 10,000 years and since this time has largely been characterized by only two things: abuse of power and war. Every historian at one point will realize that all he or she is reading about is the shifting of borders and the destruction of cultures as a result of abusive rulers looking for more territory and more riches. The only difference between all these wars is that they have become increasingly destructive as the centuries went by. At this point they will be so destructive that a war among the major nations of the earth will have to be avoided at all costs. The globalist group understands this, which in this case is good for everyone. What people in the conspiracy community may actually want to do is to stop fighting the concept of globalization, as apparently America's ultra-right wants them to do, and instead focus on educating themselves and other people about the corruption in national governments and the globalist group. We need to get to a point in which enough people are so informed about conspiracy affairs that it will be impossible for governments to manipulate them into giving up their rights or supporting economic or military policies which will ruin the country, or maybe even Western democratic civilization as a whole. For a number of reasons, some more obvious than others, this is a daunting task, but one things is for sure: a more systematic and intellectual approach to conspiracy affairs, combined with a "different-globalist"* stance, will draw in many more educated and influential persons than the unfocused evangelist attitude of isolationism that is still dominant in conspiracy circles today.

* translation from the increasingly popular Dutch word "Andersglobalist", a term used to describe people who are skeptical of the present globalization process which is characterized by deregulation and privatization, but who do not want to be labeled "anti-globalist", as they are not against the concept of globalization itself.

Drayton was also known as the 117 Old Broad Street Group or 117 Group.

Bibliography

Material for download

* Added in January 2013, the first public material apart from the ancient 1903 lists.